Buscar:bur

2024 repress

Rush Hour’s RSS series excels in unearthing buried treasure, offering a second chance for artists and releases that have long been overlooked. That’s certainly the case with ‘Witches’, the superb sole single by British 1980s wave trio Zenana.

Originally released on seven-inch by the tiny PRM label in 1986, ‘Witches’ was the product of a sister-brother songwriting team whose music was mostly recorded in the front room of a terraced house in Nanpean, a small industrial village in Cornwall, England’s most south-westerly county. While the single was infectious, impeccably produced and dancefloor-ready, it sold in limited quantities at the time.

Zenana’s story can be traced back to the early 1980s, when singer-songwriter Anita Tedder founded the all-female trio as a vehicle for her musical ambitions. To bring her songs to life, she joined voices with her brother Mike, an early adopter of electronic music who had built a studio – nicknamed MFR, short for ‘Mike’s Front Room’ – in his Cornish home.

Countless Zenana tracks were recorded at ‘MFR’ between 1984 and ’86, with the resultant demo cassette securing the band a management contract, a slew of live bookings, a video shoot and even a television appearance. Buoyed by this underground success, they headed to the remote Sawmills Studio in Cornwall – famously only accessible by boat – to re-record ‘Witches’, a song inspired by local folk tales of witches gathering near Mike’s home.

While this version of ‘Witches’ failed to make an impact at the time, it has become something of a cult classic following its’ rediscovery by crate digger Kiernan Abbott – and subsequent championing by other dusty-fingered DJs including Antal, Skyrager, Trevor Jackson and Luke Una – in early 2023. The buzz inspired Zenana to perform live again for the first time in decades, with the story of their surprise comeback being covered by British media outlets including the BBC and (more surprisingly) the Daily Mail.

Now presented in re-mastered form, ‘Witches’ is a genuinely slept-on gem. Propelled forwards by punchy drum machine beats, a killer synth bassline and fizzing keyboard sounds, the song benefits greatly from strong vocals and an extra-percussive middle eight layered with vocalisations, cosmic spoken word sections and swirling noises.

It comes backed by a brand-new extended ‘spell of love’ courtesy of Bristol duo Bedmo Disco, AKA music journalist Matt Anniss (author of Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music) and DJ/production partner Gareth Morgan. Anniss is a long-time friend of Mike and Anita Tedder who has fond memories of visiting Mike’s home studio with his family around the time that ‘Witches’ was recorded.

Working from Zenana’s original MFR eight-track recording (tapes of the single version were lost years ago), Anniss and Morgan have turned in the extended ‘dance mix’ the track never had first time around. More atmospheric, clandestine and dancefloor-focused, it offers authentic nods to New York proto-house, mid-80s Shep Pettibone dubs, and the pioneering synth-pop productions and dub mixes of Factory Records regular Martin Rushent.

Album packaging features 24pt reverse board jackets and illustrated inner board sleeves, with silver printed center labels. All artwork created by acclaimed designer, Håvard Gjelseth. Ol’ Burger Beats’s new opus, 74: Out of Time, is a multifaceted and stunning exploration of sounds and eras. In addition to every track being produced at 74 beats per minute, the album harks back to the year 1974; particularly the music, the records, the activism, the artwork, and the aesthetics. But it’s also incredibly current, as the Out of Time portion of the title very much refers to the present. It promotes a sense of urgency in the face of current affairs such as the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change, as well as contentious politics sweeping across the US and Europe. Beyond those deeply resonating elements to the record, 74: Out of Time is a truly gorgeous representation of hip-hop through the lens of the Norwegian composer, which is undoubtedly his most ambitious undertaking to date. Using 74bpm as his basis, he constructs sublime, jazzy instrumentals that feature some of hip-hop’s finest emcees and vocalists. And to say they all gel perfectly together is an understatement—and it would be underselling OBB’s meticulous approach here. Each song blends seamlessly from one to the next spread across the album’s 17 tracks, with the help from a standout supporting cast that includes Fly Anakin, Awon, Quelle Chris, Pink Siifu, Yungmorpheus, Lojii, billy woods, Tha God Fahim, Vic Spencer and Vuyo, among several others. “An avid record collector, the producer's first release was 2014's High Rhodes which led to comparisons to his heroes such as J Dilla, Madlib and Pete Rock.” Okayafrica // “With music teachers for parents, it was perhaps inevitable that Ole-Birger Neergård would follow their path and become a student of the game.” Passion of the Weiss

