Search:cat

Having haunted stages across the UK for the best part of a decade, the critical success of their 2024 sophomore full-length `Acts of Harm' gave caustic shoegaze outft Outlander pause to refect on their astounding 2019 debut, `The Valium Machine', soon to be reissued by Pelagic Records on vinyl for the frst time. Written and recorded in 2018 over a handful of studio sessions in Stoke-on-Trent, `The Valium Machine' was a formative experience for Outlander in more ways than one. Prior to working on the album, the band would happily describe themselves as your standard, straight-down-the-middle post rock band but an openness to new infuences from the `90s slowcore and shoegaze scenes, the delicate, textural introduction of vocals and the pivotal decision to track the album in sprawling, full-band takes lead Outlander to fundamentally redefne their sound and scale; adding a pointed sense of dynamic and discordant dirge that lead to the four-piece sharing stages with trailblazing genre heavyweights Bossk and Grivo as well as breathtaking performances at festivals like Dunk! (BE) and ArcTanGent (UK). With beautiful artwork produced in partnership with street photographer Richard Lambert documenting the colourful, everyday life of their beloved Birmingham, the initial run of `The Valium Machine' was limited to a criminally small 50 CDs through tiny local imprint FOMA. Now, fve years later, Outlander owe their panoramic pace and formidable, funereal sound to those few days spent in Stoke- on-Trent and the band, along with Pelagic Records, believe this nascent recording deserves to be heard by many, many more. FOR FANS OF: Duster, Codeine, Swervedriver, Catherine Wheel, Kowloon Walled City

Producers S. Fidelity, Bluestaeb, and Melodiesinfonie form a powerhouse trio known for their innovative blend of RnB, House, and 2-Step sounds. Their collaborative magic often unfolds in unique settings, such as a picturesque studio in the South of France, where they crafted their long awaited EP "365 P". The trio's ability to capture the essence of live sessions and translate it into vibrant, downtempo grooves has earned them a reputation already. As a result the group created these most vibey tracks between RnB, House & 2-Step to their catalogue ever - catching the vibe of this beautiful sessions together with douniah.

“Being Stuck in a loop with someone. repeating the same conversations over n over while nothing changes.” - douniah
"We started working on a joint project in Paris at Bluestaeb’s flat in 2017 already. Over the course of the years following, we tried to continue working on the project remotely from Berlin, Paris and Zurich. With only one conclusion: we need to be in the room together to make this a record that feels exciting to us. This May we finally closed ourselves in for a week and created what has become this beautiful EP with tons of live recordings." - S. Fidelity

Say It Loud Records has the honor of presenting the reissue of the Catalan monkfish masterpiece Variacions en fu-remoll de la 5ª simfonia inèdita de Roger Linn. Extraño Weys it has been the most elusive group on the scene. But the hit on the table that they made 6 years ago in an exclusive 10” and that has become a collector’s item is back in the form of a reissue!

An elegant 12” vinyl with two bonus tracks never before released on plastic, the delicious “Jade” by the crazy Gordo del Puru and “Say it Extraño” with the North American MC Akua Naru. A title that is a tribute to the creator of the first MPCs, the key piece on which the productions of the album are built by Viktor Pizza. It is precisely these productions that show the solidity of the project. With an exquisite work of the sampler and an infinite number of references on vinyl, VP has built a storyline that modulates atmospheres and moods over 6 tracks where the two main mc’s, Sir JKLZ1 and Patxi Vazili, draw their obsessions.

To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Freedom Cry Sound presents its first realease with Freddie McGregor. The legendary artist sings “Behind the Wall”, a song produced by Genius T and Freedom Cry that is now available as an exclusive 7” vinyl limited edition, published and distributed by Rebelmadiaq Records. “Behind The Wall” is a projectile of roots reggae, a dazzling song where the roots are very much alive, living in harmony with the spirit of modernity.” David Vilches, musical chronicler.

