Search:the caretaker

Altsaxofonist Zbigniew Namysłowski (1939-2022) wird wird oft als der ”John Coltrane Polens” bezeichnet,
so wichtig war er für die Entwicklung des modernen Jazz in seiner Heimat. Sein 1964 veröffentlichtes
Debütalbum “Lola” war zugleich das erste Album einer polnischen Band, das nicht hinter dem “Eisernen
Vorhang”, sondern in den Decca Studios in London aufgenommen wurde. Mit seinem Modern Jazz Quartet stellte Namysłowski auf dem Album sieben teils von polnischer Folklore inspirierte Originale sowie eine
Interpretation des Standards “Ol’ Man River” vor.
Produziert wurden die Aufnahmen von Mike Vernon, der später unter anderem mit Fleetwood Mac, David
Bowie und John Mayall arbeitete. 60 Jahre nach Erstveröffentlichung erscheint dieses für die europäische
Jazzszene eminent wichtige Album in der Reihe “British Jazz Explosion” erstmals wieder auf Vinyl. Gemastert von den originalen analogen Stereobändern von David Turner bei 360 Mastering, geschnitten bei Curve
Pusher, Hastings, East Sussex. Eine Beilage enthält Fotos der originalen Masterbänder und neue Liner
Notes des bekannten Autors, Compilers und Dokumentarfilmers Tony Higgins, der auch als ausführender
Produzent für Deccas „British Jazz Explosion“-Reihe fungiert.

Kēpa is built whole, even if life has broken a few bones along the way.

Back when he was a pro skater, he gave everything to the board. Today, he gives that same intensity to the stage, delivering hypnotic cine-concerts where motion, sound, and image blur into one. The only falls left now are the ringing final chords of his guitar — not just an instrument, but an extension of his body.

Fingerpicking is his native tongue. So much so that Kēpa no longer sings — he lets the strings speak. Percussive, alive, essential. This music isn’t about performance, it’s about living: a personal quest, a way to reach others by first going inward. Moving against the current without fighting the wind. Finding breath, essence, and remembering we’re all drifting on a spinning planet, surrounded by forces bigger than us.

It’s easier to look away. Easier to follow noise, fear, or false prophets. Harder — and braver — to truly connect.

Released in late 2025, Hotline Service opened the door, offering a wide-open, spiritual escape. With SOUL WASH SERVICES— produced by Timber Timbre — Kēpa goes further. Warmer, deeper, more focused. The album feels like sunlight on asphalt, a long drive with the windows down, time slowing just enough to let something real surface.

A kindred spirit to Hermanos Gutiérrez, Kēpa plays the role of a modern, pagan preacher — guiding us through a dusty, golden road movie that unfolds entirely inside the listener. His music doesn’t shout; it cleans.

Kēpa does it all: writes, plays, films, edits, mixes. Music becomes image, image becomes music. Nothing is separate, on record or on stage. There’s no excess, no showboating — just an open invitation to slow down, go deeper, aim higher.

Tracks like Solarium and Paradisiac reach the peaks with minimal gear: five strings, a few picks, and total control of touch and space. Listening to Kēpa feels like checking in with yourself — a quiet inner trip shaped by sounds from every corner of the world. Blues, not to feel them, but to leave them behind.

After years devoted to picking, his playing has become something sacred.

And if you let it, it carries you with it.

"Electroacoustic Work" is a collection of experimental sound pieces recorded in 2024-2025 at Goldsmiths University by Kleptofirm. It spans from performance and composition to interactive installation material.

In this collection, Kleptofirm bends and breaks a variety of traditional instruments - pushing computer-controlled pianos beyond the range of human playability, live-processing mandolins with modular synthesis, and cutting a dervish of organ loops from tangles of ferric tape.

Listening to "Electroacoustic Work" feels like wandering through an immersive installation: every step and motion tracked, calibrated then transposed into ominous folds and figures of feedback, sculpted in thick air.

Recommended if you like The Caretaker, Aphex Twin, Actress.

Shrouded in myth and working quietly at the edges of modern composition, the enigmatic Anichy & Lyemn announces the release of their newest recording on the esteemed Swiss imprint Fabrique d'Instruments—a new label championing radical, visionary sound.
This deeply affecting work unfurls as a meditation on impermanence, memory, and the slow unravelling of time. Across its extended movements, they create a sound world that is at once symphonic in scale and intimate in breath, echoing the aching resonance of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, the spectral drift of The Caretaker, and the luminous stillness of Gavin Bryars.