Rain and experimental music have had an interesting connection for decades. Under the umbrella of American film music promotion, Hanns Eisler was already looking for "Vierzehn Arten, den Regen zu beschreiben” (fourteen ways to describe the rain) in 1941. A good 20 years later, The Cascades interpreted the periodicity of rain as a rhythm of mourning. For the Beatles ("If the rain falls, they run and hide their heads"), the precipitation inspired the band to use backward running tapes. However, it seems that there has always been a lot of rainfall in popular music. In the early seventies, David Toop and Paul Burwell even had a band project with the great name Rain In The Face...

That was a long time ago and today, rain, which in the age of climate catastrophe mainly occurs as heavy rain or an enervating endless loop, has lost a great deal of its inspiring quality. Perhaps as a reminder of the musical quality of rain, but knowing full well that it can only be enjoyed in theory, Razen call their new album "Rain Without Rain". In the music of the Brussels collective led by the two multi-instrumentalists Brecht Ameel and Kim Delcour, it certainly pours down on the roofs. In fact, the album opens with the sound of pouring rain before we hear the sequence of an oscillator played through a guitar amp on the first track „Lazy, Lazy Eye“.

The album is the captivating result of an one-night mobile studio field recording in an abandoned pedestrian tunnel in the centre of Düsseldorf, and it is finding beauty with brutal(ist) means: recorder, oscillator, guitar amp and reverberation, two musicians and four microphones, early electronics versus Early Music. “Suicide meet Hildegard von Bingen”, as Stefan Schneider, who recorded the session, admits. “Ghostly occurrences”, he adds.

Brecht Ameel states: “We do put a lot of weight and care on acoustics. On some of our recordings, the room acts as another band member, or as the main ‘mixing board’. Most of the albums we have recorded so far are not mixed in the traditional sense: they are simply „captured”, and we let the room decide what is left on the tapes. The studio recordings, then, give us the possibility of bringing other elements to the fore; precision of interplay, or tiny variations in breathing.”

The group Razen exists since 2010 and has since released numerous records on labels such as KRAAK, Marionette and Hands In The Dark. "Rain Without Rain" is their debut on the Düsseldorf label TAL. If there has been an increased international interest in experimental music from Belgium in recent years, this is not least due to musician collectives such as Razen. In terms of its electro-folkloristic intensity and instrumentation, Razen's music is quite unique worldwide. What does Razen actually mean? “We took the word from a poem by Paul Van Ostaijen, not specifically because of its meaning but because of the way it looked on paper”, Ameel explains. “But the meaning goes in the direction of ‘thundering / raging / speeding’ … although we prefer playing with a strong notion of restraint, building our world from (and with) silence.”

Olaf Karnik, Köln 2024

Honour's debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Alàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the unexpected poetic profundity of casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, or personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language_substantiating a mythos proposed by Fred Moten that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal. Alàáfíà delineates a gothic landscape cut by overdriven beats, swooping orchestral blasts, choral bursts and ear- splitting fuzz, where the fleshly and spiritual realms commune. Dedicated to Honour's late grandmother, the title track began to take form after their last embrace and remains steeped in her influence and spirit_a tape-saturated composition that starts in Lagos and ends in London's smoke-stained cityscape, the song's dream-like quality developed out of the artist's grief and PTSD coping with this loss. Beneath the stretched guitar drones and stuttering loops, their grandmother's shared faith bubbles to the surface. "When Angels Speak of Love," borrows its title from two works by Sun Ra and bell hooks, respectively. Sculpting echoes of praise music into disorienting spirals perforated with syrupy DJ Screw-inspired breaks and sharp splinters of melancholic guitar, "When Angels Speak of Love" engages a conceptual dialogue with the spirits of both late thinkers, folding them into Honour's pantheon of ancestral guides. The album's ninth track, "Giz Aard ($uckets)," is a dirge of regimented drums which anchor this somber melody as it whirls into a blizzard of heartache, uncertain if its consequence will be death or eternal joy. The album's sole lyrical offering, "Pistol Poem (Lead Belly)," begins with a darkly humorous bar, "He went thru hell and back/ came back/ 2 get the strap," that swells into a haunting allegory based on the life of Philip "Hot Sauce" Champion. A modern take on the Blues, Honour's lyrics reify the artist's status as a student of both literature and popular culture, crossbreeding the artist's clever wordplay with additional references to Richard Pryor, Robert Johnson, Kelly Rowland & Bryon Gysin. Setting core principles of hip-hop, R&B, jazz and gospel music to atemporal soundscapes and compositions, Honour crafts a record that marinates in its own knotty contradictions. The ghosts that sit on the artist's shoulders have never been more tangible than with this emotive debut.

