Search:look like

'Songs and Bodies' is best described as hypnagogic post-rock, an impressionistic blur of dissociated riffs, jazzy rhythms and half-heard voices that casts a beguiling digital silhouette of '90s indie music. The album began as a personal experiment, a question that emerged as Piotr Kurek cast his mind back to the era that birthed bands like Gastr del Sol, Bark Psychosis, Labradford and The Sea and Cake. Curious how this music might sound in today’s cultural climate, he started recording sketches at home on guitar and keyboard, applying the same advanced processing, editing and manipulation techniques that had nourished his last run of albums. Early on, he brought in drummer Mateusz Rychlicki and bassist Wojciech Traczyk, layering their performances into the evolving material. These ideas might have remained in that unvarnished state had Unsound not suggested a live performance of the work in October 2024. Spurred by the invitation, Kurek hardened his resolve, finishing a crumpled, uncanny set of half-songs that extend the chimerical sonic universe of the jazz-inspired 'Smartwoods' and its baroque predecessor 'Peach Blossom'.

Not an exercise in nostalgia, 'Songs and Bodies' is an examination of the '90s and '00s experimental rock canon that isolates its humanity as the world stares down a new technological dawn. At a glance, Kurek's songs are remarkably organic, diaphanous guitar-led meditations embellished with era-specific organ and electric piano vamps, cryptic vocal utterances and dusty drums, but it's all an illusion. Listen a little closer and the wrinkles appear—the robotic, garbled articulations, awkward tempo fluctuations and charming hiccups.

Kurek distills these vulnerabilities and blemishes to present a deeply personal but relatable abstraction of familiar sounds and gestures. It's the closest the composer has come to old-fashioned songwriting, but the end result is the same: an invitation to look beyond the frosted glass of an increasingly digital existence.

His fourth album, City Music works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release Singing Saw, an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. Saw was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.” And now follows City Music, the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”

AOKI takamasa and Tujiko Noriko’s 2005 album »28« has become a cornerstone in the artists’ respective discographies. 20 years after its initial release, Keplar issues it on vinyl for the very first time. Three years in the making, »28« saw the sound artist and the avant-pop singer-songwriter combine their distinct aesthetics for an album that defied categorisation. Their combination of advanced electronic experimentation and pop appeal paved the way for a new generation of artists and turned »28« into an enduring fan favourite. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu, the reissue comes with a brand-new artwork by Joji Koyama and a changed track listing—authorised by Takamasa and Tujiko—for the vinyl version to fit it on a single LP, while the digital version remains identical to the original release.

Tujiko and Takamasa first shared the stage together after the turn of the millennium. Both were emerging solo artists, with Takamasa a mainstay on the Progressive Form label and Tujiko forging a connection with Mego in Vienna, Austria. »I simply liked Noriko’s voice and music, and since we often performed at the same events, it felt like a natural progression for us to start working together,« remembers Takamasa. They first collaborated in 2002 for two shows at the Fondation Cartier in Paris and at SonarLab in Barcelona, respectively. The first joint piece was a rework of Tujiko’s »Fly« from »Hard Ni Sasete (Make Me Hard)« by Takamasa, appearing as the album opener »Fly2« on »28.«

After that, the Paris-based Tujiko and Takamasa, still based in Osaka, worked sporadically and remotely on new material. For the first two years of their collaboration, the two met in the context of live events or Takamasa’s visits to the French capital to discuss their process and exchange hard drives while also occasionally sending each other CDrs in the mail. »Aoki made beats and sounds that complemented my music perfectly, building the foundation on which my voice could float,« Tujiko says today. Takamasa used hardware such as the Nord Modular, the Korg Z1, and the Korg ER-1, while also working with different kinds of software and plug-ins as well as Logic. Tujiko was using Cubase, her preferred piece of gear at the time being an AKAI MPC.

After Takamasa moved to Paris in 2004, this enabled the duo to finish the album together in person. Starting with its subtle use of glitches to the almost-anarchic way in which it deals with the structures of a song, »28« came to be an incomparably intricate album. 20 years on, it remains timeless because of its flawless synthesis of the cutting-edge avant-garde ideas of early 2000s electronica with an idiosyncratic but accessible pop sentiment. Both artists look back fondly—though not uncritically, with Takamasa noting a certain »youthfulness« in his contributions—to the album that was titled after their respective age at that time. »Maybe we should make ›51‹ now?,« quips Tujiko. See you in three years, perhaps.

