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Ingredient is the elegant collaboration of Toronto poets, composers, producers and dear friends Ian Daniel Kehoe and Luka Kuplowsky. Their self-titled release is an enigmatic electronic avant-pop record attuned to the micro and macro perspectives of the natural world. Ingredient is an album whose lyrics are more poem than lyric, and whose songs exist in a merger of house music, philosophically-minded lyricism and contemporary R&B. One might recall electronic and art-pop luminaries such as Yukihiro Takahashi, The Blue Nile, and Arthur Russell, or connect it to contemporaries like Nite Jewel, Westerman and Blood Orange. A distinct world of dance, of questions, of secrecy and ultimate softness.

Eight years of friendship forges strange telepathy.

In the summer of 2020, Ian Daniel Kehoe was entrenched in a new feeling of heaviness; psychosomatic symptoms had started to proliferate; stress made new pores across the body, bending sensitivity into pain. His days were met with confusion, detachment, sleeplessness and pain without causation. Disfigured, he felt that what had been central and centering was blown out to the periphery of things. In a moment of self-preservation he reached out to his dear friend Luka Kuplowsky to make an album together. For Kehoe, it was an instinctual grasp for the anchoring truthfulness of deep friendship and the potential for a dedicated creative collaboration. Kuplowsky’s presence was light, supportful and curious, eager to explore musically the sounds they were mutually drawn to: house music, ambient pop, dub. The duality between Kuplowsky and Kehoe – between the Aflight and the Unmoored – is a portrait of a friendship whose exchanges came easy and produced an outpouring of song. Creation and therapy crisscross. In email correspondence that catalogs their process of collaboration, affection abounds: “feels bare without the Luka Licks”, or “Love you so much”, or “Kinda just overwhelmed with deadliness coming in at all angles.” When their voices first come in together on “Wolf,” that harmony arrives in a dramatic avant-pop sound that is bold and wondrous.

Kuplowsky and Kehoe both arrive at Ingredient as established artists whose works are committed to language’s propensity to provoke and mystify. Kuplowsky’s 2020 album Stardust is an idiosyncratic and otherworldly blend of pop and jazz romanticism grounded by Cohen-esque vocals and a stirring philosophical curiosity. Kehoe’s entrance into the new decade has hatched four records of pop experimentation, most recently 2022’s Yes Very So, a euphoric and bold album of poetic synth-pop and meditative ambient instrumentals. Kuplowsky and Kehoe’s union as Ingredient is a beautiful and unusual chemistry that integrates their distinct approaches while bringing forth a newness: a sound that alternates between cinematic technicolor and dubbed out fogginess; a lyricism that exchanges their lucid and clear poetics for a playful and obtuse verse. The album intuitively taps into the opposing emotional states of Kuplowsky and Kehoe during the conception of the record, contrasting the buoyancy of trumpeting keyboards (“Resurface”), angelic synthesized voices (“Come”), and rolling bass (“Photo”) with the record’s underlying darkness of whirring buzzsaw textures (“Transmission”), whooping sirens (“Wolf”) and murky ambience (“Illumination”). Lyrically, this duality arises in the record’s flux between openness (“Variation”, “Raindrop”) and existential dread (“Wolf”). “Illumination” most clearly crystalizes this opposition, reconciling the verses’ neurotic yearning for enlightenment with the chorus’ liberating doctrine of negation: “no more devotion… no more delusion”. Amidst the gradations of light and dark, Kuplowsky and Kehoe trade indelible, lush melodies as though their voices are made of a substance that melts easily one into the other. The harmony of poetry, sound, and texture cuts through your brain fog like a wet diamond.

