Powerful lyrics are voiced by Jah Rueben Mystic, with the inspirational Ital Horns brass section.
Jah Rueben Mystic vocal evokes the fighting spirit and hopefulness of a message sent out to defeat the arrogance and greed of the capitalistic leaders of the world.
Lock up riddim, composed by Kieko De Stefanis is an original Roots Dub tune.
The Dub -produced by Gaudi- is a musical journey through the sound of 70's roots, Gaudi here adds his own analogue trademark creativity and psychedelic-dub mastery effects to the track.
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"In 1978, Nova performed for Obama. Well, kind of: Nova was the band for the Punahou School prom in Honolulu, Hawaii, and a young student named Barack (known then as 'Barry') was in attendance.
Backtrack to 1976, and Nova was the opening band for Donald Byrd at the nearby Blaisdell Arena. The day was Sunday, June 27. The following day, Isaac Hayes would perform on island for the admission price of $1.
Nova, led by singer Checo Tohomaso, was one of several go-to party bands during the golden era of Hawaii funk and soul music in the mid-1970s through early 1980s.
The band's infectious gospel-funk-disco can be heard on their sole release, a self-titled 1980 LP that feels like one big party recorded live in the studio. (Check out the Marvin Gaye-inspired 'I Feel Like Getting Down' on the 2016 'Aloha Got Soul' compilation on Strut Records).
The story is all too familiar, however: funk band releases LP, the music goes dormant in years to follow, and today original copies sell for hundreds online.
Not long after the album's 1980 release, Checo met Marvin Gaye, who was living on Maui (where George Benson also resided). Shortly after, Marvin invited Checo and his counterparts to join his multi-city tour across Europe. Videos of Checo rocking keyboards, percussion and singing background vocals for Marvin Gaye's last European tour can be found online.
Checo, born in Florida yet raised in lush Manoa Valley as well as Okinawa, Japan, now resides in Vancouver, Canada, where he leads the VOC Sweet Soul Gospel Choir and continues to deliver his signature sound: high energy, positive, 'sweet soul' music.
AGS-7010 features two non-stop groovers with a 7' edit by Roger Bong on the A-side. LP reissue in the works!"
While Soul Togetherness' on Expansion continues to feature the best new floor fillers of each year, Soul Festival' is here now with a collection of music reflecting the label's love of 70s soul.
Soul Festival' spans the period from when new soul music took influence from the Northern soul we enjoy here at UK clubs and events. As the decade progressed, records became more lavish in their arrangement and grander in production, always with that essential soul feel, and that's what you will find here on this compilation.
Statik Selektah is a renowned DJ and Producer based in NYC, born and raised in Boston.
Statik hosts a weekly radio show on Sirius / XM Shade 45 every Thursday from 7PM to 9PM.
Statik has produced recent tracks for Eminem, Joey Bada$$, Action Bronson, Danny Brown, Royce Da 5'9' and Dej Loaf.
In 2014, Statik Selektah released his album, 'What Goes Around' (DDM CD 2375), and in 2015, Statik Selektah put out his 7th studio album, Lucky 7 (DDM CD 2430). He is now prepping his 8th album, '8,' for a December 8th release date.
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In a career spanning 45 years, Leo Sayer has sold more than 80 MILLION records worldwide.
To coincide with Leo's forthcoming return to the UK for his 22-date 'Just A Boy At 70' tour, 'The Hollywood Years
1976-1978' is the second of a series of three Vinyl LP box sets.
'The Hollywood Years 1976-1978' comprises Leo's three studio albums. 'Endless Flight' (released 1976/UK
#4) 'Thunder In My Heart' (released 1977/UK #8) and 'Another Year' (released 1978/UK #15) and marked a
clear departure from his early albums.
Leo recorded these three albums with legendary producer Richard Perry, who brought in a variety of songwriters
and collaborators to work on the projects with Leo; it was a venerable Who's Who of the record industry.
Each vinyl LP Box set in this Limited Edition release, will be pressed on heavyweight 180g clear vinyl and contain
a signed 12'x12' print.
This project has been overseen by Leo Sayer, who remains one of the UK's great singer/songwriters of all time.
15 Jahre nach seinem frühen Tod feiert - The 20th Century Records Albums (1973-1979)' Barry White als einen der größten Künstler / Songwriter / Produzenten der 70er Jahre. Er etablierte den neuen Klang der Orchesterseele, der über das Jahrzehnt und darüber hinaus zu einem Grundbestandteil wurde. Das Vinyl-Box-Set enthält alle 9 LP-Alben, die Barry White über das Label 20th Century Records veröffentlicht hat und werden hier zum ersten Mal zusammengestellt. Alle neun Alben wurden zum ersten Mal seit ihrer Veröffentlichung in den 70er Jahren von den originalen analogen Masterbändern remastert und werden hier mit ihrem originalen Sleeve und Label Art präsentiert. Die Alben wurden in den Abbey Road Studios in London auf hochwertigem 180g Vinyl geschnitten, um die höchstmögliche Audioqualität zu garantieren.
[ZZA] q4 | Oh Me, Oh My (I'm Such a Lucky Guy)
[ZZB] r1 | I Can't Leave You Alone
[ZZC] r2 | Call Me, Baby
[ZZD] r3 | How Did You Know It Was Me
Big welcome to Time is Now for J Wax for a bit of a statement EP and I am coming out swinging here cos this is a really good record. There’s good, and then there’s this, the kind of good that stays good.
You know that feeling when something’s just right. When flow state becomes clarity. Well listening to this EP from J Wax gives me that feeling. This is proper Goldilocks business. It’s equal parts Gun Fingers and Loved up hugs. Just right.
By now we all know that something very special happens when Speed Garage collides with 1st wave UK Hard House - but - what makes this just right is that J Wax didn’t stop there, just like the Dutch 2nd Wave of Hard House he’s slid onwards into euphoric trance and oh boy am I here for it. In 1997 we got Double99’s Rip Groove and Nalin & Kane’s Beach Ball and for me this EP has as much in common with perfectly formed ‘97 Trance as it does with Speed Garage. Who says you can’t have it all!
We’ve been following J Wax’s output for years. He has been grafting hard. And for me he’s already firmly a part of the long lineage of globally significant Scottish party starting producers and DJ’s. So when we signed this EP to Time is Now I was gassed. Four big tunes. Sick EP. For me it’s crystal. J Wax is now a producer operating in rarefied air.
Run the Tracks….
A1. The dubplate of ’Peaches’ has been causing mayhem for a minute. Gliding in smooth before that big diva vocal screams down the bassline.
A2. J Wax tags in Edinburgh local RUA.DJ. The pair double up on ‘Shift’ for a slice of Trance infused but no-nonsense Speedy G. Reece bass & gun shots + bouncy synthline & ethereal chords. Lose it and yourself.
B1. ‘Soul Movement’ is a big room weapon. Serious levels on this one that leave no doubt - this is a producer at the top of his game, writing high energy weapons to destroy the dance.
B2. ‘Smokin’ is peak time bizness. Harder darker house with a diiirty dirty south vocal chop. This one is heads down & lock in…
Sorry We Play Vinyl makes no bones about their love of wax, and when they serve up music as worthy as this, then who can fault them? It's another anonymous offering with three cuts that traverse a wide world of sound. 'EDIT16' starts with an elephantine swagger and cow bells adoring a deep minimal sound next to woozy, aloof vocal musings. 'EDIT17' has a more ethnic groove that's clean and fresh, and this time the foreign-tongued vocal brings an exotic and eventually hypnotic charge that is sure to make this one a summer anthem with the heads. 'EDIT18' closes down with a psychotic melange of trippy vocals that are layered up in ghostly, spectral waves over a paddy rhythm. Brilliantly unusual.
We release our second record, COPPIES002. Another hand stamped white label EP, collecting tunes from thecommunity, for the community. This time with tracks by Kerr Wilson, Salomo, illousion and APRS. Kerr starts on A1 with his "The Key To My Heart". He showed the first version of the track to Robert around 4 years ago in a memorable summer spent together. We made the promise that this will be pressed on record one day and, here it is! Thanks Kerr! It's a melancholic late-summer tune that makes you tear up and feel like the warm euphoria won't last forever, but it will surely return if you're patient. Salomo follows with a similar moody approach on "Say less (on the DF)", even though we can argue about the meaning of the title ;). illousion builds more tension on the flipside with "Masc or Mask". Entering dubby, rolling terrains with more high intensity drum patterns for later moments of the night. APRS is closing the EP with "I Want to Speak" on B2, maybe the counter argument to Salomos desire of a less noisy dancefloor. He crafted a minimal, loopy trip that drags you down the rabbit hole and won't iet you go til the party is over. COPPIES002 is available on vinyl only with digi download option
It’s not just since James Bond and the introduction of World Overshoot Day that we’ve known: The world isn’t enough. We need an Extrawelt! Arne Schaffhausen and Wayan Raabe have been tinkering with this celestial body for over two decades, and it seems to be slowly nearing completion. You certainly can’t accuse Extrawelt of lacking ideas. They are, so to speak, the legitimate descendants of the legendary planet designer Slartibartfast from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”. No doubt, the downright insanely creative bossa nova-techno bastard “Honey Hunter” will be mentioned in the same breath as Slartibartfast’s award-winning Norwegian coastlines by future civilizations. The other three tracks aren’t half bad either. Take our word for it.
Nicht erst seit James Bond und der Einführung des world overshoot days wissen wir: Die Welt ist nicht genug. Wir brauchen eine Extrawelt! Die Herren Arne Schaffhausen und Wayan Raabe werkeln seit über zwei Jahrzehnten an diesem Himmelskörper und er scheint so langsam bezugsfertig zu sein. Man kann Extrawelt nun wahrlich keine Ideenarmut vorwerfen. Sie sind quasi die legitimen Nachkommen des legendären Planetendesigners Slartibartfast aus Douglas Adam’s “Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis”. Der geradezu irrwitzig kreative Bossanovatechno-Bastard “Honey Hunter” wird von künftigen Zivilisationen in einem Atemzug mit Slartibartfast’s preisgekönten norwegischen Küstenlinien genannt werden. Auch die anderen drei Tracks sind nicht von schlechten Eltern. Glaubt’s und werdet selig.
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Terrestrial Funk welcomes Parisian producer Raymond D. Barre with a fun exploration into FM Synthesis. Bouncing in that sweet sweet midtempo zone all six tracks squelch to your heart’s delight. Simply put, “light-hearted and good vibes electro acid tracks”, as Monsieur D. Barre described them when he demoed the tracks to Terrestrial Funk two years ago. But they’re much more. Perfect programming brings that slow swing, wonky warped vocals on songs like ‘Broken Nose’, and the bells that chime in the releases final song ‘Mes Bêtes’ leave you in a paradox of fulfillment and desire. That’s the best part, you can flip the record back and listen to the release right over. DJs and home listeners alike are in for a treat with this one. Heck, get yourself two copies and mix every track back to back in the club. We guarantee it’ll go off.
Teen of Denial: Joe’s Story is a freshly reimagined take on Car Seat Headrest’s beloved breakout, Teens of Denial, now celebrating its 10th anniversary.
On the original album, Toledo often used the name “Joe” as a pseudonym – a sly homage to Daniel Johnston. Revisiting Teens in the run-up to its 10th birthday, he felt called to give Joe a unique backstory and began tweaking the album to tell that tale. The group returned to the studio with Teens producer Steve Fisk to update accordingly – tweaking lyrics, revising arrangements, and recording new songs in the “Denial-style,” including ‘Optimistic Son” and the anthemic ‘Joe Drives Again’. The result retains Teens’ dark edge and youthful cynicism, but allows a bit of hard-won compassion into the mix.
From Will Toledo:
Sometime last year, it was suggested to me that we do something for the ten-year anniversary of ‘Teens of Denial,’ so I started looking back on the album to see what we might do. In spite of some of its songs being a regular part of my life for the past decade, it wasn’t a record I’d thought much about as a whole since it came out. Most of the songs I’d come up with over a two-year period at the end of my college days, when I was struggling a lot with cynicism and misplaced aggression. But by the time the songs were done, I was living in Washington, Car Seat Headrest was a full band with a record label, and in spite of the turmoil of the writing process, the final album was pretty enjoyable for everyone to work on.
This time, looking back at the songs, I started to feel like there was a story being told through the album, though I’d never imagined it as being a narrative work. On ‘Hi, How Are You?’ Daniel Johnston had used the name “Joe” in the titles of a few tracks –“No More Pushing Joe Around,” “Keep Punching Joe” – as a sort of joke, a stand-in for himself. I borrowed the idea, and the name, for titling songs on ‘Denial.’ This time, I started thinking - who is Joe? And how do the songs, in the way they’re sequenced on the album, reflect what he’s going through? As I started asking this question, a story emerged with startling wholeness and clarity, like finding the foundations of an ancient city while digging in my backyard. As I kept digging, certain songs from the original album fell by the wayside, as they seemed misplaced in this new context; others asked for new lyrics, to fully give birth to the story contained in the music.
The resulting work feels more like the album ‘Teens of Denial’ was meant to be. When you’re writing from a dark space, it’s hard to have perspective on where you’re at. This time, I could pull from memories of that darkness, and use the distance and additional perspective of ten years of life to shed a fuller light on the experience. Joe is a character going through some of what I experienced, and some of his own problems. Telling his story, and not just my own impressions of life at the end of the teen years, brought a new level of compassion and wholeness to the album. It gave us the opportunity to write new material in “Denial style”, embracing a snappy and simple(ish) rock aesthetic, and in an additional blessing, we were able to team up once with Steve Fisk, a joy and inspiration to get back into the studio with after ten years. We mixed the material at his house in Tacoma, and were constantly amazed at the lack of divide between past and present, as we’d punch in vocal overdubs ten years later into the same gear, hearing my voice now running alongside a 2015 Will. For someone coming across this album or this band for the first time, this is how they’d hear the record, not as a relic of the past but as a new piece. It was immensely rewarding to experience that on our side.
For anyone familiar with ‘Teens,’ comparisons with the original will be inevitable, but I do hope that as much as possible, people can come to this album on its own terms, approaching it as a teen, hearing the music and story for the first time. I believe music is an ongoing story, and albums don’t always do justice to its dynamic, ongoing nature. What gives it life is the new ears that hear it, and the new hearts that engage with it. I’m so grateful that this is a work that people have kept coming to, and I hope that this presentation does them honor with a fresh offering to the conversation. We’ve known that “it doesn’t have to be like this”; now we can wonder - “what it if were like this?”
The premise of this compilation is simple: music we’d like to hear at the airport.
The idea came after learning that Honolulu’s international airport has been playing AI-generated music over its speakers since November 2025. First reported by Civil Beat, the news has caused frustration and disappointment among residents and visitors, as well as within the local music community.
Everyone knows Hawaii is one of the most musically rich regions in the world — why then is the airport using AI music? 'Music For The Airport' is our response.
Located in the middle of the Pacific at the outskirts of one the most remote cities on the planet, Honolulu’s Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL) is for most people the first place they encounter when they arrive in Hawaii. Warm sun, tropical tradewinds, playful palm trees and majestic mountains welcome every traveler, as do the sounds of birds, familiar music from Hawaiian artists like Aunty Genoa Keawe and Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, and—at least for now—seventeen “island-themed” AI-generated songs.
In late 1977, while sitting in Germany’s Cologne Bonn Airport on a Sunday morning, Brian Eno noticed how terribly uncomfortable he felt hearing the airport’s “muzak” overhead. For a harried, hurried place like the airport where travelers scramble to their gates, stand in long border control lines, and wait impatiently for their luggage at the carousels, music can create more anxiety than calm. Asking himself, "What should we be hearing here?", Eno soon created ‘Ambient 1: Music For Airports’, a sonic remedy aimed at reducing nervousness in public spaces.
When we heard the news that HNL airport is playing AI-generated “muzak”, we were immediately reminded of Eno’s genre-defying 1978 album. And we were similarly inspired to react. But how? Recreating an ambient masterpiece wasn’t in our wheelhouse. We started digging through our catalog of licensed music which we haven’t yet re-released. We quickly realized this was our chance to highlight some of favorite songs from the so-called CD era: the 1990s and 2000s (with a few exceptions). In less than 20 minutes, we pulled 17 original songs recorded by local artists between 1984 and 2017.
The speed at which this project came together surprised us; reactionary gut instinct often produces swift and lasting results. Ironically, our new compilation likely took less time than it did for the state Department of Transportation to commission its AI songs in question. But even though ‘Music for the Airport’ came together in less than one week, the truth is that this collection of 17 songs is the result of years of hard work, trust, sacrifice, patience, and understanding. Building relationships with and licensing music from artists doesn’t happen overnight, but more importantly: these songs are the result of people pouring their hearts and souls into something they believe in. This music wouldn’t exist today without the artists and their loved ones who supported them along the way.
As of this writing, the DOT states its intention in creating AI-generated songs is to “highlight different aspects of the islands, aviation and the airport” and that “no state funds were used to produce them”. Okay, but at what cost? Technology disrupting the music industry isn’t news to anyone. AI music in public spaces are cost-saving measures, since its users (airports, for example) don’t have to pay the licensing fees typically required, which can be a worthwhile source of revenue for artists. But what happens when a place like HNL airport, which hosts more than 21 million passengers annually, uses music created by machines instead of people to represent Hawaii? The identity of a place beings to erode, diluted by a language learning model’s conceptual summary of what a people and its culture sounds like. To echo Brian Eno: what should we be hearing here? In other words: what should the music of Hawaii sound like?