In the mid-90s, Ken Ishii rose to prominence, with a futuristic sound rooted in Detroit’s machine soul yet unmistakably his own. Hailing from Sapporo, Ishii quickly became synonymous with futuristic, cutting-edge productions, and ‘Jelly Tones’ – originally released on R&S Records in 1995 - was the breakthrough release that propelled the Japanese producer to global notoriety.



Driven by the success of its lead single ‘Extra’, whose iconic and surreal, anime styled video directed by Koji Morimoto (of Akira fame) became a cult classic - the album cemented Ishii’s status as a pioneer who seamlessly fused Detroit techno influences with forward looking sound design and uniquely Eastern melodic sensibilities.



Now reissued on vinyl for the first time since 2008, this 30-year anniversary edition of ‘Jelly Tones’, celebrates the album’s lasting legacy and continued influence with the dynamic rhythms, crystalline synth textures, and sophisticated arrangements that set Ishii apart - from the propulsive elegance of ‘Stretch’ and the layered complexity of ‘Pause in Herbs’, to the tribal, otherworldly darkness of ‘Moved By Air’ and the lush close of ‘Endless Season’.



Integral to this collection as well as the dazzling energy of tracks like ‘Extra’, comes the shimmering synthscapes of ‘Cocoa Mousse’, and the intricate futurism of ‘Pneuma’ - all of which highlight Ishii’s masterful command of both the dancefloor and more cerebral electronic spaces. ‘Jelly Tones’ remains a testament to Ken Ishii’s vision and to a moment when techno became a global language.

Pelican has always been a band that's not just from Chicago, but distinctly of Chicago. Formed in 2000 by guitarists Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Laurent Schroeder-Lebec alongside brothers Bryan and Larry Herweg on bass and drums respectively, Pelican's foundation was built upon the rule-free, genre-agnostic scene synonymous with the Fireside Bowl. "The `90s in Chicago was a free-for-all. Everyone was just coming from a place of pure creativity," says Shelley de Brauw. With Schroeder-Lebec returning to the band following Dallas Thomas' exit in 2022, this reunified version of Pelican allowed the band to tap back into those influences and build something distinctly new with Flickering Resonance. While longtime Pelican fans will find an updated version of the band's ethos_one that's been constantly evolving since their very first EP_their new partnership with Run For Cover Records emphasizes something that's always been implicit to the Pelican formula. These songs take as much inspiration from titanic `90s post-hardcore, space-rock, and emo as they do traditional metal, showing that though Godflesh and Goatsnake records occupied the shelves of Pelican's songwriters, so too did Quicksand, Christie Front Drive, and Hum. "A lot of people didn't hear it," says Schroeder-Lebec. "I was like, well, I guess the metal world is where we fit. But now, I'm willing to acknowledge all the suits we're wearing." On Flickering Resonance, Pelican allowed themselves to look at their music less as a means of hard-earned catharsis and more as an appreciation for the glimmers of joy that occur even in the bleakest landscapes.

For our ninth offering we have ventured out of our small but fertile swamp in search of another source of magick. Meandering across boggy pastures new, we crossed paths with Steevio, who sat hovering serenely in the fern covered shade of a nearby valley. Instantly recognising the singular vision of this fabled artist, we hastily gathered our nets and cast them under Steevio’s branches, capturing four beautiful offerings as they wriggled towards us. Upon the return to our mulch, it became clear that we could not contain Steevio’s creations, so willful was their vitality. It was therefore all we could do to release them back to the universal dance from whence they came.

The dance germinates with the writhing polyrhythmic ‘Apricity’. Hearing the crunch of frost laden grass beneath our webbed toes, we look above us to search for the sun. Angular beams of light escape over the horizon, as the warmth of Steevio’s machines coalesce. A glistening hi hat breaks through the membrane to bind his creation and anchor its ever shifting arms.

‘Octopus’ glides gracefully through a sun-dappled kelp forest. Sub frequencies rumble up from the shadowy darkness below, rippling along the fronds as they ascend. As the ocean begins to churn, a wriggling melodic tentacle parts the foliage, gleaming with primordial energy. Its joyful visit to the surface realm leaves us with a brief yet powerful reminder of the mystery beneath.

The glow of the midwinter sun warms our bones on ‘Apricity (Sunrise Mix)’. Percussive elements bubble out of the depths, forming intricate cascading patterns as they grow over the perfectly formed kicks. The moog filter tames the brew with Steevio’s intuitive restraint , until he releases its mighty power upon the gleeful forest dwellers, to their rapturous gratitude.

