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Limited edition of 300 copies on black vinyl!

‘A Part Of Me‘ is the debut album by Ivan Arlaud alias 1954, a young musician from Lyon, France. It’s an immersive journey between nostalgic and synthetic sounds, melancholia and hope, fears and confidence. He contrived to describe all the bright, warm, cold and dark moments of his restless imagination in rhythms without being intrusive. As the title says, it’s his personal disclosure.

The "Sula Bassana" project marks the fusion of two distinct but complementary musical worlds: that of 20syl, electro-hip hop producer and DJ, and that of Christophe Panzani, versatile jazz musician. The album is an ode to contemplation, an immobile voyage embodied by the Gannet, the symbol of their creativity as they fly across styles and soundscapes.

The duo affirm their complicity with the eponymous track "Sula Bassana", where 20syl's sophisticated electro production blends with Christophe Panzani's melodious instruments. The track was accompanied on its release by a remarkable interactive video that poetically retraces the journey of a gannet.

The album also features a number of enriching collaborations. On "Dreams", they invite Yael Naim with her haunting voice and poignant harmonies. "Nuevo Mundo" invites La Chica to take us into a vibrant and eclectic atmosphere, fusing electro rhythms with Latin influences. Finally, "Playtime" features jazz pianist Eric Legnini, whose subtle chords and virtuoso improvisation infuse the album with a refined energy.

"Sula Bassana" is a space where the duo asserts itself with confidence, a rich and varied musical exploration, transcending the boundaries of genres to offer a unique and captivating sonic experience.

Billy Bultheel & Alexander Iezzi aka 33’s killer debut LP of sharp cuts between hardcore rave, DIY classical chamber music, Trance arps and performance art punk - think a Duma throwdown with Diamanda Galas and yr halfway there.

Pitting Anne Imhof-collaborator Billy Bultheel in a ravenous session with Iezzi and a host of input from Naked, Dylan Kerr, Ivan Cheng, and Patrick Belaga; ’33-69’ stages an opulent complex of numerological enigmas and swarming spirits unbound from tradition. Disrupting disciplines and paradigms in each cut, they enact a ravishing rush of dancefloor drama and tormented cabaret that feels like the 1920’s rushing into the 2020’s, resulting in a time-sick and urgent avalanche of ideas from Leider or Baroque barbed in noise and hardcore rave alacrity, like a performance art piece held in the midst of Berghain or Kit Kat club’s most spangled, gloriously messy moments.

As the first C.A.N.V.A.S. release of 2022, ’33-69’ builds on the sprawling ideas and feelings outlined by Olan Monk, Lugh, Elvin Branhdi, Michael Speers and Alpha Maid since 2018 with a strident confidence that meets the new decade head-on, face-first, as it gets to grips with new cultural schisms and energies. Tearing out with the shearing digital noise and soaring elegance of Ivan Cheng’s vox on ‘369’, it prangs out between machine-gunned trance techno in ‘Fireworks’ to operatic pipe organ and string processional ‘Sexus’ starring countertenor Steve Katona (collaborator of Pan Daijing and specialist in Bach recitals), beside an extraordinary mauling of industrial and BM ritualism on ‘The knife’ featuring a feral Naked in its seat-edge first half.

The second half slips below the belt with a virulent thrust in the panel-beating techno tribalism of ‘Pigeons’, and hinges around brusque techno triplets with the cabaret keys and Italianate trance motifs of ‘Sirens’, before PAN’s cellist-composer Patrick Balaga helps pull it back from the brink in ‘Thomas The Obscure’, lending a fine temper to the crazed/reflective narrative before it launches in a full out techno assault on ‘Heaven’s blade’ and the smoky, distorted growl of ’Speed and beer’ makes perhaps the most unhinged and ultimately moving use of a brass section you’ll likely hear for time.

Stunning.

With the death in 2020 of long-standing occasional third member Peter Stapleton (percussion / electronics), A Handful of Dust has regrouped as the core duo of Alastair Galbraith (violin, guitar, cello, piano, drums) and Bruce Russell (guitar, electronics). This new set of live-to-four-track recordings from January 2022 is the first album to be wholly recorded 'in the studio' since 1995's Towards a Soundtrack to the 'Anabase' of St-John Perse. Committed to tape at the Rugby Hotel in Dunedin, the four-track recordings were played back in the room where they were made and recorded again, this time to Android telephone, to make a digital mono master which you hear on this record. Unadorned, brutal and sonically austere, this new set captures the 'wild Mercury sound' for which this long-standing unit is rightly feted among cognoscenti of the Antipodean New Thing. Three pieces that will pop your third eye in seconds flat. Astral travel for now people. Duck and Sally continue their unplanned career in the extreme abuse of the rock'n'roll toolkit. Drowned Phoenician sailors bob disconcertingly to the surface while the captain's tower rocks to a sustained monomachy 'twixt Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, brought back from the grave for that specific purpose. Don't be shy - please jump out of your window. You know you gotta trust us, when you need a friend...

A year and a half has passed since Slovak-Hungarian artist Adela Mede self-released her debut album ‘Szabadság’. Its liner notes described it as “a navigation”, a search through “the personal, familial, cultural, folkloric and geographic of her past and present.” Her second album, ‘Ne Lépj a Virágra’ no longer searches; here, she puts down roots and delves deeper into the earthy reality of her home, Central Europe. Mede sings in three languages with newfound conviction and grace – this is an album of profound faith and confidence in the potential of this fertile soil.

Composed and recorded during the last 18 months in Bratislava, Slovakia – a city where three countries meet, where the East and the West collide – 'Ne Lépj a Virárga' translates to “don't step on the flower”. Its themes – budding potential, recognizing the beauty in the ordinary, solidarity, turning despair into hope – emerged through Mede's wholehearted involvement with her community, teaching singing to both children and adults, and various grassroots volunteering initiatives. It features collaborations with local artists, Mede's singing students, as well as fellow Eastern European contemporary artists Martyna Basta and Wojciech Rusin.

Adela Mede embellishes carefully crafted songs with minimalist and folklore influences, but also embraces more experimental approaches. The result is a collection of quite varied yet consistent pieces which highlight Mede's proficiency as a singer, arranger, producer and improviser. It is a grounded, confident next step for the Bratislava-based artist. Whether her vocals are naked, heavily processed, warped and reversed, or looped and layered; whether the production is sparse and minimalist or overwhelming and swampy; none of that changes the fact that the gentle tentativeness of her debut is gone. This is “Central European music”, at its most striking and meaningful: patient, determined, embracing both complexity and possibility.

A year and a half has passed since Slovak-Hungarian artist Adela Mede self-released her debut album 'Szabadság'. Its liner notes described it as "a navigation", a search through "the personal, familial, cultural, folkloric and geographic of her past and present." Her second album, 'Ne Lépj a Virágra' no longer searches; here, she puts down roots and delves deeper into the earthy reality of her home, Central Europe. Mede sings in three languages with newfound conviction and grace – this is an album of profound faith and confidence in the potential of this fertile soil.
Composed and recorded during the last 18 months in Bratislava, Slovakia – a city where three countries meet, where the East and the West collide – 'Ne Lépj a Virárga' translates to "don't step on the flower". Its themes – budding potential, recognizing the beauty in the ordinary, solidarity, turning despair into hope – emerged through Mede's wholehearted involvement with her community, teaching singing to both children and adults, and various grassroots volunteering initiatives. It features collaborations with local artists, Mede's singing students, as well as fellow Eastern European contemporary artists Martyna Basta and Wojciech Rusin.
Adela Mede embellishes carefully crafted songs with minimalist and folklore influences, but also embraces more experimental approaches. The result is a collection of quite varied yet consistent pieces which highlight Mede's proficiency as a singer, arranger, producer and improviser. It is a grounded, confident next step for the Bratislava-based artist. Whether her vocals are naked, heavily processed, warped and reversed, or looped and layered; whether the production is sparse and minimalist or overwhelming and swampy; none of that changes the fact that the gentle tentativeness of her debut is gone. This is "Central European music", at its most striking and meaningful: patient, determined, embracing both complexity and possibility.
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Adela Mede is a Slovak-Hungarian artist who self-released her debut album Szabadság in early 2022 to critical acclaim. The album received glowing reviews in The Wire, The Quietus and Dazed, airplay on NTS, Resonance FM and BBC Radio 6, and was featured in The Quietus' Best albums from Central and Eastern Europe of 2022. Adela Mede has shared bills with artists such as Lucrecia Dalt, claire rousay, Dialect (UK tour) or Grand River in recent months and continues to perform and create site-specific sonic interventions.

Tiatoma' is a compound latinised spelling of 'τι άτομα' [ti = what? • atoma = atoms/people], a Greek expression which is colloquially used for multiple purposes to show one is impressed, unimpressed or even surprised by people's behaviour. Its interpretation is dependent on the tone with which it's delivered.

The sounds on this record were unravelled by three individual groups of conglomerate atom particles currently experiencing 'life' as a correlational passage of time and space in human format. All this within the limited boundaries of our understanding. These beings came together to experience, express and document sentiments and reactive happenings within real moments spent in the same space interacting through sound.

Saber Rider and Dimitris Foken first met Dave De Rose during Fengaros Music Village (Cyprus, 2014) where he was tutoring a workshop. Unpredictably these grown up youngsters would be there for him to share both friendship and musical exhilaration as Agile Experiments embarked on the making of 'Athens' (Jan/Feb 2019). Together this trio amassed enough outstanding material to feature not only on the Ddr012 release but also to present here another whole batch of extremely lit and unique sounds from the sessions in the Greek capital.

Rider and Foken, who'd already been making fantastic music of their own, were particularly impressive with their use of on-the-fly sampling into lo-fi vintage synths, loop mangling, drone ambience, space, tone, lyrical melodies and precious noise. We are extremely lucky to be able to feature their uncompromising original sound on this release.

We hope that you will truly enjoy these minutes of off-the-cuff cooperative creativity. In good faith and love for people and music, Agile Experiments

The Works - one of the most famous pieces by brilliant American composer Alvin Curran - was not created by will and direct purpose but, as the composer himself states, as a “providential accident” which is to say quite organically. Combining piano and voice with found sound and a custom-built Serge modular synthesizer, “The Works” is a slowly developing piece where space and ambient tape are eventually overtaken by raga-esque chanting and frenetic piano playing, where synthesizer washes become full-on workouts all leading to a coda where the listener is “finally carried off on the wheels of the Berlin U-Bahn.” Curran - whose initial training and musical education was as a pianist - had been living in Roma, Italy, in the mid-‘70s returning to his roots and performing regularly in cocktail lounges on Via Veneto. It was this return to piano and vocals that became the genesis for The Works. In relearning the piano, a five-note “motive” took hold. Added to this was “a recording I had made of our 14 year old dachshund Caspar just before he died. It was, in fact, a love song which he persisted in singing all day after meeting a lovely bitch in heat in Piazza Navona. This I knew would be the beginning of the piece.” As the piece expands further the listener will hear “cows munching grass, the Rome-Florence express train, a horse-fly caught against a window pane, my footsteps approaching a Roman fountain and later going up the steps of my old studio, cicadas, an Amsterdam calliope, a tin can being kicked, and a series of sounds from La Serra di Lerici.” Though “The Works” has been performed in many incarnations over the years, it’s this performance - captured on February 24, 1980, and originally released that same year by the short-lived Italian avant-garde label Fore - that is the definitive version, and one of the finest recordings ever made by the celebrated composer.

Born in Girona, Spain and based in Berlin since 2019, Alex Busse' Santacruz's Ameeva project previously came to life on the Lowless music label in 2020 and the album 'Fractura del SueNo'. His live set for the 9128 Birthday event took these experimental electronics to a deeper, more personal level, weaving friends' samples and conversations into a rich tapestry of drone and field recordings, creating an immersive and enveloping 40-minute narrative. That's been captured here by the 9128 label, which aims to document significant live performances by artists that previously performed on the 9128.live platform, with results that are imaginative and impressionist, like clouds of synths and other soundscapes with the serene relentlessness and sense of purpose as molten lava moving down the mountainside.

Anklepants introduces his brand new album for Detroit Undergroud, a collection of ten cuts, made with his very own arsenal of digital and hardware toys, most of them self made and customised for his purposes. This multi faceted artist creates a blend of twisted ryhthms, synthetic melodies and weird textures and noises, yet danceable stuff but with heavy focus in experimentation and risk.

Following on from this year's brooding debut, Anthony Linell gathers a storming double 12" of material to depth charge vacant participants and lilting movers. Leaving aside his well established Abdulla Rashim moniker, Emerald Fluorescents feels like an agile side-step into heavier terrain with a renewed sense of purpose. Scattered fractal stabs revolve around quietly furious low-end fit outs with enough sharp edges to let you know it's someone else's space.

Where to Now? are proud to present the debut LP from Peru based and born Areliz Ramos. ‘Frio’ seeks to explore the common reality of isolation and melancholy which exists when stepping away from our roots towards a solo global exploration of culture and place. Recorded between spells in London, Berlin, and Lima, 'Frio’ attempts to soak up experimental & electronic subcultural scenes within these environments, resulting in a body of work which seeks to connect, longs to feel, and yearns to regain a sense of belonging.

Previously recording under the moniker ‘Milkshlk’ (Female Pressure, Napp), Areliz’s sound shuffles all over the place - from occupying the same deep haze, ethereal, smudged, and downtempo space championed by the likes of Boards of Canada, Odd Nosdam, Seefeel etc, to carrying an unassuming boom bap sensibility and confidence at times, to stepping back and opening widely to experimentation, extended field recordings and tonal subtleties.

The LP begins with title track ‘Frio’, an orchestral and meditative movement in which inaudible, hushed conversations flicker in and out of focus, before the playful piano samples of ‘This Track Is For You’ swing into motion, with a prolonged sampling of a loving ‘pep talk’ from father to daughter welcoming jazzwise flutters and swirling melodies, eventually collapsing under a wave of distortion.

‘Euduvin’ switches focus to what we can only assume is a nod to the warmth and belonging felt for Areliz’s native Peru home, where a long form field recording captures distant nature, environment, and hushed intimate conversations, floating below a swell of warm ambience. All this is intentionally juxtaposed with the start of the next piece ‘Sang’, instantly evoking anxiety and dread, signifying the disconnect between the comfort of ‘home’ and the disconnect felt when moving on… ‘Samos’ develops into a melee of dizzying underwater bass and percussive experimentation, before returning to a wandering dread.

