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In 1972, left-wing intellectual film critic Uwe Nettelbeck suggested to Anthony Moore that he might write some straight songs (relatively speaking), which in turn prompted Moore to invite his old schoolfriend Peter Blegvad over to Hamburg to form the band Slapp Happy.

Dagmar Krause, a young singer from Hamburg and Moore‘s girlfriend, joined them both on their trip to Wümme to record what was to become this album, Sort of, using Faust as their rhythm section. In honour of this album ́s 50th anniversary the album will get a nicely remastered reissue with the newly founded Week–End Records –the fetsival‘s inhouse label who managed to get the band together for a final reunion shows in November of 2016 and Spring of 2017.

Worriers' new album Trust Your Gut is what happens when a queer Springsteen sleeper cell emerges to throw an indie rock house party. It’s the opening scene of Empire Records if it were soundtracked by Frightened Rabbit. It’s about yearning for a better self when you constantly feel neither here nor there. While that isn’t entirely about their gender, it’s absolutely a part of songwriter Lauren Denitzio’s lived experience as a millennial. After Worriers released an album the same week as the 2020 lockdown - and after a history of what can only be described as music industry slapstick comedy - Denitzio rebuilt their songwriting practice from scratch. Armed with a small artist grant, new collaborators, and a lot of time on their hands, Trust Your Gut was written by taking everything apart and putting it back together again. The album was written and arranged with drummer Atom Willard (Against Me!, Angels & Airwaves), pianist Franz Nicolay (The Hold Steady), and guitarist Frank Piegaro who joined the band in 2019. With bass recorded by Allegra Anka (Cayetana) and strings by Ethan Philbrick, Trust Your Gut crafts a world of heart-punching indie rock with pop and folk influences after a career of fierce punk-leaning anthems.

RIYL: PJ Harvey, Sonic Youth, Dead Can Dance, Black Sabbath, Depeche Mode. In Blood is the group’s 14th album and the follow-up to 2020’s critically acclaimed Dances/Curses (Album Of The Year – The Quietus, Top 10 International Albums – Irish Times). It was typical of a band so well-known for stellar live performances to release their most successful album at a time when they were unable to back it up on the road. As was the case for many, lockdown changed the band’s lives in unexpected ways. Some felt a form of cabin fever at not being able to continue to make music (diverting their energies elsewhere - founding Wrong Speed Records for starters) whereas others relished the peace and quiet, perhaps questioning whether they wanted to return to the life they had before. Gigs (so long the lifeblood of the band) were booked, postponed, and cancelled. Things began to unravel and perhaps for the first time since the band formed in 2003 it was hard to see how it could continue. A plan was hatched to attempt to re-energise and reassemble the band: they would begin work on a new album. They would approach this as though a Somerset version of The Desert Sessions – members old and new and guests would contribute as and when time and restrictions allowed. Lyrically, British folk and ghost mythology provided the starting position for the song themes ranging from mutated stories of grief and loss written in the 14th Century (Perle), spiritual reawakening by ancient apparitions (Avalon) to the growth of nature after devastation (Can’t Feel Around Us, Over Cedar Limb), a metaphor also for spirit and body renewal and rebirth after trauma. The results sound free of any genre shackles and it suits Hey Colossus. They have taken the expansive anything-goes approach that made Dances/Curses so successful and fine-tuned and shaped it into an 8-song single album that never treads water or fills time. The prominent vocals steer the listener through the music, defining it as opposed to punctuating it (or being buried by it). The album is a calling card for the band in their 20th anniversary year. As odd and challenging as long-term fans would expect or hope for, but somehow more accessible and to the point than ever before. It is the closest the group have ever come to a pop record, radiating positivity through the murk like a small ray of light in some very dark and very weird times. Music can never entirely negate these feelings but, like the natural world referenced in the lyrics and sleeve, it invisibly bonds people together, lifting us up if we choose to let it.

Vinyl includes lyric booklet with hand-written lyrics and exclusive photos and download card. Has collaborated with MF Doom, Czarface, Ghostface Killah, Dennis Coffey, and more. Kendra Morris, the Brooklyn-based Artist is back with her fifth LP, entitled I Am What I’m Waiting For, on Colemine/Karma Chief Records. Co-Written and Produced by Torbitt Schwartz (Run The Jewels, Killer Mike, Rubble Kings, Chin Chin), this collection is Kendra’s most personal album to date. It was spring of 2022 and Kendra had just released Nine Lives, her first new album in almost a decade and her first release on Colemine Records. She felt an urgency to get back into the studio, but something felt different this time. Returning to her usual ways, places, and people that she had been creating with felt like dragging herself back to a familiar and comfortable place - but that wasn’t what she was looking for. “I had to step into a new, unknown process because I knew it was the only way that I’d continue to grow,” she explained. She took a small batch of songs to Torbitt’s studio and the two began to write. “He challenged me to find the best version of every lyric,” she shared. “When I listen back, I’m so proud of the time we spent, because every single line is deliberate. I challenged myself to write just to write. No love songs this time around. Torbitt and I wanted to create a record that felt like you cracked open the ooze in my head. There are a lot of layers to me but I only recently through age and experience have fully accepted the weird little nuances that I’m made of. I’m a messy introvert that pretends to be an extrovert so I can feel like I fit in.” From top to bottom, I Am What I’m Waiting For is sincere. It’s a fresh take on a timeless sound, and Kendra exudes power. “My heart has always been in soul music,” she shared. “On this record, you’ll hear my influences and then some. You’ll hear all the bits of me….the vulnerable bits, the silly bits, all of it.This record is my melting pot.” Whether you’re a longtime listener or just now beginning to explore the whimsical world of Kendra Morris, the relatable lyrics and modern soul sounds on I Am What I’m Waiting For are sure to turn you into a fan

RYUICHI SAKAMOTO'S LANDMARK 1981 ALBUM REISSUED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN DECADES OUTSIDE OF JAPAN. THE ALBUM WILL BE REISSUED IN ITS RARE JAPANESE EDITION TOGETHER WITH A 2-LP LIMITED EDITION FEATURING THE ALBUM PLUS A 2ND LP FEATURING ITS NEVER-RELEASED FULL INSTRUMENTAL MIX, ALL REMASTERED BY BERNIE GRUNDMAN.

Wewantsounds is proud to announce the reissue of Ryuichi Sakamoto's third solo album "Hidari Ude No Yume" (Left Handed Dream), originally released in 1981 on the Alfa label. Save for a small-scale Dutch vinyl release in 1981, it is the first time the album's original Japanese edition is released outside of Japan (the European release on Epic Records included significantly different tracks and mixes). Newly remastered from the original tapes by renowned engineer Bernie Grundman, this LP edition comes with original artwork featuring a striking cover shot by famous photographer Masayoshi Sukita (sourced from the original negative), OBI strip and 4-page insert with new introduction by journalist Anton Spice. The album will also be released as a 2-LP limited edition gatefold including the album's full instrumental mix.
Ryuichi Sakamoto's third album, "Hidari Ude No Yume" was recorded at the legendary Alfa Studio 'A' in Tokyo during the Summer of 1981. it came after "B-2 Unit" in 1980 and his debut album "Thousand Knives Of" in 1978, the very year Sakamoto was invited by Haruomi Hosono to join Yellow Magic Orchestra alongside Yukihiro Takahashi. In the process, they became global stars as the group rewrote the rules of electronic pop and toured around the world, yet Sakamoto was keen to remain active as a solo artist.
?In 1981, the musician decided to record an album rooted in Pop, following "B-2 Unit" which had a more of an experimental edge and his landmark electro debut from 1978. For this new album entitled "Hidari Ude No Yume," Sakamoto invited British producer Robin Scott, who had had huge hit with 'Pop Muzik,' to co-produce. They entered the Alfa studio in July 1981, accompanied by a handful of musicians. These included his fellow YMO musicians Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi, keyboard programmer extraordinaire Hideki Matsutake who'd been on Sakamoto's first two albums and became YMO's unofficial fourth member, violinist Kaoru Sato, saxophonist Satoshi Nakamura and American guitarist Adrian Belew who'd played with David Bowie, The Talking Heads' "Remain In Light" and more recently, Tom Tom Club’s debut (co-writing 'Genius Of Love').
?Together, they created a fascinating mix of pop, ambient and electronic music with elements of avant garde and traditional Japanese music, the whole firmly rooted in a solid groove. Sakamoto wanted to give the album a spontaneous feel and decided to let ideas flow and evolve organically during the sessions as musicians would develop them together. From the funk of 'Relâché' to the new wave feel of 'Venezia' and the ambient minimalism of 'Slat Dance,' the album is remarkably consistent while displaying a wealth of global influences as shown by the diversity of instruments featured on the credits: Marimba, didgeridu, traditional Japanese instruments such as the Sho and Hichiriki flutes.
?The album was released in Japan in 1981 and Epic Records picked it up for Europe a year later but decided to release it in a significantly altered version. The sequencing was completely reshuffled and two tracks, 'Saru No Ie' and 'Living In The Dark' were completely dropped while three others, ‘Relâché’, ‘Tell 'em To Me’, ‘Venezia’ were heavily remodelled with english lyrics and became 'Just About Enough', 'Once In A Lifetime' and 'The Left Bank'. Last but not least, a new English-sung track, 'The Arrangement,' was added, making the album nine tracks instead of ten for the Japanese edition.
Altogether this International version called "Left-Handed Dream" was a very different album from the Japanese one and although both were successful at the time and further established Ryuichi Sakamoto as a global solo artist, the Japanese edition of "Hidari Ude No Yume" remains largely unknown to international ears.
Wewantsounds is now delighted to release this original Japanese edition for the first time in decades as a single LP together with a 2-LP limited-edition set adding, as a bonus, its fascinating instrumental mix, discovered in the label's vaults a few years ago (Note that 'The Garden Of Poppies', 'Slat Dance' and 'Saru No Ie' are instrumentals but for the consistency of the album we kept them on the Instrumental Mix). "Hidari Ude No Yume" is an essential album in Ryuichi Sakamoto's rich discography. It is now available in its purest original Japanese form.