With ‘Adref’ we return home. The sedate tempo provides oceanic space for a melody which inhales and exhales over a familiar landscape of perfectly tuned percussion. With each breath the melody seems to increase its reach, until it’s buried deep within our bones, its memory resonating on long after it’s gone.

Steevio’s music reflects the universal moments where seemingly chaotic and disparate elements are suddenly revealed to be perfectly harmonious. Of course examples of this are always universally present in nature, and have been eternally, but we have to be reminded to appreciate them. In the same way that a wave deposits a perfect line of shells on a beach, dew freezes on grass, or individual strands of mycelial hyphae bind together to form incredible patterns, Steevio’s music is likewise; effortlessly considered. For us, it has more in common with the unrelenting flow of a river than it does with dance music. It is psychedelic music in the same sense that nature is intuitively psychedelic; without ever leaning into any tried tropes of what is culturally considered ‘psychedelic’ music.

Funnuvojere’s curator and founder, Massimiliano Pagliara, reunites with longtime collaborator Gian to present a new chapter in their shared musical exploration: a full-length album under the moniker Hidden Frequencies. The pair’s creative dialogue began with a 2017 release on LACKREC — itself a tribute to Detroit electro — and this LP continues that sonic discourse, refining and expanding their vision. Hidden Frequencies pays homage to the emotive minimalism of acts like The Other People Place, channeling the melancholic elegance and machine soul of Detroit’s second wave.

It’s a record built on analog textures, brooding basslines, and crisp drum programming — both a reverent nod and a forward-looking reinterpretation. Tracks like “Oscillations Of Us” and “Dreaming In Electric Blue” inject peak-time energy into the atmospheric and almost restrained narrative, with a techno drive built for the dancefloor. “Obsidian Reflections” walks the line — structured around classic electroarchitecture but charged with intense propulsion. Pieces like “Dancing On Data Streams” — the contemplative title track — and “EncodedWhispers” offer more introspective soundscapes, inviting deep listening and emotional immersion.

Together, these tracks form a nuanced body of work that shifts seamlessly between reflective and kinetic, minimal and expansive. Familiar yet exploratory, Hidden Frequencies is the sound of two artists in conversation —not just with each other, but with a musical legacy they continue to honor and reshape. This is a modern electro séance that blends introspection with intention, nostalgia with forward motion.

The perfect accompaniment to that deep fall feeling, Frank Maston's beloved 2025 single finally gets its long overdue vinyl release! As our friends New Commute articulated beautifully, "Foreign Affairs" drifts through London fog and Paris shimmer, its avant-lounge glow wrapping each melody in a wistful ache. On B-side "Liaison," ghostly strings and a solitary piano paint a deserted twilight shoreline, Pacôme Henry's distinct 16mm cinematography hovering nearby." We've pressed just 500 of these gorgeous records so, be quick, Maston always flies.

Originally written for a film Maston was scoring in 2024, he decided to keep it aside for himself. And, well, us all. The song has a vibe Maston has previously flirted with; he wanted to dive in...all the way: "The arrangement is huge, definitely the biggest I've written, and it merited live musicians playing together. Also another experiment, to do it with all live musicians playing my arrangements. I wanted to make something that you'd want to put on when you bring a date back to your place. It's on the edge of sappy but that's sort of the point. I decided to give myself an unlimited budget - just spend whatever was necessary to get the right musicians and record it the best way possible."

It's this dedication to sonic perfection which Maston is rightly lauded for. We couldn't not put this on a cute wee 7" when we heard it.

The A side, "Foreign Affairs", is a brilliant, Bacharach-esque romp with a bit of that unapologetically romantic Morricone angle. Says Frank: "I was trying to synthesize that sort of jazzy/sexy/classy/romantic mature sound, where the edginess is in these surprising chord changes and subtle arrangement cues."

A wonderful complement, the flipside "Liaison", evokes Martin Denny, but Eden's Island was in Frank's head, too. He wanted to take a deep dive into that exotica sound - a genre he'd referenced a bit but never fully committed to - so the piece is lavished with those big sighing strings and a pretty lush arrangement. Happily, it all sounds super rich. Also, "Umiliani is always a reference for this sort of thing (Il Corpo etc.), That almost mechanical arrangement of things moving together and a simple melody over it (something I nicked from Ennio)".

