Liverpool-based DJ and production duo North 90 channel the raw energy of classic electro on their new EP, Panorama, via M.A.D Records. Fusing punchy drum programming, funk-laced basslines, and icy synth textures, the release pays homage to the genre’s old-school roots while keeping one foot firmly in the modern club landscape.
Cerca:the glass
- A1: Voting Line, Downtown Chicago
- A2: Penny Whistle Seller, Guangzhou
- A3: Sullivan's Island Beach, Charleston
- A4: Basketball Court Feat Macie Stewart
- A5: Walking Home, Los Angeles Feat Patrick Shiroishi
- A6: My Kitchen, Chicago
- A7: Outside, Arrington Feat Colin Held
- A8: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie, Illinois Feat Corey Smith, Ellie Mejía, Anna Fox
- A9: Train, Antwerp To Amsterdam
- A10: Belzec Extermination Camp Feat Jesse Perlstein
- A11: Home, Los Angeles Feat Claire Rousay
- A12: Amtrak, Hudson Valley
- A13: Home, Portland Feat Steve Rosborough
- A14: Walking Home, Chicago
- A15: Antwerp Central Train Station, Antwerp
- A16: Barcelona (6 13 Am, January 1St)
Various Small Whistles and a Song, the new album by Chicago-based artist Lia Kohl, incorporates notions of space, social relations, and humor. As the title suggests, the album responds to Ed Ruscha’s 1964 photographic artist book Various Small Fires and Milk, which Kohl sees as a wondrous celebration of ordinariness, one that reveals Ruscha’s trademark deadpan humor and depth. In the spirit of that publication, Kohl created her own series of sonic vignettes, with guest appearances from her close community of collaborators including claire rousay, Macie Stewart, Patrick Shiroishi, and others, reflecting the same sense of humor and mundanity.
The structure of the album—16 one-minute tracks—directly mirrors Ruscha’s book, which comprises 15 photographs of fire and one of a glass of milk. Ruscha’s “small fires” are represented here by recordings of whistles—mostly human whistling, with occasional appearances by train whistles, emergency whistles, and a woman selling penny whistles on the street in Guangzhou, China. About this choice of material, Kohl writes: “I’ve always been captivated by whistling—it’s musical but often a bit unconscious; usually solo but often done in public places. There’s something tender and human about hearing someone whistle, a socially acceptable version of hearing their mind wander.” As with Ruscha’s photographs, the whistles are not random snapshots but windows into social situations, narratives, or spaces.
The “milk” of the title — the 16th photograph in Ruscha’s book — is interpreted here as a single recording: a group of people singing together in Barcelona around 6 a.m. on New Year’s morning, captured through the floor of an Airbnb. Kohl describes this as a social, collective sound that contrasts with the solitary nature of whistling. The song functions as a counterbalance—a quiet celebration of shared experience.
Lia Kohl is a composer and sound artist based in Chicago. Her wide-ranging practice includes composition and performance, installation, improvisation, and collaboration. She tours nationally and internationally, working in theater, jazz, rock, and experimental contexts. Her work centers curiosity and patience, an exploration of the mundane and profound possibilities of sound.
Following a string of acclaimed collaborations, including Agua Dulce with percussionist Laura Robles and Mapambazuko alongside Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, Peruvian artist Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) returns with her most personal work to date yet, A Body Like a Home. Marking her first album under her birth name, the project is a sonic memoir exploring the tangled realms of trauma, recovery, and love through autobiographical soundscapes.
A Body Like a Home is the artist at her most exposed. Comprising 13 songs and 15 poems, the album sees her set aside collaborative fusions for solo catharsis, channeling years of turbulence - intergenerational scars left by colonialism, racism, domestic violence, and alcoholism - into a work that oscillates between brutality and tenderness. Cárdenas states: “I grew up under Alberto Fujimori’s dictatorship, when a veil of hopelessness seemed to settle over everything. This is the backdrop of the album. The songs and poems trace the inevitable loop between private wounds - addiction, domestic violence, fractured intimacy - and Peru’s national scars, carved by colonialism. It’s not a straight story or a resolution. Writing and composing became a ritual of digging for meaning, into what’s buried, disguised, or renamed, until the body itself became a living archive.
