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»Blank Vault / White Stains« is the new solo album by Franz Joseph Kaputt (DRNTTCKS, Otomatik Muziek, Hager/Kaputt). Under his S.U.V. alias, he presents nine highly personal, improvised synthesizer miniatures, accompanied by heavily delayed drum machines and enveloped in clouds of feedback. The music unveils a background rooted in years of noise exercises and ventures into the territories of dark, psychedelic folk, while showcasing a fondness for delicate synthesizer sounds and repetitive song structures. Layers of sound and rhythms collide and arrange themselves to create an idiosyncratic ambient/kraut music that explores the borders of when intimacy becomes toxic. It also delves into how relationships involving kink strategies can be used in a way that don‘t render one powerless or hurt, but ultimately leading to empowerment.

Side A is kind of an utopian dark room, filled with peculiar beats, drones, and dreamy synth arpeggios. Pleasure and joy are subversive acts that challenge and upend stereotypical role models. The pieces revolve around the mutual and consensual exploration of individual boundaries and the transformative states that emerge within these encounters – a unique entity, a »Body Of The Mind« if you will, is formed between individuals. Side B then represents the counterpart. Acid synths, distortion cascades and looped pianos evoke the regression from this playful and subversive approach on to sheer brutality and perverse destruction.

Dance music has always been grounded in a sense of place. Chicago, Detroit, London, Berlin—a zip code can tell you as much about the music as the year it was made.

But beyond the nuts and bolts of the here and now lies a netherzone where some of the best electronic music floats, impossible to pin down. Swayzak’s Snowboarding in Argentina is one such record.

The title hints at its uncanny placelessness. The music has nothing outwardly to do with Argentina, for one thing. The work of UK producers David Nicholas Brown and James S. Taylor, it was recorded in a number of locations—mostly bedrooms—around London. Yet there is little that is quintessentially British about the music.

Instead, Brown and Taylor drew much of their inspiration from, on the one hand, the luminous chords and silky heft of Detroit techno, and on the other, the staccato drums and clipped textures that were then beginning to bubble out of Berlin and Cologne.

That brings us to the question of time. For if Snowboarding in Argentina belongs to nowhere, it is equally a product of nowhen.

On a practical level, the music took shape in the mid to late 1990s, although it took nearly 10 years for it to come to fruition. Brown and Taylor began jamming on instruments, then machines, in the late 1980s. Then, after Brown suffered a serious car accident, the two musicians began working together more seriously. Trial and error yielded a promising single with a downtempo vibe that a hired-gun studio producer promptly ruined; Swayzak retreated to their bedrooms.

They learned about Chain Reaction from a radio show, found new ways to burrow into the circuitry of their machines, and by 1996 they had hit upon their sound. brought 10 copies of the first to Berlin’s Hard Wax, sold them directly to the shop for a fistful of Deutschmarks, and turned around and spent the money on records; that’s how DIY electronic music worked in those days.) The album itself appeared in 1998 on London’s Pagan label and quickly built a cult following. It was clear that the music was in conversation with its contemporaries: Heard from the right angle, it was possible to imagine it as a halfway point between the proto progressive house of Underworld and the monochromatic minimalism of Kompakt. But it also didn’t quite sound like anything else around; it was a dispatch from an unknown territory that needed no special understanding to decipher.

A quarter century later, Snowboarding in Argentina sounds simply eternal. Certain hallmarks of ’90s production are available—the music’s almost murky warmth is a reminder of what electronic music sounded like before software swallowed everything into its digital maw—but there’s nothing dated about it. The exploratory nature of these tracks, as the result of experimenting with their machines’ limitations, never eclipses their musical or emotional essence.

Long since been deemed a classic, Snowboarding in Argentina remains an underdog in the annals of electronic music. Its semi-obscurity was surely not helped by the decision to publish nine of its original 12 tracks on the CD, and seven on the vinyl, with only four appearing on both formats. Twenty-five years after its original release, Lapsus’ Perennial Series edition unites, for the first time, all the album’s tracks as a single triple-vinyl package, rounding out the 12 original songs with previously unreleased material. Working off the original DAT premasters, Swayzak have created new edits of all the tracks. The result might be considered the definitive edition of the album as it was meant to be, after a 25-year journey. It seems fitting that an album so timeless would continue morphing throughout its lifespan. For fans, it’s the chance to hear a beloved album as never before. And for newcomers, it’s the perfect introduction to a record that, in its own quiet way, reshaped the sound of electronic music, opening up new frontiers unbound by cartography or calendars.

The core of Snowboarding in Argentina appeared on a series of three two-track singles in 1997. (Taylor brought 10 copies of the first to Berlin’s Hard Wax, sold them directly to the shop for a fistful of Deutschmarks, and turned around and spent the money on records; that’s how DIY electronic music worked in those days.) The album itself appeared in 1998 on London’s Pagan label and quickly built a cult following. It was clear that the music was in conversation with its contemporaries: Heard from the right angle, it was possible to imagine it as a halfway point between the proto progressive house of Underworld and the monochromatic minimalism of Kompakt. But it also didn’t quite sound like anything else around; it was a dispatch from an unknown territory that needed no special understanding to decipher.

A quarter century later, Snowboarding in Argentina sounds simply eternal. Certain hallmarks of ’90s production are available—the music’s almost murky warmth is a reminder of what electronic music sounded like before software swallowed everything into its digital maw—but there’s nothing dated about it. The exploratory nature of these tracks, as the result of experimenting with their machines’ limitations, never eclipses their musical or emotional essence.

