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Russian titan Monokle is back to once again traverse many different sound worlds with his new album Ultraflowers. It is one of a number of superb albums landing on Constellation Tatsu this summer and one defined again by its warmth. The title track is a lo-fi, scruffy and deep opener with persuasive breakbeats, while 'Glassy Eyed' is an ambient jungle trip that drips with watery melody. 'Night Objects' offers some introspection and 'Moths' is a glitchy future techno cut with smeared synth soul. '1000Work' layer sup more breaks with elegant ambient melodies and 'Predteche' casts you admit in the deepest corners of space.

In Signal, Brendon Moeller takes his expertise in techno, ambient and dub techno into deeper ambient and drone territory, crafting a richly atmospheric journey through sound for Constellation Tatsu’s thoughtful cassette label.

This album gently balances textures, merging natural and synthetic elements for a unique sonic experience. Highlights include the track 'Light', which opens with a minimal drone and subtle, pulsing sub-bass notes, setting a calm yet immersive tone. In 'Wires', Moeller skillfully intertwines organic and electronic soundscapes, bringing together the natural and technological in seamless harmony. 'Nowhere' shifts to a more aquatic feel, conjuring the sensation of being submerged in an otherworldly lagoon. The serene, electronic layering in 'Bask' adds beauty and peace through calm sequencing and warm tones. Closing with 'Beam', Moeller expertly blends real-world sounds and hints of a surreal, alien atmosphere, rounding out an album that’s both tranquil and otherworldly. Signal encapsulates Moeller's thoughtful production approach, giving listeners a deep dive into ambient landscapes that feel as expansive as they are introspective and adventurous.

One Million Eyes, previously known as Templehof, return with a new album of balearic ambient, previously heard on two excellent releases for A Strangely Isolated Place.

This time appearing on legendary cassette label Constellation Tatsu as part of their fall combo, anyone familiar with their previous work will know what to expect. Dreamy, sun hazed analog synth lines mix with deep fourth world soundscapes that wouldn’t sound out of place on 90s labels such as Pete Namlook’s Fax or Instinct Ambient. The first half of Signal begins slowly, eyes wide shut, with 'Nickel', a slow pulsating jam of chilled out psychedelia. 'Marea' blends organic instrumentation with distant, processed voices. ‘Koala’, the deepest cut on the album, leads to a mood shift in 'Opalescent' that will sound eerily familiar to any Gaussian Curve fans. 'Polaris', 'Solstice' and highlight 'Landscape' close out the album in style.

For fans of anyone from Music From Memory, Jonathan Fitoussi & Ishq, there are few better ways to relive your memories of later summer.

WE ARE WINTER'S BLUE AND RADIANT CHILDREN (WAWBARC) is the new quartet of Mat Ball (BIG|BRAVE), Efrim Manuel Menuck (Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Thee Silver Mt. Zion), and Jonathan Downs and Patch (both Ada). On "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER" they present six modal lullabies drenched in seared distortion, slathered across striding electronic pulses. Ball and Menuck began creating music in and for the bleakest moments of Montréal winters: "We're honoring that idea of winter, when you come inside and your house is warm, a place that only exists because of how cold it is outside," says Menuck. They later recruited Downs and Patch to flesh out their initial ideas. Menuck met them in 2015 when recording Ada's final album at Montréal's Hotel2Tango _ where they reconvened to make this record. "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER" is an album about witnessing bleakness from a place of safety. Carrying newfound descriptive depth, thanks to the quartet's open-ended songs freeing him from writing in meter, Menuck likens his lyrics to photorealism. On opener `Rats and Roses' he sings of an unnamed city struck by an unknown cataclysm, but the details are local: specifically, his neighbors inadvertently poisoning birds when tackling a rat infestation. It's backed by blown out synths and guitars reaching a soaring crescendo. "Seeing things from a distance and not being able to intervene happens a lot on the record," Menuck explains. "If you're a feeling and thinking person, that's just part of the human condition. We watch horror unfolding from afar, unable to do anything concrete to change it." A powerless witness, able to describe but not intervene. `Dangling Blanket From A Balcony (White Phosphorous)' references Michael Jackson holding his child over a hotel balcony in 2002_the bizarre media spectacle still lodged in Menuck's psyche. This and the album's closing track also elegize white phosphorous, a technology of war designed to light up battlefields but capable of inflicting horrific burns on those it touches. Illumination and horror in one, here underpinning scenes picturesque and terrifying. "The last song `(Goodnight) White Phosphorous' is deliberately like a lullaby," says Menuck. "Written from the viewpoint of watching white phosphorous falling outside your window." Scorched and tarnished and laden with harrowing imagery, "NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER" is also a record bathed in light: the bewilderment of hopeful spirits witnessing despair, watching a blizzard of distress unfold outside from a place of relative shelter and comfort. You could call that emotional ambivalence, maybe numbness. But those words are too passive for the weight of conflicted feeling resonating through the album. "I never know how I feel on an overcast day when the sun is still bright despite the grayness and the light is very flat. The colours become more saturated, and you see a single flower, say a morning glory, whose colour is so vibrant beneath the gray, I don't know if that's a lovely sensation or a terrible sensation. It's both," says Menuck.

