Cerca:ca

aja monet ist eine surrealistische Blues-Dichterin, Musikerin und Bandleaderin, deren Werk fließend zwischen Poesie, Musik und politischem Ausdruck wechselt. Aus der Spoken-Word-Szene der Lower East Side in New York City hervorgegangen, wurde sie die jüngste Gewinnerin des Nuyorican Grand Slam Poetry-Titels, bevor sie ihr Schaffen auf genreübergreifende musikalische Darbietungen ausweitete, die ihre Wurzeln im Jazz, Blues und experimentellen Sound haben. Ihr Debüt-Poetry-Album ,when the poems do what they do" wurde 2024 für einen Grammy Award in der Kategorie ,Best Spoken Word Poetry Album" nominiert und etablierte Monetas als einzigartige Stimme in der zeitgenössischen schwarzen Musik- und Performance-Szene. Das Projekt verbindet Poesie mit Live-Instrumentierung und Improvisation und erkundet Themen wie Widerstand, Liebe und Freude durch einen kollaborativen, ensembleorientierten Ansatz. Als tourende Bandleaderin ist sie weltweit bei großen Festivals und in bedeutenden Veranstaltungsorten aufgetreten, darunter das Newport Jazz Festival, das North Sea Jazz Festival, das Montreal Jazz Festival, das Guggenheim, das Lincoln Center, das Barbican Centre und die Fremantle Biennale. Neben ihrer musikalischen Arbeit ist monet eine gefeierte Dichterin und Autorin. Ihr erster vollständiger Gedichtband, ,my mother was a freedom fighter" (2017), wurde für den NAACP Image Award in der Kategorie Poesie nominiert. Ihr jüngstes Buch, ,florida water", erschienen bei Haymarket Books, schöpft aus mehreren Jahren des Lebens und der Organisationsarbeit in Südflorida und setzt ihre Auseinandersetzung mit Ort, Bewegung und kollektivem Gedächtnis fort. Zu ihren Auszeichnungen zählen der Marjory Stoneman Douglas Award für Poesie, der Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award, der Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award, der EBONY 100 Artist in Residence Award sowie der Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Vanguard Award. Zudem ist sie künstlerische Kreativdirektorin von V-Day, der globalen Bewegung zur Beendigung von Gewalt gegen Frauen und Mädchen, und Schöpferin von VOICES, einem Hörspiel aus dem Jahr 2022, das die Geschichten schwarzer Frauen in der Diaspora und auf dem afrikanischen Kontinent in den Vordergrund rückt. aja monet's zweites Studioalbum, ,the color of rain", wird im Mai 2026 bei drink sum wtr erscheinen.

Two Piers proudly announces the upcoming release of Bridges Towards Open Spaces: Circadian Rhythms 1967–2025.

This new collection brings together a wide range of artists and styles, weaving immersive sonic landscapes that explore a connection between natural cycles and the rhythms within.

Featuring artists such as Brian Eno, Moebius, Roedelius, Meat Beat Manifesto, Fun Boy Three, Daniel Avery, and Spectrum, the compilation moves fluidly between shimmering ambient textures and raw, straight-ahead garage rock.

Bridges Towards Open Spaces: Circadian Rhythms 1967–2025 follows in the footsteps of Two Piers acclaimed previous releases, Night Train: Transcontinental Landscapes 1968–2019 and Music for the Stars: Celestial Music 1960–1979, continuing the label’s exploration of expansive, time-spanning musical journeys.

“I wanted once again to shape a compilation around a time period, this collection is a nod to my days behind the counter of a record shop, the people I met and the styles of music that was played and I was introduced to. Some are from that time, some are of the style/feeling, that I can associate & with the friends I met there; from the early shift to the late shifts as the tempo rose throughout the day and the neons of London started to buzz”

The album will be available on Limited Vinyl and CD in May, arriving just in time for the longer, warmer days and the shifting light of the Seasons Sun.

