Here is the debut, self-titled album from a.s.o., singer/songwriter Alia Seror-O'Neill, and producer Lewie Day. 'a.s.o.' is a thematic consolidation of the previous three singles and an impressive artistic progression. Day and Seror-O'Neill show they've mastered the format of the radio-friendly pop song and found how to subvert it completely. Across eleven songs, they have built a rich and compelling body of work.
We know where we are now, emotionally complex, trip-hop torch songs for club freaks. But the palette has broadened to encompass ethereal dream pop à la Cocteau Twins, slow- burning AOR-soul, and dubwise stylings. As a result, 'a.s.o.' is a satisfyingly coherent listen but never a musical monoculture. Variously there are nods toward Julee Cruise, Fleetwood Mac, and the uneasy listening of Portishead. It's an album that wears its influences lightly, is never weighed down by them, and always sure of its own identity.
It's anchored by Alia's unique voice. Her words speak of restraint and release, taking us from the elegiac to the euphoric. This elegantly crafted, perfect pop music sounds like it has had enough of your shit. And Day's music is the perfect foil; deep, slightly menacing, restrained, and powerful. The album has a cinematic texture, as with David Lynch; the seemingly familiar becomes uncanny and strange the closer we look. a.s.o. take our emotions for a joyride before leaving us floating in space.
'a.s.o.' is a journey; by its end, we all are changed
* very limited edition
GRANULAR POLYPHONIES SHOOTING THROUGH LIKE BOLTS
For over ten years, Brussels-originals ladr ache have dipped their toes and vocal chords in all matter of
musical mischief as only they know how. With éclats z, their latest recorded offering, new canons arise
that belong to no place or genre. Between the layers of chant, other voices turn up in old tongues and
secret languages, gliding alongside pipes and electronic warps, pulsing in time with the granularity of
choice. Recorded over two years in different times and spaces, the living textures that emerge are sonic
libations as much as modern lullabies, inhabiting zones of ancient passages and timeless exploration.
Danish electronic and ambient dub-techno explorer Stovfigur (an apt alias that comes from Danish words stov ("dust") and figur ("form" or "figure")) opts to self-title his debut album, which suggests he feels it is the most honest representation of who he is as an artist. Across nine cassette cuts on Taylor Deupree's 12K label, he fits plenty of detail into vast atmospheric soundscapes. Wispy pads are barely there; a subtle static fuzz hums like an electronic device hidden somewhere in your bedroom that you can't quite locate and pads are billowy and vaporous. It's magnificently heady and immersive and a perfect excuse to untether from the world and get lost in your own thoughts.
Put out on the circuit in 2011 as a collaboration between Leipzig's Flop Beat Disk and the
Alphacut subsidiary operating under the name Alphacute this limited to 200 copies split 7“
vinyl features contribution by both Thee Vaporizer as well as Romanian producer Yvat.
Whilst Thee Vaporizer operates in a grey area between Glitch, lo-fi IDM, decaying
DarkJungle x Breakcore and cheesy melodies with an almost childlike positivity Yvat
brings on a rather distinct take on fragmented, highly detailed Glitchtronica with a
signature Phonk twist.
Limited pressing of 200 copies on turquoise vinyl.
,X3" von Amina Hocine greift schrittweise, subtil und unaufhaltsam auf die Komplementarität verschiedener Klangmaterialien zurück. Durch die geduldige und feinfühlige Verschmelzung von reinen Sinuswellen, Feldaufnahmen und Klängen, die mit einer ,Nebelhorn-Orgel" (einem von Hocine selbst entwickelten Instrument) erzeugt wurden, lädt ,X3" sowohl zur Selbstreflexion als auch zur Kontemplation ein. Inspiriert von einem Symbol des dänischen Mystikers Martinus Thomsen, das die Entwicklung eines Wesens in der physischen Welt darstellt, nimmt uns Amina Hocine mit auf eine lange Reise, die mit seltener Eleganz und Anmut zwischen dem Statischen und dem Wandelnden, zwischen dem fast Unwahrnehmbaren und dem Grandiosen balanciert. Es ist eine Musik des Übergangs, die Amina Hocine uns bietet, eine Musik, in der die Vermittlung von Klang, Welle für Welle, zur Meditation wird. In ,Until the Fish Eyes Shine" wirft Espen Sommer Eide einen inspirierten, umfassenden und rückblickenden Blick auf sein musikalisches Schaffen, das er oft unter dem Pseudonym Phonophani produziert hat. Indem er die Klänge seiner frühen Jahre vor dem Hintergrund der Ambient-Techno-Szene in Tromso Ende der 1990er Jahre neu aufgreift und neu interpretiert, beschwört Eide eine Musik herauf, die alles andere als nostalgisch ist, sondern vielmehr eine Art ,geologische Schichtung" bietet, in der Epochen und Stilrichtungen aufeinanderprallen, sich überschneiden und ergänzen und so die bemerkenswerte Einzigartigkeit der Klangpalette des norwegischen Künstlers offenbaren. Das Stück bringt zudem die extreme Beständigkeit und Authentizität seiner musikalischen Vision zum Ausdruck - einer Vision, in der technologische Innovationen, die reflektierte Umgebung und gelebte Emotionen in einem eigenen Raum zusammenfließen: dem der traumhaften Musik, die immer neu erfunden wird, immer in Bewegung ist, immer im Wandel begriffen ist.
For Louis Johnstone, making music has never been about waiting for the right equipment, the right environment or the right moment. Across more than a decade of work as both Wanda Group and A Large Sheet Of Muscle, the Huddersfield-based musician has built one of British experimental music's most singular bodies of work by embracing whatever happens to be within reach, allowing instinct, improvisation and circumstance to shape the outcome as much as conscious composition.
"'Chinese Benefits' was made over a year ago on an iPhone that had a broken microphone and was on its way out," he explains. "I have made many records after this with clearer sounds. Sharper ideas. That is never the point, though. You work with what you hold in your hands."
Recorded entirely on a failing iPhone 6 that stopped working shortly afterwards, 'Chinese Benefits' isn't a record about damaged technology. It is a record shaped by it. Rather than resisting the limitations of the device, Johnstone allows them to become part of the music itself, where distortion, interference and deteriorating fidelity are inseparable from the recording process.
Across twenty brief but disquieting pieces, corroded spoken word, environmental recordings, abrasive noise and fractured electronics continually emerge and dissolve. Voices drift in and out of range, reverberation stretches everyday sounds beyond recognition, and bursts of white noise interrupt moments of uneasy calm. There are echoes of radio transmissions, field recordings and musique concrète throughout, yet 'Chinese Benefits' never settles comfortably into any one tradition. Instead, it inhabits a space where accident and intention become almost impossible to separate.
That philosophy has long defined Johnstone's work. Through a vast catalogue of self-released recordings on his Umbro G imprint, alongside releases for labels including The Trilogy Tapes, he has consistently favoured immediacy over refinement, embracing imperfection not as an aesthetic but as a practical reality. His recordings are less concerned with perfection than with capturing the conditions in which they were made.
Looking back on 'Chinese Benefits', however, Johnstone's own assessment is characteristically understated.
"Listening back fully, it's quite a nice record actually. Fair enough, I make them and never really listen again TBH. Even better, it was the last Large Sheet Of Muscle record made on that phone with grit and damaged guts."
Like much of his work, 'Chinese Benefits' offers few fixed meanings. Its titles remain cryptic, its voices partially obscured and its structures deliberately unstable. What emerges instead is a deeply personal document of process over perfection, where the limitations of the tools become inseparable from the music they produce, and where the act of making something matters far more than the conditions in which it was made.
In ,An Iris Crackled Like Eyelids" erkundet Jules Négrier zwei Sätze, zwei innere Momente, die durch die schwebende Zeit eines ,knisternden" Augenlids voneinander getrennt sind. Der erste Satz beginnt, wie eine Geschichte endet - mit einem Ausbruch roher Emotionen -, um dann in eine weite Fläche harmonischer Divergenzen zu münden. Der zweite Satz führt erneut eine Verflechtung aus Rhythmen, Verdrehungen, Abwärts- und Aufwärtsbewegungen ein, um einen paradoxen Raum zu offenbaren, der sich in der Zeit einer ungelösten Beruhigung entfaltet. Indem er auf inspirierte und komplexe Weise Klänge offenlegt, die zugleich durchscheinend und gewunden sind, komponiert Jules Négrier eine geheimnisvolle Musik - eine Musik, die aus den Qualen elektronischer Materie schöpft, aus Formen und Werden, die allmählich in den Bereichen der Einfachheit Fuß fassen. In ,All Solids Melt Into Aether" verwebt Maria W Horn Akkorde, die mit einer bis an ihre Grenzen getriebenen Orgel erzeugt wurden, mit den unerbittlichen Texturen computergenerierter Klänge. Zwischen der extremen, kalten Präzision der elektronischen Töne und der Instabilität der warmen Orgelakkorde, die Druckschwankungen ausgesetzt sind, entfaltet sich ein stilles Drama, aus dem eine komplexe Welt entsteht, die aus harmonischen Zuständen besteht, welche von ihrer Entstehung bis zu ihrem Zusammenbruch eine kraftvolle und ergreifende Metapher hervorrufen und Bilder eines ewigen, urzeitlichen Kampfes heraufbeschwören. Dieser Kampf ist derjenige, der in jedem Augenblick zwischen zwei gegensätzlichen Energien stattfindet: Die eine bildet das Verlangen nach einem stabilen Zustand, sucht ein zerbrechliches Gleichgewicht - eine Energie, die unerbittlich durch die Kräfte der Entropie und des Chaos eingeschränkt und widerlegt wird. In dieser Hinsicht liefert Maria W. Horn mit ,All Solids Melt Into Aether" ein Werk von suggestiver und introspektiver Kraft, das wahrhaft faszinierend ist.
Manchmal beenden Nicole Mitchell und Joe Westerlund gegenseitig ihre Sätze. Genau diese telepathische Verbindung prägt ,Written in the Universe", ein Album, das aus jahrelangen gemeinsamen Auftritten in Durham, North Carolina, entstanden ist. Mitchell - eine international gefeierte Flötistin, Komponistin und ehemalige Vorsitzende der Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) in Chicago - und Westerlund, ein Schlagzeuger, dessen Werk von experimentellem Rock über Jazz bis hin zu elektroakustischer Improvisation reicht, schaffen Musik, die sich gleichzeitig geerdet und weitläufig anfühlt: echo-getränkte, elektronisch geprägte Improvisationen, die von Westerlunds tief verwurzelten Polyrhythmen getragen werden. Das Album wurde an zwei Tagen bei ,Betty's" aufgenommen, einem ländlichen Studio mitten im Wald außerhalb von Chapel Hill, und fängt die Spontaneität einer Live-Performance ein. Anstatt die Aufnahmen durch Overdubs oder umfangreiche Bearbeitung zu verfeinern, hat das Duo die intuitive Energie jedes Takes bewahrt. Die umgebende Landschaft - ihre Wälder, die freie Natur und das Gefühl von Weite - wurde zu einem stillen dritten Mitwirkenden, der den organischen Fluss der Musik subtil prägte. Das Ergebnis ist ein Album, bei dem es mehr um die Entdeckung als um das Ziel geht. Auf ,Written in the Universe" verweben sich Mitchells ausdrucksstarke Flöte und Live-Elektronik mit Westerlunds einfallsreicher Percussion zu einer Musik, die sich in Echtzeit entfaltet und die Zuhörer zu einem gemeinsamen Hörerlebnis einlädt, bei dem spontane Komposition und Intuition untrennbar miteinander verschmelzen.
Tauchen Sie ein in eine faszinierende Welt voller mystischer Klänge, sphärischer Melodien und geheimnisvoller Atmosphären. „Mystic Spirits“ entführt den Hörer auf eine musikalische Reise zwischen Meditation, Mystik und entrückten Klanglandschaften.
Sanfte elektronische Sounds, eindrucksvolle Arrangements und geheimnisvolle Stimmen verbinden sich zu einer außergewöhnlichen Klangwelt, die zum Träumen, Entspannen und Abschalten einlädt. Die Compilation vereint
stimmungsvolle Titel, die eine ganz besondere Atmosphäre zwischen Spiritualität, Fantasy und New Age schaffen.
Mit dabei sind hochkarätige Künstler wie Mike Oldfield, Lesiem und Angelzoom, deren charakteristische Sounds perfekt in das mystische Konzept dieser Zusammenstellung passen. „Mystic Spirits“ – eine musikalische Reise in geheimnisvolle Klangwelten für alle, die außergewöhnliche Musik mit Tiefe und Atmosphäre lieben.
»Breathing Soil« is the third full-length album by Swiss musician and performance artist Elischa Heller. As a member of groups such as Film 2, Beurre, or 222Rn as well as in his live practice as a solo artist and his performances, notions of physical and temporal presence have always informed his multi-genre approach. These two side-long compositions centre around drone music and are both intended as an invitation to listen deeply as they are a product of deep listening itself. Drawing on Heller’s live practice, which aims to create shared social experiences, this music mediates between matter and metaphysics.
»If we recognise that we and the world around us are nothing but vibrations and oscillations, drone music can get in touch with a profound aspect of our ways of being,« says Heller. »It enables us to get in tune with our surroundings and each other.« Hence, resonance serves as the guiding principle of his work. As Heller explains, the title »Breathing Soil« can be read in two ways: As a description of how one breathes in the soil and gets in touch with the Earth through the sound, or that it is the soil itself that resonance, with sound serving as the connective tissue between different forms of being.
