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Imperfect Stranger is the pseudonym of Glasgow based soundtrack composer and producer Kenny Inglis. “Everything Wrong is Right” is his debut solo album for Castles in Space.
Born in 1975, Kenny didn't listen to much music, unless it was the opening credits to a TV show or a film score that had caught his ear. "I loved the pre-title music on a lot of those 80's U.S. TV shows. From the family orientated stuff like The A-Team, to darker dramas such as The Equalizer. My mother would let me stay up to watch the opening sequence of the latter then send me to bed because the story would be too heavy for a kid. That left me with this hanging sense of ambiguity as to what would happen in that hour after the titles came up.”
Exposure to a work colleague’s tiny project studio in a kitchen cupboard was a lightbulb moment for him and the experience of utilising music technology as a way of writing and producing entire tracks stirred a wave of determination to chase a career in music using the opportunities that technology could offer. Kenny figured the best way to move forward was to start a small project studio and learn his craft as a recording engineer. "It was a bit of a shock to the system. I literally had no idea how to work any of the equipment. Kenny focused on learning as much about the craft as he could whilst winging his way through recording and mixing everyone from the likes of singer/songwriters to bands, to voiceovers artists and anything in between. "Eventually, I stopped writing the music I thought people would want to hear, and started writing the music I wanted to make. I didn't come from a music loving background, but I was always obsessed by the way music and film would interact - how music brings this atmosphere and tone to even the most mundane visual stuff. I wanted to capture that. I wanted to grab some of that ambiguity I felt from the TV shows of my childhood and make it into a project of some sort". That project was Spylab. A dark, downtempo project with a cinematic edge. The initial demo consisted of three tracks, with the melancholic 'This Utopia' leading the playlist.
"At the time you did demos on normal cassette tapes. I remember having this endless battle with the bias control to try and get the best sound I could on these little tapes. Ten went in the post one Monday morning, and the following Monday there were three offers from three different labels. Studio K7 were interested in a singles deal, as was Flying Rhino in London. But then there was an offer from a Chicago based label by the name of Guidance Recordings. They wanted an album, and were offering a $15,000 advance. It wasn't a difficult decision to make"
Writing and recording Spylab 'This Utopia' began in 1999. The album took a whole year to produce. The album was to catch the attention of Mary Anne Hobbs at Radio One. At the time Mary Anne was presenting The Breezeblock - a late Sunday night show with an eclectic playlist of alternative electronic music. Picking out the album's title track 'This Utopia', Mary Anne would go on to play it no less than 8 weeks in a row. A request for Spylab to DJ on the show was to follow. "I had never DJ'd before. I think I had a week to figure out how to do that and put a playlist together. I'm not entirely sure how I pulled that off.” In March 2001 the Spylab album was finally released to a hoard of excellent reviews. A North American live tour would follow. From the launch party in Los Angeles, to a sell out show at SXSW in Austin. "I then started a new project under the name Cinephile. It had some of the core elements of the Spylab sound but it was deeper, more cinematic.” Kenny received news that a track from the previous project Spylab had been requested by HBO for the first episode of a new TV drama called Six Feet Under. This was to become a major turning point in Kenny's career. The Spylab track 'Celluloid Hypnotic' dropped during a poignant party scene of the first Six Feet Under episode. Within a couple of days Kenny was getting requests for music from other music supervisors. "It was a chain reaction. The Six Feet Under sync was like the tip of an iceberg. One day I called CBS in America and they put me on to the CSI music supervisor and I managed to get on a call with him. I sent the Cinephile stuff out and within a few months I got this fax through from CBS - a quote request for one of the tracks for a potential use on CSI. It changed my life."
The tone and style of Kenny's music sat perfectly with the CSI score requirements. So much so he found himself part of a pool of incidental writers who worked on all three aspects of the franchise - CSI, CSI: NY, and CSI: Miami. This would continue until 2013, when the last of the series would come to an end.
"I was juggling a bunch of stuff for those ten years. Writing material for CSI, whilst releasing new Cinephile stuff and playing live. As Cinephile continued to gather pace, one of the tracks from Kenny's efforts on CSI was chosen for the Hollywood trailer for the Samuel L. Jackson film 'Lakeview Terrace'. Further trailers would follow, from Gangster Squad to Dead Man Down, Spike Lee's Undisputed Truth, to Fifty Shades Freed.
At the same time, Kenny picked up his first factual commissions in the UK, and this too would be the beginning of a regular run of fully scoring factuals and documentaries. By 2021, six of these had won BAFTAs. He also would find himself soundtracking adverts for the likes of Nike, Audi, and American AirlinesIn early 2020, Kenny made a return to focusing on his own music under the pseudonym Imperfect Stranger. A tweet from Colin Morrison from Castles In Space regarding a charity compilation album 'The Isolation Tapes' caught his eye. Kenny had made a start on his debut album as Imperfect Stranger and submitted the track 'Hymn To The Sun' (which would become the lead track on the album). Further discussions ensued, and the album found a home on CiS. "I had been doing TV and film stuff for almost ten years. It paid the bills and was as close to a 'real job' as I'd had, but I yearned to get back to writing for myself, so doing an album for Castles in Space was a joy.
“The music I write is like a diary. There's an authentic narrative to everything i do. I don't write tracks for the sake of writing. I write tracks to diarise and process the stuff that I've lived through, and the experiences that have come along with the passing years. That's what makes me tick. It's a very public and vulnerable way of expressing myself. If people want to know the real me, all they have to do is listen."

Songs My Friends Wrote is an album I've been threatening to make for
years - It's a bunch of tracks that are my versions of a bunch of'songs my
friends wrote
I'm fortunate to count a lot of world class songwriters as good pals and I wanted
to shine a little light on some of my favorite examples of their work. In most
cases I've picked relatively obscure songs that have always spoken to me, even
though many of them won't be so familiar to people. The best part about
recording all these tunes was that they reminded me of all the people who I
haven't been able to hang out with for the past two years because of the plague
we've all been dealing with. All of these tunes bring a smile to my face and I hope
they do the same for you. - Corb Lund

Tape



Edições CN label founder Lieven Martens (Dolphins Into The Future) joins the Dauw label with his new album Short stories - pleasant and/or rather sad. On Short stories, Martens continues his quest for unique sound collages based on recorded original work, field recordings and samples. He offers 3 pieces depicting their own narrative. But what's the narrative? Martens leaves his listener with only music and a few linguistic traces as guidelines.

(1) Romantic collection

I. Under the 4pm sun (smoke and deep green) II. Two white-tailed tropicbirds III. Waves breaking on black lava rocks IV. The distant lights of fishing boats at night

(2) Sonorities

20 memories of maximum 20 seconds – and an intermezzo.

(3) Madrigal: a Conversation in the Dark

In front of the house across my parents’ house. There are two statues. They’re bought in the local garden shop, on a budget. In their driveway strewn with gravel, they slyly talk at night.

Lieven Martens (Lieven Martens Moana, formerly Dolphins Into The Future) is a composer and observer. He makes a conceptual form of music – programme music - that travels beyond the pure description. His works are like narrative stills; encounters with objects and thoughts.
As a recording artist, the main focus lies on the music album, and the live concert. But other forms come into play too, like an operetta, music for carillon, music for a commercial, a few movie soundtracks, installation music, et al.
Since he never submitted his work for an art prize, he didn’t won any. But a few years back he received a grant from the Flemish Department of Culture.
Next to his music he writes to make an extra euro. He also writes a few emails every week too. In general, you know.
Martens runs Edições CN, a private press that is praised for its catalogue of original works by a list of internationally acclaimed artists. He also hosts an irregular radio show on We Are Various radio in Antwerp (previous programs for Lyl Radio, and Radio Centraal).

The wiggy wanderings of Oog Bogo wind up on the same island of lost joys all at once, manufacturing a virtual jukebox of singles and side flips that won’t unplug, and just keeps reeling and raging on instead. A bright metallurgy of guitar pop, psych, post-punk and apocalypse disco embosses the sleek, multicoloured flash of ‘Plastic’.

 Oog Bogo are a four-piece rock band from Los Angeles and their new album is ‘Plastic’, an electrifying set of songs and sounds that just don’t stop, working like a machine that makes joy and endless flips and repetitions, whether in front of the turntable or out in the real world.
 In the past several years, Oog Bogo dropped two records that previewed this explosion in wildly divergent ways: 2019’s ‘Oogbogo’ EP, with wigged-out production, its contorted fun house mirror images pulling punk, psych and new wave in and out of focus in a chaotic procession of mutant tunes. 2021’s ‘EP2’ radiates a starkly different vibe, as chilled-out guitar-pop tunes conjure a flowing medley of plaintive echoes and atmospheres in a mellow mist of hiss.

 Kevin Boog recorded these records in a largely hermetic state: at home on 4-track, playing all the parts, slowly drawing out the sounds. The songs for ‘Plastic’ were demoed this way too, as a starting point for a group interpretation - but when, for obvious reasons, logistics prevented everyone from getting in the same room to even rehearse, the planned recording session at Ty Segall’s Harmonizer Studios took on a different shape.

 Starting off with only drummer Thomas Alvarez (Audacity) to accompany him, Kevin
realized that any obstacles to getting the record made were also opportunities, for
something else that was also right to happen. Rather than reach for the design of the
demos, he kept himself in the present moment, approaching every passage as fluidly
as possible, playing what he needed to play, staying open to what he needed to
know. It didn’t hurt that the laptop with all his songs crashed right after he walked into
the studio! There was no way possible but forward.
 The direction was right on with the guys at Harmonizer - Ty Segall’s sense of
imagination made him the ideal production counterpart to walk together with Kevin
into this world, psyched to experiment and ready to get weird at any time. Ty and
engineer Matt Littlejohn met all requests and requirements in the form of sounds, with
gear and approaches that amazed and delighted, and an eternally ebullient spirit.
 As this was Oog Bogo’s first time recording away from home, Kevin was a kid in a
candy store - where the store owner turns out to be a Wonka-esque philanthropist.
As band members Mike Kreibel (Dirty & His Fists) and Shelby Jacobson (Shannon
Lay) joined the session, there was a synchronicity and community with everyone
involved, finding an unexpected road to realizing the songs, with all the colours and
hues they added making everything pop that much harder.
 Fluidity was key: ‘Plastic’’s tunes depict a polymorphic cast of characters. As in life,
they leap avidly from style to style; from pretty psych rock to new wave apocalypse
disco and harsh post punk bleakness, sometimes in a verse and a half. Corkscrewing
over and over like a riff-driven space-coaster, morphing in and out of each
successive moment with increasing momentum and gravity, ‘Plastic’ defines and
redefines Oog Bogo, with sweet tunes, barely-controlled intensity and sharp
production moves - a killer first album and an equally killer evolving state of mind.

The wiggy wanderings of Oog Bogo wind up on the same island of lost joys all at once, manufacturing a virtual jukebox of singles and side flips that won’t unplug, and just keeps reeling and raging on instead. A bright metallurgy of guitar pop, psych, post-punk and apocalypse disco embosses the sleek, multicoloured flash of ‘Plastic’.