*BLACK VINYL*Asher White's third album in two years (and fifteenth overall), Home Constellation Study is less a refinement of last year’s sly, quaint New Excellent Woman and more an explosion of it. Her meticulous chamber pop has given way to resplendent swells of horns and squeals of noise, throbbing bass and queasy orchestral loops. The cover, painted by White, frames a burst of flowers against a dark blue abyss, mimicking the music: over frenzied sambas, bleary slacker rock, hushed ambient meditations, and surprisingly slick disco. The past year has found the prolific Providence-based singer-songwriter ascending through her city’s fertile experimental rock scene alongside the breakout synth-punk act BabyBaby_explores and her labelmates Or Best Offer. Live, White’s band plays riotous, unpredictable noise rock that nods to their city’s storied DIY scene; on Home Constellation Study, mid-album highlights like “Downstate Prairie” and “Hymn” nod to Providence’s bands of yore with their blistering sheets of feedback and pummeling drums, placing White, improbably, within the lineage of local heroes Les Savy Fav or the broken pop dispatches of Black Pus. At its core, however, Home Constellation Study is the product of studied, monastic auteurism. Like New Excellent Woman, it was arranged, performed, recorded and mixed by White alone in her basement studio in Providence. “Happy Birthday” is an earnest psalm, a paean of devotion and remorse to God a la Beverly Glenn-Copeland that drifts along with Panda Bear haziness. White’s concept of “toxic femininity” undergoes further investigation on “Good luck!” and “Runes,” both with Elliott Smith-like chord changes and the barbs of cynical romantics like Aimee Mann. Asher White’s vision has never been so expansive and unpredictable.

Still Wave was born from the deep outer space, in a future past of void
and broken feelings, to play violently post romantic, epically desperate
swansongs for lovers
Sing along. Hold your heart. And smile while you fall.
Line-up:
Daniele Carlo - Drums, Percussion
Luca Fois - Guitar, Keyboards, Backing Vocals
Tomas Aurizzi - Guitar, Keyboards
Manuel Palombi - Bass, Harsh Vocals
Valerio Granieri - Lead Vocals

The Guardian wrote “the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist.” With Uncut describing his songcraft “as delicate and lovely as a rare orchid” and Record Collector praising the album’s “sublime alien balladry” such are the accolades that have accrued throughout Chenaux’s unique and consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now. Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux’s solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux’s own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording. In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux’s previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux’s spartan home studio in rural France, Driver’s harmonically warped organ and Melanson’s electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux’s signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing “This Ain’t Life” that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date. Chenaux’s tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you’ve heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind

Following the release of Eric Chenaux's last album Say Laura (2022), The Guardian wrote "the Canadian songwriter has one of the all-time great singing voices in popular music, an intensely romantic Chet Baker-ish instrument that seems to float with piercing direction, like a paper aeroplane thrown hard through mist." With Uncut describing his songcraft "as delicate and lovely as a rare orchid" and Record Collector praising the album's "sublime alien balladry" such are the accolades that have accrued throughout Chenaux's unique and consummately uncompromising solo music for well over a decade now. Delights Of My Life opens a new chapter for the singer/guitarist and formally introduces the Eric Chenaux Trio, with Toronto-based musicians Ryan Driver on Wurlitzer organ and Phillipe Melanson on electronic percussion. Driver is a longtime collaborator, appearing on several of Chenaux's solo albums (even embedded into the very title of the 2010 masterpiece Warm Weather With Ryan Driver). Melanson has a long list of involvements that include Bernice, Joseph Shabason, and U.S Girls, and a recent release with his Impossible Burger project on Chenaux's own experimental label Rat-drifting, but this marks the first fulsome involvement between the two as players on a recording. In many ways Delights Of My Life also picks up right where Chenaux's previous album left off, in its subversions of a classic, timeless jazz-inflected balladry, while the interplay of the trio formation indeed unfurls many new delights. Recording together at Chenaux's spartan home studio in rural France, Driver's harmonically warped organ and Melanson's electroacoustic sampling and percussion hold time in newfound ways. Where previously Chenaux relied on a freeze/sustain pedal and minimalist rhythmic triggers to generate both pulse and chordal foundations, Melanson now paints timekeeping with expressive and intricate colourations, through live deployments of fluid sampled percussion (including orchestral timbres like timpani, kettle drums, and woodblock) that blur the boundaries between acoustic and electronic. Driver also ramps up his role in the song arrangements (prefigured in his support playing on Say Laura), teasing out chords and melodic filigree on Wurlitzer that percolate more prominently with Chenaux's signature fried guitar solos and succulent singing. Both trio members add dulcet backing vocals, most notably on the 10-minute tour-de-force of fuzzed and ring-modulated swing "This Ain't Life" that opens the record. All seven songs on the album groove and sway, simmer and sparkle, like nothing in the inestimable Chenaux discography to date. Chenaux's tunes have the uncanny ability to sound like jazz standards; songs you feel you've heard before, though certainly never quite like this. Yet these are of course all originals, compositionally and interpretively, bent through an inimitable avant/out-music lens. Delights Of My Life conveys warm familiarity, shot through with the exuberantly experimental subversion and playful, even mischievous, iconoclasm that continues to mark Chenaux as defiantly, virtuosically, and genially one-of-kind.

Deluxe 180g vinyl. Art Edition LP includes set of six 12”x12” art cards.



The follow-up to Kee Avil's acclaimed 2022 debut Crease: "A stunning debut" (The Quietus); "A whiplash style of uninhibited exploration" (The Wire); "Kee Avil's debut is a force" (Foxy Digitalis); "A work of Frankensteinian wonder" (Electronic Sound); "A tightly coiled, finely wrought vision of avant-pop" (Exclaim); "A debut of fiendish creativity" (Bandcamp Album Of The Day / Albums Of The Year) Kee Avil's music is both adventurous and intimate, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant. The Montréal guitarist and producer's 2022 debut LP Crease garnered plaudits from outlets like The Wire, The Quietus, Mojo and Foxy Digitalis, picking up a Canadian Juno Award nomination and Bandcamp Album Of The Day and Albums Of The Year along the way. Its intricate construction, unnerving atmospheres, and knife-edge take on avant-pop prompted comparisons to early PJ Harvey, This Heat, and Gazelle Twin. A remix EP with work by claire rousay, Ami Dang, Cecile Believe, and Pelada brought collaborative perspectives to four Crease tracks, offering new pathways within those songs. With Spine, Kee Avil strips back her heavily textured compositions, opening up a much rawer sound. She calls it folk… and while traditionalists might scoff, this is urgent music that reflects the precarity of modern life, as well as the jarring mixture of electronic and real-world interactions that have become the fabric of our day-to-day experiences. There's a hypnotic post-punk somnambulance to it all, using the repetition and fracturing of melodic phrases interwoven with delicate electronics to create curious and persistent hooks. While not a concept album, themes of time's passage, remembrance, and decay crop up across multiple tracks. Each track intentionally only has four elements - guitar, electronics, and two other instruments, with Kee's voice and guitar pushed to the front. Within this minimalist framework, the juxtaposition of beauty and discomfort that is key to the Kee Avil sound stands out in skin-prickling relief. "We're shaped by many versions of ourselves," says Avil. "I was looking back at these versions of myself and what could have been, what didn't end up being and what did end up being, and going back like that through time. Seeing the future, the past." Spine was written in Kee Avil's home studio after a lapse in writing while touring Crease and working on other projects. She is a well-known and respected member of the Montréal experimental scene, and formerly ran Concrete Sound Studio with Zach Scholes, who continues to work with her as a producer on Spine. Compared to the three years that went into making her debut, Spine emerged in a matter of months - a process that may also be a factor in its intensity and sharpness: "This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch." In her desire to not simply replicate or extend the sound of Crease, she felt she had to rip up the rule book, write in a different way, and pare back songs against her usual instincts. Sometimes, when we work against our ingrained habits, we get to the core of who we really are. Spine is an exercise in that process. Without over-intellectualizing or being didactic, it hits immediately and emotionally, especially if you are a person who has spent much time in the process of self-examination. Kee's voice hisses, whispers, and chants; her guitar bends and rings; electronics skitter and crackle; violin creaks like a door in the wind. There is something so evocative about the atmospheres she creates that it's easy to overlay one's own feelings onto her work, but to do that wholly would be to overlook one of the most important things about Spine: Kee Avil's clear and thoughtful vision. This isn't just the next step forward in her artistic trajectory; it's a stunner of a record that stands on its own, a bracing and thrilling listen that has much to reveal about the contradictions inherent in being human. - jj skolnik

