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"Astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars" Pitchfork

"Mood music for moments of solitude, best experienced without distraction" The Times

"Overwhelmingly effective and ravishingly beautiful" The Wire

American Dust is an ode to the beauty of the American Southwest, where vast desert landscapes hold stories both stark and tender. Eve Adams’ characteristic folk noir weaves a vivid tapestry of love, sacrifice and quiet revelation, conjuring images of dust storms, stray dogs and far off trains.

The high desert of California is a vast and confounding place. Equally inspiring as it is punishing, it’s a landscape that carries magic in its deep dark nights, holding stories both tender and stark in the coarse layer of dust that settles upon everything. It’s long been a source of inspiration for musicians, writers, and painters, each of them adding to the same current, carried forward over time, through hope and hardship and the passing years.

Somewhere out there in that broad and boundless landscape, Eve Adams has been living her own desert life, quietly writing the follow-up to 2021’s Metal Bird LP. Where that album sang of liminal space, the dream-like turbulence of Hollywood’s golden age, American Dust is far more rooted in traditional storytelling; a eulogy for the American Dream channeled through that sweeping part of the country that holds such power and mystery. Slipping into different and varied costumes throughout its ten songs, it finds Eve not just observing the people around her but stepping into their shoes and peeling back the layers of their quiet lives.

Adams writes from within. A few years ago she moved out there, to “the middle of nowhere”, finding a slowness that didn’t exist in the city, and she knows only too well about the mystical nature of the land and those who live within it. Weaving together themes of grit and romance, American Dust holds its focus on the bittersweet poetry of lives lived in solitude, most notably the women who sustain life at the center of it all. “There’s something very radical about domestic life,” Adams says of this thread. “So many women live their entire lives behind closed doors, completely in the shadows. Within those lives is such sacrifice, devotion, and love. I wanted to honor that: the poetry in the mundane, the longing in the repetition. The way love survives boredom and dust and time.”

Eve is joined on American Dust by Canadian musician Bryce Cloghesy, aka Military Genius of Crack Cloud, who plays throughout and also helped produce the album. Musically bold and vivid, it’s an ambitious and detailed stride forward from what’s come before, the scope of the LP’s narrative reflected in the radiant sweep of the playing. On top of gentle piano and guitar, gorgeous strings drift through the album, lending the songs a woozy sense of romanticism; a collaboration with Gamaliel Traynor (Cello) and Caroline’s Oliver Hamilton (Violin).

For all the drama that’s coiled around these songs, it’s the recurring notion of love and hope fighting against everything that holds true throughout American Dust. Musically it’s lush and vibrant, intimate and cinematic side by side, and always bursting with warmth. But it’s what it holds in its weary bones that elevates it to something truly special, something more than just a collection of songs penned in the heart of the desert. The characters it speaks of, and from, feel shadowed but wholly real, like they’re bursting to share their stories that have remained hidden for years and years and they allow Eve Adams to grow as a songwriter right in front of our eyes.

“The same swirling dust that clung to the covered wagons of my ancestors as they crossed the Great American Desert is the same dust my great-great-grandmother swept off her porch during the Dust Bowl of 1936 in Oklahoma, is the same dust that blows in through the cracks in my windows here in the desert, carrying stories from a time long gone,” Eve says, reflecting on the personal narrative that runs through her new album.

“It’s not just dust—it’s American Dust, the kind that settles into the bones of a family and never leaves. I think about that dust as a symbol of the passage of time. I hope this album will be part of that same current, carrying forward for the next generations of my family to find. I’ve been lucky enough to have journals and poetry from my ancestors that documents their lives during times of pure hope and pure hardship. I’d like to think of this album as a contribution to that family history.”

Originally conceived as a compilation of outtakes and live recordings from The Shadow Ring's 1995 stateside tour, Wax-Work Echoes takes its name from the first line of "Put the Music in Its Coffin," the title track of the group's breakthrough release. Lambkin abandons the bitsand- bobs approach, advancing the Shadow Ring concept with entirely original material that builds on the unit's self-mythologizing lyrics, celebrates the clicking of horse hooves, ponders on the sociability of rats and mice, and warns of the dangers of poultry. The first Shadow Ring album to officially include Tim Goss in the main lineup, Wax- Work Echoes reveals the group in its final and lasting form, awash in the outer bounds of atmospheric exploration, with Lambkin's familiar wry and morbid lyricism and the stripped-down angularity of amateurishly detuned guitars fully intact. While Klaus Canterbury and Tony Clark seem all but forgotten, and the shrugged off S. Fritz is listed on the liner notes as performing only "when required," Lambkin did solicit contributions from outside the inner circle. A bit of "Mambo Twist," lifted from a tape of unreleased Vitamin B12 material sent to Lambkin by Alasdair Willis, found its way into "V.E.R.M.I.N.," while an extended epistle contribution from Richard Youngs (and, technically, Brian Lavelle) would be employed in the second half of "Catching Sight/Of Passing Things." Released on CD in 1996 for Bruce Russell's newly minted Corpus Hermeticum, Wax-Work Echoes was recorded concurrently with intense rehearsal periods, in anticipation of the forthcoming "Rose Watson Tour," and was supported by a celebratory fanzine media blitz. The album seemingly absorbs the frenetic excess of the band's transatlantic travels; Wax-Work Echoes channels the trio's wilder instincts into an unresolved catharsis, not yet free of frustration or restlessness. Out of print for almost three decades and available here for the first time ever on long-playing disc, Wax-Work Echoes is a classic from the outer eddies of The Shadow Ring's sound, a must-have for any aficionado's collection: "A window slides, glass slips from frame / And canvas carcass breathes again." Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, the Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre-Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.

Still Forms in Air is the debut album by Italian composer Francesca Marongiu under her own name. It draws inspiration from mid-1980s Japanese ambient music — Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Takashi Kokubo — and, more subtly, from Italian experimental echoes rooted in both personal and cultural memory.

The album unfolds like suspended time, like architecture that quietly bears witness to the shifts that have shaped our cities and the ways we live in them. These tracks reflect an emotional and urban landscape, shaped by a gaze cast upon the mid-1980s and early ’90s — a time of subtle yet lasting changes in the form and meaning of shared space. That period marked a delicate turning point, later described as les années d’hiver: the slow onset of fragmentation beneath a surface of creative openness.

Still Forms in Air doesn’t dwell in nostalgia (though it draws from it), but reimagines that duality through a contemporary lens. Its sound blends memory and presence, layering ambient textures with a refined spatial sensitivity. It is a dialogue across decades — clear-eyed, affectionate, and quietly luminous.

Written, arranged and recorded by Francesca Marongiu in Rome and Pistoia between May 2024 and March 2025.
Francesca Marongiu: electronics, synthesizers, vocals, sound objects.
Antonio Gallucci: wind arrangements on track 1 and 4, bass and sound objects on track 3, drums on track 3 and 4.
Mixed by Francesca Marongiu and Antonio Gallucci. Mastered by Antonio Gallucci at Mercurial Mastering in Pistoia. Artist photo by Elisabetta Scarpini. Artwork by Daniel Castrejón.

Mutant is thrilled to partner with our friends at Neon and Filmtrax to release Edo Van Breemen’s score to Osgood Perkin’s latest horror hit The Monkey.

Based on the Stephen King short story produced by James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw), The Monkey is a new trip by Longlegs writer/director Osgood Perkins. When twin brothers find a mysterious wind-up monkey, a series of outrageous deaths tear their family apart. Twenty-five years later, the monkey begins a new killing spree, forcing the estranged brothers to confront the cursed toy.

The score is as playful as the movie itself, whimsical when it needs to be, but also managing to be terrifying and tense. We have pressed two versions of the score, one is a limited edition Lenticular edition strictly limited to 1000 copies pressed on multicolour Monkey splatter vinyl, and the other is an eco vinyl edition featuring a static sleeve. Both versions are housed in a printed outer O-Card. Composer Edo Van Breemen told us that when they were recording the score, "Mr. King’s Monkey haunted our process for the entire duration of post-production on this film while Mr. Perkins possessed us to mutilate sounds and arrangements in a manner beyond our control. We hope you enjoy this record, and if not... shit, man, that sucks.”

The Vestige is the first fruit of a new intergenerational collaboration between Giuseppe Ielasi, a quietly prolific key contributor to the European experimental music scene for over twenty years, and Jack Sheen, a young composer-conductor-sound artist from Manchester whose recent projects have seen him moving seamlessly from enigmatic chamber music composition and installations to conducting the London Symphony Orchestra. Their materials and working methods differ significantly, with Ielasi having focussed for many years on electro-acoustic techniques alongside his ongoing commitment to the guitar, and Sheen primarily composing for traditional instruments. More important, though, is what they share: a fascination with what Sheen calls “mysterious, liminal musical material,” using irregular repetition and cyclical forms to create structures at once alive with activity and almost static, as well as a rigorous exploration of spatial diffusion and the interaction of sound event and environment. Working individually with a library of acoustic instrument sounds from Sheen’s recent projects and Ielasi’s guitar, the pair eventually met for several days at Ielasi’s home studio in Monza, sculpting the fourteen pieces that make up The Vestige. Like Ielasi and Sheen’s solo works, the record shows an exquisite attention to details of sequencing and pacing, the sound palette and compositional approach consistent throughout while each piece asserts its own identity. The twenty-five seconds of the opening piece serve as an entrée into the record’s distinctive world of sound: repeated chirps fluctuate in volume as they move across the stereo spectrum, woven between strangled snatches of string glissando against a backdrop of percussive ticks, long tones, and white noise. Across the remaining thirteen pieces, Ielasi and Sheen sketch further dimensions of the ambiguous space, where distinctions between pitch and noise, repetition and irregularity, electronic and acoustic remain pointedly unclear. As the record’s title suggests, the origins of the sounds we hear have become remote: while at moments we get flashes of timbres and attacks that could come from wind instruments, bowed strings, or prepared guitar, these remain vestigial traces, glimpsed through a veil of shifting white noise textures. These textures are themselves difficult to trace, suggesting artefacts of the recording process, electronic synthesis, amplified room sound, rubbed instruments or objects. The Vestige shows an unusual degree of attention to frequency range as a compositional tool, something it shares with the hyper-subtle variations of Ielasi’s electroacoustic works and the deliberately ‘unbalanced’ midrange-heavy ensemble of Sheen’s Sub. Here, movement between episodes is as much about adding or removing a frequency band as it is about changes in density, harmonic content, or instrumental texture. Tracks are marked by the sudden appearance of subbass or exaggeration of high frequencies in otherwise similar material, contributing to our sense that these fourteen pieces are like different views on a scene that we can never quite see clearly. While calling up a range of past music, from the early works of Rolf Julius to Simha Arom’s recordings of layered polyrhythms embedded in the background sounds of central African villages to the temporal distortions and layered hiss of DJ Screw, the alluring and disconcerting world of The Vestige is entirely its own.

‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ is the latest collection selected by Mikey Young (Total Control, EddyCurrent Suppression Ring) and Keith Abrahamsson (Founder and Head of A&R at AnthologyRecordings), the mangled minds behind the beloved ‘Follow the Sun’, ‘Sad About the Times’,and ‘…Still Sad’ compilations. The twenty tracks of ‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ make a conscious(and unconscious) detour from its predecessors, sourced entirely from private press releases,spanning new decades and production modes within homespun folk, soft rock and otherwise70s and 80s FM radio adjacent music.  The magic of ‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ is the untold story of the artists behind these songs; thosewho missed the big time, but whose song craft and unrequited care hit the right notes, bothhigh and low.
Where ‘Follow the Sun’ and ‘Sad About the Times’ introduced us to the fame chasing, ambitioncrashing crooners who missed their shot in the mainstream, ‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ delvesdeeper into the isolated wilds - a private world where production quirks, late-night tape hiss andone-man studio dreams were not necessarily a choice but the hand that was dealt.
With the parameters set to ‘private press only’, Young and Abrahamsson follow a circuitous trailof invention and emotion, documenting a spirit that’s more homespun, sometimes lonelier andoften a little weirder. The guitars still strum, but the keyboards’ hum is more prevalent andprecious; wistful harmonies brush up against lo-fi drum machines; a bittersweet fog lingeringover even the brightest melodies.
As with their previous collaborations, Young and Abrahamsson weren’t interested inconstructing a museum or drafting a historical survey. ‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ is a sentimentalmixtape, assembled late at night when the mind wanders and old memories blur with imaginedfutures, those within reach and those far too mysterious to ever encounter. Songs wereunearthed in personal collections, deep YouTube burrows, dilapidated web archives and thedim corners of Discogs, with many selections tied not only to intuition but to personalconnection.  Some tracks arrived via friends - Kelley Stoltz, a frequent guide for Young, tipped him off toboth Peter Kraemer’s lost gem ‘Let the Light Slip’ and Awakening’s revelatory closer - addingan unseen but deeply felt thread of camaraderie to the compilation.
The journey takes in a wide, strange sweep: The Watson Brothers Band’s ‘Just Whistle’ opensthe collection with a sigh and a shrug, a song that feels like it’s been waiting for decades to beheard again. Jim Huxley’s ‘Tessa on a Magazine’, rediscovered after a long and winding searchby Young, shimmers with a distinctly Australian melancholia. The heartbreak of Rick Penta’s‘My Story Changes’ and Twice As Nice’s delicate ‘Thoughts of You’ float easily alongside themore buoyant, radio-dream sheen of Barracuda’s ‘Baby I Love You’ and MAK’s sunshinedappled ‘That’s Life’.
Widening the aperture to the late 1970s and early 1980s allows for a deeper exploration intoevolving production techniques and musical technologies. The Squad’s ‘D.L.M.H.I.M.A.’ andChristoph Spendel Group’s ‘Forever’ crackle with the kind of bedroom synth warmth that couldonly come from the analogue age, while the soulful, yearning undercurrent of Awakening’s‘Gotta Do Somethin / Might As Well Cultivate’ caps the collection with a call for action - ormaybe just acceptance - in an accidental Brian Eno ‘Here Come the Warm Jets’ parroting.
While ‘Maybe I’m Dreaming’ moves away from the ‘sad man with guitar’ archetype that hoveredover its predecessors, it remains tethered to a familiar emotional gravity - a balance of longingand lightness that defines this corner of the musical universe. Each track shuffles gentlybetween resignation and hope, sadness and serenity, as if the artists themselves were chasinga dream just beyond reach, recording not for fame but for the simple act of getting it, thatprimal, creative itch, out into the world.
Available on CD and 2LP, featuring the third eye-opening artwork of Dang Wayne Olsen. Thedouble LP set arrives in an outrageous double-wide spine jacket with printed inners and adream journal entry by Pacific Northwest artifactual authority Josh Lewellen.

The follow up the successful ‘Gary Crowley’s Lost 80s’ released in 2019
“I count myself incredibly lucky when I think back to my 1980’s. A lot of those bands and artists that
resonated with me during that time are featured on this, our sequel to our first Lost 80s collection, which we
have inspiringly titled “GC Lost 80s Two”!
I must be honest and say as soon as I delivered the track listing for the first compilation, I already had a
selection in mind for a sequel (if ever I was asked by those cool folks at Demon). Thankfully, they asked...and
this is it.” Gary Crowley
21 tracks compiled and themed by Gary Crowley side-by-side. Many of these tracks are rare and hard to find,
the better-known artists appearing represented by some of their lesser-known (‘lost’) tracks.
Presented on 2 x 180g Clear Heavyweight vinyl, includes an introduction and track-by-track notes by Gary
Crowley, plus memories of the era from Mick Talbot (The Style Council) and more.
“Expect a selection of not only the bigger names with some of their ‘lost’ gems, but also a raft of lesserknown artists. Many of the latter came nowhere near the mainstream but most certainly (IMHO) deserve
another chance to shine under the spotlight. It was such a diverse and eclectic time for music, hopefully this
box set mirrors that.” Gary Crowley


b a2. Working Week – Venceremos (We Will Win) 7” version





h b2. Working Week – Venceremos (We Will Win) 7” version









r c6. World’s Famous Supreme Team – Hey! DJ 7” version
[s] d1. General Public - Tenderness [Special Dance Mix]
[t] d2. Colourbox featuring Lorita Grahame– Baby I Love You So [12” Version]
[12” Remix]

2025 Repress

Laurie Torres is a Canadian musician and composer raised in Montréal, Québec by Haitian parents. Since 2008, she has been a trusted stage and studio performer for Julia Jacklin, Pomme, and Land of Talk, as well as being a founding member of Folly & The Hunter, with whom she recorded four studio albums and toured Canada, Europe and the UK.

In 2023, Laurie shifted focus to work on her own creations, a process of making time - the will and the need becoming omnipresent. Drawing creative inspiration from contemporary artists like Tirzah, Gia Margaret, Valentina Magaletti, Tara Clerkin Trio and ML Buch, 'Après coup' finds Torres intersecting at a pivotal moment where artists whose marginalized identities are at the forefront in creating a beautiful array of "other options".

"Being othered and tokenized as a woman who plays music, as well as a queer and black person, takes a toll, while also positively feeding a strong urge to push and be seen."

Centering around piano, drums and synthesizer with interweaving field recordings, 'Après coup' follows the precursor ep 'Correspondances' in the form of a sprawling 11-track album. Translating directly from French - afterwards, after the event - its title subliminally points at something deeper between the lines. Recorded in 2023 between tours in a small window of time where 'normal' life hadn't quite recommenced, Torres meticulously crafted her debut solo material in view of surrounding nature, all providing the perfect nourishment for long streams of improvisation. Built right up to the edge of a lake, Studio Wild in St-Zénon, Québec offered an unparalleled location and set up for her freeform creativity.

Instrumental music seemed like a natural response and evolution for Torres who had long basked in the world of "pop music" as she elaborates: "I had an urge to use creativity as a sort of resting place, a place where things can unfold slowly and take time to reveal themselves. In other worlds words, I felt the need to make something slower, more elusive"

The immediacy of Torres' recorded takes doubled with minimal overdubs create a fiercely direct, intimate and unpolished lo-fi beauty. 'Après coup' then is self-reflective, open and inclusive with Torres allowing herself to be fully seen. An album to be felt at close distance with unrivalled authenticity. This album stands as a testament to Laurie's artistic evolution and serves as a beacon, inspiring her to continue nurturing her own creative pursuits and finding exhilarating freedom.

Enjoy The Ride Records in conjunction with Universal Music Group proudly presents Afroman - The Good Times.

The Good Times was released in the summer of 2001; the album climbed the Billboard charts and was certified gold within a month of its release.

The Good Times includes the Certified Platinum singles "Because I Got High" and "Crazy Rap (Colt 45 & 2 Zig Zags)," along with 9 other tracks that will take you back to that early aughts summer, blasting the radio with the windows down (or with the windows rolled up while you baked out your car - we don't judge).

The Good Times is a limited edition 2xLP pressed on colorful vinyl. The packaging features new center label art on the B(lunt) Side, as well as a screen-printed D(ank) Side. Housed in a wide-spine jacket with a 12" x 24" single-sided full-color insert.

Vines, the solo project of New York-based multi-instrumentalist and composer Cassie Wieland, offers a window into her inner world through expansive swaths of sound. She pieces together a celestial mix of synths, percussion, strings, and vocoded voice, making music that is at once deeply personal and cinematic in scope. This diaristic approach first took shape with her 2023 EP Birthday Party, and is crystallized on her debut LP, I’ll be here. With the sweeping and vulnerable I’ll be here, Vines arrives fully formed as an artist who crafts deeply resonant and open music–the kind that invites listeners in to listen, reflect, and share in the journey of learning through living.

“It was through making music that I was able to meet myself,” Wieland said. “Anything I’m going through or feeling is something that somebody else out there can relate to, and that’s really special to me.”

I’ll be here is both a culmination of years spent creating gossamer soundscapes and an opening to a new journey for Wieland as an artist. The album grew out of her years as a composer and songwriter, and builds on the language she developed on Birthday Party, which transformed the tumultuous feelings of the passing of time into minimalist meditations. It was just a start, though–a prologue, a development of the kind of language and ideas she wanted to express. With I’ll be here, she digs deeper and writes music that feels more sprawling, further solidifying her singular voice.

