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“Music is my forever cove,” writes Portland, Oregon’s Luke Wyland of the ideas that give shape to Kuma Cove, his latest album under his own name. Though named after a real place on the Oregon coast, Kuma Cove casts its gaze far beyond the sightseer’s line of vision. Recorded live in the studio and blurring obvious lines between computer-based composition and electro-acoustic instrumentation, it is an album about flow, borders, transitory states, and shelter. Composed of discontinuous ripples and repetitions (“I’m forever searching for a better descriptor than looping, which feels too simple and flattened by overuse,” Wyland says), shaped into richly emotive arcs, and informed by his experience as a person who stutters, it is also an album about identity, self-expression, and the energies that sluice through and across what we perceive as linear time—like floodwaters seeking an exit, like streams running into the sea.

Artist’s Statement:
I made this record while spending significant time in the woods by the Sandy River in Corbett, Oregon,
where I've had my studio for the last five years. It is a diary of spontaneous live recordings edited to highlight the moments of clarity that emerge from long-form improvisations. These compositions express a slowing internal rhythm. An unwinding. A somatic recalibration as I enter middle age. A newly empowered vulnerability.

Here are the internalized cadences of my stutter, flowing freely from my fingers. The musicality of my disfluency is revealed in its frictions, elongations, and foreshortenings. Disruptions in linear time, where the bubbling cadences of my stutter find unexpected pathways, reveal the elasticity of the present moment. This is my idiosyncratic language, shaped and inspired by my disability. Subliminally mirroring internal processes, neural firings, cognitive entanglements...

The title, Kuma Cove, refers to a beloved cove on the coast of Oregon my wife and I return to yearly. There has always been something so magnetic about coves. The way they cradle one from the overwhelming enormity of the ocean beyond, muting a primordial fear. I experience these improvisations as ecosystems I'm able to inhabit for stretches of time, embodying the particular rhythms and sensorial textures within each. Music is my forever cove. Everything you hear is created live in Ableton on a setup I've been honing for 15 years. I celebrate MIDI and computer music as an extension of self and strive to make it as expressive as any analog instrument. I was a visual artist for the first half of my life and quickly adapted those skills to composing and producing on a computer. The transition felt natural within the landscape of DAW's interfaces, especially as a synesthete. Ableton and its community of Max creators continue to surprise me with its expansiveness.

I'm forever searching for a better descriptor than looping, which feels too simple and flattened by overuse. I envision sonic loops as tangled masses of time, three-dimensional knots spinning on tilted axes, or overlapping wreaths refracting out a myriad of colors. My practice is continually refocusing my ear to what is revealed in the repetitions, searching for the fingerprint of each. I find it incredible how technology lets us manipulate time like this. Nothing on this record is quantized or locked to a universal bpm. Experiencing numerous tempos at once feels important. Recordings as mirrors. Freedom from expected (conversational) flow as we hold time for each other.
-Luke Wyland, August 2024

Artist Bio:
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR (USA). Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records. As a person who stutters, Wyland’s approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he’s collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. He’s also the co-creator of the “It’s A Fucking Miracle” dance class with Tahni Holt.
Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.

Ever since jazz took its bop and free turn, each generation solved this eternal equation: how do you reconcile serious music and simple pleasure? On each of these occasions opinion was divided between orthodoxy and hedonism.

Trained in the theoretical rigours of classical music and jazz, experts on their instruments, and brought up on hip-hop culture, techno and house club scenes, Matthieu Llodra and Arthur Donnot - composers of KUMA – go against the conventional rules because they like to challenge their musical boundaries.

"Honey & Groat" is just like a bear (KUMA in Japanese, emblem of the band): behind the sweetness and apparent placidity, plenty of power. The resulting urban groove is reminiscent of 70's soul jazz with a contemporary sound: where instrumental talent meets pop simplicity.

