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Sault - Aiir is one of five albums released by the collective Sault on November 1, 2022. This album serves as a companion piece to Air, released earlier in April 2022, and follows a similar classical and orchestral approach. Aiir diverges from the band's more familiar funk, soul, and Afrobeat sound and instead emphasizes a more ethereal, cinematic style with orchestral and choral elements, offering a peaceful, meditative listening experience.

Like Air, Aiir is heavily influenced by classical music, featuring lush string arrangements, choral vocals, and serene soundscapes. The album has a strong focus on minimalist orchestration, blending elements of neo-classical, ambient, and spiritual music. It creates an atmosphere of reflection, calm, and transcendence, with a sense of grandeur and emotional depth. The music on Aiir evokes feelings of nature, spirituality, and human connection.

Thematically, Aiir builds on concepts of nature, space, and spiritual awakening, focusing less on direct social commentary than some of Sault’s other albums. It invites listeners into an experience of contemplation, serenity, and cosmic beauty.

Key Tracks:

"Hopes" – A track with soaring orchestration, featuring delicate strings and vocal harmonies, evoking feelings of aspiration and beauty.
"5am" – This track captures the stillness and calm of early morning, with a meditative quality that invites introspection.
"Healing" – A spiritually charged song that feels like a soundtrack to emotional and physical restoration, utilizing choral vocals and peaceful arrangements.
Connection to Air: While Aiir follows the same stylistic cues as Air, it offers its own distinct mood, acting as a meditative follow-up to its predecessor. The two albums together showcase Sault’s ability to craft music that feels both experimental and deeply evocative, extending beyond traditional genre boundaries.

Although Aiir received less mainstream attention compared to Sault's other albums, it was appreciated for its artistic bravery and its contrast with the group’s typically groove-oriented releases. Critics admired its classical influences and the way it could create an immersive, calming environment for listeners, positioning it as one of Sault’s more reflective and experimental works.

Sault - Aiir is a continuation of the collective’s exploration of new sonic territories, emphasizing their genre-fluid approach and artistic ambitio

Rasmus Faber 'Where Light Touches' [A Nima Story] Album Farplane Records / Fp076 https://www.rasmusfaber.com https://www.instagram.com/rasmusfaber/ https://myanimelist.net/people/36680/Rasmus_Faber https://rossdraws.com https://www.instagram.com/rossdraws
Available IN Dolby Atmos Where Supported.
Sweden's worldwide acclaimed composer, producer, DJ and pianist, Rasmus Faber, reveals his first album of ambient / neo-classical work, 'Where Light Touches' [A Nima Story]. The album is inspired by, and in collaboration with, Los Angeles based illustrator Ross Tran (RossDraws), as an audio interpretation of his highly praised book, 'Nima'. Crafting a fully immersive listening experience, Rasmus paints stunning audio pictures with delicate melodic hues, abound with atmospheric conversations between emotive pianos, soothing strings and sophisticated electronica that gracefully flow through this enchanting body of work. Composed, arranged and produced entirely by Rasmus, and conceived and mixed using Atmos surround sound, the album was recorded with a full orchestra in Stockholm and fused with contemporary electronic elements from Rasmus' rich musical heritage.

'Where Light Touches' [A Nima Story] began after Ross contacted Rasmus to make music for one of his projects. They immediately found admiration and kinship in each other's work. Ross sent Rasmus his new illustrations book entitled 'Nima', which served as the perfect catalyst for a musical idea Rasmus had - to make an album of subtle beauty and immense production and technical dexterity. Rasmus became absorbed in the characters and worlds in the 'Nima' book, encouraging him to match his composing and production skills with Ross's otherworldly illustrations and boundless talent. The result is something quite extraordinary and beautiful that can be enjoyed accompanying the 'Nima' book, or purely as an audio gift for the senses.