Strings sigh, distant sounds dissolve, and tape-worn melodies return like half-remembered dreams. It is music that feels remembered more than heard—a fragile architecture built from erosion, decay, and the stubborn persistence of beauty.
Adding to its mystique, the record features previously unheard collaborations with a legendary British minimalist composer, whose identity remains deliberately withheld. These rare sessions—long thought lost to time—reveal the artist exploring harmonic minimalism with a disarming tenderness, the composer’s unmistakable signature woven delicately through Anichy & Lyemn’s drifting orchestral shadows.

At a moment when the world feels increasingly unmoored, this record arrives as a quiet monument to what slips away, and what remains.
Artist is available for very limited interviews.

"deathcrash’s third album, Somersaults, glimmers with an everyday euphoria. The London-based slowcore/ post-rock quartet has always had an affinity for building worlds only to crush them. From their breakout EP, People thought my windows were stars (2021), through two critically acclaimed studio albums, Return (2022) and Less (2023), they have been both the architects and the destroyers, the creationists and the ones manning the flood barrier. But, recorded between Black Box Studio in the Loire Valley and Haggerston’s Holy Mountain, Somersaults is almost joyful.

Its ten tracks are more vocal heavy than any of the band’s catalogue – think Mark Linkous via The Kinks – but lyrically, Somersaults resists revelation. For all its abrasion, phrases appear half-swallowed, broken off at the edge of meaning, consumed by the smaller textures of living. “Thirty, no career, it fucking worries me / And doing the band doesn’t help,” Banks sings in ‘NYC’. But, “This life is the best life,” he finishes in ‘CMC’ on top of the ambient white noise of an office printer, thankful that the band is still there, “still making noise in the doorway.”

Their role as caretakers of Duster, Low and Codeine’s slowcore lineage is all across Somersaults – songs scud to a narcotic crawl, sound monolithic and inwards before spotlighting a crystalline nothing. Cathartic builds are muddied with tenderness, the bass a heavy grounding, the drums an exhausted heartbeat grasping for air. But more so than ever, even the silence feels collaborative – a gesture of communal trust – friends celebrating the room they’ve made for each other’s ghosts, and some of the biggest, brightest songs they’ve made to date."

Synthpop, minimal wave, post-punk, goth, new romantic - fans and critics alike have dug deeply into their vintage thesauruses to describe the beguiling work of Nation of Language. And if you can't precisely define the band, that's the point. Frontman Ian Richard Devaney has become prodigious in expanding what synthesizer-driven music can evoke, such that his output is as much an extrasensory journey as it is an all-too-human destination. With that experience in mind, he wrote the band's fourth album - the spectral, spacious Dance Called Memory - in the most humble of ways: chipping away at melancholia by sitting around and strumming his guitar. Nation of Language's first two albums, Introduction, Presence (2020), and A Way Forward (2021), came as pandemic godsends: gorgeous, relatable soundtracks to our collective doldrums. But it was their last LP, Strange Disciple (2023), that catapulted the group from cultural standouts to critical darlings, with the album being named Rough Trade's Album of the Year. With that release, Pitchfork wrote that the band "are learning what it means to get bigger and better." This is Devaney's calling: soulfully translating individual despair into a comforting, collective mourning. The single "Now That You're Gone," which radiates and reverberates with a devastating wistfulness, was inspired by witnessing his godfather's tragic death from ALS, and his parents' role as caretakers for this ailing friend. At its heart, the song is a reflection of how friends can be there for each other, and also highlights a theme throughout the record: the pain and lost promise of friendships that fall apart. On Dance Called Memory, the band once again collaborated with friend and Strange Disciple producer Nick Millhiser (LCD Soundsystem, Holy Ghost!). "What's so great about Nick is his ability to make us feel like we don't need to do what might be expected of us," says synth player Aidan Noell, who, along with bassist Alex MacKay, rounds out the Nation of Language lineup. They imbued Dance Called Memory with a shifted palette - sampling chopped-up drum breaks on "I'm Not Ready for the Change" for a touch of Loveless-era My Bloody Valentine or smashing all of the percussion of "In Another Life" through a synthesizer to cast a shade of early-2000s electronic music. Ultimately, the hope was to weave raw vulnerability and humanity into a synth-heavy album. "There is a dichotomy between the Kraftwerk school of thought and the Brian Eno school of thought, each of which I've been drawn to at different points. I've read about how Kraftwerk wanted to remove all the humanity from their music, but Eno often spoke about wanting to make synthesized music that felt distinctly human," Devaney says. "As much as Kraftwerk is a sonically foundational influence, with this record I leaned much more towards the Eno school of thought. In this era quickly being defined by the rise of AI supplanting human creators I'm focusing more on the human condition, and I need the underlying music to support that_ Instead of hopelessness, I want to leave the listener with a feeling of us really seeing one another, that our individual struggles can actually unite us in empathy."

