Buscar:the living

ROTTEN, FOUL, DERANGED!

Around the end of the 1980s and the first years of the 1990s bands like PUNGENT STENCH, DISHARMONIC ORCHESTRA, DISASTROUS MURMUR or MIASMA made a name for themselves by putting out some classic albums. "Been Caught Buttering", "Changes" or "Expositionsprophylaxe" were records spawned by Austrian hordes which were globally hailed by devotees of Death Metal. As fertile a soil Austria once seemed to be, throughout the last 30 years not one single Death Metal album was put out that would match the quality of the pioneers.

Apparently, it took Brenton, an Australian settling in Vienna, to eventually put Austria on the map again. After having founded FESSUS with 3 other members in 2023, the quartet put out their first demo "Pilgrims of Morbidity" in the same year.

Now, two years after the very promising demo, FESSUS return with their first full-length. Cryptically entitled "Subcutaneous Tomb" the album's six lengthy songs stylistically continue where the demo left off. Whereas other bands focus on hyper-speed, over-technicality and brutality, FESSUS' brand of Death Metal is mostly played in moderate tempi with outbursts of speed and aggression scattered throughout the album. The songs are foremost characterized by memorable compositions and groove. Every song literally oozes with morbidity and conjures a dense macabre atmosphere. Brenton's vocals which are partly reminiscent of NECROPHAGIA's Killjoy are one of the highlights of the album. With his performance being equal parts versatile and deranged, Brenton spews vile bile and brimstone like not many lunatics before him. Although there are hints of other bands like AUTOPSY or PURTENANCE found on the album, FESSUS actually managed to come up with a sound that’s distinctly their own.

"Subcutaneous Tomb" is a perfectly produced album that those worshipping at the altar of morbid, rotten Death Metal can't afford to miss out on.

Recording, mixing, mastering: Thomas Taube (Five Lakes Studio)

It has been said of Hiroshi Suzuki, one of Japan's leading trombonists, "If you want to sound good, you need to have him as a member of your group”. Suzuki moved to the U.S. in 1971 when he was invited to play with the Buddy Rich Orchestra, and had been living in Las Vegas ever since. The album Cat was recorded when he returned to Japan for the first time in about four years, and released on Nippon Columbia in 1976. The musicians are the same as in Freedom Unity, the group Suzuki had been a member of until his 1971 departure – consisting of pianist Hiromasa Suzuki, drummer Akira Ishikawa, bassist Kunimitsu Inaba, and saxophonist Takeru Muraoka.

Cat is a kind of second chance for that group, which once had a promising future but came to a premature demise. Based on the synergy that they had cultivated together in the past, the players brought their individual technical and musical growth to the album and collectively refined their efforts even further. Each of them had been active on the front lines of the jazz scene, and the quality of their compositions, arrangements, and performances here are extremely high. Cat is one of the most revered albums in the extraordinary Japanese Jazz discography and an essential piece of any music collection.

(Text by Yusuke Ogawa - Universounds)

Following his award-nominated and critically acclaimed 2023 album Until Then, Danish guitarist and composer Rasmus Oppenhagen Krogh now presents his fourth album as a bandleader. "The title refers to the pillars that life and existence rest on," Krogh explains. "The moments, feelings, and meetings that form us as human beings, and that follow us the rest of the way. Snapshots that become defining for how our life develops." Musically, Pillars balances clear song structures with rich, intricate harmonic foundations. Krogh draws on influences from jazz, indie, rock, film scores, electronic music, and pop, creating a genre-fluid universe in which the ensemble"s improvisational voices shape each piece. Krogh"s guitar takes the lead, acting as a melodic guide, while the production - crafted alongside longtime collaborator Rasmus Juncker (Yör, Anna Roemer, Little North) - adds depth and texture, highlighting the album"s bold and multi-faceted sonic identity. As on previous releases, Krogh is surrounded by some of Denmark"s finest musicians, all longtime collaborators whose personal voices and improvisational approach have deeply influenced his musical development. The ensemble includes Anders Christensen on electric bass (Paul Motian, Jakob Bro, The Raveonettes), Jakob Hoyer on drums (The Raveonettes, Jakob Bro, Nikolaj Norlund), Lars Greve on reeds and effects (Resonerede Rum, Girls in Airports, Peter Sommer), Simon Toldam on piano and synths (Simon Toldam Trio, Han Bennink Trio, Efterklang), and Victor Dybbroe on percussion (Girls in Airports, Teitur, Blomsten). Their interplay and openness create a living, evolving sound world, with Krogh"s guitar at its emotional center. Beyond his own projects, Krogh is a sought-after guitarist, working with artists ranging from Guldimund to Takykardia and Emil de Waal. Pillars underscores his identity as a deeply personal and forward-looking voice in contemporary instrumental music.