The Catalan musician and producer Genís Trani is responsible for the musical production as well as the mixing of the riddim. The musicians who have participated are: David Goldfine on bass, Pau Dangla on keys, Lamont ‘Monty’ Savory on guitar, Josep Blanes on trombone, Oriol Escolano on trumpet, Pol Prats on sax, Roberto Sánchez on backing vocals and the same Genís Trani programming the drums. The Jamaican singer, songwriter and producer Freddie McGregor is a legend and a great reference in the genre, with a professional career full of musical successes that have become immortal treasures.

Strut proudly reintroduces a classic from the Topomic catalogue, Ice’s ‘Each Man Makes His Destiny’, officially available on vinyl for the first time.
After relocating from the United States to Paris, Ice began performing regularly in the city’s Barbès district, a vibrant area with a large North African immigrant community. The band’s heavy Afro-funk sound caught the attention of producer Pierre Jaubert, leading them to become the resident session musicians at his independent Parisound studio.
Immersed in the local influences, Ice began integrating African-inspired chants, textures, and rhythms into their distinct funk style. In 1973, the group recorded their debut album, ‘Each Man Makes His Destiny’, a psychedelic funk exploration that hinted at the evolving sound that would later define them as the Lafayette Afro-Rock Band and, eventually, Ice once more.
Produced by Jaubert, the album brings some powerful social commentary on claustrophobic tracks like ‘Too Little Room’ and ‘Suicide’, under-pinned by a determination to succeed despite the adversity.
Remastered by The Carvery.

John Lee Hooker - "It Serve You Right To Suffer (Verve Acoustic Sounds Series)" 180g Heavy Vinyl LP Released on the Impulse! Records label in early 1966, this collection is a mix of new compositions and re-workings of tunes John Lee Hooker had previously recorded, including a cover of Barrett Strong's 1959 Motown hit "Money (That's What I Want)." Featuring Panama Francis on drums, Milt Hinton on bass, and Barry Galbraith on second guitar, the result is some of the best John Lee Hooker material with a band that you're likely to come across. Verve's Acoustic Sounds Series features transfers from analog tapes and remastered 180-gram vinyl in deluxe gatefold packaging. Verve Label Group; Verve; Jazz; Catalog

Repress!

Straight from the northwest 1980, Freeway was the band you could catch any weekend playing gigs in Portland and Seattle.. Their coveted AOR boogie debut 7" on Nebula Circle "Get The Feelin" is what originally started this project with PPU records, Mark J (keyboardist/songwriter/vocalist) had some original copies in the safe deposit box.. Nebula Circle was a local Oregon label that released Shock and Nu Shooz's first recordings! Freeway had another vinyl LP debut in the 80s, but it only made limited local waves, impossible to find today, so Mark J went back in the studio and pulled all these recordings from the archives, and luckily found other solo projects featured on this LP.

Jam packed with west coast twang and tongue-in-cheek lyrics, the Doohickeys' debut album All Hat No Cattle tackles classic country topics like gettin' groped, tiny trucks, and LA traffic. Produced by two-time Grammy nominee, Eric Corne, the record will have you two-steppin' along and laughing out loud. The opening track, Rein It In Cowboy, includes rippin' licks from Dwight Yoakam's touring guitarist Eugene Edwards, as well as back-up vocals from Hayley Orrantia (The Golbergs, The Masked Singer). World-famous comedian Jim Jefferies makes an appearance at the end of Please Tell Me You're Sleepin' (he infamously suggested the song idea to the duo). "This Town Sucks" earned an award for Outstanding Songwriting in the 2023 Great American Song Contest and the music video for "Rein It In Cowboy" won The American Songwriter music video contest.

TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge - Radical Remixes is a brand new take on Tee Lopes’ critically-acclaimed OST. This new soundtrack is included in the latest DLC from the multi million-seller game TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge. Several guests were invited to add their own touch: Anamanaguchi, Sean Bialo, Jake Kaufman, Button Masher, Keiji Yamagishi, Tomoya Tomita. Inspired by the 8-bit retro NES aesthetics, this album adds to the TMNT music legacy. Cowabunga!

