Nu Vision is the latest project of Duke Cooper, band leader and label boss of Nation, Kode and DirtyBlends. There are three humans who make up Nu Vision, and they all have their own stories and discographies, records released on labels you might know, gigs played in Chicago or Berlin or someone’s loft, lives lived, friends made, sleep lost - fighting for theirart, standing by truths, defending voices, honoring progenitors, whilst pushing a new paradigm. Time is both fleeting and heavy for us all, but it is not without receipts.
Nu Vision is a band in the classic do-you-believe-in-alchemy sense - equal parts rhythm, damage, and deep feeling. Drenched in nostalgia and futurism, The Seed is a singularity of sound + vision; as if heavily rotated by VJ Dave Kendall on MTV’s 120 Minutes but materialized via today’s technology.
The Seed 10 inch provides additional music inspired significant icons Section 25, Liaisons Dangeruses and Adrian Sherwood having paved the way with their prior successes..- this package of The Seed is no freshman effort; but rather, a masterclass in continuing sonic education, delivering a unified experience from beginning to end. A NU VISION.
The Seed 10 inch provides additional music inspired significant icon band: Section 25 from the period of 1981-1984 with a more electronic-dance direction, process which culminated in the album ' From the Hip ' and remix single "Looking From A Hilltop", both released in 1984 as "Insecure Man is about being true to manhood with Robert Lane leading the charge with his vocabulary message of the current state of society.
Insecure Dub focuses on the period of 1981-1984 with an alternative electronic-dance direction process as an inspired blueprint from Nu Vision inspired from Adrian Sherwood having paved the way with his individual success.
Inspired from electrifying songs produced by Chrislo Haas (DAF) and Beate Bartel (Mania D. / Matador) reinforced by Krishna Goineau’s French and Spanish Speech-Attack-Lyrics Liaisons Dangereuses created a unique style anything other than a Berlin or Düsseldorf ‘thing’ – that was propelled to an international underground phenomenon of fame.
Nu VIsion was inspired to create a blueprint from the period of their productions of 1981-1982 with an electronic-dance direction paying homage with passionate craftsmanship utilizing what equipment was possible in the studio at the time of this recording featuring new members; Zoe Murphy & Fletch The Stranger on vocals and James Chazz on Saxaphone with a Ring Modulator.
UK Garage has ridden a new wave of hype and exposure over the last few years. Artists like Sammy Virji and Interplanetary Criminal have crossed over to the mainstream, while dancefloors across the world have shaken to a switched-up version of the sound that defined the UK underground either side of the millenium.
Hidden beneath a pink balaclava, the mysterious DJ Jackum has lurked this rejuvenated scene while dropping some of the most defining bangers of the period. Often surfacing in the form of moody edits released on Soundcloud, Jackum productions inevitably demolish dancefloors whenever dropped, as they frequently are in the sets of Virji and the other big guns.
Landing on Hotflush, a storied label of UK underground music, ‘Context’ is his most substantial work to date. Six tracks covering the full spectrum of the Jackum sound, from 4/4 heaters to dubstep-adjacent eyes-down bass pressure.
And in the form of opening track ‘Floo’, Jackum spreads his wings into a place that transcends the narrow confines of genre definition. From the UKG building blocks of bass, drive, cut-up vocals, and melody, the track emerges as something both familiar and wholly unexpected - the mark of a producer at the peak of their powers.
‘Clip Empty’ is another highlight of this standout EP. Showing a flair for the cinematic, a breakdown of militaristic snares gives way to a trademark rolling bassline and earworm vocals.
Away from the 4/4 bangers, ‘Take Your Body Higher’ is a guaranteed half-step rewind, while ‘Step Up’ recalls memories of smokey Plastic People sessions of the mid-2000s.
First run of limited black and white vinyl versions of this huge cold war themed classic. Includes Devil's Dancers amongst other tracks. Huge!!
Minimal Wave proudly presents a newly remastered deluxe double album of archival material by pioneering 80s minimal electronic duo Oppenheimer Analysis. Oppenheimer Analysis formed in London, England in 1982 by Andy Oppenheimer and Martin Lloyd. Their first meeting though was at the 1979 World Science Fiction Convention in Brighton. They quickly became good friends, sharing an interest in the work of David Bowie, electronic music and early synthesizer bands such as the Human League and Soft Cell. They also shared a love of old science fiction movies, 1950s graphics and comic book imagery and a fascination with post-World War II propaganda, the politics and aesthetics of the Cold War, and the social impact of the atomic bomb. Over the next few years Andy and Martin frequented the growing club scene, including Studio 21 on Oxford Street, and became involved in the developing Futurist and New Romantic style sub-cultures. During this period Martin recorded as Analysis, both alone and with David Rome of Drinking Electricity. They released their first single, 'Surface Tension/Connections' on David's Survival label in 1981. In 1982, Oppenheimer Analysis began writing and recording together at Feedback Studio in Battersea, and performed several times at The Bell, Islington, the 1983 World David Bowie Convention in Hammersmith, the Starzone Birthday Party at Camden Palace, the 1984 European Science Fiction Convention in Brighton and other live venues. Their first demo tape and twelve song 'New Mexico' cassette were sold at gigs and by mail-order, and were reviewed in Melody Maker, Sounds and Soundmaker.
For the years to follow, Oppenheimer Analysis became recognized among electro-music aficionados as a pioneering duo who influenced countless other bands during the club and home-recording era of the early 1980s and beyond. Their cassettes became massively collectible. In 2005 they re-formed with the release of a self-titled four song 12' EP of selections from the New Mexico cassette, including 'Cold War' and 'The Devil's Dancers'. This marked the first release on Minimal Wave. Now in 2015, we're happy to present the entire New Mexico collection, newly remastered and cut to vinyl for the first time ever, to celebrate our 10 year anniversary. This first edition of 1000 copies is pressed on deluxe 'nuclear' style black and white 160 gram vinyl, housed in a glossy gatefold silver and black printed sleeve, featuring all the song lyrics on the inside of the sleeve. Release date: May 16th, 2015. This quintessential reissue has been produced in loving memory of Martin Lloyd.
The record open on a regular Atari Hardcore pusher... But the 2 other tunes are defenitly more trippy and space. The Tony Kata,na offers an epic incoming 250/260 BPM Minimalistic Hardcore.
The other side is a full-side psychedelic banger at 240 BPM, with a solid doppleganger form.
After establishing the Serebii project with several albums’ worth of trancing neo-soul, much of it done in collaboration with fellow New Zealander Arjuna Oakes, Callum Mower had no lack of confidence in his musical abilities. But much of Mower’s focus in the past was on instruments and production—swirling, cinematic instrumentals under his own name or funky art-pop jams with others on vocals. On Dime, however, Mower knew he wanted to push forward with his own singing placed center stage.
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL: WE WRITE TO YOU WITH ALARMING NEWS ABOUT THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL SPECIMEN DISCOVERED IN THE FORBIDDEN FOREST IN JULY 2017. THIS LIFEFORM, CODE-NAME “DARLING”, ESCAPED FROM THE TOP-SECRET SAFE TRIP ORGANISATION HOLDING FACILITY LATE LAST NIGHT.
ALL THAT WAS LEFT INSIDE THE SUBJECT’S ENCLOSURE WAS A PRESSED POLYVINYL DISC CONTAINING TWO PIECES OF ELECTRONIC MUSIC. THE FIRST, WHICH WE HAVE TITLED “WHEN SHE HATES ME”, SOUNDS LIKE A CALL TO A DISTANT MATE OR PARTNER, COMPOSED AT SUNRISE AND SHOT THROUGH WITH BLISSFUL POSITIVITY. THE OTHER, NOW KNOWN AS “ISLE OF RED”, COMBINES SURGING DRUMS WITH POIGNANT AND MELANCHOLIC SOUNDS THAT ARE CLEARLY UNEARTHLY IN ORIGIN.
Fred Peterkin releases a lot of music but rarely hands his work over to other artists to remix. This EP, which sees a trio of artists deliver their interpretation of the Berlin-based New Yorker's strings-and-piano-drenched 2023 deep house number 'Someone', is therefore an interesting development. He kicks things off with his own smooth, bass-heavy 2026 'Interpretation', an even deeper and more sensual take that blends dancefloor weight with light-touch jazziness, before Juliet Mendoza takes over with a more locked-in interpretation smothered in warming Rhodes motifs and snippets of soulful, eyes-closed vocal. Dave Aju's take is more weighty, psychedelic and propulsive, while Korea Town's 'Acid' interpretation is darker, faster, tougher and altogether more thickset - the kind of revision tailor-made for peak-time moments in dark basement clubs.
Nach „EBM“ aus dem Jahr 2022, einer Zusammenarbeit mit dem Elektronik-Produzenten Benjamin John Power alias Blanck Mass, haben Editors auf „Surface, Echo & Sound“ völlig neue Wege eingeschlagen. Als sich die Band im Sommer 2025 wieder zusammenfand, um an einem Nachfolger zu arbeiten – nachdem die drei vorangegangenen Alben weitgehend als Studio-Projekte geschrieben und aufgenommen worden waren –, hatten die Editors das Bedürfnis, zu einem natürlicheren Ansatz zurückzukehren, der an ihre Anfänge erinnerte: als sie in einem Proberaum in Stafford saßen und sich gegenseitig gegenüberstanden, während sie gemeinsam an den Songs arbeiteten.
Ähnlich wie bei seinem letztjährigen Soloalbum „There is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light“ verfolgte Frontmann Tom Smith auch bei dem neuen Material der Editors einen ähnlich reduzierten, akustikbasierten Ansatz: Er brachte eine Auswahl an Songs zur Band, damit sie diese gemeinsam spielen konnten, probierte verschiedene Dinge aus und schaute, wohin die Reise ging. Was die Entstehung des Albums angeht, „war es ein sehr produktiver Sommer“, sagt Smith. „Die Sonne schien die meiste Zeit, wir waren im grünen Gloucestershire, nicht weit von meinem Wohnort entfernt, in diesem unscheinbaren kleinen Gewerbegebiet – es war so ziemlich das Gegenteil von Berghain!“
„Surface, Echo & Sound“ ist als LP, Ltd. Col.LP CD und digital über Play It Again Sam erhältlich.
Info Englisch:
Following on from 2022’s EBM, a collaboration with electronic producer Benjamin John Power, aka Blanck Mass, on Surface, Echo & Sound, Editors have found themselves somewhere new entirely. When the band regrouped in summer 2025 to work on a follow-up, after three albums written and recorded very much as in-the-studio projects, Editors felt they wanted to go back to a more natural approach, something that harked back to their earliest days, sat in a practice room in Stafford, facing each other as they worked through songs together.
Like on last year’s solo record There is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light, frontman Tom Smith took a similar stripped back, acoustic-based approach to the new Editors material, bringing a selection of songs to the band for them to play together, trying different things out, and seeing where they went. In terms of creating the record, “It was a very productive summer,” says Smith. “The sun was out for the most part, we were in greenest Gloucestershire, not far from where I live, on this innocuous little industrial estate – it was pretty much the opposite of being in Berghain!”
Surface, Echo & Sound is available on LP, Ltd. Col. LP and CD & Digital via Play It Again Sam.
Nach „EBM“ aus dem Jahr 2022, einer Zusammenarbeit mit dem Elektronik-Produzenten Benjamin John Power alias Blanck Mass, haben Editors auf „Surface, Echo & Sound“ völlig neue Wege eingeschlagen. Als sich die Band im Sommer 2025 wieder zusammenfand, um an einem Nachfolger zu arbeiten – nachdem die drei vorangegangenen Alben weitgehend als Studio-Projekte geschrieben und aufgenommen worden waren –, hatten die Editors das Bedürfnis, zu einem natürlicheren Ansatz zurückzukehren, der an ihre Anfänge erinnerte: als sie in einem Proberaum in Stafford saßen und sich gegenseitig gegenüberstanden, während sie gemeinsam an den Songs arbeiteten.
Ähnlich wie bei seinem letztjährigen Soloalbum „There is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light“ verfolgte Frontmann Tom Smith auch bei dem neuen Material der Editors einen ähnlich reduzierten, akustikbasierten Ansatz: Er brachte eine Auswahl an Songs zur Band, damit sie diese gemeinsam spielen konnten, probierte verschiedene Dinge aus und schaute, wohin die Reise ging. Was die Entstehung des Albums angeht, „war es ein sehr produktiver Sommer“, sagt Smith. „Die Sonne schien die meiste Zeit, wir waren im grünen Gloucestershire, nicht weit von meinem Wohnort entfernt, in diesem unscheinbaren kleinen Gewerbegebiet – es war so ziemlich das Gegenteil von Berghain!“
„Surface, Echo & Sound“ ist als LP, Ltd. Col.LP CD und digital über Play It Again Sam erhältlich.
Info Englisch:
Following on from 2022’s EBM, a collaboration with electronic producer Benjamin John Power, aka Blanck Mass, on Surface, Echo & Sound, Editors have found themselves somewhere new entirely. When the band regrouped in summer 2025 to work on a follow-up, after three albums written and recorded very much as in-the-studio projects, Editors felt they wanted to go back to a more natural approach, something that harked back to their earliest days, sat in a practice room in Stafford, facing each other as they worked through songs together.
Like on last year’s solo record There is Nothing In The Dark That Isn’t There In The Light, frontman Tom Smith took a similar stripped back, acoustic-based approach to the new Editors material, bringing a selection of songs to the band for them to play together, trying different things out, and seeing where they went. In terms of creating the record, “It was a very productive summer,” says Smith. “The sun was out for the most part, we were in greenest Gloucestershire, not far from where I live, on this innocuous little industrial estate – it was pretty much the opposite of being in Berghain!”