The two songs were recorded in Paris and London in the summer of 2024. Aside from the rhythm section and piano, there's vibraphone, a full string section, trombones and alto and concert flutes. "Liaison" boasts strings, vibraphone, a female choir and tenor sax. Maston played piano and acoustic guitar but that's it (as opposed to playing basically everything on Tulips). His friend Oscar Sholto Robertson played drums and percussion whilst Maston mainstay Elie Ghersinu (formerly of L'Eclair) played bass.

The theme for a lot of Maston's titles is that they have two meanings. So "Foreign Affairs" is both a reference to him living abroad and the idea of constant cultural diplomacy and then there's this sexy/cheeky interpretation of foreign affairs in a literal way - "an affair abroad, ooh la la!". The artwork for this 7" single has Roman campaign flags, referencing the foreign affairs in sort of a sassy way. There's a violence implied. But then if you look from a bit of a distance it looks like a bouquet of flowers. So Frank thought it went with the spirit of the title. Also, he's used a lot of roman motifs now so he kept that theme going, even with the terracotta cover.

This is a vitally important project for our Frank. He explains why, here: "For whatever reason, these songs really resonated with me. I feel like they are either the end of a stylistic era for me or the beginning of a new one. They're sonically the culmination of what I'd been working towards and trying to get better at since I started. If I heard this when I was making Tulips I would have said "YES! *This* is what I want to be doing!". So that's the essence of it. It's a statement and the intended reaction is "This is really good, but why now?". Like the edge to it is the context of someone making this sort of thing in 2025, which I think is a huge strength. The real heads will get it. My music always has like a 2-3 year latency until people really catch onto it, and these ones will have a nice payoff I think."

We couldn't put it better ourselves. So we haven't.

2005...it"s 20 years since already? We can still feel the sensuous tickle of the wind at our back during that marvelous time. It was, as the Scorps promised, a wind of change, and we were drawn to a number of like-minded birds floating in that breeze! Today, we salute Six Organs of Admittance; their School of the Flower was just the record we"d never dreamed of when we asked them if they wanted to do one with us. Turned out their pronoun of choice was "him." "He" was Ben Chasny and we"ve been happy collaborating with him ever since. Coming on the heels of records like Dark Noontide and Compathia, School of the Flower found Six Organs riding high. Having achieved much in his traditional home-recorded kingdom, he too was looking for something different. What our Ben recalls: "It was the first time Six Organs was in a studio, so that"s cool. I wanted to play with Chris Corsano to expand on some of the rhythms in my playing, to kind of suggest some different forms for the way the folk-psych/folk music were being played at the time. The title track was inspired by John Cale and Terry Riley"s Church of Anthrax - I remember we had a big tape loop stretched around the whole studio to form the basis of that. I was taking a lot of cold medicine that week - not the coolest drugs to be on, but, you know..." School of the Flower was indeed a whole new thing - containing enduring fan favorites like "All You"ve Left," "Words for Two," Ben"s revelatory take on Gary Higgins" "Thicker Than a Smokey" (pointing the way for our reissue of Red Hash later that year) and a deep vibe of spiritual folk-jazz throughout. And best of all? It was just the beginning of twenty years of sending the inspiration of Six Organs of Admittance out into the world! But today, we"re happy to send you back to School of the Flower. There"s nothing like it.

Cambridge’s acclaimed psych-folk quintet Fuzzy Lights return with their fifth album ‘Fen Creatures’. Following on from 2021’s critically lauded ‘Burials’ the band have created their most conceptually focussed work to date – a mediation on environmental crises that uses the folklore and history of East Anglia as a lens to examine humanity’s fractured relationship with the natural world.

The album operates across multiple historical timelines, from Iron Age hill forts to medieval plague houses, from Byron's Romantic-era environmental warnings to the immediate threat of rising sea levels, creating a temporal tapestry that weaves ancient stories with contemporary concerns.

Musically, the quintet, Rachel Watkins (vocals/violin), Xavier Watkins (guitar/electronics), Chris Rogers (guitar), Daniel Carney (bass), and Mark Blay (drums), have pushed deeper into experimental drone territories while maintaining the crystalline folk sensibilities that have become their signature.

Lead track ‘Greenteeth transforms the traditional cautionary tale of Jenny Greenteeth, the water spirit who lures children to their deaths. "When I read this story to my daughter, she was instantly drawn into it," Watkins notes. "There's something timeless about these tales and the way they speak to fundamental fears and connections that span generations."