Getting stuck into the new year with a fresh, contemporary jazz attitude, Rocafort Records are proud to present the Kumadé EP from exciting Swiss-French quartet KUMA, led by keyboardist Matthieu Llodra and saxophonist Arthur Donnot.

Confidence, rhythmicality and solidity are the first impressions that hit you from this tight outfit of young but highly experienced musicians. After nine years of holding down a 10-night residency at the prestigious Cully Jazz Festival, Llodra and Donnot have honed down their skills in front of a live audience making tension, pacing and release their speciality in compositional strategy. Grooves and moods are created with just the right amount of rise and fall, push and pull, melodic catches and improvisational wanderings.

The EP is well balanced out with two spaciously laconic, ethereal tracks - Alfama and The Core - that could easily belong on some ECM-inspired soundscape, juxtaposed with Kumadé and I.G.A.T.F. that pack a fuller punch, fat and chunky in all the right places, hinting at a 1970s style George Duke at his funky-fusion best.

Despite a whiff of nostalgic reference, rest assured that the KUMA timbre is fresh and exploratory, as innovative and curious as any protagonist from the current UK jazz explosion. Keep an ear out for these young Jedi masters, all of them at the top of their game. More assured, impressive releases are due out this year.

Matthieu Llodra – Fender Rhodes

Arthur Donnot – Sax

Fabien Iannone - Bass

Maxence Sibille – Drums

Zacharie Ksyk – Trumpet (guest on Kumadé").

The Berlin-based Citylow label has been releasing quality house and techno for some time now. Born from a mix of musical influences from the metropolitan suburban life, the label is characterized by vintage, analogue sounds, modular systems and the many other influences of label manager Alfredo Trastulli aka F.T.G. The heart of the label is Citylow Humans Crew, a movement of underground artists around the world who day-after-day match their story with an underground music philosophy.

Staunchly dedicated to vinyl culture and with an ethos that tends to veer toward assured, confident sounding house and techno, theirs is a modus operandi that's served them very well indeed. For their latest, the attention switches to Fuckthegovernment.Ltd label boss F.T.G, who hooks up with regular collaborator Brando Torri aka Siyha Kuma for another release that speaks volumes of their talents. The A side features the remix, which comes at us from none other than the fucking parisienne talent Jef K, who in this instance has hooked up with Mikael Weill to supply a differing take on the original. Jef K of course, is a man who needs no introduction to house music fans. One of Paris' most acclaimed DJs and producers, he has a monthly gig at famed club Concrete, where he's renowned for sumptuous basslines and exquisite house music. Gritty and relentless, their remix is characterised by some steely bass hits and a stubborn refusal to compromise. A gnarly jam that soon comes to life courtesy of a quite brilliant bassline, this one is sure to make an impression wherever it's let out of the bag. Exceptional stuff we're sure you'll agree. Elsewhere, the B side features the original, which we soon realise is where the aforementioned remix earned its industrial stripes.

Wewantsounds Is Pursuing Its Ambitious Akiko Yano Reissue Program With The Release Of "japanese Girl", Her Landmark Debut Album From 1976. Backed By Little Feat With Lowell George And By The Cream Of Japanese Musicians (including Haruomi Hosono), Japanese Girl Is One Of The Most Important Japanese Albums Of The 70s, Mixing Pop, Rock, Japanese Folk Together With Little Feat's Superb Classic Sound. This Is The Very First Time The Album Is Released Internationally. The Deluxe Lp Edition Includes Remastered Sound, Tip-on Lp Sleeve, Download Card Plus The Original 4-page Insert With Lyrics And Full Line-up!
When Akiko Suzuki Left Her Home Town Of Aomori For Tokyo In The Early 70s Aged Just 15 To Become A Professional Musician, She Quickly Started Making Waves On The Local Music Scene Performing At The Jazz Club Rob Roy. In 1973 She Released A 7" With The Group Zariba And Caught The Attention Of A&r Man Koki Miura. She Then Recorded One Song, "oinaru Shiino-ki" With Haruomi Hosono On Bass And Drummer Tatsuo Hayashi (who Features On Many Hosono Albums And Also Hiroshi Sato's 1979 Album Orient) With A Full Album In Mind.

