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Bureau B present a reissue of Serge Blenner's Magazin Frivole, originally released in 1981. Cold, concise analog synthesizer instrumentals -- on his second album Serge Blenner remained true to his style, albeit shifting course slightly towards pop territory. The juxtaposition of dark harmonies and pop structures is what makes this album so appealing. In places, it feels like a blueprint for early Depeche Mode. Having seen his first album La Vogue (BB 324CD/LP) snapped up by the Sky Records and fast-tracked for release in 1980, Blenner delivered his second LP, Magazin Frivole, the following year. Mindful of the success of its predecessor, Blenner added the name of his debut in big letters to the front cover of the new sleeve. Blenner remained faithful to his musical style, albeit adding more of a pop flavor. Magazin Frivole would not look out of place filed alongside Depeche Mode on the record shelf, as a certain resemblance is undeniable. Moreover, Blenner was one of the few proponents of electronic music who preferred to keep his songs concise, in contrast to the meandering odysseys of many of his electronic contemporaries. The far better-known French artist Jean-Michel Jarre adhered to similar principles, yet although Blenner was often compared to his compatriot, he claims only to have heard his music long after La Vogue had appeared. Minor chords dominate his harmonies, the bass performs octave leaps which mirror the zeitgeist. Unexpected key changes abound, adding a restless, almost disquieting quality. Overall, Magazin Frivole is less dark than the preceding album, but a picture of cheerfulness it is not. Nevertheless, a poppy drum computer introduces a lighter note. From the very first track, chord changes pop up at unexpected junctures -- they seem to come in prematurely, before harmonic sequences have run their course. Blenner doesn't have any explanation for this curiosity, other than to note that "most of the music was played by hand, so of course it wasn't all perfect." "I did all I could to avoid being successful -- on a subconscious level, at least. Unpredictable metrics and irregular beats were definitely part of the process," Blenner admits with an enigmatic smile. Juxtaposed with Blenner's more recent works, one can see what he means. His latest album Musique de Chambre (2008) comprises modern classical chamber music, built on digitally sampled real instruments. Besides, Blenner points out, handling all of those analog devices was a convoluted and complex undertaking.

A child agrees then screams the name. Kid-o-suke. Did you hear that right? The music trickles in. It sounds like it was made in a toy factory. Hold on. Let me reach for the button over there. Childhood memories. The magical sounds of a roundabout sending you to sleep. The wonders of the world seen through eyes that don’t yet fully comprehend and ears that find musical potential in everything. Two kindred souls find each other, distance never the issue, they share and laugh the only way they know how.

The wonderful pixelated world of a video game. Where does reality end and where does the imagination start? Somewhere in the distance an explosion can be heard, or was it a booming bass drum? There are birds singing a crystalline melody. One I heard before, in a dream perhaps. All of a sudden a child exclaims ‘come, let’s go’. Where did he come from? Is he real or another pixelated fragment of imagination?

Yokatta desu. There’s a castle in the sky. Two boys team up to reach it, carried by the power of their dreams. The same dreams that marked their childhood and brought them to be men. If ever there was music worthy of becoming the soundtrack to a Ghibli movie this could be it. There’s a girl asleep on a plastic deer, going around and around. She reminds me of the hand drawn versions of the pixelated heroes of my childhood. I imagine her dreams filled with exciting adventures.

I swear I heard the sounds of Tokyo’s public transport. It told me we’d arrived at Shibuya yet I can’t see the neon bright lights when I look around. Oh well, I’ll just have to imagine them.

It’s an album, so of course it’s real. The music is the result of a desire to create regardless of outcome, for the simple fact that there is a story to tell. People will consume it whichever way they want. Is it this sound or that sound? Does it really matter? Stop for a minute and enjoy the music for what it is. A synthesis of two aesthetics joined not just by a love of music but also a love of the abstract and the childish, the things that remind us we were all young one day and things were simpler. Things like dancing as if no one was looking or making music as if the outcome never mattered.

Kidsuke is a collaborative project between the UK’s Kidkanevil and Japan’s Daisuke Tanabe. Their self-titled debut is released by Project Mooncircle in November 2012 on double colored vinyl LP and digital.

‘Push’ sees the bridging of two minds, a spontaneous event of shared loops, ideas and vision. My Panda Shall Fly & Mau’lin join creative forces giving birth to five abstract free-form compositions. Having followed each others work for some years, the pair found themselves in an East London studio first commencing a sonic dialogue just days before Christmas.

Each track breathing a new life; a conventional genre is hard to pin down. Fusing elements of neo-jazz, broken house and down-tempo ambient, resulting as an eclectic product of unforeseen joint creativity.
Opening track ‘Sea Beast’ heralds entrance into a murky journey through time and space. With jilted, broken keys drizzled upon a throbbing bassline a distant moan finds its way through dense textures. ‘Red’, eases up tightened bolts, it lifts a hazy smog with its loose, almost ‘Buddha Lounge’ melodies. A poly-rhythmic venture of crossing synths, snares and percussion each teasing the other in & out. Taking you into a videogame-like realm, ‘Gingerbread House’ summons intrigue with a conflict of virtuous and sinister emotives. Its minimal pulsing bass line transports an ethereal synth with playful bleeps and shuffling stirs. Calling in Irish outfit Lakker, they instinctively gravitate towards the more organically moulded ‘15Keys’. Dismembering a canon of cascading marimbas and chromatic percussions they splice and reconstruct it into a euphoric slow burner. Marking the last leg of an enchanted journey, ‘I’ finds its dance-floor energy in swelling melodies and a confident staccatoed bass gifted with sharp hi-hats & breaks. Twinkling keys descend as if embossing a newly-cleared night sky with falling stars.

Devoid of preconceived concepts, MPSF & Mau’lin have managed to bind together their own musical idiosyncrasies creating an EP of seductive suspense and intelligent textures.

Emotional Response celebrates it's 10th Anniversary in repressing a label's long held favourite - Jefre Cantu-Ledesma and Alexis Georgopoulos wonderful Fragments Of A Season - coming together perfectly for an album of laconic story-telling and atmospherics.

Over the past decade, Cantu-Ledesma and Georgopoulos have been frequent collaborators. With one another - Jefre's recent ""On The Echoing Green' Mexican Summer), Arp's "The Soft Wave" Smalltown Supersound) and The Alps "Le Voyage" Type) - and with others. Jefre has worked with Grouper aka Liz Harris), filmmaker Paul Clipson and has released music by Harold Budd, Oneohtrix Point Never and Keith Fullerton Whitman on his Root Strata imprint, while Alexis has worked with visual artists Tauba Auerbach and Doug Aitken, scored dance for Merce Cunningham, choreographer Jonah Bokaer and made liminal classical music with Canterbury composer Anthony Moore Frkwys 3 / Rvng Intl.).(Emotional) Especial

In all of their projects, the two have always been masters of atmosphere. Veering between romantic abstraction, filmic ambiguity and suggested narrative, their music draws on personal and collective memory, letting things surface. Fragments Of A Season represents a new and distinct chapter in their ongoing work together, continuing this lineage of understated but resonant work.

Arising from conversations wherein each revealed that they'd been working on tracks with a similar feel in mind, the two quickly realized their songs fit together quite effortlessly. The goal was to do something immediate and spare - most songs simply use an old drum machine and a few chorused guitars, featuring live performances with minimal editing. The result, and indeed the goal of the project, was not to make an album that would simply sounds like what one would expect of the two - there are no modular synths or sequenced basslines, no motorik rhythms or overdriven distortions. Rather, to pursue a tangent of simplicity and clarity.

The result is an album of warmth and cool, sparse but evocative, earthy and luminous, narrative and abstract, taking influence from Les Disques Crepescule and early Cherry Red artists i the duo also cite Eric Rohmer's "A Summer's Tale" and the photography of Luigi Ghirri, whose image graces the cover.

Song titles provide narrative hints. As does New York-based writer Leigh Gallagher's short story enclosed within. Each song finds the story advancing - on the beach ""Marine""); at a discotheque ""Madagascar""); sleeping in the afternoon "Mirror The Sky"). Memory of cobblestone streets and a recent relationship ""Cleo"", "The Streets Are Filled With Rain"). A sense that this temporary idyll will end casts a shadow. Ultimately, for reasons unclear, it does ""Lost Summer"").

There is the sense that a distinct arc has taken place. On some faraway beach, the buildings are white, the skies and sea turquoise. Waves rise and crest. A shaft of light crosses an empty room. A discotheque can be heard in the distance. A mist burns off. Over the course of the ensuing astral summer weeks, an encounter sets the world known previously in relief. Days stretch out and the nights hum.