Mit "Angriff auf"s Schlaraffenland" veröffentlicht Tapete Records eine umfassende, musikalisch kuratierte Reise durch 50 Jahre deutschsprachigen Punk - von den frühen Experimenten der späten 1970er bis zu modernen Positionen der Gegenwart. Die Compilation begleitet die Jubiläums-Veröffentlichungen des Ventil Verlags, der über 200 Autor:innen zu ihren prägendsten Punk-Songs versammelt und damit das Vermächtnis sowie die Relevanz des Genres würdigt. Wie ein gutes Mixtape verzichtet die Sammlung bewusst auf Chronologie und setzt auf rein musikalische Kriterien: rohe Energie, politische Haltung, Humor, Widerspruchsgeist und stilistische Vielfalt. Vertreten sind u. a. Die Radierer, Hans-A-Plast, Palais Schaumburg, Egotronic, Bärchen und die Milchbubis, Toxoplasma, Slime, Schnipo Schranke, Stereo Total, Die Nerven - Bands, die Punk mit Pop, Dada, Elektronik, Chanson oder Noise neu definiert haben. "Angriff auf"s Schlaraffenland" ist damit ein unverzichtbares Dokument für alle, die Punk nicht als Nostalgie, sondern als lebendige, widersprüchliche und weiterhin unbequeme Kulturform verstehen.

Big Crown freut sich, das zweite Album von Thee Marloes, ,Di Hotel Malibu", zu präsentieren. Es erweitert den Rahmen - ein selbstbewusster Schritt weg von den Grenzen, die ihren Sound einst klar definierten, hin zu etwas Durchlässigerem, Gesprächigerem und zutiefst Indonesischem. Zwei Jahre sind vergangen, seit ,Perak", das Debütalbum des Trios aus Surabaya bei Big Crown Records, ihren einzigartigen Sound vorstellte. Dieses neue Album bricht nicht mit dieser Tradition, sondern erweitert sie und zeigt, wie sehr sie als Band seit der Veröffentlichung ihres Debüts und all den damit verbundenen Erfahrungen gewachsen sind. Bestehend aus der Sängerin und Keyboarderin Natassya Sianturi, dem Gitarristen und Produzenten Sinatrya Dharaka und dem Schlagzeuger Tommy Satwick, haben Thee Marloes stets als Einheit gearbeitet, wobei ihre Songs von Satwick, haben Thee Marloes stets als Einheit gearbeitet, wobei ihre Songs von gemeinsamen Referenzpunkten und einem ausgeprägten Sinn für Groove geprägt sind.

Auf diesem Album erweitert sich diese gemeinsame Sprache. Die Arrangements bewegen sich über ein breiteres Spektrum, mit neuen instrumentalen Farben, unerwarteten rhythmischen Wendungen und einem lockereren Ansatz in Bezug auf die Struktur. Die Band beschreibt es als eine Reaktion auf die letzten zwei Jahre ihres Lebens: soziale Realitäten, Liebesleben in Der Album-Opener ,Under the Silver Moon" ist ein kühler Two-Stepper, der die bitteren und süßen Seiten von Fernbeziehungen vor einem luftigen musikalischen Hintergrund thematisiert. ,Six Years" ist eine Seite aus dem Leben der Sängerin Natassya Sianturi und ihrem Kampf, den Schritt zu wagen, einen bequemen und sicheren Tagesjob aufzugeben, um ihrem Traum von einem erfüllten Leben zu folgen.

The open skies of Ochre's new album, Oversail, replace the dense canopies of his last, Understory back in 2020. This time, UK-born, Netherlands-based talent Christopher Leary trades rhythmic intricacy for something more exposed and reflective on a record that unfolds in measured steps, with each passage revealing fragile melodies set against sparse, shifting frameworks. There's a tactile quality to the sound design, hardware elements clicking and sighing like ageing machinery still in motion. Tracks feel suspended and the focus is on slow revelation across the quietly affecting 'Casadastra', airy beauty of 'Meristem' and hopeful synth sequencing of 'Canthropa.'

One of the most innovative and ambitious albums ever made, Genioh Yamashirogumi’s Ecophony Rinne is a sonic masterpiece featuring over 200 musicians that expanded the limits of what music and sound could do.

Before Akira there was Ecophony Rinne. Originally released in 1986, Ecophony Rinne is a four-part symphony of “ecological music” by Geinoh Yamashirogumi that married ancient tradition with technological innovation, and changed the way we listen to music in the process.

Half-speed mastered at Abbey Road by Miles Showell, Time Capsule’s high-tech analogue reissue is the first to reproduce composer Ōhashi’s ground-breaking “Hypersonic Effect” theory on vinyl, cutting frequencies beyond the realm of human hearing into wax to capture the full spectrum emotional impact of this extraordinary work.

Founded by genius polymath Tsutomu Ōhashi aka Shoji Yamashiro, Geinoh Yamashirogumi is a shapeshifting collective of over a hundred members from across disciplines. Rejecting professional musicianship, Ōhashi cultivated an ethos where neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, journalists, engineers and students could critique society through artistic expression and pursue their research in ethnomusicological performances that spanned global traditions, Eastern spirituality and Western classical form.

