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Cloud Management return to Altin Village & Mine for a unique collaboration with New York writer and creative polymath Vivien Goldman.

A pairing spanning generations and geography, but with a musical overlap that is quite fitting in both process and result. Cloud Management’s jammy, improvisational approach to their dubby electronics blends well with Goldman’s idiosyncratic vocal style, which has its origins in the early days of post–punk and UK dub experimentalism. Cloud Management blend many historical aspects of German electronic music into something distinctly their own, while retaining a view well beyond those borders or any particular era. This approach fits well with Goldman’s deep multidisciplinary career, not easily defined because of its eclectic abundance across disciplines, yet always orbiting around music as its foundation.

When it comes down to it, these are great tracks created in the same way they sound: loose but refined, circling and turning inwards and outwards, back onto themselves. A dub of a dub of a dub, but never falling too far from the source — the minimalism necessary to deliver a direct, steady resolve and a gripping listen.

The B–Side of the record features three remixes by artists from across the globe, all with strong connections to the front line of dancehall, dub, and electronic music experimentalism. Longtime Equiknoxx member Time Cow from Kingston (Jamaica), delivers a version of »Quick Cover Up« that represents a major overhaul of the original. This remix strips away much of the looseness of the source material and leans into a lush yet slightly darker atmosphere, created by layered synths and a masterful use of underlying percussion and melodic stabs.

Up next are Twin Cities, Minnesota–based Feel Free Hi Fi, who take on »Judge Judge.« The duo tighten things up, overlaying weighty vintage string synths and digi–flute melodies. This version feels designed for smoky, late–night dub sound system sessions, harkening back to dub’s foundations.

Last but not least is London’s Pat Orburn. Stripped way down, the remix rides an interplay between alternating minimalism and a more lo-fi but lush exuberance, somewhat reminiscent of a bossa nova–esque minimal synth sound. This version’s lo–fi pop sensibility provides a fitting contrast and completes an eclectic yet copacetic trio of remixes for the record.

Esbe returns to Cold Busted for a phenomenal new four-track EP, Sunset Girl. With previous releases on Dusted Wax Kingdom and Cult Classic, as well as his acclaimed Bloomsday and Late Night Headphones albums for Cold Busted, the Los Angeles-based multi-genre beat-maker is riding a wave. Sunset Girl is another exciting moment in Esbe's musical progression. The release starts quietly with the gentle, muted piano chords of "Special." A sparse hip-hop beat and subdued melodic layers round out the tune, cutting away to reveal a lonesome vocoder vocal. "Again" is as close as Esbe gets to a pop song, as a carefree male vocal and twinkling pianos ride over a crisp, solid rhythm track. More delights await on "Sunset Girl" with its simple piano line, reverby percussion hits, distant sax solo, and splashes of vocal collide in a sonic daydream. "I Want Love" closes things out on a vintage flavor, with echoes of a mid-century school dance reverberating into a modern day beat battle. Potent vibes all around.

From the maniacal opening notes and carnival barker howl that launch the album, The Ugly Organ wasted no time searing itself into a listener's ears and quickly established Cursive as a musical force with which to be reckoned. A self aware examination of artistic constraints (or lack thereof), relationships, sex, and the intersection of all three, The Ugly Organ wowed critics and audiences alike with its cerebral, cathartic blend of songs. Fiercely intelligent and cohesive - the liner notes laid the songs out like a play, complete with stage directions - across its diverse sonic landscape, the album landed Cursive on the Sunday Arts & Leisure section cover of The New York Times (which also called it "a marvelous collection of riddles and left turns, conceived as a single piece of musical theater") and earned accolades from Rolling Stone ("a brilliant leap forward"), Entertainment Weekly, Billboard, Alternative Press, MAGNET ("The best punk record you'll hear all year"), Esquire, and SPIN, among many others, as well as a place on numerous year-end best lists.The Ugly Organ feels as vibrant and vital today as it did upon release more than 20 years ago. A landmark album, it not only catapulted Cursive from the simmering indie underground to the forefront of a genre, but also served to inspire a host of young bands in its wake.

We here at TSTD are longtime fans of UK producer/musician/Label maker MATT HUGHES. For a few years he is delivering tasteful, deep, dubbed reworks for Too Slow To Disco, some in Edit form, but also his 2 official remixes for Goodvibes Sound on The Sunset Manifesto 2.
Both new TSTD Edits on this 7 inch are slow disco masterworks, he is giving the originals his trademark deep, warm versions. Who is the guy….?
Matt Hughes is a music producer from the north of England. A purveyor of all things funk, soul, disco, jazz and house! Most recent releases have been with Outcross Records, Bubblegum Pop, Editorial and Too Slow To Disco. A large number of Matt's works have been released under the MAM project with Miguel Campbell remixing the likesof the Climbers, Deadmau5 and Flight Facilities, as well as putting out releases via Wolf+Lamb, Future Classic, Hot Creations, Outcross Records, BPitch Control and Editorial Records to name a few.
Among his most notable collaborations are works with Derrick McKenzie, drummer of Jamiroquai; Drop Out Orchestra, Art Of Tones, amongst others. Each of these collaborations has allowed him to explore new musical dimensions, enriching his characteristic sound with diverse and fresh influences.

With a musical style deeply rooted in disco, funk and jazz, Monsieur Van Pratt combines classical elements with contemporary touches, creating a sound experience that is both nostalgic and innovative. His work not only stands out for its technical quality, but also for its ability to connect emotionally with the listener, making him a central figure in the evolution of modern dance sound.

Piano-driven post-rock band We Stood Like Kings from Belgium celebrate 15 years of existence with the release of their sixth album, Pinocchio, coming out via Kapitän Platte. The 9-track, 49-minute concept album revisits the world-famous initiatory tale of Pinocchio through a dark and violent lens of betrayal and power struggles."This really feels like We Stood Like Kings 2.0, while remaining unequivocally us. It might very well be the record we've always wanted to make," says pianist Judith Hoorens. With its extended use of distorted synths and heavy post-metal riffs, Pinocchio clearly marks a turning point in the band's history.

FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER: THE LONG-LOST RECORDINGS OF BIRMINGHAM ROOTS REGGAE PIONEERS NATRUS Mastered from the original tapes by Guy Davie at Electric Needle Mythology, the label founded by music writer, author and broadcaster Pete Paphides, is thrilled to announce the archival release of newly-discovered recordings by Birmingham reggae band Natrus. Comprising members of the same family – seven in total – Natrus were a ubiquitous presence of the live circuit within and beyond the West Midlands in the late 1970s. Used as an ad hoc “Wrecking Crew” by local producer and promoter Toney Owens, NATRUS frequently provided live accompaniment to visiting Jamaican artists such as Sugar Minott, Johnny Osbourne and Freddie McKay. With an age span ranging from 9 to 25, NATRUS’S live work had to be structured around the educational obligations of their younger members. But when they weren’t playing live, they would frequently hone their own compositions at Owens’ studio in Saltley, Birmingham.

During their collective lifetime, NATRUS released one very limited edition single Mash It, with a stellar guest vocal from deejay Ranking Glad(Stone). Featured alongside Mash It on this release are a selection of recordings previously thought lost by the group who laid them down. They were only discovered after Toney Owens’ alerted Needle Mythology’s Pete Paphides to the existence of some 60 quarter-inch reels featuring all the music recorded by Owens over a period of ten years or so. When Paphides finally tracked down NATRUS rhythm guitarist Owen Taylor, he was stunned to hear of their existence. After a meeting with Taylor and his siblings, Needle Mythology collaborated with NATRUS on the restoration and remastering of the tracks featured on this, their very belated debut album. As well as Mash It and its original flipside Come From Africa, highlights on ‘NATRUS’ include a superb version of Slim Smith’s The Time Has Come and the deep roots entreaties of Freedom Inna Babylon, both showcasing the soulful vocal of lead singer Fitzdonald “Fitz” English and the almost psychic sense of musical attunement that percolates right down the the formidable rhythm section of Beverley Stewart (bass) and Clinton Gordon (drums).

