quête:the queen

White Vinyl repress. Put together in studio down-time and ably backed by Toe Rag's stable of musicians, On My Mind features Fabienne's customary mixture of both English and French lyrics sung with plenty of coquettish charm. The album marks something of a departure from the jaunty beat-pop and ye-ye of her previous albums however, there's a definite autumnal feel to several of the tracks, putting you in mind of what the much mooted Francoise Hardy/Nick Drake collaboration might have yielded.

Pink Marbled Vinyl

Our next release is a huge project executed by Dubbing Sun. The list of artists involved in making of this 12" is really impressive and it features very talented vocalists as well as instrumentalists from all over the world including Warrior Queen, Lady Skavya, Piya Zawa, Caveman Dub & Khoe Wa. It got pressed on a coloured dirty pink vinyl and is limited to just 400 pcs. Out September the 2nd.

Blue Mitchell's run of albums for Blue Note are among the great jazz recordings of the era. His '70s output has often been overlooked, however Blue Mitchell remains a fantastic set featuring the stellar lineup of Black Jazz recording artist Walter Bishop, Jr. on piano and keys, the legendary Doug Sides on drums, bass extraordinaire Larry Gales and the one and only Jimmy Forrest on tenor sax. This record deserves reappraisal as a fine selection of recordings. Licensed officially from Mainstream and remastered from the original tape transfers, this is the best the record has ever sounded. Featuring new words from Doug Sides especially for this release.

SUBVERTED's second double vinyl release "The Collective Impact" features ten non-binary, trans and female identifying artists, presenting their craft in the field of industrial techno. From ambient to raw and impactful beats, ethereal atmospheres and fast hard hitting sounds, listeners are invited to a hopeful journey and a fight for a more just society.

Picture London, thirty years ago, as Neneh Cherry gears up to release her debut album Raw Like Sushi - a thrumming, restless, vibrant city that in 1989, much like today, pulsed defiantly against a backdrop of increasing political doom, rocking to the joyful noise of culture leaping across boundaries, radically reordering itself. Rents are low.

Soho hums to the chatter of poets, vagabonds and petty sex tourists drinking in the same elixir of possibility. The divisions between the queens of Old Compton and mods and punks of Carnaby Streets look huge but feel slight. A spirit of multiracial unity permeates the air.

New York hip hop and Chicago house continue their euphoric colonisation of nightclub culture. Amid this maelstrom, Neneh Cherry emerges, capturing the entire, giddy rumble of this rolling community street culture in one record, Raw Like Sushi. With no interest in genre, Raw Like Sushi upsets and inverts everything you thought you knew about how pop can work, at it's brightest and most effective.

One of the greatest debut albums of all time, born halfway between Never Mind The Bollocks and Boy In Da Corner, Raw Like Sushi was ready to escort you right to the centre of it's dancefloor, dripping hot sweat under a mirrorball at 3am - and its particular magic remains just as potent today.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of an album that culturally, musically and stylistically defined a generation and everything that followed, Raw Like Sushi has been remastered at Abbey Road and will be released in super deluxe format across 3CD and 3LP heavyweight vinyl box sets, and 1CD and 1LP formats.

The box sets include a stunning 48-page 12x12 book packed full of iconic photos, new interviews, liner notes and memorabilia. The album features five of Neneh’s biggest singles - including the worldwide smash hit single ‘Buffalo Stance’ as well as hit singles ‘Manchild’ produced by Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, ‘Kisses On The Wind’, ‘Heart’ and ‘Inna City Mamma’. It also features rare mixes of key tracks by Massive Attack, Arthur Baker, Smith N Mighty, and more.

Since the release of Raw Like Sushi 30 years ago, Neneh Cherry has continued to define and redefine culture, style and music releasing five studio albums, including 2018’s Broken Politics, produced by Four Tet, which was met with critical acclaim by the likes of The Guardian, Rolling Stone, The Times, Q and Pitchfork.

Neneh went on to tour the album throughout 2019 including her largest ever headline show at London’s Roundhouse, and festival performances at Glastonbury, Latitude, Primavera, Pitchfork and more proving her music and message more relevant than ever.

