Suche:collective

TROY TOWN are back with their 3rd release and itʼs another dance floor focussed EP from a South East London mainstay. El Prevost has been a fixture of the underground London dance music scene for nearly 20 years - his first label, Linx Recordings, was at the forefront of the garage and grime crossover at the turn of the millennium signing early tracks by Kano, Wiley and Pay As U Go Cartel. However, over the past decade his productions in the world of house, garage and techno have brought him widespread respect amongst discerning A&Rʼs and DJs such as Third Ear Recordings, Patrice Scott and Ricardo Villalobos whilst building his own label and party series ‘No Speakersʼ. This EP is unmistakably indebted to the sounds of London but equally doesnʼt sound like anyone else out there at the moment. ‘A Little Politicalʼ, dripping in dub effects and toughened up with the immense delivery of poet Kyla Jenee Lacey, is full throttle and combines consciousness with a determination to fill dance floors. The broken beat influence of Ladbroke Grove and the Co-Op collective is given a hefty rejuvenation on ‘Nu Jazzʼ. ‘Wheelʼ and ‘Acid Tonerʼ are heads-down, deep and dubby. Both tracks that would ramp up the temperature in dark basements like Plastic People circa 2011.

Time is Local is a project by Danish collective We like We and sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard built around a 12-hour live sound installation and performance at Thorvaldsen Museum in Copenhagen.

The piece was initiated and performed by the artists during the G((o))ng Tomorrow Festival in 2017. As they slowly wandered the halls and rooms of the museum for a whole day, they performed extended sound compositions for a visiting audience at each of the 12 chambers for a longer session - a haunting experience as the outside world disappeared and the focus was on quiet sonic moments unfolding in midst of the grand, reverberous space. For this album they have collected 12 fragments revolving around the chambers in the museum. Each chamber is being represented by its own handful of tones, instruments and voice. The statues within, depicted by neo-classicist sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen get their own soundtrack of quiet emanating gusts. Barely heard frequencies reflect through the walls. The marble carved busts of Greek gods that line the museum hallways gaze eternally with a blank stare as decades pass and new audience arrives.

Although We like We should need no introduction to followers of the Sonic Pieces label, the Danish all female sound quartet consists of Katrine Grarup Elbo (violin), Josefine Opsahl (cello), Sara Nigard Rosendal (percussion) and Katinka Fogh Vindelev (voice). Together they have forged a dynamic and intuitional sound beyond genres through the last decade. Only two years ago they released the nordic neo-classical opus Next to the entire All. This time they emerge in collaboration with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard. Jacob’s works are sonic reflections on complex aspects of the human civilisation, treating themes such as radioactivity, melting ice, border walls and tones emitted by the ears. Through the last decades he has released records and sound documents through labels such as Touch, Important Records and more. As a document of their 12h performance, Time is Local is a beautiful sonic evocation that shines as a bright line of sun through the cracks of a tomb.

Alexander Gentil is as polished at compiling his futuristic sounds and unique fresh vision into tracks that leave listeners yearning for more. The Journey starts with a field recording of children playing in a playground, as the laughs and joyfulness evolve, it is taken over by dark atmospheric textures & a haunting melody line that flies throughout the record. Continuing the experience minimalist Composer & part of the Soundwalk Collective Kamran Sadeghi gives the record a new twist and a more dancefloor-oriented approach, Following it The record Inertia, is a dark and groovy record with a 303 acid Motif all throughout and beautiful reverberated sax melodies that keep the listener locked in. Salvation keeps things mysterious and concludes the EP as a bonus track only available for the vinyl release.

It seems KPM have long been fans of Smith and Mudd and, after being introduced to each other by mutual friend Andy Allday, the peerless Balearic maestros were invited to contribute to the library label’s digital-only “Album Shorts” project. The results are predictably wonderful.

With past projects under our belt working with everyone involved so far it made perfect sense for Be With to take on the vinyl release of this instant library classic. But why is it called “Tea With Holger”?

“Holger” is of course Holger Czukay and the whole LP is dedicated to Smith and Mudd’s time spent with him and Ursa Major at Can’s famous Inner Space Studio in Weilerswist, near Cologne.

When not recording it seems they spent a great deal of time sat around being entertained by Holger’s stories and drinking many cups of different sorts of tea from all over the world. These moments provide some their fondest memories of their visits:

“Looking back, it was pretty incredible that we spent part of our lives with Holger in one of the most magical places we’ve ever known, Inner Space Studio. We have our memories and, of course, the Bison album we made with him. But to honour the time we spent with him, we wanted to dedicate an album to him called ‘Tea With Holger’. The names of the tracks are about that time.”

The album was recorded over several years in London, Margate and Gorthleck, a small hamlet in the Scottish Highlands. Mike Piggott, who played with Bert Jansch, handled the strings and played violin whilst Sam Creer lent his virtuoso cello work to the proceedings. The sessions employed a key recording technique from their time with Holger: hit record and play. They wanted to capture magical improvisational moments live and not do the work later on in editing.

In their own words (and in classic library record sleeve style) these tracks are collectively described as “Balearic themes including breezy soul, sun-dappled melodies, warm pianos and sweeping strings”. You want to hear this, right?

The album is vintage Smith and Mudd. The gentle piano ushering in opening track “The Gardener” is soon joined by low, bubbling drums. When the time is just right, lush guitars glisten above a Welsh language vocal that floats like silk. Easy as a sea breeze. “Innerspace” is of course a nod to Can’s aforementioned studio. Dark, heavy piano meets rolling drums before warm chords and luscious strings take over, gliding over moody grooves to drive you home. Closing out side A, “Weilerswist” delivers more beautifully rolling piano and guitars over thumping cellos and building drums.

Side B opens with the full, string-enhanced version of “Away From Me”. This is Smith and Mudd’s prefered version and it’s only available here on this vinyl issue. For us it’s the standout on this all-highlight album. Tribal tones, piano and cello set a melodic staccato for violin to soar over while rolling piano lines and gospel organ chords descend into a drum drop that leads to a glorious vocal lead finale.

Distant synths introduce sun-drenched guitars and uplifting strings in “Kölner Street”, before a spacey Moog solo leads to a spellbinding, sci-fi drop. The sunshine returns before the track ends. The album closes with “Tea With Holger”. Airy vocal swells are punctuated by plucked cellos and picked guitars, all wonderfully warmed by a soulful piano.

Cut by Pete Norman and pressed in the Netherlands by Record Industry, “Tea With Holger” comes in a classic KPM green sleeve complete with track descriptions from Smith and Mudd themselves. The finishing visual touches come courtesy of Richard Robinson. We’ve given this record the same care and attention as we give to each our KPM re-issues, and it’s just as essential.

Microdosing is a series of compilation 12”s selected by Julienne Dessagne aka Fantastic Twins, and designed in collaboration with French visual artist Geff Pellet. Microdosing is a collective experiment aimed at helping you fighting back your modern obsession with happiness. You may deserve a nice day but the day does not need a nice you, nothing should be forced, everything is permitted. Microdosing will provide you with sonic healing weapons on regular basis and at irregular dosage. Those doses will favour psychedelic social techniques against self help tyranny, creation over soma, provoking over numbing, our outer-selves over our inner-selves. Microdosing refuses the fatality of the pleasure principle. Life is a struggle, time to embrace it. —— "My battery is low and it’s getting dark” We at Microdosing will make Opportunity’s famous last words fully ours. Some would see these as an epitaph on a black screen, we embrace them as a reclaimed fragility. Are we grains of sand wandering in space, hoping for a goal? No. We are the cosmos, the cosmos is us, unafraid of the end, unafraid of the void. Before the rise of the infinite silence, Microdosing brings you new guiding lights, white sun or black hole being a simple permutation of the kinetic rainbow. Oceanic’s “Parallel Lines Of Stripes” is a meandering mantra, an synthesised Moebius ring, a mission to your heart, that furthest star in the sky. Gilb’R’s “Cosmogonie” simply reminds us of the profound relation between spatial systems and the holy act of birth (cosmo, world and gon, conceive). The universe is a body, your body is your universe. Lucas Croon’s “Threshold Stimulus” is the soundtrack of a never ending voyage, the man is on a trip to the core sanctum. Imagine Space as a reverberation room cladded with bakelite. Losing yourself in delay repeats sometimes is the shortest way. Neuzeitliche Bodenbeläge & Sam Irl’s “Faeden” is another hymn to the umbilical chords joining us to the outer world, a black monolith of kraut acid, a pagan dance as portal to a destination only you can choose. Microdosing will be back soon with more enablers, helping to turn your petty struggles into a search for a meaning of life. The Quest lives on.

A Berlin based collective of music aficionados launch a limited and lovely 7" platform for club-ready flipped classics. Simple, effective
Floor food for all moods...TIP !

SLEEPERS POETS SCIENTISTS is the compilation of 9 female Georgian artists. It showcases works by Natalie Beridze's students at the CES (Creative Education Studio), where Beridze teaches song-writing and music production. Natalie Beridze is an international well-established artist with releases on Max Ernst, Laboratory Instinct, and Monika Enterprise, through live performances, theatre and movie soundtrack works, as a member of artists collective Goslab, and collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Thomas Brinkmann, Gudrun Gut, Nikakoi – to name but a few. "This compilation is the backbone of what I try to persuade as a lecturer and as a person, who endlessly loves the music-making process. "Sleepers, Poets, Scientists " is the embodiment of intelligent, benevolent, dedicated, talented and beautiful women, who I believe have a bright future as female composers in Georgia and this album is a significant step towards it."

The retro cover is a nod to the famous group shot from the 1927 Solvay conference, which brought together physicists like Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Marie Curie, and others. With this in mind, the name Sleepers, Poets, Scientists rings like a call to action for today's brightest minds, to wake up and save our chaotic, troubled world.

Strangelove’s latest release turns left somewhere near the edge of the Atlantic, with Electricidade Estética” documenting a vibrant window into the musical landscape of 1980’s counter-culture Portugal. Compiling early un-issued works, DWART’s organic Ash-Ra Balearics meld with spikey Iberian electronics, coalescing around the floating beauty of ‘Mate’, reissued for the first time on vinyl. With emergent music technologies of the era enthusiastically adopted by Lisbon’s avante-garde, there was a collective desire by DWART and their contemporaries to push existing sonic boundaries;- Post new wave sounds melded with distinctive local sensibilities. Vítor Rua & Jorge Lima Barreto of the legendary Telectu (whom Antoñio currently tours with) were regular collaborators while composer/ guitarist Nuno Rebelo and guitarist/singer Bernardo Devlin feature throughout. Antoñio & Manuela Duarte’s search for an artistic language melded a continuing curiosity with aural and physical dualities: experimental pop integrated with performance art, mathematics sound-tracked on canvas, organic found sounds at ease alongside synthetic drum machines. The 9 songs found here document the early emergence of their own ‘Electricidade Estética’ (Big shouts to Invisible Cities & Steele Bonus- early champions of ‘Mate’) Vital Sales Points: Follow up to the labels previous releases - Frank Harris & Maria Marquez ‘Echoes’ and previous Portuguese release Lena d’Água ?- Jardim Zoológico

Secretsundaze welcomes Eliphino to the gala relaunch of their imprint for a thoroughly satisfying mini album of contemplative jacking and dulcet breakbeats.

Eliphino's most recent 'Realistic Sex EP' on the hotly tipped Meda Fury label boasts thunderous breaks, 303s and serious sub-bass pressure which has gained praise from tastemakers such as Jon K, Carista, Josey Rebelle, Moxie and Gilles Peterson.Having flexed with this darker edged EP after a long lay-off from releasing, while sharpening his skills and reconnecting with his musical inspiration, Eliphino is now ready to really cut loose with 'Breaking Up Is Hard' - a statement longplayer that dreamily investigates the dusty spaces between house, breakbeat, ambient, hardcore and acid. Tom This album came about as way of focussing my energy in the wake of a significant break up. I tried to experiment with melody and texture to convey some of the range of emotions that come with such a testing time. That being said, the B-side bangers are more dedicated to abandon and forgetting your worries.

Hailing originally from the Leeds, but with time spent in both London and Berlin, 'Breaking Up Is Hard' lands somewhere between the Hessle Audio crew, Joy O and Selected Ambient Works era Aphex.

Having previously released heaters for Brownswood and Hoya Hoya over the years, Eliphino stepping up for the debut artist LP on the reactivated Secretsundaze label feels like a natural fit as James Priestley explains:

""We've collectively had a connection and friendship with Tom that goes back several years and in fact it was receiving this work as demos that really spurred and inspired us into getting the label rolling again. It feels totally right to be working with him on this and for this mini-LP to herald the relaunch of the label as it moves towards a more artist led as opposed to EP driven approach.

Free Love, the artists formerly known as Happy Meals return to Optimo Music with ‘Extreme Dance Anthems’ a phantasmic mini album from their hearts to yours.

They say – “We recorded EXTREME DANCE ANTHEMS in our recently moved studio, ‘Full Ashram Celestial Garden’ which is now situated in a building that holds both a church below us and a sex club next door. Most of the tracks were formed from late-night sessions that we started to kind of ritualistically hold inspired from a particular thought or idea that we later cut down and did a live mixdown of. The music is about physicality and the metaphysical – it is about a recontextualisation of the ineffable as a centre point of existence which in turn influences how we engage with everything around us. A celebration of the unquantifiable, unspeakable, indivisible EXPERIENCE as the throne from which all ideas are derived. Even though the world is fucked- we are here.

On the face of it – I realise that this description might just seem like apolitical hippy bullshit but fuck that – as a deliberate result of the modern political landscape, our societies’ individual and collective disengagement with the metaphysical has led us to treat other humans, animals and our environment like resourceful statistics rather than something that actually holds any inherent value. An Inner Revolution of the foundations of our reality in a way that reintroduces the essence of existence, and not merely its describable derivatives, into the conversation of how we should live our lives INFORMS our perception of the world in a way that demands us to ACT. The record is about a kind of gradual awakening between the two of us – a reconnection with the magic around us.

The ineffable is not without moments of illumination- mostly in the form of immediate absurdity: ONE DAY WE WILL ALL BE DEAD BUT HERE WE ARE ALIVE INSTEAD.

The record is called EXTREME DANCE ANTHEMS because it made us both laugh”.

Chillum Trio started out as a collective of like-minded musicians in 2002, however, after releasing an album together (which was supported by the likes of Laurent Garnier) the project slowly become the solo act of founding recording producer, Geza Szekeres.
At that time he discovered West-African music, latin jazz and the universe of soul and funk, these new directions have been shaping his musical evolution ever since.

