“What Robot Says L” on What Robot Says Records is a deeply immersive Dub Techno journey crafted for demanding listeners who seek atmosphere, precision, and emotional depth beyond conventional dancefloor music. Across four carefully sculpted tracks, the release moves through shifting moods and textures, balancing raw energy with subtle elegance while exploring the deeper and more hypnotic side of techno.
A1. Nicolas Barnes – Dusted Maze opens the EP with a smooth and introspective approach, combining delicate textures, refined grooves, and floating harmonic layers that capture the timeless spirit of classic Dub Techno through a modern lens.
A2. Continuing the journey with TM Shuffle, Monoder – Vihreesametti delivers a warmer and more fluid interpretation of the genre, blending rolling grooves, dub-driven chords, and sophisticated sound design into a deeply immersive experience.
On the B-side, B1. Denizo – Versus follows with dark dub pressure, stripped-back rhythmic architecture, and evolving ambient detail, creating a hypnotic late-night atmosphere filled with tension and movement.
B2. Closing the EP, The Open Circle – Shinkai dives into deeper and more mysterious territory, emphasizing submerged atmospheres, minimal rhythmic tension, and profound spatial depth that slowly unfolds with every listen.
WRSL1 – “What Robot Says L” is not designed for casual listening, but for those who appreciate Dub Techno as an evolving exploration of mood, space, and sonic detail — a refined and highly immersive statement from some of the genre’s most skilled contemporary artists.
but wait a minute.. Does anybody know What Robot Says?
Seven years after the haunting resonance of Voids, electronic pioneer Martyn returns to the album format with Music For Existing. Arriving on 15 May 2026, the record is more than a collection of tracks; it is a profound exploration of what it means to remain devoted to a craft in an era of relentless noise.
The album’s announcement is heralded by the lead single "Heavy Sound." The track serves as the perfect bridge between Martyn’s past and present - a masterclass in tension and release that previews the album’s dialogue between the producer, the musicians, and the audience. We live inside a culture that has prioritised and monetised restlessness. The modern apparatus runs on the continuous production of "next," driven by algorithms that value novelty over depth.
Music For Existing serves as a love letter to the communal act of making music - something that is both healing and inherently defiant. For Martyn, a musician often finds solace in musical conversation with others; in the moment we press record, we simply exist together. This record is an invitation to build human infrastructure around what we love, leaning into the fluid nature of community and seeing exactly where the music takes us when we choose to listen.
The album is a sprawling, "off-the-grid" tapestry that echoes Martyn’s profound appreciation for jazz - free, instinctive, and bursting in every sonic direction. This collection features an expansive cast of collaborators, including Duval Timothy, Dan Only, Lucinda Chua, and Mark Cisneros. The record is further elevated by the contributions of jazz talents Mischa Porte and Cees Bruinsma, alongside the evocative words of writer and poet Musa Okwonga.
While the acoustic textures and improvisational spirit of this record may feel like a departure, they represent a homecoming. Jazz has always been ingrained in Martyn’s work; even in his most stripped-back club tracks, the DNA of swing, syncopation, and free-form structure was always present, if not always visible.
Music For Existing marks the beginning of an exciting journey that will continue from the studio to the stage, celebrating the radical act of existing in the moment.
This release is dedicated to Rhys's family, his close friends, and everyone who continues to support his music, honoring his legacy, the profound and lasting impact he made on the electronic music scene. Never forgotten, always in our hearts. Microlith lives on!
In the realm of past-life regression hypnotherapy, there is a concept known as “Life Between Lives,” wherein a sacred exchange of energy occurs between two souls in the spirt world, helping a spirit fully understand and forgive a being who hurt them in a past life. This exchange – called “passing the cup of sorrows” – became the unexpected inspiration for William Basinski’s first new album in six years.
While sinking deeper into the daily abyss of our collective negativity bias, William Basinski stumbled upon a video describing the spiritual hypnotherapy exercise known as “passing the cup of sorrows.” Fixed on the glow of a screen that projected mounting anxiety and cynicism at a seemingly interminable pace, Basinski found the testimonials of this fascinating therapeutic practice to be profoundly moving. He sat at his piano, translating the transformation of those traumatic memories of past lives into cathartic tears of the present day.
Channeling the quiet curiosity and asymmetrical patterns of pioneering 20th Century composer, Morton Feldman, Passing the Cup of Sorrows is a single 40-minute piece that employs a solitary piano and subtle electronics to truly haunting effect. It recalls fragments of traumatic memories and projects them as fractals in a slow-moving soft focus that’s as eerie as it is enlightened.
In the realm of past-life regression hypnotherapy, there is a concept known as “Life Between Lives,” wherein a sacred exchange of energy occurs between two souls in the spirt world, helping a spirit fully understand and forgive a being who hurt them in a past life. This exchange – called “passing the cup of sorrows” – became the unexpected inspiration for William Basinski’s first new album in six years.
While sinking deeper into the daily abyss of our collective negativity bias, William Basinski stumbled upon a video describing the spiritual hypnotherapy exercise known as “passing the cup of sorrows.” Fixed on the glow of a screen that projected mounting anxiety and cynicism at a seemingly interminable pace, Basinski found the testimonials of this fascinating therapeutic practice to be profoundly moving. He sat at his piano, translating the transformation of those traumatic memories of past lives into cathartic tears of the present day.
Channeling the quiet curiosity and asymmetrical patterns of pioneering 20th Century composer, Morton Feldman, Passing the Cup of Sorrows is a single 40-minute piece that employs a solitary piano and subtle electronics to truly haunting effect. It recalls fragments of traumatic memories and projects them as fractals in a slow-moving soft focus that’s as eerie as it is enlightened.
By the time Michael Nau completed Popfly, the songs felt less like compositions than companions. Arriving in fragments, notebook lines, and fleeting observations, these pieces kept company for years until taking their final form. The result is one of Nau's most openhearted, expansive records, both homespun and otherworldly at once. Radiant folk melodies, tape-warped textures, and flashes of everyday wonder coexist in perfect balance on Popfly. Nau has never been a songwriter who forces songs into existence. Instead, he follows them, trusting intuition over agenda and allowing songs to gradually reveal themselves. Writing and recording often blur together, with melodies evolving before lyrics are finished and stray recordings forming the basis for new songs. Popfly showcases these creative detours: thoughtful folk songs, sonic experiments, and accidental beauty transformed into fully realized compositions. Many songs began at home, growing in meaning. Since he entered the Vermont studio, Little Jamaica, with longtime friend and collaborator Benny Yurco, many of them had already lived several lives. "Studio recording feels like covering my own songs," Nau says. This idea flows throughout: performances are lived-in, feeling effortless, as if assembling itself. The title track carries a flicker of wonder in its simple observations. "New Slack" moves with the loose confidence of a song content to follow its own path. On "Lost Station Hideaway," soft static and fading signals become something strangely comforting, as if the song itself is being broadcast from somewhere just beyond reach. Family and friendship are deeply woven throughout the record. Nau's children contribute vocals, bringing warmth and spontaneity to the album's communal spirit, with longtime collaborator and wife Whitney McGraw lending her serene voice. The harmonies that drift from them extend the album's central impulse of people gathering to make something beautiful. Across Popfly, loose-limbed folk songs mingle with homespun psych-pop, porchside country-folk, dreamlike atmospherics, and quietly profound observations. The record moves with the ease of conversation among old friends, finding beauty in tiny revelations, strange coincidences, and everyday mysteries. The record is full of transmissions from different moments in Nau's life, stitched together by instinct, affection, and time. Taken together, they form a portrait of a life spent paying close attention to the world and its small miracles.
