Search:filter

BROKE/ returns to JITNEY MUSIC with the brand new "TEXTURES" LP, a mix of crucial boom bap ranging from smooth and soulful to gritty and hard-hitting. TEXTURES is a tapestry of sound composed of fully realized tracks, unfinished ideas, and rough sketches. Full pic sleeve.

From Quinteros’ early rockabilly singles to his San Fran folk rock with the Au-Go Go’s, this collection highlights his Brent singles along with unissued material, acetates, demos & outtakes! Includes a booklet with liner notes & an interview with Eddie!

Eddie Quinteros was one precocious kid. Before he was old enough to drive, he was singing on live TV and flying to Hawai’i to rock out at stadium gigs. When his contemporaries were still in high school, he was hitting the charts with a tune he wrote himself, playing on an Alan Freed package tour, and making multiple appearances on American Bandstand. And before the San Francisco singer/guitarist was out of his teens, he’d already been screwed over by a shifty manager and sworn off the music business.

Along the way, Quinteros cut a handful of jumping singles showing that if he’d had the right breaks, he could have altered history. Ritchie Valens wouldn’t have been the era’s only Chicano rock ‘n’ roll hero. Quinteros’ Southern rockabilly influences are audible in his early singles, but they’re filtered through the more citified point of view of a San Francisco teen. And in the mid ‘60s, he reinvented himself as the frontman for the Au Go-Go’s, turning out a chiming, folk-rock flavored sound more in line with labelmates and fellow S.F.’ers the Beau Brummels.

All of Ed’s recorded output only amounted to a handful of 45s, but this collection sets things straight for posterity, featuring demos, unreleased tracks, live recordings, and acetates.

For our second release, circuit|breaker quips back the stacked offering of CBRK001 with another dynamic double LP, exhibiting some of the best local and international talent that’s cropped up on our radar over recent years.


The label is as driven as ever to build a bridge between our community and the wider electronic
music domain, giving artists a platform to preach the sound that speaks to them, and this release is but another stepping stone towards greatness, for us and for them.


CBRK002 opens up with a rolling, gritty number that could only be Fergus Sweetland, as metallic voices beckon forth on ‘Untitled (ARP 1.02)’. Hasvat Informant, whose thunderous reputation precedes him, then storms the barn with the explosive ‘Abispa Ephippium’. The B-side shifts gears to Goa’s Dotdat and his frantically groovy track ‘Holo’, followed by a gorgeous minimal number by Berlin-based Pino Peña – Mia’s Pocket; one that’s sure to get summer dancefloors pumping.


The C-side of the record contains two heaving tracks, the C1 from the prominent force of Cloudy Ku with ‘A Room of One’s Own’, and the C2 from the dark visage that is disgrays with
‘Turmstraße’. The final side of the record has Amsterdam legend Juan Sanchez open the filter with a warm, jacking submission in ‘Indulge’, while the Berliner Marsch takes us home with a
devious timbre that will have bodies glued to the floor on ‘Into You’.

Debut album from Los Angeles duo Los Yesterdays - Sweet Soul music meets Mexican Folklorico

"Sweet soul music - also known as lowrider oldies on the West Coast, rolas and souldies - are typically early 60s-style tunes that emphasize vocal harmonies. Most songs are slow-to-midtempo, many are ballads, and the sub-genre is generally stripped down compared to the highly produced Motown hits of the time....there is a generations-long appreciation for sweet soul music among California’s Latino communities. Eastern Los Angeles teens.... helped foster a love of sweet soul in the early 60s by covering soulful ballads by artists like James Brown... Those sounds....were kept alive by record collectors and people who spent evenings cruising along East Los boulevards." - Los Yesterdays are a Chicano soul band from Los Angeles based around the creative collaboration between Gabriel Rowland and Victor Benavides. They began working together when Rowland - a drummer by trade, then creaky and exhausted from waking up at dawn to work construction - decided to channel those struggles into song. He contacted Benavides, a former bandmate of Rowland’s deceased brother, to record the soul ballads that Southland Chicanos call “oldies.” Los Yesterdays filter love-struck R&B crooning through guitar-strumming Mexican balladeering; the result is something that sounds like the Los Angeles of yesterday and today - the indelible, immovable Los Angeles of cruising Whittier Boulevard, of cold drinks on the porch on blazing summer nights, of watching a blue-orange toxic sunset and wondering if they are thinking about you. Los Angeles changes; Los Angeles stays the same. Los Yesterdays have changed, outgrown their childhood barrios and the bands of their early 20s and their private garage hermitude; Los Yesterdays are Frozen In Time.

