All products

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

Since he started producing music, Berlin-based American sound artist Jake Muir has been obsessed with sampling. His 2018 album "Lady's Mantle" was based on manipulated chunks of vintage Californian surf rock, and its follow-up, 2020's midnight symphony "The Hum Of Your Veiled Voice" was sourced from a wide variety of old records, and inspired by the work of experimental turntablists like Marina Rosenfeld, Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck. On "Mana", Muir looks back to a misunderstood musical movement. Around 1995, a group of New York producers and DJs - including DJ Olive, DJ Spooky and Spectre - pioneered a genre-dissolving sound by unifying hip-hop techniques with ideas pulled from dub, jungle, ambient music and industrial noise. Badged "illbient", it was a short-lived genre that felt like a high-minded psychedelic cousin of the UK's trip-hop. Muir uses illbient as the springboard for "Mana", utilizing a selection of samples to inform his frothy drones and foreboding atmospheres. He ushers the material into 2021 by diverting it through his own contemporary worldview, attempting to recreate the hyperreal fantasy histories of Japanese RPGs (think "Dark Souls" and "Final Fantasy") and nod to sensual, tactile soundscapes of European industrial labels Staalplaat and Soleilmoon. The result is a magickal, sensory journey that's as physical as it is representational. If the illbient producers were encouraging a burgeoning experimental music landscape to emphasize the tactile feeling of turntablism and sample manipulation, Muir is doing the same with "Mana". Each track heaves and breathes not just with his cultural reference points, but with layered, complicated emotions. We can hear joy, sadness, desire and anguish, obscured by disintegrating noise, hallucinogenic harmonies and sub-aquatic bass. It's electronic music that's rooted not in technology, but in touch. credits

Burnt Friedman has been collaborating with German rock giant Jaki Liebezeit of CAN, who has been a close friend of his for years, and experimental drummer João Pais Filipe, who has worked with Rafael Toral and Lafawndah. João Pais Filipe, a drummer in the experimental field who has worked with Rafael Toral and Lafawndah, has released a split EP on his own Nonplace label. It's another astonishing work...! This is the first time I've ever heard a track from the band, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next... "Out Of Ape" is a trancy, avant-garde electro track that completely removes the distinction between the otherworldly and the real, while filling the track with ultra-colored psychedelia. Eurydike", and the cosmic ambient/tribal dance "Star Wars", which was inspired by Jaki Liebezeit and recorded together in 2004.

When Jako Maron reimagined Réunion island's politically-charged maloya sound on 'The electro Maloya experiments of Jako Maron', he focused on the genre's distinctive, revolutionary rhythms. Electro-plating the call-and-response thuds, he used the language of techno to upset the expected template, disrupting maloya's 6/8 pulse with modular bleeps and Roland kicks. He takes a different approach on 'Mahavélouz', focusing on the bobre, traditional maloya's only melodic instrument, a long bow amplified by a calabash that's known as the berimbau in Brazil. Maron was fascinated by the bobre's unique sonic signature, and noted that when it's usually played, it's drowned out by the louder percussive instruments. So he enlisted a number of traditional bobre performers to play a series of solos, using them to guide the album's four lead tracks and distorting and compressing the serrated hits until they stood confidently in front of his undulating roulér (bass drum) and sati (hi-hat) patterns.

"These four pieces are the culmination of my research into electronic maloya," explains Maron. "There's no need for words on this music; the bobre is the voice, and it is an ancestral voice. It's a reimagining of maloya kabaré in an electro form." This is the music that Maron has used to drive his recent live performances, so it prioritizes maloya's dancefloor potential. Swapping the traditional roulér and sati sounds for TR-606, TR-909 and TR-707 hits, he generates a hypnotic roll on opening track 'Paré po saviré' (rise up), forming a rubbery backdrop for Amemoutoulaop's acidic bobre twangs. Maron describes the track as a "call to bring spirits and people together", and using piercing feedback squeals to harmonize with the bobre, he introduces us to the voice that anchors the entire album. On 'Bék dann dir (try harder), he augments the bobre with glassy Korg Polysix chimes and Machinedrum sounds, and 'Zésprimaron'(the Maron spirit), ushers us towards a ceremony, shuffling his rhythm into a ritualistic throb, and using squelchy synth sounds to flutter into a trance.