We believe in the power of music, especially when it comes from the soul. We believe in supporting artists, especially as AI disrupts our lives. We believe that Hawaii must be represented authentically, especially when it comes to song. And of course we believe in vinyl, especially since it was a record from 1978 (Mackey Feary Band’s debut LP) that inspired Aloha Got Soul’s origins in 2010.
We hope you find as much joy in this compilation as we have. Perhaps it’ll soundtrack your next journey to Hawaii. At the very least, we hope some people take a moment to hear these sounds: in your headphones for now‚ maybe someday overhead at the airport in Honolulu.
The track titles on Post Dub Cities – the new album by Adriano Zanni, photographer, sound artist, and field recordist – evoke the aftermath, that moment when a place continues to exist and live on, but no longer serves anyone. The human element has vanished, whether it happened overnight or through a slow abandonment that lasted for years. The perspective shifts: buildings, homes and palaces reveal a dimension of reality all their own, in which even the ruins give shape to this landscape that endures, transforming into pure presence.
This, after all, is our fate. The fate of us human beings, of our civilisation, of every civilisation: to pass away, to be forgotten, to erect monuments whose significance no one will remember once we are gone.
The opening track Crisopoli transforms the sonic dimension of a city into an echo chamber: a dark, urban dub built from delays and resonances, holding the imprint of what is no longer there — like a bassline that keeps vibrating even after its source has gone silent. What we see is not the presence, but its reverb.
Available from September 11, second excerpt Warosha gives us a minimalist, enveloping, solemn beat, like the symbols on a map that no one can read anymore. Warosha was the district of luxury hotels overlooking the sea in the city of Famagusta. After the island of Cyprus was invaded by the Turkish army, the entire area, emptied of its inhabitants, who had fled south, was fenced off and surrounded by barbed wire. No one has been allowed to enter it since 1974. Now, on these unspoilt beaches, sea turtles have found the perfect place to breed.
Fordlândia, on the other hand, is the symbol of Henry Ford’s failed dream of conquest. An industrial settlement built deep within the Amazon rainforest, several hours’ boat journey from the nearest towns, to gain access to natural rubber for the tyres of his mass-produced cars in Michigan. An extremely costly project, it quickly became a ruinous pipe dream: a town that has been uninhabited for almost a century and has since been reclaimed by nature.
For a long time now, Adriano Zanni has been exploring, through music and photography, the landscape that unfolds before our eyes, as attentive yet silent observers. As if we were absent, a civilisation that has long since vanished: human presence has dissolved, preparing to fade into oblivion. The precise depiction of places through field recordings, and the black-and-white imagery, give rise to apparitions, hallucinations, and memories. The less present we are, the more we seek meaning. We resist abandonment and the indifference of time.
In the ten tracks (plus three bonus tracks) of Post Dub Cities the echoes and reverberations of dub grant us access to an unknown future, as yet untold – in which we are nothing more than a vague memory. The deep sound guides us through a landscape that is familiar yet unknown, unrecognisable. The cold, distant, industrial rhythm resonates within us as if we were the last, all too aware, inhabitant of a now-deserted village.
Every place – be it an abandoned mining settlement on an island in Svalbard, or a ghost town in Pennsylvania evacuated following an underground fire that has been burning for sixty years at a depth of one hundred metres – leaves questions unanswered, shrouds itself in mystery, and makes us wonder, ceaselessly: what happened here?
In the end, we realise that we don’t really care that much about knowing the details of the disappearance. We can guess them, we’ve seen it happen a thousand times before. Just like in the photos accompanying the album, portraits of ghostly, deserted cities: Belgrade, like Venice, Dublin, Sarajevo, Lisbon, Kraków, Sofia, Naples, Hanoi, Lampedusa, Tehran. Unexpectedly, pleasantly emptied of people, and of their obsessions, struggles, illusions.
Then, suddenly, the crowd returns. Busy, feverish, hardworking. The record ends, the spell is broken. We feel a sense of longing for a future that has not yet come to pass, for a place we were only able to observe because we were not there.
BAUGRUPPE90 return to their MONTAGE imprint with a four-track release built around different shades of peak-time functionality, moving between emotional warehouse pressure, stripped-back bounce and rolling club mechanics. A1 “Crowd Can’t Sit Down” sets the tone with an emotional big-room charge: a warehouse stomper driven by scale, tension and a sense of release without losing its physical weight. “The Bell” follows with a cleaner, more direct approach, pairing old-school energy with a bouncy, forward-pushing groove and a distinct FM-driven sound that gives the track its sharp, instantly recognizable character. On the flip, “Gummy Cluster” moves into more unconventional territory. Built around inventive sound design, shifting textures and an unusual rhythmic vocabulary, the track functions as a club tool while maintaining a character of its own. Closing track “Roller” is exactly what its title suggests: a locked-in, propulsive groove designed to keep moving without unnecessary detours. Across four tracks, BAUGRUPPE90 balance personality with utility, keeping MONTAGE firmly focused on music made for the floor.
Sadurn’s sophomore album The Underworld is a collection of heart-rendingly personal and instantly relatable songs, due out this fall on Run For Cover Records. Following years of lingering vocal issues for guitarist G DeGroot, the album is the culmination of an emotion- al and spiritual journey and a a deeply personal meditation on loss, healing, and transformation.
Sadurn began in 2017 as a solo project for G DeGroot, and from the start their approach to songwriting was informed more by emotional intuition than any kind of real ambitions to be heard. “I discovered songwriting as an outlet for processing my reality,” they explain. “A lot of times when something is hard to say, it flows more easily in songwriting. It’s a place where you can circle back to your own truth.” After moving to Philadelphia, DeGroot was joined by gui- tarist Jon Cox, drummer Amelia Swain, and bassist Tabitha Ahnert. The group recorded Radiator, a debut that immediately connected with listeners and was met with critical acclaim.
Throughout The Underworld, the rawness of DeGroot’s lyrics are matched by Cox, Ahnert, and Swain’s evocative playing. Stunning opener “the weight” describes the early stages of a relationship deteriorating, with brilliant soloing from Cox and DeGroot’s warm voice intertwining through its widescreen outro. Highlights like “mess,” “never tell me,” or “whole thing” strike a perfect balance be- tween lush arrangements and intimate performances, while tracks like “why does my heart” or “can’t stop” add unvarnished, single take moments of spontaneity, or GarageBand demo looseness that perfectly compliment the unabashed longing in the songwriting.
Sadurn’s sophomore album The Underworld is a collection of heart-rendingly personal and instantly relatable songs, due out this fall on Run For Cover Records. Following years of lingering vocal issues for guitarist G DeGroot, the album is the culmination of an emotion- al and spiritual journey and a a deeply personal meditation on loss, healing, and transformation.
Sadurn began in 2017 as a solo project for G DeGroot, and from the start their approach to songwriting was informed more by emotional intuition than any kind of real ambitions to be heard. “I discovered songwriting as an outlet for processing my reality,” they explain. “A lot of times when something is hard to say, it flows more easily in songwriting. It’s a place where you can circle back to your own truth.” After moving to Philadelphia, DeGroot was joined by gui- tarist Jon Cox, drummer Amelia Swain, and bassist Tabitha Ahnert. The group recorded Radiator, a debut that immediately connected with listeners and was met with critical acclaim.
Throughout The Underworld, the rawness of DeGroot’s lyrics are matched by Cox, Ahnert, and Swain’s evocative playing. Stunning opener “the weight” describes the early stages of a relationship deteriorating, with brilliant soloing from Cox and DeGroot’s warm voice intertwining through its widescreen outro. Highlights like “mess,” “never tell me,” or “whole thing” strike a perfect balance be- tween lush arrangements and intimate performances, while tracks like “why does my heart” or “can’t stop” add unvarnished, single take moments of spontaneity, or GarageBand demo looseness that perfectly compliment the unabashed longing in the songwriting.
Sadurn’s sophomore album The Underworld is a collection of heart-rendingly personal and instantly relatable songs, due out this fall on Run For Cover Records. Following years of lingering vocal issues for guitarist G DeGroot, the album is the culmination of an emotion- al and spiritual journey and a a deeply personal meditation on loss, healing, and transformation.
Sadurn began in 2017 as a solo project for G DeGroot, and from the start their approach to songwriting was informed more by emotional intuition than any kind of real ambitions to be heard. “I discovered songwriting as an outlet for processing my reality,” they explain. “A lot of times when something is hard to say, it flows more easily in songwriting. It’s a place where you can circle back to your own truth.” After moving to Philadelphia, DeGroot was joined by gui- tarist Jon Cox, drummer Amelia Swain, and bassist Tabitha Ahnert. The group recorded Radiator, a debut that immediately connected with listeners and was met with critical acclaim.
Throughout The Underworld, the rawness of DeGroot’s lyrics are matched by Cox, Ahnert, and Swain’s evocative playing. Stunning opener “the weight” describes the early stages of a relationship deteriorating, with brilliant soloing from Cox and DeGroot’s warm voice intertwining through its widescreen outro. Highlights like “mess,” “never tell me,” or “whole thing” strike a perfect balance be- tween lush arrangements and intimate performances, while tracks like “why does my heart” or “can’t stop” add unvarnished, single take moments of spontaneity, or GarageBand demo looseness that perfectly compliment the unabashed longing in the songwriting.
Ariwa Sounds started in a front room in Thornton Heath, South London. Four tracks, some homemade equipment, and Neil Fraser, better known as Mad Professor, at the controls. That was 1980. Over four decades later, the label has more than 300 albums to its name and a legacy that stretches well beyond the reggae scene.
This compilation pulls twelve tracks from across the catalogue. Dub, lovers rock, heavy roots music, digital dancehall — it's all here. What ties it together is the Ariwa studio sound all going through Mad Professor’s desk.
Mad Professor is the backbone of it. Dub Me Crazy got him known and his production credits run from Jah Shaka and Horace Andy to Massive Attack, Sade and The Orb. The tracks here — the Dub Sampler, H2SO4, Disco Dude, Kathmandu Dub — show why.
The Jah Shaka collaboration Only One God is a landmark. Two of the UK's most important dub figures on one track. Dark and heavy roots music.
The Robotics appear twice — Hong Kong Flew! and Miss Mood. They are Ariwa's house band and have backed U-Roy, Lee Perry, Big Youth and more over the years.
Aisha closes things out with Can You Feel It. A track that crosses reggae, soul and boogie funk. Collectors have been after original pressings for years.
Starky Banton, Ragga Doll, Professor Doppler and Earl Lawrence complete the compilation. Exactly the kind of thing that reminds you how wide the Ariwa net was cast.
Sleeve design is by Trevor Jackson. One of the UK's most respected graphic designers. His work has defined the visual language of British music for thirty years. His involvement here signals exactly the kind of release this is. A serious serious catalogue and compilation of music, treated with the respect it deserves.
Ariwa sits alongside Greensleeves as the most important reggae imprint this country has produced. This compilation shows why.
What an unbelievable record. From the wild cover to the iconic breakbeats, Roots from Ian Carr’s Nucleus is one of the dopest albums we know. This is seriously thick, funky-prog jazz-rock heaven. Originally released on Vertigo in 1973, other than a couple of versions at the time for other territories, Roots was never re-pressed since so it’s gone on to become another one of those impossible to find records.
Maybe it was a little too out there for the time, but it’s aged very, very well indeed 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.
Working together with producer Fritz Fryer and engineer Roger Wake, the seven compositions by Carr, Brian Smith and Dave MacRae that make up Roots flirt with perfection, and Nucleus at that time made up of the cream of 1970s UK jazz with Brian Smith on tenor saxophones and flutes, Dave MacRae on piano and electric piano, Jocelyn Pitchen on guitar, Roger Sutton on bass, both Clive Thacker and Aureo De Souza on drums and percussion, Joy Yates delivering the vocals and of course Carr on trumpet.
The spellbinding title track immediately renders the album indispensable. Riding the illest of loping breakbeats, “Roots” is low-slung, doped-out heist-funk. An absolute monster. If it sounds familiar then that’s likely down to it being sampled by Madlib for Lootpack and Quasimoto’s “Loop Digga”, as well as by a whole host of beat manipulators. “Roots” conjures prime instrumental hip-hop / beat music, only 20 years ahead of its time. Truly, these are the roots. Through sinuous bass, twinkling keys and a hypnotic guitar riff, a smoky brass motif weaves its way into a gloriously deep haze around Carr’s solos. “Roots” is over 9 minutes long, but there’s not a single wasted second, not surprising given that this is a condensed version of an originally 40 minute long commissioned composition.
The soothing vocal fusion delight of “Images” follows. Meticulously constructed, with gorgeous flute work from Brian Smith, with Joy Yates’ silky vocals and Dave MacRae’s Rhodes never sounding better. The cool, driving “Caliban” closes out the first side. Originally the third movement in a four part commission to celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday it stands up on its own, all robust rhythms and blended brass. Keyboard colour and Carr’s trumpet are splashed across the funk drums and basslines (and there’s even some bamboo flute). This really is fusion: the elements of jazz and rock coming together in beautifully synthesis.
Side two opens in riotous fashion with the short, thrilling samba of “Wapatiti”. Next up, “Capricorn” forms a smoothed-out, jazzy constellation. Mellow and dreamy, its twinkling percussion and languid horns slowly build the vibe before head-nod drums and a killer bassline enter the fray. With a distinct heaviness that Black Sabbath would’ve envied, “Odokamona” is a venomous slice of riff-soaked jazz metal (yes, you read that right), elevated by Carr’s wah-wah horns.
The album closes with MacRae’s exceptionally cosmic “Southern Roots and Celebration”. Very much in conversation with Weather Report, it opens as a languorous, spiritual jazz of chiming keys and serene guitar that turns slowly, gorgeously into a mid-paced, brass-laced banger. It’s another sure-fire party starter and the sound of the band having a righteous blast, building an ecstatic chaos that ends with Yates screaming.
And of course we need to talk about Keith Davis’ cover for Roots. Perhaps the coolest record cover of all time? Certainly one of the most bonkers. Just your run-of-the-mill high-gloss, acid-tinged airbrush dystopian/utopian living-room party scene. Consider this your chemical flashback trigger warning.
Front-and-centre the hip-to-death green robot holds court with their giant ball of yellow barbwire wool, hooked up to… something(?) being teased out from under the stairs (probably best not to ask). A thoroughly zoned-out, long-legged Pop Art party-goer lounges half-plugged in to the painting behind her as a pair of legs flail into shot from the the top of the stairs opposite. We won’t even begin to guess what the chap’s up to in the middle, but the view out of the windows is rather nice, and someone’s already got the hoover out ready to tidy up. All of the Nucleus sleeves are something special, but this particular one? Crikey.
This Be With edition of Roots 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. The crazy cover has been restored at Be With HQ as the finishing touch to this long overdue re-issue.
Sublime frequencies from the golden era of ambient electronica.
Plumbing hidden depths beneath a deceptively tranquil surface, MLO's mid-90s masterpiece Io is an overlooked gem from a golden era for ambient electronic music. Originally released in 1994, Jon Tye and Pete Smith's collaborative album responded to the growing chill-out movement by leaning into classical and avant-garde influences from Satie, Debussy and Cage through to Soft Machine, Incredible String Band and Eno. Recorded across various studios stacked with classic and rare synths, Io was patiently composed into slowly unfolding suites punctuated with ripples of arrhythmic interference to arrive at a purist vision of true ambient.
The next instalment in Forever Records' ongoing reissue series shines a light back on this landmark piece of UK electronica with the first official reissue since its original edition on Rising High. As well as the original double LP pressing and a new CD digipak version, there will also be a uniquely numbered, limited edition housed in a gatefold sleeve that comes with a bonus 10" featuring two previously unreleased versions of the album's opening cut, 'Wimborne'.
Press response to Io:
"Not so much ambient, more environmental music, Io lets you bring as much (or as little) of your surroundings in as suits your mood. Every listen can be different. Interactive ambient at last.”
IO is pure ambience. Relying on motif as opposed to melody, MLO have produced a truly evocative album.
Peter McIntyre, Mixmag, UK 1994.
"MLO's influences range from the likes of Eric Satie and the intellectual salon music of his era to the more predictable reference point of dubby, modern techno, though they feel, perhaps rather contentiously, that "ambient music can exist in isolation from the rest of the dance music arena". Can it? Take a trip to Io, and find out."
Generator Magazine, UK 1994.
"If you like your ambient deep and moody with long chords that creep along at approximately the speed of drying paint then check out MLO’s Io."
Mixology, UK 1994.
"MLO set the controls for the heart of headspace for their first full album release. Io is top grade ambient brain… Ace album…"
Select, UK 1994.
Sublime frequencies from the golden era of ambient electronica.
Plumbing hidden depths beneath a deceptively tranquil surface, MLO's mid-90s masterpiece Io is an overlooked gem from a golden era for ambient electronic music. Originally released in 1994, Jon Tye and Pete Smith's collaborative album responded to the growing chill-out movement by leaning into classical and avant-garde influences from Satie, Debussy and Cage through to Soft Machine, Incredible String Band and Eno. Recorded across various studios stacked with classic and rare synths, Io was patiently composed into slowly unfolding suites punctuated with ripples of arrhythmic interference to arrive at a purist vision of true ambient.