” At the heart of the album is Cárdenas’s own voice - part witness, part confessor - reciting over layers of electric guitars, electronic textures, the haunting violin of Mexican musician Gibrana Cervantes, and a collage of field recordings, from rainfall, muffled whispers, broken glass, to archival protest footage from Peru. The result is a work that resonates like a diary written in sound.
The first single, "Motherland", is a searing testimony where Cárdenas voice cracks under the weight of history and personal loss. Amid a storm of distorted guitars, she traces the cyclical legacies of colonialism, from state massacres branding Indigenous bodies as “terrorists” to the spiral of addiction as an unavoidable future. The lyrics draw parallels between political and domestic violence: a mother’s drunken knife pressed to her chest, and a motherland where racism is currency. She utters: “sacrifice demands a body.” Yet, amid the wreckage, a willful grip on love and faith persists. Ultimately, A Body Like a Home is a document of transformation. Tracks like "Evangelina" and the title piece "A Body Like a Home" hold space for resilience, spirituality, and love, while "Early Road" and "Going South" thread subtle nods to Peruvian folklore, opening up bright vignettes into a sense of belonging.
The poetry chapbook accompanying A Body Like a Home (five of its pieces are also recited on the album) extends the work, building a parallel architecture. Oscillating between the documentary and the mythic, the intimate and the forensic, the profane and the oniric, these poems practice a theology of the ordinary, where everyday objects - cameras, knives, moth-eaten cotton - are charged withspiritual and historical weight. Here, the body is land, house, battlefield, collective pain, geological territory; and trauma is, in contrast, archival, cellular, ritualistic, inherited. Read alongside the music, the stories refract across two mediums: songs give them breath and poems give them bone.
Glasses Man by Ken Laszlo is a catchy Italo disco track with charismatic vocals and a typical 80s flair. The song captivates with its danceable lightness and stays in your head with its distinctive hookline. Finally available again as a coloured maxi single – a highlight for collectors and fans of the genre.
In addition to the original versions, there are new and exclusive remixes by Flemming Dalum.
PD002 takes flight in the form of a lost, deadeye jungle bird scavenging for his next trinket. It captures the raw energy and playful, feral sound that defines the Pelican Dub aesthetic: a blend of primal rhythms, hypnotic textures, and experimental intensity.
Pelican Dub 002 features three original tracks by DJ Merlín, alongside one co-production with Adam Pits:
Obsession
Obsessed once again… Nearly lost my head rocking it like a madman.
These drums weren’t simply made. They were forged by a blacksmith with a big blade and a bad temper. It boasts a peculiar flow and a three verse arrangement. Not a mix tool, or is it?
Down the Wrong Road
A futuristic techno-dub track featuring pinched, glassy drumwork wrapped around a pseudo-acid riff. Born during the aftermath of a questionable decision of two friends meeting early in the morning after separate all-night adventures, hence the title: Down the Wrong Road…..
Dirt Bubble
Dirty, unpredictable, and uncompromising. The original version of Dirt Bubble is a raw and visceral workout, chaotic in just the right way.
Dirt Bubble (DnB Mix)
The younger sibling that has outgrown its original prototype. This DnB rework has rightfully become a flagship for the Pelican Dub sound. Expect primal rhythms, wild experimental drum design, and a savage, stretched-out analog bassline that dominates the low end.
Island5 is Islandman’s most focused and detailed exploration of Anatolian psychedelia to date. They re-imagine the deep-rooted sounds of Anatolia through a modern lens. To them, this music isn’t frozen in time — it’s alive, shifting, and always becoming. Tradition, in their hands, isn’t something to preserve in glass, but something to carry, stretch, and let grow.
Each track offers a different angle into this reimagined sound. Analog synths mimic reed instruments, fuzzed guitars evoke forgotten tales, and percussion carries both the pulse of the city and the stillness of rural ground. There are meditative passages that invite silence (Slwly), and sunlit grooves that move the body before the mind (Adada, Rüzgar). Everything flows as if improvised—but nothing feels accidental.