In 2014 he turned out as one of the winners of Gilles Peterson's Havana Cultura remix contest that gave him the opportunity to travel to Havana and record music with the creme of the Cuban jazz scene.
One of his songs recorded in this session got released on Brownswood Recordings compilations Havana Cultura Mix and Havana Cultura Anthology.

Budabeats Records is more than proud to release Chillum Trio's first ever 12" single called Cosmotropica with two dancefloor friendly tracks mixing broken afro-house with tropical and cosmic influences.



.

2019 marks the 20th anniversary of ‘Low Birth Weight,’ the second album by Piano Magic, then a loose collective of musicians centred around founder songwriter, Glen Johnson. Though a year later, the collective would take shape as a bona fide internationally touring group, in 1999, Johnson had one foot in his native Nottingham and the other in his new home of London where, finding himself label manager at Rough Trade Records, also became highly prolific, releasing his own records across a myriad of micro-labels (Che, Wurtlitzer Jukebox, Darla, Rocket Girl, etc).

By his own admission, ‘Low Birth Weight,’ owes much to the East London experimental group, Disco Inferno who, embracing sampling technology, attempted to turn pop music inside out. By 1995, the Inferno had burnt out but Johnson remained inspired by their playful, subversive manifesto and thus, the album here, partly produced by “Nottingham’s own Martin Hannett,” Martin Cooper, is difficult to pigeonhole either at the end of the millennium or even now. Drum kit signals are fed through a tiny amp literally inside a cardboard box; breathing is employed for rhythms; kick drums are replaced with broken glass; there’s a ragbag of tablas, huge slap back delay and phase, theremin, shortwave radio, and more.

Aside from the DI benchmarks, ‘Low Birth Weight’ bears the marks of an infatuation with the dreampop of the time – the guitar saturated in delay and overdrive – inspired by the likes of AR Kane and Kitchens Of Distinction and not the more languid “shoegaze,” which has oft been levelled at LBW.
There’s a revolving door of guests on the album, including Pete Astor (The Loft/The Weather Prophets) on a cover of Disco Inferno’s ‘Waking Up’; Simon Rivers of The Bitter Springs supplies lyrics and voice to ‘Crown Estate’ and ‘Dark Secrets Look For Light’; Jen Adam, then an American art student on a year’s placement in London, writes and sings ‘The Fun Of The Century,’ a personal account of being pushed off a roof at a party by someone she thought a close friend.

‘Low Birth Weight’ is undoubtedly of its time, though undoubtedly more playful and literary than much of the music made during the late 90’s and a fascinating bridge between dream pop and experimental electronic music.

“Assembly Sequence” is a split EP featuring two of the four founders of Kajunga: Berndt and Cloudy Kid. Having taken root in Minneapolis and frequenting cities like Detroit and Chicago, the EP has an inherent Midwest feel. This marks Cloudy Kid’s third release with Kajunga and Berndt’s second. Berndt has also released with sister labels Clave House, and Corndogs out of Detroit.

Assembly Sequence is controlled by the mechanical nature of its creators. Berndt and Cloudy Kid split the arrangement down the middle to manufacture a sonic signature they believe can be used to drive the biomechanical functions of life-space.

Side A begins by fusing ethereal groove polymers with stabilizing oscillations from Berndt’s precision pump rhythms; On side B, Cloudy Kid neuro-casts an injection chassis turbine on the entire structure, constraining the rhythmic patterns to rip deeper into the corrosive noise planes of the collective Darkmind.

After a steady stream of releases from the 2000 Black label which serve as a first course, Dego returns with his third album ; A full length LP of his contemporary adventures in modern sound. This album combines Dego's consistent forward looking musical explorations with a host of instrumental and vocal collaborators introducing us to new talents and reminding us of those we may have heard before. Dego continues to find new perspectives within the musical landscape.

Collaborating with singers and songwriters all expressing a distinct sense of where, collectively, we are now. There can be no doubt that this is a time of questions in every way, changes in the world and industry that will affect us all. How and what role music plays in this journey is explored as with any artist in a personal and pensive way from a tear to a smile. There is no preaching here, only statements and explorations. Individuality and sonic diversity combine and reflect the many inspirations and evolutions of style. Cooking up a strong and distinct genre-defying mix of soul, two step, funk, jazz, boogie and R&B, all dance music's that focus on heritage and natural rhythms.

Listening to the music is a relief and delight for lovers of groove and song-craft. It's a 21st century statement accessible and raw, whilst highly advanced in sound design and production. Holistic in breadth and deep in vision, it provides a way into this music for many, and challenges the cultural conversation about jazz without compromising or pandering. Music that utilizes a raw and sincere true openness narrative.

The Souljazz Orchestra return with a brand new studio album for our troubled times, 'Chaos Theories', released on Strut.
Always known for their uncompromising social and political messages, the Canadian collective hit harder than ever on 9 new tracks, outing the hypocrisy of modern day politics, police brutality and the everyday struggle of the working man. Led by chief songwriter and arranger Pierre Chrètien, the band continue to evolve their sound, drawing on a broad palette from their trademark Latin, Afro and Caribbean styles to some of the UK's political sounds of the early '80s, the era of The Clash, The Police, 2-Tone and frontline reggae.

The Transhumanism collective was born on the dance-floor at Dave Clarke's first Whip It party at the Melkweg in Amsterdam. This is the fourth vinyl release on Bass Agenda Recordings that features the four Dutch Electro artists w1b0, RXmode, Slaves of Sinus, and TFHats. The releases to date have had ongoing support from many key DJs who support the authentic Electro scene - Dave Clarke, UMEK, Helena Hauff, DJ Stingray, Maceo Plex, and Alienata to name but a few. Juan Atkins and Helena Hauff were still dropping w1b0's track from the first release this Summer (2019) at various festivals. It's no surprise that the first in the series has just been repressed, and now, the third in the series keeps the pressure up with 4 brand new tracks. As always, the brief here was simple - "be yourself and do your best to kill it". All four artists have risen to the occasion - maintaining the fundamentals of their individual sounds, evolving a little in some parts, and bringing a compilation with something for every discerning DJ with an ear for cutting edge Electro.

BLIQ unveil a debut release by Greek producer Aphelion aka George Konstantoulakis (member of Equations Collective). "Volatile Radiance" sets the pace with otherworldly futurism, while "Cosmic Vibrations" completes the A-side with addictive bass notes & crystallised melodics. On the flip, legendary electro producer Silicon Scally (Carl Finlow) follows a menacing cyberfunk route, while Aphelion's original, concludes the release with an interplanetary rhythm track interpretation.

L'Épée is a four-piece band comprised of Emmanuelle Seigner (Ultra Orange & Emmanuelle), Anton Newcombe (The Brian Jonestown Massacre) and Lionel + Marie Limiñana (The Limiñanas).
The collaboration came about last year, when husband and wife duo The Limiñanas recorded an album ('Shadow People') with Anton Newcombe. A track featured French musician, actress, model and muse Emmanuelle Seigner on guest vocals. When she came into the studio to record the group dynamic clicked and a natural collaboration ensued.
Inspired by melancholic movie scores and the mythology of Rock'n'Roll music, from Lou Reed to the Rollin Stones, 'Diabolique' is infused with light, shadows and layers of psychedelic fuzzy guitars.
It was recorded between Lionel and Marie's home place Cabestany (FR) and Anton's Cobra Studio in Berlin.
The collective have named themselves L'Épée, meaning "the sword" in English, after it came to Anton in a dream.
They will be touring Europe later this year.

It wasn’t really a movement, barely even a moment, but the Daisy Age was an ethos that permeated pop, R&B and hip hop at the turn of the 90s. Playfulness and good humour were central to De La Soul’s 1989 debut album, “3 Feet High And Rising”, which would go on to cast a long, multi-coloured shadow over rap.

In Britain, the timing for “3 Feet High And Rising” couldn’t have been better. The acid house explosion of 1988 would lead to a radical breaking down of musical barriers in 1989, and its associated look – loose clothing, dayglo colours, smiley faces – chimed with the positivity of De La Soul and rising New York rap acts the Jungle Brothers and A Tribe Called Quest, all at the heart of a growing collective called Native Tongues.

The Native Tongues’ charismatic, summery aura quickly spread west to the Bay Area’s similarly-minded Hieroglyphics crew (Del Tha Funky Homosapien’s ‘Mistadobalina’); Canada’s Dream Warriors (‘My Definition Of A Boombastic Jazz Style’) used “3 Feet High”’s colour palette and borrowed Count Basie and Quincy Jones riffs; Naughty By Nature (OPP) were mentored by Native Tongues heroine Queen Latifah, while Londoner Monie Love was also adopted by the collective, resulting in her Grammy-nominated ‘It’s A Shame (My Sister)’.

It wasn’t built to last, but the Daisy Age reintroduced Multiplication Rock, bubble writing and the gently psychedelic into the charts. It was a brief, but extraordinarily warm and optimistic moment. The songs on this collection promised that the 90s would be a lot more easy-going than the 80s.

Available on CD and double LP.

Bonding over a shared love of Chic, Parliament and the other signs in the greater funk Zodiac, Mayer Hawthorne (Aquarius) and Jake One (Taurus), collectively known as Tuxedo, return with their third studio album, Tuxedo III released on the Tuxedo-owned and newly launched label, Funk on Sight. Their powers combined have yet again yielded a bevy of absolute slappers that are packaged perfectly for dance floors in 2019. The album includes features from MF DOOM, DāM-FunK, Leven Kali, Benny Sings, Gavin Turek and others. Tuxedo is back to remind you that the dance floor will always be there to welcome you, whoever you are.

Ross Alexander first came to our attention with Memorias Vol.1 - Bugandan Sacred Places, released back in 2017 on Sucata Tapes, it featured a mind altering mix of recorded sounds from a series of visited sites considered sacred within the Bugandan kingdom and session recordings with Ugandan musicians Albert Sempeke and the Nilotika Collective layered with his own original composition using the Yamaha DX7 and programmed FM synthesis. The result being an unique reconfiguration of new age vocabulary with East African traditional sensibilities. The tape quickly sold out and the new Volume of Memorias presented here arrives now on the mother label Discrepant, on Vinyl with an expanded sound palette appropriate to the format.

Memorias Vol.2 - High Atlas To The Sahara Desert is the logical progression of Volume 1. - based on a series of field recordings Alexander made during a trip through the High Atlas Mountains and into the Sahara Desert in 2018. The aim of the trip was to visit a gathering of nomadic musicians at an oasis close to the Algerian border. Like Memorias Vol1. the recordings made on the trip were then later processed, layered and arranged with original compositions. Where Vol1. had clear nods to New Age music this volume explores the more ambient side of 80’s Industrial sound.

The vinyl-only DJ-oriented A&R Edits makes a return with a new 12” EP ‘Disco Mondo’ / ‘In The City’. Following releases from Henry Greenwood, Derek Kaye, Sophie Lloyd, Fingerman, Peza and Twisted Soul Collective between 2013-15, the label stayed on the backburner for four years as other projects took precedent. Now re-emerging with the tenth vinyl release in the series, combining the GW & Henry reworks of El Coco’s smooth grooving esoteric disco cut ‘Mondo Disco’ and Marshall Hain’s brooding Balearic treasure ‘Dancing In The City’.

Courtesy of the influential Rinder & Lewis production team, ‘Mondo Disco’, originally issued in 1975, became a firm favourite with underground DJs and disco lovers, this playful yet purposeful rework boosts the track’s drive with an eye on the contemporary dancefloor.

Marshall Hain’s hazy/lazy ‘Dancing In The City’, a much-loved memento of the summer of 1978, was a huge UK hit, reaching #3 on the singles chart. Offering a perfect soundtrack to sun-kissed beaches and blissed-out festivals, this rework breaths a new lease of life into this sonic delight.

After just 6 months since first seeing Big Yawn perform, we are thrilled to welcome them to the Research family. A compelling prelude to their debut album "No!" due out in late 2019.

Over six years the Melbourne-based group has evolved, with members of the band running various releases through label and collective Fallopian Tunes. As of 2019, Big Yawn had become a four-member music group, motivated by a history of studio production, prolific collaboration and quality hangout time.

The groups freshest effort 'Skin Rat/Thomas' captures the band performing live in the studio, and it's typical Big Yawn: fat and punchy low-end bass; drums and live drum processing; delay fx samples; thick syrupy synths. 'Skin Rat' is a hyperbolically dubbed out, tongue in cheek, magnetic blend of UK garage, footwork and breaks. And 'Thomas' takes cues from a slightly damaged post-punk sound, amplifying a brittle and sinister type of atomic porn-funk.

Limited to 200 copies. Hand numbered and housed in a screen-printed sleeve, artwork by Julian Hocking.

2025 Repress

2019 marks the year that Music for Freaks has officially been running for over 20 whole years. Two decades of topsy turvy, downright Freakish behaviour. How the hell did that happen?

So, what better time to delve deep into the labels vaults again and uncover more of its hidden treasures. Back in 2015, we approached some of today's most discerning producers, those who truly "get" the label's ethos from old, to let them loose on tracks old and new. It brought to the fore the "Freaks - Let's Do It Again" series of releases and we're super chuffed to bring you the 3rd in the series to kick off the label's 20th anniversary celebrations; a new collaboration with likeminded artists and we think you'll agree it's another testament to the divergent & insouciant house music that has always been the beating heart of this label.

First up, we welcome back the Chilean anti-hero Ricardo Villalobos.

When we sent Ricardo the parts to the Freaks album, "The Man Who Lived Underground" a few years ago, he sent back 5 interpretations which blew our collective minds. This is the 3rd of his journeys. Edited by head Freak, Justin Harris, it delivers a tripped out, discordant tech mix of the Freaks track, 'He's Angry' and is a wonderfully warped and highly hypnotic jam, that drives deep down into the subconscious.

The 20th anniversary wouldn't feel right without some brand spanking new music from Freaks themselves.
This track was properly hidden in the Freaks DAT vaults from the 1990's and Justin & Luke have dusted it off, mixed it down and "Unbeknown To Us" will finally see the light of day. It's safe to say Freaks have always had a timeless feel to their music and this track, despite being 20 years old as an original production, is no exception.

