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Rhythm master Klaus Weiss knew he had a good thing going with NIAGARA. The first album was a gathering of every outstanding drummer and percussionist he could get hold of and despite the fact that there were only rhythm instruments featured , it became quite a memorable and unique record. Now for the second album “S.U.B.” he felt he had to go other ways, and recorded with a complete rock outfit plus the one or another brass instrument. ‘S.U.B.’ is definitely worth being traded for 180,00 Euros and more among collectors for a clean original and when the needle hits the groove you will realize why. There is a tightly woven web of rhythms from drums and percussions, as the solid and ever pulsating base with a laid back but really present bass guitar adding more depth and power to the beats and clean rhythm guitars with a nifty wah wah effect for the extra kick. From time to time the guitars fire off a memorable steaming riff on top of the rhythm pulse and the horns answer the call for arms. You really have to look at the backcover to find out that this is a German outfit instead of one of these utterly hot and hip US funk rock cult bands of the time. NIAGARA aka Klaus Weiss waive the vocals so it is an instrumental record you face with ‘S.U.B’, but then this band goes so wild in some of the compositions, that you will be left breathless on your knees by all these simmering performances. Each musician participating in this project is a professional, but they all let the music erupt into a climax of sound you can only achieve, when you put your whole heart and soul into it. A masterpiece of funky and utterly unleashed rock music from the early 70s.

Labyrinth is dark, brooding, beat-heavy, melancholic mood music courtesy of Ian Carr and the Nucleus crew. A favourite of Madlib, it goes without saying that this is one magnificent record. Originally released on Vertigo in 1973, Labyrinth was never re-pressed and of course those original copies are now very tricky to score. Like all the Nucleus records, it’s aged ridiculously well and this Be With re-issue, re-mastered from the original analogue tapes, shows off just why this deserves to be back in press.

Genius trumpeter and visionary composer Ian Carr was one of the most respected British musicians of his era. He was a true pioneer and saw the potential in fusing the worlds of jazz with rock, just as Miles Davis and The Tony Williams Lifetime did in the US. In late 1969, following the demise of the Rendell-Carr quintet, and tiring of British jazz, Carr assembled the legendary Nucleus. Regarding music as a continuous process, Nucleus refused to “recognise rigid boundaries” and worked on delivering what they saw as a “total musical experience”. We can get behind that.

Under bandleader Carr, Nucleus existed as a fluid line-up of inventive, skilled musicians. This constant evolution and revolution was all part of the continuous musical exploration and discovery that took jazz to new levels. And the music has kept relevant. To steal a line from a recent review of our re-issue of Roots, when it comes to anything Nucleus “it’s basically already hip-hop”.

At this point Carr had parted ways with guitarist Alan Holdsworth and as a result the Nucleus sound found itself returning to the core elements of groove and melody. Carr had become bolder and more self-confident in his compositions and it shows in the sheer ambition of Labyrinth. Composed by Carr, and with lyrics written by his wife Sandy, Labyrinth was the result of a commission from the Park Lane Group and funded by the Arts Council of Great Britain. Originally a live performance by an augmented Nucleus, some of the expanded cast were brought back for the recording sessions, including vocalist Norma Winstone. So as the front cover of the finished album says, this is literally “Nucleus Plus”.

Labyrinth is presented as a suite, based on the ancient Greek legend of the Minotaur with musical instruments representing the various elements of the mythology. According to the LP’s original sleeve notes, the bass clarinet represents the tragic element, the trumpet represents the heroic element and the voice represents the human element. The rest of the musicians represent the two societies of Athens and Crete and their comments on the story as it unfolds.

The album opens with the experimental, sumptuously dissonant “Origins”. Teasing strands of atmospheric bass clarinet introduce the first theme before swiftly fading out with a startling blast of staccato fanfares and big drums. Heavy. The album soon finds its rhythm as it alights on the spell-binding and groove-friendly “Bull-Dance”, showing off the best Nucleus has to offer: subtle trumpet melodies, compelling rhythms, a psych-rock vibe and tight soloing. And of course there’s Norma Winstone’s stunning wordless vocals, that also take the lead in the next track “Ariadne”, a spacey-jazz song with beautiful piano, flute and clarinet, and the only recognisable lyrics on the album. You might recognise a snatch of it being looped by Madlib on Quasimoto’s “Astro Travellin”. The first part of the improvised “Arena” closes out the first side of the album, a short experimental piece with piano and horns.

Over on the flip-side, the powerful second part of “Arena” introduces a new theme. It swiftly builds, with vocal melodies, piano and horns all pronounced over the thick drums snapping your neck. It comes on like an alternate take on “Bull-Dance”, noisier, with a looser rhythm. The triumphant, shuffling Latin-jam “Exultation” leans on more scintillating vocals from Winstone, and a chunky counter melody from the rhythm section. It’ll get you moving.

The final track, the haunting, twelve minute “Naxos”, is an incredible way to close out this remarkable record. A circling bass guitar loop inspiring the group to a meditative psychedelic jazz rock improvisation in a silent, Miles kind of way, with a great flugelhorn solo from Carr and an ace synth climax.

This Be With edition of Labyrinth has been re-mastered from the original Vertigo master tapes, Simon Francis’ mastering working together with Pete Norman’s cut to weave their usual magic with these wonderful recordings. Another great Keith Davis sleeve has been restored in all its airbrushed Golden Age of comics, gatefold splendour. Complete with Minotaur of course.

Wu-Tang Clan’s own Cappadonna connects with acclaimed producer Stu Bangas for a lyrically potent, sonically raw new album, 3rd Chamber Grail Bars. The album follows strong 2021 releases from both artists, Donna’s Black Tarrzann and Stu’s Deathwish, and it represents the emcee’s first full-length collaboration with a single producer. The result is a tight, cohesive listen full of sharp verses, neck-snapping instrumentals, and some stellar guest features.

The two first worked together on the Wu rapper’s 2013 album, Eyrth, Wynd & Fyre, when Stu produced a pair of notable cuts (“We Hood Rich Now” and “Chains”). “I knew that he was feeling the beats,” Stu said. “And I saw an opportunity to reach out to him and took it.” They reconnected via industry A&R, M-Eighty, who provided Donna with a folder of instrumentals from the producer. And for the emcee, the timing was perfect because of how the beats “fit my mood and energy in the moment.”

The energy is one of a time-tested lyricist with a lot on his mind—and plenty of clever ways to get his point across. You can hear that on the piano-laced, eerie “Continuous Threat” with Planet Asia, as well as the straight-up dope “Tryna Survive” featuring ILL BILL. Both tracks showcase Donna’s gifts with the pen as well as his talents as a collaborator. Other standouts include the raucous “Bring It Out,” which also happens to be Stu’s favorite cut on the LP. “I love everything about it—the beat, the intro, the subject matter of the verses, the raw hook, all of it,” he explained.

As you’ll hear on the album, it’s clear that it was created not only for the love of the culture, but also out of mutual respect for the other artist. Stu referred to 3rd Chamber Grail Bars as “a life goal of mine that I have checked off,” while Donna had glowing praise for his collaborator. “Stu’s catalog may be as great, iIf not greater, than any producer I can name,” he said.

Idiology was originally released in 2001 and is now finally back on vinyl. This re-issue is pressed on white color vinyl and presented in a die cut jacket with artworked inner sleeve and free download card. From their beginnings in 1992, Cologne native Jan St. Werner and Dusseldorfer Andi Toma have consistently challenged electronic music"s paradigm in often surprising and always intriguing ways. Idiology is the duo"s seventh album and is no exception to this rule, as Mouse on Mars surround themselves with strings, woodwinds, brass and the band"s own heavily modified fleet of machines in the St. Martin"s Tonstudio. Fans should once again brace themselves for the inevitable shock of the new as Germany"s most irreverent audio renegades have created the perfect soundtrack for a highly sinister dance party. Kicking off with "Actionist Respoke", the album"s first single, Mouse on Mars officially declare their independence from glitchtronica"s shoegazing legions. Longtime collaborator Dodo Nkishi lends a uniquely warped vocal sensibility to the track which already features Mouse on Mars"s darkest grooves to date. The rest of the album continues to thicken the group"s sonic stew. Tracks such as "Presence" and "Catching Butterflies With Hands" have their populist intentions undermined by Werner and Toma"s meddling hands, while the duo reprise their flirtation with the orchestral as heard on the opening tracks from 2000"s Niun Niggung. At the other end of the spectrum, "Introduce" is a truly evil slice of twisted lympho-zoid hip-hop. Idiology takes no prisoners in its dual-pronged assault on the conventions of modern music. Only with the loungy closing number, "Fantastic Analysis" (a term Werner and Toma invented to describe their working process), do Mouse on Mars let the arrangements breathe a long sigh of relief, the calm after the storm. To enable these stylistic achievements Mouse on Mars enlist the help of partners in crime such as: Nkishi, the multi-talented Harald "Sack" Ziegler, house icon Matthew Herbert on piano, violinist Matty Arouse, in addition to fellow programming wizards Adam "Vert" Butler and F.X. Randomiz. The latter two toured with Mouse on Mars in 2000 as they successfully triumphed over audiences around the globe.

Charley Crockett will release his latest album The Man From Waco on September 9th via Son of Davy/Thirty Tigers. Crockett wrote or co-wrote all 14 songs on the album, and in many ways The Man From Waco is the purest distillation of his artistry to date. What started as a demo session with producer Bruce Robison at Robison’s studio The Bunker outside Austin, TX turned into the first album Crockett has ever made with his band The Blue Drifters backing him from start to finish. Mostly first takes with only a handful of overdubs, The Man From Waco finds Crockett refining his singular “Gulf & Western” sound which continues to captivate an ever-growing legion of fans. “I just wanted an honest partnership: do it at your place, live to tape, everybody in the room,” Crockett says of the recording experience, and Robison was happy to accommodate. “The magic is in the performances on that tape. That’s what Bruce wanted to do, that’s what I wanted to do. When we were done, I said ‘these are masters, not demos.’” Crockett won “Emerging Act of the Year” at the 2021 Americana Honors & Awards and made his Austin City Limits TV debut a month later. He received billboards in Times Square from Spotify and CMT, performed at several top tier festivals including Austin City Limits and Merlefest, and was featured in an exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. 'Music City USA' released in Sept 2021, stayed at #1 on the Americana radio charts for six straight weeks and the album debuted on 14 different Billboard charts. Globally, Crockett’s music has been streamed over 190 million times, with 93 million streams coming in the past year. 'Lil' G.L. Presents Jukebox Charley', released in April 2022, was celebrated by press outlets such as Holler, Billboard, The Tennessean, Saving Country Music, Rolling Stone and more. Charley's success has caught the attention of CBS' Anthony Mason, who produced a CBS Mornings segment that was televised April '22.

From Rafael Anton irisarri: It’s sometimes hard to go back and speak to work that was made in the past. Things change, but they also stay the same in some ways. I feel this strongly coming back to these pieces.

Agitas Al So was a companion suite of materials that was composed alongside my album Solastalgia. For those with a keen eye for wordplay, they might notice each title is an anagram of the other. In some respects this is actually a very fitting sonic analogy too for the pieces from the two records. They mirror each other in various ways, harmonically in the very least, but they also share the same deep sense of pressure that forged them so acutely.

To come back to these pieces I was struck by how much they expand on the ideas contained in Solastalgia. Where as Solastalgia might have been me breathing in, this set of pieces is a deep, deep exhale.

Remember to breath.

