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Brian Harden is one of the many talented Chicago house producers out there who sit just below the top talent in terms of global reputation. But he shouldn't - his sound is as musical and timeless as any from the Windy City. He's been grafting since the 90s and now taps into that long career with a new collection of rare cuts and unreleased gems on this Instinctive Meditation album for French label D3 Elements. There is textbook heavy drum work and spaced-out synths on 'Zion' before warmer, deeper basement cuts like 'Nomadic Jazz'. 'Yeah' is a party starter with clattering percussion softened by more jazzy chord work and 'Motionless' allows you a moment to catch your breath on some cosmic ambiance. The rest of the record takes in deeper techno, samba-tinged deep house shufflers and star-gazing beauties for 4AM. Proof if you needed it that Harden is a boss.

For Erika's second album "Anevite Void", she explores her live process as it permeates everything she does, including documenting the process of life in the elaborate sci fi mythology she created. Erika began performing live in Ectomorph in 1997 when she was gifted a TR-606 by BMG and asked to join the group. This grew to her building her own studio, performing solo as Erika, collaborating with people like Jay Ahern and Noncompliant, and performing as a member of Circle of Live. Her depth of thought and clarity of vision has led to her mentoring people on live performance through the In Bloom platform, where she has made a large impact on many up and coming musicians. "Anevite Void", Erika's new album, finds her organically writing songs for her live shows, allowing them to take shape through performance, and later recording them in the studio, making this the first album she has entirely written and produced on her own. Mixed by long time collaborator BMG, she finds this record as the launching point for a new process for her. Conceptually, this album was inspired by "the irregular life cycles created by three suns circling over a planetary organism that presents two major biomes: rocky crystalline desert, and deep layered forest, each of which exists above and/or below ground, depending on what phase the suns are in." From this realm the album took shape. She also chronicled this concept in drawings but found this painting by Detroit puckish punk legend Nai Sammon perfectly visually explained the concept, and chose it for the cover. She describes "each track is about an organic process that occurs: acts of survival of the biomes, or what happens between them and the multitude of other beings that they host." Erika is currently splitting her time between being based in Berlin and Detroit, is part of the triumvirate that runs Interdimensional Transmissions (BMG, Erika and Amber) that are releasing this record and produce legendary events such as No Way Back, Samhain and Return to the Source. She performs live and DJs and collaborates and oozes sonic truth in its many forms. Visit the "Anevite Void" in early 2023.

"And we"re coming out of dreams / And we"re coming back to dreams" is the first thing you hear Bill say as you remake your acquaintance on YTILAER. Right out the gate, he"s standing in two places at once: meeting up with old friends behind the scenes and encountering them on the record, finding himself coming round the bend and then again as someone else on down the line. Like the character actor he played on Gold Record, writing stories about other people, telling jokes about everyone, and in singing them, becoming the songs. "You do what you"ve got to do / To see the picture" Bill"s got a full band sound going on this one, with him and Matt Kinsey on guitars, Emmett Kelly on bass and backing vocals, Sarah Ann Phillips on B3, piano and backing vocals and Jim White on drums. Jim and Matt sing on one song, too, and some other singers come in, too. Bill plays some synth here and there, and Carl Smith drifts in and out of the picture with his contra alto clarinet, as do Mike St. Clair and Derek Phelps on brass. Somehow in between them all, you might think you hear the distant sound of a steel guitar. And you might - but you might not, too. In this company, Bill continues his journey, tunneling underneath the weathered exterior of what seems to be and into the more nuanced life everything takes on in the dark. With Bill"s voice making the extraordinary leaps and bounds that measure the lives of the songs, the band follow him through passages that seem to invent themselves; other times playing with deeply soulful grooves and/or desperate intensity, as these moments come and go. There"s nothing they can"t do. "I wrote this song in five and forever / I"m writing it right now" Bill sings on "Natural Information" - an admission of the everyday alchemy he"s forever trafficking in. Time passes, triangulating the encounters that went into any one record with two out of any three others, all of it made flesh, new constitution, in our stereo speakers. If every album is its own life, it stands to reason that they"re invariably passing in the night. Cascading images flowing from the stream of consciousness. Turning like pages from the journal, unspeakably personal, then suddenly become tall tales, like a book pulled off the shelf, completely unbound. Headlines flow through. Mirror images, mirthful ones. Bill"s lyrics strain at the lines on the page, not content to separate the printing of the fact from the myth or be confined to ink on paper. They want to fly free. And they do. "I realize now that dreams are real" On YTILAER"s inner sleeve, alongside his lyrics, Bill celebrates the "exhilaration and dread" of cover artist Paul Ryan"s paintings. Paul"s another one met up with again down the road, his indelible cover imagery on Apocalypse and Dream River now an axis of meaning in the Callahanian world - and in the bright colors found in these new images, a parallel to Bill"s recognitions here. "A breath of exquisite air as we come up from drowning", sounds like the desired hope for those hearing the songs of YTILAER.

Gated kick off 2023 with a corker of a remix package, featuring an epic electro workout from Radioactive Man and lo-fi deep house from Max Wheeler of Anushka fame.

Marcela Dias Sindaco’s breathy Portuguese vocals always lent themselves to remixes and these five cuts use them to great effect.

Keith Tenniswood’s storming version of Missao Controle kicks off the EP, with a near-8-minute bass-heavy acid monster that retains the original’s funky elements but pushes them way into the future.

German upstarts not even noticed take Extincao nice and deep for those loved-up dancefloor moments, again bringing in melodic elements from the original, but twisting them just enough to flow into a dreamy acidic breakdown.

Flip to the B and Anushka’s Max Wheeler goes it alone, with a deep and crackly analogue house version of Dois Lados. Injected with just a smidgeon of jazz, this is definitely one for the heads.

