Buscar:ben shift

« Most aresting, however, is the film's use of sound and music, which give each scene an atmospheric lilt. »

Maya Phillips

In order to celebrate the first anniversary of Sirocco and the Kingdom of Winds, the animated film by benoît Chieux, Stereo Rônin Records partners with Cristal Publishing, Sacrebleu Production, Take Five, and Ciel de Paris to offer a limited vinyl edition of the original soundtrack composed by Pablo Pico.

The soundtrack of Sirocco and the Kingdom of Air Currents, composed by Pablo Pico, stands out for its melodic richness and immersive atmosphere. It accompanies the journey of Juliette and Carmen through a fantastical world. The music blends traditional instruments with modern sounds, creating a nostalgic yet dynamic ambiance. The themes evoke adventure, discovery, and magic, enriching the film’s visual narrative. With his captivating compositions, Pablo Pico captures the essence of the story, providing an auditory experience that perfectly complements the film's universe.

Synopsis

Juliette and Carmen, two fearless sisters aged 4 and 8, discover a secret passage to the Kingdom of Air Currents, their favorite book. Transformed into cats and separated from each other, they must show courage and daring to reunite. With the help of the singer Selma, they will try to return to the real world by confronting Sirocco, the master of winds and storms... But is he as terrifying as they imagine?

“Being able to release this magnificent soundtrack composed by Pablo Pico is a great pride and a real pleasure. I want to open our catalog to unique works and universes. Being able to do this from our second published title, with a first foot in the world of animation, with Sirocco is an important shift for the label”

Frédéric Claquin – Stereo Ronin

“Sirocco’s music is like a deep breath. It was inspired by the fantastic universe of the film, the epic breath and the fantasy of the characters. I hope that with this vinyl edition, you will be able to relive the adventures of Juliette and Carmen and that the songs of Selma will take you far to the Kingdom of Air Currents”

Pablo Pico – Composer

“Cristal is a music publishing house, specializing in music for images, committed to working alongside composers for over 25 years. Our mission is to highlight the emotions sought in audiovisual productions, we choose our projects carefully, Sirocco was a real favorite, both on the subject and on its treatment, where music has its place, and becomes a real actress in the film. The talent of Pablo Pico brings this accuracy to the story”

Eric Debègue – Cristal Group.

Ben Lukas Boysen’s new album, Alta Ripa, signifies a seismic shift in his artistic journey. It revisits the foundational impulses of his youth, shaped amidst the serene beauty of rural Germany—a bucolic backdrop where his creative palette flourished. However, it was his move to Berlin in the early 2000s that electrified his sound, infusing it with the city’s pulsating energy and diverse cultural influences. Alta Ripa captures this transformative experience, blending the introspective melodies of his rural beginnings with the bold, experimental tones born from Berlin’s vibrant electronic music scene. This album is a testament to Boysen’s evolution, showcasing how geographical shifts can profoundly shape artistic expression.

Boysen’s fourth studio album under his own name, Alta Ripa is a nod to his beginnings as much as a hint to his future, and as a work, it’s almost contradictory in its boldness and humility. He invites the listener on a journey of self-discovery; both for himself and for them, describing the music as “something the 15-year-old in me would have liked to hear but only the grown-up version of myself can write.”

His last two albums involved working closely with other musicians, including cellist Anne Müller, flugelhorn player Steffen Zimmer, and drummer Achim Färber. However, inspired in part by a recent return to live performance, Alta Ripa sees Boysen circling back to his passion for pure computer music.

For Boysen, the return to his youthful musical language marks a major turning point in his career. It represents a departure from his roots in classical music – his mother was an opera singer and his father an actor with an appreciation for Wagner, Arvo Pärt, Keith Jarrett, and Stockhausen. Although these are still important influences, Alta Ripa encapsulates a new, exploratory interplay between Boysen’s careful craft and his ability to let go of some of the process.

The album’s title comes from the original Roman name of the town that Boysen grew up in, Altrip, where he lived until his early twenties. This formative period is central to the ideas behind this album, from Boysen’s parental ‘schooling’ in classical music through to his sonic journeys through drum and bass, Aphex Twin, and Autechre — all of which changed his idea of what music could be. The extreme energy of tracks like ‘Acperience 1’ by Hardfloor, ‘Tracks & Fragment’ by Cari Lekebusch, ‘Focus2 Implan’ by Jiri.Ceiver, and ‘Low On Ice’ by Alec Empire are also pivotal influences.

For Boysen, this time of his musical development also involved knocking down the pillars that he previously thought had carried his world. A key moment for Boysen was being given a precious (pre-internet) club cassette at school that featured artists like Source Direct, Photek and Goldie. Excited by this new discovery, he introduced his father to the song ‘Dred Bass’ by Dead Dred. After the song finished, Boysen Sr. turned off the tape and proclaimed it was “the end of all music”. This heated exchange sparked a new, and more mature dialogue between the two that involved them sharing and discussing music on a regular basis.

Boysen’s classical and jazz music upbringing might not be easily noticeable from the electronic palette that he uses. But it can be found in its bones; the structure of the tracks and their dynamic shifts. On Alta Ripa, he intentionally embraces a spirit of controlled chaos, churning out sonic ideas to see what sticks.

One of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards contains the phrase “gardening, not architecture”, and the trajectory of Boysen’s creative path reflects this metaphor. In much of his previous work he followed a sort of Brutalist architect’s approach; here, he was fully responsible for the tracks’ austere structures and planned them with deliberate care. But by sacrificing some of that control on Alta Ripa, he sets the right conditions for a dark and unpredictable, organic growth. It’s a push forward into a new world.

Indian born, UK artist Michael Diamond, co-founder of Vasuki Sound label and club night, announces new EP Placid Wakefulness, featuring single ‘Reverse Entropy’. available on all platforms 5th December via Vasuki Sound.

A uniquely multifaceted talent, Michael Diamond’s unforgettable ‘jazzed electronic’ sound is informed by a spectrum of influences, not least by intersection of the scientific and practical worlds of electronic music. From the music scholarship he won to read Medicine at Oxford where he quickly discovered new ways in which the two worlds can co-exist, his days were spent immersed in academic studies of music perception and cognition, while his nights were spent alongside the likes of Ben UFO, Batu & Ross From Friends, playing at one of UK’s most long-established nights ‘Simple’. A chance encounter there also led him to connect with musical collaborator Alex Wilson – the BBC Young Jazz Musician of the Year semi-finalist and then musical director of Oxford’s Jazz Orchestra – who appears frequently across Diamond’s compositions and on Placid Wakefulness.

No stranger to a concept piece, Diamond’s previous project, the highly personal and critically acclaimed exploration of culture and identity, Third Culture (album of the month/year acknowledgments from Stamp The Wax, Juno and Phonica Records, also earning him a DJ Mag ‘One To Watch’, a Youth Music Awards ‘Rising Star’ nomination and a Gilles Peterson’s ‘Future Bubbler’ accolade) explored the experience of being a ‘third culture kid’ born in Kerala, India and growing up in the UK with a sense of fractured identity.

On Placid Wakefulness, Diamond honours his academic research working alongside world-renowned musicologist Professor Eric Clarke. Specifically how music may affect our sleepfulness and wakefulness, how instinctively we are soothed by some sounds and energised by others - ‘what it is about dance music that makes people go hard all night long?’ and ‘what is it about ambient music that makes people feel the opposite way - to lull them into this sense of calmness or rest?’, mindful of the unconscious ways his findings were already manifesting in his work as an artist. And while his research provides a framework for some of the ideas within the piece, Placid Wakefulness can be viewed as more of an unintentional byproduct, or case-in-point of his findings, rather than a piece consciously constructed in their image.

Across Placid Wakefulness’s four tracks we find the artist unpacking a range of sonic ideas on this theme, from ambient calm to club-adjacent rhythms. The EP opens with hypnotic lullaby of ‘A Way of Listening’ complete with transcendent flutes provided by Alex Wilson, cello by George Lloyd-Own and a mellow groove. On the more energised ‘Reverse Entropy’, rhythmic ambiguity moves to rhythmic disambiguation with a four-to-the-floor beat as the track progresses, releasing tension and inviting an urge to dance as a jazz sax moment transmutes into glorious techno percussiveness.

On ‘Turning and Turning’ the bpm shifts down a gear, a sonic dreamstate where tough textural rhythms create a kind of liminal state tension. Closing out the EP we return to a sense of restfulness with the EP’s title track, where a gorgeous picked guitar loop interplays with vibrating ambient pads and a slow and steady beat. The Placid Wakefulness EP is a captivating testament to Diamond’s singular artistic talent and the fascinating interplay of neuroscience and how we experience and enjoy music.

"This is the time that we, who have benefitted from the Last Poets shouldbe able to say, 'it's the Last Poets. It's them we should be honouring, because we did not honour them for so many years_"

KRS One wasn't just addressing the hip hop fraternity when he uttered
those words by way of introducing the video for Invocation - a poem
written thirty years ago, around the time of the Last Poets' last significant comeback. He was speaking to everyone who's been affected by the word, sound and power issuing from the most revolutionary poetry ever witnessed, and that the Last Poets had introduced to the world outside of Harlem at the dawn of the seventies.

In 2018 the two remaining Last Poets, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin
Hassan, embarked on another memorable return with an album -
Understand What Black Is - that earned favourable comparison with theirseminal works of the past, whilst showcasing their undimmed passion andlyrical brilliance in an entirely new setting - that of reggae music. Trackslike Rain Of Terror ("America is a terrorist") and How Many Bullets demonstrated that they'd lost none of their fire or anger, and their essential raison d'etre remained the same.

"The Last Poets' mission was to pull the people out of the rubble o f their lives," wrote their biographer Kim Green. "They knew, deep down that poetry could save the people - that if black people could see and hear themselves and their struggles through the spoken word, they would be moved to change."

Several years later and the follow-up is now with us. The project started when Tony Allen, the Nigerian master drummer whose unique polyrhythms had driven much of Fela Kuti's best work, dropped by Prince Fatty's Brighton studio and laid down a selection of drum patterns to die for. That was back in 2019, but then the pandemic struck. Once it had passed, the label booked a studio in Brooklyn, where the two Poets voiced four tracks apiece and breathed fresh energy, fire and outrage into some of the most enduring landmarks of their career. Abiodun, who was one of the original Last Poets who'd gathered in East Harlem's Mount Morris Park to celebrate Malcolm X's birthday in May 1968, chose four poems that first appeared on the group's 1970 debut album, called simply The Last Poets. He'd written When The Revolution Comes aged twenty, whilst living in Jamaica, Queens. "We were getting ready for a revolution," he told Green. "There wasn't any question about whether there was going to be one or not. The truth was many of us still saw ourselves as "niggers" and slaves. This was a mindset that had to change if there was ever to be Black Power." He and writer Amiri Baraka were deep in conversation one day when Baraka became distracted by a pretty girl walking by. "You're a gash man," Abiodun told him. The poem inspired by that incident, Gash Man, is revisited on the new album, and exposes the heartless nature of sexual acts shorn of intimacy or affection. "Instead of the vagina being the entrance to heaven," he says, "it too often becomes a gash, an injury, a wound_" Two Little Boys meanwhile, was inspired after seeing two young boys aged around 11 or 12 "stuffing chicken and cornbread down their tasteless mouths, trying to revive shrinking lungs and a wasted mind." They'd walked into Sylvia's soul food restaurant in Harlem, ordered big meals, then bolted them down and run out the door. No one chased after them, knowing that they probably hadn't eaten in days. Fifty years later and children are still going hungry in major cities across America and elsewhere. Abiodun's poem hasn't lost any relevance at all, and neither has New York, New York, The Big Apple. "Although this was written in 1968, New York hasn't changed a bit," he admits, except "today, people just mistake her sickness for fashion." Umar is originally from Akron, Ohio, but had arrived in Harlem in early 1969 after seeing Abiodun and the other Last Poets at a Black Arts Festival in Cleveland. That's where he first witnessed what Amiri Baraka once called "the rhythmic animation of word, poem, image as word- music" - a creative force that redefined the concept of performance poetry and stripped it bare until it became a howl of rage, hurt and anger, saved from destruction by mockery and love for humanity. When Umar's father, who was a musician, was jailed for armed robbery he took to the streets from an early age where he shined shoes and raised whatever money he could to help feed his eight brothers and sisters. By the time he saw the Last Poets he'd joined the Black United Front and was ready to join the struggle. Once in Harlem, Abiodun asked him what he'd learnt in the few weeks since he'd got there. "Niggers are scared of revolution," Umar replied. "Write it down" urged Abiodun. That poem still gives off searing heat more than fifty years later. In Umar's own words, "it became a prayer, a call to arms, a spiritual pond to bathe and cleanse in because niggers are not just vile and disgusting and shiftless. Niggers are human beings lost in someone else's system of values and morals." And there you have it. It's not just race or religion that hold us back, but an economic system that keeps millions in poverty and living in fear - a system born from political choice and that's now become so entrenched, so bloated on its own success that it's put mankind in mortal danger. It was many black people's acceptance of the status quo that inspired Just Because, which like Niggers Are Scared Of Revolution, was included on that seminal first album. Along with their revolutionary rhetoric, it was the Last Poets' use of the "n word" that proved so shocking, but it would be wrong to suggest that they reclaimed it, since it never belonged to black people in the first place. There's never any hiding place when it comes to the Last Poets. They use words like weapons, and that force all who listen to decide who they are and where they stand. Umar's two remaining tracks find him revisiting poems first unleashed on the Poets' second album This Is Madness! Abiodun had left for North Carolina by then where he became more deeply enmeshed in revolutionary activities and spent almost four years in jail for armed robbery after attempting to seize funds related to the Klu Klux Klan. Meanwhile, the 21 year old Umar was squatting in Brooklyn and had developed close ties with the Dar-ul Islam Movement. A longing for purity and time-honoured spiritual values underpins Related to What, whilst This Is Madness is a call for freedom "by any means necessary," and that paints a feverish landscape peopled by prominent black leaders but that quickly descends into chaos. "All my dreams have been turned into psychedelic nightmares," he wails, over a groove now powered by Tony Allen's ferocious drumming. Those sessions lasted just two days, and we can only imagine the atmosphere in that room as the hip hop godfathers exchanged the conga drums of Harlem for the explosive sounds of authentic Afrobeat. Once they'd finished, the recordings and momentum returned to Prince Fatty's studio, since relocated from Brighton to SE London. This was stage three of the project, and who better to fill out the rhythm tracks than two key musicians from Seun Anikulapo Kuti's band Egypt 80? Enter guitarist Akinola Adio Oyebola and bassist Kunle Justice, who upon hearing Allen's trademark grooves exclaimed, "oh, the Father_ we are home!" Such joy and enthusiasm resulted in the perfect fusion of Nigerian Afrobeat and revolutionary poetry, but the vision for the album wasn't yet complete. He wanted to create a new kind of soundscape - one that reunited the Poets with the progressive jazz movement they'd once shared with musicians like Sun Ra and Pharoah Sanders. It was at that point they recruited exciting jazz talents based in the UK like Joe Armon Jones from Mercury Prize winners Ezra Collective, also widely acclaimed producer/remixer and keyboard player Kaidi Tatham, who's been likened to Herbie Hancock, and British jazz legend Courtney Pine, whose genius on the saxophone and influence on the UK's now vibrant jazz scene is beyond question. The instrumental tracks on Africanism are in many ways as revelatory and exciting as the Last Poets' own. It's important to remember that the kaleidoscope of styles and influences we're presented with here aren't the result of sampling but were played "live" by musicians responding to sounds made by other musicians. That's where the magic comes from, aided by Prince Fatty's peerless mixing which allows us to hear everything with such clarity. Music fans today have grown accustomed to listening to all kinds of different genres. Their tastes have never been so broad or all- encompassing, and so the music on this new Last Poets' album is as groundbreaking as their lyrics, and perfectly suited to the era that we're now living in. John Masouri

Ben Lukas Boysen’s new album, Alta Ripa, signifies a seismic shift in his artistic journey. It revisits the foundational impulses of his youth, shaped amidst the serene beauty of rural Germany—a bucolic backdrop where his creative palette flourished. However, it was his move to Berlin in the early 2000s that electrified his sound, infusing it with the city’s pulsating energy and diverse cultural influences. Alta Ripa captures this transformative experience, blending the introspective melodies of his rural beginnings with the bold, experimental tones born from Berlin’s vibrant electronic music scene. This album is a testament to Boysen’s evolution, showcasing how geographical shifts can profoundly shape artistic expression.

Boysen’s fourth studio album under his own name, Alta Ripa is a nod to his beginnings as much as a hint to his future, and as a work, it’s almost contradictory in its boldness and humility. He invites the listener on a journey of self-discovery; both for himself and for them, describing the music as “something the 15-year-old in me would have liked to hear but only the grown-up version of myself can write.”

His last two albums involved working closely with other musicians, including cellist Anne Müller, flugelhorn player Steffen Zimmer, and drummer Achim Färber. However, inspired in part by a recent return to live performance, Alta Ripa sees Boysen circling back to his passion for pure computer music.

For Boysen, the return to his youthful musical language marks a major turning point in his career. It represents a departure from his roots in classical music – his mother was an opera singer and his father an actor with an appreciation for Wagner, Arvo Pärt, Keith Jarrett, and Stockhausen. Although these are still important influences, Alta Ripa encapsulates a new, exploratory interplay between Boysen’s careful craft and his ability to let go of some of the process.

The album’s title comes from the original Roman name of the town that Boysen grew up in, Altrip, where he lived until his early twenties. This formative period is central to the ideas behind this album, from Boysen’s parental ‘schooling’ in classical music through to his sonic journeys through drum and bass, Aphex Twin, and Autechre — all of which changed his idea of what music could be. The extreme energy of tracks like ‘Acperience 1’ by Hardfloor, ‘Tracks & Fragment’ by Cari Lekebusch, ‘Focus2 Implan’ by Jiri.Ceiver, and ‘Low On Ice’ by Alec Empire are also pivotal influences.

For Boysen, this time of his musical development also involved knocking down the pillars that he previously thought had carried his world. A key moment for Boysen was being given a precious (pre-internet) club cassette at school that featured artists like Source Direct, Photek and Goldie. Excited by this new discovery, he introduced his father to the song ‘Dred Bass’ by Dead Dred. After the song finished, Boysen Sr. turned off the tape and proclaimed it was “the end of all music”. This heated exchange sparked a new, and more mature dialogue between the two that involved them sharing and discussing music on a regular basis.

Boysen’s classical and jazz music upbringing might not be easily noticeable from the electronic palette that he uses. But it can be found in its bones; the structure of the tracks and their dynamic shifts. On Alta Ripa, he intentionally embraces a spirit of controlled chaos, churning out sonic ideas to see what sticks.

One of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategy cards contains the phrase “gardening, not architecture”, and the trajectory of Boysen’s creative path reflects this metaphor. In much of his previous work he followed a sort of Brutalist architect’s approach; here, he was fully responsible for the tracks’ austere structures and planned them with deliberate care. But by sacrificing some of that control on Alta Ripa, he sets the right conditions for a dark and unpredictable, organic growth. It’s a push forward into a new world.

Research Records teams up with organist and synthesist E. Bobby G. to release his sophomore album, Bobby Business. Once again, the album is primarily centered around the 1982 Kawai DX900, but it masterfully explores more genres than his debut, Giving You M.O.R.E.

Bobby Business was recorded in 2022 after E. Bobby G. received an eviction notice from his beloved sharehouse of 12 years. After moving out, he stored the organ at his workplace, Bakehouse Studios, where his boss let him use the space overnight to record until the early hours. The remainder of the album was recorded in his old studio space, NGBE.

The first track, "Ha-Ha," is as meditative as it is glittery, with floating sustained chords. "Big Boy" and "Disco Shift" bring back a slightly more polished E. Bobby G. sound—lo-fi library music with bright tones that will appeal to fans of proto-electronic icons like Brian Bennett. Tracks like "Lucky Strike" and "Tropical Dino Ride" are video game music dreams, featuring West Coast lead lines and strutting percussion. The second half of the album explores spaced-out '90s downtempo and dub elements, with a distinctive refinement that hides the fact it was created primarily using the Kawai DX900.

Bobby Business closes with "Lillian," a sonic dedication to the artist's Grandmother, with a more traditional song structure that hints at what Bobby has planned next.

Direct follow up to OKC noise rock band’s 2022’s breakthrough album God’s Country. Mixed by Benjamin Green (Uniform, Portrayal of Guilt, Drab Majesty). Mastered by Matt Coloton (The Rolling Stones, Blur, Nick Cave, Sunn O)). Full US tour in 2024, EU early 2025, with more dates to come. Like the towering mounds of toxic waste from which it gets its namesake, the music of Oklahoma City noise rock quartet Chat Pile is a suffocating, grotesque embodiment of the existential anguish that has defined the 21st Century. It figures that a band with this abrasive, unrelenting, and outlandish of a sound has stuck as strong of a chord as it has. Dread has replaced the American dream, and Chat Pile’s music is a poignant reminder of that shift—a portrait of an American rock band molded by a society defined by its cold and cruel power systems. Though very much on-brand with Chat Pile’s signature flavor of cacophonous, sludgy noise rock, the band’s shift to a global thematic focus on Cool World not only compliments the broader experimentations it employs with their songwriting but also how they dissect the album’s core theme of violence. Melded into the band’s twisted foundational sound are traces of other eclectic genre stylings, with examples of gazy, goth-tinged dirges to abrasive yet anthemic alt/indie-esque hooks and off-kilter metal grooves only scratching the surface of what can be heard in the album’s ten tracks. Besides stylistically stretching the boundaries of the Chat Pile sound, Cool World is also the band’s first record to have someone else handle mixing duties, with Ben Greenberg (Uniform) capturing and further amplifying the quartet’s unmistakably outsider and folk-art edge. While Chat Pile’s debut album was plenty disturbing with its B-movie-inspired interpretation of a “real American horror story”, what the band depicts on Cool World is unsettling not just from its visceral noise rock onslaught, but from depicting how all sorts of atrocities are pretty much standard parts of modern existence. In film terms, think something like a Criterion arthouse film by way of schlocky grindhouse splatterfest: undeniably gratuitous and thrilling in the moment but leaving a looming dread in the back of one’s mind for how close the horrors depicted mirror reality.

2025 Repress
Sublunar is proud to present the next release from its label head Sciahri and Hertz Collision.
Following the success of their collaboration on Clergy, the two Italian artists return with Axis Mundi, a sophisticated techno EP rich in texture and nuance. The journey begins with the title track Axis Mundi, an electrifying opener with razor-sharp sounds anddriving rhythms, setting the pace for the EP. Next comes Drifting, where hypnotic grooves and floating synth lines take the listener on a captivating sonic voyage.
On the B-side, Entropia shifts gears with a mind-bending synth that propels the track into another dimension, while Silent Pulse closes the vinyl edition with its minimalist yet refined touch, perfect for any moment of the night.