"Released in 1994, “Dellamorte Dellamore” (known internationally as Cemetery Man) is one of the most fascinating and unconventional films of 1990s Italian cinema. Directed by Michele Soavi and based on the novel by Tiziano Sclavi (the creator of Dylan Dog), the film blends horror, dark comedy, and surreal poetry into a story suspended between life and death, love and madness.
The protagonist is Rupert Everett, as Francesco Dellamorte, the caretaker of a cemetery where the dead return to life. Beside him, a mysterious woman (played by Anna Falchi) embodies the obsessive nature of love and the cyclical pattern of desire and loss. Soavi crafts a visionary, melancholic, and ironic film in which death becomes a metaphor for existence itself.
Giving voice to this suspended universe is Manuel De Sica, who composed one of his most evocative and underrated scores. The soundtrack for Dellamorte Dellamore is an alluring blend of gothic romanticism, mystery, and lyrical melancholy, perfectly attuned to the film’s tone."

Autodidactic musicologist and sample collagist U turned his archival eye on the melting pot of ‘80s post-punk with his debut ‘Life Isn’t A Fountain?’ EP for Lex. He follows up with an experimental exploration of regional identity with ARCHENFIELD, a deeply personal collection of ambient music and found sound that examines the relationship between geographical space and aural histories.

To construct this record U mined a wealth of recorded material relevant to the area. With a nod to traditional music, he takes samples from these records and creates beautifully atmospheric sound pieces that are often mixed with painstakingly researched snippets to create a stirring reflection on local history and broader themes of how we interact, or even fail to interact, with English folklore today.

Pressed on 180g vinyl, the album comes with a 24-page visual companion that expands on its themes and folk stories through imagery and narrative, echoing the album’s soundscape. : The Caretaker, Oneohtrix Point Never, JG Bie1berkopf, Maxime Denuc, Leon Vynehall

Mit ,Backstage" hat Jay-Jay bereits sein 15. Album veröffentlicht, und seine Inspiration wird ständig erneuert. Hier finden wir die grundlegenden Elemente seines musikalischen Universums: Jazz, Triphop, Pop und sogar einen Hauch von Easy Listening. Die erste Single ,How Long Do You Think We're Gonna Last?" bietet einen köstlichen Soul-Sound, der auf den ersten 14 Alben von Jay-Jay nicht zu hören war. Auf ,Backstage" singt Jay-Jay zum ersten Mal in seiner Diskografie einen Song komplett auf Französisch, der Rimbaud gewidmet ist. Der Text stammt von dem französischen Schriftsteller Renaud Santa Maria. Schließlich liefert Jay-Jay eine persönliche Version von ,Lujon", dem Kultsong zum 100. Geburtstag des Komponisten Henry Mancini. Aufgenommen in Stockholm im Winter 2024, wurde das Album in Paris von Alex Gopher (Air, Phoenix, Bob Sinclar...) gemastert. Für JJJ-Hardcore-Fans: In der Auflage von 1000 LPs gibt es 20 goldene Tickets zu gewinnen, die nach dem Zufallsprinzip verteilt werden. Die goldenen Tickets berechtigen zu einer VIP-Einladung zu einem beliebigen Jay-Jay Johanson-Konzert + Backstage-Treff mit Jay-Jay Johanson. Die CD-Version hat indes zwei Bonustracks aufzuweisen.

'Quiet Pieces' initiates Abul Mogard’s personal imprint Soft Echoes with a definitive self-portrait of calm, contemplative, and discreet inner landscapes made audible. It is the first solo album on vinyl in four years. RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker.

While sifting through archived material left idle from earlier projects, a chance encounter with a late uncle’s trove of beloved 78rpm classical and opera records prompted the reworking and completion of what would eventually become the album. Spinning dusty records at 33 and 45rpm, Abul Mogard recombined their enduring spectres with unfinished sketches from his archive. The resulting soundscape blurs distinctions between his memories and those of another, exquisitely short-circuiting the senses with its waking, dream-like lucidity.

This was a process I hadn’t explored in my earlier works. I began sampling brief moments from these records, altering them with studio effects and playing them at slower speeds. In many cases, I wasn’t entirely sure how the original music sounded. These fragments, once further processed, became a source of inspiration for my new compositions. Over time, I realised that the old pieces from the archive and the new material derived from the samples naturally complemented each other.”