The next instalment in Forever Records' ongoing reissue series shines a light back on this landmark piece of UK electronica with the first official reissue since its original edition on Rising High. As well as the original double LP pressing and a new CD digipak version, there will also be a uniquely numbered, limited edition housed in a gatefold sleeve that comes with a bonus 10" featuring two previously unreleased versions of the album's opening cut, 'Wimborne'.
Press response to Io:
"Not so much ambient, more environmental music, Io lets you bring as much (or as little) of your surroundings in as suits your mood. Every listen can be different. Interactive ambient at last.”
IO is pure ambience. Relying on motif as opposed to melody, MLO have produced a truly evocative album.
Peter McIntyre, Mixmag, UK 1994.
"MLO's influences range from the likes of Eric Satie and the intellectual salon music of his era to the more predictable reference point of dubby, modern techno, though they feel, perhaps rather contentiously, that "ambient music can exist in isolation from the rest of the dance music arena". Can it? Take a trip to Io, and find out."
Generator Magazine, UK 1994.
"If you like your ambient deep and moody with long chords that creep along at approximately the speed of drying paint then check out MLO’s Io."
Mixology, UK 1994.
"MLO set the controls for the heart of headspace for their first full album release. Io is top grade ambient brain… Ace album…"
Select, UK 1994.
There’s this feeling that House Music is sometimes diluted into a pleasant, non-offensive and conformist formula. Well, Jackie Gritness - you may have heard of her big bro Gary - is bringin’ all the sweat, the attitude and the filth down - take it or leave it.
Jackie introduces herself from both sides on this well-strapped debut 12” - the slick swingin’ & sangin’
on the bass-heavy A side, and the raw clave trax and cunty snarls of the acid-laced B side.
No trace of over-production or tired sampling here: this is just Jackie, her mic and her lil’ groovebox -
gettin’ raw in the studio just like she does onstage. Only thing added is some wall-shaking mastering by New York OG Dietrich Schoenemann.
This is the kinda House that’s supposed to make regular folks wanna turn it off. This ain’t rated E for Everyone, it’s rated F for Freaks.
It’s music from the underground, for the underground - as it was first revealed on the runway of Glastonbury’s infamous NYC Downlow last summer.
And if that’s more than you can take - it’s alright. It’s not like Jackie will hold it against you.
Jackie Gritness
“Gary’s little sister.” His studio session resume reads like a House music who’s who - from David Morales to Fred P. He’s also been rockin’ clubs with the Playin’ 4 The City and MLIU crews - but she’s also been seen on Gideon’s fierce Homo-Centric Records. See, this bitch’s true feelings about House are stripped-down, bare-bones, and unapologetically sexual. With a radical ‘live’ attitude, she’s serving the realness with an irresistibly acidic zing.
Murmuration’ is the low hum made by vast, beautifully choreographed flocks of starlings as they simultaneously flap their wings and take to the sky. Some people say that the frequency of this unique, rumbling, oscillating sound can cure diseases...
One of the most exciting live bands in the UK, British Birds combine the garage-punk energy of Billy Childish, the wry English sophistication of XTC and the witty pop inventiveness of The Lovely Eggs. Like a murmurating flock of starlings, they create a unique sound, and might even be able to cure diseases.
Based in Chorley, Lancashire, British Birds are a resolutely DIY band. Bobby records and mixes all the music; Emma creates all the artwork. Their first two albums were self-released, selling hundreds of copies at gigs and at a few chosen record stores. British Birds didn’t wait for permission to take flight. They just got on with it. Their songs are sophisticated, hard-hitting, and very skilful. It may be DIY, but it’s big and it’s ambitious.
Sessions for Marc Riley and Gideon Coe have followed, along with tours supporting The Bug Club, BC Camplight and Lovely Eggs.
‘Murmurate, Oscillate’ kicks off with Lie Down With Dogs, Stand Up With Fleas, a rousing expression of exasperation at our passivity in the face of lame authority. British Birds are acute observers of the English political scene, shrouding their observations in humour and surrealism. Polka Dot Eyes is another piece of sharp social observation: it portrays Lancashire lads – friends from school – who join the Army and return home physically and mentally damaged. The song is simultaneously disturbing, funny and catchy as hell. From the fog of disinformation and doubt that surrounds us all in 2020s Britian, British Birds embrace the darkness, but with wit and verve – no slogans, no easy answers – and with an energy that helps us escape the mundanity of a declining island. This might all sound a bit bleak, but it’s not: every single one of the songs on this album has a chorus as big as a house.
There are personal songs too: Scary Movies is a poignant description of Bobby and Emma’s grandfather, who delighted in showing them horror films when they were kids – giving them sneak previews of the darkness they’d come to embrace as adults; Just Like Them is a celebration of introversion: it might not be fun, but it’s better than being an idiot. (Paradoxically, any other introverts who hear this song will feel impelled to join in in the chorus.) Blame Game and Thunder Claps examine the darkness inherent in relationships: there is always an impending storm, if you recognise the low hum of the imminent thunder. Once again: the choruses of these songs confound the melancholy sentiment.
You’ll get the same impression if you see British Birds live: Bobby’s ferocious guitar and dark lyrics are counterpointed with Emma’s sometimes haunting, sometimes playful vocal responses and insistent rhythms. You’ll be swept away by the energy of a band who don’t know the meaning of limits. And as the songs get darker and darker the smile on your face gets wider and wider.
The core members of British Birds are siblings Bobby and Emma Townson, working from their HQ-cum-nest in Chorley. Drums are by Dominic Lawson (apart from Michael Aindley on ‘Just Like Them’). Bass is by James Robinson.
British Birds will be embarking on a headline tour of the UK in early 2027.
David Norland is an Emmy-nominated English composer, known for his scores for drama and documentary, alongside his experimental choral and electronic music. Bringing stories to life through sound, he received critical acclaim for his debut solo album ‘Glam Tear Stain’ (2019) and is set to release follow-up album ‘La Source’ in June 2026 via Denovali Records.
Relocated back to his London home after many years in Los Angeles, and free from years of drug and alcohol problems, recent commissions for two choral works allowed Norland to return to the innocent origin of his musical world, and his experience as a parent prompted a lot of outward reflection. What kind of world are we leaving to our children?
Inspired by his score to the forthcoming silent black and white film ‘Carousel’ (2026), Norland found other music emerging that refused to be ignored. The film’s director opened the door to an entirely free scoring process – no temp music, no expectation, no guidelines, just pure intuitive expression. ‘La Source’ draws on this experience, alongside his childhood as a touring chorister, the honkytonk upright piano in the north-east London bedroom of his early 20s, his early recording experiments with a TASCAM 4-track cassette recorder, and his intense preoccupation with bells, flutes, stone architecture, and mysticism.
From the haunting, choral beauty of ‘E-Car Soul’ to the breezy album title track, Norland blends minimalist classical structures with electronics. A unified tapestry of blended voices, harmonies and textures, ‘La Source’ is a deeply emotional and melancholic journey for Norland. “In the end, I’m looking to find meaning through the music, like when I was a kid singing in choirs. But I get the most sense of meaning through transcendent experiences, rather than anything intellectual or dogmatic. I have to feel it, not think it. I’m trying to make work that’s luminous, wondrous, shimmering and strange, so I can keep having those experiences,” says Norland.
On his inspiration for the album, Norland adds, “I love making patterns in things and finding patterns. That’s why minimalism was so enticing to me, the patterns are so explicit. I love word play and anagrams. The big sadness coming through as I was making the record is this clarity over the future of my kids. Everything else is a complete distraction. This incredible nurturing planet and its ecosystem are being rapidly destroyed, and the forces destroying it are relentless and punitive. And they seem to be fine with consigning our children to live in an ever-more-hostile wasteland. You can’t pretend that’s not coming, if you do I think you’re lying to yourself. And perhaps eventually it will be the fact that people love their kids that will stir wider fear and action. It’s hard to think of anything more connected to the idea of spirit.” The result is the reflective, ecstatic, mystical and sad world of ‘La Source.’
Norland’s screen work includes the award-winning documentary Anvil! The Story Of Anvil (2008), directed by Sacha Gervasi, and since 2010, he has composed much of the music for US broadcasting giant ABC’s primetime news documentaries. His work for ABC is broadcast in the US and around the world on a daily basis.
In 2012, he was the music supervisor for Hitchcock (2012) featuring Anthony Hopkins, Helen Mirren & Scarlett Johansson and in 2017, he teamed up once again with Gervasi for the score to November Criminals starring Chloe Moretz and Ansel Elgort. The following year, he composed the score for the Emmy-nominated HBO film My Dinner With Herve, starring Peter Dinklage and Jamie Dornan.
Norland will be performing the score of Carousel later this year, and the score itself will be a forthcoming release on Denovali. 2026 will also see the release of documentary All Permits Secured, a valentine to the history of EDM, featuring Norland’s score.
Heavyweight psychedelic improvisers EarthBall are back with their third and most monstrous record to date: ‘Outside Over There’, released on Upset The Rhythm (Nov 7th). Born from the haunted basements of Nanaimo, Canada, the quintet thrives on spontaneity, shaping improvisation into jagged hallucinations and ecstatic eruptions.
Recorded live-off-the-floor in 2024 in Jeremy, Izzy, and Kellen’s basement, and mixed by drummer John Brennan, ‘Outside Over There’ is an album that feels both summoned and inevitable. Each track lands with uncanny purpose, as if uncovered rather than written.
The opener, 100%, features a cameo from comedian and English icon Stewart Lee, who lent his blessing for the band to use a fragment of his stand-up. The album was mastered by John Dieterich (Deerhoof), with liner text contributed by longtime comrade John Olson (Wolf Eyes). Olson describes the album in his unmistakable style:
“This eight-track odyssey unfolds like a dreamscape, where whispered incantations brush against the shadowy fringes of the cosmos, and wild, Cézanne-inspired rock anthems erupt like geysers of color in the midst of a western warm and wet rain storm… culminating in the sprawling eleven minute masterpiece, ‘And The Music Shall Untune The Sky,’ aptly dubbed the Earth Crusher. A creation so utterly deconstructed and intertwined with the pulse of nature itself that if AI was called upon to conceive ‘Outside Over There’ anew, it would just spit back, “F.U. in Tree Font”. An enchanting invitation for even the flat-earthers to join the circle, if only just a little.”
EarthBall’s trajectory has been relentless. Their 2024 album ‘It’s Yours’ was praised by The Quietus as “fully aggressive and fully life-affirming,” and by The Wire as "a boisterous mind-melting album”. The band’s live double set LP ‘Actual Earth Music Vol. 1 & 2’ (2025) captured blistering performances: a performance opening for Wolf Eyes at the Fox Cabaret, and a Café OTO improvised throw-down featuring Chris Corsano and Steve Beresford. These releases on their own confirm them as one of Canada’s most vital experimental exports, not to mention the impressive self-released discography on their Bandcamp. The band’s reach has stretched far beyond their west coast roots with a UK tour May 2024, plus this past June, EarthBall closed Montreal’s Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival alongside Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Raven Chacon. This November they will perform at Le Guess Who? Festival in Utrecht, with a European tour to follow (tour dates below). Outside of EarthBall, each member carries their own torch. Jeremy Van Wyck, founding member of the legendary Shearing Pinx, has toured extensively, released over 100 records, and has been a vital force in the Vancouver and West Coast underground for the past 25 years. He and Isabel Ford (Izzy) play together not only in EarthBall, but also in Psychedelic Dirt, Shearing Pinx, Behaviours, and Crotch.
John Brennan collaborates widely, including recently with Endlings (Raven Chacon and John Dieterich), Evichen (Victoria Shen), Francesco Fonassi, Plan Your Future (with Greg Saunier of Deerhoof), Brennan/Corsano duo and Physics with John Dieterich. Kellen Maclaughlin performs with KVMP and Ora Corgan, while saxophonist Liam Murphy is a west coast staple, playing with the best across Vancouver Island and the mainland. On three of the tracks of ‘Outside Over There’, the band is joined by their comrade Justin Patterson, who also plays with Brennan in the duo Modale. This cross-pollination fuels EarthBall’s sound - a collective improvisation, psychically overdriven, and grinding into bloom.
Outside Over There’ is more than an album though, it is a ritual, a gathering of sound at the forest’s edge; where feedback, saxophone screams, and ecstatic vocals dissolve the boundary between chaos and clarity. EarthBall invite you into their circle, to share in the joyful terror of spontaneous creation. ‘Outside Over There’ will be released on November 7th through Upset The Rhythm digitally and as a limited blue-in-black vinyl LP.
A collection of vinyl and limited digital releases, curated by Millsart, an alias of Jeff Mills, of his most eclectic and transcendent compositions that derive from his Every Dog Has Its Day project as well as new unreleased works. Vernacular creations that fall off from the "other side" of the Electronic Music tree, this project is designed for the experienced Techno music listeners, and its goal is to reflect upon the pure artistry of the craft of storytelling. A realization between music and life. Whereas "dancing" is the goal of Dance Music, the goal of this music is about "reflecting on the complexity and simplification of life".Soundtracks for people in their evolutionary process.
This release 'Drifter' is about 'Hype'.
Hype
An animal that prowls on the vulnerable - it excites those who might be looking the other way or with their eyes and minds wide shut.
What is life without hype?
As a transitional tool, hype can be most effective especially when impulse reactions are at play. Something of a psychological currency, there is a lot to gain by giving people what they want - the rush that comes with taking part in a process of making something bigger, more successful and more preferred. Even if there is nothing there.
What's wrong with getting exciting about something?
There are only a few rare masterclass cases that have lasted a lifetime.
As Andy Warhol proclaimed that "everyone will be World famous for 15 minutes" rings darkly true in an era when each one of us can be the talent scout, artist, critic, audience.......and then a revisionist, hoping to bring hype back again by reminding people how great the first round felt.
We are all free to use our attention and time anyway we please. This is the freedom we have, right?
In most cases, we wake up and at some point, the question of justification becomes a debate between those who found unconditional solace and those who re-discovered the subject of substance and "kicked the tires".
Should I care if others like or dislike something?
For some, the hype of something never ends. It hardens and becomes part of a foundation like a cement podium. Something to be stood on to speak over all dissenting voices.
In the spring of 1971, somewhere between Brussels, Paris and a collective pop fever dream, Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki landed on vinyl. It sounded like nothing else then and it still does not today. More than half a century later, Sdban Records proudly presents a reissue of this singular cult album, available from April 3, 2026 on vinyl.
The album was produced by Jean Kluger and written both by Jean and Daniel Vangarde (aka Bangalter, later the father of Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk), who were alreadywell ahead of their time, long before electronic music rewrote the rules of pop culture.
Released under the name Yamasuki, also referred to as The Yamasuki Singers, or The Yamasuki's, the project was never intended as a conventional band. It was a studio-born fantasy, a concept album disguised as a pop record. What began as a standalone single quickly expanded into a full-blown pan-cultural pop opera that ignored genres and common sense with joyful abandon.
Musically, the album sits at a delirious crossroads. Psychedelic pop collides with funk rhythms, samba and bubblegum melodies, full of chants and choruses in a phonetic pseudo-Japanese, written with the help of a dictionary. Kluger and Vangarde famously recruited a children's choir to perform the vocals, and for added spectacle, they brought in a Japanese judo grandmaster, whose ritualistic shouts and battle cries erupt throughout the record.
Several singles were released. One of them, Yamasuki, with accompanying dance move, appeared in the United Kingdom and France on John Peel's Dandelion label, a fitting home for a record that thrived on the margins of pop culture. Its B-side, Aieaoa, proved even more potent. In 1975, the song was reborn as A.I.E. (A Mwana) by Black Blood, an African group recording in Belgium, this time sung in Swahili. That melody would travel even further. Aie a Mwana became the debut single of English pop group Bananarama, and in 2010 it resurfaced once more as Helele, an official song of the FIFA World Cup, recorded by South African singer Velile Mchunu with Danish percussion duo Safri Duo. That version became the most widely known incarnation of the song. With Jean Kluger directly involved, it was less a cover than a continuation of the original idea.
The album's afterlife did not stop there. Over the years, Yamasuki has been quietly sampled, covered, and featured across media far beyond the realm of novelty pop. Kono Samourai was sampled in The Healer by Erykah Badu (2007), produced by Madlib, while Yama Yama has found its way into recent pop culture as well: appearing in the television series Fargo, on Angus Stone's project Dope Lemon, and on the 2008 Late Night Tales compilation curated by Arctic Monkeys drummer Matt Helders. Proof, if any were needed, that this strange little record carries a deeper musical DNA than its playful exterior might suggest.
This new reissue of Le Monde Fabuleux Des Yamasuki proves the renewed interest and respect for this cult album, faithful to the original spirit while finally giving it back the physical presence it deserves. In an era obsessed with genres and algorithmic neatness, Yamasuki still laughs, dances and karate-kicks its way past definitions. It reminds us that pop music can be playful without being disposable, strange without being cynical and joyfulwithout explanation. The world of Yamasuki was always fabulous, we are just lucky it found its way back to us!
Familiar. Usually reserved for things we think we know. A face, a place, a feeling, a record perhaps. Until, of course, they aren’t quite the same anymore. Or maybe you aren’t.
Jennifer’s debut album lives somewhere around there.
It’s a record about time, which is already a fairly ambitious subject considering nobody seems to have figured that one out yet. More specifically, it’s about what
time does to a person. The old versions, the new versions, and all the ones in between that you only notice when something suddenly brings them back. Someone you
haven’t seen in years. A room you used to know. A certain way the light falls. That sort of thing.
