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Yara Asmar - home recordings 2018 - 2021 / synth waltzes & accordion laments (remastered) (LP)Yara Asmar - home recordings 2018 - 2021 / synth waltzes & accordion laments (remastered) (LP)
Yara Asmar - home recordings 2018 - 2021 / synth waltzes & accordion laments (remastered) (LP)Hive Mind Records
¥5,397
HOME RECORDINGS (2018-2021) “Who is Yara Asmar and how does she make music so strangely beautiful? The 25-year-old instrumentalist-puppeteer lives in Beirut with her cat, Mushroom, and presumably that’s the feline’s shadow next to the artist’s on the album’s back cover. The warm light of that photograph and the quiet beach scene of an abandoned lifeguard’s station and an empty net tells you all you need to know. Home Recordings 2018-2021 is an assured debut album that builds an eerie tension out of dreamlike layers of isolation” Spectrum Culture "Tiny worlds expand and contract in the palm of Yara Asmar’s hand. These recordings are remarkable in their ability to command attention in the gentlest terms. There are stories to find on this album and new worlds to discover." Foxy Digitalis SYNTH WALTZES & ACCORDION LAMENTS “Melancholic drifts sound through the overcast skies of synth waltzes and accordion laments, infusing ageless melodies with a sense of falling backward through time. History is stitched through gilded aural silhouettes and elegiac drones. Asmar’s music is visceral. While electronics beckon beyond the sunrise stretched through a metallic shimmer, synth waltzes and accordion laments sticks with us while we remain lost in the hazy doldrums, always crawling forward tethered to our past lives. Highest recommendation.” The Capsule Garden “ …these tracks are a cushion against reality. Asmar creates music that unfurls in evanescent bliss, an invitation to a safe space both isolated and welcoming.” The Quietus “…a set that transmutes the instrument’s droning tones into a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty“ Pitchfork, 30 Best Jazz & Experimental Albums of 2024
CS + Kreme - The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise (LP)CS + Kreme - The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise (LP)
CS + Kreme - The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise (LP)The Trilogy Tapes
¥5,397
The latest album by Melbourne, Australia-based experimental unit CS + Kreme, "The Butterfly Drinks The Tears Of The Tortoise", will be released on vinyl by the renowned London label, The Trilogy Tapes, run by Will Bankhead!

Joanne Robertson & Dean Blunt - Backstage Raver (LP)
Joanne Robertson & Dean Blunt - Backstage Raver (LP)World Music
¥6,735
*per customer 1 copy. The dreamlike encounter between Dean Blunt's experimental refraction and Joanne Robertson's dreamy vocals is a dream come true. A dreamlike encounter between Dean Blunt's refractive experimentalism and Robertson's dreamy vocals, this dream-pop/shoegaze album is a graceful, introspective soundscape that blends lo-fi, experimental, and ambient music in a genre-defying style.
Alice Coltrane - World Galaxy (LP)
Alice Coltrane - World Galaxy (LP)Endless Happiness
¥4,163
This essential reissue presents a rare collection of dub instrumental reggae tracks recorded by Tommy McCook (who you may know as the sax man from super ska outfit The Skatalites) and Bobby Ellis (who played the trumpet for dub legends The Upsetters) in 1977. Originally licensed to Grove Music, this still remarkable album features renowned musicians such as Sly and Robbie, Ansel Collins on organ, Clinton Fearon from The Gladiators on lead guitar, and Bernard Harvey of The Wailers on piano. The recordings took place at Channel One and were mixed at King Tubby Studio and every single tune cuts deep and with great authenticity.

ROD MODELL & TAKA NODA - GLOW WORLD (CS)
ROD MODELL & TAKA NODA - GLOW WORLD (CS)13
¥2,469
"GLOW WORLD is Rod Modell's new project resulting from his collaboration with Taka Noda. The duo delivers what could be an example of perfect elegance and musical refinement, but the resulting sounds are once again dirtied, ruined and ravaged by a noise capable of deafening us, sounds that come from afar, that seem to fade away but suddenly illuminate the world around us, which lands on us and which no longer belongs to us, leaving us lost in an infinite melancholy. GLOW WORLD is a work characterized by buoyant ambient sounds from which delicate rhythmic textures emerge, and never speeding up they run along the routes of an electronic music that surely knows how to be as minimal and suffused as it is distressing. Touches of piano, slow pulsations of bass lines and constantly disturbed sounds that nevertheless almost lull the listener into listening to this timeless music, perfect for letting go, observing time inexorably slipping out of our hands forever. Sounds that are timeless, it was said. Rod Modell and Taka Noda are visionaries, and GLOW WORLD is a rare gem. Simply another masterpiece."