Elsewhere, 'War Ditches' imagines the Iron Age dead of a Cambridge hill fort keeping watch over the land, their vigil ending as modern people lose connection with the earth. 'The Promise' creates an imaginary encounter with the ghosts of Landbeach village across multiple eras, connecting the 1665 plague with our recent pandemic experience through shared narratives of community resilience and loss.

Critics praised ‘Burials’ as "way beyond folk and folk in essence all at once" (Backseat Mafia) and "folk-rock looking back squarely at the early 1970s" (Financial Times), and 'Fen Creatures' promises to cement Fuzzy Lights' reputation as one of Britain's most vital contemporary folk acts. The album positions them firmly within the lineage of artists like Fairport Convention, Trees, and Comus who understood that engaging with tradition isn't nostalgic escapism, but a way of accessing older wisdoms about how to live in the world.

‘Burials’ press:

“...the musical battle between the fuzzy and the light makes Fuzzy Lights special.” MOJO ★★★★
“...a simmering, sinister undercurrent which often explodes with apocalyptic fervour.” SHINDIG ★★★★
“...subverting genre expectations and folk melodies.” FINANCIAL TIMES ★★★★
“Way beyond folk and folk in essence all at once, it's a record that’ll bring you much reward.” BACKSEATMAFIA - 8.3/10
“a genuine delight....a stirring and unsettling listen, goosebumps adding to the pleasure of timeless music played well, with perfect precision. Don’t leave it another eight years, eh?” FOLK RADIO
“...re-inventing the folk-rock playbook and dragging it screaming through an array of influences...Fuzzy Lights’ most unique, reflective and ambitious record to date” FOR THE RABBITS

When Straight Ahead hit the shelves in 1974, it marked another bold chapter for Brian Auger’s Oblivion Express. The band—Steve Ferrone on drums, Barry Dean on bass, Jack Mills on guitar, and Lennox Langton on congas— was firing on all cylinders, pushing jazz fusion into fresh, uncharted territory.

Critics took notice, with Billboard praising the album as “excellent in development and inventiveness, ” and it found its way onto multiple charts at once.

The journey begins with “Beginning Again, ” a lively opener built on Langton’s congas and Ferrone’s muscular groove. Auger’s electric piano sparkles here, immediately setting the album’s adventurous tone. Then comes their take on Wes Montgomery’s “Bumpin’ On Sunset. ” Darker in mood and drenched in atmosphere, Auger stretches out into improvisation while still honoring Montgomery’s spirit. The interpretation struck such a chord that, years later, Wes’s widow wrote to Auger to tell him it was her husband’s favorite version of his much-loved tune.

The title track, “Straight Ahead, ” shifts gears into funk, showcasing the group’s ability to slide effortlessly between genres. “Change” pushes further, blending rock’s raw energy with jazz’s improvisational freedom, driven by Auger’s command of the Hammond organ. To close, “You’ll Stay in My Heart” brings the tempo down with a tender, soulful ballad—an intimate ending to an album full of bold explorations.

At the time, reviewers hailed the record as a gem. One called it “a minor masterpiece of incredibly engaging and melodic keyboard-centric jazz-rock fusion. ” Another singled out “Bumpin’ On Sunset” as “the best reason to own this recording.”

Half a century later, Straight Ahead still resonates. It captures that fertile moment in the 1970s when jazz, rock, and funk were colliding, and artists like Auger were busy redrawing the map. To this day, it stands as proof of Auger’s fearless curiosity and his knack for breaking boundaries—music that looked forward then, and still feels ahead of its time now.

Sarathy Korwar, genre-breaking drummer, producer and composer, announces the release of his seventh album "There Is Beauty, There Already" out on Otherland. Celebrating the melodic power of the drum ensemble, the album follows his 2022 Indofuturist manifesto "KALAK" with a deeply immersive longform suite of percussion-led compositions.

Unchained is the long-standing guitar-based project of Nate Davis, originally from Providence, RI, and based in France for over a decade. In his two most recent LPs—Gabbeh (2024, A Colourful Storm) and Frontalier (2025, Stern Records)—Davis strives to describe a new path for outsider jazz instrumentalism that remains committed to harmonic and rhythmic form while placing greater emphasis on sonic texture through experimental production techniques.

Release Description:

Unchained—a name which at the project's inception or on earlier recordings spoke perhaps to the ecstatic saturation of high gain guitar—has over the past three albums (N.D. Visitor, Pic, and Gabbeh) come to represent more and more an acknowledgement of and sensitive remove from a crashing world. An excuse of oneself from trend towards a siloed artistic development.

