Search:phenomena

NOWNEXT is a voyage from the past to the future, from now to then, from what's behind us to what's waiting for us just around the next corner. In musical terms these are the gaps that appear when you drift between genres and take risks. Strolling far from the well travelled Zeitgeist path. The second album by the Sepalot Quartet floats through this timeless space and fills those cracks with a relaxed fusion of Jazz meets Indie meets Electronica, not once denying Sepalots hip hop roots.
This freedom of expression can also be considered a sign of our times, with a generation coming of age without rivalling youth phenomena. Where a jazz show is held in a techno club with no further explaination needed.
With their first release the Quartet still relied on remakes from the established Sepalot dicography, with their current work they laid the foundation for a truly solid form of musical self discovery.
NOWNEXT is enlivened by this spirit and offers a fascinating and confindent blend of varied sounds spanning time and space.
With all this being said, NOWNEXT is truly an up to date album of international format, feeding from the rich experience of its diverse members (Sepalot, Angela Aux, Fabian Füss, Matthias Lindermayr). Memories, associations and a well carved vision are melted into a masterpiece.
NOWNEXT is the latest offering by SEPALOT and his QUARTET and needs to experienced with all senses.

Adam Beyer is back on Drumcode with an impressive array of tracks that will get the senses tingling and shows us what Drumcode is all about. These 4 tracks are deep and almost melancholic in their approach to techno, using effects to really help enforce an ambience only Beyer can achieve within his productions. The under lying throbbing of the drums drives this EP into the forefront of the heads down Drumcode sound and have been heard in many of Beyer's phenomenal sets throughout the year.

Kreng transports us through the swirling darkness and into the unknown with “Wormhole”, his first album in over a decade.

What does a trip towards another world sound like? We’re about to find out. The master of tension, melancholy, and the deranged is back after a long period working in the worlds of theatre and cinema. Last seen on Miasmah with the grief stricken The Summoner, Kreng now returns with Wormhole, following closer in the footsteps of the cult classics L’Autopsie Phénoménale de Dieu and Grimoire.

Starting with “You Are Here”, the listener travels through a vacuum of spacious minimalism and edge-of-your-seat tension. Within the journey, we are pulled and lured towards a mystic inner core and beyond, encountering drifting fragments of old-world nostalgia on the way: echoes of empty jazz bars sit alongside hellish, Hieronymus Bosch-like scenarios.

Surrendering to the album reveals a surprisingly reflective beauty beneath its darkness; it's a true home-listening gem that unfolds like a Lovecraftian cosmic horror-mystery in the way only Kreng could deliver. Forget everything you know and enter the secret door…