Surface, Echo & Sound is available on LP, Ltd. Col. LP and CD & Digital via Play It Again Sam.
Chilean label Soundrive hits double figures with an EP that is as tasteful for house heads as all the other have been. Four serious names step up for this one, starting with Nottingham's DIY man Nail. His 'In The Sky' has all his usual hallmarks - heft to the groove and rawness to the drums, but also an emotional pull that cuts through from the woozy sax notes. Sakro stacks up his kicks into driving, nicely pressured loops on 'Deep In The Street' and runs them through with some thoughtful pad work and Texan Brett Johnson brings his usual off-beat tech house trippiness to 'Beautiful Smurf'. Gari Romalis shuts down with a warm, enveloping dub classic in the form of 'I'm Ya Dancer' complete with smoky vocals and wispy pads that are primed for dead of the night sessions.
In January 2016, a 21-year-old Jacquees confidently stepped into the spotlight and officially shifted the climate of modern R&B. Released as a mixtape hosted by DJ Spinz, Mood wasn't just a collection of songs—it was a bold sonic manifesto. Merging classic, unbridled Southern R&B vocals with the heavy, localized bounce of Atlanta’s dominant trap scene, the project gave a generation of fans their definitive late-night soundtrack. Now, a decade after its initial release, the foundational classic is finally making its official debut on all major streaming services, as well as arriving on CD and vinyl for the very first time.
Produced primarily by Nash B, Mood captured an artist on the precipice of superstardom. Backed by executive support from Birdman and the Cash Money Records family, the project features a powerhouse lineup of mid-2010s royalty, including standout guest verses from Kevin Gates, DeJ Loaf, Rich Homie Quan, Kirko Bangz, and Young Scooter.
For years, Mood lived in the digital underground of mixtape websites and YouTube rips, passed around by R&B purists like a treasured secret. Whether you're streaming it on the go, spinning the rich analog grooves of the vinyl, or popping the CD into your car, this release honors the timeless body of work that cemented Jacquees as the King of R&B.
Catapult yourself back to the early-'90s raves with this limited edition vinyl of Human Resource's 'Dominator'. Including legacy-championing renditions from Klubbheads, Frank De Wulf and Rebuke alongside the UK-charting original mix, this multi-track pressing represents the sound that's proven to be rougher and tougher than any other.
Priding themselves in having cultivated a community and culture at their club nights, they play some of the best music ever cut to wax. It might not be quite what you’d expect from a typical northern soul night, it isn’t stepping back into the past, it’s the music stepping forward into 21st century.
“We’re not interested in nostalgia – we love soul music because it’s brilliant. It probably still resonates with young people because it has a message of something bigger than what’s inside your own head – that what really matters resides in relationships with other people, not material things. We think that is beautiful” – DNSC.
“Deptford Northern Soul Club have emerged as the new faces of northern soul” – Yuck.
As featured in Alan Byron’s documentary Northern Soul: Still Burning (2026).
“By recontextualising northern soul in a modern context, they empower the genre to continuously evolve, imparting new meaning to younger, perhaps previously unaware audiences” – Pilot magazine
To celebrate another year around the sun, we’re proud to present our second vinyl release: Formulation — a 4-track EP that perfectly captures the label’s output over the past year while continuing our commitment to physical formats and attention to detail.
Like its predecessor "Foundation" is a various artists release featuring some of the key names from our latest catalog. The formula goes like this:
A Side: Iron T.C. and Hor-G take control of the slower side of the record with aggressive drums, distortion and the raw energy that defines their sound. Epic atmospheres and humanoid vocals introduce a heavy breakbeat assault from two of the strongest names in the Iberian underground. A perfect blend of dirty electro and industrial breakbeat built to turn the dancefloor upside down.
B Side: Heathen, The Egg & No Rules push the BPMs higher in the other side. Dark landscapes and metallic drums twist into a spiral of tension and halftime rhythms. Three experienced explorers of the niche taking techstep sound beyond its usual limits — for those into density, introspection and long blends
Another solid step into the physical format — and a glimpse of what’s still to come...
Once again, huge thanks to everyone involved in the project and to all our supporters who make this possible.
To celebrate another year around the sun, we’re proud to present our second vinyl release: Formulation — a 4-track EP that perfectly captures the label’s output over the past year while continuing our commitment to physical formats and attention to detail.
Like its predecessor "Foundation" is a various artists release featuring some of the key names from our latest catalog. The formula goes like this:
A Side: Iron T.C. and Hor-G take control of the slower side of the record with aggressive drums, distortion and the raw energy that defines their sound. Epic atmospheres and humanoid vocals introduce a heavy breakbeat assault from two of the strongest names in the Iberian underground. A perfect blend of dirty electro and industrial breakbeat built to turn the dancefloor upside down.
B Side: Heathen, The Egg & No Rules push the BPMs higher in the other side. Dark landscapes and metallic drums twist into a spiral of tension and halftime rhythms. Three experienced explorers of the niche taking techstep sound beyond its usual limits — for those into density, introspection and long blends
Another solid step into the physical format — and a glimpse of what’s still to come...
Once again, huge thanks to everyone involved in the project and to all our supporters who make this possible.
“Everybody wants the map, but the correct one is not coming. This is understood, somewhere below language, by everyone who wants a map anyway. Meanwhile the map dealers, those slick druids and wizards, goddamn sell-outs, will try to seduce you with one. Don't buy from them. Their maps only show burned black fields.
What passes instead between the ones still walking is smaller and does not require a subscription. A sign. Nailed to a fencepost, or to an unexpected streetlight surrounded by darkness. Left by someone who was thirsty on this road back when you were only a rumor. It says one thing: water, this way.
So leave signs. Just mark the water you found and move along. It is one of the oldest customs - strangers keeping each other alive and hydrated on a long road.”
Hoshina Anniversary returns to MUSAR for his fourth appearance on the label with Sankaku, a five-track EP offering the latest snapshot of his ever-evolving ‘Watechno’ sound.
Taking its name from the Japanese word for ‘triangle’, Sankaku opens with a storming, floor-focused title track, pairing hypnotic techno rhythms with shifting textures and sharp acid drops. Tsuppari follows, named after the rapid hand thrusts used in sumo. Driving percussion, Japanese instrumentation and a raw techno pulse give the track a physical, forward-moving energy, making it a natural club cut.
Side B opens with Kono Kanjitte, where acidic tones meet jazzy elements and a playful sense of uncertainty. Slower and psychedelic, it unfolds as a track for restless minds and hazy nights. Ariake, named after the Ariake Sea, moves into more spacious territory, with Japanese instrumentation creating an atmosphere of mystery and anticipation, like looking towards an unknown horizon. Closing the EP, Itsukushimi brings a melancholic blend of melodic touches and darker cinematic tension, recalling the atmosphere of a Hitchcock soundtrack.
With ‘Sankaku’ EP, Hoshina Anniversary turns Japanese imagery, psychedelic textures and club-driven rhythms into a world that feels both familiar and otherworldly.
Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco's Today's Special is a suite of language works synthesising melody and diction that integrates the literary and the audible in a repertoire of songs that bask in the melody of voice and the punctuations of structured composition. Working with methods of reduction rather than opulence in both tonal composition and rhetoric, each piece pegs the poetic to the musical with compositional schematics and methods. It is important to state that there is little to none improvisation here, instead, the duo set up matrices, rules and structural links that facilitated meaningful locus of exchange between their two practices. Lippard's texts are a collection of new and previously completed works. In these, as is typical for her work, she enjoys the easy pleasure of wordplay, iterative language, and decontextualised anecdote, as in opener Portrait of a Betrayal, a piece about the loss of a phone and the way it haunted the owner who dropped it, based on a lived experience. Grieco's instrumentation works with Lippard's language art as a form of acoustic typography. "I studied graphic design and I think about how you can express typography through voice," she says. "Renato's use of the viola da gamba becomes like an underline, or a font's brushstrokes, in ways that feel typographical." In this, the classically-trained composer Grieco often finds and echoes the pitch movements of Lippard's voice, intonation mirrored and revealed, linguistic meaning doubled and shadowed by plucked, strummed or bowed strings. His main instrument is the viola da gamba, the instrument considered closest to the human voice for its tonal range and ability to mimic inflections and timbre, and here he brings it even closer to the voice, building systems by which it moves with and around Lippard. He also plays piano and Wurlitzer, and joins her in speaking on Receiver and in conversation for final track The Black Rose. "Hanne's voice is an artist's voice, embodied as the artwork itself," he says. "But where my approach is from the perspective of a composer, hers is around rhetoric and language. We worked towards each other in this sense, Hanne finding a space to welcome my voice, and me designing an acoustic space to enhance her vocal persona." In some tracks the structural connections are obvious - the matched tumbling delivery and stepped pitches of voice and piano in Aficionado sounding like two tipsy friends descending a staircase. In others, like the triptych of tracks Three Rungs Ladder, structured with rules derived from nursery rhymes, or cumulative song (akin to the 12 Days of Christmas). For the Colour 1 and Colour 2 pieces, the duo worked from palettes of colours connected to clusters of harmonies, which underlined the power of the word and its articulation. The absurd Labradorable personifies a people pleaser, A Story About Being Blue is an imagined playful monologue from the Deep Blue supercomputer - requesting in sing-song stop motion to be called Debbie, and Larry - as Grieco echoes in factual reportage. Hurtbeat unpacks and recomposes a tweeted non-apology by a Russian art collector about owning a piece of racist art, Grieco shadowing Lippard's generating a third `drop-shadow' performer from the resonances between the duo, typographic re-articulation of the source material. The Receiver includes lines from Robert Ashley's Improvement (Don Leaves Linda), Ashley existing as a spiritual parent of sorts to the practices contained on Today's Special, and here interpolated as if he is being quoted and written through within the audible world of the piece in a palimpsest of borrowed sentences. Closing track The Black Rose contains its own self-aware comedy, a lightly distorted conversation sourced from a Reddit thread about whether black roses exist, recorded as if it were an internet radio or a low budget podcast, the casual exchange stilted in the delivery of platitudes as scripted speech. Today's Special was developed in person over the course of a series of small residencies - at Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo, Rome; Fondazione Morra, Napoli; Callie's, Berlin. In these limited periods that rarely stretched beyond a week, Lippard and Grieco developed strategies for the works, keeping tightly locked to musical concepts. This, for Grieco, is about maintaining a solid, meaningful connection within the compositions, and committing to everything having a purpose for existing within the work. Each element pulls its weight; has something to say, literally and metaphorically speaking. In the same way that Lippard's work leaves nowhere for her to hide, he wants the music to exist with its own naked purpose: "It's is about exposing nudity via reduced materials," says Grieco. "This is a form of courage we want to embrace. Once we take off everything, it needs to be extremely precise to maintain a connection with the audience. We have a lot of tools to hide behind now, to protect ourselves and our identities as artists, performers, and in life more generally. It's something I don't want to do. I want extreme reduction: no hiding."
As Eerie Enterprise, upsammy and Piezo have funnelled their singular styles into a classic-feeling but ultra-modern album of elegant, angular electronica. With a strong melodic sensibility and a highly developed palette of playful sound design in their toolkit, the unexpected pairing grew spontaneous jams into a considered collaboration, and Places Remember Events is the end result.
Individually, Thessa Torsing and Luca Mucci have carved out strong identities within contemporary electronic music. As upsammy, Torsing has applied a delicate precision to ambient and uptempo approaches alike, building up a striking catalogue of releases including her 2020 LP for Dekmantel, Zoom. Meanwhile, Mucci has taken a wayward path through contemporary bass music and techno that matches edgy sound design with playful unpredictability. As Eerie Enterprise, both artists tap into their respective creative instincts while arriving at a unique sound with a nurturing quality they were both missing from modern dance music.
Having appreciated each other's work for some years, in July 2024 Torsing and Mucci seized an opportunity to carve out two days in the studio. There was no expectation of an end product, but the sketches conceived during those open-ended, hardware-oriented sessions felt worthy of a deeper exploration developed and finalised over the following year-and-a-half.
Places Remember Events has an unapologetically nostalgic streak, calling to mind the warm glow of melodically-charged, golden-era electronica. The twitchy rhythmic make-up of tracks like 'Decay + Collapse' and 'Folding Origin' speak to the duo's shared affinity for ravey energy, but even within faster frameworks they lean into half-time space to maintain a light-footed agility that allows the relatively busy arrangements to feel grounded and patient rather than frantic.
There's an appreciation for mystery in the emotional make-up of many of the tracks, not least in the slithering textural exploration and spatial tension of 'Capsule', but elsewhere fragile melancholia guides the melody direction of 'Superradiance' and 'Things Fall Upwards'. The final impression is crisp and modern while delivering an accessible experience that seeks to soothe rather than shock when so much contemporary club music tips towards uneasy intensity.
Finding malleable approaches to their chosen sonics and applying them to intentional song structures, Eerie Enterprise collectively land on a sound that promises a lasting reward for the repeat voyager — satisfying headphone gear in the grand tradition of introspective electronic music, but also with a physical immediacy that will manifest in the live set upsammy and Piezo have put together to perform later in the year.
Spanish label LOOPAINA hits its 007th vinyl reference with a devastating split EP that bridges the underground scenes of Spain and Argentina. For this special release, the label brings together Argentinian producer NWHR and the powerful Spanish duo MIST GASP on a limited 12-inch wax that redefines contemporary club music. The physical record features 6 meticulously crafted tracks: two original cuts from each artist alongside a crossover remix where each act replicates and transforms the other's work. The result is a cohesive sonic journey that exudes serious, deep, and hypnotic techno, while maintaining a sharp focus on the dancefloor by championing the rawest underground sound. All music written and produced by NWHR & MIST GASP Mastered by: Carlos Koschitzky Label: Loopaina Records CAT#: LPR-V007 Artwork by Rocío Barrio
Rotterdam’s Nathan Homan jumps into the Spectral Bounce spotlight on SPEC09 — Frog Mine. These three cuts of mesmeric tech house roll, slip and spring from the speakers.
