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The final installment of the GIANT SKY trilogy, Giant Sky III, will be released on October 2nd, 2026, preceded by the single "Fleeting Glimpse", which offers the first taste of the new album. A companion postlude album, The Further We Go The Deeper It Gets, will follow on October 16th, 2026. Together, the two records complete an ambitious body of work that has seen Viken explore a broader and more introspective musical landscape than ever before. "Fleeting Glimpse" provides an evocative introduction to the final chapter of the GIANT SKY trilogy. While Viken"s band Soup has become renowned for its emotionally charged, crescendo-driven soundscapes, GIANT SKY allows him to embrace an even wider palette of influences. Drawing from alternative art rock, post-rock, electronica, ambient music, indie, folk, and progressive rock, the project balances immersive atmospheres with memorable melodies. In an era increasingly dominated by algorithms, artificial intelligence and digital perfection, Viken has consciously taken the opposite path. GIANT SKY is built around the human element of music-making, embracing imperfections and authenticity as artistic strengths. "This album has been with me for a long time. Some of the ideas on Giant Sky III go back many years, and in a way it feels like a cross section of the last 25 years of my life as a composer. We live in a time where music is increasingly shaped by algorithms, AI and endless digital possibilities. I suppose this record is my way of walking upstream a little bit - taking the slower route, trusting the human imperfections, and letting the music find its own shape. It wasn"t a quick album to make, but I"m proud of what it became: ambitious where it needed to be, modest where it should be, and above all, honest." - Erlend Viken

2026 Repress

'Quiet Pieces' initiates Abul Mogard’s personal imprint Soft Echoes with a definitive self-portrait of calm, contemplative, and discreet inner landscapes made audible. It is the first solo album on vinyl in four years. RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker.

While sifting through archived material left idle from earlier projects, a chance encounter with a late uncle’s trove of beloved 78rpm classical and opera records prompted the reworking and completion of what would eventually become the album. Spinning dusty records at 33 and 45rpm, Abul Mogard recombined their enduring spectres with unfinished sketches from his archive. The resulting soundscape blurs distinctions between his memories and those of another, exquisitely short-circuiting the senses with its waking, dream-like lucidity.

This was a process I hadn’t explored in my earlier works. I began sampling brief moments from these records, altering them with studio effects and playing them at slower speeds. In many cases, I wasn’t entirely sure how the original music sounded. These fragments, once further processed, became a source of inspiration for my new compositions. Over time, I realised that the old pieces from the archive and the new material derived from the samples naturally complemented each other.”

The resulting pieces hover over a threshold, a liminal space that harmonises the old and older material. Voluminous waves of quiet and loud undulate between consonance and dissonance, conjuring imagery of a decaying grandeur that humanity’s decadence has surrendered to the elements. Abul Mogard’s seemingly abandoned yet vast landscapes are nevertheless intimate with timbral frissons of red-lined distortion. Elusive, yet as tangible as sea spray or smog, they affect the olfactory senses with a rarified, synesthetic quality that modestly engages one’s emotional register – a hypnotic, distinguishing feature long hailed as one of the hallmarks of his work. A fidelity to memory and dream recall is sensitively probed in the journey from the stately symphonic stasis of 'Following a dream' to the almost industrial, untethered brutality evoked by a looming silhouette that’s never fully visible in 'Constantly slipping away', culminating in the foreboding coda of 'Like a bird'. Those pieces appear to shield the album’s sentimental core, where the tempestuous play of light and shadow of 'In a studded procession' escalates to breathtaking, panoramic climax, while 'Through whispers' evokes an out-of-body-like experience encountered with visceral poignancy.

Looking back, Mogard notes an unexpected influence: “I realise being inspired by Phill Niblock, whose work I had barely known at the time but explored after his passing in 2024. His album 'Boston Tenor Index' changed the way I approached dissonance. It encouraged me to push my sound further, to the edge of a space where I began to feel uncomfortable.”

The album artwork, created by longtime collaborator Marja de Sanctis, features a photograph taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, an archaeological site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Captured with an iPhone, the image traces the residual presence of construction techniques and architectural forms of the Romans, where material history is transcribed through contemporary tools. The convergence of ancient and modern technology aims to reverberate the site’s lasting spiritual presence – an echo persisting in what is now perceived as a quiet, emptied space. The spiral gestures towards infinity and light. Past and present dissolve into one another, reflecting 'Quiet Pieces' meditation on sound, memory, and time.

RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker

Flug brings his singular vision to Backspin Records with 'From My Soul', a 7-track EP that marks a powerful new chapter for both artist and label, rounded out by a remix from Kashpitzky. Moving between deep emotional techno, raw percussive functionality and high intensity, the release showcases Flug's signature precision and narrative depth while keeping things classy and never falling for overused tropes. Kashpitzky completes the package with a remix that reinterprets the source material from a darker, more straight-forward angle. ??

Opening with the title track 'From My Soul', Flug sets off on an epic 8-minute journey built on reverberating melodic layers, shimmering chord pads and a strong low endthat unfolds slowly and deliberately, balancing emotional weight with a hypnotic drive. 'Make It Loud' follows with a more stripped, functional direction, where warm low-end energy, minimal percussion and reverb-drenched sine wave synth hits create a tight, circular groove anchored by a subtle but sinister vocal presence. ??

On the flip side, 'Human Instinct' turns the energy more direct and physical, driven by a saturated kick drum, looping synth motifs and sparse vocal cuts that heighten tension without disrupting the flow. 'The Awakening' expands the emotional scope with a deep kick and tom-driven bassline, expansive droning pads and dragging percussion that build a rich, cinematic atmosphere. Kashpitzky's remix reimagines the original at a faster BPM with distorted chord stabs, off-grid hi-hats and layered synth work creating a tense, industrial atmosphere that breaks into a spacious breakdown before dropping back into a stripped,high-impact groove. ??

With the 'From My Soul' EP, Flug marks a strong first statement on Regal's Backspin Records, delivering a cohesive body of work that balances depth, emotion and dancefloor utility, reinforcing the label's dedication to innovative techno.

PRAANA unveil their highly anticipated album Insight Out on Colorize, a deeply immersive body of work that explores reflection, connection and emotional growth through the duo’s signature cinematic lens.

Built around themes of reflection, presence and human connection, Insight Out creates a rich sonic landscape where atmospheric textures, subtle rhythms and emotive songwriting coexist with effortless grace. Featuring collaborations with Susie Ledge, Tina Parol, Freddie Elmberg and Courtney Storm, the album showcases PRAANA’s ability to create music that feels both intimate and expansive. An alias of Tritonal, PRAANA have amassed over 30 million streams, earned sustained support on SiriusXM Chill and recently completed U.S. tour dates in Chicago, Denver and a sold-out Elsewhere Rooftop show in Brooklyn.

Insight Out stands as a fully realised artistic statement, offering a space for stillness, reflection and meaningful escape through sound.

Pressure is the medium of wind players. Wind instruments all sound thanks to pressure differentials, whether that’s the rush of wind over a lip plate or a steady, buzzing exhalation through pursed lips. Ka Baird and Chris Ryan Williams (HxH) are wind players well- schooled in the power of using pressure and movement to amplify the mystery of an invisible force animating a metal tube. They augment their instruments, flute and trumpet respectively, with electronics, sometimes obscuring the acoustic sound source, sometimes making it hyperreal. Flutters of lip and tongue slither over the listener’s ear, and sustained tones become a dense fog, pushing on other kinds of visceral, emotional pressure points.

On Enthalpy, Baird and Williams’ first album as a duo, the energy they conjure feels barely contained, the pressure built up to a breaking point before spilling out in multiple directions at various speeds. They borrow the title from thermodynamics, referring to the total energy of a system based on its pressure and volume. The music flies out in bursts; it seeps and oozes, flows with intention. It is an incredibly rhythmic work without any hint of meter, full of sounds that punctuate with the thud of a dart hitting a bullseye. Williams’ capability to conjure swirling atmospherics, as well as his remarkable ability to pull fragments of melody from the haze, fit puzzle-like into Baird’s exclamations and the eruption of electronics that often dovetail them. The duo draws on tones from nearly the entire range of human hearing, from nimble but bulbous throbs of sub-bass to pinprick flickers of ultra-high end.

The sessions that produced Enthalpy were completely improvised, showcasing a degree of mind-meld that belies each participant’s thrill at approaching the unknown. This isn’t a casual conversation, but an omnidirectional tangle that ties and reties itself into new knots as the album progresses. Williams and Baird have both become ubiquitous presences throughout the New York City experimental music communities, collaborating with innumerable others and learning how their unique approaches work in tandem with similarly expansive thinkers and players. Even in the album’s most spacious moments, there’s a tension between the feeling of being unmoored and yet completely locked in, like the abyss is just one more river to cross. They ford it together before moving on to the next idea in lock step.