The resulting pieces hover over a threshold, a liminal space that harmonises the old and older material. Voluminous waves of quiet and loud undulate between consonance and dissonance, conjuring imagery of a decaying grandeur that humanity’s decadence has surrendered to the elements. Abul Mogard’s seemingly abandoned yet vast landscapes are nevertheless intimate with timbral frissons of red-lined distortion. Elusive, yet as tangible as sea spray or smog, they affect the olfactory senses with a rarified, synesthetic quality that modestly engages one’s emotional register – a hypnotic, distinguishing feature long hailed as one of the hallmarks of his work. A fidelity to memory and dream recall is sensitively probed in the journey from the stately symphonic stasis of 'Following a dream' to the almost industrial, untethered brutality evoked by a looming silhouette that’s never fully visible in 'Constantly slipping away', culminating in the foreboding coda of 'Like a bird'. Those pieces appear to shield the album’s sentimental core, where the tempestuous play of light and shadow of 'In a studded procession' escalates to breathtaking, panoramic climax, while 'Through whispers' evokes an out-of-body-like experience encountered with visceral poignancy.

Looking back, Mogard notes an unexpected influence: “I realise being inspired by Phill Niblock, whose work I had barely known at the time but explored after his passing in 2024. His album 'Boston Tenor Index' changed the way I approached dissonance. It encouraged me to push my sound further, to the edge of a space where I began to feel uncomfortable.”

The album artwork, created by longtime collaborator Marja de Sanctis, features a photograph taken at the Temple of Jupiter Anxur, an archaeological site overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Captured with an iPhone, the image traces the residual presence of construction techniques and architectural forms of the Romans, where material history is transcribed through contemporary tools. The convergence of ancient and modern technology aims to reverberate the site’s lasting spiritual presence – an echo persisting in what is now perceived as a quiet, emptied space. The spiral gestures towards infinity and light. Past and present dissolve into one another, reflecting 'Quiet Pieces' meditation on sound, memory, and time.

RIYL Alessandro Cortini, William Basinski, The Caretaker

"Vilhelm Bromander Unfolding Orchestra returns with Jorden vi ärvde (""The Earth We Inherited""), the follow-up to their acclaimed 2023 debut, In This Forever Unfolding Moment. Set for release on April 25, 2025, the album deepens Bromander’s unique fusion of cosmic jazz, free jazz, folk music and Indian classical traditions while carrying a powerful message about environmental and social responsibility.

Bromander composed this work as both a dedication to his children and a reflection on humanity’s role as caretakers of the planet. “The album is an attempt to spread light, beauty, hope, and resistance while acknowledging the gravity of our times,” he explains. “Right-wing forces are rising, wars continue, and climate disasters escalate. How do we find the strength and hope to change?”

The music balances urgency with a deep trust in humanity. Bromander’s meticulous arrangements, performed by an all-star ensemble, offer moments of both fiery resistance and serene contemplation. Tracks like “Jorden vi ärvde, den skall oss också ärvas” unfold patiently, blending vibrant improvisations with lush orchestration. The evocative ballad “Erde”, with stunning solos by pianist Alex Zethson and the bass-player himself, nods to Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra, while “For Dewey” pays tribute to the elastic interplay of Keith Jarrett’s legendary quartet, high-lighting the fire-y saxophone playing of Elin Forkelid. The closing piece, “Calliope,” channels Indian classical influences, with harp evoking a swarmandal’s shimmering resonance.

With Jorden vi ärvde, Bromander expands his artistic vision, weaving together intricate compositions with a passionate call to action. The result is an album that doesn’t just demand to be heard—it invites listeners to reflect, feel, and, ultimately, act."