 Oog Bogo are a four-piece rock band from Los Angeles and their new album is ‘Plastic’, an electrifying set of songs and sounds that just don’t stop, working like a machine that makes joy and endless flips and repetitions, whether in front of the turntable or out in the real world.
 In the past several years, Oog Bogo dropped two records that previewed this explosion in wildly divergent ways: 2019’s ‘Oogbogo’ EP, with wigged-out production, its contorted fun house mirror images pulling punk, psych and new wave in and out of focus in a chaotic procession of mutant tunes. 2021’s ‘EP2’ radiates a starkly different vibe, as chilled-out guitar-pop tunes conjure a flowing medley of plaintive echoes and atmospheres in a mellow mist of hiss.

 Kevin Boog recorded these records in a largely hermetic state: at home on 4-track, playing all the parts, slowly drawing out the sounds. The songs for ‘Plastic’ were demoed this way too, as a starting point for a group interpretation - but when, for obvious reasons, logistics prevented everyone from getting in the same room to even rehearse, the planned recording session at Ty Segall’s Harmonizer Studios took on a different shape.

 Starting off with only drummer Thomas Alvarez (Audacity) to accompany him, Kevin
realized that any obstacles to getting the record made were also opportunities, for
something else that was also right to happen. Rather than reach for the design of the
demos, he kept himself in the present moment, approaching every passage as fluidly
as possible, playing what he needed to play, staying open to what he needed to
know. It didn’t hurt that the laptop with all his songs crashed right after he walked into
the studio! There was no way possible but forward.
 The direction was right on with the guys at Harmonizer - Ty Segall’s sense of
imagination made him the ideal production counterpart to walk together with Kevin
into this world, psyched to experiment and ready to get weird at any time. Ty and
engineer Matt Littlejohn met all requests and requirements in the form of sounds, with
gear and approaches that amazed and delighted, and an eternally ebullient spirit.
 As this was Oog Bogo’s first time recording away from home, Kevin was a kid in a
candy store - where the store owner turns out to be a Wonka-esque philanthropist.
As band members Mike Kreibel (Dirty & His Fists) and Shelby Jacobson (Shannon
Lay) joined the session, there was a synchronicity and community with everyone
involved, finding an unexpected road to realizing the songs, with all the colours and
hues they added making everything pop that much harder.
 Fluidity was key: ‘Plastic’’s tunes depict a polymorphic cast of characters. As in life,
they leap avidly from style to style; from pretty psych rock to new wave apocalypse
disco and harsh post punk bleakness, sometimes in a verse and a half. Corkscrewing
over and over like a riff-driven space-coaster, morphing in and out of each
successive moment with increasing momentum and gravity, ‘Plastic’ defines and
redefines Oog Bogo, with sweet tunes, barely-controlled intensity and sharp
production moves - a killer first album and an equally killer evolving state of mind.

Valentina Goncharova's fundamental conceptual musical work released in full uncut form as part of Hidden Harmony Lost Tapes series (HHLTS01). Restored and mastered from the original 6.3 mm analog tapes. A large-scale work comprising eleven parts of varied, brooding, mystical reflection in which the author alters the instrumentation to fit both programmatic and musical character of each section.
Includes a 12-page booklet, which detailly explains the album's conceptual basis, background and creation context, and provides insights into unique sound recording and technical solutions adapted during the album recording in 1988. Created and written with direct involvement of V. Goncharova and I. Zubkov.

From the Liner notes:

"My task is to allow the listener to penetrate deeper into the music. The music is wholly improvisational. It has no concept in the rational sense of the word. It’s concept is purely intuitive. It presumes The Law of Analogies: “As above so below. Man is the same as the Universe. The Universe is the same as Man.” ("Emerald Tablet” by Hermes Trismegistus"). This intuition is a kind of rephrased logic which uses many more symbols which contain not only philosophical but also imaginative meanings/ visionary interpretations.

This music is a stream of consciousness in its purest form: not an imitation of a stream, as in the ‘suggestive poetry’ of the 20th century, but a stream where one flow is superimposed on another (a multilateral passage of recording). And, if we think this flow of music will be better understood under the influence of a verbal flow, then the verbal flow should also be more intuitive and associative, as objective for this short write-up you are currently reading.

Ocean did not appear within the coordinate system of logical scientific thinking of the last four centuries. It can be said that it is based on an intuitive concept of representations of the world which are captured in music figuratively. Similar to how myths were created in time immemorial with only partial support from verbal associations. Ocean is an experience of passing the Human Soul and Mind through the different states of the material world: birth, development, and achievement of perfection, transformation at the points of The Way and Silence, the manifestation of the harmony of the world (Om), which until then had remained in a latent state. It is averse to both mainstream contemporary physics and fringe scientific research. It exists outside their explanatory power.

Ocean is the source of all forms that can receive their life within time and space. Here it is. It has everything: beautiful and terrible, good and evil, self-sacrifice and betrayal. Boundless love and inspired creativity. But contact does not happen immediately. The memory of a bygone civilization is still fresh, and of the dearest things left with it."

Written, performed and produced by Valentina Goncharova
Composition A1 to C4 recorded in Kose subdistrict, Tallinn, Estonia (Recording period August-October 1988)
Composition D1 recorded in artist´s home studio in Lasnamäe subdistrict, Tallinn, Estonia (Recording period May 2021)

Soul icon Otis Redding made immeasurable contributions to the form. As a singer-

songwriter, producer, arranger and talent scout, Redding was responsible for some of the

music’s biggest and most lasting hits during the 1960s, though his death in an airplane crash

in 1967 brought his life and career to a tragically premature end. He was born Otis Redding

Junior in 1941 in the small town of Dawson, Georgia, the son of a sharecropper and preacher,

and moved to the city of Macon at the age of two, where he learned to sing at the Vineville

Baptist Church. After singing in the high school band, he performed weekly gospel songs on

radio station WIBB, winning local talent contests after being inspired by Little Richard and

Sam Cooke. Since his father became ill with tuberculosis, Redding began supporting the

family at the age of 15, working as a gas station attendant, a digger of water wells, and

occasionally by playing piano with pianist Gladys Williams at the Hillview Springs Social

Club. Then, in 1958, Redding had a repeat prize run at a talent contest held by broadcaster

Hamp Swain, bringing him first into a group called Pat T Cake and the Mighty Panthers, and

later into Little Richard’s band (during a time when Richard switched rock and roll for

gospel). Moving to Los Angeles in late 1960, debut single “She’s All Right” was issued on

the Trans World label (a subsidiary of Al Kavelin’s Lute Records), credited to The Shooters

featuring Otis; following the birth of their first child and his subsequent marriage to Zelma

Atwood, Redding recorded the popular “Shout Bamalam” for Macon’s Confederate Records

(who swiftly reissued it on the Orbit label since some radio stations objected to the original

label’s confederate flag logo, during a time of terrible racial segregation in the South).

Redding cut the movingly emotive “These Arms Of Mine” at Stax studios in Memphis in

1962, backed by Booker T and the MGs, which surfaced on the subsidiary Volt label in

October, reaching the charts some six months later (and eventually selling a reported 800,000

copies). Subsequent singles “What My Heart Needs” and “Pain In My Heart”/“Something Is

Worrying Me,” recorded in September 1963, formed the bulk of debut album, Pain In My

Heart, which was padded out by standard cover tunes of songs such as “I Need Your Lovin’,”

Ben E King’s “Stand By Me” and Little Richard’s “Lucille.” The album, which surfaced at

the start of 1964, reached the top 20 of the US R&B chart and also hit the Billboard Hot 100;

this edition has an alternate track listing that includes the Trans World debut single tracks

“She’s All Right” and “Getting’ Hip,” as well as “Mary Had A Little Lamb,” the B-side to

“That’s What My Heart Needs.” Carefully remastered, spinning at 45 rpm for enhanced qudio quality.

亂 (luan) is the latest release from LA based producer/DJ Mix Match Emperor who weaves powerful soundscapes with an amalgamation of field recordings, obscure samples and original music compositions that combine to form a cohesive work of sound art that stays true to its name, translated to “Chaos”.
The combination of jazz samples and lo-fi mixing techniques create a cocktail that in parts resembles vaporwave whilst regularly pulling away from any genre formulation with sharp cuts into noise and then back through electronic rhythms reminiscent of Autechre.

Although listeners can often be tempted to pick out their favourite tracks, this record is definitely designed to be listened to in its entirety, as it takes you on a journey through varying phases that nod to both Steve Reich & the late Sam Mehran simultaneously.

The album is the leadoff release under the Strictly Frisky label with a limited cassette run available here for the first time.

The dawn of Symphonic Therion glooming at the horizon, yet still drenched in Dark Metal execution! Though it was their fourth full-length, and we had been given a sampling of their symphonic/gothic direction with “Symphony Masses: Ho Drakon Ho Megas”, “Lepaca Kliffoth” might remain the most memorable masterpiece of the band’s career along the follow-up “Theli”. A transitional phase between the band’s Death Metal roots and the hybrid of symphonic, gothic metal which they would carry forward for the rest of their career. This is an extremely dark album. The band retains their fascination with obscure occult magick and prophecies within the lyrics, and the music revolves around killer mid-paced Metal riffs drenched in the vocal libations of Christofer Johnsson. The album starts off strongly with “The Wings of the Hydra”, and from there on the serpent has snaked about your spine. An addictive piece with an obvious Celtic Frost influence, chanting vocals, simple synth tones and arabesque guitar melodies which evoke the mythical age of the song’s namesake. The album’s ‘hit single’, “The Beauty in Black” is glorious and gothic, it uses a pair of operatic vocalists (male and female), a sort of predecessor to the revolving door of guest musicians the band would use on their later albums. Other excellent tracks include the charging “Riders of Theli”, the crushing doom of “Black” which would have fit almost perfectly on “Into the Pandemonium”. The rest of the album is equally dark and enchanting, with other standouts being the title track and “Evocation of Vovin”. Synthesizers, flutes multiple vocalists, and the core of the band are all clear and precise throughout, yet it still carries a very raw and dark, ominous tone to it which trumps the later studio efforts. This may not be quite as symphonic as many Therion fans demand of their material in recent years, but it clearly marks the point where this band transformed from a innovative Death Metal band into the Gods of Gothic Metal. There are very few parallels to something like this, and it belongs in the collection of any fan of quality Occult Metal.

"A collection of pieces about the discovery of sounds and sonic universes hidden in objects, places and within yourself." - Feldermelder & Julian Sartorius

Commissioned by the legendary concert venue Bad Bonn in Düdingen, Switzerland, and the KRAN project, 'Bonn Route' is a collaborative album by electronic musician Feldermelder and percussionist Julian Sartorius. A location- based sound walk that can be experienced both on-site in the village of Düdingen, and as a full-length album. The eleven tracks are a sonic homage to, and an artistic interpretation of, a small village in Switzerland's heartland.