»Breathing Soil« relies on radical forms of reduction that treat sound as raw form—as vibrations and oscillations whose subtle acceleration and deceleration can have wide-reaching consequences. Meant to be played on speakers, the subtle shifts in dynamics, timbre, and volume of these two pieces are supposed to resonate with the rooms in which they are played. This music aims to make the things sing.
'AMEN is a word that moves between the sacred and the ordinary, across languages and cultures. An ancient, universal expression, born in prayer yet living beyond it - in daily life, especially in the Italian language, where it has become part of ordinary speech, used to accept, conclude, affirm, and let things be.
'The sixth release on e s p e r p e n t o opens a gateway into a timeless, transcultural dimension through a continuous, immersive sonic flow. While conceived as an intimate listening journey, this record emerged from a shared experience within the walls of Frequenze Studio (Monza). ESPER006 is the result of a three-hour improvised live session that brought together experimental music trio MYS and London-based producer Big Hands.'
Sucata Tapes and Annihaya proudly present Delia, the hypnotic new album by Munda (Selu Herraiz), following up on foundational explorations of ritual and territorial memory.
Recorded in September 2021 during a residency at Konvent—an old convent set within an abandoned industrial colony in Cal Rosal, deep in the lower Catalan Pyrenees—Delia is forged from the physical ghosts of a former textile factory. Within high ceilings, terracotta floors, and walls vibrating with low frequencies, Herraiz captured the remnants of another time: shards of glass, rusted iron, corrugated plastics, and the sonic echoes of a place where hundreds of women once worked the looms.
Using a dynamic microphone placed before the speaker of a battered Yamaha Electone organ with broken keys, Herraiz transformed these industrial ruins, raw materials, and acoustic traces into an immersive electroacoustic journey. Blending primitive textures, analog synthesis, and the deep resonance of territorial history, Delia stands as a profound meditation on memory, space, and alchemic listening.
Following 2024’s Echoes of the Night EP, Michael Hodgson returns with Apply the Dub: four stunning new Adrian Sherwood remixes, this time of his long-running solo project, Misled Convoy.
The EP’s title is a nod to Sherwood’s renowned process in which tracks are not simply remixed, but dismantled, fed into his dub machinery and reimagined. The results are spacious and compelling, epic in scope, rich in detail and loaded with bass.
The prophetic voice of Kat Five (Feral Five) looms large on the opening track, as does Miho Wada’s flute on the last. David “Ital Horns” Fullwood returns to the project, providing trumpet to two of the tunes, while Doug Wimbish (Tack>>Head / Living Colour) adds bass, and Mark Bandola (The Lucy Show) guitar and keys, to a different pair of remixes.
The sessions began in 2025, with the original tracks drawn from the more experimental and industrial side of Misled Convoy, giving Sherwood plenty of room to work with sonically. In his Ramsgate studio, frequencies were pulled apart, bass lines elevated and melodies stretched while sounds disappeared into layers of delay, echo and dub processing before emerging dazed & confused and somewhere else entirely.
Since dub is the compositional glue that fuels Hodgson’s creative dynamic, this collaboration meant reverse engineering his process and stripping his compositions back to the bare bones: “Before we hit the studio, I had to remove a whole lot of my effects to make space for Adrian, which made the track sound empty and super weird, but this is how the magic happens. When you do a remix, you are inviting an artist you respect into your creative process and watch it get reimagined. This is a big part of dub and remix culture.”
Very much a meeting of two complementary approaches to sound, Apply the Dub has Hodgson’s dark and atmospheric electronica enhanced and deeply embellished by Sherwood’s long-established sonic manipulation and dub-mixing.
For Hodgson, the connection with Sherwood and On-U Sound has been life-long, from being a fan in his youth in Aotearoa New Zealand to supporting Patrick Docktor’s archiving of the label’s video and audio collection in London. In 2019 Sherwood invited Hodgson to collaborate with artist Peter Harris to create a visual backdrop to accompany his Time Boom X The Upsetter Dub Sessions tour. Hodgson went on to create videos for On-U’s 40th anniversary celebration at The Forum in London, helped with the immersive 3D Live Dub Experience at Earth Theatre and travelled to Japan for the Collapse of Everything tour where he worked on live video triggering for Sherwood’s shows.
Metabolising 20-plus years gorging on the hardcore continuum, Luke J Murray returns to Sneaker Social Club with the first album under his Liquid DnB-Like Ambient Grime 2 alias. As the first self-titled EP in 2024 demonstrated, with this project Murray applies a hauntological supplement to his life-long diet of rave's codes and signals. These 11 tracks could be embraced as dank bangers in their own right, but the ghostly shroud that lingers is no accident. It's an evocative expression of the hinterland places that frame the pursuit of the dance as much as the energy spikes in front of the bass bins — a diaristic reflection on trudging puddle-peppered streets to find little black doors or staggering home, ears ringing, as dawn comes to chase down the street lights.
Haunted House, Garage & Grime walks the line between atmospheric scene building and straight-up beatdowns with a relaxed swagger. 'The Ginnel In SK4' paints a vivid picture of urban malaise with its bleak synth warps and punk-dub splashes, not a drum sequence in earshot. It's flanked by the Caustic Window-meets-Mark One 'The Flats On Belmont Way' on one side, and low-slung electro-creeper 'Hollywood Park' on the other. As the titles hint, this is music tangibly attached to very specific places locked in Murray's memory — unmistakably UK locations that reflect back the half-hollowed out echoes of late night soundtracks, glancing off red brick and pebble dash concrete at odd angles.
There is space on the album for full-chested amen tear-outs like 'Pete's Gone Mad With The Axe' , but for the most part the mood remains downcast and pensive. The sparse approach affords you space to tangibly hear the (not-so-silent) name-checked rain pattering in the background of 'The Crown Under The Viaduct, While Rainfalls Silently Into The River Mersey' , or imagine the crunch of litter and dead leaves underfoot that snakes its way through minimalist stepper 'Bowerfield Lane, After Dark'.
Murray's vision is sharply realised, and his stated inspirations slot logically into his shelves of ordered ideas drawn from disorderly memories. From Mark Leckey's O' Magic Power Of Bleakness to the Ghost Box records alumni, Hatcha's seminal Dubstep Allstars Vol. 1 and Laura Grace Ford's Savage Messiah book, Haunted House, Garage & Grime is the logical product of a deep thinker making tracks with decades of rave in his bones and the sense that it all means something, even if it's not always clear what.
“These songs were written just before and while in my first stint in rehab at 20 years old. They were recorded about 4 days after I got out. Broke, walking on freshly sober baby giraffe legs, I sold my car and moved back in with my mom to make that recording happen. At a time where I had no direction, the mission of capturing sonically the love that unraveled my heart at that age became my North Star. These songs have sat in the vault for 8 years, and somehow never managed to collect dust. Anytime I’d revisit them, the glow they carried upon conception still shined bright. For years I’ve known there would be a time to let them loose, and that time has finally come. It took nearly a decade of gaining life experience and perspective to truly appreciate the beauty of young love, courage in the face of unknowning at such a formative time in a lifespan, and belief in magic that can break your heart as quickly as it can mend it. I hope these songs can serve as a reminder of the lessons we all learn from early heartbreak and that belief, and even more so, a looking glass at how our hearts are capable of forever expanding to find love that’s true.”
— Briston Maroney
“These songs were written just before and while in my first stint in rehab at 20 years old. They were recorded about 4 days after I got out. Broke, walking on freshly sober baby giraffe legs, I sold my car and moved back in with my mom to make that recording happen. At a time where I had no direction, the mission of capturing sonically the love that unraveled my heart at that age became my North Star. These songs have sat in the vault for 8 years, and somehow never managed to collect dust. Anytime I’d revisit them, the glow they carried upon conception still shined bright. For years I’ve known there would be a time to let them loose, and that time has finally come. It took nearly a decade of gaining life experience and perspective to truly appreciate the beauty of young love, courage in the face of unknowning at such a formative time in a lifespan, and belief in magic that can break your heart as quickly as it can mend it. I hope these songs can serve as a reminder of the lessons we all learn from early heartbreak and that belief, and even more so, a looking glass at how our hearts are capable of forever expanding to find love that’s true.”
— Briston Maroney
Limited edition LP Marbled coloured vinyl in mirror board sleeve 180g marble coloured vinyl. Packaged in a heavy weight 350gsm CMYK-printed mirror board silver reflective outer sleeve with a 170gsm inner sleeve. High gloss finish on both the outer and inner sleeves. the freshly minted label NANOQ is proud to announce a new album by david sylvian titled 'the distance between the killer and the killing' it's the first album sylvian has released in 15 years. composed of sessions recorded between 2012 - 2025, the album is based on recomposed improvisational sessions with a variety of artists ranging from otomo yoshihide, ryuichi sakamoto, bilianna voutchkova and miako klein, to jamie drouin, lance austin olson and more. the 46min instrumental is unlike anything tackled by sylvian before and is seen by sylvian himself as the official follow up to his 2009 album 'manafon'. in pauline nadrigny's essay on the album, she describes something of the listening experience. '... voices surge that belong to no one in particular. One that hoots and hums across a violin, worked until it loses its voice, becomes mere matter among other matter. A voice inside the breath of a clarinet or a recorder. Grunts, gurgles, distant cries, somewhere between man and bird, woman and nuthatch. Fragments of choirs, far off, snatches of a song long since lost. Too far to be recovered.' 'What a remarkable piece of work. At times it feels like listening to a symphony; at others, as though (sylvian's) voice is speaking through the music. At first, I was trying to find my own sound, but somewhere along the way I completely forgot about that and became utterly absorbed in the music. Hearing Ryuichi's presence emerge here and there throughout the piece also brings a very special feeling for me. Thank you for creating something so extraordinary.' otomo yoshihide 2026
the freshly minted label NANOQ is proud to announce a new album by david sylvian titled 'the distance between the killer and the killing' it's the first album sylvian has released in 15 years. composed of sessions recorded between 2012 - 2025, the album is based on recomposed improvisational sessions with a variety of artists ranging from otomo yoshihide, ryuichi sakamoto, bilianna voutchkova and miako klein, to jamie drouin, lance austin olson and more. the 46min instrumental is unlike anything tackled by sylvian before and is seen by sylvian himself as the official follow up to his 2009 album 'manafon'. in pauline nadrigny's essay on the album, she describes something of the listening experience. '... voices surge that belong to no one in particular. One that hoots and hums across a violin, worked until it loses its voice, becomes mere matter among other matter. A voice inside the breath of a clarinet or a recorder. Grunts, gurgles, distant cries, somewhere between man and bird, woman and nuthatch. Fragments of choirs, far off, snatches of a song long since lost. Too far to be recovered.' 'What a remarkable piece of work. At times it feels like listening to a symphony; at others, as though (sylvian's) voice is speaking through the music. At first, I was trying to find my own sound, but somewhere along the way I completely forgot about that and became utterly absorbed in the music. Hearing Ryuichi's presence emerge here and there throughout the piece also brings a very special feeling for me. Thank you for creating something so extraordinary.' otomo yoshihide 2026
Flowgeist emerges from a shared inquiry into sound and aesthetics. Genre remains peripheral; meaning stays tethered to sensation. The self-titled debut, released on Evighet Records (EVIGHET007), follows that logic across a full record, moving from matter to memory and giving passing states somewhere to stay. Trip Hop, Drum and Bass, post-punk, breakbeat, EBM, Techno and modular electronics all surface within it, summoned only where a feeling demands them, with acoustic instruments retaining their grain inside the electronic frame. The A side keeps its instruments close and its focus intimate, opening on "Molecules," where Zainab J Lascandri's voice and Arthur Boudet's guitar set the album's tone before it moves through cycles that won't break: a life stuck in place, a trust already gone bu14t still being tended, an attraction whose charm thins out under repetition. That inward attention eventually turns outward, closing the side on a colder note about how influence gets performed and mistaken for substance. The B side works through broken rhythm and cinematic scale. It examines political language for the seams in its polish, follows a relationship reduced to proximity without real contact, and rises to the record's most forceful club passage before settling into "Crystal Muse," where Massimo Capobianco's guitar moves alongside an extended modular passage, luminous and unhurried. The album closes by turning its attention to composition itself, treating the act of writing music as a way of holding onto experience before it disappears. Across both sides, the record travels from immediate, bodily feeling toward something more contemplative, carrying the same emotional attention from private entanglement into wider systems and finally into the quiet work of making the record itself.
On its latest album »Music For Air«, the Berlin-based interdisciplinary duo Gamut Inc explores new possibilities of the computer-controlled pipe organ — from hypervirtuoso excess to nuanced automation and rhythms beyond the fixed grid. Composed and recorded during a two-week residency in Toulouse, the pieces move between harmony and noise, conjuring a euphorically intoxicating maelstrom of overlapping, accelerating sound.
Gamut Inc’s work with the computer-controlled organ actually began in 2009 with a commission from ON – Neue Musik Köln for the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter — at a time when few congregations were ready to open their instruments to this kind of work. When the duo of Marion Wörle and Maciej Śledziecki officially founded the ensemble in 2013 as an interdisciplinary project, they first developed their own music machines with instrument builder Gerhard Kern, returning to the organ in 2018 when more churches and venues had opened their doors … and Gamut Inc carried their practice across Europe and beyond, developing AGGREGATE (first a concert series and then an annual festival) into a platform dedicated to organ music of the 21st century.