After A Marriage With Musician/producer Makoto Yano And The Birth Of Her Son (named Fuuta), Yano And Her Team Resumed The Recording Of The Album And Decided To Pitch Little Feat For A Collaboration As She Loved The Group. Against All Odds They Said Yes And Yano Left Tokyo For Los Angeles In March 1976 To Record A Full Side With Them. The Legend Has It They Found It So Difficult To Keep Up With Yano's Compositions They Returned Some Of Their Fee. The Session Was Nevertheless Stunning And Lowell George Even Compared Yano To Stevie Wonder. The Little Feat Blend Of New Orleans Groove Matched Yano's Melodies Perfectly, As Witnessed On "funamachi-uta Part 2." Originally A Traditional Song From The Nebuta Festival In Her Hometown Of Aomori (part I On Side 2 Gives A Good Idea Of What The Original Form Sounds Like), The Little Feat Version Is A Formidable Slow-funk Workout Not Dissimilar To Their Classic, "spanish Moon", Serving Yano's Beautiful Vocals And Sense Of Groove To Perfection. The Whole Side Is A Match Made In Heaven, Showcasing The Classic Little Feat Line Up At Their Funkiest With Yano's Unique Japanese Twist.

The Japanese Side On The Album Gives A Great Snapshot Of The Tokyo Music Scene Of The 70s With Many Musicians Gravitating Around Haruomi Hosono (and Present On His 1973 Classic Album 'hosono House' Including Sound Engineer Kinji Yoshino) And Also Several Musicians From Japanese Band, The Moonriders.

Recorded At The Legendary Onkyo Haus Studio In Tokyo, The Sessions Mix Singer-songwriter Sensitivity And Pop With Traditional Japanese Sounds And Instruments Like The Shinobue Transverse Flute, The Koto String Instrument Or The Tsuzumi Hand Drum As Played On "hekoriputaa" By The Legendary Percussionist Kisaku Katada Who Was Appointed Living National Treasure By The Japanese State In 1999; Together They Create A Beautiful East-meets-west Mix Masterfully Driven By Yano's Creativity And Unique Talent.

A Breathtaking Debut Album That Made Akiko Yano One Of The Most Important Artists To Emerge From The 70s, Japanese Girl Has Since Become A Milestone In Japanese Music With A Recent Documentary On Nhk Tv Telling The Whole Story Behind This Classic. Wewantsounds Is Now Proud To Present This Essential Album To The Rest Of The World.

Nous'klaer Audio introduces Maask with four sculptural works of sound: layers upon layers, each carrying a sense of life moving through every frequency. Built from field recordings gathered in remote corners of the world and transformed into powerful tracks for the dancefloor. Across these tracks you can hear a storm moving the branches of an oak in Powys, reeds photosynthesising beneath a lake in Rajasthan, highland moss, thunder above Kumasi and wind moving through a neolithic burial chamber on an island off Cornwall. As delicate as these unprocessed sounds are, as powerful are the synergies in their final forms.

Syncretic marks the debut full-length from Australian duo Bhairavi Raman, a Western and Carnatic violinist, and Nanthesh Sivarajah, a mridangam player and versatile percussionist. Both artists share a Tamil heritage, a current that hums across the album. Raman, from South India, and Sivarajah, from Sri Lanka, draw lines that connect Western practice and Carnatic tradition. This hybrid is central to Raman’s approach as a violinist, an instrument itself caught between East and West since the late 18th century. Her playing folds history, lineage and experimentation into music that acknowledges inheritance while gently rewiring its circuitry.

Expanding on traditional music can be a precarious practice, but Syncretic never feels heavy-handed. Raman and Sivarajah exercise measured restraint, letting the Carnatic framework breathe even as it is refracted through contemporary tools. Delays, looping, subtle layering and synthesized harmonies tilt tradition into a new light without disguising it.