Composed in the aftermath of family tragedy, NY Graffiti’s Burden is an album full of peace anthems, psalms, dirges, and confessionals. In the pursuit of consolation, the tectonics of techno, dub, and post-club aesthetics are pushed past their margins onto new emotional plateaus.

Like the series of EP’s that NY Graffiti has released in recent years – including a split with Subtext affiliate UCC Harlo – Burden is an amalgam of dub-informed club music, acoustic emulations, and doom-scroll sourced social media chatter, filtered through the artist’s unique sonic palette that has developed over years on the fringes of New York’s contemporary club scene.

From the largely-improvised opener (and closer) “Approximation”, to the discord of the steppa-inflected track “98 Prayers”, and the dystopian ambiance of “Reach” (evoking early Hype Williams), Burden constantly reconfigures itself in search of catharsis. The album's seven tracks are dense and claustrophobic yet unexpectedly grounding. Amid the weight of grief, and the bleakness of our shared geopolitical realities, the NYC-based artist provides moments of solace that are intimate, direct, and revelatory.

Burden was initially released as a digital album earlier this year and is now available on vinyl through NY Graffiti’s own Peace Anthem Records and Switzerland-based Präsens Editionen. While the former has primarily focused on releasing NY Graffiti’s own projects, the latter is the publishing house of zweikommasieben Magazin and has released music and sound works by artists such as Anom Vitruv, Red On, Belia Winnewisser, Martina Lussi, Samuel Reinhard, and Magda Drozd

The mighty U Roy is the originator, the man who put the DJ phenomenon on the map and made it an artform. From Kingston Jamaica to the corners of all the Dancefloors, Clubs and Sound Systems across the world. U Roy (B. Ewart Beckford, 1942, Kingston, Jamaica) began his musical career spinning records for Doctor Dickies Sound System way back in 1961. The mid sixties saw him working for Sir George The Atomic before moving in 1967 to the man who best shaped his sound King Tubby on his Home Town HI - FI. Tubbys work in the dub field, dropping out vocals on his versions for the Sound Systems allowed U Roy to voice over these spaces adding to the excitment of the Dance!!!

U Roy moved into the recording arena firstly cutting two disc's for Producer Lee Perry 'Earths Rightful Ruler' and 'OK Corral' and then following this with 'Dynamic Fashion Way' and 'Riot' for Producer Keith Hudson. Producer Duke Reid seeing the protential in this new found form brought U Roy to his Treasure Isle Studios to voice over his back catalogue of Rocksteady Hits. His first three releases for Duke Reid 'Wake The Town', 'Rule The Nation' and 'Wear You To The Ball' held the Top 3 positions for 12 weeks in early 1970's.