Extinction Burst! is the new invocation in album-form by Guttersnipe, Leeds’ premier and pre-eminent XFCER (XFCER: Xenofeminist crisis-energy rock)* duo. Slamming at full speed to multi-dimensional oblivion, Extinction Burst! is the most full, hidefinition lurid dream-mare yet spewed out by Uroceras Gigas & Tipula Confusa. Engineered and mixed by Ross Halden at Hohm Studio in Bradford and mastered by Rashad Becker, Extinction Burst! follows 2018’s My Mother The Vent, which garnered universal critical adoration. Nevertheless, this long-awaited follow up is more extreme: it is wildness beyond reason, splitting new tears in the reality gauze, ultimate hallucination through sound ecstasy. 2026’s Guttersnipe are evolved, mutated by 8 years of touring together and with the labyrinthine network of groups both Guttersnipe members are involved with - Tristwch Y Fenywod, Nape Neck, Petronn Sphene, Yexxen to name a few. On Extinction Burst!, as with previous material, the duo are heavily augmented with technology. Tipula Confusa's drum kit triggers chasm-causing synth pulses with thumping low end attack.. Strafing from all over the stereo field the constant shatter of the cymbals and toms feel like Sunny Murray or Rashied Ali in full flight during a John Coltrane session in 1967. Uroceras Gigas’s guitar + synth storm is by-now similarly an instantly recognised tool kit in underground music. Switching from screeching guitar atonality to intricate riffs from the black metal/Voivod hinterland to ultra-distorted synth meltdown, it’s an utterly overwhelming, essential and vital pouring-out of the full emotional spectrum. Both artists vocalise, ecstatic and primal, drawn out or yelped in pain or pleasure or panic. Alive On Tuesday begins with some of the only space on Extinction Burst! Digital crackles and tight-delays blow out into a fullthrottled death-dive into sweet opaqueness, offset by the duo’s vocals. There’s a popular believe that Guttersnipe is chaos, but over 9 mins here the group are clinical in their control of the simulated entropy. Mincing while the Maelstrom Churns’s guitar is modulated into jagged atonal atonement, duetting with the virtuoso drum patterns before it thuds into gear at quadruple the speed. Threads Of Radical Unaliveness veers close to the extreme Metal influences with blast beats and guttural vocalisations until the track exhausts itself into unaliveness. Keep Honking summons a demonic digital panic, with the duo reincarnating in real time as haunted versions of themselves, almost translating the lurid, ultra vivid, simultaneous hell+heaven of being alive in this dimension. Primordial Invagination harnesses No Wave’s dissension of normality before the structured collapse of Skra¨ckblandad Fo¨rtjusning, in which Tipula Confusa’s accelerating drums simulate a bouncing barrel of brimstone descending into a primordial gunky ooze, a respite in the middle before the record splutters to a stuttering finale, both members’ vocals out there in the neon realness, alive with crisis energy. There is nothing on this cursed earth like Guttersnipe. For over 10 years they have whirled in a wiggliness both woebegone and wonderstruck on a mission of radical mutant exaltation using rock music weaponry loaded with a queer hysterical ammunition to rupture the fabric of the known Rock universe and unleash a tendril-soft hallucinatory violence; thrumming with the bracing vividness of insect bodies, crazed with alien synaesthetic emotions, harnessing jagged excoriating illogic as a face meltingly snazzy affront to redundant macho mediocrity with the hope to break minds, squeeze hearts, explode pelvises and maybe even reset the parameters of reality. Addendum: xenofeminist : proposing and creating a world defined not only by sexual/gender equality, queer empowerment and the toppling of the racist heteropatriarchal hegemony and it’s tyranny of phallogocentric signifiers, but a philosophy of radical queerness that explodes the basic notion of embodied existence itself beyond even the human, where we see bacteria, invertebrates, reptiles, marine life, animalia in general, inanimate objects, quantum phenomena and as yet inarticulated bodies and minds as social and political equals that may inspire and inform our concepts of self, feeling and meaning as we labour to build a collective reality that doesn’t completely suck!! crisis energy : a term borrowed from the weird fiction author china mieville to describe a type of extreme concentration of power which emerges when a system or organism is pushed to it’s absolute limit; the point of rupture, chaos, entropic overload, just before it all breaks apart. rock : Rock ’n’ Roll, rock music, the devil’s music, sex, guitar, drums, voice, rhythm, riffs!

The new album by Mecánica Clásica, Una Teoría del Ritmo, unfolds across nine tracks as an intimate and organic rhythmic landscape. Rhythm is not something to be counted or measured, it's an odd power that shapes life and nature. Embracing rhythm is a wild experience rather than a technical concept.

The album emphasizes its strong subjectivity: rhythm exists deep within the self and at the core of perceived phenomena and listening itself transforms that kaleidoscopic perception.

Moving against cold conceptualism, Una Teoría del Ritmo embraces a truly warm and intense space, seeking a path where listeners can feel a special energy through hypnotic, melodic and percussive sound waves in a cosmic and naturalistic way.

Esbe returns to Cold Busted for a phenomenal new four-track EP, Sunset Girl. With previous releases on Dusted Wax Kingdom and Cult Classic, as well as his acclaimed Bloomsday and Late Night Headphones albums for Cold Busted, the Los Angeles-based multi-genre beat-maker is riding a wave. Sunset Girl is another exciting moment in Esbe's musical progression. The release starts quietly with the gentle, muted piano chords of "Special." A sparse hip-hop beat and subdued melodic layers round out the tune, cutting away to reveal a lonesome vocoder vocal. "Again" is as close as Esbe gets to a pop song, as a carefree male vocal and twinkling pianos ride over a crisp, solid rhythm track. More delights await on "Sunset Girl" with its simple piano line, reverby percussion hits, distant sax solo, and splashes of vocal collide in a sonic daydream. "I Want Love" closes things out on a vintage flavor, with echoes of a mid-century school dance reverberating into a modern day beat battle. Potent vibes all around.