Even within a contemporary framework, Raman’s rigorous Carnatic training under gurus Sri S. Varadarajan (India), Sri Murali Kumar (Australia) and Sri Gopinath Iyer (Australia) is unmistakable. She captures the spiritual and emotional essence of each raga: on Seven, the playful raga Bahudari becomes both centrepiece and conduit, while on the traditional piece Thunbam Nergayil, drawn from a Tamil poem, we hear a deeply personal iteration, a weeping euphony of mixed emotions hitting all at once. Tradition here is absorbed, expanded and reframed.

Sivarajah’s command of the mridangam, honed by his gurus Sri Jambunathan (Sri Lanka), Sri Balasri Rasiah (Australia) and Sri T. R. Sundaresan (India), is central to his original composition Guardian. He sustains tradition while extending it through layering and sound-spatialisation. The mridangam here functions as both a structural and ornamental force, mapping continuity between inherited form and contemporary sonic architecture.

Syncretic resonates as a space where Tamil heritage, diasporic memory and contemporary practice coalesce. Culture, like sound, circulates, transforms and persists. Tradition is not an archive but living material, a soundworld that lingers in the ears and the imagination.

Mit Selenites, Selenites! präsentiert Jimi Tenor das erste Album seiner neuen Band - ein Meilenstein in der Karriere des finnischen Multiinstrumentalisten, der 2025 seinen 60. Geburtstag feierte. Tenor, bekannt für seine genreübergreifenden Visionen, vereint hier Afrobeat, Electronica, Spiritual Jazz und experimentelle Klangwelten zu einem kraftvollen, organischen Sound. Seit den 1990er Jahren prägt Tenor die internationale Musikszene mit Veröffentlichungen auf Labels wie Sähko und Warp Records. Seine Zusammenarbeit mit Künstlern wie Tony Allen, dem UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra und Florence Adooni zeigt seine Offenheit für musikalische Kulturen und seine Fähigkeit, scheinbar Gegensätzliches zu verbinden. Die JIMI TENOR BAND entstand in Helsinki und besteht aus fünf virtuosen Musiker:innen, die ihre Stücke live erprobt und verinnerlicht haben. Die Aufnahmen spiegeln diese Energie wider: Direkt, roh und voller Spielfreude. Die Songs wirken wie Live-Mitschnitte - spontan, intensiv und nahbar. Mit Selenites, Selenites! gelingt Tenor ein Album, das nicht nur musikalisch überzeugt, sondern auch seine Rolle als stilprägender Künstler unterstreicht.

Death Is Not The End release a second part collecting pre-partition film music, compiled by Gary Sullivan of Bodega Pop.

As the 1940s began, South Asian cinema entered a transformative phase. Playback singing, still a new idea in the previous decade, quickly became standard practice. Actors no longer had to sing, and singers no longer had to act, opening the door to a wave of dedicated vocal talent that redefined the sound of the industry.

Voices like Noor Jehan, Shamshad Begum, and Suraiya rose to prominence, becoming household names across the subcontinent. Behind them, composers like Naushad, Anil Biswas, and Ghulam Haider were expanding the sonic palette of film music, blending ragas with Western orchestration, folk tunes with jazz-era instrumentation. Harmoniums, sarangis, violins, accordions, and clarinets filled out increasingly complex arrangements, while ghazals and qawwalis continued to influence mood and structure.

Although the post-Partition years are often considered to be Bollywood's "Golden Age," thanks to filmmakers like Raj Kapoor, Bimal Roy, and Guru Dutt, the music started its peak just before the divide. By 1947, Naushad and others were producing some of the most emotionally rich and musically intricate work in the industry's history, compositions that would prove challenging to surpass in the decades that followed.