His Spectral Bounce debut is exemplified by punchy percussion playing against obscured, otherworldly sonics — something Homan has a particular instinct for, and which slot seamlessly into the SPEC catalog. Starting proceedings with a taut beat, snappy drums and hallucinatory croaks, the titular “Frog Mine” creates a hypnotic trip. Second track “Hyp” is a well-honed tech house roller: its adeptly slinking rhythm hearkens back to the 00’s, yet this framework is expanded upon with alien timbres and pinwheeling FX. Having set a heady tone, Homan doesn’t shy away from loosening up his sound: swapping the original’s smooth propulsion for a healthy dose of jackin’ bounce, the house mix of “Hyp” strips the ingredients back, before adding a cascade of syncopated toms and a seriously thumping kick.
Pastel Ghost’s debut album Abyss, containing her biggest song “Dark Beach”. Both haunting and hypnotic, the album captures a sense of weightless melancholy, pulling listeners in to a world that feels at once intimate and otherworldly.
DALGA – A Selection of ’80s Pop Oddities from Turkey is the first compilation to bring together rare Turkish pop oddities from the 1980s, and the first compilation to explore how new studio technologies shaped the sound of 1980s Turkish pop and dance music. Features six tracks that were released only on rare cassette tapes.
In the aftermath of Turkey’s 1980 military coup, collective music-making gradually gave way to studio-based production, as drum machines, samplers, and synthesisers took centre stage. From the early 1980s onwards, these technologies became increasingly popular among Turkish musicians and producers. While some sought to emulate the global pop sound of the era, like Neriman’s “Sever Gibi” and Füsun Önal’s “Takma Kafana” others experimented by blending electronic elements with Arabesque, as heard in Mehmet Pekün’s “Anca Gidersin” and Zorbeyler’s “Bir Mumdur” or with Anatolian pop influences, such as the studio project Tele Tempo’s “Şu Samsunun Evleri” and “Havada Bulut”.
Let these waves carry you through the electrified tides of 1980s Turkey.
DALGA is compiled by Istanbul-based beat maker and digger extraordinaire Grup Ses.
Shape of the Unknown’ is kind of a double LP that fully embraces the idea of exploration. It is CHLOÉ’s most expansive and immersive work to date. ‘Shape of the Unknown’ is CHLOÉ’s fourth proper studio album. Its predecessor, ‘Endless Revisions’, was released in 2017. Nine years have passed. Nine years during which CHLOÉ has continued digging for music, DJing at internationally renowned clubs and festivals including Rex Club, Robert Johnson, Panorama Bar, Nuits Sonores, Glastonbury and many more, releasing EPs and remixes, while also allowing herself the time to explore entirely new creative paths.
The challenge is to capture the unknown, make it her own, endlessly reshape its textures, and ultimately preserve its mystery.
The first single ‘Drifter’, released back in June, already offered a striking glimpse of the sonic territories the album would venture into, driven by its hypnotically contoured basslines. The album's two other singles offer different windows into her world. 'Shapeshifter' captures CHLOÉ at her most hypnotic, balancing stripped-back techno and melodic house through deep rolling grooves, expansive bass chords and subtle rhythmic shifts that constantly reshape the listener's perception without ever disrupting the flow. Later, 'Repeating The Obvious' takes a more leftfield route, pairing staggered rhythms with retro-inspired harmonics and an understated indie dance pulse that feels simultaneously familiar and unpredictable.
CHLOÉ has ventured into live performance through new formats, notably alongside percussionist Vassilena Serafimova; immersed herself in film scoring with soundtracks for Paris la Blanche, Arthur Rambo, The Mountain, Blanquita, Guru and Unsubmissives; and developed compelling collaborations, from High Season, her project with Ben Shemie of Canadian band Suuns (which resulted in the album The Call), to her own organic, experimental audiovisual performances under the name Slo/Mo AV.
Throughout Shape of the Unknown, CHLOÉ blurs the boundaries between deep house, hypnotic techno, electronica and cinematic sound design with remarkable fluidity. The album unfolds as a continuous narrative rather than a sequence of tracks, moving effortlessly between beatless ambient passages, rolling analogue grooves and emotionally charged club music. Organic percussion, sweeping bass movements, melancholic harmonies and richly textured synthesisers create a body of work that constantly evolves, where no section feels static and every transition reveals another layer of depth. There is an unmistakable warmth running through the record, with grainy analogue textures and spacious production giving even its most driving moments an intimate, almost tactile quality.
The album’s title is no coincidence. It evokes a form that has yet to be named, something language itself struggles to grasp. CHLOÉ approaches it through an organic creative process. Each piece must first be performed in the studio, almost as if it were being played live. The album will be followed by a series of live performances and DJ sets, including a show at the Olympia on March 18, 2027.
She is joined by a handful of steadfast collaborators. Jazz trumpeter David Enhco appears on two tracks, ‘Undertow’ and ‘Inner Bass’. But above all, there are the voices: Ben Shemie lends his unmistakable presence to the radiant ‘More Than Just a Feeling’. Olivia Merilahti, singer, songwriter and one half of The Dø, appears on the otherworldly ‘TWYR’. Working with Olivia’s already hypnotic voice, CHLOÉ has approached it like a sculptor, enhancing its strangeness and dreamlike quality.
And finally, impossible to miss is the instantly recognizable voice of Kittin. A longtime accomplice, she lends her distinctive phrasing to CHLOÉ’s music here for the very first time. The strongest collaborations are often those that take their time, arriving only when the moment is right. Same kind, same bass, same vibe, same pride.
The result is an enigmatic, nocturnal record, drifting between introspective listening and dancefloor functionality, revealing an artist who remains far more interested in atmosphere, movement and emotional storytelling than conventional club structures. It is an album that invites us to dream more deeply and to dance again, both within ourselves and out in the open.
We are honoured and excited to share the fourth Dream Space EP with the world: Domenic Cappello - Celestial Wave.
For more than three decades, Domenic Cappello has been at the helm of Subculture - the innovative and vastly influential Saturday night at Glasgow’s Sub Club. A true master DJ with deep rooted influences from Detroit & Chicago, Dom has consistently pushed things forward over the years and remains at the cutting edge of modern dance music.
Throughout the 90’s and early 2000’s, he put out high-quality records under various monikers on labels such as Soma, 20:20 Vision & Seventh Sign. Fast forward to recent years and Domenic has been on nothing short of a hot streak - releasing music under his own name on Craigie Knowes, Clone Royal Oak and his outstanding ‘Basement Philosophy’ LP on Alien Communications.
He brings the heat once more for this record; blurring the lines of house, techno and electro to deliver four awe-inspiring cuts of electronic music.
‘The Secret Moon Party’ sets things off, nodding to a certain Highland gathering by some of Scotland’s finest purveyors of quality tunes. A warm, gritty bassline carries the track, evolving into a symphony of precise sound design that is in equal parts playful and euphoric.
Dom’s knowledge of the dancefloor shines through on ‘Acid & Love’. This early night floor filler is the alchemy of just about everything you want to hear when things are getting going. Pure warmth and bliss throughout, also holding its place played deep into the late hours.
‘We Loved Your Ears (in memory of Keith)’ is a heartfelt tribute to the one and only Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch of Optimo. Dom wrote this track as something he thought Keith would have loved, and for this one, we’ll let the music do the talking.
Keith was, and continues to be, an enormous inspiration for us and so many others. In his memory, all proceeds from the digital sales of ‘We Loved Your Ears’ and 25% of all vinyl sales will be donated to Beatson Cancer Charity and The Scottish Brain Tumour Research Centre of Excellence.
Closing the EP is title track ‘Celestial Wave’, which does exactly what it says on the tin. A beautiful piece of music and fitting soundtrack for star gazing, moon dancing and dreaming.
Wildweeds Volume II is the followup to Wildweeds (2021), Loren Connors’ first art book, and continues a series of limited artist’s books from Recital devoted to his work outside of music. Following Night of Rain, the book returns to the fragile flower forms of the original Wildweeds, but in a more expansive and varied collection of paintings, drawings, and haiku. Across 108 pages of full-color, hardbound printing, thin stems wander through enormous fields of white, blooming in eruptions of radiant yellow, blue, green, red, and violet. Some pages are nearly empty. Others retain stains, folds, shadows, and the physical disturbances of the original works. The result is a rare survey of Connors’ art, gathering years of paintings and drawings that have largely existed in isolation into one continuous sequence.
The haiku appear throughout the white space as small interruptions, sometimes nearly swallowed by the page. “wandering / into the sky / April mist.” They do not caption the paintings so much as drift alongside them, creating another kind of line, pause, and disappearance. The effect is deeply consonant with Connors’ music: the brief guitar poems of Airs, the shadowed miniatures of Lullaby, and the many other recordings and editions that have established his singular language across decades. A note from Connors’ guitar can hover on the edge of audibility, its beauty emerging through restraint and duration; the paintings possess the same fragility. A line bends, a flower appears. Colors pool and then recede into the surrounding white.
For this volume, Connors mailed hundreds of paintings and drawings as they were being made, arriving in folders with little concern for preservation or presentation. New drawings arrived often, another envelope every few weeks for a year. From this accumulation, the book was photographed, edited, sequenced, and arranged into its present form. In the preface, Yuko Otomo places Connnors’ work within the tradition of Haiga, the Japanese practice of bringing haiku and visual art together. She writes of Mujo, or impermanence, and Ku, or emptiness: the open, shifting space in which things appear and disappear. A flower blooms, a leaf falls, a line fades into the page. Francis T. Patnaude, Jr. describes Connors’ artistic impulse as an attempt to “give form to the formless.” Wildweeds Volume II is an opportunity to spend time inside his quietly accumulated body of visual work: a monograph giving sustained form to years of paintings and drawings. Portrait photograph by Suzanne Langille; art photography and design by Sean McCann.
Battle of Clontarf collects a remastered series of late-90s guitar jewels by Loren Connors, most appearing on vinyl for the first time. At its center is an unrealized double 7" from 1996, Battle of Clontarf, named after the bloody battle fought outside Dublin in 1014. Gestures of blistered guitar billow, but underneath a defiant elation prevails. Loren’s partner Suzanne Langille composed and performed the poem in Part II and the song in Part V of the Clontarf sequence. The six pieces are followed by a curated circlet of recordings from around the same period, including the complete 1994 EP The Five Points (originally issued by Table of the Elements) and several other short works from the years surrounding Connors’ notable albums Airs (1999) and Lullaby (2001). These recordings occupy only a few minutes at a time, but manage to convey such vulnerability. Each seems to find its way toward the next, like a chain of small amulets.
The collection continues with the Star of Bethlehem suite from 2000, and concludes with Connors’ arrangement of Gershwin’s “I Love You, Porgy.” The latter is a personal favorite, with a breathtaking cadence that shares the beauty of Billie Holiday’s version, but transmitted from the solitude of a dream. Battle of Clontarf gathers all these scattered parcels of Connors’ work into one fluent LP, released on Recital alongside Connors’ new art book Wildweeds Vol. II in celebration of his 77th birthday in late October.
“Trust me, you will pogo, skank, sing and possibly dance like your f*cking Dad on spice.” Party Eternal is the fourth studio album by the Brighton-based punk/ska band The Bar Stool Preachers. The album represents a massive turning point for the seven-piece, both creatively and structurally. It’s blisteringly good. Combining the best of brit-pop, ska, rock and indie ‘Party Eternal’ is exactly the tonic for the times. In parts scathing, and in others total escapism, this rowdy septet have written the greatest party punk album you’ll hear all year. Renowned for their relentless touring schedule, The Bar Stool Preachers have played stages around the globe, from grassroots venues to major festivals like Rebellion and Punk Rock Bowling. Their heartfelt lyrics and magnetic stage presence have earned them a reputation as one of the most engaging live acts in the punk scene today. Whether delivering politically charged messages or uplifting party anthems, The Bar Stool Preachers continue to inspire and unite audiences, carrying the torch of punk’s rebellious spirit into the modern era. Featuring the single ‘Pick A Side’ (the profits of which were donated by the band to Medical Aid for Palestinians), ‘This is Goodbye’ featuring Aussie Celtic Punk masters The Rumjacks and ‘Sick World’ which stars a guest turn from the genre-shattering and quite legendary Fishbone.
Sidney Gish is a songwriter and producer based in Brooklyn, NY. Her first album, Ed Buys Houses, was self-released on Bandcamp in 2016. Her second album, No Dogs Allowed, was released on New Year's Eve in 2017, receiving a 7.7 rating on Pitchfork and winning Album of the Year at the 2018 Boston Music Awards. Gish has toured with artists like Mitski, Cavetown, The Beths, and Jeff Rosenstock. She has a cult following and now a hugely viral song.
Blue System is the studio project founded by Dieter Bohlen after the break-up of the iconic synth-pop/Eurodisco duo Modern Talking. Bohlen, prolific as he is, took care of composing, writing, producing, mixing, arranging, and of course singing, while hiring session musicians for additional voices and instruments. The project ended up producing 13 albums over a span of about 10 years before being retired in favour of Bohlen's many other projects.
Hello America is the seventh album, released in 1992. It contained 11 new tracks all penned by Bohlen, of which "I Will Survive" and "Romeo & Juliet" were released as singles. The album eventually peaked at #29 on the German Albums chart. Now, after almost 25 years, we're reissuing it on vinyl for the first time.