Cathartic avant-rock, literate DIY folk & experimental composition exploring displacement, love, climate change, belonging & the places we call home - RIYL Jim O’Rourke, Richard Youngs, This Heat, Richard Dawson, Flying Nun. ‘Real Home’ is the new album by the Manchester-born, London-based artist Kiran Leonard. His sixth album proper (not including innumerable tour-only CD-Rs and short-run cassettes), since his precocious debut in 2013, ‘Real Home’ finds Leonard invigorated by inspiration and experience, making passionate, literate, and mercurial music that explores displacement, love, memory, climate change, connections to home and more. Encompassing songs recorded after moving to South London, ‘Real Home’ reflects on ideas of belonging and domesticity through folkloric, stream-of-consciousness songwriting. Across nine tracks, Leonard traces lived impressions of the household and the city, expressing sentiments of dislocation, alienation and stasis, but contentment too. Infusing the avant-rock effervescence, terraced dynamics and visionary lyricism of his music with what he defines as a greater sense of openness, Leonard is as versatile, fervent and imaginative as ever on ‘Real Home’, yet his music is somehow more intimate, affecting, and acutely expressive. Shaped by dual considerations of simplicity and formalism, ‘Real Home’ is by turns beautiful, allusive, and ruminative, an album on which Leonard considers what his songs have resembled in the past and what they mean now. In recent years, Leonard has crafted eloquent chamber music inspired by the likes of James Joyce and Clarice Lispector (‘Derevaun Seraun’), responded to contemporary politics and communication breakdown in the digital age (‘Western Culture’), and compiled solo works and ensemble recordings for a longform ode to Jonas Mekas and to one of Leonard’s enduring themes; home (‘Trespass On Foot’). On ‘Real Home’, Leonard reiterates this abiding thematic focus yet ascends to new, different heights, in music of cathartic delicacy and dissonance where all the myriad dimensions of his work to date seem to crystallize. There are sinuous songs about struggle and defying the pace of city life through drift and diversion (‘Pass Between Houses’), stirring songs of intense feeling and crescendo, described as a form of speculative detective fiction (‘Theatre for Change’). There are touching solo piano ballads (the title track), symbolic contentions with carbon capture and climate change (‘Utopia of Bog’), modes of experimental minimalism (‘Void Attentive’), and other profuse feats of compositional range, embroidered with wild tendrils of narrative and lyrical depth. A record to pore over, and get lost in. Exemplifying the vast aesthetic scope of Leonard’s music, lead single ‘My Love, Let’s Take The Stage Tonight’ is inspired by country lodestar Hank Williams, Russian poetry and a late period love poem by William Carlos Williams. Yet for Leonard, the song signals a sense of accessible materiality, and is the product of a more linear approach to writing songs: “My imitation of the great Hank Williams, in spirit if not in substance…This is one of the best efforts on Real Home at a song-as-object. Looking at it now I realise I was trying to write a song that made itself known as a song to the listener, and I wonder whether that’s crucial if you want a song to transcend its context. And that this is either accomplished through a total openness – by being inviting, by laying the tricks of the song out plain to see, as Williams and his many ghostwriters did so well – or by adopting a knowing aloofness, positioning oneself against the listener but letting it be known that that’s what it’s doing. In this song I try both, but mostly the former: as in, I wanted to write a song where every line follows on from the next.” Imbuing the endlessly elaborate and inventive qualities of his music with a newfound streak of candid, clear-cut melodicism, Leonard has reached a special place in his artistry, on a record that feels familial, and expresses closeness. Assembled with affiliates including Lauren Auder, Otto Willberg, Jasper Llewellyn (caroline), Tom Hardwick-Allan (Shovel Dance Collective), Magda McLean (caroline, The Umlauts), Alex Mckenzie (caroline, Shovel Dance Collective), Isabelle Thorn (Dear Laika) & more, the recording process had a significant influence on the subject matter of ‘Real Home’, in sessions defined by close-knit camaraderie and artistic eccentricity: “The theme of the home obviously recurs throughout the record; the album was mostly recorded in domestic spaces with friends, and the name of the album is Real Home. I like the qualifier ‘real’, like you’re getting past the cloak of the word and towards the thing-itself…also nearly all the percussion in this record was recorded on items from my dad’s shed (jam jars, sandpaper, blocks of wood, etc). Real home record!” ‘Real Home’, like anything by Kiran Leonard, is a record of dazzling multiplicity. Yet it’s a companionable prospect with a central premise; a collection of songs where listeners old and new can find a home. An album led by a scene; of Leonard standing at the threshold, ready to welcome you inside. “Exceptional songs that linger” - The Guardian // “An autodidact of amazing talent & energy” – Pitchfork // “A ridiculous amount of talent…confrontational, celebratory, provocative or perverse – he manages all of these emotions & more” - The Quietus /

What is Tentacletek? Don't you know? Then listen to the new album by those fellow underwater friendos LOS PULPITOS. The two legendary music producers Felipe Salmon (Dengue Dengue Dengue) and Dirk Leyers (one half of Closer Musik and A08 formerly known as Africaine 808) have spent the last two years in seclusion deep down in their hidden diving station creating a bigger than life wave breaker album! From the very first track, gently gyrating, digitally processed, electro-acoustic sound tentacles spiral into your techno ears. These seducing limbs will suck you directly to all the festival dancefloors of the seven seas. Caribbean 3/4 disco polyrhythms meet state of the art techno UK dubby bass music.

"Mola Mola" floods your body as if you had fallen into the Mississippi and been dragged back to Atlantis by Drexciyans. While the wonderfully deep, monstrous dancehall-like bass of "Lab Lab" describes the metallic burst of a sinking spaceship. The cumbia-dancehall-drum&bass "ii ii ii" effortlessly equalises that pressure. In the Bermuda Triangle, a well-camouflaged "Antennariidae" fishes for its diving listeners with endless deep dub, giving them ice-cold shivers down their spine until all their legs and teeth are rattling voodooesque. "Sirens" sings of West London broken-beat strings while "Squidler" gallops fluidly on a seahorse down the Aquabahn straight to Detroit. "Catfishy"! rides in the wildest water bull in reverse-cowboy rodeo style. "Pannetronica" overflows like an Abyssopelagial pool?

LOS PULPITOS debut album is a wonderfully playful and stringent, excellently produced electronic concept album. The 10 tracks are unrivalled in their merciless yet extremely balanced bassiness.

(Mirko Hecktor)

‘Since the 16th century, the Ecuadorian province of Esmeraldas has been home to a unique Afro-Indigenous culture originating in the integration of the Indigenous Chachi and Nigua peoples with African Maroon communities. Juyungo documents significant Esmeraldan artists and bands playing the Afro-Ecuadorian folklore of the province, as well as including some older field recordings. Based mostly on the marimba, whose origins lie partly in the African balafon, partly in Indigenous percussion instruments, the music is laced with call and response chants, ambient insect and bird noise, the filigree finger-styles of the Andean guitar tradition and the panpipes of the mountains. This is resonant insider roots music at its headiest — the mystic revelation of Esmeraldas, gully deep and lustral.’
- Francis Gooding, The Wire.


The fifth in our series of LPs compiling classic music from Ecuador. Customary Honest Jons runnings: a beautiful gatefold sleeve; superior pressing, with vivid, intimate sound; full-size, sixteen-page booklet, in colour throughout, with detailed, fascinating, bi-lingual notes, and stunning photographs.

The music is transfixing, magical; not like anything else. From start to finish, this album is continuously, profoundly immersive; a kind of journeying, trippy meditation about slavery and cultural resistance, identity and mix, places and spaces, futures and pasts. It’s inscrutable to net-surfing, algorithms, Shuffle. But for a taste try the insurgent marimba roller Agua Largo, jet-propelled by Rosa Huila’s rapturous blend of African spiritualist and Christian chant. ‘Healing music,’ Zakia called it on Gilles Peterson’s BBC show recently. And the ravishing pasillo Kasilla Shungulla — ‘calm your heart’ in the Quichua language — a duet between the Peruvian master-guitarist Raúl García Zárate and viola da gamba by Juan Luis Restrepo from Medellin, recorded in a baroque church in Buzbanza, Colombia.

Mutual Rytm spawns new sub-label ‘Versus’ with debut EP from longtime techno associates Regent and Chontane. Continuing to expand its creative world, SHDW’s Mutual Rytm imprint now introduces ‘Versus’ - a new sub- label crafted for creative symbiosis between two artists across one shared release. Opening the series with authority, Regent and Chontane man the debut offering - two close friends and native Berliners who have been shaping techno for more than 15 years. Both long-standing members of the Mutual Rytm family, having released multiple times here before, the pair have always created music informed by life immersed in their local scene. Having both mutually influenced one another over the years, here they present their shared interpretation of techno with individual artistic DNA, forming a unified sound that represents the best of both worlds. Regent goes first, leaning towards functional, anthemic, dance-floor-focused techno. ‘Ephemera’ is tight, minimal but forceful; ‘Slow Burn’ has synth tension rising through the dark, next to glitchy percussion; and ‘Afterglow’ lets in more light, bringing otherworldly synths that hang above the groove and consume your focus. Chontane then explores a more musical and unconventional approach. ‘Plaxaric’ is supple, warm, and deep techno that tunnels into an abyss. ‘Grounding Factor’ is just as economical in design, but with introverted funk and evolving layers of sound. ‘Mental Lab’ spins out into complex rhythms inspired equally by IDM, jungle, and techno. It’s a mental workout as well as a physical one. Both artists add a pair of digital bonus tracks. Regent’s ‘Control Room’ and ‘Rarely Enough’ deliver elevated, hypnotic tools, before Chontane’s ‘Escore’ and ‘Outside In’ bring extroverted drum patterns along with contrasting melodic unease

The first album ever to release on Jahtari vinyl, back in circulation for the first time since it’s original release in 2009.

Twelve meticulously crafted lofi Dub oddities by disrupt, off-the-grid riddims with lots of SciFi samples, cheap synths and effects from another world, all soaked in gnarly but deeply cosmic textures and with expert low end mastering by peak time CGB1 at D&M in Berlin.

This new album version includes all-time classics like “SEGA Beats”, a killer chiphop dub cut of Misora Hibari’s “Ringo Oiwake”, as well as “Berzerk Dub” and “Echobombing” (the instrumental to Kiki Hitomi‘s “Nighwalkers“), which only have been released on CD or limited 7″ before.

“The Bass Has Left The Building” comes with iconic cover art by Jimmy Cauty (KLF) – and an inlay poster with an exploding sound system…

First coming to prominence purely as a drum & bass artist, with the likes of Metalheadz, Digital's Function and Klute's Commercial Suicide labels all over his material, veteran Slough producer Amit has, in more recent years, spread his stylistic base via his Amar label to take in deep dubstep and a touch of acid as well as ruffneck junglist behaviour. This 12", his first for more than five years, is heavyweight dub business, with echo chambers set to maximum dubbage and shuddering sub causing potential structural damage to all but the sturdiest buildings in a five mile radius. 'Dem Rude', with its gunshots and sonic soup, takes the A-side, while the flip tune 'Hush Up' marries more aural abstractions with another stepping rhythm, the hi hats fizzing and sizzling like they're encased in a deep fat fryer. Great to have this vastly underrated underground trooper back in the ranks - and well worth the wait.

Originally released in 2001, Up The Country is the debut album by The Sixth Great Lake and a quietly revered title within the late-'90s / early-2000s indie scene. Rooted in jangly guitars, melodic songwriting, and a distinctly pastoral sensibility, the album sits at the intersection of indie pop, folk-rock, and classic guitar-driven pop. Although initially released with modest exposure, Up The Country steadily developed a loyal following, earning cult status among fans of understated, melody-focused indie. Its charm lies in its simplicity: clean arrangements, memorable hooks, and an unforced warmth that has allowed the record to age exceptionally well over the past 25 years. This 25th anniversary reissue presents an opportunity to reintroduce an overlooked catalogue gem to today's market, appealing both to original fans and to a new audience drawn to timeless, guitar-led indie records. With renewed interest in archival and heritage releases, Up The Country offers strong long-term catalogue potential beyond initial anniversary demand. A timeless, understated record with strong appeal for fans of melodic, guitar-driven indie.