“Fire, the divine essence stolen from the gods by Prometheus and given to humanity thus, making us unique amongst other creatures of Mother Nature, bringing us closer to the divine.
The myth’s version chosen to illustrate the songs in this compilation, whispers that the figure of this fire remains alive in the shape of intelligence and cleverness. Technology split us apart while allowing us to own the sounds of Nature, to transform them, to travel in time within the 20th century using all sorts of folk instruments, assembling mezzo-sopranos coming down from orchestras high up in the sky, with the most virtuous percussionists in the Spanish music scene. Who would have told the sailor man that he would be dancing to down-tempo with his loved one, who is leaning on the balcony waiting for him.
This compilation is a deep scream from modern gods; the flame that is still alive in this new century.
I couldn’t be more thankful to Lord Guardado (Discómanos) for relying on me for the selection of songs, for being this project’s cornerstone and engine, as well as to all the artists who agreed to be part of it.”
Daniel Nielles

Subtitled As “The Open Gate To New Spanish Music” This Is An Amazing Compilation Dedicated To Spanish Minimal, New Age, Ambient, Downtempo, Folk, Experimental Sounds, 1989-1999, All Tracks Never Released On Vinyl Before.
Feat: Suso Saiz, Iury Lech, Finis Africae, Eliseo Parra...
Sublimely Curated By Daniel Nielles (Tuharrdosons), Inspired By The Work Of People Like Luis Delgado (El Cometa De Madrid, Etc).
LP Only Release, 500 Copies. 180Gr Vinyl.

The debut album 'Pyramids' comes out worldwide on limited double, green vinyl (including download code).

Pyramids. Jagged teeth pushing through immaculate skies. The ever-changing light. The expansive sense of freedom. The wide open spaces. The textured landscape seen from above. Mountains. Watchful and immobile for thousands of years, weathering seasons, transcending change.

It's December 2016. I've left the London madness to hit the reset button and compose new music in a tiny village in the Swiss Alps. I'm over 10,000 feet high, it's minus 15 degrees and the snow is scintillating under a rich blue sky. I turn around and suddenly this gigantic pyramid-shaped peak is towering over me, staring me in the face. Mind blown. Senses overwhelmed. Perspective. Lightbulb moment. I have my album concept.

I wanted to put into sound my cathartic experiences of the mountains. Every track title was chosen before composing. The title would be a catalyst for visual memories, narrative and overall vibes. I continued developing the tracks on occasional trips to Switzerland, but mainly back in the gritty habitat of London's Hackney Wick. The urban-nature contrast had an impact on the music too.

I use a lot of found sound, stuff I have collected over the years, and a lot of resampled guitar sounds and textures. I love imperfections in sound. Detuned synths. Distortions and glitches. Rhythmic flutters and percussive frenzy. 'Manual' cut-ups. I love moving to house and disco and getting lost in the more melodic side of techno. I love polyrhythms and melodic counterpoints. I love the energy and rawness of a live rock band. I channel all this to create my own sonic palette.

Artwork by Jimmy Turrell, graphic artist and video director who combines a love of handmade collage, drawing, screen printing and painting alongside digital techniques. He has worked for Universal Music, Nike, Lexus, Levis, MTV, The New Yorker, Intro, Capitol Records, The New York Times, Green Peace, Beck, The Prodigy/XL Recordings, Channel 4, The Guardian, GQ, The Times, LA Times, Newsweek, Getty Images, Adidas, Sony Music, New York Magazine, Wired, Glastonbury Festival, and Vanity Fair amongst others.

Ushering in an exciting new era for the label, nightclub, and mix series, Bonobo opens the Fabric Presents series. His highly textural aesthetic translates into an ethos that looks to introduce a more open musical palette for the label. His mix features "Roach" from his rare pop-up alias Barakas and employs multi-instrumental arrangements in this 74 minutes of house, techno, electronica, and breakbeat. Features ten exclusive or unreleased tracks, including two from Bonobo and one from his Barakas alias. Bonobo's first official mix release since LateNightTales in 2013 and follows on from the world-wide success of Migration in 2017. Also features Poté, Alex Kassian, Âme, Durante, Dark Sky & Afriquoi, Olsen, O'Flynn, TSHA, Will Saul, Titeknots, Dan Kye, R. Lyle, Rhone, Laurent Garnier, Throwing Snow, Nepa Allstar, DJ Seinfeld, Earth Trax & Newborn JR, Annjet, and John Beltran.

Décalé. and Bongo Joe Records present an all new compilation placing the spotlight on the Swiss experimental and electronic scene of the ‘80s and the early ‘90s. The compilation Intenta assembles under-appreciated gems, sought-after titles and newly mixed versions. It places leftfield synth-pop next to otherworldly jazz, and joins the dots between lyrical post-punk excursions and proto-house experimentation.

The compilation covers a period of transition: When songs mutated into sounds. When synthesizers and samplers became the règle du jeu in DIY music-making. When a politicized youth movement slowly gave way to the hedonistic embrace of techno culture in Switzerland. Intenta mines the outer fringes of a scene yet to be. Many of these experimenters were pretty much on their own. Often the only way you would get in touch was at the local synth dealer.

A spirit of bold improvisation inhabited studios between Geneva and St. Gallen: these artists were articulating pop sensibilities (Air Project, Sky Bird, D-Sire, Peter Philippe Weiss), entering computer worlds (Claudine Chirac, Olivier Rogg, Carlos Perón), exploring exotic shores (Andreas Hofer, Bells of Kyoto, Fizzè), building future discothèques (Aborted at Line 6, Carol Rich, UnknownmiX) or finding glacial bliss (Dressed Up Animals, Elephant Château, I Suonatori).

The compilation was put together by Matthias Orsett and Maxi Fischer. Intenta unfolds as a sonic story that is laid-back yet energetic, sultry yet daring. The two crate diggers set out to meet with many of the artists arrayed here. Memories were shared, wine bottles opened. There were moments of sadness: Karl Lienert Löwenherz (Dressed Up Animals) and Claudius Scholer (Sky Bird) passed away during the making of this project. What remains of this journey into the backrooms of Swiss popular culture, is Intenta. If you listen closely, it will reveal a nation on the move. Beyond the Matterhorn, there is sweetness and light.

Compilation, concept and production by
Maxi Fischer & Matthias Orsett
Artistic supervision by Cyril Yeterian
Analog mastering by Tim Stollenwerk
Vinyl cut by Adi Flück
Editorial by Bjørn Schaeffner
Drawings and layout by David Mamie
Typeface (Office Grotesk) by Chi-Long Trieu
Leaflet design by Yanis Carnal
The gatefold cover illustration is the music sheet of ‘Mondtanz” by
Karl Lienert Löwenherz from Dressed Up Animals
Courtesy of the artist’s family

Part 3 of the Melody As Truth Studio vinyl documents

This will come as no surprise to those who've followed GGM since 2014's Bishouné: Alma Del Huila, the critically-lauded, self-produced EP that put him on the map, and served as sample fodder for a handful of popular music's most iconic artists. His follow-up LP, 2017's Jardin, melded classical and folkloric instruments with rnb, hip-hop, and cumbia, proving once again that Gabriel is totally comfortable making transformative, funky, cathartic records all by himself. Agüita, his first release for Jagjaguwar, is a sequence of impossibly diverse offerings ranging from trap anthems to string-drenched art pop ballads - a prismatic self-portrait, personal and universal all at once. The artist is present, and he is in final form. The magic of Agüita lives in Gabriel's ability to consolidate a range of truths into a focused, crystallized idea. "Bloom," "Blue Dot," and "Fields" compare the growth and loss inherent in human life with the changing of the seasons and the life cycles of the universe; on "Fields," Garzón-Montano evokes the despondent whimper of Thom Yorke. There are mirrors of the same themes in compositions like "With a Smile," "Tombs," "Someone," and "Moonless," a quartet of songs that explore the births and deaths of the relationships we have with the people we love; on "Moonless," Gabriel explores for the first time his struggle with the grief of his mother's passing: "Mama died / and I was moonless in a Stygian tide...trying to hide the ripening tumor / breathing fire, love but a rumour / There's a woman in my sky / 17 when I learned to cry_" It is to his immense credit as a songwriter that we are left with an understanding of the depth of his loss, despite having never experienced it. Equally impactful are the trap and reggaeton cuts - the album's energetic high points. On "Agüita," "Mira My Look," and "Muñeca," GGM delves into club-banger territory, performing in Spanish for the first time on record. Whether you're here for the medium, or for the message, for the man himself, or one of his characters, Agüita stands as the strongest installment thus far in a series of alarmingly sincere, sensationally profound works, from an artist who has sought not only to challenge established preconceptions and categories, but to expose their ultimate unworthiness. From composition to execution, the product distills the essence of Gabriel Garzón-Montano's genius, an uninterrupted creative process rare in this age of fattened album credits.

Record Store Day 2020 Release.
Limitation: 500 copies.