Building on his practice of site-specific performances and percussive sound walks, Julian Sartorius captured sounds and patterns at eleven locations: the train station and cemetery, on the banks of a stream, on a bicycle path, and in an intimate cavern above the village's lake, amongst other locales. Sartorius documented the soundscape of the village in field recordings, recorded samples of objects and captured percussive patterns by playing on the architecture and vegetation found on-site.

Feldermelder then processed these recordings into eleven compositions, preserving the locations' acoustic identities, but expanding on Sartorius' material. Besides the bassline on 'Veloweg', Feldermelder used only sound reactive synthesis and resonators to create additional sounds, layers and tracks, thus multiplying the spectrum and rhythms of the original material. 'Bonn Route' is a musical journey rooted in the emittance of sound, and our resonation with the world around us.

Feldermelder is a Swiss musician, sound designer, producer and installation artist. He is co-founder of -OUS and part of the audiovisual collective Encor.studio. He has previously released several releases on -OUS, both solo and in collaboration with Sara Oswald.

Drummer, artist and percussionist Julian Sartorius' precise and multi-layered rhythmical patterns are keen excursions into the hidden tones of found objects and prepared instruments, bridging the gap between organic timbres and the vocabulary of (experimental) electronic music. He has previously released his album "Locked Grooves" on -OUS.

The groove-obsessed Sdban Ultra label are pleased to present an outstanding new collection of musical gems from Belgium's thriving jazz scene, compiled by Belgian DJ and eclectic connoisseur, Lefto.



'Lefto presents Jazz Cats volume 2', released 24th June, features a balance of known and obscure artists. From the thrilling frenetic grooves and innovative soundscapes of Bandler Ching and the electronic influenced Stellar Legions (Andrew Claes from (STUFF.), to the jazz fusion collective L?p?GangGang and weaving musical odyssey that is M.CHUZI, 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats volume 2' is a melting pot of the best musical talent coming out one of the smallest countries in Europe. In addition, there's the beautiful unease of One Frame Movement, the laidback 'acoustic electronica' of Boombox Experiments, the classic funky jazz stylings of Cargo Mas and the cinematic The Brums, making 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats volume 2' an essential release for any jazzhead with a passion for new sounds.



"By collecting all the music for 'Jazz Cats volume 2', I come to the conclusion that we are living in an era of very talented individuals and collectives. Even more so than 4 years ago. I have the impression that the Belgian jazz sound is more diverse, with more influences and more creativity. There was a time that jazz would be the starting sample to create a beat for rappers, today it is electronica, rap or afrobeat that influences our youth to create a sound or style that suits their vision of what jazz sounds like in 2022. So, once again it is with extreme pleasure that I present to you some of the best present and next generation of jazz cats this little country has to offer."



2018's 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats' included tracks from some of Belgium's biggest hitters including Black Flower, STUFF., and Glass Museum who have all gone on to receive global acclaim. The album was given the accolade of 'Album of the Week' on Worldwide FM and also received further radio support from Jazz FM in addition to numerous glowing reviews.



Tastemaker, selector, curator, DJ and producer, Lefto is one of the most important and respected tastemakers around the world with a record collection of over 15,000 records. Cutting his teeth on jazz and new beat, a genre that moulded the shape of electronic music in 80s Belgium, Lefto formed his early tastemaker know-how via his dad's record collection.



Creating his fine ear for music and the cutting edge at Belgium's legendary Music Mania record store in his hometown Brussels, he has been a resident on Belgium's leading radio station Studio Brussel and currently hosts a show on Kiosk Radio (BE) and The Lot Radio (US). He also curates his own stage at the Dour Festival and hosts his own nights in Gent. World renowned, he regularly blesses sound systems from Tokyo to Seoul, Singapore to Manila, Kazakhstan to Germany, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with residencies in Amsterdam and New York.

Limited version 2LP on red vinyl in gatefold sleeve. An outstanding new collection of musical gems from Belgium's thriving jazz scene, compiled by Belgian DJ and eclectic connoisseur, Lefto.

The groove-obsessed Sdban Ultra label are pleased to present an outstanding new collection of musical gems from Belgium's thriving jazz scene, compiled by Belgian DJ and eclectic connoisseur, Lefto.



'Lefto presents Jazz Cats volume 2', released 24th June, features a balance of known and obscure artists. From the thrilling frenetic grooves and innovative soundscapes of Bandler Ching and the electronic influenced Stellar Legions (Andrew Claes from (STUFF.), to the jazz fusion collective L?p?GangGang and weaving musical odyssey that is M.CHUZI, 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats volume 2' is a melting pot of the best musical talent coming out one of the smallest countries in Europe. In addition, there's the beautiful unease of One Frame Movement, the laidback 'acoustic electronica' of Boombox Experiments, the classic funky jazz stylings of Cargo Mas and the cinematic The Brums, making 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats volume 2' an essential release for any jazzhead with a passion for new sounds.



"By collecting all the music for 'Jazz Cats volume 2', I come to the conclusion that we are living in an era of very talented individuals and collectives. Even more so than 4 years ago. I have the impression that the Belgian jazz sound is more diverse, with more influences and more creativity. There was a time that jazz would be the starting sample to create a beat for rappers, today it is electronica, rap or afrobeat that influences our youth to create a sound or style that suits their vision of what jazz sounds like in 2022. So, once again it is with extreme pleasure that I present to you some of the best present and next generation of jazz cats this little country has to offer."



2018's 'Lefto presents Jazz Cats' included tracks from some of Belgium's biggest hitters including Black Flower, STUFF., and Glass Museum who have all gone on to receive global acclaim. The album was given the accolade of 'Album of the Week' on Worldwide FM and also received further radio support from Jazz FM in addition to numerous glowing reviews.



Tastemaker, selector, curator, DJ and producer, Lefto is one of the most important and respected tastemakers around the world with a record collection of over 15,000 records. Cutting his teeth on jazz and new beat, a genre that moulded the shape of electronic music in 80s Belgium, Lefto formed his early tastemaker know-how via his dad's record collection.



Creating his fine ear for music and the cutting edge at Belgium's legendary Music Mania record store in his hometown Brussels, he has been a resident on Belgium's leading radio station Studio Brussel and currently hosts a show on Kiosk Radio (BE) and The Lot Radio (US). He also curates his own stage at the Dour Festival and hosts his own nights in Gent. World renowned, he regularly blesses sound systems from Tokyo to Seoul, Singapore to Manila, Kazakhstan to Germany, San Francisco and Los Angeles, with residencies in Amsterdam and New York.

"The past 5 years we have taken our music all over the world: Europe, Asia, Africa besides our homeland Denmark, and even though we cannot speak with many of the people we meet, our music is a universal language that transcends borders. The meetings we have had (and continue to have) all over inspire us to create new music. But of course we are the composers of the music, so this is our representation of those meetings.

Our 3rd album is called AFROTROPISM. Tropism is a biological phenomenon that indicates growth of a plant in response to the environment; so when you see a plant turning for the sunlight, this is tropism. In other words, this is not so much about the plant's roots but more about how it reacts when it touches the air, feels sunlight or rain - in other words the outside world. So AFROTROPISM refers to the fact that we are drawn towards the African traditions, but we are "growing" our own music.

On our first two albums we have recorded extensively with African musicians, and AFROTROPISM is centered around The KutiMangoes (TKM) as a band. We are developing our artistic direction by going more in depth with how we can mix our inspirations with our own musical heritage. Our musical mission is (and has always been) to mix cultures and create our own sound.

With our background in jazz music, TKM counts virtuoso instrumentalists with a heartfelt intent and sound innovators with our horns, effect pedals, synthesizers, drums and percussion from all over the world. AFROTROPISM is a further and deeper development of our trademark bold sound that experiments with synthesizers, soundscapes and a bit of electronic effects without losing it's focus on groove, melody, atmosphere and musicianship."

The KutiMangoes, July 2019


About each track:

STRETCH TOWARDS THE SUN
This track opens up with a synthesizer groove that is inspired by the polyrhythmic grooves played by the balafon (a predecessor of the piano) from West Africa. Our rolling sequence could not be played on the balafon because of the key changes, but the basic idea comes from that instrument. Quick and light, we wanted to write a song where you can feel the sun coming out and feel the energy it's rays give. The combination of the programmed groove, the horn-arrangement, the huge percussion section and the live instruments makes for a sound that we have not heard before, and it illustrates what this album is all about (and what the track's title refers to): that we stretch towards the things that give us energy – and that although our roots are in Denmark, when we encounter a musical tradition as rich as in West Africa, it changes us and our music.

A SNAKE IS JUST A STRING
The first time we saw Mali-bluesman extraordinaire Vieux Farka Touré on stage was just after we had played at a huge festival in Burkina Faso, and we almost literally caught on fire. Their groove was so strong and insistent that we were mesmerized, and it inspired us to come up with the opening guitar part of this song. Basically a bluesy tune with some unusual chord changes and a crazy synthesizer solo by Johannes Buhl Andresen reminiscent of that fuzzy guitar-sound we love so much in the Mali blues. The title is an homage to the Nigerian writer Chinua Acheba, who in his masterpiece novel "Things Fall Apart" tells that in the village during the night, to ward off the fear of darkness, people would call dangerous animals by a different name: don't be afraid, a snake is just a string.

KEEP YOU SAFE
It is a basic human necessity to have a place where you can feel safe. But there are far too many people in our world that fear for their safety, their livelihood, their children, their relatives – and this is surely not a feeling that helps us to flourish as humans. With this song we are saying that we all need to make it a priority to help our fellow humans to feel safe. And of course, if our song can offer a feeling of safety and comfort for a short time to those who listen, we are truly thankful.

MONEY IS THE CURSE
This track is directly inspired by Fela Kuti's ability to create music that is both physical and political. Dance music with a serious message about our times. For the solo part we wanted a more melancholy, pensive feel (than the full-on baritone-trombone melody) and also wanted to experiment with some choppy, stuttering effects to make the horns sound desperate. Money is the curse because it can become the objective of our life; money is the curse because it changes the relationships we have with our fellow humans. Money is the curse.

THORNS TO FRUIT
This melody is inspired by the scales and developments of a traditional Bambara folk-song. We love the way these melodies constantly evolve with small developments and changes. We felt like an accompaniment that is really dry, sparse and earthy would fit well and then made a contrasting solo part. As a group we are interested in how to develop our improvisations together and create sonic landscapes that evoke a distinctive atmosphere – so here, we have no soloist, but a collection of synthesizer parts, saxophone lines and guitar-sounds that together create a dreamy and lush ambience.

SAND TO SOIL
We started out with a short ngoni riff played by our good friend and master musician Aboubacar Konaté. We then sampled it, built soundscapes and our own both meditative and pumping groove around it. We created a melody with both melancholy and joy, with afterthought and impulse and then the brilliant Aske Drasbæk added an emotive and blistering saxophone solo. The title refers to the contrasts in our humanism. As part of our human nature, we have a dark side that drives us (and each other) towards destruction – making the fertile soil into barren sand. The title is an encouragement to emphasize the opposite movement in our nature: to create life and help it flourish. We keep ourselves human by insisting that we must never forget this side of our nature no matter how tough, tiresome or trying it might be. Let's keep our focus on the light, the warmth, the positive energy – that can turn the cold stone into fertile ground.