Gavin Vanaelst runs the space Aboli Bibelot in Antwerp where exhibitions and musical performances can happen side to side with dealings in centuries-old furniture and unique pieces of folk art or volkskunst. Gavin makes music under the aliases DJ Charme, Kassett and So Sorry. This is the first album under his birth name. Takeaway Loops cycles back to the days when Gavin was working as a courier for .

is a food delivery company. Their couriers - ehm, brand ambassadors, as the company prefers to call them - dressed in bright orange, they race their bikes around the city. They deliver meals and groceries for all sorts. Thanks to them, the privileged can stay tucked in their private spaces. Interaction between the two groups - the privileged and the brand ambassadors - is mostly kept to the bare minimum. And sparse communications are often driven by annoyances - “my Coke is warm because you kept it too close to the French Fries.” And on the streets the general public dis-approaches the brand ambassadors with pity. We tell our peers: “That’s not a good job,” and “stay away from the Sharing Economy.” Because, you know, in our capitalistic dollhouse we all stand our grounds and play our parts wholeheartedly.

During his shifts for , Gavin recorded location sounds on his phone at fast food restaurants while waiting on the orders he had to pick up and deliver. Later in his home studio Gavin added piano and electronics to this source material. The result: a gloomy soundtrack for a shadow world. Seven songs in evening blue with a bright orange glare.

A few years ago, our favorite Belgian publishing house Het Balanseer released Seizoenarbeid by Heike Geissler (available in English trough Semiotext(e)). Geissler writes about her job at Amazon in Leipzig. Because her writing and freelance work did not pay the bills any longer, she was forced towards this underprivileged shadow-world of unwanted jobs. Seizoenarbeid shed a light on freedom in an unfree world. A monument of ‘we are all in this, but not together’. Takeaway Loops gives us a similar peak in a world that is at the same time so visible, but then also very veiled for many. A world that we prefer to use, yet that most of us prefer not to see - a world that we don’t like to enter.

Last year at Harbourland subway station in Kobe i was mesmerized by its sound design, created by Hiroshi Yoshimura. For each part of the subway station he composed a short phrase. While walking trough the station, a full composition grows in your head. The looping melodies guide you trough a microworld. Trough a blue world of commuters, of the homeless, of the lonely, of the fast paced, of the tourist. Gavin creates a similar effect with Takeaway Loops. The tonality somehow corresponds to Yoshimura’s work. Yet instead of being guided trough a building, we are now taken to the after dark. You feel the concrete evening heat of the city. You hear the rain. Stiff fingers during cold winters’ nights. You are alone on the bike, cruising. Your maps app telling you where to go. You just left the fake leather bench of the well-lit pastiche interior of a fast food restaurant.

Next order, number ECN44! Please wait outside, sir?

Oase is the sophomore album from Berlin-based progressive rock collective Weite, and the follow-up to the band’s 2023 debut LP Assemblage. Clocking in at almost an hour, Oase—German for "Oasis"— takes listeners on an intricate and textured journey that draws inspiration from the pioneering spirit of 70s psychedelic rock, blending influences from “Canterbury scene” prog, Krautrock, early electronica, post rock, and Americana. The new album show cases Weite's ability to merge the old with the new, creating an immersive, exploratory sound that moves from contemplative and pastoral to riffy and doomy without ever sacrificing melody. Oase is characterized by longer expansive, atmospheric compositions yet is undoubtedly more composed than the band’s debut, with more of a focus on songs, albeit in the broader sense of the word. With the focus on melody, texture and mood—although not necessarily always in that order—Weite create a sound that’s intricate and meditative, inviting the listener to embark on a journey through shifting soundscapes and evolving musical narratives. Weite was formed in Berlin in winter 2022 by bassist Ingwer Boysen (delving) recruiting drummer Nick DiSalvo (Elder, delving) and guitarists Michael Risberg (Elder, delving) and Ben Lubin (Lawns). Initially intended as a one-of recording session, the four recognized an obvious musical chemistry and common ground and decided to turn the project into a proper band. Keyboardist Fabien de Menou (Perilymph) joined in 2024.

Die Londoner Experimentalisten Kinkajous releasen ihr neues Album auf dem Nottinghamer Label Running Circle. "Nothing Will Disappear" ist Ambient-Maximalismus in seiner subtilsten und zartesten Form. Anklänge an Floating Points und subtile Klangfarben-Shifts á la Jon Hopkins und James Holden sind deutlicher zu erkennen als bei anderen zeitgenössischen Jazzacts. Die beiden Vorgänger "Hidden Lines" (2019) und "Being Waves" (2021) sind Paradebeispiele für ihre Mischung aus analoger, akustischer und orchestraler Instrumentierung und schafften es beide in zahlreiche Jahresendlisten.

Von CLASH als "ein wichtiger Teil der britischen Musiklandschaft" beschrieben, beziehen Kinkajous ihre Inspiration aus Orchester-, Instrumental- und elektronischer Musik und sind für ihren fesselnden und filmreifen Sound bekannt. Angeführt von Schlagzeuger/Produzent Benoît Parmentier und Saxophonist Adrien Cau, können sie mit einer beeindruckenden Besetzung aufwarten, zu der auch Keyboarder Jack Doherty und Bassist Andres Castellanos gehören. Die mutigen neuen Räume, in die Kinkajous vorgedrungen ist, kommen gut an, mit ausverkauften Headliner-Shows im Londoner Jazz Café und King's Place, neben einer gigantischen Zusammenarbeit im letzten Winter mit dem London Contemporary Orchestra im Londoner Earth Theatre und Auftritten bei den Bluedot und EFG London Jazz Festivals.

Joni Mitchell Gets Jazzy, Counterbalances Love and Trust with Freedom and Confusion on Court and Spark


Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP
Plays with Definitive Detail and Clarity: Pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl Strictly Limited to 5,000 Numbered Copies
Box Set Features New Liner Notes
1/4" / 15 IPS / Dolby A analogue master to DSD 256 to analogue console to lathe


Court and Spark, the most commercially successful album of Joni Mitchell's trailblazing career, arrived after a year in which she took some time to breathe and kept a low profile. The pause led to more breakthroughs for the singer-songwriter. Marking Mitchell's increasing drift toward jazz (and affinity for Miles Davis and John Coltrane), Court and Spark garnered four Grammy nominations, earned the Best Album of the Year vote in the prestigious Pazz & Jop poll, and ranks #110 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Sourced from the original analog master tapes, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing on MoFi SuperVinyl, strictly limited to 5,000 numbered copies, and featuring new liner notes, Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP box set presents the 1974 classic with definitive detail, tonality, and directness. Marking the first time the revered LP has received audiophile-quality treatment, it's one of six iconic 1970s Mitchell records Mobile Fidelity is reissuing on vinyl and SACD sets.

Benefitting from a virtually nonexistent noise floor, dead-quiet surfaces, and superior groove definition, this collectible edition reproduces without compromise the textures, details, and breathtaking craftsmanship that help make Court and Spark into what many fans believe is the Canadian native’s finest hour. Notes bloom and decay as they do amid an acoustic live environment. Soundstages extend far and deep, with black backgrounds and balanced tones adding to the uncanny realism.

The reference-grade presence and openness put in transparent view Mitchell’s incisive words and unique phrasing, as well as the contributions of her prized support musicians — including Tom Scott and the L.A. Express as well as guest turns by the likes of David Crosby, Graham Nash, Jose Feliciano, and Robbie Robertson. Mitchell, experimenting with the melodic parameters of guitar and piano, is rightly found at the center of it all. The jazz-rock rhythms of drummer John Guerin, slippery guitar lines of Larry Carlton, vibrant horns and reeds laid down by Scott — crucial to the songs’ shape-shifting arrangements — can now also be heard with fresh ears.

Visually and physically, the packaging of the Court and Spark UD1S set complements its distinguished status. Housed in a deluxe slipcase, both LPs come in foil-stamped jackets with faithful graphics that illuminate the splendor of the recording. This reissue is for listeners who desire to engage themselves in everything involved with the album, including Mitchell’s “The Mountain Loves the Sea” painting — a picture of waves embracing and receding away from a mountain, a metaphor for the record’s lyrical themes — on the cover art.

Pitching deceptively light compositions against underlying tensions, Court and Spark witnesses the singer-songwriter finding her footing with a group of top-shelf musicians who seemingly understand her visions as well as expanding her lyrical palette and venturing further into territory no artist had dared explore. Mitchell’s accessibly complex structures, beat-propelled rhythms, and spirited interplay with Scott & Co. both give the music a different identity than her prior efforts and point in the directions she soon headed.

Lyrically, Court and Spark matches the wit, integrity, originality, and intellect of anything in Mitchell’s oeuvre — no small feat. Offsetting positives with negatives, and considering circumstances from multiple angles, Mitchell explores issues connected to love and freedom, certainty and confusion, and trust and fear with unfettered boldness and introspective empathy. She teeters between surrender and retreat, and spends a majority of the record sussing out the complications and sacrifices involved with such actions.

Mitchell addresses the transactional nature of desire (the intimate title track, the upbeat “Raised on Robbery,” complete with rock ‘n’ roll pep from Robertson and zesty sax from Scott); anticipation and disappointment of romance (“Car on a Hill,” “”Down to You); fame and celebrity (“A Free Man in Paris,” “People’s Parties”); and sanity (the dark and stormy “Trouble Child,” a satirical cover of Annie Ross’ “Twisted”). Throughout, she sings with an emotionally penetrating beauty and devastating honesty that teaches about ourselves.

Or, as Mitchell relays on “People’s Parties”: “Laughing and crying/You know it’s the same release.”

"Deep inside my mouth is where dark treasures can be found / Would you like to find out?" Die Wiener Gruppe GARDENS präsentiert sich mit ihrem Debüt-Album in einer Vogelperspektive und besticht mit unheimlicher Klarheit, Wärme und Selbstbewusstsein, zusammen mit einigen dunkleren Tönen. Das Quartett, bestehend aus Luca Celine Müller, Peter Benedikt Mathis, Patrick Stieger und Laura Keiblinger, erlangte Bekanntheit durch ihre ersten beiden Singles ,Talk" und ,Waves" - wurde von Radio FM4 gleich mal in die Jahrescharts gehievt - und etablierte ihre üppige Mischung aus Indie-Pop, 60er Jahre Psych-Folk und Dream-Pop. Unter den elementaren, aber täuschend komplizierten Arrangements erzählt das Album mit viel Songwriting-Gespür von Herausforderungen im Bereich der psychischen Gesundheit, von Übergangsriten der Jugend und den schwindelerregenden Nebeln des Herzschmerzes. Der Name des Debütalbums ,FLAWS" - das am 1. November 2024 bei Siluh Records erscheint - ist ein offenes Eingeständnis frischer Narben, die sich noch im Heilungsprozess befinden, direkt unter einer diamantenen Oberfläche. Die ersten beiden Singles von GARDENS, ,Talk" und ,Waves" - letztere wurde von Österreichs populärem Radiosender FM4 in deren Jahrescharts gehievt - etablierten ihre üppige Mischung aus Indie-Pop, Psych-Folk der 60er Jahre und Dream-Pop. Auf ,Flaws" gelingt es GARDENS auf einzigartige Weise, das Erhabene aus der Unordnung herauszufiltern.

"Deep inside my mouth is where dark treasures can be found / Would you like to find out?" Die Wiener Gruppe GARDENS präsentiert sich mit ihrem Debüt-Album in einer Vogelperspektive und besticht mit unheimlicher Klarheit, Wärme und Selbstbewusstsein, zusammen mit einigen dunkleren Tönen. Das Quartett, bestehend aus Luca Celine Müller, Peter Benedikt Mathis, Patrick Stieger und Laura Keiblinger, erlangte Bekanntheit durch ihre ersten beiden Singles ,Talk" und ,Waves" - wurde von Radio FM4 gleich mal in die Jahrescharts gehievt - und etablierte ihre üppige Mischung aus Indie-Pop, 60er Jahre Psych-Folk und Dream-Pop. Unter den elementaren, aber täuschend komplizierten Arrangements erzählt das Album mit viel Songwriting-Gespür von Herausforderungen im Bereich der psychischen Gesundheit, von Übergangsriten der Jugend und den schwindelerregenden Nebeln des Herzschmerzes. Der Name des Debütalbums ,FLAWS" - das am 1. November 2024 bei Siluh Records erscheint - ist ein offenes Eingeständnis frischer Narben, die sich noch im Heilungsprozess befinden, direkt unter einer diamantenen Oberfläche. Die ersten beiden Singles von GARDENS, ,Talk" und ,Waves" - letztere wurde von Österreichs populärem Radiosender FM4 in deren Jahrescharts gehievt - etablierten ihre üppige Mischung aus Indie-Pop, Psych-Folk der 60er Jahre und Dream-Pop. Auf ,Flaws" gelingt es GARDENS auf einzigartige Weise, das Erhabene aus der Unordnung herauszufiltern.

On How It Ends (?), slinky melodies snake through nocturnal atmospherics, drawing you into a world built on poetic, painterly lyricism. Night Crickets, a long-distance groove affair that materialized during the drawn-out days of lockdown, has emerged once again to soundtrack our waking dreams.

David J (Bauhaus, Love & Rockets), Victor DeLorenzo (Violent Femmes) and multi-instrumentalist Darwin Meiners spearhead a loose collective of like-minded creative souls whom, through sheer tenacity and a burning desire to collaborate and create, transcend the restrictions of space and time. Audio files shared from Los Angeles to Milwaukee, from London to the San Francisco Bay, and the ghosts of Candlestick Park shimmer through the fog, coalescing in a glorious ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ that draws from the past, the present and the imagined future.

Declaring Bauhaus, Love And Rockets, and Violent Femmes iconic, foundational bands in the history of alternative music would receive little pushback from those in the know. San Francisco born artist Darwin Meiners is a fan of all three. A chance meeting with David J grew into a friendship, and Darwin not only became a bandmate, but his manager. After reaching out to Victor DeLorenzo through e-mail, Darwin met the Violent Femmes drummer after their set at Coachella. Soon, after the three collaborated on Darwin’s 2014 release Souvenir.

As the pandemic took hold, Darwin was looking for a new project to occupy the lock down time and approached Victor, who was keen to proceed and suggested that David join as well. The musical trust established between these three was immediate and Night Crickets were born. Within weeks a global process was initiated between them, the recordings eventually forming the album, A Free Society.

Following that release, inspired by how well – and quickly – they all worked together, the trio kept up their collaboration. “We are each free to discover musical connections that could only exist in an ideal creative setting” explains Victor. “We are very lucky to have three musicians who write, sing and play various instruments in one trio… our egos seem to melt into one when we face musical decisions, so our expeditions are always filled with pure discovery, humor and drive!”

How It Ends (?) was crafted with the same collaborative spirit as A Free Society. Each member contributed contributed unique elements to spur their collective creativity—whether a drum pattern, a lyrical concept, or a musical idea—and together, they expanded these initial sparks into the finished work. True to their approach, much of what you hear was captured in the first take, reflecting a genuine, unfiltered moment.

The music on the How It Ends (?) is a true evolution of the debut album. It is deeper and darker. Having said that, the dark tone is alleviated by a healthy measure of the buoyant, bouncy and melodic. “Much of the new material is very psychedelic and the contrast between this heavy, dark psychedelia and the more uplifting pop elements puts me in mind of The Beatles’ ‘Revolver’ album to some degree,” tells David J. “The recording process for the new album was exactly the same as the first in that we all recorded remotely, taking turns to share files and reacting spontaneously to the previous track, overdubbing then passing on once again until we all felt that the track was done.”

“While we didn’t start with a specific theme, the album emerged as a contemplative exploration of endings” says Darwin. “It touches on the loss of individuals, the shifting of ideas, and the fragility of systems. Beneath this sense of darkness and finality, however, there are threads of beauty and glimpses of hope. We invite you to immerse yourself in the album and experience the journey we’ve embarked upon.”

PIFF Records welcome 4 in - demand artists to the label on their latest release, also available as a limited 500 press vinyl release. Home to forward-thinking house, trance, and techno, PIFF Records boasts a diverse yet united musical output. Cosmic, dub - driven techno, atmospheric house beats, and everything in between coalesces under the imprint’s distinctive output of thoughtful, club - ready sounds. All aspects of PIFF Records come together on this release as the featured artists balance the cerebral and visceral in their productions.

Cybernet kicks off the release with Resonant Shifter. Pumping kicks lay the foundation for captivating synth arpeggios and warped call and response basses in this ‘90s - inspired cut of contemporary progressive trance. The perfect soundtrack for any location from sunset on the Ibiza seafront to sunrise as the shutters open at a warehouse rave.

Goa elements are out in full force on Hoe Down, courtesy of Glen S. Squelchy 303s, low textures, and metallic arpeggios resonate above a pulsating bassline and weighty kicks, relentlessly pushing forward and ascending to a new sonic dimension - taking you along for the ride.
Body Clinic substitutes the progressive trance for progressive house on Love X, bringing down the tempo but keeping intensity intact. An infectious, syncopated plucked bassline dances around groove - rich drums, psychedelic effects and leads indebted to early ‘90s releases. A masterful blend of the past, present, and future together on one track.

Closing the EP with Empty Clip, Tom Jarmey disrupts the 4x4 rhythms of the preceding tracks w ith a genre - bending cut of electro - infused breaks. Two-step drums are matched with clinical sound design, deep basses, and mystical arpeggios. Sure to add depth to any set and turn heads in the process.

Since first bonding over Slowdive at a Texas karaoke bar six years ago, musicians Uriel Avila and Jonathan Perez have grown trauma ray into Fort Worth's foremost flag bearer of crushing shoegaze. A five-piece rounded out by bassist Darren Baun, drummer Nicholas Bobotas, and guitarist Coleman Pruitt, the band's debut album, Chameleon, captures their evolving sound at an apex of majestic devastation. A fusion of downer hooks, gauzy melancholia, and bulldozer riffs, the album heaves and crashes across 50 minutes of stacked amplifier alchemy. Lyrically the songs trace similarly lofty and brooding terrain; Avila says "The theme is death. And a chameleon, like death, can shape-shift in and out our lives in different forms." Chameleon opens with "Ember," dreamy and distant, alternately anthemic and apocalyptic, defeated and deafening. Lead single "Bishop" perfectly encapsulates trauma ray's depth and dimension, ripping out of the gate with "the biggest, baddest, saddest wall of sound." Lyrics about being burnt at the stake and "tossed in the flame" float above a stop-start assault of precision distortion, eventually expanding into a lush, heavy, sorrowful end coda. "Spectre" is a mysterious, introspective dirge, envisioned as a "mellow, slowcore, Duster-thing," all feeling and heavy fuzz chords (with no lead guitar). Avila wrote it, "to be a hymnal" from the perspective of someone who won't let go - a ghost, an ex, a shadow self. Although the album is rich with subtleties, graceful lulls, and "breaths of air," the band's three guitar attack is its defining force, a power flexed to its peak on "Bardo." Perez's intentions were blunt: "I wanted to write a riff that was hard as fuck." The result is alternately mean and eerie, veering between noisy one string bends and surging headbang, mapping a middle ground between Unwound and early-Deftones. One of trauma ray's greatest gifts is their ability to make doomy, sledgehammer heaviness sound like an earworm, without production tricks or gimmicks: "Riff, verse, chorus, three guitar parts - that's all you need." This quality is particularly apparent on the title track, a churning slab of amplifier worship, swirling chords, and heavenly, defeated vocals about not belonging, shape-shifting, and death ("A twisted face / Void of attention / An empty space / In your reflection"). "U.S.D.D.O.S" closes the album, swaying across seven minutes of grey skied guitar and haunted voice, subtly thickening as it deepens. Feedback and shrapnel gradually begin raining down, like a satellite disintegrating in the atmosphere. Titled as an acronym after a poem by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño that loosely translates to "a dream within a dream," the melody softens, smears, and then disappears, slowly swallowed by the gravity of eternal descent. Chameleon is a masterpiece of craft, balance, melody, lyricism, and gravity, flexing a fresh vision of loud-quiet-loud architectures and the vertigo depths of blasted harmonics. From Slowdive to Nothing, to Hum and beyond, the band absorb and expand on their influences into a rare and dedicated alchemy. trauma ray's cinematic tempest is a gathering storm only just taking flight.

Since first bonding over Slowdive at a Texas karaoke bar six years ago, musicians Uriel Avila and Jonathan Perez have grown trauma ray into Fort Worth's foremost flag bearer of crushing shoegaze. A five-piece rounded out by bassist Darren Baun, drummer Nicholas Bobotas, and guitarist Coleman Pruitt, the band's debut album, Chameleon, captures their evolving sound at an apex of majestic devastation. A fusion of downer hooks, gauzy melancholia, and bulldozer riffs, the album heaves and crashes across 50 minutes of stacked amplifier alchemy. Lyrically the songs trace similarly lofty and brooding terrain; Avila says "The theme is death. And a chameleon, like death, can shape-shift in and out our lives in different forms." Chameleon opens with "Ember," dreamy and distant, alternately anthemic and apocalyptic, defeated and deafening. Lead single "Bishop" perfectly encapsulates trauma ray's depth and dimension, ripping out of the gate with "the biggest, baddest, saddest wall of sound." Lyrics about being burnt at the stake and "tossed in the flame" float above a stop-start assault of precision distortion, eventually expanding into a lush, heavy, sorrowful end coda. "Spectre" is a mysterious, introspective dirge, envisioned as a "mellow, slowcore, Duster-thing," all feeling and heavy fuzz chords (with no lead guitar). Avila wrote it, "to be a hymnal" from the perspective of someone who won't let go - a ghost, an ex, a shadow self. Although the album is rich with subtleties, graceful lulls, and "breaths of air," the band's three guitar attack is its defining force, a power flexed to its peak on "Bardo." Perez's intentions were blunt: "I wanted to write a riff that was hard as fuck." The result is alternately mean and eerie, veering between noisy one string bends and surging headbang, mapping a middle ground between Unwound and early-Deftones. One of trauma ray's greatest gifts is their ability to make doomy, sledgehammer heaviness sound like an earworm, without production tricks or gimmicks: "Riff, verse, chorus, three guitar parts - that's all you need." This quality is particularly apparent on the title track, a churning slab of amplifier worship, swirling chords, and heavenly, defeated vocals about not belonging, shape-shifting, and death ("A twisted face / Void of attention / An empty space / In your reflection"). "U.S.D.D.O.S" closes the album, swaying across seven minutes of grey skied guitar and haunted voice, subtly thickening as it deepens. Feedback and shrapnel gradually begin raining down, like a satellite disintegrating in the atmosphere. Titled as an acronym after a poem by Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño that loosely translates to "a dream within a dream," the melody softens, smears, and then disappears, slowly swallowed by the gravity of eternal descent. Chameleon is a masterpiece of craft, balance, melody, lyricism, and gravity, flexing a fresh vision of loud-quiet-loud architectures and the vertigo depths of blasted harmonics. From Slowdive to Nothing, to Hum and beyond, the band absorb and expand on their influences into a rare and dedicated alchemy. trauma ray's cinematic tempest is a gathering storm only just taking flight.

Reissue of the Philadelphia group"s gritty psychedelic milestone, "Set And Setting" from 1999. The songs on Bardo Pond"s first two Matador releases - "Amanita" and "Lapsed" - were largely worked up at home and then recorded on the clock at a professional studio. On "Set and Setting," the band chose to work out of its home base, Lemur House, and the end result benefited from the open-ended DIY flexibility. "It was closer to the heart of what we do," says guitarist Michael Gibbons. "There was more improvisation, but also more culling of material. We had more time to find things that jumped out at us, go places we wouldn"t normally go, do investigative work. I think there was a shift. It"s just somehow a more true experience of Bardo Pond."

Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time is a portal into somatic chiaroscuro, aglow with the embers of imperfect memories and smudged with the plumes of internal echoes, which augment in vast, mercurial dimensions. For his third album on RVNG Intl., the British cellist, composer and producer offers a capsule of personal resonance and remembrance, assembled over the past six years. Throb, shiver, arrow of time traces the familiar metallic anatomy and viscous string modulations of his 2020 release skins n slime, while recentering his inner compulsions following a procession of lauded score writing projects, including the films Aftersun (Charlotte Wells, 2022), The Stranger (Thomas M Wright, 2022) and Occupied City (Steve McQueen, 2023). While working on Aftersun, Wells asked Coates how music could signal that someone is going on a trawl through their memory_a question that has stayed with him ever since and fosters a heartbeat running through the record. Throb, shiver, arrow of time is "all about inaccurate transmissions from our memories, overlaid with emotions from other sources," says Coates. The release is imbued with the ache and glow of recollections mulched together, where the guttural dissonance of misremembering is shrouded by strange orbs of sentiment. At the record's inner core is "Shopping centre curfew," a swift yet cavernous track that emerged five years ago when two real world events, both occurring in South London during the pandemic lockdowns, became fused in a dream: the demolition of Elephant and Castle shopping center, and the discussion of a curfew as a real possibility for all men following a violent crime. A strange simultaneity occurred with this piece of music and Coates built the album out from there, a sense of temporal entropy refracting shimmers of lurking convulsions into lucid sonic topologies. The ten compositions of Throb, shiver, arrow of time find weightless melodies soaring across after-image gradients, magnified and compressed. Misted tones within "Please be normal" and "90" soften drone-soaked shudders of inner acoustics messing up. Vocal invocations appear from long-term collaborators Malibu and chrysanthemum bear, as well as drifting synth radiance from Faten Kanaan. Throb, shiver, arrow of time furthers Coates' reach in collapsing the digital into the analogue and vice versa, allowing serendipity to reorganize the material and push out against the confines of flatness. This sculptural approach to sound is deeply influenced by the intricate installations of artist Sarah Sze, whose permutations of visual matter with its own after-image form kaleidoscopic epitaphs for ephemera and emotion. Coates' thinking about Sze's work and processes flowed together with his own playing and editing techniques, superimposing the textural relief of a live take back into a composition, and allowing the sound to succumb to a dream of itself. As Coates expands, "The cello is a kind of melancholic instrument with a light ethereal spirit. When the sound is flattened into digital processes, with shifted frequencies and time stretching I'm trying to give it even more of those qualities. Sometimes I'm distancing myself from it, so it becomes a piece of discarded debris that has soul in it, a down-sampling. Or other times, it's trying to maximize the present tense in the act of playing, and collapse that vivid color into a burnished, photocopied kind of sound. So the music acts like weather, weathering the listener, or as flames licking at the sides of objects." As the record unfurls, the compositions swell in duration, until the granular glimmers of its finale "Make it happen" persist in almost violent delight. "There's a feeling of not wanting to let this album go, trying to defy the extinguishing sound at the end of the music, trying to push the colors beyond the confines of the structure, to defeat the silence." In the scramble to resist denouement, Coates suspends the arrow of time in its eternal flight, just for a moment, to reveal the solace of the dust settling in the afterglow. Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time will be released on vinyl, Japanese import CD, and digital editions on October 18, 2024. On behalf of Oliver and RVNG Intl., a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit The Traditional Music and Song Association of Scotland, an organization fostering opportunities for people of all ages to participate in the traditional music and culture of Scotland.

Phoebe Rings is a dream-pop band offering a unique blend of introspective yearning with celestial danceable grooves. Their self-titled debut EP, a hopeful collection of musings, out on Carpark Records, is a testament to the distinctive musical style of Auckland jazz-school-trained pianist and songwriter Crystal Choi. Across six tracks, the EP is a love letter to some of the band’s influences: Studio Ghibli films, Zelda and Stardew soundtracks, Bossa Nova, Stereolab, and 90’s Korean ballads.

In 2020, the band played their first gig in a ‘funny side room’ during a festival at Auckland Town Hall. Choi’s songwriting was brought to life with Alex Freer on drums, Simeon Kavanagh-Vincent on guitar and synths, and Benjamin Locke on bass. Choi says she knew the tracks had to be recorded after the band played the songs better than she could ever imagine. And so, remotely through the COVID-19 lockdowns, the band started recording the EP.

“Daisy” is the vibrant leading single, with the shimmery refrain “Ooh-wee-a-waa” and the uplifting mantra: “When you’re next to me, the world’s full of daisies.” The swirling synths fizz on the skin like warm sun, promising growth and new starts. “Cheshire” is an Alice in Wonderland-inspired trip through the rabbit hole, pacing in anticipation. “Like a Cheshire cat, it grins and disappears in moments when you accept yourself,” explains Choi. Locke and Choi finished the lyrics one evening, huddled in the corner of a local underground music venue, with references to Murakami’s book Dance Dance Dance.

Choi grew up in Seoul, developing a palette for K-pop and retro sounds. The city-pop influence of “January Blues” shines through, with Choi crediting one of her favourite songs from the ’80s: “연극이 끝난 후 After Play”. The track explores her disconnect with the summer break. “In the Northern Hemisphere, January is winter,” says Choi. “I missed that a lot, and I don’t vibe with the beach.”

“Spissky,” chimes in with Choi’s lilting vocals reminiscent of childhood lullabies, inspired by a lonely-looking castle she saw on tour with Princess Chelsea in Slovakia. While “Ocean” leans into its mumble-core roots, taking a leaf from the Cocteau Twins. There’s an external shift in the EP, with “Lazy Universe” being the most energetic track, evolving with the band’s chaotic sci-fi experimentation. Asking, “Are you still waiting for a kiss?” Choi is self-critical and urgently speaks up from being passive.

The members of Phoebe Rings are cemented in the musical ecosystem, balancing other projects and full-time work. Yet Sundays will always be carved out for Phoebe Rings to dream up imaginative, world-building tunes — often with a Nintendo game soundtrack in the background as inspiration.

Die Londoner Experimentalisten Kinkajous releasen ihr neues Album auf dem Nottinghamer Label Running Circle. "Nothing Will Disappear" ist Ambient-Maximalismus in seiner subtilsten und zartesten Form. Anklänge an Floating Points und subtile Klangfarben-Shifts á la Jon Hopkins und James Holden sind deutlicher zu erkennen als bei anderen zeitgenössischen Jazzacts. Die beiden Vorgänger "Hidden Lines" (2019) und "Being Waves" (2021) sind Paradebeispiele für ihre Mischung aus analoger, akustischer und orchestraler Instrumentierung und schafften es beide in zahlreiche Jahresendlisten.

Von CLASH als "ein wichtiger Teil der britischen Musiklandschaft" beschrieben, beziehen Kinkajous ihre Inspiration aus Orchester-, Instrumental- und elektronischer Musik und sind für ihren fesselnden und filmreifen Sound bekannt. Angeführt von Schlagzeuger/Produzent Benoît Parmentier und Saxophonist Adrien Cau, können sie mit einer beeindruckenden Besetzung aufwarten, zu der auch Keyboarder Jack Doherty und Bassist Andres Castellanos gehören. Die mutigen neuen Räume, in die Kinkajous vorgedrungen ist, kommen gut an, mit ausverkauften Headliner-Shows im Londoner Jazz Café und King's Place, neben einer gigantischen Zusammenarbeit im letzten Winter mit dem London Contemporary Orchestra im Londoner Earth Theatre und Auftritten bei den Bluedot und EFG London Jazz Festivals.

Nothing But Net presents “Perceptions”, the debut LP from Los Angeles producer/beat maker Jamma-Dee aka Dyami O’Brien. Jamma-Dee has been a figure in the west coast modern funk and boogie scene, both as an accomplished DJ and music producer, having released records under his own name and producing for the likes of Joyce Wrice, Mndsgn and others.

From a musical upbringing in Los Angeles, Dyami’s adolescent obsession with record digging and beatmaking eventually led him to Dam-Funk’s renown Funkmosphere parties where he built friendships with key players in the LA funk scene and began to make a name for himself as a DJ and producer. In the second half of the 2010’s he released a series of EPs on Arcane and hosted the legendary Soul In Paradise show on NTS radio.

His first full-length, “Perceptions” is a long time in the making. Beginning with studio experiments nearly a decade ago, a version of the album found its way to producer and Nothing But Net label boss Onra, who helped guide the project to completion. The album artwork was created by outsider soul music conceptualist and painter, Mingering Mike, whom O’Brien felt compelled to reach out to after discovering his work years earlier. Thematically, the artwork, record, and its title touch on very modern themes: the alienation of life in a world of instant-gratification, an overly-connected society of masks, distorted realities and shifting identities.

Musically, “Perceptions” is the culmination of a life lived under the groove. Featuring a long list of collaborators, including Benedek, Mndsgn, Koreatown Oddity, the legendary Craig T. Cooper and fellow NBN labelmate, Devin Morrison, the double album touches on all of O’Brien’s musical influences. Album opener “Up N Down” sets the scene with it’s syrupy g-funk impressionism, before “Jamma’s Jam” bounces out of the speakers through an auburn-colored sunset haze of lush Rhodes chords and sparkling vibraphones. “It Takes A Freak” and “Datafile Groove” shuffle westward, re-imagining New Jack Swing grooves through a distinctly Californian lens. Elsewhere, the album touches on classic deep house rhythms (“Tic Toc” and “Silly”) and crystalline, downtempo R&B and UK street soul (“Joy”, “Saturday”).“U.R.” features legendary L.A. guitarist Craig T. Cooper laying down a network of stunning, silken guitar lines with absolute class.

Over the course of these 15 tracks, Jamma Dee consolidates, renovates and perpetuates the sound of his influences. “Perceptions” is a masterclass in modern funk and soul production.

FFF’s music exemplifies the Dystopian Dreamstates vibe through its ability to evoke exploration of futuristic and alienated themes, and creation of surreal sonic landscapes. His work resonates with listeners seeking music that challenges traditional structures and transports them into haunting, introspective realms. This EP evokes a complex blend of haunting dystopian elements with the surreal, shifting qualities of dream states. Such music creates an auditory landscape that can be both unsettling and hypnotic, often exploring themes of alienation, technology, and subconscious experiences.

Big Crown Records is proud to present Dave Guy’s debut album Ruby. Having lent his talents both on stage and in the studio to artists like Amy Winehouse, Lizzo, Pharrell, and Sharon Jones to currently playing every night on The Tonight Show as a member of The Roots, Dave steps out on his own with a jazz record that is both unique and modern. Ruby mixes his musical in­fluences with the energies of the city that raised him, capturing different moods and inviting the listener into the world as Dave Guy sees and feels it. Recorded in Queens at The Legendary Diamond Mine, the album is produced by Homer Steinweiss and Nick Movshon and features musical contributions from Leon Michels, Marco Benevento, Claire Cottrill, and more.

Ruby instantly sits with the classics as an album that is fully realized and not simply a collection of songs. Lead single “7th Heaven” opens the album with an anthemic energy as Dave’s horn lines soar over thundering drums, ethereal vocals, and dancing piano. Keeping the energy high, “Footwork” is a Latin inspired number that is sure to soundtrack many a dance fl­oor from SoHo to Harlem. The synth intro of “Pinky Ring” cleanses your palate for the mood shift when the track drops. Deep bass tones underline the impeccable drumming and

Dave effortlessly finds the pocket wasting no notes as the verses and choruses trade off. The record leans into spiritual jazz vibes on “Diamond Encore” with a dark and deep almost “Axelrodish” rhythm track then picks the energy back up with the stomper “Still Standing”. “Dave Wants You” has a bop all its own with an unorthodox drum pattern that Dave anchors with his trumpet hits. The otherworldly arrangement of “Drony Boy” puts the production on a pedestal. The first intro almost serves as an intermission on the album while the second

intro sets up the neck snapping track that is about to drop. A menacing guitar signals the builds and the whole thing is juxtaposed by Dave’s beautiful trumpet riffs. “Quesodillas” & “Green Door” begin the autumn of the album with their mellow & intimate energy and “Ruby’s Rubies”, the album’s closer is the perfect ending to the journey.

Chet Baker was an American jazz trumpeter, actor and vocalist and a major innovator in cool jazz, leading him to be nicknamed “the prince of cool”. The 1989 album Cool Cat contains six tracks, split into 3 instrumentals; ""Swift Swifting "", ""'Round Midnight"", ""Caravelle"" and the 3 vocal tunes ""For All We Know"", ""Blue Moon"" and ""My Foolish Heart"". The songs are written by top jazz composers, including Thelonious Monk, Rodgers & Hart. For the recordings of Cool Cat, Chet is accompanied by pianist Harold Danko, bassist Jon Burr and drummer Ben Riley. Cool Cat is available on black vinyl.

Marking its first decade of activity, Blume returns with the first ever vinyl reissue of the seminal “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media”, from 1977, the third and final instalment in a suite of releases that includes James Tenney’s “Postal Pieces” and Ben Vida’s “Vocal Trio”. Unquestionably among the most important collections of experimental music to emerge during the 20th Century, “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” is the original feminist presentation in its context, releasing the work of Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Roberts, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson under its collective banner. Includes newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey.

Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding that already includes the efforts of efforts of Werner Durand, Sarah Hennies, Bruce Nauman, John Butcher, Jocy de Oliveira, Mary Jane Leach, Valentina Magaletti, Alvin Curran, Julius Eastman, Alvin Lucier, and others, Blume delivers their third release in their first suite of releases for 2024, the fist ever vinyl reissue of the seminal “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” compilation, originally issued by Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch Records in 1977. Out of print for decades on vinyl and arguably the most important feminist statement in the history of experimental music, illuminating the work of Johanna M. Beyer, Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Megan Robert, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson - in a number of cases representing their recording debuts - during a crucial moment in the history of experimental music. Blume’s brand new edition - complete with newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey, as well as reproducing Charles Amirkhanian’s original accompanying text - radically shifts perceptions of the past and present day with its truly revolutionary sounds.

Issued by Thomas Buckner's 1750 Arch Records in 1977, and out of print nearly the entire time since, “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” can be understood within two simple frameworks. On one hand, it is an astounding document of the landscape of experimental music toward the end of the 1970s. On the other, it is a historically significant feminist statement, being the first collection of experimental music entirely dedicated to female composers, a number of whom were grossly under-celebrated at the time, but have since gone on to be regarded as among the most important composers of their generation.

The eight pieces gathered by “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” - Johanna M. Beyer’s “Music of the Spheres”, Annea Lockwood’s “World Rhythms”, Pauline Oliveros’ “Bye Bye Butterfly”, Laurie Spiegel’s “Appalachian Grove I”, Megan Roberts’ “I Could Sit Here All Day”, Ruth Anderson’s “Points”, and Laurie Anderson’s “New York Social Life” and “Time To Go (For Diego)” - might be regarded as the first cohesive vision of alternate proximity or expression of experimental music to what has always been a frustratingly male dominated environment, and to the tropes, temperaments, and sensibilities that have been historically perceived to define it. It is an expanded vision of truth. While the presence of feminine sensibilities and temperaments in experimental music, however they may present themselves, were anything but new in 1977, “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” was the first opportunity, beyond the temporal limitations of live performance, to view them collectively, rather than as individualised expressions within a larger body of similar gestures (as was the case of Oliveros’ inclusion in Odyssey’s 1967 “New Sounds In Electronic Music” and “Extended Voices” compilations) where they might be confused for something else; to regard and celebrate a radical notion of feminine sonority for its unique characteristics and through its interrelations.

While its historical significance and groundbreaking nature can not be debated in its totality, nearly half a century on “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” remains compelling in both its musicality and the palpable sense of its lasting influence. Every composition across the album’s two sides is not only engrossing and deeply compelling - feeling as fresh and relevant as the day it was laid to tape - but clearly tangible in their lasting influence. Viewed in context, the album’s eight works feel like breath of fresh air when compared to much of what came before, and laid the groundwork for much of what was to come, introducing a new, often more holistic temperament and more sensitive and inclusive sensibility into the landscape of experimental music.

Particularly in the case of Annea Lockwood, Pauline Oliveros, Laurie Spiegel, Ruth Anderson, and Laurie Anderson, it's hard to throw ourselves back in time and imagine a moment when these composers rested in a fairly marginalised corner of the creative landscape. Blume’s brand new edition of “New Music for Electronic and Recorded Media” - complete with newly commissioned liner notes by Jennifer Lucy Allen and Bradford Bailey, as well as reproducing Charles Amirkhanian’s original accompanying text - brings us back to this confounding moment and points us toward a crucial moment of change set forth by these incredible composers and their sounds. Absolutely seminal and not to be missed.

Filipovich is one of a kind. The Belarus-born, Paris-based artist works in a multitude of media - found footage films, painting, silkscreening and performance to name a few. It's her musical output that has caught the attention of late, though, with Filipovich dropping a run of releases in recent years which began with 2021's Magnificat on Time Released Sound. Filipovich takes as much of a novel approach to her music-making as she does with her other artistic endeavours - Magnificat was centred around treated samples of Sergei Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil, and she's also combined classical composition with contemporary electronic techniques on her subsequent drops.

For Idealized, Filipovich's debut on Sheffield's Central Processing Unit, she maintains the gothic air which characterised her previous releases and applies it to a record of widescreen contemporary techno joints. These tracks represent something of a gear shift for CPU, a label which has long made its name by delivering top-quality electro and machine-funk jams, but such is the quality of Idealized that these superbly-executed techno productions are sure to win over label fans both old and new.

Idealized is very much schooled in the German tradition of minimal/dub techno. Tracks like 'Physical', 'Wave' and 'Dance Minor' all anchor themselves on single, steady drum pulses and delay-drenched single-chord loops. Filipovich generally lets the central idea of these tracks play out across several minutes while introducing increasingly disorientating elements into the rest of the mix - wiccan atmospherics, clashing chords, spiralling delays and so forth. It's an approach at once respectful of Filipovich's predecessors - Basic Channel, Deepchord, Ellen Allien and so on - but also full of idiosyncrasies and individuality.

Many of the club cuts here hardwire us into the moody, murky environs of the darkest Berlin Basements. 'Ultra Red' rides forward on a crisp drum machine snap, a menacing burble of bassline and an eerie single-note synth whistle in the upper end of the mix; 'Dance Minor' shows off a bit of KiNK in the brain-bending modular loop that waxes and wanes at its centre; the second-half run from 'Wave' to closer 'Small Cave' travels ever-further out into deep space - the kick drums remain insistent, yet the textural elements are delivered with an edge and flair that evidences Filipovich's ability to think outside the box.

Filipovich's unusual methods, and the influence of sound art and electroacoustic composition on her music, are drawn out further when Idealized steps away from the dancefloor. 'Hydra' comes off like a more gothic version of Pole - its central pulse draws from dub techno but never quite settles into a danceable groove, and this beat is combined with the kind of unnerving keyboard work that would make John Carpenter proud. Although closer 'Small Cave' eventually locks into another dark-room techno roller, the opening section of the track delivers a weightless soundscape of bright, tinny chords and a scene-setting field recording.

Idealized, the first drop on Central Processing Unit from Paris-based Belarusian Lina Filpovich, broadens the label's horizons with a selection of finely crafted minimal/dub techno joints.

RIYL: Andy Stott, Deepchord, Ellen Allien, Moritz von Oswald

Following a ten-year hiatus, multi-instrumentalists Rafael Anton Irisarri and Benoît Pioulard return with »How to Color a Thousand Mistakes«, their third LP together as Orcas. Building on the electronic minimalism of »Orcas« (2012) and the Twin Peaks-inspired haze of »Yearling« (2014), the duo have expanded their sound and vision into a full-spectrum ensemble.

In the time since their last major collaboration, Irisarri and Pioulard have done plenty on their own, while also traversing significant life changes: relocation from Seattle to New York, separation and divorce, illness, hospitalizations, and the loss of siblings, parents, and friends. Yet from these tribulations, they gleaned inspiration to reconstruct their lives, creating music with new collaborators and partners. Recorded in a variety of studios and cities including Brooklyn, Cambridge, Oxford, Seattle, and upstate New York, the resulting album, under the tutelage of UK producer James Brown (Arctic Monkeys, Kevin Shields, Nine Inch Nails), is a patiently-crafted beast, equally inspired by impressionism, British new wave, and dream pop.

With Irisarri’s guidance and Brown’s encouragement, Pioulard brings his velvety voice to its harmonized peak on songs like »Wrong Way to Fall« and the Durutti Column-indebted »Fare«. Where his most recent solo albums for Morr Music (»Sylva« and »Eidetic«) navigated foggy forests of ambient pop and stacked tape loops, here his characteristic blur shifts into focus with a unique degree of clarity and confidence. »How fare against balance do I / Navigate my errors?«, Pioulard sings in a heartbreaking tenor, echoing the album’s broader themes of introspection, grief, loss, trial and trauma.

Lead single, »Riptide«, is a summary of Pioulard’s life changes and personal upheavals in the past decade, »flitting eastward toward a yen deep in the past« and learning to glide through the tumult of ocean waves, as a metaphor for the punches one takes in pursuit of grace. Its towering, key-changing midsection arrives with the monumental drumming of Slowdive’s Simon Scott, a long-time friend and cohort who appears on most songs in the set. Scott’s quintessentially English, jazzier approach offers a balance of force and restraint as the backdrop for Irisarri’s majestic guitars, analog synth lines, and Martin Heyne’s Fender Rhodes counterpoints.

Second single, »Next Life«, began as a sketch by Scott, and reached its final form in the hands of Pioulard and Irisarri, at a point that each had endured major concurrent losses, finding a commonality in the need to gaze over the horizon while acknowledging the unavoidable bittersweetness of letting go – not only of people, but of routines, places, and expectations. It’s one of Orcas’ most nuanced pieces, with a mid-tempo, sunset glow that unfolds into a sparkling, slide-guitar finale as it disappears in the rear view.

On third-act highlight, »Bruise«, Scott is doubled on the drum kit by MONO’s Dahm Majuri Cipolla, whose Liebezeit-influenced metronomy anchors a nimble bass groove from Andrew Tasselmyer (of Hotel Neon), and some of the album's most syncopated, spaced-out interplay, courtesy of Puerto Rican guitar player Orlando Méndez (a childhood friend of Irisarri’s). Originally a droney, fingerpicked guitar demo, »Bruise« is the most storied composition here, having gone through almost a dozen versions and lyrical edits, with Brown distilling hours of improvised performances into the final arrangement.

Throughout »How to Color a Thousand Mistakes«, Irisarri uses his deep well of production experience to paint the stereo field with meticulously designed textures, exemplified on the slow burn of »Heaven’s Despite« and the heady rush of »Swells«. As a mixing and mastering engineer with Black Knoll, he has built a client list that reads as a who’s-who of modern, forward-thinking composition, including Temporary Residence, All Saints Records, and Ghostly International, among many others.