Red Rack’em returns with a surefire summer smash ‘Italo Disco Banger’ which immediately evokes the most euphoric festival vibes ever.

The feedback has been INSANE with Gerd Janson immediately responding ‘Sounds like a hit!’ and huge support from a wide range of artists including DJ Harvey, Crazy P, Roman Flugel, Luke Una, Leon Vynehall, Avalon Emerson, Jamie 3:26 and many more.

Italo Disco Banger does what it says on the tin and more. Tailor made for Tisno and Adriatic vibes, from the first few bars of the heart tugging, eyes closed intro, you’re locked into a beautiful, sun kissed joyous ride.

Hotline is another party starter anthem. No soft B sides here. A heads down filtered disco sub bass club wrecker.

Composed in the aftermath of family tragedy, NY Graffiti’s Burden is an album full of peace anthems, psalms, dirges, and confessionals. In the pursuit of consolation, the tectonics of techno, dub, and post-club aesthetics are pushed past their margins onto new emotional plateaus.

Like the series of EP’s that NY Graffiti has released in recent years – including a split with Subtext affiliate UCC Harlo – Burden is an amalgam of dub-informed club music, acoustic emulations, and doom-scroll sourced social media chatter, filtered through the artist’s unique sonic palette that has developed over years on the fringes of New York’s contemporary club scene.

From the largely-improvised opener (and closer) “Approximation”, to the discord of the steppa-inflected track “98 Prayers”, and the dystopian ambiance of “Reach” (evoking early Hype Williams), Burden constantly reconfigures itself in search of catharsis. The album's seven tracks are dense and claustrophobic yet unexpectedly grounding. Amid the weight of grief, and the bleakness of our shared geopolitical realities, the NYC-based artist provides moments of solace that are intimate, direct, and revelatory.

Burden was initially released as a digital album earlier this year and is now available on vinyl through NY Graffiti’s own Peace Anthem Records and Switzerland-based Präsens Editionen. While the former has primarily focused on releasing NY Graffiti’s own projects, the latter is the publishing house of zweikommasieben Magazin and has released music and sound works by artists such as Anom Vitruv, Red On, Belia Winnewisser, Martina Lussi, Samuel Reinhard, and Magda Drozd

On August 16, Toronto-based musician and producer David Psutka aka ACT! (fka Egyptrixx / Anamai / Ceramic TL) will release his latest project ‘Face to Face, Day by Day’ for his own Halocline Trance imprint.

This is is Psutka’s third album proper as ACT! following the release of the “sonic mixtape” ‘Universalist’ in 2018 and the augmented reality soundtrack ‘Grey Matter AR’ in 2021; a series of Snapchat filters created by artist Karen Vanderborght and soundtracked by ACT! which explored the poetic and existential potential of AR and social media.

“Aesthetic accidents in the periphery of the ‘work’ can be the message. In 2018, at an Egyptrixx concert at Bagni Misteriosi de Teatro Franco Parenti - a gorgeous, sprawling outdoor pool theatre in Milan - I had a clarifying moment. Gigs around then had mostly been in pummelling, dark music venues, so I wasn't prepared for this expansive space (and the thoughtful work of the organisers who had layered sheets of plastic film on the pool to parallel eco-materialist themes from a previous album). It was the midday soundcheck that struck me most - brittle digital sounds from the set echoed off the colonial Milanese facades and ricocheted down the Via Carlo Botta, pinging off buildings in the distance and clashing with the noise of traffic, tourists and whatever else. It was a strange, collisionist moment, and a reminder that my essential approach to music is, above all, a preoccupation with the materiality of sound. 

Everything on Face to Face, Day by Day began as an improvisation. Openness to accidents and the emotional complexity that comes from centering them in composition has become important to my work, and helps the music go beyond the possibility of what is playable, imaginable. I also wanted to channel adventurous solo pop records of the 1970’s and 80’s, like Yasuaki Shimizu, Jon + Vangelis and Stevie Wonder. These came from an interesting era in commercial music as studio production techniques became increasingly formalised as compositional devices, like AMS RMX16 percussion sounds and early digital stereo effects. 