There’s a bit of a doppelgänger situation going on, too. Finding something completely new and somehow recognising it. Meeting yourself again without immediately realising who you’re talking to.
Which can be nice. Or strange. Usually both. The songs on Familiar sit comfortably with that contradiction. Looking backwards without wanting to go back. Missing things without necessarily wanting them
returned. Realising that people who once occupied most of your waking hours can become people whose address you don’t know. Meanwhile, some tiny, seemingly irrelevant detail from fifteen years ago remains perfectly intact.
Memory has its own filing system. Not a particularly sensible one.
Jennifer wrote a series of poems alongside the album. In them, familiarity appears in melting snow, rough coastlines, a kitchen already warm in the morning, somebody’s hands fitting into yours. Elsewhere she wonders about someone she
once knew everything about and now knows nothing about. They could live around the corner. They could live on another continent. They could, technically, be dead. Probably not. But that’s time for you.
Maybe Familiar is less about remembering who you were than realising you never entirely stopped being them. Things get added. Things disappear. Things come back looking slightly different.
And somehow, you recognise them.
* long version / previously unreleased on vinyl
** exclusive / previously unreleased
Felix Laband's highly acclaimed electronica masterpiece album "Dark Days Exit" (2005) is now available as an Extended Version 2LP vinyl. Originally planned for last year's 20th anniversary, this special edition features a new design by Felix Laband and includes a double-sided DIN A2 art print. Dark Days Exit features four exclusive tracks, alongside five vinyl-only tracks available for the first time in their original long versions. Listening to the key track, Sleeping Household, on Dark Days Exit is unsettling: like being an impostor rambling around an uncanny house, a Lynchian leitmotif in the form of a young girl divulging secrets that you probably shouldn't hear. Dark Days Exit is an album that paints an interior landscape, an invitation to transgress private thresholds. Made with old-school production tools that require hands-on application, Dark Days Exit is a sound-production tour de force. The music is as wide as the savannah and microscopic at the same time, a lesson in what can be achieved when 'music' is placed on an equal footing with sound as a phenomenon, by an artist who decides to apply themselves without reserve. The masterful manipulation of reverb and delays and hyper-detail was a generation ahead of its time, and Dark Days Exit is preferred by audiophiles for testing their systems. Dark Days Exit is intimate, demanding, and a masterclass in tension, and Laband's ability to use all sound without hierarchy to paint a detailed personal vision — one that is less overtly political and streetwise than on subsequent albums — is unsurpassed. Most discerning listeners are into music because, in the hands of a master, it can manipulate our mood and transport us. Felix Laband opens with a sonic portrait of spring happiness and gradually dismantles the atmosphere in front of our ears, as epitomised by the haunting track Black Shoes. No sooner are we afraid than the artist drops us off where we started. In many ways, the intimacy derives from the tight group of friends and believers whom Laband corralled as contributors: Mark van Niekerk (xylophone, "Miss Teardrop"), Jane Rademeyer (clarinet, "Black Shoes," "Radio Right Now"), Brendon Bussy (mandolin, "Black Shoes"), and Derek Gripper (sampled violin, used throughout) and Alex van Heerden on Minka. The difficulty in categorising Dark Days Exit is probably due to Laband listening mostly to ambient and classical music at the time, and consequently registering the album at the lush, cinematic end of the electronic spectrum. There is poise and restraint in the spare use of beats, and when they do appear, they hit hard. Forged in the optimistic post-apartheid years, Dark Days Exit is music about life and death, spanning hope, despair, terror, tension, with humour and empathy. Twenty one years on, the album's gravity endures, due to its almost perverse authenticity, its timeless themes of hope and despair, and its apex level of technical mastery. The additional, immaculately produced tracks add new rooms to the uncanny house we are invited into.
This record was originally released by us in 2019 on yellow vinyl, part of the Holy Quattro. Only 250 were pressed back then and sold out that year. We have done a limited repress of 150 units on 180g black vinyl.
MEMORIALS jump off the waterslides and head above the clouds with their stunning second album, ‘All Clouds Bring Not Rain’. The duo of Verity Susman and Matthew Simms (formerly of Electrelane and WIRE) locked themselves away in a studio in a barn secluded deep in the woods in southwestern France and re-emerged with a beautiful, unusual record that is both melodic and unconventional. For such an ambitious album it’s striking that it was written, performed, recorded and mixed solely by the two of them. Sounding like an unearthed classic, MEMORIALS twist their influences into their own unmistakable sound. Imagine Nico singing with Can produced by David Axelrod and you’re somewhere in the right ballpark.
The record draws inspiration from a wide range of music including folk, dub, post punk, experimental tape music, 60s soul, garage rock, 70s spiritual jazz and Canterbury prog. This attention to detail in their sound meant finding several other studios to get what they needed to record with, including a harpsichord at 4AD’s studio in London and a vibraphone and vintage Leslie speaker in Stereolab drummer Andy Ramsay’s studio Press Play. Verity’s distinctive, unadorned singing is a focal point of the record, moving from tender to wild. Her vocal melodies quickly become earworms, providing the tuneful heart around which the songs’ more unorthodox elements are arranged, which is where Matthew’s unconventional approach to recording and production comes to the fore. With their adventurous arrangements, classic songwriting skills and innovative production techniques, MEMORIALS have created another mesmerising listen that’s accomplished and compelling in its unique approach yet remains dizzyingly immersive - just like their acclaimed live shows.
You've never played a game like Blippo+ before, and you've never heard a video game soundtrack quite like Greatest Hits from Planet Blip.
Composed by Rob Kieswetter and Jona Bechtolt from the LA-based trio YACHT, the soundtrack collects 71 tracks from the cult classic video game Blippo+, reworked and sequenced into a continuous listen for this special release —a TV static-speckled gatefold double LP, out Oct. 16 via Hologram Opera, marking the soundtrack’s physical debut.
Taking the form of a cable TV simulator, Blippo+ captures the magical feeling of seizing a mysterious signal from outer space and discovering the television programming of an alien culture. Soundtracking the game’s pastiche of programs is Rob and Jona’s genre-spanning score—synth-heavy, eccentrically electronic, with a skewed sensibility that pays homage to cable access, library music, video art, and the late-night margins of the 80s and 90s underground.
TV obsessives will find plenty to love in Greatest Hits from Planet Blip: with surreal theme songs, jangly jingles, zippystings, catchy kitsch, period-accurate menu music and even pop hits from the alien airwaves, this propulsively playful soundtrack will have channel-flippers tingling with nostalgia.
“Planet Blip is an alien planet where art and music are the only currency and ‘consciousness particles’ form the basis of all media. To capture the spirit of this world, we drew inspiration
from all the music we felt best embodied this ethos and ran it through our own utopian blender,” say Bechtolt and Kieswetter.
Blippo+ is an award-winning, experimental, live-action video game created by YACHT and Telefantasy Studios, along with developers Noble Robot and Dustin Mierau, and published by Panic Games. It was released for Steam, Playdate and Nintendo Switch in 2025 to widespread
critical acclaim and has earned a devoted fandom. A Mac version followed earlier this year, and was nominated for an Apple Design Award.
"Simultaneously nostalgic and futuristic, otherworldly yet
welcoming, Blippo+ is an absolute artistic triumph.
" —Deven McClure, Screen Rant
"Blippo+’s presentation might ape old traditions, but the collective impact of its content is richer, deeper, and more entertaining than any mere remembrance.
" —Garrett Martin, Paste/Endless Mode
"In the increasingly reactionary and prescriptive landscape of video games, it is remarkable to encounter something so distinctive, so hopeful, so celebratory, so devoted to expanding the possibility space of art beyond a single medium." —Sam Bodrojan
Back in November 2015, after years of collaborations with such as Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Obie Trice, Sean Price, Kool G Rap, Eternia and countless others, Toronto-based producer MoSS released his debut producer album entitled "Marching To The Sound Of My Own Drum". Since the beginning of his career, the Canadian beatsmith, record digger and music connoisseur has been making a name for himself with his signature sound and on this record he gives an amazing display of what he's capable of doing being backed up by an all stars team that features AZ, Havoc, Slum Village, Onyx, Inspectah Deck, Ill Bill, Skyzoo, Guilty Simpson and 20+ other legendary MC's. A few years after its original release, we've decided to team up with MoSS to bring you this masterpiece on wax and, for the occasion, he's also added an unreleased bonus track called "We Here" that features Smif-N-Wessun that, together with "Emotional Redux", we've put on a 7" together with its instrumental. Limited edition of 500 hand-numbered copies, with the first 200 pressed on orange/black A-side B-side vinyl, and 300 on black vinyl.
BONUS 7”
A1. Emotional Redux (feat. Big Gov, Guilty Simpson, Jon Connor, Vstylez, Willie The Kid)
B1. We Here (feat. Smif-N-Wessun) UNRELEASED
B2. We Here (Instrumental)
The fifth album from Saint Abdullah & Eomac began as a poem and became a record that refuses to stay in one place. The title arrived in a cab in Paris. Mohammad Mehrabani read it aloud from a list of options. Ian McDonnell said: that's interesting, what does that mean? The answer, it turned out, was the album. Their fifth album When The Sandbox Has No Edge is rooted in hip hop, but its cast tells you how far it travels. Abbas Zahedi, Richie Culver, and Armand Hammer contribute vocals and poetry. Lester St. Louis brings cello. Che Chen of 75 Dollar Bill brings guitar. The producer and sound designer Seraphim contributed textures and sound designs throughout. Samples run deep, from records pulled from charity shops to market stalls on road trips across the UK. Raw fragments were shaped into fully formed compositions, structuring the chaos without flattening it. The sandbox, rendered without an edge.
Two of the most prolific remixers in the world of Disco,Dave 'Love' Lee and John Moraleshave teamed up for one of their biggest projects to date - 'Mixed To The Maxxx'. After gaining access from the legendary original artists, the pair take the multi-track tapes of many classic Disco, Funk & Soul tracks and re-work them...to the Maxxx!
Where Remixed With Love stands as Dave Lee's own gold-standard body of work, Mixed To The Maxxx sets that legacy alongside Morales' own decades-deep M+M body of work: Lee brings his musically dense, groove-first touch to the likes of Harold Melvin, Syreeta, Lenny Williams and The Brand New Heavies, while Morales applies his extended, dancefloor-built M+M treatment and crushes the likes of Barry White, The Temptations and Loleatta Holloway, plus Dennis Coffey's breakbeat classic "Scorpio" for the DJs and collectors alike. Both work from original tapes, surfacing parts barely audible or entirely unheard in the source mixes, and both know when to let a classic breathe rather than bury it under modern production. It's a pairing a long time in the making. Lee and Morales first talked about working together around a decade ago, and getting Mixed To The Maxxx off the ground took five years of patient work: tracking down usable stems, securing approvals, and navigating a licensing landscape where much of the best material is now tied up with major labels increasingly cautious about clearing remixes. What's landed here is the product of that graft as much as the pair's shared ear for a great record, the sound of two people who know exactly what they're looking for and are willing to put in the time to find it.
A double 12" sampler in summer 2025 previewed the record's range. A bass-driven overhaul ofThe Brothers Johnson's "The Real Thing" and an extended mix of Philly legends Bell & James' "Livin' It Up (Friday Night)" showcased Lee's side, while an anthemic take on Inner Life's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough" and a tempo-lifted Light Of The World"London Town" flew the flag for Morales. Both drew strong early support ahead of the full LP.
The fifteenth release of Barro comes with an exclusive: behind the Transylvanian mask of Orlok 101 lies Nöle himself, the boss of the label.
Remember that he used this vampiric AKA to kick off Barro—his The End Of The Beginning being the first release, published in late 2018. That same year, his techno-industrial sound—packed with references from the famous work of Bram Stoker and nightmare atmospheres—helped launch another label: Soil, the Valencia-based imprint, with a project that included a suitably fitting remix of The Horrorist. The following year, he released an EP with five original tracks, titled Runaway, while also “spreading blood” on Antikhrist Visions Vol I alongside his Industrias Mekanikas comrades.
His dark influence has been felt across Barro’s catalogue, whether through his own tracks or remixes—sinking his teeth into artists like The Hacker (under his real name, Amato) or Nebula Circuit. In 2025, Orlok made his debut on Aspecto Humano with a powerful EP, equally gritty and dark. In Barro, we’ve recently had Nöle—the most techno side of Imanol Pagola—with the EPs Electro Bloody Music and Demencial Chico Aceleradom, two great showcases of his ability to keep us dancing nonstop, following the popular Mendekua, released by Xtraperlo.
For Barro 15, the two sides of the producer and DJ come together on this EP, titled Sex With a Cop—four tracks released on vinyl and digitally, plus an alternate version of the final composition as a bonus track.
Nöle's knowledge of the dancefloor and Orlok 101's ability to create atmospheres that will give you goosebumps come together on this EP to create an explosive mix.
Sex With a Cop starts with Hilerri, a techno EBM track where Orlok provides repetitive, screeching sounds and a ghostly melody, while Nöle adds incisive synths and a catchy, addictive vocal sample that warns you of the danger of the material you’re listening to. Orlok then takes over with his industrial and metallic sonorities on the next track, Amets Fabrika, although Nöle’s influence still comes through with his powerful bass and addictive synth lines. A stifled scream and a production packed with a thousand details create an unsettling atmosphere that will surprise you on the dancefloor.
The flip side begins with No Voy A Quedar Con Nadie, a track closer to Nöle’s technooid world. Even with its unsettling opening, it doesn’t take long to turn into a danceable bomb, with that dark touch typical of the Navarro producer.
Surprisingly, he saves the best for last: Harina de Huesos Humanos is one of the most interesting tracks created by Imanol Pagoda, and we can hear it in two versions, one as a bonus track. Thanks to complex production full of details and sounds that come and go, a punchy, hard as granite kick drum, and a carefully crafted industrial atmosphere, it all ends up being the perfect union between the two sonic worlds. A spectacular finale for the label’s fifteenth release.
After decades contributing to records where a single riff could transform a dancefloor, Charlie May turns that instinct inward on Trusted Farms.
For over thirty years, Charlie has occupied a position that seems increasingly rare in electronic music: the musician’s musician, the person behind the machines, the extra pair of hands in the studio, and quite often, the person responsible for the melody you end up carrying around in your head for weeks on end.
Alongside Duncan Forbes as Spooky, Charlie helped shape some of the most important electronic music to emerge from the UK in the early ’90s. That partnership would also sow the seeds for one of Sasha’s defining records: the central riff behind Xpander began life in Spooky’s live material, before Charlie brought the idea into the studio with Sasha and helped transform it into one of electronic music’s most enduring anthems.
Listen closely to Charlie’s work and there’s a particular instinct that keeps returning: knowing when a simple synth line is enough. Knowing which note needs to change. Knowing when repetition stops being repetition and starts becoming the entire reason a track works. More recently, as one-third of Quiet Places on ASIP, he’s taken those same instincts somewhere looser — beatless, gridless and led by improvisation.
Trusted Farms puts those instincts front and centre.
Tiny melodic phrases appear and refuse to leave. Synth lines repeat just long enough to become lodged in your head. Parts rub against each other without being tidied into submission. There’s a sharpness and directness to it all amongst the purposeful analogue warmth.
Some of these tracks feel almost ridiculously simple at first. But simplicity is difficult when you’ve spent decades learning every possible way to complicate something. Many of the parts on Trusted Farms were performed live with minimal editing. A synth line might be doubled, distorted, re-recorded and pushed back through another piece of equipment, but it remains the same idea. Instead of filling the gaps, Charlie works on the weight and character of what is already there. The melodies become physical; slightly worn around the edges.
For someone whose fingerprints can be found across some genuinely monumental moments in electronic music, Charlie has spent decades knowing what to add.
Trusted Farms is about knowing exactly what to leave alone.
Available on black 12”, mastered by Andreas Lupo LOOP-O Lubich and featuring artwork by Peter Skwiot Smith,
On Dummy’s new album, do you love the color of the sky?, the Los Angeles-based 5-piece deliver a breathtaking piece of work that introduces new textures and rhythms to their already varied and refined catalog. For the band’s third album, and first for new label home Polyvinyl, the group split time between self-recording at their home studio as well as Studio 22, linking up with frequent collaborator and engineer Joo-Joo Ashworth (Corridor, Automatic, Spiral XP). The band focused on intentionality and experimentation, exploring downtempo dance beats and electronic music while pushing the guitar as far as they could, using new self-sampling and processing techniques. Percussionist Alex Ewell’s overall sound design and production skills can be heard across the album, with layered drum sounds and rhythmic tremolo techniques shining throughout. Tracks like “Full Spectrum Dominance” and “Alluvial Fan” showcase the band’s tasteful pop sensibilities, while closing track “Heaven’s What You Make Of
It” features perhaps the strongest vocal delivery yet from vocalist/keyboardist
Emma Maatman. Additionally, the dynamic exchange between guitarists Joe Trainor and Nathan O’Dell is absolutely gorgeous, adding a new layer of immersion and directness that is unlike anything the band has done before. The result is Dummy’s most ethereal and sincere record to date, with more feminine and delicate undertones that sit beautifully alongside the gritty and noisy textures the band has become known for. Dummy has been praised in numerous outlets such as Paste, Stereogum, Aquarium Drunkard and Pitchfork, who described their second album, Free Energy, as “the
sound of a band turning all its potential energy into music that’s dazzlingly kinetic and powerful." The band has toured the US, UK, and EU extensively, with festival appearances at Austin Psych Fest, Treefort Music Festival, and others. In addition to larger outlets and festivals, the band’s strong ties to community and DIY ethos are ever-present, oftentimes preferring to play and connect with different local artists on tour, uplifting those around them while shining a light on the history of independent music.