Onna Last Live 1983 includes the final performance by the original line-up of Onna, the psych-rock project of revered Japanese manga artist, Keizo Miyanishi. Onna’s legend has largely rested, until now, on one self-released and self-titled seven-inch from 1983. Reissued by Holy Mountain in 2009, its rediscovery, along with several archival live and studio sets that leaked out across the 2000s, signalled to a wider audience the power of Miyanishi’s strikingly hypnotic songwriting. With Onna Last Live 1983, though, we hear the group’s perfect line-up performing at its peak.

While Miyanishi was the core member and conceptualist of Onna, the other members of the group would also go on to make significant contributions to the Japanese underground. Guitarist Michio Kurihara would eventually be known for his membership of YBO2, Ghost and White Heaven, and collaborations with the likes of Boris and Damon & Naomi. Drummer Ken Matsutani formed Marble Sheep & The Run-Down Sun’s Children and The Mickey Guitar Band, while also running the Captain Trip label. Joined by the late bass player Yasui Yutaka, to whom the album is dedicated, this quartet only performed live in 1983; the live set here was recorded at Silver Elephant.

It’s a different line-up to the Onna duo that’s documented on their single. After Miyanishi and fellow manga artist Mafuyu Hiroki recorded that material, Miyanishi decided he wanted to start playing gigs; Hiroki left, and Kurihara, Matsutani and Yutaka joined soon after. This line-up allowed Miyanishi to significantly expand Onna’s powers, leading to a sound that Kurihara once described to Ptolemaic Terrascope magazine as “repetitive and heavy, yet quite orthodox.”

The songs here are simple yet deeply effective in their repetitive power, generally revolving around two or three simply strummed chords for guitar. Bass and drums repeatedly lock into mantra-like grooves as Kurihara’s guitar scales the walls, with Miyanishi’s consumptive moans and sighs sent torquing through FX. The cumulative effect of the seven songs here is very heavy indeed; if the prologue “Always…” drifts beautifully through five minutes of placid, beseeching melancholy, the epilogue, “Never Seen A Light Like This”, spirals out into sixteen minutes of glazed-over psych-rock, completely monomaniacal and thrilling in its slow-motion tumult.

Throughout, you can hear Miyanishi and co. reaching for something ineffable, something beyond and between the notes. It’s a phenomenal performance; it’s also no surprise that the group disintegrated after this show, given its intensity. Matsutani and Yutaka left after the Silver Elephant show, with Miyanishi and Kurihara continuing through the first half of 1984 firstly as a duo, and then a trio with new drummer Yoshiki Ueonyama. Kurihara left soon after. But Onna Last Live 1983 is proof plenty of the powers of the original Onna quartet, sending their Rallizes/Velvets dream-mantras off into darkened, stormy skies.

Faitiche welcomes a new artist: Christina Kubisch belongs to the first generation of sound artists. Her practice ranges from performances, concerts, to works with video and visual art, but she is best known for her sound installations and electro-acoustic compositions.

TUNING brings together three pieces by Christina Kubisch from different periods of her oeuvre. What they have in common is the way they transform sound phenomena originally considered “non-music” into compositions.

Jan Jelinek: Gaming in Silence (2024) is the most recent work on this compilation. It’s a collage of electromagnetic waves, voice, and abstract sound textures. How did this combination come about?