New Jersey's noisegazers High. are excited to announce their sophomore EP, Come Back Down, available on vinyl and digitally on January 24, 2025. The announcement is heralded by lead single "In A Hole," which begins with a wall of guitars as powerful as the emotions behind it. Inspired by finding friendship and community amid trauma and hardship, the band excavates difficult memories of their past to match their heaviest guitar work to date. With a greater expression of range - more noise, more hooks, more heaviness and more emotion. The sad is sadder and the love is more in love. More songs about loss and being lost. Come Back Down will be released January 24, 2025 as a digital EP and on yellow vinyl, with their previously released EP on the B side.

Feeling the deep and the hi simultaneously. Not craving for the extreme - finding balance instead. Indifference.
The word reflects what I often felt in recent times. Not just a feeling but a desire for things less pointed. It seems to be a general zeitgeist phenomenon but as I am part of the electronic music scene, I reflect a lot
about what is happening within this genre. There has been an urge for the either really hard, driving, fast and aggressive, or the extreme opposite.
Catchy vocals with a pop music feel, very direct and relatable melodies, soft grooves, piano chords. Either way - it feels like it has to be very distinctive - aggressive or soft - as long as it is extreme. It seems to be a moment in time where in whatever you do - it HAS to be in the face. All of this is fine of course - but never was my nature or personality. There is a reason why I chose to the adjective "Recondite" as an artist name because I could identify with the meaning of it. "hidden, obscure, not in the obvious”.
“Indifferent” is opposing this Zeitgeist and is representing driving techno with minimalistic melodic atmospheres, deep, haunting vibes, reserved yet strong and decisive within its own language, floating between melancholic desperation and hopefulness - music that lives right in between the hard and the soft... the aggressive and the neat... not black or white.

David Allred is a prolific composer and producer based in Portland, Oregon. His new album The Beautiful World captures an enriched, realised understanding of why he composes in the first place. Dedicated to the expression of existential themes such as death, grief, longing and loss, the album’s core theme centres around the suicide of a young girl Lauren, who was a family friend to Allred. For as long as he could remember, Allred always created music out of a kind of dissociative state which he finds alluringly easy to lapse into. A repetition of a motif is usually where he begins composing. But unlike his previous works, The Beautiful World firmly has one foot in reality and is deeply intertwined with Allred’s relationships, past and present. Through his correspondence with Erased Tapes label head and the album’s producer, Robert Raths, over the past year, he came to realise that everyone has a Lauren in a way – someone they’d lost. Through writing to Raths, Allred was able to draw out this thread from the work and position it more clearly as the central concept to this work. The music doesn’t reflect the chaos of trauma, instead it has a therapeutic quality. It was through this dialogue that Allred was able to create what may be his most cohesive body of work to date. The 11 track album unfolds around Oh Lauren, providing the core of the album’s sentiment – how grief returns to us throughout life over and over. Embedded more than halfway through the album, Allred allows listeners to cohabit a meditative space through ambient textures, drones and ballads echoing the vocal sincerity of Arthur Russell, Daniel Johnston and the hypnotic storytelling of Robert Ashley. To truly reckon with The Beautiful World’s emotional position, listeners must understand the importance of the figure of Lauren, and the significance she has had throughout Allred’s life. Lauren’s suicide as a child provided the catalyst for Allred’s lifelong grief. But it was death anxiety and grief itself which provided Allred a link to a universal relationship that people have with each other and the world they live in. Impermanence and loss are the driving force behind all of our connections. The trance-like nature of the album perhaps comes from David Allred’s time sense – particularly when it comes to memory and trauma. Time becomes non-linear rather than a straight line – where one can repeat or return to the same themes but older and in a different frame of mind. Grief continues to manifest itself in life and despite personal growth, there will always be moments where the same feeling will manifest itself again. The album encourages listeners to sit with the concept of grief, and Allred is hopeful they can find comfort and learn to process it in a healing way. The Beautiful World is therefore heavily influenced by Allred’s work in therapy, particularly his relationship to writing music. In the past, Allred would be composing music as a means to dissociate from his life, but the album sees him engaging and connecting more authentically than ever with others and himself. Despite his prolific previous works being made in the company of others, Allred needed to step back from the scenes that he’s worked in to discover what he really wanted to create. Allred concludes: “In the power of love, curiosity, humour, and reconciliation, we give you The Beautiful World.”

