Cerca:terms

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.

What’s Mu about? Mu is about everything: Songs about heartbreak and parting share the album with songs marvelling at the scale of the universe. Mu is a concept from Zen and Chan Buddhism that means: “nothingness” and also, “pure awareness.” The awareness at the source of all things. In Hannah’s words: “There is so much life in every moment. Endless patterns, algorithms and instances repeating and changing and adapting. Spiralling outwards from the source. What source? The source.” In search of the source, Hannah has composed and arranged an undefinable, cinematic album that leads the listener on a winding path through her imagination. Sonically as well as thematically, Mu is an album of extremes and lofty ambitions. Fragile and delicate vocal and violin textures contrast with crunchy noisescapes and brooding synthesizers. Hannah’s commanding voice shares the spotlight with a string section and is backed by spacious production featuring many acoustic instruments. Sonically, producer Nick Herrera has brought a reassuring chunkiness to this unplugged palette, in particular the head nodding drums that anchor Hannah’s celestial musings. Like a film soundtrack or a symphony Mu is best listened to and understood as a whole - it circles back to themes and refrains and re-examines them. Sometimes a song is a song, sometimes it’s a soundscape dreaming of a song. “When making this album, I had a specific concept for how I wanted the music to sound. I don’t mean in terms of genre… it was more of a visceral, sensory concept which I knew I could only realise by allowing myself to experiment and create simultaneously, believing in my rough ideas enough to grow them, to weave them into stories. I began allowing myself to enter and remain in a very heightened state of awareness, which is a state I have continued to pursue and learnt to enjoy ever since. I let my mind dissolve into blackness each day. From there the most wonderful colours can appear. I have decided to call the album “Mu” to signify the empty chasm I allowed to hold within me whilst these songs were born.”

Producer & musician Handshaking continues the legacy of Finnish electronic music with the upcoming album ‘There was a chance’, due for release on May 19th of 2023.

Handshaking is a familiar name in the Helsinki underground scene and has become known for surprise-filled and versatile DJ gigs and energetic live performances.

Handshaking’s 2020 debut LP Garden Clogs was a long-awaited work for the electronic and dance music audience. The limited 200 vinyl edition sold out during the release weekend. Image Magazine said the “Handshaking’s debut album is of the highest quality in terms of production value, which competes with peers like Yaeji, Peggy Gou and Jaakko Eino Kalevi”.

Handshaking releases via PME Records, which is the biggest independent label in Finland, representing artists like ALMA, Babel and AHO. Founded in 2012, the label has almost 30 artists in its roster with a wide variety of genres.

Baby Rose makes healing music for the aimless and heartbroken. The Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter and producer's uniquely rich voice naturally lends itself to her powerful, smoke-filled ballads lamenting lost loves and broken futures. "I make music to help myself get through things," she says. The piercing honesty and vulnerability she brings to her lyrics in turn helps others process their feelings and find a place of healing. For Rose, it's a journey that's still ongoing. "If I'm going to leave anything behind, it's going to be getting people back to themselves," she says. "As I get back to myself, it's a constant reset: Remember who you are, remember who you want to be." You can hear the impact of this approach in Baby Rose's upcoming second album, Through and Through. Take the hypnotic "Fight Club." Over the track's simmering baseline and crashing cymbals, she declares, "I don't need no one else to show me the way." She describes the song as a "breaking of the shell. It encourages me to just go for it and not care about what anyone else thinks." Therein lies Baby Rose's strength: a determination to live, love, and create on her own terms. "I'm not just a singer with a unique voice," she says. "I'm somebody that has something to say." In the years since releasing her last album, To Myself, Rose has been painstakingly piecing together its sequel. Started almost immediately after its release, her new body of work finds her in a state of musical and personal transition. It's a subtle merging of new sounds_stirring rock, upbeat r&b, psychedelic funk, pop, and soulful ballads_, all mastered through analog tape to make the music feel warmer and all-encompassing. It's also a journey inward as she battles past fear and self-doubt to finally discover_and love_who she is, where she is. Finishing an album with such peace and firm resolution is a first for Rose, but she makes it clear: She's nowhere near done writing her story. "I think as long as I'm being raw and trying to push past my comfort zone, it will feel rewarding," she says. "I don't want to be the type that doesn't take risks because I'm afraid. I have to trust that as long as the music is honest and innovative, it'll be timeless."