Swiss shapeshifter Elsa surfaces on Punctuality for the first time, marking the label’s seventh release with a debut EP that dives deep and swims sideways through an eclectic milieu of club influences.
Across the five tracks on Web Glow, there are nods to turn-of-the-century tech house, liquid D&B, broken IDM, psy-laced trance, and modern tek mutations. Subtle wubs ripple under the surface, low-end pressure coils tight, and meticulous sound design binds the tracks into a fully realized vision of Elsa’s forward-thinking sound. Enter the unfolding.
Roza Terenzi steps up to remix “Web Glow,” reanimating the track as a skeletal early-morning stepper—the mood is giving sizzling dubbed-out vocal wisps, pulsing subs, and stripped-back drums. “Groupie” notches up the BPM but keeps things fluid with aquatic atmospherix, jittering FX, and drums that skid out and under rolling basslines.
“Fortune Cookie” flashes uk-tinged tech house with shimmering shards of SFX, resplendent with stuttering kicks, glassy pads, and sultry textures. The halftime jungle-IDM stylings of “No Ads” round off the EP in a haze of fractured breaks and dubbed-out atmospherics. A murky, magnetic debut on Punctuality—Elsa sketches out a soundworld all her own. Dive in and catch it.
Kyntral is a co-founder of the so-far so-sophisticated Argentinian label Danza Nativa, and he serves up a deeply immersive trip here. 'Inner Depths' is liquid deep techno in the mould of Neel or Donato Dozzy. Percolating rhythms and dubby undercurrents subsume mind and body while deft little details place you underwater. 'Bloodstone' is a little more lumpy with a gentle smattering of percussion of drums that bump. 'Ancient Apparition' is a spacious sound with wispy pads disappearing to infinity, glassy tinkles and undulating drums all getting you into a meditative state. The Patrick Russell Phantom remix is more warped and dark to add a nice counterpoint.
- A1: Original Album Like Eating Glass
- A2: Helicopter
- A3: Positive Tension
- B1: Banquet
- B2: Blue Light
- B3: She’s Hearing Voices
- C1: This Modern Love
- C2: The Pioneers
- C3: Price Of Gasoline
- C4: So Here We Are
- D1: Luno
- D2: Plans
- D3: Compliments
- B-Sides | & Rarities A1 Little Thoughts
- A2: Skeleton
- A3: Storm And Stress
- A4: Always New Depths
- A5: Staying Fat
- A6: Tulips
- B1: Two More Years
- B2: She’s Hearing Voices
- B3: The Marshals Are Dead
- B4: The Answer
- B5: The Present
- B6: Every Time Is The Last Time
- C1: Live & Demos Bbc Peel Session: So Here We Are
- C2: Tulips
- C3: Luno
- C4: Compliments
- C5: Demos Banquet
- C6: This Modern Love
- D1: The Pioneers
- D2: So Here We Are
- D3: Helicopter
- D4: Price Of Gas
- D5: Skeleton
White Vinyl LP 2x12"[33,57 €]
Ltd. Boxset White Vinyl
Zum 20-jährigen Jubiläum ihres ikonischen Debütalbums Silent Alarm veröffentlichen Bloc Party drei limitierte Jubiläumsformate: eine 2LP auf weißem Vinyl mit dem original Album, eine 2CD Edition mit dem original Album und Bonus Discs, welche Demos, B-Sides und eine BBC Peel Session beinhalten. Außerdem ist ein 12-seitiges Booklet inkl. Lines Notes und einem Vorwort von Produzent Paul Epworth. Die Deluxe-Box umfasst alle oben erwähnte als 4LP Set. 2LP für das original Album und 2LP für die Bonustracks und Raritäten sowie Demos und Sessions. Wobei es hier ein 24-seitiges Booklet mit noch nie veröffentlichten Fotos der Band und exklusive Liner-Notes gibt. Ein Muss für Fans und Sammler gleichermaßen.
