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After the people asked, The Gallery is finally back open; and what 2 stunning new pieces of Artwork are now on show for everyone to enjoy, and have a lovely, lovely time to…it was worth the wait! You would have heard Harvey, Artwork, Hunnee, Peggy and a few other choice DJ’s showing these beauty’s to the crowds over the last 2 summers…and now you too can own these masterpieces. Be quick before Christies and co make copies unaffordable. Art for all!

Emily A. Sprague's Cloud Time traces an audio-spiritual journey through time and place, recorded across a long-awaited debut tour of Japan in the fall of 2024. Compiled from environmental improvisations captured in and for the moment, material at once welcoming, responsive, and inimitable, the album distills a voyage guided by psychic wayfaring, unbound presence, and activating performance for a reciprocal exchange with space, listener, and each fully engaged instant. The Japanese tour documented on Cloud Time held an almost mythic significance for Sprague, taking on properties of her own sonic white whale. After many near-departures and dropped plans to play in the country, "the empty spaces of cancelled trips and forgotten music turned into strange little misty spirits that I felt followed by," she says. "When I began preparing for the tour, I couldn't shake a sense that the invitation to Japan was more about opening myself up to this new place instead of bringing something into it tightly under my control. Improvisation has always been such a pillar in my music practice, and I really wanted to meet the country, spaces and people through that process." To amplify these intuitive whispers on-stage, Sprague reimagined her time-tested live rig, designed to be as free from error as possible, as a looser, more flexible set up that would allow her to interface with what was essentially a blank sonic canvas every night. Each performance became a collaboration between environment and instinct, Sprague processing the events, energies, and emotions informing the evening through her new sound ecosystem, and projecting an entirely present and unique version of herself to each open-eared and hearted crowd. "It was very much more than just an act of playing for me, but a total experience of time and place," she says. The seven long-form pieces that plot the course of Cloud Time, excerpted from over eight hours of recordings archived on the artist's on-stage recorder and generously shared on the album with no additional mixing and only minimal editing, invite listeners to become still in these deep-rooted moments of presence as the album moves from city to city, venue to venue. Cloud Time chronicles material recorded at each tour stop, Sprague selecting and sequencing the album around mood-based storytelling more so than linear chronology. "I tried to make the whole album flow in the way that any one of the complete live performances did," she explains, "while also keeping the spirit of the whole thing as a journey." The result is equal parts travelog, love letter, and impressionistic collage channeled from the potent ferment of a now encased in the glowing amber of memory. Intrinsically inspired by kankyo ongaku, an environmental music philosophy, known both in and widely outside of Japan that tunes into the similarly expansive ethos as Pauline Oliveros' deep listening practice and posits the listener as composer, Cloud Time is ambient music that seems to be listening right back, grounded in heartfelt synthesized frequencies that abundantly hold and heal. Pieces like "Nagoya," "Tokyo 1," and the ten minute "Matsumoto" in particular hum with the atomic resonance of gently tended landscapes, offering space for tuning way in and dropping far out from perspectives that stifle and bind. Cloud Time is an invitation to embrace each moment as both fleeting and eternal, floating by with nothing to grasp onto and absolutely everything to gain. The exercise in acceptance and letting go that Sprague practiced throughout the tour deeply impacted her understanding of self as both a guest and venerable performer. "The process of loving wherever I am, being present and focusing on a clear channel of communication for mind and emotion, rooted so deeply in respect for the space, those within it, and myself, ended up being profoundly healing," she says. "My vision and hope is that this album can be released as a gift back to anyone who either was or wasn't there. A cloud time of life passing by."

Unlike anything we have heard from her before, Okkyung Lee returns to Shelter Press with "Just Like Any Other Day: Background Music For Your Mundane Activities", a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives. For more than two decades, Okkyung Lee has stood at the forefront of the most radical trajectories of experimental music: a virtuosic cellist and improviser, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth. Particularly noteworthy for her range, dexterity, and adaptability, over the last five years Lee's output has revealed unexpected shifts and developments that move far afield from the realms of free improvisation for which she is most well known. 2020's "Yeo - Neun", a heart-wrenching, ambient chamber work - drawing inspiration from the Korean popular music of her youth - was issued by Shelter Press to great critical response, followed closely by "Teum (The Silvery Slit)" - one of a series engrossing electroacoustic works created at Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris - on Portraits GRM, and then "Na-Reul" in 2021, regarded by Lee as a closing statement of more than two decades living in New York, which set the precedent of her allowing her emotions to fully occupy the forefront of the music for the first time. Marking her return to Shelter press, "Just Like Any Other Day": Background Music For Your Mundane Activities", encounters Lee upturning the apple cart once again, weaving a profoundly intimate artistic statement on completely unexpected terms. Like its three aforementioned predecessors, "Just Like Any Other Day" belongs to broadening shift in Lee's approach to composing that roughly aligns with her return to her native South Korea, having lived in the United States since her late teens. Infused with a deep reengagement with her own culture and relationship to memory, it is equally a response to those critical challenges and questions provoked by significant life change. Worked on in isolation, and continuously returned to, over the course of four years, the album's nine pieces began with a simple recognition that experimental music is not always what we imagine it to be. It is a practice and a pursuit - a music for which, at its inception, the outcome is unknown - rather than an idiom defined by certain syntaxes, approaches, and qualities of structure and sound. From this departure point, Lee began to inquire after the utility of music itself: what is it for, what does it do, and what place does it (or can it) occupy in our lives? This solitary and durational journey, each composition gradually moving through different phases and evolutions over years, led Lee toward uncharted ground: a music that is not only playful, introspective, and seductive, but also intended to provoke a relationship to experimental music beyond its normative expectations. Rather active or deep listening, it pursues passive listening. Rather than a grand statement, it is discreet. Rather than virtuosity, it embraces the elegant and direct. Even more strikingly, for the first time, the music of "Just Like Any Other Day" encounters Lee leaving the cello entirely behind. Created at home on keyboard, computer, and an inexpensive cassette recorder, "Just Like Any Other Day" presents a remarkable form of ambient music - organisations of sound that become their own environment, to be occupied - intended, as the album's subheading infers, as Background Music For Your Mundane Activities. An expansion of the creative pathways opened by the Korean pop imbued compositions of Yeo - Neun, aspects of electronic process explored by "Teum (The Silvery Slit)", and the emotive foregrounding of "Na-Reul", each of the pieces presented across the two sides of "Just Like Any Other Day" implies something far greater than the limits of its own temporarily: a mood, provocations of memory and place, mirrors for the solitude within which it was made, and palpable emotion lingering just out of grasp. For Lee, each of the album's compositions could be continued or looped for an indeterminate duration: straddling a ground between the minimal and the baroque, enveloping the listener in endless cycles of appreciating, repetitive and rhythmical notes, flirting with the melodic and implying a disembodied imagism that borders on the profound. Remarkably beautiful and direct, Okkyung Lee's "Just Like Any Other Day: Background Music For Your Mundane Activities" - issued by Shelter Press on vinyl - represents a radical reconfiguration of experiential music, stripped to its bare essence in defiance of the widely presumed aesthetic signifiers. Unlike anything we've heard from her before, this immersive body of intimate recordings not only reveals new dimensions of Lee's striking range as an artist, but also of how we might regard and occupy music itself: an ambience to lived and felt like a second skin.

On September 19, 2025, Mac Declos will release his second album, MTY-013 « Nothing Stands Still », on Mama Told Ya. Following the acclaimed MTY-007 « Hard Work Always Pays Off » and a trilogy of striking EPs : Angel Eyes (2025), Endless Cycle (2024), and Cuir en Cage (2023), as well as countless DJ sets and All Night Longs around the globe, Mac is now ready to unveil a bold new chapter in his musical journey.

Nothing Stands Still is a sonic artefact: a double-vinyl album composed of 12 timeless tracks. Eleven pieces are produced solely by Mac Declos, with one co-produced alongside Anetha. The album also features unique contributions from Mac’s mother, Doona Rolls, and Mac’s dad, Eric Declosmenil, adding emotional
depth to the project. While music is often elusive and ephemeral, with Nothing Stands Still, Mac Declos set out to create an archive of the future that transcends time and trend, an echo meant to endure. Once again, Mama Told Ya reminds us: Music remains.

Repress!

Biosphere is the main recording name of Geir Jenssen (born 30 May 1962), a Norwegian musician who has released a notable catalogue of ambient electronic music. He is well known for his works on ambient techno and arctic themed pieces, his use of music loops, and peculiar samples from sci-fi sources. His 1997 album Substrata was voted by the users of the Hyperreal website in 2001 as the best all-time classic ambient album.