Deluxe 180gram vinyl edition comes in a foil-embossed and die-cut cardstock jacket with printed inner sleeve and additional 12x12 art cards featuring the collages of Maciek Szczerbowski. All the art interacts with the die-cut jacket framing. Edition of 300. Rooted in a distinct and immediately identifiable sound_with the cello of Rebecca Foon (Saltland, Set Fire To Flames, Thee Silver Mt Zion) and the marimba of ex-Godspeed You! Black Emperor percussionist Bruce Cawdron at its core_Esmerine has long embroidered emotive chamber works using threads of post-classical, post-rock, Minimalism, neo-Baroque, jazz, pop and a wide array of folk traditions. Multi-instrumentalist Brian Sanderson, who joined the group in 2012, has furthered Esmerine's melodic and ethnomusicological sensibility ever since, expanding the ensemble's palette as its third core member with guitars, ngoni, ekonting, hulusi, brass horns of all sorts, and more. Since 2003, six stately and filmic instrumental albums have inscribed compositional landscapes through epigrammatic miniatures, longform multi-movement chronicles, and all manner of evocative musical prosody between. Marked by an inimitably turbid yet tempered pastoralism, alternately lit by dappled dawn and disquieted dusk, Esmerine's musical narratives balance asceticism and romanticism, melancholy and hope, stillness and wanderlust. Esmerine now shares Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, its seventh full-length album and first in five years. The band surprise-dropped the full album digitally on 06 May 2022, with the CD and Deluxe 180gram LP editions hitting stores on official release date 26 August 2022. Following an acclaimed run of mid-career records on Constellation through the 2010s_the last three of which have all been finalists or winners of Juno Awards for Instrumental Album of the Year and/or Album Packaging of the Year_Esmerine began working on new music at decade's end. Under the auspices of a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and a summer 2019 residency at Le Château de Monthelon (an artist commune in France where the band has cherished long-standing spiritual, creative, and personal connections), compositional seeds were planted_and then pandemic rooted everyone in place. In between lockdown waves, at the respective rural Québec homesteads of Cawdron and Foon, longtime co-producer Jace Lasek (The Bernard Lakes) began capturing the band in various stripped-down configurations with spartan remote equipment. More fulsome arrangement and overdub sessions at Foon's converted barn during the summer of 2021 brought the album to full fruition_where a notable increase in the use of acoustic piano also poured forth, with just about every band member having a go. The record also signals the definitive integration of bassist Philippe Charbonneau_having joined Esmerine as a touring member pre-pandemic, he plays throughout the album on upright and electric bass, with turns on piano and synth, as well as sound design contributions via tape echo and other processing. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More grapples with the existential tensions between atmosphere and airlessness, seclusion and claustrophobia, forbearance and coalescence. In many ways it is one of Esmerine's most restrained records. Only a few passages are driven by full percussion. There is palpably less Sturm and Drang or overt crescendos compared to its recent predecessors. The new album roils with a different sort of dynamic intensity, where instrumental densities ebb and flow within an overtonal centre, melding into each other with gauzy timbral warmth, sometimes tracing fleeting tendrils outwards, but always rotating around a saturnine gravitational force. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is like a dark forest lit by a closely-orbiting opalescent planet; it could be the alternate score to Von Trier's Melancholia or Cormac McCarthy's The Road.

Baton Rouge sludge band Thou have released over a dozen LPs worth of music, collaborated with divergent artists like Emma Ruth Rundle and The Body and released covers that run the full gamut of genres. Continuing their practice of bucking typical metal tradition, their latest record, a split release with composer Gewgawly I, is a soundtrack created for the highly anticipated new video game NORCO.

Gewgawly I has created a master work of ambiance, not only reminiscent of some of the best game soundtracks from the 80s and 90s but also a stunning work of contemporary experimental music pushing the genre forward in exciting ways. Thou have rounded out the game’s grit with a wash of downtuned doom and drone. The band has previously been described as “For fans of: alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease,” and these themes
come to life vividly in Thou’s collaboration with the richly illustrated world of NORCO.

“Thou represents an aspect of Louisiana that’s close to my heart. The members know the suburbs of New Orleans and Baton Rouge well. They capture a kind of strange irreverence in their sound and visuals that’s specific to the region and has influenced the game NORCO,” says Yuts from Geography of Robots. ”We’ve been trying to collaborate for a while, and I’m just stoked it’s finally happening!”

Baton Rouge sludge band Thou have released over a dozen LPs worth of music, collaborated with divergent artists like Emma Ruth Rundle and The Body and released covers that run the full gamut of genres. Continuing their practice of bucking typical metal tradition, their latest record, a split release with composer Gewgawly I, is a soundtrack created for the highly anticipated new video game NORCO.

Gewgawly I has created a master work of ambiance, not only reminiscent of some of the best game soundtracks from the 80s and 90s but also a stunning work of contemporary experimental music pushing the genre forward in exciting ways. Thou have rounded out the game’s grit with a wash of downtuned doom and drone. The band has previously been described as “For fans of: alienation, absurdity, boredom, futility, decay, the tyranny of history, the vulgarities of change, awareness as agony, reason as disease,” and these themes
come to life vividly in Thou’s collaboration with the richly illustrated world of NORCO.

“Thou represents an aspect of Louisiana that’s close to my heart. The members know the suburbs of New Orleans and Baton Rouge well. They capture a kind of strange irreverence in their sound and visuals that’s specific to the region and has influenced the game NORCO,” says Yuts from Geography of Robots. ”We’ve been trying to collaborate for a while, and I’m just stoked it’s finally happening!”

Mo Troper is truly one of a kind, and that’s never been more apparent than on his fifth full-length, the winkingly titled MTV. Arriving hot on the heels of his 2021 full-length, Dilettante, the album finds the Portland, OR-based power pop extraordinaire diving further into home-recorded immediacy to make a record that feels like a strikingly direct conduit to the world of Mo–where heartbreak, hilarity, and hooks all go hand-inhand.

MTV hurtles through 15 songs in just 31 minutes, with most of the tracks never even coming close to the three-minute mark. The sequence feels like a combination of a fever dream and a travel diary, intertwining tales of romantic longing with the ups and downs

of cross-country touring. Songs like “Across The USA,” “Royal Jelly,” or “Coke Zero” unravel the headaches and heartbreaks, often alternating between unflinching emotional details and legitimately funny one-liners. “I feel like I’m just in this mode of rebelling against the expectation for artists to be emotionally or aesthetically cohesive,” Troper says. “I think about all my favorite records and songwriters, and they’re often these people who would have really depressing stuff and then insane moments of levity that don’t get talked about as much. I want to make music that’s emotional but also campy or sarcastic or resonates in other ways. I’m like, ‘you know what, it’s all me.’”

The iconic US blues-rock guitarist Walter Trout is set to release his 30th
solo album, Ride on 19 August via Provogue/Mascot Label Group.
However fast or far a man travels, he can never truly outrun his past
On his new album he found himself eyeing the horizon and the green shoots of
his triumphant late career. There was a new record deal with Mascot/Provogue. A
move from California to Denmark with his beloved family. Even now, aged 70,
Trout was still writing fresh chapters of his life story.
The last time we saw Trout stepping out, he was on the road in support of 2020's
Ordinary Madness. The campaign ended in frustration, when Covid rendered live
work too dangerous, both for this liver- transplant survivor and his fans,
condemning Trout to an enforced downtime in Denmark that he hadn't known in a
half- century. "I've been at this since '69, when I started out in the New Jersey
bars," he reflects. "Suddenly, I'm sat on my ass for sixteen months, although I did
still practice guitar every day. My wife and manager Marie knew I needed to make
music. So her present to me for my 70th birthday was a brand-new record deal
she had negotiated. My producer, Eric Corne, scoped out a new studio in LA, and
my plan was to fly home to make a new album."
The result is Ride, providing an emotional release-valve – both for its creator and
his loyal listeners – perhaps this veteran artist can reconcile with his past, accept
his future and live in the present as it unfolds. "I think you can interpret this album
title a few different ways," he concludes. "I mean, this album is definitely a
musical ride and I certainly tried to cover a lot of ground. But, really, life is kind of
a ride too, isn't it? And I want to live mine to the fullest."

The iconic US blues-rock guitarist Walter Trout is set to release his 30th
solo album, Ride on 19 August via Provogue/Mascot Label Group.
However fast or far a man travels, he can never truly outrun his past
On his new album he found himself eyeing the horizon and the green shoots of
his triumphant late career. There was a new record deal with Mascot/Provogue. A
move from California to Denmark with his beloved family. Even now, aged 70,
Trout was still writing fresh chapters of his life story.
The last time we saw Trout stepping out, he was on the road in support of 2020's
Ordinary Madness. The campaign ended in frustration, when Covid rendered live
work too dangerous, both for this liver- transplant survivor and his fans,
condemning Trout to an enforced downtime in Denmark that he hadn't known in a
half- century. "I've been at this since '69, when I started out in the New Jersey
bars," he reflects. "Suddenly, I'm sat on my ass for sixteen months, although I did
still practice guitar every day. My wife and manager Marie knew I needed to make
music. So her present to me for my 70th birthday was a brand-new record deal
she had negotiated. My producer, Eric Corne, scoped out a new studio in LA, and
my plan was to fly home to make a new album."
The result is Ride, providing an emotional release-valve – both for its creator and
his loyal listeners – perhaps this veteran artist can reconcile with his past, accept
his future and live in the present as it unfolds. "I think you can interpret this album
title a few different ways," he concludes. "I mean, this album is definitely a
musical ride and I certainly tried to cover a lot of ground. But, really, life is kind of
a ride too, isn't it? And I want to live mine to the fullest."

Bobby Oroza puts his desire for the profound on wax with his sophomore album Get On The Otherside. Musically, he has updated the formula we were introduced to on the first record. But lyrically, songs are bravely rooted in the more complicated, ubiquitous inner tangles of life like self-examination and coming to terms with the vastness of the human experience. With Coronavirus bringing the world to a halt, Bobby-a father and husband-had to do something. No tours to play or studio time to fill, Bobby found himself back in the construction yard, doing blue-collar work to provide for his family. "I was super grateful for the work-a lot of my colleagues didn't have an option like that," Bobby admits. More than a few personal hardships forced him to acknowledge and work through some brutal truths. And what came of it? Well, for one, this new record Get On The Otherside which pretty well describes what Bobby's been through: He had to demolish his ego, his old ways of thinking, and his tried approaches to anchor into a refreshed perspective with new understandings. As Bobby tells it, "I had to do some real self-searching, come to terms with what was wrong, and how much of it I was responsible for." So how does this translate to the new album? Moments of clarity as to where the real value in life lies on "I Got Love," encouraging numbers like the title track "The Otherside", and declarations of self actualization on "My Place, My Time." Even the more straightforward love songs are outside the box lyrically like "Sweet Agony" and "Loving Body." If you have never had the pleasure of catching one of Bobby's live shows you may have no idea that he is a maverick on the guitar. He lets us in on a little of that on "Passing Things" with a solo that possesses the same restrained and space that his lyrics do. As we'd expect, the songwriting still has that raw, direct edge to it. But an evolution has taken place. There are new points of view on familiar territory which in Bobby's words "For me to love, I needed to take a bigger view of love. One with less ego and more empathy" really hold true. The result is a record with Bobby's new found humility on full display and a message of encouragement to anyone who is struggling and can't see a way out. It still may be hard to nail down and define Bobby and his sound. He's no one thing more than the other. But what he's showing us now, on Get On The Otherside, is that we can also label him a soulful, philosophical optimist. Someone who can say a lot with a little, and who wants us all to know that it's us that has to do the hard lifting to truly live a life in love-both with the world and with yourself.

1970 album that marked a milestone in the history of Peruvian tropical music comprising an outstanding repertoire of Cuban rhythms as a response to the trends of the moment: boogaloo and Colombian cumbia. Guitarist Pancho Acosta lead the band and Kiko Fuentes delivered the vocals across some juicy descargas and guarachas. In the late sixties, a generation of young Peruvian musicians, who were fans of tropical sounds, chose Cuban rhythms over the onslaught of boogaloo and Colombian cumbia. This musical movement attracted a legion of young followers, mostly from popular districts of Lima. In 1969, percussionist Domingo Guzmán Villanueva was commissioned by the MAG record label to get together a group to revive Cuban musical tradition. To lead the project he recruited, Francisco "Pancho" Acosta, founder and guitarist of the Company Quinto. The new group was baptized Los Kintos, in a nod to their desire to carry on playing in the Compay Quinto style. The link between the two groups appears on this first album, as the group's name is written in two different ways: Los Kintos, on the front cover; and Los Quintos, on the back. Recordings began in 1969 and included the stunning 'Descarga Kinto', Richie Ray and Bobby Cruz's original 'Pancho Cristal' -renamed here 'Pancho Guzmán- and Cuban classics from the repertoire of the historic Trio Matamoros like 'Lágrimas Negras' or 'Mentiras', all with lead vocals by Kiko Fuentes. The success of their concerts would take them on tours across the country, always recognized as outstanding figures of Cuban music in Peru. This reissue brings back an album that marked a milestone in the history of Peruvian tropical music and revives the fame of the group's legendary live performances. First time vinyl reissue.