Rasmus Faber started his career as a Jazz musician and house DJ, touring the world, performing to fans of the melodic side of electronic music over the last two decades. His success as an artist in Japan, and being fan of Anime and Manga opened the doors to becoming a composer (one of the only non-Japanese) of music for Anime. He's composed music for the Meta Quest VR platform, AAA games such as Metal Gear Solid and is behind an almost constant stream of music releases under aliases and his on name garnering hundreds of millions of streams.

Volker Bertelmann and Hildur Guðnadóttir hardly need an introduction - their distinct styles have graced the speakers of pretty much anyone enamored with experimental music in the last decade, and between them the two have chalked up an enviable canon of successes. Bertelmann, under the Hauschka moniker has explored the extremities of prepared piano improvisation, and Guðnadóttir has taken cinematic, explorative cello music into a new era of depth and passion, so to hear them both together is a rare and unexpected treat. Rare is putting it lightly even - „Pan Tone“ is a recording of a single concert which the duo performed on the 26th of February 2010 as part of Arctic Circle - Bubbly Blue and Green festival at Kings Place in London, and documents an event that would truly never be repeated. Sure, they could attempt to re-create the event, but the spontaneity and glorious serendipity in this particular recording is a pleasure to behold.

Bertelmann and Guðnadóttir decided to create a set of compositions which based on the idea of the ocean, and took a book of Pantones to extract exact references to the specific colors of the sea. These watery tones form the backbone of the performance and inform the direction of the collaboration, guiding us through rich blues, glassy greens and frothy whites. In listening to the music it seems incredibly appropriate that the artists should choose blue as the middle ground in their work; the ineffable lightness that Bertelmann brings to the table is a stark contrast to Guðnadóttir´s sinking darkness, and as the two styles collide we witness a plethora of tones, shades and hues. It sounds as if the two artists have been playing together for decades, and their sound is so perfectly matched you might wonder why it´s taken them this long to collaborate. All that´s left for us to do is to soak in the tidal beauty of this very exclusive body of music, to listen to it sing, bubble and crash through its duration before settling in total silence. When the record reaches its conclusion there is an unsettling calm, a sense that you have witnessed something very special indeed, and that is a feeling to prize amongst all else.

Following the compass of an entrancing debut, Flore Laurentienne's Volume II presents another palette of rich orchestral sound, where changing forces of water inspire metaphorical markers that navigate passages of life and loss. Mathieu David Gagnon resumes his voyage into environment and emotion with Volume II, drawing inspiration from the rivers and rugged wilderness of the composer's native Quebec. In his return as Flore Laurentienne - the namesake of an inventory documenting St. Lawrence Valley flora - Gagnon assembles vivid melodic motifs and delicate modulation with a vast string ensemble to emulate the tides of human experience. Listeners of Volume I will recognise Gagnon's signature approach towards reworking and reframing an emblematic melody or concept across a series of works in Volume II, a process he likens to that of a painter creating multiple sketches of the same view. Continued from the first album, the enigmatic "Fleuve" series is conjured to evoke the multiple personalities of the great St. Lawrence River, and the "Navigation" works ("iii" and "iv") wade through dappled progressions and expansive streams of string, the latter of which harbors the gentle meanderings of improvised clarinet. In the world of Flore Laurentienne, complexity emerges from simplicity as the composer roams familiar environments in constant flux. Gagnon extracts beauty through repetition and constraint, utilizing the writing style of counterpoint for which one of his greatest musical inspirations, Johann Sebastian Bach, is renowned. The lilting waves of "Canon" possess the eponymous formation of melodic 'leader and follower' motif, and magnify the softness of the album's eighteen string musicians into a force of full euphoric resonance. In Volume II, Gagnon continues his expansion of classical composition archetypes to meet a new realm of sonic romanticism. Thematic conventions of wandering the pastoral sublime become altered into glimmering refractions, relaying the emotional and kinetic power of natural energies. Volume II forms an estuary where streams of auditory microcosm reach a horizon of dynamic contrast, and reflect the parallel tenors of nature and humankind.