Maron concludes his live bobre experiments with '1 piton 3 filaos' (one hill and three trees), and it's his most ambitious fusion, with hallucinatory flutes and technoid stabs rising weightlessly in-between Amemoutoulaop's frenetic performance. But this isn't the end of his investigation: Maron fleshes out 'Mahavélouz' with tonal studies that replicate the bobre synthetically. On 'Mdé prototrash', the characteristic ping is re-created by his modular system, and it's almost indistinguishable from the original instrument, buzzing and popping alongside Maron's surging percussion. The sound is more uncanny on 'dann kér Mahaveli' (in the heart of marvelous land) but no less affecting, knotted around synthetic bird calls and entrancing warbles. Even more idiosyncratic than its predecessors, 'Mahavélouz' is a bold step forward for Maron that builds on ancient foundations to construct a staggeringly new kind of dance music.

Jako Maron was born and raised on Réunion, a small island in the Indian Ocean not far from Madagascar that's governed by the French Republic. The primary musical form to emerge from Réunion is maloya, a percussion-forward call-and-response style that differs from séga, another popular local genre, due to its lack of harmonic elements. Maloya was developed in the 19th century, when enslaved peoples from Madagascar and West Africa were taken to the island by French colonists who wanted to exploit the country's sugar cane and cotton fields; indentured laborers from South India also traveled to Réunion, bringing with them their own musical traditions. The sound then represented Réunion's own Créole musical language, using the keyamb, a sugar cane rattle, the Indian tabla, a barrel drum known as the roulér, a bamboo percussion instrument called the pikér, and other tools. Because maloya was such an emotionally charged expression from a suppressed underclass, it inevitably became associated with political revolution. This was a sound that was developed for and by the workers, and when France made the island an "overseas département" in 1946, maloya became synonymous with independence and freedom. As its popularity increased, so did its perceived danger, and the French government banned the music in the 1960s, only lifting the restriction years later in the 1970s. Once the ban was over, musicians began experimenting wholeheartedly with the form, splintering it into radically different sub-genres. Maron, who was born during the prohibition in 1968, was fascinated by the genre's open endedness and has been working to integrate it with electronic music since the 1990s, when techno and house sounds reverberated across the island from the USA, through Europe, Africa and beyond. Using modular synthesizers and drum machines, Maron offers a completely unique take on maloya. Like Charanjit Singh's disco-cum-acid raga fusions in the early 1980s, or more recently Equiknoxx's innovative and deeply personal fragmentation of Jamaican dancehall, Maron's electro maloya experiments take an initial idea and shuttle it across unfamiliar sonic landscapes. The all-important 6/8 beat is at the core of his music, with electronic thuds, zips and pings standing in for hand drums and congas, while the usually vocal call-and-response elements are handed off to wheezing synthesizers. 'Batbaté Maloya' is an appropriate introduction, with familiar electronic sounds used in surprising patterns - the maloya beat is the most striking element, but Maron adds effects, processes and swing that can't help but inspire comparisons to db reggae and dembow formulations. But he never stays in the same place for long. When Maron edges into minimalism, like on the cybernetic 'Maloya Valsé chok 1', his unsettling mood and noisy, percussive framework harmonizes with similarly prismatic grooves from Pan Sonic, or the Raster Noton catalog. And when he approaches long-form on 'Fanali dann bwa', it sounds as if he's integrating dubstep pressure with psychedelic kosmische sounds, submerging the beat beneath hypnotic synth wobbles and squeals. Maron's relentless examination of maloya and its application within electronic music is endlessly invigorating, and across 15 tracks (four are exclusive to this new vinyl edition) he makes a convincing case for the genre's continuing relevance as unshakable protest music.