Ingredient’s self-titled record was assembled by Kuplowsky and Kehoe over the course of six months in a home studio they frequented daily. Amidst synthesizers and drum machines they composed, re-composed, and workshopped a wide array of music, ultimately focusing on a set of eight songs that lived in a shared musical and philosophical world. Recording days often ended in basketball games at a local court or a rooftop commune over a pot of tulsi tea and a crossword puzzle. Kuplowsky brought in the Blue Cliff Record – the classic anthology of Chan Buddhism – whose inscrutable and sublime insights remained constant throughout the recording process as an activator of reorientation and reflection. While Kehoe was frequently rendered physically immobile by bouts of anxiety, a patience and mutual caring governed the pace of their creation; rest, stretching and meditation became equally important as the act of arrangement. Invited into their intimate circle of composition was Thom Gill, whose heavenly voice uplifts “Variation” and “Raindrop,” and Karen Ng, whose alto sax simmers and dances around the funky strut of “Raindrop.”

The lyrics on Ingredient reflect the persistence of change, the infinite variability of nature where randomness and divergence are no accidents. In Daoism, duality, in the form of Yin and Yang, is not contradictory as it is in Western idealist philosophy, but rather composes the eternal and lived paradox of our changeless-changing universe: changeless because all is change, and changing because the dynamism of the Dao makes each moment transformational. Kuplowsky and Kehoe refract this way of seeing the world, as in Variation: “Variation in the natural world / there it is.” Ingredient is an experience of the manifold ways of saying there it is of the transformational world, and there it is, unfolding. Elsewhere, change and ephemerality is addressed through the record’s preoccupation with non-human perspectives, reorienting the listener to the wolf, the mouse, the emerald frog, the centipede, the bird, the fly in the lamp. The album cover visualizes this fascination with the striking image of a reddish-orange frog atop a defamiliarized landscape of dark green leaves. Mirroring the exploratory process of the record’s collaboration, the frog also signals the amphibian’s natural inclination to leap into boundless potential. Kuplowsky and Kehoe’s lyrics manifest philosopher and ecologist Timothy Morton’s concept of “the mesh,” drawing attention to the “vast, entangled web” of interconnectedness that connects all life forms and interweaving the songwriters’ shared wonder into the Animal’s unknowability. As Luka narrates in the breakdown of the dance-floor ready “Photo,” “the closer we observe things, the further they retreat into abstraction.” In Ingredient’s ecosystem, perception is a reversible fractal where the world’s minutest details mirror the shape of the cosmos.

According to the Dao, the path to healing starts by reorienting perception away from the self and toward the self’s subsumption in Totality. For Kehoe, collaborating with Kuplowsky became the reorientation necessary for the self-preservation he was seeking, opening up a shared creative practice to navigate and soften the complexity of his psychological shattering. The album begins with Kuplowsky intoning “colossal faith” which bounces around the stereo field in a cloud of echo, and it is the enormity of “faith” that centers both Kuplowsky and Kehoe’s collaboration and their inquisitiveness in the vast mysteries of our very being. Truth in Ingredient is not an essential nugget, but a bending of the light – it is the equivocal entanglement of how we are in nature as nature, but with a plea or prayer under our breath that marks our felt distance from what we are a part of: “carry me towards the mountains of my birth / returning to the nest / the silence of the earth.”

Limited to 100 copies on red vinyl.