Sharpening a critique of mechanisation, digitality, and the human in between, the project is conceived around the construction of pre-modern instruments and the control of these instruments by contemporary technologies, resulting in an aesthetic that bridges the very old and the very new. Recent works include the human-machine trilogy »Over The Edge Club« (2021), »Rossum’s Universal Robots« (2022), and »Zeroth Law« (2023, performed at Deutsche Oper Berlin with the RIAS Chamber Choir and the Logos Robot Orchestra), and »Black Square« (2025), a wind-dynamic modular organ built by Tony Decap, inaugurated at CTM Festival and broadcast on Deutschlandfunk Kultur and SWR Kultur. Their organ installation AGGREGAT#10, commissioned by Sónar Festival, was acquired for the permanent collection of Palau Güell Barcelona in 2022.
Gamut Inc’s latest album »Music For Air« was composed and recorded during a two-week residency in Toulouse on the wind-dynamic organ »L’Explorateur«, with individually computer-controlled wind pressure per pipe. The seven pieces move between harmony and noise, conjuring a euphorically intoxicating maelstrom of overlapping, accelerating sound and again exploring new possibilities of the computer-controlled pipe organ — from hypervirtuoso excess to nuanced automation and rhythms beyond the fixed grid. Sensual and ecstatic.
Greer delivers a hyper textural masterclass in experimental sound design through their debut album, 'Seven Wise Dogs Bless You With Their Kindness'. Originally hailing from Meanjin, a scene known for outstanding musical output and consistently interesting variety, Greer has brought this spirit into Naarm's musical landscape with careful consideration and style. Organic entities meet machine rumbles, from tense drone hums to easing ambient soundscapes. Greer navigates these territories in a way that feels uncharted and perfectly at home with Oomycota.
London-based French artist, composer and vocalist Vanessa Bedoret returns with her second
album, About Time, released via Scenic Route.
Across 11 tracks, About Time moves between intimate vocal-led songs, glitching electronics haunting soundscapes and moments of catharsis. Bedoret’s classical training remains at the heart of the record, underpinning an approach that brings together spectral vocals, strings, guitar and experimental electronics with a striking sense of compositional clarity.
Written through a period of significant change in Bedoret’s life, the album explores transition and our shifting perception of time - how some moments disappear almost instantly while others seem to stretch indefinitely.
About Time follows Bedoret’s 2024 debut Eyes and marks a significant step forward for an artist whose work moves fluidly between classical composition, experimental electronics and songwriting. Alongside her solo work, Bedoret has collaborated with Astrid Sonne, Blackhaine , Space Afrika and Mark William Lewis.
stray dogs is the second full-length album from the Finnish electronic duo Shepherd’s Call. Released on the BELOW0 label, the project blends moody, emotional ambient textures with experimental club beats and live cello arrangements. This physical edition is pressed on heavy 180g black vinyl and features exclusive vocal dub tracks on Side B with guest spots from 3NDLES5, Merely, and Glayden.
Budapest based concept label Blue Sun arrives with the 3rd edition of their annual VA series, showcasing a colorful taste of the local underground music scene, with some international sidenotes.
Following up on the label’s customs, the 19-track selection is not only released digitally, but also on a limited 200-piece cassette series. Curated by the label heads, the tracks follow Blue Sun's listening-oriented concept without genre restrictions with downtempo, trip-hop, jazz, dub, balearic, ambient, experimental, and electronica as highlights, with pieces that are more difficult to classify.
As before, instead of the usual A-B markings, the two sides are divided by the label's colors: “ORANGE” contains more organic and high-energy music, while “BLUE” contains more pensive and experimental tracks. Moreover, the selection has been carefully curated so that it can be listened to as an endless loop: the end of a side always resonates with the beginning of the other, wherever the listener begins.
The list of contributing artists this year are truly various and just as impressive. From uniqe debuting local artists to internationally recognised performers, it gives a taste of how the Hungarian underground scene sounds like atm. Important to note, that the release marks another debut: the label’s new visual identity by Blue Sun’s new designer, Péter Tóth.
The open skies of Ochre's new album, Oversail, replace the dense canopies of his last, Understory back in 2020. This time, UK-born, Netherlands-based talent Christopher Leary trades rhythmic intricacy for something more exposed and reflective on a record that unfolds in measured steps, with each passage revealing fragile melodies set against sparse, shifting frameworks. There's a tactile quality to the sound design, hardware elements clicking and sighing like ageing machinery still in motion. Tracks feel suspended and the focus is on slow revelation across the quietly affecting 'Casadastra', airy beauty of 'Meristem' and hopeful synth sequencing of 'Canthropa.'
Three late works by Éliane Radigue, composed in intimate dialogue with singular instrumental voices Charles Curtis and Dafne Vicente-Sandoval, reveal the extraordinary technical control and sensitivity required to realize Radigue’s radically reduced sonic language. Presented here for the first time on LP, these works stand as a landmark document of the composer’s late acoustic practice, where microscopic shifts in tone, texture, and resonance become the music itself.
Éliane Radigue (composer)
Dafne Vicente-Sandoval (bassoon)
Charles Curtis (cello)
In 2023, Kraków-based composer Martyna Basta and Los Angeles-based sound artist claire rousay were invited to Poland by Unsound for a short residency, where they spent a few days trading ideas and concepts, and brainstorming their first collaboration. Initially motivated to create lengthy, expansive pieces together, they also ended up experimenting with shorter vignettes, and ‘hotel room’ expresses these two extremes, featuring three long-form tracks and three brief, euphoric songs. “It wasn’t something we specifically planned,” explains Basta. “It just unfolded that way.” The most important stage of the process, however, was the period that followed the residency, when rousay and Basta began working on their sketches in isolation, trading drafts and sculpting the sounds independently before rousay handled the final mixdown. In the comfort of their own bedrooms, they were better able to reflect their individual creative routines, organically reaching a junction where their music felt truly unified. Even while they were in Poland, the duo joked that it might have been easier if they’d been holed up in separate rooms emailing each other.
Both artists have had an energetic few years: after steadily building a reputation for her diaristic and candid concrète experiments, rousay signed to Thrill Jockey in 2023, releasing the acclaimed ‘sentiment’, ‘a little death’ and the more eaze collaboration ‘no floor’; Basta, meanwhile, followed up 2023’s hallucinatory ‘Slowly Forgetting, Barely Remembering’ and her debut for Belgium’s Stroom imprint, ‘Diaries Beneath Fragile Glass’ with a studio album on !K7’s 7K sublabel: ‘Winged in Collapse’. The title of their collaboration reflects rousay and Basta’s hectic touring schedules in the wake of these releases, the constant feeling of displacement and the emotions that emerge when the environment is in flux. “I know we aren’t the only musicians traveling and creating work at the same time,” says rousay, “but being able to speak about that experience and all the things that come with it was comforting.” And the music itself, assembled from hypnagogic field recordings, spectral voices, electronics and filtered instrumental improvisations, sounds bewitchingly unmoored, not tied to a specific location but hovering around the uncanny space in-between.
Scratchy ASMR sounds introduce us to the opening track ‘zoom’, initially obscuring the duo’s elegiac harmonies. They are careful to let the various elements evolve at their own pace, with the fictile guitar drones melting into the foreground while Basta’s dissociated whispers and rousay’s illusory synths pick out the subtlest subliminal shades. It all builds to the piece’s dramatic third act, when layered chords ring out like organ blasts, enveloping the negative space. The shorter, more anxiety-provoking ‘denim’ is remarkably divergent, a dismantled folk memory pieced together from skeletal piano notes, vaporous choral echoes, haunting string plucks and pulsating feedback. Where the music aligns is in the mood itself, capturing a feeling that’s neither completely abstract nor fully referential. Not ambient exactly, ‘hotel room’ is a suite of soundscapes that gesture towards structure while repeatedly folding in on themselves.
On ‘Lost and Found’, wordless Autotuned ad-libs spiral around delicate guitar plucks and washing waves, coalescing into a faded Polaroid of opiated Americana, and on ‘Where Are You Now’, operatic squeals and corroded orchestral scrapes are juxtaposed with nauseous low-end tones. Evaporating until only industrial whirrs and music box chimes remain, the latter encapsulates the entire album’s chilling liminality, smudging saturated voices with casual electro-acoustic interjections before it erupts abruptly, transforming into a dense, pitch-skewed hymn. ‘hotel room’ plays like a surreal travelogue, teasing listeners with airy familiarities as it humidifies dry, awkward spaces. More a labyrinth of catacombs than a single, fixed chamber, it’s Escher-like – cryptic and seductive – and decked out with personal asides and intimate details that reward the most patient, curious listeners.
Tara Cunningham’s guitar glitch miniatures draw patterns in negative space on new mini-album Warm Ground. Operating predominantly within improvisational and experimental music, guitarist Tara Cunningham has developed a discrete sonic language that reveals the full textural and timbral range of her instrument.
Marking a new chapter for Cunningham that builds on her solo debut, Almost – Not Exactly, released on Non Classical in 2025, Warm Ground unfolds across seven compelling instrumental dialogues - each a conversation of rhythms and found sounds, syncopated and juxtaposed, open to encounter.
Implied by the title of first single ‘Following a Thought’, Cunningham weaves an exploratory melody into the spaces between field recordings. At once introspective and highly relational, each track ushers the listener into a world of different scales, seeking beauty and meaning in the everyday, from the discrete mechanisms of ‘Fridgelight’ to the delicately unhinged organism of ‘Flying Ant Day’.
Cunningham finds a natural home on Odda’s roster of artists sensitive to the details of their materials and surroundings, finding kinship alongside the intimate songcraft of Kirk Barley and Fohn in the gaps between composition and improvisation.
In 2026 she released a self-titled LP as The Sleeves with Jack Cooper, performing at Cafe Oto ahead of a US tour in the autumn. She continues to pursue a range of projects as collaborator and side person with Modern Nature, Sebastian Rochford, Red Snapper, Liam Noble, Laura Jurd and Caius Williams.
A collection by Peruvian visual artist Jonathan Castro between 2024-26 at home studios while living in Amsterdam, then Rotterdam, NL. The compositions were made using various synthesizers, samplers, electronic percussion, congas, and an array of effects pedals. Knackered out salsas, looped up and chucked down into a custom dub chamber.
Limpe Fuchs performs a live improvised score to an almost-lost silent western action film in a darkened Brussels theatre, continuing the tradition of the silent film pianist. Intimate and poetic: moonlight, projected images reflecting on the audience's faces, and a family connection (her grandfather once played violin for silent films) make this a uniquely personal recording.
Easily one of the strangest, most quietly influential archives to surface in years. Padesip is bedroom-built electronics that still sounds like the future we were promised but quietly cancelled, rewiring decades of DIY history and daring you to keep up.
Intervals of waiting, in the in-between mind, strumming a keyboard as if for the first time. From sample to simple, child to child, womblike cocoon when awake, the world crumbling at night. They "dream the dream forward", these lullabies.
Die Musik auf Horse Lords' "Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive!" wirkt zugleich unglaublich detailliert und zutiefst menschlich. Die zwölf versammelten Stücke sind vielschichtig, verflochten, tonal und rhythmisch komplex - moiré-artige Muster aus Interaktion und Verzahnung, die sich sowohl körperlich als auch geistig entfalten, voller klanglicher Gänge mit einem unausweichlichen Groove. Künstler sind nicht notwendigerweise Wissenschaftler, Logiker oder spirituelle Führer, doch durch ihr persönliches Verständnis von Ordnung und Erfahrung eröffnen sie einen unmittelbaren Zugang zu gesteigerten Zuständen von Materialität und Immaterialität. Horse Lords wurden 2010 in Baltimore gegründet; sie gingen aus einer anderen Gruppe namens Teeth Mountain hervor und starteten als Trio mit Gitarrist Owen Gardner, Bassist Max Eilbacher und Schlagzeuger Sam Haberman, bevor der Altsaxofonist Andrew Bernstein zum Kernensemble hinzustieß. Obwohl das Quartett aus einer fruchtbaren Noise- und Experimental-Rock-Szene hervorgegangen ist - einem legendären Umfeld für Künstler und Außenseiter, das viele einflussreiche Bands hervorgebracht hat (Lungfish, Matmos) - war ihr Ansatz über sechs Alben, zahlreiche Kollaborationen und als gefeierte Liveband weit vielseitiger, als es die punktierten Rhythmen instrumentaler elektrischer Rockmusik vermuten lassen. Für dieses Projekt wird die Band durch Bassklarinettistin Madison Greenstone, Posaunist Weston Olencki und - erstmals bei Horse Lords - durch Gesang von Nina Guo und Evelyn Saylor ergänzt. Das Eröffnungsstück ,Eureka 378-B" ist ein Arrangement von sakraler Harfenmusik aus dem 19. Jahrhundert, getragen vom Gesang von Guo und Saylor; seine Melodie entfaltet sich weit und setzt einen tonalen Startpunkt für vieles, was folgt. Dazu kommen die kurzen "Rotations", die Fragmente aus anderen Stücken isolieren. "D2BT2HA!" enthält unzählige klangliche und konzeptuelle Schichten, doch angesichts der unverkennbaren Kraft und Menschlichkeit der Musik ist der Prozess, sie zu entschlüsseln, begeisternd und zutiefst lohnend. Selten ist eine Platte, die einen so unmittelbar packt und zugleich bei jedem Hören vollkommen neu erscheint.
