Mink & Shoes' is a gooey drip of murky low slung slinky disco, falling somewhere in between smokey retro-futurism and hazy desolation.
It's a seductively squiggling romp through the outer reaches of the cosmos — sky-crawlingly atmospheric, slow-motion dance floor abstraction for acid heads and space cadets. With Navid Izadi's intoxicating vocals it's quite something, and comes in three flavours: dub, radio and original.
From Richmond, Virginia, Shy, Low have a reputation as one of the most compelling voices within the modern instrumental underground. Their music speaks to fans of post-rock's emotional grandeur and post-metal's crushing intensity alike, while simultaneously appealing to listeners drawn to experimental, atmospheric, and cinematic forms of heavy music. The band's ability to merge these seemingly disparate qualities has resulted in a body of work that is immediately recognizable and continually evolving. Luminous melodies, driving heaviness, layered textures, and carefully controlled tension allows `Purity Spiral' to move effortlessly between fragile moments of introspection and towering passages of intensity. Whether constructing intricate layers of harmony or driving songs toward explosive climaxes, there is a deep understanding of pacing, atmosphere, and the power of restraint. Momentum is at the heart of this album, through intricate rhythmic detail, and explosive bursts of energy, drums become the anchor and catalyst, supporting the band's expansive arrangements while pushing them toward moments of cathartic release. What distinguishes Shy, Low is their ability to balance enormity with restraint. Their music unfolds patiently, allowing tension to accumulate through layers of texture, melody, and dynamics. Moments of delicate clarity often coexist with overwhelming weight, creating a sense of organic motion. At the core of the band's sound lies an acute understanding of contrast. From shimmering, expansive passages to towering walls of distortion, the rhythm section provides both propulsion and atmosphere, becoming integral narrative voices that shape the emotion. There is a disciplined sense of purpose in their writing, an understanding that every note serves a larger arc. Shy, Low thrives in the space between introspection and catharsis, where subtle details become as impactful as the heaviest climaxes, and listeners are taken on a journey that is as visceral as it is profound. FOR FANS OF Caspian * Russian Circles * If These Trees Could Talk * Pelican * Toundra
From Richmond, Virginia, Shy, Low have a reputation as one of the most compelling voices within the modern instrumental underground. Their music speaks to fans of post-rock's emotional grandeur and post-metal's crushing intensity alike, while simultaneously appealing to listeners drawn to experimental, atmospheric, and cinematic forms of heavy music. The band's ability to merge these seemingly disparate qualities has resulted in a body of work that is immediately recognizable and continually evolving. Luminous melodies, driving heaviness, layered textures, and carefully controlled tension allows `Purity Spiral' to move effortlessly between fragile moments of introspection and towering passages of intensity. Whether constructing intricate layers of harmony or driving songs toward explosive climaxes, there is a deep understanding of pacing, atmosphere, and the power of restraint. Momentum is at the heart of this album, through intricate rhythmic detail, and explosive bursts of energy, drums become the anchor and catalyst, supporting the band's expansive arrangements while pushing them toward moments of cathartic release. What distinguishes Shy, Low is their ability to balance enormity with restraint. Their music unfolds patiently, allowing tension to accumulate through layers of texture, melody, and dynamics. Moments of delicate clarity often coexist with overwhelming weight, creating a sense of organic motion. At the core of the band's sound lies an acute understanding of contrast. From shimmering, expansive passages to towering walls of distortion, the rhythm section provides both propulsion and atmosphere, becoming integral narrative voices that shape the emotion. There is a disciplined sense of purpose in their writing, an understanding that every note serves a larger arc. Shy, Low thrives in the space between introspection and catharsis, where subtle details become as impactful as the heaviest climaxes, and listeners are taken on a journey that is as visceral as it is profound. FOR FANS OF Caspian * Russian Circles * If These Trees Could Talk * Pelican * Toundra
Without turning anything upside down, the trio has released their second album, gracefully deepening the unique path they have carved out for themselves. It is an album that already stands in stark contrast to the attention-deficit culture of our times. Indeed, whilst music sometimes seeks to concentrate the intensity of its references and artefacts, the trio takes a step back, deploying an intensity that is subtly distributed. Thanks to their progressive instrumental tracks blending elements inherited from dub, jazz, folk and even musique concrète, the trio has never allowed the quality of their music to suffer from their experimentation; at the same time, they have never been afraid to venture off the beaten track to achieve the sound they desire. Every single track of this album cast like fragile bridges over various landscapes that explore cycles and the natural rhythm within. It is up to the listener to tread carefully and not lose their footing and embrace the cinematic movement of this music. The three artists have indeed achieved a musical expression so free that it possesses the power of illusion. We are suddenly swept up in all these illusions, to the point where our memories are in flux. Both haunting and in motion, this trio’s music offers an impregnable mental retreat and an invitation to dance. This album conveys a dreamlike conviction that time, in its relentless flight, might—if only for a moment—be brought to a halt. A halt that awaits you.
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.
To kick off our 5th year party celebrations the label begins its new set of releases starting with the joined forces of Regal86 and IMOGEN. The artists contribute two tracks each to the four track vinyl alongside remixes of each other's work, meeting at sonic crossroads.
The EP journeys through rave nostalgia filled with warmth and hope for the future, recollecting some favourite memories of the dance floor.
The A side is fast, driving with a sense of longing for the Halcyon Days and the offline times of partying when things felt easier. The release opens with ‘One Night In 1992’, IMOGEN’s nostalgic ode to an earlier rave era, built around a vocal recollection of her mother’s experiences on the dancefloor in the 90’s. Raw, hazy and deeply personal, it sets the tone for a record rooted in memory while remaining firmly in the present. Regal86 follows with ‘Rush’, bringing a different energy to the record. Driven by rolling rhythms, playful movement and a strong sense of groove.
The B side takes a more optimistic turn looking into the future with dubby aquatic pads and euphoric breakdowns, carrying a feeling of forward motion. There is a lightness to the tracks, a sense of joy running beneath NC Station and keeping the momentum locked whilst turning inwards on the final track, IMOGEN’s ‘Midnight At Bret’ rounds out a release that moves naturally between nostalgia, propulsion and the shared language of the dance floor.
As the next release launches, IMOGEN takes wigs on tour for a five year special run of shows starting on release at Tresor for a two club take over following with further cities: London, Milan, Dublin and more.
Fused around saxophonist Ornella Noulet and a shared devotion to the spiritual jazz of John Coltrane, OLA TUNJI is a Brussels-based quartet whose music channels the intensity and openness of the 1960s “New Thing” movement.
Deeply inspired by John and Alice Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders, and Albert Ayler, the group embraces improvisation as a political and spiritual act. On stage, their performances often take on a trance-like intensity, carrying musicians and audience alike toward a sense of shared elevation. The music becomes a reminder that it can still be a medium for love, sister and brotherhood, and collective uplift.
Debut album ‘TRUST’ was born from a long artistic and spiritual journey, with music playing a central role as a space for inner exploration. Trust, a key concept for the group, lies at the foundation of this journey. The album’s title embodies an approach rooted in self-awareness, connection, and the sharing of love.
‘TRUST’ presents itself as a cohesive body of work, moving through moments of intensity, calm, spirituality and joy, each track contributes to a shared intention: to remind us that personal transformation is the starting point for a more authentic relationship with ourselves, with others and with the world around us.