Ecophony Rinne represents the pinnacle of this vision - an expansive orchestral suite made with over 200 musicians that channeled Ōhashi’s thinking about mankind’s relationship with nature, and fundamental questions of life, death and rebirth.

Here pipe organ synths made from sampled Tibetan horns sit alongside field recordings from Central African forests, Buddhist mantras circle dummy head microphones, Javanese Jegog percussion ensembles pulse like verdant ecosystems, and the acoustics of temples, caves and landscapes are conveyed in the mix. Weaving together culture, nature and technology, it is a record that vibrates with the polyphony of life on Earth.

But Ecophony Rinne was not only musically innovative. Noticing the difference between vinyl and CD versions of the album where digital reproduction limited the sound, Ōhashi developed a theory of “Hypersonic Effect”, determining that ultra-high frequencies above 20khz can impact human perception even if they are inaudible. At once a physical and a psychological experience, to listen to Ecophony Rinne is to feel music differently.

The rest is history. After its release, Ōhashi was approached by director Katsuhiro Ōtomo to produce the soundtrack for Akira, the work for which Geinoh Yamashirogumi is best known. Emerging from the shadows at last, Ecophony Rinne was its transcendental blueprint, reissued in its most complete hypersonic form on vinyl for the first time.

Rather than describe nature, Ecophony Rinne embodied it. Rather than reflect culture, Ecophony Rinne defined it. Rather than explore technology, Ecophony Rinne changed it. As a work of art, it is more relevant than ever. You won’t have heard anything like it.

Tajemnica is a transgression—too gentle for dancing, too euphoric for standing still. Sparse, scarce, and subtle, the new album by Polish performance artist, musician, and poet Wojciech Kosma, aka spalarnia, eagerly explores modern dance genres, experimental production, and nostalgic electronics to surrender to what is truest—essential song forms, melodies, harmonic and rhythmic basics, the most resonant feelings.

Sung in spalarnia’s trademark soft, low, almost tactile voice, the eight hypnotic songs tell stories of closeness and love, and their favored companions—pain and heartbreak. In “Bliżej” he sings “I love not loving you / I want to be a part of you.” And in “Jedyna”—the album's single—he states: “You are the only one / there is no other me / only the one for whom you are the only one.”

Contrary to the meaning of its Polish title (Tajemnica translates to “secret”), the album that moves between ghostly ambient pop, languid R’n’B, and Eastern European folk doesn’t reveal anything outright—the music only points to where the secrets might lie. One can choose whether to hear them or not.

Transversales Disques proudly presents PANORAMA Vol. 2, another deep dive into rare French soundtracks, Library music, and instrumental oddities that have largely remained untouched by reissues or compilations.

This curated selection features 11 forgotten gems recorded between 1968 and 1980. It showcases the brilliance of celebrated maestros like Francis Lai, Karl-Heinz Schäfer, Eric Demarsan and Jean-Claude Petit, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with unsung composers such as Oswald d'Andréa, and Jean-Louis Bucchi.

Embark on a cinematic journey brimming with moody string arrangements, funky flanged drums, signature French basslines, and deeply dramatic atmospheres.

Deluxe Tip-On jacket LP with printed innersleeves
Including exclusive and extensive liner notes.
Vinyl Only / No Digital

Shaped from fragile, emotionally charged piano motifs that distort, disappear and transform into dense, cinematic textures, 'CANALS' is a debut that's finely matured, the result of years of friendship and growth. Italian artist Vanja Sturno and Montréal-based Belgian-Spanish composer Pablo Geeraert (aka Sanea Ima) have worked together extensively on various projects up until now, but 'CANALS' is their first official release as a duo. Having both studied music academically, the pair were eager to work more intuitively, so applied their well-honed set of skills to sound that, instead of fitting into a conceptual box, reflected more personal experiences.

Back in 2023, Geeraert travelled to Rome to support his friend at a difficult time and, during the trip, received some bad news of his own. The complicated feelings unconsciously surged through a series of delicate Ryuichi Sakamoto-inspired piano improvisations and a new project began to coalesce. They didn't realize it at the time, but once the record was finished, Sturno and Geeraert began to understand that the entire process had been a form a joint catharsis - a release of pressure. They were able to function so effortlessly and swiftly because they had already provided the space for each other to resonate emotionally and the music flowed from that point.