Memotone - Fever of the World (LP)Memotone - Fever of the World (LP)
Memotone - Fever of the World (LP)Soda Gong
¥4,021
Following releases on Sähkö Recordings and The Trilogy Tapes, "Fever of the World" is the Soda Gong debut by Memotone, the nom de plume of UK-based multi-instrumentalist Will Yates. As a collection, it is both intimate and expansive, like the feeling of gathering one's thoughts before setting off on a long journey or committing to an irrevocable course of action. Throughout, Yates' talents as both player and sound designer are on full display, as are the sonic signatures that have come to characterize the Memotone catalog: low-lit, ECM-inflected noir; evasive and evolving loop-based accretions; and mellifluous mosaics of keys, guitar, reeds, and percussion. It is patient and focused music, built around production techniques and compositional ideas that have been perfected both in studio and in live performance over a period of several years. "Catherine, On Fire" sets the scene, one of two languid, longform selections, and develops slowly from a spare, harmonic-laden guitar loop into a bed of rippling textural ambience and woozy clarinet filigree. Later, "The Bus" and "When the Bakery Has What You Want and It's Cheap" conjure images of rain-streaked windows, fanciful baked confections, and grey skies broken finally by sunlight. Warm, generous, and comfortable in its own skin, this is music that reminds us that when it feels easy to resign ourselves to world weariness, we should pause for a moment and listen to the rustle of the leaves. The wind knows not to linger.

Mark Templeton - Two Verses (LP)Mark Templeton - Two Verses (LP)
Mark Templeton - Two Verses (LP)Faitiche
¥4,021
Mark Templeton is a Canadian media artist and the founder of Graphical, an audiovisual label dedicated to publishing his own musical and image based experiments. Mark’s audio compositions are constructed from reel-to-reel tape loops and sampled cassettes that are contrasted with contemporary sound techniques. In his published photobooks, he incorporates his own 35mm pictures and found images, focusing on intangible fantasies and realities. During his audiovisual performances, he utilizes digital instruments while projecting his own photographs, VHS footage, Super 8 film, and other sampled video. 

Mark Templeton’s reinterpretation of outdated media as musical instruments makes him a compelling artist for the Faitiche label roster. For his debut on Faitiche, he browsed his old hard drives and invited Andrew Pekler to listen through and co-produce a selection of Mark’s unreleased works. The compositions act as a series of snapshots: a look back at a decade of archived sounds, re-envisioned and re-imaged for Faitiche.

 The album contains nine tracks that follow an AB song structure. Each piece begins with verse A, transitions into verse B, and then ends. This simple formula creates a dichotomy that is also present in Mark’s diptych photographs, featured in the artwork. Throughout the album, both juxtaposition and inherent connections are simultaneously at play. One way or another, Two Verses provides a beginner’s guide to Mark Templeton's highly idiosyncratic catalog.