White Vinyl
u b2 She’s Hearing Voices Original Version
Next up on Butter Sessions Records: a two-track 12" from founders Sleep D, blending elements of dub, techno and ambient sound worlds. 'Gummy Drop'—long-evolved in the duo's live sets—lands in its peak form. Designed with bass bins in mind, a hefty lowend carries the track through a fog of glassy-eyed atmosphere and SFX. The B side goes deeper with 'Dreamhole'. Driven by rich melodies and a broken rhythm, it's an exploration into a more cerebral dimension.
After two albums inspired by vast northern landscapes, the forces of nature, and an ever-present sense of duality, Glass Museum shifts gears. The Brussels-based group-originally formed in 2016 by pianist Antoine Flipo and drummer Martin Grégoire-welcomes bassist Issam Labbene as an official third member, opening up a richer, more immersive sound and setting its sights on the rhythms of the modern city.
A true turning point in Glass Museum's career, the new album 4N4LOG CITY twists the codes of electronic music, explores the depths of jazz, and asserts its eclecticism through a fresh and infectious groove.
Signed to the forward-thinking Belgian label Sdban Records, the group shapes its identity within the vaulted ceilings of Volta, a creative hub in Brussels frequented by the vanguard of Belgium's "new scene." Sharing space with acts like ECHT!, Lander & Adriaan, and Tukan, the band continues to push its boundaries through collaboration and reinvention.
Recorded between the French countryside of Drôme, the industrial edges of Brussels, and Volta, 4N4LOG CITY features striking guest appearances. Swiss drummer Arthur Hnatek-known for his work with Tigran Hamasyan and Erik Truffaz, and praised by Gilles Peterson and Laurent Garnier-drives the opener "GATE 1" into hypnotic, krautrock-inspired territory. Meanwhile, rising vocalist JDS lends soulful grace to "Call Me Names", evoking the emotive textures and elegance of vintage soul-jazz reminiscent of the likes of Jordan Rakei or Tom Misch & Yussef Dayes.
Without abandoning their melodic roots and foundational approach, the trio takes daring steps into new terrain. The experimental centerpiece "III" explores the piano as a textural and rhythmic force, drifting between ambient and breakbeat. Elsewhere, the gritty "VAN GLAS"-a hip-hop-tinged track featuring rapper JAZZ BRAK of STIKSTOF-the band ventures far beyond their comfort zone, injecting streetwise lyricism in their mix of electronics and jazz.
Fueled by the heartbeat of the city, 4N4LOG CITY captures the mechanical ebb and flow beneath concrete towers-the anonymous rhythms of daily life moving over the asphalt, and the fleeting, meaningful connections made along the way. Produced by Antoine Flipo and mixed by Elsa Grelot (Avalanche Kaito), the album stands at the intersection of human emotion and urban architecture-a post-modern, deeply cinematic work that asserts Glass Museum's place at the cutting edge of European music.
Sticking a dirty thumb in the eye of fate, our third collaboration sees this marrow deep family malarky turn official as Pace Yourself teams up with YS’s own imprint ERF REC for a split release. As if our status as minor celebrities and footnotes of the underground could level off no further: the unification no one asked for is here. Sticking it to the man, handing your arse to ya on plate; cauterising infected suburban minds world over.
Burn is the second YS album and written as a direct follow-up album to Brutal Flowers. If their first album was an exercise in the incremental, a construction of poise and patience, Burn, should be taken way the fuck at it’s word: it quite literally finds catharsis in twisted reverse. Birthed out the malignant kick found in deconstruction and chaos. Evil twin, psychotic younger sibling, call it what the hell you like. It might take you a moment to get the lay of the land in this darkly mutated world. Like a bug eye’d native first confronted with a zippo, the hit is radical and instant: a new way for the world to go up in smoke.
Splice the Seattle slacker scene with the spliffhead soundsystem culture of the 90s Bristol trip-hop scene, then cross-breed that with the DIY optimism and glee in creation found in the cut-and-paste worlds of skate, graffiti and hiphop, now run that through the skitzo basement mind of John.T. Gast and you’re close to the kind of scorched earth and spiked suburbia that birthed Burn.