So the album's title, while remaining ambiguous, suggests its formation: a sequence of eight interconnected channels that feed a creative whole. On the first segment, Sturno and Geeraert's initial recordings can be perceived most nakedly, the melancholy, Satie-like phrases floating peacefully for a moment before the tranquility is agitated by stormy distortions and swelled into thick waves of harmony. The piano provides the record with its emotional anchor, offering focus and clarity as multi-dimensional noise wells up around it before inevitably dissipating, leaving gentle, unadorned sounds once again.

And the familiar instrument is reshaped into a wheezing artificial organ on the animated 'CANALS III', punctuated by percussive, tape-warped pitch fluctuations that seem to bite into its very essence. Gauzy acoustic granulations snowball into a powerful, bass-heavy crescendo on the fourth part, setting the tenor for the album's second half. But after the crushing 'CANALS VI', possibly Sturno and Geeraert's heaviest track, a brief tremolo-heavy vignette that ripples through experimental rock and ambient music's braided history, the duo clear the air with a jazzy diversion, introducing soft woodwind blasts as a palate cleanser before an epic, widescreen finale.

It's an album that's best absorbed as a whole, a vortex of ritualistic, rhythmic repetitions that Sturno and Geeraert appropriately refer to as "spiral listening".

Recorded in New York in 1967, Silk & Soul is Nina Simone's second album for RCA. Despite arrangements that don't always best suit her voice, this album does contain classics "I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free", which would become a Civil Rights anthem and "It Be's That Way Sometimes", written by her brother Sam Waymon. "The Turning Point"' is a song that seems to be about a child making a new friend, but turns out to question the origins of racism. Ms Simone also takes on Dusty Springfield by covering "The Look Of Love", which was originally featured in the 1966 James Bond spoof Casino Royale.

Silk & Soul is available as a limited edition of 2500 individually numbered copies on red vinyl.

Robert Johnson was an American blues musician whose 1936 and 1937 recordings heavily influenced many, many future generations of artists. Despite the fact his recording career spanned a mere seven months, he is universally recognized as a master of the Delta blues style, one of the earliest-known styles of blues emerging from the Mississippi delta in the early twentieth century.

This second compilation of the King of the Delta Blues collects sixteen recordings previously available on the 78 rpm format and includes recordings of two Johnson songs that have since become blues standards: "Sweet Home Chicago" and "I Believe I'll Dust My Broom." In contrast to the deeply emotive songs released on the 1961 album, many of the tracks on this volume display Johnson's lighter side. In 2003 the record was ranked #424 on Rolling Stone's list of 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

Whether he really needed to sell his soul to the devil at the crossroads to reach these great heights, we'll never know...

King Of The Delta Blues Singers, Vol.2 is available as a limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on yellow vinyl and includes an insert with liner notes by Pete Welding.

Bright Opaque Orange Vinyl, Opaque Turquoise Vinyl & Semi-Opaque Natural Vinyl. ,Images of Life" ist ein die gesamte Karriere umfassendes 3xLP-Retrospektive-Boxset, das die beeindruckende Bandbreite und Tiefe von Detroits unbekanntem Songwriting-Genie Ted Lucas beleuchtet. Die erste Platte ,Strange Mysterious Sounds (1965-1970)" zeigt Teds Annäherung an die psychedelische Major-Label-Szene durch seine Bands The Spike Drivers, The Misty Wizards und The Horny Toads. ,Rainy Days (1970-1974)" präsentiert die akustische Wärme und den Charme seiner Solokarriere, die denjenigen am besten bekannt sind, die bereits mit Teds selbstbetiteltem ,OM"-Album von 1975 kennen. ,Impossible Love (1979)", das verschollene zweite Album, präsentiert Ted sanft und fast schon im ,Yacht-Rock"-Stil, ohne dabei jemals die wahre Kunstfertigkeit und das handwerkliche Können des einmaligen Talents Ted Lucas zu verraten.


































[xh] 11IMPOSSIBLE LOVE [ACOUSTIC]

Time To Get On Board A New Black Universal Express.

With each new recording Anthony Joseph presents an imaginative, personal vision of contemporary black culture, and The Ark is yet another compelling album by the award-winning Trinidadian poet and musician. This second part of a sequence of two albums launched with last year’s Rowing Up River To Get Our Names Back, finds Joseph giving full vent to his desire to explore many thought-provoking themes. However, there is a specific thread running through the glorious offering of sounds.