SONIKKU announces the release of their new album ‘Joyful Death’, via Bella Union. “I love songs that make you want to cry and dance at the same time,” says Tony Donson, the London-based musician who records as SONIKKU. That sense of unfettered release and liberation drives their new album, ‘Joyful Death’. A fluent, fertile and full-colour hybrid of vibrant Italo-house, liquid synth-pop, righteous disco and French philosophical asides, it’s an album that signals the emergence proper of SONIKKU - a fully formed dancefloor artist. It’s also a farewell of sorts, perhaps, but with an emphatic rebirth at its heart. “This album feels like a transformation in the sense that I’m creating the music I’ve always wanted to make. A fully realised, coherent pop record that showcases my craft as a song-writer and producer.” Total control of their craft is swiftly asserted on ‘Let The Light In’, where the
influences of lost-in-music disco and the Pet Shop Boys merge under vocals from immersive, exploratory British singer-songwriter Douglas Dare. The pace accelerates as ‘WKND’ gets into a groove pitched somewhere between Madonna, Daft Punk and Indeep, with LA future-pop singer LIZ primed for dancefloor abandon on vocals. Meanwhile, SONIKKU’s independent intent is firmly asserted on the freestyle-inspired ‘Don’t Wanna Dance with You’, where singer Aisha Zoe coolly brushes off unwanted advances in favour of dancefloor pleasures.
LIZ assumes vocal duties again for ‘Sweat’, a song fully equipped to make dancefloor devotees do as its title suggests. Dreamily melodic evidence of SONIKKU’s dynamism (and love of melancholy Swedish electro-pop queen Robyn) beckons on ‘X Hopeless Romantic’, where Little Boots contributes a sweetly loved-up vocal over a sublimely
infectious chorus. Pummelling synths signal a dramatic shift of pace on the almost electro-darkwave dash of ‘Remember To Forget Me’, where actor/singer Chester Lockhart presides over a summit meeting between Depeche Mode and New Order. Performance artist Tyler Matthew Oyer takes the vocals for the Italo-disco-inspired title-track, a vividly imagined album manifesto - of sorts - inspired to varying degrees by an 1892 poem, French thinker Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “body without organs” and a 1997 anime called The End Of Evangelion. Finally, that grand piano takes over as Dare returns, presiding over an achingly stripped-back version of ‘Remember To Forget Me’. With help from friends and artists they admires on vocals, ‘Joyful Death’ is a hugely confident and self-contained leap forward for SONIKKU after his time as a feted DJ. Having moved from Derby to London at the age of 18, Donson worked as an intern (at MTV, Dazed & Confused, SHOWstudio and elsewhere) then turned to DJing (from
London to Tokyo, Paris and Berlin) after they were signed to London label Lobster Theremin. Though they continues to DJ regularly at Tottenham’s LGBTQ rave-up Adonis, they have extra ambitions in mind: “I love DJing but I’m more looking forward to developing a live show.” LP pressed on mint green vinyl with digital download.

180 grams / incl. dl code

Universal Vibrations is my most personal project to date. I came back from a month long trip to Brazil feeling very inspired during the start of lockdown and decided to experiment with some slower BPMs for the first time after producing dubstep for the last 15 years.
This album is the result.

One tune came flying out after the other during a crazily productive 2 month period. I was so happy with the beats I thought I'd get some of my favourite MCs on board so spent the next 8 months organizing and mixing down the vocal features.

It all happened very naturally and very quickly, it was just waiting to pop out! To say I'm proud of this album is an understatement.
2 years in the making, I can't wait for you all to hear it!

NOW Music is proud to announce the second release in the ‘NOW Presents…’ series, following ‘The 1970s’ with ‘NOW Presents… Electronic’. The 5-LP box set highlights some of the most innovative and enduringly popular tracks of the genre, and includes some era-defining 12”, extended, and full-length versions alongside the single versions. NOW Presents…Electronic’ is presented in a rigid slip case, with complementary design extending across the 5 individual LPs, with the reverse of the covers featuring track by track annotations that include chart positions, and facts about both song and artist(s). NOW Presents… Electronic’ is strictly limited to 1200 numbered copies. Featuring artitsts Queen/Buggles/Giorgio Moroder/OMD/Human League/ Howard Jones/Tears For Fears/ Joy Division etc etc - 67 tracks in total

Isle Of Wight’s resident slacker pop queen. Lauran Hibberd’s rise towards the forefront of the emerging indie elite shows no signs of slowing, with her charismatic, tongue-in-cheek songwriting already attracting widespread press attention (The Guardian, NME, The Line Of Best Fit, Dork, DIY, Billboard, NYLON, Clash, Gigwise, Upset), and significant praise across BBC Radio 1 airwaves (Clara Amfo, Jack Saunders, Jordan North).

Following releases on 777 Recordings, Low Income Squad, as well as his own Nasty Enterprises imprint, Nasty King Kurl sets his sights to Queensland’s finest for the energetic and head-turning ‘Weak Lips’ EP.

‘Reich’s music expands from minimalist austerity to more full-bodied passages and back again. Reminiscent of his earliest work, it is very beautiful.’ – Financial Times

‘The music has tender energy, and an undercurrent of melancholy. Its droning tones sometimes seem to be pulling apart – like taffy, or like Richter’s stretching spaghetti stripes of color.’ – New York Times

Nonesuch Records releases the first recording of Steve Reich’s Reich/Richter, performed by Ensemble intercontemporain and conducted by George Jackson. The composition was originally written to be performed with German visual artist Gerhard Richter and Corinna Belz’s film Moving Picture (946-3).