As with previous collaborations, Irisarri and Pioulard bring disparate styles and specialties to the table, but with an interpersonal dynamic that transcends friendship into brotherhood, their open-minded workflow and mutual respect are evident at every turn. »How to Color a Thousand Mistakes« brims with tight, complex art rock songwriting, masterful production, and sonic versatility, informed by a plethora of genres and tonal hues. The title might promise answers, but the gravitational center of the album is the dawning realization that, as you reckon with the infinite whims of the cosmos, there could be none.

2024 Reissue

Deep in View is the debut album from Cola, a new project from Ought members Tim Darcy and Ben Stidworhty. Built on a foundation of elegant guitar grooves and knotty rhythms, Deep in View offers meditations on modern life and technology through curious lyrical vignettes, where everyday objects and scenes are never just as they seem. Cola, which most obviously is the fizzy beverage that’s bound “to poison most ordinary life on Earth,” as Darcy recites in spoken word on closing track “Landers,” but is also a term in poetics, as well as acronyms related to social security (Cost of Living Adjustment) and aeronautics (Collision on Launch Assessment).

The album sounds streamlined and intentional, as the rhythms of the punchy and exuberant guitar parts, urgent basslines, and unexpected drum patterns all tangle with each other in an elegant dance. At the center of all these elements is Darcy, whose characteristically wry voice shifts from detached to decisive to distressed, throughout the album’s course. Both enigmatically dense in meaning but precisely intricate in sound, Deep in View is an album that sparks novel interpretations with every listen, like an art object that takes on new shape with each angle from which you hold it.

On her sophomore album "Germ in a Population of Buildings", upsammy moves through her surroundings with the curiosity of a place-bending landscape architect. The album is rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift, and the feeling of discovering strange patterns in different ecosystems. Often, the Amsterdam-based artist finds herself zooming in and out beyond a place's most recognizable surface features to inhabit the microscopic and gigantic. Gathering field recordings and evocative environmental sounds, she shapes this source material into vibrating electro-acoustic rhythms and unstable, psychedelic textures. upsammy's debut album, 2020's critically-acclaimed "Zoom", was praised for its careful reimagining of IDM, evolving vignettes that nodded towards the dancefloor without being shackled to its rigid set of rules. On "Germ in a Population of Buildings" her process has evolved considerably; the skeletal trace of IDM is still present but it's been trapped in amber, allowing her unique sonic landscape to develop organically. 'Being is a Stone' is a proof of concept in many ways, layering upsammy's contorted voice in rickety patterns beneath a lattice of fragile rhythms and faintly melancholy synths. It's never immediately obvious where the sounds are coming from - a hiccuping beat might be glass cracking underfoot, and larger pulses could be wet concrete, rusted iron or bent plastic. As the sounds develop they morph into each other, demolishing what came before and building on top of the ornamental wreckage. On the dynamic 'Constructing', upsammy's sound design fluxes through hyperactive bass music structures, abstracting expectations at every turn. Often her sounds are whisper quiet, rattling and vibrating until heavier masonry drops and disrupts the structure. And when discernible rhythms subside into the background, like on the album's eerie title track, they become almost illusory, morphing between the real world and the electronic. upsammy's processed voice works like a bridge between these realms, snaking between stark, whimsical melodies on 'Patterning', arching from AutoTuned detachment into cooing, dreamy intimacy. By considering the harmonies between each location she's visited, upsammy has been able to build a unique topology that's an uncanny digital amalgam of her lived experience. It's a thoughtful alternative in an era more concerned with flatting the landscape than crumpling it and examining its peaks and troughs.

Missing out on that super-chill, uber-jittery minimal groove thing? Let"s get real, real Ghosted again. Oren Ambarchi has been collaborating with the Fire! trio (Mats Gustafsson, Johan Berthling and Andreas Werliin) for over a decade - and both Johan and Andreas played on Oren"s Live Hubris as well. Oren and Johan began music-making together back in the early aughts - but it wasn"t until 2021 that the three of them got together to record music. That became the first Ghosted album. When they were done, it was clear they had founded a new group. A music of sustained tension and deep atmosphere marked by subtle, shifting dynamics, Ghosted was released in May of 2022 to psyched response everywhere; the trio embarked upon an ongoing series of concert bookings around Europe, with loads of other people in the world still hoping to have the chance to be in the room at the next show. Two years on, Ghosted has gone through several represses, now it"s time for the "dreaded follow up album"! Rather than go back to the well, the guys decided to tear everything down and start all over again, reimagining themselves from scratch. Just kidding! As we"ve noted, Oren, Johan and Andreas have been playing together for years and years, developing an essential telepathy within their shared space. They get each other and feed each other"s music processes on an elemental level. Why change that? What made the most sense was to go back to Daneil Bengtsson at Studio Rymden in Stockholm for a couple days, then have Oren and Joe Talia mix and Joe master it at Good Mixture in Melbourne again, then get Pål Dybwik to do some well-distinctive cover art, and once more, call it a record. That"s just what they did - and it should be no surprise at all that the new Ambarchi/ Berthling/Werliin album looks and sounds as engrossing as their debut, if not more so! Ghosted II has a definitively fresh quality radiating throughout. The mutual feeling among the three players goes deep, allowing for lots more to say every time they get together - a further recombination of elements, a new expedition through alternative angles... there"s always more, and incredibly, it"s all improvised, with next-to-nothing prepared going in and minimal overdubs after they"ve laid things down. References are shared in shorthand, with just a single word, like "Santana," or "Police" acting as working titles for certain pieces on this record (have a guess!). It"s a disservice to call them jams: above and beyond the innate feel of the songs, there"s a strong sense of structure, informed by the band"s communal aesthetic, and edified immeasurably by their time spent in concert the last couple years. As noted at the top, these guys balance their music improbably between a relaxed feel and a nervy resolve, as each member holds down their corner in an open sound field. Making Ghosted II, the band found that there"s a different kind of tension making something for an established project rather than the kind one feels making something for the first time - and they used this new variety, as before, as a kind of fuel - driving their terse minimalism fruit-fully through the process of succumbing to and then transcending guilty pleasures. Finding fresh territory in funk sketches, jazzy heads, ambient pastorals and droning soundtrack pieces, Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin compellingly haunt a mad variety of spaces, leaving us wanting to get Ghosted II.

"NY Psychedelic Art Rock!

Touted as the “new Doors,” Ars Nova’s second release shows the band genre-bending jazz and heavy psychedelia in a style that’s their own. Shifting from a largely classical centric sound, this was the group’s last album before going their separate ways. Pressed on pink vinyl!

Sunshine & Shadows takes the baroque-meets-psych sound of the debut and turns a bit more to the psych side. The stately brass interludes are gone, but horns still figure prominently in the mix. There’s some jazzy New Orleans flavor to a couple of the tunes, albeit twisted into a 7/4 vamp on “You Had Better Listen.”

The instrumentalists in the band, featuring trumpet and trombone, really give the music a unique flavor, setting them apart from the multitudes of other American psych bands. Ars Nova might be likened to Ultimate Spinach (but without the overly serious, pretentious lyrics) or later Zombies (though with less emphasis on the keyboards).

It’s all very well written and nicely played, and when they do a tender ballad like “Temporary Serenade,” the acoustic guitar is very lute-like, much more along the lines of classical than folk (like the later work of Jan Akkerman with Focus), and the trumpet descant adds a lovely spice.

“Well, Well, Well” is the heaviest rock tune in their repertoire, with a great electric guitar riff and hot organ playing, again set apart by trombone and trumpet. This one is definitely worth seeking out for baroque pop fans."

"NY Psychedelic Art Rock!

Touted as the “new Doors,” Ars Nova’s second release shows the band genre-bending jazz and heavy psychedelia in a style that’s their own. Shifting from a largely classical centric sound, this was the group’s last album before going their separate ways. Pressed on pink vinyl!

Sunshine & Shadows takes the baroque-meets-psych sound of the debut and turns a bit more to the psych side. The stately brass interludes are gone, but horns still figure prominently in the mix. There’s some jazzy New Orleans flavor to a couple of the tunes, albeit twisted into a 7/4 vamp on “You Had Better Listen.”

The instrumentalists in the band, featuring trumpet and trombone, really give the music a unique flavor, setting them apart from the multitudes of other American psych bands. Ars Nova might be likened to Ultimate Spinach (but without the overly serious, pretentious lyrics) or later Zombies (though with less emphasis on the keyboards).

It’s all very well written and nicely played, and when they do a tender ballad like “Temporary Serenade,” the acoustic guitar is very lute-like, much more along the lines of classical than folk (like the later work of Jan Akkerman with Focus), and the trumpet descant adds a lovely spice.

“Well, Well, Well” is the heaviest rock tune in their repertoire, with a great electric guitar riff and hot organ playing, again set apart by trombone and trumpet. This one is definitely worth seeking out for baroque pop fans."

"Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey MQ sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey's known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey MQ reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom. "It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too_there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget. Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" _ its title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory _ presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind," Casey says. "Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real..." Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery _ screenshots, smiles, streetlights _ searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of its boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection's only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

"Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey MQ sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey's known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey MQ reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom. "It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too_there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget. Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" _ its title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory _ presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind," Casey says. "Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real..." Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery _ screenshots, smiles, streetlights _ searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of its boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection's only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

The relatively short life of San Francisco's Aluminum has so far yielded a single (Spinning Backwards, 2020) and an EP (Windowpane, 2022), but their debut LP, Fully Beat, overflows with tenured confidence and a singular style that deftly comprises shoegaze, big beat, and jangle pop. With influences ranging from Orbital, to Wipers, to The Avalanches and Sly and the Family Stone, theirs is a multifaceted take on established forms, fed through fuzz and led by honeyed, male-female vocal harmonies from Bay Area post-punk veterans Marc Leyda (of Wild Moth) and Ryann Gonsalves (of Torrey). "Smile" begins with deceptive sparseness, adding neon swirls of stacked tremolo over a mesmerizing lyrical refrain, and hinting at the dynamism to come with understated grace and grit. "Always Here, Never There" is Fully Beat's first pure hit of melodic pop: its liquid bass groove winds beneath a melancholy-sweet synth hook and Leyda's plaintive vocals, while drummer Chris Natividad's deep, pillowy snare and propulsive style maintain a driving pace. Lead single, "Behind My Mouth", shifts gears into a big beat shuffle and howl of overdriven guitars, which relent to Gonsalves' rolling bassline and playful, snarky vocal. Composed across several weeks of experimentation, it is a prime iteration of Aluminum's meticulous world of sound, which nevertheless carries an air of wry nonchalance. Asking, "Do you ever see behind my mouth?", Gonsalves notes that the song "comes from a place of wanting to be understood authentically, and to communicate intentionally." This approach speaks to the album's broader theme of exhaustion amid the demands of the modern grind: working unfulfilling jobs to pay exorbitant rent, feeling society break at the seams, and trying to maintain a meaningful personal life with the remaining scraps of morale. The response, then, must be to find joy. These songs were crafted over a half-dozen months in basements and practice spaces, creating an abundance of authentic passion and catharsis that's as nostalgic and comforting as a cherished, tattered band t-shirt. The closer, "Upside Down", is a full-throttle blare of joyous release - "a straight-up love song," according to Leyda. The deliberate choice to end it with a gradual fade, rather than a dramatic climax, smartly suggests the ambivalence of acceptance - perhaps fitting, when considering the immensity of the album's subject matter. It also hints that there is much more to be said, and as such a rich and compelling debut, Fully Beat shows that Aluminum are only getting started.

Throw the gauntlet: Fast Castle is back with Gent1e $oul’s “Shoals”-EP, our furthest excursion into the unexplored depths of mind-bending bassweight! Having perfected his build order on his recent “Block Printing'' and “Silk Armor”-EPs, Gent1e $oul continues to infuse his productions with sonic bass strategies over five versatile tracks.

“Dark Age” provides an aggressive opening, immediately applying pressure with nasty bass wobbles, dembow echoes and a 4x4 switch that might catch distracted players off guard. Tried and tested in many settings, this is an essential option for the incoming dancefloor rush!

With its heavy neo-stepper energy, ”Bad Neighbor” lays siege to dancefloor resistance with a piercing lead, breathing drums and powerful waves of sub wubs. Just like the AoE2’s legendary trebuchet of the same name, “Bad Neighbor” – paired with the right Soundsystem – will make the walls shake.

“Dusty Acer” is a homage to Gent1e $oul’s dear but aging AoE2 gaming machine, capable of producing similar noises to this dark UKG cuts’ central bassline.

Deep dubstep cut “Illumination” takes us to the for a wholesome mana refill: Mystic ambiences make you pull down your cowl, before diving into a fully blown sub massage.

The standout self-titled cut “Shoals” concludes the release: A deep-yet-powerful half-stepping perc grower at 160bpm, operating on subdued rhythmic shifts and layers.

As a special tribute to the AoE2 community, all tunes are flavored with the game's original sound effects. Thanks for keeping us inspired, Nili_Aoe for NAC5 and T90 for HC5!

Tulsa, Oklahoma's Unwed Sailor have been on a tear over the past few years. Following a quiet phase through much of the 2010s, they reëmerged with the aptly titled Heavy Age (2019), and two more full-lengths, Truth Or Consequences (2021) and Mute The Charm (2023), that chart a remarkable evolution of their bass-led, pop-leaning post rock. On Underwater Over There - their ninth LP overall - a current of 80s goth and jangle-pop runs beneath a litany of memorable hooks and compositional left turns, creating a propulsive and intricate world of sound. The band worked collectively on all elements of mixing and production to craft a meticulously layered environment, while maintaining an air of spontaneity and experimentation across the set. Early standout, "Final Feather", drifts through varying landscapes of airiness and haze on a high-neck bass hook, while the hum of voices adds a contrast of angelic comfort. Bearing influence from New Order and The Cure in particular, its balance of gravitas and shimmer is the result of founding member Johnathon Ford's intuitive writing method: the lead bass line comes first, followed by supporting melodies, drums, guitars, keys, and final detailing. "Dusty" is a prime example of this process, as Ford's powerful, low-end groove anchors a full-spectrum array of guitars, bells, and arpeggiations along with Matt Putman's energetic drum section. Its fluid pacing provides a perfect establishing shot, with shifting moods that gather into a coda guided by David Swatzell's harmonized, glittering guitar riffs - a sunrise after a moonless night. In quick succession, "Blue Tangier" widens the aperture with a pounding percussive refrain, vibrant bass tone and an unforgettable, fuzzed-out melodic motif. Sprawling centerpiece, "Junko", is a loose callback to 2003's The Marionette and The Music Box, its deliberate stride and interwoven melodies evoking the hands of a mechanical clock, and the anticipation of something long-awaited but nebulous. It drifts effortlessly from innocence to intrigue, expands into a mesmerizing howl, and vanishes abruptly into mist. While honoring their forebears in winks and nods, Unwed Sailor remain totally inimitable in their approach and style, twenty-five years into an acclaimed career. The band's clear vision for Underwater Over There has yielded some of their most indelible work, and their inventive, passionate approach gives a strong sense of plenty more beyond the horizon.

2024 Repress

Imagine a held-up-in-traffic Wayne Shorter arriving late to a Weather Report studio session and Joe Zawinul, Victor Bailey, and Omar Hakim filling in the time by jamming on a grooving house cut. Had that happened, it might have sounded a little bit like “It Never Stops,” one of two ultra-fresh tracks on Kaidi Tatham's Yore debut. Jazz and house are obviously distinct genres, yet as this irresistible cut makes clear swing is common to both. The other track, the cerebrally titled “One for the Brain,” locates itself closer to house music proper but is no less appealing for doing so.
Given the jazzy vibe of “It Never Stops,” it's fitting that Benji B once deemed Tatham the "Herbie Hancock of the United Kingdom.” Regarded as one of the originators of the Broken Beat sound, the UK-based multi-instrumentalist has worked with many an artist, from Bugz In The Attic and The Herbaliser to DJ Jazzy Jeff, and his session work credits list Slum Village, Amy Winehouse, Soul II Soul, and others. His own discography includes EPs and releases for labels such as 2000 Black, First World Records, Theo Parrish's Sound Signature, Eglo Records, and now, of course, Yore.


“It Never Stops” rolls in on a wave of silky synthesizer textures and percolating precision with a tight, funky groove that instantly pulls you into its velvety world. Triangles, electric bass, and clavinet add collective radiance to the material as the tune struts its way into your psyche. As if to make the jazz connection even more explicit, Tatham works an acoustic piano solo into the cut's second half before shifting focus back to the groove for the coda. “One for the Brain,” by comparison, digs into its chugging house pulse with fervour whilst also sweetening the arrangement with painterly synth flourishes. This one charges with breathless determination and like “It Never Stops” nods in jazz's direction with the inclusion of a freewheeling piano solo. Every minute and second on this strictly limited 12“ release seem's meaningful. No Represses / Limited 200 Copies.

London-based four-piece Adult Jazz announce their first full-length album in a decade, So Sorry So Slow, out 26 April 2024 via Spare Thought. Alongside the announcement comes lovesick new single ‘Suffer One’ featuring Owen Pallett, a cautious excavation of self and sexuality, clambering across a gorgeously shapeshifting, filmic five-minutes.

Containing some of the band’s most abrasive but gentle, beautiful and melismatic work to date, So Sorry So Slow has many defining characteristics: romance, panic, devotion and remorse, threaded together by an intentionally laser-focused love. It’s deeply personal, bruised and candid in its expressions of tenderness, and deeply pained in its concurrent reflections of ecological regret. Across its hour-long runtime, a delicate, frenetic energy and glacial heaviness coexist, the band pitting those paces against one another. In their richly experimental timbre, dancing strings and fluttering falsettos prang against a bed of brass drones like a wounded bird.

“We started writing in 2017 and began recording in 2018,” says vocalist Harry Burgess. “We genuinely thought it might be finished in 2018! But things kept developing and, having resolutely not struck while the iron was hot, there was no real external push to rush things after that, so we just kept letting things shift and unfold until it felt right. Listening back to my voice notes it’s nice to notice that there are fragments of ideas from the whole period 2017-2023 which have shaped the record.”

Recorded in bursts at studios across London and in the band members’ flats, at Konk, on the Isle of Wight and in Sussex, So Sorry is unambiguous in its evolution. Sonically, there are sparks of the arrhythmic brightness that afforded the band’s critically acclaimed debut album Gist Is its cult adoration, for fans of Arthur Russell and Meredith Monk, but with a blossoming, melancholic darkness often overhead. Piano sprees and luscious string sections appear like low-hanging stars on a night-time drive, whilst plunging vocal distortions and humming brass loops resurrect heavy limbs in a bad dream.

“I usually have objects as kind of totems for ideas,” explains Burgess. “The album initially started out to do with performance… the totem was a head mic, one of the subtle skin-tone ones, discreet on the forehead of a West End star. A number of the first songs in their original forms were almost musical theatre piano ballads. I think that was really a device to write about my life as the ‘main character’ (pre internet-speak reframing): regrets about romance, relationships - unsustainable relationships with the self and others.”

“However, once we started writing, the ideas about unsustainable personal relationships, loving unevenly and heartbreak conflated with a more expressly ecological regret. Like contending with big feelings of loss, endings, beauty, desolation, and with how much joy the earth contains in it. Feeling so much gratitude bound up in waves of sadness. Maybe witnessing a slow-motion goodbye to all that, or its last gasps. I love the earth and the life it supports so much. I love how ecosystems fit together - even the brutal stuff. It may be basic to say, but now is the time to be laser focused on that love. I was thinking about human centrality on earth, us as the ‘main character’, the way that is served by faith and romanticism, and the subsequent disingenuous understandings of our position in the ecosystem, as only stewards somehow, rather than subjects. The totems at this point: a herald’s horn, lorry inner tubes, archaeological tools. I guess from doom, industry, history respectively.”

“Now I would say the record is about gripping. Totems being: crampons, rope, drips, desalination equipment, accruing various survival tech. I think gripping sums up both of the threads. There’s the emotionally correct clinging to the earth that is the substrate of everything we value, or the delusional clinging to our imagined dominant position. But also the practical, technological aspects of creating a sustainable relationship, of remaining here. Then I think of romance again.”

So Sorry So Slow comes out 26th April 2024 on Spare Thought, mixed by Fabian Prynn at 4AD Studios and mastered by Alex Wharton at Abbey Road.

Adult Jazz is Harry Burgess, Tim Slater, Steven Wells and Tom Howe.

The collaborative project from Vincent Lemieux and Guillaume Coutu-Dumont, Flabbergast, returns this March with a new EP, entitled ‘Default Mode Network’ and coming via Swiss imprint Adam’s Bite.

Vincent Lemieux is a staple of the Montreal, Canada underground and a widely beloved DJ for his impeccable technique and selections, he’s also offered up productions on the Studio Club and DISDAT labels and a collaborative EP alongside Ohm Hourani for Jigit and co-founding the Musique Risquée alongside Akufen, Deadbeat and Stephen Beaupré.

Guillaume Coutu-Dumont, a fellow Montrealer has long been a prized producer for his unique spin on micro house and
deep house music with his music finding a home on the likes of Mule Musiq, Meander and Dokutoku among others. In 2015 the two joined forces for their Flabbergast debut on Circus Company, have gone on to release with Yoyaku and Copier/Coller, and here makes a triumphant return for Switzerland’s Adam’s Bite with four fresh original cuts.

Opening the EP is the playful ‘Peppermint Poddle’, fuelled by oscillating synth tones, twitchy percussion and saturated bass alongside a spoken word vocal. ‘Manger Du Bon Manger’ then
shifts focus to cinematic organ lines, jazzy drums and a snaking bass groove throughout.

‘Mou D’état’ kicks off the B-side and sees the duo dive deeper via ethereal atmospherics, their signature wonky, mind bending synths and an amalgamation of processed vocal murmurs. Lastly
‘Dans L’oeil’ sees César Merveille join the party, the trio working collectively to create a unique slice of percussion fueled microhouse with intricately intertwined organic percussion, dubby
synth flutters, cinematic pads and pulsating subs.

Irresistible Brazilian blues reggae from the heart of the Amazon rainforest. A psychedelic guarana induced trip and ode to the fading indigenous cultures and shifting hegemony in Brazil. This one-off release by Manaus native Natacha Fink was originally written in 1986 as the lead track on NOSSA MUSICA - a compilation celebrating regional music from the Amazon. Emerging out of the dictatorship, Natacha and her fellow artists rejected the aesthetic standards driven by internal colonialism and sought out new ways to express themselves away from the styles of the dominant Rio-São Paulo axis. What surfaced was a melodic blend of genres, with Natacha’s haunting vocals and playful lyrics gliding over an arrangement of guitars and double bass. Vocal backing is led by Torrinho, well known for his layered composition style, whose song ‘Porto de Lenha’ is recognised throughout Amazonas as an unofficial anthem. Hidden within the Amazon, Pirarublue lies in that wonderful space between innocence and honesty. Proudly exploring cultural and ecological spaces through a refreshing, ghostly infectious groove. For fans of Gal Costa, Elis Regina, Chico César, Jorge Ben Jor and Joni Mitchell.