With her third Gondwana album, "Constellation", Manchester"s Caoilfhionn Rose has come of age as an artist, digging deep to find experimental new ways of expressing her wonder at nature"s beauty, her love of music in all its diversity, and her belief in the restorative powers that both afford in the troubled post-COVID world. The ten tracks on "Constellation" feel rooted in a knowledge of folk, jazz and all the twentieth century"s classic tunesmiths, and yet they seem to create a magical, otherworldly space of her own imagining, blending Caoilfhionn"s core piano with synths, and pitting a live rhythm section and saxophone embellishments against ambient samples and future-facing production techniques.

With her third Gondwana album, "Constellation", Manchester"s Caoilfhionn Rose has come of age as an artist, digging deep to find experimental new ways of expressing her wonder at nature"s beauty, her love of music in all its diversity, and her belief in the restorative powers that both afford in the troubled post-COVID world. The ten tracks on "Constellation" feel rooted in a knowledge of folk, jazz and all the twentieth century"s classic tunesmiths, and yet they seem to create a magical, otherworldly space of her own imagining, blending Caoilfhionn"s core piano with synths, and pitting a live rhythm section and saxophone embellishments against ambient samples and future-facing production techniques.

Kee Avil's music is both adventurous and intimate, intellectually challenging and emotionally resonant. The Montréal guitarist and producer's 2022 debut LP Crease garnered plaudits from outlets like The Wire, The Quietus, Mojo and Foxy Digitalis, picking up a Canadian Juno Award nomination and Bandcamp Album Of The Day and Albums Of The Year along the way. Its intricate construction, unnerving atmospheres, and knife-edge take on avant-pop prompted comparisons to early PJ Harvey, This Heat, and Gazelle Twin. A remix EP with work by claire rousay, Ami Dang, Cecile Believe, and Pelada brought collaborative perspectives to four Crease tracks, offering new pathways within those songs. With Spine, Kee Avil strips back her heavily textured compositions, opening up a much rawer sound. She calls it folk—and while traditionalists might scoff, this is urgent music that reflects the precarity of modern life, as well as the jarring mixture of electronic and real-world interactions that have become the fabric of our day-to-day experiences. There's a hypnotic post-punk somnambulance to it all, using the repetition and fracturing of melodic phrases interwoven with delicate electronics to create curious and persistent hooks. While not a concept album, themes of time's passage, remembrance, and decay crop up across multiple tracks. Each track intentionally only has four elements—guitar, electronics, and two other instruments, with Kee's voice and guitar pushed to the front. Within this minimalist framework, the juxtaposition of beauty and discomfort that is key to the Kee Avil sound stands out in skin-prickling relief. "We're shaped by many versions of ourselves," says Avil. "I was looking back at these versions of myself and what could have been, what didn't end up being and what did end up being, and going back like that through time. Seeing the future, the past." Spine was written in Kee Avil's home studio after a lapse in writing while touring Crease and working on other projects. She is a well-known and respected member of the Montréal experimental scene, and formerly ran Concrete Sound Studio with Zach Scholes, who continues to work with her as a producer on Spine. Compared to the three years that went into making her debut, Spine emerged in a matter of months—a process that may also be a factor in its intensity and sharpness: "This record was much harder, like it was really discovering everything from scratch." In her desire to not simply replicate or extend the sound of Crease, she felt she had to rip up the rule book, write in a different way, and pare back songs against her usual instincts. Sometimes, when we work against our ingrained habits, we get to the core of who we really are. Spine is an exercise in that process. Without over-intellectualizing or being didactic, it hits immediately and emotionally, especially if you are a person who has spent much time in the process of self-examination. Kee's voice hisses, whispers, and chants; her guitar bends and rings; electronics skitter and crackle; violin creaks like a door in the wind. There is something so evocative about the atmospheres she creates that it's easy to overlay one's own feelings onto her work, but to do that wholly would be to overlook one of the most important things about Spine: Kee Avil's clear and thoughtful vision. This isn't just the next step forward in her artistic trajectory; it's a stunner of a record that stands on its own, a bracing and thrilling listen that has much to reveal about the contradictions inherent in being human. — jj skolnik.