Like many musicians, I’ve been travelling and performing less since the pandemic and as a result, have wanted studio sessions to feel more collaborative and improvisational. There were great writing and recording sessions for this album. Vox, synth, sax and guitar jams - much of what ended up on the record isn’t edited much, if at all. I jammed a sm57 into Colin Fisher’s sax bell and created feedback loops using various preamps and distortion units. The clunky sounds were sampled and used as percussion elements. I also had a great synth jam session with Jeremy Greenspan at Barton Building Studio in Hamilton, which was recorded by filmmaker Liz Adler. 

I’ve had a few months to sit with this album and see clear throughlines connecting it to previous projects. There are aspects of the experiential and structuralist sound design ideas from the EGYPTRIXX records; and also some arrangement tricks borrowed from ANAMAI - specifically, the use of interruptionist sound events. Perhaps most of all, it feels connected to the Ceramic TL + Ipek Gorgun record ‘Perfect Lung’ and its splattered take on musical complexity. “ (David Psutka)

In addition to ACT!, Psutka has released music with numerous projects including Anamai, Egyptrixx and Ceramic TL, he has collaborated widely with artists such as Junior Boys, Ipek Gorgun, and Kuedo as well as Jessy Lanza (2016) and an official remix for Massive Attack’s ‘Hymn of the Big Wheel (2012). The contributions on this album, from Robin Dann and Ben Gunning, reflect the deeply collaborative nature of the Halocline Trance label and the Toronto creative scene more broadly.

Many of Psutka’s releases have received critical acclaim from media outlets such as Pitchfork, Exclaim, The Quietus and Resident Advisor. As a live performer, he has toured extensively including performing at Sonar Festival, Roskilde, Mutek, MOMA PS1 Warm-UP and CTM Festival. He’s also presented sound installations at various institutions such as Galeria Civica Commune di Modena, and Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

In 2015, Psutka launched Halocline Trance as a home for his various sound projects, events and collaborations. Now a creative collective and label, it has grown to include a diverse array of artists including Casey MQ, Xuan Ye, Myst Milano, Colin Fisher and others. The label is described as “genre-agnostic” and conceptually open, supporting work across a wide spectrum of creative fields including soundtrack recording, AR design and traditional artist albums. Their impeccable roster also includes, theorist/improviser Eldritch Priest, and AR/VR artist Karen Vanderborght. In recent years, Halocline Trance has established itself as a platform that facilitates many of Canada’s most exciting creative music projects. Many of the releases have received critical acclaim from outlets including Pitchfork, Exclaim, Bandcamp and Resident Advisor.

Dutch artist LEYO delivers his debut album via Cécille Records this September, comprised of eight originals and featuring collabs with Toman and Thierry Ganz.

LEYO is a project based out of Amersfoort in the Netherlands, marking its beginnings here with an LP composed utilising a
full band set up, vocals from Thierry Ganz and a singular collaborative appearance from fellow Dutch artist, Toman. The debut album showcases LEYO’s depth of influences, straddling the lines throughout between soulful electro-pop and funkinfused disco jams through to more raw house and sun drenched lounge cuts.
Opener ‘Hello (Intro)’ sets the tone with bumpy drums, psychedelic guitar tones and a dreamy phone call voice before
‘Don’t Do It’ picks up the pace, blending funky guitar lick, organic percussion and resonant synth leads with sporadic vocal
chants. Thierry Ganz first appearance on the album follows with ‘Know Your Name’, merging together Ganz hypnotic vocal
stylings with choppy bass stabs, cinematic strings and crisp disco drums. ‘Open Up The Trunk Do It’ then shifts gears into
jazz-tinged raw house territory via twinkling keys, saturated drums and a vacillating low-end drive.