Accompanying Natacha’s beguiling single is the field recording “Unseen Songlines” by artist and academic Nimalan Yoganathan. The composition immerses the listener in the soundscapes of Mamori Lake, a remote village inside the Brazilian Amazon. Nimalan explores the ambiguous perception of sounds emanating from the dense rainforest and deep beneath the Amazon River, where we hear the sounds but cannot see their sources: an acousmatic concert performed by the rainforest itself. Processed field recordings of birds and frogs, as well as underwater hydrophone recordings of dolphins and fish subtly weave throughout electroacoustic textures and beats. The listener is invited to hone in on the musical subtleties hidden throughout the environment. The compositional methods employed in this piece draw on the concepts of sonic rupture, presence, absence and memory found in the dub music tradition.

This limited edition 7” by Sticky Buttons puts these two outlying works together for a unique listening experience, combining the human and more-than-human experience of life at the heart of Brazil. Both uniquely Amazonian but with a universal appeal.

Warehouse Find!

Time to welcome Soul 223 to the label with his debut Delusions EP entitled Fear Of Stopping. Something of a complete legend in our eyes and ears, Steve Pickton has been releasing top drawer tuneage for over two decades both as Stasis on influential labels such as B12 and Peacefrog and more recently as Soul 223 on equally well regarded imprints like Delsin, Soul Jazz and Neroli. Always one to shy away from any limelight or self promotion it's true to say that this underrated British producer remains something of an anomaly, staying true to his underground roots where faceless, shadowy and obscure reigns supreme over the latest over-exposed cover star. This ethos naturally carries through into his music where you will always find both expansive beauty and unrefined rawness in equal measures ensuring his tracks always sound fresh rather than over produced or contrived.

Fear Of Stopping opens the EP with a low-slung disco groove providing the backbone for intermittent pad washes and reversing stabs. The focus here is firmly on the drums and simple conga riff with thankfully very little else to deter you from this sublime slice of abstract dance music.

Next up we have a remix from another ridiculously talented producer who chooses quality over quantity, having only ever had one release under his own name, albeit for one of the most respected labels in the world; Rush Hour. Maxi Mill came to our attention having released one of the tracks of 2011 namely To The Next. On this, his first ever solo remix he brings a brilliant bump to the EP with a raw, warehousey and bass-heavy workout. Just the right amount of strings and pads keep the deep vibe intact but the filtering bass and jacking drums definitely take this one to the floor.

Flipping over we have Walberswick in it's Hoist Covert Mix incarnation. Almost thirteen minutes of spaced out, deep Detroit house music awaits you, ready to lure you in and cocoon you with it's warm and hypnotizing machine funk. Lovely to hear the old Stasis influence working it's way into this one sounding both decidedly old-school and completely futuristic and otherworldly as only the best tracks ever do.

Closing the EP we have Birdbrook Rain dropping the BPM's for a beautifully sparse track that brings with it an almost desolate and disconnected feeling, echoing synths providing a naive melody while a dusty pad shifts simply beneath. A little slice of magic concluding a fresh and interesting EP, we hope you agree.

Theo Kottis arrives on Dekmantel with an EP of snappy, melodically-charged house, techno and electro with a distinct 90s edge. Lighthouse marks a shift in focus for the London-based Scottish producer — the result of a self-imposed creative reset which has seen him honing a more mature sound both in the studio and on the decks. The EP’s title track has been on heavy rotation this summer from the likes of Ben UFO, Francesco Del Garda & Palms Trax, and it’s not hard to work out why. ‘Lighthouse’ draws on all the best elements of club music and moulds them into a deadly, effective whole.

From the driving low-end of the Reese bassline to the razor-sharp attack of the 4/4 drums, the swoon of the Motor City pads to the tweaked acid line, it’s a hybrid techno workout of the highest order. Following the inspirational flash point of ‘Lighthouse’ Kottis built out the rest of the EP in a similar vein of characterful, impactful club tracks driven by iconic 90s sounds wielded with precision. ‘Warp’ brings the 303 further to the forefront while ‘Take Control’ digs into deliciously dirty lead lines and ‘Distance’ takes a more explicit electro direction. He might be exploring a revitalised sound, but Kottis holds true to his flair for ear-snagging anthems evidenced on past releases for Permanent Vacation, Space Dust and DGTL amongst many others. As Kottis’ impact on the scene continues to grow, it’s a true pleasure to present some of his fiercest tracks to date on his continued upward trajectory.

Having built a loyal local Antwerp following off of the success of their 2019 debut self released album, ‘Forgotten Kingdom’, and growing reputation for electrifying stage performances, Kolonel Djafaar achieved worldwide recognition in 2021 for the ‘Cold Heat’ EP on Batov Records, attracting praise from Music Is My Sanctuary (“triumphant), and support from Gideon Coe on BBC 6 Radio Music, and DJs across Worldwide FM, Soho Radio, Le Mellotron, and KEXP.

The group overcame busy schedules and frequent quarantine periods to hit the studio in February 2022 to lay down four tracks. However, the creative itch persisted, leading to an intense writing session in August, deep in the heart of a tranquil forest. From noon until midnight, the band immersed themselves in the creative process, embracing the freedom to make noise without restraint.

Fueled by hearty breakfasts, unwavering focus, and the ambient clucking of chickens roaming the studio, Kolonel Djafaar crafted the majority of ‘Getaway’. This period marked a pivotal shift as a number of new band members joined just in time for the August sessions.

Membership changes, including Emiel Lauryssen joining on trumpet, alongside guitarist Philip Matthhijnssens, the band's palette has broadened and new sounds are able to break through. From psychedelic rock and soul influence of the Daptone Records’ affiliated Budos Band, surf rock (“Urban Dweller”), Morricone Spaghetti Western guitar, and Afro Cuban (“Kelmendi”), alongside the brassy Afrobeat and Ethio jazz vibes the group have been known for.

The broader dynamics of ‘Getaway’, and the band’s more cinematic and experimental approach, is particularly apparent on "Siren’s Glitch" and "Phil’s First Tear". The latter, first conceived by drummer Anton Van Hove, features the lead guitar doubling up with the bass guitar for added impact. Whilst the origins of "Convoi Exceptionnel", a brass & synths stomper of a march, trace back to a jam session during the band's Hungarian tour, another vital period of prolonged time together, capturing the organic essence of their experiences on the road.

Each track on ‘Getaway’ holds a unique connection to at least one band member, and all benefit from a collaborative approach to songwriting. "Sparking Clover'', an Ethio-inspired psych & soul groover penned by tenor saxophonist Doyin Smith, carries a poignant undertone inspired by personal loss, while psych rock leaning tracks like "Apologies in Advance" showcase the band's evolution and increasing professionalism in crafting a distinct sonic experience.

The curious cover art depicts a lone individual heading down an empty city street towards a large mysterious glowing object, evoking the common emptiness and struggle of urban life, and the search for meaning or just something better. The band envision the object to represent this album, offering a beacon to like-minded listeners. Kolonel Djafaar invite music enthusiasts on an immersive journey, to ‘Getaway’ from the daily grind of life, on an album reflecting diverse influences and marking a new chapter in their musical exploration.

Founded by Joe Laycock and Jack Sharp as a successor to theatrical punk group Cheap Teeth, the pair birthed the project from their joint love of immersive, beat-driven soundscapes and subtle shifts. Featuring members of Catholic Action and Pressure Retreat, the band aims to urge the listener"s ear into progressively choppy waters whilst simultaneously grounding them in firm lyrical soil.

'Scope Neglect' ist ein experimentelles und genreübergreifendes Album, das aus Frosts Bewunderung für den Metal geschmiedet wurde, wobei er sich bewusst von dessen konventionellen Attributen entfernt hat. Wo das Album Aspekte des Genres berührt, trifft es auf glitchende Elektronik, immersive Ambient-Industrial-Sounds und tief kontemplative Erkundungen, die zu etwas führen, das sich nicht in eine Schublade stecken lässt. Das Album wurde zusammen mit dem Gitarristen Greg Kubacki (von der New Yorker Progressive-Metal-Band Car Bomb) und dem Bassisten Liam Andrews (von der Melbourner Band MY DISCO) in den Candy Bomber Studios in Berlin mit dem Toningenieur Ingo Krauss (Swans, Nick Cave und Mick Harvey) aufgenommen.

Chicago hip-hop outfit Angry Blackmen made up of Quentin Branch & Brian Warren (ABM) have been stretching their arms and tapping into different sounds since they smashed onto the scene with their debut single “OK!” in 2017. A prime introduction starring two emcees showing they deserve to wield the microphone and do so with good cause. Then barely a month later ABM released sophomore single ‘Riot!’ a complete shift in sound that still housed the foundation set in ‘OK!’ A few years later the duo would drop their debut project ‘Talkshit!’ which saw them amass the following they have today.
‘The Legend of ABM’ immediately smacks the listener in the eardrum leaving no second wasted and jumping straight to the point. The 11-track adventure truly presents an expression of hip-hop that we haven’t seen before, infusing multiple sounds with the 50-year old genre. To go even deeper, Quentin Branch & Brian Warren are teaching a masterclass in top-notch poetic lyricism, creating both accessible and mind-bending music. “Stanley Kubrick” has both heroes shattering the beat with their braggadocio for what is just the appetizer to prepare the listener for what’s to come in the next ten tracks. ‘Sabotage’ tells the story of two Black men hustling through the trenches of capitalism and the effect that this journey has on them. While the album exudes catchy wordplay and spine-splitting production, if you lift up the hood, ABM is spinning a tale of depression, existentialism and self-reflection that isn’t always pretty. “Dead Men Tell No Lies” is another mutation in sound for the duo, where the industrial sounds clash, violently yet perfectly together with a blistering hook harkening to the end of time. Warren & Branch’s raw poetry educates the listener of the pre-apocalyptic world we’re already living in throughout this project. ‘The Legend of ABM’ is not an excursion for the weak, the production is meant to snap your spine in half, the lyrics from Quentin & Brian are pathos-infused and relatable to anyone simply trying to survive.

Impossible to find in the wild, KPM's Image is exactly that; this record paints extraordinary, hyper-vivid scenes with music, in the way only the library greats can. Originally released in 1974, Image is an absolutely stunning listen from start to finish, and arguably the most wanted KPM grail that's still not been reissued - until now! Just too good…

Worth the price of admission alone, and likely the reason you're all already drooling about this release, the mellow, dramatic beat of "Image", Brian Bennett's opener and title track, is a Jaylib-sampled firecracker. A reflective, scenic underscore which grows to full orchestra and ends as it begins - it's just beautiful. Next up, swoon to "The Little Orphan" by Neil Richardson featuring strings and harp. It's a deeply emotive, sweeping orchestral piece. Just straight gorgeous. It's followed by "Paradise Island", a lush, horizontal Balearic gem courtesy of Gordon Rees and David Gold; it'll send you into a blissful reverie with its elegant strings and gentle drums. From the same pair, "Forbidden Fruit" is, again, string-drenched but the strings are more insistent, stabbing even, and, with drums and Blaxploitation guitars high up in the mix, it's definitely a funkier proposition. "The Enchantress", again a Rees-Gold special, is a slower, groovy, synthy wonder. Closing out the A-Side, "Phenomena" is a mysterious gem, a Gold solo effort set at a breezier tempo with propulsive percussion and head nod, fast-paced breaks with ace keys.

Flip over for "Infinite Expanse", John Scott's dramatic panorama adorned with proud, triumphant horns. Scott's "Static Objects" paints patient, pastoral scenes; there's a serenity and stillness to the proceedings. Next up, Be With favourite John Fiddy delivers shifting shapes and patterns with his wonderful "Metamorphosis", all wah wah, harps, dramatic percussion and strings. It's by turns billowy and blasting. "Cubist Pictures" follows, Neil Richardson's brilliant nebulous, fragmentary piece. Better yet, Richardson's gorgeous, beatless "Analysis" follows, and it's an orchestral beauty featuring cello, harps and woodwind. It's no exaggeration to describe this as transcendental. His "Crystal Ball" presents more static scenes with cello, twinkling percussion and strings, before Steve Gray's fantastically-titled softly-ace "Gliding Through Clouds" closes out this remarkable set.

As with all of our KPM re-issues, the audio for Image comes from the original analogue tapes and has been remastered for vinyl by Be With regular Simon Francis. And as usual, the sleeve reproduction duties were handed over to Richard Robinson, the current custodian of KPM’s brand identity.

Following their contribution to the 2022 International Women’s Day compilation, and a co-production credit on “Dreaming is Essential” by Byron Yeates, Eoin DJ drops their first release on Radiant Records, Total Body. The 4-track EP is replete with mind-bending, lustrous tracks waiting to be spun out to sweatbox dancefloors.

“Total Body” invites movement from its first seconds. Layers and layers of snares, shakers and rhythmic synth stabs build tension before the pulse of a rolling bassline cements the elements into a cohesive hard house groove. Fragments and chops of sensx’s vocals wrap in and around the sonic field, leaving wisps of reverb and echo in their wake before repeating the track’s Total Body mantra in the breakdown. The result is a lushly-scored density of sound, with a relentless stomp that never feels overcrowded or too heavy.

Angel D’lite’s remix takes a more skeletal approach to “Total Body”: a snare and clap march beneath chiming vocal stabs, rumbling low end and rolling breakbeats, flipping the original into a modern bass-heavy hybrid number. The rhythmic synth from the original, reversed and efex’d, ushers us in, and then out of the track, around extra bass stabs and pitch shifted “Total Body” chops.

On the B side, “Ultra Soft” lifts off with a firm kick and a rolling 3-note bassline. Despite the title, the track hits harder than “Total Body” and sings with Eoin DJ signatures: swirling funnels of processed vocals, rich, ear-itching textures, stripped back percussion and rave-ready samples are sprinkled with 303s, to create a track that sits comfortably with both classic trance and techno and contemporary “Progressive” dance music.

The EP’s closer, a remix of “Ultra Soft” by Byron Yeates, compresses the astrally-inclined scale of the original track into shining slices of sound. A playful, chiming melody starts off the track alongside the kick, working through precise grooves, knife-sharp snares, a throbbing bass and chopped-up, smokey vocals. The result: 6 minutes of total embodiment from the Radiant Records boss.

Repress.


After the success of Bollywood infused edit of Koi Jaye and the Three Eyes remix, Tjade is back on Bordello A Parigi with a four tracker of varied delights. A clear enthusiasm for bright melodies and bending bars of trance runs through his Voyager EP. The title track judders to life on rumbling arpeggio lines, while the leads are crisp and beats racing fast as an anthem for dancing till sunrise dawns. “In Contact” offers corkscrew acid key shifts and sentimental chiptune melodies, while broken beats and the devil-may-care chords characterise “Shut Out”. Tjade provides music to help cares float away and bring people together. To top it all off, the master of all things modern rave Marlon Hoffstadt dons his DJ Daddy Trance moniker to rework the title piece. The BPMs rise, the breaks extend and drops fall from great height.

Multi-instrumentalist, composer, performer and curator L’Rain (Taja Cheek) returns with her third album I Killed Your Dog. Over-writing themes of grief and identity that informed her previous work, I Killed Your Dog considers what it means to hurt the people you love the most. Multi-layered in subject and form, L’Rain’s sonic explorations interrogate instead how multiplicities of emotion and experience intersect with identity. The experimental and the hyper-commercial; the expectation and the reality; the hope and the despair. “I’m envisioning a world of contradictions, as always,” Cheek explains. “Sensual, maybe even sexy, but terrifying, and strange.” Written amidst heartbreaks from the perspective of an earned maturity, I Killed Your Dog takes the sonic world laid out by L’Rain in 2021’s album Fatigue on a compelling new trajectory. Described by Cheek as an “anti-break-up” record, I Killed Your Dog takes the universal pop theme of love as its starting point – bold, bratty and even a touch diabolical – and inspects it through the form of a conversation with her younger self, untangling her relationship with femininity and the formal musical conventions that others have come to expect of her. Alongside long-time collaborators Andrew Lappin and Ben Chapoteau-Katz, Cheek has developed L’Rain into a shape-shifting entity that blurs the distinction between band and individual

Following on from the psychoacoustic concrète of Outside Ludlow / Desert Disco LP (BT075), Sam Dunscombe returns to Black Truffle with Two Forests / Oceanic. Dunscombe has been active in recent years on multiple fronts, including as a key member of the Berlin community of Just Intonation researchers and practitioners; working with composers like Taku Sugimoto, Mary Jane Leach, and Anthony Pateras; and the release of Horatiu Radulescu - Plasmatic Music vol. 1 (the result of many years performance research into the thought and music of this seminal Romanian spectralist). In parallel with these activities, Dunscombe has been deeply involved in research on the role of music in psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, prompting these two side long pieces, composed using field recordings and digital synthesis. As Dunscombe explains in the accompanying liner notes, music plays a key role in psychedelic-assisted therapy, yet it is often restricted to stock forms of New Age, ambient and electronica. Taking seriously the potential for spatio-environmental sonic experiences to add to the therapeutic process, these two pieces are intended to suggest how ‘a music-as-environment approach may help to add options to the therapist’s toolbox’. ‘Two Forests’ begins in a central Californian sequoia grove. Bird songs and buzzing insect life are treated with a variety of time-based processing methods (slicing and recombination, primitive granular synthesis, delay, and so on), which strip the field recordings of their linear, documentary character, reframing them in an enchanted web of traces and echoes. Analysing the pitches found in the original recordings, Dunscombe used them to generate a large Just Intonation pitch set. These tones are woven slowly into the field recordings, gradually building in density and complexity until the forest has been transformed into an unreal space of infinite proportions. Emerging from this cosmic expanse in the final minutes of the piece, we find ourselves in the Amazon rainforest outside Manaus, Brazil. As Dunscombe writes, the piece creates ‘a sense of place-gone-strange, of space and time simultaneously expanding and contracting across octaves, miles, and minutes’. On ‘Oceanic’, several recordings of different beaches fade in and out to create a texture both homogenous and constantly shifting in both the rhythm of the waves and each recording's sense of depth and distance. Tones relating in simple ratios to the average rhythm of each beach float over each other, colouring the white noise texture of the field recordings with shifting hues. In both pieces, Dunscombe forgoes the easy consonance that bogs down much contemporary ambient music for a richer harmonic array informed by extended tuning practices and spectralism. The end results suggest a hitherto undreamt-of meeting of Radulescu’s undulating sonic masses and the discreetly processed location recordings of Irv Teibel’s ‘psychologically ultimate’ Environments. Looking beyond the insularity that can afflict experimental music culture, Dunscombe’s work is a moving argument for the healing power of expanded approaches to sound and music. Even outside of a psychedelics-assisted therapy, frequent immersion in Two Forests / Oceanic is almost guaranteed to produce beneficial psychological results.

Black Truffle is thrilled to present a previously unheard performance by rudra veena master Ustad Zia Mohiuddin Dagar, recorded in the North Indian city of Vrindavan at the Druhpad Samaroh festival in 1982. Z.M. Dagar was a nineteenth-generation descendant of the Dagar family of musicians, famed for their profoundly meditative approach to the tradition of Hindustani court music. Perhaps the most revered members of the family were the brothers Mohinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar, who played a key role in reawakening interest in dhrupad in the mid-20th century. The great exponents of the tradition from whom Z.M. Dagar descended were all singers, and dhrupad is essentially vocal music. However, as Z.M. Dagar explained, the veena family of instruments plays an important role in the education and practice of dhrupad singers, especially as an aid to mastering the fine microtonal nuances of pitch essential to the genre. Introduced as a child by his father to the rudra veena, a large and low-pitched veena amplified by two enormous gourds, Z.M. Dagar became the first modern dhrupad musician to perform with it as an instrumental soloist, giving his first recital at the age of 16. Devoted to the instrument throughout his life, he made innovations to its design and materials, as well as introducing novel techniques (such as playing without the use of the traditional wire plectrum, resulting in the remarkable warmth of his tone). In the great Dagar family tradition, his approach to the various ragas that make up the dhrupad repertoire was stately, slow, and considered, with a great emphasis on the alap, the heavily improvised exposition section. True to form, in this recording of Dagar performing the night raga Yaman Kalyan, the alap section stretches out to more than forty minutes of slow-motion bliss, a frozen tanpura drone hovering above Dagar’s gracefully bent notes and elegantly twisting phrases. In the alap’s first half, Dagar’s figures are so intently focused on the lower reaches of the rudra veena’s range that they register more as shudders and moans than melodic patterns. As the performance continues, he slowly climbs in pitch, though continuing with the same intent focus on the articulation of single notes and subtle microtonal variations. This leads to the jod section of the performance, which, though still accompanied only by the tanpura, gradually takes on a more rhythmic character. Developing almost imperceptibly over the course of nearly thirty minutes, the jod moves from the stillness of the opening alap to a rapid pulse that announces the closing section of the piece, where Dagar is joined by Shrikant Mishra on the pakhawaj (a double headed hand drum). Where many performers use the final section of the raga as an exercise in unrestrained virtuosity, Dagar and Mishra subtly weave a web of finely shifting accents and hypnotic melodic variations, bringing the recording to a fitting conclusion while remaining within the meditative space occupied by the performance as a whole. Adorned with beautiful archival photographs of Dagar taken by Swedish percussion legend Bengt Berger and accompanied by detailed notes from Bradford Bailey, Vrindavan 1982 is a stunning document of music unmatched in its patient focus and mysterious emotional depth. .

Polish jazz rebels sneaky jesus are back with their second studio album For Chaching Taphed.The highly imaginative quartet out of Wroclaw comprising Maciej Forreiter (Guitar), Matylda Gerber (Saxophones), Ben Łasiewick i(Bass) and Filip Baczyński (Drums) have won fans around the world for their restless, quirky brand of jazz which takes in breakbeats, twisting chord progressions and improvisation as well as a wealth of musical influences.

The band have been touring their asses off ever since they surprised the world with their debut album For Joseph Riddle in 2021. From out of nowhere their debut LP of 500 copies sold out in a month and they quickly went on to sell close to 1,000 CDs of the album. Fast-forward to 2023 and the band are sharing stages with artists such as Ill Considered and Theon Cross.

For Chaching Taphed was created in complete isolation. The group locked itself in a barn at the Museum of Agricultural Technology in Piotrowice Świdnickie. It worked on its sophomore output surrounded by machinery, trucks and carriages. These new compositions mirror the abstract conversations which the group frequently has just for fun. Contrary to For Joseph Riddle, this album is simple and does not rely on ongoing grooves. This enabled the group to be much more experimental. The band was joined by friends Flautist Mariya Mavko on Piękno Niemożliwe (Impossible Beauty) and her playing is sampled in Hipotetyczny Taras (Hypothetical Terrace). Pięciu Pszczelarzy (Five Beekeepers) closes the album featuring EABS' Jakub Kurek on trumpet. His fiery solo is one of the most intense moments of the album.

Spacer Po Nadodrzu (A walk around Nadodrze) opens the album and is inspired by one of the districts of Wrocław. It is a sonic story depicting a walk through Nadodrze late at night. A steady bass rhythm imitates a careful pace and the responding sax line is a spooky theme that might pop to oneʼs head in a moment of uncertainty.

The album's first single Krztusiec (Whooping Cough) finds the group diving head first into their most recent influences. The trackstarts with drum improvisation, rolling into a solid hip-hop backbeat provided by Ben Łasiewicki on Bass and Drummer Filip Baczyński. Sax and Guitar weave steady but dissonant lines, written by Maciej Forreiter after many hours spent listening to the Ethiopian jazz greats. The track takes off right after that. Matylda Gerber delivers a fiery Sax solo, while the group picks up the tempo and quickens the groove. The essence is the middle section, a dubby collective improvisation. Forreiter, Gerber and Baczyński take turns playing both classic dub phrases and fierce avant grade lines. Łasiewicki keeps everybody in check with a steady bassline. The energy slows down until Baczyński's drum solo, which explores phrasing detached from the rest of the tune.