‘Emails’ tells tales of the heart and communication breakdown over what could be a lost cut from Los Angeles era Flying Lotus before we hear the most unnerving cut on the record ‘Kabal’, again conveying isolation and unease via it’s shards of sharp tone and off kilter rhythm, building into a emotive, heads down clash.

‘Driller 1’ sees the return of Areliz’s more exuberant side, where dense, straight faced ambience skittishly flips to sudden joyful bass dives and unpretentious sample phases. ‘Ava’ rounds us out with the hum of Cicada’s, drifting throughout the album’s closing 8 minutes, becoming buried under layers of hopeful texture, and serene warmth.

Ash Ra Tempel is the eponymous debut studio album by the Krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel.
It features guitarist Manuel Göttsching with drummer Klaus Schulze and bassist Hartmut Enke.
Engineered by Conny Plank it was recorded in March 1971 and released in June 1971 on Ohr Records.

Much has been written about the record and band.

Having finished a first musical chapter with their Steeple Chase Bluesband and still at very young age of only 17 and 18 years old Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke met Klaus Schulze. Together they started to write and and compose what, to many,
became one the holy grails of Psychedelic Rock and early Electronic Music -
the German variant which was later also named "Krautrock":

Ash Ra Tempel´s self-titled first album "Ash Ra Tempel".

"The trio of Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke decided to abandon conventional composition and song writing, in favour of free-form improvising and developing a new musical language. As such, they became notorious for jams that could exceed 30 minutes." Says Discogs. "Some of these recordings can be found on Manuel Göttsching´s "The Private Tapes" releases", which will be re-released on MG.ART as well, following this edition.

"Krautrocksampler" author Julian Cope mentioned it to be "… one of the greatest rock 'n' roll LPs ever made." (Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage | Unsung | Reviews | Ash Ra Tempel - Ash Ra Tempel". 15 March 2000.)

AllMusic called the album "both astonishingly prescient and just flat out good, a logical extension of the space-jam-freakout ethos into rarified realms."

Here we would like the Band to be heard, for what can easily be said as the first time in 50+ years, with the exception of some early Journalists for whom the young Manuel Göttsching wrote a statement of intent (the original text can be found inside this edition) as following:

"Our musical concept is based on a combination of blues rock and delicate collages of electronic sound. These two elements should remain inseparable. And in their complex unity, the different musical philosophies of each musician find a common sweet spot. Our music is a permanently impulsive experience left to develop as it will, starting from a common fixed point of departure. This is where the difficulty of the music begins: No standardized formulation of our music can and should be possible. Only the constant reaction within the band can determine the musical result. And this requires constant listening with full concentration on the part of the creators. The idea of a particular musician will be - if flexible enough - absorbed by the others, transposed to their own instrument, and reflected back into the music as an individual contribution. This reciprocity within the band is then transferred over to the audience. And this process means that their reaction is not only a contribution to the end result; it actually makes them jointly responsible for the creation of the final musical product.
…
On our album, the track "Amboss" represents the first layer. Conventional instruments communicate familiar music which is in part expanded through electronic means. In the second track of the album - "Traummaschine" - the actual basic sound approach is dissolved into an electronic Nirvana which no longer allows the concrete identification of actual instruments. Innocent, virgin listening, free from any and every association, can finally begin - and the music can be absorbed and processed free from the limitations of categorization. That is the purpose of our music: To convey freedom without any predetermined criteria or traditions.

Thank you for your attention."
(Taken from the original A-R-T Bio 1970)

Hartmut Enke, Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze aka. Ash Ra Tempel travelled to Hamburg in March 1971 to record their debut, with assistance of another Icon, legendary engineer Conny Plank.
The rest is history.

Transparent Vinyl, Sticker, 50th Anniversary RE-Edition, first-ever official reissue on vinyl since 1975,
Re-Cut carefully overseen by Manuel Göttsching.

TRACKLIST:

A. "Amboss" 19:40
B. "Traummaschine" 25:24

Ash Ra Tempel is the eponymous debut studio album by the Krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel.
It features guitarist Manuel Göttsching with drummer Klaus Schulze and bassist Hartmut Enke.
Engineered by Conny Plank it was recorded in March 1971 and released in June 1971 on Ohr Records.
This 50Th Anniversary Album will be Released in Memoriam of all the Musical Contributors to this Release and on Manuel Göttsching´s MG.ART label.
It´s the fourth and headlining edition in this series and was finalised, carefully overseen by Manuel Göttsching himself in the late Autumn of 2022.

Much has been written about the record and band.

Having finished a first musical chapter with their Steeple Chase Bluesband and still at very young age of only 17 and 18 years old Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke met Klaus Schulze. Together they started to write and and compose what, to many,
became one the holy grails of Psychedelic Rock and early Electronic Music -
the German variant which was later also named "Krautrock":

Ash Ra Tempel´s self-titled first album "Ash Ra Tempel".

"The trio of Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke decided to abandon conventional composition and song writing, in favour of free-form improvising and developing a new musical language. As such, they became notorious for jams that could exceed 30 minutes." Says Discogs. "Some of these recordings can be found on Manuel Göttsching´s "The Private Tapes" releases", which will be re-released on MG.ART as well, following this edition.

"Krautrocksampler" author Julian Cope mentioned it to be "… one of the greatest rock 'n' roll LPs ever made." (Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage | Unsung | Reviews | Ash Ra Tempel - Ash Ra Tempel". 15 March 2000.)

AllMusic called the album "both astonishingly prescient and just flat out good, a logical extension of the space-jam-freakout ethos into rarified realms."

Here we would like the Band to be heard, for what can easily be said as the first time in 50+ years, with the exception of some early Journalists for whom the young Manuel Göttsching wrote a statement of intent (the original text can be found inside this edition) as following:

"Our musical concept is based on a combination of blues rock and delicate collages of electronic sound. These two elements should remain inseparable. And in their complex unity, the different musical philosophies of each musician find a common sweet spot. Our music is a permanently impulsive experience left to develop as it will, starting from a common fixed point of departure. This is where the difficulty of the music begins: No standardized formulation of our music can and should be possible. Only the constant reaction within the band can determine the musical result. And this requires constant listening with full concentration on the part of the creators. The idea of a particular musician will be - if flexible enough - absorbed by the others, transposed to their own instrument, and reflected back into the music as an individual contribution. This reciprocity within the band is then transferred over to the audience. And this process means that their reaction is not only a contribution to the end result; it actually makes them jointly responsible for the creation of the final musical product.
…
On our album, the track "Amboss" represents the first layer. Conventional instruments communicate familiar music which is in part expanded through electronic means. In the second track of the album - "Traummaschine" - the actual basic sound approach is dissolved into an electronic Nirvana which no longer allows the concrete identification of actual instruments. Innocent, virgin listening, free from any and every association, can finally begin - and the music can be absorbed and processed free from the limitations of categorization. That is the purpose of our music: To convey freedom without any predetermined criteria or traditions.

Thank you for your attention."
(Taken from the original A-R-T Bio 1970)

Hartmut Enke, Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze aka. Ash Ra Tempel travelled to Hamburg in March 1971 to record their debut, with assistance of another Icon, legendary engineer Conny Plank.
The rest is history.

Turning their gaze to the buoyant culture of wyrd, modernist German folk music, Quindi welcome a spectacularly idiosyncratic offering from Johannes Schebler, aka Baldruin. Bewildering narrative twists, high drama and intricate delicacy make Mosaike der Imagination an engrossing listen from the outset, as baroque atmospheres and tumbledown drums intertwine with tactile string plucks and needlepoint synthesis in an authoritative bridging of ancient and hypermodern sonic sensibilities.
Schebler's catalogue as Baldruin is extensive, reaching back to the late 00s and covering a lot of ground through cassette albums on respected underground labels like SicSic, A Giant Fern and Lullabies For Insomniacs. Meanwhile, his work has been recognised as part of a broader movement of experimental electronic music in Germany taking inspiration from folk traditions, as documented on last year's essential Bureau B compilation, Gespensterland. Beyond his solo work, Schebler also works with Jani Hirvonen as Grykë Pyje (mappa), and both collaborate with Paul Wilson as Yayoba (Not Not Fun). Christian Schoppik of leading dark folk project Brannten Schnüre joins him as Freundliche Kreisel (STROOM). It's a tangled, fascinating and evocative sound world which Mosaike der Imagination offers a compelling window into.
No two tracks on the album follow the same pattern or palette, whether gliding through the Giallo synth undulations and post rock tonal arcs of 'Stimme des Wegelagerers' or spelling out miasmic incantations through flickering flames on 'Aus dem Feuer, aus dem Licht'. 'Hinein, hinaus, hinüber' revolves around meditative drum mantras and cascading melodic phrasing, densely layered and evolving with purpose. 'Gemeinsam hindurch' flicks between swooping strings and pizzicato plucks in a purely romantic expression of orchestration, 'Mit verbundenen Augen' is a bewildering choral voice study and 'Im Sternstrom' revels in ecstatic synth arpeggios. Nothing can be predicted except the vibrancy and clarity of Schebler's vision.
It's a vision which extends to the front cover artwork for Mosaike der Imagination — a glorious tapestry created by Finnish artist Jan Anderzén, with a responding design and layout from Schebler adorning the rear sleeve.
Stepping to the side of the cosy daydream reveries that inhabit much of the Quindi output, Mosaike der Imagination indulges the label's penchant for sophistication in a freakily fascinating new framework from the heart of an exciting movement in experimental folk music.

After a near decade of solo and collaborative projects, Up in Air is Ben Pritchard's most confident foray into songwriting yet, nestling lopsided experimentation into a bed of lowslung blues and reflective folk.

Up in Air is sewn from threads of everyday life: trails of thought, small stories and conversations with his daughter. Collecting, layering and condensing the world around him, his musings spill out in a palimpsest that renders both the material and metaphysical world. From describing a time where he inadvertently found himself on a hunting trip, recalling stories from doing role play and drawing together with his daughter, or scribing observations on the strange dedications people make in their lives, he explores the banal and the fantastical; the whimsical and the serious; the light and dark. Each line, aphorism or vignette carries with it weight that is looking to free itself, to embrace the impossibility of life distilled into simpler parameters.

Ben's music acts as a motor for his words, weaving wistful melodic mantras and creaking guitar lines in and out as each song finds its feet. Although the album finds a rich array of influences dancing in an awkward balance, the emotive register of the music drinks from the fountain of the US rock continuum, with Supreme Dicks' uneasy indie, Low's slow unfurling grace and Neil Youngs' heart-worn drawl lifting each song to new heights. Expanding on this soundworld are collaborators Sholto Dobie (self-built organs) and bassist Otto Willberg, who provide drones, dissonant jolts and detuned paths for the music to open itself, but also curl into its own. Sounds are folded into one another, birthing new shapes, layers and sonic possibilities.

Ben describes the album as "permeated by the sense that came from being around this sort of connection to the world where everything is immediate and fundamental." The album is representative of this shift inwards: on his own, socially, as a parent. But with that it also represents a confidence to deal with everything. The album is an excavation, both finding strange joy in simple findings and an unburdening himself of everything else, letting every thought and feeling whisks itself away up in the air.'

Fielding Hope (curator, Cafe Oto, London)

American singer-songwriter, poet, and photographer Thomas Meluch, known musically as Benoît Pioulard, returns with his most structured and vocal release to date. Titled »Eidetic,« a word denoting the ability to recall mental images with extraordinarily rich precision, the album presents unprecedented clarity and vitality for Benoît Pioulard. To access its thematic ground, Meluch looked inward with an affinity towards the people he loves during a period marked by his move from Seattle to Brooklyn in 2019. The resulting work engages with the universe's unflinching mortality and, as he says, »the ways it has modified and improved my relationships, especially with family.« Embodied by the creek, leaves, and ferns of the cover photography — taken in Michigan’s Burchfield Park, where he and his dad used to hike and »muse on existence« — the music glistens and unfurls with the flow of life he’s come to know. »Eidetic« is the culmination of Meluch's craft both as a producer and writer. An evocative sonic vocabulary meets deft lyrical introspection, articulated with the nuance, vulnerability, and confidence of a longtime artist hitting a stride. Meluch has continually refined, redefined, and adjusted the focus of his gentle pop project over the last 20 years. Recorded primarily with guitar, tapes, and voice — and spanning labels with albums for Kranky, Morr Music, Beacon Sound, and Past Inside the Present — his catalog flows seamlessly between ambient improvisation and pop composition. Much like the analog photos that often accompany his releases, songs can feel dreamily softened and distant, and others beautifully vivid and detailed. 2021 full-length »Bloodless« found Meluch deep in droning decay, expressive yet wordless. With »Eidetic,« he swings back to sharpened forms. Lush banks of treated guitar and synth brush against hushed percussion; there is mist in the distance, but everything up close is intricately constructed and radiant. Meluch's voice is notably forward in the mix — a warm and calming tenor, a harmonic coo more than a whisper — ever-observant and actively processing. To record much of the album, Meluch filled a cabin in rural Maine with his usual setup of simple percussion, a couple of Fender electrics, and a parlor guitar made by his friend who does bespoke luthier work. The modest utility is what he knows best, and here he pushes the output to its most pristine potential. »Eidetic« opens in a swirl of familiar haze; »Margaret Murie« eases listeners in, as lush and verdant as the landscapes conserved by its famed namesake. With the setting established, Meluch, the narrator, enters the foreground with »Crux,« a tender piece written about finding new motivations in a new city. »We covet this rare green hue / Here at the farthest point from home,« he sings above a reassuring pattern of strums and percussion. Meluch's prose shines on the swiftly-moving »Nameless,« inspired by the neurological effects that came with the antiquated practice of manufacturing mercury mirrors; »folks would slowly go insane while looking into their own reflections every day,« he adds. The idea informs a series of surreal abstractions before everything drops out in the final minute, and we are left free-floating in eerie nothingness. Across the album, labyrinthine lyrical ponderings scatter with dazzling imagery, artfully blurring scenes from world history with Meluch's more personal, present-day. The propulsive and earnest »Thursday Night« catches his mind overly active and too stoned, riffing on black holes and songwriting itself. »Halve« references the splitting of the atom, what he considers »the beginning of man's downfall,« and the unrealized initiative proposed by the US government that would have created 'nuclear refuges' in its national parks. Meluch's loved ones weave throughout; »Tet« holds his father's experience in Vietnam and its lasting effects. »Lillian Isola« touches on his maternal grandmother's spinal curvature, and »Pastel Dust« navigates the wake of his cat, who died on New Year's Eve 2020. At first blush, Meluch's atmospheric and melodic sensibilities resonate purely in their own right. Upon closer meditation, his ability to render stories — many of which surround human tragedy, misfortune, and understanding — through the prism of his poetry makes »Eidetic« even more rewarding.