In a continued disruption to the airwaves following releases from Bondo and Monde UFO, Quindi returns to the Californian noise rock scene-not-scene to dig on the gnarled riffs of Expose. On their new release, the LA outfit double-down on a unique blend of bloated guitar fuzz and grimy analogue synths, and come out with a curiously cosmic kind of kick-ass.
If there was a dreamy, sun-bleached quality to Bondo and Monde UFO, their label mates Expose sound more wrought from sweat-drenched jam sessions under halogen strip lights in grease-stained garages. But the guttural quality of their blown-out guitar tone is matched for vibrancy by the dexterity of their playing, bringing angular free jazz to post hardcore and sludge rock, capped off with the unearthly sonic possibilities of flamboyant synthesis.
This dual-layered wall of sound lends extra weight to the likes of shit-kicking 'Speed Dial', which thunders like a kosmische juggernaut with amped up leads and a dead-eyed vocal condensed into a visceral minute, all with enough time for a dramatic breakdown, synth eruption and a final thrust. Similarly scooped out of the trash compactor, 'Description' rides for longer with one foot pressed firmly on the fuzz pedal, letting the electronics squeal around the punked-up rush of the guitars.
But Expose are not a one-dimensional band constantly thrashing it out. By contrast, 'The Constant' hits a crushing emotional note in its more structured push and pull between delicacy and heaviness, hitting bittersweet notes along the way throughout the peaks and troughs of the arrangement. 'Self Terror' washes languid, discordant guitar strum into swirling FX accompanied by sax from Monde UFO's Ray Monde.
Smart as a whip, sharp as a tack and boiling over with an untameable urgency, Expose make their presence felt in brilliant, bruising form on this particularly fierce addition to the Quindi catalogue.

Four silhouettes levitating above an endless expanse of sand, their movements being captured like stolen from time, that is the cover image of Later.’s sophomore album ‘Golden Bay’. This striking visual sets the tone for an album that delves into profound themes—exploring the sacred, the transformative power of music, and love as a gateway to an inner world. It offers a dreamlike escape into a world governed by instinct, passion, and freedom. ‘Golden Bay’ stands out with its distinctive fusion of electronic-pop, gospel, and rock influences. The prominent use of synthetic sounds intertwined with organic elements creates this warm feeling of being at the heart of Later.’s imagination. Lyrically, the album is infused with a blend of sensuality and raw honesty, retaining the unfiltered emotion that has become a hallmark of Later.’s music.

Quote from the band : “This whole album was built like a trip. After our first album it was hard for us to figure out where we wanted to go musically. We never made as many demos and drafts- almost forty or fifty - for any release before. Then suddenly Paul played a guitar riff and we knew that something had been unlocked in our creative process, like a revelation, it later became our album opener ‘Open the Gates’.

Everything escalated from this first melody and we began seeing the picture of what we wanted sonically: prominent synths creating this levitating feeling, powerful uplifting guitars and lyrics that captured the almost spiritual high we get when creating music. Every time we hit the studio, ‘Golden Bay’ became this sacred space—our escape where we could let go and liberate ourselves. Overall it’s a pop album, but it has this raw energy and carefree spirit that we wanted to preserve throughout the use of live sounds.

Our biggest wish with this album is that the listeners embark on a trip and feel the way we do when we’re in the studio, at 3am, and we don’t want to stop because you have to catch these rare moments when inspiration strikes you, and you become the messenger of something beautiful.”