Up next LEYO welcomes both Toman and Thierry Ganz into the mix for ‘That Booty’, a high octane disco house jam fuelled
by swinging drums, soulful vocals and tension building atmospherics. ‘That’s Why’ then brings down the pace to a more
dreamy aesthetic with fluttering keys and wandering synths intertwined with congas and breathy vocals. The final full
length track ‘Without You’ then lays down a shuffled rhythm section and plucked guitar lines with hypnotic chords and
filtered vocals throughout its six and a half minute duration before ‘On My Mind ft. Thierry Ganz (Outro)’ concludes the
package in a fully- fledged funk fashion, Ganz lays down his signature vocal style uttering the tracks title while underpinned
by wandering bass notes, bouncy drums, wandering guitar notes and Moog style synth licks.

The legendary UK Thrash Band Solitary mark three decades of metal, with the release of a brand new album " Embrace The Darkness" which is the fifth of their thirty year career - and not only is it their heaviest, hardest, most confrontational release to date, it's undoubtedly their best yet, following on from the highly acclaimed "The Truth Behind The Lies" (Metalville Records 2020).

The UK's resolute and relentless kings of thrash, Solitary, have tapped into the thick, black blood that pulses sluggishly through the fat and filth congested veins of society. It is fact that we live in dark times; alongside war, pandemics, grief and horror. These are the days of division, where we turn against each other in politically driven hatred and against ourselves, choking on a social media diet of self-loathing and isolation.

Through our ever-glowing screens we watch the crumbling of virtue and the slow, agonised death of decency and honour. Solitary have stared into the alleyways, the cellars and the broken minds of our youth and forged their most unflinching album yet. This is their hymn to a dying world, their soundtrack to the end of days it's time to "Embrace The Darkness"

Dam Swindle return to Heist in excellent form with a 4-track EP in their signature style.

The iconic Amsterdam duo returned to the studio after their much-lauded ‘Minor Fools’ EP, where the lead track ‘That’s Right’ became one of the most heartwarming tracks 2023. Their recent contribution to the Phonica 20-year compilation -‘Allright (just a tribute)’- is turning into one of the biggest hits of this year with big plays on pretty much every festival around, whether it’s Glastonbury or Dekmantel. The guys are known for their ability to bend different styles into something very much their own and their newest addition to the Heist catalog is no different. The ‘Touch Me Again’ EP sees them go from sample-heavy house to classic 90’s piano-driven tracks with a touch of acid and it’s one you don’t want to miss.

The record starts with ‘Touch Me Again’, a house jam with chopped vocals, energetic synth stabs and a big breakdown. Add to that a touch of acid and you’ve got a follow-up to their Phonica hit of 2023.

‘Hang On’ takes you back into classic Swindle territory, with their signature sampling style and knack for finding those lush vocals. The synth chops and bassline give the track its upbeat energy and the distant filtered pads move in an ever so subtle way, that there’s always something new happening while keeping the attention on that catchy main hook.

On the flip, we see the guys take things a bit deeper with emotive vocals and introverted keys layered over a steady groove on their track ‘The Joy of Melancholy’. Fast-forward to the drop and all that energy comes free with a huge piano break, which propels the track into a blissful ‘hands-in-the-air’ dancefloor moment.

The EP closes with ‘Forever and Ever’, a gospel-inspired Deep house tune full of organ hits and off-kilter sample chops. This 4-track EP gives you jam upon jam upon jam and sees Dam Swindle solidify their position as the go-to artist in the house scene and keeps them at the forefront of electronic music.

Grab this record while you can and share the love,

Heist Recordings.