In many ways Kumoyo Island represents the culmination of a journey for Kikagaku Moyo. While their decade-long career can be summarized as a series of kaleidoscopic explorations through lands and dimensions far and near, there's a strong intention in each of their works to take the listener to a particular place, however real or abstract they may be. In that sense, the title and cover art for the band's fifth and final album draws you into a magical mass of land surrounded by water-but the couch suggests that Kumoyo Island may not be a fleeting stop, but rather a place of respite, where one could pause and take it all in. Reconvening at Tsubame Studios in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, where their earliest material had been recorded, the five members of Kikagaku Moyo found new inspiration in a familiar and comfortable environment. With their adopted homebase of Amsterdam under lockdown and their touring activities halted due to the pandemic, the band felt a renewed sense of freedom being back in shitamachi, or the old downtown area of their hometown. With unrestricted time in the studio, they began to build upon the demos and song fragments they'd amassed since their last tour. In the 1.5 months spent in Tokyo, everything started to come together. "Monaka", its name taken from a type of Japanese wafer sweets, takes melodic inspiration from traditional minyo folk styles, while "Yayoi Iyayoi" is a rare instance of the band singing in their native tongue, its evocative lyrics utilizing archaic words taken from old poetry and nature books found in one of the many secondhand bookstores of Tokyo. For "Meu Mar", an Erasmos Carlos cover, the original Portuguese lyrics were translated into English, then to Japanese. Strangely enough, the words seem to conjure an image of the protagonist floating among the clouds, looking down upon Tokyo Bay. In fact, it may be possible to draw a parallel between the topography of the band's home country-an island nation, surrounded by bodies of water-and the mysterious isle of Kumoyo. Are they one and the same? Has the band finally made it back home? It's up to the listener to decide.

What happens when you let go of something you've always been passionate about? Will it come back? And if so, in what ways and with what impact?
These questions laid the foundation for Toby Whyle's debut album 'Call It A Night'.

It is a journey to find out what feels right to him-this means escaping old patterns and allowing himself to try new things. Musically, he exposes himself unreservedly to the gravitational forces of electronic music and guitar pop by orbiting these points of attraction without ever really getting caught by either of them. Each song moves along its own trajectory, fueled by Toby's thoughts and experiences.

His first single, 'No One Moves', hitting number 1 on the FM4 charts in early 2021, marked the beginning of a new adventure-a journey upon which Toby embarks entirely on his own for the first time. After his first EP, 'A Mood Of Its Own', and the release of further singles, the debut album 'Call It A Night' will be out on May 20th, 2022, on Matches Music.

PRESSTEXT
Writing songs has always been quite natural and ever-present in Toby Whyle's life. And he's written plenty of them over the last decade. However, what's new is the realisation that songwriting is one of his few means to slow down the bright and fast-paced world surrounding us. Driven by the urge to create and develop something new, he started to write again. And suddenly, this feeling of being able to pause time came out more intense and immediate than ever.

In this way, the singer, songwriter, and guitarist manages to stand back from the constant rush, carving out space to move freely at his own pace. " Each song is an empty room, and I can decide for myself how I'm going to furnish it. It might get rather chaotic with stuff piled up to the ceiling, then again there's almost nothing in it", he describes his approach to songwriting. For him, creating melodies, crafting music and lyrics is not just a means of reflecting on situations he finds himself in but also a tool of handling them. Toby's music strives to affect and inspire people in all the different phases in life, as his songs are also a result of the diverse situations he's gone through.

Aesthetics and craftsmanship play a crucial role in Toby Whyle's creative process, from crafting songs, recording and producing them, and building and maintaining a particular visual language. He aims to create high-quality and exceptional music that enthuses and delights people, which sparks energy and conveys a certain feeling.

Anna Tivel's ‘Outsiders’ is a meditation on otherness, a deep dive into the myriad forces that keep us from connecting in real ways, and a celebration of the ones that draw us together. From space exploration to schizophrenia, power imbalance to potent honesty in an old van, these songs are meant as a small prayer of recognition for loneliness and love, and all the ways we try and fail and try again to see each other clearly and let ourselves be seen. "Tivel's characters are common but unforgettable, and her prose paints their worlds in colors that are vivid but always in balance ... Her images linger, and become populated with the energy of the real." - Ann Powers, NPR 2019's album 'The Question' named Paste's Number 1 “Essential Folk Albums from 2019” ahead of Big Thief and Bedouine.

UK label Dawn State continue their hot streak this summer with further eclectic moods for the dance floor and beyond. On the tools for the fifth outing on the label is KIDWHO, a blossoming talent who through the last years whilst enduring the pandemic found light by burying himself in his studio experiencing new creative flows. The “Warez House” EP varies in tastes, similar to the highs and lows of the times that just passed us by.

Diving into the deep end is the title track, “Warez House”, loopy and hypnotic, swaying between shades of low end leaned house and techno. Off kilter synths and pads maneuver their way around the driving force of the track. “It came together layer by layer, eventually turning into a dense (and at times, unruly!) groove. A final touch
of atmospherics from an old Roland ROMpler and the track was done - bar a generous helping hand in mixdown from Joel Kane (who also turned out a heads-down dub version which might make an appearance!).”

Leaning in a more hazy direction is the blissful cruiser, “Leploop Lagoon”, a deep and emotive vibe crafted especially for the early mornings. A sophisticated deep house energy from the talented producer. “‘Leploop Lagoon’ is the oldest track on the EP, a cleaned-up version of a rough jam I made around four years back. It takes its name from the Leploop, a quirky semi-modular analogue groovebox of sorts, hand-built in Italy. A very unique and unpredictable machine, it’s on bass duties here as well as providing some percussion sounds via the MPC sampler.”

On the flip side lies “Spectral Pattern”, and it packs a certain punch. The rolling arrangement converses in harmony with icy hi-hats that flash in and out teasing the energy, all of the elements having space to breathe and work their magic.“‘Spectral Pattern’ came together quickly one very productive weekend in the studio last year. It developed from the bass sequence, which comes from a Yamaha TG-33, an unassuming 80s digital synth known for its glassy mix of ROM samples and FM tones - very New Age sounding, or 90s computer game soundtracks. But when you strip it back to basics, it punches hard in the low-end.”

Slipping on to the B side is a five minute transcendental trip, offering yet another series of textures to this otherworldly EP. The final track “At Least We Hav Music” is an ethereal soundscape waiting to be explored, wandering amongst ambient realms throughout. “The label was keen to include an ambient track on the release, and I wanted to record something specially for them. At first I had in mind something droning and melancholic, but after a few experiments with cassette
loops and reverb pedals this was the one that stood out. It was recorded during one of the lockdowns, and I guess I needed to create something that sounded more hopeful than brooding. I messaged DS boss Tom Haus with a rough version, and we went on to have a grumble about the gloomy state of things, locked-down in our respective cities and missing friends, family, activities… At some point I wrote ‘at least we have music’ - and almost as soon as I had sent it I knew I had found the track’s title. I’m very lucky to have had my home studio as a refuge through the long months of lockdown, and I’m honoured to have the chance share some of my output from this period on this record.”
KIDWHO fitting the Dawn State ethos to a tee here as they set up shop for what looks to be another fantastic release. “Each of these tracks came about in quite different ways. Like many creative people, I had moments of struggle during the pandemic, where the lack of variety and day-to-day stimulation lead to periods of writer’s block, and so I used those times to focus on smaller, more manageable projects such as making synth patches, recording sounds and and throwing together short loops in my samplers for later use. A number of
these short loops eventually laid the foundations for title track ‘Warez House’. Big thanks to Dawn State, Joel Kane, El Choop and everyone else who has helped make this happen.” -

KIDWHO

Two heavyweights of the Detroit underground come together on this kicking new EP from Puzzlebox. K-1 aka Keith Tucker brings his famously repetitive sounds and rugged electro-funk to 'On My Computer', which bumps irresistibly as smeared sci-fi chords set your sights on the future. Add in robotic vocals and supple bass and you have an instant classic. It's then to the Eastside of the Motor City for DJ Maaco's 'The People' which is just as funky but in totally different ways; his laid-back groove is embellished with lush synth sequences and late-night cool that is topped off by a more seductive male vocal. Two very different but equally brilliant tunes.

Red Hot Chili Peppers will unveil their new album and twelfth full-length offering, Unlimited Love Warner Records, on April 1, 2022. It notably marks their first recording with guitarist John Frusciante since 2006 and first with producer and longtime collaborator Rick Rubin since 2011. To herald Unlimited Love, the Los Angeles band just shared the first single and music video “Black Summer.”

“Our only goal is to get lost in the music. We (John, Anthony, Chad and Flea) spent thousands of hours, collectively and individually, honing our craft and showing up for one another, to make the best album we could. Our antennae attuned to the divine cosmos, we were just so damn grateful for the opportunity to be in a room together, and, once again, try to get better. Days, weeks and months spent listening to each other, composing, jamming freely, and arranging the fruit of those jams with great care and purpose. The sounds, rhythms, vibrations, words and melodies had us enrapt.

We yearn to shine a light in the world, to uplift, connect, and bring people together. Each of the songs on our new album UNLIMITED LOVE, is a facet of us, reflecting our view of the universe. This is our life’s mission. We work, focus, and prepare, so that when the biggest wave comes, we are ready to ride it. The ocean has gifted us a mighty wave and this record is the ride that is the sum of our lives. Thank you for listening, we hope you enjoy it.

ROCK OUT MOTHERFUCKERS!” - Anthony Kiedis, Flea, Chad Smith, John Frusciante

On lead track “Black Summer,” ethereal guitar underlines introspective lyrics as the rhythm unlocks a hypnotic drum groove highlighted by evocative bass. It quietly inhales only to exhale with a massive refrain, “It’s been a long time since I made a new friend, waiting on another black summer to end,” before a guitar solo echoes to the heavens and back.

Unlimited Love resumes a three-decade partnership with Rick Rubin Johnny Cash, Adele. Their creative collaboration spans legendary albums, including the diamond-selling Blood Sugar Sex Magik 1991, Californication 1999, By The Way 2002, and Stadium Arcadium 2006.

The interplay between the band borders on intergalactic once again—yet elevated to another stratosphere altogether. Unlimited Love represents the united spirit of four individual souls still fearlessly exploring the future of their eternal friendship and musical congregation.

This summer, Red Hot Chili Peppers will launch their first tour in support of Unlimited Love. They’ve invited a dynamic cohort of guests along for the ride at select dates, including Anderson.Paak & The Free Nationals and Thundercat and will be playing stadium dates in the UK in June 2022.

Im Jahre 1993 waren die Kellys noch Straßenmusiker. Sie wurden besonders in diesem Jahr immer beliebter
und die Marktplätze voller, wenn sie gespielt haben. WOW war zwar nicht das Album, was der Familienband ihren ganz großen Durchbruch brachte, sondern das Album davor, aber es war für ihre musikalische Entwicklung sehr wichtig. Bis heute ist es eines der beliebtesten Alben unter den Fans. Mit WOW wurde allen klar wohin die musikalische Reise der Kellys gehen sollte. Alle Songs wurden selbst geschrieben und der neue Popsound entwickelte sich in den nächsten Jahren stark weiter und machte die Kellys zu Megastars. Dieser Klassiker wurde tatsächlich bisher noch nie als LP veröffentlicht und so wird es viele freuen, dass es endlich eine Vinylausgabe davon geben wird.