”I was especially interested in the idea of using Afrofuturism as a means of using the future in order to correct the wrongs of the past,” explains Joseph. “And so a lot of lyrics reimage or imagine an alternate black history. At the same time there are elements of autobiography.” The aforesaid cultural phenomenon, a view of the black experience through the prism of science fiction and ancient Egypt and Africa, as mapped out by visionaries from music and literature such as Sun Ra, Parliament-Funkadelic and Octavia E. Butler, has previously inspired Joseph. His 2006 novel The African Origins Of UFOs was a multi-hued work, and the new music shows how Joseph

has, much like all significant artists, gone on to broaden his conceptual palette, creating beguiling new stories and images set to startling rhythms and tones. Tracks such as ‘James’, with its taut, crisp bass and dubbed-up brass, and ‘Transposition Of Space (Glissant)’, a potent evocation of the influential Martiniquan theorist set in a haze of jazz guitar and ambient synthesizers, are marvels of text-sound painting.

As for ‘Baron Samedi’, shaped by a languid, almost wounded guitar line and slow rise of horns that frame Joseph’s journey to the ‘mountain of fire, almost touching the sky’ it is an epic blend of commanding vocal delivery and dramatic sonic tapestry.

Joseph led the Spasm band in the early 2000s and recorded well-received albums such as Bird Head Son and Time, in which songs were largely based on spirituals or chants enhanced by improvisation. But his musical curiosity has naturally led to collaborations, and the new work is produced by Dave Okumu, the prodigiously talented guitarist-vocalist-composer known as the leader of Mercury Music Prize-nominated The Invisible, and who was also a member of the seminal band Jade Fox.

Having first performed together at a show curated by influential saxophonist-flautist Shabaka Hutchings at the storied Total Refreshment Centre In London during lockdown, Joseph and Okumu struck up a rapport that further developed when the former guested on he latter’s album. With the connection made Joseph knew Okumu was the ideal producer for this latest project, which has a freewheeling, almost black psychedelic thing. After sifting through demos and loops the guitarist made on pro-tools the poet started to live with the music. Many months later words began to take shape. Joseph then went into the studio with Okumu’s band and set about creating a magnum opus. Boasting a stellar cast such as vocalist Eska Mtungwazi, trumpeter Byron Wallen and keyboardist Nick Ramm, The Ark is a highly intricate musical mosaic framed by simmering funk grooves, wily jazz improvisation and haunting dub effects. Through the use of many genres the music has simply become its own genre.

The Ark can be perceived as a vessel or means of transport to new worlds, along the lines of Sun Ra’s Ark or Funkadelic’s Mothership, and the material it contains is a unique blend of who Anthony Joseph is and how he sees the world and society in these stimulating, challenging times. “It balances the personal with the universal in a much more vulnerable, accessible way than on previous albums,” Joseph explains.

“It has become less about a personal experience and more about a collective, communal experience in which the artist is conduit, messenger, urban griot.”

Berlin-based duo Mug present their debut album 'The Well'. With a range of influences from no-wave, shoe-gaze, rock, and ambient, “Mug’s” emotional rawness refracts through a lens of spectral soundscapes and austere textures.
Intimate and sincere, 'The Well' is about licking your wounds after a breakup, finding light within the cracks and letting it grow.
Ludwig Wandinger and Yves B Golden began their musical collaborations based on mutual respect and interest in each artist's vastly different backgrounds. Golden grew up singing in her grandmother’s pentecostal church, but is known widely for published essays and poetry. Wandinger, is an internationally acclaimed drummer, music producer and visual artist, interacting in various fringe music scenes.
What began as long distance collaborations released under various outlets such as Caterina Barbieri´s light years, Wandinger and Golden, now living in the same city, morphed into a protracted exploration of songwriting and improvisation, a process defined by immediacy and unfiltered expression: “first thought, best thought.”
Though “The Well” marks the first release from this impulse driven duo, this album promises an ongoing evolution, or discovery, wherein genre specificity is inconsequential.

Dead Calm is a band from Liam McCay... a young, prolific Irish musician from County Donegal, known for creating music under numerous aliases, most notably Sign Crushes Motorist, Dead Calm, and Take Care, exploring genres like slowcore and indie rock with poignant, introspective, and often melancholic themes, gaining significant online traction while maintaining a low-key, hobbyist approach to his rapidly growing career. He began with the fiddle, pivoted to guitar during the pandemic, and has since released extensive work, even turning down record deals to keep his creative process personal.