"ABYSSUS stand as one of the most significant forces within the Greek Death Metal scene, having forged their path since 2011. Drawing profound inspiration from genre-defining pioneers such as DEATH, OBITUARY and BOLT THROWER, the band preserves the unadulterated spirit of old school death metal while imprinting their own distinct identity.
From the very outset, ABYSSUS placed equal emphasis on studio output and live performance. A steady stream of EPs and split releases established their presence within the international Underground metal community. Their debut full-length, „Into the Abyss“ (2015), garnered widespread acclaim and marked a pivotal moment in the band’s evolution - leading to increasingly frequent appearances both in Greece and across Europe, often sharing the stage with renowned acts, like POSSESSED, SINISTER, SUICIDAL ANGELS and ROTTING CHRIST.
With renewed creative vigour and greater maturity, ABYSSUS unveiled their sophomore album „Death Revival“ in 2022 via Transcending Obscurity Records. Adorned with an arresting cover by the legendary Andreas Marschall (KREATOR, BLIND GUARDIAN, IN FLAMES a.o.), the album was met with universal praise, further cementing the band’s reputation for delivering unrelenting, yet masterfully crafted, death metal. More shows with a.o. ASPHYX, TANKARD, GRAVE DIGGER and THE CROWN followed.
Now in 2026, ABYSSUS return with their third full-length opus, “The Reign” - a ferocious testament to their artistic evolution. The album encapsulates all the core elements that have defined death metal through the decades: raw aggression, blistering riff-work, and a suffocating, commanding atmosphere. Once again, the visual narrative is entrusted to Andreas Marschall, whose artwork enhances the band’s sonic vision with striking intensity.
Relentlessly evolving, ABYSSUS remain true to their roots while continuing to push the boundaries of the genre. With a prolific discography and an ever-growing presence on the live circuit, they have rightfully earned their place as a formidable name within the global death metal landscape."
Italian percussionist Umberto Vitiello takes us on a journey into a vanished world. Mixed by Italian techno master Donato Dozzy, the album draws on memories spanning decades, including Vitiello's years living on Yarakh Beach on the outskirts of Dakar, Senegal. There, the rhythms of daily life flowed with the tides: fishermen launching their pirogues at dawn, griots and vendors gathering beneath three towering palm trees, and the Atlantic Ocean providing a serene soundtrack.
Named after the Lébou people whose fishing culture has shaped the coastline around Dakar for centuries, the record is both a tribute to a community that welcomed Vitiello as one of their own and a reflection on what has been lost.
Those years left a profound mark on both his life and his music. Yet this is not simply a work of remembrance. It is also a meditation on change.
Today, the beach that inspired these recordings has been transformed by pollution and environmental decline. Where fishing boats and palm trees once stood, a sculpture by Senegalese artist Serigne Gorgui Mbaye now depicts two giant ears facing the sea-a reminder of the need to listen: to one another, to nature, and to our own conscience.
Blending percussion, atmosphere and storytelling, the album revisits formative experiences from the 1980s through the perspective of the present day. Featuring vocal contributions from Olympia Ndiaye, Anna Caragnano and Mariangela Morais, and guided by Dozzy's spacious, immersive mix, it unfolds as a deeply personal journey through memory, place and transformation.
This compilation containing both super limited and sold out EPs "Naehe & Flackern" and "Es laesst nicht los, mich jedoch laengst" on one 12" Vinyl. The band Nidare presents their EP "Naehe und Flackern", a collection of three powerful songs that thematically deal with the feeling of hate. The singer's lyrics paint a vivid picture of hate in different facets: the hate towards society, the hate the singer faces in his life and the hate the singer himself carries outward. "Naehe und Flackern" is an EP that takes listeners on an emotional journey while also being a profound emotional exploration. Nidare manages to channel the darkness in her lyrics and music. The EP is an expression of pain, anger and despair, but also a call for self-reflection and understanding of the complex nature of human emotions. "Es laesst nicht los, ich jedoch laengst" is a visceral, unapologetic journey through the emotional landscape of a fractured world. Built around themes of political disillusionment, mental health struggles, and the crushing weight of existential dread, this EP serves as both a cry for help and a reflection of the suffocating atmosphere of modern life.
NAILS is beyond brutality. These grindcore tyrants of the American underground have triumphantly returned with their 2nd full length “ABANDON ALL LIFE”! Like the band's debut album: “Unsilent Death", was recorded with CONVERGE’s Kurt Ballou.
These 10 tracks of barbaric rage have no resemblance to the laughable retro party metal that passes as extreme music in today’s world. Abandon All Life viciously carpet bombs the listener with a horrifying brand of Death/ Grind/ Hardcore chaos.
Bludgeoning beatdowns, grinding blasts, hyper-distorted vocals, hard-hitting metallic chugs and early death metal riffs intensifies to a climatic end where the guitars wail and militant drum breakdowns send us marching. With profound hatred, the howling war cry of ABANDON ALL LIFE shows NAILS as a band without equal in their class.
''A swirling, savage and harrowingly sincere listen from start to finish, the record introduced the world to the band in the most brutal and brilliantly harsh manner possible. The new version of the album also features tracks that were never released from the sessions over a decade ago and completes the story of one of the most influential and affecting crossover releases of the century so far.'' ROCK SOUND
'When Southern Lord picked up and re-released their 2010 debut LP Unsilent Death after its smaller first pressing sold out, they offered a comparison of 90s AmRep bands and early Cro-Mags going faster than either. That sort of works. So does Eyehategod's songbook played by 2013 Converge. This music is more suffocating than it is Suffocation; it also pulls largely from hardcore and comes with plenty of raw emotion attached to it.'' PITCHFORK
a collaboration forged over the years with Francesco Borrelli, a sound engineer, musician and performer who has shaped Gerardo’s recordings for the last ten years and more. It embodies the natural evolution and fulfillment of a shared journey, a dedicated pursuit of sound and vision, and a creative dialogue where concept and execution become one.
“Meridio” primarily defines the project’s geographical roots: Francesco, from Naples, and Gerardo, with ties to southern Calabria, carry a Mediterranean sensibility that emerges organically, not as a mere reference but as an attitude: a sense of fluid rhythm, a constant tension between order and improvisation, between elegance and instinct. The titles of the two tracks included on this 7-inch single – ‘Partenope’ and ‘Ligea’, muses and symbols of the Mediterranean Sea – draw on mythological imagery and further reinforce the connection to a profound cultural dimension.
The result is a dense yet layered sound that openly embraces the funk and progressive aesthetics of the 70s and 80s, reprocessing them in a contemporary spirit; a language effortlessly moving between arrangement and production, between timbral exploration and rhythmic immediacy.
Spain's celebrated deep house outlet Mate comes correct again here with an EP that deals in rich musicality and mature emotions. HITTO aka Alberto Alba is the Mallorcan producer behind the music and his childhood love of jazz really shines through. Opener 'Beyond Words' has singing synths that speak to the soul with lovely ambient chords. Then, 'Take Me Away' brings groovy percussion and cosmic synth transmissions that make it feel all the more profound. Glenn Underground is the perfect remixer to dial up the sunshine with his astral rework of 'Beyond Words' before 'Swish' shuts down with a mix of smeared chords that radiate sun over a grittier bassline. Four accomplished cuts.
Discover the Underground Vibes of Steve O'Sullivan From England. His First Record on Phonogramme Is Pure House Music Magic, Full of percusive rhythms . Profoundly Minimal, and Soulfully Club-Ready House Music. Don't Miss Out Available Now !