Reich describes Richter’s book Patterns, which served as source material for the film: “It starts with one of his abstract paintings from the ’90s. He scanned a photo of the painting into a computer and then cut the scan in half and took each half, cut that in half and two of the four quarters he reversed into mirror images. He then repeated this process of ‘divide, mirror, repeat’ from half to quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, all the way up to 4096th. The net effect is to go from an abstract painting to a series of gradually smaller anthropomorphic ‘creatures’ (since the mirroring produces bilateral symmetry) to still smaller very fine stripes.

“Belz described the film in terms of ‘pixels’. It begins with two-‘pixel’ stripes and the music begins with a two-sixteenth note oscillating pattern. When the film moves to four ‘pixels’, the music moves to a four-sixteenth note pattern, then to eight, and sixteen,” the composer continues. “After that, I began introducing longer note values – initially eighth notes, and later to quarter notes. By the middle of the film, when the images move from 512 to 1064 pixels, the music really slows to dotted half notes. Finally, as the ‘pixel’ count begins to diminish, the music moves back into more rapid eighths and then ending with the most intense rapid sixteenth movement.”

After more than one hundred performances of Reich/Richter at The Shed in New York in 2019, it was performed in London at the Barbican by the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Colin Currie and then in Paris at the Philharmonie, where this recording was made. The Austrian ensemble Windkraft Tirol, led by Kasper de Roo, will perform Reich/Richter on September 8 at Szentrum, Silbersaal in Schwaz, and the LA Phil New Music Group, led by Brad Lubman, performs the piece, accompanied by Richter and Belz’s film, at Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on April 1, 2023.

Nonesuch has recorded every new piece of music by Steve Reich since 1985, beginning with The Desert Music and continuing through 2018’s Pulse/Quartet, resulting in twenty-two albums and the two box sets Phases in 2006 and Works: 1965-1995 in 1997. The label will put out a collection of his complete works in 2023.

Reich released a book last month, Conversations, that includes dialogues with past collaborators, fellow composers, musicians, and visual artists who have been influenced by his work, including: David Lang, Brian Eno, Richard Serra, Michael Gordon, Michael Tilson Thomas, Russell Hartenberger, Robert Hurwitz, Stephen Sondheim, Jonny Greenwood, David Harrington, Elizabeth Lim-Dutton, David Robertson, Micaela Haslam, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, Julia Wolfe, Nico Muhly, Beryl Korot, Colin Currie, and Brad Lubman. Booklist said in its review, ‘Iconoclastic American composer Steve Reich is singular in his own right, and when he is in conversation with other equally iconoclastic composers, conductors, sculptors, musicians, percussionists, and video artists, sparks not only fly, they sparkle. Reich and his colleagues conduct lovely give-and-takes during which they share stories, creative approaches, and viewpoints. Reich's Conversations is the best kind of eavesdropping.’

Steve Reich has been called ‘America’s greatest living composer’ (Village Voice), ‘the most original musical thinker of our time’ (New Yorker), and ‘among the great composers of the century’ (New York Times). His music has influenced composers and mainstream musicians all over the world. Music for 18 Musicians and Different Trains have earned him two Grammy Awards, and in 2009, his Double Sextet won the Pulitzer Prize. Reich’s documentary video opera works – The Cave and Three Tales, done in collaboration with video artist Beryl Korot – have been performed on four continents. His recent work Quartet, for percussionist Colin Currie, sold out two consecutive concerts at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London shortly after tens of thousands at the Glastonbury Festival heard Jonny Greenwood (of Radiohead) perform Electric Counterpoint followed by the London Sinfonietta performing his Music for 18 Musicians.

In 2012, Reich was awarded the Gold Medal in Music by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has additionally received the Praemium Imperiale in Tokyo, the Polar Music Prize in Stockholm, the BBVA Award in Madrid, and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale. He has been named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the Royal College of Music in London, The Juilliard School, and the Liszt Academy in Budapest, among others. ‘There’s just a handful of living composers who can legitimately claim to have altered the direction of musical history and Steve Reich is one of them’, states the Guardian.

Pierre Boulez founded the Ensemble intercontemporain in 1976 with the support of Michel Guy (who was France’s Minister of Culture at the time) and the collaboration of Nicholas Snowman. The Ensemble’s thirty-one soloists share a passion for twentieth and twenty-first century music. Under the artistic direction of Matthias Pintscher, the musicians work in close collaboration with composers, exploring instrumental techniques and developing projects that interweave music, dance, theater, film, video and visual arts. In collaboration with IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), the Ensemble intercontemporain is also active in the field of synthetic sound generation. New pieces are commissioned and performed on a regular basis. Resident of the Cité de la musique – Philharmonie de Paris, the Ensemble performs and records in France and abroad, taking part in major festivals worldwide.