We have compiled some of U Roy's best loved cuts from his mid 70's period when all were still looking at him for guidence.  The opening cut Call On Me sees him working over Delroy Wilson's 'Got To Be There'.  You Never Get Away gets U Roy answering Delroy Wison's 'Keep On Rocking'. Johnny Clarke's 'Time Gonna Tell' with rootsy bassline turns into Every Knee Shall Bow. Cornell Campbell the Gorgon himself gets his 'Check Mr Morgon' turned into Gorgon Wise. Johnny Clarke's Hold On gets reworked. Jeff Barnes 'Blowing In The Wind' tuned into Number 1 and alongside King of The Road which sees Lennox Brown blow his saxophone over the instrumental 'In The Swing of Things', was one of U Roys first releases. Linval Thompson's 'Let Jah Arise' is versioned to Joyful Locks. I Originate which lends us to the title of this compilation, says it as it is, a classic built over Dave Barker's 'Shocks of Mighty'. Linval Thompson again provides the backbone with his Cool Down Your Temper cut for U Roys version. The mighty Burning Spear's Creation Rebel although providing our next track, it is Johnny Clarke's version that gets worked over. Leo Graham's 'Birds of A Feather' turns into Stick Together. Soul Syndicates instrumental 'Goliath' grows into Riot. A big hit for Max Romeo Wet Dream sounds great under U Roy's new rendition.

Two extra tracks for the CD release of this album sees the great voice of Slim Smith on his 'Let's Stick Together' becomes ‘Ain’t To Proud To Beg’ and Cornell Campbell's 'Stand Firm' works with
U Roy to sign us off with ‘I Shall Not Remove’.  A fine collection i hope you agree to the Daddy of all DJ's who in his own words ''I Originate, so you must appreciate, while the others got to imitate'' says it all really……

Heiko Maile und Julian Demarre, vertraut mit dem Schreiben von Popsongs und Filmmusik, arbeiten seit dem Album-Klassiker "MEANWHILE" von Camouflage Mitte der 90er Jahre zusammen. Während Heiko seine Arbeit am perfekten Popsong kontinuierlich weiterführte, kam es bei Julian und Heiko unabhängig voneinander zu ersten Engagements im Bereich Filmmusik. Seit die beiden begannen, auch gemeinsam an Spielfilmen zu arbeiten, wuchs in ihnen stetig das Bedürfnis, eine Liebeserklärung an die elektronische Musik der 70er und 80er Jahre zu schreiben. Mit manch esoterischen japanischen Keyboards aus den 70er Jahren, die für den Klang von morgen entwickelt wurden, entstand so ein Werk für alle Tage danach - das genreübergreifende Album NEOSTALGIA, eine einzigartige und facettenreiche Mischung elektronischer Stile, verbunden mit einer Prise Krautrock. So finden sich dann auch auf so manchen Stücken Intros/Outros, Flöten, Flanger-Gitarren oder Vocoder, und sogar solche, die die Sechs-Minuten-Marke spielend erreichen.

Since first splashing on to the Southern California circuit in the mid-aughts, Geneva Jacuzzi (née Garvin) quickly cemented herself as the queen of the Los Angeles underground. Her immersive and unhinged multimedia performances are the stuff of legend, a psychotropic gallery of masks, costumes, confrontation, and massive art installations. Jacuzzi’s recordings are equally revered, catchy hooks and cryptic moods dusted in 4-track grit. The arrival of her third official full-length, and Dais Records debut, is cause for such celebration. Triple Fire vividly expands and crystallizes Jacuzzi’s signature fusion of midnight melody and mutant aerobics across a 12-track hit parade of wildcard synth-pop and sly post-apocalyptic camp. Her enthusiasm for the album is as bold as her body of work: “Halfway through, we started calling this the record of the prophecy, the record that’s going to save mankind.”



Opener “Laps of Luxury” sets the template – a strobe-lit dreamer’s delight of swaggering synth bass, Haçienda drum machinery, and sultry vocal spellcasting (“Tragic mysteries I’ve known for centuries / I burned all memories and turned to fantasy”). The collection burns through shades of sardonic strut (“Art Is Dangerous,” “Nu2U,” “Keep It Secret”), coldwave kiss off (“Speed Of Light,” co-produced by Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty), retro-futurist body music (“Dry,” “Scene Ballerina,” “Bow Tie Eater”), and cheeky glitterball pop (“Take It Or Leave It,” “Heart Full Of Poison” co-produced by Roderick Edens and Andrew Briggs). She likens the eclectic spectrum of moods to the continuum of human emotions: “Funny, sexy, sad, scary, witty, hopeful, menacing. Eventually it deconstructs, turns into a party, and then ends sweet and soft.”