Ponytails & Cocktails is a collaboration between 5 individuals from all different backgrounds. Front man and lead singer, Chad Dukes hosts a daily sports talk radio program (Chad Dukes VS The World) for over a decade in Washington DC on CBS 106.7 The Fan. He also hosts the everlasting podcast,'' Big O and Dukes'' since 2007, boasting more than 50 Million downloads. Acoustic Guitarist, Dempsey Hamilton, is the owner of Mobius Records in Fairfax, VA. as well as a long time touring sound engineer. Spawned from their love of the Broken Lizard movie ''Club Dread'', Ponytails & Cocktails started as a tribute band to Bill Paxton's character ''Coconut Pete''. They are the Only band endorsed by Jay Chandrasekhar and Erik Stolhanske of the comedy troop ''Broken Lizard''. From there, they decided to write their own material in the same spirit. ''Big Blue Wave'' is their first original album and it debuted at #6 on the Billboard Comedy charts in 2019 and shot up to #3 on iTunes sales the first 2 weeks it was available.They made only 250 hard copies of CD and Tapes and sold them out within the first weekend. This limited edition record comes with a bonus track and skit not included on the CD or Streaming. Think Wheeler Walker Jr. on a beach in Pina Coladaberg.

1.Big Blue Wave 2.Look Behind The Banana 3. Interlude #1 4.Percy Pelican's 5.Son Of A Santa 6.Week Of Tribulations 7.Interlude #2 8.Tacos In Valhalla 9.Canyons Of Urine 10.Putman's Hair 11.Follow The Banana 12. Big Blue Wave (clean)

Videosphere, the debut album by Kompakt’s latest signing, the London-based artist Lake Turner (aka Andrew Halford), swoons into focus with “The Sunbird”, a teasing drift of lilting, ambient tones, riding out a submerged piston-pulse rhythm. Across its brief 109 seconds, it manages to traverse evocative terrain – something mythopoetic, something both humble and grandiose, a glimpse of the other behind the sky’s curtain. “I wanted to conjure up something resembling an ancient ceremony or death procession,” Turner nods. “Like a hymn to the surroundings of a faraway hill.” It’s both sky-bound and earthen, a ritual incantation to call in the music of the spheres.

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.”

Lionel Marchetti is a major figure of the “third generation” of concrète musicians, a term he values. Listening to these works, imbued with poetry and traversed by micro-narratives, one can indeed retrieve the original concrète spirit, the one that draws from the sonic world, with ears wide open, so as to extract a fertile, rich and multiple substance then shaped and conveyed towards a formal and musical abstraction. Lionel Marchetti has mastered this process, but his real distinctive feature is a truly unique talent for setting climates (as one sets traps) and keeping us on constant alert. The two pieces in this record perfectly illustrate the entrancing dimension of Lionel Marchetti's music, whose charm leads us, through each successive listening, to become voluntary captives so as to better liberate ourselves - François Bonnet, Paris, 2020

"I wonder if my fascination for clouds (without being an obsession) may have risen at the end of the 80s as, whilst composing Micro-climat, I would regularly wander between the Vercors mountains and the high plateaus of the Monts du Forez discovering, through my eyes, body, breath, active observation and walk, that natural forms when constantly changing and yet swollen with a unity of matter (in this instance, water) open one up to a deep, fundamental breath and a clear field for the mind. The sky and its forces: our ally. A model for a natural music which, although fixed, as in musique concrète (a rule of the genre), moreover on a recording tape, will remain charged with such a poetic quality that (isn't it its role or rather its reality?) it will ensure a perpetual renewal for our senses, so as to reach another idea of the world, far more open and richer than what we could have imagined." - Lionel Marchetti, 2011

Venerable avant-gardist John Duncan supplies quietly jaw-dropping new fruits from his fertile relationship with iDEAL Recordings, rendering a concept album for the times split between thoughts on social energy/failure, and intimacy, in his singular style In quizzical pursuit of the haunted muse that’s informed Duncan’s boundary-pushing work since the late ‘70s, and which has lit up the iDEAL catalogue over the past half decade, ’Soft Eyes’ renders Duncan’s oblique reading of the psychic zeitgeist in subtly contrasting sides of furtively rhythm-driven and richly atmospheric songcraft. In keeping with Duncan’s reputation as a sort of avant garde shaman or psychopomp, there’s something unfathomably timeless and ineffably eternal about his work on ’Soft Eyes’, which follows the course of his modern classics such as the songbook of wizened covers ‘Bitter Earth’ (2016), and last year’s ‘Red Sky’ 2CD, without feeling like he’s re-treading old ground, and still sounding vitally unusual. The record’s first half revolves around Duncan’s thoughts on social energy and failure, from crowds to tribal gatherings, in a low-key but extraordinary style. Chamber wind meets a metallic pulse somewhere between dembow and Yemeni folk to underline his achingly hoarse vocals on ‘The Rabid Position’, while the lurking vox of ’Say No’ smartly reaffirms his counter-cultural cache, and the queered ambience of ‘Homecoming’ sees him slip into a sort of curdled tribal reverie. On the other hand, the B-side dwells in a starker, intimate half light, with songs stripped to a spectral quintessence between the petal-fall keys and prickly sax of ‘Foreplay’, a face freezing, ASMR-triggering beauty titled ‘Frenzy’, and an unmissable, abyss-hovering vision ‘Resolve’, and pooling into the miasmic folk strings and stygian glyde of ‘The Beautiful Attempt.’

Limited Edition LP.

Release Text:

So that moving from the middle passage forward (and backward), as Jacques Roumaine said, from that “railroad of human bones . . . at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean,” one traced the very path and life and development, tragedy, and triumph of Black people. How they had been “removed” from Africa and had been transformed by this hideous “trip,” and by the context of their lives in the actual “West,” into a Western people. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Du Bois points out, the majority of us were “Americans.” (Here, a pause, for “canned” studio laughter!)

At each juncture, twist and turn, as Black people were transformed, so was their characteristic music. It became emphatically clear to me that by analyzing the music, you could see with some accuracy what and why that change had been. To reflect that “newer” them, which I later termed, in the book Black Music, “The Changing Same.” In the continuously contrasting contexts of their actual lives. My deep concentration on the continuing evidence of surviving “Africanisms” and parallels between African customs and philosophies, mores, etc., and the philosophies and their Afro-American continuum were to teach myself, and whoever, that Black people did not drop out of the sky, although, “fo’ sho’,” they continue to be, despite the wildest of ironies, the most American of Americans.

But for all the syncretic re-presentation and continuation of African mores and beliefs, even under the hideous wrap of chattel slavery (“many have suffered as much as Black people ... but none of them was real estate” –– Du Bois), there is one thing that I have learned, since the original writing of Blues People, that I feel must be a critical new emphasis not understood completely by me in the earlier text. That is, that the Africanisms are not limited to Black people, but indeed American Culture, itself, is shaped by and includes a great many Africanisms. So that American culture, in the real world, is a composite of African, European, and Native or Akwesasne cultures, history, and people. [...]

Actually, Blues People is a beginning text. There is much work yet to be done to properly bring the music into the open light of international understanding and collective social development and use –– despite the massive commercial exploitation...*

— Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963)

*excerpt from the introduction of the 1999 First Quill edition by Amiri Baraka

A few weeks ago, I was sitting late in the evening just before sunset at Chlodwigplatz in Cologne. For a few years I sat here almost every evening with my best girlfriend, until the café we liked so much fell prey to gentrification and general indifference. For that long, we just sat here in this place and watched people rush to the train stop, go shopping, or heading home. Usually at some point, a homeless person we know briefly came by and we gave him some money. The square and its people are a mixture of very beautiful and incredibly ugly. It is full of contradictions. Like so many things in life. Chlodwigplatz is the heart of this part of town where I have lived for over 20 years. Sometimes I see Julian walking by, somehow elated and always elegantly dressed; we greet, talk briefly, maybe he goes to do sports or to his apartment a few streets away to make music. With Julian, I never really know whether he is happy or very sad. But you can see right away that he feels a lot. Probably we both live here in this city, in this neighborhood, for exactly this one reason. This evening, the sky over the city is a sea of light and colours. The unique meteorological spectacle of nature is reminiscent of impressionist painting, and it is so overwhelmingly beautiful that the social networks are full of photos of this orgy of orange, yellow, blue and gray. It looks like the sky is on fire. I have to think back to this sight when I hear "Sky Without Colours" for the first time and look at the cover. The artwork by Frederike Wetzels and Franziska Stetter for Julian's first solo album looks like a minimalist, reduced abstraction of my memory: a calm surface that very gradually goes from a cool blue to warm reddish colours at the bottom of the picture. But in contrast to the described moment, so colourful and euphoric, the title of the album sounds like a deep melancholy, telling you something about absence and loss. In fact, this album is carried by a very special emotion, it is not a work that communicates with the outside world in bright colours and loud words. Instead, it functions like an inverse image of that glowing sky over the city, almost bursting with intensity: it rests entirely within itself, and yet it burns ablaze. Julian Stetter simply turns the inside out, but he does this without pathos, without kitsch. He gently shifts the lines between club and pop, between song and track, - like a painter he blurs the boundaries (and his traces) and lets the transitions slowly blur. Aydo Abay is Julian's voice, moving through him and through the album, expressing, formulating, giving voice to all that the producer himself lacks the words for. In the beautiful title track "Sky Without Colours", in the floating "No Cure" and finally in the slightly gloomy broken "Mountain Of Geeks" you think you hear Neil Tennant singing, so beautiful, so clear and precise, androgynous and always a little sad Abay sounds here. In the instrumental sketches Julian draws on his long and successful experience as a composer of soundtracks and music for film and theater. The opener "Calm" and especially the last track "Sleep", which embrace the album from both sides, are such little masterpieces that, between ambient and the exceedingly nuanced and careful use of sounds and rhythm, invite the brain to take nightly walks. And there is always this emotional ambivalence, laughing and crying eyes at the same time, looking forward, confidently saddened. Hardly a straight bass drum, no fat beats, - Julian Stetter doesn't need any imperatives at all for an album that sounds musically as well as atmospherically like from one cast; it is rich in spirit, intensity and resilience, full of elegance, passion and of excellent timing. Deep down, it is animated by a remarkably self-assured humility. Listening to "Sky Without Colours" and writing about it actually helped me perceive the person behind producer and DJ Julian Stetter differently. The next time I see him at Chlodwigplatz, I will still ask myself whether he is happy or sad. Only the sky, I now see with different eyes.