One day, you wake up with a cloud in your head. You feel out of place and uninspired, and juggle so many worries the balance is skewed. That was Armin van Buuren three years ago. He put so much love and passion into his work and found it hard to cope with the fact that not everyone can be pleased. Something needed to change. So, he reformed his life routines, took up meditation to calm the storm and did everything he could to negate the numbness. And what he ended up with was a newfound love for music and an incredible three-part album: Feel Again.

From "No Fun" and "Computers Take Over The World" to "One More Time", "Come Around Again" and "Roll The Dice", the Feel Again album sonically represents the journey of an artist extraordinaire radically looking for harmony within himself. Its 34 tracks may be different in terms of sound, but together, they reflect an equilibrium that could only come from a man in balance.

From reconnecting to friends, family, and fans to finding inner peace, Feel Again means acknowledging harsh truths, finding out what really matters and letting that power a new step forward. Because in the evergreen words of Armin van Buuren himself, “we're still learning and will never stop learning till the day we die”.

Feel Again is available as a deluxe limited edition box set, including 3 LP's, which are housed in printed innersleeves. The set also includes 5 exclusive Armin van Buuren lithos. This deluxe boxset is limited to 3000 individually numbered copies on turquoise marbled (LP1), white marbled (LP2), and orange marbled (LP3) vinyl.

buen clima is the solo project of producer, composer and DJ Felipe Castro (Santiago, 1993). Under that alias, he makes a sometimes clean, sometimes dirty mix of techno, house and electro, among other styles, with a soft spot for high BPMs, big, glossy pad sounds and interlocking rhythms. With a background in classical music and free improvisation, his productions and live performances often bring into them unexpected moments of noise, unusual influences and, above all, humour.

« This EP is comprised of five tracks written between 2020 and 2022, and it's got quite a bit of contrast among them, as well as some common threads. Some are gritty and noisy, some are a bit more amiable. However, they all show signs of recurring obsessions with certain rhythms, certain synth sounds, and share a sense of fun and humour. Each is an exploration of different production and synthesis techniques.

Big Butibit Chess Master Pro v.3.5 is on the lighter side, with some big warm pads and jazzy drum sound. It's kind of a sunny ghettotech cut, if that makes any sense. The synth part has a spontaneous feel, it was recorded pretty much in one take.

>:) Is a heavier club track, made to go a little evil, a little mischievous. It's full of squelchy sounds and has a drum part that sounds like a never ending Street Fighter combo, or a bunch of beer bottles being opened one after the other.

Forma/Contenido is also on the darker side, with a droning, oppressive mass of sound that accumulates and evolves all throughout the track. It's very much inspired by the piece "I am sitting in a room" by Alvin Lucier, and is, in fact, a sort of live version of the same premise, a long feedback loop of the voice and the beat recorded and played in the studio.

Arturito is how we call R2D2 in Latin America (or at least in Chile), and it's also my father's name. We both love the original Star Wars and this is a little tribute to that. I had a lot of fun making this track, using only Ableton's Operator synth to make 90% of the sounds. It's a bouncy, evolving electro cut with a lot of quirky bleeps and bloops.

Pequeña midi is definitely the heart of the EP, a slower track made for my cat, who's sitting in my lap as I'm writing this. The rhythms and the sounds are a musical representation of how I imagine her life is like, and of her little games, running around the house. In terms of style I feel like this is what it would sound like if Yellow Magic Orchestra did a slowed down footwork track (play it at 160 BPM if you don't believe me!). »