American singer-songwriter, poet, and photographer Thomas Meluch, known musically as Benoît Pioulard, returns with his most structured and vocal release to date. Titled »Eidetic,« a word denoting the ability to recall mental images with extraordinarily rich precision, the album presents unprecedented clarity and vitality for Benoît Pioulard. To access its thematic ground, Meluch looked inward with an affinity towards the people he loves during a period marked by his move from Seattle to Brooklyn in 2019. The resulting work engages with the universe's unflinching mortality and, as he says, »the ways it has modified and improved my relationships, especially with family.« Embodied by the creek, leaves, and ferns of the cover photography — taken in Michigan’s Burchfield Park, where he and his dad used to hike and »muse on existence« — the music glistens and unfurls with the flow of life he’s come to know. »Eidetic« is the culmination of Meluch's craft both as a producer and writer. An evocative sonic vocabulary meets deft lyrical introspection, articulated with the nuance, vulnerability, and confidence of a longtime artist hitting a stride. Meluch has continually refined, redefined, and adjusted the focus of his gentle pop project over the last 20 years. Recorded primarily with guitar, tapes, and voice — and spanning labels with albums for Kranky, Morr Music, Beacon Sound, and Past Inside the Present — his catalog flows seamlessly between ambient improvisation and pop composition. Much like the analog photos that often accompany his releases, songs can feel dreamily softened and distant, and others beautifully vivid and detailed. 2021 full-length »Bloodless« found Meluch deep in droning decay, expressive yet wordless. With »Eidetic,« he swings back to sharpened forms. Lush banks of treated guitar and synth brush against hushed percussion; there is mist in the distance, but everything up close is intricately constructed and radiant. Meluch's voice is notably forward in the mix — a warm and calming tenor, a harmonic coo more than a whisper — ever-observant and actively processing. To record much of the album, Meluch filled a cabin in rural Maine with his usual setup of simple percussion, a couple of Fender electrics, and a parlor guitar made by his friend who does bespoke luthier work. The modest utility is what he knows best, and here he pushes the output to its most pristine potential. »Eidetic« opens in a swirl of familiar haze; »Margaret Murie« eases listeners in, as lush and verdant as the landscapes conserved by its famed namesake. With the setting established, Meluch, the narrator, enters the foreground with »Crux,« a tender piece written about finding new motivations in a new city. »We covet this rare green hue / Here at the farthest point from home,« he sings above a reassuring pattern of strums and percussion. Meluch's prose shines on the swiftly-moving »Nameless,« inspired by the neurological effects that came with the antiquated practice of manufacturing mercury mirrors; »folks would slowly go insane while looking into their own reflections every day,« he adds. The idea informs a series of surreal abstractions before everything drops out in the final minute, and we are left free-floating in eerie nothingness. Across the album, labyrinthine lyrical ponderings scatter with dazzling imagery, artfully blurring scenes from world history with Meluch's more personal, present-day. The propulsive and earnest »Thursday Night« catches his mind overly active and too stoned, riffing on black holes and songwriting itself. »Halve« references the splitting of the atom, what he considers »the beginning of man's downfall,« and the unrealized initiative proposed by the US government that would have created 'nuclear refuges' in its national parks. Meluch's loved ones weave throughout; »Tet« holds his father's experience in Vietnam and its lasting effects. »Lillian Isola« touches on his maternal grandmother's spinal curvature, and »Pastel Dust« navigates the wake of his cat, who died on New Year's Eve 2020. At first blush, Meluch's atmospheric and melodic sensibilities resonate purely in their own right. Upon closer meditation, his ability to render stories — many of which surround human tragedy, misfortune, and understanding — through the prism of his poetry makes »Eidetic« even more rewarding.

Naucke traveled to EMS with the express purpose of creating an album in the spirit of 70s academic synthesizer music, but knew he was going to build it out of exploration. When he thought about EMS residencies, he didn’t think of albums recorded entirely there, and for his tenure, he wanted to flip the script. For EMS Hallucinations, Naucke recorded several hours of audio using Ems’ Buchla 200 and their Serge Modular system. The result is a meditative, immersive collection imbued with the pioneering ethos of artists like Pauline Oliveros, Ruth White, Morton Subotnick, and others, but draws from a more contemporary palette - dance music, especially.

Evoking the geography and spiritual energy of the west coast while showcasing the producer’s growing confidence in both carefully crafted dance productions and expansive sonic arrangements. It’s been brewing for a long, long time and it holds so much information. This is the crowning burst of harmonious song, an opus, a cosmic regal song.

Diapason Rex is the second LP by Oakland-based producer Brogan Bentley on Leaving Records. Picking up right where Bentley’s 2014 LP The Snake left off, Diapason Rex’s songs evoke the geography and spiritual energy of the west coast while showcasing the producer’s growing confidence in both carefully crafted dance productions and expansive sonic arrangements. Bentley states, “It’s been brewing for a long, long time and it holds so much information. This is the crowning burst of harmonious song for me, my opus, my cosmic regal song.”

Haunting, swelling album-opener “Ecstasy” sets the record’s tone, where a bed of meditative pads are confronted by a driving breakbeat, heavy layers of soulful vocals and hard-edged synths. Almost defying categorization, the sound of Diapason Rex is bracingly personal. Bentley states, “I’m so particular in so many aspects, and I’m so certain of what I want things to sound like, that I’ll go after it with everything I’ve got. Between the two places of pure experimentation and total intention, is where this album was born from… I really feel like every single song is a crystal.”

Club-ready tracks like the stuttering, sample-slicing “Work” and the elegant yet pained “Phantom” highlight Diapason Rex’s production value. Bentley’s attention to sonic detail is deep-seated; according to the producer, “For me, music is my teacher, and specifically bass.… This stuff is really supposed to acclimate the energy centers in your body.

Diapason Rex is thematically heavy, with late album cut “The Keeper” occupying a special place for Bentley. He states, “’The next day I found out that my friend had gotten hit and killed by a drunk driver. I think it was my friend showing me stuff from the other side about where we go… I sat with this piece of music for a year and a half, writing and producing it. I recorded that the day after my grandma died - I can hear the tears in my eyes from when I was recording those vocals. . It’s stuff like that. For that song to have such a connection to the afterlife, I couldn’t have imagined that going into it. I wasn’t thinking, ‘I’m going to make this song that describes being guided into some eternal space by some all-knowing hand,’ but that’s kind of what comes through when I hear this stuff now, because I’m just a human. We’re stuck down here on this mortal plane, but through music, something spiritual and sacred and timeless is transmitted.”

From Francesco: "After first performing together at Sonar Festival with what was essentially a live version of our respective "B.O.A.T.S." and "Adamant" albums, Thomas and I decided to expand on these ideas for something more broad and improvisation-centric. After months in the studio drinking nothing but amaretto and working on new music for this purpose, our new live experiment (now simply called CW/A) was ready. The reception on these shows was so (thankfully) positive that Vakant eventually pressured us into releasing some sections as tracks. "Conducting the Method" is nothing other than a sample of what this new project is about: a collection of three excerpts taken from this year's performances. To round things off, we invited over our friends Dead Heat for a reinterpretation of one of our tracks. We can state with confidence that we are excited these tracks are no longer confined to our club and festival performances and can't wait for everyone to hear them. Hopefully you will enjoy them as much as we enjoy playing them out. "

Reveries is Zach Frizzell, Marc Ertel and Damien Duque’s first album for over three years, and follows the success of their debut Liberamente. Together, the trio craft delicately textured and slowly unfurling sonic vistas, occupying a unique aural domain that lies between guitar-driven drone music and modern classical compositions.With their individual projects they are incredibly prolific, but Dawn Chorus releases are few and far between and Reveries represents a refined evolution, leaning more heavily toward string-based arrangements and compositional virtuosity. It is the very essence of what they are calling “dronegaze”, pushing the boundaries of the ambient genre while embracing a profound auditory expression. According to the trio, the six, long tracks on Reveries are “heavily reliant on improvisation, intuition, and allowing the compositions to exist in their own moment; the aim was a feeling of fluidity and a sense that every instrument has its place and purpose”. And they’re right. The opening title track emerges quietly in a swirl of strings; lead single ‘Deus’ eases its fittingly reverent grain into a glorious minor-key immensity; ‘Cadere’ pulls together a cast of orchestral instruments into a comforting devotional; ‘Somnium’ plays out in diffuse, shimmering melodic rounds; ‘Vale’ blossoms from a pair of sparse, alternating chord swells; and ‘Aufero’ is the perfect coda that reprises the low-end rumble of the album’s overture before being swept away on a sea of dissonance. “We live in an era of infinite distraction,” says Zach Frizzell, “where often the most valuable thing you can find is a respite for the soul.” How right he is. This, truly, is music from a higher place.

Dettinger’s Intershop and Oasis have long been held, by many fans of ambient and electronic music, to be some of the finest albums in their field. Produced by the mysterious Olaf Dettinger, about whom not much is publicly known, they were some of the earliest full-lengths released by the then-nascent Kompakt, and in many ways, they both articulated and defined the sound that would come to be known as Pop Ambient, while also existing, somehow, to the leftfield of any clearly recognisable genre.

Beautiful, sui generis works, it is a rare pleasure to see them being reissued on vinyl for a new generation of listeners to embrace. Originally released on CD only in 1999, Intershop was Kompakt’s first artist full-length. The music here simmers and broods, with opulent banks of tone marking out territory for rhythms that seem to be built from the clacking detritus of technology – hisses, thunks, knocks. Bass is deployed carefully, each drop a dubbed-out depth charge; drones spin and spiral, warping and weaving between the beats.

Oasis, released in 2000, refined the palette that Dettinger had explored on its predecessor. A blurred crusade of ambient texturology, its unassuming patterns, and subtle, incremental dynamics, admit to real beauty, and a kind of abstract sensuality that you don’t often experience with music that is, perhaps, similarly tooled, but not as poetic. Through seemingly simple gestures – whether lushly expansive repetitions, hyper-acute tremolo tones, or ear-tickling rhythms – it builds complex emotional resonance. It’s no surprise to discover Oasis is held in high esteem by artists like Panda Bear of Animal Collective, who once said of Dettinger, “For us, he was the dude.”

There is, of course, other music to know Dettinger by, too – his three excellent EPs for Kompakt, Blond (1998), Puma and Totentanz (1999), the latter of which, Michael Mayer once argued, “invented dubstep.” There is also a small, yet graceful run of compilation contributions, many of which can be found on Kompakt’s Total and Pop Ambient series. All this music has plenty to recommend it, sharing a clarity of purpose, and a rare, human warmth and depth. But Intershop and Oasis are the releases that distil Dettinger’s singular vision, and allow him, should he wish, to claim his place as a modern master of ambient and electronic music.

Dettinger’s Intershop and Oasis have long been held, by many fans of ambient and electronic music, to be some of the finest albums in their field. Produced by the mysterious Olaf Dettinger, about whom not much is publicly known, they were some of the earliest full-lengths released by the then-nascent Kompakt, and in many ways, they both articulated and defined the sound that would come to be known as Pop Ambient, while also existing, somehow, to the leftfield of any clearly recognisable genre.

Beautiful, sui generis works, it is a rare pleasure to see them being reissued on vinyl for a new generation of listeners to embrace. Originally released on CD only in 1999, Intershop was Kompakt’s first artist full-length. The music here simmers and broods, with opulent banks of tone marking out territory for rhythms that seem to be built from the clacking detritus of technology – hisses, thunks, knocks. Bass is deployed carefully, each drop a dubbed-out depth charge; drones spin and spiral, warping and weaving between the beats.

Oasis, released in 2000, refined the palette that Dettinger had explored on its predecessor. A blurred crusade of ambient texturology, its unassuming patterns, and subtle, incremental dynamics, admit to real beauty, and a kind of abstract sensuality that you don’t often experience with music that is, perhaps, similarly tooled, but not as poetic. Through seemingly simple gestures – whether lushly expansive repetitions, hyper-acute tremolo tones, or ear-tickling rhythms – it builds complex emotional resonance. It’s no surprise to discover Oasis is held in high esteem by artists like Panda Bear of Animal Collective, who once said of Dettinger, “For us, he was the dude.”

There is, of course, other music to know Dettinger by, too – his three excellent EPs for Kompakt, Blond (1998), Puma and Totentanz (1999), the latter of which, Michael Mayer once argued, “invented dubstep.” There is also a small, yet graceful run of compilation contributions, many of which can be found on Kompakt’s Total and Pop Ambient series. All this music has plenty to recommend it, sharing a clarity of purpose, and a rare, human warmth and depth. But Intershop and Oasis are the releases that distil Dettinger’s singular vision, and allow him, should he wish, to claim his place as a modern master of ambient and electronic music.

Reissue of this cult 1972 album which featured on the infamous Nurse With Wound List.

During the long, dark hangover of the Summer of Love, the classically-trained Essex prodigy approached CBS Records with demo recordings. A forward-thinking A&R executive must have seen a potential revenue stream in Don Bradshaw-Leather's avant-classical noise. The artist was given an advance to record an album. He used the funds to create a large studio in Sussex with many instruments including an actual church organ. Here, on his own, without the use of any electronic sequencing, he recorded "Distance Between Us" using simply multitrack tape, layering each part of the composition. Upon hearing the product of their financial investment - four side-long tracks of blurry organ drones, frantic piano tinkling, and ritualistic percussion - CBS got cold feet.

The album was self-released on Bradshaw-Leather's own Distance imprint; a vanity label established for the sole purpose of releasing the album. The sleeve art is full of mysteries, from the misspelling of "Bradshaw" ("Bradsham"), to the coal-blackened visage of the bohemian madman on the cover (dbl himself?), to the rear photo collage depicting the same madman accosting a nude woman. The music isn't any less mysterious; shapeless symphonies of smeared-out Mellotron, tribal drums, and wordless vocals. Don Bradshaw-Leather passed away in the 90's.

Dylan Henner (AD 93, Phantom Limb) returns to Dauw with 'Performs Raymond Scott’s Soothing Sounds for Baby’, a new album where he reinterprets a selection of Raymond Scott’s iconic work originally released in 1962. Artwork is provided by Skrew Studio in reference to the original releases.