George Jackson, winner of the 2015 Aspen Conducting Prize, came to attention after stepping in at short notice with Orchestre de Paris, where he stepped in for Daniel Harding. Recent highlights include leading Ensemble intercontemporain at Festival Romaeuropa, the Rainy Days Festival in Luxembourg, and Festival D’Automne in Paris, as well as conducting the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of Opéra de Rouen and the world premiere of Tscho Theissing’s Genia with Theater an der Wien. His varied operatic experience includes performances at Opera North, Hamburg State Opera and Opera Holland Park, as well as conducting a new production of Hänsel und Gretel at Grange Park Opera.

The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Westonsuper-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye.

Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

Strut present the first box set release to bring together the 1970s recordings of The Pyramids, led by Idris Ackamoor. As students at Antioch College, Ohio, alto saxophonist Idris Ackamoor, flautist Margaux Simmons and bass player Kimathi Asante created three lasting monuments in sound - Lalibela, King of Kings, and Birth / Speed / Merging, a trio of albums produced without any label backing or distribution between 1972 and 1976. Their music is unique among the varied canon of avant-garde and experimental music of 1970s America: high intensity African-styled percussion topped with songs, chants, and horns, laced with African instruments and arranged into long, flowing suites that surge and

Sacred Bones celebrates its 15th year label anniversary with this pink vinyl repress of the critically acclaimed The Turning Wheel. "It's weird to think that every classic album was new once; that even Purple Rain had a release date. As hyperbolic as the sentiment may seem, taking The Turning Wheel for it's inaugural spin for the first time gave me the distrinct feeling of hearing a record that it's impossible to imagine the world without." - The Wire

Long-time collaborators YUNGMORPHEUS & THERAVADA join forces on Up Against The Wall; A Degree Of Lunacy. Hazed storytelling from YUNGMORPHEUS, the record talks of personal endeavours, where wisdom meets braggadocious and irreverent lyricism. The album was produced entirely by THERAVADA and has guest features from Awhlee and Starker. YUNGMORPHEUS is an American rapper and record producer that has released music with Lex Records and collaborated with Pink Siifu, Fly Anakin, Koncept Jack$on and Ohbliv. THERAVADA is a rapper and producer hailing from Queens, New York that has worked with Earl Sweatshirt, Navy Blue, Ahwlee, YL & LORD JAH-MONTE OGBON.

A return to form after the departure that was 1980's muddled Panorama, the Cars' Shake It Up bursts forth with a rich assembly of synthesizers, drum machines, electronic blips, and catchy melodies that make it an early 80s pop staple. Known the world over, the famous title track proves the band's arrangement skills were in perfect shape and set the stage for a record overflowing with memorable hooks and complementary rock riffs.

Shake It Up also plays witness to primary songwriter/vocalist Ric Ocasek's increased cynicism and biting wit. While the Cars never took a rosy-eyed view of romance, the songs here impart a newfound sense of sympathy, regret, limbo, and reservation. The beauty of the Cars – and all ten tunes here – is that the music suggests something else entirely. Such subliminal emotions and dynamic contrasts act as a magnet, and the band plays as if it's in on the secret.

Apart from the party vibe of the title cut, the Cars aim for deeper targets and smarter undertones. Shake It Up is defined by an urban edginess and modern feel that comes alive on tunes such as "Cruiser" and circular "I'm Not the One," a pop gem laded with stacked vocals and keyboard lines that double as a horn section. The band's arrangements have never been better – or more involved. Absent the cheesiness that would mar the group's late-period work, the songs ride on the strength of keyboard-heavy lines and layered harmonies. You will not be disappointed.

Recorded at the band's Synchro Sound studios by famed Queen producer Roy Thomas Baker, the album takes advantage of electronic textures and varying timbres in immersing the listener in accessible albeit abstract washes of sound. MoFi's engineers made sure to capture every note and nuance; this marks the first time that Shake It Up has been remastered in any way, let alone from the original tapes.

DJ Rap is without a doubt the Queen of Jungle and Drum ‘n’ Bass! With a career spanning three decades she has earned that title through immense talent and endless hard work, and from having been there from the start of the rave scene, producing some classic slices of breakbeat hardcore, jungle and D’n’B. Spiritual Aura is one of the biggest of her releases, and the DJ Rap Gets Raw Remix is her darker slice of the original. But the flip is even darker with a classic Ray Keith Remix! Fully remastered and sounding better than ever, this is a must for any classic junglists.

Club / DJ Support
Jay Cunning, Billy Bunter, the Fat Controller, Liquid, Hyper On Experience, Glowkid, Slipmatt, Dj Jedi, Dj Luna-C, Dj Brisk, Paul Bradley, Jimni Cricket, Bustin, Jimmy J, Doughboy, Lowercase, Dave Skywalker, Ponder and many others