On Dummy’s new album, do you love the color of the sky?, the Los Angeles-based 5-piece deliver a breathtaking piece of work that introduces new textures and rhythms to their already varied and refined catalog. For the band’s third album, and first for new label home Polyvinyl, the group split time between self-recording at their home studio as well as Studio 22, linking up with frequent collaborator and engineer Joo-Joo Ashworth (Corridor, Automatic, Spiral XP). The band focused on intentionality and experimentation, exploring downtempo dance beats and electronic music while pushing the guitar as far as they could, using new self-sampling and processing techniques. Percussionist Alex Ewell’s overall sound design and production skills can be heard across the album, with layered drum sounds and rhythmic tremolo techniques shining throughout. Tracks like “Full Spectrum Dominance” and “Alluvial Fan” showcase the band’s tasteful pop sensibilities, while closing track “Heaven’s What You Make Of
It” features perhaps the strongest vocal delivery yet from vocalist/keyboardist
Emma Maatman. Additionally, the dynamic exchange between guitarists Joe Trainor and Nathan O’Dell is absolutely gorgeous, adding a new layer of immersion and directness that is unlike anything the band has done before. The result is Dummy’s most ethereal and sincere record to date, with more feminine and delicate undertones that sit beautifully alongside the gritty and noisy textures the band has become known for. Dummy has been praised in numerous outlets such as Paste, Stereogum, Aquarium Drunkard and Pitchfork, who described their second album, Free Energy, as “the
sound of a band turning all its potential energy into music that’s dazzlingly kinetic and powerful." The band has toured the US, UK, and EU extensively, with festival appearances at Austin Psych Fest, Treefort Music Festival, and others. In addition to larger outlets and festivals, the band’s strong ties to community and DIY ethos are ever-present, oftentimes preferring to play and connect with different local artists on tour, uplifting those around them while shining a light on the history of independent music.
Superfan is the songwriting veil of Kali Priya Flanagan, the Brooklyn-based multi-instrumentalist and producer. While initially imagined as a solo act, ambitious string arrangements crafted in collaboration with cellist Omeed Almassi have come to define Superfan’s noisy and magnetic pop soundscape.
Today, Superfan announces their forthcoming album ‘My Piledriver Heart’ (MPDH), out October 16 via new label home AD 93 (Joanne Robertson, Dagmar Zuniga, YHWH Nailgun). Along with the announcement, Superfan presents his new single “In the Gold Room” paired with the live version filmed by Garrett Winston inside Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
MPDH marks the first release outside of the record deal Flanagan signed at age 14. The album finds Flanagan embracing a more expansive, experimental vision of indie rock - melding deeply tuned acoustic guitar, cello, and Eastern musical influences into what he calls his “Acousticello” sound. Recorded largely live with cellist Omeed Almassi and producer Hudson Pollock, the record explores heartbreak, independence, and hopeful melancholia. Kali says “This time around it was about being (myself) versus becoming myself. This album was made to acknowledge the ebbs and flows in chugging along with life and love, from a place of comfort within the self that opens you up to the beauty in everyday life.” He does so through intimate performances that blur the line between folk, chamber music, pop-rock ballads, and alternative rock. Last year, he released the singles “Apeiron (Fantasy Football)” and “Miss W Jones” and earlier this year he released “Picture of Return.”
Following his acclaimed debut Tow Truck Jesus, Flanagan opened for The Strokes at Red Rocks, and has quietly become a fixture of New York’s DIY scene, performing alongside artists like Horsegirl, Knifeplay, and Quiet Light, while also playing support shows with King Woman and Victoryland this summer. He is also in the rising emo band Holidays in United States.
Before Superfan, Flanagan found success during the pandemic under his first moniker, “KALI.” His initial releases garnered millions of streams and led to collaborations with seasoned high-profile producers and industry teams. Despite his budding career as an indie-pop star, Flanagan was dissatisfied with the conditions of his artistic output and community as he reached adulthood. His coming-of-age years in Los Angeles were marked by an ever-present new-wave pop music oblivion: “hits” made in 5-hour sessions with strangers, a social life suffocated by others’ aspirations for fame, and an absent audience for live music that pushed past the prescriptions of recorded music. On MPDH, Kali says “I can’t help my urge to write these pop-rock ballads, but we really wanted to push the boundary of genre and expressing the sentiments of the songs through experimentation.”
A dream come true for A Colourful Storm to be releasing an early gem by Tenniscoats, a duo whose DIY spirit, boundless creativity and lust for life and collaboration has left an indelible mark. From self-releasing albums and tapes on their own Majikick imprint to meeting kindred spirits The Pastels, Bill Wells and Jad Fair in between outings for Morr Music, Chapter and Häpna, to name but a few, Tenniscoats have embodied an understated determination and optimism for over two decades.
"A foghorn melodica, voice, fractions, fragments, nothing and everything all at once. We Are Everyone opens out slowly, a little eerily, magic tumbles into play in well-measured rations. Meanwhile, on the cover, Saya and Ueno's heads seem to merge into the sky as if living amongst the wisdom of the clouds. Or maybe somewhere between sleep and reality, like Ueno's description of Tenniscoats' music. We Are Everyone is one of those records where you almost feel engulfed in its making - you feel like you're in the room with Tenniscoats as they push themselves to the limit, trying to make the very best record they can." - Stephen Pastel
There's something about summer that makes everything fall into place. Maybe it feels even more significant to us, especially if you know MM Discos through its Balearic leanings. It's that time of year when the whole scene reaches its peak, with everyone dreaming of being in Ibiza-or at the very least, somewhere on a forgotten beach or island in the Mediterranean.
For that very moment, Desert Island Disco make their MM Discos debut with a record tailor-made for the summer of 2026. Splitting their time between London and Lisbon, the collective have already shown a deep affinity for African-rooted midtempo sounds through releases on Shades of Sound and Mister T Records, alongside a steady stream of sought-after self-released edits on their Bandcamp.
This time, Desert Island Disco dive headfirst into South Africa, drawing deeply from the worlds of Kwaito and Bubblegum to deliver a record steeped in the warmth, groove and unmistakable spirit of both genres.
From its South African foundations, *World View* reaches far beyond, weaving together tropical textures, Caribbean flavours and Balearic sensibilities into something fluid and difficult to pin down. A borderless collection where geography becomes secondary to feeling, yet every track remains firmly rooted in the dancefloor.
Originally released by Umor Rex on cassette in 2018, Rafael Anton Irisarri’s Sirimiri is now available on vinyl for the first time, newly remastered for this edition. This LP marks the fourth and final installment in a series of four reissues released throughout 2026 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Umor Rex.
It is a fitting way to close such a special anniversary year. Rafael is not only an artist who has released three albums on Umor Rex, but someone who has been part of the label’s history for more than a decade. His sensibility and way of listening have complemented and nourished the label throughout the years, while his mastering work has helped shape the sound of many of our releases. A close friend, and an essential part of what Umor Rex is today.
Sirimiri roughly translates as “drizzle” in Basque, and we can’t think of a better word to describe its content. The album consists of four long-form pieces, each shaped through different processes and with its own distinct identity, in which Irisarri seeks to blend subjective time with the listening experience through loops, repetition, and subsequence-based sound. Following Eno, nothing happens in quite the same way twice: perception is constantly shifting, and nothing stays in one place for long. The desolation and despair—in a strangely positive way—that we heard in The Shameless Years (Umor Rex, 2017) and later in FAÇADISMS (Black Knoll, 2024) are present here, but the impression is more concrete, unfolding through rawer, less rhetorical landscapes. If The Shameless Years existed somewhere between beauty and active tragedy, this record travels through the beauty and melancholy of an observing eye—a quiet, rebellious insurrection.
Written, produced, mixed & mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio, NY. Carl Hultgren: Guitars on “Sonder”, Taylor Jordan: Electric Piano on “Mountain Stream”. Design by Daniel Castrejón.
Rick Wade’s Late Night Basix returns in a fresh repress, keeping that raw Detroit deep house spirit alive. Heavy on groove, soulful in feel, and made for late-night sessions.
A must for heads who know the value of a true floor weapon.
The collaboration we’ve all been waiting for is finally here! Thee Sacred Souls asked him to... and Victor Axelrod delivers with two massive platters sure to usher summer in with a swing.
Thoughtfully plucked from their sophomore album, Got a Story to Tell, the Cupid struck ‘Waiting for the Right Time’ gets a soulful reggae reboot from Axelrod and session team The Inversions.
Josh Lane’s emotional delivery and impressive vocal range meld with the raw, heavy rhythms as if preordained—transforming the beloved tracks into something exciting and fresh whilst leaving its DNA intact. A testament to what a skilled producer can do with rock-solid compositions. Comes complete with respective HEAVY B SIDE DUB VERSIONS. Get into it!
Emerging from the dark Olympic forests with a new album and a full bag of chanterelles, fish narc's Ben Funkhouser has shifted the damp melancholy characteristic of his earlier work towards the sun. Uncle is at once a cry of resignation ("say uncle!") and a declaration of seniority, a set of observations steeped in the blues of youth, delivered with Westerbergian inclination. Recorded and produced by Alex Farrar, the album's 11 tracks bear the hallmarks of his style: textured rock `n' roll somehow both raw and polished. Neither waxing pathetic nor sugarcoating, fish narc and the band are at peak form on Uncle, strumming out the complexities of aging with the conviction of a group that's fully found its footing in well-crafted rock and powerpop. Uncle KLP313, is a culmination of the punk rock musical work fish narc has done in his native Northwest environs. Says Funkhouser, "I feel like Uncle is the best record I've ever made. The songs grew without changing, the textures are spot on, and Alex [Farrar] and I saw eye to eye about almost everything. The album represents what I want for my band and songwriting and is the touchstone on which all my future work will be based." fish narc is a rocker and producer from the Pacific Northwest, recently relocated to Los Angeles. As a member of GothBoiClique, his innovative guitar playing became iconic of the group and helped shape the style of the movement that they pioneered. As a songwriter, fish narc leans more on influences from SST, K and the diy scene he grew up in. Catch him with a full band for the true intended experience. Previous records include WiLDFiRE in 2020, Camouflage in 2022, fruiting body [KLP295] in 2023 and frog song [KLP298] in 2025. This autumn fish narc will tour the United States with his punk horde.
With her fifth solo studio album, Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising, landing on Dekmantel Records, Steffi harnesses the energy of the dancefloor for a powerful, uplifting ride into the core of what makes this culture so transformative. From her years as a dedicated raver in the late 80s, through to her global tours, prolific production and ceaseless love for music in its many forms, Steffi's innate understanding of the dancefloor informs this new body of work. Key to all of this is the joy of the club experience: the high energy and the vibrational field that's created when the DJ, their musical selections and the dancers align on the same wavelength. The "Feel Factor" as she calls it. Even the title is a reference: half an owl meaning half a pill.
Each track is imbued with pure, unfiltered club energy. Steffi's approach with her albums is to start from scratch, working up and out from a core idea rather than compiling music from an existing collection, and Half An Owl And A Full Moon Rising is comprised of eight cuts, whittled down from over 40. Opening with 'The Rolling Wave', the album immediately transports the listener into a world of emotionally and physically moving soundscapes. Across all eight tracks Steffi weaves together potent drum programming with ethereal pads, strings, heartrending melodies and straight up grooves: honest, no fluff productions that are designed for a very specific purpose. Listening to cuts like 'Sweeping Leaps', you can hear echoes of the huge variety of house and techno Steffi has absorbed. The title track wraps you up in its scintillating rhythms and heady strings, while, midway through, 'Acoustics Of Space' fires on all cylinders with its dynamic tempo, relentless drums and euphoric pad work.
Folksongs and Ballads by Tia Blake & Her Folk-Group, is more than just a “lost classic”. As clear and honest as can be, Folksongs and Ballads is a magnetic record, a refuge like only Nick Drake, Nico, and a few others have been able to create. A graceful, delicately minimalist approach to classic Appalachian and British folk songs.The perfect balance between melancholy and daydream. Originally released only in France in 1971, Ici Bientôt is very pleased to present the first-ever reissue on vinyl.
When she recorded her only album, Tia Blake was nineteen years old and had just arrived in Paris a year and a half beforehand. She spent most of her time at Disco’Thé, a record shop in the Latin Quarter, a free space, peaceful and inspiring, a hub for students as well as the local artistic community.
There, Tia would occasionally sing—when she managed to overcome her shyness. Two young guitarists who were passionate fans of folk music and regulars at the shop began to accompany her, forming “Her Folk Group.” One year later, they cut 11 tracks at Pierre Barouh’s Studios Saravah.
Folksongs and Ballads is composed of traditional tunes that have been covered many times, but they’re not the best-known folk standards. A collection of stories ranging from the Middle Ages to the 1960s, bringing together sublimely doleful ballads, lamentations for a lost lover, and an unexpected, brilliant version of the road anthem “Plastic Jesus.”
Tia Blake's haunting, unaffected voice captivates and comforts us, wrapping us in its cool embrace. Meanwhile, the tasteful, stripped-down, mellow acoustic arrangements provided by the guitarists, reminiscent of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, occasionally supported by a kena flute, have created the space Tia Blake needed to reinvent these traditional songs.
Folksongs and Ballads is a timeless record, deep and unique, a longtime companion for repeated listening, in the vein of works by Sibylle Baier, Bridget St. John and Vashti Bunyan.
And they can't. Tiny things are important - This house could be anywhere, These things could happen to anyone." With this reflection, Charlie Parr introduces the characters of Rooming House, a conceptual folk opera that chronicles the lives of Upper Midwesterners through his quietly raucous, deeply rooted, and empathetic blues. These are songs of lost memories and hardship, but also of the improvised acts of kindness that help neighbors make do. Joined by celebrated drummer and fellow Minnesotan Dave King (The Bad Plus, Happy Apple), Parr cements his role as one of the great troubadours of our time with an album that becomes its own small yet profound offering of care. * "A gritty blend of Delta blues and Depression- era roots music soaked in his hardscrabble voice. It's a sacred realm of folk wisdom and sorrowful vulnerability." - Rolling Stone * "Expertly-picked resonator guitar and lyrics that puncture the soul" - NPR * "Arguably America's finest living troubadour." - Songlines (UK) * Compelling character-driven portraits on a folk opera concept album that chronicles the lives of Upper Midwesterners through his quietly raucous, deeply rooted, and empathetic blues. Driving, groove- driven resonator guitar pulls you in. Working through the material realities of our contemporary moment but also weaving that narrative with his hypnotic sound reveals the near-mythic scale importance of these stories
Released in 2000 on Tommy Boy, the album fi nds Capone and Noreaga leaning into their chemistry: Capone's colder, clipped delivery grounding Nore's wild-eyed charisma and off-kilter bounce. The record features heavyweight production and appearances from names like DJ Premier, The Alchemist, Havoc, L.E.S., Nas, Mobb Deep, Foxy Brown, and Carl Thomas, surrounding CNN with some of New York rap's most recognizable voices and architects. Highlights like "Bang Bang," "Invincible," "Queens Finest," and "Phonetime" keep the album rooted in hard drums, prison- call tension, borough pride, and that unmistakable CNN slang. Commercially, it made a solid showing, reaching No. 31 on the Billboard 200 and No. 8 on Top R&B/ Hip- Hop Albums, with "Phonetime" hitting No. 22 on Hot Rap Songs. The Reunion stands as a hard-nosed second chapter for CNN: a tough, guest-heavy, post- millennium Queens record that captures Capone and Noreaga reconnecting without sanding off the grime. This deluxe edition features the remastered original album with 3 bonus tracks.
For the second installment of its renewed imprint, Fuse's own in-house resident and one of Belgium's proudest exports Phara takes the reins for a deep dive into thick percussion and vibrant club landscapes. 'The Wall' puts current dance music under a microscope with a brush of truly vintage spontaneity, merging techno's confrontational nature with house's harmonic genuineness. This duality is reflected through Phara's own relationship with his home base Fuse and the complementary contrast between its two rooms.
The EP's title track serves as a hypnotic introduction for the A1, imposing a bass-heavy rhythm and a persistently oscillating synthline. A dense production full of energy, 'The Wall' inspires intrigue throughout its duration, revealing its true intentions through a capable sound system. Sharing the first side of the press is 'Blaes 208', a name that Fuse club goers will likely recognise, that guides the listener from effect into embrace. With lush keys echoing past a comforting drum sequence fit for a close-eyed dancefloor experience, Phara's impactful tendencies meet his affinity for the melodic through a blissful six minutes of crowd to selector connection. Switching sides, a return to a cold cold aesthetic is quickly apparent through 'Hush Now 206'. A pummeling, saturated bass competes with a kick of equal effect, rolling through a storm of metallic stabs. Mastering the message of urgency, Phara presents a lightshow of resonating percussive work, defining his space just to cut right through it. To close out with a lasting impression, the producer mutes the acoustics of his work through razor-sharp sound design dotting along playful snares, a duality reminiscent of the dynamism of Detroit electro. 'Motion Steps', referring to the stairs that ascend from Fuse's main room to its more left-field counterpart, captures the atmosphere of the almost shimmering music that can be expected to be played there; a place where Phara and many others have been known to explore the extremities of their music. He swiftly throws in melodic elements to recontextualize an otherwise pressing composition, and after three chapters of considerable weight, he concludes his record with infectious groove that flaunts technical ability.