Taken as a whole, Triple Fire comes as close as any document yet to capturing Jacuzzi’s kaleidoscopic alchemy of pop sugar and chaos energy, flickering between icy and ironic, chic and surreal, hungry and heartsick. Hers is a muse as rare as it is regenerative, forever reborn at the precipice of the next chorus: “Someone said that Alcatraz had fallen into the sea / Almost sounded like an angel calling me in a dream / I felt an electric shock when I picked up the microphone.”

“Tu non hai questo suono. Non avrai mai questo sound”

Blank Mind presents three sublime versions of Big Hands’ ‘Girde Maye / Astere’ from Tammo Hesselink, Notte Infinita and Paperclip Minimiser - originally released on the Ossario EP in 2021.

Though playful in nature, and not overtly political - the lyrics explore identity and geographical boundaries. As the artist explains - it is written by an Italian and a Türk that talks in Italian, released in Britain in times of Brexit “and that’s why I chose to have a title in Kurdish in a song “sung” by a Türk.”

The vocal provides endless scope for reshaping and is entrusted to some of the most distinctive producers in electronic music; each of whom sensitively reimagine the original.

On the flip, the esteemed and prolific Tammo Hesselink produces a robust, and heavy version in his angular, crystalline style. Finally, Cong Burn wizard Paperclip Minimiser slows the tempo with a futuristic roller, an impressive creation by a man deeply immersed in technological innovation and at one with his machines.

Introducing John Prine ‘Now Playing” on Cobalt Blue vinyl - This ‘Now Playing’ John Prine's tracklist features a collection of deeply personal and storytelling songs that span folk and country genres. Tracks like "Illegal Smile" and "Angel from Montgomery" showcase his ability to craft vivid narratives, while songs like "Paradise" and "Fish and Whistle" add a touch of humor and charm. This compilation is a testament to Prine's songwriting prowess and his enduring impact on folk and country music.

a a1. ILLEGAL SMILE [3:10]
[b] a2. PARADISE [3:10]
[c] a3. ANGEL FROM MONTGOMERY [3:43]
[d] a4. THE GREAT COMPROMISE [4:57]
[e] a5. SWEET REVENGE [2:58]
[f] b1. PLEASE DON’T BURY ME [2:47]
[g] b2. SADDLE IN THE RAIN [3:30]
[h] b3. THAT’S THE WAY THAT THE WORLD GOES ‘ROUND [3:19]
[i] b4. FISH AND WHISTLE [3:13]
[3:37]

Returning from time apart to a world forever changed, dread-fuelled duo A SWARM OF THE SUN bring with them their fourth studio album, `An Empire'; its brooding, yet beautiful, melancholic narrative arc allows the band to dig ever deeper into desolation whilst a newfound lyrical focus adds a tenderness that is both harrowing and heartwarming at once. With the early bones of forthcoming `An Empire' tabled by events beyond their control in 2019, Erik and Jakob came together years later and scrapped them in favour of creating something entirely new; something distinctly different to break the cycle, defy categorisation and reflect the uncomfortable uncertainties of the times we now live in. The result is astounding; continuing the thread of narrative composition seen on `The Woods', `An Empire' is a six-track tale told in four distinct movements that are nothing short of devastating, from plaintive piano ballads to raw, full-band fury. For instance, taken from the album's third side, lead single `The Burning Wall' embodies this sprawling compositional feat perfectly, with the painfully frank opening couplet of "I know I fail you / I know that I run" establishing a gripping narrative trajectory backed by a simmering, impatient pulse that slowly and inevitably rises to an inescapable crescendo of cymbal chaos and wall-of-sound guitar drone. Elsewhere, 18-minute epic `The Pyre' represents Side B of `An Empire' with the confessional intimacy of a waltz-time ballad; the raw, wavering emotion of Jakob's words accompanied only by a haunting, lilting piano refrain before it too is consumed by the bittersweet might of post-rock euphoria to leave only embers of the apocalyptic lyrics in its wake_ `An Empire' marks a significant evolution of A Swarm of the Sun's already indelible post-metal sound. With increasingly bleak times forcing the band to reassess their relationship with creativity and suffering, this new body of work captures all the anthemic, intimate highs and crushing, debilitating lows of modern life on a knife edge.

