Buscar:turn me up

Clear vinyl, limited to 700 copies. Upon hitting play on the opening prologue track of BATS, it's safe to assume that we're about to embark on quite the journey - with GAMA BOMB as our intrepid tour guides. From the tombs of Egypt to the faded glamour of old Hollywood, Philly, Domo, John, Joe and James lead us through new sonic landscapes and all manner of novel adventures on what they themselves call their "weirdest" album yet. Sonically, GAMA BOMB manage to stay true to their distinctive thrash sound, honed to perfection over two decades at the frontline of headbanging and fist-pumping. There are nods to heavy metal titans such as Judas Priest and Iron Maiden, there's even a sliver of Bad Brains-esque punk attitude, and more familiar influences such as Tankard and Sodom are still evident. But if you think GAMA BOMB are serving up something run of the mill then you've clearly not accounted for a blazing saxophone solo (courtesy of Irish sax man Gavin Kerins) or a star-turn from hip hop pioneer The Egyptian Lover who raps on - naturally - Egyptron. BATS is an album that could only be borne from GAMA BOMB; on this, their eighth studio album, they have embraced their inner absurdities, they've taken a trust fall into each other's arms, relying on the idiosyncratic glue that has bound them together over the last 21 years to propel them forwards.

"With gargantuan riffs and amps turned up to 11, pure metal is tempered with the grace and complexity that have become the band’s trademark...an unapologetically fierce beast" - The Guardian The legendary CAVE IN perform a ferocious live set at BBC Studios in Maida Vale! The session was recorded on October 24, 2022 on The Radio 1 Rock Show with Daniel P. Carter, and features tracks from their critically acclaimed newest album, Heavy Pendulum. FFO: Converge, Helmet, Mastodon, Dillinger Escape, Queens of the Stoneage, Baroness, Chelsea Wolfe, Melvins, Red Fang

Hark! Joel Paterson returns to your holiday turntable with "The More The Merrier" (Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar Vol. 2). The guitar wizard from Chicago slides down your chimney once again with this latest program of instrumental gems. Recorded in lifelike "holiday-phonic" high fidelity, these 14 selections are a study in artistry and sound. "The More The Merrier" is a companion piece to the perennial fan-favorite, "Hi-Fi Christmas Guitar". No mere sequel, this new album will soon join its predecessor as an integral part of your holiday gatherings for years to come. This is music to please guitarists, carolers, and hi-fi enthusiasts alike. Limited "Ruby Red" colored vinyl.

Undo & Casiowaves return to Melodize with the ‘Casiobass’ EP backed with a remix from Nhar.

A long-time resident at Barcelona’s legendary Razzmatazz and label head of Factor City for two decades, Undo is a Spanish mainstay with countless releases that have garnered support from the likes of Andrew Weatherall, Roman Flugel and Erol Alkan. He teams up with fellow Spaniard and synth-pop wizard Casiowaves to return for their second collaborative release on Melodize after last year’s ‘Predict The Future’ EP.

The straight-forward ‘Casiobass’ kicks off with fizzing synth lines, chugging dark disco drums, a fat bass and
circling pads. ‘Overcruiser’ is a pumping, Italo-influenced cut with retro-future chords and a clean, cosmic feel, while ‘Something Blue’ layers up the crispy analogue drums with sonar pulses, deadpan cold wave vocals and majestic leads that bring color and vibrancy.

Drummer-turned electronic producer and live act Nhar, who boasts an impressive discography spanning two decades, makes his debut on the label with a remix of ‘Waves to Come’ that brings a widescreen serenity and calm to the original through pensive chord work and starry keys twinkling in the distance. The original then closes out with Balearic guitar licks, punchy drums, and rich bass for a fusion of retro sounds with futuristic sentiment. From the driving Casiobass to the Balearic, serene ‘Waves to Come,’ Undo & Casiowaves have served up offerings for all hours with the versatile ‘Casiobass’ EP.