In 1955, Chet Baker prepared the first European tour of his newly formed quartet. The tour began in Holland in September 1955 and continued with stops in Germany, Switzerland, and France. In Paris, pianist Dick Twardzik died from a heroin overdose in his hotel room on October 21, 1955. He was only 24-years old, and his early death was a tragedy for the jazz world. Chet was marked for life by this tragedy and from that point on his own addiction would haunt him forever. This album compiles material from three studio sessions made during that European tour. Side A presents music recorded right after Twardzik's death, and Side B has tunes from the only two studio sessions recorded by Baker with Twardzik.

If you dig deep enough into the underground you will find the most precious jewels and it ain't that much of an effort these days to turn on the computer and trip through the colorful World Wide Web. But beware for not all the glitter is gold. I stepped by some dark and dusty back street club in Atlanta / Georgia, USA and some enchanting music tempted me to enter. A powerful raspy voice screaming out the pain of the world no matter if it were big or small affairs. "California dreaming on such a winter's day", wow, when the MAMAS AND PAPAS sang this in a sweet folk manner it was a light and joyful anthem for all hippies and hipsters back in 1966, like a call to love. Lee Moses' version is more of a desperate cry for sunshine and freedom. And it goes on this way. His voice has this special phrase showing determination, pain but also sheer joy of life. His 1971 album is a steady groover with a steaming hot band performing , which includes a brass section of divine greatness. These devoted players build up a massive wall of groove and melody on which Lee Moses can unleash his voice like a volcanic eruption. The groove itself stays quite relaxed but definitely hypnotizing throughout the whole album and clears up your mind for the message of love Lee Moses raves about. The high skills of Lee's backing band gets showcased in a steaming instrumental version of THE FOUR TOPS' "Reach out (I'll be there)", which appeared on an early 7" first and got added here as a bonus track. They don't stop for THE BEATLES' "Day tripper" either and next to "California dreamin'" you can find another heart warming version of "Hey Joe" on the regular album. Not as extraordinary outraging as Hendrix' turn on this classic Lee and his mates make it a slightly more epic effort. All in all this is a soul album with very few covers and even more classic anthems of this genre that should actually be worshipped by lovers of the late 1960s Motown sound. Especially the bonus tracks will drive you wild. Go for it, brothers and sisters.

Vinyl includes lyric booklet with hand-written lyrics and exclusive photos and download card. Has collaborated with MF Doom, Czarface, Ghostface Killah, Dennis Coffey, and more. Kendra Morris, the Brooklyn-based Artist is back with her fifth LP, entitled I Am What I’m Waiting For, on Colemine/Karma Chief Records. Co-Written and Produced by Torbitt Schwartz (Run The Jewels, Killer Mike, Rubble Kings, Chin Chin), this collection is Kendra’s most personal album to date. It was spring of 2022 and Kendra had just released Nine Lives, her first new album in almost a decade and her first release on Colemine Records. She felt an urgency to get back into the studio, but something felt different this time. Returning to her usual ways, places, and people that she had been creating with felt like dragging herself back to a familiar and comfortable place - but that wasn’t what she was looking for. “I had to step into a new, unknown process because I knew it was the only way that I’d continue to grow,” she explained. She took a small batch of songs to Torbitt’s studio and the two began to write. “He challenged me to find the best version of every lyric,” she shared. “When I listen back, I’m so proud of the time we spent, because every single line is deliberate. I challenged myself to write just to write. No love songs this time around. Torbitt and I wanted to create a record that felt like you cracked open the ooze in my head. There are a lot of layers to me but I only recently through age and experience have fully accepted the weird little nuances that I’m made of. I’m a messy introvert that pretends to be an extrovert so I can feel like I fit in.” From top to bottom, I Am What I’m Waiting For is sincere. It’s a fresh take on a timeless sound, and Kendra exudes power. “My heart has always been in soul music,” she shared. “On this record, you’ll hear my influences and then some. You’ll hear all the bits of me….the vulnerable bits, the silly bits, all of it.This record is my melting pot.” Whether you’re a longtime listener or just now beginning to explore the whimsical world of Kendra Morris, the relatable lyrics and modern soul sounds on I Am What I’m Waiting For are sure to turn you into a fan

. It started in a cafe in Chico, California, with a flier, covered in glitter, wires, feathers, and assorted melted items, with a three-word advertisement: “Noise person wanted.” It wasn’t a sign. It was a sample. A tiny piece lifted from the visionary environment that the band XDS would continue building over the next couple of decades, hoarding an eclectic stockpile of collage materials/influences/approaches for assembling psychedelic dance-punk jams played with homemade instruments, blown-out samples, off-kilter drumming and dub baselines. Shoko Horikawa had come from Japan to (the small, music-crazy college town) Chico for school, and responded to Jesse Hall’s mysterious flier and a pitch to collaborate on making interesting sounds. The partnership would end up featuring her syncopated polyrhythmic drums alongside his vocals (through a duct tape-and-PVC-pipe mic) and custom-built Guitar-o-bass, plus synths/samplers and various noise-making devices. The two-piece Experimental Dental School eventually morphed into XDS as the duo moved the operation from Chico to Oakland to Portland and back to Chico, touring the world (playing alongside the likes of Deerhoof and other innovators) and releasing 11 recordings (on Cochon Records, German label TCWGA, etc.) as they went. On the new XDS album, Bicycle Ripper, the band’s genre-bending roots are as deep as ever, but the goal now is to be less “noise” people and more “fun” people. The songs are weird yet cohesive, with jittery grooves and inventive hooks. Throw a dart at the album and hit “Hot Panther, Cold Moon” for one random sample: an unrelenting fuzzed-out bass dances with a insistent drums; a sharp turn into sparse tin-can-guitar break; then a return to the dance floor with a bonus overdriven bass riff and full-throttle drums. The Panther stays hot whether she’s under the “hot hot sun” or the “cold cold moon.” It’s all very irresistible and, yes, really really fun

A historic collaboration by two of jazz music's greatest artists on 180g Double LP Set! Impex Records' deluxe production captures the amazing outdoor acoustics with fine detail and wide dynamic range. The beautiful gatefold jacket is coated in a vintage high-gloss lacquer.

The White House Sessions, Live 1962 contains inspired performances of classic tunes "Take Five", "Castilian Blues", "Lullaby of Birdland", and "I Left My Heart In San Francisco".

"Bennett's vocals are particularly natural and present-sounding... Brubeck's group in its prime, with Paul Desmond on Alto, Eugene Wright on bass and Joe Morello on drums... Bennett/Brubeck is nonetheless a record I found myself playing more times than I expected to before sitting down to write this. There's something about a live performance from a time when life was so much simpler, even if more jittery and dangerous because of the cold war, that makes you want to go back in time and enjoy it all again."

This two LP set is beautifully re-mastered and the original artwork has been carefully replicated.

Two remarkable visionaries at the peak of their powers, Dave Brubeck and his quartet and Tony Bennett (both with his group and with Bennett with trio) give hot performances of some of their biggest hits: Brubeck's revved up "Take Five," and Tony Bennett's soulful "I Left My Heart in San Francisco."

Playing the popular White House Sessions concert on the Washington Mall for President John F. Kennedy, these titans of popular jazz have a great time informing, joking and playing the lights out. You'll want to play the grooves out of Impex's impeccably produced issue of this lost treasure. Quiet surfaces, incredible dynamics, full frequency responses and deluxe packaging will provide years of listening and viewing pleasure.

Freak Frequency was a fitting title for the new material Greg Obis was planning for Stuck, the frenetic and twisted post-punk outfit he formed in 2018. Inspired by the doomy social economics of Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the bleak worldbuilding of horror games Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, and the bombastic yet arty satire of Devo, Obis channelled his audio analogy into Freak Frequency, an album ringing out with explosive sounds and ideas.

Stuck formed after Obis’ previous projects, Yeesh and Clearance, called it quits in short proximity. Obis is on guitar and vocals, which span from booming theatrics to ecstatic yelps. The project’s rhythm section is completed by shoegaze guitarist-turned-chugging bassist David Algrim and tightly wound drummer Tim Green—also a graphic designer, and the artist responsible for Stuck’s distinctively unified visual aesthetic. Original co-guitarist Donny Walsh contributed freely inventive lines for the first few years of the project, including on Freak Frequency; Ezra Saulnier of Red Tunic, the newest member of the band, now brings calculated contrapuntal riffs to match Obis’ parts.

