Cerca:dark times

Matrix Music Arhiv (MMA) are proud to announce a re-issue of the highly sought-after album 'Resistance' by the seminal Yugoslavian electronic rock band Borghesia, originally released in 1989 on Play It Again Sam/PIAS (Europe), Wax Trax (USA) and Jugoton (former Yugoslavia). Available on 2Lp, 2CD & 1MC (MC original album only). The re-issue features a carefully remastered edition along with the exclusive bonus live album "Dal Vivo A El Paso", recorded in December 1988 during their performance in Torino, Italy, on one of their European tours. This recording features very different, raw and at times 'dubbed up' versions of their early tracks such as 'Naked, Uniformed, Dead', Am I? and Him (On). The historical perfectly captures the atmosphere and energy of their live appearances at the time. Borghesia (Italian for 'bourgeoisie'), who were formed in Ljubljana (Slovenia) in 1982, had always considered its art to be far broader than just sonic. Borghesia's transgressive, transdisciplinary alloy of film expression, distinctively physical performative practices, usage of new technology and conveniently abrasive EBM (electronic body music) musical production hasn't only been ground-breaking in terms of the holistic, visual/sonic presence of an art collective, but had a rather decisive influence on the general aesthetics of the immensely important Yugoslav subcultural landscape of the 1980s. Borghesia was one of the first bands from the East of the Iron Curtain who used the VHS video medium to distribute their art and was also one of few projects from socialist Yugoslavia to successfully penetrate the curtain itself, reaching international audiences. A series of their releases in the fruitful period between the years 1987 and 1991, including the Resistance album itself, was released by the legendary Belgian label Play It Again Sam (PIAS). The band dissolved in the mid-1990s and then continued their work in 2014. In line with Borghesia's unique social engagement, progressiveness and political criticism, Resistance is one of their most powerful statements. It's the ultimate fight the power manifesto, which makes punk and hip-hop albums of the time sound like children's songs. This is not music for nodding your head to; it's tactical broadcast for the nocturnal resistance to this very day. Borghesia didn't address control only - they sampled the political top, the secret police and explicitly connected authority with dominance. The production of the album isn't clean or polished. On the contrary - Resistance sounds like it was created in a bunker, using stolen military equipment and synthesisers. Borghesia's genius lies in their understanding that the relentless, mechanical EBM beat was the sound of the State - and by hijacking it, turning the system's own rhythm against itself they created the most powerful form of sonic insurgency. And since history repeats itself while the little man learns slowly, the re-release of 'Resistance' comes at the right time. The dark clouds of violence are already looming over Europe, they've never really left the Middle East, and the levers of power and capital ever so louder, not even covertly at all incite: war, war, war! In these times the only appropriate answer is: revolt, rebel, Resistance!

Roy Montgomery, a key figure in the experimental underground rock scene, lives in Christchurch, New Zealand, just a short drive from the sea. Avant-garde vocalist and songwriter Martha Skye Murphy is based in London. Though geographically worlds apart, the pair inhabit an intimate and almost tactile shared sonic world. Their collaboration feels transformative, like the gradual shifting spell from night to day.

What draws them together is the emotional force of each other’s music. Montgomery’s cyclical, decaying compositions are shaped through intricate guitar and piano work, blending post-rock, folk, and drone. Murphy, meanwhile, possesses a rare gift for transformation, from the intimate cracked whispers of 'At Dawn' to the hypnotic drift of 'The Play of Dark and Light'. On the latter, she evokes old maritime folk tales of fishermen lured into the darkness by the sea’s siren call. The song both seduces and warns, finding something magical and frightening in the temptation of drowning. Though her vocals often resemble fragments of words, consonants, or vowels, they frequently function as pure sound, drawing on glossolalia and prioritising feeling over any ‘learnt’ language.

Emotion and intuition are the driving forces behind Nebular, an album that oscillates between the intimate with the unknown. This spirit is reflected in its artwork. Murphy shared a painting by Irish artist Simon English depicting a solitary house bathed in dusky blue light, and the pair quickly settled on it as the cover image. Both were captivated by its atmosphere. Montgomery related it to the isolated, seemingly uninhabited houses he encounters while travelling through rural New Zealand—places that inspire a desire to knock on the door and discover what lies beyond. “Terra incognita springs to mind. A search into the unknown,” Murphy agrees.

The nocturnal and remote nature of the artwork mirrors the process of making Nebular. With Montgomery in New Zealand and Murphy in London, the album was created entirely through remote correspondence, with stems exchanged via email. Their messages were often written and read at different times of day, and, because of the time difference and the demands of daily life, replies usually were sent late at night and the music too often composed at nocturnal hours. Their exchanges took on the quality of pen pals sending letters across great distances. This suspended sense of time is echoed in Nebular’s sound, with its feeling of temporal drift and timelessness.

On Nebular, Montgomery and Murphy have harnessed raw emotion and launched it into a time capsule bound for the stars. It allows you to drift, to be present, and to feel; creating something timeless.

TRACKLISTING

180g White Vinyl

* Following on from the hugely popular ‘Klavirni’ (Emika’s first solo piano album in 2015) her second installment of piano solos are a magical cluster of melodies, dreamy effects, obscure production mistakes with tape echo’s and other old analog gear.

* The pieces were recorded during the time she was pregnant with her first child Silvy, to whom she has dedicated this record ‘To Silvy who heard it first from the inside’.

* The collection of ‘Dilo’s’ which means moment in Czech, were recorded ‘in a state of ultra hyped up creativity combined with a massive fear about losing my identity or creativity as an artist once I would become a mother’ - says Emika about the album process.

* A truly personal affair and in keeping with the original style of the first Klavirni, all the Dilo’s were recorded improvisations by the composer on her home piano, this time in Berlin.

* Dilo 7 from the first album has been streamed more than 15 million times on Spotify and there will also be a ‘Red Edition’ repress of the album on vinyl.

* This release marks the 5 year anniversary of Emika Records, celebrating 5 years of independence since her days with Ninja Tune.

* Dilo Variations EP (not released previously before on vinyl) will come with the anniversary releases on a cute little 10’’ with updated artwork.

* This is also the final release in her Emika Records catalog before starting a new venture in 2020 with more details to follow later in the year.

* ‘Klavirni Temna’ which means dark piano in Czech, explores the relationship between dark and light, good and evil, death and rebirth.

* ‘Music is a powerful and sometimes unexplainable force.’ - Emika

New Jersey malevolents FUNEBRARUM uncloak their third full-length; the sheer magnitude of "Beckoning The Void Of Eternal Silence" rains down world-ending Doom tenebrosity with searing scowls of Death Metal assailment. With a perturbed atmosphere writhing around the entire record, the pulsation of which "Beckoning The Void Of Eternal Silence" breeds is an expertly calculated Deathdoom craftsmanship and yet emitting at times a surreal bridging between extreme genres in orchestra-like precision. The core DNA of FUNEBRARUM has remained intact albeit the exalted darkness have shaped themselves to be cut from a different cloth. Recorded at Elektric City Recording (Ascended Dead, Coffin Rot, etc) by Charles Koryn with additional recording and mixing duties by Stephen DeAcutis at Sound Spa Studios (Ripping Corpse, Evoken, Disma, etc). Mastered by Daryl Kahan at Winterdark. Cover artwork by Daryl Kahan.

born (literally) in fire, soma flared briefly as the alchemical pairing of two unique and dynamic musicians. david thrussell and pieter bourke met through mutual friends in the artistic melting-pot of early 1990s elwood, melbourne, australia. bourke was an integral member of the gothically ambient eden, thrussell frontman of anarchic industrial combo snog. both admired each others work, and though some considered them an unlikely combination, something rather potent was brewing which drew them inexorably together.

initially bourke joined snog live and then in the studio, contributing mightily to their epic second album ‘dear valued customer’. as a natural result of their friendship and muse, thrussell and bourke instituted their own project, soma, to explore the intersections of arcane and mysterious technologies. the first soma album “hollow earth” was released to acclaim.