SAOR in Scottish Gaelic means free, without obligations, unconstrained. All of these characteristics intrinsic to the music of SAOR, the musical entity spearheaded by sole member Andy Marshall. Presenting his fifth album and first release on Season of Mist, 'Origins' comes across as a more raging, black metal-infused effort, copiously evocative in its imagery and even melancholic in places, but decisively strong and abrasive at the same time.

For fans of: SOJOURNER, WINTERFYLLETH, DRUDKH, UADA

SAOR in Scottish Gaelic means free, without obligations, unconstrained. All of these characteristics intrinsic to the music of SAOR, the musical entity spearheaded by sole member Andy Marshall. Presenting his fifth album and first release on Season of Mist, 'Origins' comes across as a more raging, black metal-infused effort, copiously evocative in its imagery and even melancholic in places, but decisively strong and abrasive at the same time.

For fans of: SOJOURNER, WINTERFYLLETH, DRUDKH, UADA

Classic 2001 collection from Detroit's ADULT. 20th anniversary of the original release, 10th anniversary of the first vinyl pressing. Available for the first time in red & black marbled vinyl. "We've wanted to re-release this album for some time," says ADULT.'s Adam Lee Miller, "but we weren't ready until now. We have some new material in the pipeline, and we thought this would be a nice way to reintroduce ourselves." It is indeed a nice way for the hugely respected Detroit duo to herald their return to the world of music, especially for anyone who missed out on Resuscitation the first time around _ the album was never available digitally until the 2012 re-release and vinyl pressing on Ghostly International. The reissue thus presented the chance to own one of the more influential records of the early 2000s: either on double 12" LP or, for the first time, as a digital release. Now, in 2022, the vinyl is available for the first time in a new red and black marble colorway. When it first dropped in 2001, Resuscitation served as a de facto introduction to the duo, collecting a bunch of songs on CD that had only previously been available on hard-to-find singles and EPs. Eleven years later, it does the same thing, except this time around, we can see just how influential its creators' work has been _ and ADULT.'s music only sounds more remarkable with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, Resuscitation's combination of crisp beats, squelch-laden synths and Nicola Kuperus' detached monotone sounded like a broadcast from the future, steeped in the analog synth sounds of forebears like Kraftwerk but possessed of an ultramodern sheen all its own. The duo's visual aestheticwas just as important _ Kuperus' photography adorned all their album packaging (including this re-release), and their liveshows drew on a sense of what a reviewer once called "detached intrigue." Echoes of ADULT.'s aesthetic can be heard today in everythingfrom today's surfeit of analog synth-toting minimal wave bands to the highly stylized divas who dominate the pop charts. But really, in 2022 Resuscitation still sounds like no-one else.

A.B. Crentsil is a heavyweight of Highlife music and the main vocalist of Sweet Talks, one of the most popular Ghanaian bands of the 1970’s. In 1992, musician Charles Amoah and producer Richie Osei Kuffour offered him the opportunity to explore a new popular sound: Bürger Highlife. Little did he know these studio sessions would give birth to the biggest song of his career.
Charles Amoah, who had released his Sweet Vibrations LP in 1984 to great acclaim, extensively toured in Europe with bands such as Black Earth and Saraba, was eager to bring a new sound to Crentsil, an artist he had admired for years. Throughout the 1980’s, Highlife had been changing pretty radically, following the same evolution as Congolese Soukous, Caribbean Zouk and most popular black music
genres of that era: Heavy use of drum machines, synths and digital technology was conveniently replacing big bands and expensive
analog studios and equipments. Mostly recorded, produced or mixed in Germany, this new breed of electric Highlife dubbed ‘Bürger Highlife’ could be defined as a fusion of Disco, Jazz, Funk and Pop with the popular Highlife beats, rhythms and lyrics.
According to A.B. Crentsil, the name was a reference to the ever present American cultural influence on Ghanaian musicians. Charles
Amoah has his own take: “I initially called this particular kind of Highlife ‘Ethno Pop’. Bürger is the German word for citizen, and that’s how Ghanaian musicians living and working in Germany were calling each other”.
The music for both “Obi Baa Wiase'' and “Sika Be Ba” was entirely composed and played by Charles Amoah, using minimal equipment: a
DX7 synth, a Korg M1, a Yamaha RX5 drum machine, and an Akai 1000 sampler. A.B. Crentsil provided the lyrics for both tunes on the spot. Obi Ba Wiase’s message is one of gratitude and faith: it says we should appreciate our life way more and follow the example of people who have a lot less but still praise God all day.
Charles remembers fondly Crentsil’s larger than life personality: "A.B. slept a lot, he really loved sleeping. His lack of punctuality was easily dismissed by his wonderful sense of humour and it wasn't uncommon to find musicians rolling with laughter on the studio floor."
Charles also remembers vividly the "Obi Baa Wiase" session: he could feel the magic in the air while working on the soon to be hit, and
knew something special was happening. A.B. asked for a break in the middle of the session, which Charles adamantly refused until the song was finished and the magic fully captured.
Success was not immediate, and Charles was first a little concerned by the lack of buzz following the immediate release of the Gyae Me
Life Ma Me album. But a few months down the line, the situation took a new turn. "Obi Baa Wiase" was making its way into radio playlists,
weddings and festive celebrations. It was covered by local bands, and soon most of Ghana and its European and American diasporas were hooked. It became A.B. Crentsil’s most requested song at live events for the following decades.
As producer Richie Moore wrote on the album back cover : "A perfect integration of two musical geniuses, the result of which are the
scintillating tracks of music on this record… so all you party fans go onto the floor and dance the body music"

FEAN II is the following of the first opus released on Moving Furniture Records in 2018, from some materials of the improvisatory collective FEAN based around Jan Kleefstra (voice, poems), Romke Kleefstra (guitar, bass and effects), Mariska Baars (vocals) and Rutger Zuydervelt (electronics) from Netherlands, joined by the Belgian musicians Annelies Monseré (church organ, keyboard), Sylvain Chauveau (tuned percussion, radio) and Joachim Badenhorst (acoustic and amplified clarinet, bass clarinet, saxophone). Like The Alvaret Ensemble, this project is the result of some improvisations in a Church. But at not the same place.

The FEAN project gets its inspiration from the ecological decay of peatland in the Dutch province Friesland and in other parts of Europe. Agriculture and peat extraction are threatening the landscape severely and with long term consequences. This forms the underlying thought for the improvised recording sessions, which were overseen by Jan Switters. Although the Piiptsjilling members are obviously used to perform and record together, adding the three Belgian guests (who didn’t play together before) added an extra dimension to the group’s dynamics, resulting in a concentrated yet playful series of improvisations, that were later mixed and edited for the project.

For laaps, that was an obvious choice to continue the exquisite corpse project with FEAN and a part of the same members than the first release, just before to move to the Spring season and some news bridges, colors and sounds imprints to come.

O’o share many of the musical characteristics of their ornithological namesake. The Kaua’i O’O produced the most exquisite birdsong before its extinction in Hawaii in the late 1980s. The beauty and character of its voice was delicate and mysterious, tuneful and surprising. You can experience it with just a cursory websearch, a haunting cri de coeur from the last century. If the poor O’O is consigned to history, then life is just beginning for this French duo, based in Spain, who’ve won plaudits and awards already in their short musical lifespan.

O’o are about to release their sublime debut album Touche. This is not an endling, it’s just the beginning: “I found the name on a website of weird English language words, and I loved the way the letters were arranged like a pair of glasses,” says O’o singer Victoria Suter. “Afterwards, I went onto YouTube and started listening to the last bird of its species, calling for a mate that would never come. I thought: ‘Oh my God, that’s so sad’. Then we talked about the name and we thought it could be a nice thing to honour it and keep it alive in some way.”

Suter met her musical partner Mathieu Daubigné at college in Agen, South West France, when the pair were studying music theory in their teens. Victoria moved to Barcelona in 2010; Mathieu followed six years later. Their debut EP, Spells, appeared in 2018 a beautifully crafted patchwork of vocals and samples that is redolent of the uncanny vocalese of Laurie Anderson. The bird makes an appearance at the beginning of the EP: “Sweet tooth beak. Soft melody peak / Oh O’o, go round and round in circles / Looking for a honeydrop, til you vanish, til you drop”.

That sense of profound longing for something lost is carried over to Touche, as well as the same heightened sensory awareness of the world around them. What has developed in spades is the creative process. O’o have blossomed organically, augmenting their pop sensibilities. Avant-garde techniques have been brought to heel as the pair create off-kilter pop music that warms the heart and nourishes the brain. The catalyst that enabled this bold pop transformation came with the song ‘Touche’ itself, a saucy chanson at the heart of the album. Suter’s wry narrative about a botanical femme fatale is inserted into a lithe and skittish song with reggaeton beats and an inviting, balmy atmosphere.

“The song is about a flower which attracts male insects, producing the very same smell as the female of the species,” explains Victoria. “The poor male is fooled by the sex-appeal of this botanical trap, and gets so excited that he exhausts himself and wastes all his other chances of ulterior mating and having any offspring. The flower entices the insect in in mermaid-like fashion, to come nearer and touch her. It’s the hot track!”

‘Touche’ reaches into hitherto unexplored areas of pop, while the rest of the album is accessible in the way that James Blake, Radiohead or Kate Bush are accessible, and it always challenges, in a way that pop isn’t supposed to. Suter writes playful, poignant, observational songs that tell stories as well as tell us something about ourselves. Songs like ‘Dorica Castra’ are built upon the voice as an instrument, centrifugal and layered from its core.

Complimentary to this method is Daubigné, who brings startling innovation with found sounds, samples and clever vocal manipulations—creating unique, otherworldly sonic flourishes. A guitar whirs like a musical spinning top on ‘Spin’, created in Ableton; an Ondes Martenot appears to make a guest appearance on the title track, though it’s the ingenuity of the Prophet 8 synthesiser. “I’ll often say to Mathieu, ‘what’s that?’” says Suter, He’ll reply, ‘that’s your voice’.”

O’o found their own voice when they won a competition held by the legendary festival organisers Primavera Sound. Victoria entered the band into a competition she saw on Instagram, sending off rough demos on the final day of entry, thinking little more about it other than the fact Mathieu might be annoyed. Soon they would have to build a live set from scratch and figure out how to present their music for the first time. At stake was seventy hours of recording time at Aclam studios, used by Rosalía and Kendrick Lamar, and for the winner a coveted spot at the festival. A pool of 350 acts were whittled down, and then O’o triumphed at a Battle of the Band style face off.

The O’O might be extinct, but O’o the band have learned how to fly. Just watch them go.