Long since been deemed a classic, Snowboarding in Argentina remains an underdog in the annals of electronic music. Its semi-obscurity was surely not helped by the decision to publishnine of its original 12 tracks on the CD, and seven on the vinyl, with only four appearing on both formats. Twenty-five years after its original release, Lapsus’ Perennial Series edition unites, for the first time, all the album’s tracks as a single triple-vinyl package, rounding out the 12 original songs with previously unreleased material. Working off the original DAT premasters, Swayzak have created new edits of all the tracks. The result might be considered the definitive edition of the album as it was meant to be, after a 25-year journey. It seems fitting that an album so timeless would continue morphing throughout its lifespan. For fans, it’s the chance to hear a beloved album as never before. And for newcomers, it’s the perfect introduction to a record that, in its own quiet way, reshaped the sound of electronic music, opening up new frontiers unbound by cartography or calendars.

Penguin Cafe kündigen heute ihr fünftes Studioalbum Rain Before Seven... an, das am 7.Juli 2023 bei Erased Tapes erscheinen wird.



Eine zuversichtliche Grundstimmung durchzieht das fünfte Studioalbum von Penguin Cafe, Rain Before Seven…, wobei es sich keinesfalls um jenen extrem selbstbewussten, fast schon prahlerischen Optimismus handelt, sondern eher um so eine auf bescheidene Art hoffnungsvolle Grundhaltung, die man den Menschen auf der Insel ja häufiger nachsagt. Auch wenn alle Anzeichen das Gegenteil behaupten, spürt man hier sofort diese Gewissheit, dass sich alles doch noch irgendwie zum Guten wenden wird. Vermutlich zumindest.



Der Titel des Albums geht auf eine alte Bauernregel zurück, wobei die gereimte Vorhersage – „… fine before eleven“: ab 11 Uhr also wieder alles klar – auf ein baldiges gutes Ende hindeutet, vollkommen unabhängig davon, was die Wissenschaft sagt: „Ich habe diesen Spruch in einem Buch entdeckt. Davor hatte ich ihn noch nie gehört“, erzählt Arthur Jeffes, der Kopf von Penguin Cafe. „Er hat so einen dezent optimistischen Beigeschmack, und das gefällt mir sehr. Man verwendet ihn heutzutage kaum noch, aber der Reim beschreibt tatsächlich Wetterphänomene in England, die vom Atlantik aus über die Insel ziehen.“



Angefangen beim leinwandgroßen und schwärmerischen Eröffnungstitel „Welcome to London“, der mit einem Augenzwinkern auf Morricone anspielt, bis hin zum „Goldfinch Yodel“, jenem „Maibaum-Banger“ (um es mit Arthurs Worten zu sagen), mit dem das neue Album ausklingt, zieht sich ein angenehmes Gefühl von Leichtigkeit und Lebensmut durch den Longplayer, unterfüttert mit der Ausgelassenheit exotischer Rhythmen. Alles wirkt spielerisch und verspielt, und selbst der Titel ist eine Anspielung – auf A Matter of Life… aus dem Jahr 2011, der letzten Veröffentlichung, deren Titel in eine Ellipse mündete Jenes Debütalbum von Penguin Cafe diente einst als Bindeglied und Brücke – zwischen dem legendären Penguin Cafe Orchestra, das einst Arthurs Vater Simon Jeffes leitete, und dem gefeierten Nachfolger, als dessen Mastermind seither Arthur verantwortlich zeichnet.



„Ich glaube, das wirklich Neue an seinem Ansatz bestand darin, spannende und schräge Ideen zu nehmen – und dann seltsame Dinge damit anzustellen“, meint Arthur, „dabei aber konstant im Blick zu haben, dass es hinterher auch schön klingt und emotional ansprechend bleibt.“ Dieses Ethos lebt weiter in der Musik von Penguin Cafe: „Dazu haben wir uns entschlossen, als ich daran anknüpfte, schließlich spielen wir die Sachen meines Vaters und machen dazu auch neue Musik, die im selben Klanguniversum angesiedelt ist. Das bedeutet, dass ich gewissermaßen moralisch dazu verpflichtet bin, den ursprünglichen roten Faden im Auge zu behalten – und dafür zu sorgen, dass wir nicht plötzlich in Richtung Thrash-Metal abbiegen.“



Dennoch waren die rhythmischen Elemente, die zum Teil sogar an elektronische Sounds erinnern, noch nie so präsent und tonangebend wie auf Rain Before Seven…, was durchaus auch dem Co-Produzenten Robert Raths geschuldet ist. „Find Your Feet“ etwa hat ein Beat-Fundament, das weit über einen bloßen Pulsschlag hinausgeht. Abgemischt von Tom Chichester-Clark, blitzt an Stellen wie diesen etwas auf, das Arthur selbst als „fast schon elektronischen Vibe“ bezeichnet, um dann ganz aufgeregt zu ergänzen: „Es geht vor allem auch einfach ums Spaßhaben, was auf den letzten drei Alben nicht so zu hören war.” Extrem ausgelassen klingt auch „In Re Budd“, das dem verstorbenen Ambient-Urgestein Harold Budd gewidmet ist. Arthur erfuhr von dessen Tod an jenem Tag, als er diesen feierlichen Ohrwurm komponierte, dessen Synkopen deutlich komplexer sind, als sie auf den ersten Blick wirken. Auf einem präparierten Klavier gespielt, wobei die Filzstücke dem Track zusätzlichen Bounce verleihen, setzt Jeffes hier auf einen Afro Cuban Cafe-Vibe – was wunderbar zum widerspenstigen Geist des verstorbenen Budd passt.