The building blocks of Stuck include the egg punk eccentricities of Uranium Club and The Coneheads filtered through noise rock power, à la Jesus Lizard or Slint; that melange is glittered with the precision microtones of Unwound and Women. “I want the feeling of immersion and chaos and tension, with a big guitar amp playing a big chord,” says Obis of his inspirations, citing friends and peers Cloud Nothings and Preoccupations. “But I want it delivered by having a lot of smaller points of light poking through.”

In fact, writing for Freak Frequency began while Content’s recording was still underway—beginning with “Scared,” which features acoustic layers under feedback squalls. “Time Out,” with motoric guitars in the sputtering lineage of Wire, was also composed in late 2019. Obis wrote it about the cycles of compulsion and shame woven into social media use, and the way negativity drives algorithmic engagement. It became an exciting exercise for the group in ramping up speed; “I thought I knew how far I could push Tim’s tempos,” Obis recalls. “But Tim kept insisting we do it 20 bpm faster than what I had. He is an absolute monster for playing that.”

Album opener “The Punisher,” a spiral staircase of disembodied guitars and rhythmic slams over a 2/4 beat, came in the aftermath of the January 6 insurrection. It felt immediately emblematic to Freak Frequency, and Obis describes it as his favorite Stuck track: one he wishes he could write again and again. “It hits all the boxes that Stuck can do: it’s goofy, but there’s a lot of intricate guitar interplay, and at the end, there’s a big payoff,” he explains. The last song written was “Do Not Reply,” a pre-album single that came to Obis after engineering for Melkbelly and channelling their earworm melodies. Algrim wouldn’t let it on the record unless Melkbelly’s front person Miranda Winters dueted on vocals; she was happy to oblige, and the gritty epic closes Freak Frequency.

With slippery snark, percussive heft, and funhouse mirrors of sludge, Freak Frequency delivers its needed screeds with gratifying nuance. If Stuck’s interpretation of this messed-up world goes down like a bitter pill, it’s only because its sugar coating is too delicious to keep from eating.

LP includes Poster.

When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more.

Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom.

Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man's sound. There's the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson) alongside some newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is "Zoos of the World," where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, slumbering animals from a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name.

The mind reels at just what project would have yielded a scintillating title like "Western Dragon," but these three selections were found on tapes in the archive with no further information. The crown jewel of the set is no doubt Garson's soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind. But for decades, this audio was presumed lost, the only trace of it appearing to be from an old YouTube clip. Thankfully, diligent audio archivist Andy Zax came across a copy of the master tape while going through the massive Rod McKuen archive.

So now we get to hear it in all its glory. Across six minutes, Garson conjures broad fantasias, whirring mooncraft sounds, zero-gravity squelches, and twinkling études. It showcases Mort's many moods: sweet, exploratory, whimsical, a little bit corny, weaving it all together in a glorious whole.

Maybe at the time it scanned as crass and opportunistic for Garson to apply his keyboards to subjects like astrological signs, the occult, hippiedom, houseplants, or the moon landing. But more than most other electronic music pioneers of his ilk, Garson foresaw the integration of such electronics into our daily lives, how they would allow us to engage with the world.

LP includes Poster.

When Sacred Bones first began their Mort Garson reissue project in 2019 with a proper reissue of Plantasia, the Garson-naissance began in earnest. Soon after, you could hear Mort Garson and his Moogs bubbling up on TV shows, documentaries, podcasts, hip-hop tracks, or anywhere else, the man a cultural phenomenon once more.

Like a perennial that returns with each new spring, the Mort Garson archives have brought to bear yet another awe-inspiring bloom.

Journey to the Moon and Beyond finds even more new facets to the man's sound. There's the soundtrack to the 1974 blaxploitation film Black Eye (starring Fred Williamson) alongside some newly unearthed music for advertising. Just as regal is "Zoos of the World," where Garson soundtracks the wild, preening, slumbering animals from a 1970 National Geographic special of the same name.

The mind reels at just what project would have yielded a scintillating title like "Western Dragon," but these three selections were found on tapes in the archive with no further information. The crown jewel of the set is no doubt Garson's soundtrack to the live broadcast of the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing, as first heard on CBS News. That's one small step for man, one giant leap for Moogkind. But for decades, this audio was presumed lost, the only trace of it appearing to be from an old YouTube clip. Thankfully, diligent audio archivist Andy Zax came across a copy of the master tape while going through the massive Rod McKuen archive.

So now we get to hear it in all its glory. Across six minutes, Garson conjures broad fantasias, whirring mooncraft sounds, zero-gravity squelches, and twinkling études. It showcases Mort's many moods: sweet, exploratory, whimsical, a little bit corny, weaving it all together in a glorious whole.

Maybe at the time it scanned as crass and opportunistic for Garson to apply his keyboards to subjects like astrological signs, the occult, hippiedom, houseplants, or the moon landing. But more than most other electronic music pioneers of his ilk, Garson foresaw the integration of such electronics into our daily lives, how they would allow us to engage with the world.

In addition to his day job transforming pop music with his own records, as well as those of Gastr del Sol, Loose Fur and Sonic Youth over the past few decades, Jim O"Rourke has been contracted for several dozen film scores over the years as well. It makes sense - his abilities as an improviser, composer and producer allow him to interpret cinematic moments with a unique understanding for their construction and how they work. It doesn"t hurt that Jim"s a well-versed cineaste, a complete and total fan of watching films, which has given him a preternatural understanding of the role of music in movies. What doesn"t make sense is how Hands That Bind is the first film soundtrack of Jim"s to ever receive worldwide release! He"s worked with filmmakers of international repute, like Olivier Assayas, Allison Anders, Werner Herzog and Kôji Wakamatsu! He served as music consultant on Richard Linklater"s 2003 laff-fest, School of Rock! He"s played in ensembles of award-winning documentaries and films alike! Throw the guy an internationally-promoted soundtrack LP every more often, why doncha? It was left to the "suits" of Drag City Records to innovate, once again, by taking a leap on an O"Rourke work. Made for an indie film that"s been seen by festival audiences and not enough others, the soundtrack for Hands That Bind is a moody, atmospheric delight. Jim"s roots in composition via tape-editing have evolved into a sophisticated assembly of found-and-processed sounds that achieve highly musical, near-orchestral majesty as they hang in the very air of the drama that unfolds in Kyle Armstrong"s Hands That Bind. Described as a "slow-burn prairie gothic drama" set in the farmland of Canada"s Alberta province, and starring Paul Sparks, Susan Kent, Landon Liboiron, Nicholas Campbell, Will Oldham, and Bruce Dern, Hands That Bind is a spellbinding trip to the existential bone of rural working life in North America. As conflict rises over the hard-worked patches of land that provide a mere and mean existence, a desperate air settles in, as a series of mysterious, often supernatural occurrences rock the small community. O"Rourke"s vaporous, serpentine musical backdrops and atmospheres reflect the obsessions and distractions of the film"s principles; moods of all sorts seen or otherwise implied. Additionally, the music highlights cinematographer Mike McLaughlin"s closely observed accounting of the farmers" environment, as well as the striking widescreen images of the big sky country with unnerving flair. For fans of Jim"s ongoing steamroom series as well as collectors of soundtracks, Hands That Bind will provide hours of engrossing listening. And if you get a chance, see the movie projected in a movie house, please - farmers aren"t the only ones struggling these days!

Published in 1989 in the "Weekly Shônen Magazine", "Hajime no Ippo" by George Morikawa has become over the years a cult sports manga, and remains to this day one of the longest river series, still being published, counting more than 130 volumes.

It is only natural that an animated version was born in 2000, produced by Madhouse, under the name of “Hajime no Ippo: The Fighting! of 76 episodes (covering the first thirty volumes of the series). This narrates the beginnings and the rise of a high school student, Ippo Makunouchi, in the world of professional boxing. Find now a selection of the best anime music with rock and jazz accents with the final destination: The ring! Three composers worked for this selection: Tsuneo IMAHORI (TRIGUN and GUNGRAVE), Hideki TANIUCHI (in collaboration with Yoshihisa HIRANO on DEATH NOTE) and Naoya MORI.

Repress!

Ska, rocksteady, funky reggae, roots, dub mixes, disco mixes, they're all here from the queens of the Jamaican music scene - Studio One Women features a wide mix of classics and obscurities from the finest female voices in reggae.

Until now most of these tracks have only ever been available as extremely hard to find Jamaican 7" and 12" singles and even if you were lucky enough to find them they'd cost you a small fortune

Marcia Griffiths and Rita Marley (here with her first group The Soulettes) are two of Jamaica's most famous female singers hugely popular today. Both these artists became internationally famous as The I – Threes (along with Judy Mowatt), Bob Marley's backing singers alongside The Wailers. Also featured are Hortense Ellis, sister of Alton who cut many smash hits on the island, and Jennifer Lara, a lady who had a long career with Studio One, singing on countless sides.