Compositions such as ‘DEVOTION,’ WE CHOOSE LOVE’ and ‘SPEAK UP! (YOUR VOICE IS YOUR STRENGTH)’ reveal the album’s guiding thread: self-knowledge, resilience and the awakening of consciousness. Each track invites the listener to reconnect with their inner voice, cultivating a deeper sense of awareness and view of the world through a lens of reflection and humanity. Modal and physical, the album is built on long-form playing and moves between a deeply meditative and ecstatic sound.
Back to Pennsylvania, started (as so much great art does) in the beginning stages of a breakup in Brooklyn. Anna was weighted down by a sense of stagnation that required the kind of restart only returning home—to your childhood bed and bedroom, your parents backyard—can provide. So she went back to Pennsylvania. She sat at her hometown bar with her dad and his friends. She walked the sidewalks of her childhood. She spent time with her friends whose paths never quite diverged from that traditional, tale-as-old-as-time children’s chant—love, marriage, babies in a baby carriage. Despite all the shakeups of her life—no more New York, no more boyfriend, an impending nationwide tour with Joe P, frequent writing trips to L.A.—Anna still felt static. But it was on one of those fateful writing trips to L.A. that she regained a sense of motion, writing the record’s titular single. And what was supposed to be a single songwriting session with producer Gab Strum spun itself into 10 tracks reckoning with her new phase of life.
Across the past decade, KAS has established herself as a unique voice in experimental electronic music, a composer and synthesist whose work dissolves the boundaries between ambient electronica, contemporary classical, composition, and immersive sound design. Her new album “Ruin: It’s Not Just Music” arrives with a distinctive gravitational pull. The record moves with greater physical force, placing rhythm and impact at the centre of its architecture, revealing a more confrontational and embodied dimension of KAS’s musical language.
The first single “Ruin” arrives May 22nd, with the full album released October 2nd via SOMEONE SPECIAL the new label co-founded by KAS.
Where much of KAS’s earlier work explored harmonic environments, the forthcoming album is built around tension and release. Inspired by the sound of drum and bass, breakbeats fracture through dense fields of synthesis, percussive patterns and her signature melodic fragments – motions that feel closer to the kinetic language of club music than the meditative spaces often associated with her past catalogue. The result is a body of work that feels both recognisably hers and newly charged, music that moves through the body as insistently as it engages the mind.
For listeners who first encountered KAS through the glowing synthesis of “Ears” (2016) or the intricate experimental pop of “The Kid” (2017), this direction may feel initially surprising, yet the shift has been quietly unfolding across the past several years. KAS’s practice has steadily expanded beyond the expectations placed upon experimental electronic artists, moving between orchestral composition, audiovisual installations, film scoring, and large-scale commissions while retaining the unmistakable sonic signature that defines her work.
The 2022 albums “I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon” (2022) and “Let’s Turn It Into Sound” (2022) explored a deeply immersive approach to composition, expanded her reputation and instinct for constructing detailed sonic ecosystems while continuing to blur the lines between experimental electronics and contemporary pop structures. KAS’s most recent output has continued to widen that field including the rhythm oriented electronic album “Gush” (2025) and her return to more orchestral roots with “Thoughts on the Future” (2025). Together these releases underscored the breadth of her practice.
Her prolific collaborators and creative partners have ranged from Patti Smith and Suzanne Ciani to Danny Elfman, Tycho, Glass Beams, RY X, Caribou, Four Tet, Reggie Watts, and Max Richter, while her compositions have appeared in projects with Apple, Chanel, Meow Wolf, the BBC Orchestra, and major film and television productions.
On “Ruin: It’s Not Just Music”, that vocabulary becomes more kinetic than ever before. The record draws energy from jungle, drum and bass, and dance-floor focused electronic music while retaining the intricate synthesis and tonal curiosity that have defined KAS’s work from the beginning. The result is a record that feels equally at home within club culture, contemporary composition, and the experimental spaces that have long championed her artistry.
On May 27th KAS will present a major performance at London’s Barbican Centre alongside the London Contemporary Orchestra, marking the ten-year anniversary of her landmark album Ears. The evening will trace the arc of her creative evolution while also introducing material from the new album.
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Madelyn Byrd returns to Glasgow’s Somewhere Press with a hazed set of weightless soundscapes. »Night Rider« opens in widescreen with the chirp of cicadas dancing across a desert landscape, before Shiroishi’s saxophone eventually cuts through the dark like neon. The story Byrd tells is close to their heart: they spent their teenage years in the Sonoran Desert, the vast subtropical expanse spanning parts of Arizona, California, and Mexico. Its seemingly alien landscape — pocked with giant, tree-like cacti and looming rocky outcrops — is lodged in the cultural memory, a quality Byrd draws on as they slowly reveal their poetic narrative.
The album plays like a road movie of sorts, moving through Byrd’s memories and setting them to very different rhythms. Clattering drums emerge on »Of Nature, Of Bodies, Of Dreams«, while Byrd’s soft tones, processed to sound almost otherworldly, glide gently across the metallic clangs. Each track highlights a form of movement: there is the microscopic, insectoid crunch of »Imprint«, where guitar prangs meet Shiroishi’s spirited runs, while »Into Sonoran Pool« creates motion from the atmosphere itself, recreating the thick desert air with shimmering electrical currents and psychedelic processes.
At this point, the album begins to echo Robert Ashley’s late-period theatrical work: compositions that broke with familiar formats, juxtaposing dialogue with knowingly experimental orchestral flourishes. Byrd strikes a similar note through a fusion of poetry, sound design, choral music, and chiming, listless ambient elements that also recall Harold Budd. Budd grew up in the Mojave Desert, which borders the Sonoran, creating an eerie parallel with the moods he conjured throughout his long career.
Byrd finds a similarly aesthetic link to the West Coast landscape, referencing the history of experimental music while establishing their own voice. As the album rides into the sunset with a roar of engines, they offer a distinct vision of pop: »What Is, What Was« integrates a chugging break and ketamised vocal hook, while the finale, »In Perfume, Remember«, lands as a James K-like heartmelter.
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The sun sat high above the desert outside Joshua Tree on October 17, 2024, baking the rocks and shrubbery outside the Farrington Observatory as a small group of invited guests ventured up a steep path towards the telescope. Kyle Simon, the artist and printmaker who founded the Observatory, was standing outside the print studio sat below the towering cylindrical building, greeting friends alongside his wife Sarah and lifelong friend Brian Weitz, the musician widely known as Geologist of Animal Collective. Simon and Weitz had spent the previous day testing and retesting a system that would transform the light of the oncoming full moon captured by the gigantic telescope into a signal that would modulate the control voltage of Weitz’s modular synthesizer. As the sun dipped below the horizon line, the audience gathered on a small wooden patio surrounded by speakers while Weitz readied himself behind the array of patches and knobs. Simon addressed the group, presenting the history of The Sirens, the sonic exploration of the night sky’s mystical and scientific significance about to unfold.