Dunno quite what YS have been ingesting of late but this massively twisted LP touches on a host of gloriously fucked totemic underground sources while not sounding much like any of them. It has the ballsy swagger and hard flipping of the script as Massive Attack’s seminal Blue Lines. Indeed, the eponymous album tracks sound similar - the opener ‘Burn’ is like a hard nosed jammed out redux of ‘Blue Lines’. Getting into a kind of slow-spinning overdubbed maximal euphoria ending with mumbled downer vocals, struggling to conceal their tongues in their cheeks there’s an air of paranoia and proto-conspiracy theory. It’ll leave you scratching your head, feeling like you’ve stepped into a New World Order governed by a cacophony of drop outs, dope fiends and apocalyptic stoners. A cracked out world somewhere between Richard Linklater’s movie Slacker (1990) and Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2001).
The rest of the album parts like a tongue on a wine glass: Smith and Mighty, Bandulu, ambient Luke Slater records, Wah Wah Wino, Nurse with Wound, Land of the Loops, Placid Angels, Adrian Sherwood, Urban Tribe and DJ Shadow can all be heard in momentary splatters - but Burn like other works by YS, is its own ritual beast. ‘Moth’, a track which has been knocking about the underground deejai circuit for many moons, is a real raw chopped and screwed slice of stoner erotica that reeks of obsession and unrequited desire. Elsewhere, on tracks like ‘Switch’, ‘Trying’ and ‘Drift’ the throughline from Brutal Flowers can be heard. Underneath the driving heavy gravity the trademark emotional intimacies of YS linger: eternal recurrence, ghosts of static and shortwave, worn memories of the playful and painful sort. The brief moments where flashes of orchestral ambience get out from underneath the swagger are so pure, personal and unguarded that for a moment they leave you completely lonesome. In the album’s closer ‘End’, you can hear the fleeting promise and DIY possibilities of an analogue world and embers of ash that flutter in its wake: where it seemed, for a brief moment, that collective of DJs, engineers, rappers, graffiti artists and skate crews were emerging from the streets, giving the middle fingers to the system, before just as quickly disappearing back to the doldrums of obscurity. ‘End’ is a bittersweet ode to early soundsystem culture, MCs and pirate radio - an out of step time where for a moment the underdogs and weirdos seemed to be kicking on the door of something bigger.
A veritable teenage doof suite dosed with desire, claustrophobia and deviance. Burn is a good old howl at the moon: lonely, raw, and out for blood; basement style exegesis at its best. A thump to the gut, a stud through your blood. A dubbed-to-death classic straight out of the annals of nowhere. A perfect post card from oblivion. A bleak, bold and personally ferocious vision of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
This is everything that record collectors skip dates for. Fuck the scene and keep that shit underground. That’s what it is all about. Know what I mean, if you do? You’re in…
Tom Jarmey returns with Daybreak, a widescreen second album weaving ambient textures, dusty drum breaks and hazy melodies into a deeply emotive listening experience. Known for his genre-blurring releases on Holding Hands and X-Kalay, the London-based producer continues to push his sound into bold new territory. Having clocked 20M+ streams and earned praise from DJ Mag, Mixmag, and Four Tet, Jarmey's second LP cements his place in the UK's new vanguard of genre-fluid electronic artists.
The formative years of Hunter Thompson’s music as Akasha System were seeded and shaped by the shrouded meadows and wet woodlands of the Pacific Northwest: Sea Glass, Shadow Self, Echo Earth, Geomind. But pandemic flux flipped the script, prompting a migration to the monsoon tropics of Tampa. Heliocene ushers in a fresh chapter in the Akashic record, recasting the project’s precision synergy of cellular melody, holographic pads, spiral tribalism, and eco-futurist swing for a new solar age.
The album’s eight songs were recorded across 2023 and 2024, inspired by explorations of the many sanctuaries hidden in Florida’s ragged paradise: singing towers, ancient grottoes, emerald lagoons. From vortex house (“Purity Vector,” “Sun Particle”) to mirage electronica (“Haunted Planet,” “Soma Totem”) to hand drum divination (“Terraform Dream”), the sides flow, glow, and gleam, dialed in but dreaming out, tracing radiant waves of the eternal now.
“This album is a meditation to experience where and when you are, fully and wholly, regardless of where the path leads.”