Next up, longtime Gated collaborator Dip Shim, whose debut album only just dropped, brings a straight-up electro jam version of Pro Meu Bem, with haunting pads and insistent arpeggios.

Rounding off the EP is Perseus Traxx’s deeper than deep take on Missao Controle, a tripped out reverby journey laden with his signature hardware sound.

On her third album, Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, asks what guiding forces might be driving, enticing, and affecting us. “All Above” is rooted in her deeply personal philosophy as an artist, blurring the boundaries between electronic music and acoustic music and sculpting familiar ambient forms into personal themes painted with rich emotional colours. Written painstakingly over the last two years, the album is the most ambitious and divergent set of music Portioli has assembled so far, with a wide variety of instrumentation (including voices, strings, organs, guitars, and synthesisers) focused around the piano. She‘s keen to assure listeners that while that instrument isn‘t always heard, it‘s constantly at the forefront of the album, shepherding its emotions and anchoring its mood. It makes sense then that on the opening track ‘Quasicristallo’, the acoustic piano is the first element we hear, recorded closely, so its characteristic rattle and creak can speak as loudly as the familiar tones themselves. When the music blooms into abstraction and processed electronics, it‘s almost imperceptible: reverb mutates into ghostly vapour trails, and distortion forms the keys into another instrument entirely.

“All Above“ follows 2020‘s acclaimed “Blink A Few Times To Clear Your Eyes“ and 2018‘s “Pineapple” released on Donato Dozzy and Neel‘s Spazio Disponibile imprint. Having garnered praise from outlets like Resident Advisor, XLR8R, The Quietus, Inverted Audio, and The Verge, Portioli operates in a unique space within the electronic music scene, straddling the art world and the wider electronic music scene. She‘s developed sound art installations for Rome‘s La Galleria Nazionale and the Terraforma Festival-related Il Pianeta, and has appeared at Barbican, MUTEK, Le Guess Who?, Kraftwerk, and other internationally renowned venues and festivals, often collaborating with Marco Ciceri on A/V presentations. Ciceri also maintains the visual identity of Portioli‘s label One Instrument, a concept imprint that asks artists to create music only using a single device. All this experience is poured into “All Above”, a richly visual album that‘s far more than just an imaginary film score. While on ‘Human’, her piano punctuates a rhythmic synthesised bassline and smudged choirs that can‘t help but trace out the silver screen. The composer is keen to clarify that she doesn‘t think of her music (or sound in general) in visual terms.

Portioli studied as a linguist and used her art to develop an emotional language that‘s not bound by expected cultural constraints. When she adds a different instrument or process, it‘s not to reference a visual cue but to mark a journey through different states of being. Each element embodies a different emotion or mood: the electric guitar represents strength or violence, synthesisers shuttle us into the dream world, and the acoustic instruments highlight intimacy and warmth – even heart. Read like this, the tracks are like meditative poems rather than cinematic vignettes: ‘The World At Number XX’ is seemingly centred around a chugging synthesised arpeggio, but the cosmic, Klaus Schulze-esque pads, strangled guitar and evocative organ tones hint at the open-hearted, literate psychedelia of the 1970s; ‘In The Present As The Future’ meanwhile is breathy and windswept, juxtaposing urgent rhythmic phrases with light, flute-like gusts of harmony.

Dedicated to Editions Mego founder Peter Rehberg, who died suddenly last year, “All Above” demands engagement and refuses to evaporate into the background. The album asks listeners not just to absorb the album as a whole but notice the cracks in the structure and discern the tension they cause. That‘s never more evident than on the closing track ‘Cost What It May’, a piece of music almost jarring when Portioli chops into noisy waves of electric guitar. In the wrong hands, this might sound like a power move – some rock posturing to act as a finale. But Portioli‘s expression is different. She‘s forcing a level of engagement that perceives the negative space as just as necessary as the saturated positive, and what could be more haunting and emotionally resonant than that?

Composed, produced and mixed by Aimée Portioli.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin.
Photography by Federico Boccardi.
Design and layout by Riccardo Piovesan.

Finnish bassist Antti Lötjönen returns in February 2023 with his second Quintet East album on We Jazz Records. With Verneri Pohjola on trumpet, Mikko Innanen and Jussi Kannaste on saxes, and Joonas Riippa on drums, Quintet East is a hard-hitting ensemble of Helsinki scene A-listers. The new release sees the quintet work with Lötjönen's inspired new music with remarkable spirit, spreading out on a quest for new sounds and ideas, and returning to base with a fresh batch of acoustic creative music, wild to the bone even when sounding completely in control.

Circus/Citadel is essentially a coherent album, rather than a series of loosely connected compositions. There's plenty of diversity within Lötjönen's compositions and the band's dynamics, yet it all flows into one effortlessly, creating a suite of sorts, even outside of the title composition which consists of three parts. During the course of the album, the quintet often gets together in smaller formations: in trios and duos of different combinations of the players. The music breathes and maintains its energy at all times, leaving plenty of headroom for the all-out quintet "attacks" when needed. It all comes together in a shape that feels unified and cyclical, leaving the listener hungry for repeated listens in order to get deeper into the many layers found within.

Antti Lötjönen says:

"These compositions vary in terms of form and density, with each player having enough room to re-invent and expand on the music within the pieces. I wrote this music over a relatively brief time span. This, I think, is something you can also hear on the album, as the temporal closeness of the ideas brings with it a certain kind of unity. The world we live in sometimes feels like and absurd circus, from which you need to get away from to get new ideas and energy. Everyone needs their citadel, whatever it may be. This pairing of the two words Circus/Citadel is inspired by a poem by the Romanian-born German-language poet Paul Celan (1920–1970)."