Returning from time apart to a world forever changed, dread-fuelled duo A SWARM OF THE SUN bring with them their fourth studio album, `An Empire'; its brooding, yet beautiful, melancholic narrative arc allows the band to dig ever deeper into desolation whilst a newfound lyrical focus adds a tenderness that is both harrowing and heartwarming at once. With the early bones of forthcoming `An Empire' tabled by events beyond their control in 2019, Erik and Jakob came together years later and scrapped them in favour of creating something entirely new; something distinctly different to break the cycle, defy categorisation and reflect the uncomfortable uncertainties of the times we now live in. The result is astounding; continuing the thread of narrative composition seen on `The Woods', `An Empire' is a six-track tale told in four distinct movements that are nothing short of devastating, from plaintive piano ballads to raw, full-band fury. For instance, taken from the album's third side, lead single `The Burning Wall' embodies this sprawling compositional feat perfectly, with the painfully frank opening couplet of "I know I fail you / I know that I run" establishing a gripping narrative trajectory backed by a simmering, impatient pulse that slowly and inevitably rises to an inescapable crescendo of cymbal chaos and wall-of-sound guitar drone. Elsewhere, 18-minute epic `The Pyre' represents Side B of `An Empire' with the confessional intimacy of a waltz-time ballad; the raw, wavering emotion of Jakob's words accompanied only by a haunting, lilting piano refrain before it too is consumed by the bittersweet might of post-rock euphoria to leave only embers of the apocalyptic lyrics in its wake_ `An Empire' marks a significant evolution of A Swarm of the Sun's already indelible post-metal sound. With increasingly bleak times forcing the band to reassess their relationship with creativity and suffering, this new body of work captures all the anthemic, intimate highs and crushing, debilitating lows of modern life on a knife edge.

Reissue des zweiten James Holden-Albums von 2013, das zum ersten Mal seit 7 Jahren wieder auf Vinyl erhältlich wird. Im Gegensatz zu seinem Debütalbum "The Idiots Are Winning" (2006) erforscht Holden auf der Triple-LP "The Inheritors" die (Un-)Tiefen der elektronischen Musik und liefert eine ausgewogene Balance zwischen brachialen Experimenten und transformativen Trips. "The Inheritors" wurde von Resident Advisor zum Album des Jahres gekürt und schaffte es in die Jahresbestenlisten von The Quietus, The Wire, Drowned In Sound und Bleep.

ercury Rev take you on a swan dive into the mystic: a rapture of ballad-dreams and emotional memoir at the crossroads of The Dharma Bums, Pet Sounds and Side Three of Electric Ladyland. A profound, transcendant trip from the psychedelic explorers who brought you Deserter's Songs.
David Fricke In upstate New York, deep in the seam between the Catskills mountains and the Hudson Valley, a richly swelling, spellbound sound emerges, eddying and flowing like the local Esopus Creek, or in the slipstream of the grander Hudson river, carrying the flotsam and jetsam of our hopes, dreams, fears. A sound composed of organic and electronic; guitars, keys, brass, strings, woodwind, drums - and a voice of incantations, tapping streams of consciousness that similarly eddy and flow.
Spiritually, literally, psycho-geographically: where else does Mercury Rev’s ninth album Born Horses spring from? This cascade of gleaming, glistening psych-jazz-folk-baroque-ambient quest that searches its soul but can never truly know the answer? A sound and vision linked to their exalted past whilst quite unlike anything they have created before?
The answer is somewhere between the homes of founder members Jonathan Donahue (the hamlet of Mt Tremper) and Grasshopper (the town of Kingston), in their veins and brains of their now-legendary tapping of musical cosmology, and the vital presence of new permanent member Marion Genser (keys), plus long-term ally Jesse Chandler (keys) and guests Jeff Lipstein (drums), Martin Keith (double bass) and Jim Burgess (trumpet). A place that feeds off the levitating mood of their last album, 2019’s expansive tribute Bobbie Gentry's The Delta Sweete Revisited, and the instrumental psych explorations under the names of Harmony Rockets and Mercury Rev’s Clear Light Ensemble, and the spiritual guidance of avant-garde artist Tony Conrad and Beat poet Robert Creeley, to whom Born Horses is
dedicated.