Cirque - originally released in 2000 - was Biosphere's first album for the UK label Touch. This new re-issue comes with a 6-track bonus album and new artwork.



Mojo (UK): Fourth full album from ambient pioneer. Coming to prominence with 1992's Microgravity - which along with the first couple of Aphex/Polygon Window CDs, defined the genre ambient - Geir Jenssen as Biosphere has made three of the '90s' best albums, culminating with last year's near beatless Substrata. The idea - as it always was thanks to Eno's On Land - is music as environment (reflecting, creating): working from his base in Tromso, Arctic Norway, Jenssen offers a polar, Apollonian exploration of the human psyche. Cirque is a perfectly constructed 47-minute sequence: cold clarity up against real depth of field, synth cycles dissolving into sudden moments of sonic revelation that sound like a waking dream - try the first 20 seconds of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. (And if you think that's pretentious - your loss). Inspired by the story of a young American, Chris McCandless, who walked alone into the Alaskan wilderness and perished, Cirque balances the tightrope between warmth and unease, resolving into a moon melody that leaves you a peace. What a good record! Jon Savage.

Furthering the passionate exploration of cinema that has guided her two previous LPs - 2017’s ‘Fassbinder Wunderkammer’ and 2020’s ‘I Should Have Been a Gardener’ - the Milanese guitarist/composer, Alessandra Novaga, returns to Die Schachtel with ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’, two sides off shimmering, tense compositions – culminating as one of her most creatively ambitious and conceptually rich outings to date – freely inspired by the life and work of the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Classically trained at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland, over the last decade Alessandra Novaga has emerged as one of the leading figures within northern Italy’s thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, rendering striking solo efforts, in addition to collaborations with Loren Connors, Stefano Pilia, Elliott Sharp, Nicola Ratti, Paula Matthusen, Sandro Mussida, Kid Millions, Travis Just, Francesco Gagliardi, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar embarks upon a relentless deconstruction and rethinking of her instrument’s unique properties through distinct applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone, creating in a deeply personal and emotive music, seeking narrative and meaning within the abstractions of sound.

In 2017, with the LP, ‘Fassbinder Wunderkammer’, issued by Setola Di Maiale, Novaga embarked upon the exploration of her love of film. Having begun with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, this was followed in 2020 by Die Schachtel’s release of ‘I Should Have Been a Gardener’, a deeply intimate mediation on the life and work of Derek Jarman. Rather than focusing on a fixed point of inspiration or a single film to work from, these pieces achieve a form of abstract portraiture, distilling elements drawn from these filmmaker’s life and work into ambient networks of texture and tonality. ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle”’ freely inspired by the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, finds Novaga radically expanding her sonic palette within this approach.

The seeds of ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ can be traced to a conversation that Novaga had with Alan Licht (contained in the highly regarded Common Tones: Selected interviews with artists and musicians 1995–2020, Blank Forms, 2021), relating to the connections between music and cinema, which led her to consider Andrej Tarkovsky’s use of Bach's music within a symbiotic framework: how the music illuminates the imagism of the films, and the film illuminates new dimensions of the music. Slowly developing over the subsequent years, the resulting album comprises six individual works, some of which draw directly upon pieces of Bach’s music that Tarkovsky used in his films – specifically 'Erbarme dich, Mein Gott', 'Das alte Jahr vergangen ist', and 'Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ' - while others draw upon the sensibilities and moods evoked in the imagination by the director’s films.

As a point of departure and illumination into the process and spirit that underscored the creation of the album, Novaga points toward a passage in Tarkovsky’s "Sculpting in Time”:

“Art is born and takes hold wherever there is a timeless and insatiable longing for the spiritual, for the ideal: that longing which draws people to art. Modern art has taken a wrong turn in abandoning the search for the meaning of existence in order to affirm the value of the individual for its own sake. What purports to be art begins to look like an eccentric occupation for suspect characters who maintain that any personalized action is of intrinsic value simply as a display of self-will. But in artistic creation the personality does not assert itself, it serves another, higher and communal idea.”

‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ can be understood as a realisation of the collectivism of which Tarkovsky speaks, in the service of something far beyond the expression of self. Encountering Novaga moving into fairly uncharted waters, three of the album’s pieces incorporate the human voice we encounter the voices of others: that of the poet Arsenij Tarkovsky, the director’s father; a singer from Bach’s ‘Erbarme dich, Mein Gott’, capturing a broadcast in an underground parking lot, and Novaga’s own, rendering the melody from Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”. Roughly alternating between solo excursions on guitar and bristling electroacoustic pieces, over the course of the album’s two sides Novaga weaves one of her most abstract and ambitious bodies of recordings to date, shifting between the complex tonal mediations generated by the six strings of her instrument, and phycological densities activated by the expanded pallet of sonority made possible by the tactics and approaches of musique concrète.

An immersive, deeply engaging meeting of beauty and melancholy within a labyrinth of voices and ideas, ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ transfigures the life and work of Andrej Tarkovski – one of the greatest auteurs in the history of cinema – into a singular, experimental statement of collective truth. Belonging to recent, ambitious stream of contemporary new music releases on Die Schachtel that’s already included Novaga’s ‘I Should Have Been a Gardener’, Stefano Pilia’s ‘Spiralis Aurea’, Jim O'Rourke & Giovanni Di Domenico’ ‘Immanent In Nervous Activity’, Claudio Rocchetti’s ‘Labirinto Verticale’, and Damāvand’s ‘As Long As You Come To My Garden’, among others, ‘The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle’ is available on as a limited edition of 300 dark turquoise vinyl LPs released on June 21, 2024. The LP, designed by Bruno Stucchi / dinamomilano, comes with an 8-pages insert illuminated by Alessandra’s text as well as the lovely and intense photographs of Matilde Piazzi.

Emily A. Sprague's Cloud Time traces an audio-spiritual journey through time and place, recorded across a long-awaited debut tour of Japan in the fall of 2024. Compiled from environmental improvisations captured in and for the moment, material at once welcoming, responsive, and inimitable, the album distills a voyage guided by psychic wayfaring, unbound presence, and activating performance for a reciprocal exchange with space, listener, and each fully engaged instant. The Japanese tour documented on Cloud Time held an almost mythic significance for Sprague, taking on properties of her own sonic white whale. After many near-departures and dropped plans to play in the country, "the empty spaces of cancelled trips and forgotten music turned into strange little misty spirits that I felt followed by," she says. "When I began preparing for the tour, I couldn't shake a sense that the invitation to Japan was more about opening myself up to this new place instead of bringing something into it tightly under my control. Improvisation has always been such a pillar in my music practice, and I really wanted to meet the country, spaces and people through that process." To amplify these intuitive whispers on-stage, Sprague reimagined her time-tested live rig, designed to be as free from error as possible, as a looser, more flexible set up that would allow her to interface with what was essentially a blank sonic canvas every night. Each performance became a collaboration between environment and instinct, Sprague processing the events, energies, and emotions informing the evening through her new sound ecosystem, and projecting an entirely present and unique version of herself to each open-eared and hearted crowd. "It was very much more than just an act of playing for me, but a total experience of time and place," she says. The seven long-form pieces that plot the course of Cloud Time, excerpted from over eight hours of recordings archived on the artist's on-stage recorder and generously shared on the album with no additional mixing and only minimal editing, invite listeners to become still in these deep-rooted moments of presence as the album moves from city to city, venue to venue. Cloud Time chronicles material recorded at each tour stop, Sprague selecting and sequencing the album around mood-based storytelling more so than linear chronology. "I tried to make the whole album flow in the way that any one of the complete live performances did," she explains, "while also keeping the spirit of the whole thing as a journey." The result is equal parts travelog, love letter, and impressionistic collage channeled from the potent ferment of a now encased in the glowing amber of memory. Intrinsically inspired by kankyo ongaku, an environmental music philosophy, known both in and widely outside of Japan that tunes into the similarly expansive ethos as Pauline Oliveros' deep listening practice and posits the listener as composer, Cloud Time is ambient music that seems to be listening right back, grounded in heartfelt synthesized frequencies that abundantly hold and heal. Pieces like "Nagoya," "Tokyo 1," and the ten minute "Matsumoto" in particular hum with the atomic resonance of gently tended landscapes, offering space for tuning way in and dropping far out from perspectives that stifle and bind. Cloud Time is an invitation to embrace each moment as both fleeting and eternal, floating by with nothing to grasp onto and absolutely everything to gain. The exercise in acceptance and letting go that Sprague practiced throughout the tour deeply impacted her understanding of self as both a guest and venerable performer. "The process of loving wherever I am, being present and focusing on a clear channel of communication for mind and emotion, rooted so deeply in respect for the space, those within it, and myself, ended up being profoundly healing," she says. "My vision and hope is that this album can be released as a gift back to anyone who either was or wasn't there. A cloud time of life passing by." Emily A. Sprague's Cloud Time will be released Friday, October 10th in vinyl, Japanese import CD (via Plancha), and digital editions.

