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Perhaps best described as a pioneer of the underground experimental scene, the signature of Jørgen Teller on the musical landscape of Denmark traces back to the late 1970’s. Sprung out of a whirlpool of post-punk and art school ideas, Teller has relentlessly been chiseling away on the constrictions of music in various bands, collaborations and solo projects ever since. Searching out its farthest outposts - be it free jazz, noise or acousmatic music - Teller has strived towards an approach to music without rules, often by way of improvisation and usually with the aid of electric guitar.

This album is based on a live performance held at the Inter Arts Center in Malmö in early 2022, where Teller performed a semi-improvised piece in homage to the poet Poul Borum, whom he had worked with in the mid-90’s closely before Borum’s death in 1996.

As a composer, Teller relies on a set of “basic choices” that becomes a “precise point of departure” - where he can then go against his “good knowing” of the science, trends and different schools of music and go straight into his own instincts as a performer. For this performance, he used pre- recorded material of three rhythm boxes (all out of sync), timbales and sessions on Erica synths.

In dialogue with the label, Teller has focused on extracting the recording of the rhythm boxes and timbales alone, emphasizing the tension between the rhythms. With minimalist drum sequences that could easily be placed in a proto-techno context, and the whooshing of what might be an ancient rhombus instrument, there is a feeling of a primitive presence to Teller’s rhythmic excursions. A throwback to the spiritual realms of a wordless society fighting the demons of chance.

Occasionally pierced by stark industrial drum crashes and rattling post-punk percussion, it also conjures echoes from the darker side of the 1980s. In citing Borum as its inspiration, Teller shares that he channels the poet’s energy and their shared love of “noisy stuff and darkness”.
But the pace can also go somewhere close to breakbeat on track B2, where a whirlwind of rhythmic elements clash into a deranged deconstructed club tune.

The album also features a remix by a fellow colleague of the acousmatic community; the composer Jacob Riis. On the closing track B3, Riis quietly manipulates and balances the elements of Teller’s recordings and gently releases them into a contemplative pool of static.

Anna Erhard returns with her third Album Botanical Garden, on which she expertly deconstructs social mores with her trademark lightness of touch, seeking out the funny side of life's everyday's frustrations with a breeziness and genuine warmth. Available on 180g black Vinyl Side A 170 Botanical Garden B.M.G. Academy Spa Package Side B Hot Family Stash Not Rick Teeth on the King

Death and the Maiden’s Uneven Ground draws back the velvet curtain on the trio’s crepuscular dreamworld with nine songs of their distinctive shadowy slow-motion fusion of underground electronic dance music and post-punk guitars washed through with psychic unease. The trio’s name is taken from that of a nineteenth century engraving by Edvard Munch: an artwork steeped in mythology, exploring the dark boundaries between love and death, strength and frailty, beauty and decay. Their three albums to date each reinforce the symbolism of the name, and Uneven Ground’s title could apply as much to their own journey in the years since Wisteria, their previous album, as to the times in which we live. Bassist and vocalist Lucinda King is the bedrock, guide and storyteller. Guitarist Hope Robertson weaves swooping, soaring motifs and sometimes deconstructed layers of noise to build analogue atmosphere for these alternate worlds. Danny Brady’s beats mix old-school drum machines with electronic tones and distortion, while his synth arrangements blend elements of psy-trance and acid house with more amniotic ambient and industrial textures. While Uneven Ground may be the most overtly “pop”-sounding album in their catalogue, it also ratchets up the ominous atmosphere, noise and experimentation. Once again King’s evocative lyrics appear as cryptic stories, built from events, memories, dreams, moments, warnings, regrets; where questions raised are left unanswered, and possibilities remain open.

Since first splashing on to the Southern California circuit in the mid-aughts, Geneva Jacuzzi (née Garvin) quickly cemented herself as the queen of the Los Angeles underground. Her immersive and unhinged multimedia performances are the stuff of legend, a psychotropic gallery of masks, costumes, confrontation, and massive art installations. Jacuzzi’s recordings are equally revered, catchy hooks and cryptic moods dusted in 4-track grit. The arrival of her third official full-length, and Dais Records debut, is cause for such celebration. Triple Fire vividly expands and crystallizes Jacuzzi’s signature fusion of midnight melody and mutant aerobics across a 12-track hit parade of wildcard synth-pop and sly post-apocalyptic camp. Her enthusiasm for the album is as bold as her body of work: “Halfway through, we started calling this the record of the prophecy, the record that’s going to save mankind.”



Opener “Laps of Luxury” sets the template – a strobe-lit dreamer’s delight of swaggering synth bass, Haçienda drum machinery, and sultry vocal spellcasting (“Tragic mysteries I’ve known for centuries / I burned all memories and turned to fantasy”). The collection burns through shades of sardonic strut (“Art Is Dangerous,” “Nu2U,” “Keep It Secret”), coldwave kiss off (“Speed Of Light,” co-produced by Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty), retro-futurist body music (“Dry,” “Scene Ballerina,” “Bow Tie Eater”), and cheeky glitterball pop (“Take It Or Leave It,” “Heart Full Of Poison” co-produced by Roderick Edens and Andrew Briggs). She likens the eclectic spectrum of moods to the continuum of human emotions: “Funny, sexy, sad, scary, witty, hopeful, menacing. Eventually it deconstructs, turns into a party, and then ends sweet and soft.”



Taken as a whole, Triple Fire comes as close as any document yet to capturing Jacuzzi’s kaleidoscopic alchemy of pop sugar and chaos energy, flickering between icy and ironic, chic and surreal, hungry and heartsick. Hers is a muse as rare as it is regenerative, forever reborn at the precipice of the next chorus: “Someone said that Alcatraz had fallen into the sea / Almost sounded like an angel calling me in a dream / I felt an electric shock when I picked up the microphone.”

This is the repeated call and the rallying chorus of the nearly 40-minute centerpiece to composer and percussionist Asher Gamedze’s new album Constitution. The expansive double album, a minoritarian fellowship in breath, is Gamedze’s follow-up to 2023’s Turbulence and Pulse (IARC0057), and his first with The Black Lungs. The album – recorded in one day at Cape Town’s Sound and Motion Studios – is an elaboration of the possibilities of autonomous constitution in and through polyrhythmic, modal, large ensemble music.
On Constitution, the power of the question, the possibility of an improvised answer and the celebration of being together exists not in the solo but in the group, the ensemble. Here The Black Lungs collectively explore and deconstruct the conceptual, tonal, and atonal possibilities of themes which are at once of old and new dreams - curious and instantiative, melancholic and emergent.

“The Black Lungs is inspired by the revolutionary thought and practice of the Black Consciousness Movement. In particular, the relationship between antagonism – constituting a united front of all the oppressed against white supremacy and racial capitalism – and the possibilities for resistance and elaboration - the creative militant capacities of those assembled – enabled and unleashed by that process of constitution.”

Since first splashing on to the Southern California circuit in the mid-aughts, Geneva Jacuzzi (née Garvin) quickly cemented herself as the queen of the Los Angeles underground. Her immersive and unhinged multimedia performances are the stuff of legend, a psychotropic gallery of masks, costumes, confrontation, and massive art installations. Jacuzzi’s recordings are equally revered, catchy hooks and cryptic moods dusted in 4-track grit. The arrival of her third official full-length, and Dais Records debut, is cause for such celebration. Triple Fire vividly expands and crystallizes Jacuzzi’s signature fusion of midnight melody and mutant aerobics across a 12-track hit parade of wildcard synth-pop and sly post-apocalyptic camp. Her enthusiasm for the album is as bold as her body of work: “Halfway through, we started calling this the record of the prophecy, the record that’s going to save mankind.”



Opener “Laps of Luxury” sets the template – a strobe-lit dreamer’s delight of swaggering synth bass, Haçienda drum machinery, and sultry vocal spellcasting (“Tragic mysteries I’ve known for centuries / I burned all memories and turned to fantasy”). The collection burns through shades of sardonic strut (“Art Is Dangerous,” “Nu2U,” “Keep It Secret”), coldwave kiss off (“Speed Of Light,” co-produced by Andrew Clinco of Drab Majesty), retro-futurist body music (“Dry,” “Scene Ballerina,” “Bow Tie Eater”), and cheeky glitterball pop (“Take It Or Leave It,” “Heart Full Of Poison” co-produced by Roderick Edens and Andrew Briggs). She likens the eclectic spectrum of moods to the continuum of human emotions: “Funny, sexy, sad, scary, witty, hopeful, menacing. Eventually it deconstructs, turns into a party, and then ends sweet and soft.”



Taken as a whole, Triple Fire comes as close as any document yet to capturing Jacuzzi’s kaleidoscopic alchemy of pop sugar and chaos energy, flickering between icy and ironic, chic and surreal, hungry and heartsick. Hers is a muse as rare as it is regenerative, forever reborn at the precipice of the next chorus: “Someone said that Alcatraz had fallen into the sea / Almost sounded like an angel calling me in a dream / I felt an electric shock when I picked up the microphone.”

Pirates Press Records is proud to re-release Close My Eyes, the 2002 album by NYC ska-reggae legends The Slackers - a complex and nuanced album that shows the band's versatility and capacity for both commentary and introspection. It is often said - to the point of cliche - that New York City is a "character" in the work of the city's most noted filmmakers. A similar statement could be made about the artistic symbiosis between the city and The Slackers. From the Bronx-born accent of lead vocalist Vic Ruggiero to the band's embrace of cosmopolitan musical traditions from a melting pot of cultural origins, New York defines The Slackers at least as much as the band have contributed to defining the sound of New York for well over 30 years.Therefore, it bears mentioning that - aside from a 2002 collaborative album by "The Slackersand Friends" - Close My Eyesis the band's first proper studio LP released after the traumatic terrorist attacks on their home city in 2001, and the band took enough time to reckon with the global fallout of this tragedy. "So feel free go steal and rob, revolution ain't my job," sings Ruggiero on the title track. "And if I sing your happy song, please don't tell me I am wrong." It is the statement of an artist searching for a way to still sing about joy and life in uncertain times of great upheaval. And ultimately the band must reckon with these times. On "Real War," toaster Marq Lyn takes lead vocals as the band addresses the march to war that was omnipresent in those early days of the 21st century, stating in no uncertain terms that it was "Time to fight the real war_ Against hunger and poverty_ For racial equality." The Slackers make it clear that while the machinations of hawkish politicians grind on, the real needs of people all over the world are left behind. This tension between a dangerous world and the struggles of one's personal life are present throughout the record, and the band weaves stories from the whole spectrum of human emotion, war, heartbreak, joy, and everything in between. Bookended by instrumental tracks, opening with the energetic "Shankbon" and ending with moody dub reggae, these veteran virtuoso players ultimately take listeners on a masterful journey through the human experience.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce a reissue of Chico Mello and Helinho Brandão’s self-titled release from 1984, the first return to vinyl of this classic of Brazilian experimental music with its original cover art and complete track listing. An under-recognised figure whose work inhabits a singular terrain where radical new music techniques and music theatre meet musica popular brasileira, Mello has lived and worked in Berlin since the late 1980s. A student of Dieter Schnebel, Mello played in the 90s iteration of Arnold Dreyblatt’s Orchestra of Excited Strings alongside compatriot Silvia Ocougne, with whom he produced a radical and hilarious deconstruction of MPB classics on Musica Brasileira De(s)composta (an early and rather atypical release on Edition Wandelweiser).

On this release, his only recording predating his move to Europe, Mello works with the alto saxophonist Helinho Brandão, who appears to be otherwise unknown outside Brazil. The record’s six tracks range from solo saxophone improvisation to densely layered ensemble works bridging minimalism, acoustic sound art and a plaintive melodic sensibility that calls up Edu Lobo or Milton Nascimento. Beginning with a dramatic, dissonant wind and string surge from which emerge ominously pounding piano chords, opener ‘Água’ slowly builds in intensity, a halo of clustered vocal harmonies gradually closing in on Brandão’s squealing sax until the piece opens up to reveal a gorgeous passage of melodic singing. The piano accompaniment reduces to tolling bass notes as the voice begins a repeated incantation, suggesting a ritualistic atmosphere reminiscent of parts of Xenakis’ setting of Oresteia. Dissonant, sawing tremolos on the strings climb to a crescendo before disappearing into the sounds of water being poured and splashed into metal vessels, presented not as a field recording but as a percussive element performed by the ensemble. A child’s voice then appears, singing to piano accompaniment the same melody heard earlier in the piece. After a brief solo alto improvisation from Brandão, working with the guttural pops and fleeting melodic gestures of Braxton or Roscoe Mitchell, the remainder of the first side is dedicated to the leisurely unfolding of ‘Baiando’ over the course of twelve minutes. A trio for Brandão on soprano saxophone, Mello on a very period-appropriate phased nylon string guitar and Edu Dequech on bongos, the performance eases its way hypnotically through subtle variations on a set of rhythmic and melodic patterns, almost derailed at points by Brandão’s wild forays into extended technique but held together by Mello’s droning guitar notes.

The second side opens with another multi-part epic for a larger ensemble, ‘Matraca’, which makes use of strings, electric guitars and a wide range of South American percussion instruments. Rasping violin harmonics hover as drum hits, repeated guitar notes and triangle accompany a slowly descending bass glissando. A sudden change in direction introduces a thrumming, incessantly repeated bowed bass tone, beginning a series of episodes of minimalist phasing and pattern variation, the combinations of electric guitars and orchestral instruments giving the ensemble an ad hoc charm like the early Penguin Café Orchestra but with more percussive drive. Eventually the piece is overrun by a cacophony of the titular matracas (a kind of ratchet/cog rattle). Following a lyrical trio improvisation by Mello, Brandão and Gerson Kornin on bass, the final ‘Danca’ focuses entirely on Mello’s layered acoustic guitars and vocals, using this restricted palette to build up a haunting piece of almost orchestral density, reminiscent of the 70s work of Egberto Gismonti in how it thickens a folkish ambience with harmonic sophistication.