Hello America is available as a limited edition of 2000 individually numbered copies on blue vinyl and includes an insert with lyrics.
In C is a musical piece by the composer and performing musician Terry Riley. As one of the first minimalist compositions, it was a response to the modern music that dominated the scene in 1968. It is considered a masterpiece in the genre and served as an inspiration for many composers, classical and otherwise.
The pieces consist of repeating cells and different rhythms, loosely based on the musical structures he had heard and loved in north African music. In total, the compositions consist of 53 short musical phrases. The thing that makes In C so enduring, is that once all its conceptual ideas are stripped away, it's a seriously hypnotic piece of music, full of energy.
Songs of Joy and Peace is a Christmas music album by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, originally released in 2008. The album features collaborations with many other artists, including vocalists Diana Krall & Alison Krauss, James Taylor, Dave Brubeck and Chris Botti.
This holiday disc doesn't exclusively stick to traditional Christmas songs, but covers a wide scope of material in a very ambitious manner. Ma opens with a lovely take of the traditional favorite “Dona Nobis Pacem (Give Us Peace)”, playing both the melody and counterpoint via overdubbing.
Jazz pianist/vocalist Diana Krall is superb in a swinging rendition of Jerome Kern's unjustly obscure "You Couldn't Be Cuter", adding bassist John Clayton. An arrangement of “Joy To The World” features pianist Dave Brubeck and cellist Matt Brubeck (his son). Chris Botti has never sounded better in the warm arrangement of “My Favorite Things”, playing both open and muted trumpet. James Taylor is featured on vocals on the Beatles cover “Here Comes The Sun”.
With one foot in the Mexican underground rock scene and the other one in the global tape trading circuit, Las Ánimas del Cuarto Obscuro found themselves in the middle of a crossroad after their first LP. México wasn´t the same country as when the band first started. Even though access to non-commercial music still was a difficult task in the late eighties, the fringes of culture had way more resources thanks to the stubbornness of certain anonymous heroes: dwellers of El Tianguis Cultural del Chopo, niche record stores, illegal underground parties and hosts of late night Mexican public radio shows.
Ubiquitous social unrest expressed itself in every way possible. The aftermaths of the 1985 earthquake weren’t the only matters on the table. Protests erupted after a rigged presidential election and a student strike hit Mexico’s biggest public university. This was just the tip of the iceberg of issues PRI’s perfect dictatorship was or wasn’t addressing. The clash of the authoritarian regime against new and fresh ideas.
If the first record was about the loneliness of self-destructive youth and it’s urban phantasmagories, LACO’s second LP dealt with change as the axis of human existence. Las Ánimas is just the beginning of the sonic metamorphosis Toño Sánchez went through until this very moment.
The departure of former bandmembers set a different approach towards more experimental and atmospheric sounds. As the project’s only member, Toño Sanchez took an alchemical trip aiming for more mysterious horizons.
Despite the fact that we can still find conventional dark pop and catchy songwriting, the record rests on sound landscapes closer to Jorge Reyes or Tuxedomoon and This Heat than the orthodox ways of so called post-punk, seasoned of course with the lack of music gear and the economic reality prevalent in Mexico of those convulsed times.
Las Ánimas is a goodbye letter to underground but not because the next move is the mainstream. Far away from it, it’s a farewell to traditional rock and a the first steps down into the depths. From now on, Toño Sánchez will dedicate his musical efforts to weirder sounds and scarcer audiences in the search of the arcane, possessed by a mania of constant change that infects the soul after crossing the black door’s threshold.
For the first release on Agingwell, we are proud to present a selection of artists who have
been working hard in the music scene for years. Some have spent decades behind the scenes, building soundsystem and shaping parties from the ground up, while others have made DJing and production a way of life.
Agingwell is about giving space to their own vision of electronic music, with no boundaries and no fixed rules.
What happens when bassweight electronic beats meet the abstract world of one of the most uncompromising MCs on this planet?
Get ready for a special listening experience as Abu Ama and Sensational take you deep into a world of heavy bass, fractured rhythms, strange frequencies and completely unpredictable flows.
Abu Ama is known for his unique production style, combining Dub, Ambient and Industrial soundscapes with Middle Eastern sound structures. His productions create vast, atmospheric spaces where bass pressure and subtle details constantly collide. Over the years, he has developed his signature sound through releases on forward-thinking labels such as Bokeh Versions and Accidental Meetings. With Ringing In Your Ear, Abu Ama presents some of his most adventurous and forward-thinking productions to date.
On the microphone, we are proud to present a true underground legend straight outta NYC: Sensational.
Born Colin Julius Bobb in Guyana and raised in Brooklyn, Sensational became one of the most distinctive and unpredictable voices to emerge from New York’s experimental hip-hop underground. Originally performing under the name Torture, he was already connected to the Jungle Brothers in the early 1990s before developing the completely unique style that would become synonymous with Sensational.
In 1997, he released his debut album Loaded With Power on the influential Word Sound label. Built from dusty beats, unusual samples and lo-fi textures, the record established Sensational as an artist who seemed to operate completely outside the established rules of Hip Hop.
Over the following decades, he continued to explore the space between underground rap, experimental electronics, noise and abstract music. His long list of collaborators included artists such as Spectre, Kouhei Matsunaga, Kid 606, Cardopusher, Handsome Boy Modeling School and many others. His work with Kouhei Matsunaga was even remixed by Autechre.
Sensational was never interested in fitting into a particular scene. His rhymes were surreal, his flows unpredictable and his approach completely his own. For more than three decades, he remained a true outsider — a cult figure whose music connected underground Hip Hop with some of the strangest and most adventurous corners of experimental music.
After Abu Ama and Sensational’s heavy 2023 single International Rokkaz left us wanting more, the two decided to take things much further. What started as a single collaboration evolved into a full length soundclash.
We were already incredibly hyped about this collaboration from the moment we heard it. But while we were preparing for the release of the single MOZZ, the terrible news reached us: Sensational had passed away.
The news hit hard. It is still difficult to believe that we will never hear a new Sensational verse again.
What makes Ringing In Your Ear even more special is that it captures Sensational doing what he did best — completely free, completely unpredictable and completely himself.
We dedicate this record to Colin Julius Bobb aka Sensational, in loving memory of an extraordinary artist, MC and true underground original.
Mastering is done by Ultramars in a very specific way :
Both Crystal Distortion and Sadistic tunes are playing 45 RPM, even if on the same side the other tunes are playing 33 RPM.
This to enhance the sound for the 45RPM ones...
The extract on the site are made with the vinyl, so you can hear the sound of it.
Das zweite Album der "Colors"-Trilogie! Der aufstrebende Metal(core)- und Alternative-Künstler hält seine über 2 Millionen TikTok-Follower in Atem. Arankai stammt aus Wisconsin (USA) und trat erstmals 2022 mit einer Reihe von Independent-Veröffentlichungen in Erscheinung. Durch die Kombination von Elementen aus Metal, Alternative Rock und emotionalem Storytelling baute er sich dank seines rohen Sounds und seiner markanten Präsenz in den sozialen Medien schnell eine treue Fangemeinde auf. Nach der "The Portrait Tour" im Mai und Juni 2026 - seiner ersten Headliner-Tournee, die mehrere ausverkaufte Shows in den USA umfasste - wird Arankai ausgewählte Headliner-Konzerte in Europa spielen (darunter einen Auftritt beim Reeperbahn Festival). Anschließend nimmt er diesen Schwung mit ins Frühjahr 2027, wenn er gemeinsam mit Melrose Avenue als Support-Act durch Europa tourt. Arankai in his own words: ""The Shape of Blue", like its predecessor "A Portrait of Red," covers a range of human experiences: rebellion, pride, sacrifice, to name a few that stick out. I tend to draw from personal experiences, but with this particular record I found myself writing songs that reflected specific situations involving other people; sometimes I wasn't even a part of those situations, it was just a powerful moment I found inspiring. I really wanted this record to be something special. I did a lot of things I haven't done before, wrote songs in styles that were new to me; I really wanted to give people a new, exciting experience. I believe "The Shape of Blue", as an album, is a strong, emotive piece. And I hope people enjoy it as much as I loved making it."
Originally, symptoms started out as a memoir chronicling Devin Daniels' mental health journey by way of the beat tape. "I made these beats in my worst mental health state of all time, like 2018 to 2023. In 2017, I had a experience in Boston and it gave me a schizoaffective reaction. I'm schizophrenic now. I've been hearing voices for the past almost 10 years. A terrible time, just really negative. Making beats is the kind of stuff that would just like cheer me up, you know, it would just make me forget about all that stuff." Devin has also been consistently working in the Los Angeles music scene as a bandleader and session musician, graduating from the Herbie Hancock Institute of Jazz Performance at UCLA, and going on to play in bands with the likes of Herbie Hancock, Joel Ross, Gerald Clayton, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and more. Although Devin does not have social media, and thus currently might not have the name recognition as others in the wider music world, he is very respected and beloved in many circles of the Los Angeles music scene.
Timeless – yet always fresh: Regardless of the whims of the pop business, Planet Yello has been making its rounds for almost fifty years, repeatedly whisking us away to a world where past and future greet each other and James Bond joins forces with the Man in the Moon, Dionysus and Philip K. Dick.
"To the future, through the past"—with their fifteenth studio album, "Time Lab," Dieter Meier and Boris Blank put this maxim into practice more vividly than ever. Blank meticulously crafts his imaginary soundtracks from fresh samples and found objects from his own archive, which has accumulated a vast collection of sonic fragments, riffs, and motifs over nearly fifty years of creative work. Meier immerses himself in these parallel soundscapes, discovering within them his romantic tales of robbers, mysterious night creatures, and Dadaist wordplay. Essentially, every Yello track is both ancient and brand new at the same time. This principle is perfectly illustrated by the first single, "Around the Sun." It's based on a dormant Meier recording that was cut at the last minute from the selection for "Claro Que Si" (1981). Blank gave Meier's sonorous voice a fresh sonic makeover – the result is an elegant and flexible, thoroughly Yello-esque combination of past and present, romantic wanderlust and driving percussion. "Break Out" also plays with stylistic elements that can be traced back to Yello's earliest days: a dangerously prowling bass riff, fiery percussion, and storyteller Meier in hypnotic top form.
Time begins where it ends, or vice versa. Or, as Boris Blank says: "Yello's music doesn't really know time."
The sound is crazy loud and the music is mental, banging.
Very into Peur Bleue's vibe if you listen to the harder among them.
Pablo, from Unhinged Records has been playing and producing music for the past 15 years, and just started to released his music the past years to the people...
Some of these tunes are early ones from Pablo, and some others are the latest ones. A way to discover an evolution, and a constance : his style !
A superb discovery to me... The kind of Tek I love to mix !!! and listen !
Enjoy !
Music : Pablo
Mastering : Stefan ZMK
Cut : Simon Davey
Visual : Toolsy
Pressing : Record Industry
Produced in 2026
“The Long Transition From Death To Wisdom” marks a new chapter in Dmitry’s evolving sonic world – a contemplative, slow‑burning journey through grief, memory, and the quiet emergence of clarity. Rooted in a brooding fusion of shoegaze, goth, and darkwave, the album drifts through washed out guitars, spectral synths, and poignant vocals – its emotional landscape suspended between sadness and awakening. On vocal duties is Dmitry’s longtime collaborator Valeria Simonova, whose presence deepens the album’s atmosphere. Each track feels like a step forward in the ritual of becoming aware of one’s own existence, moving through silence and ancient memories toward a sense of spiritual renewal.
The album opens with the mysticism and layered metaphors of “Liar,” before descending into the ancient, biblical presence of “Serpent Queen.” Midway, “Zenith” rises with shimmering synths and steady, triumphant percussion, while “Echoes of Yesterday” lingers in celestial melancholy, dissolving the boundary between remembrance and insight. The Bside begins with “The Other Side of Life,” a threshold into a quieter, more reflective space, followed by the meditative, ritual like ambience of “Shrine of Ruins.” Closing track “Cold” offers a final exhale from the fading realm of the past – an acceptance shaped by distance, time, and the erosion of old wounds.
An array of musicians contributed to the recoding of the album: Mathys Dubois (No One Is Innocent, exBlack Strobe), Loïc Maurin (M83), Victor Sologub (Deadушки, Странные Игры), Alexander Titov (Кино, Аквариум), Ben Easton (Deary), and others. The album was mastered at Abbey Road Studios by Miles Showell.
For our Sophomore release, Solar Suite steps up with Back 2 Basics, four groove-led productions that favour restraint and subtlety. Stripping things back to the essentials with patiently crafted rhythms and basslines that could just keep on chugging. Club trax with one eye on the classics and the other fixed firmly forward.
The vinyl saga between Planet Rhythm and Derailed Records rolls on with a full album from none other than the mighty Tensal. Landing as a double 12", this release carries the unmistakable VVS signature: uncompromising, high-impact techno and a selection of heavyweight prime-time cuts made to ignite the dancefloor. We’re excited to welcome Tensal to the label, whose unmistakable sound makes this vinyl release a truly special addition to the catalogue. '' I Want VVS's More Than Ever ''
“Carl layers willowy guitar arpeggios, foggy keyboards, and chimes over Windy’s murmured intonations and rippling basswork. Everything sounds fresh and unaffected in the careful hands of these two gentle souls. Pick it up, lie back, and allow it to lull you into an undisturbed reverie.” Big Takeover
At the time of original release it was written that the album "will transport the listener to other plains of reality.” (Acid Test). Meanwhile, Alternative Press called it “alluring and addictive.” and CMJ called it "expansive, daydream enhancing music.”