Deluxe LP features 140g virgin vinyl; heavy-duty board jacket, artwork by Art Rosenbaum + DL. RIYL: Bob Dylan, John Prine, Townes Van Zandt, Ry Cooder, Michael Chapman, Michael Hurley, The Youngbloods & Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Jake Xerxes Fussell’s 4th album finds the acclaimed folksong interpreter, guitarist, and singer navigating fresh sonic and compositional landscapes on the most conceptually focused, breathtakingly rendered, and enigmatically poignant record of his wondrous catalog. Produced by James Elkington and featuring formidable players both familiar (Casey Toll, Libby Rodenbough) and new (Joe Westerlund, Bonnie “Prince” Billy), it includes Jake’s first original compositions; atmospheric arrangements with pedal steel, horns, and strings. One of the most striking and strangely moving moments on Jake Xerxes Fussell’s gorgeous Good and Green Again an album, his fourth and most recent, replete with such dazzling moments arrives at its very end, with the brief words to the final song “Washington.” “General Washington/Noblest of men/His house, his horse, his cherry tree, and him,” Fussell sings, after a hushed introductory passage in which his trademark percussively fingerpicked Telecaster converses lacily with James Elkington’s parlor piano. That’s the entire lyrical content of the song, which proceeds to float away on orchestral clouds of French horn, trumpet, and strings, until it simply stops, suddenly evaporating, vanishing with no fade or trace, no resolution to its sorrowful minor-key chord progression, just silence and stillness and stark presidential absence. It feels like the end of a film, or the cold departure of a ghost, and is unlike anything else Jake has recorded. In all his work Jake humanizes his material with his own profound curatorial and interpretive gifts, unmooring stories and melodies from their specific eras and origins and setting them adrift in our own waterways. The robust burr of his voice, which periodically melts and catches at a particularly tender turn of phrase, and the swung rhythmic undertow of exquisite, seemingly effortless guitar-playing here he plays more acoustic than ever before pull new valences of meaning from ostensibly antique songs and subjects. On Good and Green Again, Jake not only ventures beyond his established mastery of songcatching and songmaking into songwriting, but likewise navigates fresh sonic and compositional landscapes, going green with lusher, more atmospheric and ambitious arrangements. The result is the most conceptually focused, breathtakingly rendered, and enigmatically poignant record of his wondrous catalog. It’s also his most deliberately premeditated album, representing his fruitful return to a producer partnership after two self-produced projects, What in the Natural World (2017) and Out of Sight (2019) (William Tyler produced his friend’s self-titled 2015 debut.) This time James Elkington produced and played a panoply of instruments, bringing to Jake’s arcane song choices his own peerless sense of harmony and orchestration, balance and dramatic tension. The pair enlisted a group of formidable players including regular bandmembers Casey Toll (Mt. Moriah, Nathan Bowles) on upright bass, Libby Rodenbough (Mipso) on strings, and Nathan Golub on pedal steel. They were joined by welcome newcomers Joe Westerlund (Megafaun, Califone) on drums, Joseph Decosimo on fiddle, Anna Jacobson on brass, and veteran collaborator and avowed Fussell fan Bonnie “Prince” Billy, who contributes additional vocals. Album opener “Love Farewell” (featuring some beautiful singing by Bonnie “Prince” Billy), an elliptical tale of the folly of war, set to the world’s most heartbreaking goodbye march for a lover left behind. “Carriebelle” and “Breast of Glass” each similarly concerns, in its own way, romantic love and leavings. All three songs highlight Jacobson’s diaphanous, understated brass parts, tying them together in a true lover’s knot. “Rolling Mills Are Burning Down,” with its distant keening strings and capacious sense of space, observes and mourns the loss of work and community in the wake of elemental disaster. Nine-minute tour de force “The Golden Willow Tree,” the sole explicitly narrative song herein, is a hypnotic, minimalist rendering of a tragic maritime ballad about scuttling an enemy ship in exchange for wealth and glory and a captain’s inevitable betrayal. “Fussell is creating his own legacy within the long lineage of traditional folk musicians and storytellers that have come before him.” The New York Times // “So elegant … It’s relaxing in the way that pondering a Zen koan is relaxing, and sweet in the way that the wounded, honey-voiced blues of Mississippi John Hurt are sweet.” Pitchfork // “Music that resides at the seams of Appalachia and the cosmos.”
Who would expect that a new Krautrock release on Macadam Mambo would come from a Japanese band called Heavenphetamine?! The duo/couple have been touring all over Europe in the past two years, and started to build a serious fan base, as every performance they deliver is leaving an imperishable memory. This is on a date in Belgrade at Karmakoma that they met with Sacha. They had this album recorded and auto-release on tape but not on vinyl, and it came completely naturally to decide to release it as a LP on Macadam Mambo. The tracks on the album are new versions a bit different from the tape, let’s say a bit more mature and minimal than from the first ones recorded and give the feeling of listening to a masterpiece in the genre. It can be dark and profound but also enough light to bring back this little sun that has trouble to shine in the winter. This album has been highly influenced by their experience with the war in Ukraine, and the friendship they made there, where it has been recorded, and it express this mix of emotions due to the feeling of exasperation and the hope to see someday this conflict come to an end and the relief of the peace…
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.
MARGOT is a violinist, composer and producer defined by a deeply emotional orchestral language shaped by classical training and a highly personal approach to string writing. She has collaborated with artists including Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and St. Vincent. Trained from the age of four in North Florida, she moved to New York at nineteen, where her musical world expanded through collaborations and exposure to new scenes, alongside the discovery of artists such as Radiohead, Sigur Rós and Björk via their string arrangements. In 2020, she met pianist and composer Juan Villacrez in Colombia, leading to the creation of the instrumental album The Apartment on Third Street (over 13 million streams) and a long-term creative collaboration.
Her new album The Villain presents a major new artistic statement: a cinematic, immersive instrumental work unfolding across ten movements, shaped by profound personal loss and recorded live in Colombia with a minimum of takes and no overproduction. The physical edition of the record is designed by NYC-based artist Bráulio Amado (known for his work with André 3000, Harry Styles, Frank Ocean and Róisín Murphy), reinforcing the album’s position as a complete visual and sonic object. MARGOT’s writing, violin playing and emotional depth resonate throughout, particularly through arrangements in which she layers her own performances, creating a sound world that is at once intimate, restless and constantly evolving.
Rekombinant is the solo project of Rome based composer and sound artist Alfonso Montagnese. Blending electroacoustic composition, analogue electronics, magnetic tape and sound design, his work explores the physical qualities of sound, embracing imperfection, transformation and degradation as expressive compositional tools.
Borrowing its title from the physical principle of parity symmetry, the album is less interested in scientific theory than in the possibility that an identity may endure even after profound change. Sound is treated as matter, it is stretched, reflected, saturated, compressed and displaced, yet never entirely separated from its origin.
Magnetic tape is the medium through which this question unfolds. Magnetic tape does not preserve sound faithfully, it reshapes the sound. It compresses, saturates, colours and gradually erodes it, producing not a copy but another state of the same material. Every recording becomes both document and transformation.
Most of the instruments used throughout the album were selected from more recent generations of electronic equipment compared to previous works. Their character is not defined by nostalgia, but by their functional and sonic qualities: instruments chosen for how they behave under pressure.
The album consists of fourteen compositions, each one approaching sound as a material in continuous state of alteration and was conceived within what feels like a new Middle Ages, one that is still unfolding. An era marked by increasing fragmentation, uncertainty and the erosion of shared cultural references. The music does not illustrate this condition; it absorbs and inhabits it.