It’s abundantly clear from the first bars of their 5th studio album Through Other Reflection, that this is, and could only ever be, The Soundcarriers. From the enchanting vocal duets of folk-bidden Chanteuses Leonore Wheatley and Dorian Conway; to the precise bass lines of Paul Isherwood and the limber, jazz-cool, Hal Blaine-esque drums of his his co-songwriter Adam Cann; from the fairy-like flutes, 60s-garage guitars and organ sounds pilfered from the archives of exotica - listening to the Soundcarriers resembles a rediscovery of all the most prized, esoteric corners of the 1960s, all bundled up, warped and refracted through the quartet’s astutely modern cultural lens. Channelling Tropicalia, Middle Eastern psychedelic Jazz/Funk, The French Library sounds of Nino Nardini, and a whole host of lavish obscurites beside, Through Other Reflection delivers another sonic adventure from one of the most unique and distinctive voices of British Psychedelia. After an 8 year wait for their album 4 - 2022’s Wilds - it thankfully didn’t take so long for the follow-up this time round. In many ways, this feels like a companion to Wilds; recording again at their Nottingham warehouse studio, Through Other Reflection retains that same organic glow, all the passions and imperfections of a tightly clipped unit jamming out these living, breathing pop-art nuggets as if straight onto the acetate.”We wanted to keep an air of spontaneity with this album and not get too bogged with the recording process”, explains Cann, “It was more a case of getting the songs as tightly written and arranged as possible first so we could get them down quickly in the studio. It always takes longer than you think” Less packed with strident pop hooks as its predecessor however, the music of Through… has been given extra licence to breathe, stretch out, and wander more uncharted terrains. While gleaming psych-pop of tracks like ‘The City Was’, or ‘Already Over’ confidently carry on from where they left off, from the album’s 2nd track ‘Always’, the trip becomes a little less predictable. Starting out as a smoky Procol Harum-meets-French-Psych organ ballad, the music drifts, as if of its own accord into an eerie, garage trance that lingers, cycles, and hypnotises, growing ever stranger, reaching ever-further away from its point of conception. And almost every track on Through Other Reflections holds that outer-body moment, where the band fix themselves on a limber, lysergic groove, lose all grip on time and reality, and melt themselves away into a liquid state of blind euphoria. There are sequences on this record that feel more like rituals than songs, built upon a single hypnotic rhythm which, like the centre of a vortex, pulling everything under its beatific command. Take the finale to ‘What We Found’ for instance, sounding like a ghostly march across the psychedelic moors, or ‘Feel The Way’, where a single athletic drum-loop rises and rises, growing ever more urgent and suspenseful underneath its frantic harpsichords and rasping flutes. Full of such rich stylisms as these, The Soundcarriers showcase themselves as abstract storytellers par excellence by virtue of their textures and arrangements alone. Resembling Romantic composer Maurice Ravel, but if he had just a four-piece rock band at his disposal, Through Other Reflects is rich with detail; there’s shakers, rattles, clarinets, booming drums; there’s synthesiser swarms, chiming xylophones, vintage organs and experimental Cluster & Eno-esque ambiences. Within all this nuance the music flows like some undisclosed narrative swathed in a magnetic secrecy. “It almost comes across like a story in some ways”, says Cann of the album, “the music is quite sectional with elements of exotica and cinematic type layers, it's a good balance of grooves, tunes and weirdness”. No more is this “epic cinematic feel” heard more proudly than on short instrumental ‘Sonya’s Lament” - its innate, hauntological atmospheres befitting a Peter Strickland soundtrack, or the classics of Lex Baxter, the so-called ‘Founder of Exotica’ himself. On the other hand, providing a greasier undercurrent to all these bucolic sounds is a leaning towards a more “direct” lyricism referencing more “external concerns. Laying down the first tracks for the album in the wintry gloom of pre-lockdown 2020, and drawing inspiration from time spent in Berlin, Through Other Reflections returns to some of the post-apocalyptic futurism explored in 2014’s Entropicalia - a loose concept album inspired by J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World. “The songs explore a disillusionment with the way things are going particularly after 40 years of neoliberalism”, says Cann, “They follow that folk-song tradition of wanting to escape to an imagined time, but here it’s more urban than pastoral. The first couple of ideas I came up with when doing some music in Berlin and had some time to wander aimlessly. And think the atmosphere seeped in, particularly on The City Was and Already Over. He continues, “One aspect of the title, ‘Through Other Reflections’ is about synthesis and layers of influence. How things can be filtered through other things and change the perspective. This is something you get in cities as well.” Though, as with everything The Soundcarriers make, “It can mean anything. It also just sounds kind of cool.”