Studio One is the greatest label in the history of reggae and is the foundation of all reggae music. It's where virtually every world renowned Jamaican superstar started out, Bob Marley and The Wailers included. Under the guidance of the legendary Clement Coxsone Dodd the musicians at Studio One recorded hundreds of instrumental rhythms which still provide the backbone for many of the records made in Jamaica today.

Somewhere in the Lower-Franconian vineyards lies a hidden and mostly unknown canyon, a place that often returns to the thoughts and dreams of Läuten der Seele’s Christian Schoppik. Though a much rarer occurrence now as a consequence of environmental change, chance encounters upon the area in the past would sometimes reveal small ponds amongst the reeds, teeming with life and populated by colonies of newts and the now endangered yellow bellied toad. The transience of the water and the wildlife it hosts, dependent on season or climate, lends the area an almost fantastical, dream-like quality. Was it ever even there at all? A secret place that may or may not be present holds vast appeal to some enquiring minds… Ertrunken Im Seichtesten Gewässer, the third Läuten der Seele album in two years, is inspired directly by these experiences. Translating as ‘drowned in the shallowest stretch of water’, a title as pregnant with dread as it is wonder, the themes present speak both to personal memories and a wider understanding of place and time, and how we might interpret our own position within an ever-changing, sometimes disappearing world.

The record is presented as two long-form pieces divided into four separate movements, each titled so as to reflect this natural environment and its intersection with imagination, relying on processes of collage that draw from myriad indeterminable samples, field recordings and various recorded instruments. Those familiar with Schoppik’s work, both as Läuten der Seele and with Brannten Schnüre, will find present many of his signature tropes - the way deeply layered collages render abstracted visions of the past alive in the present - though what is always significant about his approach is not so much aesthetic as the wider concepts it attempts to express and emote. Indeed, emotional response is key to the Läuten der Seele sound, how overlapping notions of nostalgia, memory and identity calibrate experience and understanding of who we are and the world around us, whether it’s a world that’s gone or another imagined into being. If you observe the artwork closely enough, you may find a clue as to the canyon’s location, though such specifics are besides the point. The music itself infers a wider sense of the impermanence that characterises hidden worlds, wherever they might be or whoever they might belong to.

"Bastian Epple makes an eagerly anticipated return to marionette under his elusive MinaeMinae guise that imagines rich sonic architectures for the journeying spirit to voyage to. Räumlichkeit is Epple’s debut album and third release to date following Gestrüpp from 2020, venturing further into melodic electronic nostalgia and percussive beat oriented soundscapes.

Growing up in a small village in southern Germany, Bastian Epple was never interested in kitschy folk sounds, rather he took solace in the time he would spend meditating to repetitive and hypnotic patterns. His guitar strumming and what sounded to his mother like a young Philip Glass on a cheap Casio keyboard encouraged little Epple to tread on this self-taught path of developing his own musical language. This led him to start experimenting with a tape recorder and layering sounds with non-musical samples to eventually working with a DAW.

Bastian went on to study Media Art at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Karlsruhe and graduated with a diploma in film and documentary media - where he now works as a freelance filmmaker and lecturer at Stuttgart Media University. However, this never stopped him from creating and playing with wide-eyed sounds, eventually amassing a vast collection of tunes and finally emerging from this anonymity.

Utilizing modular synth, self made tape echos, synthetic sounds, recordings of ethnic percussion and guitar, MinaeMinae understands musical material similar to documentary footage which he would splice, repitch, and rearrange intuitively into captivating worlds."

Hailing from the seaside communities surrounding Enoshima, a small island located 50 km southwest of Tokyo, Maya Ongaku is a ragtag collective of local musicians whose brand of earthy psychedelia transcends widely beyond the roots of their inner souls. The name derives not from any kind of ancient civilization, but rather a neologism defined as the imagined view outside one’s field of vision. The band—currently a trio of Tsutomu Sonoda, Ryota Takano, and Shoei Ikeda—finds sanctuary at the Ace General Store, a beachy vintage shop and salon-like space just hidden from sight from the bustling, touristy riverside Subana Street. Between discussions on music and art, curating the vinyl section and manning the register, and chatting up with locals young and old, the members find time to jam and record their spontaneous ideas in the studio tucked away in the back. It’s in this unlikely setting where Maya Ongaku finds its origins, the culmination of what Sonoda describes as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), meaning spontaneous generation, or the supposed production of living organisms from nonliving matter.

Approach to Anima, the group’s debut album released on Guruguru Brain, finds Maya Ongaku building a foundational groove while tapping into their innermost psyche. Sonoda’s malleable guitar and vocals, Takano’s sinuous bass lines, Ikeda’s floating woodwinds, and a sprinkling of delicate percussion—all coalesce into an aural experience that’s assertive yet abstract, calm but unsettling. The slow building, sax-laden “Approach” serves as an introduction to Maya Ongaku’s world, while the appropriately-named “Water Dream” floats its way toward the gentle finale of “Pillow Song.” It’s a concise distillation of their many interests and influences, from Neo-Dada and Fluxus, to where contemporary art intersects with the development of modern recording technology in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

As the title suggests, Approach to Anima is not intended to be a terminus; it’s merely the beginning of an exploration. The three childhood friends that comprise Maya Ongaku are always looking beyond the confines of the idyllic but rapidly gentrifying enclave of their beloved Enoshima. Feeding off of the energy that still radiates from the triumphant, decade-long journey of their label bosses’ band Kikagaku Moyo, who rose to global prominence from scrappy beginnings busking on the streets of Takadanobaba, they hope to go wherever inspiration takes them, to anywhere around the globe where their music can find a home.

Ultimately, Maya Ongaku’s uninhibited world-building will make it possible for us to see the unseen, expand the possibilities of the naked eye—all through the unbridled vibrancy of their music.

Born of a thousand nights lost in a surrender to stillness and contemplation, In The Air is Anna St. Louis’ second full length album and her most considered work yet. St. Louis’ debut If Only There Was a River seemed to emerge fully formed out of the recesses of her mind; a gritty, mesmerizing affair, filled with jagged edges and ghostly apparitions. The type of record that announces a new voice; one haunted by what has come before.

But this time, St. Louis is no longer concerned with what could have been and sets her sights to exploring what could be. It’s an outlook on the world that was formed when her immediate one was small. The intervening years since her last album found St. Louis in a small one-bedroom cabin in the middle of the woods of upstate New York with a new love and time to think of what she wanted to express with her music. For weeks on end, the only trips she took were to and from her job as the front desk clerk at a nearby hotel. The previous years she had spent on tour and performing constantly in the venues of Los Angeles felt like they had occurred in another lifetime.

“It really compelled me to surrender to the unknown,” she says. And in this surrender, she found liberation. St. Louis is more self-assured, open-hearted and ready to say what she wants. St. Louis describes the writing period as one of a slow harvest; a fertile time but one that required a newfound patience. Instead of documenting her first thoughts, she spent more time with each song, going deeper with the themes and ideas she wanted to express.

This slower approach also guided the sonic textures of the album. Working with producer Jarvis Taveniere (Purple Mountains, Woods) in two extended recording sessions in Los Angeles in 2021, St. Louis used the studio in a previously unexplored way, opening up her songs to more experimentation featuring brighter tones and a more orchestral sound to accompany her new perspective. To that end, she was aided by a cast of friends and collaborators including Jess Williamson, Kacey Johansing, Oliver Hill (Kevin Morby, Vagabon) on strings, Alex Fischel (Spoon) on piano, Josh Adams on drums (Bedouine, Tim Heidecker) and Keven Lareau (Cut Worms, Hand Habits).

In the Air has the sound of a joyous consideration of the present moment; a quiet morning revealing a new snowfall outside, steam coming from the kettle, just before it whistles, St. Louis with her guitar, staring out the window, with a few free hours before work. She’s reflecting on the scene in front of her, imagining the times yet to come. You can hear it; she’s a long way from the noisy bars of Los Angeles, the rigors of the road. As she intones in “Rest”: “You spend your whole life believing in the chase. And then you realize that being somewhere doesn’t matter like it used to.” She doesn’t need a river to carry her anymore ... She’s in the air.