Throughout these fourteen pieces, sound continuously changes its appearance without abandoning its identity. What remains after every inversion, every saturation and every layer of magnetic degradation is not certainty, but persistence.
Parity Symmetry is Conserved is ultimately an exploration of that persistence: the fragile possibility that memory, identity and human experience may continue to exist, even after passing through irreversible transformation.
»Breathing Soil« is the third full-length album by Swiss musician and performance artist Elischa Heller. As a member of groups such as Film 2, Beurre, or 222Rn as well as in his live practice as a solo artist and his performances, notions of physical and temporal presence have always informed his multi-genre approach. These two side-long compositions centre around drone music and are both intended as an invitation to listen deeply as they are a product of deep listening itself. Drawing on Heller’s live practice, which aims to create shared social experiences, this music mediates between matter and metaphysics.
»If we recognise that we and the world around us are nothing but vibrations and oscillations, drone music can get in touch with a profound aspect of our ways of being,« says Heller. »It enables us to get in tune with our surroundings and each other.« Hence, resonance serves as the guiding principle of his work. As Heller explains, the title »Breathing Soil« can be read in two ways: As a description of how one breathes in the soil and gets in touch with the Earth through the sound, or that it is the soil itself that resonance, with sound serving as the connective tissue between different forms of being.
»Breathing Soil« relies on radical forms of reduction that treat sound as raw form—as vibrations and oscillations whose subtle acceleration and deceleration can have wide-reaching consequences. Meant to be played on speakers, the subtle shifts in dynamics, timbre, and volume of these two pieces are supposed to resonate with the rooms in which they are played. This music aims to make the things sing.
Sucata Tapes and Annihaya proudly present Delia, the hypnotic new album by Munda (Selu Herraiz), following up on foundational explorations of ritual and territorial memory.
Recorded in September 2021 during a residency at Konvent—an old convent set within an abandoned industrial colony in Cal Rosal, deep in the lower Catalan Pyrenees—Delia is forged from the physical ghosts of a former textile factory. Within high ceilings, terracotta floors, and walls vibrating with low frequencies, Herraiz captured the remnants of another time: shards of glass, rusted iron, corrugated plastics, and the sonic echoes of a place where hundreds of women once worked the looms.
Using a dynamic microphone placed before the speaker of a battered Yamaha Electone organ with broken keys, Herraiz transformed these industrial ruins, raw materials, and acoustic traces into an immersive electroacoustic journey. Blending primitive textures, analog synthesis, and the deep resonance of territorial history, Delia stands as a profound meditation on memory, space, and alchemic listening.
Immersive, roots-infused dub-reggae power from Jamaica meets heavyweight instrumentation from Denmark on a landmark collaborative album out now via Recall Reality.
Rooted in the rich traditions of classic Jamaican sound yet pulsing with a hypnotic, contemporary organic weight, Signs of the Time brings together the evocative vocal artistry of rising roots talent Azizzi Romeo and the master craftsmanship of Denmark's formidable instrumental 11 piece band Guiding Star Orchestra. Built for sound systems and vinyl purists alike, featuring lush tape saturation, spring reverbs, and spacious dub mixes.
Released on Recall Reality, the album is a masterclass in modern roots reggae and deep dub dynamics. Rather than relying on rigid digital presets, Signs of the Time champions warm analogue textures, sprawling horn arrangements, and rolling basslines that echo the golden age of Studio One, Joe Gibbs, Bunny Lee and Channel One while carving out an entirely fresh, meditative space for the listener.
Azizzi Romeo carries forward a legendary musical lineage as the son of the late roots icon Max Romeo, bringing a captivating blend of spiritual urgency, conscious lyricism, and soulful conviction to the microphone. His delivery cuts straight through the mix, offering profound reflections on modern society, unity, and resilience in a changing world.
Backing him are the Guiding Star Orchestra, renowned for their authentic analog production ethos, deep-crate sensibilities, and musicianship that treats the mixing board as an instrument in its own right. The result is a seamless symbiotic project where every bubbling organ skank, hypnotic drum drop, and reverberating tape delay serves the song's core message.
To bring the record home, producer CHLLNGR spent a week in the spring working alongside UK dub maestro in his London studio - Prince Fatty, who mixed the entire album. Fatty invited legendary drummer Winston "Horseman” Williams into the sessions, and Horseman percussion added the final glue to the record.
Track highlights:
"Signs of the Time": Azizzi is joined by his late father, the legendary Max Romeo, on a prophetic warning of what awaits the world if we don't soon unite in peace and love.
"Thanks and Praises": An anthem of gratitude for everything life brings, and of rising up even when others want to see us fail.
"Jah Jah Disciples": A meditation on following Jah, and the strength that faith gives in the midst of adversity.
Signs of the Time is available now on Vinyl LP and Digital streaming platforms via Recall Reality.
Red Vinyl. Swiss quintet Sunday, June present " Cinema ", their second album, recorded at the legendary Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire, England. Produced by Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers), " Cinema " is a luminous record with deep emotional layers, traversing psychedelic rock, dream pop, and indie rock, an album steeped in nostalgia, self-discovery, the redemptive power of beauty, and the profound joy of playing together. " Cinema " moves in the space where memory and desire blur into one. Drawing its central metaphor from the moving image, the album frames love, nostalgic, imagined, never quite realized, as a succession of interior scenes, each a fragment of an unfinished film.
Swiss quintet Sunday, June present " Cinema ", their second album, recorded at the legendary Chapel Studios in Lincolnshire, England. Produced by Andy Savours (My Bloody Valentine, Arctic Monkeys, The Killers), " Cinema " is a luminous record with deep emotional layers, traversing psychedelic rock, dream pop, and indie rock, an album steeped in nostalgia, self-discovery, the redemptive power of beauty, and the profound joy of playing together. " Cinema " moves in the space where memory and desire blur into one. Drawing its central metaphor from the moving image, the album frames love, nostalgic, imagined, never quite realized, as a succession of interior scenes, each a fragment of an unfinished film.
In a world that buckles and cracks under our calamitous weight, something at once old and beautiful, bitter and malign, stirs just a shade below what can be seen. It had dreamt of the end of things, and tasted there sweet emptiness, but now a new hominid stench has disturbed its slumber.
So keenly it ponders, un-lidding an eye, and within each potent coil desires fester, many and urgent. And so it untangles, and organises, and lurches upwards like a whale; bloated, rotten and desperate to breathe.
Emily and Joe have caught glimpses of that which lurks beneath. As each has struggled to make sense of what they have seen, they have been dragged inexorably into a frightening new reality; a shadow world of lurid horrors, where nothing is as it ought to be. Yet they have witnessed great beauty too, a joy stark and profound, and an addiction is growing.
iO Pan is about a love for that special era in the UK dance music scene that from the late 1980s onwards mixed funk, soul, hip-hop, electro, reggae, dub and Jamaican sound system culture together with the freshest dance music coming out of Chicago, Detroit, Belgium and Italy. A unique melting pot that would lead to some of the most original and groundbreaking musical movements the world has ever seen in Bleep, Breakbeat, Hardcore, Jungle and Dub Step.
iO Pan is an artist, musician and DJ who has presented live art at the Barbican Centre, the Open Data Institute, the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths University.
As a musician, iO Pan has supported the Arctic Monkeys and worked with the Human League, and with the track ‘Forever’, reached number 5 in the Mixmag Ibiza chart.