The contributions of Raymond Scott to our world are immeasurable and pioneering, and his records still sound totally unique. But one could say that, viewed through the lens of what we now understand to be "ambient" music, the meaning of his compositions have changed since their inception. Now, we (mistakenly or not) see them as archival or documentarian pieces preserving an era of early electronic music and the capabilities and limitations of the technology of its time. It has become an artefact, a means to an end. So, with huge reverence to Scott's foresight and genius, Dylan Henner wanted to recontextualise those same ideas into the mindset and studio of a musician in 2024, to create a version of what Scott left us that corresponds with Henner's own perception of this music's purpose: soothing baby. He returned to the original records only once or twice, transcribing melodies and taking notes on timbre, before setting off his own journey.

“I didn't want to take too much from Scott or his music, as it is untouchable, both creatively and culturally. But I wanted to offer my baby (and any babies whose parents play this record) something soothing and meaningful of my own.” Dylan Henner

The lauded krautrocking, global groove ensemble’s first album On maverick producer Madlib’s label. The late Christian Burchard, who founded the Embryo ensemble in 1969, loved the slogan Auf Auf, German for Up, Up, or Keep On Going. Anyone with anything more than a passing interest in the German Krautock scene of the 1970s and 1980s knows that Burchard followed that intent, all around the world, tirelessly seeking out new sounds and inspirations and creating a catalog of music unlike most anything else the world has ever heard. Madlib has often said Embryo is his favorite rock band. Of course the hip-hop-producer-with-the-deepest-musical-knowledge knows Embryo is more than just a rock band – but, for the purposes of these notes, let’s keep it simple. When Marja Burchard, Christan’s daughter, who grew up with Embryo and toured with them for years, took the reins of the ensemble after Christian’s death in 2018, she started recording what would become this album, over the course of two years, finishing it in the throes of the Covid pandemic in 2020. She approached Madlib and Egon, who had, years back, visited and jammed with Christian Burchard, and Embryo musicians Uve Mullrich, Roman Bunka and Jan Weissenfeldt, in a Bavarian wine cellar, with the idea to issue Auf Auf on Madlib Invazion. The reply was a resounding, definitive “yes.” So here is Marja’s take on the Embryo ethos, continuing with her father’s intrepid style, and leading the band in her own style. Auf Auf ranges from the deep, free-form jazz of “Alphorn Prayer” to modal music from Afghanistan on “Baran” to psychedelic-tinged jazz-rock of the title track Joining Marja are those like Embryo veterans Bunka, on oud and guitar, and Karl Hector and the Malcouns/Whitefield Brothers/Poets of Rhythm producer and guitarist Jan Weissenfeldt and others, including important players on the global scene from Afghanistan and Morocco.

This is a selection of previously unreleased tracks created at home by Enrico Serotti, without any purpose other than the fun of playing with new musical devices. The tracks date from 1983 to 1999. A pretty long time span, coinciding with the transition from analog to digital technology. Cover Art by Alessandro Pessoli.

Electroacoustic explorer Erik Enocksson consolidates his raging industrial noise and choral ambient urges
with a manacled grasp of quiet/loud dynamics and mournful melancholy, recommended listening if you’re
into Tongue Depressor, Kevin Drumm, Beatriz Ferreyra, Maja S. K. Ratkje, Vainio.
‘Räkna evighet som intet’ (‘Count eternity as nothing’) pits Enocksson’s mettle at the service of a palindromic
transition from ethereality to phantasmic facemelt terror and a choral sublime on the first part, into atonal
metal-on-metal wondering on the 2nd. It follows a course of releases for the Kning Disk, Release the Bats,
Posh Isolation and Irrlicht labels since 2007.
The choral sound du jour has been flung in every conceivable direction over the last few years, but is
here handled by an experienced hand, able to transition from hushed reverence to clanging brutality with
conviction and purpose. On the A-side, the sombre mood is gradually elevated by phased and pitched
transitions that grow with an urgent, metalic intensity, recalling recent work by Henry Birdsey and Zach
Rowden’s Tonge Depressor. On the flip, the mood is more industrial and aggressive, landing somewhere
between Kevin Drumm’s ‘Sheer Hellish Miasma’ and Mika Vainio’s analogue terror zone

A download code is included. ‘Neka Neka’ (on General Purpose) is the first solo release by multi-disciplinary artist, Ex Ponto (Ivan Mašic). Coming of age during the mid-90s Melbourne rave scene, Ivan was infected with music by the legendary Kate Bathgate on 3RRR community radio. Hearing music by the likes of Oliver Lieb, Will E Tell, HMC & and other producers of the time, an infection quickly turned into a music obsession that lives on today. In the following years Ivan would go on to manage one of Melbourne’s longest running record stores (Dixons Records) and in 2005 built a recording studio, aptly named The Womb. From 2005-15, he produced and played on over 20 albums for improvisation collective, Council of Elders and experimental, no-wave band, Wunderlust. ‘Neka Neka’ is a nod to ex-Yugoslavian experimentalists of the 80s (Rex Ilusivii, Kozmetika, Miha Kralj etc) and the thriving, late-night hedonism of Belgrade’s Club 20/44.

A limited edition of 150, the 12” will be available on clear vinyl in a full colour sleeve plus Riso Print of sleeve art, shrink wrapped plus download code. Exterior released the unique 'Plagued Streets Of Pity' EP via Hobbes Music back in January '19, picking up plaudits from Laurent Garnier, Avalon Emerson, JD Twitch, Mixmag and a few others. His music is some of the gnarliest and most confrontational the label has released and also some of the most exciting. Experimental without losing sight of dance floor dynamics, he manages to traverse genre boundaries while sounding coherent and like no one else out there. He's also one of the most exciting live performers we've seen - and the crowd always laps up his set, which gets better every time.

Exterior is the artist moniker of Edinburgh producer Doug MacDonald. The artistic mission is to bring together the formally disparate worlds of electronic club sonics with elements of live instrumentation. Exterior’s pathway coalesced from years spent performing in bands and nights spent on dancefloors. Guitar feedback and live drum eruptions provide a textural abrasion and a haunted, humane groove currently absent in much UK dance. Admittedly, the latter’s unshakable syncopation and melodic pressure inform the method of the former. The two approaches are synthesised most noticeably in live performance. The combination is now made manifest in Exerior’s debut album ‘umbilical Digital’.

The record is a playful, irreverent, propulsive long-player, underpinned by the emergent global latticework of connectedness. Umbilical Digital is an admission of the level of dependencies in contemporary music styles. This comes most noticeably in Fugazi-on-dancehall moment Orthodox Dreams, footwork and math-rock mashing oddity Tyranny OF Choice, or ritalin-addled robo-disco workout Populist. That the record is only eight tracks long and combines as many elements as it does, reflects Exterior’s artistic ambition in the process. The bedrock allowing this confidence has been road-testing the material live in Edinburgh venues, most overtly at local electronic institution The Bongo Club. Umbilical Digital features artwork by Exterior’s live visual artist collaborator, Panos Baras. Mastered by Keith 'Radioactive Man' Tenniswood (Curvepusher UK)

2022 repress

Leading lights of the neo ambient rhizome alongside Huerco S’ West Mineral label, Experiences Ltd has already amassed a cult following after just one release - ULLA’s ‘Tumbling Towards A Wall’, now returning to relay a sublime, probing debut of crackling, cross-continental communications from mdo, Ultrafog, and Nikolay Kozlov, aka Folder. Weft from dematerialised ambient tropes spooled between their respective bases in Kansas City, Tokyo, and Samara in Russia, ‘New Path’ slots fuzzily into an expanding prism of contemporary ambient music which echoes the purpose and effect of the original thing via traces of ‘90s/‘00s experimental techno and minimalist rhythms. Their sound effectively recalls K. Leimer’s systems music as much as the Pole’s eerie dub malfunctions; running a lushly frayed and decentralised style that embraces a gently psychedelic sort of chaos and lysergic, hallucinatory vision in an up-to-the-moment way shared by the likes of Huerco. S and uon.

Elle Andrews & Jon K’s MAL label pushes left with Foql’s new album of polyrhythmic sidewinders and blacklit electronics, edging into crankier spaces on a tense flux somewhere between Raime’s blasted-earth topographies and Anthony Manning’s crystalline FM sequences. Justyna Banaszczyk aka Foql was raised in the post-industrial decay of a city beloved by David Lynch for its abundant, knackered architecture (think ‘Eraserhead’, or run go check his warehouse photo studies). ‘Wehikuł’ translating to ‘Vehicle’, echoes its provenance and dark surreality across eight cuts of intricate post-techno pulses webbed with brooding synths that lend a fine new stripe of influence to MAL’s unpredictable ‘Rebel Music’ agenda, perfectly in step with its off-road vectors. Banaszczyk has been a part of her country’s grassroots underground for many years at this point, making music with a diverse cast of collaborators, co-founding the Oramics Collective and Radio Kapitał, running the Ignorantka space in Łódź, and helming the Pointless Geometry label. She brings this wide-ranging expertise and boundless motivation to her music, charging through her undulating productions with a rare sense of urgency and intensity. Foql patently has a taste for the tang of metallic tones too, coupled with a keen proprioceptive awareness of dubbed-out reverb in wide, vertiginous industrial space that manifests in her ductile, spatialised production. ‘Myrhh’ is a gummy introduction to her distinctive sound, a ruffled clash of bell-like synthesised sequences that harmonise with Anthony Manning’s brilliant (and still underrated) “Islets in Pink Polypropylene”. But Banaszczyk really lets rip with ‘Escapist Dubbbbb Machine’, building up from spliced drum hits into vaporous synth textures and pulsating electronics. Escapist dub is a good descriptor, finding a malleable mid-point that touches Tackhead to Sandwell District without treading into overused “dark” tropes. Her influences coalesce on the album’s title track, adding tense strings to jerky acidic dub, refining the rhythm into a disorientating, convulsive gallop. From here, Banaszczyk’s compositions hover around a similar thematic locale, interpreting her sense of turmoil but driving through it regardless with a relentless sense of purpose. ‘Twój Mózg’ adds fractal synth sequences over rolling loops and paranoid vocal snatches; ‘Shhhshh’ steps into the warehouse, syncopating industrial drums with a voice that’s begging for mental quietude; and ‘Divine Horseman’ dispenses with the rhythm altogether, connecting with Banaszczyk’s DIY noise roots and serrated foghorns over tape-saturated, microtonal rounds. Grim but not suffocating, “Wehikuł” is a flaming torch through inky black territory.

Ground Tactics returns to Midgar Sands for his second release on the IDM/Leftfield focused side catalogue of Midgar Records. Over the past five years, Midgar has developed its sound through inventive records by the likes of Wata Igarashi, Forest Drive West, Susumu Yokota, and Retina.it, among others. Having developed from a music producer into a sound alchemist and tuning fork practitioner, Ground Tactics (aka Colin Tobelem) is moving beyond sound, Ground Tactic’s treatments inspire the addition of symbolic values in life – devoted to the purpose of seeking deeper meaning and knowledge of one’s self, to serve in the process of humanity’s transcendence. In a world uniting for self-reflection as a necessary step to spark our precious virtues into Light, Reality Implant symbolizes the start of a techno-prophecy: introducing the coming of a new era in which multiple realities and timelines merge together.

Facta & K-LONE’s Wisdom Teeth imprint continues its busy schedule of 10 year celebrations with the debut LP by H TO O: a new collaborative project by Japanese ambient artists H. Takahashi and Kohei Oyamada. Set across six distinct movements, the LP maps the different stages of the cosmic cycle through a series of dynamic ambient set pieces: from the exponential expansion of the universe 7 in its infancy - here invoked by the bright, chiming album opener ‘Inflation’ - through to its inevitable collapse and rebirth, captured by the record’s driving, ominous closer, ‘Ever’. The record started life in Takahashi’s hands, initially intended as a solo follow-up to his acclaimed 2018 LP, Escapism. The Kankyō Records founder shared his early sketches with friend and collaborator Oyamada, who began to play with the arrangements, taking the work in an experimental new direction. Naturally the project evolved into a cooperative effort, and its final form is the result of an honest and fluid back-and-forth between the two artists. The collaboration marks a considerable shift in energy to the artists’ previous works - most of all in its foregrounded use of rhythm. Where Escapism was built from a series of gently lilting, dream-like vignettes, each movement of Cycle has a clear sense of forward momentum and purpose. Each composition builds from a set of sparse, meandering elements into something dense, cinematic and, at points, discordant. Although Cycle is at heart an ambient record, there is a club-informed feeling of forward motion running through the record, placing it in a similar sonic world to the beatless-but-rhythmic ambient techno of artists like Barker, Lorenzo Senni and Sunareht. Delicate and dramatic in equal measure, Cycle is a vital and exciting debut dedicated to the building of worlds - and to their eventual and inevitable dissolution.

Dedicated 21st Century polymath Kay Logan continues to expand her soundworld in every direction at once with her Helena Celle alias. A maximalist internal landscape of broken Jungle patterns, distorted synths and heavily warped instrumentation bent out of cognisance, »If You Can’t Handle You At Your Worst, Then I Don’t Deserve Me At My Best« is Logan’s most danceable, most fun and most gloriously congealed record to date.

Conceived in part as a response to her 2016 debut release »If I Can’t Handle Me At My Best, You Don’t Deserve You At Your Worst,« 2023’s update employs similar principles (degrading technology, the joy of chance, an outsider’s gaze onto the dance floor, an embracing of the occult) to delirious effect. If »I Can’t Handle« was lo fi and fragile in its technoid recasting of dance music, here Logan’s confidence allows a frantic playfulness that retains the spontaneity of all her output. It’s the work of a creative spirit revelling in the possibilities of sound, rhythm, texture and pattern.

Helena Celle’s music opens up psychic space in front of the listener and invites them in. In this world, sounds and tropes once recognisable are rendered fractal, spectral and continually melting in and out of recognition. Simply put, Helena Celle might be detouring Drum & Bass, Techno and Breakbeat with a prankster’s grin but the result is pure ecstasy crushed into a part of the listener’s consciousness hitherto untroubled.

Since her 2016 debut, Logan has released music as Time Binding Ensemble, Otherworld, in groups Anxiety and Herbert Powell and myriad variations on the Helena Celle moniker. This album is a riposte to her debut and updates its principles. Joyful, degraded Jungle breaks, Cyberpunk synth meltdown, noise solos, true head music, like the furthest Aphex Twin being deep friend in a Glasgow backwater.