Jali Nyama Suso was known and loved throughout his native Gambia and renowned the world over as one of the greatest kora harp players. This recording was the first release of a solo kora and griot music album anywhere. Jali Nyama, whose real name was Mohamadu Lamin Suso, was the eldest of four brothers, and the only one who took up the kora to follow the profession of traditional music and oratory of the Mandinka people, known as jaliyaa. A practitioner of jaliyaa is known as a jali (or if a woman, jali muso). Jaliyaa is multi-faceted, requiring the jali to be a singer, oral historian, genealogist and praiser, with emphasis on one or more of these depending on ability, interest and circumstance. The kora is a 21-string harp, strung today with nylon, but in the past with rawhide. The body is made from a large half calabash covered with cowhide and pierced through by a stout neck of rosewood that also forms the tailpiece. This manner of construction identifies it as a spike harp, a type of instrument unique to West Africa. The traditional role of the kora in jaliyaa is to accompany singing. The kora player himself may sing, or he may accompany a vocal soloist, male or female. In addition, kora players create solo pieces from songs by varying the basic ostinato, by adding improvised passages called birimintingo, and by playing the vocal line on the instrument.

A 22-year-old genius jazz pianist who also works with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Carlos Niño, including his grandfather legendary soul jazz drummer Donald Dean, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and more. A young Jamael Dean who needs attention to be influenced by. The long-awaited official debut work is fully released from the prestigious ! Currently, he leads the music group The Afronauts and participates in the legendary black jazz "Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra". It is a two-part album consisting of 10 hip-hop songs produced under the name of his own nickname "Jasik" using jazz performances by his group and beats sampled from them. Sharada Shashidhar and Mekala “Mickey” Session, who are also enrolled in Brooklyn's female singer and have collaborated with Jamael Dean many times, participated. The title comes from the Genesis of the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group. Both sides are fertile and superb!

Modern Love’s 7” series returns with a 45 special from Chicago’s Sun God, delivering a pair of chrome-burn acid jak and cosmic house tear-outs fired to spangle the dance. Screwed, exceptional music for the club. A follow-up to Jamal’s album ‘Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ (Modern Love, 2022), this rare 7” outing hails the Chi house don at his mind-bending best, plotting coordinates for the outer limits of club music whilst firmly tethered to its fundamentals. Never one to follow the grid, Jamal makes the template his own with a hands-on approach that translates decades of experience - from dancing to Ron Hardy in the ‘80s, being an apprentice of sorts to Adonis in the ‘90s, and then thru countless performances and almost innumerable releases ever since - into uniquely transcendent shapes. Coming on like Sun Ra strapped with a 303, ’It Is My Fault, My Fault Alone’ yields the chewiest acid and spitting, hot oil rhythms articulated with the sort of fervour and psychosexual thrust that underlines all of Jamal’s best work, and here emphatically brought to to the boil via a maze of knotted drums and frayed synths that join dots between Prince and Armando in an effortlessly asymmetric style. The B-side ‘Be Fearless In The Pursuit Of What Sets Ur Soul On Fire’ only ramps the pressure with a frenetic arrangement anchored to a modulated kick and synced to psychedelic synths that roll with seemingly endless momentum. At the risk of sounding like yoghurt-weaving rave casualties; Jamal is once again utterly attuned to the type of cosmic frequencies and aerobic mystic needs that have been lost in translation by successive waves of dry-ass posers and dancers who don’t like to get their kicks dirty. And for that, we eternally salute him.

Rare private press Jazz-Funk with breaks and some spiritual influences reminiscent of Brother Ahh at times. They cover Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” plus play originals that include “Sweet Heritage,” “Free Will,” “One of a Kind (Love Affair),” “Serene Beauty,” and “In the Fall of the Year.” This is a beautiful sounding record with elements of straight Jazz, Soul/Jazz, and some funky stuff including some Free and Afro-centric influences.

The main man is Jaman himself (J.E. Manuel) on keyboards, who in the past had worked with R&B bands and many people in the Jazz world (Turrentines, Bostic, Stitt, Joe Farrell, Lenny Welch, Ethel Ennis).

The Payback is the 37th studio album by American musician James Brown. The album was released in December 1973 by Polydor Records. It was originally scheduled to become the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Hell Up in Harlem, but was rejected by the film's producers, who dismissed it as "the same old James Brown stuff."

The Payback is considered a high point in Brown's recording career, and is now regarded by critics as a landmark funk album. Its revenge-themed title track, a #1 R&B hit, is one of his most famous songs and an especially prolific source of samples for record producers.

The duo’s third album of instrumental guitar recordings pushes their sinuous compositions into labyrinthine new shapes, interlocking and interlocutory, supported by a cast of stellar collaborators. Interwoven among the dazzling original pieces is a fascinating array of covers, ranging from traditional Breton dance tunes to a deconstruction of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance.