Important Note: Unfortunately THE Sides ARE Reversed ON THE Vinyl, I.E. THE A-side IS THE B-side AND Vice Versa. With THE Purchase OF THE Vinyl OR THE CD YOU Will GET THE Single MP3 Files AS Well AS A Continous MIX VIA E-mail. With the cover artwork for Pop Ambient 2022, longtime Kompakt graphic artist Veronika Unland has once again outdone herself. Following the almost baroque, blood-red and jet-black, extremely physical sculptures of Pop Ambient 2021, which emerged from a dark, floral sea like bodies erect for dancing, the front of 2022 is adorned with a pastel-white form, intertwined, folded many times and crisscrossed with delicate shading, which seems to float on a pale pink background; soft, gentle waves woven from Venetian colors that leave the viewer puzzled: Is it a flower, a coral, a mollusk?

Again, the current edition of the tradition-steeped compilation series curated by Wolfgang Voigt is about the persistent and ever-necessary definition of beauty, of reduction, of electronic music of heavy lightness and light heaviness, of ambient's eternal promise of a state of physical and acoustic weightlessness and Pop's of redemption. And about the question why a never arbitrary combination of soundscape, drones, samples and loops, put together in a certain way, can create this feeling of warmth, depth and space, - something three-dimensional, where the imagination feels at home as a fish in the water or a bird in the sky. A key aesthetic stimulus that sends all the senses into a slow glide and drift, after which your synapses feel like they've been bathed in essential oil. Next to Soul, Ambient is probably the most effective musical healing plant of mankind.

Behind the aural test tubes, the who's who of Pop Ambient is once again at work, led for the first time by the highly trafficked Californian duo Blank Gloss, whose debut album "Melt" this year was certified by The Guardian as nothing less than "heartaching beauty". Yui Onodera's "Chrome" as well as "Kari", a cooperation of Markus Guentner and Joachim Spieth, could also be imagined in the score of Denis Villeneuve's new film version of Dune - however, colleague Hans Zimmer managed that quite well without the three. After such wonderful and stylish contributions by Reich & Würden, Triola and Thomas Fehlmann, the ear then lingers a bit longer on the ghostly "Weiht" by Morgen Wurde feat. Maria Estrella, a track like a temple of sound, a deep electronic immersion in a Japanese onsen. In this sea of unnameable time you could sink forever, but with the tracks of Andrew Thomas, Thore Pfeiffer and Max Würden & Pepo Galán the journey slowly comes to an end.

Tiger Blood Tapes, Underwater Computing _, and No Problema Tapes are truly honored and proud to present: Imaginary Pathways A posthumous final album release by Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza, in partnership with SkyTwoHigh Proceeds going directly to the estate of Cesar Alexandre.

Imaginary Pathways Some places in our cities can be incredibly awestriking. These places don‘t need to be beautiful, but you connect with them anyway. You go through them on your way to work, when you walk by and look out of the window, visit a virtual landscape, a city cascaded in light and darkness, a landmark from that place on an old photograph. These places burn deep into the mind. Laying on your bed, you can imagine any of these places vividly - but your mind wont show you every detail. You build your own imaginary pathway, a collection of memories and synapses, with all the information you have. We did exactly that in this album. We took real places and situations that embossed our life and constructed our own imaginary place with our music. Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza from Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, and SkyTwoHigh from Dortmund, Germany, bring to you a construction our of own Imaginary Pathways.

A word from SkyTwoHigh: I've often had trouble working with people musically and collaborating on projects. Usually finding that our musical visions were not in alignment. I sometimes thought about how I'm always making music alone, but then I met you Cesar, and this finally changed. Now I could truly share my musical experience, and I never had more fun in my entire life. Your musical vision was identical with mine and our styles matched so perfectly, it was a real blessing. I remember specifically when we did our first track and how amazed I was that everything worked so well. You had exactly the same ideas as me. It was unbelievable. The project went so well that we decided we'd do one each year, so I hope this lives on forever as a collection our imaginary pathways R.I.P. Cesar Alexandre aka Lindsheaven Virtual Plaza / Mount Shrine, one of the nicest, most creative people I ever met. Let your music inspire forever! We will never forget you. Never!

Loraine James' new ambient-minded alias, Whatever The Weather, follows her 2021 solo LP Reflection (Hyperdub). In contrast to her club music sensibilities, this mode embraces keyboard improvisations and vocal experimentation, foregoing percussive structure in favor of shaping atmosphere and tone. From this divergent headspace emerged new coordinates and climates, a new outlet: Whatever The Weather. A longtime fan of ambient-adjacent Ghostly International artists such as Telefon Tel Aviv (who she'd ask to master the album), HTRK (whose singer Jonnine Standish features on Nothing), and Lusine (whom she remixed at the start of 2021), James saw the label as the ideal home for this eponymous album of airy, transportive tracks as they began to formulate. The titling on Whatever The Weather works in degrees; simple parameters allowing James to focus on the nuances as a mood-builder. Her suspended universe fluctuates; freezing, thawing, swaying and blooming from track to track. James describes her jam-based approach for the sessions as "free-flowing, stopping when I felt like I was done," allowing her subconscious to lead. The improvisations have an intrinsic fluidity to them, akin to sudden weather events passing over a single environment - the location feels fixed while the conditions vary. The album opens at "25°C," a sunshower of soft hums and keys. As the longest piece, it serves to establish stability, the inflection point where any move above or below this temperate breeze breaks the bliss. Given James' proclivity for organized chaos in her production, this scene is fleeting, naturally. From that utopia, we plummet to the most melancholic read on the meter, "0°C," its isolated synth line traversing a hailstorm of steely beats and static. Next, the dial jumps for the propulsive standout "17°C." Like a timelapse of springtime in the city, the single accelerates across a frenzy of frames; car horns, screeching brakes, and crosswalk chatter fill the pauses between rapid jolts of multi-shaped percussion. For portions of the work, James leans neo-classical, rendering pensive vignettes of cascading piano keys and warm delay. "2°C (Intermittent Rain)" ends the A-Side on a short and stormy loop; a resulting sense of reset permeates the B-Side's opener, "10°C." The producer mingles intuitively on echoed organ, locking into and abandoning atypical rhythms that suggest her jazz-oriented interests. "4°C" and "30°C" display the range of James' vocal experiments. The former chops and pitches her voice to a rhythmic, otherworldly effect, the latter reveals James at her most straightforward (she cites Deftones' Chino Moreno and American Football's Mike Kinsella as inspirations), singing tenderly and unobstructed for nearly the duration before beats collide in the climax. Whatever The Weather closes at "36°C," while a sweltering heat by any standards the track eases along comfortably on a chorus of synth waves, acting as an apt bookend for this evocative, sky-tracing collection that started in a similar state. Cyclical, seasonal, and unpredictable, true to its namesake.