The music conjured under the Hunter’s Moon that night is now documented on this first official release of The Sirens, which was conceived by Simon and Weitz as a recurring performance piece and sound installation. Over a decade ago, Simon began immersing himself in literature on humanity’s sonic relationship to the celestial realm, including Homer’s Odyssey, Plato’s “Spindle of Necessity, ” Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi, and the field of astroseismology. He fitted homemade telescopes with photodiodes and optical sensors to make the images audible, finding latent patterns in the noisy sonic signals he began receiving from the stars. With Weitz, the process expanded as the signal was routed through an analog amplifier and set to modulate the pitch, filter, and other elements of his synthesizer. Together they developed a system of improvisation, with Simon adjusting the telescope to change the intensity of the light based on its relationship with the moon’s position (imagine a theremin player moving their hands in subtle, meaningful motion), and Weitz responding to that input in real time: bending it, amplifying it, or letting it stand on its own. The duo debuted the piece at the Integretron in Joshua Tree in 2018, providing a crucial proof of concept for the performance at Farrington featured here.
The first thing the listener hears on The Sirens is the opening of Farrington Observatory, the cranking of motor and metal. As the lens of the telescope is exposed to the evening air, a wavering drone emerges from the synthesizer, flickering at the margins, the tuning of the oscillators adjusting to the rapidly cooling desert air. The piece progresses and the drone becomes a luminous, spherical constant, bathing the listener in pure tone as Weitz draws out harmonically ambiguous melodies that spiral upwards. Electronics crackle and convulse, coalescing into dense dissonance before widening out into an open octave. Just as the moon orbits the Earth and the stars shift as the planet rotates, so each sonic element appears in flux, interrelationships slowly forming and falling away. Divided into two parts, The Sirens flows as a continuous conversation between the artists and the starlight completing its thousand-year journey across the galaxy.
The Sirens belongs primarily to a lineage beyond music: of sea captains navigating by looking skyward, of astrophysicists studying the formation of the Milky Way, of the modern myths of werewolves, of the stories embedded in constellations. As Simon writes in the album’s extensive liner notes, “These stories and explorations reveal a collective yearning to become conscious of our connection to the universe, our deep-seated desire to understand how we fit into it all.” This music underscores the history of the night sky as the place where poetry and science find common ground, where exploration hinges on the imagination. Driven by curiosity and ingenuity, Weitz and Simon look up and wonder.
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When you hear the name Need For Mirrors, you know you’re about to listen to something solid. Few DJs have created such successful and varied careers as Need For Mirrors’ Joe Moses, both behind the decks and behind the desk! Joe’s pioneering attitude earned him the reputation as one of DNB's leading DJs. Having created one of London’s most influential club nights Soul In Motion with Bailey, the two expanded further to create the Soul In Motion Records and agency as well as his own label Zoltar.
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The follow up to her UK number 1 album This Is How Tomorrow Moves, the stark and striking fourth album by beabadoobee is named for the electricity towers that dot every major artery in the world—the strong, spindly structures that reminded Beatrice Laus of her connection to friends and family at home while she was staring down extreme disconnection and isolation on tour over the past few years.
The title can also be read as an allusion to Laus’ spiky, forceful new sound—the waves of distortion that crash and shatter across this record’s 14 songs mirroring the intense crackle you hear when walking under power lines. The pylon is also a fitting symbol for an album that reckons with the repetitive anxieties of your mid-twenties: What if I’m always going to be this way? What if life is just pylon after pylon on the road?
The album’s first single is available to stream and buy from today: “Sun Has Set” introduces Pylon as, in essence, a set of songs that began as diary entries, words that Laus thought she’d never be able to say out loud. “A lot of the songs on this record are things I wish I could have said to someone,” she says. “This song has this petty tunnel vision—it’s like, I hate you. You’re gonna stay here and listen to how much I hate you. Because I never got to say that.” The single comes accompanied by a striking first person video directed by Bea’s partner and longtime visual collaborator Jake Erland.
Ever a devotee of pure rock music—both as something to be cherished and something to be played with—Laus casts these feelings in songs that touch on classic grunge, midwest emo and ‘90s radio rock, zeroing in on a sound that is both harsher and more direct than any of her previous records. She says the music she’s loved has “always been an influence” on her music, and so for B4 she went straight to the source. A fair few of Beabadoobee’s composite influences contributed to Pylon, a fact that speaks to the goodwill and respect Laus has amassed over the course of her relatively brief career.
Hayley Williams sings on “Nothing to Prove,” a deeply anthemic indie-rock song about getting your power back from fairweather friends who just want a bit of your success. The moody “Powerlines” features a verse from Turnstile singer Brendan Yates, a master of matching vocal force with emotional nuance. Elsewhere, you’ll find contributions from Pinegrove’s Evan Stephens Hall, Deftones’ Chino Moreno, and Title Fight’s Shane Moran, as well as, on “Write Me A Letter”, production work from Laus’ longtime friends and collaborators Matty Healy and George Daniel of The 1975.
Beabadoobee will debut songs from the record on the Powerlines Tour, her first ever arena shows and biggest tour to date, taking in shows across North America, the UK and Europe this autumn-winter. The Powerlines Tour kicks off 1 October and includes stops at Madison Square Garden, The Kia Forum, The O2 and more (full routing below). Support comes from Wisp in the US, Canada and UK and Violet Grohl in France, The Netherlands, Belgium and Germany.
Born in the Philippines and raised in London, Beatrice Laus emerged as a British alternative music icon across three acclaimed albums and five EPs. She has garnered multiple BRIT Award and BBC Sound Of nominations, and won NME’s Radar award, whilst amassing over 10 billion streams worldwide and more than 12 million followers across her social channels.
This Is How Tomorrow Moves became her first record to reach number 1 on the UK Official Album Chart in 2024, following her Top 10 albums Fake It Flowers (which reached number 8) in 2020 and 2022’s Beatopia (#4). Earlier this year, beabadoobee released the one-off single ‘‘All I Did Was Dream Of You,” teaming up with Grammy-nominated best New Artist The Marías, the result of a longtime mutual creative admiration between María Zardoya and Bea.
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Composer and multi-instrumentalist Koen Holtkamp has spent more than two decades shaping a body of work at the intersection of ambient, experimental, and electroacoustic music. Known for his role in the influential duo Mountains, as well as a solo catalog defined by texture and spatial awareness, Holtkamp has long explored how sound interacts with environment and perception. With Nightlife, he enters a new phase of that inquiry, one shaped as much by physical relocation as artistic evolution.
After leaving Brooklyn for the relatively rural setting of New York’s Hudson Valley, Holtkamp found himself immersed in nature and embracing a slower way of life, a shift that directly informed the album’s creation. Rather than rushing into a new project, he allowed the space itself to guide him, focusing on experimentation and play instead of a fixed outcome. Over time, a new instrument emerged from his modular system, built around physical modeling techniques that emulate plucked string sounds. Drawing on a deep affinity for acoustic traditions, from guitar soli to the kora and other chordophones, he began translating those influences into an electronic language, creating music that feels tangible, effusive, and even intimate, despite its synthetic nature. As the pieces took shape, Holtkamp expanded the project into a kind of imagined ensemble. Composed with specific collaborators in mind, the album features extensive contributions from drummer Greg Fox and saxophonist and flutist Matt Bauder, whose performances subtly reshape the material and draw it toward more fluid, song-like forms, alongside a guest appearance from Ben Vida on synth bass. Yet even as Nightlife occasionally resembles a band in motion, its construction resists traditional cohesion. Acoustic and electronic sources coexist to create a hyper-dimensional sense of space, with each element deliberately placed in its own distinct environment, yielding a complex yet inviting setting that feels both otherworldly and completely natural.