Next up, The Martinez Brothers make their MFF debut and to say we're chuffed to be releasing this one after 3 years of it being in the vault, is a huge understatement. There's nothing but good vibes, cranked to eleven, on this cut and the brothers have cooked up a true rip snorting tech house remix of "Time", that will charm the roof off any self-respecting club or festival tent.

And last but by no means least, fellow previous collaborators on Let's Do It Again, Part 1, Gerd Jansen and Phillip Lauer, aka Tuff City Kids, have graced us with another superb remix of a firm Freaks favourite from back in the day, "Turning Orange". The duo have whipped up an excellent stripped 808, electro-hop mix with low slung electro beats, minor key atmospherics and nostalgic 80s vocal pitch-shifts. Villalobos, Martinez Brothers, Tuff City Kidz and Freaks all on the same record? This is the type of house music madness that dreams are made of.
A fitting start to the celebrations - we reckon you'll agree!

ODD OKODDO is a Kenyan/German duo formed by Olith Ratego and Sven Kacirek. This vinyl single marks their first outing, announcing the album "Auma" which will be ripe and ready in autumn 2019. Olith Ratego performs his immaculate vocals in the musical style called "dodo", which originates from the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya, high in pitch and soulfully expressive. He himself refers to his music as "dodo blues". As a skilled luthier, Olith Ratego designs and builds his string instruments himself, first of all the five-stringed Okoddo which lends its name to the project. Sven Kacirek is a multi-instrumentalist commuting between Germany and Kenya for many years now. He plays the marimba, percussions and piano, next to producing this project. He has closely collaborated with various international musicians, among them Nils Frahm, Shabaka Hutchings, F.S. Blumm and Marc Ribot. "Okitwoye" is one song of the first ODD OKODDO album "Auma“, it comes in a multi-layered, ambiguous rhythm between three and four. The remix on the B side amplifies the essence of the song. Peter Power is a part of the Voodoohop collective from Brazil and his releases on Multi Culti or Polychrome Sounds fuel the rather slow, organically hypnotic dancefloors. He premiered this remix at the Heliodora festival in Brazil, at sunrise next to a giant waterfall, and it was just perfect.

“Following on from Homenagem, Lugar Alto’s first critically acclaimed project, the São Paulo label's new endeavour is the reissue of another neglected masterpiece. This time, it’s “Poema da Gota Serena” turn by Zé Eduardo Nazário from 1982. This unique work gathers elements of free jazz, Brazilian Northeastern rhythms, Asian percussive instruments and electronics.

Zé Eduardo is a virtuoso drummer and percussionist with a prolific career as a musician and teacher. He was introduced to music in his youth and started playing professionally at the age of thirteen. In the late 60’s he was a regular at the famous Totem night club in São Paulo, where he performed alongside the pianist Tenório Jr. and other exceptional instrumentalists. It was there that he met Guilherme Franco, and together they formed the Grupo Experimental de Percussão. This period defined Nazário’s interest in different sonorities involving percussion, and he broke away from the more traditional genres, such as bossa nova and jazz. Over time, this distinctiveness in sound and playing allowed him to create his own path which culminated in an extensive number of remarkable works, including the colorful and psychedelic “M andala”, which examines Indian and hippie themes. He also played with Hermeto Pascoal’s group and joined him and Jaques Morelenbaum for the recording of the cult classic “Imyra, Tayra, Ypy” by Taiguara. For Egberto Gismonti’s “Nó Caipira”, Nazário performed with the khene, a mouth organ from Laos, a present from Gismonti himself.

But it is Nazário’s work with the 1976 collective Grupo Um which is his most well-known, who, during their 6-year legacy recorded, amongst movie and ballet soundtracks, 3 albums: “Marcha Sobre a Cidade”, “Reflexões Sobre a Crise do Desejo” and “Flor de Plástico Incinerada”. The combo is considered one of the most innovative formations of its time, unusually combining electro-acoustic elements, jazz and Brazilian traditional music.

Poema da Gota Serena was Zé Eduardo's first solo project and it was financed by the legendary Lira Instrumental, a collaboration between the ground-breaking venue, label and publisher for the São Paulo avant-garde, Lira Paulistana, along with the always interesting Continental Records, home to such luminaries as Tom Zé. The album was offered as a package deal simultaneously with the production of “Flor de Plástico Incinerada”, ensuring 2 studio sessions at JV studios in October 1982.

Each side of the album explores different duets which, with its suite formated tracks, give the album the feel of a cohesive whole. The first half of the A side, “Energia dos Três Mundos”, is shared with the improvised saxophone of Cacau. Nazário delves into free jazz rhythms and plays his drums with a rolling and tumbling swing, using the kit in full, demonstrating the power of Brazilian jazz fusion. The second half of the suite takes us into a more tranquil mode. “Só Prá Ouvir”, demonstrates Zé’s mastery on the glockenspiel, and Indian percussion instruments, such as the tabla and mridangam. Cacau, on his side, switches his saxophone for more delicate dancing flute driven passages, equal parts northeastern rhythms and deep Amazonian indigenous influences. The B side, with “Prá Pensar / Prá Sentir e Prá Contar”, contrasts heavily with the A side’s more organic and natural feel. In Prá Pensar Lelo Nazários’s synth clusters and electronic blasts strangely interact with the exploring, wandering percussion. This track leads into the sublime “Prá Sentir e Prá Contar” where South Indian inspired vocals, performed by Zé Eduardo, accompany the graceful synth chords and fluttering percussion. The result is a hypnotic, otherworldly feel to the music that is infectious and takes the listener on an extraordinary journey.
With Poema da Gota Serena, it is possible to hear music that extrapolates the lines of the avant-garde and popular music. It is an album the demonstrates that Brazilian jazz fusion can be both spiritual and challenging at the same time.

All the tracks were expertly remastered by Lelo Nazário, directly from the original tapes, maintaining the high quality of production that Lugar Alto are becoming renowned for. All the artwork was reinterpreted by the São Paulo design studio Sometimes Always, including an exclusive insert and unpublished images.

It seems that Lugar Alto have managed to excavate yet another gem from the seemingly bottomless Brazilian mines. Long may they continue to do what they do so well.”

In the early eighties, Edmond Mondésir, professor of philosophy and Léon Bertide, trade unionist, founded the Bèlènou group. They were actors of the great agricultural strike of 1974, which resulted in the death of two workers (Ilmany and Marie-Louise) and left many wounded. Activists of the patriotic movement Asé Pléré An Nou Lité (Stop crying, Fight), they were part of the identity and the cultural affirmation la revendication identitaire et culturelle of the time. Like the Guadeloupean musician Gérard Lockel and his work on the Gwo Ka, they put the Bèlè, in its traditional form, back in the spotlight during Swaré Bèlè (Bèlè nights).Minimalist and spiritual, a true rural ancestral art from Martinique, the Bèlè combines dance and music from responsorial monodies, which is a choir that responds to the lead singer (Respondè / La vwa dèyè), on codified drum rhythms and ti-bwa (2 sticks that hit the back of the drum or a piece of bamboo). It comes in a series of collective choreographies, working up into the trance. The texts are simple, short and tell the story of everyday life and struggle. While preserving the emotion and the drum’s central place, the fundamental contribution of Bèlènou is to keep the traditional form of Bèlè while adding a modern instrumentation: bass, guitar, saxophone, drums...
Emosyon Tambou-a (Emotion of the Drum) was released in 1990. This third opus of the band expands the musical spectrum in harmonies, arrangements and influences to create a contemporary music anchored in the Bèlè matrix, while keeping the beat, the energy and ancestral roots of music. Bèlènou adapts some classic rhythms: Bélya, Gran Bèlè, Bèlè Pitjé or Ting-Bang rewritten here for an orchestra.With the appearance of long couplets and a complex harmonization of the choruses, Bèlènou's music brings a form of modernity, it opens notably to jazz territory as well as to other forms of music and grooves. Also, Bèlènou leaves the musicians with space for improvisation: not only on the saxophone or the guitar, but also with the drums (cleverly adaptating traditional rhythms to the drums).

The texts sung in Creole are of a social nature, appealing to the solidarity and self-denial of the people (Bélya pou péyi-a, Tout pèp-la sanblé), to the struggle for political emancipation towards a new democracy (Wi ny ké rivé, Ni dé jou, Démokrasi); land protection (Sové tè-a); finally, to the vitality of the Bèlè culture ... (Emosyon Tambou-a, Dansé Ting-Bang)...Culture participates, according to the expression of Aimé Césaire, as "Miraculous Weapons". Bèlènou sings a project of a new and united society. A precursor group, experimental in the its early years, Bèlènou reconciles with talent tradition, modernity and cultural identity.

Lovely crafted tip-on sleeve. Remastered. 700 copies

Birthed from Arizona’s regaled Ascetic House collective, Body of Light is a dark synth-pop outfit comprised of young brothers Andrew and Alexander Jarson. What began as a vehicle for their exploration of noise and sound during their early teens has evolved into an established production over the last decade, as Body of Light continues to carve out their own style of complex, structured, and moving dancefloor electronics.

Their music is not only individually personal, but drawn from experiences shared between the two brothers – and calls on elements of new wave, freestyle, goth, and techno to create timeless and singular tracks without fear of trend or passing fashion.

On their third album Time to Kill, Body of Light refines their brand of cold and driving synth pop with a bold pallet of sounds and a focus on uncharted technique and purpose. Like the pale digital stare of the modern devices surrounding our daily lives, the album weaves stories of love and obsession in an era of technical bondage and fleeting exhilaration. Written over a period of intense and profound change, Time to Kill stands as a startling reminder of how important our existence truly is. Haunting keys, swelling pads, and punching rhythms score their work as Alex Jarson presents an alluring and romantic dialogue with confident projection. The title single “Time to Kill” kicks off the album with a merciless signature beat, complimented by distorted sample patterns against an infectious, moving bass groove

In an era of boundless self promotion, anonymity is a rare and precious thing. Listening to Trevor Jackson's NTS show one night we heard a glorious piece of music by something called Elite Beat. A quick search found 10 years worth of recorded material but not a single photo or youtube clip. They had made a record with Niger born guitarist Mdou Moctar but were based in Portland, Oregon. More questions than answers but we knew we had just heard one helluva cosmic link up!

We still don't know what they look like but we can tell you Elite Beat is a 6 piece ensemble now in their 12th year as a musical collective. Their sound is non prescribed rhythm music with an emphasis on live playing, free form expression and dubbing techniques. Players who have absorbed the plethora of global grooves from dub, Ethiopoques and Tuareg guitar music (probably the odd Dead bootleg too). They aren't retromaniacs or here to revive a genre. Just some cats from Oregon talking that universal language, fueled by laugher and a vision of the eternal.

"By The Light Of The Pyramids" and "Postcards From Gortupal" are their latest and greatest offerings, birthed out of live sessions.

*The vinyl versions are shorter edits of the original / digital to preserve sound quality.

Hyperdub launch new sub-label Flatlines for the release of ‘On Vanishing Land’, an audio-essay by Justin Barton and the late Mark Fisher. ‘On Vanishing Land’ evokes a walk along the Suffolk coastline in 2006, from Felixstowe container port ("a nerve ganglion of capitalism") to the Anglo-Saxon burial ground at Sutton Hoo. A walk under immense skies, through zones of deep time, and within sunlit, liminal terrains, into the eerie. Everywhere there are charged atmospheres, shadowy incursions, enigmatic departures. A derelict radar base, coastal heathland, drifting thistledown, towers of overgrown shipping containers - music haunted by wider levels of reality, narrations about rarely visited zones and potentials, voices of dreams and stories. This music includes newly-composed tracks by John Foxx, Gazelle Twin, Baron Mordant, Raime, Pete Wiseman, Farmers of Vega, Skjolbrot, Eerie Anglia, Ekoplekz and Dolly Dolly. Alongside these are glimpsed views toward M.R.James’s ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad’ (1904), Joan Lindsay’s ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock’ (1967), and Brian Eno’s ‘On Land’ (1982). Beyond the surface of the day something becomes visible, a way forward, an escape-path from capitalist reality. ‘On Vanishing Land’ is about following the lines of terrains and dreams. It is about a micropolitics of escape, of disappearance. A micropolitics of waking the faculties. ‘On Vanishing Land’ was initially part of an exhibition commissioned by The Otolith Collective and The Showroom in London, and after ‘londonunderlondon’ (2005) it was the second audio-work collaboration by Justin Barton and Mark Fisher.

The LP cover features photos taken by Mark Fisher, and a short essay by Justin Barton. Pressed on 180g vinyl, in deluxe rigid board sleeve, with free mp3 download code.

TRjj is made up of several people that meet regularly since 2016. It is practiced collectively with interchanging names and roles, so the full control about disguised authorship would be guaranteed. Everyone involved was set to meet half way. TRjj is a filter for the kinship of many. Its the freedom attained, once you have gotten rid of yourself. This heteronomic practice would be ideal to advocate against reasons which are claimed, biographies that are scripted, economies that are fueled and histories that are written to be recognized as something apparently truly valid and fully finnished.

Legitimately available again on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 1983, Outernational Sounds proudly presents a major statement from a crucial figure on the Los Angeles jazz underground – pianist Nate Morgan’s spiritualised deep jazz classic, Journey Into Nigritia.

How many 16 year olds would have the confidence to walk up to a revered bandleader at a gig, and inform him that one day they’d be playing together? As improbable as it sounds, this is how pianist Nate Morgan introduced himself to the great Horace Tapscott, founder of the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra. The teenage Morgan had heard Tapscott’s Flying Dutchman LP The Giant Is Awakened being played by Greg Kufahamu on local Los Angeles radio station KUSC, and Arthur Blythe’s wailing sax had gone ‘straight to the heart. It was a spiritual experience.’ Morgan showed up to all the Arkestra shows he could find. He was already studying with Joe Sample and Hampton Hawes and playing in local bands, but the draw of the Tapscott’s band was too much for the gifted young pianist:

‘I could only take about two or three more concerts before I had to run up on stage. When I first introduced myself to Horace, he tells everybody that I said, “Yeah, I’m Nate Morgan. I’m going to play with you all.” Not that I want to, but that I’m going to.’

Over the next decade and beyond, Morgan would become a central figure in Tapscott’s UGMAA (Union Of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension’), bringing new figures into the fold (it was Morgan who first hipped Jesse Sharps to Tapscott’s circle; they were lifelong friends), running jam sessions, and eventually being given the task of organising the Arkestra songbook. During the early 1970s he also worked commercially, doing a stint with Rufus and Chaka Khan and appearing on Willie Hutch’s Foxy Brown soundtrack. Into the 1980s and 1990s he remained active, keeping the UGMAA flame alive in late night jams and private sessions, and working tirelessly around LA, including collaborations with Bone Thugs N’ Harmony; he was also part of the early 2000s LA jazz collective Build An Ark. A true musician’s musician, Morgan died in 2013.