Originally released in 2001, Once is the debut album by The Tyde and a quietly influential title from the late-'90s / early-2000s West Coast indie pop scene. Rooted in warm melodic guitars, subtle psychedelic textures, and introspective songwriting, the album occupies a distinctive space between indie pop, folk-rock, and California psychedelia. While never a mainstream release, Once steadily built a loyal following over the years, earning its reputation as a cult classic among fans and collectors. Its understated production, emotional restraint, and timeless melodies have allowed the album to age exceptionally well, making it as relevant today as it was upon release. This 25th anniversary reissue offers a strong opportunity to reintroduce an overlooked catalogue gem to both established fans and new listeners. With the continued demand for high-quality reissues and historically important indie titles, Once fits perfectly within current collector and indie-focused retail trends. The album's enduring appeal, combined with the anniversary context, gives it solid long-term catalogue value beyond initial release interest.

Grounded in a season of life that has been earned rather than borrowed, Benjamin Tod speaks with the ease of someone no longer running from himself. There is joy now - a steadiness that comes from commitment. With the recent arrival of his son and a deep well of new music on the horizon, Tod is firmly rooted in both purpose and possibility. That clarity is evident in Vengeance and Grace, the Lost Dog Street Band frontman's forthcoming and most expansive solo album to date. Conceived as a "dual-version" release, the project presents two parallel worlds: (Alone) is a stripped solo-acoustic version, along with its full band counterpart.

Together, the two versions form the full range of what Tod is capable of: restraint on one side, force on the other. At the core of Tod's writing is a simple conviction: music should serve something larger than the moment. His writing speaks to mind, body, and soul, shaped by faith, discipline, and a hard-earned understanding of consequence. The darkness that once defined him is neither denied nor indulged. It is understood and no longer in control. Today, Tod moves with a sense of calm that wasn't always there. He is grateful, settled, and intentional, continuing to follow the compass that's guided him from the beginning. Rooted in traditional country and folk, his work stands firmly in the modern music landscape, shaped by experience, restraint, and the life he's built around it.

Formed by Don Grashey and Lloyd Palmer in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Gaiety Records was an outlet for many relatively obscure but excellent Canadian garage and rock bands during its existence. They released their own singles as well as sub-licensing material to other labels, such as RCA (49th Parallel), Columbia (Jarvis Street Revue and Souls of Inspyration), Decca, Epic, Musicor, and others. Features the Checkerlads , White Knights , Tomorrow's Keepsake, Lexington Avenue, NRG , Solid Reputation, and the Plague , including their face melter, 'Face of Time' and the essential psych classic 'High Flyin' Bird'.

Joe Bataan's Ghetto Records released Joe Acosta's "The Power of Love" LP in 1971. It is now beloved among both salsa dura fans for the tough uptempo numbers and with the lowrider "souldies" crowd for its sweet and slow Latin soul track 'I Need Her.' There are a number of funky mid-tempo son montunos, as well as three super hard guaguancos enough variety to make for a solid dancing-and listening experience. Reissued once again thanks to our collaboration with Now-Again Records. Our release includes an insert with liner notes.

Longtime friend of the label Eraserhead returns after over a decade away from producing music due to his surreal MS Paint work as 'Jim'll Paint It' becoming an unexpected cultural phenomenon. With his debut full-length, 'Violence', Eraserhead presents a truly eclectic electronic LP featuring collaborations with established producers such as Om Unit, Enduser, and Brain Rays, as well as the vocal talents of Nadia Rose, Beans (of Antipop Consortium), and Cadence Weapon. An album held together by theme and tone rather than style or tempo, 'Violence' is the culmination of a bitter wave of inspiration, initially conceived in the wake of a personal tragedy that quickly grew into a broader polemic about the state of the world.

Originally linking up with Love Love in its breakcore netlabel infancy with his refined, breaks-heavy breakcore/gabba, Eraserhead's flair for tight, intricate productions was evident in his finely tuned tracks of controlled chaos. This time around, his work is a darker, more expansive evolution of his sound, with the scale upsized and the stylistic scope massively broadened, remaining unfaithful to any single genre, but with firm nods to Breakcore, Grime, Drum & Bass, Techno, Rave, Dubstep, and Footwork, all chewed up with a hard industrial edge and cinematically framed by a backdrop of apocalyptic synths.

Opening with the cold tech-noir of 'Shining Brainless Beacon' to set the tone, the album quickly locks in with the blistering spoken-word headrush of 'Hurricane With Teeth' alongside rapper Beans, before Om Unit lends his expertise on the sharp groove and clinical bass blasts of 'Operation Hardtack'. The album shifts and morphs constantly throughout the runtime, moving from the raw and urgent acid techno of 'Crowd Control' to the crunching military march of the Gore Tech collaboration 'No More Worlds' and the tribal sci-fi footwork of the Brain Rays collaboration 'Night Visions'. 'Monolith' provides a final burst of catharsis, channelling Underworld by way of Nine Inch Nails, complete with writhing screams from Amée Chanter of sludge-punk-noise-rock duo Human Leather, before the heart of the album is laid bare with the painfully bleak closing dirge of 'Animal'. In its final moments, 'Violence' leaves the listener suspended between devastation and awe - an unflinching portrait of an uncaring world.

UILTY RAZORS, BONA FIDE PUNKS.



Writings on the topic that go off in all directions, mind-numbing lectures given by academics, and testimonies, most of them heavily doctored, from those who “lived through that era”: so many people today fantasize about the early days of punk in our country… This blessed moment when no one had yet thought of flaunting a ridiculous green mohawk, taking Sid Vicious as a hero, or – even worse – making the so-called alternative scene both festive and boorish. There was no such thing in 1976 or 1977, when it wasn’t easy to get hold of the first 45s by the Pistols or the Clash. Few people were aware of what was happening on the fringes of the fringes at the time. Malcolm McLaren was virtually unknown, and having short hair made you seem strange. Who knew then that rock music, which had taken a very bad turn since the early 1970s, would once again become an essential element of liberation? That, thanks to short and fast songs, it would once again rediscover that primitive, social side that was so hated by older generations? Who knew that, besides a few loners who read the music press (it was even better if they read it in English) and frequented the right record stores? Many of these formed bands, because it was impossible to do otherwise. We quickly went from listening to the Velvet Underground to trying to play the Stooges’ intros. It’s a somewhat collective story, even though there weren’t many people to start it.
The Guilty Razors were among those who took part in this initial upheaval in Paris. They were far from being the worst. They had something special and even released a single that was well above the national average. They also had enough songs to fill an album, the one you’re holding. In everyone’s opinion, they were definitely not among the punk impostors that followed in their wake. They were, at least, genuine and credible.

Guilty Razors, Parisian punk band (1975-1978). To understand something about their somewhat linear but very energetic sound, we might need to talk about the context in which it was born and, more broadly, recall the boredom (a theme that would become capital in punk songs) coupled with the desire to blow everything off, which were the basis for the formation of bands playing a rejuvenated rock music ; about the passion for a few records by the Kinks or the early Who, by the Stooges, by the Velvet mostly, which set you apart from the crowd.
And of course, we should remember this new wave, which was promoted by a few articles in the specialized press and some cutting-edge record stores, coming from New York or London, whose small but powerful influence could be felt in Paris and in a handful of isolated places in the provinces, lulled to sleep by so many appalling things, from Tangerine Dream to President Giscard d’Estaing...
In 1975-76, French music was, as almost always, in a sorry state ; it was still dominated by Johnny Hallyday and Sylvie Vartan. Local rock music was also rather bleak, apart from Bijou and Little Bob who tried to revive this small scene with poorly sound-engineered gigs played to almost no one.
In the working class suburbs at the time, it was mainly hard rock music played to 11 that helped people forget about their gruelling shifts at the factory. Here and there, on the outskirts of major cities, you still could find a few rockers with sideburns wearing black armbands since the death of Gene Vincent, but it wasn’t a proper mass movement, just a source of real danger to anyone they came across who wasn't like them. In August 1976, a festival unlike any other took place in Mont-de-Marsan – the First European Punk Festival as the poster said – with almost as many people on stage as in the audience. Yet, on that day, a quasi historical event happened, when, under the blazing afternoon sun, a band of unknowns called The Damned made an unprecedented noise in the arena, reminiscent of the chaotic Stooges in their early adolescence. They were the first genuine punk band to perform in our country: from then on, anything was possible, almost anything seemed permissible.

It makes sense that the four+1 members of Guilty Razors, who initially amplified acoustic guitars with crappy tape recorder microphones, would adopt punk music (pronounced paink in French) naturally and instinctively, since it combines liberating noise with speed of execution and – crucially – a very healthy sense of rebellion (the protesters of May 1968 proclaimed, and it was even a slogan, that they weren’t against old people, but against what had made them grow old. In the mid-1970s, it seemed normal and obvious that old people should now ALSO be targeted!!!).
At the time, the desire to fight back, and break down authority and apathy, was either red or black, often taking the form of leafleting, tumultuous general assemblies in the schoolyard, and massive or shabby demonstrations, most of the time overflowing with an exciting vitality that sometimes turned into fights with the riot police. Indeed, soon after the end of the Vietnam War and following Pinochet’s coup in Chile, all over France, Trotskyist and anarcho-libertarian fervour was firmly entrenched among parts of the educated youth population, who were equally rebellious and troublemakers whenever they had the chance. It should also be noted that when the single "Anarchy in the UK" was first heard, even though not many of us had access to it, both the title and its explosive sound immediately resonated with some of those troublemakers crying out for ANARCHY!!! Meanwhile, the left-wing majority still equated punks with reckless young neo-Nazis. Of course, the widely circulated photos in the mainstream press of Siouxsie Sioux with her swastikas didn’t necessarily help to win over the theorists of the Great Revolution. It took Joe Strummer to introduce The Clash as an anti-racist, anti-fascist and anti-ignorance band for the rejection of old-school revolutionaries to fade a little.