Vom Bösen das Gute - Wer entscheidet über Aufstieg und Fall, kontrolliert die Produktionsmittel, bestimmt den Gefühlshaushalt, wessen Stimmen sind voller Kreide, wessen Duft ist so vertraulich wie ein Zuhause. Wer verwandelt und verdreht, nimmt ohne zu geben, verdirbt zu Wasser, zu Lande und in der Luft. Wer ist Legion, gegen wen ist jeder Widerstand zwecklos. War immer schon alles hin, durch unsere Schuld, durch unsere Schuld, durch unsere große Schuld. Neun Lieder wie eine neunschwänzige Katze.

Thandii (aka Jessica Berry, Graham Godfrey) first made waves with their debut album A Beat To Make It Better in 2023. The album gained somewhat cult critical acclaim long after its release, with listeners luxuriating in the unusual sound collaged from offcuts of Soul, Lo-fi Hiphop & Psych. Thandii’s world comes bolstered by collaborations with esteemed artists such as Michael Kiwanuka, Inflo, SAULT, Joy Crookes, Jordan Rakei, and Little Simz. The duo’s sophomore offering comes in the form of two companion albums Dream With You & Come As You. The two albums make up a single conceptual statement celebrating dissonance, contradiction, polarity and opposition.

The pair believe that binary thinking has a lot to answer for in today’s world and is often used to divide us as a people. ‘We wanted to explore what it felt like to hold disparate notions in both hands whilst making the music. Starting with the title tracks, we explored the idea of unashamedly being your authentic self in every moment - this is admirable for those that can live their life in an uncompromising way. In contrast to that idea, we explored those moments where we perhaps wished we were more than our reality - a dreamed up, imagined self’. It’s no surprise that duality is central to what Thandii is all about with the pair co-writing, co-recording & co-producing from their seaside studio HaloHalo in Margate, Kent.

The albums each have a distinct flavour of their own. Dream With You is built on cassette-tape-driven lofi beats, art-pop melodies and soulful piano breaks. Whilst Come As You explores more experimental song-form that wouldn’t seem out of place on Tender Buttons - Broadcast or Dots And Loops - Stereolab. Jessica’s voice is the transcendent, ethereal form that shapeshifts between the realms of the two statements; dancing playfully through falsetto harmonies, confessional spoken word, detuned alter egos and haunting choirs. Key collaborators on the albums include bass player Jonathan Harvey and pianist Steve Pringle, both members of Margate’s burgeoning Arts scene. Thandii escaped London nearly a decade ago, their sights set on creating a means for prolific expression, without the distractions that the city can bring. The albums find them in an exploratory stage, throwing paint at the canvas with joyful abandon, gifting themselves permission for uncensored expression. The LPs muse on relationships - romantic, platonic & familial - community, self-worth, self love, healing and boundaries, at times from differing perspectives. This contrast of opinion makes for rich listening throughout a vast emotional landscape

PM Warson returns with the new album "A Little More Time". Having established himself as "one of the leading lights on the modern-day R&B scene" (Shindig! magazine UK), his third long-player represents an expansion of his mid-century vision. Less a departure, more an arrival, the album moves beyond the R&B revivalism of his previous work, taking in a breadth of styles and moods within its distinctly '60s sonics.

Recorded at Lightship 95, London's floating analogue studio, the 10 original tracks combine the direct feel of live performance, alongside a developed songwriting and production approach. The album is led by the second single (following "Right Here, Last night") and title track "A Little More Time" setting the tone with a dose of sweeping vintage pop and uptown soul. "For this record I wanted to channel the sound I'd developed playing live with a band, while at the same time further exploring my songwriting. I allowed my wider influences to permeate a bit more and placed the vocal and lyric more forward in the songs" PM Warson says.