On the Ifness ist das gemeinsame Projekt von Sean McGuinness (Pissed Jeans) und Mike Petillo (Protect-U, Geo Rip). Auf ihrem zweiten Album verbindet das Duo experimentelle Elektronik, psychedelische Klanglandschaften und hypnotische Rhythmen zu einem atmosphärischen, nächtlichen Sound. Musikalisch bewegt sich ,On the Ifness" zwischen Ambient, Jazz-Fusion, Dub, elektronischer Clubmusik und den sogenannten ,Fourth World"-Klängen von Jon Hassell. Organische Percussion, Synthesizer, Drones und improvisatorische Elemente verschmelzen zu vielschichtigen Kompositionen, die zugleich rhythmisch, meditativ und futuristisch wirken. Unterstützt wird das Album unter anderem von Geologist (Animal Collective) sowie weiteren Gästen aus der experimentellen Musikszene.
Brussels composer and organist Sander De Keere debuts on Phantom Limb with evocative, elegant new works for solo church organ The Manual Stop, mosaicking patterns of minimalism, IDM, electronic, and sacred music with utmost symbiosis and reverence for the instrument. Recorded entirely on a centuries-old Contius baroque organ at the historic St. Catharina Church in the town of Wondelgem (Ghent, Belgium), The Manual Stop is described by Sander De Keere as “an homage to the organ’s ancient craftsmanship and sonic experiment in itself.” While remaining in keen veneration to the instrument, its heritage, and its spiritual gravitas, De Keere’s works employ the church organ as the centrepiece of a broad compositional superstructure coloured by the influence of many contrasting music.
Sleepytime Gorilla Museum wurden 1999 gegründet und verbinden seitdem experimentellen Rock, Avantgarde, Theater und Performance-Kunst zu einem einzigartigen Gesamterlebnis. Entstanden aus den Bands Idiot Flesh und Charming Hostess, entwickelte die Gruppe einen ebenso präzisen wie chaotisch wirkenden Stil, der musikalische Komplexität mit spektakulären Live-Auftritten verbindet. Die nun erstmals in den USA auf Vinyl erhältliche Neuauflage ihres Debütalbums wurde von Bassist Dan Rathbun remastert und erscheint parallel zu weiteren Wiederveröffentlichungen aus dem Katalog der Band. Mit ihrer aktuellen Besetzung knüpfen Sleepytime Gorilla Museum an ihre lange Geschichte an und zeigen, warum sie bis heute zu den ungewöhnlichsten und einflussreichsten Bands zwischen Avant-Rock, Progressive Rock und experimenteller Musik zählen.
,In Glorious Times", das dritte Album von Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, verbindet avantgardistischen Rock, experimentelle Kompositionen und theatralische Elemente zu einem ebenso komplexen wie mitreißenden Werk. Inhaltlich kreist das Album um Transformation, Chaos und die ständigen Veränderungen des Lebens, die sich in ebenso dramatischen wie humorvollen Songs widerspiegeln. Die nun erstmals in den USA auf Vinyl erscheinende, von Dan Rathbun remasterte Neuauflage würdigt eines der zentralen Werke der Band. Mit ihrer einzigartigen Mischung aus Progressive Rock, Avantgarde und Performance-Kunst festigen Sleepytime Gorilla Museum hier ihren Ruf als eine der außergewöhnlichsten Experimental-Bands ihrer Generation.
Das zweite Album von Sleepytime Gorilla Museum entstand zwischen 2002 und 2004 und spiegelt die politisch und gesellschaftlich aufgewühlte Zeit nach der Jahrtausendwende wider. Die Band verarbeitete diese Eindrücke in ihrem charakteristischen Mix aus Avant-Rock, experimenteller Komposition und theatralischer Intensität. Während der Entstehung stieß Schlagzeuger Matthias Bossi zur Band und prägte den Sound maßgeblich mit. Ein Höhepunkt des Albums ist der Song ,Phthisis", der in einem Studio in den Hollywood Hills aufgenommen wurde und zu den bekanntesten Stücken der Band zählt. Die nun erstmals in den USA auf Vinyl erhältliche Neuauflage wurde von Bassist und Produzent Dan Rathbun remastert und unterstreicht den Stellenwert des Albums als eines der zentralen Werke im Katalog von Sleepytime Gorilla Museum.
Following their self-proclaimed LP trilogy (2020-2024), Straw Man Army returns with a new songwriting experiment in the form of True North; a collection of 11 songs written for acoustic instruments over three 72 hour sessions at a cabin, isolated in the woods north of NYC. The result is a concept album in practice as opposed to subject alone. Attuned to both the spiritual and political dimensions of seeking refuge in our times, it asks what exactly we mean by “peace” in this era of increasing violence, incarceration, and skepticism towards a future worth living. Does it feel like relaxation, does it tend towards silence? Is it the cooling of our collective rage? Not here. On True North, peace is a spiritual contradiction; a chimera incorporating our innermost desires and the brutality of the world that surrounds us. The album’s central character is a “sleepwalker” trudging through the waking nightmares that have defined daily life since the release of 2024’s Earthworks. Because True North is music that dreams. Sonically, the band toys with the aesthetics of psychedelia, folk, and kosmiche music for contrast, creating a still pool into which their deepest anxieties ripple and flow and flower into ever darker shapes. And while the musical palette plays on tropes of peace—lush piano instrumentals, fingerpicking guitars, gong, vocal harmony—the subject remains steeped in environmental collapse, death, mental breakdown, and the rejection of our most closely held myths. The clash of these forces is the engine that turns the musical wheel. True North is the sound of music mourning a future that never took place and a bout of anticipatory grief for something that’s only just begun…
A quiet intensity permeates Chantal Michelle’s music, like a veiled flame. Even at its most spare and delicate, an undulating tension unsettles the ear through wavering microtonal interference and uncanny spatial juxtaposition. She takes seriously the mandate of the composer to foster new relationships between various types of sounds, bringing together disparate field recordings, instrumental stems, and the sounds of circuitry in unheard configurations. Resolution is elusive, in its place a sense of oblong cyclicality and prickly uncertainty. When the veil is pulled back, we find more depth, more complexity, and more mystery.
Unit of Heart, Michelle’s second album of 2026, presents two interrelated pieces that highlight diverging compositional modes. Here she brings in two key collaborators: Patrick Shiroishi, who contributes flutes and saxophones throughout, and poet Funto Omojola, whose words and voice bookend the title composition. Both compositions unfold gradually, but where the album’s a-side “Sudden Oceans” presents a minimal tonal palette focused entirely on the subtle grain of wind instruments, “Unit of Heart” proceeds linearly, moving through passages of synthesizer, environmental recordings, and full-cheeked wails of saxophone. Both encourage a state of focused listening as the scope of the music deepens and widens.
“Sudden Oceans” allows the listener to hover in rippling currents of air, breath overlapping breath in a shimmering patchwork. All flutes and saxophones on the piece are played by Shiroishi, which are molded by Michelle into a pattern that resembles the flow of tidal waters, surging and receding moment to moment as the tonal density increases. Expansive and recursive, it reflects both the restorative awe and eerie disquiet of encountering the sublime. The first and last sounds we hear are the gentle rush of unmediated breath as Shiroishi connects and disconnects from his flute.
Michelle’s skill at presenting the familiar as preternatural comes to the fore on “Unit of Heart, ” one of her most ambitious works. Omojola’s voice begins with a melody that could be a lullaby, but as it’s bounced around the stereo field it takes on a haunted quality. Their poem, reprinted on the LP’s inner sleeve, hints at a similar type of transformation: “I mean this is where our mouth turns saliva into spears only a throat can recognize. ” Pads of downy synthesizer billow and are subsumed by a discordant ringing. The climactic section features atonal electronics and field recordings, first of water and then the evening call of insects, processed in such a way to transform them into pulsating bursts of noise. What we think we know about the world, what is elemental, can change with even the slightest adjustment of the lens.
Coil’s 17-minute soundtrack for »How to Destroy Angels«, performed on January 19, 1984: ritual music ›for the accumulation of male sexual energy‹, structured around magickal and numerological concepts.
Throughout history man has made and used music for two distinct and separate purposes. In recent years, particularly since the advent of sound recording, the most popular use of music has been for entertainment - the temporary amusement and distraction of as large a number as possible. As a consequence, many people tend to overlook its more fundamental and ancient use as a tool for affecting man's body and spirit. The many varieties of religious music from around the world contain a vast quantity of clues to the way in which sound can affect the physical and mental state of the serious listener, yet many find their associations with religion itself too difficult a stigma to overlook in their appreciation of the sound and its potential, for its own sake.
On this record, hopefully the first in a series, we have tried to produce sound which has a real, practical and beneficial power in this modern Era. Specifically, it is intended as an accumulator of male sexual energy. Although we make neither claims nor rules for its use, we do suggest that for maximum potency it should only be played in circumstances that exclusively male and/or onanistic in nature. What these are is entirely up to you.
The execution of the piece was structured around concepts we felt would work for us - in this case magickal and numerological rather than conventionally musical in form. One image or symbol which we drew upon that may be useful to bear in mind is that of Mars, often indicated by the male symbol.
Should this music have any power, over and above the banal and transitory titillation achieved by most records available now, it is a positive and beneficial power to be used and controlled by the listener, as he desires.
Coil’s 17-minute soundtrack for »How to Destroy Angels«, performed on January 19, 1984: ritual music ›for the accumulation of male sexual energy‹, structured around magickal and numerological concepts.
Throughout history man has made and used music for two distinct and separate purposes. In recent years, particularly since the advent of sound recording, the most popular use of music has been for entertainment - the temporary amusement and distraction of as large a number as possible. As a consequence, many people tend to overlook its more fundamental and ancient use as a tool for affecting man's body and spirit. The many varieties of religious music from around the world contain a vast quantity of clues to the way in which sound can affect the physical and mental state of the serious listener, yet many find their associations with religion itself too difficult a stigma to overlook in their appreciation of the sound and its potential, for its own sake.
On this record, hopefully the first in a series, we have tried to produce sound which has a real, practical and beneficial power in this modern Era. Specifically, it is intended as an accumulator of male sexual energy. Although we make neither claims nor rules for its use, we do suggest that for maximum potency it should only be played in circumstances that exclusively male and/or onanistic in nature. What these are is entirely up to you.
The execution of the piece was structured around concepts we felt would work for us - in this case magickal and numerological rather than conventionally musical in form. One image or symbol which we drew upon that may be useful to bear in mind is that of Mars, often indicated by the male symbol.
Should this music have any power, over and above the banal and transitory titillation achieved by most records available now, it is a positive and beneficial power to be used and controlled by the listener, as he desires.
The songs of Jules de Corte are condensed, folky gems with an almost effortless charm. Poised between the intimate and the universal, between lightness and darkness, they touch on religion, love, loss, and the small dramas of everyday life. Yet they resist easy translation. Packed with wordplay, de Corte’s signature alliterations, humor, and local cultural references, the songs inevitably lose something in another language. Still, when a Belgian quartet of improvisers takes them on, joined by American songwriter Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, the songs are reborn rather than merely transposed: literal fidelity gives way to interpretation, and what is lost in words is often gained in spirit.
Even without tracing every change, their overall effect is fascinating. Songs are slowed down, often doubled in length, and filled with unexpected musical intrusions. They gain fuller arrangements and are placed in an entirely new context. Replacing de Corte’s piano with guitar can create a radically different vibe, as in “Mariska.” An added solo can heighten the contrast between childlike perspective and the almost matter- of-fact brutality of “Little Anita.” In “The Stranger,” another use of contrast unsettles the everyday harmony, transforming it with a subtle, disorienting twist.
Ultimately, these performances show that interpretation is not successful simply because it is literal. With the groundwork laid by Linus, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy further liberated the songs from their original versions. Lyrics and melodies become malleable, shaped by his recognizable cadences, timbre, and personal quirks. Like his collaborators, he allows himself the freedom to bend the material to his own approach. There is no radical break between this performance and his other records. Listeners familiar with the originals may be puzzled at first; for those new to de Corte, it is a wholly different experience.
Does it really matter that the original “Little Jesus, Mighty God” is a 100-second nugget combining playful naivete with biblical fervor? In the hands of these five explorers, the song becomes an intriguing contemplation, with subtle musical shades and a recitation in which every syllable carries a maturity that offers a new perspective. Then there is “The Outsider,” which feels as genuine as any original American folk song. The musicians’ process is more than reinterpretation—it is reimagination, bringing new musical compatibility and emotional depth. Whether that depth was there from the start, waiting to be uncovered, or created in the process is beside the point. What matters is that Linus and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy have made the essence of these songs their own, paying homage yet dancing to their own tune.
Linus is the Belgian duo of guitarist and banjo player Ruben Machtelinckx and reedist and synthesiser player Thomas Jillings. Across five previous albums — Onland (2014), Linus + Skarbø / Leroux (2015), Felt Like Old language at the crossroads of folk, jazz, minimalism, chamber music and free improvisation. Their music is adventurous, shaped by a particular sensitivity to texture, timbre and the subtle interaction between musicians.
What began as a duo gradually grew into a flexible musical world, bringing Linus together with musicians such as Nils Økland, Ingar Zach, Niels Van Heertum, Øyvind Skarbø and Frederik Leroux. Yet each new constellation has remained recognisably Linus: music in which carefully considered forms leave space for intuition, interaction and the unexpected.