First-ever reissue of the 1988 album. Gatefold LP includes new and restored artwork and a chapbook, featuring forty-eight pages of lyrics, essays, photographs, and Gordon's extraordinary drawings for each song. The Choctaw, Assiniboine, and Texan poet, journalist, visual artist, American Indian Movement activist, and musician Roxy Gordon (First Coyote Boy) (1945-2000) was above all a storyteller, known primarily as a writer of inimitable style and unvarnished candor, whose wide-ranging work encompassed poetry, short fiction, essays, memoirs, journalism, and criticism. Over the course of his career he recorded six albums, wrote six books, and published hundreds of shorter texts in outlets ranging from Rolling Stone and The Village Voice to the Coleman Chronicle and Democrat-Voice, in addition to founding and operating, with his wife Judy Gordon, Wowapi Press and the underground country music journal Picking Up the Tempo. Along the way he cultivated close friendships with fellow Texan songwriters such as Lubbockites Terry Allen, Butch Hancock, and Tommy X. Hancock, as well as Ray Wylie Hubbard, Billy Joe Shaver, and, most famously, Townes Van Zandt, whom he called his brother. Although his work covered a vast array of topics exploring strata personal, local, global, and cosmic alike, Gordon's primary subject as a writer, musician, and visual artist was always American Indian culture, specifically the ways it collided and coexisted with European American culture in the South and West-and within the context of his own life and braided identity. The ten songs on Crazy Horse Never Died, his first officially released and distributed album, were recorded in Dallas in 1988. "Songs" is perhaps an imprecise taxonomy for what Roxy captured on this and his other albums, all of which remain out of print or were released in instantly obscure limited editions of homebrew cassettes and CD-R's. (Paradise of Bachelors plans to reissue remastered, expanded editions of his catalog; Crazy Horse is the first.) He only occasionally attempted to sing, and his musical recordings are primarily corollaries of, and vehicles for, his poems. His sharp West Texan drawl, tinged by formative years of reservation living in Montana and unmistakable once you hear it-high, lonesome, flat, and cold-blooded as a bare rusty blade-instead patiently unfurls in skewed sheets of anecdotal verse and discursive narrative rants. Although Gordon's music at times incorporated powwow style drumming, fiddling, or unaccompanied ballad singing, the majority of it hews to an idiosyncratic spoken word style, accompanied by atmospheric, sometimes synth-damaged country-rock that skirts ambient textures and postpunk deconstructions. His songs are essentially recitations over backing tracks of finger picked guitars, rubbery washtub bass, and buzzing, oscillating keyboards. On the stark yellow and red jacket of Crazy Horse, which he designed himself, Gordon describes these recordings as innately ambivalent in terms of form, content, and identity: These are poems and/or songs about the American West, white and Indian. My life has been Indian and/or white. Maybe there's not a lot of difference-maybe. I guess that's mostly according to which white person or which Indian you're talking about. That's probably what this album's about. Crazy Horse Never Died comprises songs that span the personal and political arcs of his writing practice and the poles of his native and white ancestries.

Sustained exercises in tension. Personal healing. Dischord Records. The Unit Ama make music that explodes outward: dense but soothing metronomic pulses morph into a wild fracturing of the traditional rock trio. The Unit Ama take their time. They act on their own terms. This applies to their music and their work-rate. Two albums and a handful of singles in twenty years. Sporadic gigs. No endless Bandcamp messages or weekly mailing list updates. Rare missions outside their native north-east. And then… Toward is their second studio album and their second Gringo release. It’s not their ‘pandemic’ album but does see the band considering the important things: post-traumatic growth, insight through experience. Utilising the past to navigate towards a meaningful future. Toward was self-produced and will probably get tagged as post-hardcore which is fair enough. But it’s also informed by post-punk, jazz and folk, and by working closely together for two decades. The Unit Ama play in other incarnations that inform their music and the way they dismantle expectations of the rock trio. There’s as much Richard Thompson as Minutemen. Toward takes the exploratory, explosive sound of their debut and adds twenty years of living and listening. Toward is eight tracks that are thoughtful and intricate without losing any impact. This is gut music as much as it is head music. The Unit Ama never let their abilities get in the way of their instincts and Toward is full of surging urgency and roaring anxiety. But there are moments of brooding calm too, and a song – Mary – that could be stripped down and sold as a folk ballad. The trio also play variously as The Long Lonesome Go, Archipelago, The Horse Loom and more. They have supported everyone from Fugazi to Lungfish, Lightning Bolt to Sunburned Hand of the Man

Black Vinyl – stock is slightly limited on this one and orders might be subject to cutbacks

After asking Chloé Thévenin to collaborate on the soundtrack of her show "Static Shot" (2020), Maud Le Pladec has called upon the producer and DJ again for "counting stars with you (musiques femmes)". A new ambitious, militant and feminist creation made for the 2021 season of Montpellier Danse. The dancer and choreographer, accompanied by six dancers, uses dance and song to explore the unspoken, the marginalisation and the representation of women musicians from the Middle Ages to the present day by summoning historical and contemporary figures such as Kassia of Constantinople, Barbara Strozzi, Giovanna Marini and Clara Schuman...