Temples of Jura is proud to present ‘The Great Beyond’, the ninth studio album from Ilija Rudman. The concept of the album is the afterlife with words from Nikola Tesla, Slavoj Zizek, Jim Morrison, JF Kennedy, Charles De Gaulle, WH Auden, Azar Nafisi and Eleanor Roosevelt woven together to tell the story of ‘The Great Beyond’ and what may lie ahead for us all. The voice itself was created by Ai (let’s call him Eric) and is set beautifully to music that has a timeless cinematic quality. Ilija only uses pure Analogue equipment in the creation of his music, resulting in a rich tapestry of basses, drums, chords and lead sounds. He’s been a prolific producer for over 20 years now with a discography that runs deep with more than 100 Vinyl EP releases and 8 studio albums, but we feel he’s reached the pinnacle with this concept album. We’ll leave the final word to Eric “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.”

avigating vibrant influences of Latin-jazz, Tropicália and joyful grooves; multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, singer and producer Inês Loubet presents her utterly gorgeous debut album ‘Senga’. The album covers Inês’ experiences over the past five years, originating in Portugal, travelling through Brazil, before finding home in London.

Previously, Inês co-wrote and performed on Caravela’s album 'Orla' on None More Records, which was praised by the likes of Gilles Peterson and The Line of Best Fit. Her music has been played on Jazz FM, BBC 6 Music, BBC Radio 3, NTS and Soho Radio. A relentless live performer, she’s played alongside Brazilian legends Gilberto Gil & João Bosco, graced the stage of The Royal Albert Hall, Union Chapel, and O2 Shepherds Bush, around UK and international tours.

The album explores a range of profound themes including nature, travel, grief, unconditional love, separation, family dynamics, and the nuanced experience of womanhood in contemporary society. Dedications to the music, philosophy and revolutionary history of samba (‘Sambo Mesmo Sem’), everyday observations of joy (‘Guri’), and motivating generational change for the better (‘Sab Sabim’); glide across romantic harmonies and the Brazilian rhythms at the melodic heart of the album.

“I started writing whilst living in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, in February 2020”, says Inês. “I was shy and hadn't written fully composed tracks before then. During lockdown I received support from The Arts Council’s Dycp, started making demos, gained confidence and started playing them live”. In October 2022 Inês was presented with the Drake YoLanda award and went to Giant Wafer studio in Wales for three days, before recording the final vocals at her home studio and mixing and mastering in Porto, Portugal.

Inês is joined on the album by a band of close friends. Percussionist and long-time collaborator Jansen Santana from Salvador da Bahia brings the soul of the drums, the tambor. “I always have the Bahia drums present in my mind when I write a new composition. I studied Latin percussion at University and then lived in Salvador absorbing all that heritage and knowledge”. Playing four different stringed instruments on the album, Greg Sanders is a long-time friend and collaborator from London “I met him in a samba band in 2015 and he was the first person I ever showed my songs to and played with”. The band is completed by Ruta Sipola on flute, Jake Burgess on tenor sax, Peu Meurray who recorded a lot of the percussion and lead vocals, and bassist Julio de Castro from Sao Paulo. “I was blown away by his bass playing, his swing and creativity, his ton of experience and professionalism but also his voice - he's an amazing singer and I believe that adds a lot to the magic”.

Inês concludes, “Last year, I had a show in London and I asked everyone in the audience to write down what they felt when they listened to the music. These are some of the things they wrote: wholesome, refreshing, lifted, moving, joyful, happy, nostalgic, warmth, force, goosebumps, emotional, togetherness, transported, rooted”. ‘Senga’ captures all of these feelings and more in a memorable first impression from a highly talented musician.

Since his earliest projects nearly two decades ago, Polish composer Michal Jacaszek has kept some proximity to film music. Initially, his output simply felt cinematic by nature; densely detailed electroacoustic textures on releases like Lo-Fi Stories (2004), Treny (2008) and Glimmer (2011) evoked dimly-lit worlds within themselves, vignettes of the imagination. Over time his interest in sound design and collaboration would manifest actual film projects and commissions, some of which have earned him awards. Jacaszek's practice - an amalgamation of ambient, classical, and musique concrete - deploys field recordings, acoustic samples, poetry, and baroque instrumentation to paint pictures, oftentimes melancholic, nostalgic, tragic. His 2020 album, Music For Film, marks the naturally-occurring intersection of his identities as a solo artist and a film score artist. The collection is now sequenced and released as a single autonomic movement. "I didn't write to particular scenes," says Jacaszek, recalling the process of envisioning music for Rainer Sarnet's 2017 black-and-white fantasy drama November. "He asked me to create a bunch of pieces for a dark fairytale-like movie about love in old Estonian pagan times - full of dark magic, strange beliefs, poverty, grit, and natural beauty." That versatile purpose from the onset affords the material particular pliability in the album format; the pieces work on their own. Two tracks originated from the 2019 documentary He Dreams of Giants; another was first used in 2008 project Golgota wroc?awska. Context removed, they fuse seamlessly; ten years time between some recordings, erased. A visceral dynamism emerges here with a relatively restricted palette of sounds. Music moves in measured steps, inconspicuous yet holding attention. Opener "The Zone" is curious and brittle, crawling on keys and a foundational bass thump as strings seep beneath in a raspy hush. Centerpiece "Dance" folds into an ominous and molasses-slow trot through minor chords, spacious percussion, and static, all under the spell of a mournful violin lead. Windswept vocals haunt "Liina" from a distance, while they sink deeply into orchestral closer "November Late." Jacaszek's work is that of an auteur; he has signatures that he uses faithfully and with much aplomb. Listeners can expect subtle gesture and baroque grandeur on Music For Films: soaring melodies cloaked in reverberation, delicate piano ruminations, and textural craftwork capable of creating and disrupting motifs, smothering and enchanting minds.

In February 2021, Jan Jelinek's seminal album "Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records" turned 20. The anniversary repress, a double LP with two bonus tracks (B-sides from the Tendency EP, 2000), is a little late to the party.

What the press said about Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records:

“Don’t be misled by the title, though for there isn’t a finger-snapping rhythm c bebop lead anywhere on the album. Instead, Jelinek chooses to explore the visual effect moiré - two shifting patterns creating an implied third dimension - in the audio realm.” (Alternative Press)

“The title acts as explanation for the studio technique that provided the basis for this album, snippets of other people’s arrangements deconstructed through a sampler into loops and then splashed onto an audio canvas.” (atm)

“Jelinek’s sound evolved out of his dislike for (and inability to play) keyboards.” (rpm)

“Jelinek has abstracted his sources beyond recognition, looping his millisecond samples into flickering patterns of sonic moiré laid atop a dub Techno framework. (...) Jelinek might as well have sampled a horn player’s hissing intake of breath – it would have been ‘jazz’ enough for his purposes.“ (The Wire)

“It’s a perfect inversion of conventional music, a sonic negative. Everything that would typically be foreground is moved back or pushed off the screen altogether, and the flecks of sonic debris that would normally be covered by other sounds are left to carry the melody and rhythm.” (Pitchfork)

“All you need to know is that these onomatopoeic non-specific songs (...) are warm, paradisical creations”. (nme)

“Listen carefully and you’ll hear textures slowly unfolding and mutating. Presuming you’ve not fallen asleep of course.” (iDJ)

“At times, it’s all a bit dripping tap Japanese water torture; so sedentary it drowns in its own motionlessness” (dj)

“Loop Finding Jazz Records' is a genuine modern classic whose re-release is anything but a cynical mortgage repayment exercise. Consider this a second chance, then pretend you had it all along.” (Boomkat)

PS:

“I’ve been fortunate enough to see Jan Jelinek live once, at Tonic NYC (...). Wearing a black and white striped shirt, he looked like a nihilistic Charlie Brown.” (beachsloth)

Viajes al Sur is the first non drum and bass LP released on Sable Noir recordings, it is a recollection of tunes produced during the past 10 years, sometimes used to score music for documentaries, others just experiments, but also the desire to release a full album going throught all genres that tells a special story, and this time maybe more for a "listening purpose" and not following any dance music rules . It is done to express something more personal, and also dedicated to persons I love.

‘Nine Spells’ is a collection of vocal-only compositions by experienced vocalist and multimedia artist Jolanda Moletta, a musical tribute to nine of her female ancestors. Having fronted the folk band She Owl for over a decade, releasing two full-length albums and playing more than 300 concerts across Europe and the US, Jolanda turns the isolation of the past two years into an undeniably personal project of ancestral connection and healing. Her solo venture first appeared in 2021, contributing vocals for the Pepo Galán & Karen Vogt album ‘The Sweet Wait’, as well as a loop for the Thesis Recurring project. Nine Spells, however, sees her delicately arresting voice take centre stage for the first time. The Turin-born, Berlin-based musician found the urge to rediscover her origins while traveling with her band. Collecting photos of her female ancestors, she uncovered their stories. She learned of her great grandmother, a herbalist and healer, who defied the dangers of Wwii to gather medicines to help the people of her hometown; she learned of her grandmother the violin player, who gave up after marrying, the only other musician in her family; she learned of her great-great-grandmother, the nomad, who ended up settling in what is now their hometown of Turin; and she learned of her great aunt, the first woman to receive a literature degree in the city’s university. Though her intention was to connect with and heal the past of her ancestors, what transpired was the reverse: their stories of courage gave her strength, imbuing her present experience with healing echoes. Channelling these formed the basis of the Nine Spells, from the ethereal, haunting opener ‘Let the Wave In’, through the melancholic reverberations of the inner cages of loneliness in Spells III and IV, right through to the sacred, choir-like conclusion in ‘Your Wildfires Light Up the Darkness of Your Heart’. Each musical composition, written from each spell, drawn from each collage, has been evoked from a place of healing intention, that can be enjoyed together as a full practice. Along with the accompanying videos, supplementary limited edition ornaments, boxes and Giclée prints, Nine Spells presents a fruitfully holistic, multimedia approach to musical healing. Unencumbered by instruments, and unfiltered by words, Jolanda’s heartfelt radiations emanate with each Spell. And why a spell? This is perhaps best left to the poetic words of Jolanda herself: Because of their evocative intent: singing beyond words is a way to express an entire lifeline in one single breath, a way to represent and move emotional mountains, clouds full of tears and winds of laughter, infinite gardens where memories and desires intertwine and work together. The purpose is to break the frame and let the paint spread throughout the wall.

Gal (Juju) and Jordan (Jordash) return home to the Dekmantel stable for their fourth LP. It’s their most complete record to date. A series of purpose-written compositions, that highlight their maturity as musicians, and adept dexterity in the studio.

Without the pairing of Juju & Jordash, there would be no Dekmantel. The duo are an integral part of the label’s history, dating back to 2009 when they where they were the first act to release on the imprint. The two vagabonds can often be found performing live at various outdoor festivals and renowned clubs around the globe, jamming away behind a tabletop of buttons, knobs, synths, and drum machines - like a retro, control-station from Star Trek - albeit one that hums along with the jazz-centric, discordant house, and techno whirrings played by the musicians.

Nowadays Juju & Jordash have evolved far beyond their ’oddball house’ moniker. Their freestyle approach to performance, and immaculate refined sounds have became somewhat more defined, in a style that’s unique, yet elaborate, with a sense of otherworldliness, not only befit for the dancefloor, but otherwise transcendental moments. Following on from their previous LP, 2014’s Clean-Cut, a record of primal, forward thinking, variations from the studio, Sis-boom-bah is an album steeped in studio traditionalism, with a direction towards composition. “We wanted the focus of this album to be the music and not necessarily the process, so we made sure to perfect the performances before shifting the focus on to the production,” states Jordash about the record. Recorded over the space of a few, intense weeks, and built upon years of improvised live shows in front of thousands of listeners, Sis-boom-bah was written around grooves written by Juju on the guitar, and Jordash on the Rhodes. It was the first album the duo have written using such an approach, and solely produced and mixed by Jordash in Amsterdam over the course of a year, making it their most authentic record to date.

Sis-boom-bah’s diverse, spiritual nature is built around Juju & Jordash's use of polyrhythms. The percussive sequenced grooves, and rhythmic backbone was generated using the Yamaha DX7, along with the Roland TR606 drum machine. This approach to rhythm can be heard from the outset within the very first track ‘Herkie’, an ephemeral, yet tribal approach to minimalist funk. The spirituality flows throughout the record, where it sounds like the duo have brought along the nature with them from the foresty raves. In actually fact, the background noise comes courtesy of “noise generators from two separate synthesizers, each with its own filter slowly opening and closing so it kinda sounds like waves or wind.” There are also nods towards their acid influences, with some surefire slices of house music too. Sis-boom-bah is still very much a Juju & Jordash record, yet it's one with a greater depth, musically and stylistically. As electronic music albums go, you'll be hard pushed to find one more complete. "People should listen to this on a loud and clear sound-system," explains Jordash, "high on life, in their own special safe place."

Mariachiara Troianiello, the force behind Katatonic Silentio, continues her exploration of spatial and sound design, slicing various forms of dub while following her instincts and storytelling through each work.

Troianiello's music and live sets are known to be meditative, with each transition subliminally serving a purpose. As 'Axis Of Light' delves into five pieces for this EP, one can experience the drops and transitions connecting, gradually uncovering hidden meanings.

Kate NV's WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling them across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life. WOW is Kate Shilonosova's fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for Rvng Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments. It's difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova's voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect's perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as "funny tiny sounds." WOW skews and skitters, trips over its own feet and laughs about it, plays out of tune on purpose, tilts and leans like a top-heavy flower. Shilonosova is a longtime user of Found Sound Nation's Broken Orchestra sample pack, a sound catalog of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools. These perfectly imperfect instruments are tightly spliced into WOW's patchwork of synthesizer and reworked snippets of Shilonosova's friends playing clarinet, flute, and marimba. It's central to the record's internal logic: a disregard for what is, and isn't, broken, what is, and isn't, a sentence or a song. A commingling of subject and object, with a firmly new wave sensibility. Shilonosova has long had an unusual relationship with inanimate objects (citing her bicycle as her best friend), as if the joys they evoke for her are personality traits of the objects themselves. On WOW, she evinces a kind of inverted anthropomorphism: she shrinks her voice and becomes an object among multitudes, toylike in size and perspective, cohabitating with sedentary, indifferent roommates. This pursuit of childlike perspectives is a thread that runs through much of her catalog, and places her work on a plane with that of her personal hero Nobukazu Takemura, who for decades has treated his music as a portal to childlike curiosity, both in subject matter and tone. With an invitation to pursue this curiosity, WOW further confirms Kate NV's deeply inventive, fluid and technically dizzying artistry. By refusing constraints and rules, Shilonosova embodies a profound freedom, allowing objects, sounds, and processes to unfold organically; or, as she puts it, a commitment to "accepting randomness." She succeeds terrifically at a breed of auditory defamiliarization that is all her own, and the rewards for listeners are many: through her lens, the small becomes monstrous, the abstract becomes sensorial, and the old becomes new. Kate NV's WOW will be released on February 10, 2023 on vinyl and digital formats. On behalf of Kate NV and Rvng, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit War Child, an organization that supports children and their families impacted by conflict, and working to build sustainable peace for generations to come.