Circus/Citadel is released by We Jazz Records on 24 February, 2023, as white and black vinyl editions, on CD and digitally. The artwork displays a freeform graphic score of the music by We Jazz artistic director and designer Matti Nives. The vinyl versions are housed in heavy duty tip-on sleeve with silver-embossed lettering, and the CD comes in a matte digisleeve with silver-embossed lettering. Antti Lötjönen Quintet East performs live in Finland in January and February.

Finnish bassist Antti Lötjönen returns in February 2023 with his second Quintet East album on We Jazz Records. With Verneri Pohjola on trumpet, Mikko Innanen and Jussi Kannaste on saxes, and Joonas Riippa on drums, Quintet East is a hard-hitting ensemble of Helsinki scene A-listers. The new release sees the quintet work with Lötjönen's inspired new music with remarkable spirit, spreading out on a quest for new sounds and ideas, and returning to base with a fresh batch of acoustic creative music, wild to the bone even when sounding completely in control.

Circus/Citadel is essentially a coherent album, rather than a series of loosely connected compositions. There's plenty of diversity within Lötjönen's compositions and the band's dynamics, yet it all flows into one effortlessly, creating a suite of sorts, even outside of the title composition which consists of three parts. During the course of the album, the quintet often gets together in smaller formations: in trios and duos of different combinations of the players. The music breathes and maintains its energy at all times, leaving plenty of headroom for the all-out quintet "attacks" when needed. It all comes together in a shape that feels unified and cyclical, leaving the listener hungry for repeated listens in order to get deeper into the many layers found within.

Antti Lötjönen says:

"These compositions vary in terms of form and density, with each player having enough room to re-invent and expand on the music within the pieces. I wrote this music over a relatively brief time span. This, I think, is something you can also hear on the album, as the temporal closeness of the ideas brings with it a certain kind of unity. The world we live in sometimes feels like and absurd circus, from which you need to get away from to get new ideas and energy. Everyone needs their citadel, whatever it may be. This pairing of the two words Circus/Citadel is inspired by a poem by the Romanian-born German-language poet Paul Celan (1920–1970)."

Circus/Citadel is released by We Jazz Records on 24 February, 2023, as white and black vinyl editions, on CD and digitally. The artwork displays a freeform graphic score of the music by We Jazz artistic director and designer Matti Nives. The vinyl versions are housed in heavy duty tip-on sleeve with silver-embossed lettering, and the CD comes in a matte digisleeve with silver-embossed lettering. Antti Lötjönen Quintet East performs live in Finland in January and February.

Country songwriter from Brooklyn's indie underground, Dougie Poole blurs the lines between genre and generation on his third solo album, The Rainbow Wheel of Death. Rooted in sharp songwritingvand the organic sounds of a live-in-the-studio band, it's a classic-sounding record for the modern world. The Rainbow Wheel of Death's title nods to the colorful pinwheel that appears onscreen whenever a computer's application stalls. For Poole _ who found himself working as a freelance computer programmer once the pandemic brought his touring schedule to a temporary halt in 2020 _ it's also a reference to the holding pattern that's left much of society feeling stuck, unable to move ahead in an uncertain world. That feeling was pervasive when he in his New York City bedroom and wrapping up the songwriting process in the recording studio itself. Once hailed as the "patron saint of millennial malaise" for his sardonic wit and topical, tongue-in-cheek songwriting, Poole broadens his reach here. "High School Gym" builds a bridge between 2020s lo-fi textures and 1980s pop vibes, while "Must Be In Here Somewhere" _ whose narrator sits at a lap top, searching through "every server burning in North Carolina" for a digital souvenir of a long-lost relationship _ mixes modern concerns with classic country instrumentation. If records like 2017's Wideass Highway and 2020's breakthrough release The Freelancer's Blues told stories about uninspired Millennials languishing in dead-end jobs and no-good relationships, then The Rainbow Wheel of Death focuses on more universal issues like mortality, love, and the passing of the time. With The Rainbow Wheel of Death, Dougie Poole breathes new life into country music, retaining the acclaimed elements of his previous work _ drum machines, synthesizers, and his deep-set voice _ while pushing toward something warm, organic, and prismatic.

O-Wells and 41ISSA have teamed up for their first joint EP. Marking 41ISSA's release debut, the result is three tracks full of speed and space-filling melodies: think big festival stage, think rave, think 2010 dance music (in the best possible way). Taking influences from their early clubbing years in the late noughties, O-Wells and 41ISSA found a mutual musical voice in a large and crisp sound between electro, techno and trance. Catchy melodies take the lead, backed by reverberating claps and relentless basslines that build up to rich club tracks. Opener "Suzuki" is a 149-bpm laser-focussed workout with a raucous deep synth. The Berlin-based producers embrace the trancier side of contemporary club music in "Are You Ready", with a breezy ambient intro that leads into an epic dome of darkness. The more reflective"Pulse" takes it down a notch, breathing a sense of calm - an introverted techno track dripping with melancholy. A bleepy electro remix by Finnish DJ and producer Sansibar completes the spectrum of "BKM", an EP sure to be heard across club dancefloors this winter. "BKM" marks 41ISSA's first release as a producer. She's been part of Live From Earth since 2018 as a DJ, covering a wide range of genres with a zeal for emotional sound textures and a lot of bounce, from ambient to club and techno. O-Wells has been producing for more than a decade now, having found a musical home at Die Orakel lately. Both are not only partners in music, but also in life. "BKM" is short for "blutigekaesemauken", their joint alias as which they've been making music since their early days of dating.