Brian Jonestown Massacre, Velvet Underground, TOY. “Upon the highways of Freedom, where Evil is like a Ferrari… “ Unbeknownst to its members, Index For Working Musik was born on an evening in late 2019 amidst the discovery of a collection of faded b&w photocopies that had been marinating on the floor of a urine-alley in the Gothic Quarter of Barcelona. An assortment of sacred and profane imagery were crumpled amongst an essay on early Christian hermits, entitled Men Possessed by God, the meaning of which was enticingly vague. Received together, they planted the seeds for a new endeavour. Though Max Oscarnold and Nathalia Bruno were already engaged in a creative ping-pong of sorts, the results to this point had only totaled a 30 min long ½ inch tape containing one track and four interludes. They needed a page and they needed ink, and they needed a place and it needed energy. Suddenly by chance or divine intervention, their experimental venture had been given form and direction. Back home in London’s cursed smog, they moved themselves and their 8-track studio into a basement in E8, where the project’s gravitational pull gained strength, quickly developing into an unexpected collective with the incorporation of drummer Bobby Voltaire, double bass player E. Smith and guitarist J. Loftus. As the world shifted around them and the Plague Years followed, it became increasingly clear that they were not going to leave that small basement room. The scarcity of light or outer world presence was less a limitation, instead the main tool at hand, allowing the recording to stretch for boundaryless days in architectural isolation, and forcing them to make straight forward free guitar music, adopting a ‘first thought, best thought’ approach. 35 minutes of repeat phrased guitars, slow-clipped drums and dulcet vocals where the recurring landscape is the desert. Reel-to reel-loops of Afghan music compete with the found sound overlays of voices recorded at the queue of the pharmacy and drum machines borrowed from Spanish heroes, channelling both far-off climes and snippets from a closer reality. It’s a strange psychic brew, built of imagined mysticism and domestic realities, of fever dreams and days that stretched into weeks of months. What was sparked by that discovery in the Gothic Quarter was actually a realisation that what they were looking for was with them all the while, buried as it was in piles of voice memos and recorded guitar feedback. Men Possessed By God they may be not: it was self-possession that was to guide their way in the end. “Life, despite all its destructive changes, remains indestructibly powerful and joyful

Marc Richter aka Black To Comm released his debut record 20 years ago. In 2023 he is still busy releasing music under various disguises and is currently signed to the Thrill Jockey label. To celebrate this anniversary his own Cellule 75 label is re-releasing some classic out-of-print vinyl albums that originally came out on the defunct Type and De Stijl labels. The LP will feature a full-colour printed inner sleeve exclusive to this edition.

In 2009 the Type Recordings label run by John Twells had just released seminal records by Grouper, Jóhann Jóhannsson and Yellow Swans when they signed Richter and put out his breakthrough Alphabet 1968 album. The LP sold out within two weeks, receiving a glowing full-page review in The Wire Magazine by the late Mark Fisher (later reprinted in his book Ghosts Of My Life), was selected for Boomkat's Top 10 releases of the year (alongside debut albums by Leyland Kirby, Demdike Stare and Oneohtrix Point Never) and was greeted with universal praise in the underground blog network as well as established magazines such as The New Yorker and Pitchfork.

The music itself played with the notion of nostalgia without being nostalgic itself. It's the sound of half-remembered dreams, a surreal distorted vision of the past, an aural polaroid of long forgotten musics, a ghostly voice from a non-existent era.

From the original Type one-sheet:
"The mission statement for Alphabet 1968 was to write an album of "songs" for want of a better word. Short tracks which represented genre points, the milestones which stuck in Richter's mind when he thought back to his favorite records. What we arrive at is a breathtaking 10-track album which, over the course of 45 minutes, explores world music, techno, noise, avant-garde, ambient music and even exotica. Each track is linked with a loose thread of radio static or environmental sound, dragging you through the album, as if tuning in to a stray broadcast or a particularly adventurous mix. Richter has pieced the album together from hours of recordings made at his studio with home made gamelan, small instruments and loops gathered from a collection of ancient vinyl and 78 records. The scope of the album is admirable, but ignoring this, it is simply a shockingly arresting collection of experimental oddities, with references ranging from Moondog to Basic Channel by way of Bernard Herrmann. It's not hard to fall in love with Alphabet 1968, far harder would be to place exactly where the record should fit into your collection."

Mark Fisher in The Wire:
"But what if we were to take Richter's provocation seriously - what would a song without a singer be like? What would it be like, that is to say, if objects themselves could sing? It’s a question that connects fairy tales with cybernetics, and listening to Alphabet 1968, I’m reminded of a filmic space in which magic and mechanism meet: JF Sebastian’s apartment in Blade Runner. The tracks on the LP are crafted with the same minute attention to detail that the genetic designer and toymaker brought to his miniature automata, with their bizarre mixture of the clockwork and the computerised, the antique and the ultramodern, the playful and the sinister. Richter’s musical pieces have been built from similarly heterogeneous materials - record crackle, shortwave radio, glockenspiels, all manner of samples, mostly of acoustic instruments. ….. JF Sebastian's apartment was itself an update of older spaces in which science and sorcery co-existed: the workshops of ETA Hoffmann's inventor-magicians, or of Pinocchio's creator, Geppetto. I think, too, of Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam's astonishing 1886 tale The Future Eve in which Edison, using the expertise he has recently acquired from inventing the phonograph, sets himself the task of constructing an artificial woman. But if there are songs here, they are sung by the gramophone and other recording and playback machines. Richter so successfully effaces himself as author that it is as if he has snuck into a room and recorded the objects as they played (to) themselves. Rather than simply automating his music, as in the case of Pierre Bastien and his mechanical machines, Richter makes us feel that he has merely recorded the unlife of objects. ….. Indeed, the impression of things winding down is persistent on Alphabet 1968. Entropy has not been excluded from Richter's enchanted soundworld. It feels as if the magic is always about to wear off, that the enchanted objects will slip back into the inanimate again at any moment."

From Alehouse to Playhouse Bjarte Eike and his barnstorming Barokksolistene capture the vital spark of Restoration London’s entertainment scene with a captivating new recording for Rubicon Classics! The Playhouse Sessions will be released on 23 September 2022 to coincide with Barokksolistene’s concert double-bill at London’s Southbank Centre.

‘A smattering of Purcell, dances from Playford’s Dancing Master, shanties, reels and ballads succumb to a nine-piece ensemble drawing on Baroque, jazz and folk styles for a no holds barred hooley of riotous improvisatory give and take,’ (BBC Music Magazine review of The Alehouse Sessions, August 2019)

London’s musicians, pushed in the 1650s, to the margins of society by order of Oliver Cromwell, found room for new forms of entertainment in city-centre taverns and alehouses. They remained there long after the restoration of the monarchy, performing sets of dances, theatre songs and bawdy ballads to audiences glad to be free from Puritan constraints on pleasure.

Norwegian violinist Bjarte Eike and his Barokksolistene have restored the spirit and substance of those long-forgotten performances with their Alehouse Sessions, hailed by The Times as ‘irresistible’ and ‘fabulously unrestrained’ by The Guardian. Five years ago the Norwegian violinist and his band scored a best-selling album with The Alehouse Sessions on Rubicon Classics. They return to the label with another compelling collection of music and words of the kind on offer more than three centuries ago at Henry Purcell’s favourite Westminster watering holes. The Playhouse Sessions, set for release on Rubicon Classics on 23 September 2022, reflects the uplifting energy and engaging emotional contrasts of Barokksolistene’s Alehouse performances.

“The album contains a sort of inner narrative that runs through the recording,” says Bjarte Eike. “It has become like a play in its own right, with each track being a small tale within a larger story.” The recording’s tracklist includes Eike’s beguiling arrangements of music from Purcell’s semi-opera The Fairy Queen and his own original compositions on words from the play on which it is based, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream; popular songs and ballads such as ‘The Irish Washerwoman’, ‘I often for my Jenny strove’ and ‘The Three Ravens’; tunes from Purcell’s welcome odes and stage shows, Come ye sons of art and Dido and Aeneas among them; the ‘Willow Song’ from Shakespeare’s Othello; Eike’s own voice in Puck’s monologue from Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and John Dowland’s sublime air ‘Can she excuse my wrongs’.

London’s theatres were closed at the start of the English Civil War in 1642 and remained shut until the Restoration. Alehouses offered redundant musicians, actors and dancers a place to scrape a precarious living and soon became their creative refuge. “Although a few surviving theatres reopened in 1660 with the return of Charles II, there was little money around to rebuild those that had been demolished,” observes Bjarte Eike. “And a generation of musicians had already found an audience in places like the Black Horse in Aldersgate Street. So popular were their alehouse sessions that Cromwell tried to abolish them! But they outlived him and became part of Restoration musical life.” The form of a Barokksolistene Alehouse, he adds, is like a creative room. “Within its framework I can frequently refurbish the show with new contents. The Playhouse project is likewise an extension of the ever-evolving Alehouse Sessions. Together they tell the story of music and theatre in London during Cromwell’s time and after the Restoration. Of course there’s an historical context to what we do. But there’s also the practical context – which is even more important to me – of connecting with a contemporary twenty-first century audience. An Alehouse / Playhouse performance is not something for the museum; it's about music made in the present moment, just as it was in the London alehouses of Purcell’s day -- with their playhouses annexed to the rear of the beer-drinking saloons. The encounter of musicians onstage and the audience in the hall is the real magic of it. We have to fuse the audience into the action of our performance!”

The Playhouse Sessions will be launched on Friday 23 September with a late-night concert at the Purcell Room and a post-concert Alehouse Session in the foyer of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Soprano Mary Bevan is set to join Eike and his Alehouse Boys for the first half of their Southbank Centre double-bill, offering unique interpretations of songs from Purcell shows and other hits from the late seventeenth-century London stage. “The Southbank Centre is a direct descendant of concerts given in the 1650s in the alehouses of London,” notes Eike. “These alehouses after all staged some of the world’s first public concerts. Later, after the Restoration, it became common for promoters to advertise alehouse concerts in the press and offer subscription tickets. Purcell and his fellow musicians were thus just as at home performing there as they were in the chambers of the royal court or in London’s new theatres.”