Christina Kubisch: Gaming was commissioned as a fixed-media composition for the Sound Dome at ZKM Karlsruhe. Since Resonances: The Electromagnetic Bodies Project (2005), I’ve been making recordings in the old and new server rooms at the ZKM and in their permanent collection of historical computer games. Computer games like Asteroids (Atari, 1979) and Poly-Play (VEB Polytechnik, 1986) have specially generated analogue electromagnetic waves that interest me in particular on account of their density, rhythms and textures. I originally studied painting and to me the work of composition often feels like painting an abstract picture. I alter my source material as little as possible, layering and overlapping until a distinctive sound space emerges. In recent pieces, I sometimes combine magnetic waves with field recordings or live instruments. In Gaming it’s my recording of a Chinese song about silence.

JJ: Two persons walking through a street in Madrid (2004) is a recording from your Electrical Walks series. Here we should give a brief explanation of one of your best known works: participants in an Electrical Walk move through public spaces wearing prepared headphones that allow them to receive electromagnetic waves from their surroundings – for example from security gates, ATMs or neon signs. They discover a situation that normally is inaudible to the human ear and they can actively shape it by choreographing their movements. I really admire this piece, not least because there’s no clear dividing line between participants and artist. What exactly do we hear in Two persons walking through a street in Madrid (2004)?

CK: With this early work, I wanted to understand what is heard by people participating in an Electrical Walk in the same place but moving in different ways. The Spanish composer Miguel Alvarez-Fernàndez and I set off from opposite ends of a major shopping street in Madrid, met briefly in the middle, and then continued to the end. We both recorded our walks and I then layered them over one another. You might call it a work of electromagnetic conceptualism.

JJ: Diapason (2009 version) is an installation that plays a composition based on sounds from fifteen tuning forks. This setting is audible in the recording: there’s no dramatic arc, no beginning or end – instead, it recalls a piece of aleatoric music focussing on the decay phase. How did you come to make this work and could you tell us something about your compositional method?

CK: Diapason is part of a series of three pieces that deal with “non-instruments” or instruments that no longer exist: electrical mine bells used to send signals to the workers underground; a historical glass harmonica originally used for medicinal purposes; and tuning forks that were used by doctors to test people’s hearing. All of these methods are no longer in use. The sound of the tuning forks, audible only if held close to the ear, was recorded at the electronic studio at Berlin’s Technical University in such a way that even their decay remained audible. The frequencies range between 64 and 2048 Hertz and they can be adjusted at micro-intervals using small movable weights. The sequence and the duration of the pauses are dictated by chance and were not defined in advance. The 2009 version was created for an installation in the historic Holy Cross Church (Korskirken) in Bergen. Visitors could enter and leave the space at any time, deciding for themselves where and for how long they wished to listen to the sounds played back over an array of small loudspeakers placed on the floor of the apse.

Credits:

Gaming in Silence: commission of the ZKM/Hertzlab, Karlsruhe 2023
elektronic sound processing: Tom Thiel
sound engineering and mixing: Eckehard Güther

Diapason: produced at Elektronisches Studio of TU Berlin
rearrangement: Eckehard Güther

Christina Kubisch, published by Edition Christina Kubisch / Random Musick Publishing

image front: Transitionen 2021 by C. Kubisch, sonagrams of electronic waves (courtesy: Galerie Mazzoli Berlin)
image back: Diapason Tuning Fork, property of Folkmar Hein, Photo: Archiv Christina Kubisch

design by Tim Tetzner
mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Thanks to Miguel Álvarez-Fernández, Folkmar Hein, Dominik Kautz and Mario Mazzoli

Please Note: This format is 3×12' Vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with the full 11 track CD inside. Dub Police are proud to announce the release of their first artist album courtesy of Birmingham-based producer Emalkay, who is set to release his hotly anticipated debut LP 'Eclipse' this Spring. First making a name for himself with early releases on his own Morphic Sounds imprint, Emalkay has continued to push the boundaries of underground bass music ever since, delivering a slew of huge releases on the way. Having been an integral part of the Dub Police stable ever since his 'Explicit / Heroics' 12' for the label in 2009, Emalkay has gone from strength to strength with a series of heavyweight tracks that includes the phenomenal 'When I Look At You' and recent smash 'Crusader'.Comprised of 11 tracks, 'Eclipse' is a bold and powerful album encapsulating perfectly everything that makes Emalkay such a prodigious talent, effortlessly showcasing the depth and diversity of his sound while always remaining true to his inimitable style. As addictive as it is hard-hitting, the album doesn't just provide a collection of dancefloor tracks, but a confident and coherent artistic statement.A brilliantly confident and varied debut album, 'Eclipse' is set to cement Emalkay's place as one of the biggest and most exciting producers working in bass music today.