From deep in the heart of Moomin Valley, frozen in time for many
midwinters passed, comes a genuine treasure chest of never
heard Moomin melodies and instrumental comet songs composed
for the continued animated adventures of our Fuzzy-Felt freak folk
friends who disappeared from UK TV pastures in the mid-1980s.
From the top of the Hobgoblin’s Hat and the bottom of Snufkin’s
satchel, original Moomins composer Graeme Miller (‘The Carrier
Frequency’) kindly shares this patchwork selection of spellbinding
sound poems and percussive peons made using the very same
selection of ocarinas, kalimbas, miniature squeak boxes, Waspy
synths, cornflake box shakers and a seemingly endless array of
talent and lo-fi home studio trickery.

Regarded as one of the most enigmatic, beguiling and haunting
imported children’s programmes to ever grace UK TV screens,
‘The Moomins’ was one of the first-ever commissions by Anne
Wood (‘The Teletubbies’) who ingeniously replaced the original
Polish/Austrian/Finnish soundtrack with homemade music
experiments by unknown post-punk theatre students Graeme
Miller and Steve Shill (aka The Commies From Mars) who, after
the screening of two unforgettable series in 1983 and 1985, were
left in eager anticipation of rescoring further Moomin adventures
with new melodies, arrangements and sound designs, which then
lingered in the ether waiting until the Groke awoke and
Snorkmaiden sang once more.

With future felt adventures screened exclusively in Poland and
Germany for many years (often as feature films) these unheard
recordings are the only genuine musical sequel to the bizarre UK
version of ‘The Moomins’ and stand as important inclusions in
Graeme Miller’s own portfolio of theatrical theme music and sound
installations as part of The Impact Theatre Cooperative, including
collaborations with artists and writers such as Russell Hoban.

Witnessed in fragmented form during a short run of incredible rare
live screenings at The Barbican Theatre and various film festivals,
this record marks the first time this music has been heard in its
original full-length form, free from sound effects, dialogue and
whimpers of euphoric joy and nostalgia from those who have
continued to crave the company of our Moomintrolls and their
mysterious music over the last five decades.

James Hinton aka The Range veröffentlicht neues Album nach 6 Jahren. Mercury ist stimmungsvoll, mitreißend und unbestreitbar von Rave beeinflusst.

Auf Mercury baut Hinton auf den Techniken auf, die er auf seiner von der Kritik gefeierten LP Potential aus dem Jahr 2016 etabliert hat, und versucht, eine menschliche Verbindung im Internetzeitalter zu schaffen, indem er Vokalisten aus den Ecken von YouTube, Instagram und Periscope sampelt. "Ich habe das Gefühl, dass ich Wege finden kann, mich auf eine Art und Weise auszudrücken, für die ich in der realen Welt zu schüchtern oder unfähig bin", sagt Hinton über diesen Prozess. Mercury ist stimmungsvoll, mitreißend und unbestreitbar von Rave beeinflusst. Obwohl es IDM-Größen wie Aphex Twin und Grime-Pionieren wie Skepta verpflichtet ist, bewegt sich Hinton auf dem Album außerhalb der Grenzen eines bestimmten Genres. Das Ergebnis ist sowohl maximalistisch als auch zurückhaltend: riesige, weiche Synthies treffen auf treibende Beats, die die komprimierten Vocals seiner sorgfältig ausgewählten Clips ausgleichen. "Mercury ist mein bisher vielseitigstes Album", sagt Hinton. "Meine Erinnerungen an Rave-Musik, Grime und MPC-Musik spielen in fast jedem Song eine große Rolle." Mercury wurde von James Hinton mit zusätzlicher Produktion von Damian Taylor (Bicameral, Ricercar, Relegate) produziert, von Lexxx (Alex Dromgoole) gemischt, mit Ausnahme von "Relegate", das von Damian Taylor gemischt wurde, und von Dave Cooley bei Elysian Masters in Los Angeles, CA gemastert.

Black Truffle is pleased to present Landscape and Voice, a radical new work (and rare vinyl release) from major Japanese sound artist Toshiya Tsunoda. Undoubtedly one of the most influential artists working with location recordings since the 1990s, Tsunoda’s work possesses a rigorously searching quality that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Tsunoda is known to many listeners for the subtle atmospheric poetry of his early Extract from Field Recording Archive series, which focussed on vibrations recorded in various indoor and outdoor environments in his native Miura Peninsula, often inside pipes, bottles and other vessels. In more recent years, his work has explored the implications of his claim that field recording should be seen as ‘depiction’ rather than ‘documentation’. He has explored disorienting editing and processing in his works with Taku Unami, and, perhaps most radically, represented Maguchi Bay as a kind of kinetic sculpture for shaking speakers by removing all but the inaudible low frequencies from a field recording (Low Frequency Observed at Maguchi Bay).

One of the recurrent concerns of Tsunoda’s recent work, as he explains in the crystalline liner notes accompanying this release, is ‘exploring how I can establish a subjective relationship with an environment, rather than seeing it merely as an object to be recorded’. This has taken various forms, from documenting simultaneously an outdoor environment and the blood flowing through the listener/recorder’s body (captured with a stethoscope) on The Temple Recordings, to representing his own experience of the landscape as made up of ‘grains of space and time’ by inserting looped fragments into field recordings in Grains of Spring.

On Landscape and Voice, this meeting between subject and object becomes an almost mystical union between the natural and the human. As with all of Tsunoda’s work, a relatively simple concept leads to compelling, thought-provoking results. Landscape and Voice combines vowel sounds spoken by six voices with short, looped fragments of field recordings, their noise character suggesting consonants: voice and landscape thus join together in something like words. The record consists of three pieces, each using a different, richly evocative field recording, which periodically freezes, catching on a looped fragment to which is synchronised an abruptly looped spoken vowel sound. The lengths between these interruptions vary, as do the tempi of the loops. The interruption of these lushly immersive recordings of the world – bristling with bird song, rushing water, distant traffic, and clinking metal – only serves to intensify them, as if the depicted environment itself had been returned to the listener each time it abruptly reappears. At the same time, the constant interruption creates an uncannily frozen effect, as if the recorded environment were an object rather than a stretch of recorded time. When combined with the bare human presence of the vowel sounds, the result is both austere and magical. Pressed on 45RPM for maximum fidelity, in a gorgeous sleeve designed by Lasse Marhaug with liner notes from the composer, Landscape and Voice is a radical proposition from one of the deepest thinkers in contemporary sound.

140g Black vinyl LP – Printed inner sleeve – Sealed plastic sleeve

In Trux We Pux is an editorial project organized by the Porto based label and collective Favela Discos. Focusing on the city’s thriving experimental and improvised music scene, it sets out to portrait in a series of four volumes some of the characteristic sounds and collaborative practices that have been in development in Porto during the last few years.

In Trux We Pux 02 contains the first of Favela Discos’ collective pieces to be published, and it was chosen to represent a long series of site-specic pieces developed by the collective since its formation. Most of the time these pieces remain lost in time or in the label’s archives.

Desilusão Óptica is an audiovisual piece developed for the festival Serralves em Festa 2017 and was recorded between the concert and rehearsals. The piece is influenced by the book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks, and tries to explore the notion of auditory hallucination, in this case based on the idea of a phantom sound unconnected to its object.

Starting quietly with a single flute note, Desilusão Óptica slowly grows fuller but more uncomfortable as the pitch rises gradually in a hypnotic effect. The sound we hear is a mix of the sound produced live, its manipulation and repetition, thus the piece exists between the time when it happens, its immediate repetition and ghosts of past sounds.

The flute, delayed and sampled, embodies both the sounds it produces and memories of past sounds, creating a confusion between objecto and sound. The sound is produced by an object but is at the same time separated from it, like in Mulholland Drive when we watch a singer emotionally dedicated to a performance and whose voice keeps on singing even when her body collapses.

Like in Dub Music, the musicians are divided into two groups: those who play, in this case divided by winds, percussion and electric guitars, and the dub master / sound manipulators who launch samples of previous recordings and manipulate the sound that is produced live, through loopers and delay pedals.

The Spy from Cairo (aka Moreno "Zeb" Visini) returns with his 5th studio album on Wonderwheel Recordings: "Animamundi" features some special collaborations from his travels & live shows from over the past few years. The album reflects the move from his home in NYC to his mother's home in a quiet village in Italy to take care of her in her older age. It's been a difficult transition with Italy's challenging experience with the pandemic, including some of the strictest measures enforced on the public. He recalls by stating "This album was conceived between 2020 and 2021 in Italy, between lockdowns, restrictions, and various pandemic mandates. Its message is of hope and positivity - a reminder that we are all spiritual beings… Free spiritual beings… and that freedom can't be broken."

"Animamundi" is a reconfirmation that The Spy from Cairo overcomes all obstacles & delivers a diverse progression of his iconic "Arabadub" sound, with the help of collaborators like Andalucian vocalist Carmen Estevez, Mexican vocalist Mambe Rodriguez on the heavy hitting "Criminal," Egyptian vocalist Adii Small on "Beautiful Baraka," and former touring band member, the multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Fatima Gozlan from Hungary. The music can vary from heavy deep electronic synths and live eastern instrumentation with Zeb playing oud, saz, chiftelli, bass, percussion, and other instruments, all along giving it his signature dub mixing style.

The songs take inspiration from a wide range of musical traditions and cultures, including Turkish (on "Cosmic Pasha," "Qanun in Dub" – using the qanun, an instrument popular across the Middle East, with a sound between the European harp and a dulcimer – and "Black Sea," which utilises a typical Dabke melody), Egyptian ("Mizmirized," sampling riffs from a mizmar), Indian ("Seeds of Culture), and Sufi ("Divination," a devotional composition), fusing these reference points with healthy doses of cumbia, funk, reggae, psychedelic, and dub. Thematically, "Animamundi" deals with some of the struggles Zeb – and all of us – have faced the last two years, through the lens of his personal experiences. Yet, the tone of the record manages to remain positive, like an uplifting dance through the world's sounds; after all, "Animamundi" means "soul of the world" in Greek. With album art by Sam Angeli and layout design by Marcial Arts, this beautiful album is a truly well-rounded worldwide collaboration.

"Animamundi" will be released digitally on March 4th, 2022, with the LP to follow shortly after.