ensemble 0 (pronounced zero) is a band /contemporary music ensemble, whose line-up and instruments can change according to the repertoire performed. Directed by Stéphane Garin and Sylvain Chauveau, performing pieces by, mostly, contemporary composers including its own members, and working with numerous collaborators.

The year 0 of ensemble 0 was 2004, when four friends decided to assemble a vessel, essentially dedicated to acoustic music for the present time. A light and adaptable vessel, of varying geometry and geography (its members are based in different cities and countries, including France, Catalonia and Belgium.)

Zero, in cartography, is the reference level from which altitudes are erected. In other words, where the field of possibilities stands. Depending on the chosen direction, the disentangled or deciphered compositions, the musicians and instruments brought in, ensemble 0 performs upon a unique range of reliefs. First, its own compositions are specifically performed by the pulsating heart of the collective, i.e. a trio made of Sylvain Chauveau (acoustic guitar, glockenspiel), Stéphane Garin (metallic percussions) and Joël Mérah (acoustic guitar). Then, with a contemporary repertoire the ensemble expands according to the needs of each work. ensemble 0 occasionally performs pieces by Moondog, Julius Eastman or Ligeti but is particularly keen on living composers such as Tristan Perich, Michael Pisaro or Rachel Grimes.

Here, ensemble 0 plays in according to the movie: L’Incroyable Femme Des Neiges (directed by Sébastien Betbeder with Blanche Gardin and Philippe Katerine) a soundtrack with their own strong and beautiful imprint.

After screaming to the world You Don't Know What Chiptune Is, arottenbit returns with an even more radical and collective statement: You Don't Know What A Rework Is. Ten tracks, completely deconstructed and rebuilt by twenty Italian bands, each in their own sonic language. From drone swallowing the void to the most savage death metal, from visceral punk to a fearless flamenco twist, every track becomes an uncharted territory, a journey where arotttenbit's identity dissolves and multiplies into twenty new forms. Most of the recordings were captured by Otto himself with his mobile studio, during a tour across Italy that took him into basements, rehearsal rooms, and underground spaces, harnessing raw and direct energy from the bands in their natural environment. Mixing and mastering then came to life at Otto Engineering Labs, his personal sound-space where everything was stitched together and transformed into a single living organism.



[a] SPECIMEN 1.1.[FLC:011-015] (FEAT. FULCI)
[b] SPECIMEN 2.1.[ISK:006-008] (FEAT. JASON DAHLKE)
[c] SPECIMEN 3.1.[FSG:005-007] (FEAT. FOSGENE)
[d] SPECIMEN 4.1.[OVO:004-007] (FEAT. OVO)
[e] SPECIMEN 5.1.[UND:008-010] (FEAT. UNDERTAKERS)
[f] SPECIMEN 6.1.[HWF:007-009] (FEAT. HYPERWÜLFF)
[g] SPECIMEN 7.1.[3ST:009-010] (FEAT. THREESTEPSTOTHEOCEAN)
[h] SPECIMEN 8.1.[MBR:006-007] (FEAT. MASTER BOOT RECORD)
[i] SPECIMEN 9.1.[LXN:010-011] (FEAT. LESLIEXNIELSEN)
[j] SPECIMEN 0.1.[8NE:006-008] (FEAT. OTTONE PESANTE)