Diese Erstpressung wird auf 180 g Coloured Vinyl erscheinen und ist dabei streng auf 1000 Stück limitiert.

Matmos are one of the most prominent experimental electronic artists working today, crafting work by creating new conceptual frameworks & immediately testing those frameworks absolute limits. For Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer they've focused on another artist known, in large part, for doing the same. Boguslaw Schaeffer was one of the first Polish artists creating electronic music. In step with American contemporaries like John Cage and Morton Feldman, he worked across the boundaries of classical composition, electronic experimentation, and radical theater in playfully form-breaking ways. Matmos are not the first ones to recognize the power of his catalog, from Solo (a 2008 documentary that garnered numerous international awards), to the annual Shaeffer's Era Festival (most recently celebrated simultaneously in Warsaw and Los Angeles) his work continues to inspire. Regards.. however, was not just inspired by his work, Matmos were given access to the entirity of Schaeffer's recorded works to use as they saw fit, commissioned by the prestigious Instytutu Adama Mickiewicza. They re-assembled & re-combined these recorded works with modern instrumentations in a way that only Matmos could, and what emerges is a composite portrait of the utopian 1960s Polish avant-garde and the contemporary dystopian cultural moment regarding each other across a distance. To facilitate the transcultural exchange that is the album's essential premise, all song titles and liner-notes are provided in both English and Polish. The album was mastered by Rashad Becker and features illustration and design by acclaimed artist Robert Beatty (Tame Impala, Osees, Mdou Moctar). Like the anagrams of the letters of Boguslaw Schaeffer's name that were re-assembled to create some of the song titles, the album itself is a musical re-assemblage of component parts into possible but unforeseen new shapes. Adding harp from Irish harpist Una Monaghan, erhu, viola and violin from Turkish multi-instrumentalist Ulas Kurugullu, and electronic processes from Baltimore instrument builder Will Schorre, and Horse Lords wunderkind Max Eilbacher, the resulting arrangements constantly toy with scale as they move from the close-mic-ing of ASMR and the intimacy of chamber music to the immensity of processed drones and oceanic field-recordings that close the album. Offering a "life review" of production styles, Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer builds temporary shelters out of the panoramic wreckage of modernist composition, sixties tape music, seventies dub, eighties industrial music, nineties postrock and dark ambient, 2000s era glitch fetishism, and contemporary post-everything collage sensibilities.

Sub Pop debut by accomplished Greek artist Σtella, produced by Redinho (Swet Shop Boys).
‘Up And Away’ is an eclectic, compelling modern pop album showcasing Σtella’s skilled songwriting and the influence of classic love songs, Greek folk, and contemporary electronic-music production.

Σtella makes her Sub Pop debut with the mesmerizing ‘Up And Away’, an oldschool pop paean to the pangs and raptures of love. From the Greek folkinflected get-go, we’re swept up in Σtella’s world - and it’s quite the captivating place to be.

The singer songwriter joined forces with artist and producer Tom Calvert (aka Redinho), and it was a match made in Athens; the results are heavenly. Tom caught one of Σtella’s gigs on a visit to the city. He reached out, they started hanging out, and the pair soon clicked creatively. Both mention chemistry when asked about their collaboration and it’s clear, from what we hear, they had it in spades. The meld is seamless.

Σtella’s songs have always riffed on American and Greek mid-century pop but ‘Up And Away’ doubles down on the vintage aesthetic. Tom says he styled the record “as if it was a rare gem from the ’60s found in a box of records in Athens,” and Σtella notes she was ready for a more “deeply Greek touch - it felt comfortable and right, smoothly fusing with the pop.” The bouzouki appears on a full five tracks played by Christos Skondras who, she says, “was brilliant at improvising,” while Sofia Labropoulou on the kanun “brought an insane amount of dreaminess to the last two songs. Having these amazing musicians play for ‘Up And Away’ - I couldn’t be more grateful.”

While not exclusively a confessional artist, Σtella is always intimate - when she sings, it’s personal. She writes “about things I feel passion for. Stories about me, about others, about all that’s there in love and war.” Σtella was “in a very emotional state at the time, which came through in the lyrics and vocals.” And it’s true, her honeyed voice - layered in those unmistakable harmonies of hers - thrillingly runs the gamut from tender to terse, by turns bracing and smitten, aching and forlorn. But it’s the lyrics that feel key. Across her output, Σtella has proven herself a strong storyteller, and ‘Up And Away’ is no exception (the guise of the medieval bard she assumes on the cover is telling). Past releases have been studded with gem-like vignettes - a diverse array of stories set tightly together to form non-linear narratives unified by emotion. Her latest feels singular in that it seems to trace a longer-form tale across songs, with each track escalating the record’s erotic arc.

By the end of the album, ‘Up And Away’s core concerns are clear: the conflicting and conflicted emotions inherent in love, that live on in ways we can’t always understand or control. Love is like this record: when it’s over, you still feel it for time to come.
Loser Edition LP pressed on blue vinyl.

Released to coincide with a pan-European tour kicking off in the UK, themulti-platinum double Grammy Award winning group Arrested
Development deliver 'For the FKN Love', a true hip-hop tour de force, once again executively produced by charismatic veteran frontman Speech and British production maestro Configa.Significantly, it marks the first time that Arrested Development have worked with equally legendary collaborators, making this their biggest ever release

Big Daddy Kane, The Sugarhill Gang, Masta Ace, Freddie Foxxx, Monie Love, Kxng Crooked, G. Love, Tony Momrelle (Incognito), Dee-1 and Fatman Scoop all feature. Legends of this calibre rarely do features and yet have graced this album. Arrested Development have always been dedicated to supporting up-and-coming talent, and this trend continues with the likes of Twan Mack, Dell-P, Lish, Ke'Andra,
4ize, Twisted Royalty, Cleveland P. Jones, MRK SX and Jahah all adding weight to proceedings. When it comes to boom bap and classic rap, few artists come close to Arrested Development.

The two-time Grammy Award winning hip-hop group was the first hip-hop group to ever receive the Grammy for Best New Artist, while also receiving one for Best Rap Single. Showing the group's widespread appeal, its track 'Tennessee' was later named by the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame as one of the Top 500 Songs That Shaped Rock & Roll, while the group was recognised at the Black Music Honors Awards in 2019. Meanwhile, 1993's 'Unplugged' album was not only Gold-certified
by the RIAA, but proved influential as one of the first hip-hop performances from the institution that is MTV.

'Vibe' is the latest single from Arrested Development, as featuring Big Daddy Kane, Cleveland P. Jones and Tasha LaRae. Part of the new studio album 'For The FKN Love', 'Vibe' was produced by the aforementioned boom bap specialist Configa. Configa had previously worked with Arrested Development on 2020's acclaimed 16-track studio album 'Don't Fight Your Demons'.

San Francisco’s Xyla is a queer BPoC classical musician-turned producer, heavily influenced by footwork, R&B, club and orchestral music.
 ‘Ways’ is Xyla’s Leaving Records debut. Echoes of
sweaty rave anthems and classic IDM head trips
can be heard strewn throughout the album’s eight
compositions, awash in deep ambient swirls and
intriguingly twisted samples.
 For fans of Bochum Welt, Aphex Twin, Four Tet,
Barker, Matmos, Plaid.
 Tip-on jacket with gloss finish and black polylined
inner sleeve.

As many artists have experienced, the past two years hit the entire music and culture industry hard. But MY SLEEPING KARMA – they have truly faced the abyss. Formed almost 20 years ago as a strong bond of best friends with a steady line-up ever since, the band has amassed an incredibly successful back catalogue of five highly acclaimed records and a live album in 2017, as well as extensive touring performances at sold-out venues and prestigious festivals that have marked them as one of the most well-respected instrumental post- and hypnotic rock bands within the heavy music community. Closing a seven-year gap since their latest studio album, Moksha, MY SLEEPING KARMA will release their most emotional, deepest, darkest record to date, inspired by tragic events, on July 29, 2022. The new album, Atma – the logical successor to Moksha – describes the (absolute) self, the indestructible, eternal essence of the spirit, and is often translated as the "soul". Sickness, death, and existential fear had brought the band to a point in music and life at which they were close to parting ways. But their will to survive has been recorded on Atma, a record the band wasn’t even sure would see the light of day when they started working on it back in 2017, and if it did, would’ve never been for industry sales, fame or success.

WRWTFWW Records is very happy to announce the official vinyl reissue of the highly sought-after Haruomi Hosono-produced Interior self-titled debut, originally released in 1982 on legendary label Yen Records. The LP comes in a heavy 350gsm sleeve.

Interior is Daisuke Hinata, Eiki Nonaka, Mitsuru Sawamura, and Tsukasa Betto. Their classic 1982 debut, produced by Yellow Magic Orchestra's Haruomi Hosono, is one of a kind - a very rare breed of feel-good ambient music blending instrumental synth-pop, soft electronic minimalism, and cozy sound design in the most heartwarming ways. It evokes the intimate pleasures of daydreaming in a hotel lobby, holding hands in a museum, or napping by the pool. It depicts the urban landscape as a caring environment, where simplicity and repetition is mind soothing and smile inducing.

Interior takes you into an alternate reality, where nostalgic modernism makes the present time feel like the fondest memories.

The unique sound of Interior caught the attention of William Ackerman and Anne Robinson who re-released the album in 1985 on their famed label Windham Hill Records (with a slightly different tracklisting) and then proceeded to put out their follow-up, Design, in 1987. After that, members of the group continued their careers separately, Daisuke Hinata notably recording an overlooked but absolutely amazing solo album, Tarzanland, in 1988.

Kula Shaker's most inspired album in years, 1st Congregational Church Of Eternal Love and Free Hugs is a firebrand double-album, energised with an assured display of vehemence and songcraft that spills over with 15 blazing songs of cross-genre sonics and a renewed super confidence. The album will be available on double vinyl, CD and digital formats.

When he's not dishing out breaks-y garage and slick retro-future electro, Burnski still finds time to exercise his decades deep prowess in the art of tech house. On this new drop for Constant Sound he's clearly having a lot of fun sculpting a hefty, big room sound with Ibiza in its sights. 'Trigger' hinges around an epic breakdown-build up which goes off like a rocket when it drops, swinging with glee and leaning in on playful synth licks. 'Go' is an absolute monster too, which nods to Burnski's recent UKG explorations with some rough bass and a killer 4x4 groove. If you want to do some damage in the dance in the classiest of ways, look no further.

*Gatefold sleeve - black vinyl**

In many ways Kumoyo Island represents the culmination of a journey for Kikagaku Moyo. While their decade-long career can be summarized as a series of kaleidoscopic explorations through lands and dimensions far and near, there’s a strong intention in each of their works to take the listener to a particular place, however real or abstract they may be. In that sense, the title and cover art for the band’s fifth and final album draws you into a magical mass of land surrounded by water—but the couch suggests that Kumoyo Island may not be a fleeting stop, but rather a place of respite, where one could pause and take it all in.

Reconvening at Tsubame Studios in Asakusabashi, Tokyo, where their earliest material had been recorded, the five members of Kikagaku Moyo found new inspiration in a familiar and comfortable environment. With their adopted homebase of Amsterdam under lockdown and their touring activities halted due to the pandemic, the band felt a renewed sense of freedom being back in shitamachi, or the old downtown area of their hometown. With unrestricted time in the studio, they began to build upon the demos and song fragments they’d amassed since their last tour. In the 1.5 months spent in Tokyo, everything started to come together.

“Monaka”, its name taken from a type of Japanese wafer sweets, takes melodic inspiration from traditional minyo folk styles, while “Yayoi Iyayoi” is a rare instance of the band singing in their native tongue, its evocative lyrics utilizing archaic words taken from old poetry and nature books found in one of the many secondhand bookstores of Tokyo. For “Meu Mar”, an Erasmos Carlos cover, the original Portuguese lyrics were translated into English, then to Japanese. Strangely enough, the words seem to conjure an image of the protagonist floating among the clouds, looking down upon Tokyo Bay.