For the listener, Enthalpy is often felt in the body as much as it reverberates within the ears. We’re tossed from side to side, made to shoulder the impact of detonating electronics, absorbing these sounds with the feet, gut, and crown. Baird reaches into the back of their throat for guttural growls, and we can almost feel the scratch. As we tread the border of the synthesthetic, it's a reminder of the physical nature of sound, that the space between our ears and the speakers is its own enthalpic system of energy conduction. Move with it, let it move you, and see how it feels.

In 2024, Audrey Powne emerged as a compelling new voice in contemporary jazz with the release of her acclaimed debut album From the Fire; a self-produced and self-composed work celebrated for its lush string arrangements, soaring trumpet performances, and emotionally rich songwriting. Now, two years later, Powne returns with Bodies of Water, a bold and deeply introspective follow-up that continues her elemental exploration: from fire to water. An exploration of what it means to exist alongside others in an increasingly unstable world, Bodies of Water reflects on vulnerability, responsibility, and human interconnectedness. The album’s title and conceptual foundation were inspired by a passage from Caleb Azumah Nelson’s novel Small Worlds: “...to make himself a body, like water, a still surface, but beneath this, a ripple, and beneath this, an ebbing tide, and beneath that, a violent, constant tow…” Throughout the record, lyrics ruminate on the idea that like all bodies of water, we are vulnerable to disruption and catastrophe. Unlike inanimate bodies of water, however, we are conscious participants in both the damage and the repair. That tension between what we are made of and what we are responsible for became a grounding and harmonious thought. This album is a meditation on that idea, both in my personal life and in a broader, collective sense. Swollen, Broken Record, and Karma, reflect on moments of cruelty and error including her own that felt unbearable. Viewing them instead as forces moving through the landscape of a life, violent but temporary to survive their immediate impact. More socially conscious tracks Stay Awake, Creeds, RYV, and Two Sides confront frustration with political polarisation and the emptiness of language unaccompanied by action. The title and final track Bodies of Water brings these ideas together, reimagining both personal and societal upheaval as events shaped by bodies of water moving through the world destructive at times, transformative at others, and always in motion. Blending traditional jazz with Afrobeat rhythms, Dilla-inspired grooves, ambient textures, and expansive arrangements, Bodies of Water reveals the breadth of Powne’s artistic vision. The record moves fluidly between spiritual jazz, warped soul and rhythm-driven experimentation, while layered interludes and meticulous production thread its disparate influences into a unified and immersive sonic world.

Jonathan Kaspar returns to Crosstown Rebels with an eclectic four-tracker that shows his stylistic range. The EP features his own vocals, as well as some long-time personal secret weapons.

After an intense touring summer with acclaimed gigs, including Fusion Festival, Fabric London, Else Berlin or Woodstock 69 Bloemendaal, Jonathan Kaspar lands back on Crosstown Rebels. After remixing CRM head Damian Lazarus with two different versions in 2025 and his last massive "We Come EP” to the label in 2024, Jonathan is in a purple patch right now with upcoming remixes for the likes of Âme and Acid Pauli. This upcoming release reveals different sides to his sound while still feeling connected as one body of work.

Opener 'Take Control' will be familiar to fans who have seen Kaspar play recently - it's stripped back but tense, with a searching lead synth and tight, dusty tech drums that grip you and never let up. 'The Reason Why' came to life when Bákayan's incredible vocals were added to the deep, dreamy groove, bringing a smoky soul and human warmth that tugs at the heart. 'Play With Me' and 'I Love Your Voice' both feature Kaspar's own vocals: the former is a subtle, late-night grower that unfolds with trippy synth details and sci-fi motifs. The closer is a deeply immersive and widescreen mid-tempo sound that carries a heartfelt reminder to hold on to the voices of the people who love you when everything else gets loud.

Emerging from the Hungarian underground, POST ANALOG DISORDER inhabits the fractured space where EBM, hard-beat techno and post-punk converge. Cold, spectral melodies collide with relentless machine rhythms, dissolving the boundaries between body music, industrial tension and guitar-driven darkness into a singular, uncompromising language.

Driven by heavy analogue basslines, razor-sharp sequencers, haunting female vocals and hypnotic guitar motifs, the duo shapes a sound that is both mechanical and deeply human. Each composition unfolds through constant friction, balancing disciplined repetition with emotional instability, where raw physical force meets moments of haunting introspection.

Rather than revisiting the vocabulary of classic EBM, POST ANALOG DISORDER deconstructs and reconfigures it through a contemporary, forward-looking perspective. The result is an immersive work of hypnotic intensity, suspended between industrial ritual, post-punk melancholy and uncompromising electronic experimentation—a record conceived not only for the darkest dancefloors, but for those drawn to the outer edges of underground electronic music.

Ezra Collective's Here Because Of Hope is the most ambitious and personal record of their career - conceived as a body of work split into three spiritual and geographical movements, the album traces the movement of Black people across continents and decades, from the music of Africa to the rhythms of the Caribbean, and home to the streets of London. Formed in the youth clubs of London, Mercury Prize and BRIT Award-winners Femi Koleoso, TJ Koleoso, Joe Armon-Jones, James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi have now spent over a decade making jazz joyful, urgent and undeniable. On Here Because Of Hope, they push that vision further than ever, asking a simple but profound question: why does so much Black music born out of pain sound so joyful? Their answer is hope: the belief, carried across generations and oceans, that something better is possible. Anchored by collaborations with Pa Salieu, Lila Iké, Leona Lewis, and reaching across the full breadth of the global African diaspora (including America, where those same African and Caribbean roots gave birth to jazz itself) Here Because Of Hope is a record of remarkable warmth, ambition and humanity, and the sound of Britain's most vital band at the peak of their powers.

In 2023 we began our hugely successful 80s 12” series on CD – a year-by-year journey through the greatest 12” singles from the decade, and in 2024 we presented a selection of tracks from 1980-1982 as the first volume in our collectible vinyl boxset series, followed by Volume Two celebrating 1983-1984 in 2025.

This year, Now Music is proud to announce the third instalment in this essential collection, NOW Presents…12" 80s: Volume Three: 1985-1986, as a stunning 5-LP boxset. A limited edition and numbered set with each of the 5-LPs pressed on a different colour vinyl – red, yellow, blue, hot pink and lime green – to be released on July 17th, 2026, and for many of these tracks this marks the first time back on vinyl since their original 12” release!

Opening with one of the decade’s most powerful rock anthems, Queen’s ‘One Vision’ appears in its Extended Version, ahead of Eurythmics’ euphoric ‘There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart)’ in the Special Dance Mix and Dead Or Alive’s irresistible ‘You Spin Me Round (Like A Record)’. Side A closes with Frankie Goes To Hollywood and the epic ‘Welcome To The Pleasuredome (An Alternative To Reality)’. Flip the LP over for more iconic 12” versions from 1985, beginning with Tears For Fears and the UK Extended Version of ‘Shout’, alongside Go West’s ‘We Close Our Eyes (The Total Overhang Mix)’, the massive soundtrack hit ‘Don’t You (Forget About Me)’ from Simple Minds and Arcadia’s sophisticated ‘Election Day (Consensus Mix)’.

LP2 opens with four defining tracks that perfectly capture the electronic and cinematic sound of the mid-80s. Paul Hardcastle’s groundbreaking hit ‘19 (The Destruction Mix)’ leads into two instrumental classics: Harold Faltermeyer’s ‘Axel F’ and Jan Hammer’s ‘Miami Vice Theme’, both featured in their Extended Versions, before Propaganda’s peerless ‘Duel (Bitter-Sweet)’ closes the side. Side B showcases some of the era’s biggest dancefloor favourites, from Mel & Kim’s ‘Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend)’ and Gwen Guthrie’s enduring club anthem ‘Ain’t Nothin’ Goin’ On But The Rent’, to Aretha Franklin’s ‘Who’s Zoomin’ Who?’ in its Dance Mix and the soul-pop brilliance of Loose Ends’ ‘Hangin’ On A String (Extended Dance Mix)’.

LP3 brings together some of the decade’s most beloved pop and rock crossover hits. Side A opens with the powerhouse pairing of Philip Bailey and Phil Collins on ‘Easy Lover (Extended Dance Remix)’, followed by Bonnie Tyler’s dramatic ‘Holding Out For A Hero (Club Mix)’ and Pat Benatar’s classic ‘Love Is A Battlefield (Extended Version)’. Stephen Duffy’s infectious ‘Kiss Me (Mixe Plural)’ precedes The Human League’s U.S. #1 ‘Human (Extended Version)’. Over on Side B, Duran Duran lead with the ‘Extended Mix’ of ‘Notorious’ before a run of timeless dance-pop including Sly Fox’s ‘Let’s Go All The Way’, Jellybean’s ‘Sidewalk Talk’ and Maria Vidal’s ‘Body Rock’, culminating with Ashford & Simpson’s club classic ear-worm ‘Solid (Special Club Mix)’.