The Lycée Jean-Baptiste Say at Porte d’Auteuil, despite being located in the very posh and very exclusive 16th arrondissement of Paris, didn’t escape these "committed" upheavals, which doubled as the perfect outlet for the less timid members of this generation.
“Back then, politics were fun,” says Tristam Nada, who studied there and went on to become Guilty Razors’ frontman. “Jean-Baptiste was the leftist high-school in the neighbourhood. When the far right guys from the GUD came down there, the Communist League guys from elsewhere helped us fight them off.”
Anything that could challenge authority was fair game and of course, strikes for just about any reason would lead to increasingly frequent truancy (with a definitive farewell to education that would soon follow). Tristam Nada spent his 10th and 11th unfinished grades with José Perez, who had come from Spain, where his father, a janitor, had been sentenced to death by Franco. “José steered my tastes towards solid acts such as The Who. Like most teenagers, I had previously absorbed just about everything that came my way, from Yes to Led Zeppelin to Genesis. I was exploring… And then one day, he told me that he and his brother Carlos wanted to start a rock band.” The Perez brothers already played guitar. “Of course, they were Spanish!”, jokes their singer. “Then, somewhat reluctantly, José took up the bass and we were soon joined by Jano – who called himself Jano Homicid – who took up the rhythm guitar.” Several drummers would later join this core of not easily intimidated young guys who didn’t let adversity get the better of them.

The first rehearsals of the newly named Guilty Razors took place in the bedroom of a Perez aunt. There, the three rookies tried to cover a few standards, songs that often were an integral part of their lives. During a first, short gig, in front of a bewildered audience of tough old-school rockers, they launched into a clunky version of the Velvet Underground's “Heroin”. Challenge or recklessness? A bit of both, probably… And then, step by step, their limited repertoire expanded as they decided to write their own songs, sung in a not always very accurate or academic English, but who cared about proper grammar or the right vocabulary, since what truly mattered was to make the words sound as good as possible while playing very, very fast music? And spitting out those words in a language that left no doubt as to what it conveyed mattered as well.
Trying their hand a the kind of rock music disliked by most of the neighbourhood, making noise, being fiercely provocative: they still belonged to a tiny clique who, at this very moment, had chosen to impose this difference. And there were very few places in France or elsewhere, where one could witness the first stirrings of something that wasn’t a trend yet, let alone a movement.

In the provinces, in late 1976 or early 1977, there couldn’t be more than thirty record stores that were a bit more discerning than average, where you could hear this new kind of short-haired rock music called “punk”. The old clientele, who previously had no problem coming in to buy the latest McCartney or Aerosmith LP, now felt a little less comfortable there…
In Paris, these enlightened places were quite rare and often located nex to what would become the Forum des Halles, a big shopping mall. Between three aging sex workers, a couple of second-hand clothes shops, sellers of hippie paraphernalia and small fashion designers, the good word was loudly spread in two pioneering places – propagators of what was still only a new underground movement. Historically, the first one was the Open Market, a kind of poorly, but tastefully stocked cave. Speakers blasted out the sound of sixties garage bands from the Nuggets compilation (a crucial reference for José Perez) or the badly dressed English kids of Eddie and the Hot Rods. This black-painted den was opened a few years earlier by Marc Zermati, a character who wasn’t always in a sunny disposition, but always quite radical in his (good) choices and his opinions. He founded the independent label Skydog and was one of the promoters of the Mont-de-Marsan punk festivals. Not far from there was Harry Cover, another store more in tune with the new New York scene, which was amply covered in the house fanzine, Rock News (even though it was in it that the photos of the Sex Pistols were first published in France).
It was a favorite hang-out of the Perez brothers and Tristam Nada, as the latter explained. “It’s at Harry Cover’s that we first heard the Pistols and Clash’s 45s, and after that, we decided to start writing our first songs. If they could do it, so could we!”
The sonic shocks that were “Anarchy in the UK”, “White Riot” or the Buzzcocks’s EP, “Spiral Scratch” – which Guilty Razors' sound is reminiscent of – were soon to be amplified by an unparalleled visual shock. In April 1977, right after the release of their first LP, The Clash performed at the Palais des Glaces in Paris, during a punk night organised by Marc Zermati. For many who were there, it was the gig of a lifetime…
Of course, Guilty Razors and Tristam were in the audience: “That concert was fabulous… We Parisian punks were almost all dressed in black and white, with white shirts, skinny leather ties, bikers jackets or light jackets, etc. The Clash, on the other hand, wore colourful clothes. Well, the next day, at the Gibus, you’d spot everyone who had been at this concert, but they weren’t wearing anything black, they were all wearing colours.”

It makes sense to mention the Gibus club, as Guilty Razors often played there (sometimes in front of a hostile audience). It was also the only place in Paris that regularly scheduled new Parisian or Anglo-Saxon acts, such as Generation X, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Slits, and Johnny Thunders who would become a kind of messed-up mascot for the venue. A little later, in 1978, the Rose Bonbon – formerly the Nashville – also attracted nightly owls in search of electric thrills… In 1977, the iconic but not necessarily excellent Asphalt Jungle often played at the Gibus, sometimes sharing the bill with Metal Urbain, the only band whose aura would later transcend the French borders (“I saw them as the French Sex Pistols,” said Geoff Travis, head of their British label Rough Trade). Already established in this small scene, Metal Urbain helped the young and restless Guilty Razors who had just arrived. Guitarist for Metal Urbain Hermann Schwartz remembers it: “They were younger than us, we were a bit like their mentors even if it’s too strong a word… At least they were credible. We thought they were good, and they had good songs which reminded of the Buzzcocks that I liked a lot. But at some point, they started hanging out with the Hells Angels. That’s when we stopped following them.”

The break-up was mutual, since, Guilty Razors, for their part, were shocked when they saw a fringe element of the audience at Metal Urbain concerts who repeatedly shouted “Sieg Heil” and gave Nazi salutes. These provocations, even still minor (the bulk of the skinhead crowd would later make their presence felt during concerts), weren’t really to the liking of the Perez brothers, whose anti-fascist convictions were firmly rooted. Some things are non-negotiable.
A few months earlier (in July 1978), Guilty Razors had nevertheless opened very successfully for Metal Urbain at the Bus Palladium, a more traditonally old-school rock night-club. But, as was sometimes the case back then, the night turned into a mass brawl when suburban rockers came to “beat up punks”.

Back then, Parisian nights weren’t always sweet and serene.

So, after opening as best as they could for The Jam (their sound having been ruined by the PA system), our local heroes were – once again – met outside by a horde of greasers out to get them. “Thankfully,” says Tristam, “we were with our roadies, motorless bikers who acted as a protective barrier. We were chased in the neighbouring streets and the whole thing ended in front of a bar, with the owner coming out with a rifle…”
Although Tristam and the Perez brothers narrowly escaped various, potentially bloody, incidents, they weren’t completely innocent of wrongdoing either. They still find amusing their mugging of two strangers in the street for example (“We were broke and we simply wanted to buy tickets for the Heartbreakers concert that night,” says Tristam). It so happened that their victims were two key figures in the rock business at the time: radio presenter Alain Manneval and music publisher Philippe Constantin. They filed a complaint and sought monetary compensation, but somehow the band’s manager, the skilful but very controversial Alexis, managed to get the complaint withdrawn and Guilty Razors ended up signing with Constantin with a substantial advance.

They also signed with Polydor and the label released in 1978 their only three-track 45, featuring “I Don't Wanna be A Rich”, “Hurts and Noises” and “Provocate” (songs that exuded perpetual rebellion and an unquenchable desire for “class” confrontation). It was a very good record, but due to a lack of promotion (radio stations didn’t play French artists singing in English), it didn’t sell very well. Only 800 copies were allegedly sold and the rest of the stock was pulped… Initially, the three tracks were to be included on a LP that never came to be, since they were dropped by Polydor (“Let’s say we sometimes caused a ruckus in their offices!” laughs Tristam.) In order to perfect the long-awaited LP, the band recorded demos of other tracks. There was a cover of Pink Floyd's “Lucifer Sam” from the Syd Barrett era – proof of an enduring love for the sixties’ greats –, “Wake Up” a hangover tale and “Bad Heart” about the Baader-Meinhof gang, whose actions had a profound impact on the era and on a generation seeking extreme dissent... On the album you’re now discovering, you can also hear five previously unreleased tracks recorded a bit later during an extended and freezing stay in Madrid, in a makeshift studio with the invaluable help of a drummer also acting as sound engineer. He was both an enthusiastic old hippie and a proper whizz at sound engineering. Here too, certain influences from the fifties and sixties (Link Wray, the Troggs) are more than obvious in the band’s music.

Shortly after a final stormy and rather barbaric (on the audience’s side) “Punk night” at the Olympia in June 1978, Tristam left the band ; his bandmates continued without him for a short while.

But like most pioneering punk bands of the era, Guilty Razors eventually split up for good after three years (besides once in Spain, they’d only played in Paris). The reason for ceasing business activities were more or less the same for everyone: there were no venues outside one’s small circuit to play this kind of rock music, which was still frightening, unknown, or of little interest to most people. The chances of recording an LP were virtually null, since major labels were only signing unoriginal but reassuring sub-Téléphone clones, and the smaller ones were only interested in progressive rock or French chanson for youth clubs. And what about self-production? No one in our small safety-pinned world had thought about it yet. There wasn’t enough money to embark on that sort of venture anyway.

So yes, the early days of punk in France were truly No Future!

,,Hologramm" is the new EP by Schwefelgelb.

Remix contributions by Nastia Reigel and Norbak make it a 5 track Techno heavyweight.

An intriguing combination of positive, joyful atmosphere and gritty, pushy sound aesthetic spans all over the record. "The Show" and its euphorigenic rising stabs appears like what could be transformed into an Euro Dance anthem easily.
Yet the aware and well curated production holds it firmly in the zone of Techno and House underground. Speaking House, here's "In Mein Glas" - a sportive track with an irresistible bounce foiled by a lackadaisical vocal line, which gives it a comic twist.
As "Fieber" keeps the bounce we're getting a little more aggressive again: a delicate distortion, a dominant bass and a groovy drive. In all these 3 original tracks it's the melange of melodic motives, vocal highlights, crispy production as well as versatile creative details, which creates this specific sound that gets you hooked. It is lightness however wrapped in an Industrial musical language.