soon after, thrussell was awoken by a 3am knock on his door. bourke was now homeless - the result of a devastating fire that had just torn through his apartment and studio - and he needed somewhere to sleep. this is when work on ‘the inner cinema’ began, with bourke and thrussell ensconced in the same dwelling, able to write and record around the clock (often only leaving to plan the next session while dining at local vegan eateries).

at the time thrussell was obsessed by the testosterone bravado and haunting alienation of ‘spaghetti-western’ theme songs, while bourke brought his love of all things percussive and the other-worldly atmospherics of arvo pärt (with the outer-space dub of king tubby) to the mix. together, on a diet of blood-plum sago, fortean times and lingering smoke fumes, they concocted their dadaist brew.

magical and unforgettable, ‘the inner cinema’ stands apart and outside of the musical mainstream. since its 1996 release the album has developed a mythical reputation and is spoken of in hushed and adulating tones among acolytes of atmospheric and electronic music. you hold in your hands a lovingly remastered deluxe reissue of this sonorous gem.

time marches on, and after a few more sporadic soma recordings bourke and thrussell moved on to other pastures. bourke would work with dead can dance, lisa gerrard and hollywood auteur michael mann, as thrussell toured regularly with snog and black lung, cut some interesting soundtracks and birthed the idiosyncratic omni recording corporation.

expelled from its fiery crucible, this dark jewel of sound, this soundtrack of the mind, has lain in the soft earth awaiting rediscovery. fluid metabolic rhythms and breathy washes of timeless melancholy pulsing, inviting, in the warm soil. now is your chance.

Jon Schaffer's Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) is a bold new mix that fuses the raw essence of the "Brush-fires of the Mind" LP (2009) and the "Spirit of the Times" EP (2011), breathing fresh life into a message that has proven eerily prophetic in an era of escalating world challenges. " Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) " is out now on all streaming platforms, inviting listeners everywhere, old or new, to discover its urgency. For collectors, a special physical rollout will arrive via The Circle Music on July 4, 2026 , marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. At its core, Sons of Liberty's music exposed the machinations of a fraudulent financial system and the insidious creep of authoritarianism, serving as a stark warning to humanity. Today, with those shadows cast longer than ever, this music stands as a timeless testament to truth, unfiltered and unapologetic.

What sets Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) apart is its transcendence of partisan divides. This is not an echo chamber of political agendas; it's a universal wake- up call, championing freedom as the bedrock of peace and prosperity for every person on the planet. In a world fractured by division, Schaffer's lyrics rally for pro-freedom/pro-humanity ideals: anti-authoritarian, non-partisan, and rooted in the unyielding principles of liberty. It's a reminder that true empowerment comes from questioning and resisting systems that promote aggression and erode our shared dignity, fostering unity through principles of liberty, individual sovereignty, and collective resilience. Elevating the original material to new heights, this release features thunderous, newly recorded drums by longtime friend Mark Prator , whose precision and groove has powered classics from Iced Earth ( The Dark Saga , Something Wicked This Way Comes ), Demons & Wizards (Self- Titled Debut), and Jon Schaffer's Purgatory (EP 2018).

Paired with a cutting- edge modern mix by Jim Morris , the result is a sonic powerhouse that has matured like a fine wine - delivering an intensity and honesty that's all too rare in today's pop culture landscape. In an age where ideas can be silenced, this stands as the most censored and cancelled heavy metal music in history. It begs the question: Why? Are thought crimes an inevitable reality in a world that fears unbridled truth? Dive in, reflect, and educate yourself-- because freedom isn't a spectator sport; it is difficult, it requires action, and it's the only path to a better world for all of us

Jon Schaffer's Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) is a bold new mix that fuses the raw essence of the "Brush-fires of the Mind" LP (2009) and the "Spirit of the Times" EP (2011), breathing fresh life into a message that has proven eerily prophetic in an era of escalating world challenges. " Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) " is out now on all streaming platforms, inviting listeners everywhere, old or new, to discover its urgency. For collectors, a special physical rollout will arrive via The Circle Music on July 4, 2026 , marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. At its core, Sons of Liberty's music exposed the machinations of a fraudulent financial system and the insidious creep of authoritarianism, serving as a stark warning to humanity. Today, with those shadows cast longer than ever, this music stands as a timeless testament to truth, unfiltered and unapologetic.

What sets Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) apart is its transcendence of partisan divides. This is not an echo chamber of political agendas; it's a universal wake- up call, championing freedom as the bedrock of peace and prosperity for every person on the planet. In a world fractured by division, Schaffer's lyrics rally for pro-freedom/pro-humanity ideals: anti-authoritarian, non-partisan, and rooted in the unyielding principles of liberty. It's a reminder that true empowerment comes from questioning and resisting systems that promote aggression and erode our shared dignity, fostering unity through principles of liberty, individual sovereignty, and collective resilience. Elevating the original material to new heights, this release features thunderous, newly recorded drums by longtime friend Mark Prator , whose precision and groove has powered classics from Iced Earth ( The Dark Saga , Something Wicked This Way Comes ), Demons & Wizards (Self- Titled Debut), and Jon Schaffer's Purgatory (EP 2018).

Paired with a cutting- edge modern mix by Jim Morris , the result is a sonic powerhouse that has matured like a fine wine - delivering an intensity and honesty that's all too rare in today's pop culture landscape. In an age where ideas can be silenced, this stands as the most censored and cancelled heavy metal music in history. It begs the question: Why? Are thought crimes an inevitable reality in a world that fears unbridled truth? Dive in, reflect, and educate yourself-- because freedom isn't a spectator sport; it is difficult, it requires action, and it's the only path to a better world for all of us

Jon Schaffer's Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) is a bold new mix that fuses the raw essence of the "Brush-fires of the Mind" LP (2009) and the "Spirit of the Times" EP (2011), breathing fresh life into a message that has proven eerily prophetic in an era of escalating world challenges. " Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) " is out now on all streaming platforms, inviting listeners everywhere, old or new, to discover its urgency. For collectors, a special physical rollout will arrive via The Circle Music on July 4, 2026 , marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. At its core, Sons of Liberty's music exposed the machinations of a fraudulent financial system and the insidious creep of authoritarianism, serving as a stark warning to humanity. Today, with those shadows cast longer than ever, this music stands as a timeless testament to truth, unfiltered and unapologetic.

What sets Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) apart is its transcendence of partisan divides. This is not an echo chamber of political agendas; it's a universal wake- up call, championing freedom as the bedrock of peace and prosperity for every person on the planet. In a world fractured by division, Schaffer's lyrics rally for pro-freedom/pro-humanity ideals: anti-authoritarian, non-partisan, and rooted in the unyielding principles of liberty. It's a reminder that true empowerment comes from questioning and resisting systems that promote aggression and erode our shared dignity, fostering unity through principles of liberty, individual sovereignty, and collective resilience. Elevating the original material to new heights, this release features thunderous, newly recorded drums by longtime friend Mark Prator , whose precision and groove has powered classics from Iced Earth ( The Dark Saga , Something Wicked This Way Comes ), Demons & Wizards (Self- Titled Debut), and Jon Schaffer's Purgatory (EP 2018).

Paired with a cutting- edge modern mix by Jim Morris , the result is a sonic powerhouse that has matured like a fine wine - delivering an intensity and honesty that's all too rare in today's pop culture landscape. In an age where ideas can be silenced, this stands as the most censored and cancelled heavy metal music in history. It begs the question: Why? Are thought crimes an inevitable reality in a world that fears unbridled truth? Dive in, reflect, and educate yourself-- because freedom isn't a spectator sport; it is difficult, it requires action, and it's the only path to a better world for all of us

Jon Schaffer's Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) is a bold new mix that fuses the raw essence of the "Brush-fires of the Mind" LP (2009) and the "Spirit of the Times" EP (2011), breathing fresh life into a message that has proven eerily prophetic in an era of escalating world challenges. " Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) " is out now on all streaming platforms, inviting listeners everywhere, old or new, to discover its urgency. For collectors, a special physical rollout will arrive via The Circle Music on July 4, 2026 , marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. At its core, Sons of Liberty's music exposed the machinations of a fraudulent financial system and the insidious creep of authoritarianism, serving as a stark warning to humanity. Today, with those shadows cast longer than ever, this music stands as a timeless testament to truth, unfiltered and unapologetic.