A defining album of the 90s, Last Splash by The Breeders turns 30 this year. To celebrate, the band have returned to the original tapes to give it its first-ever remaster, and by doing so have also unearthed two lost tracks that will delight fans. Recorded by the "classic" Breeders line-up of Kim Deal, Kelley Deal, Josephine Wiggs and Jim Macpherson and featuring singles "Cannonball" and "Divine Hammer", Last Splash was "an alt-rock classic" (Pitchfork"s Top 100 Records of 1990s) on release; a fast seller too, quickly attaining Platinum status in the US. Despite having had the boxset treatment on its 20th birthday, the album was still left to be remastered so 10 years on, the original y" tapes were taken out of the archives and have been lovingly worked on by Kim Deal, Benjamin Mumphrey and Miles Showell (Abbey Road). Never sounding so good, the album for its 30th anniversary, it"s getting the ultimate vinyl pressing. Entitled Last Splash (the 30th Anniversary Original Analog Edition), this new version has been cut at half speed at Abbey Road by Miles Showell, now spanning two LPs and running at 45rpm. A Japanese cd edition will also be available. This edition contains an exclusive, one-sided etched 12" which features two previously unreleased tracks - "Go Man Go" and "Divine Mascis" ("Go Man Go" is a track that Kim co-wrote with Black Francis while "Divine Mascis" is a different version of "Divine Hammer" with Dinosaur Jr."s J Mascis on lead vocals). Both tracks originate from the original sessions and were left forgotten until the sessions were exhumed to create this new master. The attention to detail continues to the album"s art, which equally celebrates Vaughan Oliver"s iconic sleeve. With Vaughan sadly no longer with us, his long-time design partner Chris Bigg has gloriously reimagined the album"s sleeve for this new version.

Straight Outta Caledonia is the first commercially available “Greatest Hits” of the outsider songwriter Jackie Leven, an artist
who has largely remained in obscurity in his native Scotland despite being one of the greatest wordsmiths – and singers – it ever
produced. A well-travelled musician who began making psychedelic, progressive music in the late 60s before emerging as an
epic storyteller full of pathos, humour and humanity in the 90s, Leven lived and wrote like many of the fragile, gregarious
characters of his songs; large, full of life and empathy. Leven passed away in 2011 after recording 30+ albums under different
guises or with his briefly successful New Wave band Doll by Doll. Straight Outta Caledonia is a compilation collated by Night
School Records on its Archival label School Daze that seeks to introduce Leven’s music to new generations.
In an age of isolation, alienation and loss of visceral experience, Jackie Leven’s music can be massive and welcoming. It feels
connected to some universal humanity and vibrates with vitality. His songs are often full of tragedy and comedy simultaneously,
cutting straight to the heart, often plugging directly into the nervous system of the listener. His lyrics are rich, dense with imagery
that can veer from apocalyptic to the comically banal in a sentence, with a songwriting panache that can be heavy handed to
almost bursting point before skewering the song with a clownish, warm punchline. His productions ranged from Bob Dylan’s
Rolling Thunder Revue style rock band orchestrations with strings and organ as on the epic Ancient Misty Morning or they could
be pared down to the purest form of folk song as on Poortoun: Leven on stage alone with an acoustic guitar, albeit played with a
mastery of the instrument that he often only hinted at. Musically his sound can bend traditional structures or stay completely
confined within them yet still forever push towards an ecstatic release, as on the cinematic Snow In Central Park.
The most exciting, jaw-droppingly effective tool at Leven’s disposal was his voice. A multi-octave instrument that, though
damaged during a savage assault in Fife, he used with flair; he had both a brazen disregard for the rules and a deep humility, all
of which is evidenced with every phrasing. A baritone that could flit up through the register – always touched by his gentle
Kirkcaldy accent – it’s the prime delivery method for his songs. Leven’s voice enabled him to inhabit the characters in his songs to
an uncanny degree, a skill that in turn enables the listener to empathise with them and, subsequently, the singer. It’s most evident
in stand out song The Sexual Loneliness Of Jesus Christ, a breathtaking re-telling of the life of its protagonist, not as a pure,
sinless messiah but as a sexually frustrated, solitary man condemned to an existential loneliness no one else will ever feel. In
many ways the track is the archetypal Jackie Leven song. Produced by Pere Ubu’s David Thomas, what strikes the ear first –
after the samples of unemployed workers in Glasgow following the closing of the Clyde shipyards – is the audacious, rhythmic
tremolo effect Leven employs through the verses before the production opens up to allow Leven’s vocal to lift into a soar, a
freeing glide powered both by the force of the singer’s chutzpah and the inherent, doomed destiny of the protagonist. With any
other singer such subject matter could come across as gauche or worse, pretentiously sonorous, but Jackie Leven’s genius was
such that he could be this cinematic and brazen while touching something elemental and true in the beholder. It’s a skill evident in
every song on Straight Outta Caledonia, the trademark of a songwriter who revelled and excelled in intensity with a lightness of
touch.
In his lifetime, Jackie Leven toured, wrote and recorded at a ferocious rate. He recorded under aliases to avoid record contract
restrictions, played house shows in Europe after or instead of official concerts, events which were often spoken word story telling
masterclasses as well as performances of his often bewilderingly dense songbook. His music has traditionally been catalogued
as “folk” music and has been largely banished to a small, dedicated group of international fans and apostles both private and well
known, like author Ian Rankin or Glenn Matlock. Since his passing in 2011 however, there has been a growing recognition
amongst a newer generation, with artists like James Yorkston or Molly Nilsson publicly stating the influence of the unsung
troubadour on their own craft. Jackie Leven’s fairytales for hard men are often forensic deconstructions of masculinity, sad and
ecstatic, light and shadow, always endlessly rich, a resource as bountiful as Leven himself’s human spirit undoubtedly was.