Und schließlich wäre da noch das bereits erwähnte „Welcome to London“, das seinen Titel erhielt, als sich die Welt gerade wieder zu öffnen begann und die Menschen auch wieder Fernreisen antreten durften. Jeffes, der somit nach langer Zeit endlich wieder einen Fuß auf britischen Boden setzen konnte, war sofort beeindruckt von filmischen Soundtrack-Qualitäten (à la John Barry) dieses Stücks, als er mit dem Taxi von Heathrow nach West-London fuhr und zur Musik die opulente, in Dämmerungslicht getauchte Metropolenkulisse auf sich wirken ließ. Hier kann man deutlich die eingangs erwähnte Zuversicht raushören – und dazu vielleicht auch einen Hauch von bissiger Ironie: „Robert Raths hat der Sache noch eine Nuance hinzugefügt, die ich interessant finde, weil doch so viele Londoner ursprünglich gar nicht aus London stammen. Man schlägt also in London als Zugezogener auf, man weiß noch nicht, zu welchem Lager man sich zugehörig fühlen soll, und dann wird man auf der Straße überfallen und ausgeraubt – und in dem Licht betrachtet, hat dieses ‘Welcome to London’ doch einen eher sarkastischen Beigeschmack.“

On their sophomore effort Tusky, surrealist duet Robbie & Mona ascend beyond the lo-fi scrawlings of their debut album to something altogether more grandiose. Between the lights down drama of sprawling opener ‘Sensation’, to the ‘roll credits’ coda of closer ‘Always Gonna Be A Dead Man’, Tusky exists as a glitzy, lucid journey playing out before the listener.
While debut album EW captured William Carkeet and Ellie Gray as they were finding their feet with one another, creating Tusky was a wholly symbiotic process from day one. “We got better at knowing what each other wanted,” William offers. “This was the album that we were trying to make from the beginning.”

Simultaneously evoking multiple eras of music, the album drifts through worlds of synth pop, jazz, trap, drill, ballroom waltz and leftfield electronica, with the scatterbrain sound palette melded by a peppering of instrumental motifs and William’s addiction to sampling sounds across multiple tracks. “I wanted there to be this weird dimensional thing going on,” William explains, “where songs from the album are playing in multiple places.”

The record sees an expansive cast of musicians assembled, with a much heavier focus on live instrumentation than previous outings. Alongside the expected fare of crackly synths, samplers and drum machines, Tusky gets its glossy sheen from a rich tapestry of jazz drums, double bass, grand piano and saxophone.

Most of the tracks are laden with improvised saxophone from Campbell Baum (Sorry, Broadside Hacks) and Ben Vince (Housewives, Joy Orbison), much of which was scrambled by William in post-production, lifting scraps from one song and layering them atop an entirely different track. Elsewhere, session musicians were cherry picked, including Bingo Fury, his drummer Henry Terrett, and a string ensemble led by Caelia Lunniss and Jo Silverston (Spindle Ensemble).

Most surprising is a rap feature from Monika (of South-East London collective Nukuluk), who brings album centrepiece ‘Mildred’ to new heights with a fiery verse on pain. Aside from being the most unlikely addendum to a sombre piano ballad, it demonstrates Robbie & Mona’s natural state of playfulness, forever following emotions and sensuality over any notion of traditional compositional boundaries.
Many of Tusky's tracks owe their inception to cinema, be it the soundtrack to Betty Blue, the glowing films of Wim Wenders, or the surprising parallels between La Belle Et La Bete and Bad Boys. Equally, much of Robbie & Mona's new-found sense of tension and spectacle comes from William’s recent work soundtracking independent filmmakers, while Ellie gave greater priority to threading a narrative through her stream of consciousness writing style.

In all its majesty, Tusky celebrates creativity with creation. “If you begin to see fiction as real, you can reincarnate and become different things. You can grow,” Ellie implores. “Nothing stays the same. You can shed old characters in yourself. There’s great joy in that.”

Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. The LP will feature a full-colour printed inner sleeve exclusive to this edition.

In 2009 the Type Recordings label run by John Twells had just released seminal records by Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yellow Swans when they signed Richter and put out his breakthrough Alphabet 1968 album. The LP sold out within two weeks, receiving a glowing full-page review in The Wire Magazine by the late Mark Fisher (later reprinted in his book Ghosts Of My Life), was selected for Boomkat's Top 10 releases of the year (alongside debut albums by Leyland Kirby, Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never) and was greeted with universal praise in the underground blog network as well as established magazines such as The New Yorker and Pitchfork.

The music itself played with the notion of nostalgia without being nostalgic itself. It's the sound of half-remembered dreams, a surreal distorted vision of the past, an aural polaroid of long forgotten musics, a ghostly voice from a non-existent era.

From the original Type one-sheet:
"The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of "songs" for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking 10-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with home made gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection."

Mark Fisher in The Wire:
"But what if we were to take Richter's provocation seriously - what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that is to say, if objects themselves could sing? It’s a question that connects fairy tales with cybernetics, and listening to Alphabet 1968, I’m reminded of a filmic space in which magic and mechanism meet: JF Sebastian’s apartment in Blade Runner. The tracks on the LP are crafted with the same minute attention to detail that the genetic designer and toymaker brought to his miniature automata, with their bizarre mixture of the clockwork and the computerised, the antique and the ultramodern, the playful and the sinister. Richter’s musical pieces have been built from similarly heterogeneous materials - record crackle, shortwave radio, glockenspiels, all manner of samples, mostly of acoustic instruments. ….. JF Sebastian's apartment was itself an update of older spaces in which science and sorcery co-existed: the workshops of ETA Hoffmann's inventor-magicians, or of Pinocchio's creator, Geppetto. I think, too, of Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's astonishing 1886 tale The Future Eve in which Edison, using the expertise he has recently acquired from inventing the phonograph, sets himself the task of constructing an artificial woman. But if there are songs here, they are sung by the gramophone and other recording and playback machines. Richter so successfully effaces himself as author that it is as if he has snuck into a room and recorded the objects as they played (to) themselves. Rather than simply automating his music, as in the case of Pierre Bastien and his mechanical machines, Richter makes us feel that he has merely recorded the unlife of objects. ….. Indeed, the impression of things winding down is persistent on Alphabet 1968. Entropy has not been excluded from Richter's enchanted soundworld. It feels as if the magic is always about to wear off, that the enchanted objects will slip back into the inanimate again at any moment."