Killer Groove Records presents a new 7" by Electric Circus, pairing "High Fever" and "Ogres": raw, hypnotic funk built on obsessive bass lines, sharp horns, dub delays and wah-wah guitars.
Both tracks are taken from Rites, the band's second studio album, out November 27 on limited-edition LP, CD and digital. The 7" is limited to 500 copies worldwide and is out September 25.
On the A-side, "High Fever" maps Electric Circus's territory: '70s funk, Afrobeat and psychedelia meet in a steady build toward a climax of synths and groove. The track grew from a bass line written over one feverish weekend and runs as a single continuous rise in tension.
The groove takes its cue from The Meters, locking syncopated accents into place while a punchy horn section cuts through from the opening bar. Dub delays and layered textures then open the arrangement out, trading space with wah-wah guitars and a treated clavinet that sounds vintage without dating the mix. After a darker, nocturnal passage, the saxophone rises over percussion and synths for the climax.
On the B-side, "Ogres" was the first track conceived for the album and the last to be completed. It began as a bass-and-percussion ostinato in an Ethiopian pentatonic scale, modelled on a war march, and grew into a dense groove with psychedelic and trip-hop textures. Its rhythm conjures a twilight bestiary of dark, menacing or perhaps merely curious creatures, building to a tense climax before resolving into a smooth, dreamlike finale that suggests awakening, or re-emergence.
Like the rest of Rites, both tracks started in jam sessions and were recorded in stages: live takes of the core arrangements first, then dedicated sessions for synths, horns and overdubs. Marco Sirio Pivetti engineered at Metrò Rec Studio in Riva del Garda, Gio Solo at Sberdia Studio in Turin. Overdubs were reamped through tube amplifiers and analog outboard. The band co-produced with Pivetti, who also mixed; Riccardo Ricci mastered at Velvet Room Mastering Studio in Brighton.
Electric Circus are based in Turin. They released their debut album, Canicola, in 2018 and have toured the U.S. Scoring Contrecourant (2021), a documentary series shot in Senegal and Mali, led them to Sahel Roots, a duo from the north of the country. The two groups recorded On est ensemble (Mieruba, 2023) remotely between Turin and Bamako, each writing two pieces for the other to finish.
For fans of The Heliocentrics, Calibro 35, BADBADNOTGOOD.
Dan Kye is the mysteriously evoked moniker from multi-instrumentalist, producer, and vocal sensation Jordan Rakei. The New Zealand-born artist - who now resides in London - presents his first long-player from Dan Kye, ‘Small Moments’, on Bradley Zero’s Rhythm Section INTL. An ode to the dancefloor, the musical project was born out of Jordan’s lockdown experience, created from the comfort of his own home. Recorded with just a laptop, extra live instruments and guest musicians, ‘Small Moments’ seamlessly transcends across electronica, jazz and funk, with each genre being effortlessly fused with Jordan’s melancholy vocals. Allowing himself to push the boundaries, Jordan’s Dan Kye moniker draws on the energetic and uplifting elements of house and techno and perfectly mixes it with the sultry vocals and emotion that come with the live elements we know and love from Jordan Rakei. The record offers listeners a journey through more floor-heavy tracks such as ‘Mogeri’ and ‘Raro’ to more groove infused offerings such as ‘Rainbow Road’ (which is named after one of the maps in Mario Kart and inspired by the energy of Prince’s iconic live concert at The Aladdin in Las Vegas), whilst tracks, like ‘Sober’, take on a more lyrical and anthemic feel.
Jordan Rakei: “Rhythm Section INTL was my entry point into dancefloor orientated music, and it was Bradley who asked me whether I could head in that direction so he could play my music out in the clubs. Dan Kye has still got melodies, but the main focus is to keep it high energy.”
After meeting Bradley Zero online whilst living in Australia, Jordan eventually moved to London in 2014. The same day he landed, he went straight to a Rhythm Section party to meet Bradley, and it was here that he first got a taste for house music. He enjoyed Rhythm Section INTL’s ability to draw on both live and electronic talent; and thus, after Bradley asked him for some productions for the parties, the idea for Dan Kye was born. ‘Small Moments’ is a musical masterpiece that can be enjoyed as much on the dancefloor as it can in the comfort of your own home and is a perfect step into Jordan’s landscape and idealism of dance orientated music.
Bradley Zero - “In around 2014 the proprietor of the famous Northside Records in Melbourne handed me a self released 12” from a new, unknown artist based in Brisbane. It was Jordan Rakei - Franklin’s Room. I’d been home almost a year before I actually got round to listening to it and I remember that moment like it was yesterday. I lay down on the sofa, put the record on and was transported! The Dan Kye project is a testament to the experimental and independent ethos Jordan lives by and is a product of an artist reaching full stride but not afraid to still try something new. This ‘Small Moments’ LP was conceived in a record store, born in a club on Rye Lane and is now flying the nest, throwing caution to the wind and making a bold statement.”
180g Heavy double vinyl LP with liner notes by Tyran Grillo. Limited Japanese Obi for the first pressing. Original artwork by Russell Mills and photography by Jean-Baptiste Mondino.
The third Time Capsule is a body of dub reinterpretations by celebrated producer Bill Laswell of Ethiopian singer Gigi. Curated by Tokyo record collector, music researcher and seasoned reissue supervisor Ken Hidaka, it is the first time Illuminated Audio is pressed to vinyl after its CD release in 2003.
Ejigayehu Shibabaw was born in 1974 in Chagni, northwestern Ethiopia and by pursuing a career as a singer, went against her father’s strict, traditional gender roles. As Gigi, she embraced the same musical freedom she had strived for in her personal life, incorporating the Ethiopian church, funk, hip-hop, West and South African music into her work. She first settled in Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, where she quickly established herself as one of the city’s leading singers. A move to San Francisco in 1998 led to a long and fruitful creative partnership with bassist and producer Bill Laswell.
Around the same time, Chris Blackwell had stepped away from Island Records to start the art house film company and label Palm Pictures. He took an interest in Gigi and together with Laswell, pulled together an all-star cast of musicians for her self-titled US debut album, including Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter. It won international critical acclaim, not just for its musicianship but for making Gigi a “defining voice for the Ethiopian expatriate community”, as journalist Tyran Grillo praises in his Time Capsule liner notes. From the nation-defining 1896 victory over Italian invaders to the quiet revolutionaries who wear simple shemma garments, Grillo believes the themes in Gigi make it “a shower of sunlight on her homeland for those ignorant of its struggles.”
After its success, Blackwell encouraged them to go back into the studio to rethink the album and Illuminated Audio was born. “Anyone can make a voice sound worldly”, Grillo remarks, “but rare are those who can make one sound inner-worldly.” Gigi was clear with Laswell to give her vocals a minor role “because it’s already been done.” Instead her Amharic verse is fleeting, exhaling through the textures like ghostly fragments; soaring yet muted. Yet the album is still titled under her name, an assertion by Laswell of her central role in the album’s creation. Not only was it a fully endorsed project by Gigi, but she would be present throughout its development, giving feedback on half-finished ideas as Laswell played them back in the studio. “It works perfectly”, she reflected after the album’s release. “We wanted to capture the whole spirit of each track, and Bill’s remixes create a different music language that really puts you in a pleasant place”.
This new vocabulary takes its lead from a technical approach that Laswell had been perfecting during a furtive creative period at the turn of the millennium. Much like his ambient interpretations of Miles Davis (Panthalassa, 1998), Bob Marley (Dreams of Freedom, 1997), and Carlos Santana (Divine Light, 2001), Laswell approached Illuminated Audio by returning to the original multitrack masters. Gigi wasn’t just reworked, but recomposed into an expansive lattice of instruments, submerged in a watery ambience of dub and trance undercurrents.
Sonically, this new language that Gigi refers to, is manifested by the original album’s more understated parts being pushed to the fore. Explaining his contrasting methods, Laswell saw Gigi as being “put together in a way that fits”. Contrastingly, in Illuminated Audio, “a lot of things that I featured in the remix weren’t as audible in the original.” Instrumentation laying near-dormant, deep in the mix, are brought to the fore: the acid rock guitar and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone on ‘Tew Ante Sew’, Graham Haynes’ flugelhorn on ‘Nafekeñ’, Laswell’s bass on ‘Kahn’, the melodica in Mengedegna or the floating synths and talking drums in ‘Gud Fella’.
Brought to his attention by mentor DJ Nori, Hidaka describes Illuminated Audio as a “masterful sonic exploration into ethereal ambience and dub” and made sure this reissue also contained a full remaster to give its “deep musicality” much better dynamics and density in the overall sound. Hidaka admits that Laswell's music “is sometimes so out-there, it is often misunderstood” and, indeed, to dub album non-believers this might seem like a prolific producer imposing himself on another artist’s work; eternally developing rearrangements that never quite get to its destination. But that’s missing its true power and triumph. This is more than the reissue of a remix, but “a wholly unique musical entity”, as Hidaka describes. Illuminated Audio refers to the illuminated manuscripts that comprise the major part of Ethiopian art and its new compositions stand in proud solitude as a rare body of reworks that both informs and enhances their originals.
You wake up abruptly on cold floorboards, your body aching as if from a great fall. White light floods your vision. Where are you? Last thing you can remember you were hurtling through the Genesis Domain at breakneck speed, but this is definitely somewhere different. As your eyes come into focus you see the hall is grand, intimidatingly opulent. A full house of seated onlookers peers at you expectantly. You’re on a stage, you realize. Flames creep up the walls, engulfing the room and lighting the faces in the audience; the heat is oppressive, but nobody seems to notice. A voice booms out.
“And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Presenting: a performer of great renown all across the land, yours for one night only… introducing—”
Tiny bells jangle around your head as you shift your weight, obscuring whatever name the announcer just called out. You try to sit up. The jester’s hat tumbles off with a clatter. Not this again, you groan. Your head spins with vertigo. You grimace, trying to remember something. You had just gleaned an urgent and existential truth in the Genesis Domain, but it’s slipping away now… what was it?
Off to your left, a whip cracks. The impresario glares at you from the wings, fist clenched around a diamond-encrusted whip, mouthing at you to get up.
You try to run, but the weight of an incorporeal authority bears down upon you. The impresario cracks his whip again, an impish smirk forming on his lips.
With resignation, you begin to work the room. What else can you do? Tendrils of giggling and gossip creep through your periphery. The heat is suffocating and the smoke stings your eyes, but the show goes on. Remembering your bag of tricks as if from a dream, you raise your hands in the air, invoking the universal call to audience participation. The crowd goes wild. You feel the rush of a familiar thrill. Being the Fool comes naturally to you, you realize, as the palace burns around you.
In 1996, Busta Rhymes delivered his debut album, The Coming, three years after the Leaders of the New School unofficially disbanded. Though his talents were evident on those Leaders of the New School releases, Busta went on a series of features that only built up the public's desire for a solo Busta album. Right out of the gate, Busta dropped his classic debut single "Woo Hah!! (Got You All in Check)" that made it abundantly clear he was to be mentioned among Hip Hop's greatest solo artists. The energy and originality packed on that one song set a tone for the album that displays Busta's raw talent and ability to bend words with his ever rambunctious flow. The album features production by Easy Mo Bee, DJ Scratch, Q-Tip, and J Dilla. Songs such as "Everything Remains Raw", "Abandon Ship", and "Still Shining" all rise above as The Coming's stand-out tracks, but "Ill Vibe" is the album's crown jewel moment. Busta sounds right at home over this J Dilla beat, trading verses with his Native Tongue cohort Q-Tip. The Coming was a critical and commercial success for Busta Rhymes. It reached #6 on the Billboard 200 chart in 1996 and has since received a platinum certification from RIAA. As mentioned, The Coming boasts the hit single "Woo Hah!! Got You All in Check " which reached #8 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 1996. It was nominated for a 1997 Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance. It also ended up sporting another hit single, It's a Party featuring Zhané. The Coming shows amazing variety where Busta can break free from the bells and the whistles of the Busta Dungeon Dragon flow to explore other ways of leaving our jaws open by his incredible lyricism. The Coming surely lives up to its title, as Busta delivers a performance that ignited his impeccable solo career.
Project Pat, the older brother of Three 6 Mafia’s Juicy J, is a legend in the Memphis rap scene. He began rapping in the 90s with Killa Klan Kaze and released several independent mixtapes. In 1999 he released his debut album Ghetty Green via Hypnotize Minds/Loud Records. In December of 2000, he released a new single and video “Chickenhead” which blew up on the charts and led to the release of his second album Mista Don’t Play: Everythangs Working. Mista Don’t Play produced by Three 6 Mafia’s DJ Paul and Juicy J was certified Gold a mere two months after its release.
A former architect of the cult DiY sound in Nottingham, as well as being a member of downtempo outfit Bent, Nail is a house making machine whose own distinct fingerprint is all over everything he makes. His sound is raw but never hostile - he always finds a neat sample to bring some soul to his louche, loose drums. This EP for his In The Dance label starts with 'And So', a wonky sound infused with sensual whispers, while 'Before' blends woozy pad work with deep drums and prickly percussion. 'Grief' is a sombre affair with bluesy sax lines weaving between the dusty drums, and 'Size A Dat' gets choppy, playful, and funky. Another majestic EP.
Dire Straits' arresting self-titled debut arrived in the midst of punk's reign but couldn't have been further removed from the era's slash-and-burn style. Recorded in West London in February 1978, the band's tasteful, jazz-inflected set embraces folk, blues, and pub rock while also tracing a direct line back to the beat-oriented sound of early rock n' roll. Country and roots accents further distinguish the British quartet's stripped-down music from any 1970s peers, as does the transparent production, which has remained revered among audiophiles the world over – and which has never been better than on this meticulous pressing.
Mastered from the original master tapes and pressed at RTI, Mobile Fidelity's 180g 45RPM 2LP version of Dire Straits features natural tonalities, superb balances, you-are-there imaging, deep-black backgrounds, and pristine clarity. Even if you've heard this album hundreds of times before, you've never experienced it with such lifelike sonics and premium richness. This numbered-edition collector's set immerses you within the smoky, laidback atmospherics of every song. This is how all vinyl should sound.
Crucial to every arrangement, Mark Knopfler's winding guitar lines emerge with supreme transparency and multi-hued textural detail. His intricate playing comes across as if it's being transmitted via his 60s-era Fender Vibrolux amplifier placed right before you. The cleanliness, dimensions, and live feel are that good. His bandmates, too, benefit from the extra groove space afforded by this 45RPM edition. Rhythms skate and swirl; percussive effects resonate with crispness and attack; the leading edges of notes naturally decay.
Dire Straits' strong, well-edited batch of original material further enhances the overall enjoyment and makes the record one whose pleasures go far beyond the organic sonics. Just as Knopfler's narratives pour forth with poetic and surrealist texts, the musical settings – an intoxicating combination of easygoing shuffles, back-hall boogies, and pop-honed ballads – mirror the old-fashioned soulfulness inherent in the classic recordings of the late 50s and early 60s. The lyrics are equally captivating.
Drawing from his time as a youth in Newcastle, Leeds, and London, Knopfler invests tunes with an autobiographical slant and emotional connectivity that become obvious the moment he opens his mouth to sing. "Down to the Waterline," "Wild West End," and "Lions" all feature colloquial touches that add to their reach. By extension, "In the Gallery" functions as a tribute to Leeds sculptor Harry Phillips (father of future Knoplfer collaborator, Steve Phillips) while the record's breakout smash, "Sultans of Swing," pays homage to struggling bar bands.
Through it all, Dire Straits performs with a subtle cool and clever poise that no band ever matched. Just how good is the chemistry? Bob Dylan heard the quartet and invited Knopfler and drummer Pick Withers to play on Slow Train Coming. But even Dylan himself didn't hear Dire Straits sound this magnetic back in its original heyday. Now, everyone can.
Devotional music most often gets distilled into earthy chants and ancient folklore, it doesn't always ascend to the sky like Julinko’s ‘Naebula’ an album that from the first organ note clearly trades in terrestrial dreams for ethereal visions. A feverish quality permeates the whole record, as if a ritualistic performance was being captured from start to finish, a collection of hallucinatory doom, synthetic neo-folk hymns and ghostly art-rock.
Julinko, stage name for Giulia Parin Zecchin, has long been one of the best kept secrets of the experimental community in North-East Italy, with three records that helped define her unique blend of heavy psychedelia, slowcore and dark ambient. On ‘Naebula’ what really stands out is how powerful and soaring her voice is, a weapon of undeniable force that can transform into a vessel of raw fervour or glide effortlessly as a delicate lament. Her unconventional approach shines through on tracks like ‘Jeanne De Rien’, where a marching pulse acts as a pillar for an extended mantra, almost verging into powwow territory. ‘Peace Of The Unsaid’ uses its arrhythmical structure to create space, a crepuscular night ode that reaches the heights of Sinead O’Connor’s most intimate force-fulness while retaining a sweet composure. Whether it’s glacial murderous shrieks or gospel-esque vitality, songs like ‘Cloudmachine’ or ‘Kiss The Lion’s Tongue’ seem to draw as much from a tradition of European minimalism, the use of drones and repetition, to the tradition of folksongs as hymns, where modal harmonies make way for an apparent stasis. Another key element in Julinko’s songwriting is the seamless blend of her minimalistic approach with these dense textures borrowed from a distant outsider metal heritage, Lynchean noir on steroids or wordless exorcisms with deep undercurrents.