“I hope you die by my side, the two of us at the exact same time, I hope we die not long from now, the two of us at the exact same time”
By the time Molly Nilsson released History, she had already established a fledgling cult status built on homemade YouTube videos and home-burnt Cdrs. Writing from a distance, it’s clear that History is the first classic album in her canon and arguably a classic of the 21st Century underground music panorama.While the methodology on History hadn’t changed from Nilsson’s previous 3 albums – it was recorded solo at The Lighthouse, Nilsson’s home studio based on a Berlin crossroads – on this record the songwriting reached a new peak and the emotional scythe cut deeper. Here, Nilsson managed to combine a cosmic, outward looking perspective with an intimate knowledge of the human condition and its place in these turbulent times. In truth, no other songwriter has excavated the modern psyche so clearly and perfectly.
The tracklist to Nilsson’s fourth album reads as an early greatest hits for Molly Nilsson followers and also serves as the perfect entry point to a whole world the artist has been building for the last 10 years. In Real Life crystalises the millenial obsession with relationships built online, with a generation paying for the baby boomer’s excesses with their anxiety towards the harshness of every day life. It’s a call to arms for a generation who fell in love on Skype. On I Hope You Die, one of Molly Nilsson’s most iconic songs, the songwriter flips the song title into a tale of doomed romance, a relationship based on discommunications and the thrill of the other. It’s also one of the most heartfelt songs full of pathos written by anyone, an ode to obsession. Doomed romance, life lived on the flipside of day and the role of the outsider in society are themes that crop up through-out History. On
Bottles Of Tomorrow, the narrator is sweeping up, in love with the night and examining the remains a society leaves behind.
On City Of Atlantis, Nilsson veers from the plaintive balladry she had begun to make her name with, embracing trance-like synth and dance music details to create an unlikely anthem using the mythological city as a means to comment on the patriarchal rendering of history by power. With by now trademark panache, she turns complicated subject matter into a glorious song that transforms into an ecstatic pop moment.
Hotel Home, another Nilsson classic, paints loneliness not as a debilitating anxiety, but as a powerful to that propels the artist forward through her travels. It’s a song that hints at an endearing self-awareness also; the writer is never at home, living life on the road, content that “the world will find me when the time is ripe.”
There’s never been a greater time.

• Following on from the highly successful first two editions of
Dance Masters featuring the classics mixes from maestros
Shep Pettibone and Arthur Baker, the spotlight turns to
another remix legend, John Luongo.

• Boston born, John is one of the truly legendary DJ's and
remixers of the Disco era. John got his break at Epic by
overdubbing percussion from salt shakers and spoons onto a
promo and then passing them back the tape. This resulted in
him being flown to New York, and put in a studio (of his
choice) to mix and produce Melba Moore`s “You Stepped
Into My Life”. From this point everything he touched was a
hit. He went onto remix Disco classics by Jackie Moore –
“This Time Baby”, Dan Hartman “Vertigo / Relight My Fire”
and Patti Labelle “Music Is My Way Of Life”.

• However, John was not afraid of remixing artists that didn’t
fit into the disco genre and this attitude is borne out by the
tracklisting of this compilation, on which Gladys Knight and
The Pips rub shoulders with Fine Young Cannibals and
Billy Idol, and Baltimora appears alongside Banararama
and Serge Ponsar.

• “…if you played this whole thing, just put it on and didn’t
tell anyone it was me, they’d say ‘boy, what a great group of
songs this is!’” - John Luongo

• This cut down 16 track essential edition in pressed on 140g
black vinyl and features foreword by Arthur Baker and an indepth essay written by Alexis Petridis (Rock and Pop
reviewer for The Guardian).

• All tracks remastered by Nick Robbins at Sound
Mastering

First Word Records in collaboration with Heavenly Sweetness proudly bring you a 'Beautiful' new album from the formidably funky French duo, Souleance.

So the saying goes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder (or perhaps in this case, the ear!). How we define beauty varies from person to person. Be it a meal, a landscape, a picture, a record… Appreciating and admiring beauty could be considered an art in itself, and one that Souleance have made a rule of life. This ethic is transposed into their own craft, used as fuel to turn beautiful moments into music.

This 15-track album seeks to convey this through an assortment of sun-saturated grooves of different shapes and sizes. While remaining true to their style of creating cut & paste sound collages and incorporating dusty samples, this album seeks to expand upon their own sonic path. Fulgeance lays down masterful work on keys, beats and bass, with Soulist the driving force behind song composition and percussive scratching. Comb...