Yet this high point came during a time of immense upheaval. The Second World War, the Bengal famine, and the crumbling of colonial rule all loomed large. Film songs often reflected the uncertainty, sometimes mournful, sometimes romantic, sometimes defiant. And when the Partition finally came, it fractured the world that had created this music. Artists became refugees, studios were split, and careers were thrown into flux. Noor Jehan, who would go on to become Pakistan's most iconic singer, recorded many of her most beloved songs in Bombay. Khursheed, another major star, faded from public life after migrating. K.L. Saigal, a towering figure of the 1930s and '40s, died in Lahore just months before the split.

This collection spans those final years before Partition, a time of creative flowering and looming catastrophe. Like Part 1, these songs were sourced from immigrant-run music shops in New York and New Jersey. They are fragments of a vanishing world, each one a snapshot of the art, longing, and resilience that defined this extraordinary era.

Japanese artist Tomoki Tsukamoto aka W-Moon, co-founder of Metro Juice Records.

Three unreleased tracks produced back in 1999, finally seeing the light of day.
Includes a remix of Slow Didi, originally featured on his 2012 album INNERVOICE.

Mastered by Isao Kumano.

Analog Africa doesn't do anything other than special releases really, but this one tracing the label's origins back to Zimbabwe over 20 years ago is a real standout. A carefully curated collection of 25 tracks with a fine booklet proving plenty of extra context, it captures the birth of the country's modern music scene and brims with the creative sound explosion of the 70s and 80s. Before genres were fully defined, artists blended rock, rumba, soul and traditional rhythms in bold, experimental ways that still stand up and get diggers and dancers excited in 2025. Included are never-before-released tracks from Thomas Mapfumo, Oliver Mtukudzi and more and they all add up to rich and dynamic snapshot of Zimbabwe's peerless musical evolution during what was a transformative era.

2024 Reissue

After more than 20 years of studio work, it can be said that this album is the result of long hours of introspection and solitude. The inquisitive, investigative and analytical listening of the earliest works of artists such as Robert John Brown & Sean Booth, Mike Paradinas or Jochem George Paap influenced me a lot during the execution of this EP. The deconstruction or deconstructive process was something I needed to explore and put into practice, giving as a result naked periplos or sound spaces, in which the protagonism belongs solely and exclusively to sounds or textures that for my part deserved a thorough review and analysis, making these periplos a challenge in themselves, giving way to resulting works where the rhythmic section was in the background or simply disappeared. In relation to the cover design, thanks to Julian Schnabel and T?fol Cruz for the inspiration and the final artwork respectively.

Life might be a predominantly linear affair, but when lived right, it’s nevertheless a turbulent experience. It’s a system of trial and error, ebb and flow, order and chaos, action and reaction. And paradoxically, this system somehow still feels balanced amid all this turmoil. In fact, the same can be said about Keope’s second longplayer for Bigamo. Easily.

Keope might be a duo consisting of Marcus Rossknecht and Toni Bruna, but they actually sound like a collective of rather nomadic - and heavily gifted - musicians on their ever-present quest to reach different musical spheres. Everything is in motion, everything is in constant flux. Everything, everywhere, all at once. Their previous record “Triangulo“ already provided the audience an idea of their elaborate rhythmic vocabulary, but it’s the cryptically titled “Flikka Flokka“, which sees their multilayered compositions bloom into a fully-formed, new musical Esperanto.

You can immediately sense that Keope must be a phenomenal live act because the twelve tracks on “Flikka Flokka“ sound as if they were born from endless jam sessions fueled by a whole variety of influences. As a result, the work of Rossknecht and Bruna presents itself as a prime example of sound in motion that responds solely to its very own pulse by taking the aforementioned influences and making them completely their own. Now, let’s dance!

180g vinyl pressing.

During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says.

Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyō Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains.

Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyō Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums), Jesica Rubino (violin) and Marian Benitez (vocals, now his wife), released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition.

Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.

Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within.

An assortment of grooves of artists from many walks of life all on one 180g piece of vinyl...