Journey Into Nigritia, featuring firebreathing reedsman Dadisi Komolafe, was the first of two LPs Morgan recorded for Tom Albach’s storied Nimbus West imprint. A committed, spiritualised work that showcases Morgan’s heavy composing as well as his McCoy Tyner- influenced and technically flawless playing, Journey features dedications to Coltrane (‘He Left Us A Song’) and Cecil Taylor (‘Study In C.T.’). Surging, modal jazz from the LA undergound, Journey Into Nigritia is a crucial recording by an unsung jazz legend.

A heavy new compilation from Brownswood shines a light on the independent underground in Melbourne, where a close-knit collection of artists have taken cues from soul, jazz and club culture to carve out a fresh Melbournian sound. Featuring nine different groups, many of them sharing members and studios, the record surveys the musical contours of this bubbling scene, nodding to house, broken beat, samba, p-funk and soul.



Recorded over a week at The Grove, a fabled house-cum-studio in the North Melbourne suburb of Coburg, it’s home to the record’s engineer, Nick Herrera, and two members of Hiatus Kaiyote, the city’s breakout gangster-soul dons with whom many of the record’s personnel have collaborated. Silentjay was musical director, the Rhythm Section-affiliated multi-instrumentalist and producer (who’s played with Joey Bada$$ and Flying Lotus) marshalling together the album’s different players, many of them part of influential collectives 30/70 and Mandarin Dreams.



Nurtured in the city’s collaborative, close-knit confines, the scene has been bubbling up under the radar of Australian music institutions, in the garages and makeshift studios of Melbourne’s suburban sprawl. Sunny Side Up is a colourful portrait of the scene’s potential, exploring the story behind this flourishing period and shining light on some of its most compelling figures.

The tail end of 2018 saw the release of Oberman Knocks’ third album on aperture records, Trilate Shift, which was included in The Moderns Vol.2  written by Kevin Press (a book dedicated to the world’s great, currently active, avant-garde artists).

2019 sees the release of Remhex Coyles EP – neither companion piece, nor follow-up to Trilate Shift, but a standalone set of tracks with a different collective energy to them. Knocks steps out from the experimental room and heads towards a different kind of space, one that's less claustrophobic and subterranean – a place that’s more structured and in places more melodic than his usual output, but one where he still brings his own distinctive sound.

Before heading into the sound production for a new film, his first theatre piece and next album, this five track EP shows an electronic musician in total control of every last detail. The surprising shift of focus in these tracks displays an alternative approach to his output whilst retaining the usual attention to sampling and manipulating sounds, combining them with a more regimented logic and groove than is usually apparent.
These undeniably enjoyable tracks show a desire to have a more playful immediacy, with a different sound palette and a drive to forge Oberman Knocks’ sounds into something that would be as likely to be played out as listened to at home.

Music collective Africa Express announce the release of a brand new studio album titled EGOLI, coming on the newly created Africa Express Records imprint.

Hailed as the most revolutionary force in popular music for two decades, Africa Express was founded in 2006 and brings together musicians from different cultures, genres and generations to break boundaries and offer a new perspective on Africa and its music.

Each record and event is unique, based upon on-the-spot collaboration and filled with unique moments of magic; the collective have hosted trips and concerts in Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Mali and UK to date.

Africa Express travelled to South Africa in January of last year to complete an electronic album in just 7 days, a week of discovery, collaboration and music-making. The result is EGOLI - 18 tracks capturing the fresh, joyous sounds of Afro Futurism, straight out of Johannesburg.

Featured artists include Damon Albarn, Blue May, Gruff Rhys, Georgia, Ghetts, Mr Jukes, Nick Zinner, Remi Kabaka, Otim Alpha and Poté as well as emerging and established stars of the buzzing South African music scene including BCUC, Blk Jks, Dominowe, Faka, Infamous Boiz, DJ Spoko, Mahotella Queens, Moonchild Sanelly, Muzi, Morena Leraba, Nonku Phiri, Radio 123, Sibot, Sho Madjozi, Zola 7, Zolani Mahola (Freshly Ground) and Maskandi guitar legend Phuzekhemisi.

DJ Haram is a producer & DJ who distinctively ties her New Jersey musical history with more recent involvement in the Philadelphia DIY noise scene, whilst paying homage to her Middle Eastern roots. A close affiliate of New York's Discwoman collective, she is also one half of 700 Bliss with rapper & poet Moor Mother, who features on this EP. Haram’s non-traditional understanding of Islam, paired with a nuanced perspective on folk tradition and mythology, underpins the EP, bringing fantasy and colour to this in-between place. On opener ‘No Idol’, a darbuka rhythm pairs with offbeat claps around a dark synth and a contrasting airy flute melody, illustrating the theme of duality running through the music. The melodies of ‘No Idol’ are revisited in the final track remix, sped up with a classic Baltimore club beat and energetic bedsprings samples.‘Interlude’ is a combination of the sounds and patterns from each song. ‘Gemini Rising's synth is reminiscent of John Carpenter, paired with a darbuka rhythm and war drums that transmit a religious sci -fi horror aesthetic. ‘Body Count’ is propelled by Jersey Club kicks with a distorted drum crunch and ticking rim shot in triplets, and an ethereal melody. ‘Grace (K.O.D.)’ has menacing cinematic stabs that feel like acid raining on the scattered percussion. On the 700 Bliss track ‘Candle Light’, Moor Mother's distorted and doubled up vocal chorus evokes a frantic yet solemn energy as she speaks on themes of life and death.‘Grace’ is an EP constructed through deep feeling, transmitting vital dancefloor energy. It’s music is versatile, imbued with a strong will, personality, and colour.

Seven Swiss artists & collectives sharing the same passion for music came together for a unique collaboration. The result is a sequence that evolves through rhythm and each contributor‘s colour of sound. Artists involved: Melodiesinfonie, Jack Pattern, Lexx, Look Like, Alma Negra, Manuel Fischer, Les Points.

If you draw a map of electronic music today, you will come to realise that Switzerland still represents a blind spot for many people. Even if you see from the inside the many talented artists romping about in such a small space, you have to admit that interest from the outside is virtually non-existent. Therefore there is only one way: Teamwork! The MEGAMIX is a statement for it.

Ashley Henry is one of a new generation of musicians who've been raised with a wide range of influences, from such luminaries as Kirkland, Moran, Madlib and Dilla, yet also steeped in the traditional sounds of masters such as Hancock and Monk.

At the time of recording, Henry was only 24, playing with such beauty and sensitivity - that usually comes from a lifetime immersed in jazz - that allowed him to tour the UK appearing at Ronnie Scott's, the Jazz Cafe and the Royal Albert Hall. He was the youngest performer on the bill for the 2015 International Piano Trio festival where he performed alongside the likes of Robert Glasper.

After graduating from Leeds College of Music with the Yamaha Jazz Scholarship Award, Ashley continued his studies, attaining a Master's degree in Jazz Piano & Performance from the Royal Academy of Music.

As well as performing with some of the UK's leading Jazz musicians (including Gary Crosby, Jean Toussaint, Shane Forbes, Jay Phelps, and award-winning saxophonist Krzysztof Urbanski) he's also recorded extensively with Manchester-based hip hop collective The Mouse Outfit.

This, his debut album, shows that his trio is clearly influenced by hip hop but has its roots firmly in jazz. This is the next generation planting their feet firmly in twenty first century.

Assemble Music welcomes back Activ-Analog with a solo ep from Paul D, the collective’s founder. Paul delivers 4 analog techno tracks in a perfect balance between acid, jazz and the machines.

At the end of last year we quite enjoyed the little spat when Simon Cowell's chosen one, Joe... Something or other had his Christmas number one spot whipped away from under his nose by Rage Against The Machine. Still whilst we enjoyed the sight of the X Factor being given a bloody nose as much as anyone else, there was also an undercurrent of the ridiculous prejudice that ROCK = GOOD & MEANINGFULL whilst POP = CRAP & DISPOSABLE to the whole thing that we found less agreeable.

Here at Hot Pockets we have no truck with such orthodoxy, no, what we need is suite simply better pop music, made with all the passion and spirit of your finest indie troubadour but filtered through the prism of a 3 minute teenage symphony. Listen back to the likes of Roxy Music or Pet Shop Boys and you have music that is as equally up to the task of inspiring as it is of soundtracking a quick fumble on the dancefloor, that is the beauty of great pop music.

Thankfully for those of us that do like smart, clever pop that doesn't come hurtling off a production line but instead is crafted with much love and precision :Kinema: have arrived with their debut release a classic double A-side of pop perfection, Recreation/My Girls.

First up we have Recreation, a slow burning slice of South coast electro-soul inspired by an insatiable thirst for fun and those who would pass judgement on our basic human need for intoxication and ecstatic night time rituals. All in all a bonafide late night disco classic. Flip the virtual release over and you'll find the band's stunning cover version of Animal Collective's My Girls, a live favourite the track has already been the subject of a blogging frenzy when a demo leaked back in December. Finally available the whole world can now enjoy this smooth, autotuned refix of the indie classic.

The new pop revolution starts here

Cyberspeak multidipliscinary collective keep on programming. The second output from the label goes deep inside the restless character of Katatonic Silentio, a sound artist driven by cyberfeminism and queer culture who perfectly express the collective accellerationism. Emotional Gun is an half-stepping beats masterpiece, seven tracks crossing mystic territories full of pulsating soundscapes, apocalyptic and cinematic atmospheres with a painstaking attention to details.
Mixed at Zona9Studio
Mastered by TapewaveMastering

L’Illustration Musicale, Sonimage, Técipress-In Editions (Timing), Musax, Freesound,
Montparnasse 2000 in France but also De Wolfe and Chappell in England, every of these
sound illustration labels have in common to bring out as a legendary spectre the name of Jacky
Giordano and his aliases. Widespread practice in the library music world, Joachim Sherylee,
chosen for the In Motion album, is one of his plentiful aliases (with José Pharos, Jacky
Nodaro, Gruppo Sounds, Rubba...) used by the french composer, that we regain as well for
Black Devil with Bernard Fèvre or even for the Shifters with Yan Tregger.
For his enthronement on the mythical English label De Wolfe, it's under the obscure name of
the Rubba collective that Jacky Giordano aka Joachim Sherylee sneaked in the londonian De
Wolfe studios with the companionship of British colleagues such as John Hyde (aka John
Saunders, James Harrington, Astral sounds or even Wozo) and his wife Monice Hyde (aka
Monica Beale), Alan Howe (aka John Collins), Robert Poole and Tim Broughton.
Published in 1980, the In Motion: Modern Progressive Group Sounds Played By Rubba LP
and its minimalistic and utilitarian red record cover which contains 13 tracks, mainly composed
by Joachim "Giordano" Sherylee and was never reissued since then. This record became cult
over time; it will have taken that the Hip-Hop world seizes it in order to dig out from the
disregarded and underestimated musical gems graveyard. First of all with beatmaker Madlib
and Freddie Gibbs in 2011 with the track “Thuggin'”, in which he sampled the track “Way Star”,
also used more recently by Mil and the rapper Westside Gunn on his track “Brains Flew” by
(1964 Version).
Nearly 40 years after, the Farfalla Records label, after publishing Timing Archives, presents
another aspect more progressive and psychedelic of the multi-faceted composer Jacky
Giordano by fully reissuing at last this coveted, mysterious and mesmerizing "Rubba". Very
desired by crate-diggers, In Motion appears in the want-list of plenty enthusiasts in this
enigmatic world of the library music. (Erwann Pacaud)

Exactly three years after their debut release landed on Studio Barnhus,
MLiR are back with Trans-World Junktion, a summer-ready two-tracker
that packs enough musical twists and turns to put your favourite
quadruple 12-inch to shame. Half part awesome exotica, half vigourous
festival blitzin' from this Barcelona-based Swedish musical collective
fronted by Marco Gegenheimer and Einar Christoffersson. Artwork by
Studio Barnhus logo renderer and a/v show maker Leolyxxx.

“Ta Da” is the debut full length from J. McFarlane Reality Guest, the collective name for the trio headed by the eponymous McFarlane. As a member of the group Twerps, McFarlane has traversed guitar-centric, melodic pop music for some years while honing a highly unique, personal musical language. Ta Da is the first recorded unveiling of McFarlane’s affecting, oblique songwriting panache. Originally released in her native Australia on Hobbies Galore, Ta Da will be released worldwide by Night School in June 2019.

Wheezing into view with a troubled reed instrument set against a s of whoozy synth lines, Human Tissue Act is a foggy curtain the listener is invited to peel back. The dissonant notes are left to dance entwined, with clarinet heralding a Harry Partch-esque mallet percussion interlude. It’s a mood. With no resolution in sight, an audience dragged closer into uncertainty is suddenly drenched with the light of inter-weaving wah wah synth and saxophone. I Am A Toy introduces us to McFarlane’s vocal, an effortless and matter-of-fact, accented statement that quietly takes the reins. While McFarlane’s previous work in Twerps might reference 80s UK and antipodean guitar pop, Ta Da showcases a different influences immersed in psychedelic music and synths. It’s a brilliant, deft concoction swimming in Young Marble Giants-type minimalism washed with bare pop and harmony similar to Kevin Ayers making sense of a Melbourne suburb full of faces half-recognised in the blanching sun.

What Has He Bought begins with a Casio-keyboard rhythm pattern, palm-muted guitars and immaculately enunciated vocal give way to a burnt melodica part that elevates the spirits. Simple patterns repeated, like a well-tempered pop song that does what it needs to do and no more, build into the sound of summer leaking orange juice. They’re moments of joy, layered on top of each other like a melting cake. Do You Like What I’m Sayin’ recalls Marine Girls covering a classic ‘66 Garage nugget, organ lines fighting funk with guitar chords played just behind the percussion. “In a talking world, meanings are the same. Words want to hold on to the people they contain. Do you like what I’m sayin’?” We’re in a Beckett play perhaps, obtuse absurdities rendered pretty. Alien Ceremony is a heart-melter, given a melancholic timbre by bowed double bass it’s a tragi-comic piece that almost reeks of Robert Wyatt at his mid-whimsical twisting a fugue completely out of shape. Beneath the layers of harmony and twinkling instrumentation you sense there’s a genuine sadness somewhere even if it remains veiled.