To a degree, all musicians are a product of their environment, the places they record and the venues they play. For proof, check out the alumni of the n-wave era CBGBs venue in New York, Cabaret Voltaire’s Western Works studio in Sheffield or more recently London’s Total Refreshment Centre. We can now add to that list the Constellations Workshop in Colwick, Nottingham, a project that provides employment through making studio furniture, for out-of-work musicians. It was here, after-hours, that the music on Brown Fang’s impressive and ear-catching debut album took shape. Both members of Brown Fang, bassist John Thompson and guitarist Henry Scott AKA Henry Claude, have a long association with the Constellations Workshop. Though their musical projects are manifold – Thompson having toured with the likes of The Nectarine No9 and The Selecter, with Scott being both a mainstay of Nottingham jazz circuit and recording ambient music as Fang Jr – the work provided by the community-minded project has kept their heads above water and allowed them a space to record in when the shutters go down and the bandsaws get switched off. Yet the music showcased on Sherwood Pines is more morning-fresh and sun-kissed than industrial and sawdust-sprinkled. Combining the pair’s brilliant musicianship – think languid bass guitars and Pat Martino-esque jazz guitar licks – with saucer-eyed electronics, occasional downtempo drum machine rhythms and plenty of glistening special effects, the set’s eight tracks are as blissful and becalmed as an early morning saunter through Sherwood Forest on a misty autumn morning. For proof, check epic opener ‘Tracing Paper’, a slow-build ambient soundscape in which bubbly electronic lead lines and colourful chords sashay around Scott’s sparkling, laidback guitars, and the beguiling ‘That’s All You Can Think’, a subtle tribute to Steve Reich masterpiece ‘Electric Counterpoint’ in which slow-burn, stretched out synthesizer sounds wave in and out of a gradually evolving cycle of delay-laden electric guitar motifs. The band’s love of classic American minimalism – as well as a shared love of the Duratti Column and Robert Fripp – comes to the fore on ‘hdmi I Love You’, which boasts a deliciously dubby bassline, Tangerine Dream style synths and the deepest of ambient chords, while ‘I Nearly Married a Human’ and ‘Fridgewords’ balance bespoke electronics – languid, dewy eyed and comforting – with Scott’s gorgeously laidback, slow-release guitars. Every great album needs a triumphant conclusion, and Sherwood Pines is no different. You can hear everything that makes Brown Fang great on ‘Goodbye Donkey Jacket’, from the pin sharp, effects laden jazziness of Scott’s guitars and the fluid dexterity of Thompson’s bass, to the pleasingly spacey pulse of the synths and the gentle rhythms of the soft-focus machine drums. It’s a confident, ear-catching conclusion to a debut album that’s been years in the making.

“Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?” This quote from a poem by Edgar Allan Poe sums up the lamenting, primal work that is "All That We See or Seem"; a project conceived between Finland, England and Brazil. The self-titled album consists of two long-form pieces of droning mysticism hailing from the trio of Gruth (concept, production, electronics), Ellen Southern (vocals, field recordings, percussion) and Johanna Puuperä (violin, modular synthesizer, additional vocals). The album opens straight into a thousand yard stare with “Myrskymielellä", adapted from a 1891 poem by the Finnish national poet, Eino Leino, who wrote it at the tender age of 13. Here a blank distant droning of synths and the sounds of flowing water hover underneath like a dark river observed from the air. This is a sound and feeling that will stay constant for the entirety of the piece´s thirty minute duration. It is a trance-inducing composition that slowly unfolds elements of pagan ancestry into its own life. At first, faint female vocals are introduced as distant spatial elements, which gradually advance into waves of cries and anguish as the piece progresses and moves further into the storm. The tranquility of the first half is slowly morphed into a full blown ceremony as driving ritualistic percussion and a foreboding witch-like presence shifts the piece into a Dead Can Dance-like territory. Here a constant enveloping mixture of violins, modular synths, field recordings and vocal screams creates the feeling of a grande finale. It is an astounding piece of music that develops like a drone symphony for the beginning of time. With the second piece, “A Dream Within A Dream”, from Edgar Allan Poe´s 1849 poem, you are transported to the shores of an undisclosed island; a place where it´s only you, your thoughts and the endless emptiness. The continual sound of waves is soon brought together with a cloud of synths and mourning violins that will keep a steady dreamlike state during most of the piece´s duration. This time the wordless vocals feel almost angelic in their pageantry. The composition flows like a slow caress of the soul and feels like the spirit twin of Gavin Bryars' “The Sinking of the Titanic” with its lamenting slow movements towards the unknown. Truly a ghost of a record, “All That We See or Seem” is an experience hard to shake and feels like entering sacred ground. We are in a place surrounded by earth, both ancient and present. "Let loose, Vanha, the rage of an earthly storm! Detach the elements, completely open the sky! In the Earth, let an incessant storm prevail, so that in my chest I would not feel the miserable pain” - Eino Leino

When British Airways got privatized and listed on the London Stock Exchange, somewhere in Canada the first Starbucks outside of the US opened, and the Walt Disney Company signed an agreement with the French Prime Minister to construct Disneyland Paris. In the sky above southern Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, northern Somalia, and the Atlantic Ocean a hybrid solar eclipse materialized for 7.57 seconds, whilst Margaret Thatcher performed for 45-minutes on Soviet television. Some days later, The Simpsons cartoon first appears as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, Diego Maradona wins his first Italian soccer championship with Napoli, and Eighteen-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust lands a private plane on Red Square in Moscow. In the mists of the world's first conference on artificial life at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mainland China opens in Beijing, and Prozac gets approved for use as an antidepressant in the United States. Much give way for the future, down there in 1987, the year that marks the title of Benedikt Frey’s freshest mini album, out into the world on R.i.O., the label he runs with some pals in the North of Berlin. It’s a dubby melancholic conqueror, wistfully, repetitive, drilling, absorbing, spooking. It makes you dream. Not particular of the year 1987. But it’s all there: The Red Square, the untouched land of the Val d'Europe, Diego on fuego. Six dark-ish tracks in trance, melancholic dub, downbeat heaven, journey music depths, all full of light and yet so dark. Futuristic dramas linked to a speculative past. In our dreams all might look different. The eclipse may last 27- minutes. You meet Neuromancer cyberpunks and blade running Ghost dogs, all taught to hack by Phrack. Cristal clear melodies, sampled voices, and veiled basslines, analogue scopes, and digital ropes, longing for a past that storm into the future. A time where deep listening widens the acoustics into infinity, while neon glows charm the light smog. Benedikt Frey been down there. Or maybe not. His latest music tells stories from the bygone, vested with the forthcoming. Come in and look out. There is nothing to see, yet so much to hear.

Andean inspired home recordings from Tomás Tello - solo and with friends. ACA (roughly translated as right here) is a new project by Tomás Tello enabling him to collaborate with whoever crosses his paths creating a truly mystifying journey of highland mysticism crossed with late night bonfire jams, whichever way you look at it Tello keeps the South American experimentalism torch flying high above in the starry sky. Tomás had this to say about the album: ‘’Where I live the crickets never stop chirping… and during quarantine they kept going and going and going … Grillito (small cricket in Spanish) was recorded in Tavira, Portugal between 2019 and 2020 in various impromptu sessions. Side A begins, appropriately, with the theme Grillito ... the opening is inspired by the music of the Sikuris. Next comes Yarabits, recorded with Raul Jardín and Aya. I recorded the rest of the side by myself including some field recordings of the Quelccaya glaciar in Cuzco, Peru. Side B extends the concept to its illogical conclusion with an infinity mix between the Quelccaya recordings and various songs that I recorded with Daniel Llermaly on bass and a Nintendo making simple beats...I also decided to include an homemade cover of Olas de Verano by Los Pakines and a cumbia samba by Juaneco y su combo. Eventually the album peaks with a long section I recorded with Laura Robles using the Cajón... I mixed those recordings with others of the Pacific Ocean spray in Lima. It’s really nice to have this music committed to tape because when I started playing music it was with Laura Robles, so it's really special to have recorded this! Grillito, for me, is a displacement between different memories and fantasies that appear when I remember traveling on Peruvian roads... each theme is like looking through a window on a bus...you sleep and wake up and you are in another type of territory...in the desert...in the highlands....in the city... in a small town ... next to the sea … inside your memory... these are long, long trips ... The little crickets are there to remind us that we are not alone... a nature musical gift. ‘’

Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds) takes us beneath all the bedazzled glam stardom as Yves journeys through the limbo of life and love, escaping toxicity to get higher and holier. From the raw, unapologetic drawl of 'God Is a Circle' comes a mercurially shifting tracklist where Yves picks apart their psyche, discerning lovers and enemies both spiritually devoted to. 'Lovely Sewer' captures the incendiary spark of love, heart racing to the red flags under sunset coloured new wave guitars; a total flipside to the later sultry sighs and strong shuffles of 'Echolalia', where heat rises from the spiralling synths and funky dance grooves.