Wieland’s musical composition process is similar to journaling, lending itself to the music’s honesty. When she writes, she makes room for all the ideas she has; in these sessions, there are no wrong ideas, and she allows the music to be attuned to the experiences she’s having at the time. With I’ll be here, Wieland zeroes in on themes of anxiety, loneliness, navigating human connection, and having to grow up from a young age, ultimately coming to a place of acceptance. And though it began as a journal written in solitude, her collaborators shape the music with her.

Working with friends, in fact, was a crucial part of bringing the record to life. “Everything that was supposed to happen came together so easily because of the people involved,” Wieland said. I’ll be here was co-produced and recorded with Wieland’s longtime collaborator Mike Tierney, a four time Grammy-nominated engineer who has worked with artists across the contemporary classical and experimental scene like minimalist pioneer Steve Reich, LA’s preeminent classical ensemble Wild Up, and various bands on Bang on a Can’s Cantaloupe Music label. Percussionist and composer Adam Holmes and violinist Adrianne Munden-Dixon are two other longtime collaborators who are frequent fixtures of her live show. Holmes plays synths, drums, and banjo; in live settings, his kit is loaded with elements of the songs that are then triggered by MIDI, making the music an interactive, evolving experience. The album’s gentle, filamented edges are colored by Munden-Dixon, whose poignant string melodies elevate Wieland’s introspective compositions, as well as cellist Helen Newby, saxophonists Julian Velasco and Jordan Lulloff, and bassist Pat Swoboda.

Wieland takes an economic approach to writing music, building the swirling and immersive landscapes of Vines through short melodies, lyrics, and phrases. As each element layers and interweaves, they grow into sprawling webs of ghostly sound. Prior to Vines, Wieland composed pieces for other people to play using a minimalist’s sensibility, writing slowly unfolding melodies for instruments like violin and saxophone. In recent years, she sharpened her solo style across a variety of singles and covers which have garnered significant attention on social media for their emotional resonance (“being loved isn't the same as being understood” in particular went massively viral on TikTok in 2024). Birthday Party, her debut as Vines, brought her writing to a much more intimate space, centering on her vocoded voice cloaked in feathery reverb. A series of recent singles, meanwhile, including “I am my home,” showcase the way that Wieland’s music is born from the story of her innermost feelings, extending far beyond just the self.

Though Wieland’s music often deals with dark themes, it unfolds with tender melancholy, the kind that feels like a warm embrace. On “Evicted,” Wieland wonders if she’s getting sick or moving on, if she’s lost or found. Her vocals expand with each lyrical repetition, as the instrumentals slowly encircle and the music’s rhythm grows and bursts into a heart-wrenching, yet radiant wave reminiscent of post-rock bands like Explosions in the Sky. “Tired” follows a similar trajectory, building from a looping, melancholy rhythm and floating lyrics into a solemn resignation. Elsewhere, Wieland takes a more ruminative approach: “Omw” begins with twinkling piano and melancholy strings that gradually transform into an undulating mass. It is a song born out of the warm feeling of reminiscence, the slight return of hope that comes with nostalgia.

With any searching journey, there is also a point of understanding. The title track closes the album with the freedom of acceptance. A marching drum beats steadily beneath Wieland’s open vocals, moving forward, ever onward as it flies into the ether. In Wieland’s delicately textured music, there is room to come into yourself, and learn to love whomever that is. I’ll be here is a special space that can be all your own, one in which to feel what needs to be felt. “This is music for your story,” Wieland said. “I want you to use it how you need it.”

Known for his ability to create captivating, emotionally charged techno, Jonathan Kaspar eventually returns to Cocoon Recordings with his third contribution Twofold Split. One, yet simultaneously two releases that once again showcase his extraordinary talent through condensed techno with a pinch of trance, weaving together driving rhythms and atmospheric textures in a way that feels innovatively progressive.

Rooted in a minimalist rhythmic structure, ‘Power’ takes us in a new direction, steadily building momentum as its energy billows upwards, with the intensity never wavering throughout. A large, dented, tinny tuba sounds imposingly as Jonathan blows louder and louder into the old thing, its raw, metallic tone instantly commanding attention. What an explosion in the break, leading us into a wild, almost chaotic energy, before Kaspar’s meticulous attention to detail ensures that the shimmering synths feel perfectly placed, guiding us to the absolute freak-out moment. After all the insanity, Jonathan Kaspar takes us by the hand and leads us into a melodic, trancy after-hours mood with “1993,” bringing a sense of release after the wild ride of the previous tracks. What a successful closing track to this outstanding release. With its melodic trance influences, it offers a soothing, almost nostalgic atmosphere, bringing a sense of calm and closure, a perfect moment of introspection and euphoria as
the EP winds down

Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP Set Plays with Authoritative Tonality, Airiness, and Clarity:
Pressed on MoFi SuperVinyl and Strictly Limited to
3,000 Numbered Copies
1/4” / 15 IPS Dolby A analogue master to DSD 256 to analogue console to lathe

Joni Mitchell is the only artist who could’ve made Hejira. The legendary singer-songwriter said as much when discussing the album decades after its release. Yet that fact seemed obvious from the moment the gold-certified effort streeted in fall 1976. An adventurous travelogue, probing narrative, and offbeat homage to freedom, Hejira remains an inimitable entry in the catalog of recorded music — a spare, gorgeous, meditative series of sonic vignettes comprised of floating harmonic pop, cool jazz, soft rock, and sensitive vocal elements that beckon feelings of motion, discovery, and self-examination.

Sourced from the original analog master tapes, pressed at Fidelity Record Pressing on MoFi SuperVinyl, and strictly limited to 3,000 numbered copies, Mobile Fidelity's UltraDisc One-Step 180g 45RPM 2LP set presents the record ranked the 133rd Greatest of All Time by Rolling Stone with definitive detail, richness, accuracy, and directness. Marking the first time the revered LP has received audiophile treatment, it's one of six iconic 1970s Mitchell records Mobile Fidelity is reissuing on vinyl and SACD.

Playing with a virtually nonexistent noise floor, dead-quiet surfaces, and superior groove definition, this collectible reissue reproduces in enveloping fashion the tones, textures, and craftsmanship that help Hejira function as the equivalent of a liberating trip down an open road with nothing but blue sky, natural landscape, and fresh air in the immediate vicinity. Passages bloom, carry, decay as they do amid an acoustically optimized environment. Soundstages extend far, wide, and deep, with black backgrounds and pinpoint images adding to the realism.

The reference-grade immediacy, airiness, and presence put in transparent perspective Mitchell’s dense strings of words, stream-of-conscious-like phrasing, and unhurried albeit forward momentum. Likewise, the instrumental contributions of her A-list support musicians — a cast that includes L.A. Express members John Guerin, Max Bennett and Tom Scott, plus Neil Young, Victor Feldman, and Abe Most — emerges with breathtaking clarity and dimensionality.

While Mitchell, whose intimate vocals and abstract guitar parts center everything, Mobile Fidelity's restoration of Hejira further reveals the visionary breadth of guitarist Larry Carlton and bassist Jaco Pastorius. Though heard on only four tracks, Pastorius' fretless bass epitomizes the fluid, subtle, flexible, roomy, and shape-shifting characteristics of songs that often appear to transpire out of nowhere akin to the formation of a puffy cumulus cloud overhead. In sync with Mitchell’s voice, Pastorius’ fusion hovers and floats, suspended in a fog you want to deeply inhale. The "grace notes" Mitchell desired on Hejira can now be heard in full. Ditto the luxurious tapestries of alinear lines, fills, and supplements unreeled on Carlton’s six-string.

Visually, the packaging of this UD1S set complements its identity as the copy to own. Housed in a deluxe slipcase, the LPs come in foil-stamped jackets with faithful-to-the-original graphics. This version is for listeners who desire to become immersed in everything about Hejira, including the unforgettable album cover — a pastiche of 14 different photos Mitchell used a Camera Lucida to assemble into one image that’s anchored by a portrait of her in a stoic pose — and the interior shots of Mitchell skating on a frozen Wisconsin lake wearing a pair of black skates, black shirt, and fur cape.

The notion of skating, feeling an awakening wind whipping against your face, and losing yourself to the surroundings are extremely apt for Hejira, which Mitchell wrote after a sequence of trips and relationships prompted her to reflect on the complicated conflicts between independence and marriage, success and satisfaction, duty and desire — and, more specifically, “the cost of being a woman.” The Canadian native delved into such themes before. But never as she does on Hejira, whose liberating, running-away aura doubles as another of Mitchell’s rejections of tradition as well as a suggestion of a better alternative.

At once observational and personal, expansive and insular, cheerful and poignant, Hejira spans a sea of human conditions, emotions, and circumstances. It addresses drifting, isolation, pleasure, place, time, and surroundings with strikingly poetic discourse matched with music that, save for the crooned ballad “Blue Motel Room,” forgoes conventional structures and choruses.

The jazz-based arrangements, marked by scaled-down percussion and all manner of bent, rounded, and unsettled notes, hint that Mitchell has no exact destination in mind. Excursions such as the moody “Furry Sings the Blues,” funky “Coyote” and edgy “Black Crow” throw open previously locked doors to possibility and journey. They signal it’s time for a welcome departure from norms and the past, one that leads to a heightened sense of clarity and perspective. Or, as Mitchell said upon choosing the album title, it’s time for “leaving the dream, no blame.”

Compiled by Philip King
“And then came the rise of synth pop : blokes with dodgy haircuts hunched over keyboard-operated
machines stuffed with wires and do-it-yourself tone oscillators making sounds like a brood of geese
passing gas in a wind tunnel. Whoopee! This is the way the ‘70s ended : not with a blood-curdling bang
bang but with a cheap, synthesized, emasculating whimper.”
NICK KENT, NME.