Kate NV's WOW offers listeners a prismatic shift in perspective and scale, a parallel dimension in which the mundane becomes funny, unfamiliar, and altogether sensational. Turning the contents of her 2020 album Room for the Moon upside down and spilling them across a floor checkered with intrigue and surprise, Kate places sound, object, and ritual under the microscope to magnify the delight hidden in plain sight of everyday life. WOW is Kate Shilonosova's fourth full-length release as Kate NV in six years, and third for Rvng Intl. Her prolific musical output aligns with a highly attuned aesthetic and a deep commitment to visual world building. WOW is one of many of these worlds in which music is fully saturated with color, deeply tactile and textural. Shiny, sproingy, plastic. Where Room for the Moon embraced structure (abstractly speaking) and veered pop, WOW happily abandons conventional song shapes, parsing the experience of musical time into ecstatic fragments. It's difficult to imagine a more fitting album title: pure exclamation, an organic pitch of delight leaving the mouth, with no clear etymological links. On Room for the Moon, Shilonosova's voice was layered and lyrical, with sweeping and urgent melodies. WOW finds her as a peripheral purveyor of high jinks, peeking out from the corners, commenting on her surroundings in non-verbal, and arguably non-human, utterances. Instead of employing lyricism, Shilonosova steps outside of language, and rewards us with a gum ball machine of textures: soda fizz and wind-up teeth and scraps of bubble wrap become comically huge, as if heard from an insect's perspective. Words are tasty plosives, onomatopoeias, percussive chirps and one-liners, and singing serves as another form of what Shilonosova refers to as "funny tiny sounds." WOW skews and skitters, trips over its own feet and laughs about it, plays out of tune on purpose, tilts and leans like a top-heavy flower. Shilonosova is a longtime user of Found Sound Nation's Broken Orchestra sample pack, a sound catalog of over one thousand dilapidated instruments sourced from Philadelphia public schools. These perfectly imperfect instruments are tightly spliced into WOW's patchwork of synthesizer and reworked snippets of Shilonosova's friends playing clarinet, flute, and marimba. It's central to the record's internal logic: a disregard for what is, and isn't, broken, what is, and isn't, a sentence or a song. A commingling of subject and object, with a firmly new wave sensibility. Shilonosova has long had an unusual relationship with inanimate objects (citing her bicycle as her best friend), as if the joys they evoke for her are personality traits of the objects themselves. On WOW, she evinces a kind of inverted anthropomorphism: she shrinks her voice and becomes an object among multitudes, toylike in size and perspective, cohabitating with sedentary, indifferent roommates. This pursuit of childlike perspectives is a thread that runs through much of her catalog, and places her work on a plane with that of her personal hero Nobukazu Takemura, who for decades has treated his music as a portal to childlike curiosity, both in subject matter and tone. With an invitation to pursue this curiosity, WOW further confirms Kate NV's deeply inventive, fluid and technically dizzying artistry. By refusing constraints and rules, Shilonosova embodies a profound freedom, allowing objects, sounds, and processes to unfold organically; or, as she puts it, a commitment to "accepting randomness." She succeeds terrifically at a breed of auditory defamiliarization that is all her own, and the rewards for listeners are many: through her lens, the small becomes monstrous, the abstract becomes sensorial, and the old becomes new. Kate NV's WOW will be released on February 10, 2023 on vinyl and digital formats. On behalf of Kate NV and Rvng, a portion of the proceeds from this release will benefit War Child, an organization that supports children and their families impacted by conflict, and working to build sustainable peace for generations to come.

Multiply Intentions is the fourth full length release from Russian multi-instrumentalist Katya Yonder and her first long player since 2017. Borne from a new found sense of confidence and self-awareness, the album is inspired by both local and neighbouring musical cultures and a wide range of social influences. Whilst her previous records were purely instrumental, for fear that she would be misunderstood or even ridiculed, Multiply Intentions sees Katya introduce her vocals for the first time. Singing in four different languages (her native Russian, English, Japanese and French) across 13 tracks, the album is an ode to her diverse musical upbringing and the wide range of influences on her as an artist. Multiply Intentions was built from initial sketches she developed for her 2018 Métron Mixtape (a mix that was highlighted in Pitchfork’s monthly mix roundups). Working with these building blocks, and blending in her love of the music of Madonna, Brian Eno and Cocteau Twins with references drawn from 80s pop, old video game soundtracks and soviet films, Katya moved these initial ideas into larger, richer songs that are layered by her ethereal vocals.

The 1st release on Kmru's own Ofnot imprint is a project that emerged from his studies at Berlin's UDK. The Kenyan composer and sound artist is best known for his field recording work, and as he traveled, he made a point to snapshot each city. But the more he studied and the more he examined his practice, the more Kmru began to wonder what the purpose of these recordings were, and what bearing they might actually have on his self-expression. Simultaneously, he'd begun to dive more wholeheartedly into the world of synthesis. In a way, synthesis is the most basic form of sound, and Kmru started to wonder not just how he could harness these sounds but how he might be able to more dynamically combine them with field recordings.

“After a banner year that witnessed Lafawndah release her first album Ancestor Boy, the debut of her soundsystem Fara Fara, and further incursions into film, contemporary art and fashion, the ceaseless artist returns with another plot twist: The Fifth Season.

Inspired by her encounter with author NK Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, Lafawndah both pays homage to and extends further the elemental, emotionally charged myths of Jemisin’s books. These are stories where a broken heart can tear apart a continent. In contrast to the precision- tuned industrial productions of Ancestor Boy, The Fifth Season breathes a different kind of volatility. Inviting a new degree of spontaneity and freedom into her process, Lafawndah’s collaborators - Theon Cross (tuba), Nathaniel Cross (trombone), Valentina Magaletti (percussions), and Nick Weiss (keyboards) - encircle her confrontational character studies with iridescent, cinematic chamber-bass moves.

These are torch songs for when it rains ash, creation ballads for when the earth turns inside out. Ghosts of Art Ensemble of Chicago and Rahsaan Roland Kirk color the air, yet Lafawndah’s mastery of pop songcraft, vocal production and razor-honed clarity of purpose cut through. In addition to the Lafawndah originals, The Fifth Season features interpretations of hybrid-folk godfather Beverly Glenn Copeland’s “Don’t Despair” and acid-impressionist prodigy Lili Boulanger’s “Old Buddhist Prayer.” Album highlight “You, at the End” deploys a poem by poet-performer Kae Tempest to aching, rift-tearing ends, and french dream-trap wraith Lala &ce features on “Le Malentendu”.

The Fifth Season anchors Lafawndah as a descendent of forebearers Brigitte Fontaine and Scott Walker - a born theatric whose acid humor warps the sub-continental undertow of her emotive storytelling. Lafawndah’s elementalism on The Fifth Season finds her imagination more agile than ever, and recent live shows have evinced a drive to push these compositions further out, deeper, and more aflame.”

Metal Aether': ‘Metal Aether’ continues to explore Lea’s acute interest in the nature of acoustics and the harmonic accumulation of sound, with it’s four pieces having been recorded in Le Havre, France in a former military base, and in New York City, at Issue Project Room. With her horn, Lea produces pulsing minimalist patterns, transcendent drones, and upper register squalls that envelop these spaces in waves of overtones, microtones, and psychoacoustic effects. ‘Metal Aether’ feels like the defining statement from an artist in elevated control of their form - a summary of concepts, ideas, and emotions given life from one’s mind and heart. Lea demonstrates the desirable ability to use her art to sincerely communicate in a language of one’s own personal invention, utilizing music and sound for their most meaningful and human purposes. 'Resonant Field': It is with tremendous pleasure that we announce ‘Resonant Field’, the brand new full-length album from New York-based sound artist and composer Lea Bertucci. Following up her critically acclaimed 2018 NNA full-length ‘Metal Aether’, Lea continues her devotion to the exploration of physical spaces by way of sound, channeled through her alto saxophone. Where her previous work investigated a variety of locations around the globe, ‘Resonant Field’ narrows her focus to one space in particular - the Marine A Grain Elevator at Silo City in Buffalo, New York. This formation of an intimate connection with her surroundings is both scientific and spiritual, putting Lea in a duality of roles as both an archaeologist of sound and as a sonic medium. The fact that these recordings took place during the partial solar eclipse of 2017 further contributes to the ceremonial, ritual quality of the work, making ‘Resonant Field’ a profound, industrial meditation on beauty, emptiness, and the deep melancholy of forgotten spaces.

"Mother", Logic1000's debut album. "I felt so much love and inspiration entering into motherhood that I just needed to create something really powerful," explains Samantha Poulter, the Berlin-based DJ and producer , who grewed up in the Sydney suburbs of Yarrawarrah and Botany Bay and better known to fans as Logic1000. "And with a lot less free time, you really make sure you make the most of any moment you get." That vitality and renewed sense of purpose is captured on Mother.Preceded by the single 'Grown On Me', the 12-track set is a laser-focused "love letter to house music", written in collaboration with her husband and long-time creative partner Thom McAlister (Cop Envy, Big Ever). Finding Poulter further fine-tuning her inventive, multi-genre approach, it's a crucial contribution not just to the world of dance but to the canon of art inspired by parenthood. As Poulter herself puts it, a little awed, "I never thought I would be capable of something so powerful."

Louis Fitton debut Kilopascal on Omena is an excellent proof of his ability to deliver forward-thinking music with a fresh and experimental focus. Sometimes less is more and even though not every track on this release contains drum programming it feels complete. All the tracks flow well for listening purposes and live performance and Louis shows a unique sensibility and approach to electronic music throughout the EP. When it comes to remixes, Finland's best kept secret aka Saine has delivered several memorable moments including for Omena in the past. His take on Tides is a dubbed out house version melding house with more abstract techniques.

The new record from M.M.M. (Macelleria Mobile Di Mezzanotte) goes back to the sound of "Black Lake Confidence" and reveals more cold and deeper Doom Jazz suites in the style of Bohren and Der Club of Gore, The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation, Dale Cooper quartet. Manuele Frau (Der Noir, Blackland) joins the band to play guitar tunes, while Riccardo Chiaretti (Moonlite Bunny Ranch, Chaos/Order), who has contributed on the last two records, performs more songs and helped with songwriting. New soundscapes are explored by the band on this fine new album on Subsound Records.

"Interior sounds from Madalyn in an album that flits between eerie ambience, environment, and hermetic logic. The music's timing and sequencing feels distant, the elegant constructions conjured and organized semi-consciously, drawing the listener deeper into the dream and towards a zone where watch hands tick forward accurately and their perception of time unspools. Here each neatly tuned conversation and clockwork assemblage harmonizes, spinning tantalizingly just out of range and understanding." "Puzzle Music is the desire to create images out of diverse pieces of sound. To collect timbral colors in a gradient procession and connect them until they create reason. Principally not knowing how the image will turn out, or what the picture even is. It is the act of placing sound shapes next to one another in the hope that clarity will gradually be revealed. When grouping the songs together I was thinking of them as mechanisms in a timepiece. I have something of an obsession with Swiss watchmaking, although I think this stems from a desire for creative mastery and the design of an energy source independent of electronic needs. Hopefully the songs all serve a purpose towards the end goal of the album... but also, the way the Oberheim Xpander pans sounds is in a very clear circular pattern, which makes me think of gears turning."--Madalyn Merkey

Infoldings / Diffractions combines synthesis and acoustic percussion in unpredictable, pointillist
arrangements where Guthrie plays against patterns derived from Max MSP patches by Fell. The
album’s four longform expositions are in this sense different to the man-machine concept of
Fell’s acclaimed ‘Intra’ album, where he triggered performances by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo
De Percussão to play a metallophone designed by Iannis Xenakis. Here, the pair find common and
sometimes contrasting purpose in a probing of rhythmic signatures, with groundbreaking results.
Recorded at HFG, Karlsruhe (where Fell is guest professor), and finished later in respective
isolation, the pieces were edited from iterations of call-and-response between Fell’s rhythmic
patterns and Guthrie’s overdubs. They effectively propose beguiling solutions to electronic music’s
problems with grid-lock, using generative processing to make physical actions seem unfeasibly
effortless, while melting the computer’s clock to a real-time, free-hand syncopation.
Taking the influence of gamelan and fusing it with the fractal computer music that Fell has
obsessively picked-at over the last four decades, the duo zoom into a sound that’s completely
captivating; mutating into polyrhythmic outer-realms and eerie universes of microtonality that
are hard to fathom in a single sitting.
There are trace echoes of free jazz hanging from the rafters, the post-everything chatter of
Humcrush and Food drummer Thomas Strønen’s mind-expanding solo material or even Autechre
at their most confounding. The genius here is that just as you convince yourself that the music
could only possibly have been generated by a computer, Guthrie’s unmistakably human flex edges
into focus - playing with perception and expectation in the most wild, liquid way imaginable.

“Have you ever really loved a human? Have you ever come across the wisest of them? They will slip right through your fingers, leaving the most unimaginable impression.”

Jupiter’s Purse is the debut EP by Dallas, Texas-based artist Mattie on Leaving Records. Produced in conjunction with fellow Dallasite Black Taffy, Jupiter’s Purse is an expansive and unique work of experimental soul. Featuring 2021’s lauded single “Human Thing,” Jupiter’s Purse broadens a window into the fresh and exciting vision of Mattie. Explaining the EP’s theme, Mattie states, “I’m very fond of the planet Jupiter in the astrological sense because Jupiter represents expansion. It also represents the planet that takes everything that it is that we desire to see for ourselves in this life and it expands it, right? I was inspired to call it Jupiter’s Purse because it also reminded me of a female womb in a sense, the incubation process that happens within the womb, and kind of the purse being the womb of Jupiter. And the planet is basically holding our things and incubating them until it’s time to expand them.”