As a DJ iO Pan was a resident for legendary Sheffield clubs Gatecrasher, The Leadmill and Plug throughout the 90s.
iO Pan now presents the full-length album When The Lid Opens on Sound Records whose roster includes KiF Productions, Benyayer, Yarni and Lara Jones.
‘Blood Spilled’ - the latest single from Blonde
Redhead - pairs cascading guitars, relentless
rhythms and one of vocalist, multi-instrumentalist
and songwriter Kazu Makino’s most explosive
vocal performances, with an exploration of
mortality, grief and the enduring bond between
body and soul.
The song surges with ecstatic intensity as Kazu
lingers on “each and every cell” and the urge to
“sing and scream just to hear myself,” transforming
these moments into affirmations of the beauty,
vulnerability and freedom of physical existence.
Suspended between the earthly and the ethereal,
the track finds transcendence, not by escaping the
body, but by fully inhabiting it, turning profound
loss into a fierce celebration of being alive
Houston’s premier street griot is stepping into his most profound chapter yet with his highly anticipated upcoming album, O.Y.N. Throughout a decorated career that spans over 1.2 billion global streams and a fiercely loyal fanbase, Maxo Kream—born Emekwane Ogugua Biosah, Jr.—has established himself as one of rap’s most authentic, uncompromising storytellers. From the raw trenches of Alief to the critically acclaimed triumphs of Punken, Brandon Banks, Weight of the World, and his triumphant 2024 independent pivot Personification, Maxo has long been celebrated by Pitchfork, NPR, and Complex for his cinematic, hyper-detailed world-building. Now, O.Y.N. finds the Houston icon turning his gaze inward, pairing his signature Texas grit with an expansive, global perspective that redefines his artistic boundaries.
If his previous work was about Maxo taking full creative control as an independent force, O.Y.N. is about him uncovering who he is at his core. Following the passing of his father, Maxo found himself searching deeper for his family origins, leading to a pivotal moment of artistic and personal rebirth. For the first time in his life, Maxo traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, anchoring his new music in a profound celebration of his Nigerian heritage. The emotional centerpiece of this journey is the JPEGMAFIA-produced single “Time Out,” an introspective track that moves away from the frantic energy of his past releases to offer a stripped-back look at love, loss, and legacy. Featuring a heavy, resonant drum presence on the outro, the song’s accompanying music video was filmed on location in Lagos, capturing Maxo navigating his ancestral roots in real-time.
While O.Y.N. reaches new emotional depths, it doesn't sacrifice the hard-hitting, volatile street persona that made Maxo a star. The album expertly balances soul-baring vulnerability with cutting-edge hip-hop experimentation, showcasing elite chemistry with some of the genre's most forward-thinking visionaries. Look no further than “Fake Jeezy,” a collaborative explosion featuring Denzel Curry and masterminded by JPEGMAFIA. The track is a masterclass in industrial chaos, combining sharp lyricism and early-2000s trap imagery with cold, surreal visual aesthetics. This duality highlights Maxo's unique positioning in the culture as a trusted street general who can effortlessly trade bars with rap's avant-garde elite.
From his early days flipping Kendrick Lamar's “Rigamortis” to sharing marquee tracks with the likes of A$AP Rocky, Travis Scott, and Tyler, The Creator on hits like “Big Persona,” “Cracc Era,” and “Cracc At 15,” Maxo Kream has always been a rapper's rapper. O.Y.N. represents the ultimate synthesis of this incredible journey. It is an album born from the soil of Alief but elevated by the spirit of Lagos—a raw, beautiful, and heavy-hitting testament to an artist who has survived his past, honored his losses, and fully embraced his destiny.
Experiments and profound sounds accompany IAL's sixth release, proudly featuring MOD21 & Toki Fuko. The two have collaborated to present an EP brimming with analog sounds, a dedication to sound, and musical design, taking listeners on a truly immersive journey. Following the label's limited-release policy, this EP is a must-have for your collection, as it's an unmissable discovery of their signature sound, perfectly suited to any musical context.
10th anniversary, limited Edition pressing of 1000 worldwide, expanded to 2xLP w/ nine demos & live tracks, sleeve jacket art updated with foil elements! Released in 2016, Trophy Eyes' sophomore album, Chemical Miracle, is celebrated as a modern masterpiece for its seamless blend of hardcore grit and pop-punk melody. The record marked a massive evolution for the Australian band, driven by frontman John Floreani's dynamic vocal shifts between raw, gravel -throated screams and soaring clean melodies. The instrumentation perfectly matches this energy, swinging effortlessly from manic, punk-rock aggression to softer, atmospheric alt-rock moments. The album's defining characteristic is its deeply confessional and gut-wrenching lyricism, which offered a mature contrast to a genre typically dominated by simpler themes of heartbreak. Floreani tackles the darkest corners of his life with unflinching honesty, exploring survivor's guilt, suicidal ideation, addiction, and profound loneliness. This emotional weight is best exemplified in the opening track, "Chlorine," which pairs bouncy, energetic instrumentation with the devastating true story of Floreani processing the suicide of the man who saved him from drowning as a child. Culturally, Chemical Miracle elevated the mid-2010s pop-punk scene by proving that catchy music could effectively tackle heavy, complex human experiences. By addressing severe mental health struggles frankly and without glorification, the album fostered a profound connection with fans and provided a vital, relatable outlet for listeners. Furthermore, its massive critical and commercial success helped propel the thriving Australian alternative music scene onto the global stage, cementing Trophy Eyes' legacy in the genre.
Born in West Palm Beach, Florida, to a mother of Indian and Congolese heritage and a father of Slovak and Belgian descent, Siân grew up between Belgium and New York before finally letting her travelling wings come to rest in Paris. What could have become a story of fragmentation instead became a source of creative strength. Singer, songwriter, composer and photographer, Siân has always turned borders into bridges.
She first honed her voice in the jazz clubs of Paris and New York, performing alongside renowned artists such as Richard Bona, Jon Batiste and Mike Stern. Yet her path has always extended far beyond the stage. For nearly a decade, she led cultural initiatives with women and children living through exile, violence and poverty across India and Southern Africa, weaving together music, photography and artistic transmission as tools for dialogue and empowerment.
The true turning point came when she discovered the kamele ngoni, the West African harp whose ethereal sound seemed to echo something long buried within her. The instrument became her musical alter ego—the invisible thread binding together her many inheritances. Guided by Malian master Abou Diarra, Siân embarked on an inward journey towards her African roots. Yet this return to her origins was never an act of retreat into identity. Instead, it gave rise to a body of work that remains profoundly open to the world, where Africa enters into conversation with jazz, folk, soul, alternative pop and the rhythms of Brazil.
Along the way, she has crossed paths with remarkable artists including Rogê, Chico César, Fatoumata Diawara, Lokua Kanza, Flavia Coelho, Thomas de Pourquery and Philippe Baden Powell. On stage and in the studio, Siân continues to shape a musical universe that refuses labels. Like artists such as Björk, Joni Mitchell and Laura Mvula, she moves forward as an explorer, guided not by genre but by intuition.
Today, Siân stands as one of the most distinctive voices of the new Francophone music scene an artist capable of uniting musical sophistication with emotional power, introspection with collective celebration, depth with an irresistible urge to dance.
Animal — The New Album
With Animal, produced by British musician Tom Excell (Nubiyan Twist, Africa Express...), Siân delivers her most intimate and assured work to date. Every song feels like a shedding of skin, a quiet metamorphosis, exploring self-acceptance, femininity, the freedom to be oneself, cultural heritage, and the reconciliation of one's own imperfections.