LP4 opens with huge examples of sophisticated synth-pop and dance-floor innovation from 1986. Pet Shop Boys’ era-defining ‘West End Girls (Dance Mix)’ is joined by New Order’s influential ‘Bizarre Love Triangle (Extended Dance Mix)’. Up next, Red Box’s pure-pop of ‘For America (Bazooka Mix)’ and Nick Kamen’s breakthrough hit ‘Each Time You Break My Heart (Extended Version)’. The reverse side celebrates some of the biggest floor-fillers of 1986 – all in their 12” Versions, beginning with The Communards with Sarah Jane Morris and their unforgettable #1 version of ‘Don’t Leave Me This Way’, alongside Bronski Beat’s ‘Hit That Perfect Beat’, Bananarama’s global smash ‘Venus’ and Five Star’s ‘Can’t Wait Another Minute’ in its ‘M&M New York Remix’ form.

The final LP opens with a side packed with some of the most enduring dance-pop and of the era. Whitney Houston’s ‘How Will I Know (Dance Remix)’ is followed by Steve Winwood’s uplifting ‘Remix’ of his massive hit ‘Higher Love’, the celebrated ‘Shep Pettibone Remix’ of Level 42’s ‘Lessons In Love’ and Bryan Ferry’s elegant and atmospheric ‘Slave To Love (12" Remix)’, whilst over on the final side some of the years’ most distinctive and innovative sounds are showcased: Big Audio Dynamite’s genre-blending ‘E=MC2 (12 Inch Remix)’ and Furniture’s cult classic ‘Brilliant Mind (12" Mix)’ feature alongside Talk Talk’s majestic ‘Extended Mix’ of ‘Life’s What You Make It’, and to close this superb collection, the full ‘Extended Version’ of Spandau Ballet’s powerful ‘Through The Barricades’ provides a fitting finale, bringing together 42 essential 12” versions from 1985 and 1986 across five superb LPs.

En Direct presents “No More Spectacles”, the fourth release from one of the finest electro EBM projects worldwide. With this new work, En Direct leans further into a sharper and more emotionally charged EBM sound while making clear they do not renounce their roots as the driving force behind the influential electro imprint Clear Memory. The record is infused with strong post- punk overtones, somewhere between the cold intensity of classic body music and the melancholic tension of post-punk reimagined through EBM structures. No More Spectacles delivers a sound that feels both immediate and deeply atmospheric. Drill-like kicks hammer through the mix while distorted basslines split the tracks wide open, locking into martial and commanding vocal lines that push the energy forward with relentless precision. Mechanical yet deeply human, the record balances darkness, groove, and emotional weight with remarkable control. Built for strobe-lit floors and restless bodies, “No More Spectacles” confirms En Direct as masters of a sound where post- punk sensibility and EBM functionality collide at full force. Presented in ONE-OFF truly limited edition of 300 copies lacquered pressed on 180 gr. high quality solid BLACK vinyl. All tracks have been specially remastered and mastered for vinyl by Daniel Hallhuber at Young and Cold Studios (Germany).

ROSE KEELER-SCHAFFELER

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Magic Hollow (MH002)

Before we learn language, we learn the voice.

Universal Language is the second release on Magic Hollow and an exploration of the voice before song and before speech. Written and recorded during pregnancy and early motherhood, Rose Keeler-Schaffeler's album draws inspiration from the earliest forms of human communication: coos, cries, sighs and instinctive vocalisations that precede language yet already contain the seeds of music.

Best known as Keel Her, the cult DIY songwriter, producer and NTS Radio DJ whose fiercely independent body of work helped define a generation of bedroom pop, Rose reveals a strikingly different side of her musical practice here. Produced by Daniel O'Sullivan, Universal Language places the human voice at its centre, treating it not as a vehicle for lyrics but as the raw material from which music, language and relationships emerge.

With the exception of a handful of bass vocal parts performed by O'Sullivan, every voice heard on the album is Rose's own.

Across twelve meticulously composed pieces, layered vocal arrangements intertwine with subtle electronics, tape manipulation, synthesizers and understated drum machines. At times the music evokes the luminous purity of medieval sacred music; elsewhere voices dissolve into hazy ambient textures or unfold through hypnotic loops that blur the distinction between singer, choir and atmosphere.

The album was recorded during the first year of her son’s life. Many of its melodic contours and vocal gestures were inspired directly by his earliest sounds. His pre-linguistic attempts at communication became compositional material, guiding Rose towards a deeper exploration of the voice at its point of origin.

Deeply personal yet reaching towards something universal, Universal Language is a meditation on the human voice: our first instrument, our first language and our first experience of belonging.

There’s something quietly defiant about Melody Boy. Written and recorded in a tiny beach hut studio on the English coast, and notably know for his previous work with Paul Weller and The Moons, Andy Crofts’ debut solo album arrives without compromise or concession to trend. It’s a record built on melody above all else, songs that feel unearthed rather than manufactured, guided by instinct, memory, and a lifelong obsession with the craft of songwriting.

Crofts, long established as a songwriter and musician, steps forward here with a voice that feels both seasoned and strangely elusive. There’s no rush to explain, no attempt to overstate. Instead, Melody Boy unfolds with a natural confidence, hook laden, harmonically rich, and emotionally direct without ever losing its sense of mystery.
Drawing from a lineage of classic songwriting while remaining firmly his own, the album leans into warmth, analogue textures, and a sense of timelessness that resists the churn of the modern music cycle. It’s not chasing a moment, it’s creating its own space.
Lead single “Blue” introduced that world: melodic, reflective, quietly anthemic. Across the album, that same thread runs deep, songs that reveal themselves slowly, rewarding repeat listens rather than demanding immediate attention.
There’s a deliberate sense of distance in Melody Boy. Not coldness, but clarity. A refusal to overexplain. The result is a body of work that feels personal without being confessional, detailed without being crowded.

In a landscape built on constant output and fleeting attention, Andy Crofts offers something else entirely: a record that trusts the listener to meet it halfway.
"Blue is another song that I can't get enough of at the moment" - Gary Crowley (BBC London)

There’s something quietly defiant about Melody Boy. Written and recorded in a tiny beach hut studio on the English coast, and notably know for his previous work with Paul Weller and The Moons, Andy Crofts’ debut solo album arrives without compromise or concession to trend. It’s a record built on melody above all else, songs that feel unearthed rather than manufactured, guided by instinct, memory, and a lifelong obsession with the craft of songwriting.

Crofts, long established as a songwriter and musician, steps forward here with a voice that feels both seasoned and strangely elusive. There’s no rush to explain, no attempt to overstate. Instead, Melody Boy unfolds with a natural confidence, hook laden, harmonically rich, and emotionally direct without ever losing its sense of mystery.
Drawing from a lineage of classic songwriting while remaining firmly his own, the album leans into warmth, analogue textures, and a sense of timelessness that resists the churn of the modern music cycle. It’s not chasing a moment, it’s creating its own space.
Lead single “Blue” introduced that world: melodic, reflective, quietly anthemic. Across the album, that same thread runs deep, songs that reveal themselves slowly, rewarding repeat listens rather than demanding immediate attention.
There’s a deliberate sense of distance in Melody Boy. Not coldness, but clarity. A refusal to overexplain. The result is a body of work that feels personal without being confessional, detailed without being crowded.

In a landscape built on constant output and fleeting attention, Andy Crofts offers something else entirely: a record that trusts the listener to meet it halfway.
"Blue is another song that I can't get enough of at the moment" - Gary Crowley (BBC London)

Puerta Negra presents “Metafísica”, the third chapter in the project’s subversive and revolutionary sonic vision. Moving again through the outer edges of EBM, industrial funk, and mutant electronics, the new EP channels the raw physicality of contemporary American body music, aligned with acts such as High-Functioning Flesh or Spike Hellis, alongside the fractured futurism of late-’80s Cabaret Voltaire and its mutant new beat mutations. The result is tense, hypnotic, and deeply confrontational. At the center of the record are the stripped-down, unfiltered vocals of María Aguirre, moving through broken, hallucinogenic rhythms that continuously destabilize and reconstruct the groove. Mechanical yet visceral, cold yet intensely human, the tracks unfold like transmissions from a collapsing future. With “Metafísica”, Puerta Negra continues to push its singular language forward: radical avant-garde body music for the most restless corners of the underground — perfectly suited to ignite a revolution. Presented in ONE-OFF truly limited edition of 300 copies lacquered pressed on 180 gr. high quality solid BLACK vinyl. All tracks have been specially remastered and mastered for vinyl by Daniel Hallhuber at Young and Cold Studios (Germany).