Der gefeierte Komponist (A Scanner Darkly, Before Midnight, Hit Man) und musikalische Außenseiter Graham Reynolds veröffentlicht sein erstes Soloalbum für Fire Records. Gepresst auf limitiertem lila/weißem Splatter-Vinyl in einem Deluxe Die Cut Mountain Sleeve. Eine sozio-geografische Reise entlang der Sierra im Kopf. Der herausragende Titeltrack "Mountain (Part 1)" ist voll von romantischen orchestralen Schwüngen, die das Bild einer weiten Landschaft heraufbeschwören, die von einem einzelnen Gipfel unterbrochen wird, während "...Part 2" einen zerklüfteteren Weg einschlägt, der einen kantigen Bergrücken überquert, bevor er sich in einem Hermann-esken Hitchcock-Stück festigt. "Mt. Monadnock" in New Hampshire wird namentlich erwähnt, während der "Enchanted Rock" (ein donnerndes, an die Einstürzenden Neubauten erinnerndes Wiedererwachen der Sinne, das von Grahams charakteristischer dröhnender Orchestertrommel begleitet wird) etwas außerhalb von Austin, Texas, steht, wo Reynolds seit über 30 Jahren zu Hause ist. Das Album wurde von Reynolds komponiert und eingespielt, mit Beiträgen vieler seiner musikalischen Freunde. Produziert und abgemischt wurde es von geheimnisvollen englischen Duo PeterTalisman. Das Album birgt einige Überraschungen, Austin-Nachbar Jad Fair (Half Japanese) taucht mit Backing Vocals auf, ebenso die italienische Chanteuse Marta del Grandi, deren beschwörende Worte auf "Linger In Silence" das exquisite siebenminütige "Prophet Harmonic" wieder zum Leben erwecken. ,Dieses Album ist sehr persönlich. Es beginnt mit Monadnock, dem ersten Berg, den ich je bestiegen habe, oben in Neuengland. Die erste Seite endet mit dem Enchanted Rock, dem ersten Berg, den ich in meiner Wahlheimat Texas bestiegen habe. Und obwohl ich schon mein ganzes Leben lang Musik veröffentlicht habe, ist dies das erste Mal, dass ich für etwas Eigenes, das nicht an einen Film oder ein anderes Medium gebunden ist, echte Labelunterstützung bekomme. In gewisser Weise ist es also mein erstes echtes Soloalbum", so Graham Reynolds.

On their most explicit venture into music for moving image, Miles Whittaker & Sean Canty rudely fracture piano and vocal recordings by US filmmaker-musician Kristen Pilon in a short-circuiting of style and pattern.

Shredding up definitions of electro-acoustic opera, spectralist chamber musique and concrète rave, Demdike hit square between the eyes/ears of film music vernaculars on a startlingly strong addition to their unique oeuvre, now in its 16th year of elusive psychoacoustic strafes and jump-cuts across putative borders. The 13-part, hour-long album dislodges source material made for the experimental film ‘To Cut and Shoot’, by Kristen Pilon, an NYC-based musician and filmmaker, to farther refract the film’s themes of serendipity and the nature of ghosts and dreams with a flickering flux of sound-imagery and aleatoric weirdness appropriate to her original meditations, but also freely messing with their forms.

Situated just a few miles north of Houston, Cut and Shoot is a relatively insignificant Texas town with an unforgettably bizarre name. Pilon grew up not far from Cut and Shoot, and it's there where she ran into 65-year-old machinist and motorcyclist Robert Lewis Stevenson, better known as Bobbo, who's pictured on the album's cover. The meeting occurred a few months after Pilon recorded her improvisations on piano, strings and voice in the basement cellar of the Halle in Manchester, with Bobbo providing the necessary narrative heft the trio needed to inspire an experimental film and its accompanying soundtrack.

Responding to Kristen’s initial piano and operatic vocal recordings, Demdike return a volley of discrete parts tilting from typically cantankerous mayhem to quieter, more clandestine buzzes sliced with crazed interstices of the imagination, all marbled with the plasmic contrails of the paranormal which have long been peculiar to their work. With a poetic flair reflecting Pilon’s own phrasing and melding of mediums, Demdike unfold and expand her melodic fragments into temporal mazes, variously resembling the most messed-up ends of The Caretaker in ‘A Grave Fall (January)’, but also liable to skew into buckshot club turbulence, as with ‘Belly Up’, or the bittersweet bruk contortions of ‘Twist’.

The storyline wickedly frays and loops into itself with a non-linearity that recalls the mid-to-latter stages of Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ or waking from a sweaty fever dream only to pitch back into its thorny bush of ghosts, often within the space of one track. It’s testament to the ever-tighter binds of Demdike’s symbiotic vision that the results nevertheless hold a thread of logic that weaves in everything from their Jon Collin jams to reams of mixes and Gruppo edits with an unresolved, open-ended quality that still keeps us on our toes, perhaps more so than ever here.

"New Modern Homes" is the first album by The Chesterfields since nearly 40 years and was produced by John Parish.