Bjarte Eike launched his Alehouse Sessions in company with like-minded musicians 15 years ago. The ensemble comprises a core of regular performers, all of whom have committed to memory a huge setlist of up to four hours of music. Typically they meet a day or so before a concert tour to share a meal and make music together; then next day, re-grouping thirty minutes before the show, they discover Eike’s select-menu for the evening. “That ensures that every show is fresh,” he notes. “I make sure we never repeat the same programme twice. It’s therefore essential to work with people who share my outlook and dare to adventure. We’re into a high-risk sport, with lots of traps and places where the unexpected appears - for good or for ill. And so the audience knows we’re vulnerable. But our skill is seen in how we re-act on the hoof to the unpredictable. That’s authenticity and honesty - and above all it’s a performance that’s genuine.”

Armed with a classical training and a background in folk music and improvisation, Bjarte Eike was drawn naturally to Early Music in all its stylistic variety. “I never really felt at home with only one genre,” he recalls. “Early Music allowed me to study profound, complicated compositions, but performing it has also opened up the chance of rebellion and uproar! Early music offers wide, multi-faceted areas of musical exploration for me. You find, for instance, links to different types of music wherever you look in seventeenth-century English repertoire. And I am fascinated by all these connections. They offer a foundation for the Alehouse Sessions and for all Barokksolistene performance more generally. Every member of the group plays, sings, dances and improvises without limitation. We’re all interested in the many different fields of being a stage performer and pushing hard at the ‘normal’ boundaries of what it means to be a classical musician.”

The Search for God is a wake-up call for a troubled world that’s still worth saving, animated by a belief in the power of small connections to add up to big changes. At 10 songs delivered in a brief 15 minutes, Jimmy Whispers’ long-awaited sophomore album feels present in a way that feels brand new for the cult auteur. Like many of us, Jimmy has been affected by the pressure of the past few years. After embracing sobriety in 2019, and now as a filmmaker sharing the stories of lesser known Los Angeles community members, he’s brought his dreaming down to earth, while turning its direction even further out.

Recorded with his longtime friend Ziyad Asrar of the band Whitney (and re-recorded after a hard drive incident destroyed the original files), The Search for God was created in the wake of Jimmy’s COVID isolation, and returns to some teen influences that are out of step with the chill/lo-fi LA indie rock scene he’s found himself lumped in with. Created mostly with two vintage synths, a single Roland CR5000 drum machine, and a busted karaoke machine, it channels Midwestern emo, the Beach Boys’ Smile, subtle nods at hyper-pop production, and forgotten jewel-box era college radio of the early aughts into a pure pop sound that transcends easy categorization.

The album’s standout single—and its statement of purpose—is “Hellscape,” which packs more into a minute and 40 seconds than you’d think possible: multiple immediately-unforgettable hooks, kaleidoscopic keyboards, and a bracing reminder that even the most transcendent moments are rooted in a world full of suffering. “This is a fucking hellscape,” Jimmy sings. “This is real life / this is happening.”

That may sound like punk nihilism, but The Search for God is anything but. Every lyrical acknowledgment of how fucked things are right now comes with a promise that we can still make positive changes. Jimmy calls it “God”; you might call it Love or Peace or A Place In the Universe That Makes Some Kind of Sense.

Will The Search for God deliver whatever that is to you? Of course not. At its heart, it’s still just a really good pop album. But maybe that’s enough. For a minute or two at a time, Jimmy’s music cracks open a space where the divine can enter our lives. The utopia we’ve all been dreaming of is already here if we’re just willing to build it. Jimmy Whispers is there, ready to add his voice, whenever we want to reach out.

When I first heard Natalie Rose LeBrecht's time-suspending, air-ionizing music, more than twenty years ago, I thought "this kid is on to something." She's been proving that thought right ever since. Her recordings, from the teenage 4-track tapes she made as Greenpot Bluepot to the recent albums under her own name, have been fascinating dispatches from her progressively deeper dives into her gorgeous, weird, wildly idiomatic aesthetic. Holy Prana Open Game is a jewel of intensely personal cosmic music, created through a remarkable process of openness, craftiness, addition and subtraction. It belongs to a tradition of albums that document a rich, meditative sound as it rises up to join the world outside its creators' minds: Alice Coltrane's Universal Consciousness, Harmonia's Musik von Harmonia, Philip Glass's North Star, Talk Talk's Laughing Stock.

"Meditative" is specifically the idea here: Holy Prana Open Game had its origins in the fourteen days LeBrecht spent silently meditating in her home's small music room in the summer of 2019. "I came out of that bursting with the will to create new music," she says, and she created it sound-first. LeBrecht taught herself to program an analog synthesizer's timbres from scratch, and built a new set of glacial, heady compositions out of them, eventually singing to accompany the keyboard parts she was playing.

Then she closed her eyes at her computer, "let my mind be clear and open, imagined light pouring down through me, and began auto-writing to my memory of the music playing through my mind. Most of the lyrics emerged this way, and then I used my conscious mind to refine them a bit at the end." One other song came along with LeBrecht's new pieces, a cover that seems wildly unlikely from the outside and makes total sense in its context: it's a version of Atoms for Peace's "Amok" (which had been created by improvisation and editing, too), mutated into her own idiolect.

In early March of 2020, LeBrecht recorded Holy Prana Open Game's analog synth parts with Martin Bisi at his studio in Brooklyn--and then the world shut down. As you may have gathered, LeBrecht is very much a spiritual, head-in-the-stars type. She is also extremely hardcore, and if making the art she wants to make means doing things the hard way, she cracks her knuckles and gets down to it. Within weeks, she had taught herself how to record, mix and edit with a digital audio workstation. She recorded her vocal parts (sometimes multi-tracked into a radiant choir) at home, assembled a rough mix of the album, and sent it off to her collaborators.

LeBrecht spent some years studying with and assisting La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at their legendary sound-and-light installation, the Dream House. As with their work, her singular, precisely focused vision is shored up by its openness to artistic voices beyond her own. For Holy Prana Open Game, she worked with the Australian guitarist Mick Turner and drummer Jim White (both of Dirty Three, the Tren Brothers and innumerable other projects), as well as woodwind player David Lackner, a longtime presence on her recordings.

Turner and White have been playing together in one context or another since 1985; in the summer of 2020, they were only blocks from each other in Melbourne, Australia, whose strict lockdown meant they couldn't meet up to record together. So both of them, as well as Lackner, recorded their improvisational additions to LeBrecht's rough mixes individually, often without hearing each other's contributions. "I had asked them to play as much as they could on each track," she says, "and told them that I would edit it all down in post, so I had a lot of source material of theirs to work with."

LeBrecht arranged and edited the recordings from all four of their homes to flow together like breath across the duration of her suite. Prana, one of the album's central conceits, is in fact the Sanskrit word for breath, with the connotation of the breath of life. Like LeBrecht's music, prana flows at its own pace, and demands stillness to take in fully--but it's also subtly playful and surprising, a force that can be as light as air or as immersive as the atmosphere itself.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Symphony No. 107 –The Bard, a previously unheard archival recording of the legendary improvising ensemble MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), captured in concert at Bard College, New York in 2012. Formed by a group of American expat composers in Rome in 1966, the MEV ensemble played an important role in the development of free improvisation, bridging the live electronics tradition begun by Cage and Tudor and the high-energy squall of free jazz. Early recordings like Spacecraft or The Sound Pool unleash volleys of metal and glass amplified with contact microphones, howling winds, primitive synthesizer bleep and raucous audience participation, the intensity of which puts much later ‘noise’ to shame. In later decades, the ensemble would go through many iterations, often including legendary free players like Steve Lacy and George Lewis. In its final years, MEV settled into the core trio of founding members heard here: Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum, using piano, electronics, and small instruments.

Curran, Rzewski, and Teitelbaum were life-long friends blessed, as Curran says, with ‘incompatible personalities’: major figures in the post-Cagean experimental tradition, they explored countless divergent and even contradictory paths as composers and performers, from agitprop songs to brainwave-controlled synthesis. MEV is the sound of these three personalities coming together, their contributions radically individual yet attaining a state of ‘fundamental unity’ that Rzewski, in a text written in the collective’s earliest years, defined as the ‘final goal of improvisation’. Of course, listeners familiar with aspect of the trio’s individual works might hazard some guesses about who is doing what: the crisp piano figures are probably Rzewski’s, the cut-up hip-hop samples most likely Curran’s, the sliding, squelching synth possibly Teitelbaum’s. But often these identities are dissolved in a constantly shifting hall of mirrors, the listener unable to tell which of these pianos is live and which is a sample of a past virtuoso, or whether a horn blast derives from ethnographic documentation or Curran cutting loose on Shofar. The two side-long sets here occupy a similar terrain of constantly shifting texture and instrumentation, unexpected interruptions, and moments of sudden beauty. The first set is sparser, at times almost ominous, as a bell repeatedly sounds across wheezing harmonica, seasick orchestral textures, and creaking wood, making room for episodes of yodelling and delicate prepared piano before exploding into a storm of buzzing synth and piano fragments. The second set is more frenetic, moving rapidly across centuries and continents: cars crash into post-serial piano pointillism, wailing voices collide with chopped and screwed hip-hop samples, Hollywood strings are buried under layers of electronic gurgles. The performance slows in its final moments, making way for a sampled voice repeating the phrase ‘protest and the good of the world’, reminding us that MEV’s idea of freedom was always more than musical. Symphony No. 107 –The Bard is a beautifully recorded example of the endlessly multi-layered later MEV sound, accompanied by new liner notes by Alvin Curran (now the only surviving member of the group) and a selection of previously unseen photographs from across the many decades of the group’s activity. Arriving in an elegant sleeve bearing a beautiful photograph by Francis Zhou of the Olin Hall at Bard College where the concert was recorded, this is an essential document from a major group in the history of experimental music. As Rzewski wrote, this music is ‘like life, unpredictable, sometimes making sense, mostly not’.