Jessie J´s sechstes Studioalbum ”Don’tTease Me With A Good Time” - ihr erstes seit fast acht Jahren
- ist ein kühnes Kaleidoskop der Emotionen, das die rohen Höhen und Tiefen des letzten Jahrzehnts
einfängt. Das Album, das in den letzten fünf Jahren in Los Angeles aufgenommen wurde, ist emotional,
ungefiltert und kompromisslos, es ist Musik, die ihr Herz auf der Zunge trägt und danach verlangt, in voller
Lautstärke gefühlt zu werden. In Zusammenarbeit mit einer eingeschworenen Gruppe von Kollaborateuren
arbeitet Jessie J mit Ryan Tedder (One Republic, Beyoncé, Adele), Jesse Boykins III, Los Hendrix (SZA,
Brent Faiyaz), Marty Maro (JohnLegend, Anitta) und anderen zusammen, um ein Werk zu schaffen, das
mühelos Sold-Skool-Alt-R&B, Upfront-Pop und zeitgenössischen R&B miteinander verbindet. Das 16-
Track-Album enthält herausragende Singles wie ”BelieveIn Magic”, das zutiefst persönliche ”NoSecrets”
und die euphorische Hymne ”Living My Best Life”, die den breiten Sound und die Thematik des Albums
andeuten. Das Album endet mit der Power-Ballade ’AwardGoes To’, mit der Jessie J Anfang des Jahres
bei den BAFTA Television Awards eine atemberaubende Live-Performance ablieferte

Siècle, the fourth album by Superpoze (Gabriel Legeleux, born in 1992), stands as the culmination of what the composer of Opening, For We the Living, and Nova Cardinale, also a producer and performer, has been meticulously crafting for the past ten years, with both precision and sensitivity.



A striking and melancholic electronic music, where instruments and machines collide, blending synthetic textures, strings, and spectral voices.



The result is an album of eight expansive and sharp-edged tracks, where life pulses, burns, and soothes.

»Lilac« is the first Donna Regina album since 2019’s »Transient.« The world has changed considerably since then, which has also left its mark on the Berlin indie pop duo. The songs released as part of the 2021 single »Welt in einer Stadt« (»World in a City«) for Karaoke Kalk had already dealt with the pandemic-induced standstill and its effects on urban space, and also the rest of the album shows that Günther and Regina Janssen have been influenced by recent social and political developments. »In ›Lilac,‹ I imagine good ol’ Earth as a big ol’ bear shaking us off because it can’t stand us anymore,« says Regina Janssen. It has become a serious album, Günther affirms, but he is also adamant that it is not a sad one. Musically, Donna Regina have remained true to the spirit of their early work, recently re-released by Karaoke Kalk: their arrangements are as minimalist as they are emotionally rich.

»The music is always there,« says Regina Janssen about the creation of the tracks on »Lilac.« As always, the two record their music »track by track and without computers,« as Günther notes. Samples play a smaller role this time than on earlier albums, with analogue instruments such as a monophonic synthesiser and, above all, guitars coming to the fore again. This frames lyrics that are being delivered by Regina in German, English, or in both languages. They delve even further into the intricacies of urban life. »Cities are underrated! What a civilisational achievement it is to have so many people living under one sky,« says Regina. »They constantly put you in touch with the unfamiliar. Sometimes they’ll be overwhelming, and they are always alive.« This ambivalence shapes the tone of the album that ponders on the state of the world today.

Starting with the ominous sounds of »Whole World In My Town,« through the dreamscapes of »Autumn In Paris,« to the elegiac conclusion of »No More Roses,« Regina and Günther Janssen move through different timbres and styles with a few select means. Their preference for minimalist electronics becomes evident at times, while elsewhere the pieces open up to balladic arrangements in which the guitar plays a leading role. This turns »Lilac« into a city by itself, the songs forming its soundscape: every neighbourhood looks different, every street has its own character.