Nothing compares to Lewis Taylor and nobody crafts a "B-Side" quite like him. Indeed, his long deleted B-Sides are the stuff of legend. So, gathered together for the first time on one slice of wax, we present The Damn Rest: an album's worth of B-Sides from the era of the 1996 Lewis Taylor ("Damn") album. More off-the-wall and abstract than the album proper, these rare, underheard tracks burst with Lewis's uncompromising genius. A lot more experimental, the music is still drop dead beautiful. The Damn Rest is the essential bridge between Lewis Taylor and Lewis II.

Lewis Taylor's self-titled masterpiece from 1996 was to be originally called Damn. You can see the word right there on the from cover. However, concerns over distribution in the US scuppered this desired title. When thinking about what to call this collection of essential B-Sides from the era of that first album, we thought The Damn Rest would be appropriate. But these tracks aren't simply throwaways or outtakes, as Lewis himself states: "each little group were recorded specifically for the release of each 'single'." These B-Sides were simply the next thing to happen after self-titled, and before Lewis II. In other words, you need this!

The collection opens with "Asleep When You Come", the A2 on the original "Lucky" 12". It's a slow-mo string-drenched soul offering, cast in cinematic soft-focus with a vocal performance from the heavens set against wonky, shuffling drums and delicate instrumental flourishes. Beautiful. Also from the "Lucky" single, "You Got Me Thinking" may actually be Lewis' funkiest moment and is definitely one of our favourites, a great, gently psychedelic funky club track, that's for sure. Next, the gorgeous, meandering "I Dream The Better Dream" is just sheer, metronomic bliss, with shades of Stevie Wonder. Just ask D’Angelo, who included the track on his Feverish Phantasmagoria show for Sonos. Not only a celebrity-fan-favourite, it's Lewis's, too: "My favourite has always been this track. In my fantasy it’s what early Soft Machine would’ve sounded like if Marvin Gaye was their lead singer."

As we move to the B-sides from the "Whoever" single, the first to feature is "Pie In The Electric Sky / If I Lay Down". It's a brilliantly sprawling classic. A head-nod funk workout in two parts; part psychedelic heavy soul jam, part breezy Marvin-esque near-instrumental of the deeply lush variety. It needs to be heard to be believed. Astonishing! Flip over for "Waves", a shimmering, dramatic, sweeping string-led fan favourite. The climax of the song is just too stunning for words. It's followed by the deep wyrd-soul of "Trip So Heavy" the final, dizzying track from the "Whoever" single and another celestial funk delight featuring strings, organ, twisted bass and heavy drums. From the "Bittersweet" 12", "A Little Bit Tasty" is a building, schizophrenic soul-jazz epic that starts out with Lewis performing a call and (distant) response with himself over a gentle mid-90s drum loop before snatches of heavy, crunching metal guitars blast apart the otherwise neat song structure. Ultimately, it's unarguable that The Damn Rest is worth it for the inclusion of the jaw-dropping "Lewis III" alone. A dazzlingly lush and stunningly sophisticated prog/soul hybrid that owes as much to "Pet Sounds" as "What's Going On" with arrangements that grow and unfold in layers. Just sparkling.

A compilation like this feels like one of those promo-only rarities they used to give out to a select few back in the good old days, so when it came to the artwork it only made sense to follow what Cally Callomon (head of Island’s art department) had done for the singles and promos back in the 90s. He even did us some fresh scribbles of “The Damn Rest” to match his handwriting that’s all over the first album and its singles. We hope you like it as much as the music contained within. Simon Francis’s vinyl mastering ensures these classic recordings sound as great as they deserve to. The record has been cut by Cicely Balston at Air Studios and pressed at Record Industry. We've lost Prince. We still have Lewis.

Mit ihrem 2020 erschienenen Debütalbum hinterließ das aus Hull in Nordengland stammende Post-Shoegaze- und Dream-Pop-Quartett bdrmm deutliche Spuren und machte einen Aufschlag, von der jede junge Band nur träumen kann. So wurde Bedroom vom Clash-Magazin als “a heady, forward-thinking shoe gaze distillation” gefeiert, der Guardian rief einen Song der Band zu “one of the underground hits of lockdown” aus, während der NME dem Album fünf Sterne verlieh und es zu nicht weniger als “a modern day shoe gaze classic” erhob.

Jetzt bei Mogwai's Rock Action Records unter Vertrag, kehrt die Band mit 'I Don't Know' zurück, ihrem beeindruckenden zweiten Album, das mit den charakteristisch effektgeladenen Gitarren und Neu! Grooves aufwartet, für den Hörer aber auch einige Neuerungen bereithält wie den Einsatz von Piano, Streichern, Electronica, Sampling und dem gelegentlichen Dance-Beat. Bdrmm-Fans werden nicht enttäuscht sein und die Fans von Radiohead, Ride, Mogwai, The Cure, die bdrmm noch entdecken müssen, würden gut daran tun, das spätestens jetzt mit 'I Don't Know' nachzuholen.