Hogan’s involvement with new wave, new romanticism, post punk and all-things-avant makes her a uniquely placed character through the last four decades on the scene - her recording/performing biography intersects with everyone from Soft Cell, The The and The Human League through to Simon Fisher Turner, Barry Adamson, The Style Council and more recently with Karl O’Connor aka Regis’ Downwards universe. For ‘Without the Moon’ (a title borrowed from Cathi Unsworth’s book of the same name), Hogan pulls out some of the most satisfying collaborations from her archive, featuring a couple of tracks originally released in 1985 on Cabaret Voltaire’s Doublevision label, as well as recordings that are here issued for the very first time. It’s properly all-over-the-place brilliance, ranging from Nick Cave’s incredible 1983 piano blues slo-mo grind ‘Vixo’ all the way thru to the Paul Kendall (Nitzer Ebb/Depeche Mode) engineered ‘Come Take My Hand’ produced and featuring Barry Adamson and sounding like some vintage Les Disques du Crépuscule poolside obscurity. Opening with ideas mapped out while staying at Lydia Lunch’s gaff in summer ’83, the record lassos 30 years of Hogan’s personal highlights, harking to a time circa 1984 when she regularly caught The Birthday Party playing Leeds or London, often crossing paths with Cave, and right thru to 1989’s ‘Come Take My Hand’. While ‘Delirious Eyes’ is a gorgeous slow dervish of swaying middle eastern scales featuring Gini Ball’s elusive smoke trail vocals, it’s best heard in context of the sequencing, which soon erupts with Marc Almond’s vocals on the arsonist thrill of ‘Burning Boats’ and JG Thirlwell’s signature clangour, while ’Scattered Carelessly’ was written in 2008 and gives the sweetest canvas for Hogan’s keys complemented by a whispering Jarboe ov Swans, and ‘Black Nocturne’ stars a perfectly tempered guitar shimmer by Kid Congo Powers, a longtime accomplice, whom Hogan first heard playing guitar on The Cramps’ records that she played in DJ sets at the time. Illuminated by Hogan’s favoured solo piano, ranging from flickering candlelight to hammering theatrics, and even including a rare appearance of her vocals on the could-have-been-a-popsong closer, the six songs on ‘Without The Moon’ speak to an incredibly rich artistic life spent immured at the core of her practice. Song to song, she outlines an extraordinary oeuvre that ties together and leaps between eras, drawing on decades of experience as a performer, composer, collaborator and ardent listener to portray a full spectra of styles she’s been involved in shaping for decades. Stunning.

Still shrink wrapped but opened.
Cover as new with slightly dented corners.
Includes original insert.

Highly original material on a very limited EP... be quick!

Polyphonic Waves OF Soulful Madrigals

The power of duality is an inscrutable thing: we’re endlessly fascinated by the interplay between light and darkness, East and West, voice and silence, our senses tingling from the compelling synergies that thrive in perceived opposites. Drawing from an urbane Antwerpian upbringing and a Moroccan family lineage, the Brussels-based multidisciplinary artist Younes Zarhoni, embraces these very dualities in all of his projects, exploring those murky areas of contrast and bringing all their ambiguous energy to crystal clear focus.

A longtime staple of the local electronic music scene with his hypnotic techno outings as YZ, Zarhoni’s latest focus is on the compositional power of pure harmony and silence: namely, his polyphonic renditions of medieval mystical poetry, sung in multiple voices and left to solemnly radiate beyond their given spatial grounds. Stripped of all instrumental accompaniments, what you get is Gregorian chant meets Boyz 2 Men, articulated by the lyrical ineffability of Arabic tongues and finding their rhythm in the silences that act as the juncture between observation and anticipation.

These sparse stanzas tread under an elusive referential threshold, conjuring visions of architecture and archaism, madrigals and MTV, the sacred and the profane ~ ostensibly disparate elements that seamlessly fold themselves into the radicality of the compositions. In these 20 minutes of verse, Zarhoni oversteps the margins of categorization to deliver an immersive story of song, flowing freely and sustaining the arc of the narrative long after it has ebbed into silence.