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies. Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world. Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream. Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record. Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind. — James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. His work encompasses a variety of media, including sound, video, painting, and publishing. Hoff’s multidisciplinary approach begins at the user level—the level at which we interact with consumer technologies, media, and data. He has worked with computer viruses, inaudible data signals, ear worms, culture bound illnesses, dead zones, and hacked google maps as tools and framing devices for works that reimagine and expand the creative potential of digital and cultural networks beyond their economic and corporate-engineered use value. By exploiting and manufacturing technological and cognitive glitches, Hoff illuminates the social, political, and historical context of the software and media that we interact with on a daily basis. Hoff co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books. The organization has published hundreds of titles, including facsimile editions of Art-Rite, Broken Music, Black Art Notes, Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, and Womens Work as well as new works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, DeForrest Brown Jr, Tony Conrad, Dara Birnbaum, Constance DeJong, Alexandro Segade, Martine Syms, and Flora Yin-Wong, among many others. He has exhibited and performed at Artists Space, Bergen Kunsthall, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), The Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Hessel Museum of Art, ICA London, The Kitchen, Kunsthall Oslo, The Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, MassMOCA, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and the Onassis Cultural Center, among many others.

Friend, james K’s critically-acclaimed third album, opens as a portal and continues to garner a life of its own, a constant earworm that continually resonates as the map of its emotional cartography shifts into new ground. The map continues to unfold with Friend Remixes. Speaking on the remixes, K says: “Friends remix Friend. It is such a sweet honour to have my friends and collaborators, whose work has inspired mine, interpret and translate this work into new narratives.”

New York based artist James K returns with Friend.

"Friend: The rupture is filled with sounds and a translation is made from blazing starlight to harmony and weather. Laid down in our silken dreams, the tripped out flows in the dubbed footpath, and with our hands wet, we root down. Her voice fades and gathers from this place, where we hold the water of our bodies against the speaker of time, and let the ripples give us pleasure and vision. Spin slowly around the open air room, dripping with the undertone of two hearts, to hear the warming of her sun come across our deep cold space.

She flies out from the vapor whirlpool feeling the celestial breakdown rise and slip, making room all around for singing out, signaling the days to come and go in peace. And still we find that heaven and earth don’t ever mean enough, even when they speak the same. It’s in these distilled moments we construct a reality, learning to listen quietly for the voices and call out in return. A kiss, a friend, a hand in hand, continuing until things disappear. In the metronome of the cat’s tail, erasing and mending, we find reasons for love and for life.

Riffs of glory and bitter-sweet chorals, trilling and resonant, source from the sub-zeit; it's a deeper sense of emotion that we travel through this space with. And with the blissful sequencing in reverse, we recognize the sonic vistas to come through us. It’s all smiling and sliding in the backwards, floating in the drift of cricket circuitry, when you say to me “is it real?” She leaves us where sounds flicker into taste and touch, where shadows sparkle into color, where star-kissed clouds come down like doorways."

Proto-house classic 'Nightgruv' gets a re-release and includes a longer unreleased edit! James Mason is mostly known for his late 70's album 'Rhythm Of Life', which is a soul-jazz classic. Soon after music trends shifted to (electronic) disco and James' music became out of fashion, leaving 'Rhythm Of Life' to be the only album he released to date. The early early 80′s saw him have a few studio sessions from which more electronic output like Wuf Ticket’s ‘The Key (Prelude Records) resulted. James also produced various disco acts like Disco 3, Earl Flint and Brenda Bayton. However, most of his early 80s studio sessions have remained unreleased until today. ‘Nightgruv’, which was recorded in 1984, did eventually get a release when it was picked up 12 years later (!) by a small UK indie label and was again reissued in 2000 by Soul Brother. Both pressings are still highly sought after and go for a lot of money on Discogs, mostly to do with the timeless nature of this proto house wonder, which sounds like a recording Larry Heard never made. A magically seductive groove, recorded at a time when house was still in its infant years. Not only is this release offering a remastered version of the original, it also includes an unreleased edit which stretches the original to a cool 6 minutes. The B-side features the epic 11 minute original version of 'I Want Your Love', a soul classic.