In fact, it may be possible to draw a parallel between the topography of the band’s home country—an island nation, surrounded by bodies of water—and the mysterious isle of Kumoyo. Are they one and the same? Has the band finally made it back home? It’s up to the listener to decide.

Crazy speed flashcore... at the Ambient frontier. A total abstract musical concept escaping the usual ways... No-Tek records now goes more and more into weird and creative concepts. Grown up culture !

 Matmos are one of the most prominent experimental electronic artists working today, crafting work by creating new conceptual frameworks and immediately testing those frameworks’ absolute limits. For ‘Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer’ they’ve focused on another artist known, in large part, for doing the same.

 Bogusław Schaeffer was one of the first Polish artists creating electronic music. In step with American contemporaries like John Cage and Morton Feldman, he worked across the boundaries of classical composition, electronic experimentation and radical theatre, in playfully form-breaking ways.

 Matmos are not the first ones to recognize the power of his catalogue, from ‘Solo’ (a 2008 documentary that garnered numerous international awards), to the annual Shaeffer’s Era Festival (most recently celebrated simultaneously in Warsaw and Los Angeles), Bogusław Schaeffer’s work continues to inspire.

 ‘Regards/Ukłony dla Bogusław Schaeffer’, however, was not just inspired by his work. Matmos were given access to the entirety of Schaeffer’s recorded works to use as they saw fit, commissioned by the prestigious Instytutu Adama Mickiewicza. They re-assembled and re-combined these recorded works with modern instrumentations in a way that only Matmos could, and what emerged is a composite portrait of the utopian 1960s Polish avant-garde and the contemporary dystopian cultural moment regarding each other across a distance.

 Vinyl packaged with digital download card.

Pressing Info: 180g black vinyl, standard sleeve, printed inner sleeve. In dark, troubling times, maybe the most instantly gratifying solace one can seek is a wittily barbed diagnosis of the situation. “The fox has his den. The bee has his hive. The stoat … his stoat-hole,” Stewart Lee once remarked: “But only man chooses to make his nest in an investment opportunity.” Caustic retorts like this are what fuel the debut EP by dance-punk outfit Regressive Left, ‘On The Wrong Side of History’. For pervading through their dynamic and glitching music is a duty to report unflinchingly society’s ills. They are a staunchly political group, but far from your average po-faced by-numbers punk band. There is a gristly social commentary at the band’s core, but the songs themselves are characterised by a need to have fun, to find some kind of solace and escapism from the inevitable rapture. Recorded over an intense 5-day spell with in-demand producer Ross Orton (Arctic Monkeys, MIA, Amyl and The Sniffers) in Sheffield, Regressive Left’s debut EP ‘On The Wrong Side of History’ was immortalised over a handful of 11am-1am sessions in his studio. In many ways it is a time capsule of the maelstrom of ideas that got the group to this point in the first place – the infuriating, bleak political climate, and the urge to find escapism from it – consigned to vinyl in one herculean effort. Taking influence from the booming post-punk, funk and disco scenes of New York, Regressive Left’s sound is stark and danceable. Angular guitar scratches meet dirty synth basslines, whilst Simon Tyrie’s Edwyn Collins croon is chased around by effervescent drums. The banal horror of life in Tory Britain expressed with sharp and dry wit, and then set to truly barnstorming and infectious dance music Due out July 15th on Bad Vibrations Records, the new EP arrives following a trio of acclaimed singles (‘Eternal Returns’, ‘Take the Hit’, ‘Cream Militia’), tours with the likes of Bodega and Folly Group, festival appearances at End of the Road, Latitude, Great Escape and Wide Awake, and a sold out headline at The Windmill.

Future Islands' romantic synth sound scales new heights with On the Water, the Baltimore trio's most ambitious and fully realized statement yet. Built around a song cycle exploring love, loss, and memory, their latest album finds the band continuing to deliver pounding rhythms, swelling melodies, and undeniable hooks - but finding new ways to probe inner space and tug at hearts.

The co-curated Air Texture Compilation series returns with two Brooklyn based selectors.

As the cost of living in Manhattan proper moved artist minded migration patterns further afield, places like East Williamsburg, Bushwick, and Ridgewood became post-cultural centers in a way, with producer after producer gaining international recognition in the last 10+ years. New clubs such as Nowadays, Knockdown Center, and Elsewhere furthered the momentum, anchored by first mover Bossa Nova, and important festivals like Mutual Dreaming and Dweller came soon after.

Collectively, the stage was set for a beautiful moment in electronic music history, still unfolding, and maybe something that could only happen in the States in a place like Brooklyn.

Motorik, Techno, Lo-fi, Primal and monotonous are words to describe Black Bones unique take on afro and post punk. This 7” is their first on Höga Nord Rekords and contains two tracks showing depth in musical creativity and record collections.

Black Bones use familiar components in surprising ways: electronics and loops swirl over sequenced pounding backbeats, but when the aggressive stereo bass kicks in on “Nairobi Night Train”, Kenya’s border stretches all the way up to the British Isles and a huge savannah opens its horizons just south of Belfast.

This is an unusual mix of European and African music tradition - a meeting of genres so seamless it’s hard labelling it crossover. It’s just an explosive potion mixed for dancing!

24 Songs. A new project from The Wedding Present. A new 7” single every month throughout 2022. 24 Songs sees David Gedge writing with legendary Sleeper guitarist Jon Stewart for the first time, and a more perfect union could not have been predicted. The notion of a monthly 7” single is not new to The Wedding Present, but 24 Songs shows us that even classic concepts can be reinvented. The series also continues the band’s association with photographer Jessica McMillan, who has created stunning images and films as a visual accompaniment to the recordings. Explaining 24 Songs, David Gedge said: “In 1991, The Wedding Present were rehearsing in a studio in Yorkshire when we hit upon an idea that immediately thrilled us all. Our bass player Keith Gregory had been a member of the ‘Sub Pop Singles Club’ - a service that allowed subscribers to receive 7”s released by that Seattle label on a monthly basis. Keith wondered if we, as a band, could attempt a similar thing. In that instant, The Wedding Present’s Hit Parade series was born and, during 1992, we managed to release a brand new 7” single each and every month. “The Hit Parade went on to become something of a significant milestone in the history of the band and it’s a project about which I’m often asked. As its thirtieth anniversary approached, I began to wonder if we should celebrate it in some way. A ‘Hit Parade Part 2’ didn’t feel quite right, though. Then, someone said to me: “Other bands have released music in similar ways but there has been nothing like the Hit Parade.” And they were right! A 7” single a month seems, somehow, very ‘Wedding Present’. So, inspired by that little idea from three decades ago, we’ve embarked on this new project, 24 Songs. “Even though The Wedding Present have never been known for taking the easy route, the idea of recording 24 tracks and releasing them in this way could seem daunting to any band. However, I’ve been inspired by the music that has been written since Jon and Melanie joined the group. The thought of celebrating this exciting new line-up with an exciting new series has motivated us all… and I suppose we also didn’t want any of these songs to be hidden away in the middle of an album!”

In 1989's In Step, Vaughan found his own songwriting voice, blending blues, soul, and rock in unique ways, and writing with startling emotional honesty. Yes, there are a few covers, all well chosen, but the heart of the album rests in the songs he co-wrote with Doyle Bramhall, the man who penned the Soul to Soul highlight "Change It." Fueled by a desire to make up for lost time and delight in his reawakened commitment to life and sobriety, Vaughan turned in what many consider his greatest artistic statement, an album ensconced in sweat, soul, determination, and not an ounce of filler.

Available for distribution for the first time! The new album by drummer producer Teppo "Teddy Rok" Mäkynen continues where his trio 3TM was last spotted: "Atonal Drums", out on Helsinki's We Jazz Records, lives someplace in & around the new spots where acoustic jazz and electronic music spill into each other in ways previosuly unheard. Each vinyl copy is unique and comes "edited" by Teddy Rok with personalized signatures and extra bespoke stickers glued in. "Atonal Drums", initially a Bandcamp only exclusive, was featured in Wilco's best albums of 2021. Vinyl and tape copies include download code.

Available for distribution for the first time! The new album by drummer producer Teppo "Teddy Rok" Mäkynen continues where his trio 3TM was last spotted: "Atonal Drums", out on Helsinki's We Jazz Records, lives someplace in & around the new spots where acoustic jazz and electronic music spill into each other in ways previosuly unheard. Each vinyl copy is unique and comes "edited" by Teddy Rok with personalized signatures and extra bespoke stickers glued in. "Atonal Drums", initially a Bandcamp only exclusive, was featured in Wilco's best albums of 2021. Vinyl and tape copies include download code.

Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to »Image Langage«: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises? —to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life.

At times listening to »Image Langage« is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in »The Lake is Speaking,« a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. "I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars." At other times, listening to »Image Langage« is more like being in a theatre, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On »Pieces of Sylvia,« a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that "Image Langage" is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and langage and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound.

»Image Langage« is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channelling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments.

»Image Langage« is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity.

For Félicia Atkinson, human voices inhabit an ecology alongside and within many other things that don’t speak, in the conventional sense: landscapes, images, books, memories, ideas. The French electro-acoustic composer and visual artist makes music that animates these other possible voices in conversation with her own, collaging field recording, MIDI instrumentation, and snippets of essayistic langage in both French and English. Her own voice, always shifting to make space, might whisper from the corner or assume another character’s tone. Atkinson uses composing as a way to process imaginative and creative life, frequently engaging with the work of visual artists, filmmakers, and novelists. Her layered compositions tell stories that alternately stretch and fold time and place, stories in which she is the narrator but not the protagonist.

Following the precursor singles of 2021, Formality Jerne-Site’s unveiling is finally cast upon her already-growing fanbase. Trained classically as a composer and completing a masters at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Jura introduces a highly-anticipated playground of carefully sculpted characters, plots and lessons - sometimes charming, sometimes nefarious, always absolute and sincere. A fictional land opens its doors and roof to us. A trio of trans kids run amok in rural suburbia. Various sorcerers of the wild future enter the scene on some songs; on others, the mind is cast to sun-drenched drives and journeys of yesteryear. At the heart is a pop sensibility: yearning, reflections, vanity, guesswork, hope. Jura is adamant about practice and precision. Dead seriously she offers, about making music: ‘Nothing should be half-hearted or an accident.’ There’s a maturity and elegance to her compositions, arrangements that - although at first sound seem abstract - lean away from experimental, somehow. She sing-speaks in English, and somehow not typically theatrically for such a play of a record. The theatrics are all real. It’s a fantasy land for sure, but it's based on hard facts. Like academia subdivided into poetry. It’s that weird-ass specificity she mentioned. Opener ‘Someone’s Lifework’ introduces less a choir of voices, than a choir of personalities. The art of storytelling is at the center of the musical expression. A protagonist relinquishes control of chaos that’s bigger than them on a perilous journey on some vessel: they comfort their co-passengers. There’s a sense that the hero - or anti-hero - might be more canny and cunning than the sweetness they first sell to fellow players. 'Is this our getaway chance?’ sings fellow Copenhagener Ydegirl amongst swelling synths and reverb that become so definitely Jerne-Site as the quest continues. The search? For intimacy, perhaps. ‘Same late Age (dIcK bIfFeReNcE)’ imbibes at once, some further disorientation, perhaps a little hallucinatory feeling which may come over the listener. Through a synthesizing of political themes that work across time ‘Same Late Age (dIcK bIfFeReNcE)’ bears reminiscences of the musical expressions of anti-capitalism in the 1980es, although in a new body and context. “I have a feeling that music reconjures societal morals and ideas from the time in which it was written when we press play or hear a live performance. From the moment at a concert when the symphonic orchestra starts tuning in, the time traveling begins. So I imagined how it would be to be trans sitting there playing the first violin, having the job of producing that first tone that all the other musicians around me tune in ona, ” Jura explains. The listener yearns for more; and subsequent tracks deliver. On ‘How Intimate It Gets,’ Jura meditates on the futility of closeness, begging the audience to enter the blood and guts of their own entanglements, the blueprints of focusing entering. Jura sings richly about fingers being lines, pointing or bending, and we’re reminded of their own wicked ways we can’t control. A history of singing in choirs informs the harmony of myriad inner voices heard across the album. At once prophetic and enigmatic, some of the songs rearrange historical events out of pop musical language. The enormously entertaining ‘Pinot-Botticelli Toast to European Users’ conjures scenes of Cold-War world leaders stuck on a cruise in the Transatlantic vacuum, and the protagonist watches a devastating heartbreaker careen on into the picture, led by his own hips on ‘The Lasceaux Associate’. Finally, on title track ‘Formality Jerne-Site’, American English rises to the occasion like a verdict around the narrative of three trans teenagers in rural Colorado: language turns into something sensual and haptic, playing with the snare and sizzle of syllables. The words twist and bend, while the music follows its own synaesthetic logic: “around us pop culture made a vow to a normative desire, drawing in like water color percussion”. Anyines is a site of play and documentation, with a canon so far quite nice. Their future is one that envisions supporting the galaxies their dear friends embody, be it music, performance, video games or beyond. Highlights from their discerning back catalogue include myriad formats: live and digital, plus releases binded to physical artefacts that enhance the live experience such as sculptures and scents. Their history also includes disappearing time-sensitive shadow-tracked material and cross-disciplinary opportunities that reflect deep professionalism and a totally non-schooled semblance of sound and drama. Recent releases include a dance-theatre soundtrack, a traditional shiny pop record, and the acclaimed ML Buch sophomore, Skinned.