The Chesterfields came to prominence in 1986 as part of a thriving UK underground scene that had turned its back on bland over-produced 1980s chart music and was looking for back to basics pop music. Bands, independent record labels, gig promoters and fanzine editors were making their own entertainment, with The June Brides, The Wedding Present, Primal Scream and The Loft leading the way, supported by Radio One's John Peel and Janice Long. They released 3 albums ('Kettle' getting to number 2 in the independent charts), 5 singles ('Ask Johnny Dee' reaching number 3), and toured the UK and Europe non-stop before splitting in 1989.

They reformed briefly in 1993 to tour Japan and release a fourth album and sixth single, and then returned to action 23 years later when they were asked to play New York Pop Fest in 2016. The current line-up features Simon Barber on bass and vocals, Rob Parry on drums, Helen Stickland on guitar and vocals, and Andy Strickland (of The Loft and The Caretaker Race) on guitar and vocals.

The Telescopes Radio Sessions collects together the essence of three live session recordings in 3 different countries over a three year period between 2016-2019. This is the third in a series of radio session releases from Tapete Records that have so far included The Monochrome Set and Comet Gain. More session releases are being lined up for the rest of the year and beyond - enjoy the sonics and stay tuned. Over the years I have read a lot on people’s impressions of The Telescopes. Some folk think it’s a collective, others imagine it used to be a band and feel nostalgia towards what they consider to be the original line-up (even though many had come before, during and since) and some people refer to it as currently a solo career. In a way this is all true and none of it is. When faced with these kind of questions, along with questions about the style of music that The Telescopes make I often say The Telescopes house has many rooms, which explains things perfectly for me but for people on the outside looking in it only serves to increase their confusion. For me, confusion isn’t such a bad thing. Everything is born into confusion, the sense we try and make of that chaos is interesting and excites me. The universe often disorientates, it sends me a jumble of thoughts and impressions coupled with a feeling of something I need to express… if I could only decipher the encryption. This is how The Telescopes music comes to be and it is also how The Telescopes came to me. I regard The Telescopes as an entity of it’s own that introduced itself in my darkest hour and I was chosen as its vessel. From the second it arrived I was obsessed to the point where there was nothing else. A bit like having an imaginary friend. As the obsession grew it began to infect others, everybody loved my imaginary friend and wanted a piece of it. As its success grew however, so did the corruption, until one day the entity fell silent. The silence lasted for years, I tried everything to reconnect but it was having none of it. I had been a bad caretaker, I had let the house become infested and I had lost my way. This epiphany served to remind me of simpler times when anything felt possible with this entity by my side. It had trusted me with something so simplistically profound and I had let it down. The realisation of this was a eureka moment. I am not The Telescopes, I never was and never will be, I am the caretaker, the lighthouse keeper and if a job is worth doing it is worth doing well. With this dawning, I felt a crack open up in the cosmic egg and a familiar confusion in my head. The entity had returned. It was time to start untangling its tangled threads once more, to make sense of what it was saying, this time without corruption. It’s all about listening. I listen to what my cosmic friend sends me and channel this expression into what you hear through your speakers. It may take one person to achieve this, it may take more. There is no set line up or instrumentation that can hold The Telescopes. Whatever it takes to hit the zone, whatever is available, absolute focus is imperative. Sometimes it takes sabotage to keep that line of vision intact, there is no room for preconceptions or complacency in making the music. The Telescopes music is the now

incarnate and a state of total being is necessary to achieve. From the outside looking in... again, it’s all about listening. What comes through your speakers is the only thing that matters. The music either reaches you or it doesn’t. Everything else may seem interesting or confusing but ultimately it is corruption. So if you’ve bought the record, read the sleeve notes and bought a ticket to see a live show, don’t be surprised if the line-up is or isn’t the same as the recording. The only thing that is for sure is that The Telescopes as an entity is speaking to you in its own voice in every scenario.
Of course the difference between albums and live shows is that you can play the record over and over again to the point where you know every line and every note that was played. Whereas with live events you are left with an impression that can only be replayed in your mind. It can be frustrating at times. When you are touring with a great line-up and feel like something exciting is happening, you want everyone to hear it, not just the people at the shows but the people that couldn’t make it on the night as well. There is no guarantee that there will be the same line-up at a live show as there is on the album. This is why live sessions are important, they document a side of things that is often fleeting. Here we have three sessions, all different people transmitting The Telescopes sound on each. Some are regulars, some dip in and out and some were just passing through. In each case The Telescopes chose them as their vessel and as the lighthouse keeper I did everything I could to help them on that journey while trying to be a good caretaker to the house of many rooms. The Telescopes have been invited in for many sessions over the years, the first two were for John Peel on BBC Radio 1. We also recorded a session for Marc Riley and Mark Radcliffe before their
celebrity when they had a show on BBC Radio Manchester. We could have compiled this album from those sessions, it was certainly considered but Tapete and myself believe this selection gives an exciting glimpse into that fleeting side of The Telescopes in a constant state of flux that is left mostly to myth and imagination. For those who listen to the records but have never had the chance to take in the live experience, welcome to the other side. For those that follow us live, here’s a little reminder and a keepsake. Infinite suns. Stephen Lawrie February 2024.

Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road is a duet in ambience by Pan American (Mark K. Nelson) and Kramer. This experimental record is 11 brief sojourns into the dream state, produced by Kramer (of Shimmy-Disc) and co-written with Mark K. Nelson (of Labradford, Anjou).This record is a brotherly and collaborative follow-up to Kramer's 2022 ambient excursions, "Music For Films Edited By Moths".On the making of this collaborative project, Mark K. Nelson said "It was an honor to work with Kramer. That we came out of it with a great friendship and a record that's unique to each of our histories and music that we're proud to share is a privilege and a joy."As Kramer has described, the result of this record is a work that begs listeners, both animal and human, to allow these beautiful landscapes to sing and speak and weep for themselves.Simply put by Kramer, "Please. Forget about words. Just LISTEN."

Reverberations of Non-Stop Traffic on Redding Road is a duet in ambience by Pan American (Mark K. Nelson) and Kramer. This experimental record is 11 brief sojourns into the dream state, produced by Kramer (of Shimmy-Disc) and co-written with Mark K. Nelson (of Labradford, Anjou).This record is a brotherly and collaborative follow-up to Kramer's 2022 ambient excursions, "Music For Films Edited By Moths".On the making of this collaborative project, Mark K. Nelson said "It was an honor to work with Kramer. That we came out of it with a great friendship and a record that's unique to each of our histories and music that we're proud to share is a privilege and a joy."As Kramer has described, the result of this record is a work that begs listeners, both animal and human, to allow these beautiful landscapes to sing and speak and weep for themselves.Simply put by Kramer, "Please. Forget about words. Just LISTEN."

I want to introduce this work ‘Halos of Perception’ to you in the way Lisa introduced me to it, through the sharing of experiences.

Lisa and I met for a walk near South Yarra station to talk about this work, when inclement weather made it too wet to visit the tunnels. Moving almost seamlessly from a world of leisurewear, infinite milk alternatives and blaring neons to stretches of green by the water that brimmed with sounds and life, we saw a few people climbing the Burnley bouldering wall, butterflies suspended in the hot wind and lots of plants I wish I knew the names of. Overhead the cars rumbled like a ceaseless animal as we talked about hidden ecosystems, imagined spaces and networks of care.

Stemming from a serendipitous encounter with an original Cave Clan member that led to many underground adventures, this work explores the worlds that exist outside of our perceptions. By the river, I leafed through a selection of tunnel photos Lisa had printed off at Officeworks, revealing alien textures, tunnels that stretch on into abysses of their own, underground flowing streams. Light is sparse and delicate, something reflected by the flickering and wavering in Lisa’s piano compositions.

As we walked, we noticed the ways in which infrastructure is often designed to keep people out—cut doors into fencing and clipped wires show an active and ongoing defiance of this. We spoke about how her Cave Clan friend used to go down to this painted room and read in solitude, using candles for light. The way sound exists underground, encased in these hollow cement tunnels, a painted room with its own deep hum. How people used to hold underground shows, how there were rules for safety (no exploring after rain, never alone) that was shared with each other. This warmth and absorption of other’s experiences is present in Lisa’s work—it’s immersive, like wading in water.

We paused on the walk to eat berries and talk about how The Caretaker creates transitory worlds with recorded sound, how this technology captures memory, and the exploratory pursuits of Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening Band. These citations of memory and deep listening inform Lisa’s use of analogue and classical instruments, playback artefacts and acoustic feedback in her own world-building. When speaking about ‘Halos of Perception’, she describes it as a fascination with timbre and acoustic artefacts.

Ideas of networks and enmeshment are felt deeply in Lisa’s compositions, motifs overlaid over each other evoking the image of many hands interlinking playfully, tenderly, softly. The way her compositions delve into refraction and echo makes me think about the tunnels and the way they splinter off into many possibilities. Manipulated textures reminiscent of the chalky, earthy, moss air that perfumes the tunnels’ subterranean air. Tactile details that gesture towards close attention, verging on obsession.