Mit ihrem 2020 erschienenen Debütalbum hinterließ das aus Hull in Nordengland stammende Post-Shoegaze- und Dream-Pop-Quartett bdrmm deutliche Spuren und machte einen Aufschlag, von der jede junge Band nur träumen kann. So wurde Bedroom vom Clash-Magazin als “a heady, forward-thinking shoe gaze distillation” gefeiert, der Guardian rief einen Song der Band zu “one of the underground hits of lockdown” aus, während der NME dem Album fünf Sterne verlieh und es zu nicht weniger als “a modern day shoe gaze classic” erhob.

Jetzt bei Mogwai's Rock Action Records unter Vertrag, kehrt die Band mit 'I Don't Know' zurück, ihrem beeindruckenden zweiten Album, das mit den charakteristisch effektgeladenen Gitarren und Neu! Grooves aufwartet, für den Hörer aber auch einige Neuerungen bereithält wie den Einsatz von Piano, Streichern, Electronica, Sampling und dem gelegentlichen Dance-Beat. Bdrmm-Fans werden nicht enttäuscht sein und die Fans von Radiohead, Ride, Mogwai, The Cure, die bdrmm noch entdecken müssen, würden gut daran tun, das spätestens jetzt mit 'I Don't Know' nachzuholen.

Lewis II was the follow up to Lewis Taylor's epochal, self-titled debut album. It was initially released in 2000 and this double LP release, its first ever vinyl edition, has been heavily anticipated for nearly a quarter of a century. It's often years before most listeners catch up with an album's breathtaking vision and devastating execution, and so it has proved with Lewis II; it stands up exceptionally well today.

After Island rejected Lewis Taylor's second release (later released as The Lost Album), he returned to the studio to record Lewis II. Less esoteric than Lewis Taylor, Lewis II is a more polished, sophisticated funk and mature uptempo soul than the dark psych-soul of his debut. The production, whilst slicker, is a bit tougher, with more crisp, R&B-flavoured grooves and head-nod beats and more bass pumping up his voice. The vocal intensity present on album number one doesn't abate. Indeed, as Lewis himself noted, "my voice is better on Lewis II and the vocals are high in the mix."

The moody funk of "Party" sounds like a mad blend of Riot-era Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. It rides a stuttering drum machine groove with acapella harmony vocals arriving halfway through to stay for the duration. "My Aching Heart", with its clean, slick, late 90s R&B drums, could surely have been a single. Perhaps Lewis's idiosyncratic melodies would've been too challenging for the charts. Lewis *had hoped* "You Make Me Wanna" would be a single but the dank, organ-drenched groove, coupled with the growling eroticism of Lewis's vocals would've, again, made this beyond the pale for most mainstream music fans. Somewhat incongruous acidic synths and bleeps give way to a laconic summertime groove on breezy highlight "The Way You Done Me", all funky acoustic guitars and stunning, good-time vocals. Sumptuous ballad "Satisfied", a real fan favourite, marries unusual instrumentation with classic soul-ballad structure and closes with a monster guitar solo which almost out-Princes Prince in its gritty melodicism, set against sweeping strings of real majesty. Prog-Funk-Rock!

The dubbed-out, spaced-out "Never Gonna Be My Woman" is the closest the album comes to classic D’Angeloesque neo-soul, with echoes of the esoteric funk featured across Maxwell's contemporaneous Embrya. But what follows is on some next level business. As Lewis's biggest fan, Geoffrey Scull, noted, "the "I'm On The Floor" / "Lewis II" / "Into You" song cycle stacks up against any other consecutive 15 minutes of recorded music, ever!" And who are we to argue with that? These could've been hits for Justin Timberlake during his fascinating Timbaland-collaborating days, such is the sonic and textural pop experimentation at play here. The extraordinary title track sounds like an outtake from Marvin Gaye’s Trouble Man and spends its last third as a searingly dark piano-led psychedelic-guitar-crunching soul instrumental. Just astounding. And then. AND THEN! The way it segues into, er, "Into You" is just straight up genius. Goosebumps galore on this one, no words can describe its celestial brilliance. Just kick back and be beguiled by the "Let me come on over again" refrain that ornately adorns its sensational coda. Phew.

The swoonsome, lovelorn ballad "Blue Eyes", apparently written in the spirit of Marvin’s "Vulnerable", is a lush, slow swinger with some gorgeous noir touches. To close, Lewis completely retools Jeff Buckley’s beloved, beautiful "Everybody Here Wants You" and, while talking some liberties, even manages to surpass the original. Yes, really! With soaring, fiery vocals set against icy piano and psychedelic guitars, Lewis recasts Buckley's effort as dramatic, ethereal soul.

When it came to translating the original CD booklet into a 12 inch LP sleeve, thanks to some suggestions from Cally Callomon (head of Island’s art department, who designed all the sleeves for Lewis’s two Island albums and their singles) and his trusting us with his “Lewis Taylor” folder full of various negatives, test prints and whatever else he was able to salvage from the old Island art department, we’ve gotten pretty close to what the original LP sleeve would’ve looked like if it existed. Simon Francis’s vinyl mastering, presents the eleven tracks over a double LP so, as ever, the record sounds outstandingly good. The records have been cut by Cicely Balston at Air Studios and pressed at Record Industry.

**Limited edition single-sided LP 300 copies**

David Horridge's unreleased bedroom studio tape material (1982).

Shortly after releasing the inimitable Light Patterns, David Horridge recorded a handful of demos. These sole artifacts from Dave capture the same Mancunian melancholy presented on
Light Patterns, and offer an insight into David’s contributing piece of the puzzle. It comes as no surprise that every track laid to tape from that era is an absolute gem.
David’s playing comes in the form of well-timed melodies and carefully placed basslines.