From Stereotype, a fearless manifesto against the expectations imposed on women, to the title track Animal, an anthem celebrating the beauty of imperfection ("I've turned my cracks into a crown"), the album gives a voice to everyone who refuses to fit into predefined boxes. In Terre, je danse sur toi, featuring Fatoumata Diawara, Siân pays tribute to Mother Earth and to the roots that unite us all. Oh! Congo, recorded with Lokua Kanza, reconciles her cultural heritage with an ancestral homeland that feels both distant and intimately familiar. En équilibre, with Flavia Coelho, embraces the exhilaration of risk and the courage to leap, while Put a Mask and I Could Kill confront hidden wounds and the invisible violences that quietly shape who we become.
In ADé, Siân addresses Adenomyosis as though speaking to an unwanted housemate. "My body is your battlefield," she sings, giving voice to an intimate shadow lodged deep within herself. This bittersweet lullaby transforms a pain so often left unspoken into an act of profound tenderness towards oneself.
The album also holds a rare treasure: Reste tel(le), an unpublished text by Pierre Barouh, the founder of the Saravah label. Never before set to music or performed, this elusive poem of free love finds new life through Siân's voice, becoming a dialogue across time between two artists united by the same devotion to freedom, métissage and openness to the world.
Driven by Tom Excell's vibrant Afro-pop pulse, the spiritual breath of the kamele ngoni, organic arrangements and deeply personal songwriting, Animal is an album of liberation. It invites us to lay down our masks, embrace our contradictions and reconnect with the free, instinctive and powerful animal that lies dormant within us all. More than a collection of songs, it is a radiant manifesto for the richness of identity, the passing on of memory, and reconciliation with oneself.
Animal is not simply the title of an album, it is a declaration of independence. An invitation to live fully, unapologetically, and without instructions.
A citizen of the world, travelling freely between continents, languages and memories, Siân Pottok delivers with Animal her most personal, and perhaps her most universal work to date: an album that reminds us that our fragilities, our roots and our differences are, beyond doubt, our greatest strength.
— Christophe Tison
Following the critically acclaimed Fantômes… Futurs, praised by FIP, France Inter, Radio Nova, ARTE and International jazz press, double bassist and composer Kham Meslien returns with Vévés électriques, a deeply immersive second album where memory, landscape and improvisation merge into a singular sonic journey. Joined by Laurent Bardainne, Roger Raspail, Naïssam Jalal and David Neerman, Meslien expands the intimate language of his double bass with subtle loops and organic textures, weaving together echoes of Iceland, the Caribbean and imagined territories. Blending spiritual jazz, contemporary classical influences and ambient soundscapes, Vévés électriques is an invitation to drift beyond geography and into a profoundly personal exploration of emotion, identity and freedom.
Set upon an oil-smooth sea, an immense range of directions opens up before Kham Meslien for “Vévés Électriques”, his second album after “Fantômes… Futurs.”
With only his double bass and bow as vessel and sextant, a distant journey nevertheless begins to take shape. Vibrations and the striking of strings against wood quickly trace lines and winding paths across the surface of the water—so many routes to follow before leaving them behind, allowing the outward journey to become an inward voyage as well.
After an improvisation intended to shed light on the course ahead, isolated lands came into view: the shores of Iceland, the lands of the far north, places cut off from the rest of the world by vast expanses of water. Islands battered by a harsh climate that can only be endured by drawing warmth from deep within oneself.
Then the Caribbean arc appeared. The archipelago, a setting for joyful and unsettling experiences, takes Kham back to a childhood from which the passing years have carried him away. Rather than following the conventional channel of the music of these places, the West Indies emerge through memories whose colors are still vivid.
Through the morning mist, Roger Raspail’s percussion locks into the same frequencies of the groove. Double bass and struck skins then become companions on a road that intersects with Laurent Bardainne’s saxophone. Carrying a dreamlike message, David Neerman’s vibraphone also joins the narrative to write a few chapters of its own, while others are enchanted by the flute and voice of Naïssam Jalal, or struck by the metaphorical rhymes of rapper Rocé.
On the surface, through the themes along which the pieces navigate, landscapes slowly reveal themselves and change shape as the shore draws nearer or recedes. Straying from the marked course and allowing oneself to drift, breaking free from pure acoustic sound by adding loops first played live and then sampled, allows Kham to explore the depths. The depths of the ocean, as well as those of his soul. To enter a world of improvisation that reveals itself even as he explores it. Examined up close, feelings become shells to pick up and hold to one’s ear, so that they can be felt intensely until they take material form.
This sea, which had appeared peaceful, became the stage for a succession of stories and images, which then accumulated to give birth to a larger narrative.
Mercury Prize-shortlisted, MOBO Award-winning drummer, composer and producer Moses Boyd returns with his first album in six years. Since the release of his critically acclaimed album, Dark Matter, Boyd has continued to push at the boundaries of contemporary jazz. Songs For Sinners is a deeply personal body of work that explores the push and pull of faith as something profoundly human – a force capable of comforting, dividing, unsettling and restoring in equal measure. Across an ambitious, vocal-led collection that fuses gospel, jazz, soundsystem culture, Caribbean rhythms, 808s and soaring choir harmonies, Boyd expands the language of contemporary jazz into something entirely his own. It’s a record that draws from the church he grew up in, the London soundsystem culture that shaped him, and the freedom of improvisation, asking what sacred music can sound like when it’s no longer confined by convention.
Mercury Prize-shortlisted, MOBO Award-winning drummer, composer and producer Moses Boyd returns with his first album in six years. Since the release of his critically acclaimed album, Dark Matter, Boyd has continued to push at the boundaries of contemporary jazz. Songs For Sinners is a deeply personal body of work that explores the push and pull of faith as something profoundly human – a force capable of comforting, dividing, unsettling and restoring in equal measure. Across an ambitious, vocal-led collection that fuses gospel, jazz, soundsystem culture, Caribbean rhythms, 808s and soaring choir harmonies, Boyd expands the language of contemporary jazz into something entirely his own. It’s a record that draws from the church he grew up in, the London soundsystem culture that shaped him, and the freedom of improvisation, asking what sacred music can sound like when it’s no longer confined by convention.
COUNTRY GREAZE is the 2nd independent album released by multi-Platinum-selling artists, Sigma - their 5th studio album overall. COUNTRY GREAZE is a bold, high-concept body of work that visually and sonically collides the raw, underground energy of Drum & Bass with the refined grandeur of a country manor backdrop. Sigma’s idea of blending high-octane basslines, heavyweight lyricism and tongue-in-cheek cultural contrasts flips expectations — pairing gritty rave culture with aristocratic imagery to create a striking, rebellious aesthetic. Its muddy boots on marble floors, signet rings next to gold chains. Sigma say, “The COUNTRY GREAZE concept was to create an exaggerated version of our lives in the countryside and then pull our guest vocalists into to it to see what happened. Obviously, we don’t live in grand manors, but for this we do! Its great having the creative freedom to bring an idea like this to life and we’ve had a lot of fun making it.”
The 12 tracks incorporate a variety of influences including the reggae-infused WATCHIN’ U, the hip-hop inspired NEED U NOW and BACK 2 LIFE featuring legends of UK Sound System culture, Soul II Soul. These influences, together with garage, jungle and grime, can be heard throughout the album. One of Sigma’s aims for this album was to celebrate the scenes and artists that have shaped their journey whilst pushing their sound firmly forward. COUNTRY GREAZE has certainly delivered on this with the project showcasing fresh sounds whilst bringing together a heavyweight cast of UK talent including Danny Byrd, Professor Green, Kurupt FM, Basslayerz, Dutch & Graft and many more. In addition to the 6 singles that Sigma have released in 2026, COUNTRY GREAZE unleashes another 6 bangers which have only been heard in their DJ sets this Summer and whose release has been highly anticipated by many fans of Drum and Bass. In addition to the 6 singles that Sigma have released in 2026, COUNTRY GREAZE unleashes another 6 bangers whose release has been highly anticipated by DnB fans since Sigma started playing them at their 45 gigs this Summer.