On Frontalier, Nate Davis crosses further into this patient personal lexicon of guitar composition, presenting a new set of richly developed songs and leaps in arrangement which may very well shock Unchained fans the world over. The sympathetic geometric guitar themes of the earlier second-period Unchained style are almost entirely absent, making way for a fully realized presentation of the jazz, MPB, and fusion influence present to varying degrees on the previous three albums. Davis's keen sense of melody and songcraft have never been stronger, here landing on music which is at moments evocative of Wes Montgomery, Allan Holdsworth, Jobim, or the jazzier impulses of Lô Borges. Distinct in Davis's music, however, is what these references might belie: an innate tending towards repetition as an affective tool—one which has less to do with the aesthetics of the scene from which the project emerged than it does with devotional prayer. In this way it feels as if Unchained has always been music for living. What was once a maximalist expression of youth has matured into the sound of living with and in the world and an empathic transmuting of all the joy, disappointment, and ambivalence that comes with it. Songs that feel like the sort of thinking one does looking out the window on a long train ride, or the routinism of internal and external life and the breaking out of it. As much as it will be recognized by the fandom as a significant step forward, Frontalier serves also as a perfect gateway for new listeners to the singular music of Unchained.

Latest record off the Kalahari production line comes courtesy of a real one. Klon Dump in the building, moving like a madman across four barrelling tech house scorchers.

Part-producer, part-engineer and a long time co-conspirator of A Colourful Storm’s Moopie. Better known to some under the alias Mark, but always surefire for some serious dancefloor potency. Doubters, look no further-this is another demonstration of his mastery.

Big with the radiant stabs, even bigger on the earworm groove. Ploughing the furrow of tough, direct but deft as the Klon Dump faithful will have come to expect by now. Proper belters.

Always flexing outstanding rhythmic ingenuity, whether it’s hardcore hybridity as Mark or the tech house innovation shown here. If anything in life is certain, it’s that a KD record will lay down some serious torque.

There’s also an off-kilter playfulness that kinda feels reminiscent of T+++’s ‘Space Pong’ or Fiedel and Errorsmith’s MMM project. Another ace in the hole from the Antipodean shapeshifter.

Friend Of A Phantom is the third studio album by the Danish progressive metal band Vola, released under Mascot Label Group. This highly anticipated album showcases Vola's signature blend of intricate rhythms, soaring melodies, and thought-provoking lyrics.

With tracks like "Straight Lines" and "These Black Claws," Friend Of A Phantom takes listeners on a musical journey that seamlessly combines heavy riffs with electronic elements, creating a dynamic sound that is both captivating and innovative.

Vola's musicianship shines through in every song, from the complex drum patterns to the mesmerizing guitar solos. The band's ability to craft intricate arrangements while maintaining a strong sense of melody sets them apart in the progressive metal scene.

The production quality of Friend Of A Phantom is top-notch, allowing each instrument to shine through while still blending together to create a cohesive and immersive listening experience. The album's rich textures and layers reveal new details with each listen, making it a rewarding choice for fans of progressive music.

Overall, Friend Of A Phantom is a must-have for any music lover looking for an album that pushes boundaries and challenges traditional genre conventions. Vola's unique sound and innovative approach make this album a standout release in their discography.

For more than thirty years, Arnaud Fournier has been shaping the landscape of the French expe-rimental scene. First within the duo HINT, a singular fusion of experimental, noise and indie music, he released three studio albums in the late 1990s and has continued to perform regularly ever since, including a live album with EZ3kiel in 2009. With La Phaze (1999), Dead Hippies (2013) and later Atonalist (2017), he has always instinctively sought to cross genres and stage dialogues bet-ween extremes. In 2025, with 100% Black Puzzle, he delivers his very first album under his own name, a work where saturated guitars, saxophones, trumpet, hypnotic loops and vast layers of drone meet. Mixed and mastered by Olivier "Cali" Fournier at Studioscope in Angers, 100% Black Puzzle gathers familiar faces around it. Its title resonates as an intentional echo, directly referencing 100% White Puzzle, HINT's debut album. Thirty years on, Arnaud Fournier rediscovers the same spirit of absolute freedom across these five tracks: no format constraints, no compromise on length. The title track, an eight-minute instrumental, sets the tone - a raw, urgent gesture, cap-tured in the moment. In his own words, it was about "finding myself once more in that first-song state of mind, without any confinement." With 100% Black Puzzle, Arnaud Fournier fully embraces signing the work under his own name. No pseudonym, no mask, but an unveiling: a profoundly intimate record, steeped in family and friendship, where noise and beauty constantly collide and entwine. Thirty years after shaking up the French indie scene with HINT, he delivers a body of work that is at once retrospective and forward-looking - a black puzzle that resounds like a rebirth. And what better way to "close the circle" than by heading back on tour?