The last twelve months have been a whirlwind for Henry Counsell and Louis Curran, the men who make up Joy (Anonymous). Having established themselves during the Covid-19 era by playing impromptu meet-ups on London’s South Bank, they have graduated to bigger venues, travelled to far-flung locales and recorded their second album, Cult Classics, while maintaining the spontaneous energy and irrepressible joy that made their name. Their music revels in the euphoria of being alive and all the feelings, good or bad, that come with it. It invites us into a community, draws us close and promises the night of our lives.

Recorded over the course of a year, the blueprint for Cult Classics was laid down over a two-week span at Imogen Heap’s Round House in east London. Joy (Anonymous) invited friends old and new to visit - they’d record live instruments in jam sessions upstairs and then retreat to a second room to flip and loop and generally mess with the sounds, moulding them into sizzling dance tracks. “Loads of people were coming up to me like ‘I thought this was going to be a dance record?’” Louis says, remembering the quietly beautiful music they’d be recording. “I’d be like, don’t worry about that, just keep playing.” He’d send it back to people later and they’d be floored - “That was my bit and you’ve made it... jungle!”

It was an organic and creatively fulfilling approach, one that didn’t allow any of the music to get stale or stagnate. As they built the tracks from the sounds they’d collected, Joy (Anonymous) would weave the new songs into their famously improvised live sets, testing them, refining them, taking note of the audiences’ reactions. In a year punctuated by a lot of travel, they’d also incorporate the voices of people they met along the way - “Beazley’s Poem”, which opens the record, features the words of a man who was working security at a Fred Again show at New York’s Terminal Five. “He was basically doing the opposite of his job and being a hype man, climbing on the fence and ramping up the crowd - we ended up hanging out with him - like, who’s this legend?” Louis explains. “He just speaks really amazingly about his life, all these amazing thoughts and opinions - he started jumping on the mic when we were playing, preaching these amazing messages to the crowd, like that we all need to be nicer to each other. The first time we played the record in its entirety, he introduced us and that’s the recording we’ve used.”

Joy (Anonymous) remain dedicated to the spirit of spontaneity. They shut a street down with a surprise waterside party in New York. On a trip to Copenhagen they played an impromptu set in a cafe, which turned into a house party and a night-long good time. In Lithuania, they ended up playing in a decommissioned prison. It’s harder, perhaps, to keep that spirit alive now that they are operating more within the confines of the music industry but they will keep lugging their kit to wherever the party calls for as long as they can. “I think if we lose that, we’ve kind of lost what makes us us,” Henry says.

Bursting with multi-genre reference points and disparate influences, Cult Classics is very much a dance album. The samples we made ourselves or we took from music that is quite different to dance music, but we definitely wanted to shout out a lot of the dance influences that we love,” Henry says. They listened to a lot of Daft Punk and Basement Jaxx as well as The Prodigy (“more rage stuff”), taking songwriting tips from their dance forebears, but also recording bits that felt more like jazz and motown (see: A Place I Belong and the lovely album closer, You’re In Or You’re Out). Emir Taha’s gentle classical guitar runs like a thread throughout Cult Classics, washing into the undertones of the record, tying it all together.

The album follows the beat of a night out, from frenetic, sweaty movement to the gentler winding down as the dawn breaks. At times it is euphoric, celebratory and pure, whirling fun, at others it seeks the joy in the darker emotions that life throws our way. 404 is designed to encapsulate everything about the Joy (Anonymous) journey so far. Skittering beats and ghostly vocals give way to vibrating house chords: sirens blare as we approach a dubstep drop. It’s dramatic and wild, ratcheting up, seeming to settle then hitting you with an intense and frantic breakdown before the ghostly vocal returns to lull us back into the world. It has the feel of a hungry cat playing with a mouse, toying with it before letting it get away.

What sounds like someone playing the spoons on playful, housey How We End Up Here is actually Louis’ restless habit of clicking his rings on everything, one of a myriad of calling cards and easter eggs that day one fans will recognise. They rework Miley Cyrus and Swae Lee’s Party Up The Street into a French-electro-inspired future classic, adding a note of melancholy to a tune that you can imagine hearing blaring from every car on a summer drive. The lyrics on Cult Classic are generally reassuring, inspirational, originally drawn from Henry in stream-of-consciousness freestyles. You’re fine the way you are, they seem to say - the repeated “No need to try” of A Place I Belong, the assurance that “It’s in me all the time” on In Me All The Time. Even the summery but regretful Did You Wrong hints at the growth that is possible from less than ideal behaviour. For Joy (Anonymous), joy isn’t about just being “happy” all the time - it’s about relishing every element of your being.