That said, the remixes proof how a new energy can be revealed by more minimal re-interpretations. Nastia Reigel, getting hands on "The Show", pushes drums and a fresh rhythmic play of vocal chops into the foreground. A sparse break followed by a powerful drop adds a strong climax. Norbak's approach on "In Mein Glas" takes the melodic motive and embeds it into a dubby space, not giving up on the hard-hitting kick.

"Hologramm" will be released on 140 g colored vinyl and digitally, April 10th, on n-PLEX.

On Psalm Funk, Bnnyhunna deepens the artistic language he first articulated on his celebrated debut Echoes of a Prayer. Rather than retracing familiar ground, the Amsterdam-based composer and producer expands his palette, allowing rhythm and space to carry as much narrative weight as harmony and lyricism.

While Echoes of a Prayer felt personal and devoted, Psalm Funk opens things up. Gospel harmonies stay central to his music, but now they are energized by smooth funk rhythms and heightened by the flexibility of jazz improvisation. Bnnyhunna moves between styles effortlessly, in a way that nothing seems borrowed, but everything feels lived in.

At the center of the record is an understanding of space. Silence acts not as an absence but as a structure. Breath, restraint, and patience shape the music just as much as basslines and backbeats. This awareness of dynamics allows the album to grow without losing its focus. It signifies a subtle but important change in Bnnyhunna as an artist, moving from inward reflection to forward momentum, from prayer as personal dialogue to prayer as a physical expression. The clarity, discipline, and emotional depth that marked his debut remain, now directed into something more rhythmically confident and spiritually uplifting.

Fusing gospel, funk, jazz, and African rhythmic traditions, Psalm Funk serves as both a meditation and an outpouring. It invites deep thought while demanding a physical response.

The album includes collaborations with American saxophonist Braxton Cook, trumpeter Sheila Maurice-Grey of Kokoroko, 3DDY, and Reggie Dartey, among others. The singles "Sorry Not Sorry" and "Waiting For You" have already hinted at the project's range, while the latest single, "The Heart Part 2," further expands on the album's dynamic and emotional scope.

To celebrate the release, Bnnyhunna will tour the Netherlands in April, with performances in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Nijmegen before heading to the UK for a show at The Great Escape.

Released in October 2024, Bnnyhunna's debut album Echoes of a Prayer was created as a dialogue with God, a personal call expressed through sound. The record resonated both with fans and media, gaining support from platforms like 3voor12, Rolling Stone Africa, and Afromixx. It reached the airwaves of BBC Radio 1 in the UK, KEXP in the US, J-Wave in Japan, and 3FM in the Netherlands, and landed in playlists such as BUTTER, Morning Rhythm, and Vanguard.

In 2025, Echoes of a Prayer earned the Edison Pop award for Soul/R&B/Funk and received Grammy consideration for Best Alternative Jazz Album. On stage, Bnnyhunna established his presence with performances at festivals such as Lowlands, Couleur Cafe, Brick Lane Jazz Festival, Dour, and Super Sonic Jazz, as well as his first tour in Japan.



Upcoming live shows:
10/04/26 - BIRD, Rotterdam (NL)
11/04/26 - Doornroosje, Nijmegen (NL)
12/04/26 - Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (NL)
13/05/26 - The Great Escape, Brighton (UK)

Blue Hour is Nick Schofield’s first foray into ambient jazz music. The album is an ambient ode to Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, and opens up Schofield’s sonic palette to introduce his childhood instrument, drums, with his contemporary ambient-electronic practice. Blue Hour features the intuitive, and totally improvised, trumpet playing of Scott Bevins (No Cosmos, Busty and the Bass).

Schofield grew up playing drums, but turned to creating experimental-electronic music when studying Electroacoustics at Concordia University. Well-known for his signature ambient aesthetic, Schofield has been called a “dazzling electronic artist” by Aquarium Drunkard and a “synth maven” by Constellation Records. Blue Hour marks the first time that he has merged his percussion practice with his ambient electronic explorations, and it is all in the service of reinterpreting Miles Davis’ 1969 watershed recording In a Silent Way.

Schofield improvised all of the drumming and main synthesizer parts over the course of a single day, recording in a church in Ottawa. These foundational layers comprise tender Moog pulses and Roland Juno-6 pads, some of which would not be out of place on the back half of Another Green World or Music Has the Right to Children.

If this was to be a reflection of In a Silent Way, of course there would need to be trumpet. Schofield invited Bevins to record the missing piece of the album during a one day recording session, where Bevins improvised all his trumpet parts having never heard the songs before. Scott Bevins’ contribution gives the music a leading instrumental voice, and his intuitive approach shows a perfect understanding of how to both integrate and elevate the compositions.

Blue Hour is itself a profound reference, an ambient adaptation, a dream realized and an uncanny synthesis of sounds, styles, and personal history.

Blue Hour is Nick Schofield’s first foray into ambient jazz music. The album is an ambient ode to Miles Davis’ In A Silent Way, and opens up Schofield’s sonic palette to introduce his childhood instrument, drums, with his contemporary ambient-electronic practice. Blue Hour features the intuitive, and totally improvised, trumpet playing of Scott Bevins (No Cosmos, Busty and the Bass).

Schofield grew up playing drums, but turned to creating experimental-electronic music when studying Electroacoustics at Concordia University. Well-known for his signature ambient aesthetic, Schofield has been called a “dazzling electronic artist” by Aquarium Drunkard and a “synth maven” by Constellation Records. Blue Hour marks the first time that he has merged his percussion practice with his ambient electronic explorations, and it is all in the service of reinterpreting Miles Davis’ 1969 watershed recording In a Silent Way.

Schofield improvised all of the drumming and main synthesizer parts over the course of a single day, recording in a church in Ottawa. These foundational layers comprise tender Moog pulses and Roland Juno-6 pads, some of which would not be out of place on the back half of Another Green World or Music Has the Right to Children.

If this was to be a reflection of In a Silent Way, of course there would need to be trumpet. Schofield invited Bevins to record the missing piece of the album during a one day recording session, where Bevins improvised all his trumpet parts having never heard the songs before. Scott Bevins’ contribution gives the music a leading instrumental voice, and his intuitive approach shows a perfect understanding of how to both integrate and elevate the compositions.

Blue Hour is itself a profound reference, an ambient adaptation, a dream realized and an uncanny synthesis of sounds, styles, and personal history.

Xylitol, aka producer and DJ Catherine Backhouse, shifts up the refinement and musical breadth for her second album Blumenfantasie, the follow-up to her Planet Mu debut Anemones.
With Blumenfantasie, Xylitol wanted “to make space and for the music to float and propel at once”, finding routes through the pointillistic figures, cascading synths and the meditative stillness of kosmische musik and bolder breakbeat programming. She reaches this delicate balance through careful subtraction, hoping “to convey a sense of intimacy and sadness but without sentimentality” which she manages with a feel and sound that's raw and intuitive.

Blumenfantasie rolls through detailed jungle workouts that flutter and bleep, through beatless ambience, taking a rare dip below 160 bpm for the elegiac Mirjana, the album’s most explicit nod to Krautrock with a drum break chopped up from Amon Duul II’s anthemic ‘Archangel’s Thunderbird’, through to Halo, a bare bones grime rhythm that calls to mind the missing link between industrial pioneers Nurse With Wound and Wiley's Eskibeat.

Catherine cast her net to draw in experimental audiovisual duo Sculpture and Reading based post-rock band The Leaf Library as collaborators, pulling the former’s whirling eddies of musique concrète into a slice of sublime aquatic jungle, and the latter’s radiophonic folksong into a dark and disorientating breakbeat workout equally indebted to Source Direct as to Broadcast.
Blumenfantasie moves with a confident, self-effacing fluidity which has been informed by DJ Bunnyhausen’s more regular DJ gigs. She speculates ‘if this album feels more cohesive than its predecessor it's likely because I've been DJing a lot more, with Worthing Techno Militia, with central and eastern european electronica collective Slav to the Rhythm, as well as being part of Italo Disco crew Flex. Moving between these zones seemed to open up hidden pathways between the disparate musical trajectories they represent.'
While Anemones contrasted the rough and the delicate, its successor is an album built for the head, hips and heart, with painterly sounds and a sense of intimacy that encourages deep listening while keeping its eyes on the strobelight and its feet on the dancefloor.

Silicon Scally and Fleck E.S.C. need no introduction at this stage. Both artists are veterans not just of Sheffield's Central Processing Unit label but of modern electro as a whole, with the pair having decades of skin in the game at this point. Their new release, a four-track EP entitledSlipwhere Silicon Scally handles the first half and Fleck E.S.C. the second, carries itself with the adventurous confidence of a record made by masters of their craft.

Slipopener 'Phased Array' is exactly the kind of top quality machine-funk tackle you'd expect from this meeting of minds. The beat programming is deliciously tactile from the off, hissing and clanking like machinery in an old Detroit factory. The feel of 'Phased Array' is altered, though, when the chords come in, a series of alternating floating sounds which give the track an altogether eerier feel. When all of this is coupled with the otherworldly synth blurts that periodically force their way to the front of the track, the overall effect is a piece of real depth assembled by an expert practitioner.

'Phased Array' is followed up by 'Stax', another brilliantly propulsive number. Here we find the drum beat - one which is a little reminiscent of that Kraftwerk tune about the numbers, no less - once more offset by some decidedly more shadowy synth work, all while arpeggiated keyboard licks work against an intricate web of basslines, chords and unidentifiable flying synth tones.

Fleck E.S.C. opens theSlipB-side with 'Good Ride', a number where the nudge-wink title is borne out by a track built around looped snippets of sighing vocals. That said, with a bassline that sounds like a blurting old landline telephone, a ghoulish synth lead and all manner of motion-sick breakdowns, the 'ride' in question could just as well be aWipeout-style whizz through hyperspace as anything more suggestive. 'Good Ride' also sets itself apart from the other joints here by showing off a swaying halftime breakdown.