- A1: Queen - Somebody To Love
- A2: Electric Light Orchestra - Livin' Thing
- A3: Fleetwood Mac – Say You Love Me
- A4: 10Cc - I'm Mandy Fly Me
- A5: Dr. Hook - A Little Bit More
- A6: Chicago – If You Leave Me Now
- A7: Eric Carmen - All By Myself
- B1: Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons – December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night)
- B2: Leo Sayer - You Make Me Feel Like Dancing
- B3: David Dundas - Jeans On
- B4: Bryan Ferry - Let's Stick Together
- B5: Sailor - A Glass Of Champagne
- B6: Smokie - I'll Meet You At Midnight
- B7: Slik - Forever And Ever
- B8: Showaddywaddy – Under The Moon Of Love
- B9: Brotherhood Of Man - Save Your Kisses For Me
- C1: Elton John & Kiki Dee - Don't Go Breaking My Heart
- C2: Cliff Richard – Devil Woman
- C3: Tina Charles - I Love To Love
- C4: The Real Thing - You To Me Are Everything
- C5: Billy Ocean - Love Really Hurts Without You
- C6: Dana - Fairytale
- C7: R & J Stone - We Do It
- C8: Gladys Knight & The Pips - Midnight Train To Georgia
- D1: Wings - Silly Love Songs
- D2: Neil Diamond - Beautiful Noise
- D3: Daryl Hall & John Oates – She’s Gone
- D4: Paul Simon - 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover
- D5: Thin Lizzy - The Boys Are Back In Town
- D6: The Who - Squeeze Box
- D7: John Miles - Music
- E1: Donna Summer - Love To Love You Baby
- E2: Andrea True Connection - More, More, More
- E3: Candi Staton – Young Hearts Run Free
- E4: Melba Moore - This Is It
- E5: Diana Ross - Love Hangover
- E6: Tavares - Heaven Must Be Missing An Angel (Part 1)
- E7: Barry White - You See The Trouble With Me
- E8: The Isley Brothers - Harvest For The World
- F1: Dolly Parton - Jolene
- F2: Pussycat - Mississippi
- F3: Bonnie Tyler - Lost In France
- F4: Demis Roussos - Forever And Ever
- F5: Guys N Dolls - You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me
- F6: Gallagher And Lyle - Heart On My Sleeve
- F7: Joan Armatrading - Love And Affection
- F8: Elton John - Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word
next instalment in our ongoing ‘Yearbook’ series – pressed in lovely-lime-green vinyl on a 3-LP set packed with 47 stellar tracks celebrating a brilliant year of pop singles. NOW – Yearbook 1976.
LP1: Kicking off in magnificent style with signature songs from legendary artists: A #2 in 1976, Queen’s ‘Somebody To Love’ is first up, followed by Electric Light Orchestra with ‘Livin’ Thing’, Fleetwood Mac with ‘Say You Love Me’, and 10cc with ‘I’m Mandy Fly Me’. Dr. Hook had a huge hit with ‘A Little Bit More’, and Chicago hit #1 with their all-time classic ballad ‘If You Leave Me Now’, while the side closes with Eric Carmen’s enduringly popular ‘All By Myself’. Flip the LP over for huge hits from the year – including 4 #1s: 14 years after making their UK chart debut, Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons enjoyed their first chart-topper with ‘December 1963 (Oh What a Night)’, whilst Leo Sayer reached #2 in the UK, and #1 in the US with ‘You Make Me Feel Like Dancing’. Pop gems follow from David Dundas, Bryan Ferry, Sailor, Smokie – and Slik, featuring a pre-Ultravox Midge Ure reached the top with ‘Forever And Ever’. Showaddywaddy celebrated their biggest hit and their first #1 with ‘Under The Moon Of Love’, and the UK won at Eurovision, with the winner ‘Save Your Kisses For Me’ by Brotherhood Of Man not only hitting the #1 spot but also becoming 1976’s biggest seller and bringing the first LP to a close.