Canto Ostinato is the new volume of classical minimalism from musician and producer Erik Hall. Written for four pianos in 1979 by Dutch composer Simeon ten Holt, the piece is freshly framed as an intimate, hour-long solo performance consisting of multitracked grand pianos, electric piano, and organ. Modern yet warm, ethereal yet tangible, Hall's Canto Ostinato expertly bridges a revered piece of meditative concert repertoire with a tactile and highly personal studio setting. Chicago-born and Michigan-based, Erik Hall is known as a multi-instrumental pillar for the groups NOMO, Wild Belle, and his own songwriting moniker In Tall Buildings. He has composed music for feature films, and as a producer/engineer he has shaped records for Natalie Bergman and Western Vinyl labelmates Lean Year. In a 2020 creative pivot, he chose to reinvent composer Steve Reich's monumental contemporary classical masterpiece Music for 18 Musicians as a solo undertaking, applying the piece's score to the familiar keyboards, guitars, and synthesizers in his studio. "At the time I think I was working through my identity as a musician and an artist," Hall explains, "and on a level there was some sort of exorcism of a long held pop spirit." The album was celebrated for being "freshly thrilling" and "legible in history but assertive of the moment" (Pitchfork) and "beguiling, meditational, and magical" (Electronic Sound). It won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record, and it quickly joined the canon of the piece's quintessential recordings. "There is a pseudo-meditational benefit to working on a longform piece that's built on repetition," Hall says. "Every stage- from internalizing the music, to executing the performance, to editing and mixing the record- requires deep and sustained presence of mind. I've always been drawn to a hallucinatory combination of harmony and repetition, and I found the entire process addictive." An apt second chapter, Canto Ostinato is inherently vast, and its score gives great creative license to the performer. Comprising 106 sections, complete freedom is given to repeat each one as many or as few times as desired. Additional leeway is given with regard to dynamics, articulation, and even instrumentation. On the heels of his previous, rather maximal arrangement, Hall chose to limit this album's palette to three foundational keyboards of his studio: a 1962 Hammond M-101 organ, a 1978 Rhodes Mark I electric piano, and his family-heirloom 1910 Steinway grand piano. "This particular piece brought the added challenge of rekindling my dexterity as a pianist, something I haven't maintained in earnest since I was a teenager," he admits. The ensuing five-note rhythmic motif- the piece's primary building block- is steady and workmanlike, forgoing virtuosic flare for depth, texture, and resonance, and eventually giving way to the stunning gratification of a gorgeously lyrical left turn. As with Music for 18 Musicians, Hall employed no loops nor quantization nor any programmed or sequenced instruments of any kind. Every part was performed live in a room and captured with microphones, one at a time, each informed by, and reacting to the last. In this way the record breathes with interplay and an organic humanity, complete with flaws, noise, and the faint sound of turning pages. The recording quality is nonetheless toneful and saturated, characteristic of Hall's production style and straying from the usual transparency of classical albums by using gear with tubes, transformers, and various stages of compression in the signal path. Always there is unmistakable realism and the feeling of being present in the room, sitting among the keys, hammers, and tines. Ten Holt said: "Time, patience and discipline are the prerequisites for making a genetic code productive." His landmark composition provides Hall once again with a wondrous space in which to reverently embody this sentiment and deftly convey the elegant beauty of this music.

Fly Me To The Sun is a breathtaking German library gem from the hallowed Coloursound label. Originally out in 1983 it features two Polish composers, Andrzej Marko and André Mikola. If outré synth-funk is your thing, you need this record.

Almost blindingly luminous with positive vibes and radiant optimism, Fly Me to the Sun is a collection of funky, sun-dappled compositions for synthesizer and live instruments like drums, bass and guitar. A dope blend of beatbox driven future jazz and electro pop.

The wonderfully sleaze-adjacent opener "Dhamma" includes some grandiose piano chords amid floating ambient sounds a la Steve Hillage with slick drums entering the fray at a languid pace. "Circulation" sounds like Bowie ran into Chaz Jankel during an extended stay in Los Angeles, the Thin White Duke emerging out of a studio at 6am, bleary-eyed and clutching this filthy, bleepy instrumental of sonic smut. "Magic Scenery" is as delicate and astounding as the title suggests, a deep ambient movement conjuring halcyon images of rolling fields with abundant fauna and flora; acid-tinged visions of intense colour and natural beauty. Cool, slo-mo breaks adorn the strutting melancholy of “Longing for Tomorrow” and “Nocturnal Flowers” to close out Side A.

Skip the title track, which opens up Side B, and head straight to “Birth of a Butterfly” for a slice of creeping digi-dub-soul niceness. This should've been front and centre of that Personal Space compilation a decade ago. Raising both the tempo and the temperature, “Riding on a Sunbeam” continues in the mesmerising cosmic funk style before "Osmosis", one of the clear stand-outs, presents a fine vintage synth solo over a mellow funky rubberband beat. The closing track, "Solar Heating", warms things up with slapped bass and bold drum machine beats and the synth lends Sci-Fi vibes to the dark dub-funk-reggae rhythm.

As David Hollander, in Unusual Sounds: The Hidden History of Library Music, states, Coloursound was "founded in 1979 by composer, music lawyer, and vibraphonist Gunter Greffenius. A Munich-based library with a reputation for releasing innovative and ambitious music, it catered largely to the market for experimental sounds, its first release was 1980’s Biomechanoid, an abstract synthesizer excursion by Joel Vandroogenbroeck, of the pioneering kosmische band Brainticket. The record — complete with imposing, anonymous title and unearthly H.R. Giger cover art — set the tone for the label’s progressive leanings. The label’s catalogue stands as a tribute to the unfettered creative license that libraries were able to provide to forward-thinking musicians who, frustrated by the whims and constraints of the commercial scene, found complete freedom in the world of production music."

As with all our library music re-issues, the audio for Fly Me To The Sun comes from the original analogue tapes and has been remastered for vinyl by Be With regular Simon Francis. Richard Robinson has brought the original Coloursound sleeve back to life in all its metallic silver glory.

