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Southern Italian sociologist, DJ and electronic music producer Simone Gatto is about to release his second album, 'Heaven Inside Your Frequencies', in November 2017.

Gatto's second album represents a complete excursus of his personal and professional paths, into which he combines music, words, studies, researches and experiments. Along with the album, split in two parts and to be released on both his labels Out-ER and Pregnant Void, the artist is also releasing his first essay, named as the album; the latter offers a theoretical and practical analysis on the use of sounds and frequencies in diverse areas of interest, dedicating space to music therapy and primordial techniques as well as their application in the current digital and virtual era.

Both the album and the essay result from Gatto's personal experiences as well as his ten-year's artistic career: the love of his motherland and his parents, the first approach to clubs, the studies about the potentiality of frequencies, the electroacoustic experimentation and last but not least, the aesthetic sonorous research.

The the first part of the album showcases Gatto's experimental inclination for electronic and electroacoustic music; as such, the upcoming on his label Pregnant Void, has been created to enhance the sounds of the environment and personal panoramas by agglomerating artists, projects and publications. The second part definitely focusses on Gatto's dance personality and club vision, even so, it stays strongly connected to its first part as complementary for the artist's objective.

Ranging in between his favourite club niches, and collaborating with producers with whom he has shared embryonic projects, DJ booths or vinyl releases, Gatto prepares the audience for a complete journey into his idea of club music and grooves, featuring wide aesthetics and emotional resonance. It goes from the gentle tidiness of ambient and deep techno - 'No Te Olvides De Acordarte', 'Today Will Be Tomorrow ft. Kaelan', 'When I Was With You' and 'Limbo' to the intrinsic vitality of break beat, dub and funk tracks 'Caronte' and 'Holographic Drama' continuing with the dynamism of a typical Detroit techno brand of sound reinterpreted in a modern context, like in 'Forbidden Area' and 'Amazonia ft. Aubrey', and finishing with the joyful wildness of distorted sounds, in 'Jamming On The Couch ft. The Analogue Cops, OL047' in collaboration with long-time friends OL047 and The Analogue Cops; the last track, 'Il Canto Dell'Anima', is a partial excursion into the electroacoustic sound, articulated by ethereal soundscapes and piano arpeggios. The whole work is enriched by samples, field recordings and filtered vocals, sound elements which have been deeply explored in the first part of the album, confirming Gatto's aesthetical aptitude as for the club's universe as for the aesthetic sonorous research dimension.

'Heaven Inside Your Frequencies', recorded and produced between his motherland and other significant spaces and cities - the Ionian coast and natural parks of Lecce, his second home Berlin, the Whitney Museum in New York City and other significant places - 'Heaven Inside Your Frequencies' combines Gatto's theoretical background with personal and artistic maturity, achieved in the last decade. Simone Gatto's life, culture and emotions translate into a sonorous and written project, among sounds, frequencies and attempts to achieve empathetic communication with people. Specifically, the second part of the album in meant to increase the sensibility about potential interaction between performer and audience as for club contexts. The album listening and the essay reading are therefore complementary and equally functional to the achievement of the artist's goal: the empathetic communication through sounds.

Franco Battiato is often heralded as Italy's answer to Brian Eno. A quizzical composer/lyricist, Battiato turned pop music upside down in the early '70s with three classic LPs - Fetus, Pollution and Sulle Corde Di Aries - that formed a confluence of avant-folk sensibilities and analog electronics.

Pollution from 1972 is the captivating follow-up to Fetus. Like its predecessor, the album features Baroque textures, motorik rhythms, weird tape effects and Battiato's perfectly oblique vocals. Upon hearing Pollution, Frank Zappa joyfully proclaimed it "genius."

While Battiato's core group of collaborators remains largely the same as on his debut, this phenomenal band (joined by an eighteen-year-old Roberto Cacciapaglia on keys) appears even more in the foreground on Pollution. Out of the Ash Ra Tempel-like riffs and urgent guitar strumming emerge hypnotic grooves and cinematic flourishes, suggesting a futuristic meeting point between Stereolab and Ennio Morricone.