Amid rusted transistors and owner manuals blurred by dust, Rogelio Serrano rescued abandoned vintage synthesizers from Mexico City's flea markets. These devices, revived by a Japanese technician based in the capital, returned to life with electric pulses, becoming accomplices in nearly clandestine recording sessions at a solitary, remote location called "Ojo de Agua" on the city's outskirts. Sound Cartography is a sonic archive of tracks recorded between 2017 and 2019, which could easily be considered demo pieces, unfinished works, or simply orphaned creations.

Persistence of Sound releases a new work by Brunhild Ferrari called »L’oreille Voleuse« (The Thieving Ear). The LP features an extraordinary live reinterpretation by Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O’Rourke, recorded in October 2025 in Paris.

»No, without listening at doors, the ear captures noises here and there and unexpected sounds without choice, but remains attentive to the messages of each one picked up over the years. It gathers surprises and impressions, bringing them together in a simple mix. In waking up these ear memories again, which were mostly recorded on magnetic tapes, I am very happy about the collaboration of Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O'Rourke in playing on this mix tape.« Brunhild Ferrari

Eiko Ishibashi is a Japanese composer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist who has developed a unique body of work blending experimental pop, improvisation, and film music. Her work, praised for its expressive intensity and sensitivity to sonic textures, has led her to collaborate with numerous musicians on the international scene, including Jim O'Rourke, with whom she forms a long-standing duo. She is also the composer of several film scores, notably for the films of Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car, Evil Does Not Exist), which have helped to bring her work to a wider audience beyond experimental music circles.

Jim O'Rourke is an American composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist, and has been a major figure in experimental and independent music since the 1990s. His work spans rock, improvised music, electronic music, and contemporary music. A former member of Sonic Youth and a collaborator with Wilco, Gastr del Sol, and Merce Cunningham, he has released numerous solo albums and film scores. Based in Japan since the early 2000s, he continues to pursue a rich and multifaceted musical practice, where formal rigor and freedom of invention coexist.

Persistence of Sound was founded in 2019 by Iain Chambers (Langham Research Centre, Rubbish Music). The label explores the world of electroacoustic music, contemporary global field recordings, and the unclassifiable music spanning these genres.

Australian composer-performers Judith Hamann and James Rushford have worked together in countless projects for two decades, perhaps most notably in Golden Fur, their trio with Sam Dunscombe. Black Truffle is pleased to announce Midmeste, their first work as a duo. Its title is Middle English for ‘the middlemost point’, alluding to how the piece builds on the points of overlap between the highly personalised musical languages Hamann and Rushford have developed in recent years. Performed on cello and a variety of pipe organs, Midmeste is a spacious, sometimes unsettling exploration of their shared interest in alternative tunings, psychoacoustic phenomena, the physical properties of their instruments, and the usually peripheral sounds generated by the performing body.

Beginning with a sequence of austerely vibrato-less harmonics from Hamann's cello, trailed by Rushford's whistling portative organ tones, the music soon expands into a slow-moving melodic wander, pausing at times to linger over an uncomfortable harmony or particularly resonant cello tone. Hamann and Rushford have long histories of engagement with pre-Classical European musical traditions, having in past projects performed and radically extended the work of Solage, Louis Couperin, Johann Conrad Beissell and other composers. Here they use a 15th century song by John Dunstaple, ‘O rosa bella’, which returns throughout the piece, distorted, aerated and splayed into new forms.

Developed while the two shared residencies at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart in 2020 and La Becque on Lake Geneva in 2023, Midmeste integrates recordings made (at at the invitation of the Biennale Son) on the organ of the Basilica St Valere in Sion, Switzerland—the world’s oldest playable organ, built in the early 15th century. Played by both Rushford and Hamann, the instrument’s idiosyncratic features, including bellows pumped manually using massive wooden beams, are integrated into the music through amplification. Creaks and thumps locate the music physically both in the performers’ bodies and the specific site of its making. Moving through a series of distinct episodes across its forty-minute span, Midmeste makes space for near-silent duets of high harmonics and hissing air, moments where twittering high tones and rumbling sub-bass could be electronic, and static fields that unexpectedly blossom into almost Romantic harmonies.

Listeners familiar with Hamann and Rushford’s work will find many familiar features here: the stunningly rich cello tones, their patient sustain allowing heightened awareness of the inner life of sound and its interactions with the environment; the care with which acoustic space is activated, becoming at times a third instrumental voice; the attention to fragile, unstable sonorities that sometimes have a comic edge. A major work from two key figures in contemporary experimental music, Midmeste synthesises rigorous exploration of fundamental questions of sound and performance with an unapologetic embrace of beauty.