★Japanese obi-strip
★First time reissued on vinyl

Turning Into Small, the second album by shoegaze band All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors from New Jersey, originally released in 1998 on local label Gern Blandsten,
is now being reissued on both CD and vinyl.

Formed in the mid-90s, All Natural Lemon & Lime Flavors were deeply influenced by UK shoegaze and alternative rock—most notably My Bloody Valentine—while
pursuing a uniquely experimental sound within the US emo and indie scenes. Their innovative spirit reached full bloom on Turning Into Small, which remains their
final album to date.

One of the standout tracks is the nearly eight-minute-long “Your Imagination,” a spacious sonic landscape that draws listeners into deep immersion.
It has become a signature song for the band, heralding a new wave of shoegaze that emerged in the late '90s and beyond. Even more noteworthy, however, are
tracks like “Puzzled Into Pieces” and “In Between And After,” which showcase the band's layered, synth-driven electronic textures, dynamic collage-like structures,
and occasionally buoyant melodies. These elements come together to create a strange and otherworldly sense of weightlessness—something rarely found even
within the shoegaze genre.

While resonating with the likes of My Bloody Valentine, Stereolab, and The Flaming Lips, the band's mutant-like blend of styles also draws parallels with acts like
Swirlies, Serena-Maneesh, and contemporary shoegaze innovators such as They Are Gutting a Body of Water.

This is a groundbreaking album in US shoegaze—one that still feels fresh and vital thanks to its timeless experimental spirit and originality. Now is the perfect time
to (re)discover it.

Returning to Die Schachtel with his fourth full-length with the label, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, delivers “Lacinia”, a new, immersive cycle of compositions, delving deeper into the realm of metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, weaving astounding arrangements of sonority from a palette of synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion. Resting at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electroacoustic, drone, and chamber music - overwhelmingly beautiful, delicate, and bold, - “Lacinia” stands as a high-water mark in Pilia’s already remarkable and forward-looking career.

Since its founding in Milan during the early years of the new millennium, Die Schachtel has occupied a singular place in the landscape of experimental music, issuing a carefully curated body of reissues and archival releases by historically significant figures and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino Capra Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, and numerous others, balanced against bristling contemporary counterparts by the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi ArchettI, Valerio Tricoli, etc. Running like a spine through the label’s output is a deep dedication to the work of the Italian guitarist and electroacoustic composer Stefano Pilia. Now Die Schachtel returns with “Lacinia”, Pilia’s forth full-length with the label and their first release of 2024. Building on the ground of deeply personal engagement with metaphysical, spiritual, and divine meaning, explored within his previous LP with Die Schachtel, 2022’s “Spiralis Aurea”, “Lacinia” encounters the composer working in close calibration with various ensembles, including the Bologna based Ensemble Concordanze and Comunale di Bologna String Orchestra, weaving synths, strings, brass, organ, various electroacoustic instruments, and percussion into an astounding reconfiguration of immersive, contemporary minimalism that stands among Pilia’s most noteworthy releases to date. Issued by Die Schachtel in two special double vinyl editions and a CD edition, “Lacinia” features artwork by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano, and is an absolute marvel that draws you in and doesn’t let go.

First emerging during the early 2000s, over the past two decades – via solo releases and numerous collations with artists like Oren Ambarchi, Valerio Tricoli, Alessandra Novaga, Z'EV, Andrea Belfi, David Grubbs, and numerous others - the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia has presented a singular voice within Italian experimental music, harnessing visceral energy and hands-on immediacy within delicately woven tapestries of sonority, each investigating the sculptural properties of sound and illuminating its relationship to space, memory, and the suspension of time. “Lacinia”, Pilia’s forth solo venture with Die Schachtel, encounters the composer reentering his longstanding practice of collaboration with various ensemble forms, including the Bologna based Ensemble Concordanze, for the albums central piece, “Lacinia Off Axis”, spinning stunning string confirmations by Pietro David Carami and Elena Maury on violin, Alessandro Savio on viola, and Mattia Cipolli on cello.

A new, important cycle of compositions by Pilia, “Lacinia” (meaning "lace" in Latin) builds upon the exploration of the metaphysical, spiritual, and divine dimensions through numbers, geometry, and the creation of tonal forms explored by 2022’s “Spiralis Aurea”, mirroring archetypal, immutable forms at the juncture of the abstract realm of mathematics and architectural structures in the physical world, expands the poetics and compositional ideas featured in its predecessor. Regraded by Pilia as both a series of individual compositions and a single work, “Lacinia” was conceived to “define a circular path (a sort of "rhizomatic lace") where the beginning and end touch, suggesting the concept of time not only as linear but also cyclical and ritualistic—an eternal return, a process of transformation where matter changes, its state changes, but without altering the invisible internal principle of mutation”, embarking upon a a series of “steps, degrees, and energetic quanta in a progression of archetypal whole numbers and transcendent creation.”

The resulting 16 tracks unfold as a series of complex sonic meditations. While deeply resonant with the minimalism of composers like Arvo Pärt, LaMonte Young, Pauline Oliveros, and Eliane Radigue, Pilia digs deep and moves far beyond the predictable tonal relationships and structures of that idiom, echoing the ancient liturgical and devotional music of composers like Gesualdo da Venosa, Monteverdi, and John Dowland, at a refined intersection of the acoustic and electroacoustic, drone, and chamber music.

Fascinatingly structured as a whole to include a number of motif returns, across which we encounter works like “Lacinia Off Axis” appearing in slightly different rendering, states, or evolutions three times, and compositions like “Eve” appearing twice in subtly different forms and arrangements - first for four oscillators, guitar and voice and then for string orchestra - as well “Maris Stella”, which similarly makes two appearances, first for horn trio, organ and percussion, and then for string orchestra, with “Lacinia” Pilia delves further into the world of chamber music than ever before, creating a deeply inward, mediative body of work the totality of which, guided by its rich string arrangements of arching, sorrowful tone, feels almost like a mass for some unproclaimed loss; simultaneously locked in the nuances of a moment, while managing to suspend time.

Perhaps most remarkable is Pilia's ability to create a remarkable sense of sonic cohesion while using such a varied number of ensembles and instrumentation. From the sprawling string arrangements delivered by Comunale di Bologna String Orchestra, under the direction of Paolo Mancini, and Ensemble Concordanze, and a flute trio (Cadux / Plectere) brilliantly played by Manuel Zurria, to pieces for sax, organ and percussion, violin duo and percussion, organ and percussion, Pilia manages to create a sense of singular, encompassing world that flows forward like a shifting stream.

Overwhelmingly beautiful, delicate, and bold, “Lacinia” is unquestionably a high-water mark in Stefano Pilia’s already remarkable, forward-looking career. Nothing short of a marvel of contemporary Minimalism that, through its shifting arrangements of harmonics, tonality, and texture draws flickering images of ancient forms of music into the present day, “Lacinia” is Issued by Die Schachtel in two special editions on double vinyl and a CD edition, featuring artwork by Bruno Stucchi/Dinamomilano. This is an immersive all-consuming listen that can’t be missed.

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This quote from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe sums up the lamenting, primal work that is "All That We See or Seem"; a project conceived between Finland, England and Brazil. The self-titled album consists of two long-form pieces of droning mysticism hailing from the trio of Gruth (concept, production, electronics), Ellen Southern (vocals, field recordings, percussion) and Johanna Puuperä (violin, modular synthesizer, additional vocals).

The album opens straight into a thousand yard stare with “Myrskymielellä", adapted from a 1891 poem by the Finnish national poet, Eino Leino, who wrote it at the tender age of 13. Here a blank distant droning of synths and the sounds of flowing water hover underneath like a dark river observed from the air. This is a sound and feeling that will stay constant for the entirety of the piece´s thirty minute duration. It is a trance-inducing composition that slowly unfolds elements of pagan ancestry into its own life. At first, faint female vocals are introduced as distant spatial elements, which gradually advance into waves of cries and anguish as the piece progresses and moves further into the storm. The tranquility of the first half is slowly morphed into a full blown ceremony as driving ritualistic percussion and a foreboding witch-like presence shifts the piece into a Dead Can Dance-like territory. Here a constant enveloping mixture of violins, modular synths, field recordings and vocal screams creates the feeling of a grande finale. It is an astounding piece of music that develops like a drone symphony for the beginning of time.