The first of these is the album’s focus track, THE DAYZ, featuring the spoken words of Jude Moore who hits the proverbial nail on the head with his nostalgic look back at life growing up in the UK around the turn of the millennium. It’s no surprise that he has a massive 670k TikTok followers as his words speak profoundly to an entire generation. With talk of house parties and care-free fun layered over space-disco synths, THE DAYZ exudes a nostalgic vibe before skilfully blending it with punchy drums and a chunky bassline bringing it straight to the here and now. This uplifting track is guaranteed to inspire any listener to think about the best nights of their lives and say, “Ah geez, those were the days!” Similarly, FABRIC, named after the club that helped shape the Sigma sound back in the 2000s, has the same ethos – classic sounds with cutting edge production. Its euphoric multi-layered synths and deep sub bass fully encapsulate the many late nights spent by Cam and Joe in Room 2.
Sigma also unleash the mighty ALLIGATOR. This much-hyped track has been killing dancefloors one snap at a time since the start of the Summer. The old movie samples and ominous synths in the intro give warning of the impending doom before attacking the listener with its enormous bassline and ferocious drums. Its 36ft long and weighs over 2000lb and its coming to a dancefloor near you.
Available in the following Territories: Wordwide minus Japan & Korea
NOTON is pleased to announce12 Conversations, a collaborative album by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto to be released on 18 September 2026.
The partnership between the legendary musician and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and the German artist Carsten Nicolai (aka Alva Noto) has produced some of the most distinctive and enduring works in contemporary electroacoustic music. Beginning with Vrioon in 2002, the artists spent more than two decades fusing and expanding their disciplines, with Sakamoto's evocative, sustain-drenched piano compositions finding their counterpart in Nicolai's skilful and sensitive electronic detailing.
Each successive project further deepened their artistic dialogue: from the five studio albums of the V.I.R.U.S. series (Vrioon, Insen, Revep, Utp_ with Ensemble Modern, and Summvs), to their score for Alejandro G. Iñárritu's The Revenant; Glass (2017), a wholly improvised performance inside Philip Johnson's iconic Connecticut landmark, in which the pair fixed contact microphones to the glass walls, playing the architecture itself as an instrument; and Two (2019), a document of their live performance at the Sydney Opera House.
Across these works, their distinct approaches achieved a rare synthesis, a brilliantly sustained dialogue between piano and electronics, Sakamoto's warmth and melodic finesse meeting Nicolai's abstract electronic formalism to invoke a mesmeric quietude as deeply satisfying in its melodic resolutions as in the merger of its filmic romanticism and meditative subtlety.
12 Conversations brings together musical exchanges recorded in November and December 2022. Rooted in the same creative period that gave rise to Sakamoto's final solo album 12, these recordings were not originally intended as a standalone release. It was only after the completion of 12 that Sakamoto and Nicolai decided to present these exchanges as a work in their own right.
The album reflects the vitality and curiosity that defined more than two decades of shared inspiration: fluid, exploratory, and forward-looking. Created with openness and trust, it captures a creative process in constant transformation - sounds expanding, altering, and evolving through attentive listening.
Conceived as the continuation of an artistic dialogue extending beyond the physical, 12 Conversations honours Sakamoto's wish that these encounters should exist beyond the archive, offering an enduring testament to one of contemporary music's most revered collaborations.
Carsten Nicolai writes:
"A heavy breath can be heard in the recordings. Yet this work is not about remembrance but continuation, vitality, curiosity, and the spirit of experimentation that shaped an artistic relationship over decades.
The twelve pieces we exchanged in November and December 2022 possess extraordinary density: sounds expanded, altered, recontextualized. Initially, every intervention felt almost inappropriate. Yet this was part of our openness and trust: adding, shifting and radically yet softly transforming.
Even in these final exchanges, plans for future projects continued to take shape, mindful of finite yet firmly believing in the power of new ideas. We chose the name Conversations, which has become a space of memory and vision, where past, present and future intertwine.
For a long time, releasing this music seemed impossible. The loss felt too sudden, and the emotional connection too profound. As time passed, it became clear that these twelve musical encounters should have life outside the archive. To honor Ryuichi's wish, these pieces are now being released as the continuation of a dialogue that extends beyond the physical."
The first single, Conversation 3, will be released on Tuesday, July 14, 2026. The second single, Conversation 6, will be be released on Wednesday, August 26, 2026.
12 Conversations will be available worldwide on vinyl, CD and digitally. A Japanese edition will be available on Ryuichi Sakamoto's commons.
Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and musician Aimée Portioli aka Grand River presents the new album Temporary, returning to the renowned Editions Mego label with her most expansive and focused LP yet.
Rooted in existential ideas of impermanence and flux, Temporary is a deeply emotive work centred on the rich interplay between resonant guitar work and innovative electronics. Written in the wake of profound personal grief and loss, the album sees Portioli infuse her music with a raw, expressive intensity anchored in this experience. Across eight strikingly melodic and affecting soundscapes, Portioli powerfully embodies a dramatic encounter with mortality.
Temporary reprises Portioli’s exceptional streak of material across acclaimed labels including Donato Dozzy and Neel’s Spazio Disponibile, Caterina Barbieri's light-years, Ghostly International, Tresor and Umor Rex. The LP represents the latest tour de force in her distinctive electronic practice. Alongside a raft of lauded releases, Portioli has devised visionary multichannel installations which dissolve the boundary between the art gallery and the performance space.
Her new album signifies a culmination of her work, imbued with the depth of Portioli’s artistry. Shaped by a paradigm shift rising from loss, the record reflects a contemplation of the human condition and the ephemeral nature of existence. Ruminating on the thoughts and experiences that have fed into the record, Portioli reveals a consequential recognition underpinning the record:
"Sometimes, when travelling in places far from home that I know I will most likely never return to, or while accompanying someone I loved towards the end of their life, I become intensely aware of the singularity of the moment, and of how precious and sad this feels at the same time. It carries a particular weight because it will never happen again in quite the same way. Through experiences like these, I have gradually come to understand the temporary nature of all things. They taught me that to live is to experience the present while already feeling the trace of its disappearance, something both painful and blissful." - Aimée Portioli, Grand River
The album is invested with a potent mood and momentum from the outset. Establishing an evocative tone with the subtle, pulsating synthesis, rustling undertow, and oceanic low end of 18 circles to heaven, Portioli gradually ascends through the incandescent modular majesty of Come to stay, and the turbulent, brooding guitar figures of The crossing of the body, the crossing of the mind. The album progresses through the rapturous electronic phasing of The little we last into the coruscating synth grandeur of Let me know when you’re pure, before a thrilling endgame.
Closing with the wavering harp runs, heavy percussive thud, and cataclysmic guitar discordance of Maybe I am dead and this is paradise, and the evanescent atmospherics and beautiful acoustic refrains of Work of ending, Portioli takes the listener through vast landscapes of sound and mercurial emotional states. Intimate and immersive in equal measure, the record traces a compelling sensory journey.