All The Young Droids: Junkshop Synth Pop 1978-1985 is a new compilation that charts the
underbelly of the epoch-defining sound of the synthesiser in 80s popular music. Compiled by Philip
King (previously seen compiling All The Young Droogs, Glitterbest and Boobs - The Junkshop
Glam Discotheque), the music here connects the dots between DIY synth enthusiasts grappling with
new, cheap synthesisers at the tail-end of punk and wannabe, jobbing songwriters enthral to the new
music pioneered by Gary Numan, Depeche Mode and Daniel Miller’s Mute Records. Featuring rare
tracks of auto-didactic progressive pop music, proto-techno punk, shoot-for-the-stars-land-in-the-gutter
chart flops and heralded, underground synth classics, School Daze paints a picture of beautiful failure.
Complete with extensive sleeve notes written by King and never before seen imagery, all 24 tracks
were remastered by RPM in-house engineer Simon Murphy, many from vinyl copies due to lost master
tapes. The story told on All The Young Droids is one of the dawning opportunity presented by both the
emergence to the market of cheaper analog synthesisers and the distribution networks plus indie labels
that exploded with the advent of punk music in 1976. While the music that sprouted out all over the
globe in the wake of these factors was decried as fake, plastic, a refutation of punk’s guitar-led
revolution, it’s telling that much of the music on All The Young Droids.. was created in bedrooms,
ramshackle studios and home-made set ups with often borrowed equipment. In the era of record labels
jumping to capitalise on the success of The Sex Pistols, The Clash (both on major labels, of course)
these artists struggled to stand out from a new gold-rush with next to no budget or PR team. With radio
and labels desperate for the new Yazoo, what resulted was a testament to necessity being the mother
of invention.

At the time, the synthesiser was the music of the future, a shiny new machine that could paint like an
orchestra with a single finger and a 4-track. In the hands of Manchester avant-pranksters Gerry & The
Holograms it’s a pulsing, sardonic weapon.. the only instrument on the Messthetics classic lampooning
of New Wave fashion. In Hamburg, a 16 year old Andreas Dorau used it to write and record (with his
female classmates on vocals) a global smash in Fred Vom Jupiter (later licensed to Mute Records).
The hard-to-find English version (Fred From Jupiter, natch) is included here. Many artists with alreadystoried careers caught the bug and recorded synthesiser-fuelled peons to space, computers, the future
and, of course, love-interests. Harry Kakoulli, late of Squeeze, recorded a solo album in 1979 that
included the incredible power-synth-pop smash-that-never-smashed I’m On A Rocket. Similarly, Ian
North of Neo and American Power Pop stalwarts Milk ’n’ Cookies bought a Korg MS20 and used a
tape machine to record We’re Not Lonely, an absolute lost-classic of minimal synth pop. We’re Not
Lonely also features on the Junkshop Synth Pop sampler 7” twinned with John Howard unreleased
track You Will See, released April 12th 2025.

There are plenty of compilation debuts in evidence. Sole Sister were a mysterious trio who were
featured on the Scaling Triangles compilation of female-fronted, queer-adjacent post-punk /
underground music that also featured The Petticoats. Selwin Image were from San Francisco and
featured members of the recently defunct power pop/punk group The Pushups. Their stupidly catchy
The Unknown fizzes with New Wave energy - think XTC to Sparks but remains unreleased until now.
Dream Unit’s A Drop In The Ocean is an early synth wave cut, positively teaming with Joy Division
instrumentation, previously only released on a long-forgotten and super rare, self-released EP.
Incandescent Luminaire’s Famous Names belies an archetypal struggle of a small-town trying to
make it in a cruel industry but is a thrilling New Romantic-Synth Wave cross over with a OMD
gloominess that’s a joy to hear. Feminist Minimal Wave track I Am A Time Bomb by performance artist
Peta Lilly and Michael Chance is a revelation destined for new found cult status. It was released on 7”
and lost until now.

The flipside to the subterranean, never-made-it synth pop mentioned above are the ambitious, even
fruity attempts at success that have a perennial elegance to their confidence. New Jersey-ite Billy
London (real name Ed Barth) tried to cash in on the synth boom with Woman, released by a major
label, a lurching new wave track built on the Louie Louie rhythm and a wonderfully camp Lou Reedstyle sleazy vocal before exploding in the synthesised chorus. The song bombed but with a chorus like
this, you have to wonder why? Ex-Glitter Band member John Springate’s My Life is truly epic, with
doomed chord progressions and massive sounding drums turning into at least 3 different songs in the
course of the track. Before you wonder what’s going on the song resolves with a glorious return to the
main refrain.

The dry-ice-dressed dance floor is well catered for too. Design’s Premonition and Vision’s Lucifer’s
Friend are stone-cold minimal synth bangers, well loved but given a new lease of life here. The
Warlord’s The Ultimate Warlord was released in 1978, a homespun proto Hi NRG banger that was
later re-recorded by The Immortals in Canada who had a club hit with it. One-man- band Disco
Volante’s No Motion was re-issued by Synth wave label Medical in 2012 but makes its first vinyl
compilation appearance here. Close your eyes and you can imagine what Lawrence of Felt would have
sounded like with some cheap Korgs a little earlier in his career. Gibraltar-based trio The Microbes
imagined a computer programming people to dance - how prescient - and ended up with a propulsive,
robo-funk track with splendid rubbery bass playing over a tectonic drum machine. Previously picked up
by Belgian label Stroom TV, Dee Jay Bert & Eagle’s heavily Euro-accented I Am Your Master
demands the listener to “come to paradise!” In a frankly terrifying manner.
All The Young Droids is the first compilation to peel away from the narrative that dour, Minimal Synth
and Cold Wave were the only musical children of the first rush of synth pop. Philip King and School
Daze Records describe a much more complicated world: along with the austere, Brutalist children of
Daniel Miller (who produced Alan Burnham’s Bowie-Low-influenced Science Fiction here) was a
plethora of desperate cash-ins, accidental mainstream hits, ambitious pop dramas and major label
punts that went nowhere. Crucially, the compilation blurs the line between junk and treasure. What if the
two things are interchangeable. What if it’s all science fiction?

With a room fulla fine pickers and a set of Hollywood orchestral cues to kill for, Cory Hanson proclaims I Love People! His 4th solo album drills down (baby) on a dryly parallax worldview, with songs about all those people he loves and all the crazy things they get up to. As ringmaster for a circus show of classic folk and rock tropes, Cory tugs at our heartstrings with expert misdirection, embracing tradition by throwing it out, into the wind.

With a room fulla fine pickers and a set of Hollywood orchestral cues to kill for, Cory Hanson proclaims I Love People! His 4th solo album drills down (baby) on a dryly parallax worldview, with songs about all those people he loves and all the crazy things they get up to. As ringmaster for a circus show of classic folk and rock tropes, Cory tugs at our heartstrings with expert misdirection, embracing tradition by throwing it out, into the wind.

HEMELBESTORMER have been a commanding entity in the heavy music scene for over 10 years, with their idiosyncratic take on the merger of post-rock, doomgaze and black metal. Made up of veterans from the Belgian hardcore and metal community, the four piece from Hasselt, Belgium create intricate sonic journeys through space and time built over punishing riffs and spine-chilling climaxes. With their fourth full-length The Radiant Veil HEMELBESTORMER take their songwriting and production to new heights, honouring their name as trailblazers on the intersection of dark and light, the crushingly heavy and the hauntingly beautiful. Having appeared at many of Europe's finest music festivals - ranging from Roadburn festival to Dunk! festival to Graspop Metal Meeting - HEMELBESTORMER feel right at home on stages with a wide variety of heavy, experimental and ethereal acts. The road combining ethereal post-rock with seething black metal has been travelled by many acts, but with HEMELBESTORMER that winding path has taken a different turn. Facing away from shoegaze or indie rock influences, the band find a more sophisticated way of incorporating unsettling melodies, blast beats and lo-fi synthesizers to emulate the dark void of space and eerie cold light of stars. HEMELBESTORMER are a sight to behold on stage, and with The Radiant Veil they penetrate deeper than ever into the farthest reaches of their sonic space ethos. Once more the Belgians capture the cavernous expanse between the cold lights of the universe, but also our power as humans to explore it, proving their greatness as masterclass storytellers in sight and sound. FOR FANS OF Neurosis, ISIS, Year of No Light, The Ruins of Beverast, WuW

HEMELBESTORMER have been a commanding entity in the heavy music scene for over 10 years, with their idiosyncratic take on the merger of post-rock, doomgaze and black metal. Made up of veterans from the Belgian hardcore and metal community, the four piece from Hasselt, Belgium create intricate sonic journeys through space and time built over punishing riffs and spine-chilling climaxes. With their fourth full-length The Radiant Veil HEMELBESTORMER take their songwriting and production to new heights, honouring their name as trailblazers on the intersection of dark and light, the crushingly heavy and the hauntingly beautiful. Having appeared at many of Europe's finest music festivals - ranging from Roadburn festival to Dunk! festival to Graspop Metal Meeting - HEMELBESTORMER feel right at home on stages with a wide variety of heavy, experimental and ethereal acts. The road combining ethereal post-rock with seething black metal has been travelled by many acts, but with HEMELBESTORMER that winding path has taken a different turn. Facing away from shoegaze or indie rock influences, the band find a more sophisticated way of incorporating unsettling melodies, blast beats and lo-fi synthesizers to emulate the dark void of space and eerie cold light of stars. HEMELBESTORMER are a sight to behold on stage, and with The Radiant Veil they penetrate deeper than ever into the farthest reaches of their sonic space ethos. Once more the Belgians capture the cavernous expanse between the cold lights of the universe, but also our power as humans to explore it, proving their greatness as masterclass storytellers in sight and sound. FOR FANS OF Neurosis, ISIS, Year of No Light, The Ruins of Beverast, WuW

D.S.A. and Night School Records are once more teaming up to release a limited edition 7”: Certe Notti by Molly Nilsson. The
record contains the two new songs Un Po’ Più Vicino al Cielo and Il Peggior Bar di Caracas.
The songs were written and recorded in August 2024 in San Giorgio del Sannio, Benevento, during a month long artist
residency, made possible thanks to the kind invitation and hospitality of AUNA a.p.s.
A whole moon spent between local festivities, sagras and late nights in the best of worst bars, making new friends
forever and life-long memories (including an unforgettable Inti-Illimani concert), all infused with sweet drinks and ancient
lore of local witches.
The cover art depicts the view from the window on one of those nights, the rising moon, Liquore Strega yellow, and the
inlay hints at Nilsson's favourite crosswords magazine. With all these distractions it’s really a wonder any music was
made at all. But thanks in large part to endless espressi and ginseng, two new songs came to be. The first is Nilsson’s
first opus in the Italian language! The second, a hommage to her favourite joint and hang out, The Worst
Bar in Caracas.