a Emalkay - Flesh & Bone
b Emalkay - Metropolis
c Emalkay - Keep Goin On
d Emalkay - True Romance
e Emalkay - Space Hopper
f Emalkay - When I Look At You

Like its cover, Nicolas Remondino's Hìeratico plays in the rich shades of crepuscular spaces. A night-tuned, percussion led album where prepared drums are accompanied by flickers of spoken word, acoustic instruments and muted electronics,

The title translates to 'hieratic', for Remondino a "black and gold" term laden with dualities and complex connotations. A sense of teetering between sparkling light and richly coloured darkness imbues the music, the compositions simulating a sense of heightened acuity as they convey us through a spooky elemental soundworld. The opening title track begins with a metallic shimmer, a drum skin activated in a way that sounds like it's being smelted. A cushioned rhythm enters, a smothered timbre akin to hearing something lurking around the garden. On "litho non-danse", percussion cracks like branches and dried foliage under foot.

Remondino recorded initial outlines for the pieces at Giuseppe Ielasi's studio in Milan, before fleshing out these ideas with his own additional instrumentation and contributions from a globe-spanning network of collaborators. On "blue hymne", chiming percussion equal parts jubilant and sinister heralds spoken word from Limpe Fuchs. "Tombal" opens with Massimo Silverio whispering in the Carnic dialect, a minority language from the Carnic Alps. Around, Marco Baldini, Pierre Bastien and Remondino construct a somber soundscape that cranks and sighs in the crevices.

Hìeratico is an album of hybrids. Diverse voices, accents and dialects deliver its lyrics, the instrumentation underpinning it crosses idioms. The drumkit at its core is modified to amplify its resonant tones and harmonics. Inspired by natural substances and phenomena: stone, wood, wind, earth, metal, grass, rain, clouds and bark, Remondino explores how percussion could evoke their materiality, treating drums as lucid textural instruments as much as rhythmic timekeepers. It gives the album a finely shaded depth and clarity as it conjures the vibrancies that reside in darkened corners. Hìeratico dwells in a sensation that crosses borders, the speckles of light in the oblique night sky. Listening is an aural equivalent to stepping into a pitch black forest and waiting for your eyes to adjust, a lightless void turning into a spectacular tableau of shadows and glows. Daryl Worthington

London-based musician, composer, and NTS resident Kit Grill presents his extraordinary new album 'Andøya', inspired by a solo residency on the eponymous Norwegian island, a profoundly dramatic territory situated in the Vesterålen archipelago, inside the Arctic circle.

With evocative, sonorous ambient, drone, minimalism, experimentalism, and modern classical music, Grill captures the environmental essence of a remarkable region; an isolated Nordic landscape of small coastline villages, raw peatlands and sublime mountain ranges, surrounded by wide, open views of the Arctic ocean.

Drawn from his experience on solitary excursions around the island - hiking, exploring, and encountering the locals - 'Andøya' is a beautifully stark, stirring exploration of acoustic phenomena, seclusion in nature, and the expressive power of unique landscapes. For Grill, the trip entailed a surreal day-night cycle, and his experience has had far-reaching, existential implications, both for his practice and his perspective:

"On the 8th January 2025 I travelled to the Norwegian island of Andøya, in the Arctic Circle for a three week solo residency. Surrounded by sea, snow, and mountains, I lived in isolation and travelled around the island each day documenting the landscape. At 10am, the background light of the sun beneath the horizon would light the day and in the 4 hour window of light, I would hike into the mountains and explore the wilderness. It was a profound experience that changed the way I thought about sound, solitude, and what it means to be alone in nature."