Of collaborating with Black Taffy, Mattie says, “I felt like his melody and my pen, and the voice that was coming through me and what really wanted to be said through the lyrics, it’s like they just found a home together. And it was so effortless to really just kind of dance with his melodies and write these lyrics and these stories. So that’s basically how we kind of started working together, and yeah, I think we made a baby. A studio baby.” The EP’s five cohesive tracks loosely follow the story of a narrator named Mhuv. Mattie states, “It’s really a story of myself as Mhuv, and how it’s felt for me to be at times identified with the body as a person, and then other times being able to observe the body, and know myself as that as well, and what that has felt like, kind of being in this sense of duality. Jupiter’s Purse is basically a vocal representation of a lot of duality that I experienced. In coming to know my true self, that duality kind of came more to the forefront, so I started to write from that, and to really understand the power in the duality, while returning back to myself as source.”

Director Tramaine Townsend provides visuals for the project. Mattie states, “I wanted it to be clean but experimental, experimental and also clean. I wanted it to have that two-fold. I’ve been listening to a lot of recordings from Virgil Abloh, and he inspired me this year to really appreciate the duality that’s in my work. And even in the visuals, the cleanliness of it, but the experimental aspect. The purist meeting the tourist. The purist being that classic approach to visuals, which I appreciate Tramaine for, and then also allowing me as the tourist, the one that is experimental and that wants to have a different experience… Once you see it, you’ll see the beauty, the continuity of what we’re trying to say.”

Mattie concludes, “I feel like what I realized is that there’s a home in me that is comfortable no matter where I’m at. And my life is based on finding that and remembering that home within myself. And so my focus on the external things, even though I keep them up and I maintain the physical things, but I realize that my only purpose, if there was one, is to really remember myself, as if to remember that home within myself, so that I can be comfortable no matter where I’m at. And my music is an expansion of that, that surrender to that aspect of this experience which is to come home and find that home within myself. The music is about going through what it feels like when you are on the path to remembering yourself. What it feels like, that oiliness, that stickiness, that bulldozer, the big explosions, the feeling of ground zero, the feeling of heightened senses, the feeling of being a giant but then also you feel like you are David, and there’s a Goliath. I plan on moving through, which is why the character’s name is Mhuv in Jupiter’s Purse, because I see ourselves, everyone on the planet, moving through these spaces and them not being intended to be a sticking point for us. And so Jupiter’s Purse is what I would call maybe a gateway, a womb to the other side. Jupiter is going to expand this project, because that’s what Jupiter does, and has blessed this project already, so I know Jupiter’s going to expand it to be another side of this, where we won’t be speaking from duality, but we’ll be speaking from our natural state as wholeness.”

High quality weirdo political pop from MB Jones (Jee Jee Band, EM Records) - sparse, quirky and strange with English and Korean vocals. TIP!
Recorded in Busan, Republic of Korea by former US special agent MB Jones, ROK Spy documents both his stay in a country on the verge of a nuclear conflict and his mission there (for obvious confidential reasons, the purpose of this mission is only to be referred to in an elusive way). While most of his personal belongings have disappeared – or, more likely, been destroyed – we are very thankful for the safe receipt of a USB stick containing 7 songs recorded in Autumn 2017, alongside a drawing and a few handwritten notes. We are proud to now be able to share these with you.
In order to do so, we hastily came up with a label. The circumstances under which it was born lead us into calling it “Drama”. This release is DRAMA1.
The content of this LP is a seemingly disparate set of pop-not-pop tunes, flirting with dance music on songs like the apocalyptical disco Nuclear War or the bizarre and mind puzzling boogie Pusan Perimeter. Though it is quite hard to put words on MB Jones’s productions (one may accurately call it an “oddball” of a record), his musical testimony may sit somewhere in-between Holger Czukay’s most narrative pieces and Arthur Russel’s most cheerful moments, sharing with these two brilliant musicians a genuine feeling of intimacy emanating from each second of his songs. The only thing that may be said without a doubt is that these 7 songs are the product of someone whose ear has been attentive and receptive to all sorts of contemporary musical genres (from trap to experimental electronic music and EDM).
It’s still not clear whether the cryptic lyrics evoke situations which already occurred, whether they are oracles, some insider’s warnings or whether they are the product of a mind in a hallucinatory state. On Poison Pill – the closing song – he is particularly ambiguous : “the CIA bought me a trip / I put the tab under my lip / They want to build a shopping mall / On the DMZ wall”. We’ll leave the interpretation to you.

Minor Science aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms. He makes his Balmat debut with Absent Friends Vol. III, the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. The first two Absent Friends--a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93)--were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio--idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc.--he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he learned as a club DJ into a live context, accompanied by visuals by Stockholm-based artist Paul Witherden. Absent Friends Vol. III is an album of studio versions of the music developed for the live show. But in Minor Science's world, even a category as simple as "studio versions" is slightly opaque. "Most of these tracks weren't 'composed' in the studio," Finlayson explains: "The sounds started out as stems and source material for the live show, and might not have been intended to go together--but then through performance, they settled into shapes that worked. I then recreated those performances in the studio." That organic process of ideation and realization might help explain the unusual coherence of the album, in which sounds and textures flow seamlessly from one to the next, sometimes seeming to stand still, and sometimes looping back. There are virtually no melodies, few recognizable motifs or riffs, yet the eight-track album nevertheless moves with a distinctive logic and a determined sense of purpose, from the frozen-in-time shimmer of the opening "Introduction" through the early cuts' studies of space and light; from the seemingly autobiographical "Summer Diary" through the rushing trance (yes, trance) arpeggios of "Contingency" and on to the dulcet denouement of the closing "Gather Your Party (Dispersed Mix)."

Stunning liturgical shoegaze from Kranky’s Melissa Guion aka MJ Guider, originally released a couple of years back on a limited tape and now available once again in a new edition for 2023. Fuelled by pulsing drum machines, bells and an exceptionally expressive voice, it hits so many buttons for us all at once so as to feel like we’ve known it a lifetime, reminding us of sections of Cocteau Twins, Seefeel, Tropic of Cancer, Preisner’s ‘No End’ score, Cranes - but still in possession of its own unquantifiable spirit. Recorded as a music score to ‘Known Mass. No. 3: St. Maurice’, a collaboration with friend and choreographer Ann Glaviano, ‘Temporary Requiem’ makes use of the traditional Latin requiem mass across 6 movements designed to help transport “the congregation” to the dreamworld. The 10 minute opener ‘Kyrie: The Stained Glass Windows in Their Original Order’ opens from choral drones into a sort of rumbling dreampop reminding us of AFX’s reworking of Seefeel’s ‘Time To Find Me’, the melodic lead supplied by a padded bassline wrapped around countless layers of texture and sweeping, filtered hi hats. ‘Gloria: Small Dance of Gratitude’ re-purposes the thudding kickdrum opening Cocteau Twins’ ‘When mama was moth’, but swerves through a vocal keychange into something else entirely, all detached vocal yearning somewhere between love song and lament. Guion’s vocals have always been impressive but feel especially devastating here, leaving enough space for each sound to respire; ducking around slow-motion beatbox cycles and queasy electronics. She binds her biographical litany of inspirations into a coherent blast of pseudo- plainsong and ethereal post-punk, her voice tripping from morose low-registers into layered choral cascades that genuinely made this listener bottle up in a gulp. When we reach ‘Sanctus’ - the album’s shortest piece, a tape-rotted chant dissolves into an angelic aria. It’s an apt preface for ‘Benedictus’, the moment we’re shifted into gnarly droning landscapes of distended drone and saturated distortion. Somehow the tenor adjustment works, deepening Guion’s narrative and drawing parallels between vastly different forms of post-Catholic musical expression - there’s truly no light without darkness. On the finale ‘Agnus-Dei’, she bolts together both strains of expression, singing over walls of harmonic guitar fuzz and a drum machine that sounds like machinery pushing through sandstone blocks. The noise abates before the track dims to a flicker, as Guion’s operatic wails spiral deep into the pious abyss...

Dieter Moebius (1944–2015) was one of the most important protagonists of avant-garde electronic music in Germany. He was founder member of Kluster/Cluster (with Conrad Schnitzer and Hans-Joachim Roedelius) and Harmonia (with Michael Rother and Hans-Joachim Roedelius) and worked together with several artists such as Brian Eno, Conny Plank, Mayo Thompson, Hellmut Hattler, Asmus Tietchens, Gerd Beerbohm, Karl Renziehausen, Mani Neumeier, Arno Steffen, Jürgen Engler, Jean Hervé Peron, Zappi Diermaier, and Chris Karrer. On July 20th, 2015 Dieter Moebius died.

In 2012 Dieter Moebius was invited to perform music to Fritz Lang’s legendary silent film “Metropolis”. For this purpose he produced pre-arranged tracks and samples to be treated with effects and combined during live improvisation according to the dramaturgical setting of the film. His impressive work reveals its full power and depth in combination with the images from the film.

It was his plan to create an album-length version of this music for release. Unfortunately, Dieter Moebius passed away on July 20, 2015 and was not able to complete the project. With the help and support of Dieter Moebius’ widow Irene and two longtime musical partners, Tim Story and Jon Leidecker, the Berlin musician Jonas Förster finished the remaining work and completed the production.

Spells is the debut release by Los Angeles based multi-instrumentalist and composer Nailah Hunter on Leaving Records. Each of the EP’s six tracks represent a spell, a unique sonic place forged by imagination and incantation. Ambient in nature, each spell highlights Hunter’s skills as a composer. “It really started off with me just wanting to kind of reclaim the way that I thought about creating music and then also performing it,” Hunter says. “I was like, okay. I need to get back to the basics of why I like to create and what it does for me … so I set out to make spells, in the sense that each layer is one of the steps in incantation... It became about purpose... the procedure and the ritual, so that when it came to performing it, I wasn’t able to get into my head about it because I was just carrying out these steps. Each track is its own incantation, its own spell, its own world.” Colorful atmospheres permeate Spells, each track offering tranquil, reflective setting. Hunter explains, “Another thing that I always wanted to focus on and through making this project have sort of been able to name is that, I like to create places, songs as locations ...whether there are field recordings [involved] or not.”

Opening track “Soil” is accompanied by a poem: “a seed is sown, a song from silence.” Its beautiful harp and angelic voices establish the album’s mode of beautiful stillness. This is followed by “Ruins,” a tranquil soundscape abetted by insect field recordings and a slightly warped, heaven-bound trajectory, described by Hunter as a love spell. “Another thing that’s really important to me about my relationship with music is synesthesia. It’s all very palette based... For the song “Ruins,” it comes on like magenta and clementine.” On the colors present in the single “White Flower, Dark Hill,” Hunter describes “the idea of the purples and navies of the night sky and the way that shadows appear under full moonlight, the different shades of moonlight, and how it always brings out the color white.” Each track’s nuanced production and big, emotional sounds do carry a charged energy, colorful and magnetic. The shifting phases and sustained drones of “Enter” mimic the feeling of approaching and walking through a rift into a fantastical world. The listener is advanced into album highlight “Quiet Light,” which Hunter states captures, “that feeling of being like golden light in a cold still pool of water, this very specific image and feeling that I just love so much.”

Spells is a powerful opening statement that uses this musician's innate artistic gifts to promote healing and self awareness. Of the album’s inspirations, she adds, “definitely rune magick and just the idea of creating places of rest … sonic places of rest, places to ponder and consider your feelings. Me making music, it’s always been about healing for me and making myself feel better. If other people listen to it and also feel better, then that is delightful.”

Ned Milligan is a New York based elementary school teacher and occasional musician. He’s behind the great small-run label Florabelle since 2015. This is his sixth solo album.

"My work in the past five years has been grounded in recording and playing outdoors, trying to communicate the meaning of being in a particular location and finding meaning in interacting with whatever sounds or elements are equally present. I'm still excited by all of it! This sense of purpose continues with Considerable and the most I could wish for is that the specificity of what I am doing and where I'm doing it manages to evoke something in anyone listening--a connection to their own environments and spaces. None of these pieces is strictly documentary or one-take in approach or composition, but I hope that the combination of processed and "factual" sounds achieve integrity."

chimes, singing drum, autoharp, field recordings, processing: Ned Milligan campfire recording in "Sky Smokes & Electronics": Jerome Klap additional percussion in "Mosey With Me": Rory Milligan singing: graciously and anonymously donated

recorded mostly outdoors, sometimes indoors in York, Maine.

Ondrej Zajac doesn't practice. Neither does he play his guitar with as little as a hint of striking technical prowess. Despite this, he makes music with the confidence of a master instrumentalist who doesn't let their chops get in the way. This is because Ondrej Zajac understands that the point of playing an instrument is to transcend it.

Such principles have been the source of pride for the idioms of experimental and free music, but these suffer from the chronic peddling of artistic narcissism. Ondrej Zajac works in the confines of these genres, but impressively avoids all their pitfalls. His music is almost pure content, as straight as a line, and so immediate and so fucking honest it leaves you wondering.

I Will Be Forgotten offers plenty of opportunities for such wondering, regardless of whether the composition is sixteen minutes or sixty seconds long. The structure of the whole thing, the appreciation of all properties of sound without indulgence in any of them, the playfulness and composure beyond it all, not even the beautiful sonic grain of the guitar itself, none of this does dwarf the most remarkable accomplishment of this record // its utter artistic integrity.

Recorded live at Divadlo 29 in Pardubice and co-produced and mixed by Václav Šafka, I Will Be Forgotten is the second solo release by Ondrej Zajac (Banausoi, Data Koroptev) and the 19th release by the sincere label Weltschmerzen.

As an important agent of Gothenburg’s underground scene, Dan Johansson has been a member of several experimental harsh noise projects such as Sewer Election, and lo-fi indie folk bands like Enhet För Fri Musik and Amateur Hour. Ordeal is his latest solo output, and might as well be ashes stuck in the blast furnace's edges of his last longing career. Not by means of summing up genres or as a culmination of his musical development, but as a profound music piece weaved in his own household.

With not much more than a synthesizer, Vätterns Pärla is built by trembling, dissonant drones stained in feedback and reverberation, thickly textured by the no-fi quality of the recording, depicting a menacing atmosphere congested with heavy fumes. In Johansson's words, Ordeal "takes inspiration from the early 80’s albums of Maurizio Bianchi, filtered through a Gothenburgian no-fi bleakness. It’s an album for inner voyage, childhood memories, and places that now lost purpose and meaning”.

After the "kosmonauter" journey into distant galaxies, Pan/scan penetrates deep into the interior of the human mind with their latest work "A FAR Distant Corner OF Nothing Special". While the musical style serves as a continuation of the previous album, here the listener is lulled into a compellingly hypnotic sound-environment. The record tells the story of secret telekinetic experiments for the purpose of creating a new form of "power", conducted in dark laboratories deep under the surface of the earth. A human mind, captured within a state of permanent tension and relaxation, finally unleashes its full potential, bringing not only the desired success of the experiments but also the opening of a gate to a new world. What awaits us on the other side?