William Basinski & Janek Schaefer - “ . . . on reflection “ (LP)William Basinski & Janek Schaefer - “ . . . on reflection “ (LP)
William Basinski & Janek Schaefer - “ . . . on reflection “ (LP)Temporary Residence Limited
¥3,649
Time and duration are core themes in the work of both William Basinski and Janek Schaefer, and this long-distance collaboration took a suitably long gestation of eight years from start to finish. In that time, our collective perception of time has at times become disorienting. “ . . . on reflection ” remodels that instability as an exquisite work of art – one that is unmoored by time or space. Limitation breeds creativity, revealed as an expression of minimalism and close focus. Deploying a delicate piano passage from their collective archive, Basinski and Schaefer weave and reweave in numerous ways, forging an iridescent flurry of flickering melodies. The sounds of various birds heard from late night windows on tour can occasionally be heard throughout, ricocheting off mirrored facades, reflecting on themselves as they continually reshape their own environments with song. “ . . . on reflection ” looks backwards, a bustling revelry of positive emotions heard through the aging mirrors of memory. It is a celebratory meditation where sound shimmers through time like the light of the sea’s waves glistening as it folds and unfolds upon itself. Created 2014-2022 between L.A. & London. Mixed at Narnia, Walton-on-Thames.
Ai Aso - Lone (CD)
Ai Aso - Lone (CD)Ideologic Organ
¥2,384
2024 Repress. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.
Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (Inkwell Vinyl LP)Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (Inkwell Vinyl LP)
Mary Lattimore - Goodbye, Hotel Arkada (Inkwell Vinyl LP)Ghostly International
¥3,336
Through evocative, emotionally resonant music, Goodbye, Hotel Arkada, the new LP from American harpist and composer Mary Lattimore, speaks not just for its beloved namesake — a hotel in Croatia facing renovation — but for a universal loss that is shared. Six sprawling pieces shaped by change; nothing will ever be the same, and here, the artist, evolving in synthesis, celebrates and mourns the tragedy and beauty of the ephemeral, all that is lived and lost to time. Documented and edited in uncharacteristically measured sessions over the course of two years, the material remains rooted in improvisation while glistening as the most refined and robust in Lattimore’s decade-long catalog. It finds her communing with friends, contemporaries, and longtime influences, in full stride yet slowing down to nurture songs in new ways. The cast includes Lol Tolhurst (The Cure), Meg Baird, Rachel Goswell (Slowdive), Roy Montgomery, Samara Lubelski, and Walt McClements. “When I think of these songs, I think about fading flowers in vases, melted candles, getting older, being on tour and having things change while you're away, not realizing how ephemeral experiences are until they don't happen anymore, fear for a planet we're losing because of greed, an ode to art and music that's really shaped your life that can transport you back in time, longing to maintain sensitivity and to not sink into hollow despondency.” Memories, scenes, and split-second impressions have long filled Lattimore’s musical universe. As one of today’s preeminent instrumental storytellers, she has “the uncanny ability to pluck a string in a way that will instantly make someone remember the taste of their fifth birthday cake," writes Pitchfork's Jemima Skala. Lattimore's impulse to record life as it happens matches her drive to travel and perform, as profiled by Grayson Haver Currin for The New York Times: "Lattimore recognized that being in motion shook loose strands of inspiration, moods she wanted to express with melody. She needed, then, to remain on the go." That sense of fluidity has also made her a prolific collaborator outside of solo work. 2020's Silver Ladders, recorded with Slowdive's Neil Halstead, opened the door for Lattimore to widen the vision of her primary project as well, and its proper follow-up is the natural next scale. “All of these people I asked to contribute have deeply affected and inspired my life.” For the title and inspiration, Lattimore’s mind returns to the island of Hvar in Croatia, where she first saw those silver ladders at the water’s edge. “There's a big old hotel there called the Hotel Arkada, and you could tell it had been hosting holiday-goers for decades in a great way. I walked around the lobby and the empty ballrooms and it looked like a well-worn, well-loved place. My friend Stacey who lives there told me to ‘say goodbye to Hotel Arkada, it might not be here when you get back’ and I heard soon after that it was actually going to be renovated in a very crisp, modern way.” Lattimore became fixated on the ingredients that make a place special — for Hotel Arkada, the patinaed chandeliers, the patterned bedspreads, the echoes of its intangible charm — and how when those leave this world, as they inevitably always will, it feels important to memorialize them, “to bottle it for a brief second.” For the opening track, “And Then He Wrapped His Wings Around Me,” Lattimore looks to two of her closest friends — songwriter Meg Baird, her collaborator on 2018’s Ghost Forests, and accordionist composer Walt McClements, who she’s toured and performed alongside — to surface a core memory. As a kid, Lattimore won a drawing contest through a country radio station and got to see Sesame Street Live! in Asheville. She and her mom were invited backstage, and there the benevolent icon Big Bird “gave me an incredible hug with his scratchy yellow wings.” The trio channel the enveloping warmth of that portrait, the feeling of innocent escape, flying away towards a childhood dream that is just out of reach, surreal, and tinged with sadness. In a rare vocal passage in Lattimore’s library, Baird softly hums with the rolling washes of harp above McClements’ tranquil drone; just for a moment, we are held in a sublime canary yellow embrace. “Arrivederci” features the synth work of Lol Tolhurst, an original member of The Cure and one of her musical heroes. Lattimore started the song after getting fired from a project because she hadn’t played the harp parts well enough. “So I came home and cried my eyes out and then wrote this song to try to recapture my love of playing the harp with nothing to mess up. I received Lol’s parts on New Year's Eve when I was hosting a party. I secretly went into my room and listened to the song and it felt just so magical to have such an influential musician connecting with a song that I made, especially a song I made when I was feeling like a total failure.” On “Blender In A Blender,” Lattimore connects with guitarist Roy Montgomery, a pioneer of New Zealand’s underground. First drafted by Lattimore during an artist residency program in UCross Wyoming, the track later evolved over the duo’s pen pal correspondence. Montgomery adds chords that first feel distant, hazed behind a high-drama harp pattern, before thundering into the foreground in a thrilling outro. The title refers to the trend of teenagers blending their cell phones; Lattimore and a friend were joking about all stuff that could be blended, including another blender. Humor is an unsung key to Lattimore’s craft; titles and anecdotes provide unexpected, counterbalancing levity. The subdued and striking “Music For Applying Shimmering Eye Shadow” is a tribute to the earthly rituals of preparation. “I wanted to make a song for the green rooms,” she says, recalling a moment in the mirror when a tourmate readied herself to go out into the unknown of performance. “It originally was made after googling ‘what does space smell like’ and getting an answer of ‘walnuts and brake pads’ and thinking about the wooziness of space, somehow smelling familiar earth smells in unfamiliar territory. Once I started adding more layers, I started thinking about what I hoped the song would soundtrack and what I wished a song would do.” In the case of “Horses, Glossy on the Hill,” the narrative is nearly inextricable from the sonics. The percussive clacking resembles hooves in an anxious gate. There’s a storm cloud in the sky; from a car window, Lattimore captures the silvery sheen coming off the horses’ striated shapes as if photographing the scene through sound. Her shimmering strings accelerate and distort under twisting effects as the herd becomes one with the horizon. There’s a crumbling elegance to the closing track, “Yesterday's Parties,” indebted to the reveries of Julee Cruise and the droning down-tuned strings of The Velvet Underground. We join Lattimore on a midnight stroll through the streets of Brussels; she looks through stained glass windows into quiet apartments and thinks of late nights with her friends who were out of town. Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell sings a wordless hymn as the harp, a special one Lattimore keeps in Brussels, glides with violin from Samara Lubelski. Leaving Lattimore in this place, itself a memory of yearning for connection, is an appropriate end to an album devoted to remembering and manifesting through shared expression.
Whatever The Weather (Glacial Clear Vinyl LP+DL)Whatever The Weather (Glacial Clear Vinyl LP+DL)
Whatever The Weather (Glacial Clear Vinyl LP+DL)Ghostly International
¥3,197
Loraine James has processed the last two years of turbulence through her art. The North London producer started a monthly show on NTS radio, shared several projects on Bandcamp, and recorded two Hyperdub releases, the Nothing EP and Reflection, the proper LP follow-up to her 2019 breakthrough, For You and I (which landed James, then a teaching assistant by day, the top spot on year-end lists by Quietus and DJ Mag). She also returned to a distinct creative terrain uncharted since her teenage years. 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.
7038634357 - Neo Seven (LP)7038634357 - Neo Seven (LP)
7038634357 - Neo Seven (LP)Blank Forms Editions
¥3,819
Neo Gibson records, performs, and produces under the alias 7038634357. Their music is characterized by its formal precision, melodic structure, and an idiosyncratic emotional tenor. Up until this point, it has been primarily self-released on small-batch CD-R’s and performed in intimate settings. Synthesized and recorded entirely on their computer, Neo Seven is their first vinyl record, and perhaps their seventh release depending on where you begin amidst their prolific and fluid output. Within a runtime of just over thirty minutes, Neo Seven contains a spare, beautiful, and raw journey through the artist's emotive, psychologically-charged ambient songwriting. The album’s seven tracks bleed into and out of one another, continually forming and deforming between soundscape, song, and silence. The record opens slowly with Winded, as brief intervals of soft noise, nearly indistinguishable from dust breeding on the turntable, gradually become the ground upon which harmonic form is built. As tones subtly shift across regular lulls of sound, one gets the sense they’re traveling amidst a pulsar in deep space. Neo’s heavily-processed melodies, gated regularly by silence, form the heartbeat of the record, creating an expansive field in which an interior, subjective journey takes place. Square Heart utilizes this motif to rhythmic ends, in what surprisingly develops into an achingly tender pop song, albeit one in which Neo’s robotic, heavily vocoded voice is distant, sullen, and mixed low. As each track explores its own interior logic, complex forms emerge out of simple structures, and layers of oscillations commingle and build upon one another. Rhythmic cuts of compressive texture begin to feel like meteors burning up in the atmosphere or hail upon the windshield. The record begins and ends with Neo’s slowly built-up waves of ambient harmony being cut by grating digital noise. On the final track, Perfect Night, beneath the thrashing, a song-form appears nearly inaudibly. Hidden beneath the noise, Neo’s voice bears a clarity and a softness that is revealed only momentarily, when the noise flitters out cinematically toward the end of the track.
Cocteau Twins And Harold Budd - The Moon and the Melodies (LP)Cocteau Twins And Harold Budd - The Moon and the Melodies (LP)
Cocteau Twins And Harold Budd - The Moon and the Melodies (LP)4AD
¥4,558