When the whole world collapses around you, sometimes the only thing you can do is stomp it all loose. Erin Anne's second album, the gleaming, electrified Do Your Worst, charts that uninhibited romp through disaster. Written amid the rubble of personal grief and professional disappointment, later exacerbated by the devastation of a global pandemic, the record deepens Erin's venture into the blur between human and machine, adding a new roster of digital instruments to the mix. Drawing on dark, glossy '80s synthpop as well as the unabashed bombast of bands like The Killers, the L.A.-based songwriter deploys a cyborg persona to articulate a feeling of displacement from the world as a queer artist struggling to survive the machinations of late capitalism. With bright, interweaving synthesizers and ripples of Auto-Tuned vocals, Do Your Worst poses a dare to the world: Whatever you have in store, I'll take it standing.

Erin began writing her second album not long after adding a MIDI keyboard and vocal processing hardware to her home studio setup. While exploring her new gear, she found that she could work in the same vein as the artists and producers she loved the most. Do Your Worst takes inspiration from the music of Patrick Cowley, the disco and hi-NRG producer best known for working alongside Sylvester. Erin was taken by Cowley's use of vocoder on the 1982 album Mind Warp, where his distorted vocals create a queer, mutant subjectivity. That album rang out against the cataclysm of the AIDS epidemic; Erin found resonance in Cowley's music during the present-day pandemic. "I have found the most catharsis and the most safety in listening to the music of people in really, really horrific circumstances making something lasting and profoundly beautiful," she says.

Throughout Do Your Worst, which was mixed by Sarah Tudzin of Illuminati Hotties, songs like "Typhoid Mary" and "Florida" reckon with loss, despair, and abjection. "This Hungry Body" sears through pandemic-era touch starvation, while "Mirror Mirror" attends to the noxious but necessary funhouse of social media. On the playful, guitar-driven “Eve Polastri’s Last Two Brain Cells Have a Debate,” Erin uses the spy thriller TV show Killing Eve to explore queer codependency and masochism. Among these fraught subjects, Erin Anne finds opportunities for release. She stages internal conflict on a scale so massive that its details start to become clear; if they don't resolve, they at least become palpable.

"I’m very much a maximalist when it comes to production. I like vast landscapes. I like a stratosphere and a core -- I want the bass to be beneath the floor," Erin says. "This record is, in a lot of ways, a collection of some of the first moments that I was technologically able to achieve accurate renderings of how I hear my own emotional world."

It's hard to believe it's taken this long for a proper retrospective of legendary Los Angeles collective CVE. "We Represent Billions" is a crucial portrait of one of the West Coast's most low-key influential crews - a hydra-like collective of rappers, producers, designers and engineers who were key members of the Good Life Cafe's open mic scene, going on to inspire artists like Jurassic 5, Kendrick Lamar amongst many other. Initially called Chillin Villain Posse before morphing into Chillin Villain Empire in the late 1980s, they eventually centered around the core trio of Riddlore, NgaFsh and Tray-Loc. The crew were years ahead of their time, self-producing music without samples and pioneering a stream of consciousness lyrics that still sound fresh and innovative. CVE were self-sufficient and motivated from the beginning, named "Chillin Villains" because that's how they were perceived by white America. This social motivation was channeled into their groundbreaking performances at Good Life Cafe, the South Central session that evolved into Project Blowed and later on came to influence LA club night 'Low End Theory'. It was chronicled by Ava Duvernay, herself an MC in short-lived duo Figures of Speech, in her "This is the Life" documentary, where she interviewed CVE alongside Jurassic 5, Freestyle Fellowship, Abstract Rude and Busdriver. On "We Represent Billions", we're treated to a snapshot of the CVE sound from 1993-2003, their most prolific era. The retrospective collects music from the handful of albums the crew released on their own Afterlife Recordz label (mostly as limited edition CD-R's) plus many previously unreleased tracks and highlights their untethered eccentric creativity and sheer breadth of influence. Whether twisting twitchy West Coast electro on 'All Over Da Globe' or free associating over horror synths and foley sounds on 'Made in Chillz Ville' there's a sense that their music was just too future for its time. Assembled from heaving industrial samples and graced by back-and-forth tongue twisting flows, 'Thugs and Clips' is as eerie and hard-hitting as anything 2Pac's "The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory" full-length. Fuzzed-out and unsettling, 'Calistylics' welds an ambient synth loop and bone-rattling percussion to Tricky-esque percussion, while the flickering closer 'Unicycle' is a cross between Dr. Dre's icy G-gunk pressure and Three 6 Mafia's pitch black lo-fi funk. In many ways, 2022 is the perfect time to rediscover this music: an urgent, creative fusion of spine-tingling pre-grime electronic minimalism and mind bending wordplay that still sounds completely idiosyncratic and utterly alien. Tracks: 1 All Over Da Globe 2 Thugs and Clips 3 C.V. Vault 4 Made in Chillz Ville 5 Bring It On 6 Calistylics 7 No Feelins 8 Let's Get It On 9 Today Was A Fucked Up Day 10 Untitled (Freestyle) 11 Unicycle

It's hard to believe it's taken this long for a proper retrospective of legendary Los Angeles collective CVE. "We Represent Billions" is a crucial portrait of one of the West Coast's most low-key influential crews - a hydra-like collective of rappers, producers, designers and engineers who were key members of the Good Life Cafe's open mic scene, going on to inspire artists like Jurassic 5, Kendrick Lamar amongst many other. Initially called Chillin Villain Posse before morphing into Chillin Villain Empire in the late 1980s, they eventually centered around the core trio of Riddlore, NgaFsh and Tray-Loc. The crew were years ahead of their time, self-producing music without samples and pioneering a stream of consciousness lyrics that still sound fresh and innovative. CVE were self-sufficient and motivated from the beginning, named "Chillin Villains" because that's how they were perceived by white America. This social motivation was channeled into their groundbreaking performances at Good Life Cafe, the South Central session that evolved into Project Blowed and later on came to influence LA club night 'Low End Theory'. It was chronicled by Ava Duvernay, herself an MC in short-lived duo Figures of Speech, in her "This is the Life" documentary, where she interviewed CVE alongside Jurassic 5, Freestyle Fellowship, Abstract Rude and Busdriver. On "We Represent Billions", we're treated to a snapshot of the CVE sound from 1993-2003, their most prolific era. The retrospective collects music from the handful of albums the crew released on their own Afterlife Recordz label (mostly as limited edition CD-R's) plus many previously unreleased tracks and highlights their untethered eccentric creativity and sheer breadth of influence. Whether twisting twitchy West Coast electro on 'All Over Da Globe' or free associating over horror synths and foley sounds on 'Made in Chillz Ville' there's a sense that their music was just too future for its time. Assembled from heaving industrial samples and graced by back-and-forth tongue twisting flows, 'Thugs and Clips' is as eerie and hard-hitting as anything 2Pac's "The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory" full-length. Fuzzed-out and unsettling, 'Calistylics' welds an ambient synth loop and bone-rattling percussion to Tricky-esque percussion, while the flickering closer 'Unicycle' is a cross between Dr. Dre's icy G-gunk pressure and Three 6 Mafia's pitch black lo-fi funk. In many ways, 2022 is the perfect time to rediscover this music: an urgent, creative fusion of spine-tingling pre-grime electronic minimalism and mind bending wordplay that still sounds completely idiosyncratic and utterly alien. Tracks: 1 All Over Da Globe 2 Thugs and Clips 3 C.V. Vault 4 Made in Chillz Ville 5 Bring It On 6 Calistylics 7 No Feelins 8 Let's Get It On 9 Today Was A Fucked Up Day 10 Untitled (Freestyle) 11 Unicycle

For "Spectres", a 6-track split release, Buttechno teams up with DJ SPEEDSICK, a Chicago-based artist, famous for his raw and uncompromising approach to sound. Together they explore sonic and textural possibilities of the extreme forms of dancefloor music employing distinct ways of sound manipulation. Buttechno's side features highly saturated textures being torn out, dissected and sewed back together with a wicked use of spectral processing. On the other side, Dj Speedsick, known for reamping his material with guitar amplifiers and cabinets, puts out tracks that bear unique sonic qualities and transform the usual sense of space and distance. The underwordly sounds and high-speed beats presented on this split go beyond the common bounds of dancefloor music, exposing the spectres that dwell between the genres.

Matmos are one of the most prominent experimental electronic artists working today, crafting work by creating new conceptual frameworks & immediately testing those frameworks absolute limits. For Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer they've focused on another artist known, in large part, for doing the same. Boguslaw Schaeffer was one of the first Polish artists creating electronic music. In step with American contemporaries like John Cage and Morton Feldman, he worked across the boundaries of classical composition, electronic experimentation, and radical theater in playfully form-breaking ways. Matmos are not the first ones to recognize the power of his catalog, from Solo (a 2008 documentary that garnered numerous international awards), to the annual Shaeffer's Era Festival (most recently celebrated simultaneously in Warsaw and Los Angeles) his work continues to inspire. Regards.. however, was not just inspired by his work, Matmos were given access to the entirity of Schaeffer's recorded works to use as they saw fit, commissioned by the prestigious Instytutu Adama Mickiewicza. They re-assembled & re-combined these recorded works with modern instrumentations in a way that only Matmos could, and what emerges is a composite portrait of the utopian 1960s Polish avant-garde and the contemporary dystopian cultural moment regarding each other across a distance. To facilitate the transcultural exchange that is the album's essential premise, all song titles and liner-notes are provided in both English and Polish. The album was mastered by Rashad Becker and features illustration and design by acclaimed artist Robert Beatty (Tame Impala, Osees, Mdou Moctar). Like the anagrams of the letters of Boguslaw Schaeffer's name that were re-assembled to create some of the song titles, the album itself is a musical re-assemblage of component parts into possible but unforeseen new shapes. Adding harp from Irish harpist Una Monaghan, erhu, viola and violin from Turkish multi-instrumentalist Ulas Kurugullu, and electronic processes from Baltimore instrument builder Will Schorre, and Horse Lords wunderkind Max Eilbacher, the resulting arrangements constantly toy with scale as they move from the close-mic-ing of ASMR and the intimacy of chamber music to the immensity of processed drones and oceanic field-recordings that close the album. Offering a "life review" of production styles, Regards / Uklony dla Boguslaw Schaeffer builds temporary shelters out of the panoramic wreckage of modernist composition, sixties tape music, seventies dub, eighties industrial music, nineties postrock and dark ambient, 2000s era glitch fetishism, and contemporary post-everything collage sensibilities.