For their sixth album, Linus takes a new step by moving into the world of song and text. Inspired by a shared love for the late Dutch songwriter Jules De Corte, the album is a reimagining of De Corte’s unique repertoire. More than simply interpreting De Corte’s songs, they absorb and reshape them, bringing them into dialogue with their own musical language. In keeping with this open approach, they are joined by celebrated vocalist Bonnie “Prince” Billy. With albums such as 1999’s I See a Darkness appearing on several greatest album lists, Bonnie “Prince” Billy is a cult figure in the alternative folk scene, and his highly intuitive way of singing seamlessly matches the subtle interplay Linus has developed over more than a decade.
,BETHLEHEM" ist eine Zusammenarbeit, die über Grenzen hinweg entstanden ist, die nicht überschritten werden konnten. Das Stück vereint die Stimme von Lawrence Sammour - der seit mehr als fünf Jahrzehnten den Chor der Geburtskirche leitet - mit der elektroakustischen Sprache der Beiruter Komponisten Sary Moussa und Abed Kobeissy. Entstanden als Reaktion auf die Entscheidung der Geburtskirche, die Weihnachtsfeierlichkeiten während des Völkermords in Gaza auszusetzen, verwandelt das Werk traditionelle liturgische Hymnen in eine weitläufige und tief bewegende Komposition, in der Stimme, Elektronik, Buzuq und Atmosphäre ohne Hierarchie nebeneinander existieren. Weder Neuinterpretation noch Bewahrung - ,BETHLEHEM" ist ein Akt des Zuhörens über Entfernungen hinweg: ein Werk der Trauer, das auf der fortbestehenden Präsenz von kulturellem Gedächtnis, Hingabe und menschlicher Verbundenheit besteht.
,Every Martyr Is A Universe" ist das Constellation-Debüt des palästinensisch-kanadischen Gitarristen, Komponisten und Community-Organisators Bilal Nasser. Das Album entstand während der studentischen Protestbewegungen gegen den Krieg in Gaza und setzt sich mit der Frage auseinander, welche Bedeutung Kunst in Zeiten von Gewalt, Verlust und politischer Krise haben kann. Daraus entwickelt Nasser eine musikalische Reflexion über Trauer, Solidarität, Erinnerung und Widerstand. Bekannt für seine Verbindung von klassischer Gitarre, Folk-Traditionen und zeitgenössischen Einflüssen erweitert Nasser auf diesem Album seinen bisherigen Solosound erstmals um ein größeres Ensemble. Gemeinsam mit neun Musikerinnen und Musikern aus seinem kreativen Umfeld in Windsor, Ontario, schuf er vielschichtige Arrangements für Streicher, Bläser, Elektronik und Gitarren, die dem Album eine orchestrale und zugleich intime Atmosphäre verleihen. Das Ergebnis ist ein tiefgründiges, emotionales und ambitioniertes Werk, das klassische Komposition, Folk, Post-Rock und experimentelle Klänge miteinander verbindet. ,Every Martyr Is A Universe" ist zugleich persönliches Statement und kollektiver Ausdruck von Erinnerung, Hoffnung und Widerstandskraft.
After some years of (non)hiatus, Contagious are back with a new album that
furthers the evolution of their uncompromising sound. The album features the high
caliber talents of guests: Valentina Magaletti, Sofia Jernberg and Andrea Belfi.
“Being” is conceived around the different activities pursued by the band since the
release of their first (self-titled) album. Members: Sabine Erklenz, Andrea
Neumann and Mieko Suzuki have been concentrating on performing, composing
and organizing their own event series “Partners in Crime” at Morphine Raum,
Berlin.
This series is an ongoing process of inviting musicians to collaborate, share
and record new material - unrestricted by genre or anything else. It was during
these sessions, “Being" was conceived and recorded. Inspired by the wide range
of lifeforms found in nature, the track titles are once again dedicated to species
that challenge binary notions of sex.
The album conveys the band’s brutal approach to improvised processing - tense
buildups, powerful grooves and delicate release. Contagious’ signature sound
very much suits the wild vocal extensions by Sofia Jernberg, obsessive drum
patterns by Valentina Magaletti and the Moondog-esque, hypnotic percussion of
Andrea Belfi, all of whom offer powerful contributions to a tracks on the LP.
The overall result is a blissful and loving punch in the stomach
'Kiliae is a collection of pieces that tell the story of a homecoming. It is a cohesive narrative that captures the feeling of what a home can be, drawing its inspiration from life in that place itself - life that has now become something different after having lived in foreign places for an extended period of time.
'Kiliae captures a certain atmosphere, a feeling that has built up during countless walks and bike commutes in and around the city of Kiel.'
Devotional and visceral, patient and euphoric, a poem, a hymnal. Shygirl calls Swallow! a reintroduction. Her 2022 debut Nymph announced an artist fluent in sonic languages: slippery club structures, toothy pop hooks, juicy production—music that invites you to come closer, pay attention, keep up. That magnetism took her from the electronic underground to the foreground of contemporary pop. She’s collaborated with producers Sega Bodega and Mura Masa, Charli xcx, Arca, SOPHIE, fka twigs, and Björk, and performed on stages across the globe. Swallow! is a new kind of rapturous indie songwriting, woven through the electronica she came from, recorded with Karma Kid and Casey MQ. It is the scripture of the cult of falling in love—radiant, clear-eyed, all-encompassing, divine transformation. “I want people to remember how big the world is even when you feel so small and singular,” she says. “Swallow! is the soundtrack to that experience. “This record is my message in a bottle. Let’s see who picks it up.”
Another Day on Earth (2005) was Brian Eno’s first song-based album since Nerve Net in1992, and remains one of his most acclaimed solo records. It featured a young Jon Hopkins alongside long-standing collaborators Nell Catchpole, J. Peter Schwalm and Leo Abrahams, with lyrics co-written by Michel Faber and Danny Hillis. The album was launched with a public conversation between Eno and the writer Michael Bracewell at the Marble Palace in St Petersburg and its cover photograph was taken by Eno himself in Beijing, during his first Chinese audio installation in the city’s Ritan Park. Following Warner Bros’ purchase of Hannibal Records in 2006, the licence for Another Day on Earth lapsed in 2008 and the album has been unavailable outside Japan ever since.
“Grand, sweeping choruses ... that insinuate themselves deep into the memory, but also moments of whispering intimacy - a wistful, haunting record that runs warm with understated emotion. ★★★★★” - Matthew Collin, The Observer (2005)
Drawn From Life, originally released on Virgin Records in 2001, was a full collaboration between Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm, the two having met through Eno’s longtime friend Rolf Engel. It will carry that joint billing for the first time. The album featured Holger Czukay, Laurie Anderson, Nell Catchpole and Leo Abrahams, and was supported by a tour taking in Porto and Lanzarote before a headline appearance at Japan’s Fuji Rock Festival. The rights to Drawn From Life reverted to Opal when Citigroup acquired EMI and the album has not been available since. The 2026 reissue will be available across all formats and includes the bonus track ‘Bloom (Instrumental)’.
The music on ‘Remanens’ is the result of a commission by Art Cinema OFF off and B.A.A.D.M to score the short silent film ‘Positano’ made by french actor and filmmaker Pierre Clémenti in 1969. The film itself is an ever-shifting series of glimpses, without much context, of a family vacation to the island Positano. The short cuts are similar to a dream or obscured, residual memories where chronology has fallen apart.
The score was reworked into album format on ‘Remanens’, the title being the Swedish word for remanence. The word has several meanings, most commonly residual magnetism left behind in a material. It is consequently used when referring to residue on magnetic tape, as well as data remanence, which is the residual digital data that remains even after attempts have been made to erase a hard drive. The music was reworked with remnant traces of memory in mind, of the film, but also of how glimpses of memories from another life, when the future was undecided, can make a person feel – and how it can unveil one’s own traces of what the future felt like.
Linus Hillborg (b. 1989) is a Swedish composer, musician and multidisciplinary artist based in Stockholm. His diverse creative practice spans experimental music across both electronic and acoustic realms, as well as compositions for film, theatre, and interactive installations. In 2021 he released his acclaimed solo-debut 'Magelungsverket' through Moloton, derived from the installation 'Orphan Works' which he built with an obsolete computer game engine. In 2023 he released 'Four Works' through Kali Malone and Maria W Horn’s label XKatedral, which featured a series of instrumental works by himself and Theodor Kentros.
Berlin-based Mor Elian is back as Alloy Sea with a new work exploring spacious dub and tape-processed soundscapes following an ambient outing, Xoomin, back in 2023. This is music for quiet moments and private contemplation with slowly unfolding arrangements and many layers made from synth, hiss, texture and the scantest of melodic motifs. The release also features the project's first vocals with Emkay of Trickpony on 'Air Index' adding a human soul to the widescreen designs. It's a hugely evocative and cinematic world and another doozy from Elian that culminates with the eerie and sparse 'The Receiver', which is full of scattered found sounds that slowly coalesce into a rhythm.
David Norland is an Emmy-nominated English composer, known for his scores for drama and documentary, alongside his experimental choral and electronic music. Bringing stories to life through sound, he received critical acclaim for his debut solo album ‘Glam Tear Stain’ (2019) and is set to release follow-up album ‘La Source’ in June 2026 via Denovali Records.
Relocated back to his London home after many years in Los Angeles, and free from years of drug and alcohol problems, recent commissions for two choral works allowed Norland to return to the innocent origin of his musical world, and his experience as a parent prompted a lot of outward reflection. What kind of world are we leaving to our children?
Inspired by his score to the forthcoming silent black and white film ‘Carousel’ (2026), Norland found other music emerging that refused to be ignored. The film’s director opened the door to an entirely free scoring process – no temp music, no expectation, no guidelines, just pure intuitive expression. ‘La Source’ draws on this experience, alongside his childhood as a touring chorister, the honkytonk upright piano in the north-east London bedroom of his early 20s, his early recording experiments with a TASCAM 4-track cassette recorder, and his intense preoccupation with bells, flutes, stone architecture, and mysticism.
From the haunting, choral beauty of ‘E-Car Soul’ to the breezy album title track, Norland blends minimalist classical structures with electronics. A unified tapestry of blended voices, harmonies and textures, ‘La Source’ is a deeply emotional and melancholic journey for Norland. “In the end, I’m looking to find meaning through the music, like when I was a kid singing in choirs. But I get the most sense of meaning through transcendent experiences, rather than anything intellectual or dogmatic. I have to feel it, not think it. I’m trying to make work that’s luminous, wondrous, shimmering and strange, so I can keep having those experiences,” says Norland.
On his inspiration for the album, Norland adds, “I love making patterns in things and finding patterns. That’s why minimalism was so enticing to me, the patterns are so explicit. I love word play and anagrams. The big sadness coming through as I was making the record is this clarity over the future of my kids. Everything else is a complete distraction. This incredible nurturing planet and its ecosystem are being rapidly destroyed, and the forces destroying it are relentless and punitive. And they seem to be fine with consigning our children to live in an ever-more-hostile wasteland. You can’t pretend that’s not coming, if you do I think you’re lying to yourself. And perhaps eventually it will be the fact that people love their kids that will stir wider fear and action. It’s hard to think of anything more connected to the idea of spirit.” The result is the reflective, ecstatic, mystical and sad world of ‘La Source.’
Norland’s screen work includes the award-winning documentary Anvil! The Story Of Anvil (2008), directed by Sacha Gervasi, and since 2010, he has composed much of the music for US broadcasting giant ABC’s primetime news documentaries. His work for ABC is broadcast in the US and around the world on a daily basis.
In 2012, he was the music supervisor for Hitchcock (2012) featuring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren & Scarlett Johansson and in 2017, he teamed up once again with Gervasi for the score to November Criminals starring Chloe Moretz and Ansel Elgort. The following year, he composed the score for the Emmy-nominated HBO film My Dinner With Herve, starring Peter Dinklage and Jamie Dornan.
Norland will be performing the score of Carousel later this year, and the score itself will be a forthcoming release on Denovali. 2026 will also see the release of documentary All Permits Secured, a valentine to the history of EDM, featuring Norland’s score.
Verdad Y Error (2026) resides in the tension between the thrashing of external noise and beating centred internal calm. Gibrana Cervantes is known for her work across experimental music and contemporary performance, a practice with focussed intensity and surging physicality, often pushing the limits of endurance, presence, and embodiment. A central axis of her performance practice is her ongoing collaboration with acclaimed choreographer Florentina Holzinger, including composing the music for SEA WORLD (2026), Florentina Holzinger’s critically acclaimed installation for the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Alongside this, she is a core member of the experimental ensemble Amor Muere (Mabe Fratti, Concepción Huerta, and Camille Mandoki). Cervantes maintains an active recording practice that directly informs her live output including her collaboration Memoria (2025), with Colombian Drone Mafia (Nyksan) for Ambie-Tón (Tratratrax),
Verdad y Error is a record of her artistic approach which expands her body and the violin’s horizon of possibility to near breaking point. Cervantes uses a register closely associated with Metal, yet buried deep in the alchemy of these pieces are motifs which hark back to her classical background. Across these pieces the violin is used as an instrument with a fragmented and shifting voice — blurred, repeated, and reshaped through distortion. “Many of these pieces come from images, memories, and sensations that have stayed with me for years. I'm interested in the blurring of what actually happened and what time transforms.” The recordings are built with layers of violin tones which oscillate between recognisable, processed, stretched and shifted, and lay embedded in a frequency stratum of volatile static and noise. “The violin on this album doesn't appear as a clean instrument. I process it, repeat it, distort it, and multiply it until it begins to feel more like memory than melody. Something blurry, shifting, difficult to grasp.” The origins of the album were born at a time when Cervantes was seeking inner calm amidst a relentless external noise, questioning the validity or possibility of memory and its radically changing perception in relation to experience. Subsequent reflection on this contemplative moment allowed her to develop a relational music which moves through memory, erosion, repetition, and emotional ambiguity. Creating a space that feels both intimate and unstable, mercurial with the patina of lived imperfection.