The Moon and the Melodies is a singular record within the Cocteau Twins’ catalog—unusually ethereal, even by their standards, and largely instrumental, guided by the free-form improvisations of Harold Budd, an ambient pioneer who had drifted into their orbit as if by divine intervention.  Building on the atmospheric bliss of Victorialand, released earlier the same year, it signaled a possible future for the trio, yet it was a path the Cocteau Twins would never take again.  Now, 28 years after it was first released, it has been reissued for the first time—remastered, from the original tapes, by Robin Guthrie himself.

The album was never actually meant to happen; no one can even recall exactly how it came about in the first place. As both Guthrie and Simon Raymonde remember it, the independent television station Channel 4 approached 4AD about a film project pairing musicians from different genres.  In interviews in the 1980s, however, Budd, who passed away in 2020, believed that his music publisher had linked him with the Cocteaus after the group had expressed interest in covering one of his songs.  In any case, the film never happened. “But we’d spoken to Harold, and we were all quite excited about it—in a very sort of downbeat Cocteau Twins way, where we were rarely excited about anything,” Raymonde recalls.  “We’re like, well, let’s carry on and do it anyway—you’ve already booked your flight, let’s just hang out in the studio and see what happens.”

“There was a lot of hilarity,” Guthrie says.  “It was strange to have an older man in our life, because Liz and I saw everybody around us—the contemporary bands, the people running record labels, the journalists—as grownups.  We were literally kids.  I thought, ‘Oh Christ, he’s going to be some pompous, you know, into his classical music,’ and he wasn’t.  He was just a big man-child. We clicked in that respect.”

The Cocteau Twins had recently built their own recording studio in North Acton, in West London.  It was the first time they’d had their own space, and they relished their newfound freedom.  “We were in this lovely little bubble of making our own music,” Raymonde says.  Budd fit right into their bubble world; all four musicians got on immediately.  Over pints at the pub, they talked about everything but music, and in the studio, Raymonde and Budd both say that very little, if anything, was discussed, save perhaps for questions of tempo or key.

“Harold would sit down at the piano and start playing something, and then maybe I’d pick up a bass and start playing along with him,” Raymonde says.  “They were very much noodles rather than songs.  That was the way we tended to work anyway.  Work out what kind of mood are we feeling, get a drum beat going, just a two-bar pattern; Guthrie would plug his guitar in, I would plug my bass in, and then we’d just jam for a few minutes and go, ‘Yeah, that was cool, let’s carry on doing that thing or that thing,’ really casually, and then all of a sudden we’d have a song.  I know that sounds ludicrous, but that is how we did it, and with Harold it was exactly the same.”