REMASTERED

Grönland Records announce a revised, remastered reissue of “Sleepwalkers” by DAVID SYLVIAN. Available as a gatefold 2LP with exclusive art print and as a gatefold digipack CD, this new edition also features the previously unreleased track “Modern Interiors”.

in the 00s, DAVID SYLVIAN produced two of his strongest and most solitary statements, BLEMISH and MANAFON. but those records don’t tell the whole story. during that the same period, SYLVIAN created an alternate body of work: a series of collaborations and side projects with leading talents of pop and improv, electronic and contemporary classical music. the best of these recordings are gathered here on SLEEPWALKERS, meticulously sequenced and remixed: the fruits of one-off meetings and lifelong partnerships, they jump from bliss to intrigue, romance to sensuality, as arch experiments lead into the lushest pop.

the single ‘world citizen – i won’t be disappointed,’ written with RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, is a sublime example, with an impeccable melody and lyric warmed by SYLVIAN’S gorgeous tenor. SYLVIAN has worked with SAKAMOTO for close to three decades. by contrast, on ‘pure genius,’ a collaboration with CHRIS VRENNA aka tweaker, he sounds like he’s walked into a heist flick, singing the part of a delusional, dangerous bedroom genius. as sylvian explains, tracks like this ‘give me a chance to write in a way that’s completely non-personal, playful. it’s an exercise of some kind, working within the parameters of a given assignment.’

intrigue of a different kind drives ‘sugarfuel,’ with music by JEAN-PHILIPPE VERDIN, aka READYMADE FC. the lyrics offered ‘an opportunity to grapple with a more overt sexual theme than anything i’d previously attempted, as suggested by a vocal sample in the original track provided, a threateningly insistent ‘i’m on your side.’ so i took that as my point of entry and ran with it. i would love to write more on this subject should i find the right context. you’re always aware of walking a thin line exploring sexuality with language alone. the failings of the great and the good are strewn all around.’

NINE HORSES’ ‘wonderful world’ strolls in on a black tie bassline and the echoing coos of swedish chanteuse STINA NORDENSTAM, whose high chirps brush hands with SYLVIAN’S lead; there’s the blistering ‘money for all’ by FRIEDMAN and SYLVIAN, an oblique response to the fallout of 9/11 and the war on iraq. this is followed by the last known recording of SYLVIAN’S singing voice in over a decade, ‘do you know me now?’, a live studio recording later augmented by JAN BANG, EIVIND AARSET and ERIK HONORÉ. it’s certainly a title that’s become more relevant over time as SYLVIAN, in the latter stages of his career, repeatedly comes face to face with a new generation of admirers fixated on the life and times of the band formed by his younger self. SYLVIAN is one of only a handful of musicians to have successfully moved on from overt pop beginnings into a domain all his own but is consistently plagued by the misguided desires or expectations of some unfamiliar with his evolution to do a u-turn, pick up where he left off in the late 90s. although this compilation, as well as his writing for NINE HORSES, adequately shows SYLVIAN’S traditional love of melody is
intact, that it’s consistently remained part of his output, there’s no denying his focus has shifted, evolved.
the refusal to embrace complacency, the need to cover new ground ‘as older generations of popular musicians have a moral duty to explore despite, or because of, the greater possibility of failure’ will, i believe, lead to a reassessment of his later work that embraces a sightly more complex relationship with what we’re referring to as ‘melodic’, accompanied by an exploration of improvisation without dogma or beholden to any ‘givens’ for which he’s not infrequently been castigated. for SYLVIAN, there are no such boundaries. it’s obvious that different facets of his work co-exist without conflict but not necessarily for the majority of his audience. again, this places SYLVIAN in the odd, rare, unenviable(?) position of moving forwards leaving many in his devoted audience behind as, should he decide to return to music, it’s unlikely he’ll be aiming to placate an audience in love with work that preceded the 00s. in fact we’ve no idea where new work, should it surface, may lead.

SLEEPWALKERS also spotlights the innovators who contributed to MANAFON and BLEMISH. CHRISTIAN FENNESZ hangs a crackling, shimmering curtain behind the vocal on ‘transit,’ matching his signature mass of sui generis sounds to sylvian’s stately performance. and the title track began with an instrumental handed to SYLVIAN by MARTIN BRANDLMAYR of POLWECHSEL, soon after the first recording session for MANAFON. spite crackles in the gaps between the percussion, and onkyo artists TOSHIMARU NAKAMURA and SACHIKO M set the stage for the scathing lyrics in the chorus.

it cuts close to the bone and so do the two spoken word cuts, ‘angel’ and ‘thermal,’ produced by SAMADHISOUND recording artists JAN BANG and ERIK HONORÉ (and featuring ARVE HENRIKSEN on trumpet). SYLVIAN describes the latter work as a ‘love poem’ to his daughter. ‘‘thermal’ reflects on a period when our time in sonoma, ca was coming to an end. we’d stayed in temporary accommodation which had lulled us into a false sense of security. we had pear, apple, lemon, and figs trees growing in the yard. a small but exotic paradise. a cocoon. but the cracks were beginning to show in the relationship between ex-wife INGRID CHAVEZ and i which is where i think this underlying sense of anxiety, which runs throughout the poem, is derived from, coupled with the need to provide physical and spiritual stability to the children, the youngest of whom was just under two at the time. the poem is addressed to her. our world was dissipating, coming apart at the seams, but we were an island unto ourselves.’

‘five lines’ marked the start of a new partnership with acclaimed young composer DAI FUJIKURA, who at the time of recording was also working on remixes of MANAFON for what became DIED IN THE WOOL. the string quartet was performed by the celebrated ICE ENSEMBLE and written for SYLVIAN, who FUJIKURA cites as an early influence. says SYLVIAN, ‘the composition moves through numerous changes in time signature but as i had no knowledge of what these were i just relied on my gut instinct, and responded, as i always do, with what felt right to me, composing an entirely new melody in the process. some months later i was working in a studio in london and dai dropped by. i rather tentatively asked if he’d like to hear a rough mix of the song as it stood, painfully aware that my contribution might make no sense to him at all but, to my relief he loved the result.’

there’s one further new addition to this collection, the first official release of a track composed in response to the tsunami in fukushma, ‘modern interiors’, featuring SYLVIAN once again in collaboration with BANG and AARSET.

like 2000s EVERYTHING AND NOTHING, SLEEPWALKERS is a retrospective of a particular decade when SYLVIAN was free of major label interference and could follow his own instincts without having to explaining himself – but it’s also an eye-opening complement to his solo releases. as SYLVIAN explains, ‘some collaborations seem to be a one-off exchange but you can never be too certain of that fact. others have been long term. in this respect, RYUICHI comes to mind. there’s others with whom you hope to continue working as you feel you’ve barely scratched the surface. other times offers come out of the blue, welcome, inspired. regardless, it’s wonderfully explorative to have so many possibilities to juggle with. each collaboration seems timely. it’s as if there’s a rightness to the exchange at a given moment in time.’

in the meantime, we hope you enjoy the work presented here, personally selected, remixed and sequenced and entirely remastered. these are the orphans, abused, estranged, exotic, migrating from diverse corners of the globe, brought together under one roof which they're learning to share despite their differences.

‘as many of you will already be aware, despite relatively continuous work on solo albums, i’ve maintained strong ties with a number of musicians throughout my life in one context or another. on this new collection, let’s call it SLEEPWALKERS 2.0, a selection of collaborative work produced over the period encompassing blemish through to manafon, i’ve included compositions by nine horses as well as more fleeting flirtations and one-offs. neglected offspring. represented also is long term friend and writing partner, RYUICHI SAKAMOTO, as well as more recent but potentially equally productive partnerships such as CHRISTIAN FENNESZ, ARVE HENRIKSEN and contemporary classical composer DAI FUJIKURA.
i hope you enjoy the work presented here, personally selected, remixed and sequenced and entirely remastered. these are the orphans, abused, estranged, exotic, migrating from diverse corners of the globe, brought together under one roof which they're learning to share despite their differences.

we contain multitudes. we’re nothing if not contradictory.’

DAVID SYLVIAN, 2010

(consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life: aldous huxley)

Technology for the Afterlife (aka Victor Groth) is an ambient/new age
artist from Denmark, set to release his debut album Interpretations of
Eternity on Cracki Records in the spring.
The instrumental album explores the frontiers between faith and knowledge, consciousness and oblivion, past and future. It is about longing for a time when rationality and spirituality are not arch enemies, but one and the same.
When there is neither science nor religion: Only mythology.

Solo bedroom-pop project of Michael Ramos (Flowertown, April Magazine, Hectorine). Mostly recorded between last Christmas and New Year's during a window of isolation at home, “Hey There Flower” preserves Tony Jay’s prowess at making beautifully eerie lo-fi pop; like a hazy memory where your favorite Sixties girl-group melody is perpetually slowed down. Without a band to practice with, Tony Jay recorded the music alone, but recruited a slew of friends to remotely record backing vocals: Karina Gill (Cindy), Griffin Jones (Galore), Kati Mashikian (Mister Baby), Alexis Harper (Al Harper), & Hannah Lew (Cold Beat). "Hey There Flower", the most recent release from the prolific and mysterious Tony Jay delivers real melodies -- both lacey with vocal harmonies and dusty with layered guitars -- as fans have come to expect. This release also carries forward and elaborates on Tony Jay's tradition of songs that express a kind of naked honesty about things we all know -- love and loneliness and all that -- while communicating at the same time a wry edge of skepticism, so that the songs are like coins spinning on edge before landing heads, tails, or lost under the couch. Tony Jay brings us into a nostalgia where we recognize moods from music of the past -- Marc Boland definitely comes to mind, as well as Velvet Underground of the Nico era, and Tony Jay even covers Francoise Hardy on this collection -- but the songs create a three dimensional space with what feels like a thousand layers so that instead of being thrown back in time, it's like stepping into a little world with its own laws of nature, of which the listener gets just a few hints. - Karina Gill, Cindy/Flowertown. “Hey There Flower” is introduced by thudding snare beats eliciting reverb-stained tattered noisy guitar scrapes, to weave abrasive shimmery emotive vibrations, imbued with shattered nostalgic dreams, lit by brittle yet dazzling forsaken keyboard flows, over submerged and distorted male vocal’s whispery deluge of obsessive longing, lonely melancholy, and dark desire to exude a hazy gritty concoction of awkward sadness and brooding unrest.” White Light // White Heat // “What Tony sketches are concise commentaries on love, loneliness and a few things in between. His mode of expression is sparse, intense, and captivating. The arrangements are invariably lo-fi and slow tempo, blanketed with a fuzzy hiss. And it only took one listen to decide that it is a very special album. It has a '60s feel, albeit washed in an eerie slowcore machine. An ace example is "September Skies", which could be the 1965 'last dance' at the prom for the introverted students.” - When You Motor Away