With the second piece, “A Dream Within A Dream”, from Edgar Allan Poe´s 1849 poem, you are transported to the shores of an undisclosed island; a place where it´s only you, your thoughts and the endless emptiness. The continual sound of waves is soon brought together with a cloud of synths and mourning violins that will keep a steady dreamlike state during most of the piece´s duration. This time the wordless vocals feel almost angelic in their pageantry. The composition flows like a slow caress of the soul and feels like the spirit twin of Gavin Bryars' “The Sinking of the Titanic” with its lamenting slow movements towards the unknown.

Truly a ghost of a record, “All That We See or Seem” is an experience hard to shake and feels like entering sacred ground. We are in a place surrounded by earth, both ancient and present. "Let loose, Vanha, the rage of an earthly storm! Detach the elements, completely open the sky! In the Earth, let an incessant storm prevail, so that in my chest I would not feel the miserable pain” - Eino Leino

Erik K Skodvin's feature-length score to Thomas Roth's thriller "Schächten" feels like the epitome of all his musical projects, conjuring a dark cinematic trip through 1960's post-WWII Vienna in a film that touches on topics such as law, justice & revenge.

Releasing a soundtrack as a stand-alone album can be challenging; and "Schächten" is by no means a typical listening experience. The record contains 24 more or less short pieces evolving through dramatic movements, underlaying menace and deep emotive scenes. One thing that stands out is the linear atmosphere throughout the story which creates a wholeness that keeps your attention to the very end. Set in wintery Austrian landscapes in dimly saturated colours, the film's dramatic events with dark political undertones feels like a perfect situation for Skodvin's atmospheric collages - perhaps sounding closer than ever to his early works as Svarte Greiner or Deaf Center. Cello, violin, piano, analogue synth and plenty of hardly recognizable instrumentation come together in a record that feels very organic in its subdued tones. The score also features percussion by Andrea Belfi as well as a Chopin piano interpretation by Kelly Wyse to the bizarrely schizophrenic piece "Judenfreund".

With the contemporary world sliding into darkness again, listening to the soundtrack feels like coming to terms with ones own anxieties - something that in the end comes through as a cleansing experience. As quoted in the film "Everyone is their own devil. And we make this world our hell".

Short synopsis : "Vienna 1960s - The young Jewish business man Victor has to witness how the prosecution of a Nazi crime against his family fails. The political and legal system is still virtually run by former Nazis with large parts of society being entangled in the past. When Victor also loses his grief ridden father and his girlfriend’s family opposes their relationship and his identity, Victor begins to loose faith in formal justice and takes matters in his own hands."

At the end of 2024, Elder looked back on an unusual period in their now near 20-year career. A few years ago, the band had dropped their most progressive record yet, 2022"s highly acclaimed Innate Passage, followed by the usual heavy touring schedule (including a 24-show arena tour supporting Tool). The band had then taken a year long sabbatical to recharge their creative batteries, which instead of rest culminated in the release of multiple albums by side-projects. Convening in winter of that year for a 2 week songwriting session at Big Snuff Studio in Berlin, the band set a goal of knocking off the rust and putting together some ideas for the next record. While combing through an archive of old sketches, they hit upon an outline of a song from somewhere between 2020"s Omens and its successor Innate Passage, abandoned then for reasons now inscrutable. Picking up the pieces with fresh ears, Elder fleshed out a new version of the track, which is firmly rooted between those two albums but with an identity of its own. Building on the song"s ending, a swirling tower of synthesizers, chugging guitars and almost tribal drumming was constructed in the course of lengthy in-studio jams. Liminality/Dream State Return can be seen as a bridge between eras in Elder"s creative universe; one foot is planted in the highly melodic and sometimes alternative/grunge tinged riffing of Omens, the other in Innate Passage"s dreamy prog soundscapes, and its head in the clouds looking toward Elder"s upcoming LP 7. The vinyl version comes as a one-sided, 180 gr. translucent LP with etching on the B side (including download).

Remastered using pure analogue components only, from the master tapes through to the cutting head.

Ornette Coleman, who died in June 2015 from cardiac arrest, must be counted as one of the most influential musicians in the jazz genre. His importance does not only lie in his ground-breaking recordings in the late Fifties and early Sixties, but lies more significantly in the educational effect of his work – in the fact that he always went beyond himself to the very end.

Just a little more than a month after his ground-breaking release "Free Jazz", Coleman recorded the present album, in which he perhaps distanced himself somewhat from the conceptual idea, but still guided his quartet to ever more richness of detail and creativity. "Ornette!" was the first recording with bass-player Scott LaFaro and Coleman, and the difference in approach between LaFaro and Charlie Haden is noticeable from the very first note of "W.R.U.". His playing is more direct and agile, and one can hear how he drives Coleman and Don Cherry actively onwards and more aggressively than Haden’s warm, languid phrasing.

The tracks, with titles that are taken from the works of Sigmund Freud, are all gems and serve as a wonderful starting point for the musicians’ improvisations. By now, Coleman felt himself comfortable in lengthy pieces, and neither he nor his fellow musicians had trouble in filling out time, never once lacking for new ideas. Ed Blackwell deserves a special mention – he shows himself here at his very best. "Ornette!" is a superb release and an absolute must for all fans of Coleman and creative, improvised music in general.

This LP features Christmas music for the piano in a timeless journey through the decades and centuries. These songs have been through a remarkable evolution over the course of several centuries, with the changes they have undergone reflecting the shifting musical styles and cultural influences that prevailed in various times. Composers such as Irving Berlin created Christmas songs centred around the piano that went on to become instant classics. An example that epitomizes this era is Irving Berlin’s ‘White Christmas’. The growth of Christmas carols arranged for piano is a monument to the everlasting spirit of the Christmas holiday as well as the development of musical styles throughout the course of history. On Merry Christmas Pianomania, Jeroen van Veen performs in his signa- ture focused, serene minimalist style, reimagining Christmas music from medieval carols to modern jazz-inspired pieces.

Wrong Filament embodies Robert Piotrowicz's creation of fictional traditional music - not studied but invented, a utopian and oniric construct that becomes tangible in sound. These imagined traditions act as communal forces of music-making, resisting dominant structures of power.

The album unfolds in six dense compositions built on rhythm, repetition and minimal melodic gestures that draw on archetypal patterns of Eastern European traditions. Entirely synthetic yet strikingly instrumental in character, they develop as autonomous sound events, expanding into multi-part forms that evoke the physicality of ensemble performance - as if played by an imagined community of musicians.

Rather than reconstruction, Piotrowicz invents forged dances - a pre-techno of sorts, where complex meters and dense textures point to a parallel history of collective sound beyond industrial uniformity. They imagine a utopian and fictional genealogy of collective sound: one where industrial modernity yields to more unstable, communal energies.

This is celebratory music with invocatory charge: calls to dance, echoes of ceremony, microtonal melodies shaped by emotional weight, and traces of Eastern ornamentation stretched through synthetic means. Wrong Filament sacralises performance through sound alone, spinning a world where spectres of collective experience vibrate against the limits of rupture and resistance.

These pieces confront the traces of violence inscribed in body and memory, yet also affirm freedom, emancipation and integration. They manifest celebration, identity and resistance while opening a path toward liberation and shared needs that exceed social, private and intimate categories.

After an initial European release in 1976 on the Isadora label Age Of Earth was re-issued on Virgin Records in Summer 1977 and fast became a beacon for electronic music and what was becoming known as ambient - Some cite its very title as helping introduce 'new age' music - This re-issue faithfully replicates the original 1977 Virgin Records release and is pressed on 180g heavyweight vinyl.
Guitarist and synthesiser player Manuel Göttsching formed Ashra after disbanding Ash Ra Tempel, the outfit he had led since 1971. Moving away from the space rock of his previous group, Ashra was a far more electronics-based project. Recorded in Berlin, between March and June 1976, the four pieces on the album represent the very best of what became known as Kosmiche: dreamily repetitive, glancing to the stars while keeping feet firmly on the ground.

New Age Of Earth is a record full of contrasts: the throbbing, techno-predicting Sunrain opens the album; with its waves and crickets sound effects, Ocean Of Tenderness pulses gently like a space-age early Fleetwood Mac; Deep Distance brings elements of surf music into glacial electronica. At 21 minutes long, Nightdust occupies all of the album's second side, a ruminative, slowly unfolding piece that, after its crescendo, gives way to Göttsching's impressively celestial electric guitar solo.