Arriving in a starkly beautiful gatefold sleeve and sounding better than ever in its new remaster, one might call the stunning music contained on Chico Mello/Helinho Brandão ahead of its time. But what (other than some of Mello’s own work) produced in the years since its initial release has really touched the organic fusion of minimalism, free improvisation, radical instrumental technique and popular song achieved here? Forty years after its first release, Chico Mello/Helinho Brandão remains music of the future.

Emerald vinyl LP is for Indies only. Cassette is also for indies only. San Francisco Bay Area-based metal desconstructionists’ latest is both inspired by the loss of a bandmate and the legacy of Oakland A’s legend Vida Blue. Time is a slippery fish. Loss has inspired Mamaleek’s latest full-length album, titled Vida Blue. This marks the San Francisco Bay Area metal deconstructionists’ eighth album and their third as a full lineup. Tragedy struck in March of 2023 when the band lost a longtime friend and member, keyboardist Eric Livingston, leaving the group, which began as a duo of two brothers and later expanded to a five-piece, now with only four members. Despite this profound loss, Mamaleek persevered, performing as a quartet at various festivals, including the 2023 edition of Tilburg. The band returned to the studio to create new material that appropriately reflects their journey through loss and honors their fallen comrade. The resulting album draws inspiration from the legacy of Oakland A’s baseball legend Vida Blue, whose former team coincidentally announced its relocation to Las Vegas that same year. The band members themselves describe this poignant chapter in their own words: “Time is a slippery fish. Maybe only someone like Vida could grasp it. Although he’s left time behind, his image and that lefty heat remain in the memories of many. Eventually they’ll be forgotten, and hopefully replaced with even more exultant ones. This musical recording is a reflection on loss and its acceptance. We explore several examples for each song, including the loss of pride, of money, of glory, of country, of sanity, of a favorite sports team, of significant others, and, every day, one’s self. It also explores various associated moods fear, panic, reverence, stoicism, and steadfastness—to arrive at a resolution: Loss is only a test, the glue that holds and erodes each memory, the connection that binds and loosens us all, pitch by pitch, inning by inning. This is your celebration.” Vida Blue is a person, moment, and memory, together the crystallization of apocalypse: “unveiling,” “disclosure.”

Fractal Void is an avant-garde duo based in Düsseldorf, Germany. Their experimental music blends electronic and contemporary genres located somewhere in the field of musical tension between ambient, drone, halfstep and floor-affine IDM. During their live sets, Fractal Void create vertical reflections by processing sounds through software and interaction with real instruments in every unique musical performance like the Chinese contemporary calligraphic practice Dishu.

Their debut album Elemental Collection unveils a dense and lavishly layered transformation of artificial organic signals, sculpting an auditory world filled with emotive landscapes, overgrown polyrhythms and futuristic elements. Embedded within each track are field recordings serving as the heartbeat of the album. Through innovative and expansive deconstruction, Fractal Void create an energetic and sometimes contemplative experience.

The persons behind Fractal Void:
Back in 2008, their musical journey began with winning a Spectrasonics competition using field recordings of a locker door, that was implemented as a bass synth. Their collaboration was continued as producers of the eight-piece electronic jazz project „Mothers of Guru“.

Marcus Scheltinga is a composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Besides studying jazz trombone at the Conservatorium Hilversum and the Folkwanghochschule, he works as a musical director, lecturer and coach in 39 countries around the world. From ZDF sound design to live and studio performances with international greats, his own productions have included such as Grammy winner Larry Carlton and Peter Erskine. Mid-east and Indian inspired, Marcus is a true story teller as a musician and composer.

BORGBORG is a producer and DJ. She moves freely in different styles of electronic music with a focus on avant-garde driving techno, dark hypnotic vibes seamlessly blended with deconstructed beats, noise and timeless elements of IDM. She is a member of About Repetition, a group of artists dedicated to the research of repetition through artistic means, collaborating with a wide range of other collectives across Europe and co-founder of the techno event series „SCHLEIFEN“. 

'Gemelo' is the new album from songwriter and pop auteur Angélica Garcia. Its title is a reference to the twin self – the idea of a second, more intuitive self within. It’s a vibrant, prismatic hybrid-pop record that soundtracks a journey through the different stages and forms of grief. Angélica explores its inherent loneliness, beauty, and tension, eventually finding liberation. 'Gemelo' also expertly deconstructs facets of universal themes like religion, spirit, heritage, womanhood, and ancestral veneration.

Born in East LA with Mexican and Salvadoran lineage, Angélica embodies the essence of contemporary America, a cultural landscape continually evolving through its fusion with rich Hispanic influences. In a reflection of modern America itself, 'Gemelo' also marks Garcia’s first album sung almost entirely in Spanish, inviting listeners to reconsider what they think an American record can be.

'Gemelo' was produced by Carlos Arévalo of LA-based rock band Chicano Batman, his first time working in such a role. Sequenced with extreme intent, the album progresses from a delicate, tender entry on Side A which serves almost like a meditation, to the visceral intensity of Side B, which immerses into the difficult, at times terrifying work of healing. With growth and exploration like wind behind her, Garcia arrives at her clearest and most fully realized vision of self on 'Gemelo.'

'Gemelo' is the anticipated follow-up to her 2020 breakthrough 'Cha Cha Palace,' which featured on several year-end lists and brought Angélica to NPR’s Tiny Desk.




[d] Ángel [eterna]

A1 - Tensor
Opening with an earworm minimal old school melody which lives long in the mind, Tensor sees JLM Productions kick off his latest Spatial EP in style, flexing his versatility in the genre with an exquisite Hot Pants break pattern in delightfully laid back fashion. Showcasing sublime filtering techniques, a lush 808 bassline and a nominal usage of kicks, Tensor lives long in the memory - and rightfully so.
A2 - Pseudovector
A real treat in store for fans of clean, edited breaks as JLM Productions immediately drops the crispest assortment of drum samples which will delight the ear and the feet in equal measure. Pseudovector is a real treat for the senses with an immense high note melody punctuating the track as the breaks build and build, adding layers of punchy detail which combine beautifully with cymbals, bongos and gentle atmospherics.
AA1 - Helios Drift
A more laid back piece that harks back to a special bygone age of slower atmospherics - as is Spatial's speciality - Helios Drift offers a feast of breakbeats with distinctive tribal maracas jubilantly shaping a unique vibe. Soothing padwork provides an elegant backdrop to the beats with rolled chords and sci fi melodies draped throughout, deconstructing towards a polished outro to this memorable mid-set breather.
AA2 - Wavefunction
Instant rolling 2-step vibes unfold as Wavefunction sees JLM Productions close the EP in style with a track which won't fail to move the discerning dancefloor. Immense 80's synthwave vibes tell a tale of cyber dystopia, highly evocative notes washing harmoniously with the breakbeats while a superb bassline solo in the breakdown invites contemplation from the audience before the beat rolls on to a reflective conclusion.
Words by Chris Hayes (Spatial / Red Mist)

Repress!

** Now available on vinyl* Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in
20th century music. Though he studied at the prestigious
arts institutions Julliard and Mills College, by the mid-
1960s Reich set about dismantling the very orthodoxy that
he had been trained in. Forming a new musical language
based on repetitive processes, Reich became established
as part of the so-called 'Big Four' of New York minimalists
(along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip
Glass). Reich's influence can easily be seen today in both
the classical world and contemporary pop music.
'Four Organs' is the ultimate minimalist composition.
Performed by Reich, Glass, Art Murphy and Steve Chambers,
four identical Farfisa organs strike a single chord and
gradually lengthen each note to produce polyrhythms between
the players. Anchored by Jon Gibson's stoicallysteady
pulse on maracas, the piece deconstructs its opening
burst to a sustained mass of sound - stretching the tones to
create (in Reich's words) 'slow-motion music.'
Inspired by Reich's early training on drums, 'Phase Patterns'
treats the keyboards like tuned percussion instruments:
a basic rhythm pattern is played in unison and almost imperceptibly increases tempo to move out-of-sync.
Each progressive cycle emphasizes unique figures that are
not generated by an individual alone, but rather emerge
from the communal expression of the group.
Originally released on Shandar in 1971, Four Organs /
Phase Patterns is one of most highly regarded avant-garde
recordings in the past 45 years. This CD release features
cover photography by artist Michael Snow and is recommended
for fans of Neu!, Glenn Branca and Tim Hecker.

Palmyra’s full length LP You Are What You Absorb was released in 2013. “The title comes from a lifetime of absorbing music and pinching production ideas, not just listening to music, but deconstructing it and putting it back together my own way” as described by Palmyra. With the release of two singles, Shy Boy and You’re My Brian Jones, Stevie Van Zandt took notice again, and added You Are What You Absorb to the Underground Garage music library. Palmyra has signed with Wicked Cool Records, released Come Spy With Me with her band The Doppel Gang, formed all gal trio , The Coolies with Kim Shattuck and Melanie Vammen, and released an EP, Uh Oh... It’s The Coolies, and various 45’s with the label. Now, a decade later, Wicked Cool Records is reissuing You Are What You Absorb on vinyl for the first time. “I’m thrilled that this album is finally coming out on vinyl. I’ve always been proud of this one, and feel that it holds up in every way - the songwriting, the production, and am looking forward to a new life and audience for the record.” Palmyra Delran

Suns of the Heart is a follow up to Junior Boys and Caribou live collaborator Colin Fisher's Reflections of the Invisible World and the preceding album V le Pape.

Suns of the Heart was created as part of the process of building on the relationship of documenting Fisher's live solo process and augmenting it over the course of 3 records with studio compositional ideas.

With Suns of the Heart, Fisher connected with his good friend David Psutka, who released Reflections of the Invisible World on his label Halocline Trance, to engineer and produce the project.

The concept for the album was to deconstruct Fisher's live process and apply a studio sampling methodology from hip hop to establish foundational layers for each track. Psutka was the perfect partner for this endeavor considering his long history of electronic music as well as his appreciation for interesting conceptual ideas.

Psutka essentially became a co-composer for a few tracks and was an indispensable force in constructing this unique document. Together they sampled various sounds, textures, incidental sounds from me on various instruments, reconfigured them in Psutka's daw and then built compositions on top of them.

Conceptually this reflects Fisher's live process, where he samples and loops sounds in transparent ways and orchestrate textures, sounds, chord changes into fully realized compositions in real time. The freedom in the studio scenario enables complete separation of each sound and texture for mixing, orchestration, and composition. The result is a compelling augmentation of his live process with the addition of Psutka's skill and conceptual sense for an entire new synthesis of ideas to something not previously possible or imaginable.

The album title and track titles were all inspired by the work of Henry Corbin.

Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in 20th century music. As part of the so-called "Big Four" of New York minimalists (along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass), Reich influenced both the classical world and contemporary pop music.





Back in print ! Steve Reich remains one of the most important figures in 20th century music. Though he studied at the prestigious arts institutions Julliard and Mills College, by the mid-1960s Reich set about dismantling the very orthodoxy that he had been trained in. Forming a new musical language based on repetitive processes, Reich became established as part of the so-called "Big Four" of New York minimalists (along with La Monte Young, Terry Riley and Philip Glass). Reich's influence can easily be seen today in both the classical world and contemporary pop music."Four Organs" is the ultimate minimalist composition. Performed by Reich, Glass, Art Murphy and Steve Chambers, four identical Farfisa organs strike a single chord and gradually lengthen each note to produce polyrhythms between the players. Anchored by Jon Gibson's stoically-steady pulse on maracas, the piece deconstructs its opening burst to a sustained mass of sound – stretching the tones to create (in Reich's words) "slow-motion music."

Inspired by Reich's early training on drums, "Phase Patterns" treats the keyboards like tuned percussion instruments: a basic rhythm pattern is played in unison and almost imperceptibly increases tempo to move out-of-sync. Each progressive cycle emphasizes unique figures that are not generated by an individual alone, but rather emerge from the communal expression of the group. Originally released on Shandar in 1971, Four Organs / Phase Patterns is one of the most highly regarded avant-garde recordings of the past 50 years. This first-time vinyl reissue features cover photography by artist Michael Snow and is recommended for fans of Neu!, Glenn Branca and Tim Hecker.

2024 Repress

Niandra LaDes And Usually Just A T-Shirt is the first solo record by John Frusciante. Between 1990 and 1992 the guitarist made a series of 4-track recordings, which at the time were not intended for commercial release. After leaving the band Red Hot Chili Peppers in 1992, Frusciante was encouraged by friends to release the material that he wrote in his spare time during the Blood Sugar Sex Magik sessions.

Originally released on Rick Rubin's American Recordings label in 1994, Niandra LaDes is a mystifying work of tortured beauty. Frusciante plays various acoustic and electric guitars, experimenting with layers of vocals, piano and reverse tape effects. Channeling the ghosts of Syd Barrett and Skip Spence, his lyrics are at once utterly personal and willfully opaque.

Frusciante's rapidfire, angular playing shows how key he was in the Chili Peppers' evolution away from their funk-rock roots. His cover of "Big Takeover" perfectly deconstructs the Bad Brains original with laid-back tempo, twelve-string guitar and a fierce handle on melody.

The album's second part - thirteen untitled tracks that Frusciante defines as one complete piece, Usually Just A T-Shirt - contains several instrumentals featuring his signature guitar style. Sparse phrasing, delicate counterpoint and ethereal textures recall Neu/Harmonia's Michael Rother or The Durutti Column's Vini Reilly.

On the front cover, Frusciante appears in 1920s drag - a nod to Marcel Duchamp's alter-ego Rrose Sélavy - which comes from Toni Oswald's film Desert in the Shape.

This first-time vinyl release has been carefully remastered and approved by the artist. The double LP set is packaged with gatefold jacket and printed inner sleeves.

Exzellenter Sampler mit den besten Partitüren aus den ersten 4 Ausgaben der "John Wick" Actionfilmreihe mit Keanu Reeves in der Hauptrolle. Pulsierende, elektronische Beats und wunderschöne, eindringliche Melodien von Komponisten wie Tyler Bates, Joel J. Richard und Le Castle Vania, eingespielt von den besten Filmmusikern Londons, fangen die Stimmung und Intensität der Serie perfekt ein.