The pair have also recently released their collaborative album with Optigan Conservatory, which can be revisited here. A beautiful and hermetic energy larger than the sum of its parts was captured in the collaborative process of making this album. There are echoes of the earliest releases from Windy & Carl as well as refractions of the same opacity that surfaced in the early kranky catalog.
A fine time to be shining a light on these label stalwarts as the dark Autumn evenings roll in
Electrumos is said to be a lost continent hidden somewhere on Earth. Some believe it lies beneath the surface, others claim it drifts invisibly through the atmosphere or exists between different layers of time. Despite countless attempts, nobody has ever managed to locate it.
On this EP, pdqb becomes the first known traveller to access Electrumos, intercepting and decoding the mysterious electromagnetic transmissions emanating from within.
He transforms these signals into irresistible electro-cognitive frequency patterns.
Featuring remodels by dynArec and DMX Krew, along with artwork by John Armleder.
Bill Beau was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, but was raised in the western provinces, finishing high school in Edmonton, Alberta. It was while in high school that the "righteous rays" via radio struck Beau in the form of Meade Lux Lewis, Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons at the height of the Boogie Woogie rage. It was while in high school that Bill got his first gig. He played piano and worked with Wilf Harper, a guitarist of local renown. Beau played on weekends and during the week worked as a clothing salesman, stock clerk, refinery worker, service station attendant and freight checker. He travelled all across Canada, and finally landed in Los Angeles, California.
In 1958 his love of music compelled him to direct all of his energy toward the perfection of his musical talent, so he decided to settle permanently in Los Angeles. Beau first worked there as a vibraphonist, gigging with such stars as Ben Webster, Rex Stewart, Pete Fountain, and Stuff Smith. Once, when his regular organist failed to show up for a date, Beau ended up on the Hammond. Beau then formed his own group, and the trio got a standing date at the Blue Port Lounge. The other two members of the trio are Jo Stafford on guitar, Lorenzo Green on drums, plus the pretty and petite vocalist with the group, Chi Chi.
"Live at the Blueport Lounge" by the Bill Beau Trio is mod-soul-jazz at its very best! A stunning treasure rarely to be found - unless it's on Mo-Jazz!
Based between Brussels and Berlin, Golden Hours is comprised of past and present members of Gang Of Four, The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Tricky, The Fuzztones and The Third Sound, to name just a few. A band with mileage and stories, they trade in rock’n’roll missives that are at times dark, tense and hypnotic, at others sweaty, relentless and danceable. Made up of Hákon Adalsteinsson (Guitar/Vocals), Rodrigo Fuentealba Palavacino (Guitar), Tobias Humble (Drums/Vocals) and Wim Janssens (Bass/Keys/Vocals), Golden Hours’ self-titled debut album is due for release March 31st 2023 on Fuzz Club Records. Wim says of the project and its incoming debut: “The musical backgrounds of each member are pretty broad but somehow when we come together there’s a pretty clear definition of what our music should sound like. There’s a beautiful friction between the noise we produce and the love for melody that seems to overtake at just the right moment. There never seems to be a lack of ideas when we come together. In silent agreement, every idea gets tried and will be further developed into a song or skipped in a heartbeat. No time is wasted. It all happens pretty automatically
Or Kantor returns with his sophomore album Snake Island, a vivid and cinematic journey through imagined landscapes and lost love, for fans of Eden Ahbez and other seekers of sound and spirit.
Following the critical success of his 2024 debut Sarda Sarda, praised by BBC Radio 6 Music, FIP Radio, RRR Australia, WYEP, KCRW, and Songlines Magazine, Kantor continues to refine his distinctive sonic identity, grounded in instrumental storytelling.
With Snake Island, Kantor ventures deeper into what he calls Subterranean Music, an atmospheric fusion of Mediterranean ballads, desert blues, spiritual jazz, and psychedelic textures. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Gábor Szabó, Omar Khorshid, The Budos Band, Dorothy Ashby, and Tommy Guerrero, he crafts instrumentals that feel both timeless and cinematic.
"Snake Island was written as a soundtrack to a fictional film that disappeared from the world, one that most likely no one has ever seen," says Kantor. "It began as a tragic love story, imagined during my time on a remote island in the Cyclades. Every landscape felt like a scene waiting for music. Eventually, the story gave way to sound."
A respected tattoo artist and founder of the Love Light Studio, Kantor's musical path began after a chance encounter with Johnny Sharoni (Garden City Movement, A&R at Anova Records). During a tattoo session, Sharoni heard Kantor's demos and was immediately struck by their raw beauty.
Kantor now steps confidently into the next chapter of his creative journey. Snake Island is more than an album. It is a mythic, imagined soundtrack to a film that only exists in memory, rendered in tones that shimmer like heat on stone.
“Sacred Aeolian music capturing and harnessing the divine power of the wind”
Aeolian Harp is somewhere between a string instrument and a receiver. Its strings are agitated by the wind without any human interference, producing tones entirely of its own volition. Archer toured the British Isles setting up his harp in various sacred and loosely mystical locations. Where he let the Devaharp transmit an otherwise unknown sacred music that has ALWAYS existed around us.
Listening to the natural swells of the strings and their unusual tonalities, the billowing wind and bird song overhead, it feels divinely calm and comforting. Something like tapping into the natural resonance of Mother Gaia or being back inside the womb.
DELUXE 2LP REISSUE
Housed in it’s original gatefold sleeve with original inserts, 2 new special colour inner sleeves, a new 2026 insert and a BONUS UNRELEASED album recorded in 1983 on Robert’s previously UNHEARD pyramid-shaped Aeolian harp the DEVAHARP 2.
Jonah Ellis came to the Drifters as a guitarist but was soon singing with the group and acting as their musical director.
This multitalented musician/ songwriter hailed from DC where he was born on 25 August 1947 and grew up to graduate from Springarn, Senior High in Washington.
He went on to study further at Morris Town Junior College in Morris Town, Tennessee.
Then he received a BA degree in Music from Knoxville College in Knoxville, Tennessee, and a Master of Arts in Music from Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan.
His first move into recording came with his group Jonah and the Whales and ‘Savannah Sun’ which sold well locally by didn’t chart nationally.
Jonah’s second single ‘I Get Hot/ Popcorn Cellar’ on Viking Records in 1970 had similar results but he was writing great songs and creating a lot of interest. In addition to penning Yarbrough and Peoples big hit ‘Don’t Stop The Music’ in 1980 which hit platinum.
Jonah was writer/ producer at Total Experience Records where he found time to cut a single under his own name ‘Christmas Won’t Be Christmas Without My Baby’ and also wrote hits for the Gap Band the biggest hit being ‘Desire’. Jonah only stayed a Drifter for about a year between 1986-87.
A short time later he joined the Temptations as their lead guitarist but didn’t stop writing songs for other artists (sometimes in his pen name Lonnie Simmons) like Alicia Keys ‘Gangsta Lovin’, Puff Daddy ‘Soul Food’, Evelyn ‘Champagne’ King ‘Shame’, Billy Paul ‘Fire In Her Love’and so many more including Aretha and sister Carolyn Franklin, Esther Phillips, Rose Royce and Burt Bacharach.
Jonah continued to write and perform internationally until his untimely death from a stroke on 22 February 2010.
It all started with a small party in 2006. Peter Invasion simply wanted to create a home for his band. That small party grew into something bigger, and eventually Riotvan became a record label in 2012 — a home for many different people, all brought together by a shared love for music and art. When Panthera Krause joined the journey in 2017, Riotvan evolved once again, adding a new perspective and another creative force to what it had become. The journey began 240 months ago — or, for those too lazy to do the math, 20 years. A lot has happened since then, but one thing has never changed: the passion. People have come, gone, and stayed. And here we are, celebrating 240 months of Riotvan with our friends, our loved ones, and ourselves. To mark the occasion, we're hitting the road on tour and have put together an extended edition of our Familiar Faces series. It's a colorful collection of music that brings together everything we love and everything that makes sense to us. It couldn't represent the Riotvan spirit any better. We'll definitely see each other somewhere along the way. Here's to the next 240 months.
Underpinned by spoken folktales stretching from Indonesia to Poland, a new collaborative EP from Warszawa/Berlin-based Jerzy Mączyński and London-based Flora Yin-Wong arrives via Accidental Meetings. Demons rising from the wind, unknown beings lurking in the forest — the record conjures a landscape built from heady layers of saxophone and the tormented strings of zither, harp and kemence.
Recorded across two intense studio sessions, the EP also features idiosyncratic contributions from London-based guest vocalists and musicians Aga Ujma and Laila Sakini.
Flora Yin-Wong is a London-born experimental sound artist and writer of Chinese and Malaysian heritage, known for weaving field recordings and traditional instruments. Her album Holy Palm (Modern Love) and book Liturgy (PAN) cemented her as a singular voice in experimental music today.
Jerzy Mączyński is a Polish saxophonist, producer and composer whose jazz training feeds into genre-melting work spanning kosmische, prog, industrial techno and minimalism. One of his collaborations being a record of free jazz and rhythmic cubism with Chicago's Hieroglyphic Being.
Plus Plus Traxx is here and we open things up with the label’s main guy, Louie Fresco, and his bass-heavy track "###" (Pound-Pound-Pound).
A track that feels like it was made by a mad A.I. on shrooms inside a lab on a remote alien spaceship. Breaks weaving through glitchy sounds and creepy leads make this tune a certified secret weapon for those DJs who truly dare to break the mold and play outside the trendy shit.
Next up, we got a banger of a collab between CHKLTE and San Dee, who met inside the 16bit realm and cooked up a trippy minimal late night heater that feels like you're creeping through the Doom and Duke Nukem corridors, a tune that will definitely be making the after-hours rounds around the world.
Coming up on the B-side, we got none other than Harry Wills under his Brazen alias, doing what Harry does: dope basslines, intricate drum work, unique creativity, and overall trippy madness. 135 bpms of brazen dopeness.
And if you want more fuel in your engine, here comes Gojnea76, who turns the track "Passive Aggressive" on its head and literally kicks the “passive” out of the equation, delivering a bomb of a remix that will definitely be traveling in many great DJs’ record bags for years to come.
This is Freaky Friends Vol.1
Parisian minimal maestro olivier romero and reflex blue team up for an EP of stripped back house music. Inspired by each-others sonic palette, the duo fuse together their influences and express themselves fully through a two track journey of straight-to-the-point club sounds.
Ezra Feinberg's third album Soft Power sees the composer-guitarist enlist an impressive array of fellow musicians including Mary Lattimore, David Moore (Bing & Ruth), Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Robbie Lee and share the life affirming lead single 'Future Sand'.
Defined by its abundance of melodies, repeating figures and ecstatic improvisations, Soft Power exudes an enlightened and transformative spirit to empower the listener. Feinberg, a practising psychoanalyst and former founding member of the San Francisco psychedelic collective Citay (Dead Oceans / Important Records) resides in the artistic enclave of upstate New York's Hudson River valley. Initial recordings emerged in the late summer of 2020, before added synthesis with collaborator John Thayer (Arp, Sunwatchers) during early 2021. Soft Power follows previous albums 'Recumbent Speech' (2020) and 'Pentimento and Others' (2018).
Feinberg artfully transcends the listener to an enriched place, his compositions distinguished by the deep humanity that lies at their core, plugging the listener into a state of wide eyed being, open and alive. Soft Power then is Ezra's own mantra but also one of power giving - a colourful catharsis translated into music.
Feinberg's music always speaks to the listener, but Soft Power, in whispering, speaks loudest.
"Much like everyday life, I wanted to convey these very plain, simple, tranquil, nearly quotidian aspects, but each piece contains this arc in which that form expands, is broken out of, so what starts out like a painting of flowers in a seaside motel turns into a riot of color and sound, or you feel slipped into a dream that feels like it could go on forever"
Introducing Music for Pet Lovers Vol. 1 – a limited edition vinyl experience like no other. The magnificent MBBKR label delivers two A-sides packed with infectious energy. This one is for both: groove enthusiasts and pet lovers. So, expect the unexpected as always - groovy, soulful, and undeniably unique, this one's sure to be a classic in the making!
When the first JIM album Love Makes Magic was released in 2023, it was the end product of an experiment that had begun during the strange days of the pandemic. Cooped up in his studio, James Baron started fiddling about with an as-yet unnamed new album idea. It became Vicious Charm’s first LP release. Labelled variously as Balearic, folktronica, blue-eyed soul and Laurel Canyon, Love Makes Magic was perhaps all and none of those things: a record rooted less in Californian mythology than in Baron’s own musical world, somewhere between Sherwood, Nottingham, classic songwriting, electronic soul and the no-nonsense good times that have long run through his work under his other monikers (principally the anagrammatic Ron Basejam and, of course, Crazy P) One thing was indisputable, it connected with people... and still does.
The album was a minor hit, appearing in many a Best of 2023 chart and voted Album of the Year in Bill Brewster’s Furtive 50. A tour and a few memorable festival appearances – his 2024 We Out Here Festival being one of those wonderfully timed ‘moments’ - perfectly captured the horizontal vibes on the album, while injecting some live energy into its delivery. While there was a follow-up remix album for Love Makes Magic, JIM was already preparing a sophomore LP: “I wrote the majority of The Curious Case Of Existence in a couple of months at the beginning of 2024, then it was just a case of making the record over the next couple of years in between everything else.”
»Memorial« grew out of Nate Wooley’s work alongside Annea Lockwood recording the Columbia River, and in particular from a visit to Kettle Falls in northern Washington, once one of the river’s great salmon fishing and meeting grounds and a place of enormous importance to the Sinixt and other Indigenous peoples of the Upper Columbia. The falls disappeared from view following the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam in 1940, submerged beneath what is now Lake Roosevelt, yet beneath the still surface of the reservoir, a fast current continues to move across the buried cliffs. That tension between what remains and what can only be recovered through memory runs throughout »Memorial«.