Terri Lyne Carrington + Social Science ― Matthew Stevens, Aaron Parks, and Morgan Guerin ― delivers their sophomore project, Trip the Night Fantastic, on Candid Records. GRAMMY® nominated for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for their 2019 release, Waiting Game, this acclaimed collective returns ― boasting an illustrious roll call of emcees, spoken word artists, and instrumentalists ― this time exploring systemic and contemporary themes that demand our attention, call us to action, and add stunning breadth to the time-honored tradition of amalgamating art and activism. Women’s empowerment, climate change, immigration, gender justice, body autonomy, community building, and animal rights are all elucidated with a freshness, depth, and creative brilliance that can only be birthed from someone whose creative core is rooted in empathy and humanity.

Featured throughout this new recording are vocalists Ledisi, Arooj Aftab, Michael Mayo, Miki Howard, Fatoumata Diawara, Debo Ray, Christie Dashiell, Lizz Wright, Vuyo Sotashe, Safa, Imani Rousselle, and Ian Michael; instrumentalists Brandee Younger, Marc Ribot, Larry Goldings, Rashaan Carter, Simon Moullier, Riley G, and Brenda Navarrete; emcees Nappy Nina, Kokayi, Kassa Overall, and Khemist; and spoken word artists J. Ivy, Aja Monet, Tarriona ‘Tank’ Ball, and Moor Mother.

New York’s Ma Sha brings wigged-out rhythms to Nerve Collect with an explosive, future-facing new EP. The six tracks prove she is bound by no rules but knows exactly how to energise the club.

Ma Sha deals in sounds that operate outside the usual boundaries and demand full-bodied, physical reactions. She has become a driving force in the New York underground with Kindergarten, which is both a much-loved party and a much hyped label. Though built on global techno foundations, Sha’s grooves range from peak-time brain melters to more twisted and rugged, always at high tempo and with plenty of invention on labels like Steel City Dance Discs and Rhythm Section International.

‘Salpa’ opens with a clipped rhythm drenched in neon and psychedelic swirls as oversized bass cocoons from below with glitchy vocal fragments and hard but bouncy techno momentum. ‘Gillz’ swallows you in waves of bass and rubber kicks while screwy synths spray across the mix while a syncopated broken beat brings irresistible funk to a post-human world. ‘Shots’, a collab track with Hodge, works in overdrive with rising tones and liquid metal textures that trap you in a hall of mirrors. Intense club pressure builds with pristine percussion and hyperreal vocals.

‘Spinmachine’ is a freaky sound world of fuzzy synths, cantering drums and static electricity that is full of threat and never lets go. ‘Total Energy’ locks into rolling drums and hyping swing with descending leads and a sense of future rave chaos designed for sheer dance floor release.

Ma Sha’s sound designs feel beamed back from the future to rewire familiar rhythms that tickle the brain as they make their way through your entire body.

2026 Repress

Das Debütalbum des amerikanischen Lo-Fi/Darkwave Künstlers John Maus aus dem Jahr 2006 ist endlich wieder auf LP erhältlich.

GoldFord’s soul music is rooted in truth. His raw, unvarnished songs are a balance of introspection and catharsis, grappling with heartbreak, healing, and the quiet revelations that come with growth. After spending a decade in corporate America, the St. Louis native (now based in Los Angeles) turned to music as a means of survival following a devastating personal loss. “I was more afraid of dying with regret than I was of failing,” he says of his decision to finally choose the path at 30, a choice that set his entire trajectory in motion.

That initial fearlessness has since fueled extraordinary momentum. With over 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, GoldFord has rapidly become one of the most compelling emerging voices in contemporary music. His breakout EP, Orange Blossoms (Oct 2024), has surpassed 100M streams, and his latest project, Space of the Heart (Sept 2025), has already generated 90.8M streams, 2.7M saves, and over 153,000 pieces of user-generated content across TikTok and Instagram. The standout track “Easy Does It” has reached 43.5M streams and continues to accelerate with more than 250K new weekly discoveries on Spotify.

GoldFord is stepping into a more luminous and soulful era as he prepares to unveil his next body of work. Defined by the warmth and light of his latest single, Only You Do, the music remains a dedicated exploration of mental wellness, restoration, and the profound power of human connection. From its opening chords, this new project serves as both a continuation and an elevation of his journey toward healing.

2026 Repress

Founded by Rene Wise, Moving Pressure is a record label aimed to explore the immersive dialogue between soundsystem music and the human body, celebrating the profound connection of sound and movement.

As the inaugural release, Moving Pressure 01 serves as a sonic diary showcasing Rene Wise's music storytelling. Each track on the EP contributes to a harmonious blend of innovation and restraint, inviting listeners to embark on a captivating journey through the artistry of sound and rhythm. Sometimes, it's the space between the notes that resonate the loudest.

H- side is etched
The American cable-television industry exploded in the 1980s, pushing broadcasts of diverse programming and emissions of low-laying cultures into homes. Community stations piggybacked on the digital developments of the time, extending their existence through telephony and broadcast a iliates. For those growing up in this time, in locations such as New York City, the localized communications beamed into their homes exposed them to an impressionable array of disparate sounds and visions.
Move into the 1990s and New York was filled to the brim of emergent cultures drawing from this ebullition of communication. From Rammellzee’s shapeshifting to the late Judy Russell and Frank and Karen Mendez’s Nu Groove imprint fusing reggae, poetry and house, nascent ideas emanated from the city walls, from within stores such as Sonic Groove store and on VHS releases such as Stakker’s The Evil Acid Baron Show, a legendary technicolor psychedelic trip along the wildest frontiers of acid house. As scenes expanded and identities developed, such individuals weather the events of the visceral now, expressing themselves right into an unpredictable future.
Function’s long career has seen him uncover a vast range of sonic identities, a mainstay through house, techno and industrial with collaborations with the likes of Regis, Damon Wild alongside his highly influential Infrastructure imprint. With influences deeply tied to pop art, rave and gay scenes, and early memories of block-parties emitting Kraftwerk and Strafe, he found himself seeking out the undercover illegal nights of the 90s on a quest of sexual unearthing, mixing the ever-yearning escapology mission of disco with the influential DJ sets of Jeff Mills.
For his new album Existenz, he marks a clear step away from the corporeal techno of his recent releases. Pivoting around themes of religion, sexuality, trauma and healing, it is a work expansive and celebratory, a clear liberation from a deeply internalized past. Formed from a collection of recordings made in a period from late 2016 to mid 2019, Existenz takes the form of a creative outburst in reaction to a number of traumas - recent, childhood and throughout Function’s life. Life partner Stefanie Parnow assisted the production process in its entirety, providing inspiration, spiritual healing and featuring vocal contributions.
Cosmic synths soar and swoop in ‘Pleasure Discipline’ through towering stacks of rhythm that stutter and creak to a halt before rebooting, a firm robotic response to human intervention. ‘Zahlensender’ reflects a spatial tetris of urban life, as digitalization set within an XYZ matrix confronts the sprawling city. Constant arpeggiated meditations echo synaptic transmissions, e ecting a dissolution of boundaries. ’The Approach’ recalls the unification of the self, a state of delirium non-subjective and smooth, as all connections and functions give way to simple intensities of feeling, crossing the threshold into spirituality. ’Golden Dawn’, featuring Stefanie Parnow, marks a further elevation of dubbed-out euphoria, as once more positive rays emerge. His ode to the effortless short-trip urban navigation 'Kurzstrecke' finds Function in motion, upfront and bold, snapshots of conversation and flickers of light. 'Ertrinken' finds metallic bass jabs swamping snipped synthetic voices, with hidden stores of emotion set as a nod to the history of vocoders as a tool for encrypted military communication. House icon Robert Owens features on 'Growth Cycle' and 'Be', entrenching a celebratory atmosphere over Function's clubwise leanings. Closing track 'Downtown 161' reflects the unmistakeable filtered and squashed interjections of television, and sampled dance vocals - a sound for the curious, dreamers and dancers.
With Existenz, Function reveals an essential body of work, spread over 4LP - thought experiments on the role of identity and spirituality after a lifetime of upheaval and trauma. Leading up until the release date, Function will undertake an album promo tour with select dates - A/V shows at Berlin Atonal and Rural festival in Japan, and three dates as part of his Bassiani residency.