Much of the album was created during late-night sessions, which became a kind of personal ritual and ultimately inspired its title. Nightlife unfolds as a series of finely detailed environments, where stillness, texture, and subtle interplay take precedence over momentum. Each piece invites close listening while remaining open and unforced, reflecting both a change in pace and a deepening of focus. The result extends Holtkamp’s ongoing interest in how sound can shape, and be shaped by, the spaces we inhabit.
„Öd“ marks the long-awaited return of Institut für Feinmotorik - the Black Forest collective known for using eight prepared turntables to investigate acoustic micro-phenomena generated by everyday objects - with a new album and their first full-length release on Faitiche. It is also the return of their almost comical understatement as personal artistic principle: „making almost nothing out of almost nothing,“ compressed into the dots on an umlaut.
The Öd-nis, the wasteland, is a field that the collective has been ploughing in sound since their first release in 1997. Eight prepared turntables, four mixers, no records, six hands (give or take) merge into what they call the „Octogrammoticum“. A rotating organism of surfaces in friction, fed with the clutter from a drawer: rubber bands or tin foil, CDs, a discarded socket board. Under IFF's scrutinizing stylus, mundane almost-nothings get scratched open to reveal the acoustic density of negative space itself.
Last year’s „Adhesive Tape“ drew IFF closer together after an almost ten-year hiatus. An eponymous event series at Berlin's silent green set in motion what would become their most twistedly funky release since „Penetrans“ on Staubgold in 2002.
The only thing öd about „Öd" (meaning „barren" or „boring“ in German) may well be its title: layers of improvised play and randomized loops convolve around porous, dubby groove locks, tugging at each other in a call-and-response with howling static that cuts through bulbous ambient techno into a scrap-metal Dixieland phantasm. Stratified yet spacious, these sonic double exposures always hover on the verge of collapsing. What you think you hear might not be what you actually hear.
The album’s track titles resemble Conceptual Poetry, extending this psycho-phenomenological gesture into the realm of spoken language. Conceived by renowned poet Dagmara Kraus, they become word molecules - „stern,” „dies,” „lose“ - tilting delicately between German and English, constantly changing depending on the ear’s perspective and pointing back to the deeply unstable fabric connecting meaning and sound. Which also makes „Öd“ an unusual cross-disciplinary collaboration - at least in the field of electronic music.
PS: Since its beginnings in Bad Säckingen, IFF has always been more than the sum of its rotating parts, moving tirelessly between multimedia art, theory, solo projects and collaborations. With IFF Expanded, the collective now opens its eight-doored apparatus, inviting artists working with CDJs or samplers to join - an ambitious live format that loosens its former purity law while carrying forward a long-standing curatorial practice. The same thread also runs into the related event series Acephalic Headspace.
Institut für Feinmotorik (*1997), artist-group originating from Black Forest working in various fields. In musical context known for transforming turntables into instruments by removing the records and instead applying rubber bands, paper scraps, household materials – resulting in a vivid laboratory for the productive misuse of everyday objects. This approach is documented in record releases and performed live.
The third chapter of The Third Room's curator-led series is shaped by Verraco, one of the key voices behind a new generation of artists reshaping contemporary club music. Through his productions, DJ sets and his work with TraTraTrax, he has helped define a sound where hybrid forms, rhythmic experimentation and cross-cultural influences are pushing the genre into new territory. Structured across two distinct sides, the release draws a clear connection between past and present. The A-side leans into a deeper, more classic space, while the B-side moves towards a more forward-facing, hybrid sound. It opens with Libration (Stone Version) by Substance & Vainqueur, a revisiting of their landmark 2007 release, a track that helped define the language of Dub Techno as it is understood today. Reduced, deep and spatially precise, it established a blueprint for how rhythm, delay and tone could function together. It's presence here acts less as a nod to the past and more as a reminder of a foundation that continues to shape the genre. Skee Mask's Clear Sky 909 continues this thread, softening the edges without losing depth. Warm, enveloping textures and fluid movement give the track a sense of openness, balancing clarity with emotional weight. The B-side shifts perspective. On Untitled (Teamgeist Mix), Verraco, joined by Tils, delivers the record's defining moment - a dense, intricately designed piece built on a driving low-end and evolving rhythmic patterns. Elements from Techno, Bass and Leftfield House converge into a detailed, forward-moving structure that actively bridges cultural contexts. It results in a form of dance music shaped by technical precision, but drive.n by a clear sense of intent, marking a distinct expression of Verraco's current sound. Untitled by 1morning introduces a rolling, tribal-infused groove with a strong sense of depth, while PatumPa by Regal86 closes the record with a bright, loop-driven energy that leans into pure motion. Across both sides, the release moves between reference and progression. Rather than separating old and new, Verraco connects them - tracing a line from foundational Dub Techno to a more fluid, contemporary club language. Copyright 2026 The Third Room A1 Written and Produced by Peter Kuschnereit & Rene Loewe | A2 Written and Produced by Bryan Mueller | B1 Written and Produced by JP Lopez & Jakob Ferdinand Tils and mixed by Lurka | B2 Written and Produced by 1morning | B3 Written and Produced by Regal86 Mastered by Andreas Kauffelt (Schnittstelle Berlin) Artwork by Charlotte Ernst Design by Daniel Bornmann (STUEDIO.XYZ) Distribution by Clone Pressing by Matter Of Fact
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Featuring timeless waltzes and polkas by Johann Strauss I & II , including "An der schonen, blauen Donau", "Kaiser-Walzer" and the festive "Radetzky March", this album captures the sparkle, elegance, and tradition of Vienna's celebrated New Year concerts. Conducted by Willi Boskovsky and Hans Knappertsbusch , these historic recordings from the late 1950s and early 1960s offer an authentic and joyful listening experience, perfect for classical music lovers and New Year celebrations alike.
On her first Harmony Index album, multi-instrumentalist and producer Nico Leibman spotlights the feelings that are most difficult to express, bringing out the friction between her dreamy hooks and harsher sonics. Written almost like a DJ set, the album shifts intentionally between piano-led trip-hop, lounge, dream pop, 2-step and breakbeat house, not languishing in nostalgia but defining a language that's rooted in desire, surrender and forward motion.
Until now, Leibman has been best known as a touring musician, working alongside artists like Jessica Pratt and Ana Roxanne, while slowly putting together new solo material in-between frequent tours. The album was written in bursts over the course of five long years and provided Leibman with a much-needed outlet - a chance for her to lock into her personal musical preoccupations, like Janet Jackson's 'The Velvet Rope', Everything but the Girl's 'Walking Wounded' and Prefab Sprout's 'Jordan: The Comeback'.
It's this era of pop - when nascent technology collided at force with skillful, soulful songwriting - that provides the album's backbone, fleshed out by Leibman's potent meditations on a spectrum of experiences in Los Angeles. And as the record was evolving, Leibman let long night drives crack her creative world open. Embracing the city's notoriously cinematic romantic side, she used the car as a "little chamber of limerence," in her own words, enabling her fantasies and acting as a test system for each song. "If it wasn't hitting in the car," she says. "It wasn't going to be on the record, period."
This sense of motion is evident almost immediately on 'Recognize', when Leibman's breathy words are carried into the night by choppy, uptempo breaks and resonant pads. So even when she simply coos over chugging guitars and bass on the first half of 'Enough', the drop into a low-slung breakbeat is implied. "Another digression, a break in this tension," she sings. "Was I foolish to believe that this was never your intention?" Leibman's tales of disillusionment are imbued with power, buoyed by her pitch-perfect production, with additional help from co-producer Cesar Maria.