Budd played a Yamaha CP-70 electric grand, and the group came armed with a growing arsenal of gear, like the Yamaha Rev7 multi-effects processor and Lexicon PCM60, perhaps an Ensoniq Mirage.  Guthrie used an EBow on his guitars, along with a Gizmo, an electromechanical device invented by Godley and Creme.  Guthrie remembers endless experiments in search of new sounds: “Lots of messing around, tuning the guitar strings all the same, getting droney sorts of things—really big, loud, sort of Metallica-like feedback sounds, but then put in the mix so quietly you can hardly hear them the first time you listen.  All these psychoacoustic sort of tricks that I liked.  It’s all in there, you know.  Just being fearless—if it didn’t work out, it was never going to be a record anyway.”

The musicians’ contrasting approaches ended up shaping the album’s somewhat curious format—four instrumentals in Budd’s meandering style, more tone poems than actual songs, and four more structured pieces with verses, choruses, drum machine, and, of course, Elizabeth Fraser’s inimitable singing, as bold and inspired as anywhere in the band’s catalog.  There was no conscious decision to have Fraser only sing on four songs.  “That’s just what came out of the sessions,” Guthrie says.  “It was a lightweight atmosphere making it, because we didn’t actually feel that we were making a record at the time.  We were trying out some stuff in the studio, and it just evolved into what it did.  Which is, essentially, a recorded version of some people trying out some stuff in the studio.”

The sessions were over in two weeks, maybe three.  “And that was already getting a bit long,” Guthrie says, “because some of our earlier records had taken just a couple of days.”  They fleshed out the material, he adds, with one more song that the trio wrote in Budd’s absence, after they realized they didn’t have quite enough material for a full album.  (“Was I that drunk?” Budd asked, upon hearing the final version of the album, which included a song he had no recollection of making.)  As much as it may pain fans to hear it, there is no more extant material from the sessions—no outtakes, no rough drafts, no alternate versions. “For the 13 years I was in the band, we have no spare tracks at all,” Raymonde says.  “If after an hour or two a track wasn’t coming together, we’d just get rid of it.  If it wasn’t good now, our attitude was, it’ll never be any good.  So we’d think, tomorrow’s another day—let’s go to the cinema and come back tomorrow, and see how it goes.  Let’s go bowling.”

The other curious thing about the album—the fact that it was credited to all four players under their individual names—followed the same intuitive logic as everything else that went into the record.  “It’s because it wasn’t a Cocteau Twins album,” Guthrie says.  Raymonde concurs: “It was simple.  All four of us have gone into the studio and done something, but it isn’t a Cocteau Twins album.”  But perhaps the passage of time has changed matters.  These days, on streaming services, you’ll find the album filed chronologically alongside the rest of the band’s work.  “What’s interesting,” Guthrie adds, “is that I got the tape boxes from the studio, and guess what it says on it?  ‘Cocteau Twins plus Harold Budd.’”  Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the group got hung up on a detail that never really mattered.  In any case, Raymonde says, “The more credit that Harold gets for the work he did, the more people that find his music because it’s in the Cocteau environment, the better.”

Despite all its quirks, The Moon and the Melodies has attracted a passionate fan base over the years.  Its most atmospheric tracks routinely turn up in ambient DJ sets. 'Sea, Swallow Me' is one of the Cocteau Twins’ most streamed songs on Spotify, second only to Heaven or Las Vegas’ 'Cherry-coloured Funk'; it has also found new life on TikTok, where it serves as the soundtrack to innumerable expressions of hard-to-express melancholy.  For such a low-key affair, the album casts a long shadow—but Raymonde believes the record’s uniqueness stems directly from its humble, unpremeditated origins.  “It’s always about making something that’s pleasurable,” he says, “capturing a moment in time between friends that are enjoying making music together.  Really, that’s the essence of it—the music was just a reflection of how nice a time we were having in the studio.”

Belver Yin - Luz Bel (LP+DL)
Belver Yin - Luz Bel (LP+DL)Efficient Space
¥4,175

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal.

While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (The Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after.

Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

A glorious debut that undeniably set a high watermark, Luz Bel is finally available again, faithfully remastered by Mikey Young and featuring bilingual liner notes from John Gómez, the authoritative ear behind Outro Tempo.