Leng Records proudly presents Everything You’re About to Hear Is True: Volume 1, a compilation carefully curated by Rotation Soundsystem. Brought together by Rotation founders Dean Meredith and Ben Shenton, alongside the Wrekin Havoc trio of Rob J, Stuart Robinson, and Rich Hall, this debut volume captures the collective’s shared vision – shaped by decades of crate-digging.

Founded in 2013, Rotation has grown from a modest gathering in Staffordshire into a thriving community of like-minded music lovers, attracting heads and partygoers from across the UK – and well beyond. What began as an intimate affair has evolved into a full-scale, three-day celebration, now held in a grand yurt and powered by a bespoke six-way sound system. The rig features four Klipschorns, two JBLs with twin 18” and 15” sub reinforcements, compression horns, and an Isonoe 420 mixer.

Meredith explains: “With the help of my brother, Martin, I’m constantly looking at ways to improve the setup. I love the way Larry Levan did that at The Paradise Garage. We have a few things that are custom-made. I want our system to be unique to us.”

According to regular attendee, DJ and writer Steve KIW: “In the right hands, the sound system at Rotation – very much Dean’s labour of love – is untouchable. The comparisons with Mancuso’s Loft come easily because they are deserved. There isn’t a bad spot in the yurt. Wherever you are, it sounds incredible.”

As the dancing continues through the weekend, the DJ line-up has grown to match the occasion. Guests and headliners have included a roll call of legendary selectors: Bill Brewster, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, Phil Mison, Nick The Record, Ruf Dug, Mark Seven, and The Idjut Boys — the latter playing a marathon 10-hour set in 2024. The parties have also featured live performances from Emperor Machine, Quinn Lamont Luke, Reuben Vaun Smith, and Orbs of Light.

Presented on gatefold double vinyl, this lovingly assembled collection is the result of decades spent digging through dusty crates, reflecting the selectors’ deep-rooted passion for uncovering rare gems and overlooked treasures. Decidedly European in spirit, the album brings together 14 rarities with standout selections from Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Germany, and France. The vast majority of tracks are true obscurities, and nearly every one is a mid-tempo bumper.

“This has been a long time coming – something we’ve always dreamed of doing. We’re incredibly thankful to Leng Records, who understand our vision and what we’re trying to build. This compilation pulls together some of our favourite tracks from over the years. It’s not just a playlist – it’s a journey, a window into the sound of Rotation,” says Meredith.

Rachika Nayar und Nina Keith veröffentlichen am 18. Juli unter ihrem neuen Projekt Disiniblud ein selbstbetiteltes Album!

Rachika Nayar und Nina Keith, aka Disiniblud, treffen sich in Brooklyn, in einem Park, der so klein ist, dass man nicht aneinander vorbeigehen kann, ohne sich zu bemerken. Sie reden. Erst über Musik, dann über alles. Über das, was war, über das, was nicht mehr sein wird. Post-Lockdown-Liebe auf Distanz, als würde man sich an jemandem festhalten, den es nie ganz gab. Buddhismus, Hinduismus, ein Soundtrack, den sie beide als Teenager geliebt haben. Ein Gespräch ohne Worte. Eine Verbindung, die sich anfühlt wie eine längst vergessene Kindheitserinnerung. "Disiniblud", das selbstbetitetelte Album, das am 18.07.2025 via Smugglers Way erscheint, ist das Echo davon. Rachika Nayar und Nina Keith verfolgen unterschiedliche musikalische Ansätze, die sie im gemeinsamen Projekt Disiniblud zusammenführen. Rachika veränderte mit ihrer 2022er LP "Heaven Come Crashing" ihr Repertoire: Statt Ambient-Gitarren setzt sie nun auf maximalistische Synthesizer, tiefe Sub-Bässe und Amen Breaks. Diese Fusion aus Post-Rock und Elektronika wurde von Pitchfork als Best New Music ausgezeichnet und fand Anerkennung in Medien wie The New York Times, Stereogum, Fader und GQ - zudem eröffnete sie Tourneen mit M83. Nina Keith ist bekannt für ihren autodidaktischen Kompositionsstil. Ihr Debüt "MARANASATI 19111" präsentierte sie mit Instrumenten wie Cello, Klavier, Klarinette und Flöte, um persönliche Erfahrungen und Erlebnisse im Zusammenhang mit Gemeinschaftstraumata und paranormalen Ereignissen musikalisch zu verarbeiten. Mit neuen Veröffentlichungen wie "Come Back Different" featuring Julie Byrne erweitert sie ihr Spektrum durch den Einsatz modularer Synthesizer und komplexer Vokalarrangements.





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Stix Records, a sub-label of Favorite Recordings, is back with "Disco Reggae Vol. 6", continuing the much-loved series that kicked off over a decade ago.

Born in Jamaica, Reggae has always shared deep roots with Soul, Funk, R&B, and Pop from the US, and the island’s musicians have long mastered the art of reimagining iconic songs through their unique lens. With the Disco Reggae series, Stix Records proudly continues that tradition, serving up fresh reggae reinterpretations of timeless classics across various genres.
This sixth edition expands the selection with tributes to legendary artists like Roy Ayers, Patrice Rushen, Cymande, The Isley Brothers, Ramsey Lewis and Earth, Wind & Fire, to name just a few.

All covers on this volume were carefully curated by Charles Maurice, ensuring a cohesive and inspired selection throughout.
At the controls, it’s the same crew of friends as usual ; Taggy Matcher, Soul Sugar aka Booker Gee, and Mato, and this time, Mystic Jungle joins the gang with a killer Roy Ayers cover.

Get ready for a feel-good ride, perfect for dancing under the stars, cruising with the windows down, or just vibing with friends.

Black Vinyl LP. The world has changed, we shouldn't try and pretend otherwise. While we were shut away in isolation our routines shifted, social patterns evolved, and our hopes and dreams were twisted into cobwebs we're still trying to wipe from our fingers. Ziúr tentatively approached this on her last album Antifate, an ambitious and complex hybrid pop fever dream that looked back to a Medieval escapist fantasy as the scent of revolution seemed to hum in the air. But when restrictions were eased, she found herself staring down a discombobulated society that had trapped itself in a spiral of microwaved nostalgia and detached, narcotic repetition. Eyeroll then is Ziúr's musical panacea, a tincture to wake us from our creative slumber and prompt external connection and reflection. It's a polyphonous hex that demands human interaction, and Ziúr's hand-picked alliance of collaborators - Elvin Brandhi, Abdullah Miniawy, Iceboy Violet, Juliana Huxtable, Ledef, and James Ginzburg - each provide distinct voices that together herald a bewildering sonic epoch. Ziúr's palette had to evolve to match the scope of the project, but it was pure necessity that informed the album's defining tone. Recording mostly at night, Ziúr was conscious of the noise she was making so developed a unique way to record organic percussion. Using a set of rototoms - low profile tunable drums - she scratched, scraped and gently tapped the skins to build up the undulating and unstable rhythmic backdrop for each track. It's the first sound we hear on the opener 'Eyeroll', rattling like lost marbles against Elvin Brandhi's primal croaks and screams. And when Brandhi's twisted articulations form words, Ziúr matches the energy with chaotic thuds and serrated blasts of saturated electronics. "I roll the shittiest cigarette," she squeals like she's about to start a mosh pit at Paris's GRM Studios. Without pause, Abdullah Miniawy takes over on 'Malikan', building on the promise of material with Simo Cell, Carl Gari and HVAD with corrosive trumpet blasts and charged, politically incendiary Arabic vocals. Inspired by pre-Islamic poetry and the Qu'ranic chanters he heard growing up in Saudi Arabia and Egypt, he spins labyrinthine stories that cross between the worlds, breaking down physical and spiritual borders simultaneously. Miniawy's scope is expanded even further on his second collaboration, 'If The City Burns I Will Not Run'. "If it rains and the city drowns," he utters over gaseous electronics, "I will not run away, but I will be anxious for the heart of one close to me." After a supple vocal turn from Manchester's Iceboy Violet on 'Move On' and a surreal interlude from poet- DJ-artist-theorist Juliana Huxtable on '99 Favor Taste', Brandhi returns with two more hyperactive collaborations: ,'Nontrivial Differential' and 'Cut Cut Quote'. On the former she slices into Ziúr's skeletal jazz eruptions, screaming and crooning interchangeably, fluxing between the rap battle and the cabaret. The latter is completely different meanwhile, with Brandhi settling into her role as front-woman and groaning dizzying improvised passages that sound like grunge crossed with psychedelic no-wave. Brandhi's spiky musical history has prepared her well for this collaboration; she's a prolific producer and has been using her voice spontaneously since debuting with father-daughter improv duo Yeah You in the mid 2020s. She's found an ideal foil in Ziúr, a producer who matches her restless energy and willingness to bend formality, and leaves an indelible mark on Eyeroll. But the album's most tender moments are from Ziúr herself, who winds the album down on 'Hasty Revisionism', growling over collapsible beats and cascading strings, and comes to an unexpected conclusion with country coda 'Lacrymaturity'. Its feverish amalgamation of country music and euphoric, experimental electronics might seem incongruous at first, but in context with the rest of the album is the only possible conclusion. With Eyeroll Ziúr is making a firm statement about togetherness, humanity, and the renewal of hope when all seems lost. By bringing together such a wide but philosophically harmonic team of collaborators, she's conducted a body of work that speaks to the creative fringe in no uncertain terms. Now's the time to throw away what you think you know, and build bridges you didn't think you need. Now's the time for action. She may have spent her entire career avoiding the solipsistic trappings of "queer art", but by assembling a communal statement that questions so many normative assumptions about music, politics, and beyond, Ziúr has chanced upon her queerest album yet. Cringe? Eyeroll.