Introducing the debut release from Clair Obscur, a subdivision of Diki Records, offering mainstage melodic techno sounds. This marks the debut of a new duo from northern France, Made On Sofa.



The main track, 'Constellation', has a catchy, original rhythm, accompanied by powerful melodies and the magnificant voice of Egyptian singer Hayat Selim. The second track, 'Jungle Moon', has a progressive build-up and will have most dancefloors jumping with its powerful, recognisable theme!

FYEAR is a Montréal-based ensemble led by composer Jason Sharp and poet/writer Kaie Kellough that fuses spoken word into genre-bending compositions for electronics, two voices, two drummers, and processed saxophone, pedal steel guitar, and violins. FYEAR incorporates drone, out-jazz, post-classical, ambient metal, avant-rock, and modular synthesis in a sonic and stylistic palette the opposite of collage or pastiche: the FYEAR ensemble integrates a unique and unified sound/aesthetic while traversing adventurous and variegated terrain. Kellough’s poetic materiality conveys acute political-existential themes, alternating between declarative, meditative, and cut-up/semiotic manifestations. This self-titled debut album is a supremely innovative 40-minute multi-movement work; an ardent mission statement that mines the interzone where Saul Williams, Moor Mother/Irreversible Entanglements, Shabazz Palaces, Zulu, Angel Bat Dawid, Damon Locks/Black Monument Ensemble, Shabaka Hutchings, and Matana Roberts are all iconoclastic neighbours. FYEAR melds improvisation and composition, traditional notation and graphic scoring, electronic and acoustic instrumentation, lucid recitation and abstract vocalization, balancing intensive structure with an expansive sense of exploration. Through several years of collaboration, development, workshops, commissions and performances conducted by Sharp and Kellough, their wordsound practice has culminated in this nine-piece group which also features poet/writer/activist Tawhida Tanya Evanson (present director of the Banff Centre Spoken Word program) violinists Josh Zubot and Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq, Darius Jones, Joshua Hyslop), pedal steel player Joe Grass (Tim Hecker, Patrick Watson), drummers Stefan Schneider (Bell Orchestre) and Tommy Crane (The Mingus Big Band, Aaron Parks), with live visual typographics from Kevin Yuen-Kit Lo, who also designs the album art. Propelled by the vocal interactions of Kellough and Evanson, FYEAR interrogates our present and future post-capitalist polycrisis, invoking collective anxieties, emotions, and critiques. FYEAR re-poetizes our constructed, manipulated social/conceptual realities, re-inscribing questions about the future by setting them to a wildly dynamic and evocative temporal soundtrack: Who does it belong to? How will it be shared? How do we project a collective future into the contested challenges of climate change, global migration, wealth gaps, safety/precarity, identity/affinity, segmentation / segregation, all our seemingly irreconcilable histories and forward visions for the world we dream to inhabit