Having initially met more than a decade ago at a local community radio station, sometimes doing guest slots on each other’s live, improvised noise shows, Cormac Culkeen and Dave Grenon knew they had a mutual interest in working with sonic textures. They listened to each other’s bands for a handful of years, and in 2017, “made good on a threat” that they’d been making for quite a long time: to start a band. At Cormac’s gentle but clear urging—declaring that they’d gone ahead and booked a space in which to record a video—the two wrote their first song, “Sebaldus,” an ambitious 12-minute trip, which also serves as the fireworks finale to their self-titled debut album. With surges of pathos that smooth out into something more soothing in turn, Cormac goes: “The hunter, you’ve seen him / The archer, his arrows are strong / And hunger, you’ve known her / I know the winter is long.” The track is as much about enduring a Canadian winter as it is about the eponymous 8th century hermit, shot through with sublimated desire. As Cormac put it, Joyful Joyful’s songs are “a little bit outside of time.” But while the lyrics beg close, oblique reading unto themselves, there’s also a distinct sense that they’re only one of many more ways that the duo shapes sound. Cormac, whose voice is like a sea with irregular tides, lights up about an idea in traditional sean-nós Irish music that songs already exist and are out there; it’s up to the singer to become the conduit. This belief in music as something to be channelled, and something more than sound, resonates with the singer’s fundamentalist religious past. To paraphrase: lots of group singing, harmonies, no instrumentation, totally unmediated, no priest, congregational—not choral, not a performance, not about talent, the spirit moves through people. “Of course that informs how I think about singing,” Cormac says. So, when they were exiled from the church because of their queerness, they took the music with them, dislocating it from its dogmatic bounds but not from its transcendent potential. This record might be thought of, then, as a kind of queering of sacred, devotional traditions—or at the very least, a space where all of these things can be held at once. Perhaps perceivable by some as contradictions, these intersecting influences create the conditions for an incredibly singular sound. Dave is steady and exploratory in his handling of this multiplicity, arranging sounds as they’re revealed, corralling them, coaxing them into form. “Because Dave is there,” Cormac says, “I get to sing three times higher, and three times lower, and faster, and backwards, and all of these sounds! That are there. They’re all there.” When asked about early musical memories, Cormac recalled an immediate fascination with harmony: from demanding that the first person they ever heard singing it explain what they were doing, to always (still, to this day) singing in harmony with their twin sister around the house, to being part of a children’s choir that sang soprano in Handel’s Messiah—not realizing until they entered the room with all the other ranges that their learned melody was but one part of the whole. Just as tellingly, Dave reflects on his early attraction to “abstraction and becoming abstract,” describing childhood afternoons messing with microphone and speaker feedback loops, producing long, enduring sounds with almost undetectable variations. In a way unique to the coalescing of these two listeners, notions of harmony are central to their output. Dave samples field recordings, old keyboards and synths, and vocal drones, running the live singing through four or five parallel effects chains, sampling and treating everything again in the moment. “Another way to put it is that Cormac’s voice comes into the board and then comes back out shifted, delayed, and shattered; Cormac and I hear it, live with it, and respond,” Dave says. This work is contingent not only on a deep intuition (neither of them read sheet music) of polyphony and due proportion (something St Thomas Aquinas famously listed as an attribute of beauty) but also on their connection to each other and ability to read subtle cues. Dave says they’d hold each other’s hands while performing if it was more convenient to do so, riffing on something else Cormac mentioned about traditional Irish singing: that someone would always hold the singer’s hand, for fear that without a tether to the ground they might find themselves utterly lost, unsure how to return. Joyful Joyful doesn’t shy away from offering such experiences of departure; they’re willing to unsettle their audiences because they themselves are unsettled. Their shared penchant for spooky, heavy music, and self-described “omnivorous” listening practices equip them with an array of sonic concepts that support this effort; Diamanda Galás, The Rankin Family, Pan Sonic, Pauline Oliveros, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Yma Sumac, and Catholic hymnody were just a few that came up. Observing their audience gives them insight about the effect of each song—something they considered while arranging the album. Its arc is marked by soft, sometimes sudden oscillations between cacophony and euphony, day and night (listen for insects), and from sexual, visceral entanglements to more ephemeral, celestial ones. Front to back, it arouses expansion, unraveling. Of lightning, Vicki Kirby writes: “quite curious initiation rites precede these electrical encounters. An intriguing communication, a sort of stuttering chatter between the ground and the sky, appears to anticipate the actual stroke.” By all accounts, something similar seems to happen at Joyful Joyful shows, between those on the stage and those off it, between what’s earthly and what’s beyond. “A lightning bolt is not a straightforward resolution of the buildup of a charge difference between the earth and a cloud … there is, as it were, some kind of nonlocal communication effected between the two,” writes Karen Barad, extrapolating on Kirby’s thought. Cormac acknowledges that while they and Dave play a role in this mysterious charge that comes about, they’re not solely responsible. However ineffable it may be, it’s undoubtedly a form of communion—and a sensuously shocking one at that

180g vinyl pressing.

During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says.

Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyō Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains.

Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyō Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums), Jesica Rubino (violin) and Marian Benitez (vocals, now his wife), released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition.

Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.

Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within.

The second album from Wehrmacht, “Biermächt” saw the band maturing while still retaining their Thrashcore roots. Released in mid-1988, “Biermächt” featured a slightly cleaner production than the one found on their debut album. To some fans this rendered the album with much less intensity, but to our ears the sound was still very powerful. The massive reverb used on the first album made “Shark Attack” sound like a true shark attack and only added to the overall intensity. This time around the drums are more compressed and some blast beat parts tend to get lost in the overall blur of things. But on the same token, the guitars are much sharper sounding. Marco Zorich and John Duffy were truly evolving as guitar heroes. The thing that is really great and different compared to “Shark Attack” are the funny bit songs. We love them and enjoy them. A lot of the songs on “Biermächt” were leftovers from their demo days, including the phenomenal “Night Of Pain”, one of our all time favorite Thrash songs ever, but newer stuff like “Radical Dissection” and “Balance Of Opinion” showed the band handling a more mainstream Thrash sound somewhere in the middle of a Slayer/Kreator sound and Metallica/Megadeth. There is a certain progressiveness to those songs that hint to a more elaborate musical future. “Biermächt” is a very strong Crossover/Thrash album with a laid back party vibe to it. The sound, however, is very in-your-face. This is not a subtle album by any means. It’s not that they were the funniest bunch around (their side project Spazztic Blurr went a lot further). But Wehrmacht did have their own specific sound (mostly because of the vocals and guitars). Especially after all these years it becomes obvious all Crossover lovers and Thrashers from those days do in fact have this album and hold it dearly. The album has historic importance as well as huge sentimental value. Biermächt is a landmark in eighties Crossover Thrash and should be checked out immediately by all newbies.

Originally self-released in 2007 under the moniker Monarch, Wye Oak’s debut If Children was given a proper introduction to the world the following spring on Merge Records. Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack take their minimalist setup to maximalist ends, pairing gentle campfire folk with bombastic hazy shoegaze, sometimes within the same song. Their assured mission statement makes its vinyl debut, on red and white splatter, no less, exclusively for RSD 2022

Was tun, wenn man Desert Rock und Doom aus der Wüste mag, die Umgebung aber alles andere als besonders trocken ist? BESVÄRJELSEN haben auf beeindruckende Weise eine Antwort in den dunklen Wäldern ihrer schwedischen Heimat Dalarna gefunden. Aufgewachsen am Schnittpunkt altnordischer und finnischer Kulturen im hohen Norden, umgeben von Runen und alten Göttern, Schamanen und Geistern, hat das fesselnde Quintett seinen Namen aus dem schwedischen Wort für "Beschwörung" abgeleitet. Außerdem lassen sich die Nordschweden nur zu gern von lokalen Überlieferungen, der Mystik und den dunklen, alten Musiktraditionen ihrer Heimat inspirieren. Doch BESVÄRJELSEN sind alles andere als eine weitere "Pagan Folk"-Band, die sich nach einer Zeit zurücksehnt, die niemals war. Mit wehmütigen Melodien und gleichzeitig mächtiger Riff-Power macht ihr zweites Album "Atlas" einen großen Schritt auf dem Pfad, den BESVÄRJELSEN von Anfang an eingeschlagen haben. Die Gitarristen und Sänger Andreas Baier und Staffan Stensland Vinrot haben die Band im Jahr 2014 mit der klaren Vision gegründet, den Geist und die Traditionen der weiten Wälder Dalarnas, einer Region, die sonst eher für ihre bemalten Holzpferde bekannt ist, in zeitgenössische Heavy-Musik zu transformieren. Als die Sängerin Lea Amling Alazam mit ihrer Leidenschaft für Punk- und Stoner-Rock, die im örtlichen Skatepark im zarten Alter von 13 Jahren begann, zur Besetzung stieß, reduzierten Andreas und Staffan ihren Gesang gerne auf eine Nebenrolle. Die Entscheidung fiel leicht, da Leas unverwechselbare Stimme die Intimität und das Charisma von Sängerinnen wie NINA SIMONE oder AMY WINEHOUSE heraufbeschwört. BESVÄRJELSEN veröffentlichten im Jahr 2015 ihre Debüt-EP "Villfarelser" und kurz darauf folge die "Exil" EP (2016). Das Debütalbum "Vallmo" der Schweden detonierte im Jahr 2018 in Stockholm und schaffte es bis in den staatlichen Rundfunk, kam aber auch anderen Orts hervorragend an. Das Album verband krachende Riffs und stürmische Drums mit ausgefeilten Melodien und nachdenklichen Themen. Mit ihrer Mini-Album "Frost" wollten BESVÄRJELSEN im Jahr 2019 die Bühnen in ganz Europa erobern, bevor auch die Schweden in den nächsten zwei Jahren eine Zwangspause einlegen mussten. Obwohl die Band gezwungen war, getrennt zu komponieren, nutzte BESVÄRJELSEN die freie Zeit, um eine Fülle von Ideen zu sammeln. Diese teilten die Musiker über die Meilen und Monate ihrer relativen Einsamkeit hinweg miteinander, bis sie schließlich im Jahr 2021 die Aufnahmen zu "Atlas" mit dem Produzenten Karl Daniel Lidén begannen. Mit melancholischen Harmonien, die aus dem Skizzenbuch von ALICE IN CHAINS stammen könnten und einer Heaviness, die Windhand zur Ehre gereichen würde, haben BESVÄRJELSEN einen massiven musikalischen Monolithen aus dem lokalen Granit gemeißelt und dann in den magischen Wäldern ihrer Heimat aufgestellt, um dessen Kraftlinien über die gesamte vom Titanen "Atlas" geschulterte Erdkugel zu schicken.

Los Angeles-based experimental producer Al Lover will release his new studio album ‘Cosmic Joke’ on May 27th via Fuzz Club Records.
A staple of the global psychedelic scene, Lover has spent nearly a decade fine-tuning a broken, abstracted form of electronica that pools together a tapestry of trip-hop, synthesised krautrock, dub and dark ambient. Utilising an arsenal of samples, drum machine, analogue synths and live instrumentation, Lover’s is a kaleidoscopic sound that’s J-Dilla, DJ Shadow and Lee Scratch Perry by way of Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Kluster. Central to Lover’s music is a desire to explore the fringes of psychedelic music and the common threads that run through its far-reaching styles, drawing elements from the past and connecting them to the future. Through the years he has released a number of studio albums and beat tapes, remixed the likes of Osees and Night Beats, been resident DJ for the Levitation and Desert Daze festivals and collaborated with the likes of Goat, Anton Newcombe, Cairo Liberation Front and White Fence. Now, Lover returns with his latest studio album, ‘Cosmic Joke’ – a series of synthesised philosophical meditations on modern life, in all its tragicomic absurdity. "'Cosmic Joke' came from observing the rising, compounded absurdity in recent years and seeing structures of normalcy dissolving. It’s my attempt to view these things as part of a higher-order process, through a metaphysical lens rather than an ideological one. It’s been an exercise in holding the paradoxical relationship of comedy and tragedy, joy and pain, growth and decay, scale and decline as part of an interlocked system that, at a deep level, is essential to how we interface with the world.”