Blending late 2000's minimalism and harmonies with razor-sharp sound design, Nous'klaer Audio is excited to present Erik Luebs. The American via Japan techno producer joins the label with a four-track solo EP dropping in 2025. While Erik has released music on other labels sparingly, his self-released catalog is vast, versatile, and deeply immersive - a favorite on repeat at Nous'klaer HQ. We're proud to present his first offering with us. Glimpse of Reality is a deep dive into syncopated rhythms and intricate sound design. The EP is rich with atmospheric sounds that are meticulously crafted yet hit with real impact. Each track is layered with delicate textures and packed with detail, rewarding close listening as new elements reveal themselves with each play - especially on big soundsystems.

Keziah Jones is back with a new concept album entitled "Alive & Kicking" , recorded live in Lagos at Clout Africa Studio. Not only all his classics revisited 'live in studio" but including 2 brand new singles (studio) "Melissa" & "Rainy Saturday" , his first ones since 2013. And as bonus 2 covers (of Ricky James 'Below The Funk (Pass The J) & Police's 'The Bed's Too Big Without You).

Keziah Jones was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. Then has been living between Paris - he's been an established & cult musical brand in France - , London and Lagos. He is since the early 90's the creator of the blufunk movement, "a fusion between raw blues elements and hard, edgy funk rhythms. His catalog includes iconic songs such as Rhythm Is Love, Million Miles from Home… Keziah is known for his distinctive style of guitar playing, including his percussive right-hand technique.

Die französische Singer-Songwriterin Laura Cahen zählt in ihrem Heimatland zu einer der wichtigsten Stimmen der Indie-Szene, nun kündigt sie ihr viertes Studioalbum 'De l'autre côté' für den 24. Januar 2025 an. Inspiriert von Künstlerinnen wie Laurie Anderson, Laura Marling oder Adrianne Lenker verbindet ihre Musik akustische und elektronische Elemente, um emotional reiche, selbstreflektierende Klanglandschaften zu schaffen. In Form poetischer Liebeslieder behandelt sie Themen wie Weiblichkeit, Ökologie, Homosexualität und Gleichberechtigung.

This collection features sixteen of the most renowned salsa and Latin soul singles released on Fania Records, and its subsidiaries, between 1964-1978, making it the perfect introduction to the legendary catalog. It celebrates the trailblazing label’s 60th anniversary, and iconic artists Willie Colón, Héctor Lavoe, Rubén Blades, Johnny Pacheco, Celia Cruz and more. Archival images and new liner notes, in English and Spanish, by New York-based music historian Aurora Flores are also included.

Departure Lounge welcomes LTD to the line-up with his four-track EP, Sol Ixent.

The mysterious Parisian producer draws from a deep-rooted catalogue of releases under alternative aliases, each and every one reflecting a wholly nostalgic flair reminiscent of yesteryear - on this occasion, channelled as a house affair.

Rose City Band"s music is sun-kissed timeless country rock whose seemingly effortless momentum carries the joy of its creation without ignoring the darkness pervading our consciousness. Led by guitarist/vocalist Ripley Johnson, the music of Rose City Band is rooted in his love of private press records of the mid to late 70"s. The band, in addition to Johnson, features pedal steel guitarist Barry Walker, keyboardist Paul Hasenberg and drummer John Jeffrey who enmesh a keen sense of rhythmic drive and melody with gentler, sumptuous atmospheres. Nuanced performances and interplay between players unfurl like desert flowers splashing color onto an arid landscape. The ensemble"s buoyant moments still glide with ease, but there is room to revel in respite of the shade of a dark cloud. Across the album, Johnson"s tasteful guitar interjections and soothing voice are met in kind with the versatile playing of Walker, Hasenberg, and Jeffery, with special guest performances by synthesist/vocalist, Sanae Yamada. Album closer "The Walls" perfectly captures the band"s explorative and expansive songs, Hasenberg"s soulful organ driving the album to an emotionally cathartic conclusion. Throughout his prolific career with Wooden Shjips, Moon Duo and now Rose City Band, Johnson"s music has consistently centered around exploration and discovery. Sol Y Sombra imbues his penchant for space and resplendent tonality with a denser amalgam of his influences through a delicate balance of the somber and the serene, of subtle evolutions and familiar sounds, Sol Y Sombra makes for a holistically joyous experience, finding solace in both sun and shade.