The name ‘Joy (Anonymous)’ is taken from the work Henry did with Alcoholics Anonymous groups: it is a way to build a community around sharing joy. Their impromptu live sets are known as ‘meetings’; they encourage fans to share moments of joy to their website. They care deeply about the scene they’ve come up in and are determined not to leave it behind. Every show is another chance to reach out and connect with people who love to come together and revel in music as loud as it can go.

Support slots for Fred Again and The Streets, wild B2Bs with Fred and Skrillex, and a set at Four Tet’s Finsbury Park all-dayer this summer have given the duo the opportunity to live out childhood dreams and introduced their infectious live shows to new audiences at huge venues.

With an album as assured and joyful as Cult Classics on the horizon (and a killer collab with The Blessed Madonna coming up), they’re only going to reach higher heights. But the essence of Joy (Anonymous) remains on the South Bank. Between shows at Ally Pally in September, they dragged their camping chairs and gear back down to the banks of the Thames: and it just felt right.

■ Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me ist das fünfte Studioalbum von Gloria Estefan und ihr erstes
Album mit Coverversionen. Das Album enthält Lieder, die für Estefan eine besondere
Bedeutung haben, darunter "Everlasting Love", "It's Too Late" und "Turn The Beat
Around". Diese klassischen Songs stammen von Künstlern wie Carole King, Elton John,
Neil Sedaka und Blood, Sweat & Tears, unter anderen. Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me wurde
in den USA doppelt mit Platin und in Spanien vierfach mit Platin ausgezeichnet. Das
Album war in den USA, in Spanien und auch im Vereinigten Königreich erfolgreich in den
Charts.
Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me wird zum ersten Mal seit seiner ursprünglichen
Veröffentlichung neu aufgelegt und ist als limitierte Edition von 2000 einzeln nummerierten
Copies auf White Vinyl erhältlich. Das Album enthält ein Beiblatt mit Texten und
Anmerkungen von Gloria selbst

Repress of the sold out Record Store Day release, this time on a different colour. Black Spiders – Those trusted and true sons of the north are back. “We knew the new album had to be special. We’ve been away for a while. The first album was a straight shot, the second on the rocks, with this new one we had to kick down the brewery doors!” Pete Spiby. Back in June of 2017, Sheffield rock beasts Black Spiders waved goodbye to an army of loyal fans with some sonically charged shows before retreating into the shadows. And then, in November of last year, with the world in the grips of the Coronavirus pandemic and after a long year of very little fun from out of the silhouettes they returned with ‘Fly In The Soup’, the first new Black Spiders music in 6 years. Exactly the feel-good shot in the arm the world needed, while we await that other vaccine. The seeds of the Black Spider return were actually planted last summer, when singer and guitarist Pete Spiby began taking to guitarist Ozzy Lister to start writing new material and before they knew it, they had amassed the best part of 40 songs in a very short period of time which they whittled down. And then the pandemic hit. “It’s certainly been a strange process, in unfamiliar territory,” explains Pete. “We started to look at how we could do it given the restrictions and not only that, but we had to replace our original drummer too. For us and probably most other bands, we would usually take a riff or song idea to a rehearsal and thrash it out ‘till we either had something or it ended up in the song graveyard! This time around we couldn’t do that, so myself, Ozzy and on occasion Adam Irwin (bass player) started to send ideas back and forth until we had something to work with in GarageBand. We got to a point where we had enough song ideas with basic structure to go into a studio. It was at this point when we had to look for a new drummer.” With former drummer ‘Tiger’ Si Atkinson unavailable to play, with a week or two of grooming, the band took a chance on Planet Rock DJ Wyatt Wendel to occupy the drum stool. “I've never joined or worked with a band in this way EVER,” laughs Wyatt. “2020 certainly made it surreal. “A Pete/Ozzy writing session at the beginning of the year had produced some promising results, but it felt like barriers were popping up everywhere,” explains bassist Adam Irwin. “We started talking about how we could use technology such as GarageBand to help, and slowly but surely the song writing gathered pace. It was time to hook up with our old producer Matt Elliss and try these new songs out in the studio. “Heading into the studio to record songs we’d written but never played together, with a drummer that we’d never met, is one of the stranger experiences I’ve had while being in a band. Thankfully, Wyatt has turned out to be an excellent addition, who despite his faults (loud, southern) has fit right into the band dynamic. Covid has made life really tough for so many of us in our industry. And yet, this new way of song writing has been liberating, this is the most consistent and prolific we’ve ever been, and I am immensely proud of this album.” Against all of the odds, Black Spiders have crafted an album that features 13 tracks of high-energy, feel-good rock n’roll contrasted by demonic doom that despite the disjointed, isolated way it was recorded. It sounds like a band, firing on all cylinders. “We had to dig down deep to pull out some gems and what would we want from Black Spiders,” questions Pete. War, vengeance, mental health, death, conservation & climate change, where are we from? Relationships, friendships, our flaws. Where are we going? Alien life and Mother Earth - some of which made the record.” Kicking off with the aforementioned ‘Fly In The Soup’ single, this 3rd ST long-player wastes no time in grabbing you by the scruff of the neck and dragging you through an album where good times, hooks and riffs are not in short supply, but the doom-drenched likes of ‘Wizard Shall Not Kill Wizard’ and the psychedelic groove of album closer ‘Crooked Black Wings’ give us an album of many moods and dynamics and a reason to be cheerful in 2021. And why does the album have no title? “It wasn’t hard picking a title for the album, as we decided that the focus should be on the band, not the album title, so we decided not to have one. Let the music do the talking....