“El Compuesto Desconocido” by Absent Corps. A powerful 12” featuring five tracks that capture the spirit of 90s New Beat, blended with touches of Electro, Italobody, shades of Dark Disco, and strong influences from classic sci-fi cinema.

Sucata Tapes present the debut album by I'A'V, a conjuration born from an invitation extended by gnration in Braga to Inês Malheiro, completed Violeta Azevedo. Three inescapable figures amidst the portuguese scene, whose precious body of work resonates here in ineffable style.

A blessed triangulation of artists, each with a fully formed vision and a path forged across multiple fronts, I'A'V trace a course of dreamlike songs that blend into a long and volatile poem, where a rarefied electronic landscape of arpeggios, glassy textures, and ruptures seeps into the lyricism of Casellas's cello lines and Azevedo's flute breaths, guided by the Voice.

At times stripped bare, at others soaked in a torrent of post-human effects, settled on Malheiro's expressiveness and elevated by the Azevedo. Volatile Poem, recorded during the mentioned residency, unveils mysteries and conceals realities in a fluid sequence of communal ascension moment

Composer Vasco Mendonça presents his third album “Third Places”. The album brings together a collection of landmark performances and features some of the leading names in international contemporary music, including countertenor Iestyn Davies, mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj, the Porto Casa da Música Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble Het Muziek, and conductors Brad Lubman and Ernest Martínez Izquierdo.

More than just a record, “Third Places” stands as a space for artistic and political reflection on the present. Inspired by Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the ‘third place’ – a space beyond home and work where community life takes place – the album’s title refers to the venues where these works came to life, Casa da Música and the Muziekgebouw aan ’t IJ in Amsterdam: spaces for encounter, dialogue and cultural resistance. For Vasco Mendonça, these spaces symbolise “the ability to elevate the way we communicate with one another and to resist our most primitive and violent impulses”.

The voice lies at the heart of this work. The compositions explore the theatrical, intimate and political dimensions of vocal expression, drawing on texts of great social and emotional weight to create a shared space for listening and questioning the current state of the world.

One of the album’s central works stems from a profound contemporary concern. Inspired by the turbulent political climate in the United States following the 2016 elections and by his discovery of the poetry of Terrance Hayes and Tracy K. Smith, Vasco Mendonça composed a cycle of songs initially conceived for voice and percussion, later transposed for orchestra. The result is described by the composer as “a kind of imaginary American folklore”, where excess, transcendence, fascination and fear coexist.

The album also includes a reworking of material from the opera “Bosch Beach”, created in 2016 to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Hieronymus Bosch, commissioned by the Dutch foundation Stichting Bosch 500. Based on a libretto by the writer Dimitri Verhulst, the work reflected on the European migration crisis through a scathing portrait of human indifference. In “Third Places”, Mendonça revisits some of this musical material to construct an incisive reflection on contemporary political discourse, transforming the opera’s numbers into archetypes of election campaigns, populism and performative communication.

Straddling contemplation and confrontation, lyricism and political tension, “Third Places” stands as one of the most ambitious recording projects in contemporary Portuguese music, offering an experience that is both aesthetic and critical, where music and thought intersect in a visceral way.

The digital version of the album will include a bonus track, “Marathon”, which explores the analogy between music and long-distance running, creating a piece in which time is transformed through breathing, the heartbeat and the ritualised repetition of movement and the body, in a constant tension between exhaustion and survival.

Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance.

Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release.

The unmistakable hue of Japan hovers throughout this emotional rich landscape. Subtle field recordings and fragile, abstract motifs drift through the album, all cloaked in a warmth and humanity that only Noriko seems able to conjure.

Pon moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure. There are moments of deceptive simplicity where unexpected elements suddenly surface — strange voices emerge on Boku Wa Obaka, Knife of Yonder is a standout: a startling ten-minute unfolding that begins with a warm, almost Eno-esque drift before launching into a soaring mid-section and finally landing somewhere unexpectedly blues-adjacent.

Kikoeru Pon is brimming with childlike wonder — a heartfelt ballad that dissolves into domestic field recordings, including sounds of the feline for whom both the album and track are named. A quietly devastating ending that brings the personal nature of the record into sharp focus.

There is a deep sense of the human in the way Noriko embraces technology. This is far from cold abstraction; rather, Ponfeels like a colourful photo album, documenting Noriko’s inner world and instincts with remarkable intimacy. Hovering in liminal states between pop, ambient and abstraction, this is a deeply affective and moving release that reveals new surprises with each listen.

The emotional range of Noriko’s latest offering inspires hope in a world in disarray. It is both gentle and epic and one which we feel embodies the work of an artist fully at the height of her powers.

Although humankind has made it to the far side of the Moon and back, there is still more to discover. Strap in… Rex The Dog is taking us further out into the lesser-known realms of space disco.

‘Far Out!’ is a reinterpretation of an early breakbeat rave tune from 1991 by Son’z Of A Loop Da Loop Era. It’s a tribute to a simpler time when all you needed was a cascading piano riff played through a powerful sound system, with your best friend by your side.

In Rex’s version, the breakbeats and piano have been replaced with a punchy 4/4 beat and an arpeggiated synth workout that cuts through the air like a laser. Houston, we have a hit.

‘I Need Your Body’ showcases Rex The Dog’s more introspective side, with yearning vocals spread across a heavily bouncing rhythm track full of mind-boggling dub effects.

This new EP cements Rex The Dog’s status as a unique voice in today’s techno world, as well as an incredibly reliable purveyor of highly emotional dancefloor smash hits.
Obwohl die Menschheit es bereits bis zur Rückseite des Mondes und wieder zurück geschafft hat, gibt es noch immer Neues zu entdecken. Schnallt euch an … Rex The Dog entführt uns noch weiter in die weniger bekannten Gefilde des Space Disco.

„Far Out!“ ist eine Neuinterpretation eines frühen Breakbeat Rave Tracks aus dem Jahr 1991 von Son’z Of A Loop Da Loop Era. Es ist eine Hommage an eine einfachere Zeit, in der man nur ein kaskadenartiges Piano-Riff brauchte, abgespielt über ein kraftvolles Soundsystem, mit dem besten Freund an der Seite.

In Rex’ Version wurden die Breakbeats und das Piano durch einen druckvollen 4/4-Beat und ein arpeggiertes Synth-Riff ersetzt, das wie ein Laser durch die Luft schneidet. Houston, wir haben einen Hit.

„I Need Your Body“ zeigt die eher introspektive Seite von Rex The Dog, mit sehnsüchtigem Gesang, der sich über einen heftig bouncenden Rhythmus-Track voller verblüffender Dub-Effekte erstreckt.

Diese neue EP festigt Rex The Dogs Status als einzigartige Stimme in der heutigen Techno-Welt sowie als unglaublich zuverlässiger Lieferant hoch emotionaler Dancefloor Smash Hits.

Ital Tek's new album 'Mind Abandon' takes a different direction from his recent run of releases, embracing a more human touch in contrast to the dense, world-building drone of his previous albums and film work. This time, he set out to compose away from the computer as much as possible _ working more instinctively and allowing himself to get lost in the music. Alan found the most natural starting point was his own voice, processing vocals into shifting pads and textures. His guitar sits at the centre of much of the record, joined by live, hand-played percussion and effects, often captured in quick, spontaneous performances. The result is an album of spacious, contrasting dynamics, with textures pressing against each other and rhythmic elements fighting to surface from glutinous, layered sound. "It feels like a very introspective record for me," Alan says. "Losing my sense of identity/self as part of the process - the increasing effort to calm my mind and embrace humanity/imperfection in the music. This path made sense as a jumping off point for a lot of the music to be vocal or guitar experiments - singing in ideas and then processing to become less identifiable." The album feels carved and three-dimensional, weaving industrial and shoegaze influences with the darker edges of post-rock. Subtly embedded in its architecture are traces of dubstep dynamics _ a sound that remains part of Alan's DNA. Opening track "The Ice Is Thin" is driven almost entirely by live guitar and keyboard, awash in reverb. On "A Hidden Path," everything apart from the drums stems from processed vocals and guitar, with a fleeting appearance from his daughter's toy ukulele. It unfolds like the beginning of a journey _ vast and cinematic _ nodding to the widescreen tension of Ennio Morricone before building into a towering wall of noise. "Killswitch" disorients with pounding kick drums crafted from twanging acoustic guitar, pushing through layers of static-charged chords. "Undertow" spirals outward on looping guitar figures set against a pulsing Rhodes. "Misted," built around a rare four-to-the-floor beat, uses guitar as a driving rhythmic device, opening with a bassline that wouldn't feel out of place on a The Cure record. "Imagined Landscape" introduces icy keyboard textures that foreshadow the dark closer, "The Pull," where an arpeggiated bassline reminiscent of DAF underpins unnerving, internalised sound design that feels as though it's scratching from within. Mind Abandon closes on a heavy, stalking note _ fresh sounds drawn from the body and the heart.