This land runs through Katherine Paul’s blood. And it called to her. In dreams she saw the river, her ancestors, and her home. When the land calls, you listen. And KP found herself far from her ancestral lands during a time of collective trauma, when the world was wounded and in need of healing. In 2020 she made the journey from Portland back to the Skagit River, back to the cedar
trees that stand tall and shrouded in fog, back to the tide flats and the mountains, back to Swinomish.

It is a powerful thing to return to our ancestral lands and often times the journey is not easy. Like the salmon through the currents, like the tide as it crawls to shore this is a story of return. It is the call and response. It is the outstretched arms of the people who came before, welcoming her home. The Land, The Water, The Sky is a celebration of lineage and strength. Even in its deepest moments of loneliness and grief, of frustration over a world wrought with colonial violence and pain, the songs remind us that if we slow down, if we listen to the waves and the wind through the trees, we will remember to breathe.

There is a throughline of story in every song, a remembrance of knowledge and teachings, a gratitude of wisdom passed down and carried. There is a reimagining of Sedna who was offered to the sea, and a beautiful rumination on sacrifice and humanity, and what it means to hold the stories that work to teach us something.

Chord progressions born out of moments of sadness and solitude transform into the islands that sit blue along the horizon. The Salish Sea curves along her homelands, and when the singer is close to this water she is reminded of her grandmother, how she looked out at these same islands, and she’s held by spirit and memory.

The Land, The Water, The Sky rises and falls, in darkness and in light, but even in its most melancholy moments it is never despairing. That is the beauty of returning home. When you stand on ancestral lands it is impossible to be alone. You feel the arms and hands that hold you up, unwilling to let you fall into sorrow or abandonment. In her songs Katherine Paul has channeled that feeling of being held. In every note she has written a love letter to indigenous strength and healing.

There is a joy present here, a fierce blissfulness that comes with walking the trails along the river, feeling the sand and th stones beneath her feet. It is the pride and the certainty that comes with knowing her ancestors walked along the same land, dipped their hands into the water, and ran their fingertips along the same bark of cedar trees.

This is a story of hope, as it details the joy of returning. Katherine Paul’s journey home wasn’t made alone, and the songs are crowded with loved ones and relatives, like a really good party. And as the songs walk us through the land it is important we hover over the images and the beauty, the moments that mark this album as site specific. The power of this land is woven throughout, telling the story of narrow waterways, brush strokes, salmon stinta, and above all healing.

Let it take you. Move through the story and see the land through her eyes, because it is a gift, a welcomed sʔabadəb.*

*The word “gift” in Lushootseed, the language of the Coast Salish people“

Behold! Yes, Blue Butterfly, one of the absolute stunners on the revered Selected Sound, is finally available for all the beat-heads. Heavyweight library funk with a psychedelic touch, the super in-demand Blue Butterfly from *deep breath* Hardy's Jet Band, Orchestra Klaus Wuesthoff, Jan Troysen Band and Orchestra Gary Pacific - was originally released in 1971. Incredibly ahead of its time, it's been rare and sought-after for decades.

For many aficionados, this is the best Selected Sound release. Loaded with fuzzy wah-wah guitar, deep flute-lines atop soulful psych-rock breakbeats and huge organ action, its uncompromising funk will blow you away. Sampled for many hip hop beats and dropped by well known rare groove DJs around the world, one jewel in particular from this glorious German vault needs little introduction. The intro to Orchestra Gary Pacific's mesmeric "Soft Wind" rides the illest, crispest drum break you've perhaps never heard - like, the drum break to end them all - alongside a smooth, deep bass line from the heavens. It featured notoriously on the beloved Dusty Fingers comps of the 90s and was brilliantly sampled by Pacewon for his eternal "Sunroof Top". Just listen and be dazzled.

Beyond this mini-masterpiece, the other killer tracks offer brilliance in abundance. Hardy's Jet Band take control of the full A side, and it's full of dynamic psych-funk bombs. Hard, "big city" industrial groovers. In particular, the initial one-two of "Sorry, Doc!" and "Wind It Up" provide thrilling funky-blues rock instrumentals showcasing relentless guitars, flutes, sax and organ, the latter containing gorgeous, hypnotic breakdowns; these tracks just slay. The title track, "Blue Butterfly" is a real deep strut of a track with fantastic soloing from guitar and flute over crisp drums whilst the highway banger "What You Call To Be Free" certainly sounds a lot like unbridled, rhythmical liberty.

On the flip, the ghost-riding "Lady In Space" is a string-drenched acid-western foxtrot. Yep. “Pop Happening” by Jan Troysen Band is a heavy, druggy psych-fuzz organ groover whilst their slow beat-organ-flute gem "A Blue Message" is a gorgeous psych floater conjuring deeply strange frontier lands. Preceding their monster "Soft Wind", the soulful, uptempo groover “Ghetto Gap” by Orchestra Gary Pacific contains solo piano and flute whilst closing out the set is the free-and-easy samba beat of "So Far".

Founded in the late 60s by German composer and musician Klaus Netzle (who recorded under the alias Claude Larson for Sonoton) Selected Sound began as a production music company specialising in jazz, orchestral and electronic recordings. You can’t miss those early LPs in their iconic glossy metallic copper sleeves with minimal German typography. Serious, classy stuff.

The audio for Blue Butterfly has been remastered for vinyl by Be With regular Simon Francis whilst Richard Robinson has handled reproducing the glossy metallic (iconic) original Selected Sound sleeve. Essential.

4 big ol’ chunks of heavy house music are the order of the day from New York producer Ralph Session’s how new EP for Black Jukebox. Combining his skills as a musician and seasoned DJ along with the technical know-how from his work as an audio engineer, the result is a collection of beautifully crafted, hard-hitting house cutz.