Akin to the unreliable narrator and linguistic instability, each piece functions as an emotional landscape suspended between clarity and confusion. An album which balances melody, brutality, fragility and noise
throughout its sprawling recordings and artwork, which operates as an analogue to the music. The visual world of the album developed in collaboration with Mauro Ventura was compiled across various media with a mix of handwritten texts, burned typography, metallic textures, and fragile physical materials. “I wanted the record to feel tactile and imperfect — something emotionally direct but physically worn.” says Cervantes. More than offering explanations, verdad y error exists as a conversation between memory and disappearance, noise and stillness, truth and error.
21 Bum Salute is the fifth album from Sydney experimental psych-noise-pop duo Party Dozen. The work of Kirsty Tickle (saxophone, vocals) and Jonathan Boulet (drums, loops, production), 21 Bum Salute finds the critically-acclaimed, semi-improvised duo feeling liberated - from their peers, their worries, and what the nell they're supposed to sound like now.
Emerging in 2017 from the warehouses of the Sydney experimental noise-rock scene, Party Dozen arrive at the release of their fifth album, 21 Bum Salute, in peak form. Over the course of four, increasingly perverse albums of psych-tinged rock peppered with pop noise and bursts of doom in equal measure, they've transformed from gleeful noise-makers producing DIY albums from a tiny room in Marrickville, NSW, to globe-hopping, critically-adored favourites - producing DIY albums from a tiny room in Marrickville.
As well as tours with Amyl and the Sniffers, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Tropical F*ckstorm, Algiers and more, Party Dozen had Nick Cave appear on 2022 single Macca The Mutt', collabed with New York rapper billy woods, performed an incendiary live set on KEXP, signed international deals, firstly with Temporary Residence LTD (Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky,
Along the way Party Dozen self-released their first two albums, The Living Man (2017) and Pray For Party Dozen (2020), struck a chord internationally with album The Real Work (2022), which sent them on tours of Europe, North America, Japan, China and New Zealand, while fourth LP, Crime in Australia (2024), an ode to Aussie noir that leaned beyond rock into moodier moments, repeated it.
Party Dozen recorded, mixed and mastered 21 Bum Salute completely themselves, over a three month span. Inspired by spooky "old recordings" as well as the primal impulses of acts like ESG and Bikini Kill, 21 Bum Salute - named after a peculiar, larrikin ritual in Australia's arid Northern Territory - condenses consecutive years of jam sessions, loops and improvisations into just over half an hour's worth of fizzing, strutting, striking sonics from the fringes.
21 Bum Salute is the fifth album from Sydney experimental psych-noise-pop duo Party Dozen. The work of Kirsty Tickle (saxophone, vocals) and Jonathan Boulet (drums, loops, production), 21 Bum Salute finds the critically-acclaimed, semi-improvised duo feeling liberated - from their peers, their worries, and what the nell they're supposed to sound like now.
Emerging in 2017 from the warehouses of the Sydney experimental noise-rock scene, Party Dozen arrive at the release of their fifth album, 21 Bum Salute, in peak form. Over the course of four, increasingly perverse albums of psych-tinged rock peppered with pop noise and bursts of doom in equal measure, they've transformed from gleeful noise-makers producing DIY albums from a tiny room in Marrickville, NSW, to globe-hopping, critically-adored favourites - producing DIY albums from a tiny room in Marrickville.
As well as tours with Amyl and the Sniffers, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard, Tropical F*ckstorm, Algiers and more, Party Dozen had Nick Cave appear on 2022 single Macca The Mutt', collabed with New York rapper billy woods, performed an incendiary live set on KEXP, signed international deals, firstly with Temporary Residence LTD (Mogwai, Explosions in the Sky,
Along the way Party Dozen self-released their first two albums, The Living Man (2017) and Pray For Party Dozen (2020), struck a chord internationally with album The Real Work (2022), which sent them on tours of Europe, North America, Japan, China and New Zealand, while fourth LP, Crime in Australia (2024), an ode to Aussie noir that leaned beyond rock into moodier moments, repeated it.
Party Dozen recorded, mixed and mastered 21 Bum Salute completely themselves, over a three month span. Inspired by spooky "old recordings" as well as the primal impulses of acts like ESG and Bikini Kill, 21 Bum Salute - named after a peculiar, larrikin ritual in Australia's arid Northern Territory - condenses consecutive years of jam sessions, loops and improvisations into just over half an hour's worth of fizzing, strutting, striking sonics from the fringes.
Seven years after 2019’s ‘The Dusk Loom’, Petrels returns with a pair of new albums, Infangthief and Outfangthief. The first of these releases, Infangthief, was originally written and recorded in 2022, before being reworked in light of a subsequent album, Outfangthief, due to be released later this year.
The two albums act as companion pieces, mirrors revealing facets of the other, overlapping in sound and subject matter. Though Outfangthief may have been written after Infangthief, it is no mere follow-up, with it's own creation causing a re-visiting and re-working of the earlier album, which in turn informed the writing of its twin.
Taking their titles from Old English legal terms ("thief seized without" and "thief seized within”), the central thread running through both albums is the illusion of assumed human authority - that which is given and that which is taken by force. With Western society seemingly hellbent on willingly embracing a brutally destructive economic model (even in its death throes), these albums attempt - in their own small way - to undertake the essential task of imagining alternative ways of being.
Petrels is the solo project of musician and artist, Oliver Barrett. Since releasing his debut, Haeligewielle, in 2011 (#9 in A Closer Listen's Best Albums of the Decade), Petrels has toured across Europe and shared a stage with the likes of Jóhann Jóhannsson, Tim Hecker, FIRE!, Nate Young (Wolf Eyes), Trouble Books, Demdike Stare, Nadja, and Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Cluster). Working from his home in Somerset, UK, Barrett has released numerous albums through his Floating Limb imprint, as well as mixing and/or mastering hundreds of releases for the likes of Keiji Haino, Loren Connors & Alan Licht, Judith Hamann, Incapacitants, Mette Rasmussen & Sofia Jernberg, Yasunao Tone and more
“Petrels sidesteps the chilliness found in much of the music of his peers, replacing it instead with an almost spiritual ecstasy, his ravishing synths and almost choral vocal treatments calling out in cosmic, wide eyed wonder at the universe.” – Paul Margree, Louder Than War
At this point, the vast swathes of unreleased Muslimgauze material Bryn Jones left behind when he passed away over 25 years ago are as legendary as any of his work. And sure enough, there's still some being unearthed today.
The fourth entry in a 7" single series is taken from one of Jones' customary completely unlabelled DATs, which he sent to labels seemingly as fast as he finished them.
A new series of singles collecting one of Bryn Jones’ innumerable DAT tapes that would show up at the labels he worked with sans any identifying marks.
Side A layers multiple voices (a background, faraway wail that either is or is akin to a muezzin, and a flatly declaimed two-word phrase that periodically halts proceedings) over his classic, slightly brick-walled hand percussion for a strangely meditative experience, as Jones phases elements in and out, more or less prominently in the mix. Side B however, open in a surprisingly dreamy place for Muslimgauze, with a looped ascending synth pad and beautiful sampled singing only gradually acquiring percussive accompaniment. As with the other side, Jones is content to let these elements interact and swap spaces in the mix for the duration, trusting in the sturdiness of his chosen components to carry the listener through.
»Memorial« grew out of Nate Wooley’s work alongside Annea Lockwood recording the Columbia River, and in particular from a visit to Kettle Falls in northern Washington, once one of the river’s great salmon fishing and meeting grounds and a place of enormous importance to the Sinixt and other Indigenous peoples of the Upper Columbia. The falls disappeared from view following the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1940, submerged beneath what is now Lake Roosevelt, yet beneath the still surface of the reservoir, a fast current continues to move across the buried cliffs. That tension between what remains and what can only be recovered through memory runs throughout »Memorial«.
In the essay accompanying the record, Wooley returns repeatedly to the idea of translation: the attempt to carry an experience from one form into another, from river to recording, memory to sound, landscape to music. He moves between Lockwood’s sound maps, John Ashbery’s rain falling on canal machinery, Ravel’s attempts to make water move through a piano, Christian Wolff’s »Stones«, and the Sinixt First Salmon Ceremony, where rocks struck together recall the sound of salmon once moving through the river in their thousands. These translations cannot restore what has been lost; however, they allow us to revisit what remains beneath in another form.
»Memorial« exists as an uncertainty, concerned with the distance between a place and its recording, between an event and what survives of it, and with the way listening itself becomes entangled with memory. Kettle Falls remains submerged, the river constrained and radically altered, but the water continues to move over the old rock beneath the reservoir. »Memorial« tries to listen for that persisting memory.
'Space Between' is the debut album of The Hague based Belgian vocalist/ composer Sam Nera. This experimental indie pop album is characterized by Sam's soft repetitive vocal phrases, shifting layers, and melodic, hypnotic soundscapes that clearly echo her background in jazz.
"Thank Goodness brings together an overdubbed ‘chamber band’ of bass guitar, viola, piano, harpsichord, voice and drums. Made on my own in London and Ireland between 2023-26 as a slow channelling inward of a lot of social energy.”
Seán Being is a committed figure at the sharp edges of Irish music, including being the key instigator of the band Princ€ss, touring bass player with Maria Somerville, and a long-time affiliate of Dublin label wherethetimegoes. Their various collaborations include contributions to live and recorded projects with the likes of Spellcaster, Nashpaints, Florian TM Zeizig, Jennifer Moore, Olan Monk, Dylan Kerr, Asa Nisi Masa, Life is Beautiful, Polido, Adriana João and Usof.
Not always in the business of ‘popular music’, Seán also has Gregorian Chant and car horn performances in their repertoire.
Aspects of all of this activity have made their way, directly or otherwise, into this first full-length album.
25 Jahre nach seiner ursprünglichen Veröffentlichung bringt Warp Records Aphex Twins "Drukqs" erneut auf Vinyl und CD heraus. Damit ist dieses wegweisende Album aus dem Jahr 2001 erstmals seit Jahren wieder physisch erhältlich, was bedeutet, dass nun wieder alle Alben von Aphex Twin auf Vinyl verfügbar sind. "Drukqs" enthält einige der bekanntesten Aphex Twin-Tracks, darunter "Avril 14th" und "QKThr" und erscheint erstmals als Standard-Vinyl-Ausgabe.
Discrepant presents Fantarombo, a new album by Giovanni Lami.
While his previous works often moved through memory, residue, degradation, and dialogue with existing materials, Fantarombo takes shape as an unstable, bodily gesture.
Sound is not recalled or reconstructed, but triggered, pushed, and set in motion as an active force. Lami approaches modular synthesis as a physical, hands-on practice rather than a technical exercise or display of system mastery. The modular setup becomes a responsive body: something to be nudged, listened to, and occasionally resisted.
The pieces unfold through slow accumulations, unstable feedback paths, and carefully misaligned sequences. Rather than driving toward resolution, the music lingers in states of suspension, allowing small shifts in voltage, timing, and texture to reshape the whole. Chance and duration play a central role, with structure emerging gradually from repetition and drift.
There is an unmistakably organic quality to the sound: porous, tactile, and quietly resonant. A sensitivity to space, grain, and micro-movement, where subtle changes carry as much weight as overt gestures. On Fantarombo, process takes precedence over control, and the circuitry is allowed to speak back, resulting in music that feels intimate, unstable, and quietly insistent, revealing itself slowly through sustained attention.
A music of unresolved behaviours, suspended somewhere between obsolete digital optimism, imaginary systems and malfunctioning computational folklore.