"Since returning, I created a body of music informed by that time to try and capture the vastness and unpredictability of the Arctic landscape. The album moves through the sensory extremes: ice cracking, storms forming and fading, the rumble of tectonic plates, waves crashing, harsh winds, trudging through snow, and the sharpness of freezing air. The album aims to reflect both the landscape itself and the shifting emotions that came with living in isolation and the Arctic environment. The music and photography serve as a recorded diary of my time there, documenting the experience."

Following his critically acclaimed debut "Dentsu2060" released via Lorenzo Senni's Presto!?, Tasho Ishi's second full-length album "Tasho Ishi lI" is now available on his own label T's.

tI features the new-wave Parapara anthem "Collapse Roppongihills" which became a staple at Narita Airport raves. celebrity trap rave track "DreamDrakeDrain" reminiscent of jam session between Drake and David Chronenberg. the junk entertainment track "Hellnwein" depicting modern pop utopia and its violent underbelly.

The Japanese-style Eurodance meets Philip Glass "The Bachelor" inspired by reality TV. These anthems are contemporary, pop, and carry Tasho Ishi's unique critical edge.

The second album, 'Tasho Ishi Il', is both a musical translation of Japan's diverse techno-animism and a sequel to the previous work "Dentsu2060" Techno-animism: Para Para, anime voice actors, reality TV, epics, advertising, and raves. Each track stands alone yet forms part of a larger, chronologically unfolding narrative.

While all tracks are animated by Japan-specific sound imagery, this is a pop album rather than avant-garde or abstract. In essence, it's a series of songs generated by rave trans-layers, serving as both reportage and documentation tracing Tasho Ishi's visionary city and its phenomena.

Well, this release is like the icing on the cake for me. This is the first release I tried to sign to Vinyl Fanatiks once I knew we were creating a record label in early 2019. The problem being though - we couldn't locate Dimension! But now we have and I can finally bring to you my favourite rave release from back in the day!

Six killer tracks - zero filler here! A slice of UK dance music history that inspired so many.

Lately, it feels like the world is one endless bad news cycle. Joshua Idehen isn’t here to pretend otherwise – but on the spoken word artist’s new album, I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try, he provides a phenomenal sonic, poetic space. Made with his creative partner, musician Ludvig Parment, the album (out 6 March 2026) is an urgent but transcendent collection that holds you through it all, filled with grief, euphoria and hope.

I Know You’re Hurting… comes after the virality of Idehen’s track Mum Does The Washing, a wry and whipsmart poem examining how the world works (which started life as a Twitter thread), set to Parment’s spacious beats. The song has seen the pair propelled beyond Idehen’s wildest dreams this past year.

Across the album, that means uplifting choirs, cozy samples and exuberant, sometimes house-tinged beats. “I am personally drawn to music that transports you to a place, or scene or mindset,” says Parment. This is topped with ruminative musings on morality and human connection; about the longer loves in life – like friendships, family – that sustain us. These come from Idehen and Parment, along with a host of friends and collaborators, including writers Leone Ross and Charlotte Manning, and vocalist Amanda Bergman, to help expand on the topics of the record without sounding preachy. Similarly, there are musical guests including saxophonist Pete Fraser and Shabaka Hutchings on flute, each helping to imbue the album with a rich warmth.

World Of Echo announces the reissue of two remastered albums by Japanese guitarist and songwriter Naoki Zushi, 1988’s Paradise, and 2005’s III. Two classics of Japanese psychedelia, both Paradise and III were originally released on Org Records, the imprint of Shinji Shibayama of acid-folk group Nagisa Ni Te, with whom Zushi has guested on second guitar for decades. Both intimate and expansive, rich with revelatory songwriting and blasted, sky-scouring guitar, these reissues return these albums to print for the first time since the 2000s. It’s the first time III has been officially released on vinyl, with an extra, previously unreleased track, “Under The June Moonlight.”

Recorded in Kyoto’s Townhouse Studios in mid 1987 and released in limited-to-500 vinyl pressing in 1988, Paradise emerged from a scene in Kansai, Japan that was embracing the idiosyncracies of 1970s singer-songwriters, the soaring solos of early seventies psychedelia, and the DIY impulse of 1980s post-punk. While Zushi’s musical history stretched back to the early eighties – he was a founding member of Jojo Hiroshige’s noise outfit Hijokaidan – he found his feet with groups like Hallelujahs, whose dream-pop collection Niku O Kuraite Chikai Wo Tateyo was recently reissued by Black Editions, and Idiot O’Clock.