It’s an album where I’ve limited myself to using only two instruments – a metallophone and a four-track tape recorder. Explorations of the metallophone and tape sounds, deconstructed and reintegrated into tracks with cassette loops. This release is part of this year’s series, dedicated not to electronic but to electro-acoustic music with a focus on analog recording and production.

Dennis Brown's roots classic "Milk and Honey" freshly remastered,
complete with Clive Hunt's original "Bitter Sweet" dub (under his Azul
moniker) on the A Side
On the B side, Jay Glass Dubs unfolds a skewed and deconstructed
contemporary dub. Strictly limited- edition white label vinyl. Once it's gone its
gone.

Originally released in 1990, Royal Trux's 'Twin Infinitives' is being re-issued in all its (yet to be translated) alien glory, by Fire Records. A dismantled overture that sprawls out over two records, an avant-garde masterpiece that was the spark for Drag City Records and generations of new sound seeking musicians. Hailed in the same immortal breath as Beefheart's 'Trout Mask Replica', the Velvets' at their frenzied peak and Ornette Coleman at his most avant-garde, the duo of Pussy Galore's Neil "Michael" Hagerty and Jennifer Herrema recorded 'Twin Infinitives' while imbibing all kinds of mind-altering substances to create an inadvertent blueprint for what the duo was building with moog's, guitars and melodicas to name a few ingredients. It is the legendary second album from the masters of the genre mashup - long before "genre mashups" even existed. Arguably, the term "mashup" was coined to describe what Trux, as they subconsciously scrolled through the radio stations of their lives. The album's chaotic sound and offbeat construction laid the foundations for a string of Royal Trux albums that spiralled between genres, tunings, and noise. Through the 90s they would re-invent the rock 'n' roll ethic, straddle alien surf music, re-align boogie rock, not to mention 80s hair metal, and confound critics by their wildly meandering and courageous rites of passage. Remastered as part of a career spanning catalogue deal with Fire Records. The infamous and influential duo of Jennifer Herrema and Neil Hagerty will be delving into the archive with a comprehensive reissue series, unearthing the vaults and revisiting what made them such a compelling benchmark for their contemporaries and imitators. Reawakening their prolific output within a new monochrome vinyl series covering 1988-1993, they begin with their seminal deconstructed rock masterpiece Twin Infinitives. "Sounding like a subway ride inside a television inside an earthquake inside the end of the world and a pounding death rhythm of apocalyptic now." Pitchfork Ltd Double Silver Vinyl, Monochrome edition artwork, DL card.

Antibody presents this new opus by Berlin based Japanese artist Tot Onyx (Tommi Tokyo, formerly of group A).» Satire Of Desire« is her second solo album to date. Here, performance and sound art meet post-industrial deconstructivism. It’s radical, ferocious, wonderfully free and powerful.

Written under the covid-19 pandemic, "Satire Of Desire" is her radical criticism on the man-made catastrophe and sonic response to the cacotopic world that seemed less realistic than the surreal dreams of flying turtles. »My dreams started to become more realistic than the empty streets of Berlin. That's when I began wondering the difference between dream and reality, conscious and subconscious, how we distinguish them and what that even means. That was the beginning of creating this album. The beginning of the future i was unwillingly stepping into.«

Rbia Harsha Cinta is a dark and experimental reworking of Gilles Aubry's recent film on seaweed and pollution in Morocco (Atlantic Ragagar 2022). The film's dreadful atmosphere of environmental devastation is transposed into a haunting soundscape of analog textures and naked rhythms. With its title referring to endangered seaweed species, Rbia Harsha Cinta comprises eight tracks that pulse and breathe with a post-natural intensity.

YRLNG is a new project by Gilles Aubry dedicated to ambient and deconstructed club music. Aubry's distinctive presence in the field of noise and experimental music is marked by his numerous contributions using field recordings, electronic manipulations and feedback processing. He is also known as a member of the Berlin based noise collective MONNO who released five albums between 2003 and 2015. As a sound artist, his practice spans a broad range of media including film, installation, radio and performance works.

'Quintela', the debut album by Carme López, a performer, teacher and researcher of traditional oral music from Galicia, is a new experimental work for Galician bagpipe. Influenced by the approach of composers like Éliane Radigue or Pauline Oliveros, the Spanish composer creates slowly modulating sound environments, and stretches the sonic the possibilities of the bagpipe to its absolute limit. 'Quintela' is structured in four movements, plus a prologue and an epilogue, which serve as a link to the contemporary language of the instrument.

The bagpipe is strongly tied to traditional musics; its use in different genres and musical contexts is extremely limited and unimaginative. 'Quintela' brings it to a wholly unknown field, decontextualising the bagpipe in order to elevate a personal approach, and leaving behind its male-dominated past (in which it relates to ideas of prestige, dominance or carries even sexual connotations). López expertly demonstrates its grandeur and breadth; the music on 'Quintela' ranges from barely audible sounds of air passing through the hide bag through rhythmical use of its reeds to all-encompassing drones with complex harmonic structures and vibrant overtones.

The narrative arc focuses on the composer's past, its people and places, and could be conceived as a journey in and of itself. A homage to those in our memories, but also a step into the unknown, 'Quintela' is an ambitious, graceful and captivating debut.

"Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey MQ sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey's known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey MQ reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom. "It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too_there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget. Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" _ its title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory _ presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind," Casey says. "Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real..." Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery _ screenshots, smiles, streetlights _ searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of its boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection's only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

"Remembering is not the opposite of forgetting," Casey MQ sings at the start of Later that day, the day before, or the day before that, his new LP and Ghostly International debut. It's a phrase fittingly misremembered from something the LA-based, Canadian-born composer came upon as he spiraled into unconscious and subconscious-led writing sessions at the piano. Casey's known for his 2020 breakthrough release babycasey, which gave voice to songs seen through the lens of childhood, various film score work and collaborations with artists such as Oklou (who returns here), Eartheater, and Vagabon. His gifts as a producer and songwriter are rooted in textural world-building and the excavation of personal truth. With Later that day... he questions what is true entirely, understanding our mind's tendency to bend and project onto pictures of the past. Across vivid, baroque pop balladry, Casey MQ reorients his recording project and point of view under the notion that memories are malleable. All the joy, pain, love, and loss housed within remembrance is open to interpretation and deconstruction, which he does deftly, with curiosity and complete artistic freedom. "It's a memory album," Casey puts it simply, winding up for the deeper unpacking, "and it might be a breakup album, too_there are more questions than answers." Engaging his dreams and sitting with sheet music at his newly acquired piano, he looked to new and old inspirations including the works of Claude Debussy, Joni Mitchell, and Joe Hisaishi's beloved Studio Ghibli film scores. "Since I was young, I always wanted to write a piano album." babycasey's studied electronic sound isn't wholly abandoned on Later that day... instead, it comes through like an atmosphere, giving Casey's more spacious, minimal arrangements a distinct luster and sheen. The textures and tones shift from song to song as if mirroring the way our minds constantly recontextualize, remember, and forget. Cathartic opener "Grey Gardens" _ its title derived from a dream abstractly related to the Toronto restaurant, but not the 1975 film, which he cites as another coincidental false memory _ presents the record's plaintive, haunted feeling. "Even if not reading into lyrics, sonically I wanted it to feel like you're being pulled into a universe. Not fantasy or otherworldly per se, something more tangible, of the body and mind," Casey says. "Hearing it back, I realized this track was the key to unlocking it." His tender falsetto hovers above ambient washes and echoed keys, each word falling carefully in the crevices. "Asleep At The Wheel" unfolds on arpeggiated synth before a burst of symphonic color; the synth returns inverted to harmonize with the outro, "I love a car crash, I love a story, I love a memory, I swear it's real..." Casey leans into digital imagination on the warm, introspective "Me I Think I Found It." Subdued, stuttered percussion underscores the singer as he cycles through pixelated imagery _ screenshots, smiles, streetlights _ searching for higher meaning through love. Built on ascendent chord distortions, "Dying Til I'm Born" gives the record one of its boldest pulses of emotion. The back half stretches out; "Is This Only Water" is sparse and foggy, "Baby Voice" is intimate and desperate for something to remain. "Words For Love" grooves on guitar, and "Tennisman9" aches in heartbreak. French musician Marylou Mayniel, aka Oklou, appears as the collection's only guest for the closing duet, "The Make Believe," a bright and buoyant send-off that gives Later that day... both a sense of resolve and cyclical-motion. "We are young, under the sun," they sing together, a parting image brimming with lightness.

Piezo’s Ansia imprint returns for its 8th outing ‘Imago’, inviting Berlin’s Unity Vega for a split EP of uptempo dancefloor explorations that mine that fertile space between footwork, drum’n’bass, dancehall and experimental contemporary club sonics.

Unity Vega leads the charge with ‘No Body No Mind’ - a waterlogged darkside skanker that sits somewhere between the half-stepping jungle of the UVB-76 crew and the kind of oddball dancehall deconstructions often peddled by Ansia's extended circles. 
Appearing again on the flip, Vega ups his pace on ‘Set Em’ - a nervy footwork roller that pits gully hip-hop vocal chops against rising bell chords and washes of delayed noise. Think Rashad dubbed out by Kevin Martin and you’re in the right ballpark.

Label head Piezo’s contributions continue along similar lines, albeit in his own unmistakable style. ‘Toughts, Heavy’ also finds the midpoint between d’n’b and dembow, this time marrying a gurgling acid bassline with a euphoric-turned-paranoiac trance lead. 
Up next, ‘Nel Frigo Ah’ strips things back to the raw, banging basics: a looping vocal call pinned down by a frenetic crescendoing drum workout.

To close, Japanese legend Foodman delivers a pots-and-pans rework of ‘Thoughts, Heavy’ - a true curveball tool for the adventurous DJs amongst us.

„Awkward Attraction” captures Monstera Black’s exploration of both embracing and deconstructing pop music. The EP starts off with ‘system’, a piece that echoes a classic song structure while anticipating an unconventional sonic palette, setting the stage for the impending unraveling process that reaches its culmination in the final track, ‘who’s a hoe?’. As the journey unfolds, traditional structures progressively give way to a stream of consciousness, where motif-driven improvisation and softly sung melodies collide with a darker club and experimental soundscape masterfully crafted by alys(alys)alys. The lyrics, infused with provocation and sarcasm, delve into themes of existence and vulnerability, presented through warped vocals and repetitive hooks. „Awkward Attraction“ crafts a taunting atmosphere, challenging listeners to embark on a reflective journey.

Two legendary figures of the Greek and international music scene, Floros Floridis and SavinaYannatou join their breaths in this new release on vinyl by To Pikap Records, entitled Blink. In the album’s seven tracks-movements, the two musicians expand the time it takes for the eye to blink. Avant-garde and improvisation, modernism and tradition seek to describe, but ultimately limit, this melodrama of existence, the libretto of which is written in the langue that may have been first heard in Pangea.

Blink departs from the ground on which records like the Residents’ Eskimo sprouted, but moves on by removing the horizon points and the conventions they carry, in order to board the next Voyager that will travel to the stars. Two experienced breaths that generate sound without rules become -through reeds and mouth- vehicles of the language of newborns deconstructing the conventions of human communication. The fragility of existence becomes -like the birdsong- lullaby and dirge, hymn and incantation. The instinctive manages to express the unspeakable in this abstract and ultimately tender work that does not conclude but remains open to the timeless movement of a prehistoric future.

A Paris resident of Minsk origin, Lina Filipovich’s ‘Music for an imaginary dancefloor’ explores the liminal space between club music and something altogether weirder, elusive, and abstract. Nervous, varied and amplified by various delays, the LP was written from improvisations on analogue synthesizers between June and December in 2022.

Atonal drones and atmospheric textures convey imagery of charcoal skies and silk tapestries; an idealised parallel world untethered from reality and bodies, towards something more ethereal – floating freely in red carpet lined corridors.

“In my previous works, I used pre-existing sounds to create new pieces. I was interested in the appropriation and decontextualization of materials from various traditions and contexts. However, in this album, I don't deconstruct; instead, I attempt to co-write with the machines, relying on their aesthetics and my imagination.”

Lina's LP trickles down the spine, pulse-raising and gooseflesh on tender skin, analogous to the aftermath of a sweaty fever dream. Speaking the language of spirits in the allure of the dark.

Press release by Asmi Shetty

Fucked Up are one of the most prolific hardcore punk bands of our generation. Since their 2001 inception, they’ve challenged listeners with thoughtful artful chaos and a seemingly limitless drive for musical experimentation. Because of this, they’ve also become a record collectors worst nightmare; releasing over 80 recordings and collaborations on countless labels that include Arts & Crafts, Matador, Jade Tree, and more. Fucked Up “Year of the Hare” is the latest installment of their Zodiac themed releases. Over a two year period, it was recorded and constructed at Electrical Audio, Key Club Studios, and Candle Studios. Title track “Year of the Hare” is a 21 minute epic that frantically mixes traditional instrumentation, piano/synths, flutes and sax, experimental editing/soundscapes, and guest vocals from great Isla Craig into one dizzying experience. While B-Side “California Cold” slowly builds and deconstructs over an 8 and a half minute stretch. Organically shifting from jangly melodic-punk anthem into a fuzzed out psychedelic jam session. Eclectically blending musical styles and voices in the most, well, Fucked Up way possible.

Church Andrews and Matt Davies weave intricate patterns from Fibonacci sequences on new mini-album, Yucca.

Producer and composer Church Andrews (aka Kirk Barley) and drummer Matt Davies return to explore the outer limits of rhythm on a six-track suite that is at once angular and fluid, natural and systematic. Drawn to the restrictions of working solely with one synth and live drums, the pair found creativity in limitation, developing a compositional dialogue between the sonic timbres of Kirk’s productions and Matt’s percussive practice.

Evoking the primitive yet complex form of the plant from which it takes its name, Yucca features tracks that are built around rhythmic ratios of the Fibonacci sequence. Mirroring spiral patterns exhibited in nature, each track evolves like a cellular structure of its own, from the livewire syntax of ‘Chirp’ and the deconstructed ebb and flow of ‘Ferns’, to the mini-album’s title track, where crisp grooves flit between modulated electronics like fireflies.