Die in Montréal lebende schwedische Sängerin und Komponistin hat in den letzten 20 Jahren sechzehn unabhängig produzierte Alben vorzuweisen und ist zahllose Kollaborationen eingegangen. Sie ist eine poetische und kühne Kraft in der Musik, die sich dem Genre entzieht. Ihre Stimme wurde als "eine führende Präsenz" (Exclaim) beschrieben, die "den Unterschied zwischen dem Göttlichen und dem Dämonischen aufspaltet, gekonnt aus den Angeln hebt" (Under The Radar) und "neben den größten Indie-Künstlerinnen steht, die vor nichts Angst haben" (Le Devoir). Aufgewachsen auf einer Insel an der schwedischen Westküste, begann ihre musikalische Laufbahn, als sie 2004 nach Stockholm zog und Mitglied des renommierten Kollektiv-Labels und Veranstaltungsortes Fylkingen wurde (die älteste Organisation in Europa für experimentelle Musik und Kunst, gegründet 1933). Seit ihrem Umzug nach Montréal im Jahr 2012 erstreckt sich ihre Karriere über zwei Jahrzehnte und ist geprägt von einem unerschrockenen Streben nach Originalität, einem unerschöpflichen Wunsch, Genres zu überschreiten, und einem Engagement für künstlerische Zusammenarbeit. Angell verschmilzt musikalische Bereiche von Klassik, Folk, Rock und Pop bis hin zu Jazz, Elektronik, freier Improvisation und Avantgarde. Bekannt ist sie vor allem für ihr unkonventionelles künstlerisches Schaffen mit der gefeierten und für den Polaris nominierten Avant-Rock-Band Thus Owls, die sie seit 2007 gemeinsam mit ihrem Mann Simon Angell leitet. Zu ihren früheren Ensembles gehören das schwedische Vokal-Bass-Duo Josef & Erika und die elektronische Noise-Gruppe The Moth. Zur Unterstützung dieser und anderer Projekte unternahm sie ausgedehnte Welttourneen, bei denen Daníel Bjarnason (Ben Frost, Sigur Rós), Liam O'Neill (SUUNS), Karl Lemieux (Godspeed You! Black Emperor), Lisen Rylander Löve (Midaircondo) und Anders Jormin (ECM) zu ihren zahlreichen Partnern zählten. Ihre unverwechselbare und virtuose Stimme hat Aufnahmen und Live-Auftritte mit einem breiten Spektrum von Künstlern geziert, darunter Loney Dear, Patrick Watson, Leonard Cohen, Kim Myhr, Arve Henriksen, Land Of Kush, Wildbirds and Peacedrums, La Force und The Besnard Lakes, um nur einige zu nennen. Kürzlich gründete Angell zusammen mit Róisín Adams und Peggy Lee das Neue-Musik-Trio Beatings Are In The Body und vollendete ein Solo-Debütalbum mit uneingeschränkter stimmlicher Erkundung und expressionistischen avant-elektronischen Kompositionen, das Anfang 2024 auf Constellation erscheinen soll.

■ Das Album "Spiral" wurde ursprünglich 1973 von der Harry Roche Constellation veröffentlicht.
Angeführt von Posaunist und Musikdirektor Harry Roche, mit ein wenig Unterstützung von einer
Gruppe von Arrangeuren, darunter Pete Moore (der Mann, der für das unvergessliche Pearl &
Dean-Jingle verantwortlich war), Don Lusher und sogar Stan Tracey, war die Constellation eigentlich
nie eine fest arbeitende Band, sondern eher eine Gruppe führender Session-Musiker.
"Spiral" bietet jazzige, funkige und verrückte, aber entspannte Instrumental-Neuinterpretationen von
Stevie Wonder, The Who und Bob Dylan. Der Titeltrack enthält den Gesang von Claire Torrey, die
auch zu Pink Floyds "The Dark Side of the Moon" beigetragen hat. Das Album wurde bei seiner
Erstveröffentlichung völlig übersehen und schnell aus dem Verkauf genommen. Es findet seinen Platz
in der Jazz-Lounge-Szene, wo "Spiral" auf Augenhöhe mit Roy Budds Get Carter Score steht.
Zur Feier seines 50. Jubiläums ist das Album als limitierte Edition von 1000 einzeln nummerierten
Copies auf White Vinyl erhältlich.