Paradise appeared two years after that Hallelujahs album and share much the same membership – Zushi’s backing band on several of the songs includes Shibayama on drums and Ken-Ichi Takayama (aka Idiot) on electric guitar, though just as often, Zushi plays all the instruments himself. The coordinates here are wide-reaching – you can hear the volume and intensity of Neil Young & Crazy Horse (on “Hallelujah: Left Side” and “Paradise: Midday”), the slow-motion magic of Galaxie 500, the idiosyncratic spirit of The Only Ones, all mixed up with tender guitar miniatures and stumbling garage-psych-pop moves.

Seven years later, after the transitional album Phenomenal Luciferin, Zushi released III. Perhaps his masterpiece, it’s already been bootlegged on vinyl, but this reissue is the real deal. The album was recorded at Studio Nemu over seven years, and sees Zushi backed by Shibayama (bass) and Masako Takeda (drums), his erstwhile bandmates in Nagisa Ni Te. By this stage, Zushi had started to really stretch out, and many of the songs on III swoon languorously, taking their sweet time to say what they need to say. It’s rich with lovely, melancholy songs, in a similar realm to bandmates Nagisa Ni Te, of course, but you can also hear traces of everything from Syd Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs, through seventies private press loner folk, to the slow-burn meanderings of the likes of early Low or Damon & Naomi.

When interviewed by Shibayama in the mid-nineties, Zushi said of Paradise, “it was a sort of collection of songs that had meant something to me up to that point… it was my paradise. I wanted to create paradise.” That’s something Zushi achieves on both of these albums – visionary Japanese psychedelia, en route to paradise. - Jon Dale

rot/schwarzes Marble Vinyl. Offensichtlich parkverliebt_ eine musikgewordene Parksituation: Du schlenderst langsam durch das zerbrechliche Idyll inmitten der Stadt, die Luft ist kalt und klar, die Arme hinter dem Rücken verschränkt. Hochgewachsene Bäume spannen den Raum auf, gedämpfter Stadtlärm mischt sich mit dem Rascheln der Blätter, mehr oder weniger verwirrte Tiere sehen aufmerksam in Deine Richtung. Du setzt Dich auf eine Parkbank, hältst inne und fängst an Dich darüber zu freuen, wie schön das alles eigentlich ist. ParkWalkers emopop/slowcore sound ist bestimmt durch zwei cleane Gitarren (Hannes & Nicola), eindringliche Basslinien (Arnaud), entspannte Drums (Armin) und der warmen Stimme von Nicola. Melodien, die hängen bleiben, in meist klassischer Songstruktur. Die lieben 90er oder Nullerjahre lassen grüßen, vielleicht fällt einem American Football, Snow Patrol ein oder fühlt sich an Death Cab for Cutie und Weakerthans erinnert. ParkWalker haben sich 2018 gefunden, und leben verteilt in Berlin, Stuttgart und Karlsruhe. Klar in der DIY-Szene verwurzelt haben sie viele Stunden auf Bühnen im In-und Ausland mit verschiedenen Formationen verbracht, u.a. Tidal Sleep. Nach ihrem Debüt "Distant Phenomena" im Jahr 2021 ist für Herbst 2025 das zweite Album "The Extra Mile" bei This Charming Records geplant. Das Album wurde in den RAMA Studios aufgenommen und von Christian Bethge (z.B. Messer) produziert und gemastert

Aspen Edities is pleased to present Aerial, the third album of the experimental quartet Oker.