As Yves explores the pulchritude of purgatory, they move through electrifying rock strains. The technicolour acoustic guitars of 'Meteora Blues' evolve into a high voltage headbanger as they plead, "I'll always pray to an empty sky," sauntering into a falsetto-powered, scathing examination of the popstar on 'Parody' and the cold wave-meets-emo thrashes of 'In Spite of War'. 'Purified By the Fire' is a plunderphonic gauntlet of alchemical transmutation, with shredded loops and cataclysmic beats leading up to the anthemic and heavenly last hurrah of 'Ebony Eye', where Yves Tumor finds glory and salvation, sitting on the throne as the righteous leader of rock music’s contemporary revolution.

The world needed a new rockstar, and Yves Tumor has the answer. From the chameleonic kaleidoscope Safe In The Hands Of Love, to the visceral fusions of Heaven To A Tortured Mind, and the theatrical power jams of The Asymptotical World, Yves Tumor has proved their prowess in any sound their punk spirit inhabits. Hot Between Worlds distills all of this into a masterclass of pop songwriting and rock captivation, with songs that carry a stadium shaking energy having been teased and refined with their band live across the globe.

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.

Icelandic musician Gunnar Jónsson Collider debuts on A Strangely Isolated Place with an expansive trip through six fictional environments, brought further to life through an accompanying video by artist Arna Beth.

Inviting escapism through detailed, glacial textures, S.W.I.M. elevates a traditional beatless spectrum into a first-person narrative, moving across burning wastelands, miles-high sundown, a dizzying night sky, subterranean exploration, and more beautiful, natural phenomena. Subtle changes in tone and texture across each of the six environments provide a signal of the destination’s energy and the intended perception of the traveler. At times, elated and dwarfed by nature’s surrounding grandeur. Other times, bestowing a sense of apprehension and unknowing.

Best absorbed through the accompanying visual album by fellow Icelandic digital artist Arna Beth, S.W.I.M. is an immersive jump into a majestic sci-fi world, placing you front and center in both sound and visual.

Mastered by Franceso Fabris, S.W.I.M., will be available on limited edition 12” and digital.

"Rediscover your love of Bossa Nova!"

Tiger Blood Tapes proudly presents for the first time ever on cassette, Richard Bone's 1998 Ambient Electro Jazz album "Electropica". Features an unreleased outtake "Cosa Nova".

"Electropica" is part one in a trilogy of Richard Bone's Ambient Electro Bossa Nova albums.

Originally released in 1998 on CD by Quirkworks Labratories.

Press Release:

"A curious thing happened to me during the summer of 1996. While leaving a favorite music store, I detoured down the jazz isle. Suddenly, one of the discs flung itself out of the bin and landed squarely at my feet. I was immediately drawn to its cover. A giraffe was gliding across cobalt blue sand beneath an emerald green sky. Without a second thought I bought the disc and brought it home. My life was about to change.

The disc was Antonio Carlos Jobim's "wave". Recorded in 1967, it was one of the most sensual works I had ever heard. The gentle rhythms, the haunting melodies were mesmerizing. The stereo imaging of producer Creed Taylor was magical. I must have played it ten times that night. These were beats of another time, another place. Innocent, yet primal, but most of all...romantic. This was Bossa Nova!

I have spent the last year and a half researching this old/new music. I discovered the masters of this genre: Jobim, Luiz Bonfa and Joao Gilberto. During those many months I listened to little else.

Electropica is my homage to these artists. Through the melding of sampled, found and created sounds, I have tried to capture my impression of this music, these rhythms. My work in the past has been described as ambient or electronic. For this release, I set those catagories aside.

I hope you will take a little time and listen to Electropica with unbiased ears. Close your eyes and envision a different world. With giraffes, perhaps, and emerald skies above cobalt sand.

Peace Always," -Richard Bone

"Rediscover your love of Bossa Nova!"

Tiger Blood Tapes proudly presents for the first time ever on cassette, Richard Bone's 1998 Ambient Electro Jazz album "Electropica". Features an unreleased outtake "Cosa Nova".

"Electropica" is part one in a trilogy of Richard Bone's Ambient Electro Bossa Nova albums.

Originally released in 1998 on CD by Quirkworks Labratories.

Press Release:

"A curious thing happened to me during the summer of 1996. While leaving a favorite music store, I detoured down the jazz isle. Suddenly, one of the discs flung itself out of the bin and landed squarely at my feet. I was immediately drawn to its cover. A giraffe was gliding across cobalt blue sand beneath an emerald green sky. Without a second thought I bought the disc and brought it home. My life was about to change.

The disc was Antonio Carlos Jobim's "wave". Recorded in 1967, it was one of the most sensual works I had ever heard. The gentle rhythms, the haunting melodies were mesmerizing. The stereo imaging of producer Creed Taylor was magical. I must have played it ten times that night. These were beats of another time, another place. Innocent, yet primal, but most of all...romantic. This was Bossa Nova!

I have spent the last year and a half researching this old/new music. I discovered the masters of this genre: Jobim, Luiz Bonfa and Joao Gilberto. During those many months I listened to little else.

Electropica is my homage to these artists. Through the melding of sampled, found and created sounds, I have tried to capture my impression of this music, these rhythms. My work in the past has been described as ambient or electronic. For this release, I set those catagories aside.

I hope you will take a little time and listen to Electropica with unbiased ears. Close your eyes and envision a different world. With giraffes, perhaps, and emerald skies above cobalt sand.

Peace Always," -Richard Bone

"Rediscover your love of Bossa Nova!"

Tiger Blood Tapes proudly presents for the first time ever on cassette, Richard Bone's 1998 Ambient Electro Jazz album "Electropica". Features an unreleased outtake "Cosa Nova".

"Electropica" is part one in a trilogy of Richard Bone's Ambient Electro Bossa Nova albums.

Originally released in 1998 on CD by Quirkworks Labratories.

Press Release:

"A curious thing happened to me during the summer of 1996. While leaving a favorite music store, I detoured down the jazz isle. Suddenly, one of the discs flung itself out of the bin and landed squarely at my feet. I was immediately drawn to its cover. A giraffe was gliding across cobalt blue sand beneath an emerald green sky. Without a second thought I bought the disc and brought it home. My life was about to change.

The disc was Antonio Carlos Jobim's "wave". Recorded in 1967, it was one of the most sensual works I had ever heard. The gentle rhythms, the haunting melodies were mesmerizing. The stereo imaging of producer Creed Taylor was magical. I must have played it ten times that night. These were beats of another time, another place. Innocent, yet primal, but most of all...romantic. This was Bossa Nova!

I have spent the last year and a half researching this old/new music. I discovered the masters of this genre: Jobim, Luiz Bonfa and Joao Gilberto. During those many months I listened to little else.

Electropica is my homage to these artists. Through the melding of sampled, found and created sounds, I have tried to capture my impression of this music, these rhythms. My work in the past has been described as ambient or electronic. For this release, I set those catagories aside.

I hope you will take a little time and listen to Electropica with unbiased ears. Close your eyes and envision a different world. With giraffes, perhaps, and emerald skies above cobalt sand.

Peace Always," -Richard Bone

Flora Yin Wong’s ravishing interiority finds lucid expression on an absorbing second album for Modern
Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes with hyperrealist,
concrète sound design.
Through ten parts, Flora crystallises the ennui that followed an uncanny, disorienting trip to East and
Southeast Asia.
“On an unexpected stopover in Hong Kong after five years away, my friends took me to a Bazi
reader one night - something I was curious about, but much of a ritual for them
- ” Flora recalls.
“My father
told me that when I was born, he had obtained an auspicious reading that since stayed like a guiding talisman
with me. It was almost past midnight but people were still lined up, rather shaken and visibly upset, to see
the old man. He had kind eyes and asked me why I was there and I said I was at a crossroads. He asked me my
time and date of birth, and told me to pick one of his four little white canary birds as a vessel for divination.
”
This was the final stretch of an ultimately aimless few months across the continent, including a 20 year
overdue return with her father to his adoptive family in his hometown Kuala Lumpur - for many reasons,
ended up as a strange and uncanny trip. She spent solitude in a haunted house during the quiet snowfall
of Kyoto, where she might have offended some spirit... and nights in mountain temples with South Korean
monks, and an equally strange feeling return to the Island of the Gods.
“It culminated in what felt like a final disillusionment with Asia - sudden deaths and a breakdown in beliefs
- somewhere I never really have or will be able to connect with. The process of the reading summoned a final
blow to my gut - an overwhelming sense of rootlessness, and understanding that all there is is emptiness and
entropy. No birth-divined protection, just a measurement of the night sky based off nothing and everything.”
Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief, Flora read about Giuseppe Tartini’s ‘Violin Sonata
in G Minor’, aka the
Devil’s Trill Sonata
, a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe
music heard in a dream, which the composer felt he could never fully bring into reality. It’s this soporific
motif that binds and underpins ’Cold Reading’, finding Flora chasing the dragon of fleeting fantasy through
passages of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory.
From her use of the ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata in ‘All My Dreams are Nightmares’ through evocations of subtropical
humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of ‘Konna’ and ‘Banjar’, to a breathtaking
dreampop denouement ‘Nectar Dripping’ and the Enya-like lush of ‘Beautiful Crisis’, Flora blooms her ideas
with an openended ambiguity so often missing from so called Ambient music, ushering the listener into a
soundworld that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms.