Aaron Dilloway kehrt mit ,No Skill Comedy Mind Reading" zu Dais Records zurück - seinem ersten echten Album in voller Länge seit 2017, einer Sammlung von typisch verstörendem, absurdem Material. Geprägt von seinen typischen Verzerrungen und Verformungen - von Feedback umhüllte Fundstücke, Feldaufnahmen und Gesangsimprovisationen - versammelt ,No Skill" fast ein Jahrzehnt ausgewählter Soloarbeiten und wirkt dennoch ganz und gar zeitgemäß: ein sprunghaftes Produkt der Unbeständigkeit, zugleich hart und humorvoll. Nur wenige zeitgenössische Experimental-Künstler des letzten Vierteljahrhunderts sind so produktiv und verehrt wie Dilloway, ein Pionier der amerikanischen Noise-Szene im Mittleren Westen, ehemaliges Mitglied von Wolf Eyes und Gründer des in Oberlin ansässigen Labels und Plattenladens Hanson Records. Doch trotz seines immensen Gesamtwerks hat er nur zwei richtige Solo-LPs veröffentlicht, neben einer regelmäßigeren Produktion von Kassettenveröffentlichungen und Kollaborationsprojekten. Mit ,No Skill" vollendet er nun eine vieldeutige Albumtrilogie, die mit seinem wegweisenden Werk ,Modern Jester" aus dem Jahr 2012 begann. ,Ich habe fast das Gefühl, dass sie irgendwie Teil eines Ganzen sind. Alle drei Alben versuchen, in den schlimmstmöglichen Situationen Humor zu finden. Je nachdem, wer zuhört und wie die jeweilige Einstellung ist, könnten sie als lustig oder einfach nur als grauenhafte, schreckliche Alben empfunden werden." Halb im Ernst fährt Dilloway fort: ,Für mich ist dieses hier das Ergebnis von, na ja, verkorksten Sachen: psychische Erkrankungen, Medikamente, Scheidung, komischer Scheiß. Das Eintauchen in seltsame Dinge fasziniert mich immer auf die eine oder andere Weise." Neben den bereits erwähnten Einflüssen aus der menschlichen Erfahrung greift ,No Skill" auf verschiedene technische und ästhetische Kuriositäten zurück: das methodische Sounddesign von Alvin Lucier, Andy Milligans Low-Budget-Kult-Horrorfilm ,The Weirdo" aus dem Jahr 1989 und die pop-exzentrische Art des Filmkomponisten Hugo Montenegro. Dilloway stieß bei einer Lagerraumversteigerung auf dessen skurrile Habseligkeiten, darunter Notizen zu den frühen elektronischen Experimenten des Komponisten. Einige der beunruhigendsten Momente des Albums, wie das Lachen, das ,Bring Me The Head Of The Unknown Comic" heimsucht - klanglich eine Anspielung auf die Avantgarde-Größen Nurse with Wound und thematisch auf den Komiker aus den 1970er Jahren mit der Papiertüte über dem Kopf -, lassen sich auf den Einfluss dieses wahrhaft ungewöhnlichen Fundes zurückführen. ,No Skill" knüpft zudem an Dilloways jüngste künstlerische Ausflüge an: seine Umsetzung von John Cages 88-Band-Loop ,Rozart Mix"; die Originalmusik für ,The Absence of Milk In The Mouths of the Lost"; Gemeinschaftsalben mit Lucrecia Dalt (Lucy & Aaron) sowie Kim Gordon & Bill Nace (Body/Dilloway/Head). Während er an diesen und anderen Projekten arbeitete, legte er in Gedanken einen Ordner für sein nächstes Dais-Album an und sammelte Aufnahmen, die zu einer ziemlich vagen Vision passten. ,Dieses Album hat mich irgendwie völlig in Beschlag genommen, seit ich ,The Gag File` 2017 fertiggestellt habe. Zuerst dachte ich, es würde eher ein Pop-Album werden, aber dann hat mir das Lucrecia-Projekt diese Idee irgendwie aus dem Kopf getrieben. Es begann, eher wie meine Live-Sets zu fließen." Er entschied sich für eine Abfolge, die den Hörer ein wenig im Ungewissen lässt - ob erschrocken, amüsiert oder verwirrt; der Effekt soll absichtlich den Eindruck erwecken, dass etwas kaputt ist. Das Album beginnt mit schrillen Kreischen, bevor es in Drone-Passagen eintaucht, die durch zwei aneinander geriebene nepalesische Sarangi-Bögen entstehen, begleitet vom ersten Auftauchen seiner ogerartigen stimmlichen Präsenz. Anschließend werden mehrere Minuten von weißem Rauschen verschluckt (,Forced Auctioneer"). Dilloway verweist auf The Weirdos seltsamen Einsatz ausgedehnter Übergänge mit schwarzem Raum und seine lebenslange Liebe zum Bandrauschen. Er bekam Kassetten von älteren Kindern und hörte diese Geräusche als Teil der Songs, nur um später zu erfahren, dass es sich um klangliche Artefakte handelte, die von Generationen des Kopierens auf Kassette übrig geblieben waren. ,Ich stehe total auf die Idee, all diese Schichten aufzubauen und sie in etwas anderes zu verwandeln. Wenn ich zum Beispiel live spiele, kann es rauer zugehen als bei meiner aufgenommenen Musik, und dafür wollte ich genau dieses Gefühl einfangen - dass diese Ausbrüche laut sind, aber ein bisschen gedämpfter. Dieser totale Rauschklang, fast so, als wärst du unter Wasser." Dilloway sammelt Tonpoesie-Platten, und obwohl er seine eigene Arbeit nicht gerne in dieses Genre einordnet, spricht die Absurdität dieses Handwerks - die Verwendung von phonetischen Lauten und nonverbalen Geräuschen als Ersatz für traditionelle semantische Bedeutung - durch sein Werk. Auf ,Possession Audition Tape" liest er verschiedene Passagen aus einem Buch vor, das von einer französischen religiösen Gruppe aus dem 18. Jahrhundert handelt, die zu öffentlichen Unruhen neigte, und schneidet diese digital auseinander, wodurch er im Mix seine eigenen, echoartigen Stotterausbrüche erzeugt. ,No Skill Comedy Mind Reading" endet mit einem Stück aus Synthesizer und Orgel-Rhythmusmaschine, das auf Musik basiert, die er für den Film ,Supporting Actor" von Pieter Schoolwerth und Phil Vanderhyden komponiert hat - in dem ein Avatar von Dilloway in ein Portal gezogen wird. Dort trifft er in einem fantastischen Club auf posthumane Wesen. Die Szene, die sich irgendwie auf Audio übertragen lässt, versetzt das Set in einen passend verwirrenden Traumzustand. Ein Star der Noise-Musik, ein moderner Hofnarr, der aus dem Unbekannten berichtet.
Metal is the debut EP from elisanyhm, an electronic and experimental musician who is based in Berlin.
The tracks that constitute Metal draw on a variety of materials and methods, yet they are commonly marked by an attempt to compose music in connection with a logic of refusal. This results in pieces that are both singular and capable of being set together.
A central tendency of the pieces on Metal is to stretch out time. This tendency could also be understood as: sounding time itself, without the rush of determination.
What might initially seem static can also, eventually, and ultimately be encountered as moving through dense layers. The deconstruction of direction leaves one affected by an indeterminate multiplicity of rhythms, voices, field recordings, and electronic sounds that are more than what one is supposed to construct.
,Altarpiece H. af K." ist das neue Album von Eric Wubbels bei Kou Records - Komponist, Pianist, Co-Direktor des New Yorker Wet Ink Ensembles und Preisträger des Ernst von Siemens-Komponistenpreises 2023, einer der renommiertesten Auszeichnungen in der zeitgenössischen Musik. ,Altarpiece H. af K." hat seinen Namen und seinen inspirierenden Geist den Gemälden ,For the Temple" von Hilma af Klint entlehnt - monumentale Werke, die für einen Raum konzipiert wurden, der noch gar nicht existierte, gerichtet an einen zukünftigen Zuhörer. Wubbels begegnete ihnen 2018 im Guggenheim und ließ diese Begegnung in ein Stück einfließen, dessen vollständige Umsetzung sieben Jahre in Anspruch nehmen sollte: von einer E-Mail aus der Pandemiezeit an die Fagottistin Dana Jessen, in der er etwas Einfaches vorschlug - Multiphonik, Überlagerungen, vielleicht einen Kanon -, über Live-Auftritte in der Fairchild Chapel, bei Elastic Arts und in einer existentialistischen Kirche in Atlanta bis hin zu einer Aufnahmesession im Dezember 2025 im Power Station Studios in Midtown Manhattan, dem Raum, in dem ,Like a Virgin" und ,Let's Dance" entstanden sind. Die Besetzung - drei Fagotte, gespielt von Dana Jessen, Ben Roidl-Ward und Katherine Young - ist rein akustisch: keine Live-Bearbeitung, keine Elektronik. Was du hörst , ist das Instrument selbst, bis an seine Grenzen getrieben. Wubbels' Komposition nutzt die Fähigkeit des Fagotts zu Multiphonik und mikrotonaler Modulation, um sich überlappende Spektren aufzubauen, die voll und ganz aus den grundlegenden akustischen Eigenschaften der Instrumente entstehen - Obertöne, Differenztöne und Schwebungsfrequenzen, die den drei Musikern im selben Raum entlockt werden und einen seltenen Raum zwischen den spektralen Welten von Scelsi und Dumitrescu und dem anhaltenden physischen Gewicht von Sunn O))) einnehmen. Über zwei lange Sätze (Reh. A und Reh. C) hinweg häufen sich diese dichten, vibrierenden Spektren zu etwas an, das sich zwischen Stillstand und Vorwärtsdrang bewegt und an der Schwelle zwischen Tonhöhe und Rauschen schwebt. Das Stück gipfelt nicht in einer Auflösung, sondern in einer Transformation durch anhaltende Aufmerksamkeit. Aufgenommen, abgemischt und produziert von Randall Dunn. Gemastert von Ben Greenberg. Dolby Atmos-Mischungen von Ben Greenberg. Lackpressung von Paul Gold bei Salt Mastering. Cover-Artwork von Thomas Hooper; Porträt auf der Rückseite von Julie Bell.
Limited repress of mu tate's sought after LP on soft lilac vinyl!
Utter (in collaboration with 3XL) presents mu tate's second album 'they're with you always', featuring Joshua Inyang (Space Afrika), Nikolay Kozlov, Desirèe Monique, Igor Dyachenko and Mathilde.
Housed in a high-gloss sleeve artworked by Lucas Dupuy and Art Crime. Mastered by Ike Zwanikken then transferred and cut by Anne Taegert at D&M.
,The Long Ear" ist das Debütalbum von Noh Age _ Charmaine Lee (Parabolmikrofon, Feedback, Gesang), John McCowen (Kontrabassklarinette, Bb- Klarinette, Blockflöte) und Li-Chin Li (Sheng) bei Kou Records - live aufgenommen über drei Tage bei Brooklyn Recording im März 2026 live aufgenommen und von Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Oneohtrix Point Never) produziert. Das Parabolmikrofon hat seine eigene Geschichte: ein Überwachungsinstrument aus dem Kalten Krieg , das dafür konzipiert war, aus der Ferne zu lauschen, um das zu orten und zu verstärken, was sonst unhörbar bleiben würde. Hier ist es nach innen gerichtet - nicht auf einen Feind, sondern auf den Klang selbst, der durch vier Vintage-Röhrenverstärker geleitet wird. Die Parabolantenne spürt Resonanzen auf, die durch den Raum übertragen werden, und stellt sich auf Frequenzen ein, die von Kontrabassklarinette, Sheng und Gesang erzeugt werden, bis sich eine Rückkopplung entlädt - ein vierter Interpreter mit eigener, unvorhersehbarer Wirkmacht. Das Ergebnis ist spektrale Musik in ihrer viszeralsten Form - verwurzelt in der Tradition von Gérard Grisey, Kaija Saariaho und Iancu Dumitrescu, doch herkommend von der Überwachungsstelle, dem Abhörposten, der Abhörleitung. In sechs Stücken, die auf kompositorischen Rahmenwerken aus zellulären Automaten und grafischen Partituren basieren, bewegt sich das Trio zwischen extremen Registerbereichen - CBC-Grundtöne gegen dichte Sheng-Cluster-Klänge , die kristallklaren Obertöne von Blockflöte und Mini-Sheng - während das Feedback durch all das wandert, sich verdichtet, auslöscht, wiederkehrt. Cover- und Rückseitengestaltung von Shintaro Kago - einem in Tokio ansässigen Manga-Künstler und Pionier der ,Ero-Guro"-Tradition, der international für seine Arbeit an Flying Lotus' ,You're Dead!" (Warp, 2014) bekannt ist. Aufgenommen, gemischt und produziert von Randall Dunn. Zusätzliche Synthesizer und Sounddesign von Randall Dunn. Gemastert von Ben Greenberg. Dolby-Atmos-Mischungen von Ben Greenberg. Schablonenschnitt von Paul Gold bei Salt Mastering.