Toni Wobble is looking back on over 20 years of roots in punk, free parties and political movements. From anti-nuclear activism to the Gaggeldub performances, Toni's dug deep into the Dub universe: from Dubstation to Rootsbase to Subardo. By 2012, Toni became a respected operator of Leipzig's Plug Dub Soundsystem. Soon after, he didn't hesitate to create the very own solar- powered Sunplugged sound. Toni's live dub sets hit with all depth and energy of low bass sound culture, shaking the foundations with refreshing freakuency adventures. After a guest spot on our 18th release, helping RUZ dubbing out a deep b-side, it's time to unleash the full Wobble fury on 45Seven!

Out In Da Streetz was born in a lockdown, when urban life got stall, opening space for experiments. Inspired by Juke and Footwork at nights such as Bassmæssage, Toni ventured into Jungle production - the genre him love from way back. The result is an opus of subs, breaks, skanks and dubs. Expect 30 Hertz bass, wobbly midranges, halftime snares and Jungle edits sharp like razor. Don't miss the Ini cameo and hand-made skank work straight from the lab. The result ain't just a track, it's a state of inner and outer emergency, a deep dive into groove, texture and creative chaos.

Irie Cruise rolls up like a cloud of green smoke riding through the streets with a sick ride in a surreal vibe. Rootsy rhythms meet subtle Jungle twists inbetween the twinkles of Dub and the flickers of breakbeats. When the hook drops, the impulse fires up, the lowrider bounces through the turns of skanks, throwing dub delays and gliding deep into the night. By the final tone, you didn't just take a ride, you're actually a bit closer to the sun.

Toni Wobble is giving the full hundred. Dub ain't just a genre, it's a portal to infinite spaces of sound. It's a culture, a process and an attitude, all about echo, bass and space. But it's also about experimentation, consciousness and transformation. Each delay loop is reshaping reality, tearing it down and rebuilding it from the ground up. D.U.B. equals to deep universal beats, the universal frequency... Deep, wide and open. Tune in and dub out!

OOOOH! by Alex Bad Baby Lukashevsky with Cocoa Corner (2025)

Celebrated veteran of Toronto’s music scene, known for his boundary-pushing approach to folk and avant-garde music, twists rock music into strange and brilliant new shapes with the help of young jazz players, U.S. Girls, and his own immensely talented son.



OOOOH! is hard on the outside and soft on the inside. Made in the spirit of unity,
humanity, and poetry — disobediently renouncing the glory of personal triumph for the
generosity of an honest experiment. On the last track of the album you’ll hear “Or do you only ever never want to make a single enemy? / That’s not freedom or humility / It’s nothing, honestly.” Oooh, that's a bad baby!

A celebrated Toronto songwriter and performer, Alex Lukashevsky has always been disobedient. Which simply means, nothing is off the table when he’s looking for his
poetic voice; when trying to find the realest I of the teller. As he sings on the lead track “that musician that’s dead” The musician is radical/ it’s the world that’s demented/ listening with their eyes, the music looks dented/ they’re over-represented.
OOOOH! was recorded in January 2024 at Sound Department in Toronto, engineered by Patrick Lefler (ROY), mixed by Grammy-nominated producer Matt Smith. All the songs were tracked live off the floor in two days, with one extra day for recording vocals, to keep the recording fully alive and breathing. As leader of Deep Dark United, as a solo performer, and a sideman in Brodie Wests’ Eucalyptus and Luka Kuplowsky’s Ryokan Band, Alex has been an outsized influence on the Toronto music scene that spawned acts like Broken Social Scene and Owen Pallett. (Pallett, who has toured with Lukashevsky, went so far as to record an entire album’s worth of Alex’s songs, backed
by a full orchestra.)