London based label Natural Selection present their forthcoming release in the form of a 4-track 12" EP, courtesy of Swarm Intelligence, entitled "Radiance". Mastered by Alain Paul and cut by Simon at The Exchange Vinyl. Record Sleeve and labels printed to premium specification, featuring artwork by Kaan Ulgener.

Born in Dublin and now firmly based in Berlin, Simon Hayes aka Swarm Intelligence has cemented his place in the Techno underground with critically acclaimed LPs and EPs on labels such as 47, Instruments of Discipline and Voitax. He returns to Natural Selection, after releasing his track "Generative" on the label's latest VA release; "Natural Selection: Selected Works Vol. 1" in 2024. Featuring amongst an extensive list of heavyweight label affiliates such as SHXCXCHCXSH, Charlton, ASEC, Nørbak, MAEDON, Annie Hall & more. After further connections with the label via live performances at their regular label nights at FOLD London, it was inevitable that Simon would be invited to release a solo EP on their imprint.

His distinctive sound comes from over a decade of releases spanning multiple genres and tempos and oscillates between rhythmic noise, tense atmospherics, uncompromising levels of distortion, and stark, astute beats. This resolutely non-conformist approach to his productions has earned him a reputation as a true trailblazer in the realm of Techno and has led him to perform at some of the world's finest institutions including Berghain, Tresor and Basement NY.

For "Radiance", Swarm intelligence delves further into the sonic unknown, presenting a bold evolution in his uncompromising vision of Techno. Deep, fragmented textures form the backdrop for thunderous, distorted rhythms and IDM-laden drums and percussion, fused with meticulously designed cinematic soundscapes and powerful low-end muscle. Fierce, unrelenting, and deeply conceptual, all rules and boundaries are smashed to pieces and all tracks are equally suitable for blasting through the world's biggest club systems and rigs as they are for home listening.

Names Records in conjunction with Two Piers Editions are delighted to announce the long awaited 21st Anniversary reissue of the debut album from The Earlies.

'These Were the Earlies' was released on Names Records / 679 Recordings in July of 2004 and quickly became one of that summer’s essential albums.

"The Best Debut Album of 2004” – UNCUT
"Insane Pop Genius. Scintillating” - 10/10. NME
NME #1 Top Rated Album 2004
There is much here to love” - The Sunday Times
"This rustic hymn to imperfect pop is a reminder that Britain and the States still have a special relationship.” - The Observer

This Numbered Limited Edition Vinyl (1000) will be issued on Double Cream Vinyl, includes a poster and new refreshed artwork by Rina Donnersmarck. Produced by the band and Tom Knott. Beautifully Remastered by Shawn Joseph (Portishead, Beak, PJ Harvey).

Living in the present is an album built around the work of American minimalist poet, Robert Lax (1915-2000) who is widely praised for his artistic concept of reduction, in which a pause becomes as important as the things said.

The album brings together the sound of Robert Lax reading his poetry, narrative field recordings by Nicolas Humbert and subtle yet imaginative timbres by Carina Khorkhordina (trumpet) and Miki Yui (electronics) who is also behind the final mixing of the album.

Living in the present is drawing from an archive of audio recordings originally made by film maker Nicolas Humbert while shooting a film on Robert Lax entitled Why Should I Buy A Bed When All That I Want Is Sleep?, ( Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, Germany, 1999) The film was made on the Greek island of Patmos where Lax has lived withdrawn for 3 decades.

More than 25 years after the premiere of Why Should I Buy A Bed When All That I Want Is Sleep?, Humbert, Khorkhordina and Yui are revisiting the original audio material and patiently open worlds within worlds, pointing to new harmonic textures and isolating timbres, synchronizing different layers of time and traces of various locations into a new composition in its own right.

In some ways this album feels like an expansion of the work Humbert and Penzel did with Lax across six years, between 1993 and 1999, where they developed a unique intimacy in their textual-visual collaboration. On two long pieces, for each side of the album, “Where do i begin” and “One moment passes, another comes on” respectively – Yui’s electronics and Khorkhordina’s trumpet interweave beautifully with Humbert’s field recordings, in a manner that shadows the reflective reduction of Lax’s poetry. Indeed, it's no surprise that Lax’s poetry draws musicians into its orbit; it offers the curious a welcoming reduction in which only individual words and syllables represent the essence of language.

Lax’s poetry is notable for its qualities of near-stillness and its capacity to pause the reader’s thought, asking them to hold the sensuality of language for an extended, quietly revelatory moment. His readings on this album share a similar cadence, interested in settling with syllables, with single or several words, for an extended time.

Ultimately, Living in the present unfolds with unforced grace and poetics – one moment passes, then another comes on. (Jon Dale)

Off The Record (faitiche 39), the new album by French collagist Roméo Poirier, is an amusing romp through the discarded history of recording studios. It contains fourteen miniatures based on accidental recordings of studio talk, revealing things that were never meant for the public: we hear instructions from studio staff, scraps of talk between musicians, or just microphones being adjusted, as well as false notes, false starts: everyone stops. Start again: 1, 2, 3, 4!

Poirier’s approach recalls Accumulation, an artform practiced by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri that involved piling up everyday items into assemblages. The objects themselves often remained unaltered, the artistic gesture consisting in the careful curating of a distinctive selection. Poirier’s audio collages explore similar terrain. The fourteen pieces on Off the Record combine more than a thousand found sounds from studio archives into complex miniatures. The audio content of these outtakes is twisted, stretched, cut, reassembled, slowed down and accelerated. Voices cut into a microgroove, from a very old recording, intertwine with digital voices gleaned from YouTube. All of them in dialogue, engaging the listener with the impression of being part of a new music group.

Poirier uses the mundane routine of setting up before the actual recording gets underway to tell a universal story about working in a recording studio. And he manages something few achieve, transforming specialist knowledge into a narrative whose beauty goes far beyond its immediate subject. It speaks to everyone, because the story is told in a musical language that is open and accessible, evoking magical images reminiscent of Oz – a world consisting less of events than of camp hallucinations, captured in grainy black-and-white photographs. En passant, Poirier shows us how the notion of material accumulation can produce great art.

Written and produced by Roméo Poirier, mastered by Stephan Mathieu, photos by Roméo Poirier, graphic design by Tim Tetzner.

Animistic Resonance marks a new stage for artist and electronic musician Leslie García, as it is her first album under her own name, following several releases as Microhm and her parallel work as founder of the contemporary art studio Interspecifics, where she has developed an extensive body of sonic projects presented in major museums and programs around the world. The album is the culmination of a profound and extended exploration of sound as language. It is also a statement against the classicism of long-form ambient pieces. Narratively, each track is conceived as a finely detailed work that functions as a condensed temporal fragment, each with its own individuality while simultaneously forming part of a broader universe.

The compositional language of the album draws on minimalist structures, deep listening strategies, and experimental approaches to electronic sound. Each track offers a meditation on repetition, density, and micro-variation, unfolding like a sonic landscape shaped by temporal tension and perceptual ambiguity. Animistic Resonance resists categorization, situating itself between ambient, noise, and abstract rhythm, while grounding its aesthetic in a Latin American sensibility that embraces technological poetics, affective depth, and critical imagination.

The album invites listeners to move beyond the surface and inhabit a world of vibrational and animistic temporalities. It offers a refuge in sound, a suspended space where calm can emerge. In the midst of contemporary turbulence, Animistic Resonance opens the door to imagining new ways of listening and feeling, demanding an embodied and visceral form of engagement.

Composition sound synthesis and programming by Leslie García. Composed between 2022—2024 in Mexico City.
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio, NY. Artwork by Daniel Castrejón.