FOLLOW UP TO THE CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED 2023 ALBUM ‘RPB’ (UTR151):

- #4 MOJO FOLK ALBUMS OF THE YEAR+ FOLK ALBUM OF THE MONTH:
“ IT MELTS TRAD TECHNIQUES AND MINECRAFT BURBLE INTO ‘A MASSIVE, MULTI-PLAYER ONLINE DREAM’ . INCOMPREHENSIBLE/IRRESISTIBLE’

‘ME LOST ME’S RPG (UPSET THE RHYTHM) IS AN EXCITING, IMAGINATIVE ALBUM EXPLORING THE LINKS BETWEEN TRADITIONAL INFLUENCES AND ELECTRONICS IN FERTILE WAYS.’ THE GUARDIAN - FOLK ALBUMS OF THE MONTH.

'FROM NEWCASTLE, VIA UPSET THE RHYTHM, JAYNE DENT EXPLORES FOLK ART AND FUTURISM TO SPELLBINDING EFFECT' THE QUIETUS

FULL PAGE REVIEW IN WIRE MAGAZINE:"ME LOST ME'S NEW ALBUM RPG IS FILLED WITH STORIES OF ADVENTURE AND SELF-DISCOVERY IN VERDANT NATURAL LANDSCAPES, SUNG WITH FEELING AND CLARITY"

Me Lost Me - the project of Newcastle-based artist Jayne Dent - delights in experimenting with songwriting, creating a beguiling mix of soaring vocals and atmospheric electronics that playfully push the boundaries of genre.

On Me Lost Me’s fourth full-length, This Material Moment - arriving on Upset the Rhythm on 27th June - she has created an “emotionally raw” album, her most honest and vulnerable yet.

Concerned with physicality, interpretations, and, yes, materiality, This Material Moment is an album akin to rummaging through a box of long-forgotten trinkets. With each song, Me Lost Me extracts something from the box and asks us to consider it from every angle. "This is an album which uses words as a material, a playful tool for experimentation, full of metaphor, abstraction and analogies.” Jayne says, “it has softness and anger, humour, hope and despair, intensity of feeling in all directions expressed as textures, objects, places."

With the release of This Material Moment Me Lost Me puts into practice the automatic writing techniques she developed during a workshop with Julia Holter, and in the process has spun her music in different directions that draws on poetry, psalms and using mesostic poems and phonetic translations to generate words. “Despite the chance-based writing strategies throughout, it feels like the most emotionally raw album I've ever made,” she says, likening the process to a Rorschah test which revealed things to her she wasn’t expecting to express. “I wanted to hide in stories, but I saw things plainly when I tried to write.” Having finished the writing process, Jayne realised that she had an unexpectedly personal album on her hands, into which her feelings of burnout and overwhelm had crept unconsciously. “Several of the songs for me express a kind of inner conflict, where you’re trying to keep hope and desire and beauty and art near to your heart, to live a meaningful life, but finding that increasingly hard to hold onto in a world that’s so fucked up.”

Whilst Jayne Dent’s music as Me Lost Me has previously presented time stretching back and forwards in opposition (noticeably on 2023’s album RPG), on This Material Moment she does away with linearity altogether, evoking rather than narrating, and presenting feelings, happenings and moods with no clear beginning or end point - “like experiencing a vista, trying to capture a moment that is unfolding all at once”. Instead, each track on This Material Moment exists entirely in media res, adjacent to past and future, and instead sprawling across the endless now.

This Material Moment was written and arranged solo, but played with a core band of John Pope on electric/double bass, Faye MacCalman on clarinet, and now with the addition of Ewan Mackenzie (Dextro/Pigs x7) on drums - bringing in live drums and electric bass for the first time. The album was recorded by Sam Grant at Blank Studios in Newcastle, who also worked on RPG.

Motel d'amour - A Lost Electro-Funk Gem from the NDW Era Resurfaces

When we first collaborated with Collage member Markus Kammann on the EP project "Mit den Puppen tanzen" at the end of last year, we never imagined what would follow: Kammann approached us with a completely unreleased full-length album by his former band. Upon receiving the first three preview tracks, we were floored. One of them was "Nachtcafé" - a track that kicks off with a funky bassline layered over the punchy rhythm of a Roland TR-808. Add shimmering synths and Katrin A. Kunze's sharp, distinctive vocals, and we instantly knew we were hearing something special.

For a label dedicated to rediscovering lost treasures, this was exactly what we'd been searching for. The next two tracks - "Rendezvous" and "Casanova" - were just as compelling. When Kammann sent us the full album, we realized we were holding an electro-funk grail from the late golden days of the German Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW). We were listening to "Motel d'amour".

"Motel d'amour" is a concept album, offering a sharp, vibrant perspective from a confident, intelligent, and radiant young woman eager to experience nightlife, love, and music. Kunze's lyrics paint vivid scenes of flirtation ("Nachtcafé", "Rendezvous"), encounters with men ("Casanova"), the pulse of nightlife ("Die Nacht ist noch jung"), love ("Rotes Licht für rote Liebe"), one-night stands ("Motel d'amour"), and more. Rarely has a German album from that era captured emotional nuance and social dynamics so insightfully. Without veering into the overly personal, Kunze's direct, daring lyrical style was groundbreaking at the time - and remains refreshingly bold today.

While German listeners will fully appreciate the lyrical depth, the music speaks volumes on its own. Kunze's words are masterfully complemented by the production of Markus Kammann and Jürgen Grah. As heard on the in-demand "Mit den Puppen tanzen", their creativity seemed boundless. Each track is tightly composed, catchy, and full of character. While many German bands at the time leaned into rock, Kammann drew from the deep grooves of Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Brothers Johnson, The Commodores, and the electro-futurism of Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and "Looking for the Perfect Beat". The result: tracks with unmistakable electro-funk flair, powered by the classic 808 drum sound.

Though primarily rooted in funk and electro, the album retains flashes of NDW aesthetics - "Wir haben getanzt heut' Nacht" being a prime example. The instrumentation is a dream list for vintage gear lovers: Yamaha keyboards, Roland Juno-60, vocoder, Micromoog, Hohner D6 Clavinet, Fender bass, and a Telecaster guitar all feature prominently.
Recorded in 1985 at the high-profile Delta Studio by Richard Rossbach, the album attracted interest from Polydor. However, the label proposed using the compositions for a solo project with singer Inga Humpe (of Neonbabies), who was already signed to their roster. This would have required replacing Kunze as the vocalist, an idea the group firmly rejected. As a result, "Motel d'amour" was shelved, and Kammann, Grah, and Kunze moved on to form Cold End.
The album cover features a rare archival photo of Katrin A. Kunze - rediscovered by Kammann and now finally seeing the light of day, 40 years later.

We believe Motel d'amour deserves recognition alongside cult German classics like P!OFF?, 1. Futurologischer Congress' "Wer spricht?", Ami Marie's "Verrückt nach Glück", the funkier cuts of Cosa Rosa, or Piet Klocke's groove classic "Heute ist nicht sonst". It's a record that fits into adventurous DJ sets but also rewards a full, start-to-finish listen.

A note on audio quality: Sadly, the original master tapes were lost. The tracks were restored from a vintage TDK cassette. Thanks to modern digital tools, we were able to remaster them to a high standard - but in some songs light distortions remain. We appreciate your understanding and hope you enjoy this lost and undiscovered gem.

Motel d'amour - A Lost Electro-Funk Gem from the NDW Era Resurfaces

When we first collaborated with Collage member Markus Kammann on the EP project "Mit den Puppen tanzen" at the end of last year, we never imagined what would follow: Kammann approached us with a completely unreleased full-length album by his former band. Upon receiving the first three preview tracks, we were floored. One of them was "Nachtcafé" - a track that kicks off with a funky bassline layered over the punchy rhythm of a Roland TR-808. Add shimmering synths and Katrin A. Kunze's sharp, distinctive vocals, and we instantly knew we were hearing something special.

For a label dedicated to rediscovering lost treasures, this was exactly what we'd been searching for. The next two tracks - "Rendezvous" and "Casanova" - were just as compelling. When Kammann sent us the full album, we realized we were holding an electro-funk grail from the late golden days of the German Neue Deutsche Welle (NDW). We were listening to "Motel d'amour".

"Motel d'amour" is a concept album, offering a sharp, vibrant perspective from a confident, intelligent, and radiant young woman eager to experience nightlife, love, and music. Kunze's lyrics paint vivid scenes of flirtation ("Nachtcafé", "Rendezvous"), encounters with men ("Casanova"), the pulse of nightlife ("Die Nacht ist noch jung"), love ("Rotes Licht für rote Liebe"), one-night stands ("Motel d'amour"), and more. Rarely has a German album from that era captured emotional nuance and social dynamics so insightfully. Without veering into the overly personal, Kunze's direct, daring lyrical style was groundbreaking at the time - and remains refreshingly bold today.

While German listeners will fully appreciate the lyrical depth, the music speaks volumes on its own. Kunze's words are masterfully complemented by the production of Markus Kammann and Jürgen Grah. As heard on the in-demand "Mit den Puppen tanzen", their creativity seemed boundless. Each track is tightly composed, catchy, and full of character. While many German bands at the time leaned into rock, Kammann drew from the deep grooves of Earth, Wind & Fire, The Isley Brothers, Brothers Johnson, The Commodores, and the electro-futurism of Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" and "Looking for the Perfect Beat". The result: tracks with unmistakable electro-funk flair, powered by the classic 808 drum sound.

Though primarily rooted in funk and electro, the album retains flashes of NDW aesthetics - "Wir haben getanzt heut' Nacht" being a prime example. The instrumentation is a dream list for vintage gear lovers: Yamaha keyboards, Roland Juno-60, vocoder, Micromoog, Hohner D6 Clavinet, Fender bass, and a Telecaster guitar all feature prominently.
Recorded in 1985 at the high-profile Delta Studio by Richard Rossbach, the album attracted interest from Polydor. However, the label proposed using the compositions for a solo project with singer Inga Humpe (of Neonbabies), who was already signed to their roster. This would have required replacing Kunze as the vocalist, an idea the group firmly rejected. As a result, "Motel d'amour" was shelved, and Kammann, Grah, and Kunze moved on to form Cold End.
The album cover features a rare archival photo of Katrin A. Kunze - rediscovered by Kammann and now finally seeing the light of day, 40 years later.