“In concrete terms," says Chloé, "I composed the music by taking on board the songs of the dancers, drawing and reworking the voices from the repertoire of all the women composers who have been silenced by history. It’s a collective work, with Maud Le Pladec and Tom Pauwels (of the Ictus Ensemble), and we built on it as we rehearsed and developed the piece. The voices, their choices and reinterpretations were able to evolve into the music that I was composing.” Immersed in the creation and the work-in-progress nature of this show, Chloé has imagined a soundtrack based on song. She uses the performers’ scansions, whispers, performances

Clear Vinyl

For polymath artist Wesley Joseph, writing a song is like shooting a film. He sees in terms of scenes and colors, lighting the proper mood, drawing the right emotional arc_far beyond just getting a catchy melody down on tape. Music and filmmaking are Joseph's two great loves. Film came first_he started making DIY videos at age 12 to entertain himself and his friends growing up in a small UK community_but when he moved to London to study it, the energy he discovered in the city demanded to be captured in song, resulting in his 2021 debut ULTRAMARINE, a distinctly cinematic collection of avant-R&B and soulful future-pop shot through with moments of surprising aggression and an intriguingly complex postmillennial aura. Since collaborating with the likes of Jorja Smith and Loyle Carner, he returns with GLOW, eight more songs of love, loss, anxiety, and joy about coming of age at a time of unprecedented change. Showcasing his range across songwriting, performing, and production_not to mention his flawless transitions between singing and rapping, between character studies and raw emotional honesty_it's a stunningly beautiful work that makes it clear Joseph's on the path to becoming a worldchanging talent. As on previous projects, Joseph is providing his own visual accompaniments for GLOW, creative directing its artwork and directing its first video. "COLD SUMMER" finds Joseph singing from a supervillain's perspective over woozy film-score strings, and the concept bleeds over into its video accompaniment, a cryptic post-post-Tarantino gangster comedy shot in Kazakhstan. It's usually hyperbole to call an artist as young and new as Joseph "visionary," but it's undeniable that he has a vision, one that transcends old ideas of genre and medium, one that seems to get bigger and richer every time he steps into a studio or behind a camera. GLOW is one of the deepest and most satisfyingly cinematic listening experiences of the year_and Wesley Joseph is just getting started.

Swedish Doom/Death Metal from the Champions League of that genre!
Runemagick mines the darkest seams of crushing Death/Doom Metal for unremitting headbanging groove. Runemagick are among the most
underrated bands in the history of Metal. Their relative obscurity is hard to pin down. Musically, in terms of songcraft, atmosphere, and immersion into the unearthly realms of the occult, they are basically without peers. Yet despite a prolific thirty-year existence, their reputation exists on the fringes: highly regarded by some but not highly enough considering the overall quality of their output.

From start to finish Runemagick plays well done ancient Death/Doom metal, very slow and heavy, but the balance between Death and Doom Metal is very well chosen! This will relive the glory days of the good old 90’s stuff from the United Kingdom! Deep and intense grunts, the freezing thick guitars and the intense bass lines really spread a gloomy frightening atmosphere. Runemagick have written an album against all kinds of trends hailing a style which.

Visceral yet inherently soulful, 'Hardly The Same Snake' is the sound of the Johannesburg-born, Doncaster-raised artist Doya Beardmore finally finding his voice – both literally and figuratively. In practical terms, that involved finding the courage to foreground his gravelly baritone in these gloriously genre-agnostic productions. But it also meant branching out beyond his safety net to figure out the artist he truly wanted to be. As Skinny puts it today, “This album is what I would have created the first time round had I rated my own voice.” The idea of forging your own path – and shedding skin, so to speak – is integral to 'Hardly The Same Snake'. Begun pre-pandemic and completed in the spring of 2021, it’s a defiantly outward-looking record contemplating family, religion and major life milestones, from parenthood to death. Where previously Skinny relied on dream diaries as his primary lyrical resource, this time he took notes at design exhibitions, using these unfiltered observations as a jumping off point for songs. If this superb second album proves anything, it’s that it doesn’t matter how much Skinny errs on the side of self-deprecation – he remains one of the UK’s most fearlessly original voices. Skinny Pelembe's second album 'Hardly The Same Snake' is out on April 28th on Partisan Records.