What sets Sons of Liberty - Thought Crimes (Volumes 1 & 2) apart is its transcendence of partisan divides. This is not an echo chamber of political agendas; it's a universal wake- up call, championing freedom as the bedrock of peace and prosperity for every person on the planet. In a world fractured by division, Schaffer's lyrics rally for pro-freedom/pro-humanity ideals: anti-authoritarian, non-partisan, and rooted in the unyielding principles of liberty. It's a reminder that true empowerment comes from questioning and resisting systems that promote aggression and erode our shared dignity, fostering unity through principles of liberty, individual sovereignty, and collective resilience. Elevating the original material to new heights, this release features thunderous, newly recorded drums by longtime friend Mark Prator , whose precision and groove has powered classics from Iced Earth ( The Dark Saga , Something Wicked This Way Comes ), Demons & Wizards (Self- Titled Debut), and Jon Schaffer's Purgatory (EP 2018).

Paired with a cutting- edge modern mix by Jim Morris , the result is a sonic powerhouse that has matured like a fine wine - delivering an intensity and honesty that's all too rare in today's pop culture landscape. In an age where ideas can be silenced, this stands as the most censored and cancelled heavy metal music in history. It begs the question: Why? Are thought crimes an inevitable reality in a world that fears unbridled truth? Dive in, reflect, and educate yourself-- because freedom isn't a spectator sport; it is difficult, it requires action, and it's the only path to a better world for all of us

With bloated souls and skeletal bodies the three mad kings of the end times walk among us, with empty eyes and insatiable hunger. Innocence thieves, blood collectors, bastard children of archaic dynasties built upon the broken bones of the weak. Their consorts are the rotten and the dead, their champions soulless, empty vessels gasping for validation as they bathe in the nectar of inflicted pain. They lead us not into temptation, but into degradation and the all-consuming fire. Born in the heat and shadows of the Australian underground, in Brisbane in 2014, Graveir have carved out a stronghold for themselves in their homeland's black metal scene. Bleak, violent and uncompromising, their music possesses a powerful individuality that sees them following their own path, lone wolves in a world of people searching frantically for a voice to tell them how to think and what to believe. After their powerful 2016 debut, Iconostasis and its critically acclaimed successor, King Of The Silent World, hailed as 'captivatingly hypnotic' by Metal Bite, Graveir are poised to unleash their third set of black prophecies - The Festering Triad. The Festering Triad begins with the sinister 'Lords Of Misrule', rising from the silence with guitars like an insect swarm before a lugubrious, dolorous shift into life and movement. The song holds you on the edge of oblivion, a constant aura of threat radiating from its broken beauty. There's a powerful underlying melody too, but it's corrupted and riddled with disease. And while this unsettling and disorientating introduction to The Festering Triad is still crawling through your veins, 'A Futile Exhortation' bursts into flame - as implacable and unstoppable as the passage of time, formed from the seething darkness on the edge of chaos and touched by something ancient and primal. You are now in the heart of darkness, jagged riffs circling like atavistic, feral presences, hammering blast beats disrupting natural rhythms. Nothing is as it should be. Nothing stays within the expected boundaries. This is a malicious attack on the laws that govern reality. 'A Thief In The Heart Of Man' flies at you in a howl of rage and bloodlust; you can feel its desperate need to tear you apart and the inherent danger is exhilarating. Title track, 'The Festering Triad' arrives swathed in an aura of decaying majesty, a triumvirate of wickedness wreathed in flame, marching onwards, entwined in black briars of unease - on into twisted soundscapes of fear and dizzying anxiety, through boiling malignancy and relentless intensity to the finale of 'The Rite Of Degradation', where portentous grandeur and bestial hunger combine in bewildering, schizophrenic fury. This album is fuelled by a determination to leave you broken, beaten and humbled - and it succeeds, absolutely.

Joseph Tholl is widely known as a Swedish multi-instrumentalist, singer and songwriter. He gained international recognition as a founding member and guitarist for the speed metal band Enforcer (officially leaving in 2019). Following his time with Enforcer, he formed Black Trip (later Vojd) and is currently playing guitar for Tribulation. Following 2019’s »Devil’s Drum«, »It Might Be Art« is his second solo album (and the second for High Roller Records). It was recorded and mixed at Humbucker Studio, which he co-owns with Robert Pehrsson (who’s also on High Roller Records). On »It Might Be Art« Joseph Tholl is singing, playing guitar and most of the bass, he also handles piano and synthesizer parts. Robert Eriksson (The Hellacopters) and Jakob Ljungberg (Second Sun) share drum duties on this album. Besides that, there’s a few guest appearances by musicians such as Johannes Andersson (Tribulation), Tobias Lindkvist (Tyrann), Pia Stjärnvind (Serpent Omega), Adam Zaars (Tribulation) and Robert Pehrsson (Dundertåget, Robert Pehrsson’s Humbucker). Joseph Tholl thinks that despite its broad variety »It Might Be Art« is still suitable for heavy metal fans: “I couldn’t see why not. I mean it’s not heavy metal. But I hope people will like it for what it is, a very honest and well-crafted melodic rock album.” “»It Might Be Art« is both darker and brighter than »Devil’s Drum«,” compares the Swede both his solo albums. “Musically it probably sounds a little brighter and poppy overall. But then there’s songs like ”I’m In A Darkness” or ‘The Burial’, which are very dark.” At times, influences of Sisters Of Mercy, The Cure, New Model Army and Midnight Oil can be detected on »It Might Be Art«, leading Joseph Tholl to ponder: “It’s incredibly hard to name a few bands as influences, there’s just too many. Besides those bands you mentioned, there’s a mix of grunge, heavy metal, Swedish pop/rock, AOR etc., that I mold into my own kind of rock n roll.”

Christian Prommer – producer, drummer, DJ and multi?instrumentalist best known for his work with Trüby Trio, Fauna Flash, Drumlesson, Voom:Voom (with Peter Kruder), Prommer & Barck (with Alex Barck), and as the producer of DJ Hell’s Teufelswerk – presents his new album Rhythmic Nocturne, spanning spiritual deep house, jazz, balearic trip?hop and hypnotic rhythm explorations. A must for fans of St. Germain, Floating Points and refined grooves at all speeds.

This album distills ten years of Berlin into a twilight drift between order and abandon. Daytime studio sketches are pulled apart at night, reshaped by shifting perspectives that swing between jazz harmony, textural experimentation, and the heavy gravity of techno basslines and analog drums. Intimately close-mic’d piano, drums, percussion, cello, and strings are constantly recontextualized—dropped into new rooms, resonances, and imagined spaces—so their meaning keeps mutating. Room noise, human breath, and accidental sounds are folded into the pulse, turning spill and imperfection into rhythm. Even a piano lid thudding shut on “Dark Matter” is claimed as part of the beat, underscoring an album that embraces freedom, spontaneity, and the beautiful lack of accountability that defines this city at night.

“As always the darkest moments of human existence
have a shadow of sheer light

But it’s never to be found while sitting still

even when we want to

It’s to be found in scraping ourselves up and doing . . .

Not overthinking about

Just doing

Just making a permanent mark

Leaving a permanent reminder

for our future selves to revisit and learn from when the times right

If that’s ever comes

So many milestones . . . ?”

Vivod proudly presents the long-awaited debut album from Cestrian. The release features five essential tracks pressed to vinyl, with all eight tracks available digitally. A collection of dystopian electro workouts designed to clear the mind, fuel the imagination, and offer just the faintest glimmer of hope—though not too much. Dark, driving, and unmistakably Cestrian, this is a soundtrack for uncertain times.

Limited to just 150 vinyl copies worldwide. Get your pre-orders in early to avoid missing out.

The shape-shifting sound of Low End Activist continues to pivot around an axis of bassweight pressure with the launch of their self-titled label – the appropriate vessel to take them deeper into sci-fi scented sonics with an ‘ardcore swagger. Previous drops on Sneaker Social Club and Seagrave have seen the shadowy technician mangling grime, jungle and dubstep tropes with all the grit and flair of the most visionary sample sorcerers. At times, they’ve built their beatscapes up around fierce MC spots from such legends as Flowdan and Trim, but while there’s more to come on the vocal tip for the LEA series, this first installment works in a strictly instrumental fashion.