“I’ve always been inspired by music that is complex without sounding complex,” Matt explains. He maintains a sense of bounce amid the intricate phrasing and cites drummers Roy Haynes and his grandson Marcus Gilmore as inspirations, alongside sabar drummers from Senegal and Mridangam drumming of South India.

With a shared background in hip-hop and the swung beats of J Dilla and Flying Lotus, Kirk Barley and Matt Davies were also inspired by the minimalism of Terry Riley and the sparse palette of dub techno.

Written and recorded in Lewisham in the spring and summer of 2023, Yucca follows the release of Axis in 2022, with the duo having also performed at festivals such as Rewire and Waking Life, and recorded live sessions for FACT magazine and Worldwide FM.

The third release on Yorkshire-based Odda Recordings, following Kirk Barley’s Marionette and Flaer’s Preludes, Yucca confirms the label’s reputation for championing music on the unstable ground between the organic and the synthetic.

From the old demo music vaults of Yagya, we found this amazing dub techno track dating back 15 years to the summer of 2008. Directly at the first listen we knew that this had to be fully released, Yagya was quick to agree, and also delivered 2 remixes himself and added another one from Octal Industries which resulted in a dub techno jam made in heaven!

repress !

Following acclaimed singles from Powell, Blood Music, Shit & Shine and Prostitutes, the next release from Diagonal is a landmark. It marks both the London label's first full-length album release, and the return of abrasive and furiously funky hip-hop deconstructionists Death Comet Crew, one of the most quietly influential underground acts to emerge from the creative melting pot of 1980s New York.

Ghost Among The Crew documents the group's return to studio operations for the first time since the 80s, as well as their first ever full-length studio album. It's a remarkable trip: a consolidation of their early feral disassemblies of hip-hop and electro, but also broader in scope, chewing up and spitting out fragments of soul, jazz fusion, punk and industrial music.
Death Comet Crew were founded in New York City in 1983 by Stuart Argabright, a founder member of post-punk/industrial mavericks Ike Yard and the mind behind Dominatrix and later Black Rain. Their sound, then as now, was a singular proposition: urban in mood, exploratory, often compellingly danceable, yet confrontational. It emerged from the interweaving talents of the group's varied members: guitarist Michael Diekmann (of Ike Yard), bassist Shinichi Shimokawa (later of Black Rain) and Nick Taylor aka DJ High Priest, frequently joined by the late, great hip hop artist and graffiti writer Rammellzee. Having recorded two studio EPs - 1985's At The Marble Bar (featuring Rammellzee) and its follow-up Mystic Eyes - the group disbanded barely a year after forming. They left behind a reputation for their incendiary live performances, several recordings from which were gathered on crucial 2004 compilation This Is Riphop.
The musical climate that first birthed Death Comet Crew was one of fertile cross-pollination of styles. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the seeds of modern day urban musics - hip hop, punk and post-punk, no wave - were taking root in the streets of recession-struck New York City. Argabright recalls dancing at the downtown Mudd Club around 1980 to a bold mixture of styles, with DJs cutting from synth-pop and post-punk to funk, soul and early hip-hop: Bowie and James Brown next to Run DMC, Ultravox and Gary Numan. Indeed, the names of his New York contemporaries operating around the same time - the likes of Liquid Liquid, Run DMC, Afrika Bambaataa, Arthur Russell, ESG, Swans, Sonic Youth, Bill Laswell and more - have since been inscribed in modern music history.
With previous projects Dominatrix and Ike Yard having recently become inactive, in 1984 Argabright formed Death Comet Crew as a means of exploring new sonic avenues. He'd been experimenting with tape, recording and procesing the sounds of his surrounding environment and dialogue from films and TV. Joined by Shimokawa, Diekmann and Taylor, and using drum machines, turntables, spidery guitar and bass, the group assembled a scrambled collage of rhythms and sampled voices. Their live performances were, in Argabright's words, "aurally violent, sharp-edged, downright lacerating", hacking gleefully away at hip hop and electro's rhythmic frameworks. Rammellzee joined the group to vocal 1985 debut EP At The Marble Bar; his MC turn on highlight 'Exterior Street' is all the more remarkable for having been entirely freestyled in the studio. When Death Comet Crew reformed in 2003 for a string of live shows, he continued as an active member of the group, touring and working with them during the recording of Ghost Among The Crew, until he sadly passed away in 2010.
After reforming, Death Comet Crew began writing and recording new material. Now, following on from their just-released Galacticoast 12" through Citinite, Ghost Among The Crew - its title a homage to Rammellzee - hones the group's abrasive early experimentations while tripping into bold and astrally minded new territory. Alongside the core quartet of Argabright, Diekmann, Shimokawa and Taylor are new voices, including Rapscallion (a friend of Rammellzee's), Jessica 6/Hercules & Love Affair singer Nomi Ruiz, and Carolyn 'Honeychild' Coleman. Its eight tracks are steeped in the impulsive spirit of electric Miles and the deep space romances of Sun Ra, and possessed of an enigmatic yet undeniable pop edge. But equally they're pricked with urban paranoia and dread, traits that have long been hallmarks of Argabright's musical projects.
'Me Czar Of The Magyars' opens the album in a twist of tension like the turning of a ratchet. Its taut electroid shudder is paired with machine gunned cymbal hits and a voice telling of "wormwood and opium dens" - the sound of being teleported from everyday city streets into the astral plane, where every sensory input is heightened and the promise of danger or pleasure lurks unseen around every corner. Later, Coleman's lyrics pay tribute to Rammellzee on the sci-fi funk of 'Deep Space Woman'. 'Let The Clubs Ring' melts lounge bar organs and frazzled guitar into freakishly unstable shapes, while 'Drag Racing' matches its title, rocketing along frantically atop clattering drums. 'Moons On Titan's Seas' is halfway interlude pause for rest, like an exotic cocktail in a bar orbiting some as-yet-undiscovered new world. These varied strands are somehow all summarised in album closer 'Ignition Spark', which sets Ruiz's vocals alongside Taylor's and Argabright's. The zone the trio inhabit in this final track exists in perpetual push-pull between contemplation, memory, intrigue and violence, a decisive opening of a new chapter in Death Comet Crew's history.

As with all Diagonal releases, the initial vinyl pressing will be packaged in unique, specially designed artwork.

Following 2020’s 'Point Vacancies', the debut EP from Jamie Paton and Mike Bourne’s collaborative act Metal, the duo return with a trio of dubwise remixes from Mr Paton himself as well as a peak-time stormer from fellow Bristolian artist, Hodge. The latter immediately sets the record ablaze with a driving-tempo kick thump, a duo of grain-textured 16th note hi-hats and chalky clap. He layers an anthemic three-chord pad progression with layered octaves, peppering in arpeggiated bleeps and articulate lead melodies, then tops it off with a few modular elements that retain the character of the original, before climaxing in true rave fashion. Proper. The following three mixes by Metal’s own Jamie Paton make clear his sonic obsession, the type of infinite tweaking that sees some artists/producers to the edge of madness, or at the very least satisfies some dragon-chasing addiction. There’s a successive deconstruction from 'Remix' to 'Dubwise' to 'Dubwise II', most notably in the reduction of rhythm and drum machinery, but also in the general tonality. The melody remains central but is gradually obscured, taking on a less and less recognizable form, and by the end we’re left with a skeleton of the track, quips and cranks, an assembly line of aluminum sheeting punctuated by an array of demented nuts and bolts. As with the previous EP, the sparsity of elements illustrates just how far one can twist an aesthetic, proving that self-imposed limitations can often propel an artist’s process and land them somewhere unfamiliar, somewhere foreign, somewhere enchanted.

Getting into an album by Cyril Cyril is being invited to a party where you thought you didn't know anyone, only to realize that this chap's gal is your bro's cuz, and leave with everyone's cell. Their music seems familiar because it's not deaf to its neighbors, in the broadest sense : Geneva, their lair, Europe, their playground as a duo, and the world, their grocery store. There's plenty in those two heads, but just the two of them on stage. For their third Born Bad album, they have invited two lads from Orchestre Tout Puissant Marcel Duchamp, Ines Mouzoune, multi-instrumentalist from Amami, and Violeta Garcia's cello on Le Futur ca marche pas. On the ruins of Switzerland, people dance hard but consciously, and won't complain about them having a go at the homeland - notably in " Sweetzerland Bunker Love ", where they claim it's time to "free the money from the banks". There's something rotten in the state, wherever it may be, and they prefer to put its fall to music. And they're not shy about it, either: this album features heavy guitar/drums text-driven ballads (beautiful "Mensonge" opens the album with a certain gravitas), polyrhythmic noisy drum splatter with crafty vocal knitting ("Plus rien a? faire"), deconstructed and harmonically ambitious compositions ("Les Phoenix de l'amour"), and latino frogs croaks, because yes, why not. Since their previous efforts "Certaine Ruines" and "Yallah Mickey Mouse", it turns out that the future isn't working out so badly for the two Cyrils. (Not so) Quietly sitting on crates of records, they patiently build their sound. Never tired of sick networks and never-ending struggles, Cyril Cyril is a rousing mess, shouting out the common spleen while still managing to have a good laugh.

A Chaos Of Flowers is an album that builds on their ferocious 2023 album nature morte. BIG|BRAVE"s music has been described as massive minimalism. Their fusillades of textural distortion and feedback emphasize their music"s frayed edges as much as its all-encompassing weight. The potency of the trio"s work is their singular artistry combining elements of traditional folk techniques and a modern deconstruction of guitar music. Gain, feedback, and amplitude are essential. For A Chaos Of Flowers guitarist/vocalist Robin Wattie drew heavily on the poems of artists whom Wattie found kinship in, their words resonant with experiences of those often sidelined by cultural norms. "I discovered that most poems from folk traditions or in the public domain seem to be by men - to which I could not quite relate. In my search, I rediscovered some of my favorite works and poets," says Wattie. Guitarist Mathieu Ball and drummer Tasy Hudson help Wattie shape poetry into pieces as dense and impenetrable as they are vulnerable. BIG|BRAVE achieve their colossal sound through minimalist approaches, a deft understanding of dynamics and an inventive employment of percussion and distortion. The trio reconceptualize what it is to be heavy or minimal, challenging perceptions with their illumination of painfully overlooked perspectives. Guest guitarist Marisa Anderson lends earthen, blues-inflected atmospheres to the album, where guitarist Tashi Dorji and saxophonist Patrick Shiroishi amplify the squall. Working closely with frequent collaborator and producer/engineer Seth Manchester, the internal tumult of Wattie"s voice rings out in warbles, haunting echoes, and unearthly harmonies across bold immense walls of distortion. BIG|BRAVE have collaborated with metal monsters The Body on a previous Thrill Jockey release, Leaving None But Small Birds, and have toured internationally with bands like SUMAC, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, SUNN O))), and Lingua Ignota. As they continue to ascend in their journey as pioneers in the contemporary metal scene, it"s safe to say that BIG|BRAVE are here to stay.

The duo's third album of instrumental guitar recordings pushes their sinuous compositions into labyrinthine new shapes, interlocking and interlocutory, supported by a cast of stellar collaborators. Interwoven among the dazzling original pieces is a fascinating array of covers, ranging from traditional Breton dance tunes to a deconstruction of Neneh Cherry's "Buffalo Stance." Their melody-first sensibilities are perfectly suited to each other _ playfully complex guitar work that sounds as if it was tossed off in an afternoon of whiskey and laughs. - NPR An intoxicating, intricate web _ Wherever Salsburg and Elkington go, it's always a pleasure. - Aquarium Drunkard Sounds like winter has always been approaching, like Indian summer never quite fades, like fall isn't built around loss. - Stereogum

Hailing from Yerevan, Dave N.A. drops his 'Altura EP,' a seamless blend of jungle and deconstructed club. This marks his debut on no•id, the second release on the label. The four tracks showcase Dave N.A.'s nostalgic yet innovative sound, with sharply cut breaks, a lush palette, and vivid effects, solidifying his place in the label's diverse lineup. For the occasion, 'Pulse' and 'Novox' were co-produced with Belgium’s freq444. The DJ’s join forces around a sultry groove: it goes down smooth as cocoa on a freezing winter’s day.

UK duo Wrecked Lightship debut on Peak Oil with a six-track slate of cyber aquatic alien bass music as placeless as it is precise: Antiposition. Comprised of Laurie Osborne (Appleblim) and Adam Winchester (Dot Product), the pair share a fascination with destabilized rhythm and retro-futurist dreaming, smudging dub, drum n bass, synthetic tribalism, and kinetic sound design into fresh electronic frontiers.

Antiposition both refines and refracts the project’s vision. From wobbly interstellar ascension (“Hex”) and cavernous industrial dub (“Bizarre Servants”) to junglist murk (“Sunken Skies”) and fractal shuffle (“Diminished Ark”), Wrecked Lightship move between haze and hyperspace, mythos and mystery. It’s less deconstructed than reconstructed, fashioned from galactic debris and congealed by the gravity of outer spheres.

French pianist Dorian Dumont is an exceptionally gifted, Brussels-based jazzman and member of electronic experimentalists, ECHT! In 2021, he released his debut solo album 'APHEXionS' - a challenging exercise of solo piano focussed entirely on the music of one of the most influential and important artists in contemporary electronic music, Richard James, aka Aphex Twin. Dumont's sophomore album, 'to the APhEX', released 23rd February via W.E.R.F. Records, continues that fascination with his musical hero and acts as a musical love letter of sorts - a groundbreaking experience, where the enchanting world of classical piano collides with the electronic brilliance of Aphex Twin. Richard James' music serves as a starting point for Dumont's musical developments which are sometimes composed and often improvised, letting him find his playing field around the concepts and the poetics of the genius of electro music. Contrary to what one would expect, there are no electronics involved but Dumont carefully transcribes a wide selection of Aphex Twin's music to the grand piano, giving the songs a whole new dimension. Dumont starts from the melody lines and rhythmic structures found in the original tracks but builds on them, deconstructing pieces and adding his own improvisations. Lovingly recreated, the songs take on a completely new dimension, and it exposes both the genius and musicality of Aphex Twin and Dumont himself. "Aphex Twin is a fascinating artist and character. At first, I started transcribing his pieces just to understand them. I then sat on my acoustic piano for the pleasure of hearing these pieces that I loved so much only to realize that in the end I was improvising, I was playing. In short: I was having fun. That's how this project was born: through pleasure and games. The challenge then was to develop the concept of this project to find my own playground and my own responses around the musical principles of Mr. Richard James, in order to make this project a celebration on my own terms."