The latest album release by acclaimed Norwegian band Erlend Apneseth Trio is made in collaboration with renowned experimental composer and vocalist Maja Ratkje. Their impromptu concert together in 2022 was a glorious kick-off for a five-day festival and was luckily put on tape. After reworking and reimagining the recorded material with their steady collaborator Jorgen Træen, the result is a refreshing take on improvisations-turned-compositions. Featuring innovative soundscapes with archival material and an engaging transitory state. Listening to the album is akin to being on a voyage of discovery, in and out of the dream state. From the very beginning, the listener is met by ancient voices on tape, surrounded by distorted and dispersed sounds. Like stars on a moonless night, the sounds fall in and out of perceptibility, most twinkling, some falling. You suddenly wake up on a speeding train. As it enters a tunnel, ghostly voices sing a lullaby. The music gradually unfolds from mesmerizing melancholia to a ritualistic blowout. The music always takes the route of the unexpected and reaches momentums which shows why this is one of Norway's most unique constellations. Orbiting sounds gather around and assemble themselves into scenes, forming uncanny rooms collectively dreamed up by the artists. The album's first track Tre Vegar follows an enthralling pathway layered with field recordings and intensified by noise, suddenly plunging into a delightful stream of chords fleeting in mid-air. The variety of sounds that make up this glorious and aptly named 'Collage' is astounding. Elemental sounds range from the howling wind and soft-bright ringing of sheep-bells to the timeless trickling of a small stream of water. Strings of many timbres soar over animated croaks and quacks, assembling into a swampy symphony. The well-balanced diversity of acoustic and electric sounds has become the band's trademark. It is ever-present, complementing and creating new improvisatory trails to follow. Erlend Apneseth: Hardanger fiddle Stephan Meidell: baritone acoustic guitar, live sampling, modular synth Oyvind Hegg-Lunde: acoustic & electronic drums, percussion, timpani Maja S. K. Ratkje: voice, electronics

Here's the thing about ill peach: this band exists because they are too weird to not exist. The seed of ill peach was first planted in the recording studios of New York City where Pat Morrissey and Jess Corazza were working together as professional songwriters, collaborating with artists like Icona Pop, SZA, Weezer, Pharrell, Big Freedia, and others. Then came the day they were offered their own publishing deal. Cool, right? Well, about that: "Everyone kept saying, 'The stuff that you're writing is slightly too left-of-center-weirdo stuff," remembers Morrissey. "Why don't you start your own project?" Thus ill peach, a pop band with a punk streak and a taste for both the rotten and the sweet, with an approach to making music that goes something like: "Do you want to pick up a guitar and do you want to be on this water jug and we'll record it on the iPhone and create some weird drum pattern?" Following a series of well-received EPs on their own Pop Can Records (a record label and artist collective Morrissey and close collaborator Jesse Schuster run with friends), a digital single for Hardly Art's 15th anniversary series, and some colorful music videos that crystallized the band's visual aesthetic along with their sound, ill peach's "weirdo stuff" comes to fruition on first full-length THIS IS NOT AN EXIT: a collection of anthemic songs built out of bright pop and gritty experimental elements (Morrissey names the sculptural use of distortion on the final albums by Low as an inspiration), punctuated with hooky choruses ready to be screamed along to in the safety of your own bedroom or with a bunch of friends at one of ill peach's intense live shows. If ill peach first blossomed in New York, it took quarantine in Los Angeles for the project to ripen. The end of the world turned out to be what ill peach needed to get real with themselves. "It helped us creatively to zone in and removed us from the industry side of things to where we could just be like: this is our new identity, let's jump with both feet." THIS IS NOT AN EXIT's title is a reflection of something Corazza realized during a period of personal and familial crises "I kept walking into buildings and I'd try to exit somewhere and the sign would be like, 'This is not an exit,'" she says. "It just felt like a metaphor for a hopeful thing-don't give up yet." This combination of hope and anxiety is all over THIS IS NOT AN EXIT, reflected in a sonic palette (Alternative! Electronica! Indie! Radio pop! Coldplay!) as eclectic as it is unpretentious. Ultimately, THIS IS NOT AN EXIT is a record about healing, a process often spoken about in New Age-y terms but one that in reality can be really confusing and, yes, weird. But it is the beautiful strangeness of being alive that ill peach capture so well on THIS IS NOT AN EXIT.