Hi-tech breakbeat de/re-construction is the focus across all three tracks on LEA001, with atmospheres so densely rendered you can feel them sticking to your skin like the sweat of a well-slicked basement session. ‘Engineers Origins’ emits pure darkcore energy and icy stabs of future-shock industrialism, while ‘Look Up’ shivers with off-key orchestrations. ‘Probability 1’ gets deep in the break edit and throws in an iconic low end rumble that should spark intense reveries amongst anyone with even a passing appreciation for bass. Like the most potent foundational jungle, all three tracks swerve regimented structure in favour of moody exploration around a suite of themes and sounds, slipping time in style and setting up the LEA series for further intense sonic treatments to come.

Epsie steps up on Secretsundaze’s 9FINITY imprint with ‘Any Colour You Like’, a four-track EP weaving trippy, techy, and subtly progressive elements juxtaposed with darker, electro-orientated moments for a heady dancefloor statement.
Built with a live-first mentality, his productions mirror the fluidity of his sets—intricate rhythms and elastic basslines ground the EP in pace and movement. The release oscillates from the sleek to the abrasive with punchy drums and otherworldly synths existing in tandem with deep tech house grooves. A distinctly European sensibility runs throughout: restrained yet exploratory, minimal yet richly detailed, all landing with understated psychedelia and deep functionality tailored for the heads.

Muse are a culturally-attuned, genre-defying band who channel the anxieties of each era—technology, power, rebellion, and identity—into maximalist, stadium-ready rock that evolves with the times while staying unmistakably Muse.


Kicking off with new single “Be With You,” this next era of Muse is rooted in electronic experimentation and an insatiable curiosity. ‘The WOW! Signal’ represents a world of cosmic mystery, existential hope, and the exhilarating possibility of contact with something far greater than ourselves.

‘Cécile McLorin Salvant ... sings standards, show tunes and old novelties in a taut, flinty, elusively beautiful voice, erring toward material with difficult lyrics and tough places in history. Salvant wins over her audiences by tweaking them slightly: daring them to go there with her—not just into the archive, but toward the darkness of the past.’ – New York Times

‘Although Salvant is known as a jazz musician, her approach to music is defined by her instinct for experimentation ... Her music is beloved for ... embracing theatre and subverting classics with playful renditions.’ – Guardian

Salvant, who has performed with orchestras regularly over the last decade-and-a-half and intended to make an album with one sooner in her career, but logistics and her abundant creative ideas led to other new projects intervening. Having finally found time to make this album, With Every Breath I Take is a different sort of record than it might have been even ten years ago.

“It is a rare opportunity to be able to make an album at this scale, which has been a dream of mine for many years,” Salvant says. “Darcy James Argue wrote stunning arrangements and the Metropole Orkest, conducted by the extraordinary Jules Buckley, gave these stories a cinematic dimension. We overcame quite a few obstacles to even get into the recording studio for this project; it took almost four years for us to do so, and I am so incredibly proud to share it.

“I did not choose these songs because they are beautiful, but because they are crucial to me,” she adds.

Cécile McLorin Salvant, a 2020 MacArthur Fellow and three-time Grammy Award winner, is a singer and composer bringing historical perspective, a renewed sense of drama, and an enlightened musical understanding to both jazz standards and her own original compositions. Classically trained, steeped in jazz, blues, and folk, and drawing from musical theater and vaudeville, Salvant embraces a wide-ranging repertoire that broadens the possibilities for live performance.

Salvant’s performances range from spare duets for voice and piano to instrumental trios to orchestral ensembles. Her unreleased work Ogresse is an ambitious long-form musical fairy tale that is being made into a feature length animated film. She has performed at national and international venues and festivals such as the Newport Jazz Festival, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Village Vanguard, and the North Sea Jazz Festival. Her previous Nonesuch albums, Ghost Song (2022) Mélusine (2023), and Oh Snap (2025) received critical accolades; the former two were both nominated for Grammy Awards. Salvant is also a visual artist, and Oh Snap was named a best album of 2025 by the Guardian, Jazzwise, JazzTimes, and the Francis Davis Jazz Critics Poll.

Kercha’s debut album ‘Open The Door’ arrives this April via DNO Records. The Black Sea artist’s mystical, disorienting style has set the tone for the label since he dropped the inaugural release six years ago. Now, across 16 tracks — including collabs with Mystic State, Congi, NST, Khromi and Finnoh — his smoky sampledelic dubstep is tighter, heavier, and more curious than ever, with a new sense of danger and bubbling rage that feels fit for our chaotic times.

Themes of movement and change course through the LP. On the opening gambit ‘A Path Into The Unknown’, twinkling arpeggios emerge from the gloom like stars lighting the way. Tracks like the eponymous ‘Open The Door’ and ‘Mind Extraction’ deliver that classic Kercha sound, where left-field samples dart in at right angles. ‘Dangerous Road’ weaves between the call and response action of grotty stabs and devilish subs. ‘Take A Break’, featuring Mystic State, goes on the attack with searing acid. ‘Can’t Wait For Today’, though lethargic in its pace, sees San Francisco-based rapper Finnoh deliver stream-of-consciousness bars that skewer our present and nudge us to revolution.

Work took place over the course of several years, during which Kercha relocated with his family from Russia to Georgia, where he now resides in the capital, Tbilisi. “Sometimes I wrote music while travelling on a bus, sometimes late at night while my family was asleep, sometimes just sitting on the grass in a park, and of course in my home studio as well,” he says. “By the time the album was finished, it included music from different periods, and it may vary in sound and concept.”

Any major upheaval in life will result in moments of hardship, but also hope. Both can be found throughout ‘Open The Door’. There’s times when the darkness threatens to envelope everything: during the cold, crackling ‘Disclosed’ and the eerie, dystopian ‘Infection Of Lies’; on ‘Trigger Activation’, with its grunting lows and broken glass hook, and ‘Ballistics’, where a wall of sub-bass is pierced by shrapnel stabs.

The balancing light comes on ‘4 AM’, featuring Nottingham duo Congi, when clashing swords and cinematic strings, meet a soft Rhodes piano — the juxtaposition between heavy low-end and floaty keys and vox reflecting those moments of transcendence often found in the early hours. From the injection of garage energy on ‘Bubs’, with Edinburgh’s Khromi. And on with ‘My Feeling’, featuring South Russian vocalist NST, which closes the album on a deep but expansive note, bookending the experience with more starlight synth tones.

“It’s a reflection of my life journey and the changes connected with emigration and overcoming various difficulties,” explains Kercha. “This period means a lot to me, which is why the album includes tracks from the time of preparing to leave up to adapting to a new country.”

Still, he wants listeners to be able to derive their own understanding. “I think the essence lies in the ability to contemplate, not in any predetermined meaning,” he says. “I can only say one thing: thank you for appreciating what I do and for your support. I hope it inspires you to make the same firm decisions to change for the better as it did for me.”

Out via 4 x 12” vinyl, ‘Open The Door’ is a captivating artistic statement, showcasing the journey of an artist with a truly original signature sound — a rarity that should be treasured and celebrated.

Rhythms of postmodern realism at the very bottom of the DNO.

Thirteen years have passed since their debut album, but now Oppenheimer MKII is ready to release their long-awaited second album "Embrace The Dark”.

Oppenheimer MKII is Andy Oppenheimer, singer, songwriter and formerly one-half of 1980s synth-pop duo Oppenheimer Analysis, one of the leading bands of the ‘minimal synth’ scene, and inspiration behind the New York-based Minimal Wave label and Mahk Rumbae, electronic musician and producer known for his work with Codex Empire, Mitra Mitra, and long-running UK industrial/experimental band Konstruktivists.

“Embrace The Dark” does exactly as its title suggests: it embraces dark, apocalyptic themes for our current turbulent times. In nine mind-blowing tracks, Mahk’s thunderous dance rhythms and addictive synth-pop melodies combine with Andy’s latest dystopian – and sometimes utopian – visions of our past, present and future.