Always curious about new sounds and cultivating eclecticism, 'to the APhEX' stays truthful to the minimalistic aesthetics from the original tracks. From the unruly, emotionally stirring '180db_ 130' to the simple beauty of 'Windowlicker', Dumont is part of a new generation of musicians who have no intention of sticking to the rules. Dumont dances across the keys, perfectly capturing the mood and feeling of Aphex Twin, where classical meets electronic. Elsewhere, 'PAPAT4 155[pineal mix]' is stripped to the core showcasing Dumont's ingenuity, while 'Avril 14th' and album finale '#3 (Rhubarb)', unfolds with delicate piano, evoking a sense of tranquil introspection.
Born in Montpellier where he studied classical piano at the Conservatory, in 2005, Dumont achieved the highest distinctions in piano and chamber music. With a broadening interest in jazz and improvised music, he moved to Brussels in 2008 and after studying in the Jazz sections at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels then at the Koninklijk Conservatorium van Brussel, he obtained his master's degree in 2013. In recent years, he has played an integral part of the critically acclaimed four-piece 'ECHT!' which breaks the boundaries between jazz, electronic music and hip-hop. In addition, Dumont also participates in numerous other projects across various genres including 'Edges' with Guillaume Vierset, Jim Black, and Anders Christensen or 'Easy Pieces' with Ben Sauzereau and Hendrik Lasure. He also collaborates with bands including Juicy, Vaague, Kuna Maze, and Pol Belardi's Force, among others.


[a] A1. 180db_ [130]


[d] A4. PAPAT4 [155][pineal mix]

repressed !

It is a smart and airy groove of atoms in space that rules this mesmerizing album, leading off with an irresistibly deconstructed downbeat monstrosity deceptively tagged as the 'Modern Hit Midget' as opposed to actually being a giant. One giant of seven, to be precise: safe in harbour are the seven giants of free Funk who proceed through a variety of way-out psychedelicacies. Which increase in flavour under headphones. The wane of Villalobos' and Loderbauer's free-floating energy of their Re:ECM work is more than offset here by the increase in rhythmic push through sensual syncopation and eruptive bass energy. The duo is the impetus in Perlon's great new swinging machine.

The Sex featuring members of Mercenary God and No Suicide. A mixture of different elements with a rock substrate for an uncategorized result. Another Post-Punk gem from the 80's Italian North-Eastern scene.

My adventure buddies? The silent, enigmatic Patti, former singer of the mysterious No Suicide, and the young, faithful Chris, a passionate Police fan, we met on the battlefield and he immediately became my brother. For him, learning to play the bass was a way to get close to Sting, in other words, just one step below Paradise. Patti instead played keyboards as an extension of her mysterious and glacial presence, so still and distant that the audience sometimes wondered if she was real. And then there was my fixation for the drum machine, a futuristic device which could transform the drumming sweat into an invisible, yet physical, dreamlike pulsation. A particular combination of characters and a special astral conjunction, that’s what you need to get a nucleus source of sonic emotions, and in some ways this is what we were. You could clearly feel it during the concerts. When at the end of ‘81 My Mercenary God lost their drummer and had to disband, I felt clearly that the music had already changed.

Our old 70’s rock ‘n’ roll sound was no longer representative of the day. We were like some sort of yesterday’s newspaper. Thus I Sex was born (later The Sex). According to Freudian thought that sees sexual instinct as the driving force behind every (creative or destructive) human act. And in fact we immediately started creating, destroying, assembling and deconstructing our sound. Suddenly “tomorrow became now”. It was an outburst of creative independence in the form of homemade cassettes put together with makeshift tools, at least until the arrival of the legendary 4 track recorder. I was 19 years old, Chris was only 17. Nothing more than kids after all. Yet we were already veterans, veterans of a lost war. Wise, naive, disillusioned dreamers, everything and the opposite of everything. But, above all, we were totally devoted to our creative delirium up to the point of losing touch with reality, crossing limits, breaking down barriers and almost bordering on madness. Perhaps we were just too involved, especially if in relationship with what we could receive in return. We always spread our energies as if there was no future. We unconsciously felt that we had to live in the moment, now or never, and in retrospect it really was like that, and this is why these songs exist now. Songs created with the intent to tell an inner universe that is, now as then, far from any convention.

COUGH return with their first album in over five years. Produced by Electric Wizard’s Jus Oborn and recorded by Oborn and Windhand’s Garrett Morris, Still They Pray is the kind of monolithic cosmic doom that will take the listener to the heights of despair and the bottom of the abyss. With Still They Pray, COUGH summon psychedelic feedback-driven melodies just to deconstruct them to their core. This is easily COUGH at their most focused: pessimistic riffs and tortured grooves collide in melodic agony alongside a hallucinogenic blend of harsh and clean incantations, crushing and cathartic yet utterly mesmerizing. Step through the gates of madness and stare into the void. FFO Windhand, Electric Wizard, Pallbearer, Sleep, YOB, Uncle Acid & The Deadbeats

Eels präsentiert Vol. 2 von EELS So Good – eine Best of/Essential-Compilation mit 20 Titeln aus den Jahren 2007–2020. Fünf Songs geben hier ihr Vinyl-Debüt, von denen drei bisher unveröffentlicht waren, darunter „Christmas, Why You Gotta Do Me Like This“. Mark Oliver Everett fügt hinzu: “Everyone should have at least three Christmas songs in their catalogue. I’m sorry it took me so long.”

Repress!

Clear Vinyl

Three songs taken from Chip Wickham's spiritual jazz album Blue to Red get reshaped by Photay, Medlar, and Chip Wickham himself. The result is a lush ep, every bit as good as the combination of a wonderful original track and an uber-talented remixer could be.

Photay has deconstructed the peaceful Blue to Red to turn it into a bomb—a storming dance track that keeps the spiritual vibe intact. The extra beatless version soothes your ear while creating a certain sense of anticipation.

The original version of Interstellar blends fusion jazz with the sound of West London's seminal broken beat scene. Medlar has plucked the track apart, then rebuilt it by adding some extra perc and synth sounds to the bass-driven beats. The result is some deep and heavy and funky business.

And finally, Chip recovered a take of wonderful astral slow jam The Cosmos that didn't make it onto the album, one with no drums, and cooked up a roomy cosmic dub, full-on Space Echo.

It will be out in a limited transparent vinyl 12"

Following his impressive debut EP ‘Mirror In Man’, which touched on cosmic folk jams and Balearic pop, the Belgium singer-producer Mozes Mosuse aka Movulango has announced his second project ‘The Irony’, a 5 track EP out 24th November via Soulwax’s DEEWEE label.

Movulango’s musical paintings are a visual and intuitive reflection of what it feels like to be him. His weekly radio show, Radio Atlantis on StuBru, Belgium, is a clever alias he uses to explore different worlds, deconstruct existing music and blend it with his own musical experiments.

His latest project ‘The Irony’ is further insight into Movulango's devine mind, building deeply personal stories on feeling and emotion that bundle into soaring melodies and lyrics. You can try your best to understand what it all means or you can sit back and let them bewitch your mind and soul.

Dennis Huddleston AKA 36 is back with another new album in the form of Cold Ecstasy which arrives on lovely limited edition aqua blue double vinyl via 3six Recordings. It comes after his superb mini album Weaponised Serenity back in 2021 which was a raw deconstruction of 90s jungle and drum & bass and it follows down a path of retro-future exploration with more lush ambient soundscapes. Each one is subtly joyous and doused in gently euphoric chords while dreamy vocals drift in and out of focus. It is an expansive listen once more from Huddleston.

Skemer is a brand new cooperation between singer Kim Peers, who’s also a model for Vogue, Steven Meisel, Prada and guitarist Mathieu Vandekerckhove of post-metal band Amenra and his personal project Syndrome. Two very different worlds collide and lead to minimalist dark wave deconstructions that are equal parts brutal and erotic. This duality is reflected in the name Skemer, which next to its obvious English meaning of ‘intriguer’ also stands for ‘dusk’ in Mathieu’s native tongue West-Flemish, as well as in their debut album. Recorded just a few months after meeting, a sense of urgency shines through in the tracks that build Benevolence. The winding sensuality of Sunseeker juxtaposed with the pounding harshness of Best, the faint twirl of Call Me versus the solemn gait of Heartbreak. Just like with their effervescent live performances where Peers seductive vocals coalesce with Vandekerckhove’s austere beats to meld into a transcendent fury. Everything has a double nature in the hands of Skemer. Vinyl LP limited to 500. Comes in UV Glossy Varnish picture sleeve.

After a hiatus of quite some time, the Belgian duo composed by the world renowned model Kim Peers and post-metal band Amenra’s guitarist Mathieu Vandekerckhove, is finally back with a new full-length album.

Four years have passed since their debut Benevolence. Meanwhile Skemer took the time to let all sides of their personality grow and eventually explode. You remember their minimalist cold wave deconstructions equally made of brutal and erotic components. A duality deeply rooted in the band’s music as well as in their line-up and obviously their live shows, where romantic and ethereal atmospheres collide with the gothic side of electronic and techno music. This is even more present on their new LP Toasts & Sentiments.

Eleven new cuts where every side of Skemer’s nature gets its own share of expression only to leave you wrapped in one pitch black cloak. A few episodes in the duo’s native language Dutch, add even more mystery to the occult receipt.

Get in the introspective, tranche insistent riff on the opening track Eyelashes and get catapulted, quite literally, on the dark side of the moon. Keep on wandering the alien surface with Seen and its solemn gait. Pick up your pace with the pounding drums of Easy To Embrace and Kiss Me Kill Me. Go down the stairs to the dungeon of the club culture with lead singles Overgave and Out Of Favor claustrophobic electro. Remain bogged down in the darkness with New Born Babe, get slapped by Apocalypse’s industrial trance crescendo. Rest and collapse with the final track’s texture of ambient synths and reverberating guitars.

It may have taken four years for Skemer to present their new creation but it was definitely worth the wait. Walk the night with us.

"There could barely be a better figurehead for Belgrade's simmering multi-limbed music scene than Jan Nemeèek" The Quietus `Dissolved', a new album by Serbian synthesist and sound designer Jan Nemeèek, began its life cycle in a studio live room. It unpacks the paradigm of the individualistic act of computer music creation, transporting it into the communal setting of a band, its performers contributing elements ranging from prepared piano to Turkish lyre. The album opens with an unexpected falter, a false start that imbues the album with a sense of vulnerability. It's as if the album itself is finding its footing, mirroring the dissonance of an orchestra tuning. This digital ensemble, an assembly of electronic voices, seems to search for its harmony, its discord, its pitch, its timbre - much like a traditional counterpart would. As it unfolds, `Dissolved' further taps into the raw tonalities of partially defunct digital synthesizers, ranging from early 2000s' attempts at neural networks to precursors of oscillator-laden software synthesizers, in order to build its cloud of suspended tension and alternate histories. Through this clash of wistful piano and biting frost of digital pads with the iridescent hum of tube amps, the album reflects New Age tropes through the prism of metal (machine) music. Hailing from Belgrade, Serbia, Jan Nemeèek has been releasing electronic music since 2005, with a particular focus on ambient and bass-heavy electronic compositions. Nemeèek's music is characterized by his use of a wide range of sound generating tools, including neural networks, analog synthesizers, and granular synthesis. His approach to music production allows his work to unfold with patience, influenced by borderline dub sub-bass movements and heavily based on deconstructed recordings. Jan has released several albums, most notably 2014's Fragmented and later Recurrences. Prior to that, he co-founded the Creative Commons-based net label Norbu. `Dissolved' is set to be released on vinyl and digital on 10th November 2023 via Refractions, a new imprint founded by Nemeèek.

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TVAM announces ‘Costasol’, his new EP for Invada Records. The 10” EP is pressed on translucent blue vinyl, and housed in a reverse board, spined sleeve.  TVAM returns to the sun lounger to deliver a horizontal view from the pool of self-reflection. Joe Oxley, aka TVAM, offers, “‘Costasol’ began life as two atmospheric interludes that I wrote for my last album, ‘High Art Lite’. Over time these ideas took on a life of their own and demanded that I take another look at them. I slowly began putting the pieces together and ended up with a track which became much more than the sum of its parts.” The resultant ‘Costasol’ is a song about longing, loss and regret wrapped-up in heatwave bass and shimmering guitars, all perfectly enhanced by Mona’s dreamlike vocal.  TVAM self-released his much-acclaimed debut, ‘Psychic Data’, in the Autumn of 2018. Something of a cult-classic, the album joined the dots between Suicide’s deconstructed rock ’n’ roll, Boards of Canada’s irresistible nostalgia and My Bloody Valentine’s infinite noise. ‘High Art Lite’, released in October 2022, took a different tilt to its predecessor by emphasising the immediate and the personal. The colours were blown-out and the brightness was cranked up.  It’s in this world where TVAM’s new ‘Costasol’ EP exists. Full of colour and noise, with a vibrant, distorted palette. Though the title track may find a home at some poolside retreat, the subsequent tracks return to TVAM’s claustrophobic realm. ‘Ephemerol’ evokes its own mutant groove, part ‘Midnite Vultures’ Beck, part ‘Pretty Hate Machine’ Nine Inch Nails, with ‘Heart Attack’ and ‘VHF’ rounding off this bold, bright, brief encounter.  Radio - BBC 6 Music Lauren Laverne, New Music Fix, Emily Pilbeam, Amazing Radio B-List.  Tourdates - October 22 SWN Festival Cardiff, November 11 Hebden Bridge Trades Club, 18 What Music? Liverpool.