Nothing forced or rushed, and each movement really sits with a mood. Journey Within is an even more sedated, mellow effort than Light Patterns. The songs were perhaps even sketches for a
follow up that never manifested. The album’s greatest strength is in setting a peaceful, pastoral mood that allows for a relaxed listen all the way through. Hypnotic stuff.
The only deviation is the final song, One Note Bossa, which came as a surprise with its use of a drum machine. A feature that demonstrates what might have been were David have continued to
experiment and release albums...

RIYL: Durutti Column, Woo, Pat Metheny, and Steve Hiett.

Selected by Jim O’Rourke for his Tone Glow list of 25 albums that “never got their due”, Org was founded in the early 90’s by Espen Jensen and Kjetil D Brandsdal who would later go on to variously record as Elektrodiesel, Noxagt and Ultralyd in the swirl of the highly active Norwegian underground. “Org" was the only album the pair recorded as a duo, pressed in a meagre edition of just over 100 copies which disappeared almost as soon as they were made, lodged in the memory of the select few who have managed to hear it in the years since.

Made up of three long tracks, the near 20-minute ‘001’ opens the album with an extended organ zone-out matched with scraping factory machinery saturated into a dense cloud of harmonic fuzz. There's something transcendental about the sound that intersects with microtonal Alice Coltrane (particularly the unfairly maligned organ-only edition of "Turiya Sings"), as well as Pauline Oliveros and Ramleh. It’s music that pulls you in subconsciously; before you know it, you're fixating on the uncomfortable grind of metal on metal, buried mechanical rhythms and liturgical organ vamps that wind between industrial cacophony and sacred ritual music. For its last few seconds, we go into a full death metal tearout that fades out before it takes full flight, a glorious wtf.

‘002’ connects between minimalist drone styles and shoegaze, distorting fuzzed organ into pliable, dreamlike warbles that end up sounding like Kevin Shields' ‘Loveless’-era glides, or even Sunn O))) at their most devotional. Never losing the numbing overdriven mettle, its a piece that sounds spiritually entwined with Matthew Bower's Skullflower - a minimalist re-reading of high-contrast guitar music that takes all the psychoacoustic power and none of the annoying posturing.

For ‘003’, subaqueous organ is joined by synth and drum machine, sounding like the inspirational spark for Religious Knives' screwed 'n chopped cosmic psychedelia. The choice of sounds links it to Antena's foundational electro samba recordings too, but the overwhelming drone - a constant on all three compositions - connects the music to minimalist spirituals that have simmered beneath the DIY/avant garde for decades.

‘Org’ sits heavy on the nerves with overproof levels of mulched amp worship and ungodly, palms-down organ chords and wheezing, bezonked lines of melodic thought. 25 years out of sight and marinading in the archives, with the benefit of hindsight we can better understand the role these sounds played in the development of music in the contemporary sphere. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, one that makes valuable connections that, over time, have looked progressively more faint.

Blue Lake is the musical moniker of American born, Copenhagen based multidisciplinary artist and musician Jason Dungan, who signs to the Tonal Union imprint for the release of his new longform album ‘Sun Arcs’. It follows 2022’s release ‘Stikling’, earning a nomination for ‘Album of the Year’ at the Danish Music Awards plus warm praise from The Hum blog and musicians and DJs alike including Jack Rollo (Time is Away/NTS) and Carla dal Forno. A self taught player, Dungan began freely experimenting with self-built multi-string instruments, preferring to build his own hybrid 48-string zither and working in the realms of left-field ambient music, off kilter folk and improvised acoustic minimalism.

The starting point of ‘Sun Arcs’ saw Jason travel for a week alone to Andersabo, a cabin set in the idyllic Swedish woods just outside of Unnaryd, known also as the music project, festival and residency space which has been run by Dungan since 2016, hosting artists like Sofie Birch, Johan Carøe and Ellen Arkbro. Whilst writing 1-2 pieces per day, a conscious decision was made to leave behind everyday distractions and shut out the outside world to instead focus on the natural passage of time as Dungan recalls: “My only sense of time came from these daily walks out in the woods with my dog, and an awareness of the sun’s path as it moved across the sky each day.”

The album’s immersive world unfolds with the opener ‘Dallas’, an ode to his home state and a musical synthesis of these two disparate spaces (Texas and Denmark), the touchstones of Dungan’s life. A folk-esque single acoustic builds to a flowing arrangement of clarinets, organ and cello drones coupled with percussion. ‘Green-Yellow Field’ chimes in as the first of two solo oriented zither recordings twinned with the dreamlike title track ‘Sun Arcs’, both densely rich as cascading and overlapping harmonic tones resound. ‘Bloom’ emerges with a krautrock psyche before an eruption of cello drones, slide guitar and free-ranging zither playing, ushering in the anticipation of spring. With half of the recordings conceived in Andersabo, Jason returned to Copenhagen to form the album's centre piece ‘Rain Cycle’ which features a tempered Roland drum machine alongside shifting zither improvisations. ‘Writing’ explores the shimmering harp-like qualities of sweeping playing figurations with Dungan mapping out adjusted tuning “zones” on the zither for unconventional but creatively liberating effects. ‘Fur’ captures the feeling of openness and the momentum of time, seeing Dungan perform waves of solo clarinet, often in one takes and embellished with textural drones, a zither solo, and layers of guitar. ‘Wavelength’ the album's closer is fondly inspired by the film works of Michael Snow and Don Cherry’s seminal live album ‘Blue Lake’ (1974), as it builds out from a drone-generated zither chord and features an alto recorder solo. Dungan found a deep connection to Cherry’s stripped back performance ethos, focusing on the core beauty of minimal instrumentation creating a genre-less meeting between folk and jazz. A dialogue is formed between the solo and the bandlike performances, interlinked in a geographical duality with all finding a sense of commonplace as musical sketches of visited landscapes. The bountiful instrumentation ebbs and flows as further layers emerge with Dungan constructing his material much like an artist would, recording and reviewing, adding and subtracting.