Second single Chiński Sprzedawca Smażonych Kasztanów (Chinese roasted chestnut seller) is a fusion of breakbeats, energized songo rhythms and motifs inspired by South African melodies. Presenting the group with spacious and rhythmic horn lines, guitarist Maciej Forreiter wrote a chord progression while Beniamin Łasiewicki and Filip Baczyński took care of the rhythm section. This first part of the track suddenly drops out and explodes into the dramatic main motif which includes double sax and fierce guitar playing in harmony, plus the rhythm section playing more and more jungle-esque. Powerful guitar and sax solos feature before we return to the main theme with a completely different rhythmic backdrop.

W Klatce z Bykiem (In a cage with a Bull), starts like a race. The music plays with an incredible nerve and when the theme is right on edge it suddenly stops. It is followed by an animalistic growl on the saxophone and a doom metal-esque bash of downtuned, distorted guitars and heavy drums. In this heavy fashion it slowly approaches the finishing line hitting one final metallic clang.

Piękno Niemożliwe (Impossible Beauty) features wonderful flute playing of Mariya Mavko (Kadabra Dyskety Kusaje). Her work in the opening motif evokes sounds of Polish and Ukrainian folklore. This brief mellow moment serves as a contrast to the usual frantic sounds of sneaky jesus. It is an appreciation of thepolish jazz music of the past, intrinsically-linked to folklore. The band took this idea and reworked it into their own unique style.

Hipotetyczny Taras (Hypothetical Terrace) is built on top of a lengthy vamp in an unusual 7/8 time-signature. The bass anchors the quartet in a simple line, while the rest of the quartet share an emotional conversation. This track is the most open of the whole project and it ends accordingly. The final burst is a call back to the basics ofspiritual jazzand the whole band shows every emotion simultaneously and gracefully fades out.

Pięciu Pszczelarzy (Five Beekeepers) is For Chaching Taphed's conclusion and is a non stop assault of heavy horn lines, punk rhythms and noise. The band is joined by the extraordinary trumpeter Jakub Kurek from EABS, who blends in perfectly with sax and guitar. His exchange of solos with Maciej Forreiter is a combination of classic jazz phrasing and discordant clatter. In the same fierce manner the whole group works within the motif, switching up accents and breaks.

In the short space of two years, sneaky jesus has gone from ambitious upstart looking to break out from its home city playing spit and sawdust venues, to touring Europe as well as prestigious Jazz clubs such as Jassmine in Warsaw. In the process, it has delivered two full-length albums that don't stay in lane or pander to established jazz sub-genres as so many groups do. Some artists make the same record twice or even more than that, but not sneaky jesus. For Chaching Taphed shows the band as restless, experimental, fun, irreverent but purposeful as never before.

“A lot of over-hyped improv / jazz projects out there at the moment and Sneaky Jesus are genuinely excellent and out on their own. Drawing on the expansive atmospherics of a barn as the recording's setting, the album immediately pulls you in with the unsettling 'Spacer Po Nadodrzu' and lifts off on 'Krztusiec', effortlessly moving from angular, abrasive jazz to trippy dub and cinematic intrigue. Tempos shift and intensities shift naturally. The whole set warrants a deep listen from start to finish and watch out for two great guest features from flautist Mariya Mavko and Jakub Kurek bringing some mad fuzz licks to the boisterous closer. Brilliant album.”
Quinton Scott — Strut Records

The central theme of Steady is perseverance. Each track is based on a personal story or a fleeting encounter with people these past few years, from close friends to total strangers, either at home or on night shift commutes. People navigating their own hardships, almost giving up but always struggling through. More broadly, it’s about multiplicity, and contradiction. These central figures displaying hope and determination within a city of development and neglect, uniformity and chaos - an unfiltered representation of a city with all its jagged edges, darkness, and shards of light. It's broken and disheveled, but never not beautiful, just like the people in it. Musically, Steady continues where Bleach (debut album) left off - a sonic language of glitch, decaying tape and analogue distortion through which hints of RnB and soulful ballads bleed through. With a greater emphasis on beats, albeit lopsided on pitch-shifted tape loops, Steady feels more self-assured, more confident, more recognisable. At the same time, it's never stable or predictable - choruses break down early, harmonies bend into beating microtones, tracks emerge before others have finished. The symphonic scope of Bleach is still retained in Steady though. This is music of motivic development, of micro and macro form, of meticulous refining. The work of two classically trained composers, the album's chaos is heavily considered and carefully shaped. Hours of improvisation sessions have since been painstakingly refined into ten distilled tracks, owing to Steady's three year gestation.

Formed by Monster Magnet’s John McBain and Soundgarden’s Matt Cameron & Ben Shepherd in 1993 during some downtime from their day jobs and side project Hater (who released a self-titled album in 1993), Wellwater Conspiracy set about immersing themselves in the dayglo world of sixties psychedelia, channelling the vibrations of Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd and the 13th Floor Elevators to produce the garage lo-fi-lysergic assault on the senses that is their debut album ‘Declaration of Conformity’. Originally issued on Mudhoney’s Steve Turners Super Electro label in 1997, the album was met with critical acclaim upon its release, and Rolling Stone magazine said, “Declaration’s tinny, fuzzed-out sonics decidedly evoke the Summer of Love.” God Unknown Records are proud to be welcoming the album back into print and on all digital platforms, and this coming September 22nd will see the release of a remastered vinyl pressing with extra tracks and new artwork taking influence from Blue Note Records’ fabled artwork. From start to finish, ‘Declaration Of Conformity’ is a loving homage to the true beginnings of psychedelic rock, long before the music got harder and heavier. Songs like ‘Green Undertow’ and ‘Sleeveless’ hark back to the time when The Beatles were spinning the world on its axis with ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, Syd Barrett was the piper at the gates of dawn and Roky Erickson was introducing the world to his Texan psychedelic sounds. Wellwater Conspiracy’s music exists at that moment when pop music started to fracture and go far further out. It was still pop music, but the edges were starting to blur and the sounds were starting to fracture. This is where ‘Declaration of Conformity’ sits; at the dawn of one of the biggest cultural shifts in musical history. The Bandcamp link will also feature two bonus download-only tracks, a cover of ‘Akka Ragga’ by Shocking Blue and ‘Late Night’ by Syd Barrett. Both tracks feature Josh Homme on guitar and bass. Tracklisting A1 Sleeveless A2 You Do You A3 Trowerchord A4 Green Undertow A5 I Love You Every Day Sandy A6 Nati Bati Yi A7 Far Side Of Your Moon B1 The Ending B2 Space Travel In The Blink Of An Eye B3 6-6-5-4-3-2-1 B4 Shel Talmy B5 Lucy Leave B6 Declaration Of Conformity B7 Palomar Observatory

A month after the release of his debut album as Tambores En Benirras, 2021’s fabulous Orbe Dotodo, Graham Newby’s life changed forever. After years living with a visual impairment, his sight had deteriorated so much that he was declared “registered blind”. For a man who had spent decades dividing his time between travelling, DJing, running clubs and lengthy sessions in his own studio, it was a genuinely life-changing moment.

It was against this backdrop, and the need to alter his working methods, that Ondas Horizontales, the second Tambores En Benirras album took shape. Inspired by a mixture of daydreaming, visualisation, immersion in other people’s music (escapism that provided mood enhancement, rather than a specific set of ideas) and long periods spent soaking up the sun in Ibiza, the album is the most vividly detailed, sonically colourful, and sun-soaked collection that Newby has released to date.

Newby’s declining sight forced him to stop spending long spells staring at a screen and undoubtedly slowed down the production process. Yet it also allowed him to reconnect with his emotions, appreciate the storytelling and mood-shifting potential of music, and mine mind’s eye memories of places and spaces that have meant much to him over the years.

The results are undeniably stunning. Designed with horizontal listening in mind, the set distils a range of musical and real-life inspirations –or, as he puts it, “ambient soundtracks, cosmic journeys, Balearic rhythms and poolside sessions” – into ten mesmerising and magical tracks; an undulating, slow-motion journey that’s as breath-taking as it is beguiling.

Newby sets the tone with ‘Mi Sueno Vibe En Reverb’, a swelling, slow-burn ambient masterpiece that tiptoes between hope and melancholia, before flitting between imaginary sunset soundtracks (‘Estrellas En Mastella’, where lilting pedal steel sounds, bubbling electronics and shuffling breakbeats catch the ear), kaleidoscopic sun-up beats (the gorgeous warmth of ‘Generadora De Reyos’), enveloping beatless soundscapes (‘Templos Del Sol’, a drowsy drift in becalmed waters under the heat of the mid-afternoon sun), and dubby, loved-up lusciousness (‘Mokono’).

As the album progresses, bobbing and weaving on an ocean of vibrant chords, pulsing melodies and heart-stopping melodies, there’s no sign of Newby’s inspiration waving. ‘Alma Hablando’ channels the spirit of mid-80s ‘worldbeat’ and douses it in layers of Balearic bliss, while ‘Extrensor Entragado’ recalls the head-nodding haziness of his best Gripper productions of old while combining them with the musical equivalent of a humid summer breeze. Then there’s the mood-enhancing joy of the album’s superb title track –a mission statement of sorts – and the life-affirming post trip-hop/Balearic fusion of ‘Un Placer Celestial (Reprise)’, where the influence of his old friend Aim is clearly evident.

A serious sonic step-up from its predecessor and a future Balearic classic in its’ own right, Ondas Horizontales marks the start of a new musical and personal journey for its creator. It is, in his words, not the end of an era, but the start of a new one.

"Neural transmissions of crisis on the eve of WEB 3.0"

Net Prophet finds the band moving deeper into the vaporous territory of 21st century excess, where power casually corrupts absolutely and the mental netscape is more deranged in the membrane than we ever knew possible. A world on the edge, where imminent ecocide and violent social upheaval lurk beneath every minute mental distraction. The doomscroll gets longer and the attention span shorter as a disconnected global internet life takes over with its scepters of promise and looming evasiveness.

The sound is rich in variety from the darkwave pulsing synths of "Lichtenberg Monologue" reminiscent of Shape / Shifting's "Tomahawk" to the growling, slowdriving bass of "A New Dawn" which harks back to the bands S/ T 1st record, albeit with a synth instead of guitar. Even with the stark contrasts of murder-punk "AR-15" and jangle- pop "Purgatory Mall" the record never strays from the prime colors of the band: Vox, Drums, Bass, Guitar, Synth.

Recorded live in the Berlin studio Monoton, the record demonstrates the band in its prime - tightened up and influenced by their extensive touring, who have honed their sound from simple elements into a rich and tasty nugget, easily digestible for the modern consumer. Always true to their company slogan "tight, loose and evil".

The debut album from Winnipeg psychedelic jazz-funk collective Apollo Suns, 'Departures' (Do Right! Music), finds the band evolving across new styles and moods, encompassing the shifting tides of the pandemic years.

Produced by Juno award-winning producer Ben Kaplan (Bootsy Collins, Five Alarm Funk), Departures is a cinematic journey inspired as much by artists like Goblin, Lettuce, and Frank Zappa as film, TV and video game scores and soundtracks. The band combines classic compositional techniques with synths and electronics, showcasing genre-melding finesse. Introducing strings, acoustic guitar, grand piano, and lap steel into the mix, Apollo Suns explore the visceral and heavy, the elegant and ethereal, epic house rock to New Orleans-y brass, proggy pathways, string-backed balladry, greasy funk and beyond.

"It's been a heavy couple of years. We wanted to make an album that summed it all up," says bandleader Ed Durocher. "I always kind of think of music as the different parts of life. Sometimes it's aggressive, sometimes it's fun and loose, and sometimes it's sad and hard. So, since we don't have vocals, a lot of these songs try to convey those experiences through sound."

Gatefold single vinyl LP with an 8 page 12" size bookelt in the other side of the gatefold.

We're thrilled to announce the return of Tobor Experiment, the visionary musical project led by the enigmatic Giorgio Sancristoforo, to the Bearfunk fold. After a twelve-year hiatus, Tobor Experiment emerges from the shadows with their second LP, "Available Forms". Picture the ethereal ambiance of a dimly lit jazz club colliding with the futuristic vibrations of a 1970s sci-fi TV show, and you'll begin to grasp the sonic experience that awaits. Giorgio draws on a whole host of musical inspirations, from the name checked Tim Gane & Letitia Sadier to the moog pioneers Claude Denjean & Jean Jaques Perrey. With the moogsploration of contemporary jazz Tobor Experiment invites listeners on an extraordinary musical odyssey where jazz meets electronica meets nu-disco.

Prepare to be captivated from the very first note of the infectious opener, "Lowpass Risotto" as Tobor Experiment masterfully combines familiar elements with their unique artistic vision. Resonating with undertones reminiscent of the timeless classic "Take Five" the track immediately grabs your attention. While the familiar drum shuffle sets a comforting foundation, Tobor Experiment takes an unexpected twist by infusing the composition with squelchy Moog lines and captivating hollow body guitar solos. The result is a harmonious blend of nostalgia and innovation that transports you to an entirely new sonic realm.

Continuing the journey, the mesmerizing 6/8 rhythm of "Up!" pays homage to the iconic sounds of Stereolab while showcasing Tobor Experiment's innovative spirit. As enchanting synth pads weave through the air, you find yourself immersed in a dream-like state, carried away by the hypnotic shifting patterns of the bass and drums.

With "Astounding Stories" Tobor Experiment returns to the energetic vibes of the album opener, inviting you to surrender to a sonic tapestry rich with musical exchanges. In traditional jazz style we receive solo's from all parties. Each instrument adding its unique voice to the narrative, creating a dynamic and engaging musical conversation.

As the album progresses, "Moonscape Dust" emerges, drawing inspiration from the atmospheric brilliance of "Low." This track serves as a portal to an otherworldly sonic landscape where time and space lose their hold. Here, organic drums step aside, making way for a low-fi drum pattern that lays the foundation for ethereal synth pads. The composition invites you to explore the depths of your imagination, transcending earthly boundaries and allowing you to float in an immersive soundscape.

The album's closing track, "Monsters" has an air of "Air" about it... the ethereal synths beckon you to surrender to the weightlessness of space, just allow yourself to be carried away by the infectious rhythms, intricate melodies, and atmospheric textures that shape this extraordinary musical journey.

Each track on "Available Forms" showcases Tobor Experiment's exceptional ability to transcend musical boundaries, creating a genre-bending album that defies all expectations. From start to finish, the soundscape presented is a testament to Tobor's relentless pursuit of musical innovation. Each composition is a fusion of diverse elements, seamlessly blending organic instruments and electronic textures in a way that challenges traditional genre classifications.

The AI-generated artwork serves as a portal to an alternate dimension. Paying homage to the retro-futuristic aesthetic of 1970s science fiction TV shows, it captures the essence of the album's fusion between organic and electronic realms.

Eight years on from the release of his compelling debut album ‘Sun, Cloud’, Luke Howard has now established himself as one of the most important and exciting musicians in contemporary classical music. The composer has been at the forefront of opening up piano music to a new generation, while challenging the notion of what can be achieved in the form. New album ‘All Of Us’ is not only an exquisite portrait of isolation, loss, resistance and reconciliation in both stark and rich shades of piano, orchestra and electronics, but the theme of quarantine provides a framework for the record. Throughout the album, Howard shifts between subtle permutations of shifting sound, etched with his trademark intimacy and restraint, and applied with a palate both minimalist and expansive; to his own piano, celeste and synthesiser, the Budapest Art Orchestra (conducted by Peter Pejtsik) plays strings, guests added flugelhorn, viola, contrabass and modular synth whilst fellow post-classicist Ben Lukas Boysen provides additional programming, production and mixing on ‘Critical Spirit’ and ‘The Opening Of The Gates’.

Repress!

**NEW 2018 ALBUM FROM KIKAGAKU MOYO**The shifting dimensions of Masana Temples, fourth album from psychedelic explorers Kikagaku Moyo,are informed by various experiences the band had with traveling through life together, ranging from the months spent on tour to making a pilgrimage to Lisbon to record the album with jazz musician Bruno Pernadas. The band sought out Pernadas both out of admiration for his music and in an intentional move to work with a producer who came from a wildly different background.

With Masana Temples, the band wanted to challenge their own concepts of what psychedelic music could be. Elements of both the attentive folk and wild-¬-eyed rocking sides of the band are still intact throughout, but they're sharper and more defined.
Kikagaku Moyo started in the summer of 2012 busking on the streets of Tokyo. Though the band started as a free music collective, it quickly evolved into a tight group of multi-¬-instrumentalists. Kikagaku Moyo call their sound psychedelic because it encompasses a broad spectrum of influence. Their music incorporates elements of classical Indian music, Krautrock, Traditional Folk, and 70s Rock. Most importantly their music is about freedom of the mind and body and building a bridge between the supernatural and the present. Improvisation is a key element to their sound.



More than the literal interpretation of being on a journey, the album's always changing sonic panorama reflects the spiritual connection of the band moving through this all together. Life for a traveling band is a series of constant metamorphoses, with languages, cultures, climates and vibes changing with each new town. The only constant for Kikagaku Moyo throughout their travels were the five band members always together moving through it all, but each of them taking everything in from very different perspectives. Inspecting the harmonies and disparities between these perspectives, the group reflects the emotional impact of their nomadic paths. The music is the product of time spent in motion and all of the bending mindsets that come with it.

'Malombo music is an indigenous kind of music. If you listen to it, you can feel that it can heal you, if you’ve got something wrong. It’s healing music.'
Lucky Ranku

"Lucas ‘Lucky’ Madumetja Ranku (1941-2016) was one of the greatest African guitarists of his generation. He first made his name with the Malombo Jazz Makers – the successor group to the legendary Malombo Jazzmen, formed in Mamelodi township by guitarist Philip Tabane, drummer Julian Bahula and flautist Abbey Cindi. When Tabane left the Jazzmen in 1965, Bahula and Cindi called on Lucky to replace him, and the Malombo Jazz Makers were born. Building on the popularity and success of the original Malombo Jazzmen, the Malombo Jazz Makers become immensely popular, touring widely, winning numerous jazz competitions, and recording two successful albums for the Gallo label.

The deep and hypnotic Down Lucky’s Way was their third album. Recorded in 1969, it was the first Malombo Jazz Makers album to feature additional instruments, and the first to feature Abbey Cindi on soprano saxophone as well as flute. But more than anything else, Down Lucky’s Way is a transfixing showcase for Lucky Ranku’s sui generis guitar virtuosity. Quite different from their previous recordings, the album shifted the Jazz Makers’ sound toward hypnotic, extended compositions, layered by organ bass and guitar overdubs. Of all the Malombo Jazz Makers recordings, Down Lucky’s Way is the deepest of mood, and the richest of vision.

However, through one of the erasures that are ubiquitous in South African musical history under apartheid, it seems that the record may not ever have been properly issued. Original copies are outrageously rare – only a few are known among collectors. When we asked Lucky about the album, he was unaware it had ever been released, and had never seen a copy. Perhaps it was pulled; perhaps it was pulped; perhaps Gallo simply took their eye off the ball. Nobody knows, but it is not impossible that the apartheid authorities were involved, for by 1969, the Malombo Jazz Makers were well known to them.

Julian Bahula’s introduction of malopo drums to the music of the original Malombo Jazzmen was a moment of crucial political and cultural radicalism for South African jazz. Traditionally used by BaPedi people for healing, the malopo drums of Malombo music re-centered jazz
around indigenous sounds and culture, and over the next decade, the Malombo Jazz Makers became deeply involved in political opposition to apartheid. Their recovery of indigenous sounds made them the musical standard bearer for the Black Consciousness movement, and they toured South Africa clandestinely with the writer and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko. They also broke apartheid laws by playing with the white rock group Freedom’s Children, sometimes appearing on stage in masks or made up with UV paint to avoid detection by the authorities; they appeared regularly at the rule-bending Free People’s Concerts organized by David Marks, where Marks’ clever exploitation of a loophole – mixed audiences were prohibited from attending ticketed concerts where anyone was being paid, but the law said nothing about private functions played by artists for free – meant people could come together in defiance of apartheid laws. The notorious Special Branch would raid their concerts; Lucky remembered police storming an auditorium, throwing smoke bombs.

Eventually the political situation became too dangerous, and the band were being actively sought by the police. Though Abbey Cindi remained in South Africa, both Julian Bahula and Lucky Ranku went into political exile in the UK, where Bahula founded the group Jabula with Lucky and former members of Cymande, Steve Scipio and Michael ‘Bami’ Rose. With Jabula, Julian and Lucky worked tirelessly for the anti-apartheid movement, raising funds and awareness all over Europe and in the US. They played with Dudu Pukwana’s Spear in the joint formation Jabula-Spear, and worked together in Bahula’s Jazz Afrika formation, and Bahula organized the first Concert for Mandela in 1984 (it was Jabula that supplied the chorus for The Special A.K.A.’s hit single ‘Nelson Mandela’). Lucky also played and recorded with Chris McGregor’s South African Exiles Thunderbolt group. After the fall of apartheid, they both remained living and working in the UK. In 2012 the South African government awarded Julian Bahula the Gold Order of Ikhamanga for his cultural work during the struggle against apartheid.

Until his death in 2016, Lucky continued to play with countless groups and musicians. putting together the band Township Express with Pinise Saul, and leading his own African Jazz Allstars. The influence of his playing on the international perception of South African township music was immense, and he was held in the highest regard by his peers – ‘Lucky was a guitarist who could bring any house down’, said Michael ‘Bami’ Rose.

But despite his continuous presence on the UK live circuit over four decades, Lucky Ranku never recorded an album as leader. And so as well as restoring an important lost piece of South African musical heritage, Down Lucky’s Way is a precious opportunity to hear one of Africa’s foremost guitarists stretching out, in focus and in his element."

First issue since 1969 of the Malombo Jazz Maker’s unknown third album.
Liner notes featuring interviews with Julian Bahula and Lucky Ranku.
Fully licensed from Julian Bahula.

‘Where is Agartha? What is the specific region in which it lies? Along what road, through what civilizations, must one walk in order to reach it?.’ Saint-Yves d’Alveydre in 1886

Agartha, the debut full-length album by Japanese producer Wata Igarashi, is a mysterious, divine thing. Named for the mythical secret kingdom, understood as a complex maze of underground tunnels, perhaps designed by Martians who colonised the Earth tens of thousands of years ago, it’s a similarly mystical, perhaps even cosmic trip – but this time, exploring an inner, deeply personal cosmos. Beautifully detailed and bustling with rich incident, it takes Igarashi’s music to new places, which still retaining his unique sonic imprimatur; in this respect, it’s perfectly at home with Kompakt, a label that’s always encouraged artists to make the visionary music they need to create, to take risks and make sideways steps into uncharted territory.