Tauche ein in die magische Klangwelt von Olafur Arnalds: Found Songs kehrt zurück - erstmals als transparente Vinyl-Edition! Ursprünglich 2009 auf schwarzem Vinyl veröffentlicht und lange vergriffen, erscheint dieses intime Meisterwerk nun in einer streng limitierten Neuauflage. Die sieben Stücke entstanden in einem außergewöhnlichen Projekt: ein Song pro Tag, sieben Tage lang - direkt geteilt mit der Welt. Zwischen zarten Klaviermotiven, subtilen Elektronik-Elementen und kammermusikalischer Tiefe entfaltet sich ein eindrucksvolles Porträt eines jungen Komponisten, der die Grenzen zwischen Klassik, Pop und Ambient neu definiert. Found Songs ist ein poetisches Zeitdokument - roh, ehrlich und voller Gefühl. Ein Muss für alle, die Musik als Kunstform erleben. Step into the delicate sound world of Olafur Arnalds: Found Songs returns - for the first time ever on clear vinyl! Originally released in 2009 on black vinyl and long sold out, this intimate masterpiece is now reissued in a strictly limited edition. Born from a unique project - one song per day for seven days, shared instantly with the world - these seven pieces blend fragile piano, subtle electronics, and chamber textures into a deeply personal portrait of a young composer redefining the boundaries between classical, pop, and ambient. Found Songs is a poetic time capsule - raw, honest, and profoundly moving. A must-have for those who experience music as art.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Melopea, presenting two new pieces highlighting the incredible voice of Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), the great Italian singer, based in Berlin in later life, whose mastery of the classical Indian dhrupad developed in parallel with a commitment to contemporary experimental approaches. After two stunning archival releases documenting traditional dhrupad performances in India in the 1990s (BT079 and BT092), the two side-long pieces here embody the freedom with which Cuni explored new contexts and settings for her singing.

Both make use of a long recording of Cuni singing the pentatonic Raag Bhoop (or Bhopali) made in 2012 by her partner Werner Durand in Berlin. ‘Melopea’ began from Cuni and Durand’s superimposition of this recording with violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker’s performance of Éliane Radigue’s ‘Occam River II’. Inspired by the beauty of this chance encounter (and other experiments with non-synchronous collaboration during the pandemic years), Tarozzi and Walker recorded independently, without hearing Cuni’s voice but ‘having her present in memory’. Tarozzi and Walker’s bowed strings places Cuni’s magisterial performance in a new context, emphasising, as Radigue commented upon hearing the initial layering of her piece with Cuni’s voice, a shared ‘searching toward the partials, overtones, these natural constituents of acoustical sounds in their richness’. Beginning with whispered bowed harmonics, the violin and cello swap the stability of dhrupad’s traditional tanpura drone for a slowly evolving, uneasy web of harmonic interactions recalling some of Harley Gaber’s work, sometimes sitting on dissonances for long periods or allowing changing interference patterns to come to the fore. Primarily focusing on her lower register, Cuni’s performance demonstrates her mastery of microtonal pitch subtleties, elegant sweeping glissandi and meditatively unhurried pacing.

The continuation of the same recording by Cuni forms the foundation of ‘Bhoop-Murchana’, with Anthea Caddy on cello and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone. In contrast to the randomised layering of the first piece, here Durand and Caddy have carefully selected pitches based on the raag Cuni sings, using the ‘Murchana’ form, which uses the constituent notes of the raag as tonics of new raags, retaining the same interval structure. Both players who have developed tones of striking depth and harmonic purity on their instruments, Caddy and Durand’s patient long tones are simultaneously rigorously grounded in the physical properties of sound and possessed of an immaterial, floating quality. Combined with Cuni’s voice and, near the piece’s end, her contributions on hammered and plucked tanpura, the effect borders on miraculous. To surrender to this music is like slipping into an onsen pool, feeling the instantaneous release of every tension. Accompanied by liner notes from Durand, Tarozzi and Walker, Melopea is both a moving tribute to the profound art of Amelia Cuni and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to it.

Shhh. The command to be quiet is not just part of the title of one of the two sprawling compositions on this pioneering album. It's also an apt metaphor for the relaxed hypnotism and spaced-out atmosphere that define In a Silent Way, a record that pushes the boundaries of studio possibilities, artist-producer relationships, and rock-jazz chasms. Recognized as Miles Davis' first full-on fusion effort and part of his "electric" era, the 1969 landmark claims a Who's Who line-up that sends the music into an ethereal stratosphere.

Mastered from the original master tapes and pressed at RTI, this unsurpassed 180g LP edition lifts the veil on the cutting-edge assembly process that created the pair of lengthy suites. Helmed by three electric instruments, the bevelled compositions melt away all preconceived notions of "jazz," ˜rock," and "ambience," following a loose theory Davis dubbed "New Directions."

Few albums are so delicately textured. And on Mobile Fidelity's meticulous reissue, such sulcate elements pour over ink-black backgrounds on a canyon-wide soundstage. In particular, Tony Williams' inventive percussive touch – he causes the cymbals to shimmer as a pieces of silver tend to do when exposed to sunlight – is broadcast with lifelike three-dimensional qualities, the panoramic view extending to Davis' nocturnal trumpet, Wayne Shorter's ribbon-unfurling saxophone, Dave Holland's extrapolative bass, and the mosaic of keys.

If the record's only accomplishment is its introduction of guitarist John McLaughlin to the world, it alone would be enough. Yet In a Silent Way continues to bedazzle, puzzle, and inspire for myriad reasons – not the least of which is the seemingly telepathic communicative methods employed by the group's members. The line-up is great on paper, but, if it's even possible, the octet sounds even better in practice, with the instruments and tonalities conjoining in avant-garde communion like hyper-sensitive tentacles exploring the stippled landscapes of an undiscovered planet.

Diverting from expectation, tubular grooves twist, turn, and spin, sometimes piling atop of each other, always shying away from structure and melody. Ellipsoidal solos provide hesitant guidance, ranging from Chick Corea's Fender Rhodes phrases to Davis' decorative spirals. And as colour is the primary unit of currency on Davis' Sketches of Spain, laid-back episodes, geometric spaces, and quiet sensuality reign here, with the set's maverick reputation attained via musings on solitude rather than explosions of noise.


Controversial for the period, the heavily edited production of In a Silent Way blew open the once-locked doors on what producer's could attempt – and how artists could assist them. Knitted together as one would construct a cross-hatched quilt, songs contain grafts of repeat passages that provide unifying structure and experimental continuity. What a statement.

“Tunggak Semi” is the third album from Indonesian musician and producer Bambang Pranoto. Originally released in 2000, it’s an exemplary slice of what has become his signature style, a dream-like meditation on aspects of nature, combining elements of accordion, acoustic guitar, flute and percussion. The compositions cross eastern and western notation to inhabit a world of their own, a world between worlds, where harmonies reflect the beauty and joy of nature.

Bambang had a rather atypical entry into music, and studied electronics and telecommunications, before he took advantage of the wave of computer software like Cubase and Protools in the 1990s that enabled him to set about recording his own compositions and soundscapes. After playing in groups, he developed his own approach to constructing his productions. He invites musicians to record interpretations of his themes, which he then pieces together in Protools like a jigsaw puzzle. “The musicians have never even met!” he chuckled on a Skype call.

“Tunggak Semi” refers to the giant trees that appear all over Bali, and their process of renewal and regeneration. “If you cut the tree, and leave the roots, they will grow again. Everytime we cut, they grow again. It’s limitless. This philosophy means there’s always something new coming, whether an idea or music, anything.” This approach has grown out of Bambang’s studies into meditation, including Indian and Chinese scriptures, also Balinese and Indonesian religions. Music, like meditation, is a daily practice, and acceptance of the music and its ‘unfinishedness’, forms a central part of the process.

“We must not just think, but we must also feel, and we must accept that feeling,” explains Bambang, and that’s a step of opening one’s mind to possibility. It seems in keeping with two of Bambang’s musical inspirations, namely Ryuichi Sakamoto and Peter Gabriel, both known for their love of world folk music, and fusion of musical traditions. That’s mirrored in Bambang’s own collage-like approach, recording elements and piecing them together to make something unimagined. While the acoustic sound palette for “Tunggak Semi” is rooted in live recordings, Bambang is not afraid to put the digital technology to good use.

“We have to use the computer as a tool in the best way we can,” Bambang says. “Sometimes people say music is made by people, not by the computer, but it’s just another piece of equipment. What can we compose from this equipment? It’s technology music!”

Written and produced by Bambang Pranoto at interactive garden studio, Depok, Bogor between September and December 2001. 2025 version remastered by Wouter Brandenburg at Brandenburg Mastering.