We believe Motel d'amour deserves recognition alongside cult German classics like P!OFF?, 1. Futurologischer Congress' "Wer spricht?", Ami Marie's "Verrückt nach Glück", the funkier cuts of Cosa Rosa, or Piet Klocke's groove classic "Heute ist nicht sonst". It's a record that fits into adventurous DJ sets but also rewards a full, start-to-finish listen.

A note on audio quality: Sadly, the original master tapes were lost. The tracks were restored from a vintage TDK cassette. Thanks to modern digital tools, we were able to remaster them to a high standard - but in some songs light distortions remain. We appreciate your understanding and hope you enjoy this lost and undiscovered gem.

Fronted by brothers Peter O'Doherty and Reg Mombassa , Dog Trumpet have been playing, writing and recording their music since the early 90s. Reg and Pete were founding members of iconic Australian band Mental As Anything, who hit the charts around the world with “Live It Up”. The band made a mark with their left field mix of music, art, video and humour and leading eventually to ARIA awards and induction into the Hall of Fame in 2009.

Dog Trumpet’s new album Live Forever is the result of 2 years in the studio.

For this, their ninth album , the song writing brothers Peter and Reg have brought Peter’s multi instrumentalist son Declan in on drums, production and mixing duties, enhancing and expanding their sonic palette.

At times psychedelic and ethereal, the album weaves together Dog Trumpet’s signature acoustic and electric guitar and bass driven sound with melodic drums, synthesisers, mandolin, saxophone and added backing vocals by their touring bass player Bernie Hayes.

Juan Ramos is up to bat for the next Körperspannung release with the four-track stunner EP ‘Hard Bois’. Deeply connected to the ongoing pursuit of gay excellence and endeavors, Juan honors those who have come before us and touches us deeply in our soft spots at all the right moments. Across ‘Hard Bois EP’, the Berlin resident and behind the scenes operator (IYKYK) shows precisely why he’s one of dance music’s most exciting and dependable prospects. Opening the release, ‘Hard Bois’ combines snaking drums in a melange of samples with bff Kris Baha vocalizing sizzling and snaking lyrics winding around this propulsive club cut that could easily be a snapshot right out of a scene from Chicago’s iconic Medusa Club. ‘Saviour Sound’ is music that makes iron pipes sweat with hedonistic abandon. Exposed steel vibrates to a hardcore beat. Gears interlock to move the whole building into autonomous productivity. Conduits of electricity pulsate to the drama unfolding in a dim lit factory with dank corridors leading us on a path to a flowerbed growing and thriving in a subterranean hydroponic garden.
On the flip, the alarm strikes and it’s (shout it out): ‘Werk Day’! This is your call to get buttoned up and ready to make dreams reality. Head to the gym, pump those guns and then house your body. Technological funk winding through a sturdy and rock hard kick that helps you ride through the chasms of pleasure and pain. Rounding out the release is your ‘Acid BB’ rocking and roaring through the airspace of atomized acid matter, a perfect closer to a thoroughly exciting direction Juan Ramos takes with his newfound sound. Play it loud. Play it proud. Juan is one of our own and we do all we can to take care of each other.

Repress!

The funky, atmospheric, evocative and sometimes downright weird output of companies such as DeWolfe, Cavendish, Burton and the ubiquitous KPM have always been a guiding inspiration for ATA Records, as evidenced in the spooky soundtrack works of The Sorcerers, the big band brass of The Yorkshire Film & Television Orchestra and even in the soul-jazz of The Lewis Express ('Theme From The Watcher').

It only seemed natural for the team at ATA Records to scratch their own Library itch and so last year's "The Library Archive Vol. 1" was born. Recorded over a series of sessions in the Alladins cave of vintage recording equipment that is ATA studios, it featured many of the stalwart musicians from the label who can also be found recording with The Sorcerers, Work Money Death and The Lewis Express.

Garnering praise from Library aficionado Shawn Lee("Holy F*$K this sounds great! ATA really smash the classic British Library sound. 10 out of 10") and the Don of British Library Music himsel fAlan Hawkshaw, "The Library Archive Vol. 1" was very well received and so a follow up was inevitable. Recorded during the Autumn of 2020, "The Library Archive Vol. 2" still has the golden age of European Library music squarely in it's sights, but this time the focus is drawn more to the wonky organ work of Italian quartet I Marc 4.

Each track has been lovingly crafted with a keen ear for authenticity and the same eye for detail shown on 'The Library Archive Vol. 1', recorded on the same instruments and equipment and with the same techniques as the music that inspired it.

The Library Archive is a labour of love for the label with more volumes planned.

Mayssa Jallad is a Beirut-based bilingual singer-songwriter, architectural researcher and teacher. Her work deals with the highly personal as well as the political, as with her first solo album "Marjaa: The Battle of the Hotels", which explores the histories of urban battles that occurred before she was born, during the Lebanese Civil War, through a collaborative musical and architectural lens. "(Marjaa) is, as one might expect, a sombre affair largely comprised of Jallad's delicate vocals backed by acoustic guitar and ethereal synthesizer. Elsewhere, co-composer and producer Fadi Tabbal adds the crackle of distant artillery and a ghostly wind between the high-rise blocks." - Daniel Spicer, Songlines, April 2023 "Historical trauma, strings, drones, metallophones and buzuks wrap around powerful stories and gossamer vocals on Lebanese singer's tender, intimate debut. With shades of Nico, Jarboe and Elizabeth Fraser, '80s' 4AD fans will rejoice." - Andy Cowan, MOJO `Marjaa_' (tr. `reference') combined Mayssa Jallad's two main vocations: music and urban research/architectural history. The album was co-written with Fadi Tabbal and based on Mayssa's Historic Preservation master's thesis (`Beirut's Civil War Hotel District: Preserving the World's First High-Rise Urban Battlefield'). The thesis examined a 5-month conflict that took place within Beirut's skyscraper-laden luxury hotel district of Minet El Husn near the start of the Lebanese Civil War. Addressing a post-war generation who have never been taught this difficult history, `Marjaa_' was an attempt to process trauma, and "a call to protest for the renewal, rather than the recycling of the political class that once destroyed the country and holds us, to this day, hostage of its violence". In 2013, Mayssa founded indie-pop band Safar with guitarist Elie Abdelnour, releasing debut album In Transit with Lebanese indie label Ruptured in 2017, and follow-up EP Studies of an Unknown Lover in 2019. Both albums were produced by Lebanese producer Fadi Tabbal at Tunefork Studios in Beirut. Mayssa's most recent multi-genre collaborations include "Madina min Baeed" (2022) with electronic musician/producer Khaled Allaf; "Bi Kheir" and "Fil Aatma" (2022) with indie supergroup Baada Ab (Dani Shukri, Ezra Tenenbaum and Omaya Malaeb), released by Thawra records and Found Sound Nation. Next is the Versions version of Marjaa, which sees Civilistjävel! (aka Swedish producer Tomas Bodén) apply a stripped, dub methodology to Mayssa's original rich stems, refracting the Arabic source through the hazy prism of Northern European electronica. 140gsm vinyl, jacket printed on 20pt board with aqueous gloss coating, with a 3.5mm spine and a black paper inner dust sleeve.

LTD Repress !

LIZZ is back on PlayedBy with Chapter II, a compilation of new and unreleased artifacts and other treasures from his dense catalog. Diverse and expansive, it captures his versatile musicianship and ever-evolving production style.

Broadly speaking, there are two types of tracks produced by LIZZ: on one hand rallying for the right to party, and on the other, nostalgic odysseys, sometimes lustful and sometimes wistful. Chapter II has a bit of everything. Thirteen tracks of club heat varied narrative that is worth listening to carefully.

Opener "Seamless" and its steady snare keep spirits high while the spacey keys provide a trippy, out-there vibe. On the flipside, "Clasic Dewan" uses elements we've heard before - warm pads, a percussive organ, and a looped vocal sample - but still makes for a great dancefloor track. Both tracks are a throwback to LIZZ's tried and true Terrafirma.

"Cynelmoon" unravels a labyrinthine universe twisting in and out of misty existence, with its snake-like rattles winding through a maze of synth bleeps.

Refreshing and zippy, "Dip Si M" stands out as a gritty reinterpretation of a great space and sounds like the most fun he's ever had on record. On the other hand, "Chemical Chords" is ethereal, meditative, with a hushed musicality that is almost stoic.

LIZZ takes the listener on a journey of vertiginous peaks and deep valleys as he leads "Round Around" into spiraling locked down looped club music.

Listening to "Nothing with Nothing" feels like a video-game on its own. It’s a bundle of joy and energy, peaking with a crescendo of color.

On "69" the energy builds with such careful, gradual restraint that even the most active listener might wonder how they ever got to this point. Chopped up shards of melody and vocals combine to create a kaleidoscopic funhouse with a strong Perlon-esque flavour.
"Roaki" is the dreamy track with an irresistible groove, where LIZZ combines smooth synth pads with dubby and distorted electronic drums that add a sense of cyberpunk feel, reconfirming's Playedby's fanaticism for this project.

A bubbling, percussive roller marks the beginning of "Jazzohub" and skyrockets from there. The track hits with an inviting vocal that dissolves into a fluid swirl of layered hand drums.
"No More High" is a a real banger. This one bounces hard with a bass-heavy beat and a military snare, leaving you no choice but to tip-toe with its groove all night long.

Chasing an ever-vivid muse,"Electronic World" hits with its drumming rhythms, labyrinth of synth bleeps and bold vocals reminiscent of tunneling club nights.

Closing track "I Am Cross" brings an unusual kind of dark atmosphere to the fore: it's cavernous and enveloping, almost as if the rhythm was an afterthought.