In the essay accompanying the record, Wooley returns repeatedly to the idea of translation: the attempt to carry an experience from one form into another, from river to recording, memory to sound, landscape to music. He moves between Lockwood’s sound maps, John Ashbery’s rain falling on canal machinery, Ravel’s attempts to make water move through a piano, Christian Wolff’s »Stones«, and the Sinixt First Salmon Ceremony, where rocks struck together recall the sound of salmon once moving through the river in their thousands. These translations cannot restore what has been lost; however, they allow us to revisit what remains beneath in another form.
»Memorial« exists as an uncertainty, concerned with the distance between a place and its recording, between an event and what survives of it, and with the way listening itself becomes entangled with memory. Kettle Falls remains submerged, the river constrained and radically altered, but the water continues to move over the old rock beneath the reservoir. »Memorial« tries to listen for that persisting memory.
Amazzonia is the new album by Alex Puddu and the second volume following the erotic series
I Desideri Di Sadie (Piaceri Tropicali), where the inspiration took us to an imaginary journey in Southeast Asia. With this new album “Amazonia,” Alex Puddu takes us on a trip to Central America, the Caribbean islands, and South America, exploring a new groove of Latin-funk, reggae, and seductive sleazy disco . Here, Sadie’s adventures unfold, from the jungle to the cities and onto the enchanting tropical beaches. Another journey through temptations, on the islands, discovering the beauty of Alex Puddu’s “Erotic World.”
"Amazzonia" was written, arranged, produced, and recorded by Alex Puddu, who plays all the instruments on the album himself. He was assisted by two of the best bassists on the Italian nu-disco and Balearic scene: Domenico Andria—who has played with Pellegrino/Zodyaco and worked closely with Alex Puddu on several releases—and Daniele Labbate, who has performed as a session bassist for artists including Nu Genea and Mystic Jungle.
Other featuring musicians on the album are:
Imelda : Lead and backing vocals
Adrian Wilding: Vocal on Gimme Dub
Hendrik Jørgensen: Trumpet
Jesper Løvdal: Saxophone
With the stunning Planes In Reverse, Sascha Funke, the Berlin-born producer and DJ, and long-time member of the Kompakt family, releases his first album in almost a decade, since 2017’s Lotos Land. It’s a welcome return for one of the most eloquent and elegant producers in electronic and dance music, someone who’s always been able to say more with less, and the ten tracks here, moving effortlessly between techno, house, minimalism, disco house, and home listening tunes, are all gorgeously sculpted miniatures. With guest appearances from partner Julienne Dessagne (Fantastic Twins), with whom Funke has also worked in Saschienne, there’s something homely and family about it, too; a family of sounds, a home of tone. There’s also something consummate about Planes In Reverse, as though Sascha Funke has perfected the album format. There’s no flab here, no excess – it plays out like a perfectly designed experience, ten tracks, coming in under fifty minutes, an album where every moment matters.
It’s full of variety, but everything has the unmistakable Funke thumbprint, one that was developed during the late ‘90s / early ‘00s minimal techno and microhouse moment, but which was always open to other ideas and other sounds, too. Planes In Reverse came together quickly for Funke: “Last winter, I had two or three new tracks, which gave me a core feeling: ‘Ah, this could be the direction of something like an album.’ Sometimes it can be very easy that you wrap it up and then it becomes something coherent and solid. This happened within two or three months; it was very fast and direct.” Everything fell into place – the ten tracks revealed themselves, the album sat together as a whole, and the final piece of the puzzle was returning home again to Kompakt, who have supported Sascha Funke from the very start, releasing his first single, “Campus”, back in 1999.
Planes In Reverse opens stealthily with “What You See”, where rhythms percolate and bass prowls while gaseous textures fill the sonic spectrum. It’s also the first appearance of Fantastic Twins on the album; here, she speaks a hypnotic mantra, a prelude to the title track, where Dessagne has a pure pop moment, her voice ecstatic and vibrant. Indeed, Planes In Reverse plays out like thesis and antithesis ending in synthesis, the tracks nestling next to each other even as they shuttle between sounds, genres, perspectives. There are some beautiful moments dropped throughout Planes In Reverse – the heavenly textures that make the title track feel so cloud-bound; the glassy and orbital tones that drop from the skies through the disco house inspired “Karat”; the clamour and clatter of hyper-edited voices shuffling through “Splitter”; or the field recordings of Sascha’s son football training session that drop “Zockers” into a different place and space, slowly giving way to a beautifully paced electro-pop mantra. “In Germany,when the kids play a computer game, or when they play football, we describe it as zocken. They’re the players, they’re the Zockers.“ Funke explains.
Planes In Reverse winds down with the beautiful “Kruso”, where ticklish, loving arpeggios careen around the room, and drift-work chords shimmer and shuttle between your ears. It’s a perfect comedown to an album that feels breathes in and out at an organic pace, nothing above 130 BPM, everything sitting together just so. Indeed, that’s the feeling you take away from Planes In Reverse; it sums up the spirit of Sascha Funke productions perfectly, while also existing beautifully as its own world dreamt unto itself. It’s Sascha Funke down to the very essence. Nothing unnecessary, nothing extraneous: Pure Funke.
Forty years of cassette releases, pressed for the first time on vinyl
First of two instalments exploring the previously unreleased sonic archives of one of Poland’s most enigmatic
living artists - with its first volume focused on his deep listening practice and spiritual reverie (recorded 1990–2013)
The last time Andrzej Dudek-Dürer took a banknote bearing the face of the Polish anarchist Jarosław Dąbrowski from his pocket to trade it for a pair of shoes was in 1969. He bought them for 120zł - the equivalent of 100€ today - and never replaced them since then. Only rebuilt them, year after year, drawing a needle and thread through the leather each time it split, closing one wound before the next one opened. It became a ritual of precision, stitching a record of another year into their soles.
That same year, in Wrocław, he arrived at a conclusion that would recalibrate everything that followed. Convinced he was the reincarnation of Albrecht Dürer, he adopted the surname Dudek-Dürer, stopped cutting his hair and began wearing the same garments every day. It was the first ritual of many, though he wouldn't have called it that yet. Look closely enough, over the decades, and it is always the same gesture, returning in different material: hair growing in a single unbroken strand, a needle drawing thread through leather, sitar strings pulled taut across a neck he built with his own hands and magnetic tape spooling forward inside the cassette boxes stacked against his walls.
None of this began in a vacuum. Dudek-Dürer emerged from the Wrocław neo-avant-garde, in a Polish art world where an exhibition could be cancelled overnight by the stroke of a censor's pen. In 1973, his exhibition Auto-crucifixion was shut down by the state, and for a time he found himself blocked from exhibiting his own art at all - the one force in his life that ever came close to cutting the thread.
He seemed to experience it differently. In 1974, after long, patient research into sitar craftsmanship, he built his first prototype with his brother, a knowledgeable luthier. In 1978, in a smoked-out jazz club, he took his first steps into sound recording with the unreleased album Jazz From Underground with his first band. By 1979, recognition started to travel further than he could.
Turning toward Far-Eastern philosophy, meditation and the idea of reincarnation was another language of freedom for him. It was a way of claiming an inner territory the state could not reach, a border it could not close. Mail Art served a parallel function, reaching further out: in a country that restricted travel and expression, sending and receiving art through the postal system became an act of quiet rebellion.
The body, in his understanding, is only an envelope readied for constant transformation. From this came Metaphysical Telepathy: during the years he could not leave Poland, he treated that confinement as a rehearsal room, sending his mind out ahead on the same thread his body would later follow. Living Sculpture grew from the same root with performances of stillness beside static art objects, until the boundary between the object and the man beside it simply dissolved. Camera Meditation extended the same instinct into photography: a shutter click flattening three dimensions into two so that a single instant could be held forever. Inspired by the pioneers of self-portrait photography like Robert Cornelius, he used it to document time itself, and kept explaining to me: "You know. This is not about vanity. This is about observing time passing.”
The isolation did not end suddenly. It ended the way his own philosophy had already predicted it would, from the inside first. Mail Art quietly solved the problem politics couldn't. Correspondence built during years of confinement slowly worked its way through doors the state itself had kept locked. Contacts made through folded paper and stamps became invitations. Ultimately, invitations became passports.
In 1983 he made his first trip outside Poland, to Germany, in search of the audio technology he couldn’t get his hands on before. In 1985, he was invited by the Indian embassy in Poland to give a sitar concert on an instrument he had spent a decade patiently stringing together - half sitar, half tanpura, built from patience and determination. After the collapse of the People's Republic of Poland, the travels kept unspooling: South Korea, then Mexico, then Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, Japan and the United States - each stop leaving behind its own small knot of tape, tied off and carried home.
In the decades since, recognition arrived at the same unhurried pace: he conducted workshops at UC Berkeley, served as vice-president for artistic affairs of the Union of Polish Art Photographers and the Union of Polish Visual Artists between 2010 and 2014 and received the Bronze Medal for Merit to Culture - Gloria Artis. His visual work gradually entered collections including the National Museums of Warsaw, the Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, MoMA and the Venice Biennale. His musical practice, by contrast, never found that kind of room - left to circulate quietly, sharing his cassette tapes directly, waiting for someone willing to follow it further.
It took months before I could find a way to reach Andrzej Dudek-Dürer - his presence online is very close to nonexistent. Surprisingly, LinkedIn turned out to be the only door still open, a faintly absurd irony given everything else about him. I packed the strict minimum for a three-day trip and an empty notebook and made my way to Wrocław. His headquarters sits in the neighbourhood of Grabyszyn: a two-storey pre-war house that has belonged to his family for generations. The man who opened the door was long-haired, long-bearded, in his trademark leather shoes and patched jeans. We sat in his living room, in front of a computer where decades of recordings sat organised in cryptically named files, surrounded by books and objects that had arrived one layer at a time, leaving room for only two chairs in the middle. His shoes sat by the door, rebuilt so many times they had become their own quiet sculpture. Cassette tapes filled boxes against the walls, almost unlabelled, each one a spool of thread holding decades of sound that had never once been asked for, until now.
I listened for hours: meditating in front of strangers on the porch of a Seoul temple until the tourists stopped taking photos and simply waited with him; a stand-off with border guards at the US–Mexico crossing over an instrument they couldn't identify and didn't trust; a session with the Stockhausen family that he still, decades later, describes like it happened last week. All of it interrupted, occasionally, by the smell of soup boiling and fresh bread warming on the ceramic stove. After two days, it felt like being handed the end of a very long thread and asked, gently, to keep following it. I left with a USB drive holding his full discography, signed with his unmistakable signature.
Astral Meditations From A Living Statue is a length of that thread, drawn out from the boxes stacked against his walls - recordings gathered from different rooms, different countries, different decades. This first record breathes slowly: incense-thick, meditative, built for stillness. A cutting-edge séance in outer space where machines learn how to dream.
It begins with the neo-classical improvisations of Andrzej, space-delayed, recorded at Klub Muzyki i Literatury in Wrocław in 2002. 'When..So' opens the curtains with a deep-rooted meditation accompanied by slow-decaying piano figures illuminated by a candle-lit spirit gathering.
Los Angeles, 1990: a dormant villa, a grand piano, the voice of Bonnie Barnett. 'Exception' is captured in a single room, in a single afternoon - voice and keys circling each other, neither one leading, until the silence between the notes starts to feel like the instrument.
'The Meta...' and 'Tired Of...', recorded at Studio Morandi in Ponte Nossa, Italy, in 1992, settle into a sitar drone built entirely from patience - overtones stacking and beating against each other, strung by a man who never once set foot in India. 'Mastery Of...' follows, recorded the same year at Studio Suski in Łomianki, pushing that same hum further still, until pitch dissolves into a spectral reverie. 'Transcendental Sound', from 2000, closes the first record in a slow bath of celestial frequency - better heard beside the shores of the Odra river.
More than fifty years after deciding that a life could become an artwork, Andrzej Dudek-Dürer continues to inhabit that decision. His shoes keep wearing thin against the earth's crust. His hair keeps growing, one strand at a time. His cassette tapes keep spooling in the dark of their boxes.
Now the thread finds its last shape: a single unbroken groove, spiralling inward from the outer edge to the label at the centre. Never cut - the way nothing else in his life ever was. Drop the needle and it will find that groove and follow it, the same way a needle once followed leather, once followed a border it couldn't cross, once followed string into an instrument that didn't exist until he built it. This record is the other end of a thread that has been travelling for fifty years. For the length of both sides, it rests here, in your hands. This is a timeless proof that the Lord of the New Age was never lost."
Jozef Van Wissem and Jim Jarmusch’s Bocca di Lupo and Mouth of the Wolf were recorded in July 2025 in Bologna, Italy. The recording sessions took place just after several live dates in New York and Chicago, and a week before they began a short European tour which included Paris, London, Ghent, Porto, and a first date in Bologna.
Below are notes from Jozef and Jim directly.
“With thanks to Gian Luca Farinelli and Rosanna Mordini from the extraordinary Cineteca di Bologna, we were able to secure recording days in the very cool Fonoprint Studios — located on Via Bocca di Lupo in Bologna, hence the titles of these two LPs. (“In bocca al lupo” — in the mouth of the wolf — is the Italian idiom for wishing one good luck; equivalent to “break a leg” in English.)