It’s abundantly clear from the first bars of their 5th studio album Through Other Reflection, that this is, and could only ever be, The Soundcarriers. From the enchanting vocal duets of folk-bidden Chanteuses Leonore Wheatley and Dorian Conway; to the precise bass lines of Paul Isherwood and the limber, jazz-cool, Hal Blaine-esque drums of his his co-songwriter Adam Cann; from the fairy-like flutes, 60s-garage guitars and organ sounds pilfered from the archives of exotica - listening to the Soundcarriers resembles a rediscovery of all the most prized, esoteric corners of the 1960s, all bundled up, warped and refracted through the quartet’s astutely modern cultural lens. Channelling Tropicalia, Middle Eastern psychedelic Jazz/Funk, The French Library sounds of Nino Nardini, and a whole host of lavish obscurites beside, Through Other Reflection delivers another sonic adventure from one of the most unique and distinctive voices of British Psychedelia. After an 8 year wait for their album 4 - 2022’s Wilds - it thankfully didn’t take so long for the follow-up this time round. In many ways, this feels like a companion to Wilds; recording again at their Nottingham warehouse studio, Through Other Reflection retains that same organic glow, all the passions and imperfections of a tightly clipped unit jamming out these living, breathing pop-art nuggets as if straight onto the acetate.”We wanted to keep an air of spontaneity with this album and not get too bogged with the recording process”, explains Cann, “It was more a case of getting the songs as tightly written and arranged as possible first so we could get them down quickly in the studio. It always takes longer than you think” Less packed with strident pop hooks as its predecessor however, the music of Through… has been given extra licence to breathe, stretch out, and wander more uncharted terrains. While gleaming psych-pop of tracks like ‘The City Was’, or ‘Already Over’ confidently carry on from where they left off, from the album’s 2nd track ‘Always’, the trip becomes a little less predictable. Starting out as a smoky Procol Harum-meets-French-Psych organ ballad, the music drifts, as if of its own accord into an eerie, garage trance that lingers, cycles, and hypnotises, growing ever stranger, reaching ever-further away from its point of conception. And almost every track on Through Other Reflections holds that outer-body moment, where the band fix themselves on a limber, lysergic groove, lose all grip on time and reality, and melt themselves away into a liquid state of blind euphoria. There are sequences on this record that feel more like rituals than songs, built upon a single hypnotic rhythm which, like the centre of a vortex, pulling everything under its beatific command. Take the finale to ‘What We Found’ for instance, sounding like a ghostly march across the psychedelic moors, or ‘Feel The Way’, where a single athletic drum-loop rises and rises, growing ever more urgent and suspenseful underneath its frantic harpsichords and rasping flutes. Full of such rich stylisms as these, The Soundcarriers showcase themselves as abstract storytellers par excellence by virtue of their textures and arrangements alone. Resembling Romantic composer Maurice Ravel, but if he had just a four-piece rock band at his disposal, Through Other Reflects is rich with detail; there’s shakers, rattles, clarinets, booming drums; there’s synthesiser swarms, chiming xylophones, vintage organs and experimental Cluster & Eno-esque ambiences. Within all this nuance the music flows like some undisclosed narrative swathed in a magnetic secrecy. “It almost comes across like a story in some ways”, says Cann of the album, “the music is quite sectional with elements of exotica and cinematic type layers, it's a good balance of grooves, tunes and weirdness”. No more is this “epic cinematic feel” heard more proudly than on short instrumental ‘Sonya’s Lament” - its innate, hauntological atmospheres befitting a Peter Strickland soundtrack, or the classics of Lex Baxter, the so-called ‘Founder of Exotica’ himself. On the other hand, providing a greasier undercurrent to all these bucolic sounds is a leaning towards a more “direct” lyricism referencing more “external concerns. Laying down the first tracks for the album in the wintry gloom of pre-lockdown 2020, and drawing inspiration from time spent in Berlin, Through Other Reflections returns to some of the post-apocalyptic futurism explored in 2014’s Entropicalia - a loose concept album inspired by J.G Ballard’s The Drowned World. “The songs explore a disillusionment with the way things are going particularly after 40 years of neoliberalism”, says Cann, “They follow that folk-song tradition of wanting to escape to an imagined time, but here it’s more urban than pastoral. The first couple of ideas I came up with when doing some music in Berlin and had some time to wander aimlessly. And think the atmosphere seeped in, particularly on The City Was and Already Over. He continues, “One aspect of the title, ‘Through Other Reflections’ is about synthesis and layers of influence. How things can be filtered through other things and change the perspective. This is something you get in cities as well.” Though, as with everything The Soundcarriers make, “It can mean anything. It also just sounds kind of cool.”