PM Warson is a UK musician, songwriter and producer. He emerged in 2021 with the album "True Story", after a series of DIY vinyl releases. Breakout single "(Don't) Hold Me Down" surfaced initially among soul collectors (with the original release clocking in at over $200 on collector sites), before finding a wider audience on European radio and streaming platforms.

With touring opportunities limited due to the ongoing pandemic travel restrictions, he turned his attention to a quick-fire follow-up. The lean, brooding "Dig Deep Repeat" was released in May 2022, led by the single "Leaving Here". Extensive tour and festival dates throughout Europe followed, where he gained a reputation as an impressive live act, performing alongside the likes of Cedric Burnside, Robert Finley, Nick Waterhouse and GA20.

After a run of dates in France, and an appearance at the legendary 100 Club in London, he set about working on new music during 2023. Having released the single "Right Here, Last Night" as a 7inch vinyl on his own Acid Jazz-distributed FYND marque, he teams up again with Légère Recordings for his third album, the expansive "A Little More Time".

Black Truffle is thrilled to present a Song for two Mothers / Occam IX the first ever solo release from Laetitia Sonami. Born in France in 1957, Sonami studied with Éliane Radigue in Paris before moving to California in 1978 to study electronic music at Mills College, going on to make important innovations in the field of live electronics interfaces and multi-media performance. Sonami is perhaps most closely associated with one of her inventions, the Lady’s Glove, an arm-length tailored glove fitted with movement sensors allowing the performer fluidly to control digital sound parameters and processing, as well as motors, lights and video playback. Having performed with the Lady’s Glove for 25 years, Sonami retired it in 2016, turning her attention to the interface/instrument heard and pictured here, the Spring Sprye.

In Sonami’s own description, “The Spring Spyre is composed of three thin springs that are attached to reverb tank pickups, mounted on a metal ring. The audio generated when the springs are touched, rubbed or struck is analyzed in Max/MSP. The extracted features are then used to train machine learning models in Wekinator and Rapidmax and control the audio synthesis in real time. We never actually hear the springs.” After decades of aversion to documenting her work on recordings, a Song for two Mothers / Occam IX treats listeners to two side-long performances with the Spring Spyre: the very first piece developed for the instrument and the most recent, the two contrasting remarkably in sound palette, energy and form. A Song for two Mothers (2023) spins an intricate web of rippling synthetic burbles, rapid sweeps and fizzing textures. Performed in real time with the sensitive and partly uncontrollable Spring Sprye ("a bit tyrannical," Sonami calls it), the music is delicate yet chaotic. Abrupt gestures hover against a backdrop of silence, "devoid of spatial or temporal direction". After several minutes, the sound-world becomes metallic and percussive, tapping and ticking in pointillistic flurries before a wavering harmonic cloud emerges, sprinkled with resonant drips and pops.


Occam IX is a radically different proposition. At the outset of Sonami’s exploration of the Spring Sprye, she asked her former teacher Éliane Radigue to compose a piece for it—and her: like all of Radigue’s work since she ceased working with analogue electronics at the beginning of the 21st century, Occam IX is written not only for an instrument but also for a particular performer. These scores are developed verbally, through meetings and conversations between performer and composer; each is grounded in an image (usually kept from listeners, to avoid influencing their experience); all magnify the subtlest acoustic phenomena and require great commitment and patience from the performer. Sonami’s is one of the few Occam pieces to make use of electronics, bringing it closer to Radigue’s famous longform pieces for ARP 2500. Beginning from a rumbling low tone, the listener is gradually immersed in slowly lapping waves of synthetic tones, eventually thinning out into delicate bell-like pings against a background of white noise, reminiscent of one of the most beautiful sections of Kyema from the Trilogie de la Morte.


Accompanied by notes from Sonami, her longtime collaborator Paul DeMarinis, and Radigue, and illustrated with scores, photographs and images of the Spring Spyre, a Song for two Mothers / Occam IX is an essential document celebrating an under-recognised pioneer of electronic music and performance.

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