The Bug Club sind mit einem neuen Album zurück. Seit ihrem letzten Album sind ganze sieben Monate vergangen. Wo waren sie denn? Every Single Muscle, das fünfte Album der Band, ist das dritte, das von Sub Pop, dem angesehenen Label des walisischen Duos aus Seattle, veröffentlicht wird. Seit Very Human Features, das im Juni 2025 rauskam, sind die Lieblinge von BBC 6 Music und KEXP auf ihrer Nonstop-Tour quer über den Atlantik geflitzt, wie sie es früher auf der Severn Bridge gemacht haben. Verschiedene Festivalauftritte im Sommer haben sie davon abgehalten, Urlaub zu machen - wer braucht schon Urlaub, wenn man in Wales lebt? - bis es Zeit war, wieder ins Songwriting-Studio zu gehen. Das ist wahrscheinlich immer noch ein Schlafzimmer in Caldicott, das von einem Windhund namens Ted frequentiert wird (aufgepasst - er taucht in einem der Songs auf). Die Songwriter Sam (Gitarre, Gesang) und Tilly (Bass, Gesang) sind immer bescheiden und behaupten sogar, dass sie während des Songs ,It's Our Manager David" nur ,herumsassen und nichts taten". Das ist eindeutig eine Lüge. Every Single Muscle startet mit ,Miss Wales 2012" voll durch und bezieht sich dabei auf einen Wettbewerb, den sowohl Tilly als auch Sam tatsächlich gewonnen haben. Es ist der erste von vielen Tracks auf dem Album, die weniger als zwei Minuten lang sind, und gibt den Ton für das bisher punkigste Album von The Bug Club an, das sowohl an die kurzen, knackigen Snaps ihrer allerersten Singles als auch an das Grunzen ihrer jüngsten Veröffentlichungen erinnert. Das Album ist so vollgepackt mit Riffs und eingängigen Hooks, dass Sam tatsächlich um Erlaubnis bittet, im zweiten Track ,A Good Day For Dying" ein Solo einbauen zu dürfen. Er bekommt zwei Sekunden Zeit. Glücklicherweise fragt Sam später noch einmal und bekommt mehr Zeit. Auf achtzehn Songs gibt's genug klassisches Gitarrenspiel von Sam und Tilly, um selbst die lautstärksten Bug Club-Fans zufrieden zu stellen und die Behauptung der Band, sie seien ,nur technisch versiert auf ihren Instrumenten", klar zu widerlegen. Dieses Album ist ein Beispiel für effizienten Maximalismus - so wie wenn dein Vater das Auto für den Urlaub vollpackt. Bring mit, was du willst; der Platz ist knapp, aber sie kriegen es irgendwie rein. Zu den Texten: Während ,Very Human Features" hervorragend alltägliche Dinge aufzeigte und ihre Absurdität hervorhob, schauen The Bug Club auf ,Every Single Muscle" genauer auf sich selbst. Allerdings nicht so sehr auf introspektive Weise, sondern eher so, wie ein Außerirdischer ein gefangenes Exemplar auf einer intergalaktischen Trage untersuchen würde. Horrorfilme haben ihr ,Body"-Subgenre, jetzt bekommen auch Garage-Rock-Alben ihres. In einem völlig neuen Sinne des Wortes selbstbezogen, wird die menschliche Form und Verfassung im Laufe des Albums aus jedem Blickwinkel beleuchtet und untersucht. Wir spüren eine surreale Distanz zum Selbst, die den allgegenwärtigen, von Langeweile geprägten Humor hervorbringt; im letzten Song verkündet Sam, dass er ,es satt hat, ein Mensch zu sein". The Bug Club scheinen dem Konzept, ein Mensch zu sein, fast misstrauisch gegenüberzustehen - als wären sie in einem Kostüm aufgewacht, das sie nicht anziehen wollten und nicht ausziehen können. Ist drei die magische Zahl? Wahrscheinlich nicht. Aber Every Single Muscle - das dritte Sub-Pop-Album von The Bug Club - kommt dieser Vorstellung nahe genug, um den durchschnittlichen seltsamen Menschen davon zu überzeugen, dass es so sein könnte.

After a moment of calm, De Lichting returns with the fourth instalment in its double LP album series, Vier.



Never losing touch with its roots in emotional dance music, Vier is a tribute to the electronic soul, something increasingly overlooked on today’s dancefloors. queniv’s Frequency Match opens the album as a gentle invitation, built on minimal drum work and long, stretched pads. RDS’s Aerial Reflections continues in the same vein, leaning into a more serious mood with old school flavoured rhythms.

The first heavier club moment comes from Human Space Machine with Test Rec. A more tense, primetime leaning, proggy groove unfolds, washed in nostalgic strings and trippy elements for both body and mind. Nathan Kofi follows with Kinesis, a proper Detroit infused techno track that pushes the experimental edge further, darker and more driving.

On the second record, the mood shifts into deeper melancholy with Eversines’ Lift The Veil, featuring classic deep house textures of Rhodes chords and FM basses. Nearing the end of the album, Proxyan’s Another delivers pure credits rolling, emotion drenched analogue funk electro, a track the rest of the group had to beg Robbert to include. We are glad we did.

As a kind of bonus track, RDS and Eversines close Vier with a tech house rework of their earlier track Missing. Released on vinyl for the first time, it was previously available only in digital form via Kalahari Oyster Cult.

In an age that demands hyper acceleration, kinetic flashes and byte voracity, Blak Saagan sticks out like a sore thumb with a sprawling body of work that requires attention and unlocks profound symbols and meaning with every passage. After a 5 year gap, the Venetian composer returns with his most personal and openly political statement yet, ‘Un Sequestro Lungo 10.000 Anni’, a staggering 108 minute triple album soundtracking a dystopian city through flashes of futuristic fourth world visions, warehouse 80s rave-ups, meditative trance and dark rumblings. Following his acclaimed ‘Se Ci Fosse La Luce Sarebbe Bellissimo’ was never going to be an easy feat but Samuele Gottardello (Blak Saagan) approached the fresh canvas with a renewed sense of commitment sparking a dense parallel world inhabited by paranoia, control and repression. A world that is relieved by the figure of a woman with the body of a bird emerging from the asphalt and freeing humanity from the “sequestro” (kidnapping) to which it has long been subjected. Dystopia pushed to the limits and sadly close to our current affairs.

2026 Repress

Un-American Activities is the 11th Studio album by Molly Nilsson. Written and recorded entirely on location in California at the former home of writer, poet and early opponent of the National Socialist regime in 1930s Germany, Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife Marta. An album of experimentation, genre-mashing and, above it all, Nilsson’s instantly recognisable melodic skill and empathy, it continues the songwriter’s explorations of power, freedom, oppression and its opposing force, a love unbound.
After accepting an artist residency as part of the Villa Aurora program, Nilsson began work crafting a new album from scratch in a new environment, afforded the freedom, space and time to challenge her practice and take her music into new territory. The resulting work, Un American Activities, is a love note not only to the artist who was among the very first to be declared an “enemy of the state” by the Nazi regime but also to both the eternal struggle he fought and the human spirit that pervades all of Nilsson’s best work. It is also a double-pointed poison pen letter: a critique of the new forms of oppression wielded by her temporary adopted country of the USA but also an acknowledgement of the promise it always offers but never fulfils.
Along with the novel use of colour and photography in the artwork for Un-American Activities, there are swathes of new techniques, genres and timbres new to Molly Nilsson’s music in evidence, 16 years into her music career. On Jackboots Return is an icicle-cold New Beat track that deals directly with the current situation in Germany and the resurgent Nazi-affiliated AfD. The question the song asks is, what’s the timeframe we’re talking about? Is this the 30s, or somewhere a lot closer to home? The beat is picked up on The Communist Party, Nilsson’s deepest bow to House music, evoking the early 90s Rave pioneers, Belgian 80s music and Vogue-era Madonna. Here the lyrics are direct quotes from the McCarthy-era, anti-Communist pamphlet 100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A. The Beauty Of The Duty does to pounding Electro what Nilsson’s last album Extreme did to Metal: subsume it into the Molly Nilsson aesthetic. It goes hard.
While Un-American Activities finds Nilsson experimenting, creating instinctive music on a first-thought-bestthought basis there are still “classic” Molly moments liberally spread throughout. Excalibur feels like the Molly of old, an absolute star of a chorus refrain smudged with the vaseline of fuzz and hope, Red Telephone is wide-eyed, slathered in reverb and chorus effects, distorted with soaring melody, a heart-tugger that tugs the body upwards to the heavens with each evolving wave. Glistening digital tones wash through the album, providing a Y2K etherealness to Nilsson’s audacious Stars and Stripes reference to Wetcheeks. Perhaps the album’s standout, however, is Palestine (Somewhere Over The Rainbow), which is suffuse with empathy, solidarity and, in referencing the classic socialist-penned canon song from The Wizard Of Oz, speaks directly to the tradition of fighting oppression with full hearts of hope.