An Elephant Eye; A Frozen Girl; and an Umbrella Man walk into an Icebox. All have been shoveled out of a Jungle-den and are covered in Mud Fleas. The Umbrella Man has been Dolt-ing around on the Machinery for Years. . .knowing it Hasn’t-Really-Rained since he threw his last Bacchanal. He thinks he owns birds; he just listens to them really. The Frozen Girl keeps away from him but moves Incredibly slow given the Circumstances. . .she’s been trying to tie her shoes for 700 years. The floating Eyeball, defying all Man Physics, Miraculously Phases himself All the way to the outside of the Icebox; Barreling through the Crisp air. He then comes to a Grinding halt before a Ginormous Totem pole of Speckled flesh, Grey and exceptionally thick, Wrinkling like telephone Wire. He quickly realizes that’s where the rest of his Body went. The only thing that’s missing is his Trunk. But he’s learned to communicate Decently Well without it. . .Using Semiotic chains of Eyelid-signifiers. . .An Eyeball shaped hole has been Burnt into the Icebox but the Frozen Girl won’t know for another 53 years and by then Big-Pants won’t even be in. The Umbrella Man doesn’t particularly so much as Notice and think its smells a lot like Burnt toast. He says he’s off to the Cemetery.
What do Them Three have in common anyway? Well they all Dig Pins; they also all Exist because of Him. And, Starting today, are Perpetually Entrapped in 10 millimeters divisions of Black resin upon a Circular Plain. I want to hear them cry and shout, You might say, because we are all Up-standers. But all crying and shouting Ourselves into the Icebox. . .
Compiled onto one vinyl album for the first time, Landlocked (Numbers, 2026) presents Hallucinator’s 1999 debut album originally released under Mark Ernestus and Moritz von Oswald’s label Chain Reaction. Writing much surrounding the culture of what would be later considered ‘Dub Techno’ and its’ primary distribution center, Hard Wax, leads one down roads of shifting primary sources and decades old overheard smoke break recollections. Maybe brevity primes the listener to the paralinguistic to approach the sound on its terms; focusing on how things are uttered and not what.
This theory will remain unconfirmed. Hallucinator original press release left us with three or so gestures to consider over the years since:
“A new act on CHAIN REACTION”s distinct productional thesis. HALLUCINATOR are 3 people from he UK/London and this their first release ever- that’s all what the artists want to let us know…. This record is dedidacted to the memory of Stephen Lawrence!”
The first gesture is one of personnel. Since ’99, we’ve gotten to learn a bit more about the artists behind the Hallucinator project. All London-based, all writers, composers, and sound-designers— Anna Piva, Edward George, Trevor Mathison. These three seem to flow between parameters as aesthetic tactic and tacit structure to the work itself. For example, other collaborative shapes have come from this lineup including Flow Motion (Piva, George and Mathison) as well as the now defunct Black Audio Film Collective of which George and Mathison are founding members.
The second gesture is in the second line of the previous press release, “distinct productional thesis.” Much of Landlocked’s affect and sequencing seems to suggest an emotional study of entropy at the level of sediment. Rhythms play with space and capacity through polyvalence. The production chose subtractive vertigo, often switching and bringing back in elements that vanished from the track 6 minutes ago. Dubbing out so much of a track, one begins to associate sound akin to memories held in the experience of running your hand across a concrete block as a child. Felt (re)memberance in lieu of narrative tale. Using textures that flicker between colour and percussion, Hallucinator’s 12-tracker of loudspeaker perception music might be a mediation on the psychic wake of the Cold War. Intermittent strata of ambience and groove convects an active margin rifting event underneath a scorched geology of power in Western Europe. Again, this is all grapevine hearsay.
But it’s silence that voices the third gesture. The album’s sparse application of the written word touches on the ennui paradox of being landlocked on an island. Stuck. Trapped in the psychosis of occidental hypercentricism. A looping silence of Black British tragedy: “to the memory of Stephen Lawrence”. 18 year-old Lawrence was stabbed to death at a bus stop in southeast London by six white men in 1993. The rift of grief and implicit reiteration of modern subordination left by this hate act went legally silent for almost two decades until Lawrence’s killers were ultimately sentenced to virtually life in jail in 2012. Only six years removed at the time of Hallucinator’s initial invocation of rememory, the mind-numbing accretion of what Black Studies Professor Denise Ferreira da Silva might call “unpayable debt”, finds demonic ground across Landlocked, forming an aural sense of what continues to be refused.
The album ventures through spaces of overactive non-happenings: ‘Red Angel’’s factory floor dub flashes between smokestack and jungle visions, or the halfway mark’s stilted breath of ‘Dusk’ lending its mood to the sort of sedated dreams built from daily life under colony rule for instance. That linked rhythm links us back to our linked fates across Black and Brown folk is real, thus the syncopated signals through this work behave on the level of transnational radiotelegraphy, sounding out its windswept tension of a body negotiating a meat-grinder schema of linear production and wage for others to know that unspeakable thing can be broadcast in every drum tongue.
As the silence continues to reverb, we return to the sort of meaning-making that cannot be told but felt. Soothing to some, disturbing to others. Landlocked, a Rorschach test for a crumbled empire.
The Nu’rons were a family group consisting of two sets of brothers and cousins, the four young men in question being brothers Daryl Howard and Raymond Gibson (Daryl’s mother registered him under his father’s surname of Howard and Raymond under her maiden name of Gibson) together with Otho Bateman and Charles Bateman. They were all born and raised in Salem, New Jersey and from the age of ten and eleven began singing with a fifth member and Gibson brother Rudolph as a group called The Gospel 5. They eventually decided to crossover to secular music and as a group known for their energetic dance routines they came up with the new performing name of ‘The Nu’rons’ (taken from the word ‘Neuron’ which is a cell that transmits nerve impulses). However Rudolph was soon to leave the group due to physical illness. Also Daryl Howard and Charles Bateman had also been part of a working group known as The Devotions prior to becoming The Nu-Ron’s.Following hours of practice The Nu’rons eventually felt confident enough to put their own shows together and began to perform at local dances and parties around New Jersey and Philadelphia, often being used as a non-paid warm up act for bigger named artists. They moved between several different managers including Jimmy Bishop (Duo Dynamic Productions) until they came under the tutelage of WDAS radio DJ Georgie Woods (his wife Gilda, being the owner of the Philadelphia Gil, Dion and Top & Bottom record Labels). It was Georgie who introduced them to Manny Campbell who in turn invited them to an audition at his and partner Charles Bowen’s Emandolynn Music studio in Chester P.A. The song The Nu’rons chose to audition with was the self penned “I’m A Loner”, the audition went well, as during late January/early February of 1970 Manny and Charles took The Nu’rons into the Sigma Sound Studio’s with Tom Bell and the TSOP musicians to record “I’m A Loner” and “All My Life” which was released on the Nu-Ron label in April of the same year. The two studio takes presente don this release came short after the band moved on from the collaboration with producer Emanuel Campbell to take music matters in their own hands. Beside recording "Disco Hustle" to be part of the disco boom in Philly of the times, they recorded also “You Came Thru”, a rough yet beautiful heavy bassline driven soul funk recording, and the just amazing “Hurry Up Tomorrow”, here presented in one of the original Studio takes.
Paraiso has been doing vital work in Portugal - documenting the underground dance scene's history and pioneers in various mediums while also showcasing equally brilliant artists from newer generations. And they've been doing it for a decade now: we all know that a label dedicated to its local scene through and through is something rare and should be celebrated. This compilation 'X - 10 Years of Underground House Music from a Paradise Called Portugal' is a manifestation of that cross-generational spirit, with ten never-before-heard pieces of music by initiators and legends like The Advent alongside more recent veterans like Roundhouse Kick and Vil or younger talent like Phoebe or Van Der. Things start off with Salbany's 'Trax 10', oozing a techno elegance and irrefutable groove that wonderfully portrays the spirit of the Lisbon sound: raw yet ethereal, disarming in its simplicity while containing rave, romance and rhythmic complexities. Label founders Maria Amor & Shcuro firmly carry on the torch with 'Intracellular', gelled by dubby washes, syncopated drums, infectious rhythmic sense and layered with a melodic vocal motif. Vil's 'Cave' brings in stone-cold tight percussion offset by rich, evocative pads and technoid know-how for days. The Advent steps in with an ode to acid-minimalism, raw and slow-burning, with curious and twisted moments peppered with the skill of an expert. Van Der storms in with a piece of hybrid qualities, impeccably blending a swing onto industrial territories for a hypnotic-yet-banging hands in the air dancefloor moment. Scam Dust (the duo of Tiago and Shcuro, from adjacent generations) picks up on the industrial flavours, adds furious jacking rhythmics and live sonic experimentation that takes us to peak-quality effect and noise manipulation. 'Subvert' follows and goes deeper, as if into the depths of the ocean, with aquatic arpeggios and sparse drums that morph into an 303-driven state of mysterious oceanfloor mania - Roundhouse Kick sending us messages from the South. Violet and her 'Dream Machine' emerge with its mutant noisy motif, delay-drenched percussion and steady beat interrupted by keys, drum variations - and a u-turn to its paranoid loopy beginnings. Phoebe enters the chat and brings sonic sun rays in 'Galaxia 2000', a wide-eyed moment lead by colourful, open synthesisers with gates and filters taking us on a beautiful ride on tense, swingy drum patterns. The tenth track comes from Lisbon's rkeat and is full of closing act ear-candy with its beautifully chiseled, groovy as hell percussion, organic sonics and metallic instruments that seem to announce that the next decade is about to be just as good, if not better than this lovely 2016-2026 stint of boundary and scene-pushing.
Deep, deep stuff on the debut album from K Wata. Long and dubwise, dark and detailed. With bass that fills and warms a space.
All noir. Cast shadows against the wall. Weight being shifted and distributed with singularly delicate poise, like a knife being balanced on the end of a finger.
There’s a silvery, loose flow state to this record that maybe reveals the way some tracks were first written to be deployed live at Sustain Release 2025. Then taken back to the lab and tightened up further into the album’s final form, with beautiful mixing work between Kenzo and Chris Botta.
With that in mind, Give U Space unfolds slowly and fluidly, giving the listener the chance to access and open up to the deepness of the sound, being led down a path. It rolls and builds momentum and groove, and ratchets tensions up toward peaks of energy "Whisper Dub" and "There Will Be Love".
The tunes feel architectural. Rooms to be in and settle into. Simultaneously stripped back and then etched with neat little details and characterful or atmospheric sound choices. The silhouette of slo mo Memphis and Houston trap is a leading influence, especially with the drums. Mixing with bits of click’n’cut sampling and psychoacoustic tricks, the penumbra of dub techno and drowsier dubstep, and SG’s soft vocals rising in the ether.
The presence and inspiration of the sound system is obvious in all of Kenzo’s work, the music can rattle when spun up louder or blended into the club. But K Wata’s uniqueness and signature comes from an often equally inward facing quality, touched by distance and longing and a sort of chiaroscuro incandescent light set up.
Written and produced by K Wata.
Mixed by K Wata and Christopher Botta at Fer Sound Studio.
Drop the needle on this latest dispatch from the tape vaults, and we are back in Chicago at The Curtom Studios in 1977. For instalment number five in the "Hutson Sevens" series, Home of The Good Groove Records are so very honoured to deliver this previously unreleased cut from Leroy Hutson—a true titan of soul music and an absolute master of his craft.
"Betting On My Love" carries that signature smooth orchestration we have come to expect from Hutson’s finest hours. It moves with a wonderful, breezy optimism. Hutson’s joyful, velvet lead tones skip effortlessly across the groove, wrapped in lush backing harmonies that instantly evoke the feel of the Hutson II
classic, "I Think I’m Falling in Love".
Now, a brief confession of pure, crate-digging indulgence: if tailored strictly for the dancefloor, the track arguably hits its logical peak and fade just past the three-minute mark. But to cut it there would strip away the raw human magic of the session. If you let the wax ride to the very end, the arrangement dissolves into a wonderful, lingering instrumental outro, culminating in the studio players purposely "clattering" their instruments in a moment of pure creative release. It is a brilliant, candid studio artifact that was fortunately preserved on the original master recording. Essential listening for the global soul family—do not sleep on this debut pressing.
For the flip we present Leroy Hutson’s 1979 cut “ So Nice”, a masterclass in late-70s soul music. A stand out track from the “Unforgettable” album and a vital reminder of Hutson’s unmatched ability to inject sophisticated romanticism into the bleeding edge of that disco era.
Slightly edited for the 7-inch pressing, up steps our remastering and editing maestro Mr Phil Ward. Phil always has the utmost respect when remastering and editing original content, ensuring that every second of the groove is fully respected and preserved. His stellar work here includes the studio recording of the three-count drum intro, never heard before now, leading into that meditative smooth groove layout.
It is an exquisite arrangement of simmering electric keys, nimble basslines courtesy of the legendary Keni Burke, and subtle bongo accents that collectively deliver a timeless masterpiece. Now available on 7-inch vinyl for the first time.
When the first JIM album Love Makes Magic was released in 2023, it was the end product of an experiment that had begun during the strange days of the pandemic. Cooped up in his studio, James Baron started fiddling about with an as-yet unnamed new album idea. It became Vicious Charm’s first LP release. Labelled variously as Balearic, folktronica, blue-eyed soul and Laurel Canyon, Love Makes Magic was perhaps all and none of those things: a record rooted less in Californian mythology than in Baron’s own musical world, somewhere between Sherwood, Nottingham, classic songwriting, electronic soul and the no-nonsense good times that have long run through his work under his other monikers (principally the anagrammatic Ron Basejam and, of course, Crazy P) One thing was indisputable, it connected with people... and still does.
The album was a minor hit, appearing in many a Best of 2023 chart and voted Album of the Year in Bill Brewster’s Furtive 50. A tour and a few memorable festival appearances – his 2024 We Out Here Festival being one of those wonderfully timed ‘moments’ - perfectly captured the horizontal vibes on the album, while injecting some live energy into its delivery. While there was a follow-up remix album for Love Makes Magic, JIM was already preparing a sophomore LP: “I wrote the majority of The Curious Case Of Existence in a couple of months at the beginning of 2024, then it was just a case of making the record over the next couple of years in between everything else.”
Dark Entries is Filling Your Silence with the help of J.D. Slater. Legendary actor, director, and composer J.D. Slater is sometimes known as “the Lou Reed of gay porn.” Slater cut his teeth in the New York punk scene, even opening for the Talking Heads and Blondie at CBGB with his project Frenzy. A true polymath of the erotic, he co-founded Raging Stallion Studios with Chris Ward in 1999, which has remained a prolific outlet in the world of gay pornography. Having spent years in front of and behind the camera, 1999’s Filling Your Silence was his debut as maestro. This album collects the soundtracks from the first two Raging Stallion films - Sexpack One and Sexpack Two - to bring us nine tracks of sleazy beats and trance-like moments of pure ecstasy. Album opener “Seduction” begins with the iconic synthetic pan flute, one of the defining sounds of the 1990s, before pulling us along with its wild grooves.
Halfway through its nine-and-a-half- minute course, it breaks down to bust out a jazzy electric piano vamp. “Running with Scissors” ups the tempo with some crunchy breakbeats to undergird its portamento-laced lead synth. Elsewhere, like on “Mercy” and “Mercy (2nd Movement),” we see Slater embracing a bleep-adjacent sound close to early Nightmares on Wax or 808 State. Filling Your Silence’s endless grooves pursue that oceanic feeling. This record comes with a one-sided insert that includes archival Raging Stallion press materials. In the words of the Bay Area Reporter, Filling Your Silence is “quite possibly the best music for sex ever written.” A bold claim, but we can’t help but agree.
YARN welcomes René Audiard for its tenth release with "Makes Me Feel", a four-track EP from one of underground electronic music’s most singular voices.
Across years of dub techno, minimal and leftfield electronic experimentation, René has developed an approach to stripped-down music that feels anything but limited. Where minimalism can often become an exercise in taking things away, his work finds possibility in what remains. "Makes Me Feel" is a particularly fitting example: immersive, at times strange, but always full of feeling.
‘Lovin’ opens the EP in familiar Audiard territory: murky low-end, locomotive groove, reduced rhythmic compositions and an understated framework swimming in a pool of detail. 'Possession' lets in more light. Vocal echoes, persistent rhythms and occasional string phrases give it a cinematic quality, while a groove that seems to circle endlessly takes on an almost shamanistic pull. The EP’s 11-minute behemoth, 'Flesh', fills most of the release’s B-side while making a convincing case for patience and sophistication. There are echoes of minimal’s golden age here, but Audiard never mistakes repetition for standing still. Tiny rhythmic fragments sit alongside expansive orchestral gestures, with samples working at every scale of the arrangement. Warmth and cinematic drama run through the track, but it's the playful programming underneath that keeps it moving. 'Night' closes the record on a different note, recalling Audiard’s work with Ali Çakır in Düve. Percussive samples, accordion and Middle Eastern guitar phrases bring a more acoustic character to his reduced 808-infused broken beats, making for a playful, occasionally melancholic ending with a distinctly microtonal feel.