‘That Raw’ features a breathy spoken-word vocal from DJ Amir—one half of the legendary duo Kon & Amir—that laces the soulful, deep production with a hypnotic atmosphere. Thick bass bubbles beneath soaring strings and meandering synth arpeggios to give the track a set-building, big-room feel. ‘Do It’ rocks jaunty snatches of piano and sax over its peppy, skippy beat, with a little New Jersey feel in its incessant, phat-bottomed grove. ‘If You Want’ takes us into a deeper direction with its hazy pad work and dubby touches, with a slinky, rubbery bass groove that throbs hard beneath it all. Turn it up loud and feel it envelop you with its wide-open atmospherics. ‘Raw Sax’ rounds off with a dusty, skipping drum track shuffling around dreamy filtering synths, dubbed-out stab patterns and of course a sultry sax line.

The album’s seemingly brief tracklisting belies a work of great beauty and depth, and one which turned into a one-man crusade for singer/guitarist Lars Andersson, intertwining deeply personal stories with his love for the era of Romanticism. “Every time I go to a museum and I’m about to pass through the era of Romanticism I stop in awe,” says Lars of the enduring appeal of the 18th century artistic movement. “Whatever it is – stories, paintings, music – it triggers something deep within me, something profoundly human. It really hits a nerve, and it utterly immerses me to a point where I can’t move.” The album replicates this feeling; a gloriously over-the-top blend of Slowdive and Sigur Rós, mixed with the single-mindedness of Daniel Johnston and the noisiness of Nirvana, it’s as bold and beautiful and every bit as ornate as the art that inspired it. Unlike their acclaimed debut, 2019’s All That Ever Could Have Been, which gradually came into focus with a 15-minute opening track, Picturesque hits home from the very first note of the short and sweet opener, ‘Ballerina’. That’s not to say there aren’t epics here – ‘Metamorphosis’ is essentially a 12-minute suite of three movements; blistering closer ‘The Lot’ is 11 minutes of Swans-inspired heaviness – but everything is much more direct and focused. This isn’t an album to lose yourself in, it’s one to get swept away by. “‘More is more’ was definitely the credo when making this record,” agrees Lars. “A big inspiration were bands like Pond and the way they manage to fill their songs up with stuff to the absolute maximum. While I definitely tried to give the listener some room to breathe at certain points and while, in good old post-rock fashion, it still builds up and breaks down, it relies much more on simple melody and harmony as opposed to noisy experimentation to transport feeling.” Never more so than on the first single, ‘The Golden Age’, which is the album’s centrepiece; a soaring slice of über-shoegaze that is so stunning you can’t take your eyes or ears off it. Like all the songs on the album, it’s based around a fairy-tale from the Romantic era. In this case, it’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen by the German poet, author and philosopher Novalis (other influences are: The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen; The Seven Ravens and Hans in Luck by the Brothers Grimm; Undine by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué and The Golden Pot by E.T.A. Hoffmann), with Lars drawing parallels between the titular character’s mystical and romantic searchings and his own personal quest. This is apt as the album has been an overriding obsession for Lars for the past two-and-a-half years; as well as writing and recording the songs (bandmate Phillip Dornauer played drums), he also mixed and mastered them at his Alpine Audio studio and Picturesque is very much his Brian Wilson or Kevin Shields moment. MOLLY were in the middle of their European tour when Covid hit in early 2020, forcing Lars to retreat back to his home outside Innsbruck and giving him time and space to think about every detail of the record. “Well, I was on a quest I guess,” he admits. “Like everyone, I was stranded at home and at some point I just said to myself, ‘If not now, then when?’ It was an intense process. I’ve worked on music from other bands and artists before but producing and mixing your own music is an utterly different animal. It was probably the most intense thing I’ve ever done, but it was also incredibly rewarding and the feeling of it all coming together piece by piece is incomparable.” The artwork is just as effective. “I think of Radiohead’s OK Computer – what you hear on the record is what you see on the cover,” explains Lars. “We were inspired by what we call ‘wimmelbilder’ hidden pictures in German, a very specific style in art where there are a lot of little things happening. When you see it from further away, it looks organic like a lost painting from the area of Romanticism, but the closer you look the more digital it gets. It’s a nice analogy.” He’s right, it perfectly sums up the conflict between Romanticism and 21st century life. “Romanticism was basically an answer to the Industrial Revolution as well as the social and political norms of the Age Of Enlightenment,” concludes Lars. “Now, we all live in a much more industrialised, materialistic, individualistic and sterile society than any early Romanticist could have ever possibly imagined. Over 200 years later the Romanticists have lost the battle.” With the divine and downright pulchritudinous Picturesque, MOLLY begin the fightback.1.Ballerina 2.Metamorphosis 3.The Golden Age 4.Sunday Kid 5.So To Speak 6.The Lot

After spending his debut album exploring techno and mechanical sounds in the depths of the Pas-de-Calais mines, Toh Imago looks up to the sky, with an open breeze on his face, as tree branches and canopy filter out the sun’s rays on Refuge. All the machines used during the album recording are tuned at 432hz, carrying the mystical benefits of Earth’s resonance. Spending just seconds with the opening track, the listener is drawn into the safety that Refuge was intended to provide, and each subsequent piece pulls you deeper and deeper into the album’s forest.

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‘Refuge’ was recorded on the edge of the Mormal forest, in the North of France. With nature as a setting and studio accomplice, the album features synthesizers, field-recordings, as well as the acoustic qualities of reverbs from the nearby forest. As the artist’s inner world and nature converge in moments of self-reflection, so the album’s 11 recordings harmoniously unfold in a cavalcade of machines and organic sonorities.