When words trail off at the beginning of claire rousay’s »everything perfect is already here«, ornate instrumentation is waiting to fill a void left by the breakdown of language. Yet it becomes clear as we trace rousay’s collaged sonic pathway that breakdown, of meaning and also of melody, is also a place to rest. everything perfect… is made up of two extended compositions that cycle between familiarity and unknowing. There are seemingly infinite ways to feel in response to these pieces of music, which shift tone across their languid duration, earnest like a familiar song but unbound from the emotional didacticisms of lyrical voice and pop form.

rousay builds a fluid landscape around the acoustic contributions of Alex Cunningham (violin), Mari Maurice (electronics and violin), Marilu Donovan (harp), and Theodore Cale Schafer (piano), whose respective melodies weave gently in and out, sometimes steady, sometimes aching, sometimes receding altogether in deference to less overtly musical sounds. That is, percussive texture in the form of unvarnished samples and field recordings: the rattle and rustle and the stops and starts of life unfurling, voices sharing memories nearly out of reach, doors closing, wind against a microphone. Everything comes from somewhere in particular, possessing the veneer of the diaristic, but sound’s provenance is secondary here and so these details become tangled and fused. On this release I hear such details not as individual ornaments or stories but the collective architecture of the greater composition. It’s an architecture that is not quite formed and thus full of openings out to the world unfolding.

“The world unfolding,” that’s a kind way of saying change, movement, loss, transformation. Things rousay here indexes, not without shards of desire or pain, still somehow what I hear is coarse peace in the in-between. These two pieces sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Where am I now? What is different outside of me? What is different inside of me? Um. I think. everything is perfect is already here, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.

The music guides a certain experience of the world around. In claire’s music there is this marriage—not just a pairing or juxtaposition but an interrelationship, an eventual confusion—of song/texture, narrative/abstraction, figure/ground. Everything comes from somewhere in particular but not just the voices, the field recordings, the what is being said or meant, what matters is the where you are now. There are so many ways of anchoring oneself in the present, some have to do with fantasy or storytelling and some with accepting what is.

These two compositions find peace between these modes. They sweep you away and then bring you to earth, but which is which, anyway? Their mode of feeling is inquisitive. Where am I now? What has changed outside of me? What has changed inside of me? The music, like the answers to these questions, is loose and beautiful in surprising ways.

It’s been a long way. All seems to blend naturally with ‘A Long Way’, the debut album from Parisian duo Jacques Bon & Drux.

Jacques is a long term friend, who was running the Paris branch of the Smallville record store for 13 years (2006 – 2019). He made himself a name also outside of Paris as a DJ and with music released on Giegling, Kann, Mule Musiq and of course Smallville. Jacques shares his studio in Paris with Vincent Drux, a producer and sound engineer, who recently started his own imprint Cabale Records. Both got together naturally in the studio for hour-long sessions to craft an album together. House music at its most meticulous form.

First, as a short form, in which every track captures another time zone of the dancefloor experience. And then as longform, as a whole album with a narrative that combines futuristic aesthetics, classic ethos and human warmth.

From the rolling percussion and windy-city style bassline of opener ‘Distant Voices’, with its cut yet longing distant voices, through deepy, dubby and raw ‘Celeste’, the haunting synths of ‘Mirage’; The snares that arrive mid through ‘Space Ways’ and launch into another level; ‘Radiance’’s Techy vibe ride; The late night chords and peak time beat programming of ‘Your Wings’; And then final couple stick the landing with enough energy, deepness and beauty - ‘Elevate’, which channels Bon and Drux’s inner Fred P, and ‘Sandstorm’, a mastery percussive tale with a long, repetitive chord that opens and closes, teases until it disappears and remains nothing but a whispery dying effect.

Words by Niv Hadas


All Tracks are written, produced and mixed by Jacques Bon & Vincent Drux

Rome’s own disco wizard L.U.C.A. aka Francesco De Bellis is back for his second LP Terra, hot on the heels of his Venus 12” EP earlier this year. In this far-reaching album, the Edizioni Mondo founder explores the deteriorating relationship between Man and Nature, and the dire consequences. The album is split into two themes - part one is Consacrazione (Consecration) and side two is Coscienza (Conscience) - as L.U.C.A. charts a trip through mankind’s psychic universe, and imagines worlds beyond our physical dimension.

The opening composition Cities is an uptempo number that slowly comes into focus, as dreamy drum machines emerge from the urban bustle, before settling into a soulful groove as keyboard, upright bass and guitar figures dance across bright percussion. As it builds up a head of steam, the piece gives way to an ambient, tribal breakdown, which is also echoed in the following song, Drum Talk. This second tune sets up in a fourth world dreamscape of drums, synths, and abstracted echo effects, and is peppered with word fragments from the bush of ghosts. By the time we’ve reached the third track, Congiunzione sounds like travelling at singularity speed, beaming in from a future where human consciousness and gaia can finally dance on a cosmic plain.

Part two of Terra details how revelation of the spirit can guide the mind, as Time Spirals rises out of a drum motif with a nod to classic ragas, as a disembodied voice asks questions on the nature of corporeality. The sound design is just as front and centre as the sitar and fretless bass, and the song gives way to a richly-layered soup that sounds like the vast space between atoms. It’s this shift from composition to ambience that is the dynamic core of Terra, giving L.U.C.A. plenty of space to showcase his next-level audio and arranging skills. Midway through part two, Giallo Assoluto begins with reverb tails and choral voices before expanding in brightness and texture until the audio field is practically levitating your hi-fi speakers, vibrating them with drones, twinkling keys and shards of digital noise. The closing composition Ritorno al Domani is a perfect balance of optimism and mystery. Tension and release collapse in on themselves as waves of ambient pads crescendo and then break over stretched-out sonic turbulence, before reversed synths bring the listener to a closing door, and the end of the journey.

It’s a mind-expanding musical exploration of other worlds and parallel universes which are surely all around us, and in many ways serve to remind us of the marvel that is our own planet.

The wiggy wanderings of Oog Bogo wind up on the same island of lost joys all at once, manufacturing a virtual jukebox of singles and side flips that won’t unplug, and just keeps reeling and raging on instead. A bright metallurgy of guitar pop, psych, post-punk and apocalypse disco embosses the sleek, multicoloured flash of ‘Plastic’.

 Oog Bogo are a four-piece rock band from Los Angeles and their new album is ‘Plastic’, an electrifying set of songs and sounds that just don’t stop, working like a machine that makes joy and endless flips and repetitions, whether in front of the turntable or out in the real world.
 In the past several years, Oog Bogo dropped two records that previewed this explosion in wildly divergent ways: 2019’s ‘Oogbogo’ EP, with wigged-out production, its contorted fun house mirror images pulling punk, psych and new wave in and out of focus in a chaotic procession of mutant tunes. 2021’s ‘EP2’ radiates a starkly different vibe, as chilled-out guitar-pop tunes conjure a flowing medley of plaintive echoes and atmospheres in a mellow mist of hiss.

 Kevin Boog recorded these records in a largely hermetic state: at home on 4-track, playing all the parts, slowly drawing out the sounds. The songs for ‘Plastic’ were demoed this way too, as a starting point for a group interpretation - but when, for obvious reasons, logistics prevented everyone from getting in the same room to even rehearse, the planned recording session at Ty Segall’s Harmonizer Studios took on a different shape.

 Starting off with only drummer Thomas Alvarez (Audacity) to accompany him, Kevin
realized that any obstacles to getting the record made were also opportunities, for
something else that was also right to happen. Rather than reach for the design of the
demos, he kept himself in the present moment, approaching every passage as fluidly
as possible, playing what he needed to play, staying open to what he needed to
know. It didn’t hurt that the laptop with all his songs crashed right after he walked into
the studio! There was no way possible but forward.
 The direction was right on with the guys at Harmonizer - Ty Segall’s sense of
imagination made him the ideal production counterpart to walk together with Kevin
into this world, psyched to experiment and ready to get weird at any time. Ty and
engineer Matt Littlejohn met all requests and requirements in the form of sounds, with
gear and approaches that amazed and delighted, and an eternally ebullient spirit.
 As this was Oog Bogo’s first time recording away from home, Kevin was a kid in a
candy store - where the store owner turns out to be a Wonka-esque philanthropist.
As band members Mike Kreibel (Dirty & His Fists) and Shelby Jacobson (Shannon
Lay) joined the session, there was a synchronicity and community with everyone
involved, finding an unexpected road to realizing the songs, with all the colours and
hues they added making everything pop that much harder.
 Fluidity was key: ‘Plastic’’s tunes depict a polymorphic cast of characters. As in life,
they leap avidly from style to style; from pretty psych rock to new wave apocalypse
disco and harsh post punk bleakness, sometimes in a verse and a half. Corkscrewing
over and over like a riff-driven space-coaster, morphing in and out of each
successive moment with increasing momentum and gravity, ‘Plastic’ defines and
redefines Oog Bogo, with sweet tunes, barely-controlled intensity and sharp
production moves - a killer first album and an equally killer evolving state of mind.

The wiggy wanderings of Oog Bogo wind up on the same island of lost joys all at once, manufacturing a virtual jukebox of singles and side flips that won’t unplug, and just keeps reeling and raging on instead. A bright metallurgy of guitar pop, psych, post-punk and apocalypse disco embosses the sleek, multicoloured flash of ‘Plastic’.

 Oog Bogo are a four-piece rock band from Los Angeles and their new album is ‘Plastic’, an electrifying set of songs and sounds that just don’t stop, working like a machine that makes joy and endless flips and repetitions, whether in front of the turntable or out in the real world.
 In the past several years, Oog Bogo dropped two records that previewed this explosion in wildly divergent ways: 2019’s ‘Oogbogo’ EP, with wigged-out production, its contorted fun house mirror images pulling punk, psych and new wave in and out of focus in a chaotic procession of mutant tunes. 2021’s ‘EP2’ radiates a starkly different vibe, as chilled-out guitar-pop tunes conjure a flowing medley of plaintive echoes and atmospheres in a mellow mist of hiss.

 Kevin Boog recorded these records in a largely hermetic state: at home on 4-track, playing all the parts, slowly drawing out the sounds. The songs for ‘Plastic’ were demoed this way too, as a starting point for a group interpretation - but when, for obvious reasons, logistics prevented everyone from getting in the same room to even rehearse, the planned recording session at Ty Segall’s Harmonizer Studios took on a different shape.

 Starting off with only drummer Thomas Alvarez (Audacity) to accompany him, Kevin
realized that any obstacles to getting the record made were also opportunities, for
something else that was also right to happen. Rather than reach for the design of the
demos, he kept himself in the present moment, approaching every passage as fluidly
as possible, playing what he needed to play, staying open to what he needed to
know. It didn’t hurt that the laptop with all his songs crashed right after he walked into
the studio! There was no way possible but forward.
 The direction was right on with the guys at Harmonizer - Ty Segall’s sense of
imagination made him the ideal production counterpart to walk together with Kevin
into this world, psyched to experiment and ready to get weird at any time. Ty and
engineer Matt Littlejohn met all requests and requirements in the form of sounds, with
gear and approaches that amazed and delighted, and an eternally ebullient spirit.
 As this was Oog Bogo’s first time recording away from home, Kevin was a kid in a
candy store - where the store owner turns out to be a Wonka-esque philanthropist.
As band members Mike Kreibel (Dirty & His Fists) and Shelby Jacobson (Shannon
Lay) joined the session, there was a synchronicity and community with everyone
involved, finding an unexpected road to realizing the songs, with all the colours and
hues they added making everything pop that much harder.
 Fluidity was key: ‘Plastic’’s tunes depict a polymorphic cast of characters. As in life,
they leap avidly from style to style; from pretty psych rock to new wave apocalypse
disco and harsh post punk bleakness, sometimes in a verse and a half. Corkscrewing
over and over like a riff-driven space-coaster, morphing in and out of each
successive moment with increasing momentum and gravity, ‘Plastic’ defines and
redefines Oog Bogo, with sweet tunes, barely-controlled intensity and sharp
production moves - a killer first album and an equally killer evolving state of mind.