Through out Ta Da, McFarlane plays with counterpoint and contrast to sometimes delirious effect. On Your Torturer, a simple, upbeat chord progression is hard panned, underpinning a flute solo which seems out of place, hence making it completely in place on this warmly surreal album. My Enemy is a slowly swinging eulogy to a failed relationship punctuated by analogue synth burbles, with our protagonist simply asking, in the aftermath, “can we be nice?” Here McFarlane’s vocal is straight forward, lyrically conversational but still not completely in focus, a surreal kitchen sink drama filtered through a dream where everything is in the wrong place. It’s a fine precursor to Heartburn, which similarly borrows BBC Radiophonic Workshop-style noise synths and the use of space to carve up the simple “You Will Make My Heart Burn” line. At this point, the listener has been in such close proximity to McFarlane’s show, the reality guest in a performance where they’re the sole audience member, that when Where Are You My Love rises on the horizon as a sleepy, psychedelic send off it’s uplifting. The vocal drifts away into the sunset, simple and direct. It leaves the listener slightly confused, perhaps, but grateful for the gentle surprise.

Berlin based trio Keller Crackers collective likes to shape haunting esoteric sounds, in which self-built instruments dance with ritualistic synthesised rhythms, field recordings, psychoacoustic drones and poetical spoken silhouettes.

After a self-released MC and a mesmerising tune called “Anem” out in February 2019 on the custom-made Kashual Plastik 007 double-vinyl compilation, now they give birth to their own debut record “KC”, a four track EP resulting from various improvisational studio sessions, a bag full of spontaneous visionary DIY sound fashion that melts meandering serialism, foggy ‘Chris & Cosey’-ness, exoticism and freely expressed emotions. Some pieces are given time to evolve, being dragged through long arrangements and slow transitions, while others are playful and short. To close up the magic circle, the release includes a tripping Tolouse Low Trax signature remix.

The opening tune “Specialised” swings on a trance-like hypnotic bass line, while a self-made kalimba played through a tape delay and overtones from a DIY circuit bended device inject dynamics and colour to the composition. Out of the sonic depth, the spoken words of Sylvana Wickman emerge enchanting and unreal, naming a series of technical terms, assembling a deep notion on the specialised society we live in.

“Cow Tongue” follows, a fleeting composition of crackling electronic clicks jumping off a micro-modular device. They got overdubbed again by Sylvana’s voice, delightfully reciting phrases from a recipe of regional delicacies.

The A side of KC`s first strike finishes with a spaced-out synth bass and the lo-fi beats of a Yamaha RX15 drum machine. They are the gripping foundation of “Aithouses Anamonis“, which means “Waiting Rooms”. It describes the scene of a man sitting in a waiting room observing the consumerist behaviour by the folks around him.

The B-side opens with a Tolouse Low Trax remix of “Specialised”, elevating the original with the bass line of “Aithouses Anamonis“, while melting the all into a dark nebulous Tolouse Low Trax signature stripped down funk for endless nights in neon lights.

For their final track “Colours”, Keller Crackers invited a steady free member of their live shows to record with them: free jazz musician Robert Würz. He tuned his flute enthralling over a suspenseful bass line formed in a whirlwind of synth-sounds. The whole frenzy gets divine through sliding chords that rise from a self-built guitar.

A musical bouquet for open spirits, that value charming minimal wave zones, undefinable post-industrial psychedelics and hallucinogenic poetry reflections on the current state of our mechanical times.

In her varied career that would combine art gallery installations, major film soundtrackings and commissions for Atari, Suzanne Ciani’s earliest experiments remain some of her most challenging, beguiling and timeless... Flowers Of Evil ticks all the above boxes and flicks switches that would power-up a new uncharted universe of her own musical modernité. Finders Keepers present the first-ever release of these vital archive recordings.

As a genuine vanguard of electronic music composition at the forefront of the modular synthesiser revolution in the late 1960s, Suzanne Ciani’s forward-thinking approach to new music would rarely look to the past for inspiration, which makes this unheard composition from 1969 a rare exception to the collective futurist vision of Ciani and synthesiser designer Don Buchla. In choosing to adapt the controversial prose of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Suzanne would join the ranks of ongoing generations of pioneering musicians like Olivier Messiaen, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Serge Gainsbourg, Etron Fou Leloublan, Celtic Frost and Marc Almond (not forgetting Star Trek’s William Shatner!), all equally inspired by the 19th century writer’s works of “modernité” (modernity), a self-coined term dedicated to capturing the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, best exemplified in his symbolic, erotic and macabre ode to Parisian industrialisation, Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers Of Evil).

In her varied career that would combine art gallery installations, major film soundtrackings and commissions for Atari, Suzanne Ciani’s earliest experiments remain some of her most challenging, beguiling and timeless... Flowers Of Evil ticks all the above boxes and flicks switches that would power-up a new uncharted universe of her own musical modernité. For the many enthusiasts that have already drawn the parallels between Baudelaire’s writings and experimental/electronic music (a relationship rivalled only by the likes of J. G. Ballard and Aldous
Huxley) some might instantly recognise an unconscious sistership between this recording and another 1969 electronic adaptation of Flowers Of Evil by celebrated female electronic composer Ruth White. An interesting distinction of White’s excellent version of Flowers Of Evil (released via Limelight records, home to the likes of Fifty Foot Hose and Paul Bley) is that its dark tone generation and vocal manipulation was created with a Moog synthesiser, the commercially triumphant
rival to Suzanne and Don’s Buchla Systems (Buchla and Moog’s historic, simultaneous, neck-and-neck synth developments are well documented.) The fact that Ciani’s version was never intended for commercial release (not unlike her 1975 Buchla concerts, which could easily have taken Morton Subotnick’s Bull by the horns!) is also poetically reflective of the nature of Ciani and Buchla’s alternative perspective. The choice to present this extract from Flowers Of Evil in its intended French language further distances Ciani’s faithful reaction from some of its better-known variations. Having attempted to voice the poem herself, the multilingual Italian-American composer’s French accent did not meet her own standards, resulting in the request for a fellow unnamed French student who lived on campus at Mills College in Oakland to accurately verbalise the section of Baudelaire’s collection entitled Élévation.

Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn. Julian Muller joins the Collective with a brilliant release that exposes at the maximum level his abilities to transfer emotions and vibrant landscapes where you can freely run and have your own experience, with no time indication, and with no compass. "Frustration" signs a moment in the career of the artist where his desire to show who he really is, but everything around him starts to become smaller and smaller, the artist feels the need to express in his whole form his art, and right when everything looks far, he finds his path. This record signs a very important moment for the artist, but even more for the user that will encounter the record, the idea is to let the record take you, wherever you want to go.

Chen Yi aims for a collective approach of art. As an isolated group of humans/numbers operating directly from a secret place in Chelmsford (UK), they developped a personnal and “bizarre” utilisation of guitars, machines, voices, distortion, giving as result an unconventional regroupment of compositions amongst a lot of lost/unreleased recordings. This is likely what got John Peel interested which leads to an inexplicable CBS contract. More couldn’t be finalised, because CBS suddenly pulled out of the contract. “Due to their raw and alternative ’self-made’ musical approach, they’ve been compared to the likes of Throbbing Gristle, Borghesia & Severed Heads or more underground names as Het Zweet, Biting Tongues…

As a winemaker hailing from the Palatinate, Florian Hollerith understands a thing or two about vintage. It's something that also comes through when you sample his music - rich, full bodied with just the right level of acidity. 2018 was already a good year with Ohrenzirkus featuring on both Sven Väth's Sound of the 19th Season mix CD as well as this year's Dots and Pearls vol. 5 compilation. Florian certainly announced his arrival on the scene in style, so it's only fair that he gets the chance to demonstrate his full range of skills on his very own Cocoon Recordings release. 2019 however, has a darker, more complex flavour...

Florian certainly knows a hookline when he finds one. On the EP's title track Perlas, he's working from the inside out with complex layers creating a vortex of sound. This dense sonic mesh is playful yet dangerous, with ethereal voices and jagged chants adding to the disorientation of the opening exchanges until the congas and skipping bassline give us something to hold onto. The dance floor melts under our feet as a raw, tripped out groove takes hold before the bass suddenly morphs into a brassy acid line that spreads its wings and soars. It's music for the headstrong, a celebration of the timeless tribal ceremonies that have come to define us.

Love Summer adds a contemporary twist to the melodic joys that drenched the early nineties in pure ecstasy. The soulful vocals soothe the mind as horn stabs punctuate the sensual groove, generating power and passion in equal measures. It's a straightforward approach, revolving around a familiar yet eminently seductive riff that just keeps on rolling, propelled forward by the force of its own momentum. There's no need to fuss when you hit on a winning formula like this.

More retro futurism abounds on Electro Indianer as arpeggiated bleeps usher in another vast, sprawling soundscape designed to induce a collective trance on the dance floor. Whistling, circular effects wash back and forth increasing the tension notch by notch as we're led deeper into the wormhole. Finally, the track deconstructs slightly, creating enough space for classic Casio-style bleeps and percussion to embellish a beautiful blissed out ending that trails off into the sun rise, as ancient Native American pipes pick out a haunting melody in the distance.

* Mirae Arts presents Hush Residence. We are joined by old friends and new comrades from the Kantō underground.

* C-Kay is co-founder of the Tokyo-based collective Space Baghdad and resident DJ of Constant Value. C-Kay is typically busy shaking dance floors with her hypnotic DJ sets, but also producing music for experimental labels such as Subsist Records and Constant Value Records.

* Saraam is a Tokyo-based sound artist, performer, and DJ under the Constant Value banner. Saraam is also a resident of the yearly Tokyo Festival of Modular.

* Katsunori Sawa and Damaskin return to Mirae Arts in their usual noisy disguises.

* Hush Residence is a compilation featuring four experimental techno tracks from Katsunori Sawa, C-Kay, Damaskin, and Saraam. Mastered by James Plotkin.

* Artwork illustration is done by Sydney based architect, Patti Bai.

* Vinyl pressed at the highly reputable Gotta Groove Records, Cleveland, Ohio.

* Comes with polybag packaging

Led by Saxophonist Rob Mitchell, Abstract Orchestra have been a consistent presence on the u.k. music scene, touring constantly in the promotion of their debut LP "Dilla" and follow up 45 "New Day feat. Illa J", steadily building a loyal and supportive fanbase. Inspired by the legendary live performances of The Roots with Jay-Z and the 40 piece orchestral arrangements by Miguel-Atwood Ferguson of the work of J Dilla, classic arranging techniques underpin modern loop-based structures, breathing new life into familiar material.

The band itself is based on the classic jazz big band instrumentation of saxes, trumpets, and trombones and features the cream of the north of England's jazz scene who collectively have played with Jamiroquai, Corinne Bailey Rae, Mark Ronson, Martha Reeves, John Legend & the Roots, Roots Manuva and Amy Winehouse.

"Madvillain Vol. 2" follows on from the 2018 release "Madvillain vol. 1" and further explores the jazz, TV soundtrack and film score aspect of the original work, combining it with classic big band writing and a focus on improvisation. As with vol 1. there is a strong influence of Quincy Jones, Lalo Schifrin and David Shire(Composer of the soundtrack to The Taking of Pelham 123) on the album, and the arranger Rob Mitchell crafts his own sound that inhabits the space between Madlib's production and Quincy Jones' writing.

As a bonus track to the album, Abstract reworks Dabrye's 'Air' and have included the original vocal of MF DOOM. Dabrye's original is heavily soaked in synths and drum machines, with an almost sci-fi, Blade Runner or Tron-esque sound . Mitchell explores this further and is influenced by Bob Brookmeyer's late work 'Electricity', which explores synths and jazz orchestration.

Madvillain Vol. 2 will build on the success of vol. 1 which received enormous support from Gilles Peterson & Huey Morgan on BBC6 Music as well as numerous airplay on Worlwide FM and Jazz FM, and reviews from soulbag in France and ukvibe, qwest.tv, and vinyl district online.

Temporary linearity in a lysergic world.

Imagination and reality, science and humanity: SPIME.IM weave their audiovisual tales from the ethereal textures that shape our worlds. Their album "Exaland" synthesizes reality by combining human expression with technological potentialities in an infinitely changeable virtual world. The seven tracks are defined by razor-like sounds, crystal textures and digital overload, captured in those weightless seconds on a parabolic flight. Just as SPIME.IM's live performances, this album is a temporarily linear journey through a narrative space shaped by psychedelic landscapes, synthetic colors, mutating objects and transient life-forms.

SPIME.IM was born as a word pun between the concept theorized by Bruce Sterling - the spime for the note, an object that can be traced through space and time for the duration of its existence - and the contraction of English "I am". If the Being is therefore the object of the intertwining between the real and the virtual, then it becomes possible to create new imaginaries that turn into immersive environments and narrative spaces in which artificial and natural, science and humanity, imagination and reality interpenetrate, giving life to new boundaries to be explored, to experience the own consciousness and what, while invisible to our eyes, surrounds and influences us.

Affirming digital reality, the Turin-based media art collective SPIME.IM explores the boundaries and possibilities of identity and perception in a world where virtual doppelgängers take on an all-encompassing position. SPIME.IM use technology, 3D art and electronic music to weave immersive audio-video experiences.

Following on from big recent releases from Neue Grafik & Oliver Night, CoOp Presents Sivey, with an all-new double-header of heat, 'Nobody Else' and 'Somebody Samebody'.

For those that don't know, Manchester-based Sivey became a player in the future beats scene a couple years back, releasing music with the LA-based collective Soulection, as a solo artist and via collaborations with Evil Needle, which came to fruition after a series of online beat battles, as well as releases and remixes with labels like Astral Black and Ninja Tune.

His last wave of output was greeted with enthusiasm by fans of soulful beats championed by artist collectives such as HW&W and Darker Than Wax, and saw Sivey subsequently spinning at events across the UK, and perform shows as far afield as Los Angeles and Tokyo.

Rooted in hip hop production, Sivey's largely instrumental tracks have brought together elements of millennial R&B, neo-soul, UK garage, jazz and 80s funk. In the few years since his previous releases, Sivey has continued to experiment with new ways of exploiting his diverse influences in his productions. As his listening habits became increasingly orientated around jazz and obscure 70s fusion records, his own productions began to reflect the shift.