Transverse is the second studio album release from Colorado based metal band Messiahvore. It draws its sound from the vibes of 90's iconic bands like Helmet and Prong whilst peppering in the essence of stoner metal, death metal and a little bit of doom. The album has gained positive reviews from those amongst the metal scene, both critics and fans alike, being described as the sophomore record that "shatters expectations"

Nach ihrer äußerst erfolgreichen Sommertournee kehren BUSH im Herbst mit Loaded: The Greatest Hits 1994-2023 zurück.

Mit über 20 Millionen verkauften Tonträgern, 1 Milliarde Streams und einer Reihe von Nr. 1-Hits ist die GRAMMY®-nominierte, mehrfach mit Platin ausgezeichnete Band ein Ausnahmetalent der Rockmusik, dessen Einfluss mit den Jahren immer größer wird. Loaded bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über das unglaubliche Vermächtnis der Band mit 21 Tracks, die fast 30 Jahre umfassen.

Loaded enthält ikonische Hits von jedem der neun Studioalben der Band sowie ”Mouth” (The Stingray Mix) vom Remix-Album Deconstructed aus dem Jahr 1997 und eine Coverversion von ”Come Together” von den Beatles, die 2012 in einer sehr begrenzten Auflage erschien.

Ab dem 10.11.2023 als 2LP und 2 CD verfügbar

Straight Outta Caledonia is the first commercially available “Greatest Hits” of the outsider songwriter Jackie Leven, an artist
who has largely remained in obscurity in his native Scotland despite being one of the greatest wordsmiths – and singers – it ever
produced. A well-travelled musician who began making psychedelic, progressive music in the late 60s before emerging as an
epic storyteller full of pathos, humour and humanity in the 90s, Leven lived and wrote like many of the fragile, gregarious
characters of his songs; large, full of life and empathy. Leven passed away in 2011 after recording 30+ albums under different
guises or with his briefly successful New Wave band Doll by Doll. Straight Outta Caledonia is a compilation collated by Night
School Records on its Archival label School Daze that seeks to introduce Leven’s music to new generations.
In an age of isolation, alienation and loss of visceral experience, Jackie Leven’s music can be massive and welcoming. It feels
connected to some universal humanity and vibrates with vitality. His songs are often full of tragedy and comedy simultaneously,
cutting straight to the heart, often plugging directly into the nervous system of the listener. His lyrics are rich, dense with imagery
that can veer from apocalyptic to the comically banal in a sentence, with a songwriting panache that can be heavy handed to
almost bursting point before skewering the song with a clownish, warm punchline. His productions ranged from Bob Dylan’s
Rolling Thunder Revue style rock band orchestrations with strings and organ as on the epic Ancient Misty Morning or they could
be pared down to the purest form of folk song as on Poortoun: Leven on stage alone with an acoustic guitar, albeit played with a
mastery of the instrument that he often only hinted at. Musically his sound can bend traditional structures or stay completely
confined within them yet still forever push towards an ecstatic release, as on the cinematic Snow In Central Park.
The most exciting, jaw-droppingly effective tool at Leven’s disposal was his voice. A multi-octave instrument that, though
damaged during a savage assault in Fife, he used with flair; he had both a brazen disregard for the rules and a deep humility, all
of which is evidenced with every phrasing. A baritone that could flit up through the register – always touched by his gentle
Kirkcaldy accent – it’s the prime delivery method for his songs. Leven’s voice enabled him to inhabit the characters in his songs to
an uncanny degree, a skill that in turn enables the listener to empathise with them and, subsequently, the singer. It’s most evident
in stand out song The Sexual Loneliness Of Jesus Christ, a breathtaking re-telling of the life of its protagonist, not as a pure,
sinless messiah but as a sexually frustrated, solitary man condemned to an existential loneliness no one else will ever feel. In
many ways the track is the archetypal Jackie Leven song. Produced by Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, what strikes the ear first –
after the samples of unemployed workers in Glasgow following the closing of the Clyde shipyards – is the audacious, rhythmic
tremolo effect Leven employs through the verses before the production opens up to allow Leven’s vocal to lift into a soar, a
freeing glide powered both by the force of the singer’s chutzpah and the inherent, doomed destiny of the protagonist. With any
other singer such subject matter could come across as gauche or worse, pretentiously sonorous, but Jackie Leven’s genius was
such that he could be this cinematic and brazen while touching something elemental and true in the beholder. It’s a skill evident in
every song on Straight Outta Caledonia, the trademark of a songwriter who revelled and excelled in intensity with a lightness of
touch.
In his lifetime, Jackie Leven toured, wrote and recorded at a ferocious rate. He recorded under aliases to avoid record contract
restrictions, played house shows in Europe after or instead of official concerts, events which were often spoken word story telling
masterclasses as well as performances of his often bewilderingly dense songbook. His music has traditionally been catalogued
as “folk” music and has been largely banished to a small, dedicated group of international fans and apostles both private and well
known, like author Ian Rankin or Glenn Matlock. Since his passing in 2011 however, there has been a growing recognition
amongst a newer generation, with artists like James Yorkston or Molly Nilsson publicly stating the influence of the unsung
troubadour on their own craft. Jackie Leven’s fairytales for hard men are often forensic deconstructions of masculinity, sad and
ecstatic, light and shadow, always endlessly rich, a resource as bountiful as Leven himself’s human spirit undoubtedly was.

LOVE + POP is a snapshot of a moment in not-so-far-away time; something fast, loud, moody and a little dangerous. It is, in some ways, classic Current Joys: full of wild ambition, sneaky hooks, and songs that move from concept to completion with prolific speed. But LOVE + POP also explodes myriad expectations with aggressive, deconstructed production, house music influence, and a guest appearance from Lil Yachty. It is not so much a twist as it is a unique multiverse identity for Current Joys, as Nick Rattigan's set out to "capture this sonic moment and harken back to the way I first released music." The story of LOVE + POP begins with one of those house parties: the kind that bulldozes your home and, in its aftermath, leaves a wreckage that finds you flattened but also ready to be new. In that mess and mayhem, Rattigan watched Everybody's Everything, the documentary of Lil Peep, and recorded a cover of "walk away as the door slams". But the itch wasn't scratched, and what began as a moment of homage morphed into something bigger, deeper and more fundamental, a point where the seemingly haphazard - in his home, in Peep's process - opened Rattigan up to an entire creative space and a new approach to bending or even detonating genre. Crucially, all of this was recorded at home, in what Rattigan calls a "tribute to the process of creating" in a DIY space. And what began as a singular passion project unexpectedly grew into a uniquely collaborative record for Current Joys. "I've set out to make collaborative records before," Rattigan explains, "but they often end up totally me, with just a couple exceptions. But then this record gave me the opportunity to be extremely collaborative, to let other people write instrumental tracks, sending links around for people to mess with and weigh in on. I sat down to do credits and realized here were all these people and styles and they all came together and worked." LOVE + POP's cover art is an airbrush/spraypaint rendition of the Wild Heart album cover, which is itself a photo of Rattigan's grandparents kissing. It is sacred in some ways and shredded in others. This idea - the aggressive reimagining of something timeless into a present, finite style - is LOVE + POP.

LOVE + POP is a snapshot of a moment in not-so-far-away time; something fast, loud, moody and a little dangerous. It is, in some ways, classic Current Joys: full of wild ambition, sneaky hooks, and songs that move from concept to completion with prolific speed. But LOVE + POP also explodes myriad expectations with aggressive, deconstructed production, house music influence, and a guest appearance from Lil Yachty. It is not so much a twist as it is a unique multiverse identity for Current Joys, as Nick Rattigan's set out to "capture this sonic moment and harken back to the way I first released music." The story of LOVE + POP begins with one of those house parties: the kind that bulldozes your home and, in its aftermath, leaves a wreckage that finds you flattened but also ready to be new. In that mess and mayhem, Rattigan watched Everybody's Everything, the documentary of Lil Peep, and recorded a cover of "walk away as the door slams". But the itch wasn't scratched, and what began as a moment of homage morphed into something bigger, deeper and more fundamental, a point where the seemingly haphazard - in his home, in Peep's process - opened Rattigan up to an entire creative space and a new approach to bending or even detonating genre. Crucially, all of this was recorded at home, in what Rattigan calls a "tribute to the process of creating" in a DIY space. And what began as a singular passion project unexpectedly grew into a uniquely collaborative record for Current Joys. "I've set out to make collaborative records before," Rattigan explains, "but they often end up totally me, with just a couple exceptions. But then this record gave me the opportunity to be extremely collaborative, to let other people write instrumental tracks, sending links around for people to mess with and weigh in on. I sat down to do credits and realized here were all these people and styles and they all came together and worked." LOVE + POP's cover art is an airbrush/spraypaint rendition of the Wild Heart album cover, which is itself a photo of Rattigan's grandparents kissing. It is sacred in some ways and shredded in others. This idea - the aggressive reimagining of something timeless into a present, finite style - is LOVE + POP.

LOVE + POP is a snapshot of a moment in not-so-far-away time; something fast, loud, moody and a little dangerous. It is, in some ways, classic Current Joys: full of wild ambition, sneaky hooks, and songs that move from concept to completion with prolific speed. But LOVE + POP also explodes myriad expectations with aggressive, deconstructed production, house music influence, and a guest appearance from Lil Yachty. It is not so much a twist as it is a unique multiverse identity for Current Joys, as Nick Rattigan's set out to "capture this sonic moment and harken back to the way I first released music." The story of LOVE + POP begins with one of those house parties: the kind that bulldozes your home and, in its aftermath, leaves a wreckage that finds you flattened but also ready to be new. In that mess and mayhem, Rattigan watched Everybody's Everything, the documentary of Lil Peep, and recorded a cover of "walk away as the door slams". But the itch wasn't scratched, and what began as a moment of homage morphed into something bigger, deeper and more fundamental, a point where the seemingly haphazard - in his home, in Peep's process - opened Rattigan up to an entire creative space and a new approach to bending or even detonating genre. Crucially, all of this was recorded at home, in what Rattigan calls a "tribute to the process of creating" in a DIY space. And what began as a singular passion project unexpectedly grew into a uniquely collaborative record for Current Joys. "I've set out to make collaborative records before," Rattigan explains, "but they often end up totally me, with just a couple exceptions. But then this record gave me the opportunity to be extremely collaborative, to let other people write instrumental tracks, sending links around for people to mess with and weigh in on. I sat down to do credits and realized here were all these people and styles and they all came together and worked." LOVE + POP's cover art is an airbrush/spraypaint rendition of the Wild Heart album cover, which is itself a photo of Rattigan's grandparents kissing. It is sacred in some ways and shredded in others. This idea - the aggressive reimagining of something timeless into a present, finite style - is LOVE + POP.

‘Life And Death - The Five Chandeliers Of The Funereal Exorcisms’ pulls back the veil unto a nocturnal scene populated by shadows, embers burning coldly in the underworld. Marina Zispin is your guide, siren and protector both. Marina Zispin is the negative space between musicians Bianca Scout and Martyn Reid. Love And Death is the duo’s debut release, five chandeliers of melancholic, vibrant synth pop twinkling in the inky blackness. Both originally hailing from the North East of England and forming a musical partnership before lockdown, Bianca Scout and Martyn Reid initially worked remotely. Having relocated to South London and Newcastle respectively, Marina Zispin was born in earnest after the duo could begin writing and practising in the same space. Bianca Scout is a celebrated musician and dancer with a number of solo and collaborative works in her discographywhile Martyn Reid is a mainstay of the UK noise and power electronics scene, most recently with solo project Depletion. Marina Zispin largely eschews both Scout’s deconstructed approach to song and Reid’s focus on visceral, noise- based productions; the result is a new entity, the underground pop star that exists only in darkened dreams. Marina Zispin, then, is an avatar cajoled, nurtured and directed by Scout and Reid. Analogue electronics redolent of the early 80s Cold Wave and Synth Pop era form the base of the Zispin worldview, with Bianca Scout donning the Marina disguise, embodying the character over five songs of swooning drama, playful melodic interplays and tear-stained, doe-eyed sentiment. Flowers In The Sea opens with an austere 4/4 beat and hypnotic synth parts before Scout/Zispin floats in across the lagoon. Scout’s vocal tone is an instant winner, sweet like honey pouring down over the cold, robotic productions and stereo-panned synth work. We can almost see the petals drift into the horizon before being pulled under by the artist’s sadness. Ski Resort bursts out with a Jacno-inspired bassline and backing that could have been buried in a French disco in 1982 (think Stereo or Linear Movement) before Scout’s narrative details frivolousness and regret before a magical shift for the final coda into major key. Backworth Gold Club closes Side A, a mysterious rigid beat and minor chord synth arpeggios swimming in space, floating and obscure. On Side B, Hymn carries the tone on, church-like synths holding down the pattern for Zispin/Scout to float above in a flowing gown of reverb. The marriage of Reid’s cold musical backbone and Scout’s effortless vocal and co- production is in full flow here, the vocals at times rising to the rafters of this nocturnal place of worship, at other points they’re fuzzy samples cutting in and drifting out or sung with an extreme autotune, abstract and perfect in the moment. Surprise Party is the most straightforward pop bullet, Scout/Zispin’s vocal peering out more from the fog, perhaps revealing more than usual: vulnerability, maybe, the wandering muse of the artists behind the veil or just another layer of mystery behind the enigma? Marina Zispin’s Life & Death - The Five Chandeliers Of The Funereal Exorcisms ends as it began, scintillating in obscurity, leaving everything unanswered but open.

“Cinematic electronica embraces intelligent Indian infused beat making”.

Belgian beat collective Up High Collective return with their new album 'Koinonia.' Their second full-length comes five years after their debut album in 2018. For 'Koinonia' they have invited Belgian iconic drummer Lander Gyselinck (STUFF.) and several other guest musicians. The first single 'Koi' is available now, the record is set for release on Wednesday October 11 on vinyl, Bandcamp and via all digital platforms via San Kofa Rhythm Records.