Repress!

Vinyl format of the album that was released on CD on February 15th. Features the singles "First Off" (feat Travis Scott), "Crushed Up", "Jumpin On A Jet" and more. Radio support across R1, 1Xtra, BBC Asian Network, Capital Xtra, ILR specialists. Streaming activity across all platforms. MTV/Vevo video rotation. Ads, features and reviews across specialist music mags. Online/social media activity.

Recorded between 2010-2012, Closed Sessions Vol. 2 is a snapshot of a begotten time in Hip-Hop music and blog culture. The album features an eclectic class of artists such as Action Bronson, DJ Babu, Vic Mensa, The Cool Kids, Rockie Fresh, Freddie Gibbs, and others coming to the legendary SoundScape Studios and participating in the Closed Sessions program. Every song was followed by a documentary on MTV2 Sucker Free.

CS Vol. 2 was originally released August 23, 2012 and has been offline since 2015, the album has been re-mastered and is being released on vinyl for the 1st time ever. Limited to 500 copies.

It's been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia reemerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC. His first show back appeared on the front page of the New York Times along with a stellar review and he took off from there performing his flavor of Ethiopian jazz all over the world in the years since, including Radio City Music Hall and Montreal Jazz Festival. Finally, we have a recorded document of the keyboard player's powerful DC-based trio _ which practices each weekend in his basement _ featuring Kenneth Joseph on drums and Alemseged Kebede on bass. Beautifully captured at one of their fiery live shows at the venerable Brooklyn non-profit cultural center Pioneer Works on July 1, 2016, the concert was recorded by PW staff and mixed by Ted Young with mastering by ATFA's expert audio extraction collaborator Jessica Thompson. The performance clarifies what many people across the globe already know: in his fifth decade of music-making Hailu Mergia continues to push the boundaries of his remarkable abilities. Mergia and his veteran band energetically and playfully unpeel layer after layer of harmonic and rhythmic interest out of a spectrum of Ethiopian repertoire. Modern jazz demands constant reinvention and improvisation, night after night creating new works out of known modes and classic standards. This band is unstoppable when it comes to turning age-old melodies (like "Tizita" or "Anchihoye Lene") upside down and inside out until they emerge as molten new works, often spontaneously. Mergia's original compositions (like "Yegle Nesh") shine brighter than ever here as well. Moving from keyboard to organ to accordion to melodica, he deftly switches instruments _ often during the same song. Mergia at 77 years old seems to be working harder than musicians half his age. "Pioneer Works Swing (Live)" brings into focus the kind of onstage group improvisation and deadly solo passages that reach for places Mergia and the band have never gone, on festival and club stages across four continents. Now that Mergia has released two new recordings along with four classic reissues, he is eager to let everyone hear what he's been doing on the road since he re-took the global stage for his victory laps. So much more than an old act from yesteryear, Mergia balances his legendary Ethiopian recordings with good old fashioned sweat-soaked live concert triumphs such as the one we have here.

It's been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia reemerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC. His first show back appeared on the front page of the New York Times along with a stellar review and he took off from there performing his flavor of Ethiopian jazz all over the world in the years since, including Radio City Music Hall and Montreal Jazz Festival. Finally, we have a recorded document of the keyboard player's powerful DC-based trio _ which practices each weekend in his basement _ featuring Kenneth Joseph on drums and Alemseged Kebede on bass. Beautifully captured at one of their fiery live shows at the venerable Brooklyn non-profit cultural center Pioneer Works on July 1, 2016, the concert was recorded by PW staff and mixed by Ted Young with mastering by ATFA's expert audio extraction collaborator Jessica Thompson. The performance clarifies what many people across the globe already know: in his fifth decade of music-making Hailu Mergia continues to push the boundaries of his remarkable abilities. Mergia and his veteran band energetically and playfully unpeel layer after layer of harmonic and rhythmic interest out of a spectrum of Ethiopian repertoire. Modern jazz demands constant reinvention and improvisation, night after night creating new works out of known modes and classic standards. This band is unstoppable when it comes to turning age-old melodies (like "Tizita" or "Anchihoye Lene") upside down and inside out until they emerge as molten new works, often spontaneously. Mergia's original compositions (like "Yegle Nesh") shine brighter than ever here as well. Moving from keyboard to organ to accordion to melodica, he deftly switches instruments _ often during the same song. Mergia at 77 years old seems to be working harder than musicians half his age. "Pioneer Works Swing (Live)" brings into focus the kind of onstage group improvisation and deadly solo passages that reach for places Mergia and the band have never gone, on festival and club stages across four continents. Now that Mergia has released two new recordings along with four classic reissues, he is eager to let everyone hear what he's been doing on the road since he re-took the global stage for his victory laps. So much more than an old act from yesteryear, Mergia balances his legendary Ethiopian recordings with good old fashioned sweat-soaked live concert triumphs such as the one we have here.