From small beginnings in 1974 as a local cinema and university event, Film Fest Gent has grown yearly in stature and is now recognised as one of the major destinations for the film industry. A vital component is the celebration of film music in the shape of the World Soundtrack Awards which honours the very best composers at work in the world of cinema. In 2016 the award went to one of the most brilliant composers of his generation, Ryuichi Sakamoto. This is the first overview of his remarkable catalogue of film scores, fully approved by the composer and performed by the masterful Brussels Philharmonic under the baton of Dirk Brossé. Sakamoto was already a celebrated pioneer in electronic music and composer/pianist/singer in Japan when director Nagisa Oshima asked him to write the score for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence in 1983 and also to star alongside David Bowie. In a 30 year plus career since then he has worked with the cream of film directors including Bernardo Bertolucci (The Last Emperor), Brian De Palma (Snake Eyes), Pedro Almodovar (High Heels) and most recently Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (The Revenant). This compilation is a fitting tribute to his status as one of the greatest living musicians and film composers.

The definitive reissue of one of rock’s rarest and most sought-after albums – “acid-folk” – equal parts pastoral folk and contemplative psychedelic. The rst time since 1971 that this album has been pressed from the original master tapes, recently discovered in Italy. Lacquered directly from tape in an all-analog transfer by Bernie Grundman. This is the single LP version that we issued after the Now-Again Reserve Edition sold out. Mark Fry was 19 – recently graduated from high school and in Italy studying painting – when he walked barefooted into RCA’s Italian subsidiary, played some songs he’d written on his guitar and was signed to record the album that would become legend. The first recordings he made proved stuff, so he was paired with members of the Scottish band Middle of the Road, who were in Rome while under contract to RCA Italiana. Convening in a basement home studio with two 4-track reel-to-reel record- ers, Mark’s visions coalesced in a dreamy, airy manner – “Nick Drake meets Dr. Strangely Strange with a touch of Lewis Carroll” The Word Magazine would later write. Pressed in small amounts for Vincenzo Micocci’s RCA sub-label It, Alice remained an out of reach masterpiece for many but its creator, who returned to England in 1971 and subsequently traveled the world, playing music, sometimes recording and painting. By the time of its rediscovery, its master tapes were assumed lost. Their rediscovery allows this pristine transfer to reveal nuances not heard on anything but original It pressings.

Nothing, nowhere. #is the musical endeavor of Vermont songwriter, singer and guitarist Joe Mulherin. For Mulherin, nothing, nowhere. #is about a connection. It's one he finds with fans around the world, who gather to see him play on tour and to listen to his songs online. It's that connection that urges the singer to place his fears aside and step onstage each night to share his art. He sees the potential to help, to make a change, however small it may be and that is why he brings his music out of the Vermont wildness.

EXTREME return in 2023 with their brand new studio album “SIX”. The multi-million selling hard rockers present 12 tracks ranging from funk-tinged bangers to soaring ballads as only EXTREME can deliver. Spearheaded by the songwriting team of vocalist Gary Cherone and guitarist Nuno Bettencourt (who blessed the world with chart toppers like “More Than Words” and “Hole Hearted”), “SIX“ is an essential addition to EXTREME’s discography. The album opener and first single “RISE” will immediately fire up legions of anxious fans with its signature riff. Elsewhere, “OTHER SIDE OF THE RAINBOW” showcases EXTREME’s gift for passionate acoustic magic. EXTREME are back with “SIX“ – everything the fans have been waiting for. Formats; CD, 2LP Black, 2LP Ltd Transparent, 2LP Ltd Red & Black Marble.

EXTREME return in 2023 with their brand new studio album “SIX”. The multi-million selling hard rockers present 12 tracks ranging from funk-tinged bangers to soaring ballads as only EXTREME can deliver. Spearheaded by the songwriting team of vocalist Gary Cherone and guitarist Nuno Bettencourt (who blessed the world with chart toppers like “More Than Words” and “Hole Hearted”), “SIX“ is an essential addition to EXTREME’s discography. The album opener and first single “RISE” will immediately fire up legions of anxious fans with its signature riff. Elsewhere, “OTHER SIDE OF THE RAINBOW” showcases EXTREME’s gift for passionate acoustic magic. EXTREME are back with “SIX“ – everything the fans have been waiting for. Formats; CD, 2LP Black, 2LP Ltd Transparent, 2LP Ltd Red & Black Marble.

Pacific Blue Vinyl, limited to 200 copies. From being right in the middle at the birth of US hardcore punk with DYS to creating the blueprint of melodic hardcore with DAG NASTY, from helping to invent pop punk as we know it with ALL to finding himself in the middle of the west coast punk explosion of the 90s with DOWN BY LAW: Smalley was always on the forefront every time hardcore punk pushed its envelope. While others may use a legacy like that as an excuse to take it a little slower, Dave Smalley has no intention to rest on his laurels and keeps writing new music and releasing records.

When he founded DON'T SLEEP with fellow East Coast punk rockers Garrett Rothman, Tony Bavaria, Jim Bedorf and Tom McGrath in 2017, the world was more than excited about seeing him front a fast yet melodic hardcore band again. Being motivated by immensely positive feedback, DON'T SLEEP was finally ready to release its debut album "Turn the Tide" in 2020.


And then the world came to a grinding halt. But after the dust settled, all five members decided that DON'T SLEEP was too important to not overcome all obstacles thrown in their way. The five piece went back into the rehearsal room, finished 8 original songs and added an amazing TOM PETTY cover to the mix. The result is DON'T SLEEP's second full length "See Change".

Transparent green vinyl. From being right in the middle at the birth of US hardcore punk with DYS to creating the blueprint of melodic hardcore with DAG NASTY, from helping to invent pop punk as we know it with ALL to finding himself in the middle of the west coast punk explosion of the 90s with DOWN BY LAW: Smalley was always on the forefront every time hardcore punk pushed its envelope. While others may use a legacy like that as an excuse to take it a little slower, Dave Smalley has no intention to rest on his laurels and keeps writing new music and releasing records. When he founded DON'T SLEEP with fellow East Coast punk rockers Garrett Rothman, Tony Bavaria, Jim Bedorf and Tom McGrath in 2017, the world was more than excited about seeing him front a fast yet melodic hardcore band again. Being motivated by immensely positive feedback, DON'T SLEEP was finally ready to release its debut album "Turn the Tide" in 2020. And then the world came to a grinding halt. But after the dust settled, all five members decided that DON'T SLEEP was too important to not overcome all obstacles thrown in their way. The five piece went back into the rehearsal room, finished 8 original songs and added an amazing TOM PETTY cover to the mix. The result is DON'T SLEEP's second full length "See Change".

The name NxxxxxS (pronounced "N-Five X-S”) sounds like it could be an equation, or a mystery. But to begin to unravel the identity of the French producer who just signed to Because Music and Mad Decent (the label founded by Diplo), you first have to look for clues on YouTube and Soundcloud, where so many underground artists have found a place to hone their craft. In the ten years preceding the release of his second album Short Term Agreement in 2023, NxxxxxS built up a solid reputation for himself in the international vaporwave, vaportrap & phonk scenes. This is no small feat considering he didn’t have any real knowledge of production or composition before deciding to take on these classic genres of “Internet music”.
The Paris native first gained exposure when he started making beats on YouTube, taking his inspiration from American rappers of the blog era - when artists, especially in hip hop, used digital technology to break away from traditional distribution models - like Mac Miller or Odd Future. Building on this initial success, NxxxxxS turned to Soundcloud, an essential platform for music enthusiasts, tastemakers or anyone on the lookout for the sounds of tomorrow.
Following in the footsteps of The Alchemist and other producers of the same ilk, NxxxxxS soon became one of the pioneers of vaporwave and vaportrap music. Featured prominently in modern productions, these styles originated on social media platforms such as Reddit or Tumbler in the 2010’s and are recognisable by their frequent use of commercial samples ranging from the 70’s to the 2000’s (taken from jingles, lounge, jazz or elevator music). Altered, chopped up and slowed down to around 60 to 70 BPM to match hip-hop standards, the music offered a critique or satire of capitalism, consumer society and any culture that grew out of it, most notably yuppies from the 80’s.
NxxxxxS put his own spin on the recipe by creating a new world filled with soaring melodies and countless references to movies and horror scenes, and eventually released his debut album Fujita Scale (a scale used to measure the damage inflicted by tornadoes) in 2014. The album reached a worldwide audience because of its composer’s story and of the secrecy around his French nationality, and even won over unexpected fanbases such as the highly closed off Chinese market. Fujita Scale landed on one of China's streaming platforms, making NxxxxxS an identifiable artist in Asia who went on to tour his album three times across the continent.