While the first LP 'Nord Noir’ explored his family’s mining past, ‘Refuge' is about being present and the desire to re-contextualize the relationship between nature and humans. It is a record of uplifting tones that is filled with optimism, imbued with the lightness of those who finally reconnect with nature, their roots, and the feeling of groundedness.

Like the steps taken on a walk in the woods, the 11 tracks sonically tell the story of an inner journey divided in three chapters. "Asile sauvage", "Sylve barbare" and “Avril Mormal" take the listener into a fast-paced progression of rhythms. When the heart of the forest is reached, the journey becomes intimate, revealing a sacred space where breathing becomes the leading tempo ("Locus Neminis") and the traveller becomes a spirit lost in space ("Cosmos Intra”). The journey's climax is reached with "Monde intérieur". The album closes with "Chiff Chaff" which accompanies the listener back to a reality, hopefully a more reassuring one.

Across the album, Toh Imago finds inventive ways of opening a dialogue between nature and machine, both literally and metaphorically, creating a soundscape that both feels like and was created by the natural world that surrounds him.

The album offers a shelter from a predetermined world. It’s a story told through ambience, racy and subtle electronics, and the memories of lichens clinging to shoes.

One of These Nights occupies an important, unique place in the Eagles' discography given it represents the final album the group made before releasing the bajillion-selling Their Greatest Hits (1971-1975) compilation. The timing is telling. A coming-out party for Glenn Frey and Don Henley's songwriting skills, the studio record – the band's fourth, and its first to hit #1 on the charts – signifies the group's ascent to superstar status. Home to three massive singles (the title track, "Lyin' Eyes," and "Take It to the Limit") and nominated for four Grammy Awards, the quadruple-platinum 1975 effort solidified the Eagles' Southern California-reared sound and made the band a household name.

Mastered from the original analog tapes, pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl, and limited to 10,000 copies, Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP vinyl box set takes One of These Nights to the limit. And then some. Playing with reference sonics and a practically indiscernible noise floor thanks to MoFi SuperVinyl's special formula, it provides a rich, dynamic, transparent, and three-dimensional view into a release that moved country-rock ahead by leaps and bounds – and paved the way for the Eagles' ascendancy to global superstardom. The opportunity to zero in on the particulars of the Eagles' golden harmonies, distinct vocal timbres, and cohesive interplay has never been better.

Visually, the premium packaging and presentation of the UD1S One of These Nights pressing befit its esteemed status. Housed in a deluxe box, it features beautiful foil-stamped jackets and faithful-to-the-original graphics that illuminate the splendour of the recording. From every angle, this UD1S reissue exists as a curatorial artefact meant to be preserved, touched, and examined. It is made for discerning listeners that prize sound quality and production, and who desire to fully immerse themselves in the art – and everything involved with the album, from the renowned cover art to the meticulous finishes. As much as any Eagles LP, the connection between the imagery and the music and the band on One of These Nights runs deep. No wonder it led to a Grammy Nomination for Best Album Package.

Devised by West Texas artist Boyd Elder, the striking skull-and-feathers themed piece gracing the front of One of These Nights represents where the Eagles have been and where they were headed. Album art director Gary Burden explained: "The cow skull is pure cowboy, folk, the decorations are American Indian-inspired, and the future is represented by the more polished reflective glass beaded surfaces covering the skull." Moreover, Elder had met the group years earlier when Henley and company performed at one of his gallery openings in California. MoFi's UD1S box set allows Elder's vision (and Burden's debossed treatment of the image) to pop and appear as if it was a stand-alone object.

Of course, what's inside the sleeves, and in the grooves, proves equally compelling. Though One of These Nights marks the final appearance of band co-founder Bernie Leadon on an Eagles LP and contains three of his tunes, the record's tremendous success owes to Frey and Henley's timeless contributions. Taking the next step in their maturation and evolution, the pair crafted several songs while living together as roommates in a rented house in which they converted a music room into a recording studio.

The duo's bond and chemistry pulse throughout the record – particularly in the tight arrangements, tasteful instrumental flourishes, and seamless blending of the folk, country, and rock elements. The musical combinations and partnership not only produced the Eagles' first million-selling single (the slow-dancing "Take It to the Limit," co-written with bassist-vocalist Randy Meisner) and the Frey-led cheating classic "Lyin' Eyes," but the famed title track, which nods to the era's nascent disco scene as well as Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff's Philly soul platters.

Frey named "One of These Nights" as his favorite Eagles composition of all-time; Meisner's high harmonies alone send the track into a galaxy of its own. Speaking of the latter, Leadon's instrumental "Journey of the Sorcerer" ventures into another universe and was soon used by Douglas Adams as the theme to his "The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" radio series. Inspiration and creative experimentation also dragged the Eagles into the blues. Another Frey-Henley gem, the self-probing "After the Thrill Is Gone" serves as a response song to B.B. King's signature track and more evidence the band was turning the lens inward for lyrical narratives. Like everything on One of These Nights, the song confirms the Eagles were breathing rare musical air.

More About Mobile Fidelity UltraDisc One-Step and Why It Is Superior
Instead of utilizing the industry-standard three-step lacquer process, Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab's new UltraDisc One-Step (UD1S) uses only one step, bypassing two processes of generational loss. While three-step processing is designed for optimum yield and efficiency, UD1S is created for the ultimate in sound quality. Just as Mobile Fidelity pioneered the UHQR (Ultra High-Quality Record) with JVC in the 1980s, UD1S again represents another state-of-the-art advance in the record-manufacturing process. MFSL engineers begin with the original master recordings, painstakingly transfer them to DSD 256, and meticulously cut a set of lacquers. These lacquers are used to create a very fragile, pristine UD1S stamper called a "convert." Delicate "converts" are then formed into the actual record stampers, producing a final product that literally and figuratively brings you closer to the music. By skipping the additional steps of pulling another positive and an additional negative, as done in the three-step process used in standard pressings, UD1S produces a final LP with the lowest noise floor possible today. The removal of the additional two steps of generational loss in the plating process reveals tremendous amounts of extra musical detail and dynamics, which are otherwise lost due to the standard copying process. Every conceivable aspect of vinyl production is optimized to produce the most perfect record album available today.