Katie Meluas Debütalbum "Call Off The Search" machte sie sofort zu einem außergewöhnlichen neuen Talent. Das Album, welches dieses Jahr sein 20-jähriges Jubiläum feiert, zeigt ihren einzigartigen Gesangsstil, der Jazz-, Blues- und Folk-Einflüsse mit zeitgenössischer Pop-Sensibilität vermischt. Das Album wurde von Mike Batt mitgeschrieben und produziert, der eine zentrale Rolle bei der Entwicklung des prächtigen und anspruchsvollen Klangs des Albums spielte. Das zentrale Thema von "Call Off The Search" ist die Liebe und die Selbstfindung, ausgedrückt durch eine Sammlung von gefühlvollen und introspektiven Songs, darunter die Leadsingle "The Closest Thing to Crazy", die mit ihrer gefühlvollen Performance und der fesselnden Melodie das Publikum weltweit sofort in ihren Bann zog. Von Kritikern und Zuhörern wurde das Album für seinen reifen und gefühlvollen Sound gelobt, vor allem wenn man bedenkt, dass Katie Melua zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung erst 19 Jahre alt war. Call Off The Search" fand bei einem breiten Publikum Anklang, wurde ein kommerzieller Erfolg und zu einem der meistverkauften Alben des Jahres 2003.

Diese Neuauflage zum 20-jährigen Jubiläum wurde in den Metropolis Studios in London neu gemastert und enthält B-Seiten sowie sieben bisher unveröffentlichte und unverfälschte Demos, die Katie und Mike Batt 2002 aufgenommen haben. Die von Pete Paphides verfassten Liner Notes enthalten Beiträge aus einem neuen Interview mit Katie.

Off World presents the final album in its trilogy of surreal and spacious leftfield electronics. "A stellar project headed by Sandro Perri, one of the most singular producers in contemporary music" (Boomkat), this third volume is another distinctive collection of tracks constructed from semi-improvised ensemble recordings made over the past decade with a varied cast of coconspirators. Drew Brown, Matthew Cooper, Susumu Mukai and Andrew Zukerman join Perri again on a variety of synths and machines, along with violinist Jesse Zubot (Tanya Tagaq, Fond Of Tigers). Perri also continues to add organ and piano to the mix, while Volume 3 notably features first-time Off World contributors Nicole Rampersaud on trumpet and Martin Arnold on guitar, both mainstays of Toronto's vibrant improv and out-music scenes. The Quietus calls Off World "genuinely explorative_the musical equivalent of a Dali-esque landscape" which through all sorts of genre-defying twists and turns, at times evokes "offkilter, late Miles Davis ambience". Off World 3 doubles down on that jazz-adjacent trope in certain respects, while holding fast to Pitchfork's dictum that Perri "cultivates his own genreless brand of futurism." Marked by longer tracks than previous collections, three of the album's five songs clock in around the 10-minute mark, where overtly improvised instrumental playing wends its way across alternately bubbling and woozy electronic beds. "Impulse Controller" is a languidly skewed rhumba where ambling melodic undercurrents and dubby electronic pointillism provide a dulcet promenade for Rampersaud's Miles-esque trumpet excursions. "Ludic Loop" see-saws along in a slow synthy two-step, punctuated by Perri's restrained piano chords and Arnold's fried electric guitar. "Empasse" is perhaps most reminiscent of earlier Off World collections, though again slowed and stretched, with oozing synth bass ostinatos counterposed by ambient layers of viola and violin filigree from Zubot. These three centerpiece longform tracks each highlight one of the album's instrumental improvisers, and taken together, make for the most scintillating sedate and ruminant album in the trilogy. Off World 3 sounds as sui generis as ever, but in wrapping up the series, Perri sprinkles the project's emblematic alien surrealism with decidedly anthropic elements and temporalities. This final volume in the trilogy could also be seen as a re-statement of Perri's politico-aesthetic mission, as aptly celebrated by Pitchfork and its glowing 8.0+ reviews of Perri's 2018/2019 solo albums In Another Life and Soft Landing (released between Off World 2 and the present volume): a uniquely purposeful, subtly detailed cannon of songs "busy, vibrant, and bursting with life, but that aren't ever in a rush to get anywhere."