What makes René Audiard’s music so rewarding is how readily you recognize his hand in it. There is a particular grain to the sounds, a way of placing details within a groove, and a willingness to follow an idea wherever it leads. Across “Makes Me Feel”, those instincts give four quite different tracks a shared identity. Even when working within familiar forms, Audiard makes them sound entirely his own. It’s the holy grail of music production: a personal sound signature. And a thoughtful addition to YARN’s growing repertoire of reduced, sophisticated dancefloor music.
When everything just aligns… then it feels like it is meant to be. I think we have all experienced that feeling; a feeling of completeness and that ‘full circle’ moment. Nihil Young lands his debut album packed full or memories stemming from the day he met his wife, to more recent times and the birth of his first child.
‘Compass’ takes you on a real journey of melodic music expertly written and crafted by Nihil from instruments all through to lyrics and songwriting – he has used all of his skills on this body of work – and he does not disappoint! AT ALL!
The album features collaborations alongside Rowland Giles, Leo Wood, Lasada, Jordan Arts, FRDRK, Adriana Stone, TYGR TYGR and more… Each track sounding as special as the last. THIS IS COMPASS….
If you dig deep enough into the internet's lower depths, you'll find a shaky video shot on a camcorder. In 43 seconds, we see a makeshift drum kit built out of backyard Ostbahnhof trash, hear distorted vocals, and feel the anarchic energy of band and ravers dissolving into each other. It's now been twenty years since Bonaparte played their very first show at the legendary Bar25 on Berlin's Spree river. The ringmaster of this unhinged musical theater was Tobias Jundt then, and it's Jundt again now bringing the Bonaparte extravaganza back to the stage. New and nostalgic sit close together when the party's been going this long. Or, as they put it: "PARADISE IF YOU CAN STAND IT."
From late October through mid-November, Bonaparte will tour Germany, Austria, and Jundt's native Switzerland at full intensity, the full lineup - band to burlesque. Since their 2006 debut through their supposed farewell in 2019, Bonaparte played over 800 shows in 28 countries. Bottom line: "Too Much" isn't enough to properly celebrate a body of work like this. And the new songs from "PARADISE IF YOU CAN STAND IT" are far too significant not to bring to the stage. The lo-fi trash-punk of Bonaparte's earliest records has been built out with added layers, in production (largely alongside British avant-garde electronic artist HELiX) and in the songwriting itself.
The world certainly hasn't gotten any simpler since 2006. Tracks like "EVERYBODY PRESiDENT," loosely riffing on Zoe Leonard's poem "I Want A Dyke For President," and the corrosive "BRAiN ROT" mirror the social chaos we find ourselves in 2026. "OBEY (THERE iS STiLL A RiOT GOiNG ON)" is just as furious, though here the principle of hope still holds, as a multigenerational choir concludes "everything will be okay." Jundt speaks across generations again on "i LOVE YOU (MORE LATER)," dedicated in equal measure to his parents and his daughters: "Let the echo chamber bleed - from here into eternity."
The reconciliation and hope Bonaparte allows for and tends to, amid violence and all that noise, make "PARADISE IF YOU CAN STAND IT" a singular document of an artist grown wiser. Separation and grief don't cancel out love and vitality - they depend on each other. Ultimately, the album is a record of searching for and finding a home. To arrive, you have to let go.
And what better place to let go than in step with Bonaparte's wild, hedonistic party circus, finally back to gently terrorize our cities?
Built with the immediacy that comes from limitation, iPhone Grime is almost exactly what it says on the tape case. Pulled directly from the portable communication device of Front Left Life's Louis Payne, iPhone Grime is the perfect distillation of raw ideas through a simple medium. When producers can drown in the infinite possibilities of the DAW vortex, a simple phone app can steer you swiftly to the sharpest results. Snippets of real world sound captured on the mic ground these quick-fire beats in a time and place, dynamic and street-level like grime and early dubstep was when it was being imagined on PlayStation games and filmed on ropey phone cameras.
Payne is undoubtedly bringing perspective to his sketches, having forged a connection with London's club scene through his part in the widely hailed Front Left Life parties in Catford, at Venue MOT and elsewhere. With a roll call of guests that cuts a sharp line through the best of bassweight club music right now, his taste and knowledge precedes his first steps into the production arena. Rather than puzzling out the path to a thousand likes for a hardware jam reel, he's opted for a direct line between his brain and the beat at the end of it.
You can hear the naivety behind vocal loops like the one nagging away on 'Follow That', calling to mind the first time you ever tried making a Fruity Loops beat. But these are no amateur throwaways — the technology has moved on and Payne's instincts guide him towards legit constructions that could easily do damage in the club. Sometimes they exist as no more than an eight bar loop, while others like 'Wind It Up (Dream Dealers Version)' or 'Extra Dimensional Being' stretch an idea out. Throughout it all, the looming throb of square wave bass glues the record together and anchors the grime dimension of Payne's job lot of phone jams.
Payne's work is all his own, and the snatches of real life around the beats anchor this music in his own London life. But, like previous shifts in technology and accessibility, iPhone Grime also raises an important prospect—that anyone with one of these apps, a Bluetooth speaker and an idea can bring music out of studios and into the world. History has already proven, when that happens the possibilities become thrillingly unpredictable.
At the foot of the mountain. Our gaze is inclined toward the summit.
Toward the ascent. The destination that awaits us.
From the valley, we look up at the summit: our destination. But also the path: the true destination.
We can already trace our route, and we are already imagining ourselves walking up there. Along the small ridge, just above the tree line. There, we take a short break and look for the exact spot in the valley where we were standing earlier. It is strange to grasp that we have actually climbed this mountain. To look down from up here at the place where we were just moments ago – the same place we looked up from, toward the place where we are standing now.
And now, knowing what it is like to be up here, we remember what we imagined it would be like back then. What we believed it would mean to stand here.
Along the way, our gaze wanders back and forth. Up toward the mountain, down into the valley, sometimes only at our shoes. We keep walking, one step after another. Our thoughts detached. Our body functioning purely mechanically.
Step left. Step right. Step left. Step right.
Our mind has completely detached itself, and our thoughts race at an immense speed. They summon the most different moments. Moments from our lives. Moments that shaped us, that made us who we are. Or are we perhaps simply trying to understand who we are and how we got here?
It is strange that reaching the summit and looking down could make us believe that we have finally reached, or are striving toward, some superior, triumphant position. When in fact, it is really only about looking at the path we inevitably have to take. Processing impressions from a certain distance. Reconsidering what we have experienced, without losing sight of what lies ahead.
Our gaze turns back toward the summit.
Is there a destination?
An ascent? A summit? A descent? The return?
Or is it only about the insights we encounter along the way?
Am Fuß des Berges. Unser Blick ist zum Gipfel geneigt.
Auf den Aufstieg. Das Ziel, das uns erwartet.
Vom Tal aus blicken wir auf den Gipfel: unser Ziel. Aber auch den Weg: das wahre Ziel. Unsere Route kann man jetzt schon abstecken, und wir stellen uns bereits vor, wie wir dort oben laufen. Über den kleinen Grat, leicht oberhalb der Baumgrenze. Dort machen wir eine kleine Pause und suchen genau die Stelle im Tal, an der wir vorhin noch standen. Es ist verrückt, zu begreifen, dass wir diesen Berg tatsächlich hinaufgestiegen sind. Von hier oben auf den Ort hinunterzusehen, an dem wir eben noch waren – an denselben Ort, zu dem wir hinaufgeblickt haben, als wir noch dort unten standen. Und jetzt, da wir wissen, wie es ist, hier oben zu sein, erinnern wir uns daran, was wir uns damals darunter vorgestellt haben. Was wir geglaubt haben, es würde bedeuten, hier zu stehen.
Unterwegs wandert unser Blick hin und her. Hinauf zum Berg, hinunter ins Tal, manchmal nur auf unsere Schuhe. Wir gehen weiter, einen Schritt nach dem anderen. Unsere Gedanken losgelöst. Unser Körper funktioniert rein mechanisch. Schritt links. Schritt rechts. Schritt links. Schritt rechts.
Unser Geist hat sich völlig losgelöst, und unsere Gedanken rasen mit einer ungeheuren Geschwindigkeit. Sie rufen die verschiedensten Momente herauf. Momente aus unserem Leben. Momente, die uns geprägt haben, aus denen wir geworden sind, wer wir sind. Oder versuchen wir vielleicht einfach nur zu verstehen, wer wir sind und wie wir hierhergekommen sind?
Es ist schon seltsam, dass das Erreichen des Gipfels und der Blick nach unten uns glauben lassen könnten, dass wir endlich eine überragende, triumphale Position erreicht haben oder anstreben würden. Dabei geht es doch eigentlich nur um den Blick auf den Weg, den wir zwangsläufig beschreiten müssen. Eindrücke mit etwas Abstand zu verarbeiten. Erlebtes noch einmal Revue passieren zu lassen, ohne den Blick nach vorne zu verlieren.
Unser Blick wendet sich wieder dem Gipfel zu. Gibt es ein Ziel? Einen Aufstieg? Einen Gipfel? Einen Abstieg? Die Rückkehr? Oder geht es nur um die Erkenntnisse, die uns unterwegs begegnen?
Put your hands together and please welcome Linda Lo to Shall Not Fade's Time is Now imprint. The LA producer/DJ's new 12" EP "Masa" drops 23rd Oct 2026 and f**k is it sick.
Linda Lo fuses* mambo, samba, and salsa with UK garage, dubstep, and club rhythms to make guaranteed rewind material that is gonna light up the dance…
* imma talk about this fuses sh*t in a minute.. First we need to get a bit philosophical. Cos rewinds and fusions aside, this EP is alive. It's part of something bigger and cyclical, without a start or an end. It is music. It was part of someone else's music before and it will be part of other people's music in the future. Right now though, it's Linda Lo's music.
Too esoteric? Let me elaborate and, let's talk about fusion. There is the fusion that is – steal a bit of genre X and culture Y, chuck it on the grid and strut about professing fusion – and then there's actual fusion: Music that is something "new" and real and genuine. Music that you end up describing excitedly as a "fusion of" things (even if it inevitably ends up doing it a disservice). Music that is simultaneously one thing and not that thing, and also something else and not that something else too. Music that is just "music" to the creator but is also part of the progression and evolution of music for others. Mala wasn't making "dubstep". Skream & Benga ended up not making Garage. Like many before and after they were making their music and Linda Lo is making her music so let's hear from her about it. Big up Linda. This is real.
Notes from Linda:
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“Like Croydon by way of Havana”
“Masa, or corn-based dough used to make tortillas and tamales, is a traditional staple food for many in Mexico and throughout LatAm. In the Maya worldview, people's flesh is made out of masa. In order to make masa, corn must be dried, nixtamalized, ground, and mixed (often by hand) to create the right textured dough. I find much of my music work is a collision and a mixing of many elements, all worked into one product. In this way, I've worked these songs, transforming raw rhythms and sub bass into hand-mixed tunes. ‘Masa - EP' presents four delicious heaters. The title track explodes with a fiery double-time dubstep groove. Mambo horn stabs bite through a bass inferno. ‘Cenote' looks down upon a subterranean pool of sound—still on the surface but impossibly deep. ‘Minifalda', pure flirt and gyration, calls in cuica and other voices from a samba bateria. Finally, claves stitch across ‘Mestiza', a fusion of blooming lush orchestration and jagged 2step rhythm.
Around 1960, my grandparents were regular dancers at the Palladium in Los Angeles: young, Mexican, and falling in love to dance music, specifically big band mambo. My mom, consequently, is a fantastic dancer, and her mambo collection along with my dad's exotica records formed the base of my own vinyl collection. When I first discovered garage and dubstep, there was something indescribably familiar to me, something mambo-like about the syncopated offbeat hits and drama. Later, as I began stitching together mambo claves and 2step drums, I assumed I was trying out something totally new. The farther I go, the more I see that I was wrong.
Dubstep, garage and jungle share a parental lineage back to dub reggae, originating from Jamaica. Mambo hails from Cuba, and sister genres of salsa to NYC & PR, and bachata and meringue to the Dominican Republic. Yet, these musical genres of the Caribbean have not developed in isolation. Reggae, mambo, dancehall, salsa, even son jarocho from Veracrúz, Mexico (where my family is from), all developed together, influencing each other fundamentally. Ultimately, all musics of the Caribbean have come from West African polyrhythmic musical heritages. Garage, mambo, dubstep, and salsa are points in time along one musical continuum.
I feel very honored to be a selector working in Los Angeles (and elsewhere!). I hope I can share some music for the next generation of young people to fall in love to. "
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I'm moved by what Linda writes here. #1 Doing what you love, and finding you are part of something bigger. Creating for yourself freely and hoping to inspire others with healthy amounts of care, humility, freedom, self awareness and enjoyment. (It is inspiring and I'm honoured we are now a part of sharing Linda's music). #2 There's something wonderful about finding connection and a sense of place. A place physical, spiritual and in time. Music can help us all find connection and be part of a place. Wheel it up wherever you are.
Ever-evolving Amsterdam duo ANOTR continue their forward momentum with the release of their highly anticipated third studio album, ‘Withness’, out via their own imprint No Art. Rooted firmly in dance music, ‘Withness’ sees the pair refine their sound into their most dance-floor focused and cohesive project to date.
Born during their global tour, ‘Withness’ was shaped in real time: written, tested and refined on dancefloors across the world. Following the expansive, genre-blurring approach of their 2025 LP ‘On A Trip’, the duo felt a pull back toward the club - not as a limitation, but as a unifying space. “We really wanted to have a wide variety of songs that we can play out and create moments,” they explain. “Every track needed to make sense wherever people come together to dance.”
That intention sits at the heart of ‘Withness’. A title that reimagines the idea of “witnessing” into something more active and collective. ‘Withness’ is an album about experiencing life with others. It’s about the moments you share, the people who shape them, and the energy that becomes real only when you’re fully present. The album captures the collective high of friendship. Whether in a packed club, at a festival, or in a living room with friends, the album is designed to soundtrack moments of connection.
“The memories you make with people, they’re the witness of those moments. Withness is about being in it together.” - ANOTR
Sonically, the album marks a clear evolution. Drawing from their early club roots while building on the songwriting confidence developed on their previous records, classic drum machines and 909 samples sit alongside warm, 80s-tinged textures, layered vocals and modern production techniques, creating a sound that feels both nostalgic and forward-thinking.
A key part of the process was spontaneity. The duo embraced a free-flowing, collaborative studio environment, often working with a rotating cast of contributors. Their now-signature “open mic” approach encouraged anyone in the room to experiment with melodies, lyrics and vocal ideas. This energy translates directly into the album’s standout moments. From the euphoric pull of ‘Withness’ to the groove-led ‘Do It With Ya’, the uplifting ‘Paradise’, each track is built to live beyond a single setting.
The LP comes at a timely moment, as their single ‘Talk To You ft. 54 Ultra’ has become the biggest global breakout dance single this year. Sitting firmly in Spotify’s Global Top 200, it has surpassed 175 million streams, and is currently No. 21 in the UK Singles Chart. Spotify have tipped it in their much-coveted global ‘Sound Of The Summer 2026’ list and other highlights include peaking at No. 7 in Shazam’s Global Chart, No.1 on Beatport Top 100 and gaining over 600M UGC views so far.
Ossie lands back on Heist after his 2025 hit ‘Are U still smiling?’ with a 4 track EP featuring Miraa May.
How on earth do you follow up your debut when that record got dancefloors moving across the world and picked up radio & dj plays from dance music’s finest selectors?
Many producers would get instant writer’s block, but not Ossie. His new EP on Heist is full of joyous melodies, catchy vocals and euphoric dancefloor moments. Across 4 tracks, Ossie takes us on a trip through rolling electronics, catchy UK sounds and big room anthems.
His Heist debut in 2025 did not go by unnoticed, and Ossie kept a busy calendar since, with regular shows in London and Hï Ibiza with Skepta’s Mas Tiempo crew, his own Supercali imprint as well as his appearance alongside heavyweights Louie Vega, Kerri Chandler, Cinthie and more on Heist’s ‘House of House’ much celebrated compilation.
The Motivation EP kicks off with a bumpy UK track that somehow reminds us of Bicep early day hit ‘Vision of love’. Where the Bicep boys went for a big sample, Ossie landed a surprise studio session with Algerian born-London native Miraa May where they wrote ‘Motivation’ in a single session. The track is stripped back to its core with catchy scats and chants from Miraa May and keys that’ll stick with you far after the track is over. If you’d need any extra motivation for your daily routine, to get out of bed or to go out dancing, this is your jam.
‘Can it get any better’ is a loopy house affair with soulful vocal chants, hints of disco and a subtle piano theme that drives the track into big room territory. It’s energetic without ever getting over the top; a thin line Ossie navigates effortlessly on this record.
On the flip, we’ve got ‘Left side’; a deep groover built around a synth & disco loop and cleverly sampled vocals singing ‘I believe… oooh yes I do’. This one is definitely a lowkey banger, where Ossie turns that one simple loop into a powerful theme made to ignite dancefloors.
The EP closes with the heavy warehouse groove of ‘Don’t stop’. A cavernous low end, rough percussion and chopped synth stabs all come together on this beast of a track. Ossie cleverly plays around with vinyl backspins, vocal chops and small changeovers to keep things interesting, while the groove just keeps on going.
Ossie’s ‘Motivation’ EP has dancefloor written all over it and with all its forward energy, there’s no doubt you’ll be hearing this one a lot in clubs all over the world.