Lukashevsky has approached each of his albums and projects as something completely new, using only the musical boundaries he creates with each song. Even when he
has recorded songs with nothing but his voice and his own acoustic guitar accompaniment, the results are never “stripped down” or “back to basics,”
Gong! How do you get to heaven / have fun! have fun!
It’s cool to approach music as a game of “spot the influence”; Burt Bacharach-meets-Black Flag; Lana Del Rey-meets-LCD Soundsystem etc. Glorified mash-ups are promising because of their conversational nature. But they can turn us into hyperboreans; blowing cold air beyond ourselves while doing what we can to remain warm. To devise a game or a narrative is to have a winner and a loser, but we all know that just as you win/ so you lose. And does anything really change? Alex Lukashevsky and Cocoa Corner are more at ease drawing blind contours or playing an old game like consequences. They let things add up without knowing particularly how. Cognition is recognition.

Lukashevsky, in addition to writing all the songs, plays guitar and sings on OOOOH!, doing both in ways that are soulful and spikey at the same time. Joining him on guitar and vocals is his oldest child, Charlie Lukashevsky, who, at 23, is already a talented performer and songwriter in his own right. Cocoa Corner also includes Aidan McConnell, an in-demand drummer and composer, Jack Johnston, a jazz bassist and Barry Harris acolyte, and percussionist Evan Cartwright (The Weather Station, U.S. Girls, Cola, Tasseomancy), who plays steel pan and marching drum.

Working with his son and with other younger musicians is central to the album’s
unpredictable aesthetic. It reinvigorated the sound in unexpected ways. Lukashevsky says, “I had to reconsider my own instincts. I had to deal with being 99 years old.”
In addition to these performers, the album includes a tasty contribution from Meg
Remy, the visionary musician and producer who is the leader of the critically acclaimed
project U.S. Girls. Remy duets with Lukashevsky on the imagistic and sprawling album
closer “things keep happening.”
About that album title: OOOOH! is taken straight from “that musician that’s dead” an
arch and unhinged comment on the exertion required to navigate a lifetime of music making.
Lukashevsky’s delivery of that one emotive word is a kind of cultural posture, but also a
hundred percent primitive expression. The impact is never less than visceral. His vocal
delivery ranges through rich baritone blues to keening falsettos to a kind of sprechstimme that periodically steps out from the music to grab the listener’s shirt. He
doesn’t sound too nice, but he is sincere. When life gives you lemons lament.
For OOOOH! his first official full-length album since 2012’s Too Late Blues, (a collection of knotty-yet-effervescent tunes built upon the enchantingly serpentine harmonies of Lukashevsky and his vocal collaborators, Felicity Williams (Bahamas, Bernice) and Daniela Gesundheit (Snowblink, HYDRA)), Alex has once again broken apart and rebuilt his own approach to music. Or rather (because that sounds too over-determined), he
has allowed his music to build itself into strange new shapes that only fleetingly and
coincidentally, but happily, resemble anything that might be called rock and roll. There is some editorializing within the song’s lyrics— Lukashevsky even cheekily contributes to the “spot the influence” game with the line “Muddy Waters, Rite of Spring!” a funny preemptive strike against anyone already reaching for some variation of avant-blues to describe what the song is up to here. In fact there are many names checked on this record (literally and in spirit); they are the lily pads that trace the path of this expression! Palestrina, Peter Pears and Benjamin Brittain, Andrés Segovia, Stravinsky, Lotte Lenya, Alice Coltrane, Skip James, Chuck Berry, D’Gary, Betty Carter, Mukhtiyar Ali, Chuck D, Yoko Ono, Hailu Mergia, David Bowie, Jane Siberry. rhythm is a skeleton mansion / haunted by melody / feckless prodigy / the world is under a spell / cast by some demon angel / Practice day and night / Try as hard as hell / no one can sing that well Musicians are often worried by the way in which they are prepared to fail rather
than how they would like to succeed; it’s such a deep concern that it tempers their creativity and shackles their process. Current cultural proclivities, tend to comfort a certain kind of artistic failure and abnegate another kind. How many testimonials, full of heartfelt care and investment, have you heard for Taylor Swift, and yet a craftsman like Chris Weisman is often dismissed easily as though he’s doing something anti-social. what’s throwing itself in my ears and my eyes / arrogant devil ad hominem christ.
The music you will hear on this recording veers off in multiple directions at once,
and features a rock and roll spirit with a divergent heart. This is no sclerotic clomp of the Average Rock Song, but in fact a flood of humanity in all its darkness and moodiness and unpredictability. If most performers make songs that are like sports cars or pickup trucks to drive around, Lukashevsky has built something more akin to a rowboat in a tree: it’s weird and beautiful.