Last Summer, Daniel Foggin, guitarist, writer and chief architect of Smote, uprooted himself from his usual home in Newcastle to live and work in a farmhouse in Kelso, near the Scottish border. “Through the summer when I was working up there, myself and Rob (Smote drummer) would finish work and go sit by a small river and have a couple of beers in the sun, and it was the best thing ever” he relates “So I guess the philosophy is that to some people it looks like any other stream, but to us it was supreme happiness.” Hence came the title of the fourth Smote album proper, one largely recorded in this same farmhouse – A Grand Stream. It’s an album that’s the truest incarnation thus far of his vision for this band – a full-scale psychic voyage into the ether and a drone-and-repetition-fuelled series of incantations that takes simple, primal ingredients and utilises them for the purposes of aural sorcery, summoning spectres and revelations aplenty in its wake. Whilst the folk-tinged, ceremonial ambience that Smote have made their trademark is present and correct here, utilising Swedish classic psych heaviness and Swans textures as fuel for the ominous rhythms of ‘Coming Out Of A Hedge Backwards’ and the uplifting cadences of opener ‘Sitting Stone Part 1’, Foggin and his cohorts also waste little time exploring new more eerie and ethereal textures and dimensions. The meditative ‘Chantry’ in particular sees them gravitate towards a headspace akin to the drone-based epiphanies of Kali Malone’s ‘Does Spring Hide Its Joy’ filtered through the transcendent amplifier worship of ‘Earth 2’. A Grand Steam takes this band – one who’ve always eschewed the cliches and stumbling blocks of all contemporary psych rock in favour of their own unique and wyrd vision – into a realm in which they transcend through willpower and skill alike into something preternaturally thrilling, mapping out their own crepuscular new territory Question is; dare you step over the threshold?

Since its founding back in 2014, Blume has carved a unique place in cultural landscape, issuing free-standing works, spanning the historical and contemporary, that represent singular gestures of creativity within the field of experimental sound. Joining their broad efforts in building networks of context and understanding that already includes the works by Werner Durand, Sarah Hennies, Bruce Nauman, John Butcher, Jocy de Oliveira, Mary Jane Leach, Valentina Magaletti, Alvin Curran, Julius Eastman, Alvin Lucier, and shortly after returning with the first ever vinyl release to attend to James Tenney’s legendary “Postal Pieces”, the label is now offering a brand new, ambitious work by the American composer Ben Vida, entitled “Vocal Trio”, conceived, performed, and recorded in Bremen, Germany, during the Spring of 2022. A truly stunning work of compositional conceptualism, combining the ideas of systems based synthesis with real-time vocal collaboration - issued in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score - it’s a landmark in contemporary experimental practice and arguably the most forward-thinking and exciting piece by one of the most exciting American artists working today.

Ben Vida first emerged during the mid 1990s within a loose constellation of experimental musicians, centred around a performance series of improvised workshops at the Myopic Bookstore in Chicago, alongside Jim O'Rourke, Kevin Drumm, Chad Taylor, and the other future members of Town and Country - Jim Dorling, Joshua Abrams, and Liz Payne - the band within which he would gain widespread recognition over the following years. Like many other members of that scene, Vida remains a restless product of a fleeting context - Chicago during the 1990s and early 2000s - continuously undermining concrete notions of idiom and signifier within a practice that witnessed him rendering bristling abstractions within Pillow, glacial melodies with Town and Country, the art-rock mayhem of Bird Show Band, and the angular, driving indie rock of Joan of Arc, before becoming immersed in a practice of systems based synthesis, beginning in the 2010s, that guided much of his first decade of output as a solo performer and composer.

As early as 2013, he began to incorporate acoustic sound sources - specifically the human voice - into his work. It was this shift, evolving and refining itself over the last decade, that underscores radically the leap in his practice represented by “Vocal Trio”, a work that encounters Vida composing for the human voice with the ideas that allow for synthesis - transferring the underlying concepts and structures of both subtractive and additive synthesis to the acoustic realm - without using a synthesiser.

During the Spring of 2022 Vida was in Bremen, Germany, collaborating on a dance piece with the choreographer Fay Driscoll, when the production fell into delays. Finding himself with time on his hands, a space at his disposal, and the company of two dancers - Amy Gernux and Lotte Rudhart - who were also singers, the idea for the piece - to utilising the larynx as audio paths (multi-harmonic or harmonically pure) while conceptualising each person’s mouth as a filter to sculpt the timbre and resonance of a given tone - began to take shape in his mind. Considering how typographical scores might be developed into a non-linguistic social framework, Vida drafted a single page of text - what became the score for “Vocal Trio” - accompanied by a set of harmonic suggestion and loose parameters, seeking a core meaning from each word's phonic make-up by each of the three singers (Vida, Gernux and Rudhart) singing as slowly as possible.