Bocca di Lupo starts with a new version of our own “Only Lovers Left Alive,” and “Apology” is a new version of a pre-existing piece by Jozef. All other tracks are new originals. We were honored to have guest duet vocals from the iconic Courtney Barnett on “Never Like You Said.” The lyrics of the song arrived spontaneously in a single take in the studio. It’s not directed at a specific person, but more an emotional response to several disingenuous, deceitful people — a closing of the door on their toxic behavior. And a casually recorded conversation (concerning the haunted auras of particular pieces of vintage women’s clothing) between Adriana Coppi and Veronica Mayrr (from Deux Femmes) is woven as a background into the track titled “Pour Deux Femmes.” “Black Roses” is an original poem written in Bologna, and recited from within its own musical setting. All other tracks are instrumentals.
Mouth of the Wolf, the second LP, consists of two longer, darkly ecstatic instrumental studio tracks — “In A” and “Massa Damnata.” Both were created with two electric guitars, and derived from our live performances. We consider it to be a musically separate album, and is therefore presented in its own sleeve and with its own artwork.
Our music has many inspirations — everything from our friends in Sunn O))) and Swans to Terry Riley and Morton Feldman; from Hildegard Von Bingen and WIlliam Lawes to Psychic Ills and Spacemen 3; from Les Rallizes Dénudés and NEU! to Nadja and Glenn Branca; from Ian Svenonius and Dead Skeletons to Son House and Gwenifer Raymond…from sunset to sunrise…full moon to new moon…”
a 01. Only Lovers Left Alive 4:36
b 02. Never Like You Said 5:23
[c] 03. Apology [5:11]
[d] 04. Black Roses [2:44]
[e] 05. On Twofold Nature [9:37]
[f] 06. Pour Deux Femmes [8:09]
[g] 07. In Bocca Al Lupo [5:58]
[h] 01. In A [12:56]
[i] 02. Massa Damnata [17:51]
[a] 01. Only Lovers Left Alive [4:36]
[b] 02. Never Like You Said [5:23]
[c] 03. Apology [5:11]
[d] 04. Black Roses [2:44]
[e] 05. On Twofold Nature [9:37]
[f] 06. Pour Deux Femmes [8:09]
[g] 07. In Bocca Al Lupo [5:58]
[h] 01. In A [12:56]
[i] 02. Massa Damnata [17:51]
[a] 01. Only Lovers Left Alive [4:36]
[b] 02. Never Like You Said [5:23]
[c] 03. Apology [5:11]
[d] 04. Black Roses [2:44]
[e] 05. On Twofold Nature [9:37]
[f] 06. Pour Deux Femmes [8:09]
[g] 07. In Bocca Al Lupo [5:58]
[h] 01. In A [12:56]
[i] 02. Massa Damnata [17:51]
[a] 01. Only Lovers Left Alive [4:36]
[b] 02. Never Like You Said [5:23]
[c] 03. Apology [5:11]
[d] 04. Black Roses [2:44]
[e] 05. On Twofold Nature [9:37]
[f] 06. Pour Deux Femmes [8:09]
[g] 07. In Bocca Al Lupo [5:58]
[h] 01. In A [12:56]
[i] 02. Massa Damnata [17:51]
[a] 01. Only Lovers Left Alive [4:36]
[b] 02. Never Like You Said [5:23]
[c] 03. Apology [5:11]
[d] 04. Black Roses [2:44]
[e] 05. On Twofold Nature [9:37]
[f] 06. Pour Deux Femmes [8:09]
[g] 07. In Bocca Al Lupo [5:58]
[h] 01. In A [12:56]
[i] 02. Massa Damnata [17:51]
MIO: Memories in Orbit is one of 2026 best games so far. With a synthwave-induced melody, blissful choir voices echoing the main theme of the game, buzzing electronic noises and a hint of groovy patterns, this track captures the very essence of the game. Reminiscent of other iconic OST like Power Glove’s Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon and Ben Prunty’s FTL: Faster Than Light.
Intersecting sharpness and passion. An innovative work born from the collision of two rare and extraordinary talents.
On one side was Hiroshi Suzuki, a trombonist in such demand that people said, “If you want to record a good work, secure his schedule.” On the other hand was Masahiko Togashi, a drummer who rose to prominence at a young age and dominated the jazz world, from modern jazz to free jazz. The collision of these two personalities and talents created a new current in the Japanese jazz scene. From "Castle Cats," which moves between jazz rock and free jazz, to "Suzu No Uta," where Yuji Ohno’s piano spins a beautiful melody amid the sound of bells falling like rain, and "Passion," where each musician cuts in with sharp intensity, the entire work is filled with creativity and passion. Recorded in 1969, this is said to be the first work in Japan in which new jazz and free jazz were recorded and released as an album. From this turning point, Japanese jazz began to move in a major way.
Colorful, powerful and elegant. A watershed masterpiece that embraces before then and after that by Kiyoshi Sugimoto, the master of the era.
Since turning professional in 1960, Kiyoshi Sugimoto has been active in many sessions and recordings. From the latter half of the 1960s, he joined groups such as Hideo Shiraki, Akira Ishikawa, and Terumasa Hino, gaining attention and solidifying his position with leader works such as “Country Dream” and “Babylonia Wind.” This work was recorded with Akira Ishikawa, Hiromasa Suzuki, Takao Uematsu and others right after studying in America for about a year. Starting with the groovy and luscious “Our Time” and “Marmalade Sky”, the dubious keyboards of “Jones Street”, and the melancholic and beautiful “Quiet Pulse”, it can be said to be a gap between jazz rock and fusion. There are attractive songs. This work represents Sugimoto’s work in the mid-1970s.
Hiromasa Suzuki, the hidden force behind Hiroshi Suzuki’s ""Romance"" and Jiro Inagaki’s ""Breeze,"" gathered a superb lineup of musicians and perfected the crossover sound on this masterpiece.
Hiromasa Suzuki was a composer, arranger, and keyboardist who played an active role not only in jazz, but also across the wider Japanese music world, including kayoukyoku, film, television, and commercials. From the late 1960s through the mid-1970s, he was deeply involved in works by Terumasa Hino, Akira Ishikawa, Jiro Inagaki, and others during their most cutting-edge periods, fully demonstrating his remarkable skill. His innovation, always one step ahead of the times, reached a kind of culmination in this work, recorded in 1976. Featuring young Shuichi “Ponta” Murakami, Akira Okazawa, and Masayoshi Takanaka, this is a masterpiece of pre-fusion and crossover.
First release on brand new imprint 'Picture Dis'. The label will reissue classic tracks only on Limited Edition picture disc. First release is none other than "Pump It Up" by Danzel, one of the defining dance records of the 2000s and a global club favourite that continues to ignite dancefloors around the world. Including Marnik Remix, A Cappella version and another hit by Danzel: "Put Your Hands Up In The Air!".
Berlin-based producer and live act Volkan Akin lands on Secret Society with a brace of finely tuned minimal house sounds for the small hours. 'Famosus' is stripped back but not lacking in clout: the drums and bass are tightly coiled while the hits pop out of the mix as a soft acid line wiggles endlessly in the middle of the mix. Franco Cinelli remixes with a bolder sense of swing and trippy vocals that are like voices in your head. '2SHY4' is the other original and is dry, dusty tech house with jazzy chords softening the edges and bringing some warmth, then Thomas Melchior remixes with his masterful touch and distils everything into deft, hypnotic grooves.
Limen brings together two artists whose musical paths converge around a shared sensitivity to listening, resonance, and the evocative power of sound.
Recorded at Ritmo e Blu Studio during a five-day residency between spring and summer 2025, the album emerged from a series of spontaneous encounters free from predetermined structures. The pieces preserve their original form, retaining the immediacy and temporal flow of the dialogues as they first unfolded.
Subsequent interventions were conceived not as revisions, but as an exploration of the open spaces already present within the recordings—deepening what remained unspoken and extending resonances without altering the music's natural evolution.
The title, derived from the Latin word for “threshold,” reflects the nature of the project itself: a place of passage between improvisation and composition, silence and vibration, memory and imagination. Limen inhabits a suspended territory where listening becomes an experience of openness, presence, and transformation.
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Lino Capra Vaccina
Lino Capra Vaccina is one of the most distinctive voices in Italian experimental music. A percussionist, composer, and pioneer of minimalist and meditative sound practices, he first emerged in the early 1970s as a founding member of the influential group Aktuala, whose visionary fusion of ancient traditions, improvisation, and contemporary research anticipated what would later become known as world music.
Over a career spanning more than five decades, Vaccina has cultivated a unique artistic language centred on vibration, resonance, and the transformative power of sound. His landmark 1978 album Antico Adagio remains a touchstone of European minimalism, while his collaborations have included figures such as Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca, Markus Stockhausen, Keith Tippett, Paolo Tofani, and many others.
Whether working with percussion, piano, electronics, or voice, Vaccina's music seeks a state of suspension and contemplation. His compositions unfold as immersive sonic environments whereancient echoes and contemporary sensibilities meet, inviting listeners into an experience that is at once intimate, spiritual, and timeless.
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Luca Formentini
Luca Formentini is an Italian composer, sound artist, and improviser whose work unfolds at the intersection of experimentation, atmosphere, and deep listening. Active since the late 1990s, he has developed a highly personal language in which guitar, voice, field recordings, and electroacoustic processes become tools for exploring memory, perception, and the expressive potential of sound itself.
His music resists easy categorization, moving freely between ambient, contemporary composition, improvisation, and sound art. Throughout his career he has released numerous solo works and collaborated with a wide range of internationally acclaimed musicians, including Holger Czukay, Robert Rich, Markus Stockhausen, Steve Jansen, Theo Travis and Steve Lawson.His recordings have appeared on labels across Europe, Asia, Australia, and the United States.
Rooted in a practice of attentive listening and sonic exploration, Formentini creates evocative musical landscapes that invite reflection rather than certainty, opening spaces where silence, texture, and resonance become as meaningful as melody itself.
Twenty-five years after its original release, Markus Guentner's debut album In Moll returns in a special anniversary reissue on Black Knoll Editions, reaffirming its place as one of the defining ambient recordings of the early 21st century.
Released in 2001 during the formative years of Kompakt's influential Pop Ambient series, In Moll emerged from a period of rapid transformation in electronic music. New technologies, expanding digital networks, and shifting creative possibilities allowed artists to imagine entirely new sonic worlds. Amid this fertile landscape, Guentner's music stood apart. Combining delicate melodic fragments, slow-moving harmonies, and a remarkable sense of spatial depth, In Moll introduced a distinct artistic voice whose impact can still be felt a quarter-century later.
The album arrived shortly after Guentner's contributions to the inaugural Pop Ambient compilation, including the now-beloved "Regensburg 1," named after his Bavarian hometown. Those early recordings immediately captured the attention of Kompakt founders Michael Mayer and Wolfgang Voigt. Recalling his first encounter with the music, Mayer describes listening to a demo CDR with Voigt while wandering through Cologne late into the night, replaying the tracks for hours. "We knew that we had found something outrageously beautiful and we wanted the whole world to listen."
Across its running time, In Moll unfolds like a series of dreamlike landscapes, inviting the listener into a world that feels both familiar and strangely other. Bells, hisses, distant textures, and slow-moving bass tones drift through vast expanses of atmosphere while luminous synthesizer washes seem to blur the horizon in a fine digital mist. The album's transportive qualities are matched by a remarkable sense of compositional discipline. Every gesture feels deliberate, every texture carefully placed. Balancing warmth and melancholy with restraint, Guentner created a body of work that rewards both close listening and complete surrender.
Reflecting on the album twenty-five years later, Wolfgang Voigt describes Guentner as "one of the first, but also one of the most important ambient artists" associated with Kompakt, calling his music "an integral, timeless part of the long history of pop ambient." Music critic and former Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson, who reviewed In Moll upon its original release, similarly noted that the album "marked the arrival of an important new voice," and today regards it as "one of the finest ambient releases of the decade."
The album's influence continues to extend far beyond its original audience. For many listeners, In Moll served as an entry point into a new understanding of what ambient music could be. Black Knoll boss Rafael Anton Irisarri first encountered the album shortly after its release in 2001. "It immediately opened a door to a world of music I didn't know existed," he recalls. "At a time when I was still discovering my own creative voice, Markus showed me entirely new possibilities for what electronic music could communicate." Simply put, "The Sight Below would not have existed without In Moll paving the way."
Far from a historical curiosity, In Moll continues to feel strikingly contemporary. What once sounded futuristic now feels timeless, its patient pacing, attention to detail, and sense of wonder remaining entirely intact. The album's enduring power lies not only in its influence, but in the curiosity it continues to inspire, inviting listeners to step inside its world and lose themselves within it.
To mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, Black Knoll Editions presents the most complete edition of In Moll to date. Newly remastered in full analog by Rafael Anton Irisarri, this expanded release pairs the original album with a newly reworked interpretation by Markus Guentner himself, revisiting the material through the lens of twenty-five years of artistic development. The anniversary edition also features a new visual presentation designed by Guentner, offering a visual counterpart to the album's continued evolution. Together, these recordings and visuals celebrate both the enduring legacy of In Moll and its ability to reveal new dimensions twenty-five years later.
This 25th Anniversary Edition on Black Knoll Editions celebrates a recording whose quiet impact has only grown with time, preserving a work that remains as evocative, singular, and essential today as it was in 2001.
Twenty-five years after its original release, Markus Guentner's debut album In Moll returns in a special anniversary reissue on Black Knoll Editions, reaffirming its place as one of the defining ambient recordings of the early 21st century.
Released in 2001 during the formative years of Kompakt's influential Pop Ambient series, In Moll emerged from a period of rapid transformation in electronic music. New technologies, expanding digital networks, and shifting creative possibilities allowed artists to imagine entirely new sonic worlds. Amid this fertile landscape, Guentner's music stood apart. Combining delicate melodic fragments, slow-moving harmonies, and a remarkable sense of spatial depth, In Moll introduced a distinct artistic voice whose impact can still be felt a quarter-century later.