Caterina Barbieri & Bendik Giske's At Source resounds music as wellspring, that which is essential and unknowable, and yet utterly primary. It finds two acclaimed composer-musicians building a world together in self-contained collaboration between analogue synthesis and an extended approach to the saxophone that conjures its own universe of sound. It is at once intimate and cosmic, drawing on the challenges and possibilities of their artistic exchange, tearing down technique to access all the expansive possibilities of their sonic meeting point.



At Source is a document of the world of sound to be conjured when two artists strive for something together, discovering the expansions and limitations of performance by bodies and machines. It is not an exercise in assimilation, but in productive exchange and creative confrontation. It does not draw on outside energies or influences, but grapples with what there is to find in their respective playing. "It also reflects how natural the collaboration was," says Barbieri, "a meeting at the source which was spontaneous, graceful and natural".



Barbieri and Giske first met and were enthralled by one another's performances at Kunsthaus Glarus in 2019, a meeting that spurred conversations on the power of transitions as a compositional force. Giske later contributed a rework of Fantas for Fantas Variations (Editions Mego, 2021), an ambitious undertaking to rescore Barbieri’s work for his saxophone and voice, a challenge Giske had started undertaking two years prior as an ongoing practice of transcription. “The request came as a proof of aligned ideas”, says Giske.



Their new collaborative project then started during an artistic residency in Milan’s ICA in 2021, by invitation of swiss artist and curator Jan Vorisek, as the world was emerging from lockdown. This meeting, and the preceding closure of sites for cultural exchange, made their work together 'feel like springtime' says Barbieri. Giske, who was on the brink of releasing his sophomore album, Cracks, then joined Barbieri's light-years tour, which functioned as an inaugural incarnation of her newborn label and platform through a series of multi-artist curated shows with appearances of Lyra Pramuk, Nkisi, MFO, among other artists.



Through the tour, they continued to develop material live, and this release, laid down in the studio, is true to that ever-evolving process of creation, where live feedback stays essential to the vitality of this collaborative effort. The tracks are each named with two evocative words that contain the two poles of their sound. Theirs is both abstract and cosmic, in the synth as machine undermined by Barbieri's naturalistic playing, and in Giske's continuous exploration of the symbiosis between his instrument, voice, and body. These binaries, of body and machine, posed various challenges, notably in how the stepped patterns Barbieri uses were near-impossible to translate for Giske's body to perform, and other times where mathematical resolutions were needed to sync their playing. Explains Giske: "It forced me to go to the core of what I am and what I have to offer”. Barbieri says that it "explores the liminality between the machine and the human, and the vulnerability in this process".



At Source is testament to two divergent practices finding a whole cosmos in which to convene; music is crystalised and made utterly enveloping through the focused and critical work of two musicians working at their peak. The versions here are, temptingly, "just one of many versions" of this abundant source material Giske explains. Like the best collaborations, At Source is more than the sum of its parts – bringing more to the feast than the simple combination of two musicians, promising versions upon versions of the exquisite material captured here.

Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.


Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.


Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.


Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.


The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive deep.

Some grooves don’t rush to the dancefloor — they crawl there, slow and heavy, like smoke wrapping around a bassline. With Fragments of Reality, The Balek Band sculpt an electronic funk that lives between shadow and light — an end-of-the-world fever dream, a Barjavel-style Ravage where chaos turns nihilistic.

No sequencer grid here — just four musicians sharing the same room, shaping air and tension together: drums locked tight with a slap bass, a guitar dripping with echo and heat, and a one-man orchestra behind his machines, weaving acid lines and synth arpeggios while mixing the band live — drenching it in delay, reverb, and saturation, like a dub producer in a Kingston studio, Lee Scratch Perry or King Tubby conjuring ghosts through smoke.

This isn’t fusion — it’s friction. A living ritual where the TB-303 hums, and machines don’t dominate but converse with the human pulse. Each track feels like a night that refuses to end — that humid in-between where trance slips into languor, and the body starts to think for itself.

The record recalls the cosmic jazz of Alain Mion or Eddy Louiss meeting the fiery energy of West African afrobeat musicians freshly arrived in a smoky Belleville basement in the mid-’80s. When The Balek Band summon ghosts, it’s only to reshape them — bending the past into something futuristic, alive, and strangely refreshing. Both disciplined and delirious, Fragments of Reality feels like a promise at dawn: dark funk for the late hours, slow acid for warm blood.

This EP isn’t nostalgic, though it remembers. It’s a transmission from a parallel past — a moment when jazz players met drum machines and decided never to stop playing. Each note sweats, each rhythm breathes. You can almost see the light cutting through the haze, faces half-awake, half-possessed.

The Balek Band aren’t recreating a moment — they’re keeping it alive.
Flesh and cables. Impulse and patience.
A band, not a loop.
A trip, not a format.

Calibre announces his new album 'Tricklemore Sea', set for release on vinyl and digital on 1st May via Signature Recordings.

A deeply personal and exploratory body of work, the album moves through ambient, shoegaze, electronic, blues and folk, all subtly shaped by the low-end sensibility that has defined his music for decades. It resists easy categorisation, reflecting an ongoing interest in blending bass culture with forms that sit outside it. Following the release of 'They Want You' at the end of 2025, this new project marks a clear shift in tone. Where that record leans into intensity and forward momentum, 'Tricklemore Sea' turns inward, occupying a more introspective space. Featuring entirely his own vocals and production, it carries a more exposed and vulnerable quality.

The album has taken shape gradually, drawing from material written in the years after 'Planet Hearth'. Rather than forming around a fixed concept, it emerges as a collection of pieces connected by tone and instinct. Tracks move between simplicity and abstraction, with piano-led compositions sitting alongside field recordings, improvisations and bass-driven works. Ideas often begin quickly, then evolve over long periods of revisiting and reworking. His voice takes on a more central role throughout, bringing a heightened sense of vulnerability. Lyrics and delivery are often left open, allowing space for interpretation. His process remains fluid and instinctive, with ideas written quickly, revisited over time and combined across different periods.

Moments such as 'Little Blend' carry a quiet melancholia balanced with hope, while 'Free One' reflects on the pressures of contemporary life. The title track considers the scale of human existence within a wider universe, framing individual lives as small but meaningful within something larger. Elsewhere, 'Deflower' and 'Pigeon Luncheon' draw from recordings made in Berlin at the end of lockdown, capturing a sense of movement and return. Older material, including 'Living In Your Head' and 'Hyndsight', is recontextualised and sits naturally alongside newer work. Threads from his wider catalogue remain present. 'Able Son Dub' nods to longstanding reggae influences, while 'Bit Broken Stream' appears here in a downtempo form alongside its drum and bass counterpart from 'They Want You'. Tracks like 'United Pull' and 'Mizzle Mine' lean further into abstraction, using minimal language and space to suggest mood rather than define it.

Over more than 30 years, Calibre has built a catalogue that moves across drum and bass, ambient, dub, techno, house, jazz, soul, blues and folk. His work is marked by restraint, quiet melancholy and a singular approach that continues to evolve. Complete authorship remains central, with all vocals, lyrics and production on both 'They Want You' and 'Tricklemore Sea' created solely by him. This breadth extends into his DJ sets, where he draws heavily from his own catalogue, often performing entirely self-produced material across a wide range of tempos and styles. His ability to move between contexts has seen him play at Boomtown, Houghton and Atonal Berlin, delivering distinct sets while maintaining a clear identity.

With 'Tricklemore Sea', that identity leans toward stillness, introspection and emotional depth. It is a record that prioritises feeling over definition, holding space for ambiguity while remaining grounded in a strong sense of authorship. Each release carries an element of exposure, a moment of vulnerability in letting the work go. At its core, the album seeks to capture something fleeting but recognisable, a sense of beauty that sits just beyond language.

He describes it simply: "The river inside of me flowing into the sea."

For its third release, Honey Trap turns toward the instinctual. Ritmo Animal is a record driven by body memory, where rhythm becomes language and movement becomes communion. Vancouver- and Colombian-rooted duo Dosis weave club music with lived histories, drawing from punk ethics, soundsystem culture, and a deep commitment to collaboration.