An eloquent producer and DJ, Igarashi has been releasing techno for eleven years now, appearing on such imprints as The Bunker NY, Delsin, Midgar, and Time To Express; he has also self-released his productions via his WIP net label. Throughout, Igarashi has consistently explored his unique approach to techno and electronic music, one that’s eloquent and poised, even when it shifts into more psychedelic terrain; he’s a master at balancing the sensual and the functional, and he has an unerring ear for the right texture, the right tone, at the right time. He brings all of this into Agartha, his most thorough-going expression of self to date.

For Agartha, Igarashi had a strong concept he wanted to explore. Visualising specific scenes from an imaginary film based on the titular secret kingdom, he created soundtracks for those scenes, spending time during the pandemic in his studio, working away carefully at the ten tracks here. Given his background in creating music for television and advertisements, Igarashi is well-placed to explore the marriage of the sonic and the visual in such intimate ways, but freed from commercial concerns, he let his imagination run riot. He also drew on a rich palette of musical influences – techno is in there, of course, but you can also hear the smoky, improvised jazz of the likes of Miles Davis (to whom the album’s title is an indirect nod), and the minimalism and systems music of Steve Reich.

The latter is particularly pronounced on the gorgeous, beatless drift of “Floating Against Time”, where an arpeggiated sequence lingers, lovingly, around your ears for nine blissful minutes, coasting across swooning drones and waves of ambient noise. “Ceremony Of The Dead”, originally composed as part of a Sony 360 Reality Audio spatial sound concert, is a deep pass into systems composition, with various patterns overlaid and interlocking, before a wordless vocal rises from the depths, a gorgeous counterpoint to the swarming textures that gather across the track. On the other hand, tracks like “Burning” and “Subterranean Life” nudge toward Fourth World territory, painting deluxe dreamscapes of uncertain provenance; the title cut is an abstract drift-world, Igarashi painting an alien tableau dotted by shape-shifting creatures.

Agartha’s conceptual framework means that everything on the album sits perfectly together; listening to it in one sitting is a dizzying, lush experience. Its imaginings of inner landscapes recall, in some respects, the nautical, aqueous mythologies of the Drexciyan universe, though from different perspectives. But the result is Igarashi’s own creation, a deluxe, enchanting trip through the visionary Agartha of this unique producer’s cinematic mind’s-eye.

Wo liegt Agartha? In welcher spezifischen Region liegt es? Auf welchem Weg, durch welche Zivilisationen muss man gehen, um dorthin zu gelangen?'

Saint-Yves d'Alveydre im Jahr 1886

Agartha, das Debütalbum des japanischen Produzenten Wata Igarashi, ist ein geheimnisvolles, göttliches Ding. Benannt nach dem mythischen, geheimen Königreich, das als ein komplexes Labyrinth unterirdischer Tunnel verstanden wird, die vielleicht von Marsmenschen angelegt wurden, die vor Zehntausenden von Jahren die Erde kolonisierten, ist es eine ähnlich mystische, vielleicht sogar kosmische Reise - aber dieses Mal erforscht es einen inneren, zutiefst persönlichen Kosmos. Wunderschön detailliert und voller reichhaltiger Begebenheiten, führt es Igarashis Musik an neue Orte, die dennoch seine einzigartige klangliche Handschrift bewahren. In dieser Hinsicht hat es bei Kompakt ein perfektes Zuhause gefunden - einem Label, das Künstler immer ermutigt hat, jene visionäre Musik zu machen, Risiken einzugehen und seitwärts Schritte in unbekanntes Terrain zu tun.

Der eloquente Produzent und DJ Igarashi veröffentlicht seit elf Jahren Techno auf Labels wie The Bunker NY, Delsin, Figure und Time To Express; außerdem hat er einige Produktionen über sein Label WIP net selbst veröffentlicht. Dabei hat Igarashi stets seinen einzigartigen Ansatz für Techno und elektronische Musik verfolgt, der kontrolliert und ausgeglichen ist, selbst wenn er sich in psychedelisches Terrain begibt; er ist ein Meister der Balance zwischen dem Sinnlichen und dem Funktionalen und hat ein untrügliches Gespür für die richtige Textur, den richtigen Ton zur richtigen Zeit. All das bringt er in Agartha ein, dem bisher umfangreichsten Ausdruck seiner selbst.

Für Agartha hatte Igarashi ein starkes Konzept, das er erforschen wollte. Er stellte sich bestimmte Szenen eines imaginären Films vor, der auf dem titelgebenden geheimen Königreich basiert, und schuf Soundtracks für diese Szenen. Während der Pandemie verbrachte er Zeit in seinem Studio und arbeitete sorgfältig an den zehn Tracks. Mit seinem Hintergrund als Komponist von Fernseh- und Werbemusik ist Igarashi prädestiniert dafür, die Verbindung von Klang und Bild auf solch intime Weise zu erforschen, aber frei von kommerziellem Dünkel ließ er seiner Fantasie freien Lauf. Er schöpfte auch aus einer reichen Palette musikalischer Einflüsse - Techno ist natürlich dabei, aber man hört auch den rauchigen, improvisierten Jazz von Miles Davis (an den der Titel des Albums eine indirekte Anspielung ist) und den Minimalismus und die Systemmusik von Steve Reich.

Letzteres ist besonders ausgeprägt in dem wunderschönen, beatlosen "Floating Against Time", wo eine arpeggierte Sequenz neun Minuten lang liebevoll um die Ohren fliegt und über schwelende Drones und Wellen von Umgebungsgeräuschen gleitet. "Ceremony Of The Dead", ursprünglich als Teil eines Sony 360 Reality Audio-Raumklangkonzerts komponiert, ist ein tiefes Eintauchen in eine Systemkomposition, bei der sich verschiedene Muster überlagern und ineinander greifen, bevor sich ein wortloser Gesang aus der Tiefe erhebt, ein wunderschöner Kontrapunkt zu den wimmelnden Texturen, die sich über den Track legen. Andererseits bewegen sich Tracks wie "Burning" und "Subterranean Life" in Richtung der Vierten Welt und malen luxuriöse Traumlandschaften ungewisser Herkunft; der Titeltrack ist eine abstrakte Scheinwelt, in der Igarashi ein außerirdisches Tableau malt, das von formwandelnden Kreaturen übersät ist.

Der konzeptionelle Rahmen von Agartha ermöglicht, dass alles auf dem Album perfekt zusammenpasst; es in einem Zug durchzuhören ist eine schwindelerregende, opulente Erfahrung. Wata's Vorstellungen von inneren Landschaften erinnern in gewisser Hinsicht an die nautischen, wässrigen Mythologien des drexciyanischen Universums, wenn auch aus einer anderen Perspektiven betrachtet. Aber das Ergebnis ist Igarashis ureigene Schöpfung, ein luxuriöser, bezaubernder Trip durch das visionäre Agartha dieses einzigartigen Produzenten mit seinem cineastischen Blick.

Like a winding system of trails and paths cutting through a digital forest-scape, M. Sage's Paradise Crick is shaped by time. Full of wonder and charm, designed patiently and from a rich, curious mulch of synthesized and acoustic sound, the versatile American artist and magic realist's new suite of music is an imaginary destination and a pastoral fantasy that envisions the natural and fabricated worlds as one. Matthew Sage is a musician, intermedia artist, recording engineer and producer, publisher, teacher, partner, and parent. Assembling a sprawling and idiosyncratic catalog of experimental studio music between Colorado and Chicago since the early 2010s, recent highlights include The Wind of Things (Geographic North, 2021), an ensemble-recorded expression of bow-splashed nostalgia, and the four seasonal albums of Fuubutsushi, the improvisatory ambient jazz quartet he formed with friends from afar in 2020. Sage renders projects with nuanced velocity and a completist sensibility _ when it's finished, it's done _ which is what makes Paradise Crick, his debut for RVNG Intl., a compelling outlier. Sage first staked his tent in Crick's conceptual campground five years ago from his home studio in Chicago (he's since returned to Colorado, home to the mountains and prairies often personified in his work). He had just read Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America, a kaleidoscopic reflection of pastoral America's shifting identity by way of magical fishing sojourns. Inspired by that feeling, of getting lost but finding oneself in through the outdoors, he amassed over seventy demos documenting a fictional soundtrack for camping. Pull up to this park, and the sign might read, "Welcome to Paradise Crick. Fire Danger Is Low." The sequence, pruned down to thirteen tracks, courses the dewy mornings, afternoon hikes, and firelit nights of a weekend expedition. While Sage is not a filmmaker, he views the method of making this album as a similar form of world-building via structure, narrative, formal elements, and editorial refinement. Contrasted with his collaborative craft, here he is a sole auteur reclined in total autonomy, able to improvise scenes and implement special effects at will. A parallel precedent for such unchecked imagination in the M. Sage canon is A Singular Continent, his 2014 album that tilted its compass to a faraway land. Where Continent built its world layering samples as composition, Paradise Crick deploys a balance of accessible song structures with experimental instrumentation and sound design. Speckled with harmonica, autoharp, chimes, penny whistle, voice, hand percussion, and other mysteries, Crick's texture is treated as a sensorial adventure; the swamps gurgle, the lakes glisten, and the valleys breathe in robust HD. The rhythms are loose and buoyant, bursting with a few `kick and snare' moments shaped by Sage's lifelong love for drumming and headphone prone electronic music. Crick bumps more than most anything he's done before; crackling static pulses and lush vibrations reveal an intrinsic groove, a hidden beat map. In the landscapes of Paradise Crick, science and magic co-exist, 5k boulders and midi frogs share the frame with real-life memories of Midwest camping trips and the desire to feel extra human in a digitized space. Sage strived for "nature in the holodeck" but couldn't help leaving fingerprints in the simulation, and it's these traces of spirit and character that give Paradise Crick its strange allure. The album's bubbling sense of play, melody, and timbre takes cues from left-field electronic lineage; synth pioneers like Tomita and Raymond Scott up through the more expressive pop tendencies of Woo, Stereolab and the Cocteau Twins, and into contemporary composers like Sam Prekop. The album's vocabulary is uncomplicated; the gestures are sweet and inviting, intended to lull the listener. As much as Sage continues to be an experimentalist by nature in his work, with Paradise Crick, he spins a narrative. Not necessarily a concept album, but rather an invitation to take off for a weekend. That's the modus operandi down here in the Crick, we stretch out. M. Sage's Paradise Crick will be released May 26, 2023 in LP, CD, and digital editions. A portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit Earthjustice, the premier nonprofit public interest environmental law organization.

Fellow violinist Stuff Smith marveled, "He plays violin like Coltrane plays saxophone." Born in 1942, the French violinist Jean- Luc Ponty transported jazz violin playing into the world of modern jazz. On Frank Zappa's urging, Ponty moved to the States in 1970. Over the next years he toured with Zappa, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, and Chick Corea's "Return to Forever".If Ponty's 1983 album Individual Choice was the sketchbook of his decision to take his music in a new direction, Open Mind (1984), released the following year, was a deeper
exploration of the emerging world of synthesizers and sequencers and their impact on live and studio performance. Here, complex rhythmic patterns shift in the background while new sounds appear and disappear on the surface in colorful bursts, and outstanding jazz improvisors create familiar music in new settings. It's almost an audio version of a kinetic wind sculpture.

Ponty chose to use a Roland rhythm machine instead of faking real drum and percussion sounds and played all the keyboard parts himself in order to further explore the concept he had introduced in Individual Choice. He additionally asked two longtime friends to solo on various tracks: George Benson, whom JLP had met and played with when they were both 21 years old, and Chick Corea, who
excels on two tracks with his Moog synthesizer. Open Mind has been re-mastered by 2023 Grammy Nominee Christoph Stickeland includes new liner notes.

First released back in the fall of 1989, the In Order To Dance album was a compilation LP that pulled together tracks from a
select band of electronic producers, pushing the boundaries of the house and electronic music that was in its infancy stage.
Released on the R&S Records label, the IOTD series would become pivotal in the development of the electronic music scene
at large.
The world of music is a constant shape shifting, trend moving behemoth. Style may come and go (and come back around
again), stars are made, stars can fall. But the ethos behind In Order To Dance remains the same as it ever has, with a fierce
independent spirit, and a pledge to bring forward the next generation of young artists and their music. And so, here we arrive
at a new collection, fresh for 2023, and just in time for the labels 40th anniversary year, and with the ardent A&R’ing of label
founder Renaat Vandepapeliere, a selection of new tunes is assembled to reinforce the strength and power to be found within
music.
Across thirteen tracks, a squad of refreshingly contemporary producers from around the globe are brought together under the
In Order To Dance banner. Ushering the series into a new era, new variations on the electronic genre and fresh ideas are
fused into a delightfully engaging collection of tracks. There’s deep breakbeats courtesy of UK producer Dharma, smooth and
dubby live action from Saytek and complex bass heavy rhythms from Vromm. There’s esoteric electronics from Hyphen, epic
piano driven deep house from Dino Lenny and swinging jazzy breaks from Nphonix & Matrika. Paul Roux’s melancholic
‘Bapteme’ unfurls waves of deft pianos and guitar swirls over taunt beats, and a driving electro tone is set on Acidulant’s
contribution. Intoxicating rave tropes and hefty breaks come courtesy of Pascal Nuzzo and Adam Antine delivers a wall of
sound anchored by shuffling, funky beats on ‘Sortavala’.
And to accompany the new wave of In Order To Dance, a series of music videos have been produced. Acclaimed artists and
video directors, including Alessandro Amaducci, Ben Marlowe and Gala Mirissa, have all stamped their digital artistic
visions onto these stunning compositions, synching audio and visual for a multi-sensory experience!
‘In Order To Dance 4.0’ by Various Artists is available on R&S Records from 14th April 2023 on 3LP vinyl, download &
streaming services.

New York painter and musician exploratory industrialist Tor Lundvall initially envisioned his 14th album, Beautiful Illusions, as an entirely instrumental affair, "inspired by memories of sitting in a church or cathedral watching the shifting sunlight through stained glass." Although he ultimately chose to wreath the majority of the tracks with hushed, poetic vocals, his original muse still resonates. These are certainly songs of shadowplay and vaulted skies, the quiet grandeur of dusk deepening on the horizon. Lundvall characterizes the lyrical subject matter, too, in ways both specific and surreal, exploring "the doubts, the anxieties and even the bleak fantasies the mind spirals into during moments of isolation, separation and distance." Tricks of the eye, mind, and ear, magnified by silence and the looming long winter. Shivering pulses and muted bass lines tread the twilight while icicle synths and wiry guitar map the melody until the voice enters, narrating oblique moods of essence and absence, tenderness and truth. Glimpses of dark humor flicker in the wordplay but the greater sonic landscape is one of falling leaves and failing light, small gestures rendered as revelation, cloaked in reverb and spatial fog. Lundvall's mastery of nuance and negative space continues to heighten, whispered brushstrokes of the invisible and the unsaid, what lies beneath and what lies beyond: "Behind the shields and false fronts is usually a sadness. The heartbreaking reflections of what might have been."

Mammal Hands announce spell-binding new album 'Gift from the Trees', their fifth studio album, pointing to subtle shifts and exciting new departures for the unique trio
"We're at a point now where playing and writing together can sometimes feel almost telepathic, that as individuals we can tune in to a collective resonance..."
Mammal Hands fifth album 'Gift from the Trees' offers a fresh perspective on the unique trio's singular music. The first to be recorded in a residential studio, the band enjoyed the opportunity to go late into the night searching for a deeper, more organic experience, closer to both their writing process but also their trance-like live performances. While some of the music was pre-composed and had even been performed live, the band also enjoyed the opportunity to improvise ideas in the studio. Drummer Jesse Barrett explains:
We wanted to have a more immersive experience that felt closer to our writing process. One thing that was really important to us was feeling free to jam out ideas as they came to us. We're at a point now where playing and writing together can sometimes feel almost telepathic, that as individuals we can tune in to a collective resonance and just follow that thread where it wants to go. Sometimes it's something as simple as a rhythmic, textural flow, like in Sleeping Bear.
There was also a conscious decision to move away from the sound and ambiance of the recording studio, with the band opting to engineer the record with their go-to live engineer Benjamin Capp before mixing the sessions with Greg Freeman in Berlin. The idea was to try and capture more of the energy of the band's captivating shows, saxophonist Jordan Smart explains:
Considering the group of tracks we had, it made sense to try and capture this process as organically and honestly as possible, and so a change in studio environment felt like the right move to us. Some of the tracks have a raw joy and energy that came with being able to play together again after a long period of time of having been apart, and capture that feeling of just being happy to be in a room with our instruments altogether again.
Whereas for pianist Nick Smart there was also the chance to really go deep into the band's music:
The new studio environment really opened us up to different ways of working and thinking because we could record at any hour of the day or night. I think this allowed us much more freedom to try unusual ideas and push elements of the music to extremes because we had the time to really focus in on the detail and work on things without time pressure. With some tracks, we were trying to find the boundaries of our playing ability and push beyond that point. With others, it was just getting into the right mindset and putting as much energy and emotion into the take as possible.'
The Welsh environment outside the studio doors seeped into the music presented on Gift from the Trees, with two recording sessions (one in winter and one in the spring) bringing different moods: one bleak and wintery, the other more hopeful and bright – an energy that permeates through tracks such as Kernel and Dimu.
Gift from the Trees opens with wonderfully elevating The Spinner which grew from one of Nick's piano parts and was developed and arranged into a complete tune without losing the feeling of constant flow and motion. It is almost like a dance, with the interaction of different melody parts and the doubling of certain parts melding together and fitting into the overall energetic flow, while Jesse's drums are both floating and deeply melodic. Riser aims to capture the band's raw energy and intriguingly is influenced by both breaks and modern drum production but also minimalist classical composition. Nightingale features the band at their most delicate and lyrical – a band favourite it draws heavily on modern folk with a beautifully realised melody that came unforced to pianist Nick Smart before being jammed out together. It was recorded early one morning, bringing an extra light and brightness to this beautiful performance.
Another album highlight is Dimu which utilises one of drummer Jesse Barret's favourite rhythmic devices from the Tabla repertoire and draws inspiration from Indian, Greek and Arabic music as well as modern folk arrangements. Dimu starts with saxophone over a bed of drones and percussion and moves through many different sections that frame and present the melodies in unique ways. The beguiling, intimate Deep within Mountains aims to place you in the room with the band as they play; it was recorded late at night to capture a dreamlike, liminal ambiance. The piano solo really reflects this mood and energy while the tenor is some of the softest and closest on the recording. Elsewhere, the remarkable Labyrinth started with what Nick describes as "some weird recording on my phone from a soundcheck, where Jordan was playing some crazy sounding bass clarinet part and I quickly recorded him", giving birth to a captivating, complex slice of propulsive 'almost' contemporary classical that like so much of the music on Gift from the Trees really couldn't be any other band than Mammal Hands.
Finally, the album draws to a close with the glorious Sleeping Bear, a tune that was wholly improvised in the studio. Nick and Jesse entered a simple but 'weird' locked groove and Jordan improvises melodies over the top. The track came about without any planning or thought; it was one of those special things that came by surprise and the band felt offered the perfect ending to their latest gift to us all: a deeply enthralling album that captures so much of what makes Mammal Hands a special band while mapping out new routes and paths for their beautiful, beguiling music.

Pink Blue Marbled Vinyl

Angelo is an EP, named after a car, featuring nine songs Brijean have crafted and carried with them through a period of profound change, loss, and relocation. It finds percussionist and singer Brijean Murphy and multi-instrumentalist/producer Doug Stuart processing the impossible the only way they know how: through rhythm and movement. The months surrounding the acclaimed release of Feelings, their full-length Ghostly International debut in 2021 which celebrated tender self-reflection and new possibilities, rang bittersweet with the absence of touring and the sudden passing of Murphy's father and both of Stuart's parents. In a haze of heartache, the duo left the Bay Area to be near family, resetting in four cities in under two years. Their to-go rig became their traveling studio and these tracks, along with Angelo, became their few constants. Whereas Feelings formed over collaborative jams with friends, Angelo's sessions presented Murphy and Stuart a chance to record at their most intimate, "to get us out of our grief and into our bodies," says Murphy. They explored new moods and styles, reaching for effervescent dance tempos and technicolor backdrops, vibrant hues in contrast to their more somber human experiences. Angelo beams with positivity and creative renewal _ a resourceful, collective answer to "what happens now?". Angelo the car is a 1981 Toyota Celica they got off Craigslist during their first stint in Los Angeles, where Murphy and Stuart have since settled. "Such a bro-y, `80s dude car, it's been super fun to drive around in a new town," Murphy says. "He's older than us, he's a classic, he's got a story." It is a spiritual vehicle with a cinematic appeal, first dropping them off in an alleyway for the scene-setting intro, "Which Way To The Club." The question is quickly resolved by "Take A Trip" as a cruising bassline mingles with crowd sounds, hand-claps, cuíca hiccups, whip-cracks, even a horse neigh. Brijean have found some club on this cross-dimensional trip - the kind of imagined space or chamber within one's self capable of "shifting a fraction of who you are," says Murphy. They wrote the track with the simple intention to be "as free as we could be," adds Stuart, likening the flip on the B section to a realm unlocked: "What if the world changed completely? You open the door to a new room." Next is "Shy Guy," a motivational anthem for the wallflowers among us. Murphy sets up the daydream: "We are in junior high, we're on the dance floor, what's going down, who is dancing, who is not, how are we gonna make them dance?" The narrator, the MC, hypes up the room as conga-driven rhythms bounce between languid synth and guitar lines. "Show me how to move...I feel something...I know you feel it too," Murphy sings sweetly, calling back to the opening lines of Feelings, and this time the audience chants it back. It is easy to picture Brijean performing this one - something they only got to do a handful of times until more recently, opening shows for Khruangbin and Washed Out, an experience they found informative. Murphy explains, "It was inspiring to be out there and let loose more. To see how people can expand their expression on stage gave me more liberty with how I viewed my musicianship. My role for so long was to be a backup percussionist, so why would I ever leave the drums, you know? But then after playing all these runs, you see these artists and realize you can, you have permission." "Angelo" and "Ooo La La" deliver the danciest stretch in Brijean's catalog to date. The title track adopts a deep house pulse replete with strings, hi-hats, and kicks. The latter opts for a funkier groove that foregoes verses in favor of warbled hums and extended breakdowns. What follows is perhaps the duo's dreamiest run, a comedown initiated with the honey-hued interlude "Colors" drifting into "Where Do We Go?", a tropicália reverie where Murphy contemplates the passage of time and space. It all culminates in "Caldwell's Way," a fond farewell to their Bay Area community - "a part of my life that I knew couldn't come back," says Murphy. Above shimmering organ sounds, lush strings, and the birdcall of their former neighborhood, she wistfully articulates the uncertainty of moving on by remembering the characters dear to them. There's the wisdom of their neighbor, Santos, who refused payment when helping them move out: "I'd rather have 100 friends than 100 dollars." And the song's namesake, Benjamin Caldwell Brown, a friend and club night cohort for many years. "I'm only miles away, maybe I'm just feeling lonely," the line resigns to warm nostalgia, and "Nostalgia" runs the closing credits to this healing and transportive collection.

Brazilian experimental multi-instrumentalist Carla Boregas follows plates for Bokeh Versions and Hive Mind with a ghostly set of deep listening electronics that plays like a symphony for an imagined woodwind orchestra.