The album arrived shortly after Guentner's contributions to the inaugural Pop Ambient compilation, including the now-beloved "Regensburg 1," named after his Bavarian hometown. Those early recordings immediately captured the attention of Kompakt founders Michael Mayer and Wolfgang Voigt. Recalling his first encounter with the music, Mayer describes listening to a demo CDR with Voigt while wandering through Cologne late into the night, replaying the tracks for hours. "We knew that we had found something outrageously beautiful and we wanted the whole world to listen."
Across its running time, In Moll unfolds like a series of dreamlike landscapes, inviting the listener into a world that feels both familiar and strangely other. Bells, hisses, distant textures, and slow-moving bass tones drift through vast expanses of atmosphere while luminous synthesizer washes seem to blur the horizon in a fine digital mist. The album's transportive qualities are matched by a remarkable sense of compositional discipline. Every gesture feels deliberate, every texture carefully placed. Balancing warmth and melancholy with restraint, Guentner created a body of work that rewards both close listening and complete surrender.
Reflecting on the album twenty-five years later, Wolfgang Voigt describes Guentner as "one of the first, but also one of the most important ambient artists" associated with Kompakt, calling his music "an integral, timeless part of the long history of pop ambient." Music critic and former Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson, who reviewed In Moll upon its original release, similarly noted that the album "marked the arrival of an important new voice," and today regards it as "one of the finest ambient releases of the decade."
The album's influence continues to extend far beyond its original audience. For many listeners, In Moll served as an entry point into a new understanding of what ambient music could be. Black Knoll boss Rafael Anton Irisarri first encountered the album shortly after its release in 2001. "It immediately opened a door to a world of music I didn't know existed," he recalls. "At a time when I was still discovering my own creative voice, Markus showed me entirely new possibilities for what electronic music could communicate." Simply put, "The Sight Below would not have existed without In Moll paving the way."
Far from a historical curiosity, In Moll continues to feel strikingly contemporary. What once sounded futuristic now feels timeless, its patient pacing, attention to detail, and sense of wonder remaining entirely intact. The album's enduring power lies not only in its influence, but in the curiosity it continues to inspire, inviting listeners to step inside its world and lose themselves within it.
To mark its twenty-fifth anniversary, Black Knoll Editions presents the most complete edition of In Moll to date. Newly remastered in full analog by Rafael Anton Irisarri, this expanded release pairs the original album with a newly reworked interpretation by Markus Guentner himself, revisiting the material through the lens of twenty-five years of artistic development. The anniversary edition also features a new visual presentation designed by Guentner, offering a visual counterpart to the album's continued evolution. Together, these recordings and visuals celebrate both the enduring legacy of In Moll and its ability to reveal new dimensions twenty-five years later.
This 25th Anniversary Edition on Black Knoll Editions celebrates a recording whose quiet impact has only grown with time, preserving a work that remains as evocative, singular, and essential today as it was in 2001.
Faitiche presents the debut solo album by cellist, sound artist, and composer Topu Lyo: “quiet scenes from tokyo” brings together sixteen miniatures for solo cello and tape echo that oscillate between abstracts drones and rhythmic pizzicato sketches – all recorded at Topu’s Tokyo apartment. The constant traffic noise from a nearby highway has become an accompanying soundtrack for his compositions and can be heard on the recordings. Topu’s playing is marked by a distinctive idiom oriented more towards abstract electronic studio effects than classical technique.
The artist spoke to Jan Jelinek about his work:
JJ: A solo cello album may seem like an odd fit for a label that has to date released only music that is electronic in the broadest sense. But I think “quiet scenes from tokyo” complements the Faitiche repertoire exceptionally well. Its sixteen miniatures showcase the cello in all its complexity: the bowed passages sometimes recall a tape feedback drone; the pizzicato playing conjures up the percussion recordings of Moondog; and the abstract textures might be mistaken for the product of a granular sampler rather than rapid finger work on the cello. I’m constantly surprised by just how rich and varied this album is – without ever losing the charm of its sketch-like quality. Could you say a few words about the making of your album – first of all, from a rather technical perspective: what production tools did you use, and why?
TL: My production tools were very sparse. Just a solo cello and my Roland 301 Space Echo, which I only used at the end, running everything through it during mixing, tape only. After years of working with electronics, pedals, and synthesizers, moving to Tokyo pushed me toward minimizing my setup. But my aesthetics shifted too, toward simplicity. I wanted to strip everything back to just the acoustic cello and see how far I could push it — replicating some of my favorite electronic effects through extended technique: slow portamento, LFOs, filters, detune, noise. I’d also been listening to a cassette of ocean sounds for years. When I moved to Tokyo I was horrified to find myself living directly across from a freeway. Eventually the freeway started sounding almost identical to the ocean — and that ended up playing a prominent part in the recording.
JJ: That’s super interesting: mimicking electronic production as a compositional idea for the cello! You say the sound of the freeway is crucial to the album: I, too, tend to interpret steady traffic noise as a positive soundscape – do we hear the freeway on the album? I can also hear other field recordings, for example on “a street car with announcements”. Can you say a bit about how these field recordings influence your playing?
TL: Yes, you can hear the freeway on the album! The freeway is most prominent in “old trees in lonely spring”, “yuyake koyake”, and “the moon” (you can clearly hear individual cars). When I first began recording I had my balcony door shut tightly, but after a while I began leaning into the highway sound and slowly opening the door little by little to control the amount of noise. “streetcar with announcements” was a moment I was recording and a car passed by making announcements in the background. I loved how it sounded! Same thing with “yuyake koyake”, and later I realized that every day at 5pm the same song plays to mark sunset, telling children it’s time to go home. Having this bedrock of sound puts less pressure on me to put music on top or to play more notes.
JJ: It’s astonishing how much this differs from what I’d imagined: I’d been picturing peaceful landscape recordings, but had never thought of a freeway. Which goes to show how open to interpretation traffic noises are. So the room by the freeway had a major influence on the album – how are you going to perform it live?
TL: The contrast between the freeway and the beautiful landscape in my head couldn’t have been starker. I too was imagining a beautiful landscape in which to create the album, but somehow it still worked out. I've been going back and forth a lot on live shows and I think the most honest way is to have it the most stripped down. I was thinking of using traffic samples etc., but I think the duet really comes from the background sounds from every unique venue/environment. So as it stands, I’ll just be doing acoustic solo cello.
We don’t know much about Ariane Bonzini. Her age, perhaps. Her first name, certainly – but it’s confusing, as you’d expect. The rest, he keeps to himself, tucked away somewhere between Villeneuve-Saint-Georges and the Landes in the off-season.
What we do know is that at 16 he left everything behind to try his hand at rap. That six years later he left everything behind, again, without really saying why. That he taught himself sound engineering as one might learn a dead language.
And then came Magenta. In 2025, for three months, Bonzini set himself a challenge bordering on the absurd: to produce one track a day, write it, record it, mix it, master it, film himself doing it, and post it on social media. Without planning, without taking a step back, working until 3 am behind the screen. His monthly listeners went from 35 to 100,000.
For ‘Mec Normal’, something changed. Bonzini headed to the Rue Boyer studio – a space steeped in analogue charm, where some of the synths had once belonged to Christophe – and surrounded himself with a team for the first time: Crayon on production, Renaud Letang on mixing.
Chilly Gonzales spotted him, and from their meeting came ‘Gonzini’.
Thirteen tracks suspended between gentle melancholy and a willing detachment. Soaring synths. Recurring, obsessive ‘you’s’. A voice that whispers where others would shout.
Ariane Bonzini is unlike anything we’ve heard before. That is undoubtedly what makes her so unforgettable.
"Thank Goodness brings together an overdubbed ‘chamber band’ of bass guitar, viola, piano, harpsichord, voice and drums. Made on my own in London and Ireland between 2023-26 as a slow channelling inward of a lot of social energy.”
Seán Being is a committed figure at the sharp edges of Irish music, including being the key instigator of the band Princ€ss, touring bass player with Maria Somerville, and a long-time affiliate of Dublin label wherethetimegoes. Their various collaborations include contributions to live and recorded projects with the likes of Spellcaster, Nashpaints, Florian TM Zeizig, Jennifer Moore, Olan Monk, Dylan Kerr, Asa Nisi Masa, Life is Beautiful, Polido, Adriana João and Usof.
Not always in the business of ‘popular music’, Seán also has Gregorian Chant and car horn performances in their repertoire.
Aspects of all of this activity have made their way, directly or otherwise, into this first full-length album.
If Sylvie’s New Season were a movie, Ben Schwab would be the auteur, screenwriting and directing the vision, articulating his story through a cast of actors. In truth, New Season is a record of the freewheeling country-rock variety, Sylvie’s first with Ghostly International, and it finds the Los Angeles-based artist at the helm of a rotating ensemble, arriving at pure, joyous expression and renewed faith in the face of hardship. It’s a rare and refined kind of musical gesture, both intimate and all-embracing, self-produced, penned singularly, delivered collectively. An invitation to find beauty in life's trials and to trust that even the longest winters can give way to a new season. Like Sylvie’s self-titled effort, New Season still rings of the sunny, lighthearted, and smooth 1960s and ’70s pop, rock, and country sonics that have become the project’s signature. While Schwab constructed that 2021 project mainly with friends in his orbit, stemming from his time playing in Drugdealer’s band and other peripheral projects, he has broadened the scope tenfold for his full-length debut, New Season. The shapeshifting collective executes on an alluring mix of nostalgic and modern sensibilities, recalling the free-spiritedness of Laurel Canyon and bohemian-era Nashville with a contemporary sheen.
Nashville’s Jess Kerber focuses on the profound resonances of simple moments, pairing delicate acoustic guitar lines with her rich and captivating tenor. The World Is Dark, but I Want It to Be Funny, her second LP for Felte, is a deeply affecting collection of homespun poetry and natural artistry that finds the artists reflecting on personal history, the emotional intricacies of relationships, and the value of cosmic perspective. She explains,“These songs come from a space of feeling a little left behind, so a lot of the album is about realizing and accepting impermanence, and learning how to be good to yourself and to others.”
Opening with “Familiar Strangers”, Kerber gets to the heart of her greatest talents: fluid fingerpicking, emotive vocal cadences, feather-light touches of piano, and subtle harmonies. “Louisiana Song” positions a lyrical chain of childhood recollections up against the literal rising waters that will one day submerge a cherished place: “I think about being southern / and the sand on the gulf coast / When I think about returning / I am wading in a graveyard”.
Throughout The World Is Dark, Kerber navigates an emotional tightrope, fully aware of the ills of the world while trying to find connections and peaceful corners. Even with all their nuances and challenges, she suggests, our relationships are essential to staying grounded, even when we lose them. “Much of my writing is about facing the struggles head-on, balancing what you need to do to survive while remaining true to yourself,” she says. There are echoes of influences like Joni Mitchell, Gillian Welch, and Lomelda, though Kerber injects her own unique wit, wonder, and humility into every passage, allowing the listener into her head for a spell while quietly taking up residence in theirs.
Wewantsounds is proud to present the first official release of a legendary 1977 concert capturing Don Cherry, Collin Walcott, and Leon Thomas in their only documented performance together. Recorded live on March 5, 1977, at Pease Auditorium in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the performance featured the three musicians playing an immersive hypnotic set, joined for part of the evening by the rest of Oregon. Long circulating among a few Don Cherry fans, the full concert is now available as a deluxe, remastered 2-LP gatefold set featuring Moki Cherry artwork and new liner notes by Jason Weiss—licensed by the Don Cherry Estate and producer James Quinlan.
Don Cherry’s huge influence has steadily grown over the years, as fans and new generations of listeners continue to uncover the vast breadth of his global musical vision. Sunrise captures Cherry during a particularly fertile late-1970s period, when the American jazz trumpeter blended global and Eastern spiritual concepts into his "Organic Music" philosophy, drawing deeply from Eastern and African traditions. Moving fluidly between trumpet, the West African doussn'gouni (a traditional hunter's harp from Mali), bamboo flutes, percussion, and vocals, Cherry creates a deeply resonant world music soundscape.
Recorded live on March 5, 1977, at Pease Auditorium in Ypsilanti, Michigan, the show took place just a month after Don Cherry participated in the recording of Collin Walcott's ECM album Grazing Dreams. With Walcott playing alongside Cherry and vocalist Leon Thomas, bringing his unmistakable yodel-style vocal approach—and joined for part of the night by the rest of Oregon (Ralph Towner, Paul McCandless and Glen Moore)—the performance stands as a stunning, hypnotic forerunner to the formation of CODONA. The newly remastered audio is so vivid and intimate that it feels as though you are sitting directly in the room with the musicians.
The release also serves as a vibrant homage to Don and Moki Cherry’s creative partnership, featuring a reproduction of Moki’s striking 1975 Mandala tapestry on the front cover.
The concert was produced by James Quinlan, a central pillar of the U.S. Jazz and World Music scene who worked as a sound engineer for Carla Bley, booked Fela Kuti’s major U.S. tour in the 1980s, and went on to direct the Creative Music Studio and found Miami’s Rhythm Foundation. In the album's liner notes, Quinlan reflects in conversation with writer Jason Weiss on the surprise magic of that night:
"Don brought Leon Thomas with him... as a guest, unannounced. It was not part of the advertisement or contract... I don't know of any other time that they recorded or performed together. So, that was completely unique... The audience had no idea what was coming... It was a sound that was just mesmerizing, almost like a mantra."
Licensed by the Don Cherry Estate and James Quinlan, Sunrise is available as a deluxe 2-LP gatefold set featuring new liner notes by Jason Weiss—an essential document in the rich, ever-evolving Don Cherry musical journey.