,Prophetic Perfect Tense" ist das neue Album von Oren Ambarchi bei Kou Records. Der australische Gitarrist und Komponist gilt als eine der unermüdlichsten und einfallsreichsten Persönlichkeiten der experimentellen Musik der letzten drei Jahrzehnte. Als Gründer von Black Truffle Records und versierter Kollaborateur, der bereits mit Keiji Haino, Jim O'Rourke, Johan Berthling und Andreas Werliin - präsentiert sich Ambarchi hier in seiner reduziertesten Besetzung: Solo-Gitarre, zwei Seiten, zwei Takes, minimale Effekte. Während seine Studioalben typischerweise konzeptionelle, vielschichtige Werke mit Gastmusikern waren, bricht ,Prophetic Perfect Tense" dieses Muster vollständig - nach seinen eigenen Angaben ist es das konventionellste Soloalbum mit Gitarrenklang, das er je aufgenommen hat, und das, was im Studio der Live-Energie seines ,Ghosted"-Trios am nächsten kommt. Aufgenommen im Studio Dede in Tokio im Januar 2026 und produziert von Randall Dunn, begann das Album als Akt hartnäckiger Zurückhaltung - irgendwo zwischen Joao Gilberts leisem, selbstbetiteltem Album von 1973 und Alemu Agas ,Bägänna"-Sessions. Doch sobald das Band durch eine Leslie-Box, einen Fender Twin und einen Ampeg B-15 in einen Telefunken-24-Spur-Recorder lief, entstand etwas ganz anderes: ein lockerer, abstrakter Shuffle, warm und dreidimensional, bei dem Verstärkerbrummen, Saitenquietschen und Raumgeräusche unverändert blieben. Beide Seiten in einzigen Takes. Ein Gitarren-Overdub wurde auf Randalls Drängen hin hinzugefügt. Eine Platte, die wie ein Raum klingt, nicht wie ein Studio. Aufgenommen, abgemischt und produziert von Randall Dunn. Gemastert von Ben Greenberg. Dolby-Atmos-Mischungen von Ben Greenberg. Lackschnitt von Paul Gold bei Salt Mastering. Cover-Artwork ,Untitled, 1977" von Kazuko Miyamoto, Foto mit freundlicher Genehmigung des Nachlasses von Kazuko Miyamoto / Zürcher Gallery, NY. Porträt auf der Rückseite von Ken Langraf
,Manifold of Partially Actualized Realities" ist das neue Album bei Kou Records von Randall Dunn - Produzent, Komponist und einer der markantesten Gestalter von Low-End- und räumlichen Klängen in der zeitgenössischen Musik, bekannt für seine Arbeit mit Sunn O))), Oneohtrix Point Never, David Torn und unzähligen anderen aus den Bereichen Heavy-, Experimental- und Avantgarde-Musik. Das Album ist eine Meditation über zerbrochene Realitäten, Zeit und Sterblichkeit - ein Spiegel, der sich auf sich selbst zurückfaltet und darüber, wie zukünftige Ereignisse die Vergangenheit beeinflussen. Sein tragender Geist ist Philip K. Dicks ,Pink Light Experience" von 1974, in der der Autor berichtete, eine Übertragung von einer gewaltigen, außerirdischen Intelligenz empfangen zu haben: informationsreich, uralt und überwältigend. Dunn nähert sich dem sowohl als Konzept als auch als kompositorische Logik - Musik, die in Schichten auftaucht, zusammenbricht, sich neu formiert und sich einer Auflösung verweigert.? In vier Stücken setzt Dunn ein ganzes Arsenal an Vintage-Synthesizern ein - Korg MonoPoly, Korg MS-20, PPG Wave, CS-80, Juno-60, Waldorf Strings, Fizmo - neben einer außergewöhnlichen Ensemblebesetzung. Spoken-Word-Beiträge von Jim Jarmusch (basierend auf PKDs Prosa) und Laima Leyton (basierend auf Robert Graves' ,Time") verankern zwei der vier Stücke in Sprache, ohne sie zu erklären. Das Album bewegt sich von orchestraler Kammermusik über elektroakustische Abstraktion hin zu einem abschließenden Stück - ,Ayn" -, das sich zu ekstatischem Jazz entfaltet, mit Cyro Baptista, Briggan Krauss, Henry Fraser, Charmaine Lee und Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe. Wahre elektroakustische Komposition im vollsten Sinne: spektral, körperlich und weit offen. Produziert und gemischt von Randall Dunn bei Circular Ruin, April 2026. Aufgenommen und gemastert von Ben Greenberg. Dolby-Atmos-Mischungen von Ben Greenberg. Lackschnitt von Paul Gold bei Salt Mastering. Cover- und Rückseitengestaltung von Steve Rude.
,Reona" ist das Debütalbum von REONA bei Kou Records - Stepptänzerin, Metal- Percussionistin, Improvisatorin und eine der originellsten Klangkünstlerinnen der heutigen Zeit, weltweit. Das Album wurde im Januar 2026 an zwei Tagen im Studio Dede aufgenommen und von Randall Dunn produziert. Es fängt REONAs ganzkörperliche Performance in Echtzeit ein: Stepptanzschuhe und ein Holzbrett als rhythmische Grundlage, überlagert von Metallblechen, Ketten, Edelstahlschalen, Plastiktüten, Lautsprechern und einem ganzen Arsenal an gefundenen und handgefertigten Objekten, die im Laufe jahrelanger Auftritte gesammelt wurden. Die Instrumente tragen ihre eigene Geschichte in sich - ein Schild aus Okinawa, auf dem die Warnung vor nicht detonierten Bomben steht, ein Schild einer Transportfirma aus dem Jingisukan-Topf-Museum in Iwamizawa, eine Festglocke, die zu Beginn der COVID-Ära erworben wurde, südindische Essgeschirr, ein Ölkännchen aus Taiwan. Stampfen, kratzen, berühren, schlagen, blasen, stöhnen - REONA nutzt alles voll aus, von ihren Beinen bis zu ihrem Mund, und lässt dabei die Grenze zwischen Tanz und Percussion, Körper und Instrument verschwinden. Ihre Praxis befindet sich an einer selten besetzten Schnittstelle: die japanische Noise-Tradition von Merzbow und Otomo Yoshihide auf der einen Seite, die perkussive Körperlichkeit von Milford Graves und Han Bennink auf der anderen - ohne Präzedenzfall dafür, was passiert, wenn diese beiden Welten in einem einzigen Körper aufeinandertreffen. Track 7, M108, enthält einen Gastauftritt von Atsuo - dem Schlagzeuger der legendären japanischen Rockband Boris - in einer Kollision zweier unterschiedlicher, aber verwandter Ansätze zu Rhythmus und Noise.? Aufgenommen, gemischt und produziert von Randall Dunn. Gemastert von Ben Greenberg. Dolby-Atmos-Mischungen von Ben Greenberg. Lackschnitt von Paul Gold bei Salt Mastering. Cover-Artwork ,Legend of the Snow Spirit" von Kazuki Tomokawa; Porträt auf der Rückseite von Allison Brant.
In a blizzard of crushed breaks and dissonant tones, Shelley Parker lands on Sneaker Social Club with her third album, Screed. Taking a forensic approach to noise sculpture and harmonic interference, the UK-based artist maintains a fringe perspective on the legacy of hardcore-derived dance music, extrapolating the renegade spirit of the earliest innovators into unexplored zones where sound art and sound systems collide.
Parker's path through the underground has been informed by her art school background, equally at home in the parallel world of galleries, installations and institutions as she is in the club. This dualistic dimension to her practice charges her music with an outsider spirit that manifests across 10 striking new productions on Screed. Focusing on the sound over an umbrella concept, it's an album that rejects comfortable, functional formulae in favour of original expression.
There are plenty of forthright structures for DJs and dancers to lock onto, from the militaristic techno thrust and tightly clipped breakbeat loop of 'Relentless' to the splayed boom bap guiding the giddy string sequences of 'Stargazer Lily'. The insistent pulse of 'April' meanwhile offers only the faintest of paths to navigate dense thickets of jerky, swinging static and metallic clamour. 'Georgian Wire' closes the record out on dissembled drum licks with a brittle patina - a scooped out closer with the skeletal remains of a rave dialect that's second nature to someone with as much skin in the game as Parker.
In amongst those tracks lies a wide-ranging tapestry of rhythmic, textural and emotional approaches, from head-knocking beatdowns to billowing clouds of dub techno, angular stabs and industrial smudges. On Screed, Parker proves herself to be peerless and purposeful in her quest to find new forms within the well-worn canon of hardcore and rave.
TIM HECKER’s latest work approaches a form of secular musical transcendentalism from within the battered temple of spirituality.
Recorded in a church in Reykjavik, Iceland and using a pipe organ as the primary sound source, this new piece is essentially a live recording. In reality, it exists in a nether world between captured live performance and meticulous studio work, melding the two approaches to sonic artifice as a unity. It is in parts a document of air circulating within a wooden room, and also a pagan work of physical resonance within a space once reserved for the hallowed breath of the divine.
While the title of the piece “Hatred of Music” might be a clue, the album is also partly an attempt to confront a pervasive negativity surrounding music. Historical rituals of destroying pianos, mountains of pirated CDRs pushed by bulldozers in Eastern Europe, or the melancholy of the digital music era began as sideline motifs which quickly informed the work on this record. They also really didn't at all. Despite that the context is wide open in such a form of musical abstraction, the substance of these immersive compositions showcases Heckerʼs continued mastery of organizing sound into a visceral near entity. It is an almost physical presence that the listener feels as much as hears.
This work is a significant contribution to Hecker's oeuvre, one which spans over ten years of musical production. Ravedeath is an enigmatic document of beauty and force. The album was recorded mostly over the period of one day in July of 2010. Iceland-based musician Ben Frost assisted with the engineering and performs on this recording.
RECEIVED AN 8.6 BEST NEW MUSIC RATING FROM PITCHFORK.
Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco's Today's Special is a suite of language works synthesising melody and diction that integrates the literary and the audible in a repertoire of songs that bask in the melody of voice and the punctuations of structured composition. Working with methods of reduction rather than opulence in both tonal composition and rhetoric, each piece pegs the poetic to the musical with compositional schematics and methods. It is important to state that there is little to none improvisation here, instead, the duo set up matrices, rules and structural links that facilitated meaningful locus of exchange between their two practices. Lippard's texts are a collection of new and previously completed works. In these, as is typical for her work, she enjoys the easy pleasure of wordplay, iterative language, and decontextualised anecdote, as in opener Portrait of a Betrayal, a piece about the loss of a phone and the way it haunted the owner who dropped it, based on a lived experience. Grieco's instrumentation works with Lippard's language art as a form of acoustic typography. "I studied graphic design and I think about how you can express typography through voice," she says. "Renato's use of the viola da gamba becomes like an underline, or a font's brushstrokes, in ways that feel typographical." In this, the classically-trained composer Grieco often finds and echoes the pitch movements of Lippard's voice, intonation mirrored and revealed, linguistic meaning doubled and shadowed by plucked, strummed or bowed strings. His main instrument is the viola da gamba, the instrument considered closest to the human voice for its tonal range and ability to mimic inflections and timbre, and here he brings it even closer to the voice, building systems by which it moves with and around Lippard. He also plays piano and Wurlitzer, and joins her in speaking on Receiver and in conversation for final track The Black Rose. "Hanne's voice is an artist's voice, embodied as the artwork itself," he says. "But where my approach is from the perspective of a composer, hers is around rhetoric and language. We worked towards each other in this sense, Hanne finding a space to welcome my voice, and me designing an acoustic space to enhance her vocal persona." In some tracks the structural connections are obvious - the matched tumbling delivery and stepped pitches of voice and piano in Aficionado sounding like two tipsy friends descending a staircase. In others, like the triptych of tracks Three Rungs Ladder, structured with rules derived from nursery rhymes, or cumulative song (akin to the 12 Days of Christmas). For the Colour 1 and Colour 2 pieces, the duo worked from palettes of colours connected to clusters of harmonies, which underlined the power of the word and its articulation. The absurd Labradorable personifies a people pleaser, A Story About Being Blue is an imagined playful monologue from the Deep Blue supercomputer - requesting in sing-song stop motion to be called Debbie, and Larry - as Grieco echoes in factual reportage. Hurtbeat unpacks and recomposes a tweeted non-apology by a Russian art collector about owning a piece of racist art, Grieco shadowing Lippard's generating a third `drop-shadow' performer from the resonances between the duo, typographic re-articulation of the source material. The Receiver includes lines from Robert Ashley's Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), Ashley existing as a spiritual parent of sorts to the practices contained on Today's Special, and here interpolated as if he is being quoted and written through within the audible world of the piece in a palimpsest of borrowed sentences. Closing track The Black Rose contains its own self-aware comedy, a lightly distorted conversation sourced from a Reddit thread about whether black roses exist, recorded as if it were an internet radio or a low budget podcast, the casual exchange stilted in the delivery of platitudes as scripted speech. Today's Special was developed in person over the course of a series of small residencies - at Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, Rome; Fondazione Morra, Napoli; Callie's, Berlin. In these limited periods that rarely stretched beyond a week, Lippard and Grieco developed strategies for the works, keeping tightly locked to musical concepts. This, for Grieco, is about maintaining a solid, meaningful connection within the compositions, and committing to everything having a purpose for existing within the work. Each element pulls its weight; has something to say, literally and metaphorically speaking. In the same way that Lippard's work leaves nowhere for her to hide, he wants the music to exist with its own naked purpose: "It's is about exposing nudity via reduced materials," says Grieco. "This is a form of courage we want to embrace. Once we take off everything, it needs to be extremely precise to maintain a connection with the audience. We have a lot of tools to hide behind now, to protect ourselves and our identities as artists, performers, and in life more generally. It's something I don't want to do. I want extreme reduction: no hiding."
Few have dared to record all twenty of Philip Glass’s piano Etudes in their entirety. Even fewer have attempted to remix them. Vanessa Wagner’s 2025 album, Philip Glass: The Complete Piano Etudes, crowns a longstanding passion for Glass’s compositions. While it focuses less on the dialogue between composer and producer that she cultivated with Murcof on Study Of The Invisible, Inland, and Statea, Glass’s music resonates deeply within the world of contemporary electronic music. This EP, part of InFiné’s “Versions” series, passes the baton to a new generation of composer/producers who radically reinterpret these unique piano pieces: Aho Ssan, Carmen Villain, Cucina Povera & Tauceti.
Vanessa Wagner’s album of Philip Glass’s Piano Etudes received unanimous critical and public acclaim, both in France and internationally. This success earned the pianist a nomination for the 2026 Victoires de la Musique Classique. Following numerous sold-out concerts across France, Vanessa Wagner is currently continuing her tour around the world. She will also serve as curator of the Folle Journée de Nantes in 2027 and 2028.