On 'Don't Pretend', she sings softly and soulfully over decelerated Timbaland-inspired beats and a dubwise bassline, aided by additional production from Purelink. And 'If' marks the point where she lets go, infusing her euphoria with melancholy as her voice soars alongside the album's most infectious piano riff. Fittingly, the album concludes with 'Trust', a song about surrendering to the possibilities of love that works as a potent metaphor for the album's evolution. Over the course of five years, Leibman learned to let people in, finally trusting the process. "It's also a fantasy of what it would feel like to finally be in love again," she laughs, accepting that it's still just a fantasy. But it's this hope in unfulfilled longing that gives the album its unique character, defining a bold, unguarded voice in LA's experimental pop landscape.
For the second installment of its renewed imprint, Fuse's own in-house resident and one of Belgium's proudest exports Phara takes the reins for a deep dive into thick percussion and vibrant club landscapes. 'The Wall' puts current dance music under a microscope with a brush of truly vintage spontaneity, merging techno's confrontational nature with house's harmonic genuineness. This duality is reflected through Phara's own relationship with his home base Fuse and the complementary contrast between its two rooms.
The EP's title track serves as a hypnotic introduction for the A1, imposing a bass-heavy rhythm and a persistently oscillating synthline. A dense production full of energy, 'The Wall' inspires intrigue throughout its duration, revealing its true intentions through a capable sound system. Sharing the first side of the press is 'Blaes 208', a name that Fuse club goers will likely recognise, that guides the listener from effect into embrace. With lush keys echoing past a comforting drum sequence fit for a close-eyed dancefloor experience, Phara's impactful tendencies meet his affinity for the melodic through a blissful six minutes of crowd to selector connection. Switching sides, a return to a cold cold aesthetic is quickly apparent through 'Hush Now 206'. A pummeling, saturated bass competes with a kick of equal effect, rolling through a storm of metallic stabs. Mastering the message of urgency, Phara presents a lightshow of resonating percussive work, defining his space just to cut right through it. To close out with a lasting impression, the producer mutes the acoustics of his work through razor-sharp sound design dotting along playful snares, a duality reminiscent of the dynamism of Detroit electro. 'Motion Steps', referring to the stairs that ascend from Fuse's main room to its more left-field counterpart, captures the atmosphere of the almost shimmering music that can be expected to be played there; a place where Phara and many others have been known to explore the extremities of their music. He swiftly throws in melodic elements to recontextualize an otherwise pressing composition, and after three chapters of considerable weight, he concludes his record with infectious groove that flaunts technical ability.
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Lost Soul Super Rarity “Here I Am Baby” by Lady Jane reissued by Athens of the North
Rare 1980 Detroit funk-soul LP finally surfaces after 45 years, revealing a powerful story of survival and artistic resilience
Edinburgh based label Athens of the North is pleased to announce the reissue of Here I Am Baby, the only studio album by soul and funk vocalist Lady Jane (Jane Brice), originally recorded at Studio A, in Dearborn Heights and privately released in 1980.
Lady Jane recorded these sessions during a turbulent period in Detroit in the late 1970s, working with respected engineer Eric Morgeson and a studio band on material largely written by her then-husband. The album remained virtually unknown for decades, with copies destroyed in a flood and masters held by her ex-husband. A chance discovery by Friends of Sound Records founder David Haffner in 2022 set the reissue in motion. Remarkably, before his death, Jane’s ex-husband returned the original master tapes to her—yielding not only the complete multitracks for Here I Am Baby, but an entire album’s worth of unreleased material, also coming soon on AOTN.
Here I Am Baby showcases Jane’s extraordinary voice across a compelling blend of soul, funk, and disco, from the opening ballad through heavy funk excursions like “Never Lived In The Ghetto” and “Space Flight.” The album’s final track, “She’s A Star” - the only song Janewrote herself - carries profound personal significance. Recorded without her husband’s knowledge, the song directly addresses her survival of childhood sexual abuse and stands as a moving testament to resilience and self-belief.
Now an ordained minister, Jane Brice has spent decades away from the spotlight. But her voice—at once forceful, delicate, and vulnerable—deserves to be heard. Newly mastered from the recovered tapes, Here I Am Baby and the forthcoming Miss Disco present not merely a rare funk-soul artifact, but a powerful document of a woman’s courage in reclaiming her own story.
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Blueprint ARchives presents a reissue of Likemind 02, the 1994 UK split release by Nuron and Fugue. Four pieces of melodic, abstract techno pair Nuron?s Mirage and In Motion with Fugue?s Contrapoint and Interlagos.
Blueprint ARchives presents a reissue of Dark Llama?s Tuned In E.P., originally released in the UK by Aura Surround Sounds in 1993. Four direct techno cuts: The Ghost, Circular Motion, Certified and Force 4.
French composer, artist and co-founder of Transversales Disques, Jonathan Fitoussi has developed a distinctive body of
work over the past two decades, blending analog synthesis, minimalism and electronic music.
Inspired by the mineral landscapes and luminous atmosphere of southeastern France, DELTAS is his fifth solo studio album.
Combining hypnotic drum patterns, flowing pulses, shimmering electronic textures and contemplative movements, it unfolds as a deeply immersive journey through space, light and motion.
A rich and evocative work from one of the most singular voices in contemporary electronic music.
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GoldFord’s soul music is rooted in truth. His raw, unvarnished songs are a balance of introspection and catharsis, grappling with heartbreak, healing, and the quiet revelations that come with growth. After spending a decade in corporate America, the St. Louis native (now based in Los Angeles) turned to music as a means of survival following a devastating personal loss. “I was more afraid of dying with regret than I was of failing,” he says of his decision to finally choose the path at 30, a choice that set his entire trajectory in motion.
That initial fearlessness has since fuelled extraordinary momentum. With over 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, GoldFord has rapidly become one of the most compelling emerging voices in contemporary music. His breakout EP, Orange Blossoms (Oct 2024), has surpassed 100M streams, and his latest project, Space of the Heart (Sept 2025), has already generated 90.8M streams, 2.7M saves, and over 153,000 pieces of user-generated content across TikTok and Instagram. The standout track “Easy Does It” has reached 43.5M streams and continues to accelerate with more than 250K new weekly discoveries on Spotify.
GoldFord’s touring trajectory has followed the music's rapid ascent. He began in intimate rooms like Los Angeles’ Moroccan Lounge and New York’s Baby’s All Right before embarking on a debut North American tour that sold over 25,000 tickets. This momentum carried over to his first UK and European run, which required multiple venue upgrades in cities like London and Manchester. The international momentum continued with an Australian debut in March 2026, alongside key festival appearances at Austin City Limits and Noah Kahan’s Out of the Blue. He is currently headlining 1,000+ capacity venues on the Space of the Heart North American tour, including sold out shows in historic rooms like The Fonda and Webster Hall, with upcoming festival slots at Shaky Knees and Oceans Calling.
Following one of 2025’s standout EPs, the CEO of the National Centre for Mark Fell Studies fires from the hip in brilliant, club-troubling motion. In step with 30 years of prism-pushing work — and particularly the »Nite Closures« EP, which signalled a concerted return to the dancefloor — Fell pulls aspects of hypermodern dance and electronic music from Chicago, Tanzania, and Japan into his own peculiar agenda.