'Intox Remedy',Slip's closer, wraps the EP in a manner which continues some of the trends of the record's earlier tracks - richly tuneful chords, precision-engineered broken beat drum programming and a wide palette of delightfully unusual synth tones are all present and correct. However, there is also something about the chords here which pares back the eeriness of previous joints for a bit more of a wide-eyed, stargazing feel, and as such 'Intox Remedy' sees the record out by placing the listener firmly back in the cosmos.

Tough enough for the dancefloor and intricate enough for home listening, theSlipEP is a fabulous collaboration from two of the most respected voices in the electro game.

Three years after the release of Volume 1, Innershades returns to home turf with a second entry in his Heritage series. The New Beat territory that its predecessor tackled serves as the starting point for the A-side of Volume 2 as well. The glistening arpeggios and choir patches on "Mind State", alongside the unyielding kicks, alarm-like synth lines and plodding tempo of "System Breakdown," reaffirm how the genre's hallmarks smoothly align with the artist's own inclinations. The B-side draws from the broad spectrum of styles that emerged a bit later, in the beginning of the nineties, when it seemed the dance floor would move unimpeded between and bridge genres, its boundaries often not as firmly established. "Fuse Memory" nudges the pace forward, driven by the 909 and a staple hypnotic lead. When the drums come to a halt, a 303 emerges to flesh out the break. "Rhythm Composer" continues in a similar early techno vein, but pulls the track into outer space via its formant-heavy leads and Detroit-tinged sci-fi sweeps. On ALT023 Innershades appears in fine fettle, providing another batch of up-front club tracks that approach history as motion rather than memory, translating the past into forward momentum.

Delsin is pleased to announce an extensive compilation series combing through the catalogue of landmark Dutch techno label Djax-Up-Beats. The series, curated by Rush Hour co-founder Christiaan Macdonald, launches with a look at the label's legacy in the development of acid music through the 90s. In total, this first entry in the Djax-Up-Beats 1990-2005 series comprises 20 tracks, presented as a main triple-vinyl album plus two additional 12" EPs. The compilation also features all-new illustrations from Alan Oldham, the Detroit-rooted visual artist who gave Djax-Up-Beats a distinctive visual identity from very early on, and design by Lost Communication. Each volume of the series also features liner notes from music journalist Oli Warwick. Crucially, every track featured on the series has been carefully mastered by Johanz Westerman, bringing the best out of tracks that often had very little post-production treatment before they were originally pressed to wax. Volume 1 - The Acid Trip focuses on an area the label is best known for - acid house and techno. After the pioneering breakthroughs Chicago-based producers made with the Roland TB-303 in the late 1980s, acid music creation was starting to become more widespread when Djax-Up started in late 1990. The rebellious, rave-ready sound was an instant draw for label founder Miss Djax, and so her label ended up reflecting the development of acid as it spread from the Chicago roots across the world. Volume 1 - The Acid Trip looks at the diverse approaches to acid taken by artists on Djax-Up. Tracks on the compilation include an early outing from Ludovic 'St Germain' Navarre and Bjorn Torske's Ismistik alias, as well as Dutch pioneers such as Edge Of Motion, Spasms, Random XS and Acid Junkies, and Chicago heavyweights Mike Dearborn and Gene Hunt. With five more, equally extensive, volumes to come in this series, Djax-Up-Beats 1990-2005 is a thorough exploration of a true totem of techno culture - a renegade label that operated on its own terms and carried surprises and slammers in equal measure.

The album opens with the ominous guitar-driven Hollow Sky, accompanied by its haunting music video's verdant vistas. The song, with Iceglass ghostly vocals, shimmers with that sounds like an Omnichord flittering like sonic firefly lights and brooding bass. This perfectly scores the less traveled wanderings through the dark wooden path of Dante's perdition, leading to the titular well that graces the album cover. The Crater opens with an unsettling riff and bass, with low, repetitive frequencies on the synth create a sense of unease. Here, Iceglass recounts a fatalistic requiem for the king of romance that is cataclysmic and leaves a scar upon the earth. With Fall Industrial Wall, once again, Iceglass channels a silky and Nico-like emotive deadpan; against a dirgelike melody backed by minimal synth, bass, and drum. Almost medieval and plaintive, with its folk droning horns, deep and shallow in their resonance. This song is anachronistic, setting the scene of ruins centuries-old with crumbling edifices strewn about like memories lost in time. With the poetic lyrics of The Chamber do we find the eponymous abyss. Here, dualities are laid bare; besides love, there is heartbreak, and without this sorrow, what meaning would there be to love if one knows not what it is to lose? This song encapsulates the idea that love is heartbreak, and love lost is reaching the deepest chamber of the heart. This is carried through a sombre horn, minimalist drum machine, and deliberate bassline overlaid with Iceglass german and english lyrics. The Well is led in with a softly distorted bassline overlaid with eerie banshee howls give way to Iceglass otherworld vocal refrain, echoing through time as if emanating from a hole in the ground, and encircling that hole is a garden of woe and despair. The sinfully seductive song The Moor features a captivating SAX SOLO courtesy of Perseas; a welcome shift in tone, juxtaposed well with the intensity of Iceglass tenebrous vocal purr. This hitherto unexplored foray into dark sensuality takes the song into sordid mid 80s territory, bringing to mind a dusky drive along a serpentine road, with equally haunting instrumentations straddling time with icy fire. Broken Characters is an acoustic folk interlude featuring Selofan's Dimitris Pavlidis on guitar. Here we find a more gentle approach with its earnest and romantic lyrics. The song's melodic hook is a soft caress along with the forlorn horn elements highlighting Iceglass at her most Nico-sounding vocal yet, singing the sorrowful truth that most artists are indeed broken characters. Chimerical opens with dirgelike synth organs. The chill of winter has befallen the lamentations sung by Iceglass carried by haunting chord progressions and minimal percussion, plaintively beseeching the song's subject to remain elusive, idealistic, and a dreamer. After an album highlighting more Jill than Jack, our male protagonist finally makes his ascent in the sonorous and breathtaking Dark Hill, a masterful march of sweeping synth horns, and trepidatious drum machine with William Maybelline's bellowing voice cracking like thunder, rattling the atmosphere like his heart against his ribs. Spirals swirls in a cautionary knell of cathedral-esque droning synth dirge, with Icarian lyrics shining like a sombre ray of hope; like the sun's rays creeping into the darkest of places. The song, minimalist in its tight percussion, echoes with the solace of Larissa Iceglass vocal litany; invoking elements of the supernatural, almost like a Casio preset sequenced to the beating of an angel's wings.

Salix is a bold new departure for modular synthesist Loula Yorke, seen here using an antique reed organ to explore the ancient roots of willow trees in magic, myth and medicine, as well as inviting another musician into her recording studio for the first time, clarinettist Charlotte Jolly.

The EP forms a sonic archive of a singular instrument: an antique free reed organ left behind by a previous encumbent of Asylum Studios, (the artists' co-operative in Suffolk where Yorke's Truxalis labelmate and life collaborator, Seiche, has a studio space). The organ is in poor condition and fascinatingly, painfully detuned. Yorke's recordings bring out its host of unusual quirks exacerbated by age and neglect: the powerful rhythmic creaking of the wooden treadles; the bone-shaking resonance emanating from its body at specific pitches; unexpected exclamations of harmonic collision from within the carcass redolent of a human voice; the piercing, shrieking whistles of broken reeds, and the powerful timbres unlocked via Yorke's experiments with various combinations of stops.

The three tracks that form Salix are inspired by a local weeping willow tree, a constant companion photographed over the course of a year. Boughs caught in a gyre. A maiden in mourning. Branches that gesture in the wrong direction. A tree turned upside down. A hand-woven willow basket, an old technology to gather and store. The journey of a lovelorn bard through the underworld, a bundle of willow under one arm for protection.

For the opening track, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, Yorke recorded herself playing a simple unaccompanied improvisation on the organ, the only ornamentation being the processed sounds of the keys being struck and returning to their positions.

For Bundle of Styx, a spell of protection is cast and then broken. Yorke invited virtuoso clarinettist Charlotte Jolly into the studio to test combining the breathy textures of both brass and natural reeds, the instruments uniting and obsuring each other in turn during this one-take improvisation. The organ's unpredictable sharpened tunings take centre stage here, with Jolly using them as a point of departure to conjure a set of peerless harmonic improvisations live in the moment. Throughout the improvisation, Yorke, a self-taught musician, unpracticed on the organ, supports and challenges, freely admitting that she's not always sure what effect her decisions to move up and down the keyboard or pull out certain stops will have. Jolly's genius lies in her ability to meet and build on every uncertain pitch thrown her way, saying of the experience, "I love that Loula isn't classically trained, I can't predict at all what she's about to do."

For the final track, With the Red Dawn, Yorke has come up with another unique combination of textures, this time bringing her own specialism in modular synthesis to the fore. A ten-minute reed organ drone characterised with ever-shifting bass swells and overtones is layered with tuned sines, often shudderingly wave-folded, that ebb and flow both in intensity and harmonic colour according to the duty cycles of eight interrelated LFOs. These recordings are collaged with Yorke's singing voice and a langorous, ascending sequence across two octaves on Jolly's clarinet, all arranged to form a cohesive whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Smatterings of untuned percussion and a fragment of a conversation between the duo left in the final mix cements Yorke's unprecious DIY aesthetic into the release.

At its heart, Salix is like watching the wind in the willows; hundreds of thousands of identical tiny leaves moving in confluence on its branches; at once one thing and many things; moment-to-moment our perception makes out different individuals parts within this expanse of texture, before sinking back into the whole.

Released in November 2023, "Piranha" is the electrifying collaboration album between Brooklyn's own CJ Fly, the lyri-cal virtuoso of Pro Era fame, and masterful producer Stoic. Dive deep into the sonic depths of this mesmerizing pro-ject as CJ Fly's razor-sharp lyricism cuts through the beats crafted by Stoic with surgical precision for a sonic feast that devours everything in its path.