MoFi SuperVinyl

Developed by NEOTECH and RTI, MoFi SuperVinyl is the most exacting-to-specification vinyl compound ever devised. Analogue lovers have never seen (or heard) anything like it. Extraordinarily expensive and extremely painstaking to produce, the special proprietary compound addresses two specific areas of improvement: noise floor reduction and enhanced groove definition. The vinyl composition features a new carbonless dye (hold the disc up to the light and see) and produces the world's quietest surfaces. This high-definition formula also allows for the creation of cleaner grooves that are indistinguishable from the original lacquer. MoFi SuperVinyl provides the closest approximation of what the label's engineers hear in the mastering lab.

The trashed hotel room and communal living depicted on the cover of the J. Geils Band's sophomore album tell you all you need know about the music, spirit, and energy spilling from within The Morning After. Shot through with raw, lean rock n' roll sparked by juke-joint blues and loose rhythms, the 1971 set comes on like the most fun, party-still-raging hangover any group in the 70s enjoyed. And now it rolls with an abandon that takes you inside the sweaty, smoky roadhouses and wall-to-wall-packed clubs the group dominated in its heyday.

Mastered from the original master tapes, pressed at RTI, and limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity's 180g vinyl LP achieves a sonic acumen that brings you face-to-face with the sextet's white-hot instrumental prowess and magnetic personalities. It's always been difficult to single out just one member of the band given the cohesive bluster the ensemble achieves as a whole, but this collectible audiophile edition allows you to do just that if you so choose, by way of superb imaging and separation. As for the band's trademark dynamics? Here, they feel like they're on the verge of exploding.

So go ahead. Twist the volume knob to the right as much as you want. You'll lose none of the focus, detail, placement, or presence no matter how high the decibels climb. The Morning After spills forth with previously unheard tonalities, ranging from the distinctive swells of Seth Justman's slow-burn organ to the live-wire spark of Geils' own downed-power-line-jumpy guitar work to the mooring hi-hat/cymbal/snare combinations of arrangement-steadying drummer Steven Bladd. Friends, this is raw rhythm n' blues, this is how it should feel, and, man, this is how it should sound.

Not for nothing did the Massachusetts-based collective name the album The Morning After. The music within doesn't abide by rules, ignores speed limits, flips the bird at curfews, and digs deep down into America's blues roots to yield organic material at once fresh, exciting, traditional, and original. The back-porch punch provided by the combination of "Magic Dick" Salwitz's searing, melodic, snake-like harmonica and vocalist Peter Wolf's animated, barely controlled deliveries is alone enough to make anyone with a faint pulse to stomp their feet, climb atop a kitchen table, and kick their boot heels until the neighbors call the cops.

Just witness the deceptive smoothness of the snake-like "So Sharp" or Maxwell Street zest of the aptly titled Magic Dick showcase "Whammer Jammer," which will leave you gasping for breath before it even ends. J. Geils Band also knew its way around deep-cut soul. The ensemble's Top 40, howling, adrenaline-to-the-heart rendition of the Valentinos' "Looking for a Love" and swirling, romantic take on Don Covay's "The Usual Place" seamlessly balance drive and emotion. Coupled with rafter-shaking originals such as "Floyd's Hotel" and the riff-propelled "I Don't Need You No More," sent up with typical Wolf vocal flair, and the record parks the band's all-night festivities and go-for-broke attitudes right on your front lawn.

One last word of warning to the uninitiated: The Morning After is not the slick-pop J. Geils Band of "Centerfold." And that is a very good thing.

More than one of Jack's many nicknames, Zagg is also a shout out to her
uncanny ability to select an unanticipated word or musical flourish, her
disarming poetic acumen, her ability to zoom in and out at lightning
speed and spin a phrase into a mantra, or the opposite of a mantra
Each song on this record is its own unique little world, keeping a listener
delightfully off-kilter throughout the entire affair.
Opening track 'FMK' operates likes a sonic thesis statement. For a quiet moment,
Jackie's confessing her recurring mother-in-law dreams and initiating a suddendeath round of Fuck Marry Kill. Then on a dime she somersaults into rocket-pop
posture, ready to cut loose and head to the movies with her best boogie- boy:
'Let's go to the movies and dance a little…you can share my Twizzler…Let's go to
the movies, you can dance at the movies!!!' The charging, industrial pop of 'Get
Out' is augmented with punching strings that are both lovely and foreboding. In
the lithe, Rickie Lee Jones-nodding 'Yesterday's Baby,' a giant foot-shaped cloud
looms in the mouth- shaped sky and Jackie gets microscopic — 'Why don't you
just let it burn out/Toss that glass of wine out/Stamp that Camel Light out/Shut
your mouth up shut up your mouth.' After a few more dances, deep diaphragmatic
breaths, and Blood on the Tracks winking ballads, knock-out marathon track 'Keep
Runner' gives it straight to some Wile E. Coyote tomfool who's out getting his butt
blown up again." The energy of the record, I think, comes from finding out Patti
Smith didn't make Horses until she was 29. Extremely influential Wiki experience.
Oh, and Adam Green, my all- time favorite songwriter and artist, painted me
looking like a doctrinal seer peering into a cartoon mirror for the cover.
Pressed on Transparent Yellow color vinyl.