The hugely distinctive results pull the body into thrillingly unusual, typically ascetic arrangements, activating every pointillist drum hit with attack and decay in a soberly ludic play of rhythmelodic tension and release, executed to delirious ends; 40 minutes of computer music.
As an artist who witnessed first-hand the explosion of electronic music in early ’80s Sheffield, and its interplay with house and rave as it refracted into wild new styles during the ’90s, Mark Fell is uniquely positioned to pursue his passion for the dynamics of electronic dance music to the nth degree. »Servitude In Context« continues to develop ideas around music for movement in the mid-2020s, placing decades of keen observation — from the macro and historical to the niche and hypermodern — at the service of flexing bodies in new directions.
Long-held notions of multistability manifest in what feels like two machines playing chess on the dancefloor, attempting to adapt to each other’s playing styles and patterns in real time, anticipating and zigzagging around the next move. The result is a plethora of options for limber dancers and those who only bust a move inside their heads.
The slow-fast play of accelerating and decelerating strikes, alongside monotonic chatter in »Actuations #1 (Extended)«, acclimatises the body to a uniquely sensual physics. This develops into the rudely screwed, asymmetric angularity of »Time-Slur« and the shatterproof elasticity of »Taut Manifold«, which feels like an LLM trained on Autechre.
»Low Energy Mantra« offers the EP’s closest resemblance to melodic structure, like gamelan and footwork refracted through lab-grown diamonds. Then »Anode« flashes its teeth with a rudeness recalling the latter stages of Fell’s Pat Thomas jams, before »3 Lost Contours (Pts 1–5)« tilts into 12 minutes of proper quicksilver madness, balancing the sexiness of his Sensate Focus work with an updated, clean-hoofed step and parry.
This VA release brings together four producers who share a common language: hypnosis, movement, and an obsessive attention to sound design. Across two sides of vinyl, the record moves through different shades of deep and mental techno, held together by a sense of restraint and clarity rather than force.
Na Nich opens the A-side with a mental yet groove-driven piece, where impeccable sound quality meets a clean, deliberate design. LFO-driven elements float underneath the surface, almost speaking, giving the track a voice of its own without ever breaking its hypnotic hold.
Forest On Stasys follows with a tribal and deep approach that still hits with weight. Shakers and layered percussion drive the movement forward, building a rhythmic body that feels both organic and controlled.
On the B-side, Translate stays true to a purely mental identity: repeating LFOs and speaking tones that fold in on themselves, always kept clean and precise, letting the repetition do the work.
Save Your Atoll & Gabriele Santucci close the record with a deep, tribal-leaning cut full of groove and motion. Bongos, shakers, and background percussion build a danceable hypnosis, where every element serves the movement.
Four tracks, four voices, one shared sense of direction — a record built for the floor, but never at the expense of detail.
Following a strong debut, the Uruguayan label EviternoRecords returns with its second release, Teknovela, bringing together Molen and Nico Lampariello, two of the most talented poducers from the new generation of Uruguay’s electronic scene. Across four carefully crafted cuts, the EP expands the label’s vision through music that is equally instinctive and deliberate. Built around hypnotic movement, subtle tension and refined groove, Teknovela unfolds with patience, inviting listeners into an evolving journey where every detail serves the dancefloor without sacrificing depth or personality. The A-side finds Nico Lampariello exploring darker and more introspective terrain, weaving resonant basslines, shifting atmospheres and understated melodic touches into compositions that gradually reveal their emotional weight.
At The B-side Molen delivers two tracks driven by fluid rhythms, intricate spooky melodies and mysterious textures with a constant sense of forward motion. Rather than contrasting one another, both artists meet at the same destination from different directions. Together, the four tracks form a cohesive statement that captures the spirit of contemporary underground house and techno: immersive and built to leave a lasting impression.
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The first transmission from Pink Dolphin arrives on a double-sided 12” – two sides of music following the warmth, movement and possibility of an endless day.
Night Wind moves with the ease of a warm summer afternoon – light, fluid and quietly uplifting. Rhythm and atmosphere flow together with an effortless sense of motion, like a breeze arriving from somewhere just beyond the horizon. There is a feeling of open space throughout: sunlight on water, windows open, landscapes slowly passing by. Nothing feels hurried. The music simply finds its own pace, suspended somewhere between movement and stillness.
As the music unfolds, familiar elements seem to drift in and out of focus, leaving just enough unexplained. It feels less like a destination than a moment – one of those stretches of summer when time loosens its grip and the day seems capable of continuing indefinitely.
Night Wind is a small escape into that space.
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Second chapter in the Alkaline series. Five electro cuts and one techno excursion, crafted by two artists with decades of dedication to electronic music.
On Side A, Raakel Bloody Raakel brings decades of discipline and formal training into a sharp, uncompromising sound. Active since the late 90s and rooted in both classical education and underground culture, his work reflects precision, intensity and structural control.
On Side B, Roi delivers three focused electro pieces forged through years of experimentation and dancefloor experience. His approach blends coherence, tension and forward motion, driven by a continuous commitment to evolving the language of electronic music.
Two trajectories. One alkaline framework. Built for those who understand the craft.
Cosmic Tribe · Research & Development in Sound.
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Jason Dungan (aka Blue Lake) and Johan Carøe find beauty in the rhythms
and repetitions of domestic life for collaborative album, 'Routine' - out September 25
Copenhagen-based multi-instrumentalists Jason Dungan and Johan Carøe didn't set out to make an album. Instead, as the title 'Routine' suggests, they found their way there through a process of habitual making and listening, developing an intuitive musical language to reflect the dreamlike meanderings and creative play of life's quiet moments. 'Routine' blends pop orientated sounds, Avant-garde minimalism, folk and new age with the emotive depth of film-score.
Their meeting was not entirely coincidental. Previously in bands such as Squares and Triangles, Jason Dungan has since recorded multiple albums under the moniker Blue Lake, including the lauded 'Sun Arcs', pursuing his passion for self-built percussion and multi-string instruments. Johan Carøe meanwhile is a composer whose film soundtrack work has seen him collaborate with Angelo Badalamenti, Arp, and Sofie Birch, at whose Andersabo residency (curated by Dungan) the pair first met, resulting in the highly praised album 'Repair Techniques' written by Birch and Carøe.
'Routine' emerged organically over many years against the backdrop of great personal change. As Carøe said goodbye to his father and welcomed his first child, the pair sent each other fragments of melodies and patterns, working up responses when time allowed to assemble a sonic palette that combined acoustic instrumentation of zither, clarinet, cello, saxophone (among others) with the textures of tape, drum machine and Yamaha DX7 synth. Inspired by the vulnerability and DIY ethos of Arthur Russell's home recordings, the vision of labels like Disques de Crepescule, and the art pop, experimentation inherent to late '70s and early '80s recordings from NYC and Japan alike, Dungan and Carøe conjured new forms for their folk, leftfield pop and avant garde influences from the low-lit living rooms of Copenhagen and rural Sweden. "I'm very interested in the ways in which music and art emerge from our wider experiences as people, workers, parents and in the daydreaming activity of making music," Dungan explains of a process which allowed the duo's individual styles to drift apart and merge together seamlessly. "I think the process was definitely capturing moments in time, but over a long time," Carøe adds. "It was a bit like improvisation, but with time stretched."