Carmen Villain - Infinite Avenue (LP)Carmen Villain - Infinite Avenue (LP)
Carmen Villain - Infinite Avenue (LP)Smalltown Supersound
¥2,934
We’re all on our own unique emotional road trips. Infinite Avenue happens to be Carmen’s. Here she is, holed up in the Motel Nowheresville, unpacking a suitcase full of stories of guilt, desire, rage, apathy, love and friendship, loneliness, nature, inner demons and other tales of twenty-first century womanhood. Carmen Villain is half-Norwegian and half-Mexican, born in the USA and now living in Oslo, Norway, having moved back after living in London for a few years. She has a lot of stories to tell. Writing, recording and producing alone, Carmen’s intensely personal songs are entirely self-created in her makeshift studio, made up of tapestries of guitar, piano, programmed drums and synths, making the most she could out of her limited gear. Once she had arrived at more than enough tracks for a follow-up album to 2013’s 'Sleeper,' some of them were mixed with experimental house producer Matt Karmil and ‘Quietly’ was treated by noise improviser Helge Sten (aka Deathprod). Taboo-busting Norwegian artist Jenny Hval contributes lyrics and vocals on ‘Borders’, a song especially relevant among today’s tightening frontiers in America and elsewhere. ‘Red Desert’ is titled after the legendary Antonioni movie about a woman’s survival tactics in a surreal industrial landscape full of existential crisis. ‘To me the movie feels like a perfect visual representation of what it can be like to be anxious and uncomfortable in your head sometimes,’ says Carmen. Musically, 'Infinite Avenue' has a similar effect. With 'Infinite Avenue,' Carmen Villain’s songwriting and production skills have taken a major leap forward, and on the final, ethereal ‘Planetarium’ her voice shoots into the stratosphere, riding the comet tail of a Korg bass drone. It’s about acknowledging the immensity of the universe, while remembering that we’ve each got our own private constellation of issues to deal with down here. It’s a typically Villainous contrast of rapture and irony, with a murmured coda recorded as she was falling asleep one night. ‘Everything I write has to be true,’ she says, ‘even if I sometimes find it’s too confessional. Whatever was my truth at that moment.’ The hollow-eyed woman on the cover, that’s Hollywood actress Gena Rowlands, partner of the late director John Cassavetes – a heroine of Carmen’s because of the way her face and body can so brilliantly express psychological states, nervousness, being stressed out, desperation, anxiety, joy without necessarily using words. A freakish dream sequence in 'Love Streams,' where she gambles with the love of her estranged husband and child and desperately tries to make them laugh with a bunch of practical-joke toys, is manic genius – and one of Carmen’s favourite film scenes. Ms Rowlands, by the way, personally approved the use of her image for this project. A famous movie maker once called film ‘truth at 24 frames per second’. With 'Infinite Avenue,' you get an earful of truth at 33 1/3 revs per minute.
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn - Quiet in a World Full of Noise (LP)
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn - Quiet in a World Full of Noise (LP)Merge Records
¥3,759
Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. That shared vision first brought them together on 2022’s Pigments—icy and warm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly—and now it has reunited them for Quiet in a World Full of Noise By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noise blends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifluous soul, jazz, and journalistic vocalizing—driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. The new album finds Richard at her most raw and exposed. Quiet expands the definitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-garde R&B by rewriting them altogether.

Milan W. - Leave Another Day (LP)Milan W. - Leave Another Day (LP)
Milan W. - Leave Another Day (LP)STROOM.tv
¥4,887
Am I ever gonna be the one? Do I ever wanna be with someone? Am I ever gonna be the one? Will I ever end up being someone?

Salenta + Topu - Moon Set, Moon Rise (LP)Salenta + Topu - Moon Set, Moon Rise (LP)
Salenta + Topu - Moon Set, Moon Rise (LP)Futura Resistenza
¥5,394
It was the lonely, overwhelming early days of the pandemic. Topu Lyo was living in Georgia, feeling distant from his home in New York City, and Salenta De Badisdenne was in Wisconsin helping an elderly relative. When Topu sent Salenta the files of Moon Set, Moon Rise, the project of wistful, contemplative cello and piano music they had recorded over the previous two years, she put off listening for a few weeks because of the stress of her daily life. When she finally played the music, she was blown away by what they had created together. The 17 songs on this album are patient, exploratory, and dynamic. The keys tiptoe through space at some moments, and pirouette ecstatically at others. The cello provides a sonic backbone that glows like amber. With song titles like “Woman Reading a Letter” and “Light Coming On The Plains,” the album evokes vignettes of home, falling asleep with someone you love, learning to soothe yourself. Topu and Salenta had met in 2018 at a mutual friend’s house in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn and decided to jam together. Their connection was instant: though they weren’t recording with the intention of releasing the music they were making, the very first session they played together made its way onto the album. They continued to meet up and improvise every week until the start of 2020. The two established rituals while recording: Topu would bring dark chocolate to their sessions that they would eat while talking about their days, herbalizing, and eventually playing. Topu and Salenta made very few edits to the live recordings. The album we hear is a document of their shared bond and their time together. If you listen closely, you can even hear the two artists breathing on the recording. “This music was liberating because both Topu and I were just allowed to be,” Salenta says. “There was no right or wrong way, we were creating this atmosphere together. We were right there with the listener learning about and experiencing it.” “What I love about Salenta as a human and a musician is how honest she is,” adds Topu. “You hear when we’re playing, suddenly she’ll start laughing. There’s such a human aspect to it that makes me so happy when I listen to the music.” Both artists, as well as their community of friends and fellow musicians, see the music as healing. Topu and Salenta hope that listeners feel the peacefulness and liberation they experienced while creating these songs. — Vrinda Jagota

The Ghostwriters - Remote Dreaming (2LP)The Ghostwriters - Remote Dreaming (2LP)
The Ghostwriters - Remote Dreaming (2LP)Dark Entries
¥4,862
Dark Entries summons Philadelphia synthesizer scribes The Ghostwriters to rouse their ambient masterwork Remote Dreaming. The late Buchla maestro Charles Cohen and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Cain joined up in 1971 to craft electroacoustic chaos as Anomali, later renaming themselves The Ghostwriters. Their collaborations with choreographers and visual media artists led to their singular style, straddling improvisation and composition, the oneiric and the immediate. Following their debut album, Objects in Mirrors, they were approached by ambient outlet Mu-Pysch. Remote Dreaming would take shape in various studios over nine months. Jeff Cain's instruments on this project included electric and acoustic pianos, the Juno 106 synthesizer, and a Mirage sampler, while Charles Cohen used his signature Buchla 200 Series Electronic Musical Instrument. A stark departure from the tightly wound first LP, Remote Dreaming shows the duo unfurling with soothing pianos and psychoacoustic textures, its somnambulant drones just skirting the edges of the uncanny. Although ignored in its time, Remote Dreaming is now heralded as a landmark in 80s experimental ambient music. It is here released for the first time on vinyl, spread across a double LP with five additional tracks, four of which were previously unreleased. Remote Dreaming has been freshly remastered and includes an insert with photos and liner notes. Proceeds will be donated to SOSA (Safe from Online Sex Abuse), a nonprofit that combats online child sex abuse and trafficking.