In a realm where the threads of fate intertwined with the tapestry of existence, there existed a timeless construct we call “meng”. This transcendental domain pushed a sanctuary where an unholy wisdom was safeguarded. Within its twenty-two walls, the experiences of countless sages and seekers resided, forming a reservoir of enlightenment, of vision and of identity.

Among the enigmatic texts that adorned the shelves of The Memory Palace, one stood out—the "Tubular Heaven," a chapter that held the essence of the universe's patterns and transformations. The book we speak of is the Book of Change - I Ching. Legend has it that the Memory Palace embodied the vibrations of those who sought its wisdom, guiding them to the Slow-Chain’s pages where hexagrams unveiled the secrets of existence.

Amidst this cosmic dance of knowledge, there lived a young wanderer whose name we do not say out loud. Driven by a deep yearning for understanding, this Warrior ventured into the city of Tanoy. With every step, he felt the resonance of centuries long gone, as if the walls whispered to him the essence of reality itself - “you may fall as long as you stand up again. Repeat this 1000 times and you will understand me. Only then can we control the sound.” As he reached for the illuminated Book of Change, a light was cast onto a newly fabricated realm of questions. One hexagram, in particular, was essential. The cryptic symbolism was perplexing. Upon meditation, we slowly begin to realize that life is indeed a tapestry of imperfections, yet from these glitches we arise with profound growth and transformation.

As our curiosity spikes, we delve into the pages that follow, discovering an unexpected connection between I Ching and the world of Jeans, no denim. In ancient times, the craft of weaving denim mirrored the wisdom of these hexagrams. Just as threads interwove to create a durable fabric, I Ching reveals how life's experiences intertwine to form a meaningful existence. Denim, like life, is sturdy yet adaptable - a true testament to the harmonious balance between falling and standing.

As this journey comes to a gentle end, we must stress that hexagrams prove that other divination systems exist. It has become clear that the patterns hitherto observed are not confined to one culture, tradition, mind or body. Instead, they echo throughout history, manifesting in various divination systems across our globe. Hexagrams are a universal language, transcending boundaries and demonstrating the interconnectedness of humanity's pursuit of higher understanding.

We can now truly emerge from the Memory Palace, carrying the wisdom of everything above us. It’s time to Drag A Friend into this Made Up Reality. Or is it? We now understand that life's glitches are the catalysts for growth and that just as threads wove together to create denim, experiences wove together to create a meaningful existence. As we walk beneath the open sky, we whisper into the wind, "Hexagrams are the echoes of universal truths, proving that the search for wisdom knows no bounds."

The chimes tingle in the deep subset of your imagination. As the pages of the Book of Change unfurl one last time, the shimmering tapestry of our shallow minds unravels.

We have revealed the kaleidoscopic corridors where perceptions dance in hallucinogenic symphony to the hymns of our rich minds.

Live From The Gonsch showcases Sydney head (and O.T.I.S. label boss) Hugh Burridge aka Hugh B’s lesser known domestic dub mode, low-slung and low volume, tracked on headphones during hidden hours, often with his daughter strapped to his chest. The album’s eight cuts are built from rhythmic modular loops layered with snaky bass, swampy guitar, and occasional hazed vocals, dub-mixed to 2-track cassette through hand-built FX (Burridge runs a boutique delay pedal business). The mood throughout is loose, soupy, and slippery, shaded in echo and spring reverb, glimpsed through tall grass.

The title alludes to Burridge’s recently retired Skylab radio show, “Mornings From The Gonsch,” which repped a spectrum of home recorded modes, from bedroom dub to hybrid new age to lost synth songcraft. Here he blends these muses into a woozy fusion all his own, dub-adjacent daydreams of time, money, stasis, and absence, hummed and half-heard beneath a bleached blue sky.

The new recordings from The Dengie Hundred unfurl on Tain Records after a busy year releasing a solo tape on Sagome and a collaborative LP and tape with Japan Blues on Demdike Stare's DDS imprint.

Lammas Land is an album which meditates on the Walthamstow Marshes, an ever-changing watery landscape, rich with history and wildlife. The Dengie Hundred writes:

"I am sitting at my table overlooking the marshes listening to Lammas Land in November 2023, watching crows fight a never-ending aerial battle with the gulls. In summer, you can see bats from here every evening, fluttering around the windows as the light begins to fade, but today it is colder so there is smoke rising from the boats on the River Lea and the dog walkers are wrapped up tight against the wind. Most of Lammas Land was made sitting right here, playing guitar and recording the sounds passing by. I would hang a microphone out of the window to capture the ‘putput’ boat which delivers provisions, or the trains that rattle along the tracks that cut across the marshes and up to Stanstead, carrying passengers to the airport and away. I wonder what tourists make of the marshes as they cross them, the landscape opening up for a moment between the urban sprawl of the East End and the rampant development of Tottenham. They offer a jarring pause of green and sky. I feel very lucky to be living in that pause, a resident, for now…

The album contains a whole year of found sounds recorded from the window and while out walking. It is full of bird song and radio sounds, singing, life.

Many others have been inspired by this space, this pause. The author Esther Kinsky who wrote River, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions, captures this area so perfectly. I borrowed the two track names for this album from her book. I hope she doesn’t mind.

Also, the photographer Paul Fuller whose work reflects the atmosphere I feel here precisely. On hearing the music he wanted to collaborate on the Lammas Land project, He spent a year filming the marsh through the seasons. Some of his images are included with the vinyl release, and there is an accompanying film close to completion. I am so pleased this project is continuing in new forms.

The vinyl also contains a piece of writing, ‘Sound Fishing’, by Gemma Blackshaw, an author, art historian and curator who in a twist of fate also found herself spending time on the marshes, but that is her story, for another day."

Love International and Test Pressing commemorate yet another cracking festival with the latest instalment in their collaborative compilation series for their LIXTP label. For The Sound Of Love International #006 chosen Jay Donaldson aka Palms Trax as their selector.

The Berlin-based Brit launched his career in 2013 with releases on various labels which led to headline slots and globetrotting gigs from South America to Australia. He’s a regular at Love International, having spun at the first one in 2015, playing at Barbarella’s for an RA event.

The scope of this new record reflects the eclecticism of Donaldson’s DJ sets and his long-running ‘Cooking With Palms Trax’ NTS radio show and parties. Comprising of cuts collected on his worldwide trips, it’s a magical mind-blowing selection. Jumping between generations and genres, yet all coming together as a wonderful whole. As document it definitely demonstrates the joys of real record shops and physical digging.



The album opens with Linda Waterfall’s Clarity. A fabulous flight of late 1970s spiritual jazz-influenced folk from the late Seattle-based singer / songwriter, who released her debut on Windham Hill, and studied transcendental mediation under the Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass.

Sebastian’s Follow My Heart is a soulful soft rocker, a sax-y seduction theme. Its very European protagonist trying to entice you into a romantic liaison, and promising the time of your life.

On Did It Have To Be Me, glorious gospel choir-like backing lifts Frank E. Jeffries Jr.’s cool croon, and the spirits of anyone lucky enough to be listening.

Two tracks travel from `90s South Africa. El Pedro’s La Luna is a pumping piece of S.A. bubblegum, that’s strangely partly sung in Spanish and whose echoed snares mimic flamenco handclaps. Tropical, a little zouk-y and more mid-tempo kwaito, Novidade’s Masingita features great guitar picking and warm, welcoming group vocals.

Dieta Berliner & Jean Baptiste’s Paula & Kaspar transports us back to Berlin and forwards to 2012. A B-side secret weapon from Dieta’s short-lived Pakalolo City Records, this is a cowbell-led hypnotic head nodding chug, with a swaying sing-along melody and highlife-like licks hidden way down deep in the mix.

Culled from a cult Canadian 45 Angelo Mallia’s Hideaway is cute, catchy tumbling TR-808- driven synth-pop.

A piece of plugged-in Belgian `80s prog-rock, Zardoz’s brilliant Brasilia Drums pits its titular percussion against big cosmic synths, and segues into a new age-y journey.

Danish keyboard virtuoso Gert Thrue shows off his chops on I Play The Body Electronic. For nearly ten minutes switching between Hammond organ and Moog. Feeding everything through psychedelic phasing effects, and overdubbing some fab Fender Rhodes. A true emotional epic, the sonic auteur clearly got lost in its groove.

In Trance 95 might be one of the better known acts here, since the Athens-based duo’s work has been collected on Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave, and in the 2010s they also supported Depeche Mode. Their 1991 single, Warm Nights Driving On Wet Streets, is chunky chill out room gear. Downtempo techno, with moody minor chords, that’s actually a tender love song.