A reissue of the classic 1977 vocal fusion album that has been the source of many hip-hop samples. It features Narada Michael Walden (Whitney Houston, Herbie Hancock, George Benson) on drums. Long out of print, and coveted by collectors, Chiaroscuro provides an official faithful reissue.

Jame’s Newton’s 1977 self-released solo-debut, ‘Flute Music’ is an unheralded gem of the 70’s jazz underground. An album that showcases a diverse range of styles and fervent cross-pollination, while retaining a clear sense of direction and cohesion. An artist funnelling their wild expression into multiple facets of “The New Music”, crafting an auspicious and artistic debut. Newton would later go on to record with revered jazz labels like India Navigation and ECM, and collaborate with fellow creative luminaries like Sam Rivers, Anthony Davis, Andrew Cyrille, David Murray, and John Carter. But ‘Flute Music’ captures Newton’s fiery creativity and experimental nature in its earliest blossom. The album’s opener, Arkansas Suite, finds Newton’s flute unaccompanied, but densely layered. Folding and cascading upon itself, he creates a ricocheting web of dense woodwind harmonics. The effect is deeply immersive and meditative. From first blush, it seems this could be an album of blissful new age. But after this track, Newton’s influences explode outwards. On the same LP side, Darlene’s Bossa welcomes a full band into the fold. The track expounds upon a latin-jazz groove as if the group were seasoned experts of the form. The next track once again finds Newton’s flute on its own as he upends Duke Ellington’s jazz standard, Sophisticated Lady. And finally, on the sidelong b-side track, Poor Theron, the band is suffused with free-jazz electricity - quietly roiling in the midst of musique concrete clatter, and exploding into a din of spiritual fervor. Flute Music pushes in many directions at once, and yet it revolves firmly around a singular smoldering core. That core is Newton’s unmistakable talent and musicianship. His flute anchors the whole affair, whether it’s in cascading sheets of unaccompanied wind, or flitting between the breathmarks of his backing band. With ‘Flute Music’, James Newton casts himself as a potent force on the creative-jazz scene, and the rest of his career has certainly given credence to that promise. Reissued for the first time since its scarce private-press issue in 1977, Morning Trip are exceedingly proud to present the debut solo work by a renowned and prestigious jazz luminary.

A gum gnashing 60 minute ride of all unreleased James Pants beats & demos .. old fashioned mixtape business. BIG TIP!Spliced together by TBZ and Pissflaps.

James Ray kickstarted his career as a teenager in 1959 after he left Washington DC for New York, but debut single "Make Her Mine" flopped. Two years later, songwriter Rudy Clark discovered Ray and got him signed to the Caprice label, the resultant "If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody" a top-30 hit that the Beatles covered in early live sets. Ray's self-titled debut album had that hit and the equally appealing follow-up, "Itty Bitty Pieces," as well as "I've Got My Mind Set On You," later successfully covered by George Harrison. An overdose would tragically cut short Ray's career, this sole LP a testament to his enduring talent.

James Rushford tops over a decade of solo and collaboratibve work with Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang on this fathoms-deep, psychedelic treat, a next-level arrangement of microtonal drone, decaying concréte fuzz and windswept, somber melancholia recorded for the Shelter Press label.

James Rushford impressed earlier this year with his excellent Black Truffle collab with Will Guthrie "Real Real World", and he here heads further into the nether-realm on 'Lakes From The Louvers’, an album that draws its inspiration from the interplay of shadow and light he observed on the surface of the lake and through his window while at an artist residency at La Becque on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Rushford's detailed sound particles and concrète world-building echo the tantalising shimmer of light on water, with amplified movements, synthesized squawks, pings and harp notes rippling across the length of each track. It’s music that accurately represents the landscape but is far from ambient - instead Rushford sculpts soundscapes that demand patient, attentive listening. 

The slow-moving, deliberate processes that Rushford has been honing over the last 15 years betray a sensitive ear, swerving pretentious, exclusionary art for arts sake nonsense. This is electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart, designed to trigger thought and self reflection. Just clap yr ears around 'Hyaline Apples' as it melts buzzing clouds of synth into jagged harp plucks and woodblock percussion, or standout track 'The Bise' and its disquieting haze of microtonal bliss. When the album comes to a satisfying close on 'Dents Du Midi', it feels like the finale of a muticolored odyssey, as tangled synth notes fold in on themselves like an MC Escher painting. Futuristic and ancient, 'Lakes From The Louvers' is a breathtaking album that unspools with the patience it no doubt took to create.