From the atmospheric title track, greatly influenced by Andy’s lifelong obsession with space – ‘When you embrace the dark, you gaze back in time...’ to delusional tech-bro world domination in “I Went Too Far” – ‘The sky is not the limit; my wealth is infinite’ and the pounding paranoid lead track “Oh! My Mind is a Storm” – ‘When I go dark, I'm into demon mode’, the new Oppenheimer MkII album “Embrace the Dark” ventures deep into futuristic dreams and nightmares and is guaranteed to fill the dancefloor.

Over the course of more than a decade, the French quartet Lost in Kyiv have refined a sound that fuses cinematic ambition, electronic precision, and visceral live energy into something unmistakably their own. With their new album, `We're All Going To Be Fine', they push that identity further than ever; sharpening their production, intensifying their dynamics, and embracing a darker, more immersive sonic architecture. Lost in Kyiv's music has always thrived on tension between the organic and the synthetic. On `We're All Going To Be Fine', that integration reaches a new level of clarity and depth. The writing and production process was long and exacting, allowing the band to refine every transition and tonal detail. Songs unfold with architectural precision, motifs are introduced subtly before expanding into vast, multi-layered climaxes. Dynamics are handled with patience and control, silence and minimalism are deployed as strategically as explosive crescendos. This careful pacing gives the album a cinematic flow and larger narrative in which struggle and compassion coexist. Guitars surge and recede in wide, panoramic arcs. At moments they shimmer and support, at others they thrash violently, accumulating layers of distortion and harmonic overtones. Acoustic instrumentation is interwoven with sequenced synth lines, pulsing arpeggiators, and carefully sculpted electronic textures that give the band's sound a sense of forward propulsion. Rhythm plays a central role in Lost in Kyiv's identity. The drums provide impact and structure, locking into intricate patterns that interact with bass-driven synth pulses. At times the groove feels almost mechanical, echoing the steady insistence of electronic music; at others, it breathes and swells with human elasticity. This interplay creates a powerful sense of movement, an impression that the music is always advancing, even in its most introspective passages. "We almost consider this album as the first record of a new version of the band. That's why we decided to use the name Lost in Kyiv now. We don't want to erase the past, but it really feels like a new direction. Artistically, I think this album marks the beginning of a new direction, louder and more metal-oriented than what we did before." (Lost in Kyiv) FOR FANS OF Russian Circles * P.G.Lost * The Ocean * Cult of Luna * Brutus * This Will Destroy You

Over the course of more than a decade, the French quartet Lost in Kyiv have refined a sound that fuses cinematic ambition, electronic precision, and visceral live energy into something unmistakably their own. With their new album, `We're All Going To Be Fine', they push that identity further than ever; sharpening their production, intensifying their dynamics, and embracing a darker, more immersive sonic architecture. Lost in Kyiv's music has always thrived on tension between the organic and the synthetic. On `We're All Going To Be Fine', that integration reaches a new level of clarity and depth. The writing and production process was long and exacting, allowing the band to refine every transition and tonal detail. Songs unfold with architectural precision, motifs are introduced subtly before expanding into vast, multi-layered climaxes. Dynamics are handled with patience and control, silence and minimalism are deployed as strategically as explosive crescendos. This careful pacing gives the album a cinematic flow and larger narrative in which struggle and compassion coexist. Guitars surge and recede in wide, panoramic arcs. At moments they shimmer and support, at others they thrash violently, accumulating layers of distortion and harmonic overtones. Acoustic instrumentation is interwoven with sequenced synth lines, pulsing arpeggiators, and carefully sculpted electronic textures that give the band's sound a sense of forward propulsion. Rhythm plays a central role in Lost in Kyiv's identity. The drums provide impact and structure, locking into intricate patterns that interact with bass-driven synth pulses. At times the groove feels almost mechanical, echoing the steady insistence of electronic music; at others, it breathes and swells with human elasticity. This interplay creates a powerful sense of movement, an impression that the music is always advancing, even in its most introspective passages. "We almost consider this album as the first record of a new version of the band. That's why we decided to use the name Lost in Kyiv now. We don't want to erase the past, but it really feels like a new direction. Artistically, I think this album marks the beginning of a new direction, louder and more metal-oriented than what we did before." (Lost in Kyiv) FOR FANS OF Russian Circles * P.G.Lost * The Ocean * Cult of Luna * Brutus * This Will Destroy You

Vince Staples is one of the most revered voices of his generation. Though he's a celebrated multi-hyphenate, making an impact in TV, film, & contemporary culture, music is where he most naturally pushes boundaries as an artist, storyteller, & creative force. Following a string of acclaimed introspective projects, Ramona Park (a melancholic tribute to his hometown) & Dark Times (deeper, more personal themes), Cry Baby is a more outwardly facing artistic statement and piece of social commentary.

"Nusa" is the last part of a trilogy started in 2020 with Masao Yamamoto and Akira Uchida. A project that began with light (“Sasanami”, 2020), moved through darkness (“Kurayami”, 2023), and returned to the ambivalence of the two (“Nusa”, 2026), which ultimately sustain and complement one another in all their variations and complementarities. Both in terms of tones and in the humanity that runs through us in these times of such stark contrast.

For this last part of the trilogy, Masao Yamamoto and Akira Uchida travelled to the island of Hokkaido at the beginning of 2026 to supplement the project with photographs and audio recordings of the ice and the surrounding landscapes.

Graduated in saxophone from Senzoku Gakuen College of Music, Akira Uchida explores sound through tuning, medieval music, and acoustics, supporting jazz pianists as a piano tuner. After training under instrument maker Masahiro Adachi, he became an independent clavichord builder. In 2020, he created an instrument for Ryuichi Sakamoto. In 2021, he crafted one using reclaimed wood from Kiyomizu-dera Temple (FEEL KIYOMIZUDERA). His work focuses on making, tuning, and performing instruments.

On her second album, Sawt El Doumouh (The Sound of Tears), Beirut-based Sandy Chamoun summons flickers of light from sadness. Influences from the Arabic tradition of Tarab – one of the first styles Chamoun learnt to sing – and polyphonic Cantu are reinterpreted and reimagined through her voice and electronics, synths from her SANAM and Ghadr bandmate Anthony Sayhoun, and live percussion from Ali Hout.
Marked by its times, the record isn’t what Chamoun had planned. “I wrote the lyrics between October 2023 and September 2025,” she explains. “The plan was to write about nature, since the album’s concept was inspired by Cantu, a tenor Sardinian ritual that celebrates humanity’s victory over nature. I intended to visit several places and regions in Lebanon and write a track for each, but after the genocide and the war in Lebanon, everything changed.”
“I chose the title because many mornings during this period I woke up crying silently. I remember a dark story from school: a teacher yelled at a small boy while he was crying and told him to cry without making any sound. I feel we are still living in that condition in the region — forced to die or suffer without making any noise.”
Sawt El Doumouh is a gorgeous refusal to be silent. It opens with a booming drum. Over keening autotune Chamoun’s pure voice cuts through, burying the despair to illuminate rays of hope. On “Ward W Shok” a shuffling swing gives way to a righteous organ interlude. The title track sees a choir of Chamoun’s vocals lull and lap. Drums arrive and indignation stirs, what’s mournful begins to stride.
Chamoun’s tracks are as beautiful as they are defiant. Why write songs in the face of horror? Perhaps because music can hold onto something better. By turning to song, Chamoun catches the hopeful glints and sparks that persist and strive outside the terror. In SANAM and Ghadr she often borrows lyrics from Arabic writers through the centuries, listening to what their words say in the present while reminding us the world can and has been different to how it is now. Solo she writes her own words, and the way her songs alternately soar and sigh evokes hopeful pluralities and suggestions of other, kinder realities. Even hearing someone cry is a connection to humanity.
It’s a possibility conveyed in the album’s most jubilant moments. “Shahed” is an incandescent dance of percussion and levitating synths. “I wrote it after I saw a photo of a small boy on a horse on the beach in Gaza,” Chamoun recalls. “I imagined a fantasy where the boy lives in the water and watches the terrifying reality on the shore, trying to bring water to put out the fire. Shahed is the witness who lives far from the shore, enjoying the water and trying to help. You can hear this duality: the percussion is desert-like, while the vocals and synths evoke the feeling of water.”
Although it comes from darkness, in Chamoun’s music we can hear faith in something beyond it.