Gold Vinyl

Lael Neale still has a flip phone and there were no screens involved in the creation of her new record Star Eaters Delight. The album is her second for Sub Pop and reveals an expansion of her sonic collaboration with producer and accompanist Guy Blakeslee. In April of 2020, in the wake of transformations both personal and global, Lael moved from Los Angeles back to her family's farm in rural Virginia. Looking at the world from a distance and getting in tune with her own rhythms, she wrote and recorded steadily for two dreamlike years, driven by a need to make order out of chaos. Forged in isolation, Star Eaters Delight is a vehicle for returning, not just to civilization, but to celebration. She says, "Acquainted with Night (recorded in 2019, and released in 2021), was focused inward, amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me. It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound. This album is more external. It is me reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again." Album opener and lead single "I Am The River" melts the ice with a dynamic explosion of minimalist transcendental pop clearly descended from the Velvet Underground's branch of modern music's family tree. Blakeslee's spare yet cinematic arrangements create an ambient space in which Neale's clear and unaffected voice can explore familiar themes in an unexpected way. Subtle but potent references to Shakespeare, Emerson and the Bible (which she hasn't read) swirl together with deeply personal musings and touches of wry humor, always more optimistic than cynical. While this is a record about polarities- country vs. city, humanity vs. technology, solitude vs. relationship - the deeper intention is to heal; to come to terms with our differences and put the broken pieces back together again. Lael's affinity with the Transcendentalists has to do with her quest to hold onto sovereignty over her own mind. In a time when our devices are constantly flooding us with information, opinions and propaganda, Lael is intentional about what she takes in - hence the flip phone and the cassette recorder. Neale identifies as a minimalist "not because I don't like things, but because I value freedom more."

Tape

Lael Neale still has a flip phone and there were no screens involved in the creation of her new record Star Eaters Delight. The album is her second for Sub Pop and reveals an expansion of her sonic collaboration with producer and accompanist Guy Blakeslee. In April of 2020, in the wake of transformations both personal and global, Lael moved from Los Angeles back to her family's farm in rural Virginia. Looking at the world from a distance and getting in tune with her own rhythms, she wrote and recorded steadily for two dreamlike years, driven by a need to make order out of chaos. Forged in isolation, Star Eaters Delight is a vehicle for returning, not just to civilization, but to celebration. She says, "Acquainted with Night (recorded in 2019, and released in 2021), was focused inward, amidst the loud and bright Los Angeles surrounding me. It was an attempt to create spaciousness and quiet reverie within. When I moved back to the farm, I found that the unbroken silences compelled me to break them with sound. This album is more external. It is me reaching back out to the world, wanting to feel connected, to wake up, to come together again." Album opener and lead single "I Am The River" melts the ice with a dynamic explosion of minimalist transcendental pop clearly descended from the Velvet Underground's branch of modern music's family tree. Blakeslee's spare yet cinematic arrangements create an ambient space in which Neale's clear and unaffected voice can explore familiar themes in an unexpected way. Subtle but potent references to Shakespeare, Emerson and the Bible (which she hasn't read) swirl together with deeply personal musings and touches of wry humor, always more optimistic than cynical. While this is a record about polarities- country vs. city, humanity vs. technology, solitude vs. relationship - the deeper intention is to heal; to come to terms with our differences and put the broken pieces back together again. Lael's affinity with the Transcendentalists has to do with her quest to hold onto sovereignty over her own mind. In a time when our devices are constantly flooding us with information, opinions and propaganda, Lael is intentional about what she takes in - hence the flip phone and the cassette recorder. Neale identifies as a minimalist "not because I don't like things, but because I value freedom more."