Each part of the album is part of a larger poetic sentence, with track titles forming fragments that together articulate a meditation on transience. From 18 circles to heaven and Come to stay through From the other side and Work of ending, they read like quiet statements about being human, about loving, losing, remembering and eventually fading. The record moves through these states as a continuous passage, depicting a poignant soundworld guided by temporality.
The awareness that our time is limited sharpens the value of what remains. Each encounter, each gesture, each fleeting moment becomes more vivid. Temporary lingers in the space where presence and disappearance coexist, where everything is already passing away and therefore becomes infinitely precious. Things matter because they do not last. Mortality does not diminish life; it intensifies it. In confronting these ideas, Temporary feels irrepressibly alive.
Composed, produced and mixed by Aimée Portioli
Production and mixing assistance by Luca Sammartin
Acoustic piano on Maybe I am dead and this is paradise by Andert Tysma
Mastered by Rashad Becker
Cut by Marta De Pascalis at Schnittstelle, Berlin
Artwork by Nicola Tirabasso
Layout by Riccardo Piovesan
Volume 1 - Growth
Resurrection is a long-term musical work that has accompanied Christine Benz for almost twenty years. The first track was created in 2007 (track id - Born after Code), with another piece added nearly every year thereafter.
Throughout this time, she continued to produce other music while steadily developing her artistic language.
Musically, the album moves between minimal techno, ambient and experimental electronic music. Across different phases of her life, Resurrection gradually grew into an archive of her personal and musical evolution.
The complete work unfolds as a trilogy across Volumes 1-3.
At its core lies her fascination with sound as material. Rather than thinking in terms of conventional melodies, she works with textures, vibrations, and spatial relationships. A small number of elements give rise to complex sonic spaces, where minimal changes can have a profound effect. Mistakes, chance occurrences, and unexpected responses from the systems she uses also become part of the music. Even from chaos, remarkable structures
emerge. Whenever unplanned beauty reveals itself, she preserves it as a small “miracle” in which control and chance intertwine.
The complete work unfolds across three chapters: Growth, Structure and Resonance, exploring repetition, frequency, perception, consciousness and technological development in the relationship between humans and
machines. It moves from origin through the formation of an internal order towards connection and interaction.
Volume 1: Growth, draws upon the Fibonacci sequence and the spiral as symbols of natural development, with the music growing through repetition and minimal change into increasingly complex forms. Throughout the
project, technology appears as a tool, a partner and a mirror of our perception, raising the question of whether consciousness, responsibility and empathy can evolve alongside technological progress.
During the project’s long evolution, Donato Dozzy developed an interest in Christine’s distinctive sound design.
In 2021, this led him to propose his own interpretation of Our Determination for Volume 1, subtly reworking the track through his own musical perspective.
The artwork developed by Christine also went through a creative process of its own. The original photographs were taken in a basement around 2019, with a wet curtain draped over her. In 2026, she decided to transform
this visual world into a moving-image artwork. For the production, a film crew reconstructed the entire setting.
The video shoot demanded a great deal from Christine: after several hours beneath the wet curtain, the cold was no longer merely part of the staging. This elaborate creative process gives the artwork its distinctive character
and makes it an essential part of Resurrection.
The first chapter will be released in November 2026 as a double-vinyl edition housed in a distinctive gatefold sleeve with an inside-out finish, matte varnish, and partial raised spot UV varnish. Two further double-vinyl
releases, Structure and Resonance, will complete the trilogy. All three volumes will be released on Pirat Records.Records.
Acid Pauli's new album "Mystic Meltdown" is hypnotic mystery, textural mastery, all hurtling through your system at peak velocity, unrelenting yet full of mischief and spirit.
The first full-length Acid Pauli album since 2020's MOD, here the artist, Martin Gretschmann, who you might also remember from Console and The Notwist, reaches out to collaborators, unearths new sounds through travel and then brings it all together with one long, sweeping breath - an album to take in as a whole, to ride its compulsive energy to the end and then back to the start, over and over again.
While the album's been brewing for some time, "It took months and months to find the coherency and the story that this album is telling," Gretschmann recalls, "Arranging the pacing, feeling how the tracks come together into one album", it reads as effortless. It draws from Gretschmann's various musical languages, from the techno, house and ambient of Acid Pauli, even reaching back to the electronica of Console, but it places them in new contexts, at new speeds and in rich, giddy contrasts. Mystic Meltdown feels like endless pleasure, unflagging energy.
It's also an album rich with multiplicity. There are many voices that visit us at the Mystic Meltdown, from Hani Mojtahedy's Kurdish vocal on "Goman (Remix)", through to Lhasa de Sela's "Con Toda Palabra" in Spanish. A sample of Kingdom Molongi's voices opens the title track and returns on "Mystic Feedback" - this feels like a particularly profound connection, given the inspiration that Gretschmann has gleaned from the musical community surrounding the Nyege Nyege Tapes label and organisation over the years. He's also appeared at one of their festivals, by all accounts a revelatory experience.
Sometimes Gretschmann reaches back yet further. "Yes, Caroline" hints at an abstract relationship with the Beach Boys' pop masterpiece, Pet Sounds. Yet the way he draws these various influences into his own music always displays more than a touch of transmutation. Releasing the album on his own label All Is Acid which has recently been undertaking a reissue program of some of Acid Pauli's earlier works, "Mystic Meltdown" feels like a complete expression for Gretschmann; from beginning to end, from creation to reflection. "Building up, going into different spheres and emotions," Gretschmann concludes. "Working through some darker shades, trying to find light. Pouring in to get through."
Paul Pèrrim returns with Arati – a raw, expeditionary palindromic companion to his 2025 debut, Itara.
Exploring a rawer, harsher, and more rugged landscape than its predecessor, Arati pushes deeper into the wilderness. The anthropologist- musician continues to guide listeners down paths trodden by akaleidoscope of cultures, offering a sound that is profoundly singular, primal, and timeless.
The album’s surreal compositions weave together an eclectic arsenal of textures: mutant maqams, Africanist sound collages, acid Eastern free-folk improvisations, weird droney guitar, cosmic exotic ambient, and re-wired finger-picking. It is music engineered to forge an immediate, visceral connection.
Arati evokes place and memory—conjuring the scent of Persian leopard dung and Kurdistan saffron, dusty Afghan rugs, or the phantom sound of a camel being milked in the desert while a lone musician plays nearby. It stands proudly as an homage to timeless field recordings and visionary crossover albums reminiscent of the Deben Bhattacharya school. Arati is an unrushed journey— and with both albums, Paul Pèrrim establishes himself as a cultural wanderer crafting unorthodox traditional-futuristic soundscapes for contemporary, open-minded listeners.
Ezra Collective's Here Because Of Hope is the most ambitious and personal record of their career - conceived as a body of work split into three spiritual and geographical movements, the album traces the movement of Black people across continents and decades, from the music of Africa to the rhythms of the Caribbean, and home to the streets of London. Formed in the youth clubs of London, Mercury Prize and BRIT Award-winners Femi Koleoso, TJ Koleoso, Joe Armon-Jones, James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi have now spent over a decade making jazz joyful, urgent and undeniable. On Here Because Of Hope, they push that vision further than ever, asking a simple but profound question: why does so much Black music born out of pain sound so joyful? Their answer is hope: the belief, carried across generations and oceans, that something better is possible. Anchored by collaborations with Pa Salieu, Lila Iké, Leona Lewis, and reaching across the full breadth of the global African diaspora (including America, where those same African and Caribbean roots gave birth to jazz itself) Here Because Of Hope is a record of remarkable warmth, ambition and humanity, and the sound of Britain's most vital band at the peak of their powers.