Musically it portrays a form of double life led by an American-identifying person living in Scandinavia, and a new found presence in Denmark, seeking out underdeveloped marshlands and barren stretches of beach adrift from other rhythms and distractions. Highlighting their individual and potent importance Dungan concludes: “Both places feel like “me”, I think on some level the music is always some kind of self-portrait.” ‘Sun Arcs’ depicts the intricate balance of nature’s cycles and the paths outlined by the seasons, from a winter dormancy to a warm sun drenched scene. The album scales new glorying heights and further defines Dungan’s musical narrative, inhabiting a unique space in left-field, improvised and experimental music, borning his most accomplished compositions to date. A singular and visionary expression, drawing on an array of instruments and sound worlds with a renewed sense of joy and discovery.

The album's rich tapestry was mixed by Jeff Zeigler (Laraaji, Mary Lattimore, Kurt Vile /Steve Gunn) and mastered by Stephan Mathieu (Kali Malone, KMRU, Félicia Atkinson).

Brian Jonestown Massacre, Velvet Underground, TOY. “Upon the highways of Freedom, where Evil is like a Ferrari… “ Unbeknownst to its members, Index For Working Musik was born on an evening in late 2019 amidst the discovery of a collection of faded b&w photocopies that had been marinating on the floor of a urine-alley in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. An assortment of sacred and profane imagery were crumpled amongst an essay on early Christian hermits, entitled Men Possessed by God, the meaning of which was enticingly vague. Received together, they planted the seeds for a new endeavour. Though Max Oscarnold and Nathalia Bruno were already engaged in a creative ping-pong of sorts, the results to this point had only totaled a 30 min long ½ inch tape containing one track and four interludes. They needed a page and they needed ink, and they needed a place and it needed energy. Suddenly by chance or divine intervention, their experimental venture had been given form and direction. Back home in London’s cursed smog, they moved themselves and their 8-track studio into a basement in E8, where the project’s gravitational pull gained strength, quickly developing into an unexpected collective with the incorporation of drummer Bobby Voltaire, double bass player E. Smith and guitarist J. Loftus. As the world shifted around them and the Plague Years followed, it became increasingly clear that they were not going to leave that small basement room. The scarcity of light or outer world presence was less a limitation, instead the main tool at hand, allowing the recording to stretch for boundaryless days in architectural isolation, and forcing them to make straight forward free guitar music, adopting a ‘first thought, best thought’ approach. 35 minutes of repeat phrased guitars, slow-clipped drums and dulcet vocals where the recurring landscape is the desert. Reel-to reel-loops of Afghan music compete with the found sound overlays of voices recorded at the queue of the pharmacy and drum machines borrowed from Spanish heroes, channelling both far-off climes and snippets from a closer reality. It’s a strange psychic brew, built of imagined mysticism and domestic realities, of fever dreams and days that stretched into weeks of months. What was sparked by that discovery in the Gothic Quarter was actually a realisation that what they were looking for was with them all the while, buried as it was in piles of voice memos and recorded guitar feedback. Men Possessed By God they may be not: it was self-possession that was to guide their way in the end. “Life, despite all its destructive changes, remains indestructibly powerful and joyful

One of the masterworks of 20th century electronic music, "The Electric Lucifer" by Bruce Haack. Originally recorded in 1968 and 1969 (and released in 1970) it is an album both unique in conception and superb in realization. Your your gateway to the profound yet playful universe of Bruce Haack, a "far-out" place where flower-power and inner-space electronics collide!

Japanese folk-rock legend Morio Agata stunned fans with this way-outta-left-field dispatch - a synthesizer-laden, new-wave/post-punk classic. Originally released by Osaka’s Vanity Records in 1980 and back on vinyl for the first time in nearly 40 years, this fully authorized reissue has been remastered from the original analog tapes. In tip-on sleeve, with double-sided insert.

50 years ago, Hokkaido-born singer-songwriter Morio Agata released his debut single, Sekishoku Ereji (Red Elegy), an emotive, shuffling piano ballad that (shockingly) sold half a million copies in Japan. While he would never have another Top-40 hit, Agata would spend the next half century issuing a series of idiosyncratic, experimental pop albums. Today, he’s a beloved cult figure, still actively touring and recording in his seventies.

In his first decade as a recording artist, Agata released a stream of classics right out of the gate — Otome No Roman (1972) melded American-styled folk rock with traditional Japanese melodies, Zipangu Boy (1976) was a sprawling, Haruomi Hosono-produced psychedelic opus, and Kimi No Koto Suki Nan Da (1977) saw Agata tackle slick, lightly funky AOR. While this sort of stylistic schizophrenia might sink your average artist, Agata’s singular voice and magnetic charisma elevates everything he touches, and subsumes it all into Morio Agata World — a joyous, playful and frequently unhinged world.