At the core of the pulsing vocal drones - intoxicating, harmonically rich long-tones - that make up the duration abstraction of “Vocal Trio”, is Vida’s regard for music as a social space. It is an experiment that seeks liberation through the act of collective music making, by challenging the terms through which the act of composing is perceived and then relinquishing control. The piece’s rehearsals were simply the three performers hanging out, allowing their knowing each other and natural dynamics to contribute to its form as the score, before recording during a single afternoon at the end of a number of days sharing company and space.

Creatively visionary and groundbreaking on numerous terms, as well as being intoxicatingly beautiful and remarkably listenable, Ben Vida’s “Vocal Trio” represents a striking step forward for one of the most ambitious and outstanding sonic artists working in the United States today. Issued by Blume in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies mastered by Stephan Mathieu, featuring specially commissioned liner notes by Bradford Bailey and a leporello insert offering the piece visual score, this is hands down one of the most important contemporary records we’re likely to encounter in 2024.

Amsterdam's Toman is set to release his first EP since 18 months ‚Dolce Far Niente‘ on Cécille Records!

Dutch producer and DJ Toman, based in the country's capital, Amsterdam, has been steadily rising up the ranks of underground house music in recent years. He has released tracks on labels such as Meta, Eastenderz, Cuttin' Headz, and NO ART. As a rising star in the Netherlands, Toman tours the globe, bringing his raw, stripped-back style to many of the hottest locations, including reputed clubs and festivals across multiple continents.

'Courtyard' opens and sees Toman fuse together crunchy drums with an amalgamation of plucked bass tones and pulsating subs alongside filter house synth licks and vocal hooks, with the vocal on the track provided by Toman himself, all dynamically evolving throughout its eight-minute duration. 'De Bongo Man', as the name would suggest, shifts focus towards a more tribal feel, merging organic percussion atop subtly unfurling synth tones, dubbed-out stabs, resonant
flutters, a weighty low-end drive, and a sturdy rhythm section.

Title-cut 'Dolce Far Niente' follows next on the flip-side, a high-octane house cut fueled by a robust drum groove, twitchy synth lines, breathy vocal chants, and multilayered, gritty stab lines. 'Good Old Sunny Day' then rounds out the release on a more stripped-back tip via bumpy reduced drums, choppy vocals, and airy, fluttering chord sequences.

2024 Restock

A mix of post-Tropicalia Brazilian rock and some of the more soulful elements filtering through the country's music in the early 70s  and one of the most enigmatic albums by this unique singer! Sergio's got a sound that's incredibly hard to describe  at once sweet and melodic, but also kind of twisted, in an intimate singer/songwriter mode. The production of the album is compressed with a number of post-Beatles touches that make it sparkle like work by Caetano Veloso in the mid 70s, or some of the Peruvian rock by groups like We All Together  and hearing the record gives us the same sort of excitement of new discovery as when we heard their best work. Titles include "Rulzito Seixas", Viajei De Trem, "Pobre Meu Pai", "Labirintos Negros", "Filme De Terror", and Lero E Leros E Boleros

Garage Hermétique's sub-label dedicated to non-club excursions continues its exploration by welcoming Nummer to its collection of mixtapes.

Let yourself be captivated by the day unfolding under the morning sun, filtered dreamy synths, the memory of distant voices and eerie percussions; echoing in the garden, transporting the listener into a kaleidoscopic realm.

For its next outing, the Nebraska label has curated a mini best-of EP that serves up a quartet of tunes that have been digital only until now. Side A opens with 'Senza Parole,' featuring a weird and wonderful vocal sound and some loose hand claps under Italo-infused disco-funk drums. 'Let Me Be The One' is a nice tripped pout and slow motion 90s downtempo jam and 'Funkbraska' is an homage to French Touch with filtered synth loops fizzing with sugar goodness over a characterful bassline, and last of all is 'Love + Hate', another low slung hose groove that oozes cool and has a fantastic bassline propping it up.