Double LP pressed on transparent neon pink and opaque neon green vinyl Including exclusive unreleased tracks Holographic gatefold sleeve Reversible artwork concept After months of overwhelmingly positive reviews on the game and half a million streams on the digital album, it is finally time to announce the physical release of the original soundtrack for Sorry We're Closed. Akupara Games, à la mode games and Black Screen Records put every effort into the vinyl that lives up to the one-of-a-kind nostalgic, survival horror game with rich lore, deep characters and multiple endings. While players explore unsettling locations in Sorry We're Closed, they're being haunted by the chilling tracks, created by C.Bedford, Okumura, Devix and Catton Arthur. The soundtrack is as diverse as its artists: From the atmospheric and minimalistic electronic pieces by C.Bedford, who involved in the development of the game, to the full-on hip hop tracks by Okumura, Devix is adding a sensible folk track, while Catton Arthur is finally throwing in some heavy guitars to complete this excentric and highly enjoyable mix. For the vinyl release of the Sorry We're Closed soundtrack, the teams of à la mode, Akupara and Black Screen created a package that has its twists and turns. It comes with colourful neon LPs, transparent pink and opaque green, that are housed in a shiny holographic gatefold sleeve that you can turn around to see a second, alternative artwork.

Nobukazu Takemura"s music is singular in its ability to create a musical sense of childlike wonder and curiosity, with gracefully executed yet complex compositions. His pieces embody an innocence and the intricacies of self discovery that every human is faced with as their worlds become more complex. An acclaimed producer and composer, Takemura is known for his idiosyncratic music and video artistry as well as his prolific collaborations including those with Tortoise, Yo La Tengo, DJ Spooky and Steve Reich. knot of meanings, Takemura"s first proper album in a decade, finds the Japanese artist wrestling with the rise of technological influence on art and culture in the modern era, in tandem with his own relationship to religion, and where those struggles meet. Like the colorful, irregularly shaped glasses on the cover, the album is a mosaic of technicolor elements that come together to form a complete picture, a dense portrait of interconnected struggles and triumphs.

Sam Prekop"s work over the last 30 years, whether created primarily on his guitar or on his modular synth, is consistent in its powerful melodicism, delicate arrangements and subtle evolution. Prekop"s singular blend of melody, impressionistic lyricism and quietly intricate rhythms are the core of the singular sound of The Sea and Cake. Since 2010"s Old Punch Card, Prekop"s exploration of modular synthesis and electronic atmospheres, has come into its own. Highly skilled at manipulating the sonic interplay, Prekop has established a sytle all his own, his pieces are complex expressing real movement. Harmonies bloom with granular detail and contrary to their machine sources are able to convey emotion. Open Close is an album that captures the flow and energy of a live performance through the lens of a deft craftsman, an equilibrium of intuitive composition and the excitement of possibility.

Sam Prekop"s work over the last 30 years, whether created primarily on his guitar or on his modular synth, is consistent in its powerful melodicism, delicate arrangements and subtle evolution. Prekop"s singular blend of melody, impressionistic lyricism and quietly intricate rhythms are the core of the singular sound of The Sea and Cake. Since 2010"s Old Punch Card, Prekop"s exploration of modular synthesis and electronic atmospheres, has come into its own. Highly skilled at manipulating the sonic interplay, Prekop has established a sytle all his own, his pieces are complex expressing real movement. Harmonies bloom with granular detail and contrary to their machine sources are able to convey emotion. Open Close is an album that captures the flow and energy of a live performance through the lens of a deft craftsman, an equilibrium of intuitive composition and the excitement of possibility.

NILS FRAHM and F.S.BLUMM have confirmed the release of their fifth collaborative album, Handling. Containing three tracks but 40 minutes long, it finds the duo advancing from 2021’s dub-influenced 2X1=4, deploying its lessons in ambitious new territory that also nods to earlier collections. Recorded at his studio in Berlin’s Funkhaus, the album will be released by LEITER on vinyl and via all digital platforms on September 19, 2025.

Handling’s three exquisitely detailed pieces are each entitled ‘Leuchter,’ German for ‘candlestick,’ encapsulating the LP’s luminescent glow and rising inner energy. Its scrupulous arrangements exploit a magic cabinet of instruments, among them pianos, celestas and cristal baschets, glockenspiels, guitars and multiple forms of percussion. Their painstakingly engineered improvisations were equally meticulously reassembled in a series of intense editing sessions.

That the duo’s collaboration is built on a friendship and mutual admiration dating back to the early 2000s enables an unusual level of trust, despite both operating in their own distinct manner. “It’s not Frank, it’s not Nils,” they reflect. “We’ve become a new persona.” Handling blends Blumm’s organic chaos with Frahm’s structured intuition, offering a distinct and luminous experience that doesn’t just sound different, but feels like its own evolving world.

Den Grundstein für ihre musikalische Karriere legten SPRINTS zweifelsohne mit ihrem Debütalbum 'Letter To Self' im Jahr 2024. Allein in diesem Jahr tourte die Band um Frontfrau Karla Chubb zwei mal durch Europa, UK und die USA. Das neue Album 'All That Is Over' ist ein bemerkenswertes zweites Werk, das die Dynamik der Band noch weiter vorantreibt, noch nuancierter klingt, aber nichts an Rohheit einbüßt.

Während viele Bands nach einer solch hektischen Anfangszeit ausgebrannt wären und eine Pause bräuchten, wurde Karla umso produktiver und kreativer. 'There was just so much happening and so much to process,' erklärt sie. 'I was going through a big break up with my partner who I’d been with for eight years; Colm had left the band; we’d really progressed into being professional musicians, and I was at the start of a new relationship. But then you’d look outside and it’s like the world has never been uglier. I was writing every day because there was so much going on.' In diesem Spannungsfeld aus Wut, Ambitionen und tausend weiteren Gefühlen dazwischen legt 'All That Is Over' die Karten auf den Tisch. Das Album wurde in Tourbussen, bei Soundchecks und in Echtzeit geschrieben. Vor dem Hintergrund einer Litanei von Grausamkeiten - dem Krieg in Nahost, den Waldbränden in Los Angeles, Trumps Executive Order, die die Rechte von Trans-Personen schneidet - versuchen SPRINTS, einer verrückt gewordenen Gesellschaft einen Sinn zu geben.

Das neue Album 'All That Is Over' der irischen Band SPRINTS erscheint am 26. September 2025 via CITY SLANG (in den USA über Sub Pop Records). Im Sommer ist die Band mit Fontaines D.C. bei einigen Konzerten in Deutschland live zu sehen.

2000black releases it’s second LP ’27’.
A continuation of the afro futuristic sonic exploration, kept in its raw form. London boogie & house not house working under jazz influences, made for dancers footwork in heavy club grooves all spread over two pieces of vinyl.
Finally a follow up to ‘A Next Set A Rockers’

Billy Bultheel's debut solo album is an ambitious distillation of the composer's sprawling litany of influences and his unique approach to site-specific composition. A compilation of pieces created between 2016 and 2023, the album is a forceful testament to Bultheel's expansive performance practice and collaborations with cutting-edge visual artists like Anne Imhof and James Richards.

Letters Home is the debut full-length on ambient powerhouse Pas tInside The Present from Tennessee-based Slow Blink aka Amanda Haswell. And a fine one it is too with mesmerising routes through hazy soundscapes she calls "tape loop weather patterns." Across two half-hour pieces, bowed guitar, piano, bells, and toy synths dissolve into dreamy loops and create symphonies of colour and memory. Side one, 'The Heart's Docent', feels like a love-struck dance unraveling in slow motion, while 'Laughter at Cascade Park' evokes bittersweet nostalgia for long-lost joys. Handmade, analogue and alive with imperfections, Letters Home is an intimate meditation on memory, nature and impermanence.

Voyager is Mike Oldfield 17th album and was released in 1996. It is a Celtic-themed album with new pieces intertwined with covers of 20th century compositions and older traditional pieces. The music on this album is the most overtly Celtic music Mike Oldfield has produced. The album was originally recorded using only acoustic hand-played instruments. Later on Oldfield added synthesizers and more instruments to the album. His rendition of "Women of Ireland" was released as a single in 1997. "She Moves Through the Fair" is an traditional Irish song, the melody of which had been used by Simple Minds for "Belfast Child" in 1989 and "Celtic Rain" was sampled in 2008 by Snoop Dogg for his song "Why Did You Leave Me"

Yoyager is available as a limited edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on purple coloured vinyl.

François and Sylvain Rabbath have turned six years of touring into a joint album that patiently and intensely distills a variety of musical flavors gathered from around the world.

Since the early 1960s, François Rabbath's double bass has resonated through enough landmark recordings to fill several shelves in a record collection. As an arranger, composer, and musician, his imprint on music goes far beyond his collaborations with Barbara, Paco Ibáñez, Charles Aznavour, or Édith Piaf. Aspiring double bassists owe him a groundbreaking method for learning the instrument. Born into a lush musical universe that quickly became his own, his son Sylvain first accompanied him on his travels before settling at the piano and sharing stages around the world at his side.