Dedicated to the Centro Internazionale Studi Magnetici, Pollution touches on themes of environmental catastrophe. Futurist allusions seep in through eccentric lyrics (at times sung backwards) about hydraulics, magnetic fields, etc., yet listeners don't need to speak the artist's language to grasp his melancholy vision. With Pollution, Battiato solidifies not only his cult figure status, but also many of his forward-thinking ideas on rock 'n' roll.

Superior Viaduct is honored to present the first-time domestic release of Pollution on vinyl. Reproducing the original gatefold jacket, this reissue is part of an archival series that chronicles Franco Battiato's masterful body of work from 1971 to 1978.

Garofano Rosso's triumphant return to Giallo Disco comes in the form of his debut album 'Titoli Di Coda'. A bloodied trip to the microcosm of a doomed city, a neon-noir at the corner of Gordon & Cole, where old cellar doors slam like gated snares and justice comes with a bullet. In between krautrock funk, straight up-crime solving disco and instrumental ballads almost gothic like in their epicness, the artist also known as Giorgio Luceri, whose releases on Mathematics have been turning heads for many years, births this daring and impressive debut that we're immensely proud to release on Giallo Disco. Art by Eric A Lee.

ears ago he started putting together some selections for a friend of his: Luca. The intention was to pick songs to be played during car rides, and like any other kind of ritual, this too would come with strict rules. You'd have to go throw the whole selection of 100 tracks without skipping, because every single one was important. Be it the sounds, the arrangement or its creativity, each track was there for a very specific reasons. It quickly became a monthly event which for several years evolved in a deep musical research without genre boundaries: Disco and psychedelic, soundtracks, library music, exotica, electronic and dance music, italo, new wave, pop or prog. Tracks of each and any historical period and provenance had been featured in this special compilations. But it wasn't always that easy to come up with the right piece and eventually Francesco started producing a few on his own to fill in the gaps. After six tracks, it was quite clear that there was a project developing, one in which he could finally experiment freely, leaving behind the rules that often come with dance tracks. Of course, no name could have been better than the one of his friend that had inspired everything And so L.u.c.a was born. Now, while preserving the same mind set, L.u.c.a is back with an album that embraces a new-hippie vibe, strongly pervaded by a mystical naturalism. This is a whole new universe in the making, where rumbling magmatic atmospheres evolve gradually in a journey through an idealist new world, celestial interludes revealing a full take over of nature, with a pervasive library feel that dates back to the great Italian masters, carrying on Edizioni Mondo's legacy.

Electro kicks, raw textures, ominous choirs: L' immaginario, Previsto's opening track, ties a bound between Martelli's two releases on Antinote, giving us one last glimpse at the uninhabited post-apocalyptic landscapes drawn in Menti Singole.
However, this time Leonardo Martelli explores a more urban universe, as the use of rap samples on Negli abissi and Lo Schema suggests. Martelli exploits their aggressiveness in a way that somehow reminds us of minimalist rap tapes from Memphis. The third track's title makes it even clearer: called Leggende Metropolitane, the song is
a trip into the darkest blind alleys of the city, an invitation to wander among human wastes, driven by its light kick.

La Luna, is the most contemplative moment of the album, offering us a meditative break before the nightmarish Il
registro, Martelli's brutal come-back to raw electro with a tune which depicts us a hellish engine room for expiating souls. Finally, the record concludes with Previsto, a haunted title track, filled with wailings that give us to contemplate a cruel vision of the urban misery we're stuck in.

This is France in the Mitterrand years: fashions fleet as fast as governments. In the early eighties, the happy-go-lucky gather the nectar of each and every new release.
Believing in a bright future for videotex, and loosened up by the sexy talks broadcasted on the budding pirate radios, the new generation dreams of dance floors and holiday clubs. French Boogie, which preserves the spirit of these years of boodle and bunkum, is the ideal soundtrack to their dreams.

What the web now refers to as French Boogie is some synthetic funk reflecting the spirit of those days when nothing was impossible, or so it seemed. Its syncopated flow heralded the dawning of French rap. Often considered as some kind of post-disco, inspired as much by black music as by new wave, this carefree pop music with bawdy lyrics indulged in simple pleasures: holidays, swank and sun were recurrent themes. Totally in tune with its time, it incidentally glorified luxury, success, and a certain consumerism embodied, for instance, in Bernard Tapie.