For polymath artist Wesley Joseph, writing a song is like shooting a film - he sees in terms of scenes and colors, lighting the proper mood, drawing the right emotional arc. Music and filmmaking are Joseph’s two great loves. Film came first—he started making DIY videos at age 12 to entertain himself and his friends growing up in a small town in the UK. “There wasn’t really much happening,” he remembers, “and from a young age it created this mindset that doing everything myself was the only way to do it.”

But when he moved to London to study as a filmmaker, he discovered something in the freedom and independence of city life that demanded to be captured in song, and found a crew of collaborators—including A.K. Paul, Dave Okumu, Joy Orbison, Leon Vynehall, Lexxx, Loyle Carner and his childhood friend Jorja Smith—to help him do it. The result was his breakthrough single ‘Ghostin’’ and the 2021 debut ULTRAMARINE - released on his own imprint EEVILTWINN - a deeply textured collection of avant-R&B and soulful future-pop that stretched from psychedelic ballads to hard hip-hop bars (often in the span of a single track) and crystallized the mood of a young cohort trying to find love and live their dreams while the world is falling apart. Whilst his collaboration with Loyle Carner on single ‘Blood On My Nikes’ lead to him featuring on the artist’s critically acclaimed - and #3 charting album - earlier this year.

Now the nascent auteur returns with his Secretly Canadian debut GLOW, eight more songs of love, loss, anxiety, and joy about coming of age at a time of unprecedented change. Showcasing his range across songwriting, performing, and production—not to mention his flawless transitions between singing and rapping, between character studies and raw emotional honesty—it’s a stunningly beautiful work that makes it clear Joseph’s on the path to becoming a world-changing talent.

GLOW opens with the title track’s warm analog synths and cascading vocals that channel the harmonious Northern soul Joseph’s dad raised him on, a shimmering bed of clouds for the project’s opening credits. But like any good director, he quickly deepens the mood, drawing together disparate influences and emotions to build a unique sonic world spilling over with synchronicities and juxtapositions. “MONSOON” conjures nocturnal hedonism at the same time as it contemplates grief.

As on previous projects, Joseph is providing his own visual accompaniments for GLOW, creative directing its artwork and adding to his growing filmography as a director—he’s repped by the renowned production company Stink—with its first video. “COLD SUMMER” finds Joseph singing from a supervillain’s perspective over woozy film-score strings, and the concept bleeds over into its video accompaniment, a cryptic post-post-Tarantino film shot in Kazakhstan.

“I've never really seen them separately,” Joseph says of music and film. “They kind of just constantly drift into each other. And when they come together, it's like it was meant to be in my head the whole time.
It’s usually hyperbole to call an artist as young and new as Joseph “visionary,” but it’s undeniable that he has a vision, one that transcends old ideas of genre and medium, one that seems to get bigger and richer every time he steps into a studio or behind a camera. GLOW is one of the deepest and most satisfyingly cinematic listening experiences of the year—and Wesley Joseph is just getting started.

Received a 7.5 rating from Pitchfork. The debut full length from Melbourne, Australia’s Romero is a burst of hard hitting, punk-laced powerpop. Well informed by the classics and every bit as relevant-as-it-is timeless, Turn It On! is a memorable party. An album that captures the vitality of a young band hitting their stride and doing it on their own terms without a single note of indecision. Much in the way that The Undertones, Blondie, and even Big Star debuted with a sense of purpose, Romero invite us to eleven tracks of soulful powerpop gold. Sharp production across Turn It On! catapults the impressive guitar work of both Adam Johnstone and Fergus Sinclair to the front of the mix alongside Alanna Oliver’s heart-pounding energy and show-stealing vocal prowess. Anchored by the smooth rhythm pocket of Justin “Murry” Tawil and Dave Johnstone, Romero waste no time in showing their hand on the quick-paced album opener ‘Talk About It’—recalling '80s powerpop rhapsodies. The title track beckons bodies to the dancefloor with a rich Runaways-like temper that naturally explodes into a fiery guitar solo. Meanwhile ‘Halfway Out The Door’ and ’White Dress’ show off the band’s adept ballad-writing, boasting truly emotional highs, lows and soaring choruses. Those hip to the incredible debut Romero single—‘Honey’ b/w ‘Neapolitan’ (Cool Death, 2020) will be overjoyed to see these relatable anthems recast in the album’s tracklisting. Turn It On! reveals stories of personal striving, restarting, mulling-over the unsaid, resisting control, deteriorating relationships, the emotional throes of uncertainty and celebrating growth through all such experiences. The rollercoaster of life is mirrored by the sonic and lyrical turns Romero have crafted into their debut album—a hopeful tonic for whatever you’re going through, and a dose of excitement for what’s to come. Includes lyric insert and 11"x17" poster.