Carla Boregas is best known from her tenure in São Paulo's genre-bending experimental post-punk scene, playing in long-running outfit Rakta as well as other related offshoots. Her solo material has been knottier to unpick, here developing ideas from a collection of unfinished fragments and notebook scribbles exploring the possibility of finding a wind instrument that could be played collectively by several musicians. Coinciding with the pandemic, however, she soon realised the inherent risks involved with sharing breath and so the concept took a different direction, with added resonance.

Boregas developed a synthetic alternative, layering vocals and environmental recordings to suggest wind instrumentation without attempting to mimic it. The sounds here are airy, but rarely diegetic - on the title track, Boregas uses analog arpeggios and plucked, sustained tones to approximate the kosmische world of Ash Ra Tempel or more recently Emeralds, as if trapped in a wind tunnel, moved forward by an unseen force.

There's a whisper of the ancient past that harmonises with Wojciech Rusin's speculative medieval gasps, and Bloedneus & de Snuitkever's severely underheard ‘Milli Mille’, an examination of the ancient Greek aulos. On ’Grafia Do Invisível' the sound is completely different again, but the concept remains, using precise analog drones and minuscule timbral shifts to imitate the character of a wind instrument and simultaneously harmonise with the deep listening meditations of Éliane Radigue and Kali Malone.

A voice enters the frame on 'Sopro’, chopped into deviated gulps and syllables, creating a language that's unfamiliar and percussive. The use of breath is subtle, and vocalisations criss-cross between synths and faint whistles, forming an expression that's different from its predecessors but intrinsically interlinked. This is where ‘Pena Ao Mar’ excels, by viewing breath and its application in electronic music from multiple angles simultaneously. Fans of Lucy Duncombe, Lucrecia Dalt, or Sarah Davachi - don't miss this one.

Mammal Hands announce spell-binding new album 'Gift from the Trees', their fifth studio album, pointing to subtle shifts and exciting new departures for the unique trio
"We're at a point now where playing and writing together can sometimes feel almost telepathic, that as individuals we can tune in to a collective resonance..."
Mammal Hands fifth album 'Gift from the Trees' offers a fresh perspective on the unique trio's singular music. The first to be recorded in a residential studio, the band enjoyed the opportunity to go late into the night searching for a deeper, more organic experience, closer to both their writing process but also their trance-like live performances. While some of the music was pre-composed and had even been performed live, the band also enjoyed the opportunity to improvise ideas in the studio. Drummer Jesse Barrett explains:
We wanted to have a more immersive experience that felt closer to our writing process. One thing that was really important to us was feeling free to jam out ideas as they came to us. We're at a point now where playing and writing together can sometimes feel almost telepathic, that as individuals we can tune in to a collective resonance and just follow that thread where it wants to go. Sometimes it's something as simple as a rhythmic, textural flow, like in Sleeping Bear.
There was also a conscious decision to move away from the sound and ambiance of the recording studio, with the band opting to engineer the record with their go-to live engineer Benjamin Capp before mixing the sessions with Greg Freeman in Berlin. The idea was to try and capture more of the energy of the band's captivating shows, saxophonist Jordan Smart explains:
Considering the group of tracks we had, it made sense to try and capture this process as organically and honestly as possible, and so a change in studio environment felt like the right move to us. Some of the tracks have a raw joy and energy that came with being able to play together again after a long period of time of having been apart, and capture that feeling of just being happy to be in a room with our instruments altogether again.
Whereas for pianist Nick Smart there was also the chance to really go deep into the band's music:
The new studio environment really opened us up to different ways of working and thinking because we could record at any hour of the day or night. I think this allowed us much more freedom to try unusual ideas and push elements of the music to extremes because we had the time to really focus in on the detail and work on things without time pressure. With some tracks, we were trying to find the boundaries of our playing ability and push beyond that point. With others, it was just getting into the right mindset and putting as much energy and emotion into the take as possible.'
The Welsh environment outside the studio doors seeped into the music presented on Gift from the Trees, with two recording sessions (one in winter and one in the spring) bringing different moods: one bleak and wintery, the other more hopeful and bright – an energy that permeates through tracks such as Kernel and Dimu.
Gift from the Trees opens with wonderfully elevating The Spinner which grew from one of Nick's piano parts and was developed and arranged into a complete tune without losing the feeling of constant flow and motion. It is almost like a dance, with the interaction of different melody parts and the doubling of certain parts melding together and fitting into the overall energetic flow, while Jesse's drums are both floating and deeply melodic. Riser aims to capture the band's raw energy and intriguingly is influenced by both breaks and modern drum production but also minimalist classical composition. Nightingale features the band at their most delicate and lyrical – a band favourite it draws heavily on modern folk with a beautifully realised melody that came unforced to pianist Nick Smart before being jammed out together. It was recorded early one morning, bringing an extra light and brightness to this beautiful performance.
Another album highlight is Dimu which utilises one of drummer Jesse Barret's favourite rhythmic devices from the Tabla repertoire and draws inspiration from Indian, Greek and Arabic music as well as modern folk arrangements. Dimu starts with saxophone over a bed of drones and percussion and moves through many different sections that frame and present the melodies in unique ways. The beguiling, intimate Deep within Mountains aims to place you in the room with the band as they play; it was recorded late at night to capture a dreamlike, liminal ambiance. The piano solo really reflects this mood and energy while the tenor is some of the softest and closest on the recording. Elsewhere, the remarkable Labyrinth started with what Nick describes as "some weird recording on my phone from a soundcheck, where Jordan was playing some crazy sounding bass clarinet part and I quickly recorded him", giving birth to a captivating, complex slice of propulsive 'almost' contemporary classical that like so much of the music on Gift from the Trees really couldn't be any other band than Mammal Hands.
Finally, the album draws to a close with the glorious Sleeping Bear, a tune that was wholly improvised in the studio. Nick and Jesse entered a simple but 'weird' locked groove and Jordan improvises melodies over the top. The track came about without any planning or thought; it was one of those special things that came by surprise and the band felt offered the perfect ending to their latest gift to us all: a deeply enthralling album that captures so much of what makes Mammal Hands a special band while mapping out new routes and paths for their beautiful, beguiling music.

Steve Gunn and David Moore's Let the Moon be a Planet is a volume of improvisatory exchanges between classical guitar and piano, and a meeting place where two artists become acquainted through instrumental dialogue without a single expectation distracting them from the joy and open field possibility of collaboration. A project enveloped by an aura of reciprocity, Let the Moon Be a Planet unfolded from an invitation to connect between two New York-based musicians who admired each other's work but had never intersected: guitarist and songwriter Steve Gunn, whose solo, duo, and ensemble recordings represent milestones of contemporary guitar-guided material, and pianist and composer David Moore, acclaimed for his minimalist ensemble music as the leader of Bing & Ruth. The exchange began remotely as Gunn and Moore responded to one another's solo improvisations, embarking on a synergistic progression of deep listening and connection through musical conversation. "We were both fans of each other's music and this was a chance to try a different process which was much more open," says Moore. "It felt like something I needed personally as an artist, to not be so controlling over the final output, and to truly collaborate with somebody else." Similarly for Gunn, who was exploring new pastures and passages in classical guitar when the dialogue began, the project was an invitation for pure conversation and exchange, creating space for him to revisit foundational forms with his playing: "I was trying to break out of what I was doing, to have something that just pulled away all the elements of usual structured things." Let the Moon Be a Planet intertwines the trajectories of two musicians acclaimed for pushing the boundaries of their instruments, unified by a shift away from what they recall as more "detail-oriented" approaches to composition. Fueled by the magnetism of their call and response exercise, Gunn and Moore set out on a nomadic songwriting venture without an intended destination. "We didn't know it was going to be an album," Gunn explains. "There was never pressure on us to complete or make something. It was interesting to start realizing that this could be an album and to take a step back_ to arrive at a project after the fact." Calibrating their focus to connect with a spectrum of inner and external emotional realities, the duo found their way into a world where the most subtle of gestures can eternally flow. Let the Moon be a Planet is an ode to experimentation over outcome; it holds a candle light to the corners of introspection and captures the patterns that flicker within. Cast across the compositions of the album is a gritty, filmic grain _ a quality that emerged partially from recording "without the greatest microphones" or their usual studio environments. For both artists, this lo-fi sensitivity felt integral to the record and its production, and they worked closely with engineer Nick Principe to preserve its otherworldly haze in the final mixes. Across the record's eight compositions, the rippling impulses of Gunn and Moore's inner worlds converge in the spirit of two strangers wandering the same path, engaged in a daydream state of natural back and forth. Melodic tableaux arise, drift and disperse across serene open spaces, painted in earthy hues of nylon string and balmy, undulating keys _ side by side, the duo converse in tessellating motifs and gestures of lucid introspection, cultivated by a shared desire for intuitive play. "This project was such a simple idea," says Gunn. "It got down to the very core of where I am or where I was, and where I'm trying to be as a musician. Making this record became a very beneficial ritual for me, almost a meditative process." As Moore recalls, "Our only motivation for making these tracks was that it felt good to make them and there was nothing else behind it_ I don't know that I've ever made a record that came about so naturally." While Let the Moon Be a Planet was envisioned through a deeply collaborative process, it uncovered a path for Gunn and Moore to respectively return home as musicians. Imbued with the forces of interconnection and balance, the record is an exploration of creative synergy while following the currents of inner experience _ of looking outwards to arrive at one's natural self. Steve Gunn and David Moore's Let the Moon Be a Planet will be released March 31, 2023 in LP, CD, and digital editions. The album represents the first volume of Reflections, a new series of contemporary collaborations orchestrated by RVNG Intl. A portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit St. John's Bread and Life, whose mission is to respect the dignity and rights of all persons by ensuring access to healthy, nutritious food and comprehensive human services resulting in self-sufficiency and stability.

Oliver Cherer is back with a new Gilroy Mere record which follows on from his other much lauded Clay Pipe releases (The Green Line, Adlestrop and last year’s D Rothon collaboration, Estuary English).

Over the last two decades Ollie has released numerous collections of music in an ever shifting array of modes, from folktronic, singer-songwriter styles through psychogeographic electronica to jazz-tinged, confessional ghost-pop and most recently, the “guitar tainted machine rock disco” of Aircooled.

Gilden Gate is an album of two halves. Side 1 ‘Rising’ celebrates the sun-drenched beaches, pastures and heaths of rural Suffolk, whereas Side 2 ‘Falling’ explores the underwater world of the lost city of Dunwich and its five church spires.

Oliver says:-

“A few years ago I discovered the lost city of Dunwich. I’d made a trip to Suffolk to shoot a short film about Sizewell Nuclear Power Stations and stayed in the old Coastguard’s Cottage on Dunwich Beach within sight of Minsmere Nature Reserve and the power plants. It’s a wild, sleepy place of pines and heath and North Sea winds and a strangely mysterious air – Sutton Hoo is nearby and Eno’s reference to the very beach that I was staying on made perfect sense. In the small museum at Dunwich I learned that this tiny hamlet had once been a major medieval city of international trade. It seemed unlikely and even now, knowing Dunwich as a small village, I find putting what I know about the place into perspective as a city a certain kind of impossible.

It seems that over a period under the influence of the weather, natural erosion and market rivalry the thriving harbour port was inundated by the North Sea and eventually slipped into and under it. The city of churches was lost and all the spires engulfed and toppled. What remains are the few houses, and the ruin of Greyfriars crumbling inexorably down the cliff and exposing the bones of buried monks as the graveyard follows the building’s stones into the sea.

There are local legends surrounding the site including stories of fishermen hearing the bells of lost churches and seeing the ghostly, lighted city beneath their boats as they return to the shore.
Gilden Gate is named for one of the entrances to the old city and is a musical meditation on Dunwich past and present. Frances Castle’s beautiful sleeve art depicts the surface and the sub-marine, the warm and the cold, the past and the present. The glass rises and the glass falls and in the background there are sirens, fog horns, church bells and Eno, and on the sea bed there are the scattered remains of a once great city.”

Gilden Gate is named for one of the entrances to the old city and is a musical meditation on Dunwich past and present. Frances Castle’s beautiful sleeve art depicts the surface and the sub-marine, the warm and the cold, the past and the present. The glass rises and the glass falls and in the background there are sirens, fog horns, church bells and Eno, and on the sea bed there are the scattered remains of a once great city.”

2023 Repress

His five years at the helm of IDO (Intercontinental Dance Organization) have provided Valentino Mora the outlet to explore his concept of "active meditation", through the lexicon of deep and organically-textured ambient house and techno. Now with the inking of sub-label imprint EDO (Exothermal Dance Organization) Mora's newest output finds direct, molecular inspiration from deep in the aquaverse. Taking its name from the chemical release of heat, EDO's exothermic first EP delivers four tracks of heady, transformative techno atmospheres. Charting Mora's evolution from multi-channel acoustic recordings, samples and digital-analog hybridity, Hydrosphere EP continues his production complexity yet arrives at this point via the singular expression of modular synthesis. "Erosion" opens as a cryptic transmission from submersed entities, with haunting tone tendrils emerging from within the indigo unknown. A subtle echo of reverb softens the edge of its propulsive kick drum, creating an entrancing, enticing and unsettling journey into the deep. The snaking minimalist shimmer of the title track "Hydrosphere" evokes a landscape of frozen tundra, with a backdrop of shifting, urgent techno precision. Bewitching through endless motion and slow deliberation, chimes and pings are stretched out and warped to mind-bending effect. "Doppler Shift" takes a forthright approach, leading with prominent looped bass tones, percussion and rhythmic sweeps. Rounded shapes move rapidly through the inkinesss, forming repetitions that only intensify in pace and energy. To complete the resynthesis, "Solarized" embodies the life-giving warmth of it's name, beaming irregular shafts of illumination into dark, bass-heavy, chugging terrain, forming melodic wisps of tonal condensation.

Brigid O'Neill's new album The Truth & Other Stories, recorded at Skinny Elephant Studios in Nashville with Neilson Hubbard in the producer's chair, cannot help but be influenced by the times which informed it, 'very few people escaped being affected by the pandemic, writers included.

Somehow the experiences of it seeped through onto our work and I feel The Truth and Other Stories is no exception in that regard.'
That said, this is not specifically an album about Covid or the pandemic, 'I was fascinated by the concept of 'truth' and intrigued by the concept of everyone having a different version of their truth....a personal viewpoint, their own narrative, their own story. The title plays a bit with shades of meaning - a 'counter positioning' if you like. The 'other stories' may challenge the truth, but 'the truth'
retains that sense of the absolute. In the songs I hope to present the realities of different characters through short stories. As I moved through the pandemic however, different stories came to light and sometimes the focus would shift.

Ultimately though, I have been living with these stories and these characters for some time now.'
Neilson Hubbard as producer was an obvious choice for O'Neill. A growing relationship with Nashville had seen her writing, playing and developing relationships with the many truly great musicians available across Music City.

"Being in Nashville with a producer like Neilson who has such an intuitive feel for that music, and with access to musicians who simply live and breathe it, seemed like a good idea. I'd met Neilson a few times through our mutual friend and musician Ben Glover, and it was quickly clear we would get along and had a similar attitude to the music production process. When choosing a music
producer, listening to their catalogue of works is crucial, but so too I think is that 'gut feeling' and knowledge that you can connect. When I sent Neilson my music, I knew he 'got it' and I knew I was in safe hands." Recent years have seen Brigid O'Neill gaining a deserved reputation as one of Ireland's finest songwriters. Reviews of her critically acclaimed latest releases
have reaffirmed that the gifted artist is one of the most versatile, unique and fearless storytellers on the island. Her genre-spanning music appeals to multiple generations, effortlessly weaving elements of folk, country and jazz into relatable tales of happiness, heartbreak and the human condition.

Over the last half decade, the music collective Constant Smiles has produced a prolific output of acclaimed music, culminating in their forthcoming record Kenneth Anger, masterfully brought to life by engineer Jonathan Schenke (Parquet Courts, Liars, Dougie Pool). The group is known most recently for their much-praised debut album for Sacred Bones records, Paragons, an emotionally resonant offering of indie folk masterpieces that all confront the internal ways we process our struggles with intimacies, addiction and humanity produced by Ben Greenberg. Constant Smiles' primary singer/songwriter Ben Jones uses the creative process as a tool for working through deeply transformative periods in his life. The band's indie folk music lays bare this internal process, but on Kenneth Anger, the music shifts to synth pop and looks externally, examining creativity, community, ritual, and their place in the healing process. Ritual takes a primary role in the eponymous Kenneth Anger. Not only is auteur Kenneth Anger himself known for his sensorial depictions of ritual, Jones often used the films as a silent visual back drop during his song writing sessions, a ritual that grounded the creation of the album. And while the director's use of saturated color inspired the warm `80s synth style production, the director's trailblazing spirit of authenticity also pushed Jones through his most vulnerable expression to date. While the narrative undertones of the songs deal with fear and isolation and anxiety, the songs themselves were created through the healing process of ritual, and enriched with collaboration, community and trust. The resulting music produces a balm that can genuinely recalibrate the nervous system. The listener journeys through the depths of every track while being lifted and guided by the music's transformative, hypnotic power and this illustrates one of the foundational accomplishments of the album. Just as a Kenneth Anger film explores the underbelly of the unconscious through often soothing visuals, Kenneth Anger the album conjures the underworld into a series of synth pop classics.

Kate NV's WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling them across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life. WOW is Kate Shilonosova's fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for RVNG Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments. It's difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova's voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect's perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as "funny tiny sounds." WOW skews and skitters, trips over its own feet and laughs about it, plays out of tune on purpose, tilts and leans like a top-heavy flower. Shilonosova is a longtime user of Found Sound Nation's Broken Orchestra sample pack, a sound catalog of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools. These perfectly imperfect instruments are tightly spliced into WOW's patchwork of synthesizer and reworked snippets of Shilonosova's friends playing clarinet, flute, and marimba. It's central to the record's internal logic: a disregard for what is, and isn't, broken, what is, and isn't, a sentence or a song. A commingling of subject and object, with a firmly new wave sensibility. Shilonosova has long had an unusual relationship with inanimate objects (citing her bicycle as her best friend), as if the joys they evoke for her are personality traits of the objects themselves. On WOW, she evinces a kind of inverted anthropomorphism: she shrinks her voice and becomes an object among multitudes, toylike in size and perspective, cohabitating with sedentary, indifferent roommates. This pursuit of childlike perspectives is a thread that runs through much of her catalog, and places her work on a plane with that of her personal hero Nobukazu Takemura, who for decades has treated his music as a portal to childlike curiosity, both in subject matter and tone. With an invitation to pursue this curiosity, WOW further confirms Kate NV's deeply inventive, fluid and technically dizzying artistry. By refusing constraints and rules, Shilonosova embodies a profound freedom, allowing objects, sounds, and processes to unfold organically; or, as she puts it, a commitment to "accepting randomness." She succeeds terrifically at a breed of auditory defamiliarization that is all her own, and the rewards for listeners are many: through her lens, the small becomes monstrous, the abstract becomes sensorial, and the old becomes new. Kate NV's WOW will be released on February 10, 2023 on vinyl and digital formats. On behalf of Kate NV and RVNG, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit War Child, an organization that supports children and their families impacted by conflict, and working to build sustainable peace for generations to come.

Yellow Vinyl

Kate NV's WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling them across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life. WOW is Kate Shilonosova's fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for RVNG Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments. It's difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova's voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect's perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as "funny tiny sounds." WOW skews and skitters, trips over its own feet and laughs about it, plays out of tune on purpose, tilts and leans like a top-heavy flower. Shilonosova is a longtime user of Found Sound Nation's Broken Orchestra sample pack, a sound catalog of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools. These perfectly imperfect instruments are tightly spliced into WOW's patchwork of synthesizer and reworked snippets of Shilonosova's friends playing clarinet, flute, and marimba. It's central to the record's internal logic: a disregard for what is, and isn't, broken, what is, and isn't, a sentence or a song. A commingling of subject and object, with a firmly new wave sensibility. Shilonosova has long had an unusual relationship with inanimate objects (citing her bicycle as her best friend), as if the joys they evoke for her are personality traits of the objects themselves. On WOW, she evinces a kind of inverted anthropomorphism: she shrinks her voice and becomes an object among multitudes, toylike in size and perspective, cohabitating with sedentary, indifferent roommates. This pursuit of childlike perspectives is a thread that runs through much of her catalog, and places her work on a plane with that of her personal hero Nobukazu Takemura, who for decades has treated his music as a portal to childlike curiosity, both in subject matter and tone. With an invitation to pursue this curiosity, WOW further confirms Kate NV's deeply inventive, fluid and technically dizzying artistry. By refusing constraints and rules, Shilonosova embodies a profound freedom, allowing objects, sounds, and processes to unfold organically; or, as she puts it, a commitment to "accepting randomness." She succeeds terrifically at a breed of auditory defamiliarization that is all her own, and the rewards for listeners are many: through her lens, the small becomes monstrous, the abstract becomes sensorial, and the old becomes new. Kate NV's WOW will be released on February 10, 2023 on vinyl and digital formats. On behalf of Kate NV and RVNG, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit War Child, an organization that supports children and their families impacted by conflict, and working to build sustainable peace for generations to come.

West Midlands five piece MACHIAVELLIAN ART follow up their self released and self titled cassette only album with their first release proper, ‘Indoctrination Sounds’ released February 24th via Riot Season Records, with an eye popping promo video to go with it.
A Maximalist blowout of Sax-honking Noise Rock, Doom Metal, Hardcore Punk, and Shoegaze, with Industrial Noise, Howls, Paranoid Rambles, and pure Disdain for oneself and the rest of you layered on top.
Indoctrination Sounds was conceived in various practice spaces in Digbeth throughout 2020 and 2021 and recorded at Ian Boult's Stuck On A Name Studios in Nottingham in the Summer of 2021, despite the best efforts of a global pandemic. Will Killingsworth mastered the record at Dead Air Studios.
Serotonin Problem opens the record with a huge sludge bass riff before the rest of the band pile in on top to create an all-encompassing and oppressive low mood that continues for the rest of the album. Next, we spiral down into the more open and atmospheric post punk of Faceless Voices - the collective bad feelings of a nation in decline reach boiling point. Indoctrination Sounds, for which the record is named, is a hardcore punk song regarding the clear and easily understood ways that humanity in the Western World is indoctrinated into the death-cult of capitalism under fear of violence, soaked in misinformation and conspiracy. Revolution is a call to action as guitars shift and glide uncertainly around, in a menacing inversion of shoegaze's dreamy safety. Side A is finished - a brief respite.
Side B opens with the more introspective Let Down, as the band play out a pounding homage to Iggy and the Stooges with Fenriz taking a turn on the drums. The drum intro to We're Not Gonna Take It gives way to a Rusted Shut bassline as the band turns their disdainful gaze to the violent pornography that is the 24-hour news cycle and reality TV in Watch Them Crawl. The album closes with Digbeth B5, an improvised piece on the gentrification of Digbeth. During the pandemic one of the band's practice spaces was turned into an overpriced ping pong bar for yuppies. As our culture is softened and cleaned up to make profit, so are our communities and cities.
Machiavellian Art are : Amy Murphy - Bass Guitar Benjamin Thomas - Vocals and Saxophone Joe Parkes - Guitar and Noise John Andrews - Guitar and Vocals Sam Hunt – Drums