In popular clubs such as La Main Bleue in Montreuil, or L'Echappatoire in Clichy-sous-Bois - where Micky Milan could be seen behind the decks - an enthusiastic audience discovered this new sonic wave, influenced as much by French pop as by Sugar Hill Gang or Kurtis Blow. The artists who first launched the movement engaged in it wholeheartedly, but as often the case with new music trends in France, humour and casualness quickly became a decoy to impose a new style. This explosive mixture, in which startling and typically Frenchy French lyrics go along New-York-style tunes, is sometimes reminiscent of the kinky comedies directed by Max Pécas or Claude Zidi. On this prolific scene, partly originating from the Jewish community, everybody was looking for success, trying to hit the jackpot with what was to hand. Famous media personalities, one-hit wonders or John Does in quest of fame, all had a go at French Boogie - more or less successfully. Apart from « Vacances j'oublie tout » by Elégance, « Un fait divers et rien de plus » by Le Club, or « Chacun fait ce qui lui plaît » by Chagrin d'amour (produced by Patrick Bruel), very few songs became hits: the story of funk in France is that of a half-baked robbery.

In this myriad of new musicians, the very young François Feldman and Phil Barney pioneered a fresh and hybrid style. Other well-known artists like Gérard Blanc from Martin Circus (Attaché Case), Richard de Bordeaux (Ich), or Jean-Pierre Massiera (Anisette, Pirate Scratch Band, Mandrake, Scratch Man...) added an eccentric touch to this sound-wave, making it often entertaining, and sometimes showy.

Capture d'écran 2015-10-26 à 12.55.43Singers like Agathe (the author of 'La Fourmi' and of the hit song 'Je ne veux pas rentrer chez moi seule') were far more than just window dressing. They even tried to give an ironic and subversive twist to this rather harmless genre. The very vindictive rebel Gérard Vincent shared in this spirit, but as a whole, French Boogie became associated with nonchalance and sauciness. Thus, Stéphane Collaro, Gérard Jugnot, Alain Gillot Pétré and other TV clowns would clumsily contribute to this French variation on funky sounds. In a few but intense years, French Boogie gave all the tips to party with style.

If some hits made it possible for the happy few to get a real house under truly exotic palm trees, the wave actually ebbed away very quickly, leaving quite a few musicians stranded on the shore. Whether they were sincerely motivated, or simply opportunistic, they had failed. In 1984, French Boogie was already breathless, and got merged with other genres: on the one hand, rap and breakdance adapted its flow to a more urban world, especially with Sydney's show, H.I.P.H.O.P, and Dee Nasty's broadcasts on Radio Nova; on the other, italo, new beat and house began to rule over dance floors, even more strongly asserting the will to develop music for clubs.

Squeezed in between the age of disco and that of modern electronic music, French Boogie was a transitional phase, but it remains an amazingly refreshing testimony to the intermingling of pop and underground cultures. The genre was hastily categorized as anecdotal in spite of its pioneering synthetic groove and matchless bass lines. An attentive ear will discover the poetry of the ephemeral beyond the eccentricities of the genre, as well as a certain unexpected avant-gardism. At the origin of major music trends, always cheerful and catchy, French Boogie is what you need to party.

Garofano Rosso is the latest project by Italian producer Giorgio Luceri, perhaps better known for his work on Jamal Mossí Mathematics label. This new work eschews the house stylings of previous releases in favour of a more classic Cosmic approach. Echoes of Tangerine Dreamís Thief OST mixed with what could perhaps be the imaginary soundtrack to Miami Vice if it had infact been set in Rimini and starred Maurizio Merli as Sonny Crockett. These are not however just mere mood pieces, but take the sun, the sea and the body-count straight to the dancefloor. Not to be missed. Including download code.

NO VINYLE OF ANY MANU CHAO ALBUM HAS BEEN AVAILABLE ON SALE FOR AGES. ALL STUDIO & LIVE ALBUMS ARE BACK ON DOUBLE VINYL GATEFOLD FEAT. THE CD

FOLLOWING THE SUCCESS OF “THE OTHER HELL”, GOBLIN ARE BACK FOR RECORD STORE DAY 2026 WITH AN EXCLUSIVE COMPILATION OF SINGLES RELEASED BETWEEN 1975 AND 1979!