Slip is Paul Abbott’s response to his 3 day residency at OTO in 2023. It’s a continued exploration of the acoustic-digital hybrid drum setup Abbott has been developing for some time, which involves drum kit and synthetic sounds combined closely—through an entanglement of limbs and cables—in an intimate but strange relationship with each other.

Paul Abbott hasn’t had any formal musical training, but has a long history of making music, having collaborated for years with Seymour Wright, Pat Thomas, Michael Speers, Cara Tolmie, Anne Gillis and many others. Eventually, led by a profound suspicion of what is fixed or limited, Abbott began finding other ways to organise sound - or what he calls ‘material’:

“I wanted a way to 'persuade' or guide the possibility of something happening - my activity or the events of an algorithmic composition - for example, but without certainty or formalism. It felt to me, during playing, that certain ideas had a particular sort of shape, but more than the form of a line. I began to write alongside (before/after) playing the drums, and ‘characters’ began to enter the scene as a more wobbly, and therefore appropriate option to notation. Working with these characters allowed me to simultaneously approach body, imagination, language and music: without dividing things up or separating these aspects from each other. It allowed me to leave things messy and entangled, whilst trying to deal with form and specificity: wanting to have some things feel or respond differently to other things at other times.”

In approaching his residency, Abbott developed a fixed cast of characters - crystal, lleaf, reiy.F, reiy.C, strike, nee, qosel, sphu and aahn. They each communicate using different kinds of movement and drum kit/s, and Abbott choreographed them as ‘dances’ based on different feelings, or outlines of behaviours suggestive of ways of moving (body, drums, sounds). He then arranged these characters into ‘compositions’: one for each performance day, with each composition featuring multi-layered activity - options for behaviours, ways to move around the rooms, play drums, develop synthetic sounds, change the lights or re-distribute the sound in the space.

After the performances, Abbott took home 9 hours of recordings split into up to 28 multitrack channels for each day, and re-organised his cast once more into a performance for 2LP, CD and digital. It’s an enormous amount of work - but Abbott is activated by the process. For him, the pleasure of unstable edges, possibilities, slippages, is the vital attraction. Like all living organisms, Abbott’s characters have malleability and responsivity. They stimulate a bundle of possible behaviours, a tendency to act a certain way, a temperament, a boundary of respective limits or affordances.

It’s an affective way of working, inclusive of Roscoe Mitchell, Sun Ra, Nathaniel Mackey and Milford Graves. In ‘Pulseology’(2022), Milford Graves reminds us, ‘Breath varies, so cardiac rhythm never has that (metronomic) tempo. It’s always changing. All the alignments of the heart are determined based on the needs of the cells, specifically tissues and organs. The heart knows if it needs to speed up.’ In Slip, to slip, in a heartbeat, is to descend not into the grid of the even metre accorded to the heartbeat, but into a play of mutability and modality. To change is the condition of the heart.

Or Kantor returns with his sophomore album Snake Island, a vivid and cinematic journey through imagined landscapes and lost love, for fans of Eden Ahbez and other seekers of sound and spirit.

Following the critical success of his 2024 debut Sarda Sarda, praised by BBC Radio 6 Music, FIP Radio, RRR Australia, WYEP, KCRW, and Songlines Magazine, Kantor continues to refine his distinctive sonic identity, grounded in instrumental storytelling.

With Snake Island, Kantor ventures deeper into what he calls Subterranean Music, an atmospheric fusion of Mediterranean ballads, desert blues, spiritual jazz, and psychedelic textures. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Gábor Szabó, Omar Khorshid, The Budos Band, Dorothy Ashby, and Tommy Guerrero, he crafts instrumentals that feel both timeless and cinematic.

"Snake Island was written as a soundtrack to a fictional film that disappeared from the world, one that most likely no one has ever seen," says Kantor. "It began as a tragic love story, imagined during my time on a remote island in the Cyclades. Every landscape felt like a scene waiting for music. Eventually, the story gave way to sound."