Fiesta Soundsystem arrives on the burgeoning YUKU imprint with a fiercely experimental and timeless album - "Sinking" - which simultaneously draws on the nostalgic complexity of IDM and breakcore while leaning heavily into the future on the artist's own unique terms.

Dauw presents 'babel', the debut album from Belgian duo ZONDERWERK. The duo’s name means ‘’without work’’, but it also comes from “bijzonder werk”, where bijzonder is particular, special, unique. They like to work with images/paintings that are “bijzondere werken”, odd works.

babel is an ambitious exercise in translating images into sound. babel was initially created for the eponymous theatre piece by architect and artist Steve Salembier. Inspired by the biblical legend, Salembier envisions the legendary city as an abstract, sprawling modern metropolis in continuous flux. Its steel and glass skeleton is a representation of both an accumulation of overlapping contemporary cityscapes and a metaphor for the anonymous repetitiveness of our daily routines mirrored by the architecture. Subway lines, sky scrapers and whirling highways converge into a megalopolis of monstrous proportions. Despite the composition’s initial context as soundtrack for a theatre play, for the band this album is seen as a standalone work, whose complex sonic material can be appreciated without having seen the piece.

Their score focuses on fleshing out the imposing imaginary universe both in terms of scale and meaning. One of their biggest inspirations were Michael Woolf’s photographs, which served as the basis for the original theatre piece. His use of grey and repetition is translated into looped harmonies and fine-grained drones that progressively open up like blooming ice flowers.

With sounds of bells and metal as their primary materials, Carrijn and Sanders build soundscapes that are at once seductive and unsettling. The atmosphere on tracks like “DreamArp4Kort4” make for majestic, mysterious synths conjuring otherworldly visions, while the angelic glockenspiel set against subtle explosions in “VuurFeest” suggest a serene yet potentially dangerous place. Other tracks like “RoomCarousselTapeLoop5” create multi- layered textured drones through the process of tape decay, a commentary on the cannibalistic nature of the city.

Resulting from an arduous improvisational processusingold samplers with elements such as the Beam harp, a self-made metal instrument with piano strings, reel to reel tape recorders, field recordings and violin, babel perfectly captures the oxymoron of the man-made concrete jungle that is at once inhospitable yet endlessly awe-inducing.

ZONDERWERK is a duo consisting of Linde Carrijn and Dijf Sanders who started this project during the pandemic as a way of exploring their relationship as creative partners. Carrijn has a background in acting but recently came more to the fore as composer/performer with original scores for theatre and her other band Brik Tu-Tok founded with multi-disciplinary artist Maxim Storms. Sanders is a composer and gear enthusiast, more well-known for his eclectic works that draw from a wide-array of non-Western music. His milestone-album Moonlit Planetarium paved to way to a broader audience and recognition from major press in Belgium. In 2021, his work as a producer was recognized with a nomination at the Music Industry Awards.

New Born is a group of four Italian immigrants who all lived in the area around Ulm/Bavaria.

Primarily they sang more Italian songs and were more on the traditional side of Italian music.

This record is a perfect example of what can happen when the drummer says “Let´s jam” to the musicians. The outstanding track “Galaxy” came out, the vibe of it is like an early piano house track and a hybrid of cosmic and disco.

The original copy of the record is nowadays a highly requested collector´s item, that skyrocketed in terms of prices. Originally released as a 45 single in 1981 the record was pressed in a very small run. Try to find a unicorn it’s easier.

We decided not to do only a simple reissue of it, we asked the creme de la creme of cosmic disco to make us a new born version of the track “Galaxy”. Camp Cosmic aficionados “Albion” & “Spacelexx” are responsible for two mesmerizing versions of this song. On top, we pressed the whole record as a 12″ from the original master tapes.