The recent resurgence of the broken beat movement was something that also inspired him, admiring the balance between musicality and danceability of the genre. He made his first experiments with bruk in 2017 and found that it mixed perfectly with what he'd already been creating. Eager to share the results with the world, it made perfect sense for his first offerings of this ilk to find a home here with us at CoOp Presents.

These two tracks exemplify the ever-evolving progression of Sivey's sonics; the familiar deep keys and synth sounds of his previous productions are there, but nestled alongside more uptempo grooves, and the lush rhythmic complexity of bruk. Tied in with his love for jazz fusion, 'Somebody Samebody' sees Sivey reinterpret a late 70's track by Japanese guitarist, Kazumi Watanabe; this one also enlisting the help of Trian Kayhatu on keys. As well as the original tracks, prolific Selectors Assemble crew member Danvers adds in his own tasty heads-down version of 'Nobody Else', and label co-founder IG Culture (who recently received a Worldwide Award for 'lifetime achievement'!) provides a dope bruk-funk flip of 'Somebody Samebody' to close out the set.

Cochemea Gastelum is coming home to connect with his roots. After nearly 15 years of touring the world with Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, the saxophonist offers a deeply personal album of jazz and indigenous-influenced rhythms. All My Relations¸ out February 22 on Daptone Records, is 10 tracks of mesmerizing and spiritually ascendant instrumentation. The first single 'All My Relations' is available now.

'All My Relations is a way for me to explore my roots through music. Some of it is a memory that is imagined from a time and place I've never been ('Sonora') or a musical impression of ritual ('Mitote'),' Cochemea says. 'I felt compelled to add the way I feel when I go to ceremony, when I feel connected with my ancestors, to the musical narrative.'

A California native with Yaqui and Mescalero Apache Indian ancestry, Cochemea grew up surrounded by music but without knowing much about his heritage. Both his parents were musicians, and they gave their son a heavy name meaning 'they were all killed asleep.' Cochemea has spent much of his diverse musical career - as a soloist, musical director, composer and ensemble player - exploring and iterating on roots music, and All My Relations is a capstone meditation on his own ancestry.

Originally conceived during Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings' final year of touring, Cochemea and Daptone's Gabe Roth cast a varied but familial set of New York musicians to bring All My Relations to life. A large portion of the album was created through improvisation and collective writing, where its 10 musicians created a melodic, percussive conversation. 'It was a beautiful experience - people would start playing and we'd work up these arrangements on the spot, then record it.'

'In a sense, this record is a prayer for unity, love and the recognition that we are all part of a web, and everything we do effects everything else,' Cochemea says. 'These days there's so many lines being drawn, I wanted to focus on what unites us.'

Cochemea has a long history of uniting multiple genres with his powerful polyrhythmic sensibilities. His roots in jazz, Latin, funk and rock led to multiple tours with funk-jazz organist Robert Walter's 20th Congress, and connected him with Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings for their 2005 Naturally tour. Cochemea also played tenor sax with The Budos Band and Antibalas, and Baritone sax on the Amy Winehouse sessions, before becoming a full-time Dap-King in 2009.

In between marathon tours, Cochemea recorded a critically acclaimed solo album of soul, funk, and afro-Latin jazz, The Electric Sound of Johnny Arrow, all while doing session work for the likes of Mark Ronson, Rick Rubin and Quincy Jones. He's performed alongside Archie Shepp, Beck, David Byrne, Public Enemy and The Roots. Cochemea was also a featured soloist in the award-winning Broadway play Fela!, which led to historic performances in Lagos, Nigeria.

Initially a duo formed in Berlin, FITH have since multiplied and expanded to become a revolving collective of musicians and poets spread out across a Paris/Manchester/Berlin axis. The project, currently comprised of members Dice Miller, Enir Da, Rachel Margetts, ChrIs Lmx, & Arnaud Mathé gesture towards notions of the literary salon, expanded cinema happenings, and the ancient traditions of Greek oratory and religious sermons. Driven by the spell of the spoken word, minimal percussive refrains, oneiric textures & deep melodic synths, FITH channel cinematic imagery, enigmatic narratives & spiritual frenzy.

Their self-titled debut 12' album was released via their collectively run imprint Wanda Portal in November 2016, a 'quietly alluring debut of post punk tempered avant-pop songs' (Boomkat) that laid out the project's foreboding mystique and intoxicating dream sequences with a lurking, devastating sense of purpose and (mis)direction. Other outings have included myriad solo collections of poetry, a two-track release of lurid dissonance and elegiac elevation (Signs / Cornerstone, December 2016) and an extraordinary reinterpretation of the soundtrack for cult film & iconic document of modern alienation Wanda (1971, dir. By Barbara Loden)

With Swamp, their sequel to this activity and their first appearance on Outer Reaches, FITH become a refined force, on a record where all their compelling pluralities and attributes are honed and augmented; everything dilated to delirium. The atmosphere here is one of veiled dread and psychic disturbance, a haunting and macabre psychedelia strewn with echo and dub FX, fragmentary fever dream poetics, elemental drum patterns and volatile synthetic interference. Although the collective conserve the raw crux of their earlier material their execution is, in this special instance, heightened by an intent to broaden and prolong their unique strain of intensity.

Emphatically sinister openers like Forest and Pound present sidereal sequences before building to barrelling, corrosively processed percussion, paroxysmal free jazz and a baleful, concrète-inflected score of electronics, while Swamp introduces phasing currents and a vocal evocative of a chorale from some forgotten giallo film. Elsewhere l'au delà (the beyond) presents a stunning, sombre passage to another state entirely, like some desolate new inflection on Coil's Going Up, before Bialystok shifts into a finale of transportive and meditative evaporation. Together these tracks make for an incredibly immersive and congruous conception; an utterly complete and mesmerising document.

In Swamp's various dimensions perhaps there's comparisons to be drawn with the ritualistic krautrock of Conny Plank and Holger Czukay's Les Vampyrettes, with the hallucinatory, tribal rhythm cycles of Shackleton & Anika's Behind The Glass collaboration, with the primeval drone of Jeremie Sauvage, Mathieu Tilly and Yann Gourdon's France project, with the echoic, disquieting chamber intimacies of Tuxedomoon's Pink Narcissus material and with Lucrecia Dalt's eerie free verse abstractions. But really, we've not heard anything like this before.

Discussing their own inspirations and touchstones the collective cites Franz Kafka, Dario Argento, Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga (The Swamp - the film the record is named after) and Yiddish ghost theatre as figures, works and artforms that were prominently drawn upon during the making of Swamp. Yet whilst their imprints could be traced by some, they resemble more of a covert presence within a nuanced whole rather than obvious aspects which moor this record to any familiar setting.

Instead, the acutely unsettling yet poignant spoken word of Miller and the mercurial nocturnes and visitations produced by Margetts, Lmx, Mathé and Da make for a record of strange, novel and striking energies. In revealing the remarkable location and period in which Swamp was recorded Margetts and Miller give a vivid indication as to how these energies are so potently invoked:

'The record was mostly recorded in a caretaker's wing of a 17th century castle in Normandy. It was early March 2018, and our first encounter with the Spring. We had no idea how everything would unfold. There was a lot of tension. Some of us felt compelled to get out the attic room where we had set up our makeshift recording studio and just walk and walk down the vast flat meadows and explore the relics of the wartime barracks, others wanted to keep recording. The outside was serene and inviting, and even though we had been cooped up indoors recording for long stretches of time, we could see from the corner of our eyes, the branches of the trees quivering; an impersonal energy blew through us and then things just happened.'

Repress available in early May.

Faitiche releases a new collaboration between the Japanese sound artist ASUNA and Jan Jelinek: the album Signals Bulletin brings together joint improvisations and compositions made over a period of three years in Berlin, Kyoto and Kanazawa. ASUNA’s meandering organ drones merge with Jelinek’s pulsating synthesizer and field recording loops to create dense superclusters that span broad harmonic arcs.

"Watching the Japanese sound artist ASUNA playing the organ, some people might be surprised. ASUNA is no virtuoso flying over the keyboard in a rage. Instead, with the calm gestures of an office worker, he cuts strips of adhesive tape to the correct length before sticking them onto the keys of his instrument. In this way, large clusters of keys are held down, creating a dense and sustained range of frequencies, while the sound artist continually prepares further sets of keys or removes tape again. I have rarely seen a more convincing performance concept, with such a power to fascinate.

I first met ASUNA when we both gave a concert at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, his home city. He performed the organ drones as described above and I immediately knew I wanted to collaborate with him. Six years and five meetings later, we completed Signals Bulletin. The album includes both joint improvisations and compositions, recorded in Berlin, Kanazawa and Kyoto.

Whether using prepared organ, Casio keyboards or mechanical plastic toys, ASUNA creates rich textures of sound that barely change over long stretches of time. It is a music without breaks. For a while, I was unsure how my loops made using modular synthesizers and live sampling fitted here – until I realized the role I had to take in this duet: I would provide the rhythmically pulsating foundation over which his dense continuums could unfold.

The result is harmonically drifting superclusters that put us into a meditation-like state. It can perhaps be compared to Automatic Writing – a mode of creative expression floating somewhere between concentration and distraction. Both the structure of our pieces and our approach to our instruments allow a similar “absence”: we let the machines play and repeat themselves – while we, in a mild form of trance, adopt the role of observers, intervening only occasionally.

It is no coincidence that ASUNA owns a collection of Doodle Art – drawings jotted down during conversations or while talking on the phone. It is said that works made like this point to the unconscious and reveal pet motifs – because a doodler always inadvertently returns to his or her favourite themes. The artwork for Signals Bulletin features pictures from the collection, in this case sheets of paper from the pads provided in stationery shops to test out pens. The special quality of such doodles is that the jumble of drawings is the work of a collective whose individual members do not know each other. Layer by layer is added, by someone different each time – until it becomes a dense cluster of lines and symbols ..."

Jan Jelinek, Berlin 2018

Anadol is a psychedelic synth folk project by Gözen Atila, a Turkish sound artist and photographer based in Berlin. Her third album Uzun Havalar is based on collective improvisations of middle eastern folk songs called „uzun hava“. They turn out as rich, atmospheric synth ballads. A diverse roster of improvising musicians creates their fascinating complexity. Anadol recorded them during extensive sessions in Istanbul. You can hear drummers laughing and playing guitars, composers howling, announcements in French and screams in no language, record collectors playing oscillators, and trumpets through spacious echoes. Anadol represents Gözen Atila’s liberation from a rather academic approach to electronic composition which she pursued during her music technology studies in Istanbul. She calls her education the „darkness of serious music“ where she first tried to belong, then to break free with the help of lo-fi synth pop. As a producer of radio plays and an expert field recording artist she has developed a distinct sense of timing, editing and sound design. Her Anadol project walks in the footsteps of lone synth experimentalists like Bruce Haack and The Space Lady with their childlike curiosity for electronic sounds, pushing the boundaries of minimal equipment. On Uzun Havalar she translates her experimental background into these floating folk ballads. The album was originally released on tape via Kinship in 2018.

Spencer Parker invites Swedish artist Billie Jo to Work Them Records with five driving techno cuts entitled 'The Ravenous' EP featuring a remix from Me Me Me boss Man Power.

Hailing from Stockholm, Billie Jo is a founding member of the .WAV collective and resident DJ at Gothenburg's Rottweiler when not performing at clubs like Tresor. She now joins Work Them Records, bringing an array of robust productions with her.

With its pounding drums and ghostly vocals, 'Erroneous' quickly sets the tone of the release, leading into 'Saturn' with its glassy textures and echoing effects. 'Ravenous' then takes us into murkier territories, generating a duskier aesthetic with its twisted sounds before British producer Man Power provides a vigorous reinterpretation under his newly minted MPX moniker, which focuses on raw club tracks, featuring hard stabs and acid licks.

With its saw-like lead and trippy atmospherics, 'Dir Vsseu' sounds like being pulled through a vortex, making way for the powerful 'Planet 9' which concludes the package with metallic elements and subtle pads.

We are pleased and honored to finally introduce you our ninth release:
Carnera – Colpo Di Mano Nella Zona Grigia
The EP comes out with 4 original tracks and two stunning remixes from Esplendor Geometrico and Ancient Methods.

Carnera was founded in 2014 as a multimedia project by Giovanni Leonardi (Siegfried, Div. Sehnsucht, SNNC) and by visual artist Simone Poletti (Dinamo Innesco Revolution). In 2016 the sound designer Yvan Battaglia and Monica Gasparotto (Les Champs Magnétiques) joined the militant collective.
They have released two albums “Strategia della Tensione” (2015) and “La Notte della Repubblica” (2017), both released for the historic Old Europa Cafè, and several collaborations, remixes and singles.

A creature in continuous mutation, Carnera moves between dark ambient and soundtrack music, Martial and Techno Industrial, evolved EBM and Kosmische Musik, boldly combining new sounds and Old School attitude.

“Colpo Di Mano Nella Zona Grigia” is made by a robust and genuine dose of old-fashioned industrialism and postmodern manipulation, underpinned by a fascination with Futurism.

The EP ends up with two remixes. The first is a martial remix from Esplendor Geometrico recalling the old intelligence behind the industrial music, the epic and the aesthetics of Power, “the geometric splendor and numerical sensitivity” of Marinetti. The second is from Ancient Methods with his rare and own imprint transporting you in middle age landscapes full of metal and agony.

“The history of our country has taught us that terrorist eversion can not change things, in fact, it has often been used by power to address the fate of the community at will. It is not an exaltation of our armed struggle, we would miss it. But I do not see how it would be possible to reconstruct a civilization now in full decadence in a painless and non-gory way. It will not be the flags of peace, the barefoot marches, the fake humanitarian operations to restore dignity to our lineage. Nor are the old ideological contrasts of seventy years and the daughters of a civil war that has never really been overcome.”
credits

Having previously collaborated with the likes of Shafiq Husayn, Chester Watson and Foreign Beggars, electronic space funk outfit Paper Tiger return from an explorative journey to the dark edges of the cosmos with their long-awaited third album ‘Rogue Planet’.

The Leeds and London-based outfit (whose collective playing credits include Yellow Days, Werkha, Nubiyan Twist, Cinematic Orchestra & more) once again seamlessly combine elements of live recording and improvisation, their emphasis on blending organic sounds with electronic production techniques. The result is music which is interesting and technically proficient, but remains vibrant, colourful and funky -captivating both in headphones and on the dancefloor.