After the "kosmonauter" journey into distant galaxies, Pan/scan penetrates deep into the interior of the human mind with their latest work "A FAR Distant Corner OF Nothing Special". While the musical style serves as a continuation of the previous album, here the listener is lulled into a compellingly hypnotic sound-environment. The record tells the story of secret telekinetic experiments for the purpose of creating a new form of "power", conducted in dark laboratories deep under the surface of the earth. A human mind, captured within a state of permanent tension and relaxation, finally unleashes its full potential, bringing not only the desired success of the experiments but also the opening of a gate to a new world. What awaits us on the other side?

Cassiopeia is a constellation in the northern sky. It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century Greek astronomer Ptolemy and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations today. In the sky Cassiopeia sits with Andromeda on the South side. In Greek mythology it was considered to represent the vain queen Cassiopeia, who boasted about her unrivalled beauty.
This album is a mix between different sides of the concept of “Cassiopeia”. It’s about life, the universe, humans and the future. Cassiopeia includes musical approaches comparable to Prefuse 73, Robot Koch and Kryptic Minds. The record is predominantly Hip Hop, but features tracks with other artists that are not strictly part of this genre such as BekBekson, Verhovski and Fancy Mike. Pavel’s music is a trip into a fable and his medium is the music of different genres: Hip Hop, Dubstep, Glitch, Wonky and Downbeat, used to form pictures. His work is free spirited and there are hints of feelings, allusions, enigma and mystery. We won’t get into the inner workings of his music, how it finds its way into the hearts and souls of the audience, the important thing is that it serves its purpose. Tracks such as “LA” or “Andromeda” are very personal statements from Pavel, “Quant Magic” is composed using Overtone, Didgeridoo, Boomerang, Yedaki and other Australian instruments. “Sacred Chants Of Shiva” seizes the listener with a sensation of restlessness.
Pavel Dovgal’s “Cassiopeia”, the incision between intergalactic music and the human soul. The same formula that has been present for over a thousand years.

Cassiopeia is a constellation in the northern sky. It was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century Greek astronomer Ptolemy and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations today. In the sky Cassiopeia sits with Andromeda on the South side. In Greek mythology it was considered to represent the vain queen Cassiopeia, who boasted about her unrivalled beauty.
This album is a mix between different sides of the concept of “Cassiopeia”. It’s about life, the universe, humans and the future. Cassiopeia includes musical approaches comparable to Prefuse 73, Robot Koch and Kryptic Minds. The record is predominantly Hip Hop, but features tracks with other artists that are not strictly part of this genre such as BekBekson, Verhovski and Fancy Mike. Pavel’s music is a trip into a fable and his medium is the music of different genres: Hip Hop, Dubstep, Glitch, Wonky and Downbeat, used to form pictures. His work is free spirited and there are hints of feelings, allusions, enigma and mystery. We won’t get into the inner workings of his music, how it finds its way into the hearts and souls of the audience, the important thing is that it serves its purpose. Tracks such as “LA” or “Andromeda” are very personal statements from Pavel, “Quant Magic” is composed using Overtone, Didgeridoo, Boomerang, Yedaki and other Australian instruments. “Sacred Chants Of Shiva” seizes the listener with a sensation of restlessness.
Pavel Dovgal’s “Cassiopeia”, the incision between intergalactic music and the human soul. The same formula that has been present for over a thousand years.

Limited edition 300 only black vinyl LP housed in a gloss finished outer sleeve with download code.

Ireland based American songsmith Peter Broderick announces the release of Piano Works Vol. 1 (Floating in Tucker"s Basement) - a new comprehensive album of solo piano recordings out November 25. Shining a light on the artist"s ongoing piano-based compositions, this release offers an opportunity to celebrate his more intimate work. A comprehensive collection of Peter Broderick"s piano work to date, these recordings were originally captured in Berlin to accompany the 2017 sheet music book Piano Works Vol. 1. The book contains 20 pieces for solo piano and a download code to access new recordings of all 20 pieces. Up until now, the only way to hear these recordings was to purchase the sheet music book. This release sees the original recordings receiving further treatment and processing by Tucker Martine in the customised echo chamber of his studio in Portland, Oregon-the region where Broderick grew up. The clean and unaffected original recordings were intended for educational purposes, so for this release Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths suggested to "throw the recordings into the well", for a more dynamic and conscious listening experience. "We gave these recordings a bit of a makeover. We sent all the tracks over to legendary engineer/producer Tucker Martine, who processed all 20 of them with unique tape and reverb treatments, utilising the echo chamber of his Portland studio, Flora Recording & Playback," explains Broderick.

Ireland based American songsmith Peter Broderick announces the release of Piano Works Vol. 1 (Floating in Tucker"s Basement) - a new comprehensive album of solo piano recordings out November 25. Shining a light on the artist"s ongoing piano-based compositions, this release offers an opportunity to celebrate his more intimate work. A comprehensive collection of Peter Broderick"s piano work to date, these recordings were originally captured in Berlin to accompany the 2017 sheet music book Piano Works Vol. 1. The book contains 20 pieces for solo piano and a download code to access new recordings of all 20 pieces. Up until now, the only way to hear these recordings was to purchase the sheet music book. This release sees the original recordings receiving further treatment and processing by Tucker Martine in the customised echo chamber of his studio in Portland, Oregon-the region where Broderick grew up. The clean and unaffected original recordings were intended for educational purposes, so for this release Erased Tapes founder Robert Raths suggested to "throw the recordings into the well", for a more dynamic and conscious listening experience. "We gave these recordings a bit of a makeover. We sent all the tracks over to legendary engineer/producer Tucker Martine, who processed all 20 of them with unique tape and reverb treatments, utilising the echo chamber of his Portland studio, Flora Recording & Playback," explains Broderick.

Acclaimed Canadian electronic producer Francis Latreille, known as Priori, unveils his new singles "Learn To Fly" and “Segue” today, marking the first releases from his upcoming third album, This But More. "Learn To Fly" offers a taste of the album's lush, dubby techno soundscapes, while "Segue" showcases the album's ambient side. Arriving May 24th via Naff, This But More marks a sonic departure for the artist, exploring a richly textured landscape of electroacoustic compositions inspired by literature, cinema, and the transformative power of nature.

Priori delved into This But More from September 2023 to March 2024, drawing upon archival recordings and fresh ideas. "This album is about healing," Priori explains. "Not necessarily 'music that heals', but about the process in its ups and downs, its beauty and uncertainty." Themes of protection, healing, sleep, and decay naturally emerged during the creative journey.

To craft this immersive world, Priori collaborated extensively. Writer and musician Devon Hansen penned a series of "Suggested Stories" to accompany the album, adding depth to its lore. Musically, Priori teamed up with James K, Ben Bondy, Sabola, Adam Feingold, and Jesse Osborne-Lanthier, infusing the album with diverse instrumentation, including violin, guitar, software instruments, and field recordings.

This collaborative spirit extends to the album's striking visuals. Jesse Orsborne Lanthier designed the main and single artworks, while Ulysse De Lezenne crafted a unique jewel, both pieces seamlessly connected to the album's narrative.

The intricate world-building sets This But More apart. "It's the biggest collaborative project I have tackled so far," Priori notes. This spirit of exploration extends to the second single, “Wake”, featuring Priori's first vocal collaboration with close friend Jamie Krasner (James K).

Priori's artistic process is grounded in self-awareness and intuition, asking vital questions about how each element serves the greater purpose of the music. Swimming sessions between studio work provided clarity and focus throughout the album's creation. These meditative moments reflect in the music, inviting listeners into a contemplative, dreamlike state.

Beyond music, Priori draws inspiration from the literary worlds of Gene Wolfe, Ursula K LeGuin, China Mieville, Brian Caitlin, the evocative games of Hidetaka Miyazaki and Yoko Taro, as well as the ever-evolving beauty of myths and nature.

I was between the ages of 18 and 20 when I wrote the 22 songs found on To Anyone Who Ever Laughed at Someone Else. They express the thoughts and frustrations, hopes and fears of a young man coming of age in a world that was full of upheaval and transformation. I was a product of that period in America we call the sixties—those years between the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963 and the resignation of President Richard Nixon in August 1974. In fact, this record was released that same month Nixon resigned. Over the next five years, I toured the country as an acoustic artist performing at clubs, coffeehouses and colleges. During that time, I watched the idealism and social consciousness of the sixties slowly fade away. In its place emerged a cynicism and materialism that still seems to be with us so many years later. More than anything else, I think To Anyone Who Ever Laughed at Someone Else is a time capsule that speaks to us from a past era. A period when, above all other things, we asked questions. We questioned our country, we questioned our faith, we questioned the very purpose of life itself. I am very excited to bring those questions and these songs to a new generation on a new continent. Special thanks to my friends Jordi Segura of Wah Wah Records who took the initiative to release this 50th Anniversary Re-issue of To Anyone Who Ever Laughed at Someone Else and Michel Veenstra Klinkhamer, who introduced us.

Chicago-based producer Mike Meegan records music under the moniker RXM Reality. Meegan’s three previous albums on Hausu Mountain sketch out an evolving trajectory of omni-electronic rhythmic music that warps elements of grime, dubstep, mutated techno, hyperpop, and noise into unpredictable compositions overloaded with synthetic textures and fast-scrolling beat structures. With the new album sick for you, Meegan pushes the RXM Reality project into brand new zones along multiple intersecting spectrums. For the first time, he incorporates his voice into his work, employing a series of contrasting vocal styles that complement productions which shine with more finely-crafted details and narrative hairpin turns than ever before. The album feels more progressive and overwhelming than any prior output with its pointillistic beat mosaics and melodic arrangements, taking a few steps closer to some vision of contemporary pop music soaked in adrenaline and ballistic energy. RXM Reality’s production thrives on drama, conveyed in mammoth bursts of overlapped drum elements planted over quick-cycling snippets of software synthesis and Midi guitar. The percussive contours and chest-beating energies of sick for you can sound at times like festival-ready EDM or dubstep (even “brostep”) refracted through a funhouse mirror, maintaining a sense of swaggering confidence and bombast even as shards of disembodied beats and synths melt into putty around the edges of the mix.

Ltd. Purple & Black Splatter Vinyl. It's been four years since Zach Saginaw, aka Shigeto, returned home toMichigan from a stint in Brooklyn, NY, and since then, the multi-facetedmusician has become a part of the fabric of Detroit's music scene. Whilealways having a personal approach to his projects, Saginaw's influencesfor his third album, The New Monday are more about the community ofDetroit than anything else. Named after a weekly DJ event calledMonday is the New Monday that Saginaw does at the unassumingMotor City Wine with a group of friends, The New Monday is the resultof Saginaw diving into the city's deep record culture, where therelegacy of artist's of the past help Saginaw embrace his own contributions."It's focused on a couple things and they all kind of come together torepresent dierent things," explains Saginaw. "My time back in Detroit,back living in Michigan and spending time with a lot of kind of originalpeople who have always been here, learning from them, hearing storiesfrom them, being influenced by them, and inspired by them."While, in the past, projects like Lineage or No Better Time Than Nowwere rooted in strong personal messages, family and relationshipsrespectively, The New Monday represents a communal eort wheresolidarity is the key. Going for a simplified approach of just trying tomake good tracks, The New Monday is diverse in its styles leaning moreinto a dance music direction - new ground for a Shigeto project. A newair of confidence in Saginaw has expanded his horizons since his returnto Detroit, but traces of his past work will continue to be present."I don't want people to think I'm leaving anything," says Saginaw. "I'mstill me. It's a result of me being immersed in the culture, and inevitablymaking music that is influenced by that culture whether it be house,techno, jazz, rap. It doesn't matter. It's all coming from what I love aboutMichigan."While The New Monday still features the jazz textures long associatedwith S...

Multi-disciplinary artist Jasper Marsalis, known by his stage name Slauson Malone 1, announces his new album, Excelsior, out October 6th as his debut for iconic label Warp Records. Among the gems within this album, the spotlight shines on his newly-released second single out today "New Joy," a mesmerizing exploration of finding pleasure from submission, complemented by visuals crafted by the talented hand of Parker Corey of By Storm/Injury Reserve fame, and Marsalis himself. The forthcoming album also includes previously-released single "Voyager," which was accompanied by a music video directed by Ryosuke Tanzawa that spoke to the period of aimlessness following the release of his critically acclaimed 2019 full-length A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018 (Crater Speak), before he moved to Los Angeles.

The word "excelsior" embodies perpetual ascent. Slauson Malone 1 envisions it as a metaphorical sword, one that in someone's possession incessantly grows until it cleaves the Earth in a grand finale. That metaphor becomes his lens to explore all facets of masculinity with a newfound clarity, as he interrogates his own lived experiences through songs and movements across the album inspired by everything from Grammy award-winning composer Wendy Carlos, to the similarities between falling out of love and a nuclear half-life. Excelsior takes the form of a collection of personal essays, with vignettes that intertwine and stand-alone, but ultimately serve the purpose of forming Slauson Malone 1's most personal and enthralling musical work to date.

Multi-disciplinary artist Jasper Marsalis, known by his stage name Slauson Malone 1, announces his new album, Excelsior, out October 6th as his debut for iconic label Warp Records. Among the gems within this album, the spotlight shines on his newly-released second single out today "New Joy," a mesmerizing exploration of finding pleasure from submission, complemented by visuals crafted by the talented hand of Parker Corey of By Storm/Injury Reserve fame, and Marsalis himself. The forthcoming album also includes previously-released single "Voyager," which was accompanied by a music video directed by Ryosuke Tanzawa that spoke to the period of aimlessness following the release of his critically acclaimed 2019 full-length A Quiet Farwell, 2016-2018 (Crater Speak), before he moved to Los Angeles.

The word "excelsior" embodies perpetual ascent. Slauson Malone 1 envisions it as a metaphorical sword, one that in someone's possession incessantly grows until it cleaves the Earth in a grand finale. That metaphor becomes his lens to explore all facets of masculinity with a newfound clarity, as he interrogates his own lived experiences through songs and movements across the album inspired by everything from Grammy award-winning composer Wendy Carlos, to the similarities between falling out of love and a nuclear half-life. Excelsior takes the form of a collection of personal essays, with vignettes that intertwine and stand-alone, but ultimately serve the purpose of forming Slauson Malone 1's most personal and enthralling musical work to date.