Fredrik Saroea is best known as the frontman of Norway's bizarre, global pisco punk sensation – Datarock. After years touring the world with alternative bangers such as "Fa-Fa-Fa" he now presents an entirely different side to his songwriting: As Covid-19 shut down live music, Saroea started recording in their label YAP Records' studio –yap HQ in Bergen (Norway) – with Datarock drummer Øyvind Solheim helping out engineering & co-producing. The 12 songs jammed in on the 28 minute long album was also mixed by Solheim & Saroea at YAP HQ, and then shipped to UK's legend Mike Marsh (Björk, Massive Attack, Oasis, Datarock) for mastering. The solo album Rona Diaries was inspired by everything from post-rock (like The Sea and Cake) via hard-core (like Fugazi), noise-rock (like U.S. Maple), space-rock (like Flying Saucer Attack), art-rock (like Blonde Redhead) to Morrissey's indie-classics, Sun Kil Moon's lyrical songwriting, John Martyn's etheric "Small Hours" and Scott Walker's ballads. The Release concert took place on May 28th 2021 with an internationally streamed concert in Norway's stately Grieg Hall – famous for the most iconic true Norwegian black metal recordings. Here, Saroea was backed by award-winning string quartet Bit20 Ensemble (Martin Shultz on violin, Liene Klava on viola, Agnese Rugevica on cello, Johannes Wik on harp with arrangements by Bjørn Morten Christophersen), merging his contemplative indie rock with the exquisite air of a chamber orchestra. Thus, the tracks from Rona Diaries were premiered to an unsuspecting public who were more familiar with his former band’s rhythmic brand of dance music. Featured in "Best Of" lists from Rolling Stone to NME and headlining festivals from Coachella, Lollapalooza, Reading and Leeds, Saroea's band Datarock impacted music scenes worldwide while also infiltrating both the videogame market with inclusion in Fifa and Sims and the commercial environ with ads for Apple, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Coca Cola. While their singles including the smash "Fa-Fa-Fa" cemented them as dance sensations, Saroea moonlighted as a restaurateur by opening world famous and Michelin-rated restaurants Lysverket and Hoggorm in Norway. Rona Diaries: The Chamber Versions Live At The Grieg Hall, Bergen includes chamber versions of the Rona Diaries tracks plus two exclusive tracks. It was recorded by Kings of Convenience' sound engineer – André Luciano Trebbi – and mixed in Los Angeles by the two-time Grammy® winner Mark Rankin (Adele, Weezer, Florence and the Machine, Harry Styles) and mastered by Mike Marsh in the UK. The album artwork was created by renowned artist Magnus Voll Mathiassen who worked on Rihanna’s Unapologetic and 2021’s Oscars.

When we first heard from recent Kompakt signing Emma Kollmorgen, with 2021’s “You Are The”, she was hymning the complexity of romance: “Love is scary as fuck!”, she said. On her debut EP, “1243”, she’s built on that intensity and offered up a five-track suite of night-vision electronic pop, bristling with a stealthy sensuality. It’s a cinematic collection, building from the brooding “Escape”, through the drifting, tactile pulses of “Taciturn”, the gritty, bustling noises that run underneath the smoke-signal torch-song of “All The Wild Animals”, and the closing, tear-stained melancholy of “Home”. “You Are The” reappears here as well, settling in perfectly amongst new friends.

It’s a completely assured first EP from an artist who’s been slowly and steadily building her own sonic world. From her early days, when she busied herself by learning guitar and joining bands, Kollmorgen always had a vision of doing something “more independent”, to allow her to find her own sound and write her own songs. A brief creative alliance with the Berlin DJ duo Dole & Kom led to some recordings and live performances. All the while, Kollmorgen was carefully shaping her production and sound designing skills with Ableton Live, and exploring distinctive musical terrain in collaboration with co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Paul Seidel (The Ocean Collective, Fern, Nightmarer). She joined the Kompakt family after a recommendation by Patrice Baumel, who also remixed her debut single with typical flair.

On “1243”, though, Kollmorgen fully inhabits her songs, gifting each of them with a sweet, subtle sway, her vocal and lyrical openheartedness balancing the bluer hues of her production. Each song is confident and poised, Kollmorgen relying on cross-thatched patterns of texture as a web to support her melodies: “I like patterns,” she says, “they give me something to hold onto, something stable in an unstable world.” The songs feel as though they’re grappling with moments of revelation and experience in Kollmorgen’s world, which makes sense, given her approach to music: “I never had a diary,” she reflects, “so writing songs is my way of expressing and dealing with life.” On 1243, you’ll catch some glimpses of life lived, made sonorous through songs beautifully sung.

Kiss OF THE Whip is Tristan Victor. Writing, Production, and Mixing by Tristan Victor. Mastering by Ryan Schwabe. Artwork by Suzelle Levasseur.