With guest appearances including the likes of Mick Jenkins, Nyck Caution, Lord Apex, Blvck Svm and AMARAH, as well as young legend Lord Sko on one of the bonus tracks featured on this deluxe edition, each track on "Piranha" is a testament to the raw talent and creativity of its collaborators.

With Stoic's immersive production providing the perfect backdrop for CJ Fly's impassioned delivery, "Piranha" is an album that demands your attention from start to finish, a tidal wave sure to leave a lasting impression on hip-hop heads everywhere.

Longtime friend of the label Eraserhead returns after over a decade away from producing music due to his surreal MS Paint work as 'Jim'll Paint It' becoming an unexpected cultural phenomenon. With his debut full-length, 'Violence', Eraserhead presents a truly eclectic electronic LP featuring collaborations with established producers such as Om Unit, Enduser, and Brain Rays, as well as the vocal talents of Nadia Rose, Beans (of Antipop Consortium), and Cadence Weapon. An album held together by theme and tone rather than style or tempo, 'Violence' is the culmination of a bitter wave of inspiration, initially conceived in the wake of a personal tragedy that quickly grew into a broader polemic about the state of the world.

Originally linking up with Love Love in its breakcore netlabel infancy with his refined, breaks-heavy breakcore/gabba, Eraserhead's flair for tight, intricate productions was evident in his finely tuned tracks of controlled chaos. This time around, his work is a darker, more expansive evolution of his sound, with the scale upsized and the stylistic scope massively broadened, remaining unfaithful to any single genre, but with firm nods to Breakcore, Grime, Drum & Bass, Techno, Rave, Dubstep, and Footwork, all chewed up with a hard industrial edge and cinematically framed by a backdrop of apocalyptic synths.

Opening with the cold tech-noir of 'Shining Brainless Beacon' to set the tone, the album quickly locks in with the blistering spoken-word headrush of 'Hurricane With Teeth' alongside rapper Beans, before Om Unit lends his expertise on the sharp groove and clinical bass blasts of 'Operation Hardtack'. The album shifts and morphs constantly throughout the runtime, moving from the raw and urgent acid techno of 'Crowd Control' to the crunching military march of the Gore Tech collaboration 'No More Worlds' and the tribal sci-fi footwork of the Brain Rays collaboration 'Night Visions'. 'Monolith' provides a final burst of catharsis, channelling Underworld by way of Nine Inch Nails, complete with writhing screams from Amée Chanter of sludge-punk-noise-rock duo Human Leather, before the heart of the album is laid bare with the painfully bleak closing dirge of 'Animal'. In its final moments, 'Violence' leaves the listener suspended between devastation and awe - an unflinching portrait of an uncaring world.

"The multiple award-winning action-adventure game God of War was first released in 2005, but became such an instant hit, that Santa Monica Studio created seven more versions of the game. The most recent one, released in 2018 for the PlayStation 4, focusses on main character Kratos' journey in the Greek world together with his son Atreus, following a path of vengeance as a result of being tricked into killing his family by Olympian gods. God of War received universal acclaim for its story, design, graphics, combat system, characters, and music. It was awarded 'Game of the Year' by numerous media outlets and award shows. God of War (2018) performed well commercially, selling over five million copies within a month of its release. It became one of the best-selling PlayStation 4 games. The official soundtrack won a BAFTA Award and is composed by Bear McCreary. It is set up around themes he created around primary characters in the game. Inspired by Viking folk music, McCreary used exotic instrumentation and languages from various Northern European folk traditions. It resulted in a score featuring deep choirs, pounding drums, shrieking brass and features Faroese singer-songwriter Eivør (Pálsdóttir). The American composer Bear McCreary is best known for his work on TV shows like Battlestar Galactica, Outlander, The Walking Dead and won an Emmy Award for the main title of Da Vinci's Demons. God of War is available on black vinyl. This package contains a 4-page booklet with liner notes by Bear McCreary."

God Of War by Bear Mccreary, released 15 March 2024, includes the following tracks: "Witch of The Woods", "Ashes", "A Giant's Prayer", "Mimir" and more.

This version of God Of War comes as a 2xLP in a(n) Gatefold Sleeve packaging. This release comes with (a) Booklet.

DOODSESKADER clearly haven’t had enough of redefining boundaries – they’ve only just gotten started. Tim De Gieter and Sigfried Burroughs return on April 3rd, 2026 with their third full-length album, The Change Is Me, a rollercoaster that can only be described as the unstable lovechild between witch house, hip-hop, industrial dream pop, and stadium rock that can’t decide if it wants to watch the world burn or shout from the rooftops that we need to save it. Their combination of grungy 90s melodies with distorted synths, sludgy bass, hard tuned vocals, rapping, singing, and explosions of undiluted rage at the current state of the world leave you wondering just exactly what it was you smoked last night, and if it was too much or not enough. The Change Is Me is an album that grabs you by the arm and asks if you’re ready to go on a grand adventure, then pulls you into its chaos before you can say “yes” or “no.”

Tim and Sigfried aren’t just breaking the boundaries between genres; they’re breaking out of their own Year cycle, a path they had laid out for themselves at the band’s inception in 2020. Up until now, the duo had set out to document their “journey to getting better” through writing one album each year: Year Zero (2020), Year One (2022), and most recently Year Two (2024). After spending eight months throughout 2024 and 2025 writing, recording, producing and mixing Year Three, the band scrapped the finished record entirely. Playing shows while simultaneously navigating the process of mixing Year Three created a sort of disconnect – the people that they were when they wrote that record and the people that playing shows made them become were no longer one and the same. “We’re people with faults and strengths, and we realized we needed to accept it. That’s equal parts bleak and liberating. If you’re so focused on self-improvement, you can’t even applaud yourself for how far you’ve come,” the band explains. “This project is meant to be a document of us and of the human condition, not a self-improvement handbook designed to keep us all stuck on what may or may not have happened to us or because of us in the past.”

DOODSESKADER chose instead to embark anew on a week-long creative journey in Tim’s own Much Luv Studio with one goal in mind: to make an album that captures who they are right now. Finally writing everything together in the same room for the first time in years, the process of bringing "The Change Is Me" to life was captured by Diana Lungu in their latest documentary, "Now I Know You See Me", out December 2nd, 2025.

"The Change Is Me" marks the beginning of DOODSESKADER’s shift into a more positive era, both musically and conceptually. Over the course of the 40-minute record we hear the two friends unite in a fight against a world that grows more and more disappointing, a concept made crystal clear in tracks like “Celebrity Culture Simp Farm,” “It Keeps On Stinging,” and of course the album’s epic closer “Suffering In Technicolor.” While their previous albums saw them trying to outrun their pasts and arrive at a better version of themselves, here the search for some external or internal revelation that will “make them better” is no more. It’s been replaced by the realization that change isn’t something we force: it’s gradual, and more importantly, it’s something that’s already there – we just need to reach out and accept it.

The band’s live appearances over the last several years have been instrumental in shaping their ideology. On stage is where the duo find connection; not only with the audience, but also with each other. Their sold-out release shows at Ancienne Belgique (2022) and VierNulVier (2024) have proven that they are one of Belgium’s must-see acts. Abroad, their energy has translated into a month-long EU/UK tour with French band Alcest in 2024, as well as appearances at festivals such as Roadburn Festival (NL), Eurosonic (NL), Hellfest (FR), Mystic Fest (PL), Jera On Air (NL), ArcTanGent (UK), Fluff Fest (CZ) and more.

"The Change Is Me" is out April 3rd, 2026 on DOODSESKADER’s own label, 45 Records.

B*Witched is the self-titled debut studio album by Irish girl group B*Witched, consisting of twin sisters Edele and Keavy Lynch, Lindsay Armaou and Sinéad O’Carroll.

Originally active between 1997 and 2002, B*Witched enjoyed success in both Europe and North America. All four singles from the album performed exceptionally well, all peaking at #1 on the UK Singles Chart. They also had great success in Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. In addition, “C’est La Vie” booked its successes in the United States, peaking at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100.

B*Witched is available as a 25th anniversary edition of 1000 individually numbered copies on blue coloured vinyl and includes an insert with lyrics.

From the quiet desolation of earlier Iterum Nata now rises something heavier – more aggressive and defiant. With “Heartwood”, Finnish multi-instrumentalist Jesse Heikkinen (The Abbey, Henget, ex-Hexvessel) reshapes his progressive rock and neo-folk foundations through the crucible of metal, layering doom-laden riffs and blackened textures upon the project’s introspective core.

To give this vision its pulse, Heikkinen enlisted Ukrainian drummer Yurii Ciel (Stoned Jesus, Cailleach Calling, ex-White Ward), whose expressive performance transforms “Heartwood” into the most visceral Iterum Nata release to date. Together they carve a sound both expansive and immediate: progressive journeys steeped in folk atmosphere, driven by the weight and force of metal.

The record also features rare guest appearances: King Dude lends his commanding voice to “Forgiveness Undone”, Alexander Kuoppala (ex-Children of Bodom) unleashes a searing solo in “I Have Been Sacrificed”, and Sami Hynninen (Reverend Bizarre) delivers an unearthly vocal in “Only Ash and Bones Remain”.

“Heartwood” is an album hewn from fury yet tempered by revelation. Where past Iterum Nata releases drew from solitude and sorrow, here the wellspring is anger – but anger that points beyond itself, toward beauty, hope, and transcendence. It is a meditation on the spiritual war within the collective unconscious, channelled through music that flows between Anathema and My Dying Bride, Opeth and In the Woods…, Pink Floyd and Green Carnation.

Some tracks are just too good to only feature on a compilation, even if it is a significant and celebratory set like Leng’s 15 Year anniversary album from late last year. That’s certainly the case with Payfone’s brilliantly atmospheric ‘Dime Algo’, a seductive slab of slow-motion Balearic disco featuring ‘I Feel You’ vocalist Kyd Nereida, along with Sofi Hardoy and Ludmila Rodriguez.