"Going with the cinematic tides of sound: first single 'Koi' features compelling South-Asian sitar, imminent strings, drums by Lander Gyselinck and carefully constructed beat making."

Spearheaded by producer duo Koen De Petter and Renaldo Maria, this record is Up High Collective’s most ambitious music project to date and has been in the works since 2015. The name of the record - Koinonia is Greek for "fellowship" or "community" - refers to the intense and inspiring interplay between the collective and several musicians they invited to contribute.

Raw analog recordings and beats by the producer duo, brimming with imperfections and samples from original Indian music, laid the foundation for live studio sessions by Bert Cornelis, one of the few sitar players in Belgium, drummer Lander Gyselinck (Lander & Adriaan, STUFF.), double bassist Jens Similox (Orchestre Collone) and multi- talented bassist Boris van Overschee (Okon, Delv!s). From their intrinsic penchant for deconstruction, the live elements were cut up by the producers, heavily rearranged and presented as new sounds. After several sessions in their Up High Studio (Leuven), carefully constructed collages gradually started to form with all of its layers filling the deepest corners of the sound space.

The result is a record that balances perfectly between cinematic electronica with complex harmonies to get lost in and solid club oriented beats with crunching textures and off the grid rhythmic patterns.

"All of these songs share an underlying, invisible force bound by the intense interplay and mutual inspiration between us and the live musicians.

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning this year with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions is conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group, including a multi-year LP reissue effort and a forthcoming comprehensive CD box set and an over five hundred page book. Recorded and self-released by the group's own Dry Leaf Discs in 1993, City Lights is the debut record of the then duo Graham Lambkin and Darren Harris_an assured arrival statement teeming with stripling angst and ambition. Lifelong chums Lambkin and Harris were barely nineteen and living at home in the seaside town of Folkestone, Kent, with few overhead expenses. The two were freshly employed as a forklift operator at a hardware store and an aide at a home for children with disabilities, respectively, affording them the time and funds to commit to a proper full-length release. Frontman Lambkin describes the album as a "microscopic examination of leisure activities, this time centered around a nightclub," a conceit surging through its lyrics, song titles, cover art (depicting an audience of cats and mice at the Leas Club, a Folkestone fixture), and flip side (replete with fictional bandmates and pseudonymous liner notes). On a recently-acquired secondhand guitar, Lambkin plays repetitive, brooding licks that form the record's backbone, weaving in and out of sync with Harris's free-form percussion and the pair's sing-song poetry. Tracks range from unraveling nursery-rhyme ditties to extended jams awash with Casiotone and toy piano noodling. The duo's musical hobby-horses work themselves in: the influence of Mark E. Smith's breathless deadpan, the headless outer-edges of ESP-Disk's back catalog, the eerie atmospherics of Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, and the deconstructed rock tunes of the Dunedin scene are all detectable, although there is a sui generis quality to the Shadow Ring's artless temerity. "I've got to see and taste those city lights," intones Lambkin on the album's title track_indeed, this is a record of naked drive and pent-up desperation, and a shimmering glimpse of what's to come. For Fans of The Fall, Royal Trux, The Dead C, Shirley Collins, '70s British progressive rock, Dean Blunt.

TPG long term friend and homeboy Ben Oyefeso pulls out a trio of double-jointed cuts for the club and not, the German producer's debut EP ‘Lagerfeuer’ packs that left-of-centre house punch that’s come to define the label throughout the previous ten releases and certainly more than just that. Cutting his lane at the junction of oddball party music and deconstructionist boogie, Oyefeso’s maiden sortie floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. A weird, buzzing slab of body-jacking electronics that doesn’t play by the book.

An off-road bouncer of a track, the opening number ‘Matt’ has us nodding our heads to a high-in-vitamin mix of jacking house programming and erratic acid patterns gone astray. Knee deep in 303-marinated puddles of psychedelic squelch, Oyefeso keeps swinging the pendulum between a proper syncopated 4x4 motif’d framework and frantic digressions into an abstract-leaning headspace.

A2 ‘Kool’ opts for a further sliced-and-diced rhythmic line of action, generously infused with twisted Rephlexian phrases and sustained waves of micro-house clicking. Topping off that strange journey, the title-track ‘Lagerfeuer’ merges polyrhythmic intricacies with a forward-moving, earwormy kind of linear groove, all laced with a spooky baseline that stretches out into a purgatory of frankly eerie dissonances. Enough with the words, just jump on board Ben Oyefeso’s ghost train for a seriously tortuous, nonconformist ride across dance music’s jagged ridges and most secret crevasses.

Michael Campbell started out as an engineer with the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation and made reggae history presenting his Dread At The Controls radio program, after which he embarked on a successful career as an innovative performing artist, producer and bona fide dubmaster. As such, he was among the first to utilize the incredibly talented, young the Roots Radics to lay the foundations of his tracks. Much less relying on endlessly recycled riddims from the Studio One and Treasure Isle catalogues than many of his peers, Mikey mostly delivered crisp, original tunes. They were 'deconstructed' at King Tubby's studio - the birthplace of dub - in this case by virtuoso Scientist with Mikey himself. Dread at the Controls indeed! This catalogue includes the majestic "Two Track Dub" (a version of the Roots & Culture riddim) and "Demo Dub" (versioning Radio One, featured on the B-side of The Clash' Hitsville UK).

Dub Catalogue Volume 1 is available as a limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on translucent yellow coloured vinyl.

Despite his popularity in Peru as a famous comedian, Melcochita devoted himself to music for many years and worked as in-house studio musician for the label Discos MAG, taking part in countless sessions. This album was recorded between 1967 and 1968, accompanied by the orchestras of Betico Salas, Joe di Roma, Nilo Espinoza, Carlos Muñoz and Tito Chicoma. The album comprises amazing guarachas, mainly international hits, and the hilarious bolero 'Cobardía' where Melcochita brings in his comedian talent. First time reissue! - Back in 1968, the year "Dejen bailar al loco" was released, Pablo was still known as Pacocha (the name of a popular brand of soap) and worked during the day as a session musician for the MAG label. At night, from eight to six in the morning, he used to play percussion in clubs. Then, at the weekends, he performed on the popular variety show La Peña Ferrando, which featured "Quality acting; very funny, simple sketches", impersonations and musical performancs. Most of the guarachas on the album are international hits, such as 'El limoncito' and 'Pa' gozá candela'. The track, 'Quiero casarme contigo' has Mexican origins, and it has been adapted to guaracha style by Betico Salas' orchestra. The humorous 'No es un gato' hails from Colombia, while 'Ahorita va a llové' and 'Carta de mamita' come from Cuba. 'Dejen bailar al loco' and 'Libre de pecado' are also from the Caribbean Island. 'Cobardía' and 'Dos almas' are classic boleros, which were already part of the repertoire of most singers back then and were also included on this album. The only way to perform them to the demanding audience at La Peña without being booed was to put a new spin on the songs, deconstruct them and reinvent the structure, as the Tito Chicoma and Joe di Roma orchestras did, and above all Melcochita, who sang them in a supernatural voice and a created Creole scat that must have wowed the audience, who would then burst into applause and laughter, going home happy after a great night out.

Discrepant proudly presents the Vinyl edition of Lebanese trio Malayeen. Malayeen is the project of Lebanese musicians Raed Yassin (Keyboards, Turntables & Electronics), Charbel Haber (Electric Guitar & Electronics) and Khaled Yassine (Darbouka, Percussion). Born from Yassin and Haber's love for the music of quintessential Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, Malayeen disassembles and re-configures the work and style of the iconic guitarist innovative take on Arabic music. The final result makes for an original and unique update of Khorshid & belly dancing inspired songs from the past. Over the course of 7 compositions, appropriately named after Khorshid and famous belly dancers from the Arabic diaspora, the three musicians' varied backgrounds and techniques collide and coalesce in an experimental yet magical fashion, not actually playing Khorshid's music, but inspiring themselves from the cult guitarist's genius to create something completely new, modern and unexpected. A unique LP featuring the combined talents by key players of the Lebanese avant-garde. The Malayeen LP edition is released by Discrepant in collaboration with Lebanese exploratory label Annihaya effectively combining East and West musical strains of thought as well as conclusively deconstructing and displacing this particular form of 'popular' music. Design by Studio Safar S.A.L. Comes with full color poster painting by Omar Khouri Special vinyl one time pressing to 500 copies. "Uplifting, beat-driven pieces, often melodic, definitely Arabic, with destabilizing touches from external sounds, sound manipulations, and textural plays. The 17- minute 'Samia' is a roller-coaster ride culminating in a dizzying solo/duo between Yassine's darbouka and a darbouka track from a record played by Yassin. Great stuff. Monsieur Délire

Portland-based Kevin Palmer returns to blundar with his Best Available Technology for another release (having previously been featured on cassette). This time it’s on vinyl but still messing about with the same business of constructing and deconstructing head-nodding beats into a foggy bowl of ambience that has become the trademark sound of BAT.

Initially inspired and influenced by the sound-worlds created by Hank Shocklee, BDP and KDAY, Palmer spent his formative years combing pawn shops for samplers. This kicked off his self-described obsessive compulsive work crunching out impossibly naive and obviously unschooled jams in what might have been and continues to be an attempt to capture and document something he felt when listening to the bombastic sonic collages of early hip hop.

Going backwards in order to go forward could be an apt mantra to describe the philosophy behind BAT. Often attached with labels like nostalgia and melancholy, Palmer surely deals with the longing for that perfect time capsule of N.Y. hip hop in the 90s - but where others zoning in on that era simply imitate it, Palmer goes way further into a world of his own making.

Far removed in both time and place to the outskirts of Portland, the sonics of Palmer filters through an outsider’s perspective, sometimes offering a personal journal of the here and now via field recordings from skateparks and surfing trips.

As if one would imagine looking slightly to the left of what was supposedly going on, these tracks continuously shift one's focus. That funky feel good beat is there, but almost always just out of grasp. Palmer gives us the sound of a memory slipping away.

Yet this reads not as the end of something, but rather a stepping stone into a world of possibilities. Operating at the outskirts of genre, you could imagine anything from dub, hip hop, ambient or techno to emerge and crystalize from the haze, yet it never does. This is all those things and nothing. Or maybe it’s just some “sad fucked up funk” as Palmer puts it.

The Keplar label presents the next instalment in a series of reissues from the catalogue of Sasu Ripatti’s seminal Vladislav Delay project. Originally released on Mille Plateaux, the vinyl edition of »Entain« from 2000 omitted two shorter tracks and included all others in an abridged form. With this reissue, the full album as it was pressed on CD is finally made available on vinyl. Besides a new remaster by Kassian Troyer, it was also given new cover artwork by Marc Hohmann that picks up on that of the »Whistleblower« reissue, released in early 2023 by Keplar. This serial visual approach highlights the conceptual continuity between those masterful explorations of the interplay between dub techniques, noise, and repetition.

Ripatti himself had reworked material from 1999’s »Ele« album for the release of »Entain,« which means that it can be considered the debut album proper of his Vladislav Delay project. It saw the Finnish artist aim more vigorously for abstraction than in his earlier releases as Vladislav Delay for labels such as Chain Reaction, which were collected on the iconic »Multila« compilation in 2000; another milestone from his back catalogue that has been reissued by Keplar in recent times. To mark this special occasion, »Multila« will be repressed by Keplar with a new artwork that matches the new design of »Whisteblower« and »Entain«.

»Multila« and »Entain« correspond with each other conceptually as much as they seem to differ on a musical level. The material on »Multila« was clearly indebted to the Berlin dub techno sound, marked by its grainy and at times abrasive sonic aesthetics. From the very first moments of the 22-minute long opener »Kohde« however, it becomes clear that »Entain« takes things further away from the dancefloor, aiming less for physical impact than for intellectual stimulation. A sort of electronic minimal music, it was primarily interested in letting discrete elements freely come into play with one another.

Much like »Multila,« however, »Entain« highlighted the subtle differences embedded in what only feels like repetitive music. Of course the massive bassline and ghostly dub riddims that permeate »Notke« as well as the deconstructed beat at the core of »Ele« still hint at Ripatti’s roots in beat-driven music. However, they also make his artistic transformation audible by turning their sources of inspirations into something entirely unheard of. »Entain« took the dub techno formula further than any other record before it—onwards into the realms of pure abstraction.

Adrian Borland and Graham Bailey might be better known as members of legendary post-punk group The Sound, but the two were childhood friends and had been playing together even earlier in The Outsiders, and continued their deep musical rapport as a duo, creating these intense and engaging songs as Second Layer at the same time as their higher profile band output. Following our release of Courts Or Wars, combining their early material, we are proud to reissue their only full length album, World Of Rubber.

Fueled by experimentation in both song construction and recording techniques, the duo leave you enveloped in what The Quietus described as, “a monochrome worldview morbidly obsessed with the dehumanizing effect of war, nuclear weapon annihilation, and the fracturing and negation of the self within an increasingly distorted and technologically mediated society.” Indeed, the goal had been to make each album a concept album, with this to be titled: Second Layer’s World Of Rubber. Alas, this was to be the first and last of those efforts. New detailed liner notes from Graham Bailey shed considerable light on the creation of this cold classic and its immediate aftermath.

Bailey’s inventive construction and deconstruction of various electronics, effects boxes and tape loops form the propulsive base for these songs. Borland’s guitar playing is jagged and unleashed. Above it all is an undeniable sense of melody and Adrian’s distinctive vocals. Soon, they would wonder where Second Layer ended and The Sound began, but World Of Rubber would stand as a document of this fertile period. It would also be a lasting testament to their desire to push the boundaries of their creativity. Dark and brooding the result is what Bandcamp described as “brutally bleak, blank-eyed post-punk that remains chillingly compelling.”