17 Track compilation of all of their studio recordings, remastered and pressed on Electric Blue Vinyl. Presented in gatefold sleeve with never seen before photographs ,a printed lyric inner sleeve and poster. The VIP’s were formed in 1978 while at Warwick University. Within weeks they were gigging at clubs in the Midlands, often on the same bill as THE Specials in Coventry. Soon they found a manager, Clive Solomon, who with Timmy Mallet (now a TV and Radio presenter) and both students at the university, financed the group’s first single the EP ‘Music For Funsters. In the summer of 1978 they built up a loyal following in London. The single was picked up by John Peel, who played it constantly on his BBC radio show through the year. The 3 track EP, featuring ‘I’m Perfect’, ‘I Believe’ and ‘Boys of the City’ was released on Clive Solomon’s own ‘Bust’ label.

If you went down the wrong alleyway, took a shortcut through the park or crossed the wrong open space after dark in the UK in the 1970s, you stood a fair chance of being accosted by someone with a big mouth, low morals and some gurning mates to impress, usually reeking of fags and cheap booze and always ready to put the boot in. And, before you could say, “sickening violence”, a short but chaotic scuffle would ensue and a winner eventually emerge, battle scarred and bruised. The boot boy was the worst kind of hooligan. There wasn’t anything you could do or say to appease him. You had the same chance as a fly caught up in a spider’s web. Zero. Your best bet was to run. His intent was always to give you, and vicariously the rest of the world, a good kicking. Thugs, long-haired louts, short-haired louts; the anti-hippy. Birds, booze, bovver and football on their criminal minds. So fasten your braces for a white knuckle-duster ride. 14 bovver rock bruisers for all of you peace-loving losers. Somebody’s going to get their head kicked in tonight... Put the boot in.

Chuck Prophet beschreibt sein neues Album "Bobby Fuller Died for Your Sins" als California Noir. “Das Land repräsentierte schon immer den Goldenen Traum, und es ist die Spannung zwischen Romantik und Realität, die unter der Oberfläche in allen Noir-Filmen und -Büchern lauert, und das verbindet die Songs. Verlorene Liebe, trostlose Einsamkeit, schneller Reichtum und wieder zurück in die Armut sowie Gewalt sind immer an der Tagesordnung an der Left Coast.“ Der Song „A Bad Year for Rock and Roll“ zeigt sich hier als eine Ode an all die großartigen Künstler, die wir im Jahr 2016 verloren haben. Das Album bringt ein Bündel an Chuck Prophet Songs hervor, die prädestiniert dafür sind, sehr bald zu Klassikern zu werden.

COMA’s new album, Voyage Voyage, casts a sweet and heavy-hearted hypnagogic glow that tells the story of these complicated moments through its complex web of sonics. Across ten pristine tracks, the pair meld piano, guitar, drums, synths and electronic flourishes to futuristic vocal harmonies that amp up the melancholic pop factor and capture life’s fleeting moments, moods and adventures. One of the album’s standout tracks, “Snurrebassen”, was written during a fishing trip to the Baltic Sea. Fusing a pop sensibility with dance music’s communal properties, the German duo of Georg Conrad and Marius Bubat create music rich in melody and often melancholy. COMA’s repertoire occupies an emotionally-driven corner of the electronic music spectrum, where dynamic soundscapes collide with honest lyrics. Having initially signed to Cologne’s electronic label Kompakt, COMA may have their roots firmly in the city’s fabled club scene, but their effervescent, groove-tipped synth-pop blurs boundaries and strays outside the lines. Their new home of City Slang (Caribou, Gold Panda, Tindersticks) is the perfect fit for their hypnotic brand of indie-electro. “We’ve never been ravers,'' says COMA’s Marius Bubat. “Although we have definitely been inspired by the energy of club music”

Maryam Saleh, Maurice Louca and Tamer Abu Ghazaleh, names that have turned
heads in alternative Arabic music with solo albums and conspicuous collaborations,
with Lekhfa they give birth to an off kilter sound where layers of grit and beauty
intertwine in and around the dystopian poems of their contemporary Mido Zoheir,
whom they've dubbed the fourth member in this creation and one of the most
talented Egyptian poets of their generation. Mixed by Khyam Allami, Mastered by
John Dent at Loud.

Ibeyi's eponymous debut combines a love of two very different worlds – the Yoruba chants of their ancestors and the electronic, hip hop and jazz influences of growing up in the city.

/ voulez-vous