Exactly four years and one day after ''All That Has Never Been True'' Ultha releases their fifth full-length studio album entitled ''A LIGHT SO DIM''.
It features 10 original new songs at a combined length of 74 minutes, with guest appearances by Pieter Uyttenhoven & Annelies van Dinter (TAKH), Pardis Latifi (DAEVAR), Danni Kann and the ''Chor Der Damen Ohne Namen'', a 40-women choir from Cologne.
Recorded, engineered and mastered at GOBLIN SOUND STUDIOS (Cologne) by ANDY ROSCZYK, who also contributed guitars and keys to various tracks. Artwork was done by TOBIAS HAHN, featuring photography by MAX HECKMANN.
After the conclusion of the trilogy consisting of Converging Sins, The Inextricable Wandering & All That Has Never Been True, the question was: where do you go when you've lost everything? You either accept defeat and die - or you start fighting. This is an album about hope in the darkest of times. It's a call to arms for the inner self, to find a rope of light in a world of mist. ''A Light So Dim'' is another concept album, with a narrative spinning from beginning to end. The unnamed narrator wakes up and tries to make sense of a world gone absolutely mad, where truth is nothing more than an empty shell of its once great self.
''IT'S THE STRUGGLE FOR AMBITION IN AN OCEAN OF DEFEAT. LIKE A FOREST FOR A GARDEN IN A WORLD YOU'LL NEVER SEE''.
This is for all of you!
Viva reason, viva love.

The wait is finally over…With their new longplayer “Unseen Horror Scenes”, Mexican electro- industrial icons Hocico return with a new descent into the abyss… On this new studio assault, Erk Aicrag and Racso Agroyam dissect the digital age’s paranoia, addiction, betrayal and spiritual decay with surgical aggression. No escape, pure confrontation. Track by track, “Unseen Horror Scenes” drags listeners through algorithmic madness (“Brainrot”), online cowardice (“The Screen”), scorched-earth rage (“Hey Tú!” feat. Rafael Reyes of Prayers) and the smoldering ruins of a “Fallen Paradise.” From the opening attack “Dark Paradigm” to the apocalyptic closer “Echoes of the End,” the album pulses with hyperkinetic drum & bass injections, punishing industrial beats, razor-edged EBM sequences and Erk’s unmistakable, venom-drenched vocals. It’s raw, furious and thematically disturbingly accurate for our times. Hocico openly critique modern decay - yet they also amplify it, distort it, and make you dance inside it.

CQ Wrestling are today announcing their sophomore album Resistance for release on 29th May.
There’s a saying that simmers beneath the sonic assault of Resistance, the new album from CQ Wrestling. “Nothing changes if nothing changes,” recites Jake Mac, who knew of this idiom before 2024; before the loss that turned his and bandmate Charlie Woods’ worlds upside down; before the “year of complete mayhem, mess and chaos” that followed. From the outside looking in, the Brighton-based duo may have seemed on the top of the world. Then known as Chappaqua Wrestling, the exhilarating energy of their debut album Plus Ultra had seen the band lauded as future British music scene conquerors. The pair had a major label record deal to their name. Sweat dripped from the walls at headline show after headline show, in front of rapturous fans – and yet something felt amiss.
“We were selling out tours and people were loving the music, but honestly, we just felt f****** lost,” says Woods. Then tragedy struck. “It completely derailed us,” says Mac, recalling how the sudden death of his father – “a big part of the project” since its inception – sank them both into a period of grief and introspection. Amid the mourning emerged a desire to transform.
RESISTANCE is an album forged in the embers of personal tragedy and hammered into shape by desire, resilience and resolve. Detailing a metamorphosis, new single ‘Pacifico’ draws a line in the sand for the band as they recover from a time of tremendous upheaval to find themselves following their own creative compass, with renewed vitality.
"This album is a collection of songs above all about trying to find joy and hope in dark times”.

“Dressed In Black” was curated and annotated by Cathi Unsworth, author of the book Season Of The Witch: The Book of Goth – a woman who considers herself fortunate to have had Siouxsie Sioux, Lydia Lunch and Diamanda Galàs for role models while she was growing up. For further illumination in Cathi’s own words, read on.

“The music gathered here is an aural manifestation of turbulent times, made by women possessed of supernatural abilities. The music I fell in love with emerged from the dark end of the 1970s: The Winter of Discontent of 1978-79, when intractable industrial action left the dead unburied and mountains of rubbish in the streets. All the promise of punk came to a brutal end with the deaths of Sid and Nancy in New York; IRA bombs exploded in central London and a seemingly uncatchable ripper roamed West Yorkshire with 13 murders under his belt. Ill omens that augured badly for the events of 3 May 1979, when Margaret Thatcher became our first woman prime minister. Dressed in blue and ready to whip the country to her heel.

“But at night, malcontent youth were united by forces of opposition, whose dissenting voices were aired across the land on John Peel’s Radio 1 show, set to the sound of slasher guitars, swirling fairground keyboards, loping basslines and percussion that recalled the echo of jackhammers or the march of insect feet. Here, punk’s unruly offspring distilled the dissonance of the times into a new kind of music. Flirting with the fetishist and taboo, drawing upon horror and science fiction imagery, they were the outlaw leaders of the greatest style tribe of the decade: the goths. Dressed in black, these kohl-eyed women voiced the alienation of their generation during the decade of the Cold War, the Miners’ Strike, privatisation and AIDS.

“To make sense of the absurd is genius enough. But to then cast the glamour of sublime music around those insights – I come back to my point about supernatural abilities. I hope you will find illumination within. You know the dress code.”

**RED VINYL**Bookending “This Is My Blood “ are two cinematic hypnotist slide lute pieces that evoke contemporary deserted landscapes. They were improvised and made for “ Maquina”, a film shot in the Colorado desert during a psychedelic trip by film maker Joaquim Pujol. The works on here, like the ecstatic second piece invite a return to long form listening. They explore contemporary darkness and contemplate personal loss. There is solely one vocal piece, “ Remission”. A worldwide concert tour of this material is slated for 2026/2027. Since studying the lute in New York with Patrick O'Brien in the 1990s, Van Wissem has gone on to create works equally as rooted in classical Renaissance and Baroque forms of lute music, as contemporary sounds spanning drones, electronics and field recordings. Throw in some of his formative influences from the no wave and industrial scenes, alongside a dedicated approach to minimalism and this has resulted in Van Wissem producing distinct and singular work whose sound is often a marriage of opposites; meditative and intense, forward thinking but with a sense of the arcane. The Quietus has called him "probably the most famous lutenist in the world”. Jozef Van Wissem is an avant-garde composer and lutenist who plays a unique all-black baroque lute. His timeless music is often described as hypnotic, minimal, and hauntingly atmospheric, merging beauty with a dark, meditative edge. His lyrics have a mythical Christian appeal, incorporating themes of love, faith, and the afterlife, often with a repetitive, mantra-like quality. Bridging classical traditions with modern sounds like drones, electronics, field recordings and voice. He collaborates with filmmaker and musician Jim Jarmusch, including the award-winning soundtrack for Only Lovers Left Alive, for which Van Wissem won the Cannes Soundtrack Award in 2013. He also scored the Sims Medieval Video game ( 2011), Uncle Howard ( 2016) Land (2018), Irma Vep (2022), Queens (2023) and Un Prince (2024). He did a world tour in duo with Jarmusch in 2025 and their 5th record “ The Day The Angels Cried” was released. Van Wissem tours extensively, performing in diverse venues from rock festivals to churches, and has worked with artists like Tilda Swinton and Zola Jesus. In 2019 he was commissioned by Cinematheque Francaise to score the silent horror film Nosferatu (1922). He released the soundtrack in 2022 on his own Incunabulum label. The New York Times wrote: Beginning with a solo played on the lute, his performance will incorporate electric guitar and distorted recordings of extinct birds, graduating from subtlety to gothic horror. “My soundtrack goes from silence to noise over the course of 90 minutes,” he said, culminating in “dense, slow death metal.” In 2024 Van Wissem did a sold out nationwide American tour with the film. A worldwide tour is slated for 2026/2027

It is often in times of crisis and upheaval that the most fascinating music emerges. It is clear that times are grim, not only but particularly in the USA. On the ‘Numb Denial EP’, Orlando Voorn reflects on the emotional climate in his adopted home and conveys his uncertainty, his pain and also his anger. He impressively expresses his emotional states musically through the instrumentarium of timeless Detroit-style technosoul. These tracks are among the most moving, immediate and beautiful he has created in his decades-long career. To quote Roxy Music: “Dance away the heartache, dance away the pain.”