Chapter II is every bit as ambitious as its predecessor. Across thirteen tracks, LIZZ approaches the dancefloor forms of his earlier work with a fresh and voluptuous groovy attitude. Somehow, individually, we must reclaim our own experience.\5

Lifelong friends Richard Lowe and Rob Bendelow formed their first band “Lammergier” during the mid 1970’s together with bassist Barry Yates. Following their first love performance in 1977 the band gigged extensively across the British midlands. The standard of these performances combined with their unique brand of symphonic rock saw “Lammergier” amass a large and loyal following. Then a new decade arrived changes were made, the music remained the same, but they called themselves “Saracen”.

After several months on the road Saracen decided it was time to record an album, and in October 1981 they released “Heroes, Saints and Fools” to critical acclaim. Saracen tracks received regular airplay on Tommy Vance’s Friday night rock show and the single “We have arrived” was recorded. In 1983 line-up changes occurred and the band eventually stopped touring in 1985.

Two decades later and the band re-appear with a vengeance and the release of “Red Sky” in March 2003 put the band firmly back on the map, and it was a rework of some of the old classics with new tracks added. The band regained its popularity, and a further three albums have emerged to critical acclaim, namely “Vox in Excelso”, “Marilyn” and “Redemption”.

With renewed interest in the vinyl format of recorded music “Vox In Excelso” has been re-released in 2025 as a numbered limited edition with new artwork and now “Red Sky” is to follow, again with new artwork. These are beautiful works of art and the recordings sound fresh and vibrant, its classic progressive rock brought into the present day and it doesn’t get better than this..

Known for her delicate, subtly psychedelic approach to production - all subtlety is thrown out of the window on the opener, “Parents and God”. We are immediately confronted with a slamming Chicago house style beat in style of Mr Fingers at his most utilitarian. It slams, jerking in and out of tempo like Ron Hardy in beast mode.

Out of nowhere a soulful church organ arrives - at first for a brief respite - but then for an extended solo, which gives way to an 80s electro style breakdown before reverting back to form. It shouldn’t work, but somehow it does - to a dizzying extent - and heirin lies Mayurashka’s magic: a blatant disregard for norms and a deft touch that makes the unorthodox so compelling.

“Notango" takes another big left turn - sitting somewhere between tribal seance and rain dance, it’s mostly organic drums and otherworldly sound effects that combine to drag us deeper into the wormhole before “ Vat Murmur” takes us back into the light with its uptempo disco energy and giving way to heavy chugging bass. This one is equally for fans of idjut boys and Larry Levan.

The EP rounds off with the title track “ LSI dreaming” - to try and describe it is almost impossible, but let’s say it starts of with a mid 2000s Perlon-era tech house energy before things quickly escalate beyond all recognition and then just hover with lysergic intensity. If I ever closed panorama bar, this is the track I’d end with.

"Three years ago, Jérôme Leclercq and I from Mediatoon Licensing came up with the idea of creating a cinema concert to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Naruto. Why a cinema concert? The music is part of the success of the licence and fans have a particular attachment to the credits and the original soundtracks. The originality of the music by Toshio Masuda, the composer of Naruto, comes from the clever mix of traditional Japanese instruments, such as the Shakuhachi or the Shamisen, with guitar and other pop/rock instruments. So we came up with the idea of bringing this music to the stage with a 50-strong orchestra, accompanied by an original montage of the best moments from the anime. This orchestra is made up of three parts: symphonic instruments, pop/rock instruments and traditional instruments.

To do this, we approached the ODINO orchestra and its conductor Sylvain Audinovski. The ODINO orchestra is one of those capable of mixing musical styles while maintaining a very high level of performance. We have also chosen traditional Japanese instrumentalists to complete the orchestra's core, especially for the show.

The arrangements and musical direction are the fruit of a collaboration between Quentin Benayoun, Sébastien Caviggia and myself. My two accomplices, with whom I formed the group P.U.S.S. in 2007, have a great mastery of rock and orchestral music writing. This mix is essential to keep the promise made to the fans of the series and required several months' work to select the music and write the scores for the whole orchestra.

How do you tell the story of Naruto to fans, but also to those who don't know the anime? That's the real challenge of this unique film-concert. How do you select the best moments in the story of this young ninja apprentice from the vastness of the first 220 episodes? Six months of selection and research enabled me to choose the key images in the narrative, while preserving certain dialectics to match the anime's incredible music.

This original film-concert, lasting almost 2? hours, is a real Rock-Symphonic show paying tribute to the work of Masashi Kashimoto and the music of Toshio Masuda."

Repress!

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.



Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.



Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytumcomosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”



But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.



The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.



“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.



Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.



Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’snew renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

Allen Toussaint’s debut as a solo artist, “The Wild Sound Of New Orleans” was released in 1958 under the name of Tousan. In the 60s, he established himself as a songwriter, producer and arranger for a number of labels and generated hits like ‘Working In The Coal Mine’ for Lee Dorsey that got to #8 in the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966. Other classic tracks that Toussaint either wrote, produced or arranged included ‘Fortune Teller’, Lipstick Traces’ and ‘Ooh Poo Pah Do’

It was only in 1970 that he found time to record another solo album, aptly entitled “Toussaint”. As well as serving up his own version Of ‘Working In The Coal Mine’, Toussaint recorded other originals like ‘From A Whisper To A Scream’ and ‘Everything I Do Is Gonna Be Funky’. There were also four instrumental tracks – ‘Pickles’, ‘Louie’, ‘Either’ and a sublime version of ‘Cast Your Fate To The Wind’ listed as ‘Allen Toussaint at the piano’.
The original version of Toussaint was released in 1970 on Scepter records and is now hailed as a soulful classic. Ace were delighted to first reissue it in 1985 as “From A Whisper To A Scream” with the addition of a bonus track and with a slightly different running order.
On “Toussaint” we present the original album as Allen Toussaint intended it to be heard. Remastered to perfection this is an essential purchase

LA-based producer Real Bad Man and Detroit artist ZelooperZ release their joint album Dear Psilocybin via the pro-ducer’s own Real Bad Man Records. The album marks the duo’s first collaboration, culminating in a full-length project that also features guest appearances from Boldy James, MAVI and a verse from The Alchemist. On Dear Psilocybin, ZelooperZ invokes unconventional production out of Real Bad Man to match his own unpredictable and outlandish delivery, working outside of traditional song structures and existing in a lane of his own. The Detroit multihyphenate, who is an integral part of Danny Brown’s Bruiser Brigadecollective and also an accomplished visual artist, painted the album’s corresponding cover artwork as well.

“I definitely haven’t made anything like this before, it’s a very subtle version of my music as far as tone, ” ZelooperZ explained in a conversation with Real Bad Man for his RBM Radio show. He elaborates on the off-kilter approach to the way he recorded to say, “the album feels like a movie soundtrack for a film about a man losing his mind and getting spurts of memories along the way. ”

Speaking about how the project differs from the rest of his collaborative catalog, RBM says, “It’s trippy and it’s a little different – but the main goal was for it to be authentic to Z and his process. ” That dedication to authenticity rings true across his catalog, drawing back to the foundations of his beginnings as a producer, learning the fundamentals of sampling, experimenting with chords and learning to piece songs together by ear. RBM builds a cohesive production arc around each artist he works with, catered to their strengths as artists, working with a variety of lyrical stylists includ-ing Memphis rapper Lukah, Pink Siifu, Blu, Kool Keith, Elcamino & more.

Real Bad Man is the production moniker of visual artist and designer Adam Jay Weissman. A designer and visual artist first, he made his foray into music through his On High Alert series of imaginative, multi-generational compilations, which have featured the likes of Roc Marciano, ROME STREETZ, Pink Siifu, Maxo and more. In the years since, he’s partnered with some of hip-hop’s most talented and adventurous artists on full-length projects, refining and shaping the trajectory of some of rap’s most exciting independent artists.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger’s Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet’s electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe’s impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet’s approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O’Malley and Jim O’Rourke.

A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title’s meaning is close to the concept of ‘Wanderlust’, fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls ‘climates’. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid ‘closeness’; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space.

Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block. Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous ‘scenes’, with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies. Like his friend and collaborator Jim O’Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.

There are imagined landscapes we all carry within us—dreamed,
half-remembered, or just beyond reach. Lofoten, the new album by
Cate Francesca Brooks on Clay Pipe Music, is a musical reflection on one such place.
Located above the Arctic Circle, Norway's Lofoten Islands are known for their dramatic peaks, open seascapes, and distinctive red fishing cabins dotting the shoreline. Though Brooks has never visited this remote northern region, it became an unexpected source of inspiration.
The project began when Cate listened to a narrated "sleep story" set in the islands. Intrigued, she researched the region and found herself drawn to its stark beauty."I fell in love with creating an impression of somewhere I would probably never visit, but felt a real affinity with," she explains.
This ambitious album translates that connection into sound. Through carefully crafted electronics, melodic themes, richly layered textures and big production, Brooks captures the essence of Lofoten—its icy light, vast horizons, and profound quiet."The other thing that happened around the same time was the first lockdown here in the UK. I had taken the opportunity of having some extra time to learn a new (to me) method of synthesis; that of the Synclavier, which uses one aluminium wheel and an array of buttons to control every parameter of the sound.
"I took to it with intrigue and before I knew it, I had built up hundreds of original sounds, many of which were perfect for the textures I could hear in my head for Lofoten. So that (along with a Prophet synth and a TR-808) became the sound world." Lofoten stands as an evocative testament to how music can transport us to distant places, transforming geographical limitations into imagined creative possibilities.

Der Italo-Disco Klassiker Dolce Vita meldet sich zurück — auf einer exklusiven, farbigen 12“ Maxi Single! Auf der A-Seite findest du die zeitlosen Original-Versionen, die den Kult-Song unsterblich gemacht haben.

Die B-Seite bringt frischen Wind: Hier erwarten dich brandneue, elektronische Remixes von Szenegrößen wie Klaas, DJ Blackstone, Block & Crown sowie BK Duke & Bootmasters. Die modernen Club-Edits verpassen Dolce Vita ein tanzbares Sound-Update, ohne den nostalgischen ItaloDisco-Charme zu verlieren.

Ein Muss für alle Vinyl-Sammler, DJs und Liebhaber von klassischen Melodien im neuen Club-Gewand!