Those years of accumulating visas in their passports were put to good use by father and son. The continents, countries, and cities they passed through became a rich source of inspiration for composing Amall, the album by the Rabbath Electric Orchestra.

Long hours spent in the air or on the road, watching passing landscapes that never stayed the same, were transformed into compositions imbued with the atmospheres of the places they crossed or visited. Inspiration sometimes struck with force, like a green oasis appearing in a desert of stone—unexpectedly, as glowing red rocks suddenly dominated an otherwise open landscape with an endless horizon, while the mind wandered into a state between meditation and introspection.
Born from these travels, the pieces took on their final colors once brought into the studio, refined, and finally arranged to welcome the guitars of Keziah Jones and Matthieu Chedid, the piano of Laurent de Wilde, the bass of Victor Wooten, the saxophone of Raphaël Imbert, and the percussion of Minino Garay. Enhanced by the scale of the jazz-soul orchestrations, by the richness of arrangements bursting from strings, brass, rhythms, or keyboards, the epic breath of vast plains became ingrained. The urban tension of funk, echoing their movements, found its place—alongside more electric expressions or the ambience of a darkened room.
Melancholic and melodious, expressive and edgy, the bowed double bass—played in the high register where few dare to go—emerged as the musical guide. One that draws a path between Seville and Minneapolis, connects François Rabbath's native Syria to France, and bridges South America to Europe. It sets the tone to follow—the emotion that will carry the piece, and if not filled with light, will carry it there nonetheless.
Musical visions packed in luggage, transported in cargo holds, or imprinted in their minds just long enough to cover the distances to the next stop—father and son deepened their bond, beyond family and art. And their hands have never held each other more tightly.

François et Sylvain Rabbath ont fait fructifier six ans de tournées pour un album commun distillant patiemment et intensément la variété de parfums musicaux récoltés autour du monde.
Depuis le début des 60’s, la contrebasse de François Rabbath résonne dans assez de références pour combler plusieurs étagères d’une collection de disques. Arrangeur, compositeur, musicien, l'empreinte laissée dans la musique va bien au-delà de ses collaborations avec Barbara, Paco Ibanez, Charles Aznavour, ou Edith Piaf. C’est à lui que les
apprentis contrebassistes doivent une méthode novatrice pour apprendre l’instrument.

Né dans un univers musical luxuriant qui est vite devenu aussi le sien, c’est d’abord dans ses voyages que son fils Sylvain l’a accompagné, avant de s’installer au piano, et parcourir les scènes du monde à ses côtés. Ces années où les visas se sont entassés sur leurs passeports, père et fils les ont mises à profit. Continents, pays, et villes qui se sont succédés sont devenues un gisement pour composer Amall, l’album du Rabbath Electric Orchestra.

Les longs moments passés dans les airs ou sur la route à contempler un paysage qui défile sans pour autant rester le même, se sont convertis en compositions habitées par les ambiances de ces endroits traversés ou visités. Là où l’inspiration s’est imposée parfois brutalement, sous
la forme d’un oasis de verdure surgissant au milieu d’un désert de pierres. Au hasard d’imposantes roches rougeoyantes s’invitant dans un paysage jusqu’alors dégagé sur un horizon sans fin, quand l’esprit se laisse aller à un mélange de méditation et d'introspection.

Nés de ces pérégrinations, les titres ont pris leurs couleurs définitives une fois ramenés en studio, peaufinés puis, enfin, pensés pour y inviter les guitares de Keziah Jones et de Matthieu Chedid, le piano de Laurent de Wilde, la basse de Victor Wooten, le saxophone de Raphaël Imbert, les percussions de Minino Garay. Sublimé par la dimension des orchestrations jazz-soul, par la richesse des arrangements jaillissant des cordes, des cuivres, des rythmiques ou des claviers, le souffle épique des plaines immenses s’est imprimé.
La nervosité citadine du funk rythmant les déplacements a trouvé sa place, non loin d’une expression plus électrique ou d’une atmosphère de salle obscure.

Mélancolique et mélodieuse, expressive et nerveuse, la contrebasse jouée à l’archet, dans les notes hautes du manche où peu s’aventurent, s’est érigée en guide musical. Celui qui trace le chemin entre Séville et Minneapolis, relie la Syrie natale de François Rabbath à la France,
réduit la distance entre l’Amérique du Sud et l’Europe. Donne la note à suivre, l’émotion qui traversera le morceau qui, s’il n’est pas habité par la lumière, le portera néanmoins jusque là.

Visions musicales mises dans le coffre, transportées en soute ou imprimées dans l’esprit le temps de couvrir les distances qui les mèneront aux prochaines, c’est côte à côte que père et fils ont prolongé leur lien par delà des seules limites familiales et artistiques. Et leurs mains ne se sont jamais serrées aussi fort.
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With »Roto«, Derek Piotr revisits the aqueous terrain first explored in his 2016 album »Drono«, where the paradox of water’s stillness and perpetual motion was refracted into looping voices and glitching textures. Conceived as a »spiritual successor« and recorded in 2019, the album has lain dormant for six years before surfacing on Discreet Archive. That stretch of silence seems to have deepened its charge – the sound feels unearthed rather than made, like a whirlpool biding its time in obscurity until now.

Unlike »Drono«’s mosaic of shorter pieces, »Roto« unfurls as two expansive half-hour tracks, allowing Piotr to probe repetition with greater intensity. Vowels accumulate until they shimmer with alien sentience, drones grow dense and psychoacoustic, and the smallest digital artifacts flicker like neural sparks. The result is a work that denies familiarity; recurrence here only breeds strangeness, unspooling into a procession of hidden pulses and altered voices that resist prediction, drawing the listener deeper into a submerged, otherworldly space.

Derek Piotr is a folklorist, researcher and performer whose work focuses primarily on the human voice. His work covers practices including fieldwork, vocal performance, preservation and autoethnography; and is primarily concerned with tenderness, fragility, beauty and brutality. He has collaborated with artists including Scott Solter, Nathan Salsburg and Thomas Brinkmann across various disciplines.

He is lead archivist and creative director of the Fieldwork Archive.

Black Truffle is thrilled to present the first ever solo Donso n’goni recording from octogenarian Swedish multi-instrumentalist Christer Bothén. Active in the Swedish jazz and improvisation scene since the 1970s, often heard on bass clarinet, Bothén travelled to Mali in 1971, eventually making his way to the Wassoulou region in the country’s south where he encountered the Donso n’goni, the sacred harp of the hunter caste of Wassoulou society. Though playing the instrument has traditionally been restricted to those who belong to the hunters’ brotherhood, Bothén found an enthusiastic teacher in Brouema Dobia, who, after many months of intensive one-on-one lessons, gave Bothén his blessing to play the instrument both traditionally and in his own style. Returning to Sweden, he would go on to pass on what he had learned to Don Cherry and play the Donso n’goni in a wide variety of inventive settings, including the driving Afro-jazz-fusion of his Trancedance (reissued as BT118).

The seven pieces of Christer Bothén Donso n’goni offer up a stunning showcase of Bothén’s work on this remarkable instrument, heard entirely unaccompanied, except for the final piece where he is joined on a second Donso n’goni by his student and collaborator, the virtuoso bassist Kansan/Torbjorn Zetterberg, and Marianne N’Lemvo Linden on the metal Karanjang scraper. Recorded in three sessions in Stockholm between 2019 and 2023 in richly detailed high fidelity, the instrument’s buzzing, sonorous bass strings make an immediate, overwhelming sonic impression. Hyper-focused on hypnotically repeating pentatonic patterns, the seven pieces are at once relentlessly single-minded and endlessly rich in subtle variations. The concentrated listening environment turns small details, such as the deployment of the instrument’s segesege rattle on two of the pieces, into major events. Six of the seven pieces are traditional, with Bothén contributing the remaining ‘La Baraka’, but the line between tradition and the individual talent is imaginary here: as Bothén explained in a recent interview with The Wire’s Clive Bell, ‘I play traditional and untraditional, and I play the music forward and backward’. While the traditional Wassoulou pieces provide the rhythmic and harmonic elements, Bothén’s individuality as a performer is alive in every moment, felt acutely in boundless variations of attack, improvisational flourishes, and unexpected accelerations and decelerations. Captured entirely live and bristling with spontaneity, this music is undeniably the product of almost half a decade of Bothén’s devotion to the Donso n’goni and its traditional music.

Accompanied by detailed new liner notes by Bothén and stunning colour photos from his time in Mali, Christer Bothén Donso n’goni is a stunning document of a remarkable instrument, played with an almost spiritual intensity by one of contemporary music’s great explorers.