LP2: Opening with a stellar run of pure-pop classics. Elton John celebrated his first UK #1 single, in a duet with Kiki Dee on ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart’, and Cliff Richard with ‘Devil Woman’, ahead of dance-floor favourites – and both #1s in ’76: Tina Charles with ‘I Love To Love’ and The Real Thing with ‘You To Me Are Everything’. More pop nuggets follow from Billy Ocean and Dana, before the side finishes with R&J Stone with ‘We Do It’ and the sublime ‘Midnight Train To Georgia’ from Gladys Knight & The Pips. Over on the second side, ‘Silly Love Songs’ gave Wings a UK #2 and became ‘76’s biggest seller in the US and opens a run of great vocalists; Neil Diamond, Daryl Hall & John Oates with ‘She’s Gone’, Paul Simon’s ’50 Ways To Leave Your Lover’ and a trio of the year’s classic rock smashes: ‘The Boys Are Back In Town’ from Thin Lizzy, ‘Squeeze Box’ from The Who, and closing with the epic ‘Music’ from John Miles.
LP3: Celebrating ‘76’s dancefloor with a stunning collection of disco and soul gold: First up, Donna Summer with her debut smash ‘Love To Love You Baby’ before ‘More More More’ from Andrea True Connection and Candi Staton’s timeless ‘Young Hearts Run Free’. Melba Moore with ‘This Is It’ comes ahead of Diana Ross with the genre-defining ‘Love Hangover’, and the side is completed with huge floor-fillers from Tavares and Barry White ahead of The Isley Brothers with the soul standard ‘Harvest For The World’ and over on the final side country music is represented with Dolly Parton making her UK singles chart debut with ‘Jolene’ three years after it was a hit in the US, but it was a Dutch band, Pussycat, who hit the top with their country-pop track ‘Mississippi’. Bonnie Tyler made her chart debut with ‘Lost In France’, and ‘Forever And Ever’ gave Demis Roussos a ’76 chart topper, and an easy-listening classic, whilst Guys N Dolls had a second Top 5 hit with their cover of ‘You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me’. The LP ends with a trio of the year’s most beautiful ballads: Gallagher And Lyle with ‘Heart On My Sleeve’, ‘Love And Affection’ the stunning singles chart debut for Joan Armatrading, and finishing with a second peerless single on this collection from Elton John with ‘Sorry Seems To Be The Hardest Word’.
NOW – Yearbook 1976 – a celebration of the diversity and wonderful creativity of a truly fabulous year in pop.
Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg compose a modern symphony for virtual choir on 'Joy, Oh I Missed You', muddling sound poetry with Nuno Canavarro and ‘Systemische'-style machine-damaged surrealism. Like a mashup of Lee Gamble's 'Models', Akira Rabelais' 'Spellewauerynsherde' and Robert Ashley's timeless 'Automatic Writing’ screwed to perfection.
Duncombe and Wennborg have been chewing over ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’ for four long years, working their process until they were "queasily intimate" with their arsenal of artificial voice tools. Tracing the history of the technology, from voice synthesisers and chatbots to AI voice analysis tools, the duo experiment relentlessly to develop a digital-age response to IRL extended vocal technique - think François Dufrêne, Yoko Ono or Phew. Less interested in replicating human sounds exactly, they instead test how various tools might cough up their own idiosyncratic tics as they stretch and stutter through attempts to mimic their "fleshware" counterparts.
Duncombe's got prior form here, most recently re-synthesising her voice on the brilliantly oily 'Sunset, She Exclaims' 45 for Modern Love, following a stunner for 12th Isle in 2021. Wennborg brings along experience from her tenure as one half of microsound duo soft tissue, whose 2022 LP 'hi leaves' (Students of Decay) was a haptic treasure. These approaches mesh remarkably well on their first collaborative full-length, with Duncombe's eerie bio-electronic incantations providing the ideal foil for Wennborg's carbonated hardware processes. It's not completely clear where the human voice ends and the zeroes and ones begin on 'Your Lips, Covering Your Teeth', as rolling cyborg syllables tumble over OS-startup womps and surprisingly svelte outcroppings of glassy, synthetic glitches. The music is surprisingly mannered, a sonic reflection of the cover, where a mouth is pixellated until only colour swatches remain. Duncombe and Wennborg trace the gradual erosion of their voices, leaning into the chaos as their various tools veer off into unique patterns of failure.