A respected tattoo artist and founder of the Love Light Studio, Kantor's musical path began after a chance encounter with Johnny Sharoni (Garden City Movement, A&R at Anova Records). During a tattoo session, Sharoni heard Kantor's demos and was immediately struck by their raw beauty.

Kantor now steps confidently into the next chapter of his creative journey. Snake Island is more than an album. It is a mythic, imagined soundtrack to a film that only exists in memory, rendered in tones that shimmer like heat on stone.

His fourth album, City Music works as a counterpart to Morby’s acclaimed 2016 release Singing Saw, an autobiographical set that reflected the solitude and landscape in which it was recorded. Saw was imagined as “an old bookshelf with a young Bob and Joni staring back at me, blank and timeless. They live here, in this left side of my brain, smoking cigarettes and playing acoustic guitars while lying on an unmade bed.” And now follows City Music, the yang to its yin, the heads to its tails. It is a collection crafted using the other side of its creator’s brain, the jumping off point perhaps best once again encapsulated by an image. “Here, Lou Reed and Patti Smith stare out at the listener,” explains Morby. “Stretched out on a living room floor they are somewhere in mid-70s Manhattan, also smoking cigarettes.” It finds Morby exploring similar themes of solitude, but this time framed by a window of an uptown apartment that looks down upon an international urban landscape “exposed like a giant bleeding wound.”

Farbiges Vinyl: Purple/Black mit White Splatter

Natural Element proudly presents the long-awaited album The Paradigm Shift by one of Amsterdam’s finest and most prolific producers, Kid Sublime. Following on from the 12” single ‘You Got Me Runnin’’ which dropped in the summer, this 8 track, double LP offering is a special piece of work crafted during the pandemic years and Turbulence recording sessions with maestros Beka Gochiashvili and Mishulino.

The album showcases the evolution of Kid Sublime’s sound and the influence of London’s vibrant broken beat scene, with him having connected with some of the artists around the time of the passing of the legendary Phil Asher. It touches on house, bruk and even techno, with his signature soulful touch palpable across the whole record. Features include talented London artist Oliver Night, Sydney-based vocalist Natalie Slade and long time collaborator, flautist Han Litz, amongst others.

The Paradigm Shift takes you on a deep sonic journey straight from the heart, celebrating love, connection, spirituality and human evolution. There’s introspective moments with the jazzy house drifter ‘The Awakening’ and the dubbed out bass of ‘Kingz’, as well as joyful moments such as the uplifting ‘Heaven’s Glory’ and the romantic ‘Stay Over’, which is as soulful as it gets. ‘Bring It Come’ brings some minimal bruk flavours reminiscent of Bugz in the Attic, and the title track takes things a bit darker with a club-ready roller.

Sitting somewhere between the living room and the dancefloor, this album is sure to enliven the spirits of many a discerning listener and bring some much needed radiance and hope into people’s lives.

Voal — Vand and Shoal — reveal five more cuts on their home label Isotoop, taken from the pair’s time living together in Utrecht. Whereas the debut EP, ‘Saffron’, dropped the listener into psychedelic aesthetics and atypical rhythmic structures, the sequel ‘Jinx’ has a more crystal-cut vision of club music, made for no less exploratory dancefloors.

Possessing a natural progression almost as fluid as a contiguous live set, with imagination each track can form the basis of the next through the fingerprints of a barely-perceptible ghost leaving a piecemeal narrative impression, an exposure in negative that develops over repeated exposure to the five versatile tracks.

Relative to Saffron’s sidestepping repertoire, this latest EP goes for the jugular with insistent club dynamics from the get-go. Summoning steps on air, a self-contained package of breezy dancefloor initiation and escalation, all-in-one, and from the foothold of this thermal vortex Crosswind ups the drama with storm-hued dynamics and blustery club debris.