The music floats with grace and humility, remaining sophisticated yet acutely introverted.
Whether on 'Clouds', where soft layers of zither and clarinet are moved along by a featherlight bass riff and the hypnotic clip-clop of the primitive groovebox, or the gentle grandeur of cello rising and falling through 'Routine 1', the album reveals itself over 10 instrumental tracks, evoking the ineffable calm that descends when the light changes and the world turns inwards. The act of time passing became a key creative ingredient to the evolution of the album, enriched with the exciting challenge to transform their passing rounds of home recordings via a slow release musical dialogue. Jason found creative moments in the twilight hours to lay down zither, melodica, acoustic guitar to name but few, while Johan utilising "line-in and headphones" would manipulate, stretch and pitch Jason's melodic pathways during newly born naptimes.
Carøe rhythmically plucks and slides the stringed cello instrument, leaving palpable foundations on 'Hymn' and 'Chords', in a treated, stylistic approach akin to Mabe Fratti, while 'Silence' draws to a close with a gospel touch. Dungan's harp-motion zither flourishes reveal more classical connotations on 'Reunion' with inspiration of Bedroom Community's Nico Muhly as organs rise with Moogs, culminating with a climatic choral outro from friend, mezzo-soprano Anna Caroline Olesen.
'Routine' then is their first collaboration, an album of deep and sincere reflection with inviting overtones that gesture with unrushed authenticity. A document of a new-found friendship that opens a window into the most personal of spaces, where the daily practices of music and life exist side-by-side to wondrous effect.
the iconic project returns late September with its milestone 10th studio album, ‘I Wrote You A Letter’.
Twenty-five years after his debut, M83 (Anthony Gonzalez) stands as a genuinely era-defining electronic act, renowned for pushing indie-electronic into the mainstream while maintaining absolute critical credibility. With a massive catalog compounding billions of streams—anchored by the timeless “MIDNIGHT CITY” (1.5B streams)—the iconic project returns late September with its milestone 10th studio album, I WROTE YOU A LETTER’.
Recorded between Los Angeles and Paris alongside BENOIT DE VILLENEUVE, this new record follows the highly acclaimed ‘FANTASY’ (2023) and features striking artwork by celebrated Australian photographer BILL HENSON. This release marks a historic chapter, encapsulating a quarter-century of sonic evolution.
Commercially, M83’s power lies in an unmatched ability to transcend generations. Synonymous with cinematic emotion, nostalgia, and immense scale, M83’s sound is virtually a genre of its own, heavily sought after for film, TV, and sync. Live, the act holds top-tier global status, proven by headlining slots at major festivals like Coachella, Glastonbury, and Primavera.
‘I WROTE YOU A LETTER’ delivers exactly what M83 does best: big emotional scale, breathtaking cinematic atmospheres, and sharp hooks, all pushed into a fresh, modern palette.
Fünfundzwanzig Jahre nach seinem Debüt gilt M83 (Anthony Gonzalez) als ein wahrhaft epochaler Elektro-Künstler, der dafür bekannt ist, Indie-Elektro in den Mainstream zu bringen. Mit einem riesigen Repertoire, das Milliarden von Streams umfasst – angeführt von dem zeitlosen „MIDNIGHT CITY“ (1,5 Milliarden Streams) – kehrt das ikonische Projekt Ende September mit seinem wegweisenden zehnten Studioalbum „I WROTE YOU A LETTER“ zurück.
Das neue Album, das gemeinsam mit BENOIT DE VILLENEUVE in Los Angeles und Paris aufgenommen wurde, knüpft an das hochgelobte „FANTASY“ (2023) an und besticht durch ein eindrucksvolles Cover des gefeierten australischen Fotografen BILL HENSON.
Diese Veröffentlichung markiert ein historisches Kapitel und fasst ein Vierteljahrhundert klanglicher Entwicklung zusammen.
Kommerziell liegt die Stärke von M83 in der unübertroffenen Fähigkeit, Generationen zu verbinden.
Als Synonym für filmische Emotionen, Nostalgie und immense Größe ist der Sound von M83 praktisch ein eigenes Genre, das für Film, Fernsehen und Synchronisation sehr gefragt ist.
Live genießt die Band weltweit Spitzenstatus, was durch Headliner-Auftritte bei großen Festivals wie Coachella, Glastonbury und Primavera unter Beweis gestellt wird.
„I WROTE YOU A LETTER“ liefert genau das, was M83 am besten kann: große emotionale Bandbreite, atemberaubende filmische Atmosphären und eingängige Hooks, alles verpackt in einer
frischen, modernen Klangpalette.
In 2024, Audrey Powne emerged as a compelling new voice in contemporary jazz with the release of her acclaimed debut album From the Fire; a self-produced and self-composed work celebrated for its lush string arrangements, soaring trumpet performances, and emotionally rich songwriting. Now, two years later, Powne returns with Bodies of Water, a bold and deeply introspective follow-up that continues her elemental exploration: from fire to water. An exploration of what it means to exist alongside others in an increasingly unstable world, Bodies of Water reflects on vulnerability, responsibility, and human interconnectedness. The album’s title and conceptual foundation were inspired by a passage from Caleb Azumah Nelson’s novel Small Worlds: “...to make himself a body, like water, a still surface, but beneath this, a ripple, and beneath this, an ebbing tide, and beneath that, a violent, constant tow…” Throughout the record, lyrics ruminate on the idea that like all bodies of water, we are vulnerable to disruption and catastrophe. Unlike inanimate bodies of water, however, we are conscious participants in both the damage and the repair. That tension between what we are made of and what we are responsible for became a grounding and harmonious thought. This album is a meditation on that idea, both in my personal life and in a broader, collective sense. Swollen, Broken Record, and Karma, reflect on moments of cruelty and error including her own that felt unbearable. Viewing them instead as forces moving through the landscape of a life, violent but temporary to survive their immediate impact. More socially conscious tracks Stay Awake, Creeds, RYV, and Two Sides confront frustration with political polarisation and the emptiness of language unaccompanied by action. The title and final track Bodies of Water brings these ideas together, reimagining both personal and societal upheaval as events shaped by bodies of water moving through the world destructive at times, transformative at others, and always in motion. Blending traditional jazz with Afrobeat rhythms, Dilla-inspired grooves, ambient textures, and expansive arrangements, Bodies of Water reveals the breadth of Powne’s artistic vision. The record moves fluidly between spiritual jazz, warped soul and rhythm-driven experimentation, while layered interludes and meticulous production thread its disparate influences into a unified and immersive sonic world.
Perhaps because this debut album takes its title from the 80 duplications of the original cell, Eightycuts' first album seems constructed according to an organic logic: one idea contains another, a motif divides, bifurcates, transforms.
The tracks then function like organisms in motion, traversed by passages, secret chambers, and successive metamorphoses.
Nothing remains quite identical to itself. Through these krautrock repetitions, the psychedelic experiments of Siam and Greg, sometimes joined by Frédéric D. Oberland, the group constructs songs that unfold through proliferation. Nervous drums propel the tracks forward while the guitars open up more ambiguous spaces, both abrasive and melodic. Somewhere between the urgency of punk and the slowness of trance.