Oceanine, Jolanda Moletta’s third album and her first for Beacon Sound, is a powerful and ethereal statement of artistic community. Expanding on her previous work, each track represents a collaboration with a different female vocalist, with the foundational elements being generated entirely by her own voice. By turns haunting, enchanting, and inspiring, you won’t want to come up for air once you’ve been pulled under. Representing a
musical practice that is distinctly feminist, this is an album with a longer view in mind, to an age when the altars were to goddesses and women were centered as powerful beings representing the earth’s cycles of regeneration and renewal. Oceanine then, in all its beauty, can be viewed as an album of survival. It is deeply transportive, accessing something that lies within all of us. As the late, great Lithuanian folklorist and archaeologist Marija Gimbutas noted, “We must refocus our collective memory. The necessity for this has never been greater as we discover that the path of 'progress' is extinguishing the very conditions for life on earth.”

Jolanda Moletta is a multimedia artist and one-woman electronic choir. She creates wordless compositions through extended vocal techniques, integrating wearable-controlled live processing, alongside symbolic visuals. Moletta considers her performances to be a collective ritual and creates her Sonic & Visual Spells following the cycles of nature and the moon. Jolanda's 2022 critically acclaimed album Nine Spells was released on the Ambientologist label, followed by Night Caves on Whitelabrecs in 2025. Moletta’s artistic practice is a radical and spiritual journey through sound art, ritual, and the symbolic archaeology of the feminine.

Oceanine is inspired by sirens, water nymphs, and the timeless call of the sea. At its core lies Jolanda’s deep, lifelong connection to the Mediterranean Sea and to the ancient and modern myths and folklore that have emerged from its waters. Growing up by the Mar Ligure, Jolanda was surrounded by stories carried by salt, wind, and waves: legends of sirens, echoes of ancient voices, and the sea as both origin and oracle. This intimate relationship with the Mediterranean is not merely a backdrop, but a living source that shapes Oceanine’s emotional, symbolic, and sonic world.

Each track features a different female vocalist, creating a rich tapestry of voices, styles, and perspectives. This artistic choice not only broadens the album’s sonic palette, but also deepens its narrative core: celebrating the power, beauty, and mystique of feminine energy through myth, history, and sound.

The entire album is built exclusively from the human voice, processed and layered, yet always remaining voice, and nothing else. For each piece, Jolanda invited every vocalist involved to contribute a raw stem: a short, unedited melodic fragment of just a few seconds, inspired by the album’s themes. These intimate vocal seeds became the foundation of each track: the guest artists’ voices appear as brief, melodic stems, while the entire surrounding “orchestral” fabric is created solely from Jolanda’s own layered and processed voice. In this way, Jolanda’s voice becomes the Ocean itself, embracing, absorbing, and carrying the sirens’ calls within a vast, immersive soundscape. Every song is a unique expression of the feminine experience, revealing its depth, complexity, and emotional range, echoing the call of the sea and the many faces of the siren archetype.

The figure of the siren has transformed across centuries. In myths of Ancient Greece and Rome, sirens were hybrid beings, part woman, part bird, whose irresistible songs lured sailors to their doom. During the Middle Ages, the image shifted toward the half-woman, half-fish figure, often associated with temptation and danger. Historically, the voice of women has often been feared. Sirens were considered harbingers of misfortune not simply because they seduced or destroyed, but because they were powerful liminal beings.

In Ancient Greek, sirens functioned as psychopomps: figures who existed between worlds and guided souls, especially between life and death. Their songs were believed to carry forbidden knowledge, including prophetic insight and the ability to reveal truths about fate and the future. The danger of the sirens lay in what they revealed: knowledge that humans were not meant, or ready, to hear.

Oceanine confronts this legacy head-on. The voices heard throughout the album are not merely beautiful: they are dark and luminous, wild and enchanting, magical, soothing, dreamy, and at times fractured or distorted. They whisper, lament, beckon, and enchant. Like sirens, they skim the surface of the water and sink into its depths, hovering on the edge between tenderness and danger, vulnerability and power. They rise toward the sky, dissolve into mist, and return as echoes charged with raw, elemental emotion: voices that seduce, warn, mourn, and remember. They refuse to be reduced to decoration.

Alongside the album’s release in May, Oceanine will also unfold as a visual and performative work through a short art film. The film includes a live session recorded inside a sea cave facing the Mar Ligure, the very coastline where Jolanda spent her childhood, dreaming of sirens and listening to the sea as if it were speaking directly to her. This site-specific performance reconnects the music to its place of origin, allowing the voice to resonate within stone, water, and air, and transforming the cave into both a sanctuary and a threshold between myth and reality.

What if the sirens’ songs were considered dangerous because they carried another truth, an ancient truth long forgotten?

Oceanine embraces the idea that we are still deeply woven into myth. Though we may see ourselves as rational and modern beings, our world is saturated with ancient symbols and archetypes, often distorted, simplified, or stripped of their original meaning. And if those symbols are allowed to shift, if the mirror once held by the siren becomes an invitation to look beyond appearances and into what has been obscured, then we may finally uncover a deeper truth and reclaim the voice that was always ours.

Oceanine is not just an album. It is a reclamation, a spell, and a call from the depths.

Fifteen years after their first album "Time for a Change", and drawing on the experience of two others ("Elephanz" 2017, and "Rien de personnel" 2023), ELEPHANZ now returns with a fourth album that carries the scent of first loves, the kind you sing from the heart with your hands gripping a guitar.

"Love. Hurt. Repeat." tells, across ten songs, the story of a return to oneself, like coming home after years spent roaming the world, only to realize that everything you needed to understand yourself was already there at the starting line.

To help you understand what this new album makes me feel, I'd like to tell you about my first meeting with Jon and Max in 2009, when I became the band's bassist. Sixteen years ago, I discovered these two young men and set off in their family Kangoo van on my very first tour.

Through our early rehearsals around the piano of their childhood, I discovered their love for pop music in all its breadth, always in search of harmonies and melodies that touch the heart in the simplest way and gently ease your sorrows along the way. With them, I learned to appreciate the mainstream hits I had previously dismissed on principle, and I discovered the demanding art of melody as I listened to them sing about love and friendship through unforgettable catchphrases.

Listening today to some of the songs from their new album, I think back to those two young men with a big-city rock look, shut away in the living room of their family home, talking only about leaving that dull countryside behind to live the big life in the capital (Streets of Rage). What I once took for a kind of revenge against the hostile environment of their adolescence was in fact an almost vital need to find their place among others, to feel understood in order to feel at ease in their own skin.

Today, I find them again with the same guitar and the same inexpensive Juno as back then, but with the confidence shaped by years of concerts, writing, studio encounters, and all kinds of experimentation. The music of this fourth album has never been so close to that of their earliest days, but their voices have been set free. They no longer sing about who they dreamed of becoming, but about who they have always been, their most distant concerns, sometimes even their darkest ones, yet always in search of the light.

It is as if ELEPHANZ had to travel all the way around the world to come face to face with themselves again. There is no longer any shame in being who you are, and it is even the best way to understand yourself, to exist and to heal. To heal from grief and heartbreak, to understand the child you once were and the one who carried them (Mother), to forgive yourself and finally learn to love yourself.

That is what makes this record as sensitive as it is powerful and strikingly truthful. It was written and recorded like a cry, live, in just a few weeks, using the instruments of their beginnings: sharp bass and drums, powerful guitars, and synthesizers that are at times soaring, at times carriers of liberating melodies. The art of ballads remains, as does that of universal pop songs.

There is a beautiful urgency here, the urgency of finding oneself again in order to understand oneself through both pain and beauty, and "Love. Hurt. Repeat." is its most perfect expression.