Frenchman Alain Salvati is behind Flayer’s Wanna Get Back Your Love, which first appeared in 1983, oddly on an Italian 12. Rediscovered at the turn of the millennium it’s become a bona fide modern Balearic anthem.

The closing cut, Jeancky’s Variations Sur Protestation, kind of brings the album, musically, full circle. Returning to the late `70s with campfire congas, bongos, and gentle acoustic strumming. Saxophone and vibes taking it in turns to serenade the soothing mantra-like vocal.

The majority of the tracks included were self-released / privately pressed and in many cases the often mysterious artists’ only recorded outings. So, in putting this together Palms Trax has pulled a lot of talented people out of obscurity. No doubt exposing some holy grails and upsetting a few dealers, while making the dreams of folks who love good music come true. Full of excellent, eccentric finds, it’s a blissful collection that’ll fill floors and catch heads’ attention.

Available on super ltd edition pink vinyl with obi strip & download code. Only 300 copies pressed.

London based shoegaze three-piece Holy Springs are Neil Atkinson Jr, Maria Bellucci and Suzanne Sims. The band blend psychedelic influences with their love of lo-fi guitars and keyboards. In 2020 they self-released the cassette mini album 'Indoor Tapes'. Shortly after the incredible EP 'Camera' and, we are delighted to be releasing their debut full length E.A.T on ltd edition vinyl.

Debut albums can sometimes feel a bit disparate as bands fling all the songs they’ve been working on together with no real thought as to how they all hang together as an album. Not so with E.A.T. The effort and thought that has gone into writing a cohesive and well-structured album is evident on every note played. I particularly enjoyed the instrumental inter-ludes which play a pivotal role in neatly segueing between tracks. If this is the band just starting out imagine what their next album will sound like, and the one after that. I hope Holy Springs are ready, because this album is about to blow up.’ Static Sounds Club

The new album by Polish guitarist Raphael Rogiński is named after the grass snake Žaltys, a revered household spirit in Lithuanian folklore, and explores themes of Eastern European mythology and nature. As a conduit of cultural exchange, "Žaltys" connects with Rogińsk’s previous work, most recently his critically acclaimed 2023 album "Talàn".

"Žaltys" is deeply rooted in the rolling hills of the Suwałki region, in the northeast of Poland, where Rogiński spent childhood vacations and became intrigued by the music he heard from nearby Lithuania. Later, it was on the border with Dzūkija in Lithuania that he bought his first electric guitar, recording soundscapes on a four-track recorder in the forests; he returns to those techniques on this album.

Yet while Eastern European folk music is a constant, enigmatic inspiration here—the track titles derive from various Lithuanian plant names—"Žaltys" is (like all of Rogiński’s work) impossible to pin down, drawing on jazz, American primitivism, and a pervasive mysticism. Infused with a specific culture and place, the album contains a sense of memory, time passing, wonder, and loss. The music, Rogiński says, “is a return to the moment when my brother and I laid down in a boat near the Lithuanian border, floating on a lake at night and looking at the stars in the sky, which always seemed closer to us there.”

Working with Warsaw musician and producer Piotr Zabrodzki, Rogiński created what he describes as “guitar piano”. Rogiński and Zabrodzki made the whole studio resonate while recording, to achieve a sound “as if the wind was playing the strings”. He continues, “We connected some low-voltage effects to powerful old amps and a Leslie speaker, and put unusual sets of strings on the guitars.” For the first time on a solo album, Rogiński employs overdubs to create layers on several tracks, while other compositions are pared back, variously stark, harsh or simply beautiful, exploring his deep relationship with his instrument.

Making a guest appearance—including on the first single “Šilinis Viržis”— is musician and singer Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, a member of Merope, a band which draws more directly on Lithuanian folk forms. The two artists have been friends for years, but had never managed to record together, even though they share similar inspirations (and recently performed live at Unsound and Ephemera). Now Jurgelevičiūtė sings and plays the kanklės—a Lithuanian plucked string instrument or chordophone closely related to the zither—on two songs on the album. Zabrodski also plays piano on “Šilinis Viržis".

Rogiński has turned the mastering over to Joe Talia, a frequent collaborator of Oren Ambarchi who is known for his skills with guitar recordings. The cover is by Marcin Janusz, a Krakow painter who, like Rogiński, finds inspiration in nature and the human body’s relationship with the world.

Belgian saxophonist, composer, and producer Mattias De Craene (Nordmann, MDCIII) announces a new solo album, ‘A House Where I Dream,’ on VIERNULVIER Records. On his second album, he delivers a highly personal and healing journey, presented as an alternative soundtrack to the 1973 cult film ‘The Holy Mountain.’

The record will be released on October 11 on vinyl LP and through all digital platforms.

"The Holy Mountain" is a surreal Mexican film from 1973 directed, written, and produced by Alejandro Jodorowsky, who also stars in the film. The film holds a prominent place in avant-garde cinema and explores themes such as spirituality, mysticism, and the quest for enlightenment. It is in this vein that ‘A House Where I Dream’ is crafted.

“My mind and soul - and thus my music - come home to this motion picture” - Mattias De Craene

The album will be presented live with the film on October 16 at Videodroom during Film Fest Gent.

ABOUT THE ALBUM
With hypnotic tape loops, grainy textures, and mesmerizing saxophone, Mattias De Craene creates possible worlds that herald a spiritual transformation. From the Scottish Highlands and desolate mountains to the deepest recesses of the soul, this music has the power to create cinematic landscapes that transcend time and space. The sound of these 8 tracks is closely related to the minimalist compositions of Terry Riley, but the work of contemporary artists like KMRU or William Basinski is also drawn from the same material.

Above all, this album is a deeply personal journey and unintentionally serves as a metaphor for De Craene's ascent of his own mountain. For the Videodroom festival by Arts Center VIERNULVIER, the saxophonist began working on a new soundtrack for the film ‘The Holy Mountain’ in 2023, but his body and mind abruptly called him to a halt, forcing him to take a professional break. However, this project never left him, leading to an honest and raw quest to find himself as both a person and an artist, with Jodorowsky as a companion de route and music as an anchor. It initiated a long process of dismantling, searching, healing and back again. The album not only provides a sanctuary for dreaming to all who listen, but for its creator it also serves as both an outcry of despair and a source of comfort during challenging times.

All the tracks on 'A House Where I Dream' share an unfiltered grain of life, as one can almost feel the damp breath of the saxophone blowing.

The album opens with the three-part strong 'Transcention,' where the hypnotic interplay between soprano sax and lo-fi tape loops leads to higher realms of the mind and soul.
Alternating between deep frequencies and farout folk modalities, this mantra-like triptych acquires an alchemical character and ultimately transcends time and space.

In the ethereal 'Away,' one can peer into an abyss of resonance while a saturated tenor sax lends guidance in the spirit of Terry Riley's productions. 'You and Me' also bathes in a similar atmosphere, albeit in the vein of healing 90s ambient as granular sax tones converge with celestial chants. 'Gazing Upwards Towards The Sky,' offers different shades of blue as a slumbering tenor sax is juxtaposed to swift sax patterns. On 'A Stranger That Moved Me,' beauty lands in a soft and subtle manner, while the closing track 'Shepherd's Glow' drifts like a mountain wind flaring up at the darkest hour of the night.

The artwork is created by Gent-based artist Sam Timmerman, who portrays the world of 'A House Where I Dream' with playful repetition and mystique.

Described by the Wall Street Journal as “one of modern music’s most compelling vocalists,” New York-born and Tamil Nadu-raised singer and multi-instrumentalist Ganavya has announced details of her new album, "Daughter of a Temple*", set to be released on November 15, 2024. The album follows her performance at SAULT’s acclaimed live debut in London in 2023, where, according to The Guardian, her “voice had a delicate emotive heft that could turn stoics into sobbing wrecks.” Her first single for Leiter, "draw something beautiful," was released earlier this year in July. For "Daughter of a Temple", Ganavya invited over 30 artists from various disciplines to a ritual gathering in Houston. Consequently, the album features numerous contributors, including renowned musicians such as esperanza spalding, Vijay Iyer, Shabaka Hutchings, Immanuel Wilkins, and Peter Sellars. The results—an innovative and deeply moving blend of spiritual jazz and South Asian devotional music—were initially recorded by Ryan Renteria and then further edited and mixed by Nils Frahm at Leiter's studio in Berlin in 2024. Ganavya is the author and singer of the first Tamil text to win a Latin Grammy. She was a vocalist in Vijay Iyer’s Ritual Quartet and the soloist on Quincy Jones-produced „Tocororo", which reached No. 1 on the Jazz Charts. Her most recent album, "like the sky I’ve been too quiet", was recorded with Shabaka Hutchings and features guests like Floating Points, Tom Herbert, Carlos Niño, and Leafcutter John.