Just like the journey from debut long-player ‘Laptop Suntan’ to sophomore album ‘Blast Off’, and in-keeping with the band’s space travel fascination, ‘Rogue Planet’ is a cosmic leap from its predecessor. Band leader Greg Surmacz explains: ‘There is still humour and a sense of playfulness hopefully -largely provided by our MC Raphael Attar -but the overall sound is much more lush, jazzy and soulful. We wanted to make something that fits into our universe but hits a deeper emotional nerve’.

With diverse guests ranging from the legendary Steve Spacek on lead single ‘The Cycle’ to Olivia Bhattacharjee (the vocalist of Gondwana Records-signed Noya Rao) on the shuffling, leftfield beats of ‘Bioluminescent’ and Chicago-born but LA-based MC Lando Chill’s quick-fire delivery on the ironically titled ‘Slow Motion’ the album is a rich and varied listen. It’s a record drenched in futuristic soul, brimming with textured samples and intriguing progressions demonstrating the enviable musicianship on show here. G-Funk-esque melodies run throughout, joined by reverberating celestial horns and scattered drum patterns.

We swallow asphalt, we travel open heart, we run closed eyes. An hypnotic rhythm, some textured notes from Arp Odyssey, and a guitar that capsizes. Ashinoa. Ashinoa. Ashinoa.A last cigarette. We hang on the wheel. And we surrender on the highway of lights and vertigo, again »Ashinoa is a krautrock dementia that fans of the genre will recognize. An artistic atavism in the footsteps of the post-Stockhausen generation, a kind of round table of geniuses Klaus Dinger (Kraftwerk, Neu!), Edgar Froese (Tangerine Dream), Schulze (Ash Ra Tempel)... but also a kosmische musik of modern times, with a touch of electronic influences in the most experimental way.Part of the collective Misère Records from Lyon, which also includes the bands Abschaum (who released its first album in late 2017 on Macadam Mambo) and Pratos, Ashinoa started at the end of 2015 and occupes a special place in the Lyon alternative scene. So it's a real pleasure to welcome on board a band with such qualities from Macadam Mambo's hometown. Don't miss the trip !

* The latest EP (S.U.F.O.S. Save Us From Ourselves) from South London based producer, arranger and multi-instrumentalist, Wu-Lu.
* Pressed using 180g clear heavyweight vinyl
* Includes collaborations with long-term friends, Binisa Bonner, Kwake Bass, Nubya Garcia, Eun, Demae Wodu, and Morgan Simpson.
* Recorded at The Room and Abbey Road Studios
* Limited edition of 300

Having worked with the likes of MNDSGN (Stones Throw) and Andrew Ashong on his previous 2015 EP Ginga, Wu-Lu has already secured some strong production credits. These include Ego Ella May, Oscar Jerome and Poppy Ajudah, as well as work alongside Joe Armon-Jones (Ezra Collective) and Kwake Bass (Kate Tempest, Sampha) on a brand new project coming in 2020.

S.U.F.O.S. sees Wu-Lu collaborate with long-term friends Binisa Bonner, Kwake Bass, Nubya Garcia, Eun, Demae Wodu, and Morgan Simpson (drummer from band Black Midi). Thematically, it’s a reflection of where Wu-Lu sees himself and his people in 2019 London. This EP taps into racial injustice in Britain, black empowerment and self-exploration. Spending much of his time working behind the scenes for a range of artists, this EP helps define him as a soloist.

Speaking about S.U.F.O.S. Wu-Lu says, “The EP is about family in every sense of the word: blood family, spiritual family, extended family, your family. It’s the perception of my own experience and the young people who haven’t got a loud enough voice yet”.

Wu-Lu is no stranger to experimentation within his music. He has constantly been experimenting with the various influences on his Brixton doorstep, as well as some of the complex issues that a young, mixed race man living in London may face. It’s the live stage where the impact of Wu-Lu’s passionate retellings really come into their own. Recent standouts include sharing the Field Day main stage with the likes of Erykah Badu and Loyle Carner, Brainchild Festival and a feverish Clash Music LIVE appearance at Metropolis Studios alongside Masego.

Catch Wu-Lu headline The Windmill, Brixton on the 25th April 2019.

The collective Beste Modus Cinthie, Diego Krause, stevn.aint.leavn, Ed Herbst and Albert Vogt launched the label in 2012 as a platform for their own material, not long after came the realisation that many other artists around them were keen to be involved with the imprints burgeoning success and this led to the birth of Beste Fruende, a home for music from friends and affiliates of the label. Kevin Over’s ‘Butchers’ leads on the package with a swinging drum groove, emotive piano chords and a garage sub-tinged sub bass line alongside resonant synth licks and infectious vocals. Rindeau follows with ‘Wax On The Moon’, taking things deeper via twinkling Rhodes lines, dusty robust drums and modulating percussion. Cuartero’s ‘Floor Paca’ opens the flip side with choppy bass stabs, soft chord hits and a subtly nuanced rhythmic drive before ‘Slow Motion’ rounds out the package, employing classic deep house tropes with airy ethereal pads, vocal chops and shuffled, strippedback drums at its core.

Zodiak Commune Records presents the second TRIP release called Mist Of Souls. This is a serie pressed on 10 inch containing long, deep and storytelling acid tracks one on each side.
One side is dedicated to Ounts (FR), member of the Fr k6tem and Celestial Bodies collective recordlabel. Lovely ambient break!
The other side you can find the local rarely gifted Lox (FR). Really nice spacetraveling sound on this one!

Ounts L'Ame Hante
When it is time for a soul to move on, it simply needs complete its final task.
After that a portal will appear...and no one knows where it is going.

Lox Nova
We enter to other side of the portal. This is the time a new star is born.
The circle is complete.

Zodiak Commune Records presents the second TRIP release called Mist Of Souls. This is a serie pressed on 10 inch containing long, deep and storytelling acid tracks one on each side.
One side is dedicated to Ounts (FR), member of the Fr k6tem and Celestial Bodies collective recordlabel. Lovely ambient break!
The other side you can find the local rarely gifted Lox (FR). Really nice spacetraveling sound on this one!

Ounts L'Ame Hante
When it is time for a soul to move on, it simply needs complete its final task.
After that a portal will appear...and no one knows where it is going.

Lox Nova
We enter to other side of the portal. This is the time a new star is born.
The circle is complete.

In 2017 Blair French came out of hibernation to release contrasting but similarly sun-kissed EPs on Rocksteady Disco and Claremont 56.

Here, he returns to action with a scintillatingly sunny and sensual six-tracker on NuNorthern Soul that may well be his strongest release to date.

Given French's chameleon-like musical history, that's certainly a bold claim.
Over the years, he's been a member of a multitude of musical collectives - most notably Cosmic Handshakes and Formless Figures - established his own DIY record label (Fat Finger Cosmic) and released music that touches on a dizzying array of styles, from award-winning movie soundtracks and Afro-fired deep house, to skewed techno, blissful ambience and experimental hip-hop.

On Patio Pastel, French is in full on sand-between-the-toes Balearic mood, delivering a range of lucid, ear-pleasing compositions that will sashay their way into your consciousness.
Contrast, for example, the drowsy organs, glistening pedal steel and undulating hand percussion of opener 'Patio Pastel' with the Serge Gainsbourg style chanson-goes-tropical bliss of 'La Playa De Tercipelo', which features some deliciously breathy vocals from Stephanie Lyon.

Then there's 'Morning Sail', a sumptuously evocative soundscape rich in toasty, dub disco bass, shuffling percussion and lilting, Jonny Nash style guitar solos (see also the effortlessly horizontal Lounsbury Gardens'), and the kaleidoscopic, saucer-eyed Balearic pop brilliance of ;'Human Make Human', where new age synthesizer melodies and the fuzzy vocal refrain of Kasi Seguin gentle dances above an Afro-flecked, mid-tempo groove.

Throughout the EP, French mixes electronic and acoustic instrumentation, drawing together musical elements from a myriad of styles to create sumptuous new fusions.
It's particularly evident on superb closer 'Belle Isle Sunsets', where colourful synth motifs, eyes-closed guitar riffs and Mediterranean-warm chords wrap themselves around a gently pulsating, impressively layered groove.
Like the rest of the EP, it's perfectly pitched, expertly executed and wonderfully atmospheric.

hvmble is a newly-formed Berlin-based collective engaged in house music production and label work. Merging ideas in a fresh way is the intent of our approach and sound. Exchange in a diverse community is key to our spirit. hvmble aims at staying versatile. hvmble’s debut-EP series ’Textures’ features an eclectic practice where diverse elements of dance music are teamed playfully. Hypnotizing groove structures, vibrant hi-hats and a sublty-formed bottom-end unite and stimulate the bodymind. Textures invites the listener/ dancer to float through skillfully meshed patterns and dreamy layers, to experience promising new spaces. The sounds appearance and cover

Vactrol Park, the collaborative endeavor between Kyle Martin (Land of Light) and Guido Zen (Brain Machine), returns to the ESP Institute with II, rounding out the second half of their EP series. For this installment, a sojourn was made to Stockholm to record at the computer music mecca, EMS (Elektronmusikstudion), where the artists had the opportunity to experiment extensively with the legendary Buchla 200 Modular and Serge Modular, two of the rarest and most pornographic modular synthesizers in existence. While both instruments originate from California (Buchla in Berkeley as a commission from pioneer Morton Subotnik, and Serge at the California Institute of the Arts), the music Vactrol Park draws from these machines is far from warm and sunny. Akin to their predecessors on the 2015 debut I, these works materialize a level of taste and measure of craft that's unattainable by most, each retaining an individual cinematic approach yet working collectively toward one consummate goal—paralysis.

Following their hotly tipped 2018 debut album 'On' - Altin Gün returns with an exhilarating second album. 'Gece' firmly establishes the band as essential interpreters of the Anatolian rock and folk legacy and as a leading voice in the emergent global psych-rock scene. Explosive, funky and transcendent.

Some words from the label:

The world is rarely what it seems. A quick glance doesn't always reveal the full truth. To find that, you need to burrow deeper. Listen to Altin Gün, for example: they sound utterly Turkish, but only one of the Netherlands based band's six members was actually born there. And while their new album, Gece, is absolutely electric, filled with funk-like grooves and explosive psychedelic textures, what they play - by their own estimation - is folk music.

'It really is,' insists band founder and bass player Jasper Verhulst. 'The songs come out of a long tradition. This is music that tries to be a voice for a lot of other people.'

While most of the material here has been a familiar part of Turkish life for many years - some of it associated with the late national icon Neset Ertas - it's definitely never been heard like this before. This music is electric Turkish history, shot through with a heady buzz of 21st century intensity.
Pumping, flowing, a new and leading voice in the emergent global psych scene.

'We do have a weak spot for the music of the late '60s and '70s,' Verhulst admits. 'With all the instruments and effects that arrived then, it was an exciting time. Everything was new, and it still feels fresh. We're not trying to copy it, but these are the sounds we like and we're trying to make them our own.'

And what they create really is theirs. Altin Gün radically reimagine an entire tradition. The electric saz (a three-string Turkish lute) and voice of Erdinç Ecevit (who has Turkish roots) is urgent and immediately distinctive, while keyboards, guitar, bass, drums, and percussion power the surging rhythms and Merve Dasdemir (born and raised in Istanbul) sings with the mesmerizing power of a young Grace Slick. This isn't music that seduces the listener: it demands attention.

Altin Gün - the name translates as 'golden day' - are focused, relentless and absolutely assured in what they do. What is remarkable is the band has only existed for two years and didn't play in public until November 2017; now they have almost 200 shows under their belt. It all grew from Verhulst's obsession with Turkish music. He'd been aware of it for some time but a trip to Istanbul while playing in another band gave him the chance to discover so much more. But Verhulst wasn't content to just listen, he had a vision for what the music could be. And Altin Gün was born.

'For me, finding out about this music is crate digging,' he admits. 'None of it is widely available in the Netherlands. Of course, since our singers are Turkish, they know many of these pieces. All this is part of the country's musical past, their heritage, like 'House of The Rising Sun' is in America.'
As Verhulst delves deeper and deeper into old Turkish music, he's constantly seeking out things that grab his ear.

'I'm listening for something we can change and make into our own. You have to understand that most of these songs have had hundreds of different interpretations over the years. We need something that will make people stop and listen, as if it's the first time they've heard it.'

It's a testament to Altin Gün's work and vision that everything on Gece sounds so cohesive. They bring together music from many different Anatolian sources (the only original is the improvised piece 'Soför Bey') so that it bristles with the power and tightness of a rock band; echoing new textures and radiating a spectrum of vibrant color (ironic, as gece means 'night' in Turkish). It's the sound of a band both committed to its sources and excitedly transforming them. It's the sound of Altin Gün. Incandescent and sweltering.

Creating the band's sound is very much a collaborative process, Verhulst explains.
'Sometimes me or the singer will come in with a demo of our ideas. Sometimes an idea will just come up and we'll work on it together at rehearsals. However we start, it's always finished by the whole band. We can feel very quickly if it's going to work, if this is really our song.'

Just how Altin Gün can collectively spark and burn is evident in the YouTube concert video they made for the legendary Seattle radio station KEXP. In just under 20 minutes they set out their irresistible manifesto for an electrified, contemporary Turkish folk rock. It's utterly compelling. And with around 800,000 views, it has helped make them known around the world.

'It certainly got us a lot of attention,' Verhulst agrees. 'I think a lot of that interest originally came from Turkey, plenty of people there shared it.'

That might be how it began, but it's not the whole tale. The waves have spread far beyond the Bosphorus. What started out as a deep passion for Turkish folk and psychedelia has taken on a resonance that now travels widely. The band has played all over Europe, has ventured to Turkey and Australia and will soon bring their music to North America for the first time.

'Not a lot of other bands are doing what we do,' he says, 'playing songs in that style and seeing folk music in the same way.'

Malik Hendricks is a rhythmically inclined aesthetic enthusiast born in the 80's, and raised in the 90's. A DJ for over a decade, he has always approached music with a rigorous curiosity and views the dancefloor as the ideal arena for collective cultural appreciation, a place where the quest for knowledge meets the quest for experience. Dance is the true language of the body, and a gateway to the recognition of our shared humanity.


Money Cat Records - Round black records bringing good luck. Linking motion with emotion, dance unites the body and soul of all who participate. Music from Brooklyn to the world. Established in 2018.