This work is also about imagining ecosystems of potential. Lisa shared with me that during this project, she has been reimagining subterranean networks in dreams, thinking about oral traditions, and the way water moves—from the sky to the earth, through the ground, connecting all these spheres. Realised in collaboration with hyperreal video artist Tristan Jalleh, Lisa’s dream landscape melds waterfalls, leaks, flower graffiti, and hidden messages lit up by imagined light sources with existing subterranean networks. There’s a real sense of wonder in this world she has built, how the city can reveal itself to you with some patience and care, how the city and its secrets can find its way into your dreams.

— Panda Wong

Stephen Steinbrink discovered a short YouTube video of a street magician who approaches a highschooler walking home in Barstow, California. “Here, let me show you my idea,” he says, as he places a quarter on the kid’s hand. The magician performs some relaxed flourishes, and the coin vanishes. In silence, the kid stares at his hand at the nothing where there once, indisputably, was something, until his wonder finds a single word: “Cool.” The title of Disappearing Coin, the new album from Oakland songwriter Stephen Steinbrink, comes from this short clip. “When I look at it now,” he says, “I relate to the kid, who’s obviously uneasy in his body, and going through the experience of being a teenager in the early 2000s growing up in a bleak desert town like I did. I also relate to the coin, an inanimate disc of possibility. And I relate to the magician, an absurd facilitator of sending what is tactile and concrete into the wispy conceptual realm.” “I’ve watched it probably a hundred times,” he says. “It cracked me up but also blew my mind open the feeling of wonder I experienced watching this video became a guide as I navigated new ways of staying in the realm of what’s both real and magical.” Following the 2018 release of Utopia Teased, Steinbrink completed an apprenticeship in the nearly-lost art of Stained Glass, becoming a glazier at a studio that over three years, fully restored the enormous 90-year-old windows in San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. He committed to his Buddhist study, beginning lay monastic training before the process was thwarted by the pandemic. He dove deeper into music production for other artists, engineering two albums by Boy Scouts released on Anti- Records in 2018 and 2021. Steinbrink delighted in the way these pursuits pulled at the thread of ego’s tapestry and decentralized him from his craft, allowing him to embody a new role as a creative caretaker engaging in practices that felt communal and restorative. “As I slowly began writing for myself again, I tried to imbue my new songs with this sense of playfulness and wonder I felt while exploring these other interests.” He says. Feeling unlocked from the pressures of perfection that he often felt in his earlier work, creating Disappearing Coin felt buoyant and healing. “The album feels like an integration of all of my past musical selves zeroing in on the present,” Steinbrink explains, “I felt free to explore new ways of writing, through different perspectives, experimenting with fictional songwriting, visual archetypal language, and total collaboration.” This “total collaboration” was a joyous new venture after years of solo performing and recording. The album can be seen as a 42 minute session of show and tell, the manifestation of Steinbrink repeating the mantra of “Here, let me show you my idea” to himself over and over. Disappearing Coin is at once a welcome return for the veteran Steinbrink and the debut of a totally new artist, one who has found a new path to himself with new goals of openness, curiosity, and self-acceptance. “Recalls the magic pop purity of Arthur Russell...its minimalism manages to feel enlightened and transformative.” PITCHFORK // “Melodic and self-assured. Steinbrink delivers his knotted lyricism with a smooth lilt.

Andrew Hargreaves’ Tape Loop Orchestra makes his first mark of the year with a post-rock deep dive that continues the themes of his ‘Liminal Live’ (2020) tape.

’Temporal In-Between’ is presented as a conceptual soundtrack to a metaphysical road trip, a journey through infinitely open space imbued with phantomatic energies”. Hand-in-hand with the cover art by collaborator Keith Ashcroft, the two-part record evokes its subject with a lesser- heard (as in, have we heard him do this before?) use of electric guitar and a patented grasp of liminal, hypnagogic atmosphere to summon sustained arcs of phased chords and an almost wind- played motorik momentum that makes it feel like gliding over unlit moors at night.

The spirits of Eno & Fripp colour proceedings as TLO’s elliptical tape loop system accretes and unfurls its information in slow motion from the shimmering keys and guitar strokes of ‘Upsurge’, and its gorgeous transition to heart-in-mouth sensations, and the soothing plangency of ’Situated Presence’, where signature choral motifs are found occluded by the atmosphere, parting thru the clouds occasionally, but more often pushed to the background, as though heard from a distance like phosphorescent city lights spied from its meridian. More simply; dream food for fans of Romance, The Caretaker, Eno.