The knife of aesthetics is freshly sharpened for the flip: Jinx takes the record out of earthbound atmospheres and deep into sci-fi territory. A jigsawwing bassline seems to drill ever-deeper into an expanding landscape, as it does so uncovering small sonic treasures locked in the bedrock. A mirror to this scene, The Chain digresses with bubbling verve and psychedelic strut, a combo-finishing left hook that simultaneously holds playfulness alongside dour dramatics, a duality shared by vinyl-exclusive closing track Ouah, which blows out the lights with a smirk, and premium hallucinatory dub psychosis.

Alex Voorhies, known to dance floor connoisseurs as lil_art_hoe, is a multidisciplinary artist based in Louisiana, where they operate the boutique imprint Techno Money Records. lil_art_hoe’s signature sound is raw and unedited, with an array of grooves and melodies endlessly swirling to create truly unique tracks full of big ideas, but completely lacking in regard for normalcy.
For this Studio Barnhus debut, lil_art_hoe delivered two prime examples of their sonic practice, with elements constantly expanding and contracting, resulting in some of the most captivating yet straight-forward club music heard at Studio Barnhus HQ in recent times. A side standard living comes with a special dub mix prepared by the artist themself, while OG rave daddy and long time Studio Barnhus hero Truncate was called in to deliver a high octane techno take on flipside recall.
“standard living and recall were tracks spawned in the springtime when I was yearning for balance and reminiscing on moments that got me to the present. I was exploring a lot of live funk recordings for recall, while standard living was an emulation of going back in the work force and reestablishing a 9-to-5 schedule as a chef”, says lil_art_hoe in a rare communique straight from the swamps of south Louisiana.

The brilliantly named duo - formed by Adam Morrow and Jamie Sego - might be based in "the hit recording capital of the world", Muscle Shoals, Alabama, but somehow, they have made a concept album about the ancient religious outpost off the coast of northeast England. It's a stunning record that mixes fuzzy guitars with folk horror and fantastic melodies - for fans of Ride, Slowdive, Galaxie 500, Talk Talk, Yo La Tengo and The Clientele. Despite its lyrical inspiration lying thousands of miles away, it comes imbued with the soulfulness of their surroundings - not least because it was recorded in the old Muscle Shoals Sound studio by the Tennessee River, now Portside Sound, which is run by Jamie. "The story of Lindisfarne gave us a framework for what were otherwise very abstract ideas and emotions," explains Adam. "It became a way to make sense of our own moment in history. We really want our lives and societies to always get better, and to be left alone to make that happen. But we are stuck in these cycles of progress and regression, and I think most people are really driven to make sense of it and assign meaning. Lately, we've lived through a global pandemic, a devaluation of truth and reality, and a resurgence of far-right politics into the mainstream. Not really what I expected out of life in 2025." He is keen to point out that, despite the seriousness of its inspirations, the duo had a lot of fun making the album and really want it to be "a living and breathing thing". "We want people to be able to engage with it regardless of whether they care about it as a concept record," he says. "For me, it's just another reason to expand the pedalboard," concludes Jamie. "We hope you enjoy it. Peace, love and reverb from Alabama." Coloured Vinyl LP, and Bonustrack CD available, this version is `Lindisfarne Sky' Blue & White Vinyl and adds a postcard.

Season of The Dead is a visceral, cinematic extreme metal project born from the twisted minds of Titta Tani (former drummer of Necrophagia and Goblin), Giacomo Anselmi (former Goblin guitarist and current member of Goblin Legacy), and Enrico Giannone, founder and owner of Time To Kill Records, acting as producer and visionary behind the entire concept. The idea is as brutal as it is clear: to resurrect the blood-soaked legacy of horror-infused death metal, channeling the rotten spirit of bands like Necrophagia, Mortician, and Fulci, while paying tribute to the grotesque imagery and raw energy of cult underground horror films. Influences range from Killjoy to City of the Living Dead, The Beyond, and Cannibal Holocaust, creating a soundscape that feels like a soundtrack to a lost VHS splatter nightmare.