Born out of a chance encounter in 2012 that led to a lasting friendship, Rhythm Section Int'l & producer, DJ, label boss, radio host, and record store owner Ruf Dug join forces to present 'The Committee'. Sitting somewhere between fictional band and studio collaboration, the record is the first fully in-house production for Rhythm Section, recorded start to finish at their own South East London studio and featuring vocals from label founder Bradley Zero and label mate FYI Chris's Chris Watson.

Right from the studio's initial creation, Ruf Dug felt inspired by the space's unique musical identity, jumping at the opportunity to create a collaborative record there over a two week studio residency. And between his DJ residencies at Pikes, Gottwood and NTS radio the Manchester-via-Ibiza computer game freak and renowned vinyl digger found the time to meld his wide range of influences. Having been a key driving force behind Be With's Holy Grail reissue of Bô'vel's - Check 4 U , Ruffy has more than earned his stripes as a boss level Street Soul collector, pre-empting the resurgent interest in the genre, which began in the mid 80s and is still a popular sound in Manchester today. This new release draws parallels between the DIY attitude of Street Soul labels like TSR, Intrigue, Jam Today & Elite and the modus operandi of the RS studio.

A wholly synergetic work, the project's title 'The Committee' reflects the collaborative nature of this release, as Ruf Dug states: 'Authorship is a strange concept at the best of times but this genuinely is a group effort and I very much enjoyed feeling like just one piece of a larger entity - the complete opposite to my usual production experience of being all alone in my room for days at a time.' The EP also features additional production from Rhythm Section's own Mali Baden-Powell, who DJ's and produces as Z Lovecraft and comes from a background in Street Soul music, his father was also in legendary UK acid jazz collective D'Influence. In addition, the record features a dynamic range of vocalists: sultry deliveries from Natalie Wildgoose and Sienna Mustafa, a rap from her sister Nadina, and the vocal debuts of FYI Chris's Chris Watson and Bradley Zero. 'I had been joking with Bradley that he needed to be on the record somehow and he did appear, playing an egg shaker at one point, but his singing wasn't in the least bit planned... I got back from lunch, and the next thing you know he just starts singing...So I dragged him reluctantly down the corridor to the studio and that's it- now he's a pop star!'

Also playfully melding digidub, soul, chicago house and acid jazz, the release not only marks a new chapter in the development of the Rhythm Section sound, but also catalogues a crucial turning Point in Ruf Dug's musical development. Still oozing with the cheeky DIY approach that won his own label, RUF KUTZ an army of fans, this latest Collab steps things up and opens a whole new realm of possibilities for one of Manchester's favourite sons.

An exploration of traditional Chadian music with an electronic twist...

Chad is in many ways a blind spot on the map of today's global musical conversation. Overlooked, misunderstood and misrepresented, outside observers rarely concede the country an autonomous voice over its past, present and future. N'Djamena, the dusty capital of Chad with its well-kept stories of boundary-breaking musical collaborations and thirst for experimentation is a city that reflects the country's diversity: the arid North, bordering the Sahara, where nomadic tribes revere the endless desert with their handcrafted instruments. The lush tropical South, where the frenetic drumming of local initiation ceremonies blends with sounds of neighboring Congo and Cameroon. Right in the middle: N'Djamena, a forgotten melting pot of cultures and peoples bursting with unrecorded stories of life at the margins of the world's attention.

Tackling this view is precisely one of the aims of Pulo NDJ. In May 2018, Nickodemus accepted an invitation from Hape Collective to travel to N'Djamena to teach a group of young adults DJ'ing and electronic music production, which resulted in the encounter between and a group of talented artists from Cameroon, Chad, Congo and Togo. After a weeklong series of listening to original songs & demos, the recordings continued in a pop-up studio created by DJ Buosis & Nickodemus which culimated in Desert To Douala, an album featuring 11 songs, all originally written and recorded in N'Djamena.

The project found its inspiration in the city's un-narrated diversity and seeks to explore the possibilities offered by technology to demonstrate how the country's rich heritage connects with existing musical conversations. It strives to create bridges in a world of walls. It has been a yearlong creative process that built friendships and fostered understanding among people united by a passion for music and creation.

The fourth AF Trax release is a three-track EP from our long time ally The Fantastic Twins, who has the following to say about her EP:

This EP is a small collection of works I crafted over the past couple of years in the process of working on my live show. I have been performing versions of these tracks countless times and yet never played them twice the same way. To me, they have been material in constant motion, so shaping them into a 'finished' form was a risky challenge. Something I was also wary of - would it mean they would become set in stone Would it mean I'd have to somehow 'rationalise" the music - via the mind - as opposed to letting it run into the wildness of its physical live experiences

Whilst editing these tracks into a format that could be released, I realised that instead of shaping them into the mould my mind first intended to give them, I could in fact use the power they revealed each time I performed them to an audience and inject some of that energy - as much as it is possible to capture and recreate it in the studio - back into this EP. Then of course, it meant letting go on things I usually like to control more, and better.

But isn't it the power of music to let it take you where you didn't plan to go And how incomplete would the music be if our inspiration didn't feed off the collective experience of dancing to music together I've lost myself (and my twins) many times throughout the process - not only on German soil - I have sometimes landed in the wrong place, but I may have found one answer yet in the form of another question. Why are we here if we can't dance

That reminds me of the words of Pina Bausch 'Dance, dance or we are lost'. Lost in our internal struggles as individuals (or imaginary twins). Lost in a society where our relation to the other is often marked by fear, power or violence. We feel the need to resist. Yet nowadays, taking a political stance as an artist is too often being instrumentalised as another tactics or accessory to gather more popularity, reducing the political message to nothing else but a branding attempt. Isn't it anyway the power of capitalism to assimilate everything, even contradictory or once-upon-a-time subversive voices All to end up on a 'Rave' or 'Feminist' H&M t-shirt. Slogans that have been emptied of their initial force and substance, now replaced by their commercial value. I strongly doubt that more empty words poured in vain on social media will help us much. But, like Pina Bausch, like JD Twitch, I have always firmly believed in dancing as a physical, social and fundamental act that leads us to share a common space with others and embrace otherness. Standing together, dancing together when everything else forces us to divide.

Parallel Minds Is A Group Of Like-minded Musicians, Djs, And Graphic Artists Working Together To Bring Compelling, Progressive Electronic Music From Toronto, Canada To The Rest Of The World. Spearheaded By Ciel, And Newcomers Daniel 58, And Yohei S.—who Have Variously Released Music On Labels Like Shanti Celeste's Peach Discs, Allergy Season, Coastal Haze, And Neo Violence—the Collective Offers On Its Inaugural Va Release Four Diverse Cuts Of House, Breakbeat, And Hardcore To Energize Your Body And Comfort Your Soul. The A Side Features Two Slamming House Cuts, With The A1 Offering By Discwoman Signee Ciel And A2 By Yohei S. Clocking In At A Frenetic 134bpm, "hind Sight Is 360" Is A Peak-time Dancefloor Banger Featuring What Has Become Trademark Characteristics Of Ciel's Productions: Intricate Drum Programming And Lush, Jungle-inspired Pads. "eastern Rankin" Is A Slower, More Hypnotic Percussion Track That Demonstrates Incredibly Effective Use Of Space And Delay. Its Minimalist Structure And Echoing Drums Would Sound Ideal In A Dark Warehouse. The B Side Opens With An Even Bigger Bang, With A Track That Would Best Be Described As Indian Hardcore. "mana Sadhana" By Raf Reza Under His New Alias, Radiant Aural Faculty, Is A Vibrant Mixture Of Hindi Vocal Samples Layered Meticulously In Between Freaked-out Synths And Thumping Breakbeat Drums. Completing The B Side Is The Aptly-titled "space Bubble" By Daniel 58. Drawing On Influences From Ambient, Trance, And Breaks, The Promising Toronto Artist Closes Out The Release On A Dreamy Note, Employing Nostalgic Melodies On Top Of Tough-as-nails Drums And Deep Rolling Sub-bass. As First Releases Go, Parallel Minds One Offers A Taste Of Something For Everyone, From A City That Has Perhaps Been Overlooked But Deserves A Second (third, And Fourth) Listen.

Véronique Sanson is one of the most famous French pop oriented female
singer, songwriter, and composer of the 80s. She began her career in the 70s,
and was the girlfriend of genius composer Michel Berger. Her world turnt
upside down when she met Stephen Stills of Crossby Stills & Nash. One Day,
during a recording session in Paris, she left the studio pretending to go buy
cigarettes, but never came back... She flew overnight to the USA, where she
married Stephen Stills. In LA, she records new music with superstar
composers such as Ray Parker JR and Harvey Mason. "On m'attend là-bas",
produced in 1974, was one of the single of the album Le Maudit.
Funky French League is an intergenerational collective (based in Paris)
formed by Young Pulse (Gamm) , Dabeull (Roche Musique), Arthur Chaps,
Woody Braun (Malka Family), Mr Willy, DJ Asko et Uncle T (Groove
Deluxe). All coming from different universe from hip-hop, to electronic music,
but united by their love for the groove and the funk.

Transversales Disques presents KSHATRYA, (The Eye Of The Bird), never released before
recording by french avant-garde electronic composer Igor Wakhevitch, who composed a bunch of
major experimental albums in the 70's such as Logos, Docteur Faust, Hathor, Les Fous d'Or,
Nagual and Let's Start.
During this 10 years period, Wakhevitch was close to Jean-Michel Jarre, the Pink Floyd, the Soft
Machine, and legendary choreographer Maurice Bejart having with him many conversations around
dance and music, human body and soul, spiritual path, collective life, new society, human evolution.
As a composer Igor Wakhevitch collaborated with Salvador Dali, Carolyn Carlson, and Terry Riley to
name a few. He's considered as one of the first French composer using synthesizers like Synthi
AKS, ARP2600 or Moog modular systems.
After spending almost 30 years in India, Igor Wakhevitch dug in his archives this unreleased work
recorded in 1999 on his 'Mysterious Island 88' system. Esotheric, sacred and cosmic, KSHATRYA,
(The Eye Of The Bird) is the logical follow up of Igor's early works and a monumental piece of
electronic music. A must!

Last year saw The Last Poets celebrate their 50-year anniversary with the righteous, politically-charged poetic record, "Understand What Black Is". Now to continue the party, Brighton production-maestro Prince Fatty has reworked the album with a fresh twist and blend of smooth, dub-delights. Set to land on the 29th March, the revolution marches on - this is "Understand What Dub Is".

After Prince Fatty's involvement in the production of the original project, he was the perfect person to help update the record with five decades of experience for a new audience to enjoy. The ten tracks of "Understand What Black Is" depict a relevant, historical philosophy of identity and race that has followed The Poets over the last 50 years. Since the origins of the civil rights movements back in the late 60's, Abiodun Oyewole and Umar Bin Hassan (two of the longest-standing group members) have provided social commentaries and a voice to African-American consciousness that has now been heard on a global scale.

Their raps, exploitations and insights quickly evolved into the origins of hip-hop in Harlem, New York back in 1968, and now in 2019 they continue to voice their dedication to the cause with the backing of slick rock-steady infused beats to keep things moving. Having had their work sampled by the likes of NWA, Dr Dre, Kanye West, Snoop Dogg and countless others is just a testament to the timeless sounds and prophecy they have created, and now Prince Fatty has stepped up to put his stamp on it.

Prince Fatty's ever-reliable work gives "Understand What Black Is" another lease of life as he maintains an undeniably slick groove throughout. Both therapeutic and warm, the soulful rhythms of "Understand What Dub Is" provide the perfect platform for The Last Poets to delve into everything from Trump's inauguration, nods to Biggie Smalls and respect to Prince. The calm, collective and downright thought-provoking words go hand-in-hand with the roots-driven reggae medleys with ease - this is dub in its rawest form.

Not only do these songs explore personal struggles and individual endeavours, they also represent a collective of deprived aspects of humanity and socialism, that perhaps now need to be pointed out more than ever. Although there is a variation of sound, the overlying topics remain a constant - it is time to "Understand What Black Is" once more.

Following "Night Moves" and "Kids We Own The Summer" and its harmonious keyboards, H-Burns goes back to the quintessence of his music style: an impeccable songwriting praised internationally and an interpretation undeniably precise. To narrate in one album the only two stories worth being narrated " the one about a man living his home, and the one about a man coming back to his home " H-Burns (aka Renaud Brustlein) first matured his project isolated in a home-studio owned by French underground collective La Souterraine before bringing it to the studio with a team of musicians and engineers that he meticulously picked as usual : Earl Harvin from Thidersticks on the drums, Kate Stables from This Is The Kit as a vocal guest, Noah Georgeson (The Strokes, Andy Shauf, etc.) for the mixing, etc.
Understandably title "Midlife" this new album recorded on analog tapes tells the story of a man who looks back over the journey of his life, remembering his dreams of glory, the lost love stories, what he left behind from the others and from himself.

- 180 GRAM AUDIOPHILE VINYL
- BRAND NEW 2019 NEO-CLASSICAL ALBUM
- PRINTED INNERSLEEVE
- LIMITED EDITION OF 500 INDIVIDUALLY NUMBERED COPIES ON TRANSPARENT VINYL

Fermata, Pieter de Graaf's debut project and the birth of a new talent in the neo-classical world. 'Filmic,' he replies when asked about the direction he had in his head, and there's an epic grandeur to many of the tracks. 'I have always written music' de Graaf explains, 'but with Fermata I felt that I could do so much more than just being a pianist, so I thought: 'Why shouldn't I try' The songs aren't 'written' in any traditional sense; instead he plays and improvise segments, records them, and listens back over and over before deciding what to use, what to discard, and what to embellish. No stone is left unturned in being guided by what the song requires - he has travelled North to record a church organ, wrote a score for a choir of four sopranos, and enlisted the help of friends and colleagues at Kytopia, the music collective in Utrecht that houses his studio.

It can take a while for an artist to find their true calling. For Pieter de Graaf, he's been searching since he sat next to his father, aged five, and watched him play the classics and the classical. He later immersed himself in the world of jazz, dedicating hours to practice, and studying at the Conservatory of Rotterdam. Several years spent touring with various bands, friends, and hip hop groups including The Kyteman Orchestra taught him an invaluable lesson, something that has informed his new project right from the start. His influences - Miles Davis, Nils Frahm, Rachmaninov, Bach, Herbie Hancock, and above all Keith Jarrett - allowed him to combine easy melodies with more virtuoso passages without losing the meaning, or the essence, of each song.

Fermata is available as a limited edition of 500 individually numbered copies on transparent vinyl.