What sounds like a far-off, ghosted folk rendition (we're reminded of the Icelandic laments that Rabelais chewed up on 'Spellewauerynsherde') is offset by gnarled, bitcrushed machine faults and pneumatic lip smacks on the brilliant 'Residue', and on 'Brushed My Hair', the duo massage the voice until it sounds like a flute. Assembling stutters and barks and sighs into a celestial chorus alongside time-stretched moans, they create a levitational atmosphere on 'Smell It', freezing the energy from bizarre pitch steps to configure a zonked vocal ensemble.
'Joy, Oh I Missed You’ is an album that, like its source material, constantly morphs, testing the boundaries of its concept repeatedly without bubbling over into conceptual goo. In fact, it's remarkably euphonious, even at its most theoretically abrasive; Duncombe and Wennborg wring out uniquely angelic formations through a process of trial and error that packs a surprising, hefty emotional punch.
- A1: Cluster & Eno - Ho Renomo
- A2: Roedelius - Veilchenwurzeln
- A3: Der Plan - Die Wüste
- A4: Rolf Trostel - Hope Is The Answer
- A5: Vono - Hitze
- B1: You - E-Night (Bureau B Edit)
- B2: Serge Blenner - Phrase Iv
- B3: Moebius - Falsche Ruhe
- B4: Harald Grosskopf - Oceanheart
- B5: Lapre - Tedan (Bureau B Edit)
- C1: Riechmann - Abendlicht
- C2: Adelbert Von Deyen - Per Aspera Ad Astra - Mental Voyag
- C3: Faust - Lampe An, Tür Zu, Leute Rein! (Bureau B Edit)
- C4: Conrad Schnitzler - Electric Garden (Bureau B Edit)
- C5: Moebius & Plank - Nordöstliches Gefühl (Bureau B Edit)
- D1: Deutsche Wertarbeit - Unter Tage (Bureau B Edit)
- D2: Asmus Tietchens - Räuschlinge
- D3: Pyrolator - Minimal Tape 1/8
- D4: Rüdiger Lorenz - Southland (Bureau B Edit)
- D5: Thomas Dinger - Alleewalzer
On their last trip to Silberland, Bureau B hurtled along the chrome highways and glass skyways of the kosmische landscape, powered ever onwards in perpetual motorik motion. This time, however, the Hamburg imprint opt for an unhurried itinerary, coasting far beyond the familiar rhythmic terrain to explore crystal caverns and emerald pastures, immersing listeners in the ambient side of this alternative Allemagne. Building on the tape loops, tone poems, and minimalist compositions of the 60"s avant-garde, these musicians utilised the sweeping scope of the synthesiser to create expansive meditations on outer-planetary escapism, human connection, and the natural world. This compilation offers a survey of this singular era, blending pioneering voices with lesser-known artists for an immersive sonic experience.
Mr. Face, a four-song EP that's a terrific showcase for Segall's artfully ragged style. He plays everything on these recordings with the exception of one drum part on one song. - NPR Fresh Air / Segall appears decidedly more at ease, or even at peace, on the four tracks, but while they build upon acoustic foundations, the tracks quickly take different shapes filled with sublime guitar (and piccolo!) solos that are utterly transfixing."- Exclaim / The real testament to Segall's growing maturity as an artist, however, comes with closing track 'The Picture', one of the most subtle and moving songs in his entire catalog. Segall's guitar sounds like it's scoring a dazed carnival ride as he lays out a tale of learning to say goodbye. - Consequence of Sound
LTD SPLIT COLOUR TRANSLUCENT RED/BLUE VINYL W/ 3-D GLASSES** Back in 2015, Ty Segall released Mr. Face EP, the fantastic gatefold 2x7" was not only packed with four killer jams but was also quite possibly the world's first playable pair of 3D glasses. Now Famous Class Records is thrilled to release a 10th anniversary 12” vinyl edition. All copies are pressed on split color translucent red and blue-colored vinyl and come with special Mr. Face 3-D glasses to activate the supercharged 3D artwork.




