For the very first time on vinyl, this compilation gathers together all the singles released by Goblin during their golden era between 1975 and 1979, a journey that begins with the explosive, legendary debut Profondo Rosso, a true chart phenomenon of its time, and reaches the rare Amo Non Amo, passing through unforgettable milestones of Italian film music and progressive rock.

The collection opens with Profondo Rosso and Death Dies, taken from the soundtrack of Dario Argento’s masterpiece that catapulted Goblin to fame, blending dark atmospheres, virtuosity, and a unique sense of cinematic tension. It continues with Roller and Snip Snap, drawn from the instrumental album Roller (1976), a record not tied to any film, yet considered a cult cornerstone of Italian progressive music for its intricate structures and expressive power.

Chi? and Chi? - Parte Seconda follow; two tracks originally composed as the theme for a 1976 RAI television show, which saw Goblin bring their unmistakable sound to a different medium, experimenting within a shorter, punchier format.

Next comes Suspiria with its haunting counterpart Blind Concert, from the soundtrack of Argento’s 1977 horror classic. This remains one of Goblin’s most iconic and unsettling works, where music becomes an active narrative force: hypnotic, percussive, and filled with eerie vocal layers that made it a cornerstone of horror soundtracks worldwide.

From Il Fantastico Viaggio del Bagarozzo Mark (1978) come Un Ragazzo d’Argento and Opera Magnifica, two tracks that highlight the band’s more conceptual and visionary side, a move away from cinema toward a self-contained narrative and progressive experimentation.

The single Yell stands as another late-decade gem. Originally composed as the opening theme for the RAI television series “Sette storie per non dormire” (1978), it captures Goblin’s ability to merge rock energy with electronic pulse, proving their versatility far beyond the horror realm.

The compilation closes with Amo Non Amo and Funky Top, taken from the soundtrack of the 1979 film Amo Non Amo, one of the group’s lesser-known but fascinating cinematic works.

Far more than a simple anthology, The Singles Collection 1975–1979 maps the evolution of Goblin’s sound, from the worldwide success of Profondo Rosso to their most mature and experimental phase. It finally restores to vinyl a body of work that had long been scattered across rare 45 rpm releases, offering fans and collectors a complete, vivid portrait of one of Italy’s most inventive and influential musical ensembles.

Not all music can cope with physical reality. Instruments can be pushed until they lose grip. Eventually, they will slip so far that their untethered voice is all that remains. Panoram follows up on his Pianosequenza series engaging in seventeen excursions into playing the part of the piano that doesn't exist, coaxing out inarticulate feelings in lieu of familiar characteristics. Sounds and rhythms resulting from thoughts that can't be put into quite the right words.

The Nu’rons were a family group consisting of two sets of brothers and cousins, the four young men in question being brothers Daryl Howard and Raymond Gibson (Daryl’s mother registered him under his father’s surname of Howard and Raymond under her maiden name of Gibson) together with Otho Bateman and Charles Bateman. They were all born and raised in Salem, New Jersey and from the age of ten and eleven began singing with a fifth member and Gibson brother Rudolph as a group called The Gospel 5. They eventually decided to crossover to secular music and as a group known for their energetic dance routines they came up with the new performing name of ‘The Nu’rons’ (taken from the word ‘Neuron’ which is a cell that transmits nerve impulses). However Rudolph was soon to leave the group due to physical illness. Also Daryl Howard and Charles Bateman had also been part of a working group known as The Devotions prior to becoming The Nu-Ron’s.Following hours of practice The Nu’rons eventually felt confident enough to put their own shows together and began to perform at local dances and parties around New Jersey and Philadelphia, often being used as a non-paid warm up act for bigger named artists. They moved between several different managers including Jimmy Bishop (Duo Dynamic Productions) until they came under the tutelage of WDAS radio DJ Georgie Woods (his wife Gilda, being the owner of the Philadelphia Gil, Dion and Top & Bottom record Labels). It was Georgie who introduced them to Manny Campbell who in turn invited them to an audition at his and partner Charles Bowen’s Emandolynn Music studio in Chester P.A. The song The Nu’rons chose to audition with was the self penned “I’m A Loner”, the audition went well, as during late January/early February of 1970 Manny and Charles took The Nu’rons into the Sigma Sound Studio’s with Tom Bell and the TSOP musicians to record “I’m A Loner” and “All My Life” which was released on the Nu-Ron label in April of the same year. The two studio takes presente don this release came short after the band moved on from the collaboration with producer Emanuel Campbell to take music matters in their own hands. Beside recording "Disco Hustle" to be part of the disco boom in Philly of the times, they recorded also “You Came Thru”, a rough yet beautiful heavy bassline driven soul funk recording, and the just amazing “Hurry Up Tomorrow”, here presented in one of the original Studio takes.