What the fuck?? What the fucking fuck?? It's the only realistic response to these dark, divisive and dangerous times. How do you react? How do you feel? How do you soundtrack? Immersion is the project of post punk musical architects Colin Newman (Wire) and Malka Spigel (Minimal Compact) and Matt Schulz (Holy Fuck, Savak & Lake Ruth). Since the pandemic, Immersion has been mainly working on their Nanocluster collaborations, but they have now re-engaged with the core project after a UK and USA tour gave them a shot of musical urgency and lyrical immediacy. If the Nanocluster project is about collaboration, then Immersion in 2025 is a response to where humanity finds itself in the second decade of the 21st century. It reacts to not only that relentless rhetoric of these times but also how we as humans should respond. Music is the message, the medium, the massage and the moment. This song collection manages to combine the unease with hope, minimally hypnotic songwriting with taut melodies and inventiveness with groove. The lead off track released on July 28th is "Use It Don't Lose It" which they describe as `An expression of us both together, saying the same thing for ourselves & for others. The words are so direct they need no explanation. Anyone could join in with the chanting!

In a most original impetus this album traverses forty years of Italian new wave and singer-songwriter tradition. As in the desert where Infesta’s urge is to walk, we are ambushed by the most intense thermal and sonic difference.

It is from here that this important journey we mustn’t miss begins. It leads us eight thousand meters deep in the blue abyss. Not quite enough to come out the other side and, as a kite, bestow all the heights that I will reach. These depths are nevertheless necessary to adjust our eyes to the darkness that lives within us, as a machine to burst our hearts to which we can’t and won't be accomplices.

Machine against machine. The increasing pressure of the lashes of an incessant current, at times sweet and at times sour, on which all the courage is sung and yet is everywhere dispersed like thoughts on water and melodies to be lost at sea. Darkness persists: you said the world can be lived where all was taken. And it’s a crazy and estranging babbling that, stripped by a current, answers: never never never never, in no direction.

My companions, come back, the breaking point has been found, we sing together. Leaf after leaf the time has come: it is possible to destroy the Machine in a mad blinding light.

GOLLIWOG is billy woods' first album in two years, preceded by 2023's Maps, his second collaboration with producer Kenny Segal. That nimble travelogue has little in common with woods' newest work, despite the fact that Segal shows up a couple times in the credits. GOLLIWOG is a haunting collection that weaves horror, humor, surrealism and Afropessimism into a cinematic tapestry, aided and abetted by a murderer's row of producers. African zombies, time traveling trap cars, malevolent ragdolls and a dying Frantz Fanon are just a few of the revelers in woods' danse macabre. GOLLIWOG features production from The Alchemist, Kenny Segal, EL-P, Conductor Williams, Preservation, Messiah Musik, Sadhugold, Ant (Atmosphere), Shabaka Hutchings, Steel Tipped Dove, DJ Haram, Willie Green, Jeff Markey, Saint Abdullah, and LA-based experimental jazz trio Human Error Club. Meanwhile, woods is joined on the mic by Backwoodz labelmates ELUCID and Cavalier, along with rappers Bruiser Wolf, Despot, Al.Divino, and singer-songwriter Yolanda Watson. GOLLIWOG is another triumph in the woods oeuvre, as layered and compelling as anything he has ever done. A black carnival pitched in a muddy field overnight, empty rides whirring and clattering in the dark.

The cycle of life and nature is a precious and wondrous thing. We are born. We learn. We live. We die. And after death, another life awaits. When the world succumbs to the cold, dark grasp of winter, the promise of a spring birthing everything anew keeps hope alive. Such is the journey we make, and such is the lifespan of “Faþir”. Heaving, pulsating, filled with contrasts: ardent hostility and fiery revenge, blossoming life and lush fertility, soul-wrenching grief and deep anguish. Such is the path we walk under the guidance of the deities – the helping hand of a father, the nurturing wisdom in times of need. But sometimes, a treacherous god leads us into death and despair, albeit always with an underlying purpose. Such is “Faþir”.

With eloquence, elegance, and emotion, L. Swärd has created another monolith of sublime art to add to Forndom’s impeccable discography. This highly awaited follow-up to 2016’s “Dauðra Dura” is nothing short of a modern masterpiece, rooted in ancient ways. Expressive vocals and strings soar atop a foundation of unyielding drums, like spirits dancing in the skies yet bound to the human pulse. Never surrendering its strong connection to our mortal world, “Faþir” carries a deeply sacred dimension – a glimpse of the divine, seen through a lens of devotion and veracity. The joining of death and life, if you will.

The thick atmospheres and vast inner landscapes Forndom creates are more prevalent than ever, and from the first trembling string introduction of “Jakten” to the last wistful beat of “Hemkomst”, one is transported to another time, another place, and another mindset – leaving behind the calamity, stress, and superficiality of the modern world, and rediscovering the lost wisdom hidden behind the veil of passing years.

Building upon the striking elegance of their first collaboration, Tobias Freund and Shun Watanabe reunite as Tobias. Doltz. for another extended excursion into designer electronica with a warm, dubby glow at its centre. Their first album Versus arrived on Delsin in early 2025 as a result of a chance meeting at Eden Festival the year before. The spark of inspiration led quickly to a complete and coherent first body of work, and the same can be said for its prompt, equally inspired follow-up. Dealing in the gentle hum of digitally sculpted ambience and needlepoint micro-pulses, Freund and Watanabe evoke the experimental spirit and mellow immersion of golden-era clicks n' cuts techno. While that early 00s phenomenon sometimes cracked around the edges of its DSP limitations, here a rich and porous sound world blooms out from the crisply defined structure of each track. At times the palette opens up to more organic sound matter, and there is ample space for full-bodied synths to ratchet down the rhythm, but a strong digital core of granular processing and exacting sound design form the bedrock of the album's subtle, sublime sound. Even though its calm demeanour radiates an instant charm, like all great electronica Frontiers Of Science is an album of hidden depths to be absorbed steadily over subsequent trips.

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Collateral Intelligence's Butterflies in Funerals is widescreen, sometimes dark, often hopeful electronica with one eye on the stars, but grounded in the sheer cathartic necessity of its creation.

The new moniker from Maltese wunderkind Neil "Acidulant" Hales, the album was formed during a turbulent period in the artist's life, when his father was seriously ill in hospital. Butterflies in Funerals is his way of expressing the complexity of emotion he was going through at the time.

"To me it all looked like a very dark movie," he says. "That's why the tracks are are at times cold or have a sad, emotional, or hopeful feeling."

Drawing on his impressive background in acid house and electro – with releases on Balkan Vinyl and Jack Trax – the album takes in mutant breakbeat, battle-scarred ambient, and tripped out 303 grooves, but pushes his sound further and deeper than ever before.

The album cover features specially designed artwork by rising star Fei Meng, who will be exhibiting at the Royal Society of British Artists later this year.

So in 2021 join Collateral Intelligence on a journey into the recesses of the soul, and emerge, purified, and ready for the rest of the trip.

With two albums released—and a third arriving—in less than two years, Agitator are as ferocious in their release pace as they are on stage. All the more surprising, then, that the forthcoming album "Året av sex" is the darkest and slowest work they have made to date. Influenced as much by chanting witch doctors as by Christian Kjellvander and Leonard Cohen, and drawing from electronic and avant-garde music, the band reshapes its sound into something more brooding and expansive.

Partly recorded in a barn on the island of Öland, the album’s soundscape sees the drum kit augmented—and at times replaced—by scrap metal found in a nearby bay. Through this process, Agitator expand the idea of both what a creative process can be and what a rock band might look like in 2026. The result is bold, unsettling, and compelling: an album that digs deeper than many are willing to in Sweden today.

The lyrics on "Året av sex" are darker, more dangerous, and more precise than ever before. Given greater space within the broader sonic landscape, they become central to understanding this new incarnation of Agitator.

Agitator’s new album is released on March 27 via Adrian Recordings, preceded by three singles. The band’s first two albums have previously been praised by outlets including Dagens Nyheter, P3, Gaffa, Café, and PSL, leading to sold-out tours. A full Swedish tour is scheduled in connection with the album release.