Deluxe Edition is on 180g transparent green vinyl, gatefold sleeve, printed inner-sleeve.

Los Angeles-based experimental producer Al Lover will release his new studio album ‘Cosmic Joke’ on May 27th via Fuzz Club Records.
A staple of the global psychedelic scene, Lover has spent nearly a decade fine-tuning a broken, abstracted form of electronica that pools together a tapestry of trip-hop, synthesised krautrock, dub and dark ambient. Utilising an arsenal of samples, drum machine, analogue synths and live instrumentation, Lover’s is a kaleidoscopic sound that’s J-Dilla, DJ Shadow and Lee Scratch Perry by way of Brian Eno, Kraftwerk and Kluster. Central to Lover’s music is a desire to explore the fringes of psychedelic music and the common threads that run through its far-reaching styles, drawing elements from the past and connecting them to the future. Through the years he has released a number of studio albums and beat tapes, remixed the likes of Osees and Night Beats, been resident DJ for the Levitation and Desert Daze festivals and collaborated with the likes of Goat, Anton Newcombe, Cairo Liberation Front and White Fence. Now, Lover returns with his latest studio album, ‘Cosmic Joke’ – a series of synthesised philosophical meditations on modern life, in all its tragicomic absurdity. "'Cosmic Joke' came from observing the rising, compounded absurdity in recent years and seeing structures of normalcy dissolving. It’s my attempt to view these things as part of a higher-order process, through a metaphysical lens rather than an ideological one. It’s been an exercise in holding the paradoxical relationship of comedy and tragedy, joy and pain, growth and decay, scale and decline as part of an interlocked system that, at a deep level, is essential to how we interface with the world.”

Brasil Novo is a compilation made up of eight contemporary Afro-Brazillian tracks disseminating the rich and percussive heritage of Brasil and Samba De Coco. The compilation was compiled by Sao Paolo’s DJ Tahira and London’s Tim Garcia and flits between Samba, Candomble, Batuques, Jazz, Folk and beyond, all selected with the dancefloor in mind.

Some of the tracks have never before been released on vinyl like Dona Celia Coquista’s ‘O Bar’ and the live version of Toró Instrumentals ‘Dunas’, and the release also features tracks from Grupo Bongar, Renata Rosa and women’s Afro Bloco, Ilú Obá De Min.

The compilation has so far been supported by the likes of Gilles Peterson and Jamz Supernova (BBC 6 Music) Lopa Kothari (BBC Radio 3) and Zakia (NTS) and many more.

Giacomo “Mino” di Martino started his musical career in several early 1960s Italian beat bands. By 1968 he had found enormous success with pop superstars I Giganti. After a brief split in 1970 –during which Mino formed Il Supergruppo with Ricky Gianco and other greats of the Italian scene– he came back to I Giganti in 1971. With them and with new advanced ideas that set the band pretty far away from the sophisticated pop and beat sounds they had been so successful with, they would record the amazing Terra in Bocca conceptual LP, an adventurous experimental album that explored the obscure connections between the Italian state and the mafia. A delicate topic full of political criticism which also found them having to fight censorship –it was played only once in the radio. This fact, along with the advanced new sound probably being too far ahead from the mainstream audience’s taste, turned the record into a commercial flop. Nowadays Terra in Bocca is a highly regarded album among critics, afficionados and collectors, and a pretty seminal one for the Italian scene of the seventies, since it can even be seen as a precursor to the works on the Cramps label. Gianni Sassi, producer and photographer who founded Cramps was involved in the release of Terra in Bocca –his is the amazing cover concept.

After the Terra in Bocca experience, Mino’s will was to keep exploring new musical paths and free his mind to experimentation. Along with his wife, actress and singer Edda “Terra” di Benedetto, they formed the Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale, just after the brief post-Giganti project Telaio Magnetico (with Franco Batiatto, among others) was over. The Albergo was a venue where artists from diverse disciplines, mainly musica and theatre, could meet and create works together.

On the musical side of the community, Mino and Terra explored the cosmic sonorities that were coming from Germany and mixed them with the Italian experimental scene of names like Franco Battiato, Luciano Berio or Roberto Cacciapaglia. It is from the sessions that took place in the Albergo from 1974 onwards that the Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale LP came out. Originally released in 1978 the compositions had been made during those years of exploration, the goal not being the release of an album but the aim to explore new sounds and experiment with music. Eventually it was decided to present a sample of all that work, and a few copies of the Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale LP were privately pressed.

The record sleeve and notes on the insert reivindicate the fight against nuclear power. The music is dominated by Mino’s keyboards, creating amazing space sounds reminiscent of those from 1950s and 1960s science fiction B movies brought to the most avantgardist experimentation of the moment, exploring new sounds with the newest keyboards available. This intriguing background sets the athmosphere for Terra’s voice to improvise all over.

Discrepant presents Istanbul based audio/visual artist Koray Kantarcıoğlu's follow-up to his debut album Loopworks (CREP59, 2018).

Whilst the first volume used 60’s and 70’s Turkish records as it source material, Loopworks 2 expands the sampling pool to local records as well as snippets from 70's TV and 80's new age and jazz tapes. This disparate material is mangled and glued together with Koray’s very personal sampling techniques.

This result becomes a dreamy, haunted and enigmatic collection of floating vignettes. Koray also enlists the help of local musicians such as Ekin Fil, who contributed to the album with haunting vocals and sound textures as well as Berke Can Ozcan who adds drums and percussion into the haunted mix.

The LP comes with a bonus CD entitled 'Loopworks 2 Extras', that could be another album itself, created from extra material that couldn’t make it to the LP.
Composed in 2020 and 2021.

The second LP by California rock n roll unit SPICE expands their palette of damaged anthems and addiction poetics with a more bristling, visceral sound, distilled from years in the trenches of bands, break-ups, and breakdowns. Singer Ross Farrar explains their chemistry succinctly: "We all got in a room and this is what came out." Viv is named for a precursor project of bassist Cody Sullivan and violinist Victoria Skudlarek, but also alludes to broader notions of vividness, sonic, visual, and otherwise. Engineered by Jack Shirley and mixed/mastered by Sam Pura in Oakland, the mix achieves that rare balance of every element being elevated but distinct, with voices, strings, and drums each given space to blaze parallel paths. Opener "Recovery" captures SPICE at their stormy, weathered best, booming drums and East Bay riffs skidding out in a rockslide of rapture, regret, and bruised melody ("You sacrifice perfect days to laugh through the night / you have to get out of bed / and it's hard / and it's hard / it's so hard to admit"), peaking in Ian Simpson's poignant single-note vibrato guitar solo; Farrar agrees: "The guitar says what we cannot." Other tracks embrace the group's shredded pop potential ("Any Day Now," "Dining Out," "Live Scene") and their speedway ripper mode ("Threnody"), with detours into oblique instrumentals ("Melody Drive") and orchestral balladeering ("Ashes In The Birdbath"). But what unites and ignites these songs across different energies and arrangements is their specific sense of emotion. Rawness refined into reckonings, approaching truth, born of cold mornings, bad luck, and too many wrong turns. Waking up where you're not supposed to be, living a life you don't recognize. The album ends with no end to its narrative, still fighting, still slipping. Farrar calls "Climbing Down The Ladder" a "relapse song - telling people you're okay but you're still fucking up." Heartbeat drums march under heartbroken guitars in an elegant downward spiral of defeat, delusion, and desperate hope, dreamed more than believed: "I said it was the last time / but I was up so high / 100 miles / 1000 miles / no me in sight / I saw into the next life / I wasn't dead / I felt so vivid in the next life."

The second LP by California rock n roll unit SPICE expands their palette of damaged anthems and addiction poetics with a more bristling, visceral sound, distilled from years in the trenches of bands, break-ups, and breakdowns. Singer Ross Farrar explains their chemistry succinctly: "We all got in a room and this is what came out." Viv is named for a precursor project of bassist Cody Sullivan and violinist Victoria Skudlarek, but also alludes to broader notions of vividness, sonic, visual, and otherwise. Engineered by Jack Shirley and mixed/mastered by Sam Pura in Oakland, the mix achieves that rare balance of every element being elevated but distinct, with voices, strings, and drums each given space to blaze parallel paths. Opener "Recovery" captures SPICE at their stormy, weathered best, booming drums and East Bay riffs skidding out in a rockslide of rapture, regret, and bruised melody ("You sacrifice perfect days to laugh through the night / you have to get out of bed / and it's hard / and it's hard / it's so hard to admit"), peaking in Ian Simpson's poignant single-note vibrato guitar solo; Farrar agrees: "The guitar says what we cannot." Other tracks embrace the group's shredded pop potential ("Any Day Now," "Dining Out," "Live Scene") and their speedway ripper mode ("Threnody"), with detours into oblique instrumentals ("Melody Drive") and orchestral balladeering ("Ashes In The Birdbath"). But what unites and ignites these songs across different energies and arrangements is their specific sense of emotion. Rawness refined into reckonings, approaching truth, born of cold mornings, bad luck, and too many wrong turns. Waking up where you're not supposed to be, living a life you don't recognize. The album ends with no end to its narrative, still fighting, still slipping. Farrar calls "Climbing Down The Ladder" a "relapse song - telling people you're okay but you're still fucking up." Heartbeat drums march under heartbroken guitars in an elegant downward spiral of defeat, delusion, and desperate hope, dreamed more than believed: "I said it was the last time / but I was up so high / 100 miles / 1000 miles / no me in sight / I saw into the next life / I wasn't dead / I felt so vivid in the next life."

Justin K Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, JK Flesh) breathes new life into his FINAL project for an album on Helm’s ALTER label. Formed in 1984 out of an obsession with the industrial, noise & power electronics acts of the early eighties, FINAL made its public debut at the legendary Mermaid pub in Birmingham when Broadrick was just 14 years old. A string of cassette releases via his Post MortemRekordings label established the name within the underground noise scene of the time until increased activity with his various groups (Napalm Death, Head of David and later Godflesh) meant that FINAL naturally fell by the wayside before the end of the decade. Broadrick reactivated the project in 1993 during the British ambient “isolationism” period and FINAL's sound became focussed more on texture, producing beatless ambient work with a number of albums for labels like Sentrax, Utech, No Quarter and Neurot. ‘It Comes To Us All’ is the first FINAL album to appear on vinyl since 2015’s ‘Black Dollars’ on Downwards and continues to explore the textural nature of Broadrick’s ambient work - this time through a filter of blown-out harmonic noise that reconnects the project with its harsher roots. Rather than channelling the angst of early power-electronics, the noise here rumbles along blissfully through 8 untitled tracks, sombre in tone and at times beautiful. Melodies sampled from pop music are put through a process of decay, stripped of their form and worn down with a rusty, melancholic afterglow. Reducing all its parts to slow-motion shadows of their former selves, ‘It Comes To Us All’ is an exploration of the decay of all living things that we face collectively, day after day.