The process of making this mini-album “anaiis & Grupo Cosmo” was truly life-altering for me. It changed my approach to making music and really brought me back to the roots of what creation is about. I went to Salvador for a month-long artist residency in February 2020 and during that time, I not only fell in love with Brasil’s culture and music, but I also wrote “Toda Cor” with the wonderful Luedji Luna. A few years later, I reached out Biel who’d co-produced “Estrela Acesa” with Sessa to see if they’d be interested in re-developing “Toda Cor” with me. They were enthusiastic and we fully reproduced the record in December, remotely. The connection between us all was electric and it felt like there was a collective enthusiasm for creating more together so I flew out to Brasil in April 2023 to continue this exploration. The beauty behind this record really lies in the experience of making it. We all stayed together in Biel’s house in Ilhabela for a week with Cabral, who co-produced the record with us and plays bass. We would go to the beach, eat communally, share stories, be around the kids, but then spend most of the days creating and jamming together. Each day we would record our songs live to tape, not a computer in the room. By the end of the week we had this album. It was refreshing to make music in this way. The music and approach really held us in that moment and gave us a chance to create freely, in a big moment of transition in our lives in a way that truly embraces imperfection, spontaneity, just very human.

Demilitarize follows Nazar’s remarkable 2020 debut Guerrilla, which reprocessed Angolan kuduro music with rough textures, field recordings and media clips, telling a personal story of the civil war that exiled his family to Europe, while his father, a rebel General, fought a losing battle in the jungle back home. After Guerrilla, and an extended period of serious illness, now Demilitarize is motivated by a reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of Guerrilla inside out.This is a deep sound world, genuinely dreamy, the arc of the album describing shedding the armour of trauma and surrendering to this new situation. A constant and unexpected aspect of Demilitarize is Nazar's gentle, submerged vocal. Insistent and mantra-like, it’s like a cross between Elisabeth Frazer, Arthur Russell and Frank Ocean, and the music is fragile and opaque in response. The rhythms of kuduro are still here,but move around his voice like fish around a swimmer, while precise sound design illuminates from different angles. Chords spiral, ripple and shoot through the beats giving tracks the loosest of settings; songs disassemble; vocals float off-centre.

Hip Horns Brass Collective presents Brassvillain, a tribute to the cult album Madvillany by MF DOOM and Madlib with the collaboration of Las Ninyas del Corro, Ana Tijoux, Escandaloso Xpósito and Rodrigo Laviña. The catalan brass band covers iconic songs like Figaro, Meat Grinder or All Caps, with the metallic explosion that characterizes them and the voices of some of the best artists on the current rap scene. Daniel Dumile, aka, MF DOOM is not only a musical reference, but also the illustrations that accompanied his project have a great role in the history of hip hop. For this reason, Brassvillain is also a great graphic epic where the versatile artist Hermes LeBleu displays all his versatility. In the featurings appears HO$$$ Benítez, one of the most renowned drummers on the hip hop scene, who has already accompanied them on their previous releases, “The Dream” and “Thunder”. The production is by Hip Horns together with one of the best bassists and musicians in our country, Tito Bonacera, making this tribute a multidisciplinary meeting point between artists who grew up with the masked hero. On the B side we have two new singles from the band, BRAM! and Mulligan, in which they unleash their full potential both in composition and in execution to prove once again that they are one of the leading brass bands of the moment.

Marlon George is a British DJ and producer based in London renowned for his "slightly spacey, casually jazzy, and fully groovy house music," with support from names as illustrious as Kyle Hall and Jimpster. But really, if he's getting signed by the legendary Trelik, then that's all you need to know about his skills. He lays them bare across three tasteful cuts here, starting with the liquid dub of 'My Secrets Are Safe With Me' with its wispy shards of light piercing the water's surface and glistening against the dusty hi-hats. 'Najagen' has more drive but no less depth and warmth to it and 'Do The Rha!' is another smoky, minimal, heady dub house roller that sneaks right under your skin.