Whereas their album debut Husene våre er museer (2018) and its follow-up Susurrus (2021) focused on collective and individual compositions, Aerial features two longform pieces of fully improvised music, sculpted from the recognizable acoustic sound palette that the quartet has developed across a decade of extensive touring. The titles, Aerial, Equinoctial Tide and Crepuscular Rays refer to meteorological and planetary phenomena, and in Oker’s interplay we hear light, wind, clouds, and tidal cycles transpire as shimmering, roaring, rubbing, coalescing and diverging environments of sound. The sonic stoicism and minimalism in their expression is challenged by frictioning micro-chaoses, combining to create calm, winding paths of musical detail and form. Echoing our planet and its meteorological reality, Aerial yields both consistency and perpetual change.

Bringing together some of the most compelling musicians from the Norwegian improvised music scene, Oker operates as an acoustic experimental quartet devoted to the amalgamation of improvised and composed modes of expression. Their music combines fine-tuned tonalities, deconstructed grooves, acoustic noise and other sonic events, taking their rather conventional instrumentation as a point of departure. Textures in gradual change coexisting with responsive and spontaneous gestures create a varied but coherent musical ecosystem which can be airy or dense, dry or blooming. A certain minimalist or stoic approach to sound production is an overarching and recurring element in all of Oker’s music, differentiating their sound from the majority of music in the field of improvised music or free jazz.

Mutable Ground is an album created through an exchange of recordings between Anna and Yannis. The project is rooted in the idea of sudden shifts in current events and the ever-growing emotions tied to loss, change, and tension. Each track title is inspired by unstable phenomena and objects, reflecting the potential for unexpected movement and the transitions of both nature and humanity. Repetitive, chaotic drum patterns, vocals that echo sounds of wounded or lost animals, hollow soundscapes reveal a sonic world where creation and destruction coexist—where people dance around fires, caught between fragility and resilience.

With "Una Lama D'Argento", TENEBRO take their most extreme and visionary step yet: an entire album conceived as a tribute to Dario Argento, the undisputed master of horror, giallo, and thriller cinema. Eleven tracks that are not just songs, but episodes of a single nightmare, a journey through the dark and obsessive atmospheres of the films that shaped cinema history: Deep Red (1975), Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980), Tenebre (1982), Phenomena (1985), and Opera (1987). TENEBRO translate Argento's universe into sound: riffs sharp as blades, guttural vocals emerging from the darkness, relentless drumming, and atmospheres shifting between pure violence and suffocating tension. Iconic scenes such as the mirror revealing the killer in Deep Red, the brutal mutilation in Tenebre, or the larva-filled bathtub finale in Phenomena are transformed into brutal, immersive sonic attacks, capturing the full horror and tension of the films. As with every album, TENEBRO continue to evolve, introducing new symphonies, styles, and melodies, while remaining distinctly separate from the wider underground scene. Their music explores new horizons without ever betraying the pulsating heart that has always defined their sound: extreme, theatrical, and viscerally horror-driven.

We Jazz Records is delighted to present the first ever vinyl release for two modern classic tracks by Swedish organist Eric Malmberg. Originally released in 2007 by the label Häpna on Malmberg's second solo album "Verklighet & Beat", the pair of tunes herein serve as proof of Malmberg's remarkable artistic vision, echoing both the pure pastoral beauty and the irresistible groove of his work. This release, part of the ongoing 7" series by We Jazz Records, follows the label's Artistic Director Matti Nives's 10+ years of obsession with the aforementioned Malmberg album after an initial chance encounter with the side A track on a WIRE Magazine compilation in 2007.

"Eric Malmberg's music is a small miracle. I don't want to call him a genius, because I don't want to jinx him. But I will say that he's a complete original, in addition to being a vastly talented musician. I will also say that his recordings and the two performances that I saw by Sagor & Swing merit a place on a short list of most enjoyed musical experiences of the last half decade. I could bleat about the quality of the work, but "most enjoyed" to me carries the stronger charge." – David Grubbs, New York, March 2007

"A special mention needs to go out to the phenomenal and totally bonkers 'Till minne av Lilly Lindström' a track which starts with a clean break, builds into dancefloor abusing Hammond-hammering mayhem and then ends up with lush string orchestrations and disco-lite sweeps. Insane and more enjoyable than you could possibly imagine - an album to totally lose yourself in, and one for anyone looking for something just that little different. Huge recommendation." – Boomkat