NxxxxxS kept the ball rolling, collaborating on a new series of more accessible projects, which aimed to be less niche in terms of the references or sub-genres they tapped into, so he could find a new audience. This led to his first hits, “Synthetic Corporation” - which would also become the name of his label - “Remember Last Summer” and “Formatted Excess”, as well as his most popular track to date, “Playa Shit”, with over 11M streams on Spotify. The upcoming album’s title, Short Term Agreement, is a playful reference to his unyielding desire for independence and productivity, and his eagerness to preserve the personal freedom he turned into strength.
Yet NxxxxxS is never one to refuse support, and he has now joined forces with Because Music & Mad Decent to further establish himself as a producer at the international level - alongside Diplo especially, who is a case in point - so that this understated and ever prolific artist can meet his ambitions of widening his audience and have his name known by all.
And so the tracks on Short Term Agreement serve as the foundation for NxxxxxS' new identity, featuring a rich and diverse array of sounds thanks to the numerous guests involved: London rapper Jeshi - a new British rap phenomenon also freshly signed to Because Music, French rappers 8ruki & Bitsu, Canadian Freddie Dredd and American underground talents Pollari . Avoiding the pitfalls of a compilation-like producer album, NxxxxxS has once again carved out his own style from the modern hip hop rule book.

In other words, NxxxxxS’ constant evolution has brought us this much closer to solving the mystery that is his name.

Svart Records are ecstatic to present the first ever vinyl edition of the Mad Juana debut album Skin Of My Teeth. Limited to 500 copies and including a bonus CD with 5 home demos. Mad Juana were Sam Yaffa (Hanoi Rocks) and Karmen Guy, and Skin Of My Teeth will see the light of day for the first time since 1997. After the years spent as the bassist for Hanoi Rocks and Demolition 23, Yaffa began to search for new musical enthusiasm by exploring a wide range of different genres of music, while learning to play numerous new instruments. Mad Juana allowed him to step outside his comfort zone and redefine himself as a musician. “Re-mastered, the record will get a new life in the spring of 2023. The album that was created 27 years ago is still one of my favorite records. Written and created with my ex-wife Karmen Guy, the album is an inspired celebration of limitless musical joy, which combines rock'n'roll, punk, experimental music, a little bit of ethno and whatever came to our minds in the creative process" says Yaffa. Mad Juana's Skin of My Teeth was born in two countries and broke musical boundaries. “The album was first recorded at our home studio in the small Mallorcan village of Montuiri in Spain and finished at the late Hombre Laitinen's studio in Tikkurila, Finland. The album that also featured the percussion maestro, Affe Forsman was a turning point for me personally in creating music and my approach to it. All the rules and habits of making music learned previously were tossed aside, and a door to a new musical world was kicked wide open with a big boot", Yaffa describes the making of the album and continues excitedly, ”Re-mastered and with Svart's great album packaging, the album will hopefully reach the ears and eyes of those who might not have even known about its existence. I'm going to blast the vinyl to 11 as soon as I get my hands on it!".

Eponymous collaboration between Jim Ghedi & Toby Hay - their first
since 2018's 'The Hawksworth Grove Sessions' and their debut for Topic
Records
Postponed for two years due to the small matter of a global pandemic, finally, as
some semblance of normality took shape, in February 2022, the duo headed into
Giant Wafer Studios, mid-Wales, with very little rehearsal time and recorded the
entire album live, with no edits or overdubs over three days.
Jim Ghedi and Toby Hay are both prolific, praised and established artists in their
own right. Hailing from South Yorkshire, Ghedi's previous work has often been
instrumental, exploring the natural world and his relationship to it, as seen on
2018's A Hymn For Ancient Land but also developing into using his voice,
songwriting and traditional material on his more recent album, In The Furrows Of
Common Place. Toby Hay, hailing from the Cambrian mountains, professes
likewise, that the landscape serves as eternal muse and the spiritual groundwork
of his entrancing guitar playing which has dazzled critics and listeners alike
throughout his career. All of this makes their collaboration with the world's oldest
independent label and custodians of UK folk music, Topic Records, a natural
home for this exceptional record.
The album arrtwork includes beautiful liner notes by Andrew Male, senior
associate editor of Mojo magazine; film, radio and TV writer for Sight and Sound
and Sunday Times Culture.

Kundan Lal is a highly understated artist. Little is known about his background, though some refer to him as Kunsaf Halil, his personal life remains largely a mystery.

Gathering a cult following amongst people like Den Sorte Skole or DJ Marcelle with his previous releases, he is now set to sail new shores. There is a sense of wanderlust as he opens his box of field recordings, collected on his many travels. From the buzzing streets of Alexandria, early sunday markets in Tafraoute or a crackling bonfire down by the banks of the river Ganges. Each track takes you places.

Kundan's second album is a captivating blend of dubby beats, collages, and exotic instrumentation. Drawing from classic tools like the Roland 808, SC7 and the famous Space Echo, Kundan has created a unique and minimalistic sound that is sure to captivate listeners. At once nostalgic and experimental, "Power of Ra" is a must-listen for both electronic music purists and fans of adventurous soundscapes.

Compelled to work from home on his computer during lockdown, Kundan dusted his pawnshop e-piano, downloaded some orchestral soundkits and started to digitize almost forgotten field recordings. The "Power of Ra“ came to him.

“Illgrimage” is a good example of his approach. Combining atmospheric soundscapes with swirling strings, trombones and pianos. Echoes of birds and children playing in the streets. A small town filled with life and a theremin leading the way while you hear the faint yet powerful words of Greta Thunberg saying: "Imagine...“

“Raqaqa,” a powerful orchestral journey with a hip-hop edge. Tinkling chimes add a groovy vibe, while lush layers of wind instruments weave a masterful soundscape. It’s the slow-burning intensity of this track that pulls you in.

"Nasi Chip" is a signature song that exemplifies Kundan Lal’s musical prowess. An engaging beat coupled with chopped up vocals, 8-bit synth melodies and an arpeggiated piano provide an energetic atmosphere that is both cunning and unique.

”Cen" lures you into the egyptian realm. A Harmonium slithers serpent like around a pounding beat.Horns gently swaying to the rhythm of the desert.

It is hard to put your finger on his style or genre. You can feel Kundan Lal‘s DIY spirit in his production, carving his own ethnic genre. For enthusiasts of Roberto Musci or Muslimgauze, this avant-garde album is one for your collection. Keep your senses open and let the Power of Ra pass you to another world.

»Picture a Frame,« the debut album by the Belgian composer Elisabeth Klinck, was born out of strict isolation and is nonetheless a result of a collaborative process that saw her working closely with artist Oscar Claus. Enriching her compositions for violin with electronic soundscapes and field recordings from their surroundings, the two entered an artistic dialogue that took place inside its own idiosyncratic space outside of conventional time. It is an intimate record in which Klinck’s expressive playing that incorporates unconventional techniques forms the basis of something much bigger: an invitation to inhabit a specific space at a specific time together with the two of them.

For an entire week in the spring of 2021, Klinck and Claus stayed at an abandoned monastery surrounded by beautiful gardens, but with no power or running water. The intention was to record some of Klinck’s musical ideas on violin, experiment with electronics and acoustic spaces and to get to know each other on a musical level. This proved to be an inspiring and deeply moving process—and the starting point for more. In the winter of that year, the duo set out to the Spanish Pyrenees to build a DIY studio in a small village on a mountain top and record the eight pieces that form »Picture a Frame.« The idea of losing track of time and space is a theme that found its way in these recordings. The two spent their days and nights reading, walking, talking, cooking and taking care of the animals living there but also experimenting with sound, improvising together and making field recordings.

This deep focus on being present in the moment, listening to the world around them and each other resulted in a holistic experience that was translated into music and sound. Klinck and Claus understand this album as a collage, an attempt to evoke the implicit, an essay that suggests a time and space, and a gentle collision between two people that deeply resonate with one another. It’s impossible to argue with that, and even harder not to be drawn into it.

Unforgettable moments of beauty and peace. Eternal Reality is an electronic listening experience to the inner self while it was created in a state of deep consciousness. "Be Free" has got the pulse of endless time and describes the feeling of wellbeing and balance in a temporary world. It can be seen as a listening meditation and a call to take a break.

"Behind The Scenes" describes moments of escaping from daily routines and small moments of silence between tasks and before next rush hour.

„Shape“ is a global thought about the beginning of life and existence. All material things on earth have got a shape made by man or nature.

„Kotodama“ describes the beauty of words and languages. Information interchange for progress.

This product was created using vintage synthesizers for maximum fun!