PAPER ROUTE iLLUMINATi is the compilation album from Paper Route EMPIRE, the label founded by late Memphis legend, Young Dolph, and home to the equally iconic Key Glock and an impressive roster of additional artists including Snupe Bandz & Big Moochie Grape. Including the hit songs, "Talking To My Scale," "I Do This," & "Mister Glock 2," as well as deep cuts like "Broccoli & Cheese," this album is a must have for Southern rap fans and encapsulates a time when PRE was at the height of their game, shortly before Young Dolph's untimely passing. 2xLP pressed on Red Snake Eyes Galaxy vinyl, and housed in a gatefold jacket. Long Live Young Dolph.

Celebrating the 5th anniversary of Conway's legendary tape with DJ Green Lantern "Reject On Steroids" with a vinyl reissue in collaboration with Drumwork Music. Tape features guest appearances by Royce Da 5'9" and Benny, and productions by DJ Green Lantern. For the occasion we have two different artworks by Shk, limited to 1500 units each.

180g Heavy double vinyl LP with liner notes by Tyran Grillo. Limited Japanese Obi for the first pressing. Original artwork by Russell Mills and photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.

The third Time Capsule is a body of dub reinterpretations by celebrated producer Bill Laswell of Ethiopian singer Gigi. Curated by Tokyo record collector, music researcher and seasoned reissue supervisor Ken Hidaka, it is the first time Illuminated Audio is pressed to vinyl after its CD release in 2003.

Ejigayehu Shibabaw was born in 1974 in Chagni, northwestern Ethiopia and by pursuing a career as a singer, went against her father’s strict, traditional gender roles. As Gigi, she embraced the same musical freedom she had strived for in her personal life, incorporating the Ethiopian church, funk, hip-hop, West and South African music into her work. She first settled in Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, where she quickly established herself as one of the city’s leading singers. A move to San Francisco in 1998 led to a long and fruitful creative partnership with bassist and producer Bill Laswell.

Around the same time, Chris Blackwell had stepped away from Island Records to start the art house film company and label Palm Pictures. He took an interest in Gigi and together with Laswell, pulled together an all-star cast of musicians for her self-titled US debut album, including Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter. It won international critical acclaim, not just for its musicianship but for making Gigi a “defining voice for the Ethiopian expatriate community”, as journalist Tyran Grillo praises in his Time Capsule liner notes. From the nation-defining 1896 victory over Italian invaders to the quiet revolutionaries who wear simple shemma garments, Grillo believes the themes in Gigi make it “a shower of sunlight on her homeland for those ignorant of its struggles.”

After its success, Blackwell encouraged them to go back into the studio to rethink the album and Illuminated Audio was born. “Anyone can make a voice sound worldly”, Grillo remarks, “but rare are those who can make one sound inner-worldly.” Gigi was clear with Laswell to give her vocals a minor role “because it’s already been done.” Instead her Amharic verse is fleeting, exhaling through the textures like ghostly fragments; soaring yet muted. Yet the album is still titled under her name, an assertion by Laswell of her central role in the album’s creation. Not only was it a fully endorsed project by Gigi, but she would be present throughout its development, giving feedback on half-finished ideas as Laswell played them back in the studio. “It works perfectly”, she reflected after the album’s release. “We wanted to capture the whole spirit of each track, and Bill’s remixes create a different music language that really puts you in a pleasant place”.

This new vocabulary takes its lead from a technical approach that Laswell had been perfecting during a furtive creative period at the turn of the millennium. Much like his ambient interpretations of Miles Davis (Panthalassa, 1998), Bob Marley (Dreams of Freedom, 1997), and Carlos Santana (Divine Light, 2001), Laswell approached Illuminated Audio by returning to the original multitrack masters. Gigi wasn’t just reworked, but recomposed into an expansive lattice of instruments, submerged in a watery ambience of dub and trance undercurrents.