Long-time audiophile favorite returns as a 45 RPM on four 200-gram LPs! Plated and pressed at Quality Record Pressings! Every cricket chirp and dog bark in stellar detail! An essential upgrade to the listening experience; improved sonic intensity Roger Waters' take on America's entertainment-obsessed society

This audiophile favourite — and a brisk seller since its Analogue Productions 33 1/3 reissue in 2015 — is back with an upgrade. Now a 45 RPM 4LP 200-gram set, the remastered audio completed by long-time Roger Waters / Pink Floyd collaborator and co-producer James Guthrie is chillingly detailed — every cricket chirp and dog bark on this distinctive album has even more sonic intensity and dimension.

An unblinking look at an entertainment-obsessed society, Amused to Death addresses issues that have only grown in complexity and urgency over the past two decades. With Amused to Death, Roger Waters sounded the alarm about a society increasingly - and unthinkingly — in thrall to its television screens. Twenty-three years later, Amused to Death speaks to our present moment in ways that could scarcely have been anticipated two decades ago. In 2022, television is just one option in an endless array of distractions available to us anytime, anywhere, courtesy of our laptops, tablets and smartphones. With eyes glued to our screens, the dilemmas and injustices of the real world can easily recede from view.

The 2022 4LP 45 RPM 200-gram vinyl edition of Amused to Death features remastered audio completed by long-time Roger Waters / Pink Floyd collaborator and co-producer, James Guthrie, and has been pressed at Quality Record Pressings. The updated cover and gatefold art is by Sean Evans, the creative director of Waters' 2010-2013 "The Wall Live" tour and movie.

Graeme Martin and Liam Karima made the new pet deaths album to be
both explored and sat with
In age of dull disconnection and constant refreshing, unhappy ending, the London
duo's second full- length effort, was deliberately and acutely considered to be a
journey of its own; nine new songs but one whole immersive piece for the listener
to climb inside, in the quiet of reflection, in the sobering commute to and
from.Following on from the sparkling celestial folk of the band's 2019 debut To
the Top of the Hill, unhappy ending is the next step in pet deaths' somewhat
remarkable journey. Setting out to make their new album, the band had one
question in the forefront of their collective mind: Is life an unhappy ending, or do
we become part of a bigger movement to more positive things?
Across the album's nine tracks, this conundrum is explored in many and
meaningful ways, their subtle take on melancholic folk- pop conjuring a
bewitching atmosphere that hangs over every inch of the album. unhappy ending
thrives within the world it creates for itself, one of distinctive colours and shapes
that feel intimate and familiar but always slightly off- kilter, as if you've
momentarily stepped into someone else's dream. It sings of love and loss and the
unwieldy connection between those two things, in ways that feel quietly radiant
and beguiling, caught in an alluring contrast. Recorded at a residential studio in
Oxfordshire which they used as a retreat from the business of London – fleshedout and toyed with over time with their acclaimed producer Ian Davenport
(Slowdive, Gaz Coombes, Radiohead's Philip Selway) who encouraged the duo to
lean into the wilder parts of their creativity. Inspired, musically, by the spiritual
moments of Alice Coltrane, the freeness of Miles' 'Bitches Brew', with a sprinkling
of Talk Talk's 'Spirit Of Eden' in its colourful unravelling, unhappy ending is an
enveloping experience, touching upon universal themes but all shone through the
lens of Karima's signature perspective.
Tour in May & June in support of the release - dates in Newcastle, London, Bristol,
Manchester & Sheffield.
Pet Deaths previously supported the likes of Elbow and Arab Strap.
Support from So Young Magazine, Chris Hawkins (BBC 6 Music), DIY Mag, Clash,
Huw Stephens (BBC Radio 1)

Celebrating the tenth anniversary of their third album, Five Finger Death Punch release a special gold vinyl version of 'American Capitalist', which is limited to 3,000 copies. Including hits such as 'Under And Over It', 'Coming Down' and 'Remember Everything‘, this album is already a classic!

Berlin-based label. Burial Soil proudly presents a collaborative electro album initiated by CYRK.

For their album "Freundschaft" CYRK has collaborated with Steffi, Anthony Rother, Ravn Jonassen, JakoJako, Jensen Interceptor, Alienata, Nite Fleit and David Carretta.
Over the last few years electro has had a massive resurgence. Since then, a new generation of producers has taken the genre under the microscope, recombining classic tropes and influences in new ways. CYRK is among the list of artists consistently pushing all things electro to new heights with forward thinking, dancefloor shattering and bass-heavy concoctions ready to turn your favorite club dance floor into a sea of spaced-out euphoria.

‘Found Light’ may be Laura Veirs’ 12th studio
album, but it also, in many ways, feels like her
debut. If 2020’s ‘My Echo’ - written and mixed just
prior to her 2019 split from her long-time husband,
her long-time producer, and the father of her two
sons - was her divorce album, ‘Found Light’ is
about what comes after.
 ‘Found Light’ is a liberating collection of inquisitive
and surprisingly assured snapshots of healing and
personal growth, and her very first release with coproduction credits. Despite the sadness and
suffering that prompted these 14 graceful wonders,
the result is a testament to the inspiration of
independence, to shaping new possibilities for
yourself even after great loss. It is a reminder that
we are always capable of something more.
 CD in 4-panel digisleeve with 12-page booklet with
lyrics.
 LP on 140g Pink Galaxy vinyl in 3mm spined
sleeve with printed inner sleeve.

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Tacit Group is an audio-visual group founded in 2008 with a vision of creating new art for the 21st century. Based in Seoul but working globally, the group comprises composer Jaeho Chang and electronic musician Gazaebal(Lee Jinwon).

With audio-visual art as its core content, Tacit Group has expanded in a contemporary and experimental way in multimedia performances, interactive installations, and music installations. Representative works such as ‘Hun-Min-Jeong-Ak,’ ‘Game Over,’ ‘Morse ㅋung ㅋung,’ combine a systematic worldview weaved through intuitive materials and technology inspired by normal everyday activities such as games and text chatting. In particular, works that utilize the beauty and communica- tion power of characters are among their most striking.

“It’s like wind chimes,” says Tacit Group’s Jeaho Chang. “The creator makes the pipes, but the wind makes the music.” He’s talking about the algorithmic music that Tacit Group creates. Jaeho and Gazaebal create audio/visual systems using code that the pair work within to unleash their utterly compelling AV performances, each show, each track, as unique as a snowflake. The pair met at Korea National University of Arts in 2006. Jaeho Chang was a media installation artist and composer who’d studied classical composition in Korea and electronic music at Den Haag’s Conservatoire. Gazaebal, who’d moved to the US as a teen, had worked at the renowned Quad group studios as a sound engineer, recording acts including Rage Against The Machine, Wu Tang and Janet Jackson. Returning to Korea, he had found success as a K-Pop producer, (founding the act Banana Girl, and writing their No.1 Korean hit ‘Shake Your Ass’) and DJing under the moniker Gazaebal, before deciding to go ‘back to school’ to learn to create more challenging music.
The quiet and reserved Jae and the more outgoing Gazaebal bonded over a shared vision, forming Tacit Group in 2008. And until recently, everything they have done has been through the medium of their globally acclaimed live shows, playing all over the world from Lincoln Center in NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, MMCA (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art) and Nam June Paik Art Center in Korea, Aarhus Festival in Denmark, Stereolux in France and NYU Abu Dhabi.

Each show an utterly unique and compelling event, a synthesis of music and visual art that has echoes of the concept of synesthesia: “we love the idea that the audience can ‘see’ the music.” says Gazaebal, “the way that you can hear a painting like Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’.” The frameworks and systems are created in advance using code such as C++ and max/M- SP(sometimes combined with analog and modular synthesizers), often growing out a of a simple idea (one of their first composi- tions, ‘Game Over’ explored the idea of a Tetris gameplay as a musical score) while on stage the pair react to the audience, creating new inputs and variables that can lead the performance in ways that are unexpected and even self sustaining - some of their installations could in theory continue to evolve and run on into infinity.

For Tacit Group, the process is as important as the outcome, and every bit as fascinating for the audience, who’ve been known to react like the crowd at a rock band gig to tracks / installations like ‘Hun-Min-Jeong-Ak’ which sees abstract geometric shapes based on the Korean alphabet evolve (through the process of live text interchanges between the pair) to become almost an immersive call and response.With that in mind, the duo have long been reluctant to commit to the idea of releasing via a ‘fixed medium’ it was actually the release of an acclaimed (and beautifully designed) book Tacit.print0_Anthology that convinced them to share their work more widely through an album.

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I met Thomas Roussel in 2017 at a Pigalle fashion show in Paris. As always with Stéphane Ashpool, the designer of Pigalle, casting is perfect and the clothes are modern and groundbreaking. But my eyes and ears were intrigued by this retro-futuristic instrument next to me, the Cristal Baschet. French composer and conductor Thomas Roussel wrote the soundtrack of the show.
He add this magnificent instrument in his "not very classical" orchestra, this is what I immediately loved with him!
He invited us into his world of classical music with a fresh twist, simplicity and audacity.
At the same time I was scratching my head to find something different to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Ed Banger records.
For a long time I had this idea of mixing both electronic and classical music together. Exactly like my heroes Metallica did in 1999 with the Symphonic orchestra of San Francisco! Thomas Roussel seems the perfect man for this crazy idea. We did Ed Banger 15 together and we became friends.
Thomas Roussel grew up in Dijon, spent his days at the conservatory and his nights at L’An-Fer, one of the most respected Techno club in France. Probably the reason why he ended up working with Jeff Mills, on two projects mixing Jeff’s 909 and a classical orchestra.
By experimenting new ways of using an orchestra, by creating state-of-the-art scenography and producing more ambitious music he quickly became the man in charge of everything "classica". The list of his collaborations is too long and will ruin this little introduction.
It could sounds like this : Chanel, Apple, Cartier, Kenzo, Nike, Dior…
Performing from Paris to Macau, from Monte Carlo to Dubai and from New York to Beijing!
In 2017 Thomas Roussel released his first album as Prequell with Universal Music.
A successful collaboration that really allows Thomas Roussel to become an artist.
In 2022 Ed Banger records is proud to release Thomas Roussel "LATE METAL" a 3 tracks EP.
Where uplifting orchestration and electronic music composing collide. The perfect soundtrack of a block buster movie mixing George Lucas & Christopher Nolan generations. It’s also a marker of our time, music boundaries are explosing. It’s time to hear the London Symphony Orchestra’s strings battling with a Drum’n’Bass beat, a way to DEIFIED classical music.
It’s also a record for your eyes. Art director Andy Picci created an algorthym and gave life to a mercury abstract form. This collaboration
marks the need for Thomas Roussel to always push the boundaries and take his project to another LEVEL.

IATT is pleased to once again team up with Black Lion Records for the follow up to 2019's Nomenclature; our new full length album entitled Magnum Opus. We've meticulously crafted this album to leap from where Nomenclature left us thematically.
The listener is catapulted from the 1700s (Arsenic Ways) further back in time to a much darker, older world and the esoteric sciences of Alchemy. It was in this time man aimed to harness the world around him, bending the natural elements in a quest to obtain power, knowledge, control, and even immortality itself.
Alchemy was the key to unlocking the secrets of existence and elevating one's self to the pinnacle of enlightenment through transmutation and manipulation of the earthly elements. It was only through the process of Magnum Opus (the great work) that alchemists could harness the elementals in their purest form to create the Philosopher's Stone - the key to power, enlightenment, and immortality.
Just as in alchemy itself, creating this album has been a journey of transformation for us; a period of great growth as individuals and as a unit. It's through adversity, struggles, and the forging of the elements - of literal blood, sweat, and tears - we strive to transcend and elevate to our highest selves, "the great work", Magnum Opus.

Sound Like: (Immolation, Spawn of Possession, Death, Emperor, Obscura)