Ulla Straus - Big Room (LP)
Ulla Straus - Big Room (LP)Quiet Time
¥3,546
Originally released on tape in 2019, 'Big Room' helped establish Philly's Ulla Straus as one of the key figures in the post-"bblisss" wave of nu-ambient practitioners. Interchangeably glacial, gaseous and liquid, it's a rare downtempo tome that never shies away from sensuality and raw, messy emotionality. Gorgeous material: essential listening for anyone into Jake Muir, Perila, Shuttle358, Oval, Pendant or Space Afrika. 'Big Room' is a technically advanced record that never dangles its prowess in your face. Ulla's sound sculpting is remarkable, but the key to 'Big Room' is not her processing skill, it's her open-hearted emotional honesty. And if contemporary ambient and experimental music has been pocked by the Instagrammable nostalgia drip and hacky tacked-on PR narratives, 'Big Room' succeeds because it offers us a clear, demarcated alternative. Ulla doesn't need to shoehorn in a grandstanding press release or video footage of an elaborate modular setup to get our attention, the music does all the heavy lifting, drawing us in with clouded bathhouse textures and soft-focus dub rhythms, chiseled digital hiccups and levitational synthesizer loops. From the opening tones of 'Nana', with its sloshing pads and subtle glitches, to the dislocated wind chimes and blurry electronics of 'House', there's a resounding faded texture to Ulla's music that helps set a picture perfect mood. 'Big Room' is an album to lose yerself in - Ulla's able to dial in an aesthetic that goes beyond the surface level, piercing not just the production elements but the writing itself. Using relatively few elements, she's able to bridge the gaps between dub techno ('Net'), Mille Plateaux-esque processed glitch ('Past'), glowing Eno-influenced ambient ('Billow') and breathtaking arpeggio-led kosmische sounds ('Sister'), linking each track with her diaristic subtlety and careful choice of processes. In a forest of withered ambient mediocrity, 'Big Room' is a lonely, pristine evergreen - we just can't recommend it enough.
Ana Roxanne - ~~~ (LP+DL)Ana Roxanne - ~~~ (LP+DL)
Ana Roxanne - ~~~ (LP+DL)Leaving Records
¥3,647

Ana Roxanne is an intersex Southeast Asian musician based in Los Angeles. Born & raised in the Bay Area to immigrant parents, Ana's love for music and singing began through her mother's cd collection of 80's/90's R&B divas. Raised in the catholic church, she became a devout choir nerd and found any opportunity to sing, whether for religious mass, the jazz ensemble of her catholic high school, or karaoke at family gatherings. Her commitment to singing led her to a brief stint at a vocational jazz program in the cornfields of the midwest; in a remote town of 7,000 people, she began a formal study of jazz and classical music. During these years she would tour with various ensembles to beautiful old cathedrals in nearby cities and became enamored with the sacredness of choral music, as well as the enveloping sound of harmony. A near death experience, too, served as a connection between music and spirituality, and music as a healing art after facing tragedy. 

In 2013, Ana was also fortunate enough to spend a few months in Uttarkhand, India where she met an incredible voice teacher who introduced her to classical Hindustani singing. Living and studying with this teacher deeply impacted her outlook on the voice as art. It was there that she began to see the singer - the Diva - as a symbol of divinity; that the unique power of one's voice comes from the vulnerability of using the body as an instrument. Be it romance, love, or worship of a deity - in order to access such depths of emotional expression, one must be willing to be intensely vulnerable, lay one's heart in the open air, expose what is kept hidden. This brief study was the catalyst that led her to finish her music study at the experimental Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she began to combine all of these influences into her current self-titled project. This album ~~~ was created during her last years residing in the Bay Area, a tribute to the great musicians who inspired her and the landscape where she spent her formative years. 

In addition to the worship of R&B and pop divas, Ana's current practice explores themes of gender & identity. In October of 2018, she decided to come out publicly as intersex, and is dedicated to being a voice for her community and speaking out about social justice for intersex youth.