Sonically, this new language that Gigi refers to, is manifested by the original album’s more understated parts being pushed to the fore. Explaining his contrasting methods, Laswell saw Gigi as being “put together in a way that fits”. Contrastingly, in Illuminated Audio, “a lot of things that I featured in the remix weren’t as audible in the original.” Instrumentation laying near-dormant, deep in the mix, are brought to the fore: the acid rock guitar and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone on ‘Tew Ante Sew’, Graham Haynes’ flugelhorn on ‘Nafekeñ’, Laswell’s bass on ‘Kahn’, the melodica in Mengedegna or the floating synths and talking drums in ‘Gud Fella’.

Brought to his attention by mentor DJ Nori, Hidaka describes Illuminated Audio as a “masterful sonic exploration into ethereal ambience and dub” and made sure this reissue also contained a full remaster to give its “deep musicality” much better dynamics and density in the overall sound. Hidaka admits that Laswell's music “is sometimes so out-there, it is often misunderstood” and, indeed, to dub album non-believers this might seem like a prolific producer imposing himself on another artist’s work; eternally developing rearrangements that never quite get to its destination. But that’s missing its true power and triumph. This is more than the reissue of a remix, but “a wholly unique musical entity”, as Hidaka describes. Illuminated Audio refers to the illuminated manuscripts that comprise the major part of Ethiopian art and its new compositions stand in proud solitude as a rare body of reworks that both informs and enhances their originals.

High Focus Records are proud to present the latest collaboration from Verb T & Illinformed. ‘Stranded in Foggy Times’ both continues and completes the trilogy that began back in 2015, with ‘The Man with the Foggy Eyes’, before broadening the horizons with last year’s release ‘The Land of the Foggy Skies’. This final chapter returns to the same conceptual landscape as its predecessors, but also sees Verb T & Illinformed returning to a more classic approach to album making. In spite of its concept, the Foggy Trilogy is something of a personal outpouring for Verb T, with the original aim being to vicariously discuss the trials and tribulations that play a part in his life, including his struggles with chronic illness and the feeling of alienation from leaving his hometown, while also reflecting on the state of the world as a whole. Their approach to making the album meant taking it back to the most natural form, where the idea for the track would be outlined, Illinformed would make the beat, Verb T would write to it and then they would tweak and adjust accordingly. The result is 19 of the most finely crafted tracks to emerge from the UK shores this year. As with the previous albums, ‘Stranded in Foggy Times’ finds Illinformed moving away from the more rugged sound that has shrouded the British scene over the last few months, thanks to his collaborations with the likes of Datkid and Wish Master, instead providing Verb T with an arguably more mellow backdrop. From the string and piano driven introduction on ‘Legacy’, to the blissful head-nod vibes of the closing track, ‘Blind Faith’, the union between beats and rhymes sits at the perfect level. The album also boasts one of the most impressive guestlists of the year, one that is very much a product of both players’ worlds. Thanks to Illinformed’s Bristol connection, there are features from the likes of Res One, Datkid, Leaf Dog, Smellington Piff and Chillman, as well as some locally sourced cuts from DJ Rogue. While on Verb T’s side of the fence, we have features from Rye Shabby and Moreone, along with a collaboration that reignites the same creative spark he found in his early days, as King Kashmere steps into the booth on Feeling Strange. All in all, ‘Stranded in Foggy Times’ does exactly what it sets out to do, by drawing the trilogy to a close while also providing insights into Verb T’s personal world and the world at large. The fact that it also happens to be one of the strongest rap albums of the year is the icing on the cake

For its eighth release, Distant Gaze welcomes Ruksby with Phosphene Cognition, the artist’s debut EP on the label. Known for his hypnotic acid energy and cold, driving groove, Ruksby has developed a distinct sonic signature resonating with both classic rave devotees and listeners of indie-leaning electronic music.

The EP opens with two original cuts. “Imagination” moves in a trancy and hypnotic direction, where slow pulsating TB-303 lines and drifting acid leads unfold through a dark, steady groove. “Illusion” follows with a sharper, more aggressive edge, pushing acid frequencies and overdriven synths into tighter late-night territory. Both tracks stand as focused dancefloor pieces driven by Ruksby’s balance of tension and intensity.

On the B-side, two remixes expand the release. Long-time label friend Mike Sacchetti delivers an acid-driven dancefloor weapon built around a relentless pulsating bassline. Closing the record, Rambal Cochet offers a Goa-inspired chill-out reinterpretation, providing a calm and spacious conclusion.