Flatlife Records 3x12" Sales Pack including:

- V/A - The Factory 001 (FACTORY001RP)
- V/A - De Missie Various Artists 01 (DMVA01)
- V/A - Jack Wax Presents: Flat Acid Compilation Volume 5 (FLAT019RP)

Building off of the themes of identity, storytelling and experimentation on her critically acclaimed debut album, Khonnar (2018), Deena Abdelwahed’s upcoming album Jbal Rrsas is the next chapter of a reimagining of what club music could be. The album spans seven tracks of bass, techno, and experimental music, with Abdelwahed consulting with masterminds like Tunisian composer and multi-instrumentalist Khalil Hentati, aka Khalil Epi, and Iraqi-British multi-instrumentalist, composer, and researcher Khyam Allami, as well as Egyptian mastering engineer Heba Kadry, to help realise her vision.

Jbal Rrsas starts with the seductively apocalyptic opener, The Key to the Exit, a deconstructed sha’bi production. With tracks like Six as Oil and the delightfully intense Violence for Free, Abdelwahed leads users to a desert rave, where industrial rhythms are left unbridled. Abdelwahed’s vocals on Complain and Pre-Island are powerful and exposed, confidently placed on dizzying avant-garde productions. The Wire previously said “Khonnar is an assured debut that sits on the edge of a whole swathe of possibilities, not only sonic but also geographical, social and political.” With Jbal Rrsas finds Abdelwahed deftly navigating through those possibilities, frequently pushing against genres, labels, and social identifiers, while elevating club music to otherworldly heights.

Looooooongish Cat and Davecoin have come together for their debut album Realizer on Adeen. It is a record that swings from the dark and mysterious to the more upbeat and playful as it explores a range of techno styles. The material originates from the pair's live set so has a real dynamism to it as well as it moves through ever-evolving psychedelic soundscapes.

Vocals, synth lines, and guitars have all been laid down on tape and then resampled and deconstructed to "create an analog patchwork which floats over the hard-hitting beats and fat analog synths and bass lines." It's an immersive and inventive record that also has a fresh cover design.

Onset Audio proudly presents their first vinyl release from enigmatic duo Esthetic & Reac-Zo. As a label that has long been in the trenches of abstract bass design and cinematic soundscapes, The Torii EP encapsulates the Onset aesthetic through four tracks of deconstructed jungle and hypnotic halftime experimentation.

Formed by AFI members Davey Havok and Jade Puget, Blaqk Audio released their second studio album, Bright Black Heaven, in 2012. It topped the US Billboard Dance/Electronic album charts with its moody synth pop and atmospheric production, blending '80s influences with their electronic goth sound.

Mike Cooper wrote his final songwriter record, a suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio, while living on the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain, an era when he was considering retiring from music altogether. A chance encounter and a last-ditch record deal convinced him to make one last album, which he recorded in 1974 at Pathway Studios in London, with “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World,” featuring the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Louis Moholo and Harry Miller with UK saxophonist Mike Osborne. This first-ever reissue includes a bonus CD of Milan Live Acoustic 2018, a previously unreleased solo set that represents Cooper’s return, after forty-four years pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, steel guitar, and songcraft. The deluxe LP+CD edition also features a six-panel insert with additional artwork and an essay by the artist about both records. The deluxe 2xCD gatefold edition features an eight-panel version of the same insert. In the wake of his magisterial triptych of early 1970s avant-folk-rock records Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. (1972) the British songwriter, guitarist, and fledgling improviser Mike Cooper retreated to the Costa Tropical of Granada, Spain. With no prospects for touring or recording again, his fiery band the Machine Gun Co. had disintegrated. Cooper sets the scene in his liner notes of the first-ever reissue of his unjustly forgotten next album Life and Death in Paradise (1974): No one came running with offers of fame and riches, and we fell apart, and I left the country and headed for the beach, disillusioned and a bit disorientated musically. I went to Almuñécar in Andalusia, a place I had been going since 1969, because a painter friend from Reading, Rowland Fade who made the collage in the gatefold of my earlier album Trout Steel had moved there in 1968. It was in this synthetic coastal “paradise,” unmoored and adrift, considering retiring from music altogether, that he began tentatively writing new songs. A chance encounter with producer Tony Hall, who offered Cooper a last-ditch record deal on Hall’s nascent Fresh Air label, convinced him to make one last album with the stipulation that he could assemble what he called “The Greatest Rock and Roll Band in the World.” I told Tony that I would do it if I could hire some of my South African jazz musician friends that I had used on my Pye/Dawn albums and some friends from Reading that I still knew and admired. I called up Harry Miller, Louis Moholo, and Mike Osborne, who were in fact a trio at the time … and several local Reading heroes, including the singer-songwriter Terry Clarke. The result, recorded live with minimal overdubbing at Pathway Studios in London, was Life and Death in Paradise, an utterly singular suite of gloaming glam-rock anthems performed with a spiritual jazz trio comprising the inventive South African jazz rhythm section of Moholo and Miller with UK saxophonist Osborne. Unlike anything else in Cooper’s extensive catalog. Fresh Air fizzled, and Life and Death became Cooper’s final record as a songwriter, having pushed the form as far as he could. Drifting north from Spain back to the UK, he fell into the scene of the London Musicians Collective (LMC) including Paul Burwell, David Toop, and saxophonist Lol Coxhill, Cooper’s bandmate in the Recedents and fully embraced free improvisation. He was still, however, interested in singing and lyrics, so, influenced by Tom Phillips, William Burroughs, and Brion Gysin, he began experimenting with text collage and cut-up techniques, arriving at his own hybrid compositional strategy for improvisatory songs. The previously unreleased solo set Milan Live Acoustic 2018 represents Cooper’s return, after more than four decades pursuing free improvisation and electronics, to a new, deconstructed approach to singing, lap steel guitar, and songcraft. Presented here together with Life and Death in Paradise, the two records provide fascinating bookends to Mike Cooper’s long, mercurial, and pioneering practice as a songmaker.

Repress!

Exceptional debut album of Military Space Music and / or Fluxus Techno rave drills from the inimitable, acronymic duo for Diagonal. RIYL Belgian Techno, SuperCollider, Powell, Lorenzo Senni,
the bleep test At long last N.M.O. execute their crazed debut album for Diagonal, distilling the playful calisthenics of their laptop and drum kit live show in a totally unique manner that somehow deconstructs and alliterates tracky acid techno with avant no-wave rock, computer music and the kind of snare-
driven tattoos coming out of Portugal's Príncipe label. Best just call it Military Space Music - Cleft as two corresponding but individual sides entitled Nordic Mediterranean Organisation
& Numerous Miscommunications Occur, it finds the Romantic Viking duo ratcheting the psychotomimetic intensity of their previous tape and trio of 12"s for Anòmia, The Death of Rave
and Where To Now according to their central mantra of As Strict As Possible, resulting in 5 alarming, powerful dancefloor raids intersected by infuriating locked grooves, or Neoliberal
Madness Offering #1-4, plus a series of barking trained Unit drills.
The razor sharp and raucous results don't sit comfortably in any pre-ordained category, preferring to scythe their own route thru the time-flattened field of contemporary music by employing
the fundamentals of physical pressure and precise psychoacoustic frequencies in a disciplined pursuit of new, syncretic sensations that toy with rave convention and serve to demystify notions of aerobic mysticism.
Nose to tail, they spell out their ideas with playfully pedantic attention to detail, whether physically making you get up to nudge the needle from its pervasive locked groove, putting you thru your
paces in their German Trained Unit challenges, or simply driving you to delirium in the album's full blown dance tracks.
Cut almost a side-a-piece for optimal intensity, those five dance cuts veer from the clashing sharp and wet, tight-but-distended dichotomies of RIYL Roma to the ploughing pneu-beta bass drum
and giddy top end tickle of New Bulgaria on the Nordic Mediterranean Organisation plate, to take
in the scuffling, compartmented swerve and teeth-chattering acid of Armchair Evader and what

Rollover Milano is back with another killer release from Lorenzo Morresi entitled ‘Isla’ EP. The label is still kicking up the cosmic disco dance dust at their longstanding weekly party at the Apollo Club, Milan.

This glam affair has hosted a long list of luminaries, which is mirrored on the labels roster and output of dark disco, deep house, and Italo space funk. Lorenzo Morresi, a producer, and DJ who is constantly searching for new sounds, blending genres, merging analog and new technologies. With releases on 22a Records, Fly by Night Music, Roots Underground, Wall of Sound, INRI, and SuperEclectic, his sound spans other worldly vibes, jazz-funk sonics, and blazing electronica as a DJ and live performance. Isla is one of the main protagonists of the movie ‘The Holy Mountain’ by Alejandro Jodorowsky.

She is a companion of the Alchemist who tries to find the Holy Mountain to find the secret of immortality. This whole EP is inspired by Jodorowsky’s work. Morresi imagines transforming the dreamlike atmospheres that accompany Jodorowsky’s dystopian vision into music, bringing them to the club, primed to be played at high volume, in dark light, on discerning dancefloors. 'Jodo' is recorded live, and flows between electronica and experimental jazz, but with a dark and ritualistic core.

'Odissey Venezia' originates from studio recordings that Lorenzo made while playing the Loutar – a Moroccan stringed instrument - combined with a deadly dancefloor backdrop made up using a Roland TT303. 'Isla' is based on slower rhythms, organic percussion, and decontextualized voices of old sampled records. The 'Outro' uses some quotes from Jodorowsky’s books, robotic and digitally generated phrases combined with a rhythmic beat that encapsulates the meaning of this EP, being Lorenzo Morresi’s life long focus on the fusion between dance rhythms, psychedelia, and musical transcendence.

Loek Frey's Add Interaction is an exercise in damp, eerie atmospherics and intricate drum patterns. Released through Omen Wapta, the Dutch producer gets experimental through drum and bass, IDM and breakbeat deconstructed with unexpected tempo shifts and effects. Produced during the pandemic, the EP conjures loneliness, solitude and unfamiliarity. Expect tunneling, meditative, low-end structures fit for a journey through the earth's layers down to its core. And expansive, pearlescent vocals evoking spiritual bodies. Soundscape-leaning IDM weave into polyrhythms and muted breakbeats. Frey's release positions him as a teacher of brooding textures. The unpredictability can draw you deep into the sonic abyss -- if you let it.

In the mid-'60s, Albert Ayler found himself at the center of major transformations within jazz. On his albums for ESP-Disk', his delivery was radically aggressive and his tone blistering – aiming for something beyond the New Thing. His music would be further energized when (at the behest of John Coltrane) Bob Thiele signed him to Impulse! As Ayler told The Plain Dealer at the time, "It's not about notes anymore. It's a sound – a feeling. The approach we're taking will discontinue the use of the word 'jazz.'"

In Greenwich Village, Ayler's first LP on Impulse!, perfectly captures the Cleveland-born saxophonist's radiant intensity. Sourced from a pair of live engagements – February '67 at the Village Theatre on New York's Lower East Side and December '66 at the Village Vanguard – these recordings show an improved clarity in production and performance.

Both sets feature two basses (including Alan Silva and Henry Grimes) which allowed the ensemble to go in different harmonic directions while maintaining an organic unity. Of particular interest are "For John Coltrane," a tribute to Ayler's mentor who would pass later that year, and "Truth Is Marching In" where trumpeter Donald Ayler joins his brother to celebrate and ultimately deconstruct several jazz traditions to stunning effect.

Vibrant in sound and vision, Albert Ayler's In Greenwich Village is a landmark statement in free jazz and a career high-point for this truly original artist. Superior Viaduct is honored to present this classic album on vinyl for the first time domestically in 30 years.

In the centre of deep space we tune in to the radio broadcasts from an old Class T interstellar spaceship. The emissions endlessly resonate the frequencies of the seventeenth release on the label HC Records by one of the titans of the Valencian scene, The Lost Boys, new pseudonym of the DJ and producer Raszia.

With releases on labels such as Bass Agenda, Subsist or Hxagrm Records, the artist mesmerises our senses with the Exiles of Mars Ep, available in both double vinyl and digital.

Syncopated rhythms are the protagonists across four original tracks together
with remixes by four electro legends: Boris Divider, Estrato Aurora, Dark Vektor, and Filmmaker.

The EP’s first cut is a remix of "Wall Of Bricks" by the legendary Boris Divider, which gives the track an air of crystalline, synthetic and cosmic sound, very much in line with his latest works on the Generative Operations series. Next, we find the original version, where the kick drums are heavier, the synths and basses more colourful and the acid sequences take centre stage in an odyssey of sidereal intensity.

On the record’s flip side, a feeling of overwhelming melancholy takes root in our soul. Valencian Estrato Aurora mentally transports us to the mysterious red sand of Mars in a precise exercise in symphonic minimalism with his remix of "Exiles of Mars", which mutates the original idea with velvety pads, synths and a slow and rapturous hypnotism that sinks us to unfathomable depths.
The Lost Boys' original concept on B2 is a combination of Miami Bass-style breaks and a demonic mantra-like main synth line, backed by what seems like an infinity of pearly effects and secondary melodies, pushing the track towards a crescendo punctuated by a dry and sharp snare.

The second disc’s opener "Bust My Moves" is a masterclass in deconstruction and reconstruction by Dark Vektor with his "Electro Escuadrón Remix”. The genius from Terrassa provides powerful lyrics loaded with a message about the modern rise of the 808 movement. We return to the original Lost Boys version on C2, a futuristic martial discourse takes shape with combating breaks combined with rave chords and brief episodes of respite, almost dreamlike, in the middle and end of the track’s exciting development.

On the D side, rough frequencies verging on distortion materialise through our ship's speakers as we pick up the Colombian Filmmaker’s remix of "Data Recovery For Brains". A psychotronic final appetiser that combines harshness and elegance in the use of the rolling kick drums and saturation of the sound, it is without a doubt the ideal soundtrack to narrate the collision of two galaxies. The closing of the EP features the original track, in which The Lost Boys show us his most mental and lysergic side as the track progresses along a slow and comforting broken rhythm, made dynamic by clever use of diverse acid sequences and clairvoyant stellar melodies.

The complete artistic experience is enhanced in all dimensions with accompanying artwork by
Daniel Requeni and videos elaborated by Frank-F.

Mastering as usual by Steve Voidloss at Black Monolith Studios in London (UK).