Off World presents the final album in its trilogy of surreal and spacious leftfield electronics. "A stellar project headed by Sandro Perri, one of the most singular producers in contemporary music" (Boomkat), this third volume is another distinctive collection of tracks constructed from semi-improvised ensemble recordings made over the past decade with a varied cast of coconspirators. Drew Brown, Matthew Cooper, Susumu Mukai and Andrew Zukerman join Perri again on a variety of synths and machines, along with violinist Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq, Fond Of Tigers). Perri also continues to add organ and piano to the mix, while Volume 3 notably features first-time Off World contributors Nicole Rampersaud on trumpet and Martin Arnold on guitar, both mainstays of Toronto's vibrant improv and out-music scenes. The Quietus calls Off World "genuinely explorative_the musical equivalent of a Dali-esque landscape" which through all sorts of genre-defying twists and turns, at times evokes "offkilter, late Miles Davis ambience". Off World 3 doubles down on that jazz-adjacent trope in certain respects, while holding fast to Pitchfork's dictum that Perri "cultivates his own genreless brand of futurism." Marked by longer tracks than previous collections, three of the album's five songs clock in around the 10-minute mark, where overtly improvised instrumental playing wends its way across alternately bubbling and woozy electronic beds. "Impulse Controller" is a languidly skewed rhumba where ambling melodic undercurrents and dubby electronic pointillism provide a dulcet promenade for Rampersaud's Miles-esque trumpet excursions. "Ludic Loop" see-saws along in a slow synthy two-step, punctuated by Perri's restrained piano chords and Arnold's fried electric guitar. "Empasse" is perhaps most reminiscent of earlier Off World collections, though again slowed and stretched, with oozing synth bass ostinatos counterposed by ambient layers of viola and violin filigree from Zubot. These three centerpiece longform tracks each highlight one of the album's instrumental improvisers, and taken together, make for the most scintillating sedate and ruminant album in the trilogy. Off World 3 sounds as sui generis as ever, but in wrapping up the series, Perri sprinkles the project's emblematic alien surrealism with decidedly anthropic elements and temporalities. This final volume in the trilogy could also be seen as a re-statement of Perri's politico-aesthetic mission, as aptly celebrated by Pitchfork and its glowing 8.0+ reviews of Perri's 2018/2019 solo albums In Another Life and Soft Landing (released between Off World 2 and the present volume): a uniquely purposeful, subtly detailed cannon of songs "busy, vibrant, and bursting with life, but that aren't ever in a rush to get anywhere."

The follow-up to his acclaimed Constellation debut Third Album released in lockdown spring 2020, Markus Floats returns with Fourth Album, pushing the Montréal-based artist's distinct abstract electronic compositions into newly evocative terrain (while preserving his record-titling literalism). Faced with another couple of years spent unexpectedly, though not unfamiliarly, secluded and studio-bound, working on both paintings and music, Floats emerged by the end of 2022 with a set of tracks "about 60% finished" and a determined desire to throw off the shackles of distancing and isolation. "I had always thought about Markus Floats as a solo project but I am wrong about that. Fourth Album is about asking for help, inviting in, and making a home. It's about trust, exploration, and the effort of letting go."Sharing his in-progress recordings with a trio of close friends and collaborators from the powerhouse free music ensemble Egyptian Cotton Arkestra, each of these players then spent a day improvising to the tracks at Montréal's Hotel2Tango studio. With violin by Ari Swan, saxophone and mbira by James Goddard, and guitar and drums by Lucas Huang, Floats stitched their extemporized instruments back into his compositional process. The result is a fluid, lustrous, dynamic expansion of his sound and structure that continues to strike the ineffable balance of abstraction and soulfulness rightly highlighted and celebrated in the critical response to Third Album. Fourth Album sustains much of that previous work's enchanting equanimity, while inviting a bit more restlessness, accident and grit, with the incorporation of acoustic instruments and improvisation melding Floats' own background in Electroacoustic Studies and Jazz Performance more than ever before.Signature avant-electronic explorations of arpeggiated and timbral transformation, subtle shifts in harmonic consonance and dissonance, and a through-composed praxis that draws coterminously upon free jazz, musique concrète and modern Minimalism, all continue to shape Fourth Album to great effect. But an additional palette of sonic and gestural raw material is now also decidedly "out-of-the-box", charting a wider range of gestures, textures and temporalities. Fourth Album complexifies and intensifies across its 12 tracks, thematizing dualities and introducing new elements of play and accident, even a sort of looseness here and there, as it conjures communal expressivity within shorter, still scrupulous formal structures. Fourth Album also for the first time includes spoken word as a recorded element, previously only (and always) a feature of Markus Floats live performances. The album's final track samples the poet and activist Fred Moten, closing with these words: "What we've been trying to figure out how to get to is how we are when we get together to try to figure it out." This koan of socially-engaged process and creation/advancement of meaning through praxis and immanence reflects the unique fusion of intangible materiality and affective sensibility at work in Markus Floats music, unfolding in new depths and currents with Fourth Album.