Francesca Heart - Bird Bath (CS+DL)Francesca Heart - Bird Bath (CS+DL)
Francesca Heart - Bird Bath (CS+DL)Leaving Records
¥2,139
After two years since second effort Eurybia, Francesca Heart returns to Leaving Records with a new seven-tracks album detailing the progress in her personal musical lore. Bird Bath expands on the musician’s childlike cosmic approach, crafting new tales where feelings and symbols of unearthly love and possibility, inner protection and desire become the album’s pillars. An iteration of the artist’s interest in mediterranean mythology and the evolution of sacred icons, Bird Bath begins with the figure of the angel as depicted by early renaissance Italian painter Beato Angelico, visible at Monastero of San Marco in Florence. In that period, the not-yet-achieved perfect perspective in painting would give an abstract feeling to the image, leaving room for imaginative contemplation and therefore aiding the monks in meditating for long periods of time. As the album unfolds, the listener is playfully transported through a puzzle of whispering grottos, mossy architectures and theatrical fountains that follow the idea of the Genius Loci, the generative essence of places, and the guardians that may inhabit them. It therefore calls for a devotional relationship to nature. Bird Bath is a playful, adventurous, and whimsical journey towards embracing a delicate vulnerability. Through Francesca’s imaginative musicality, the sacred unites with the mundane, the digital and even the kitsch to generate a healing field where her compositions can come to life. In Rose Petal Place fantasy-tales meet video game sounds with a repetitive, samba-like rhythm that could recall a secret spring party. Caryatids evokes marine ambiences and insular melodies and was inspired by the island of Ponza. Angelsummit.net is a tender sound tapestry enriched by sampling which invites the listener to collect shiny floating gems along the way. Continuing in the spirit of Eurybia, Bird Bath uses fantasy as a musico-devotional choreography where Francesca’s intuitive and impressionistic approach to composition, reefs of midi arpeggios, constellations of samples and foamy ambiences become instruments to build and connect the virtual, spiritual and earthly channels of the artist’s labyrinthine and spellbinding world.

Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, Carlos Niño - Subtle Movements (CS+DL)Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, Carlos Niño - Subtle Movements (CS+DL)
Surya Botofasina, Nate Mercereau, Carlos Niño - Subtle Movements (CS+DL)Leaving Records
¥2,268
This Trio is very Californian, even though Surya is based on the East Coast . . .We swim together in the Pacific Ocean, Vibing, bonding, talking, listening, riding the Waves . . .as often as we can. - Carlos Niño Together these three adventurously creative Musical Artists have played in Portland, Oregon, Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York, London, England, Amsterdam and Zaandam, NL, Köln, Germany, San Diego and Ojai, California, and many times throughout Los Angeles County, since February 2022. They first came together in July 2021 at the Glendale, California Home Recording Studio of Jesse Peterson and Mia Doi Todd. Nate was invited by Carlos to meet Surya and to possibly play. No specific plans were set other than to explore with Surya. (Multi-Reedsman Randal Fisher was also there.) That Session turned out to be Day 1 of what became Surya's debut album Everyone's Children released by Spiritmuse Records on November 4, 2022. Suyra and Nate were both featured extensively on the Carlos Niño & Friends album (I'm just) Chillin', on Fire released by International Anthem on September 15, 2023, though not together on any of the same pieces. The first in-depth representation of the Trio was in collaboration with André 3000 on his album New Blue Sun released by Epic Records on November 17, 2023, where they are featured as co-writers and co-creators of 5 of the 8 album pieces. Niño also Produced that album in collaboration with André. Nate enthusiastically took it upon himself to be the Trio's Archivist and would get to Mixing and playlisting the group's recordings as soon as he received them from Live and Studio recordists. He took the lead on Producing and Mixing this album, Subtle Movements. His unique perspectives, thoughts, feelings and intense heart energy went into telling the story of how these pieces, recorded in different settings, with a wide range of gear, by an array of characters, all flow together. "It is a blessed opportunity and Cosmic Gift to be at the keyboards with Nate and Carlos," Surya gleams. "In appearance, I play a few keyboards at a time: a MIDI controller that I use in tandem with music studio software, my absolute FAVORITE analog sensibility synth Roland SH-201 (although it is digital), and typically another 88key board (the Roland SV-1). If there is a piano available, I will also use that with us for a total of 4 keyboards at my station, (that my cousin Georgia Anne Muldrow has forever deemed “Praise Console no.3”), Surya enthuses. "My instruments and sound are the last thing I consider about this Trio. For me, it is about us as human beings first; as members of our respective families and soul tribes before anything else. I think whatever sound that comes forth is a result of that inner connected soul conversation. That, at least in my view, is the Sound." "I play guitar, guitar synthesizer, and midi-guitar sampler," writes Nate Mercereau of his Instruments on Subtle Movements. "In addition to my main GR300 guitar synthesizer sound, I am sampling the band live as we perform and using the sound . . .It takes many different shapes, but I am often playing something like the sound of Carlos's percussion from 30 seconds earlier in a new key and tempo, or as a chord — or a quick slice of a pad from Surya’s keyboard pitched down into sub frequencies, anything can happen," Nate details. "I live-sample and expand, magnify, permutate, repeat, live-remix, live-edit, and reframe moments of our sound within our sound while it's happening. Worlds Within Worlds and Worlds Upon Worlds, Currents Within Currents. I also use previously recorded and created samples from my library in this context, allowing my guitar to be anything." Nate also offers: "I consider what I do in this trio to be a part of and extension of the greater sound of this group, which is often oceanic (which represents everything to me), waves, it's full communication. Love and support in sonic form. Going beyond together in all ways." Carlos Niño plays everything that you hear in the Aerophone, Drum, Percussion and Plant realms . . . He was the group's "Connector" and its first advocate. Depending on who received and accepted the opportunity to present the Trio their names have appeared in different orders. Hear, on Subtle Movements the order is Alphabetical by last name: Botofasina, Mercereau, Niño
Belver Yin - Luz Bel (LP)
Belver Yin - Luz Bel (LP)Noisex Music
¥9,557
Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal. While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after. Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

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