For this single release Black Science Orchestra, one of Britain’s most storied production collectives, deliver some truly exceptional remixes. Initially making their name with a series of sensational house jams on Junior Boy’s Own across the 1990s, BSO became renowned for the quality of their remixes as well as an ever-evolving trademark sound that put soul, organic instrumentation and references to dance music’s rich and varied past front and centre.

Comprised of Rob Mello, Ashley Beedle and Darren Morris, Black Science Orchestra work has been rare in recent years but here they deliver some magical takes on ‘Dime Algo’, blending Payfone’s original instrumentation with their own low-tempo magic. The Vocal Mix begins with sparse drums, Kraftwerkian bleeps and heavy sub-bass, building the action in waves with 303 lines, electro synths, warm chords and Nereida’s superb lead vocals combining to re-frame ‘Dime Algo’ as a deep, far-sighted slice of chugging 21st century acid-disco. The Dub Mix stretches things out with effects-laden instrumentation, acid lines and vocal snippets. Deeper and woozier, with more prominent use of the trio’s 303 trickery and Payfone’s superb original elements, it’s a heady, intoxicating and loved-up interpretation that subtly gains intensity throughout its seven-minute duration.

The London based singer and keyboard player Dominic Appleton, known since the early eighties for his musical activity in the post punk/dream pop band Breathless, and perhaps even more for his vocal contributions to the legendary This Mortal Coil project on 4AD, joins forces with the Milanese producer and sound artist Matteo Uggeri, active from 1993 behind several projects spanning from industrial to post-rock and ambient soundscapes, known for collaborating with artists such as Maurizio Bianchi, Nocturnal Emissions, Controlled Bleeding, De Fabriek, OvO, Giuseppe Ielasi, Lau Nau, Giulio Aldinucci and many more.

Starlight Assembly’s first album, “Starlight and Still Air”, was released in 2021 by the American label Beacon Sound. In Italy the album received amazing reviews in all four of the main music monthlies. It was album of the month in Blow Up and Rockerilla ran a four page interview. Several articles and reviews were made, including a special issue on Foxy Digitalis by Brad Rose.

A remix project was launched afterwards, including old and new friends and fans of the two S.A. members: among the others, Robin Rimbaud/Scanner, Auscultation, Gabriel Saloman (Yellow Swans), Patricia Wolf, Insides, Julia Sabra with Fadi Tabbal, Sawako and Pan American.

The new album, “There Will Be Fireworks”, continues the duo’s complex cross-genres approach to music by melding Uggeri’s intricate musical textures with Appleton’s sweet and melancholic melodies, in this case even supported by the haunting guitars of Gary Mundy (in Breathless as well but also in Ramleh and Broken Flag’s label manager). The tracks on this album are more songlike, the journey more cohesive, with the artists playing more to one another’s strengths. The mastering will be done by Martin Bowes/Attrition, making it even more powerful and clean for its publication on Silentes (ex-Amplexus), historic italian label well known for releases by Rod Modell, Gigi Masin, Dirk Serries, Eraldo Bernocchi, Merzbow, Fabio Orsi and the latest releases by AUBE and much more.

1) WAIT FOR THE WORLD
2) TIME
3) THIS DESERT
4) ALL THE LOVE THE STANDS BESIDE US
5) MOTH TO THE FLAME
6) FRICTION
7) SYMPHONY IN MELANCHOLY
8) THE NOT DEAD
9) RELIEF
+
10) THERE WILL BE FIREWORKS (ghost track)

Far Out Recordings proudly presents Ladeiras De Santa Teresa, the debut collaboration between Rio-jazz maverick Antonio Neves and carioca percussion master Thiaguinho Silva. In what could well be the first ever Brazilian jazz album centered around two drummers, Ladeiras De Santa Teresa is an uncompromisingly groove-rich recording, steeped in trad-samba roots and brass power.

Since his acclaimed 2021 album A Pegada Agora E Esssa Antonio Neves has remained a mainstay of the international facing Brazilian scene, performing both as a trombonist and drummer. His instrumental contributions to contemporary classics like Ana Frango Eletrico’s Little Electric Chicken Heart, Bruno Berle’s No Reino Dos Afetos 2, and Bala Desejo’s Sim Sim Sim will be marveled upon by future generations. His partner in crime Thiaguinho Silva happens to be the son of percussion icon Robertinho Silva, who has played on more or less every canonical Brazilian record, Arthur Verocai (1972), Clube Da Esquina (Milton Nascimento and Lo Borges, 1972), and India (Gal Costa, 1973) to name barely a few. Thiaguinho himself has worked with Marcelo D2, Gal Costa, Liniker and Alice Caymmi, and upon listening to Ladeiras De Santa Teresa, it’s clear that Thiaguinho is more than a worthy successor to carry the Silva family torch.

Some listeners may already be familiar with “Das Neves,” which appeared on Mr Bongo’s Rio De Janeiro-focused Hidden Waters compilation in 2023. The track showcases the profoundly skilled Neves brothers brass section (Antonio alongside brother Edu, who has performed with Hermeto Pascoal), the fiery elegance of pianist Luiz Otávio (Dora Morelenbaum), and Thiaguinho’s pulsating samba breaks. This synergised combo continues across the album, notably on “Fendas Vocais” with Neves doubling up on drums, exhibiting his inventive and fearless skill as an arranger. The album also features street-artist, musician and rapper Joca, adding vocalised dynamism and swagger to an otherwise entirely instrumental record on “Viagem de Trem”.

The album’s title Ladeiras De Santa Teresa (The hills of Santa Teresa) is named in tribute to Rio De Janeiro’s famed Santa Teresa neighborhood, a bohemian enclave with scenic views of the iconic cityscape. The spirit of Santa Teresa with its expansive city views and bustling energy is embodied in the album which encapsulates the jazz and samba histories felt within the neighborhood’s windy alleyways and cobbled streets.

Ladeiras De Santa Teresa by Neves E Silva is out on vinyl, CD and digital on Friday 20th March 2026.

While many have tried to emulate the ancient German (black)thrash sound, CRUEL FORCE brimmed with an authenticity that could not be denied, as well as songwriting that added to that noble tradition rather than lazily picking at its corpse. Their two successive albums, 2010's The Rise of Satanic Might and 2011's Under the Sign of the Moon, made CRUEL FORCE a certifiably CULT name in the international metal underground. Sadly, the band fell into a hiatus following that second album, but returned reinvigorated with the comeback 7" EP Across the Styx in 2022 and, a year later, the glorious full- length Dawn of the Axe at the hands of new label home SHADOW KINGDOM. Continuing to make up for lost time, CRUEL FORCE storm back with swords gleaming high on their fourth full- length, Haneda.

Where a line could be drawn between the band's "first era" of The Rise of Satanic Might / Under the Sign of the Moon, so continues this Second Era that began with Dawn of the Axe - one that harkens to the "Jurassic period" of heavy metal, when everything was rawer, less polished, and more energetic and powerful. As displayed by that pivotal predecessor, Haneda further proves that CRUEL FORCE are more so an old-style speed metal band, largely bereft of that blackened edge during their First Era. The tradeoff is that there's a prominent mysticism coursing through that speed, and the blue-collared aspect of Dawn of the Axe is now spit-shined to a lethal slickness that makes Haneda hit that much harder.

However, it must be stressed that, while it follows logically from Dawn of the Axe, Haneda is very much its own headspace, its own continuation of a still-vital aesthetic. At times more epic, exuding both more and different atmospheres, CRUEL FORCE here take the listener on a journey from old temples to desert planes, from deep jungles to mountain tops, and other mysterious locales beyond; indeed, the whole record is like a journey through mystical realms. Although no concept album, Haneda is very conceptual in its aesthetics, even down to its production: BIG and naturaltoned, from the guitars to especially the drums, everything here is as '80s and authentic as possible, underlining

April Records proudly presents the new album from Stockholm Stockholm-based bassist and composer Jon Henriksson - a confident and flexible statement that deepens his place within contemporary Scandinavian jazz. Following the success of his 2023 debut Harmonia which placed second in Orkesterjournalen s Golden Album " readers " poll, Henriksson returns with music that foregrounds collective interplay, shifting forms, and a strong compositional voice. Born in Gothenburg and now active across Sweden and Europe, Henriksson has collaborated and toured with artists including Lars Jansson, Hakan Broström, Erik Söderlind, Klas Lindquist, Jonas Kullhammar and Christina von Bülow. Alongside leading his own ensembles, he remains a soughtsought-after bassist in a wide range of projects, balancing a deep connection to the jazz tradition with a modern, exploratory approach. Shapeshifter is built around a core quartet of tenor saxophone, piano, double bass and drums, expanded with guitar on three tracks and trombone on two. The album moves fluidly between contrasting moods, from forceful and driving to reflective and restrained, with each piece shaped by the musicians " intuition and responsiveness. The title reflects Henriksson s compositional philosophy: allowing roles, textures, and forms to evolve as the music unfolds.The ensemble brings together long long-standing musical relationships. Pianist Rasmus Sorensen and Henriksson have collaborated since their studies at Skurups Folkhögskola (Henriksson is a longstanding member of Sorensen s own trio), while drummer Jonas Bäckman forms part of a well well-established rhythm section partnership with the bassist across numerous projects including the Britta Virves Trio. Saxophonist Karl Karl-Martin Almqvist, a member of the Danish Radio Big Band, completes the quartet, with guitarist Pelle von Bülow and trombonist Rasmus Holm joining the session shortly before recording to expand the album s sonic palette where the music called for it. Originally conceived as a quartet album, Shapeshifter took its final shape in the lead lead-up to recording as additional instrumental colours were introduced organically. The piece Toninho , a tribute to Brazilian guitarist and composer Toninho Horta, features acoustic guitar and subtle wordless vocals, reflecting melodic influences that sit naturally within the album s contemporary jazz framework. Across the record, space, pacing, and interaction remain central. Rather than forcing constant motion, the music allows ideas to develop with clarity and intent, resulting in an album that highlights Henriksson s growing assurance as a composer and bandleader, while keeping the collective at its core.