Arguably the biggest left-turn of Agata’s early career, however, came in 1979, when legendary experimental label Vanity Records’ Yuzuru Agi paired Agata with major players from his label’s roster and the Osaka punk scene for an impromptu recording session. An impressive list of musicians took part (SAB, Yukio Fujimoto (Normal Brain), Masahiro Kitada (INU), Taiqui (Ultra Bide), Jun Shinoda (SS), Chie Mukai (Che-Shizu), and others) and even though they all came from different wings of the underground music scene, together they built an arresting, minimalistic bedrock of synthesized and acoustic sounds for Agata to work his magic over. The recording sesssions were tense and it took a while for the collective to find their footing. But the hard work paid off — Norimono Zukan is a masterpiece of ramshackle new wave and droning dirges, topped off with Agata’s unmistakeable croon, at times delicate, other times twisted. It’s a relatively short album, but a deep one, and Mesh-Key is honored to introduce it to a new generation of music fans.

Back in 2018, two mysterious twelve-inch singles appeared in underground record sthops. Credited to Blotter Trax, a previously unknown outfit who cherished “faceless” anonymity, the pleasingly twisted and mind-altering music on show was a mutant form of electronic psychedelia. The included tracks were variously informed by analogue techno, acid, electro and minimal, but inhabited their own clandestine sonic space. These tracks were, we later discovered, lightly edited “straight to tape” jams, crafted on the fly by their creators in one of Berlin’s most admired studios.

By the time Blotter Trax delivered their follow-up on Clone offshoot Frustrated Funk a year later, the secret was out: the project was in fact a collaboration between two storied artists, techno titan Magda – a DJ/producer who should need little introduction – and serial underground aggravator (and man of many aliases) Jay Ahern, sometime Hauntologists member and acid techno royalty thanks to years spent releasing similarly shadowy EPs as T.B Arthur.

In the years that followed, and before the COVID-19 pandemic grounded them in Berlin, the pair took their incendiary, modular-driven live show to esteemed clubland institutions (Fabric included), on an acclaimed tour of Japan, and onto the stages of festivals across Europe.

Four years on from that appearance on Frustrated Funk, Blotter Trax are back in updated and expanded form. Now a trio thanks to the addition of bassist Hannes Strobl, the band is set to release their far-sighted, funk-fuelled debut album, Super Conductor – a pulsating, thrill-in-minute ride includes contributions from a swathe of notable guests (Nina Hynes, Ilhem Khodja and David Moss provided vocals, Shigeru Tanabu played guitar, Matthew Styles mixed the set and old friend John Tejada mastered it).

While rooted in electro and acid, the album is impressively low-slung, stylish and funky, with nods towards Blotter Trax’s mutual love of Arthur Russell, early ‘80s NYC downtown disco, leftfield new-wave pop and flash-fried punk-funk. Released by JD Twitch’s Optimo Music imprint, it charts the ongoing dancefloor evolution of a band whose days of mystery and mischief are now a distant memory.

Next up is an overdue reunion with a familiar face. After his outstanding contribution to Cocoon Compilation S and his first solo EP on Cocoon Recordings, Raxon is back with a more than equally fascinating sound. The Egyptian-born and now Barcelona-based artist is back on it again, delivering two tracks that will take you on a journey through the depths of robotic soundscapes.
Intricate beats, hypnotic synthesizer melodies, deep bassline grooves, and distinctive EFX sounds create Raxon’s very special signature sound.

Straight drum programming paired with chirping percussions takes us away to embark on a travel through space and time while distinctive claps poke through a futuristic nebula of floating and shifting sequences. The twisted melody of “Robotalia” carries us to a parallel dimension of machine sound and if you listen closely, you can hear the robots’ screwing and sawing. Warping bleeps and mechanical effects complete the robotic feeling. Raxon’s understanding of structures and architectural abilities are reflected through the arrangement, slowly increasing to ecstasy.

“Kryptonite” scores with alien soundscapes. Stuttering vocals are the questions, while futuristic and dramatic chord stabs are the direct answer. A straight, radiant sound appears as an electronic trombone from outer space, offensively supporting the driving bassline. The symbiotic interplay between the euphoric synthesizer hook line and the relentless beat with pushing sharp hi-hats visualize powerful images in one's mind's eye. Suddenly the beat stagnates and results in a morphing break going head over heels developing a start-stop pitch effect that not only builds up tremendous tension but also bears an increased risk of melting your brain. We just love tape delay!

Mike Parker is one of underground Techno's most vital luminaires. His hypnotic aqua-pulsing, live hardware approach has undeniably influenced the direction of Techno since the late 90's and spurned some of the genre's definitive tracks.

Sabre-Tooth sees Mike Parker arrive on Samurai with 4 tracks that follow on from his essential Devils Curators series for Donato Dozzy & Neel's Spazio Disponible label where he unveiled his initial experiments with the 85/170 BPM tempo.

Sabre-Tooth is a stylistic re-calibration of Mikes's machine funk hinted at with his remix of Presha's Mainliner in 2022 but previously unheard in stand-alone tracks.

Steadfast cyber-rhythms, precision percussion, and trademark oscillating analogue waves are the magic ingredients on each track. Sparse elements honed to maximum effect, the Mike Parker science.

Following weeks of anticipation after an already banner year for the Hot Spitta, Curren$y gifts fans with his third release of 2022, The Drive In Theatre Part 2, the next installment in the cult fan favorite series. The 21 track album features appearances from Rob49, Fendi P, Dash, URA, Blü, I’sis, Premo Rice, and Jade Angelle, and sees production from Kino Beats, Trauma Tone, Harry Fraud, Cookin Soul, and more. In traditional form, Curren$y skates over smooth, jazz-infused beats and delivers a perfect album to put on and let play out while relaxing or working. If it wasn’t already clear, it’s safe to say that Curren$y is one of the greatest to ever do it. How many more timeless classics do you need?