Tucked in the heart of Koreatown, Los Angeles, lies The Libra Hotel—the titular architecture of Nick Malkin's new album and site of his musical and psychogeographic exploration. Unlike most musical "site-specific" studies, Malkin remains wholly ambivalent to the documentarian approach, instead sharpening an auteur-like focus on the site as a conceptual and highly expressive backdrop. The Libra is musically explored as a space that houses a noir fragmentation of identity—the exhausted trope of a complicated protagonist walking through rain-soaked street corners and fumy neon lights—where an inner monologue is rendered in both miniature and at a cosmic scale. Casting aside stifling tropes around field recording, ambient, and improvised music, Malkin's work finds its own unique fidelity and emotional core through the assembly and reassembly of memory. Nearly every sound on the album—from frayed saxophones, lambent pianos, and dissected jazz drum kits—are multiplied, shattered, and reconstituted into shapes that adorn The Libra in a motion-blurred fog. The narrative of the Hotel suddenly appears as if out of the mist, with intersecting characters interacting within its walls by happenstance. Adminst the languid set pieces, wraith-like sonic grains gravitate around wide subbass beams that give structural form to The Libra, a narrative tension like when a scene is shot from hundreds of different perspectives: an image both luminous and veiled.
Much like Frank Sinatra's own spatial residency immortalized on "Live at The Sands," "At The Libra Hotel" showcases an exuberant view of entertainment, hospitality, and a form of masculinity, one that can quickly detourn into darkness. Knowing this, Malkin extracts a melancholic core out of The Libra locale. The flickering shadows of American decadence are shown in their ephemeral honesty, lines that trace how even in everyday life virtue is tested, sanity is tested, even reality is tested within the confines of desire, within the night. The album is draped in fleeting textures, carefully arranged with a trance-like microtonality, the faint inflections and articulations of a jazz band cascading into dissipated stillness. Voicemails about changed locations and covert eavesdropping on guests' whispered conversations provide an atmosphere of missed connection and voyeurism—a purloined letter of desire receding into a vanishing point. Like the music itself, The Hotel, a chapel perilous at the intersection of desolation row, the center of it all, yet simultaneously at the edge of town, becomes a structure between libidinous virtuality and actuality—our inevitable half-light.
Ultimately, the pensive atmosphere of "At The Libra Hotel," powerfully asserts a plea for the kinds of intimacy only possible in transient spaces. Here, memory cascades into a force that feels like something supernatural, perhaps even religious, yet always subject to the infidelity of our imagination. Here, the album opens into its primary psychodrama, the transient nature of subjectivity itself and how this becomes fractured in the tumult between our commitments and desires. Within this nocturnal space, to quote Louise Bourgeois, "you pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture."
For her new and most radical album »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone«, Martina Bertoni used the electronic instrument at EMS Stockholm to create four pieces that are massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming—almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.
Martina Bertoni returns to Karlrecords with »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone,« her most radical album yet. The foundation for the four electroacoustic pieces was laid during a residency at Stockholm’s legendary Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) that the Berlin-based cellist and composer used to explore the curious instrument, originally designed by Halldór Úlfarsson in 2008, as an algorithmic system in order to examine tunings and the mathematical relationships between Aiming to analyse and understand their interaction beyond the composer’s control, Bertoni sought to engage more deeply with the concepts of time, tuning, and, most importantly, control. Accordingly, her four »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone« seem both massive in scale and incredibly intimate, sonically restrained and emotionally overwhelming— almost ambient and always demanding your full attention.
While the halldorophone—famously used by Hildur Guðnadóttir for her »Joker« score—roughly resembles a cello and can be played like one, it is an electronic instrument. The vibration of its strings is being picked up, amplified, and then routed through a speaker. This creates a feedback loop that becomes increasingly complex depending on how much gain is added to individual strings. Úlfarsson gave Bertoni a carte blanche for how to handle the instrument, but she stresses that she relied on »minimal interventions—some string strumming and plucking« that set the interactions of different sounds and frequencies into motion. »I decided to not approach it like a cellist would,« she explains. »Instead I used it as a kind of generative organ by turning it into a feedback machine, with tuned feedback triggering more feedback depending on the tuning, which was based on tetraphonic scales that I could apply on the four main strings as well as the sympathetic group of strings.«
Bertoni recorded the material in the EMS studio, later composing and arranging the four complex pieces in her home in Berlin, after which they were mixed and mastered by Ciaran O’Shea. While this can be considered a compositional abstraction process, traces of her concrete work as a performer are firmly ingrained in the music. »The halldorophone doesn’t have a line output, just a double set of speakers, which is why I recorded all sounds with two microphones in the EMS studio,« she explains. »That’s why there’s plenty of breathing sounds here and there—label owner Thomas Herbst and I jokingly refer to the album as my ›chamber music record‹.« And indeed, there is a striking sense of intimacy to these four pieces throughout which individual sounds, harmonic frequencies, and even subtle rhythmic figures seem to move both on their own accord but also according to a underlying vision that steers their interplay.
Indeed, »Electroacoustic Works for Halldorophone« is an album built on and marked by contrasts. The soothing polylogue of single sounds in the higher register on opener »Omen in G« is counterpointed by massive bass drones, while the second piece, »Nominal in D,« plays a cunning game of repetition and difference by combining thick textures with all kinds of rhythmic elements. »Fades in C«—the longest of the four pieces, clocking in at 17 minutes—unlocks the emotional potentials of the sonic qualities of the halldorophone, sounding at once serene and anthemic, and »Organon in D« closes the album by underscoring how Bertoni’s unconventional approach allows her to seamlessly transform simple, quiet tones into complex, towering walls of sound.
D. Diggler joins the Kontakt family with two smoked-out dub techno cuts, drifting through hazy chords, submerged delays and weighty low-end motion. On remix duties, Per Hammar turns in a deep and hypnotic remix, true to the sound of his release on Dirty Hands and Sushitech. Limited coloured vinyl.
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Back by popular demand, Shawn Ward's sought-after Forward Motions EP returns on vinyl, giving collectors and DJs another chance to secure a modern deep house favourite.
A respected figure in underground house for more than two decades, Ward has developed a distinctive sound built on warmth, musicality and understated sophistication. Forward Motions EP continues that tradition with four impeccably produced cuts that balance dancefloor energy with timeless listening appeal.
With original copies becoming increasingly difficult to find, this long-awaited repress makes an essential release available once again for a new generation of listeners, while giving longtime fans the opportunity to replace worn copies or finally complete the collection.
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Cities blurred into one another. Borders became routine. Airports, night drives, ferry ports, backstage rooms, festival fields, hotel corridors, and long-distance journeys stitched together into a single continuous life of movement. Success, such as it existed, was measured in miles travelled, crowds gathered, and momentum sustained. The band moved because they had to. Because stopping felt like failure. Because “making it” always seemed to live somewhere just ahead.
Then the world stopped.
Lockdown didn’t just interrupt EYRE LLEW’s trajectory; it dismantled it. The relentless forward motion that had shaped their identity for over a decade disappeared overnight. Tours vanished. Plans dissolved. The infrastructure of their lives as musicians collapsed into silence. For a band built on movement, it felt devastating.
Written across lockdown and the years that followed, the album is not a record about absence; it’s a record about presence. About love that feels like home. About stillness as strength. About devotion without spectacle. About grief without melodrama. About healing without performative optimism. About growth that doesn’t announce itself loudly, but happens slowly, privately, and honestly.
After years of movement, it is EYRE LLEW learning how to stand still and discovering that this is where the real growth starts.