Formed by Daniel Rincon and Zachary Treble, Dosis operates in the space between structure and looseness, where grooves feel hand-built and edges remain intentionally rough. Across five tracks, Ritmo Animal resists clean categorization. House mutates into dub-soaked psychedelia, vocals surface and dissolve, and percussion swings between discipline and abandon.

The A-side opens with “I Want To Be Your Dog”, a low-slung, hypnotic burner featuring Alien D, setting the tone through repetition and restraint. The title track, “Ritmo Animal,” anchors the record in motion, with saxophone lines from Dave Biddle threading through percussive momentum and grounding the track in something tactile and human.

On the flip, “Malibu” offers a softer pull, with Hannah Acton’s vocals drifting through warm, unhurried rhythm. “Humo,” featuring Hashman Deejay, leans deeper into smoke and sway, while closer “Sancocho” stretches time entirely, favoring communal simmer over destination.

Ritmo Animal is music made for shared space. It is not concerned with polish or purity, but with connection, between scenes, cities, and bodies on a floor. Another chapter in Honey Trap’s ongoing exploration of intimacy, pleasure, and rhythm as refuge.

Salix is a bold new departure for modular synthesist Loula Yorke, seen here using an antique reed organ to explore the ancient roots of willow trees in magic, myth and medicine, as well as inviting another musician into her recording studio for the first time, clarinettist Charlotte Jolly.

The EP forms a sonic archive of a singular instrument: an antique free reed organ left behind by a previous encumbent of Asylum Studios, (the artists' co-operative in Suffolk where Yorke's Truxalis labelmate and life collaborator, Seiche, has a studio space). The organ is in poor condition and fascinatingly, painfully detuned. Yorke's recordings bring out its host of unusual quirks exacerbated by age and neglect: the powerful rhythmic creaking of the wooden treadles; the bone-shaking resonance emanating from its body at specific pitches; unexpected exclamations of harmonic collision from within the carcass redolent of a human voice; the piercing, shrieking whistles of broken reeds, and the powerful timbres unlocked via Yorke's experiments with various combinations of stops.

The three tracks that form Salix are inspired by a local weeping willow tree, a constant companion photographed over the course of a year. Boughs caught in a gyre. A maiden in mourning. Branches that gesture in the wrong direction. A tree turned upside down. A hand-woven willow basket, an old technology to gather and store. The journey of a lovelorn bard through the underworld, a bundle of willow under one arm for protection.

For the opening track, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Yorke recorded herself playing a simple unaccompanied improvisation on the organ, the only ornamentation being the processed sounds of the keys being struck and returning to their positions.

For Bundle of Styx, a spell of protection is cast and then broken. Yorke invited virtuoso clarinettist Charlotte Jolly into the studio to test combining the breathy textures of both brass and natural reeds, the instruments uniting and obsuring each other in turn during this one-take improvisation. The organ's unpredictable sharpened tunings take centre stage here, with Jolly using them as a point of departure to conjure a set of peerless harmonic improvisations live in the moment. Throughout the improvisation, Yorke, a self-taught musician, unpracticed on the organ, supports and challenges, freely admitting that she's not always sure what effect her decisions to move up and down the keyboard or pull out certain stops will have. Jolly's genius lies in her ability to meet and build on every uncertain pitch thrown her way, saying of the experience, "I love that Loula isn't classically trained, I can't predict at all what she's about to do."

For the final track, With the Red Dawn, Yorke has come up with another unique combination of textures, this time bringing her own specialism in modular synthesis to the fore. A ten-minute reed organ drone characterised with ever-shifting bass swells and overtones is layered with tuned sines, often shudderingly wave-folded, that ebb and flow both in intensity and harmonic colour according to the duty cycles of eight interrelated LFOs. These recordings are collaged with Yorke's singing voice and a langorous, ascending sequence across two octaves on Jolly's clarinet, all arranged to form a cohesive whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Smatterings of untuned percussion and a fragment of a conversation between the duo left in the final mix cements Yorke's unprecious DIY aesthetic into the release.

At its heart, Salix is like watching the wind in the willows; hundreds of thousands of identical tiny leaves moving in confluence on its branches; at once one thing and many things; moment-to-moment our perception makes out different individuals parts within this expanse of texture, before sinking back into the whole.

“France absolutely engage the body... but the spectacle is one for your mind, especially as you start to wonder how much of what you’re hearing is really there.” The Quietus

Legendary hurdy-gurdy-powered kraut/psych/folk/drone band France have announced a new album ‘Good Thoughts. Bad Thoughts’ on The state51 Conspiracy label; capturing a wild performance at The state51 Factory in East London - part of their very first tour of England. They played Liverpool Psych Fest as a one off some years back.

Forming 20 years ago as a trio in Valence, France, for this performance, were Jeremie Sauvage on bass, Yann Gourdon on electrified hurdy-gurdy, and Cyril Bondi (of La Tene and Cyril Cyril on drums (stalwart Mathieu Tilly was taking some much needed time off).

This album sees the band plunge into the depths of the human psyche, backed up by Hugo Hyart’s deep, all-over cosmic doodles and an unhidden homage to the Parliafunkadelicment state of mind : Uniting, dancing, staying creative and open minded despite the tribulations of life. Dedicated to the feeling of good (and baby they’re good... at being good).

On the night France were recorded by Hot Chip’s in-house engineer James Crump who subsequently mixed the record at Hot Chip’s studio in East London. The album was mastered by Richy Hughes at Binary Feedback.

WILDFIRE is the long-awaited new studio album from Loreen, set for release on 27th March. Marking her first full studio album in nearly a decade, WILDFIRE is a powerful and intimate body of work that explores emotion, perception and inner transformation, a record that allows the full emotional spectrum to exist, from vulnerability and pain to freedom, love and truth.

The album features the global phenomenon “Tattoo”, alongside fan-favourite “Is It Love” and the transcendent new single “Feels Like Heaven”, co-written with Sia. Together, the tracks reflect Loreen’s unique ability to fuse raw emotional honesty with cinematic pop, creating music that is both deeply personal and universally resonant.

Loreen is the only female artist to have won the Eurovision Song Contest twice and has amassed over 9 billion streams worldwide. “Tattoo” topped radio airplay and singles charts in five countries, further cementing her status as one of the most distinctive and influential voices in modern pop.

With WILDFIRE, Loreen returns with an album that is fearless, expansive and profoundly human

As collaborative projects often do, 33 has in time found a more fixed form, a kind of structure that turned it from a loose collection of collaborators gravitating around founders Bill John Bultheel and Alexander Iezzi into something resembling more of a traditional band. Not that there is anything conventional in their creative process tho, nor in the music itself… Nontheless Tripolar - their second album and first for Haunter - seems to take them closer to song territory than ever before.

The (progressive) graduation of multi-instrumentalist Cem Dukkha and vocalist/clarinet player Ivan Cheng from collaborators to full-time members has brought 33 to a more refined awareness of their possibilities as a creative unit, although their compositional process has retained a high level of spontaneity and musical madness. Tripolar was in fact assembled by editing hours of improvisation that Bultheel, Iezzi and Dukkah recorded with no specific endgame in mind. The sessions saw them exchange a variety of acoustic, electronic and electric musical instruments: percussions, guitars, strings, piano, hurdy gurdy, synthesizers and even CDJs as a tool of live sampling manipulation.

By molding the pieces into what they are now, the band managed to concoct some beautiful vignettes of contradictory mental and emotional states, as sonically playful as a renaissance fair happening within a broken timestream. Cheng’s lyrical and vocal contributions helped them coalesce even further into proper songs, adding a melodic presence that’s at once seductive and uncanny. But vocal duties are often ceded to guests, namely Danish pop-neoclassicist Astrid Sonne, Kenyan metal guru Lord Spikeheart, Irish goth raconteur Olan Monk and Japanese body-poet Golin.The amount of different sounds arranged into each of the tracks produces a unique sense of awe and bewilderment, a testament to the incredible talent and craft the musicians have employed into putting together such a broad range of influences and approaches into a coherent and extremely effective musical journey.

An equally erratic thematic thread seems to run through all the tracks, one ultimately preoccupied with mental health and its ramifications. Without turning the project into a concept album, 33 and their collaborators have sprinkled it with references to personality disorders and mental conditions that are all too relevant to the contemporary age, reflecting on the lineage of human inner life. A wide display of lyrical and musical tools is employed to explore these themes, ranging from Sonne’s expressionist depiction of ADHD in the opener, to Cheng’s queer-themed reinvention of an Irish murder ballad in closing track ‘Babymusicc’. Tracing lateral trajectories for introspection, Tripolar is not only highly captivating, but it ultimately sounds esoteric in the best possible way: progressively revealing layer after layer of incredible aural magic, its true meaning living in the form and in its manic scope of energies.