Artist, composer and producer James William Blades’ score Pare De Sufrir will be released via AD 93 on the 4th of October.
Pare De Sufrir (translating to ‘End of Suffering’) is the official soundtrack to A.G Rojas’ film of the same title.

Spanish-born, Southern California-raised filmmaker AG Rojas is known for creating videos and working with the likes of Jamie xx, Gil Scott-Heron, Kamasi Washington, Spiritualized and Mitski. Rojas’ sensitive eye and subjectivity has brought him from the world of music videos to creating his first independent film: a 48-minute featurette following three people as they navigate the liminal space between life and the afterlife in an attempt to heal themselves and each other. Rojas’ film is a fragile, wordless meditation on grief and how it can transform and baptise the body and spirit.

The almost silent film is a testament to Rojas’ trust in Blades’ composition to express the director’s voice and emotions. Rojas reached out to Blades after coming across his score for Keeping Time (dir. Darol Olu Kae). An intimate and unusual process unfolded. Rojas explained to Blades the personal narrative of the film, the two sharing unfurling conversations on the nature of loss and the human spirit. But Blades did not watch the film and instead worked on instinct to build out a concept of how the score would unfold, shaping its operatic, textural and granular tone. Blades went on to record the score in full, with orchestra and choir, without going back to Rojas for feedback, aware that he was taking a complete risk. “It was definitely something I felt had a gravitational pull,” says Blades of the decision. The score’s pull is reflective of the process of grief itself, how its moods and memories oscillate up and down into the past and lost futures, Blades hitting all those spaces with diverse and stretching notes.

The piano holds the memories of Blades and Rojas’ grandmothers, who both had out-of-tune pianos sitting in an empty room. The Silogo-De-Oro choir sing throughout, reminiscent of the broken phonetics of grief, the build up and release of tension and the inability to articulate complete sound or words. The harmony stabilises and then becomes distant, taking the griever away from the lushness of life and into the realms of loss, death and dream-like realities, as mirrored in Rojas’ layered vignettes. As the score closes, the harmonies become richer and fuller, marking a return to life. Understanding the power of sound to both respond to and drive narrative, Blades’ score weaves together field recordings, half-remembered conversations, choral movements, string arrangements and electronic fragments into a nuanced and evocative whole.
________________________

James William Blades is a British composer and producer based in New York, whose work dissolves the boundaries between scores, sound design and music. Rooted in a meticulous sensitivity to melody and structure, he creates sonic landscapes that have the potential to refract meaning and tell new stories in the process.

It is through his multidisciplinary experience working with visual artists, directors, musicians and fashion designers that Blades has developed the unique musical aesthetic he is now bringing to the world of cinema. Blades began by collaborating with fashion designer Grace Wales Bonner, artist Theaster Gates, and film-maker Kahlil Joseph. Exploring the expressive possibilities of composition, his atmospheric sound collages for Joseph’s 2017 film Fly Paper and short film Process for the British music artist Sampha, subsequently led Blades to work with Beyoncé on Black is King for Disney in 2020, and more recently Renaissance, Beyonce’s self-directed documentary concert film.

Learning from visual artists, themselves reframing the relationship between music, sound and image, Blades has created a singular sonic language he describes in terms of landscape painting. “I like conveying a non-linear sense of sonics, playing around with combinations, depths, tempos, and making it feel like you’re in a moment surrounded. It’s visceral,” he explains. In each case, his approach involves periods of contextual and multi- instrumental research, working closely with directors to understand how best to support the specific emotions, moods and textures of the project at hand. “Thinking about the painting of a score is something that I'm trying to translate over a longer scale.”
This capacity to work on a variety of long-form projects is evident, whether in the scores he has had exhibited in a gallery context (Venice Biennale, Serpentine Gallery, 180 The Strand, Palais De Tokyo), or in the debut solo productions he is readying for release.

Other composer credits include Tendaberry, Hayley Elizabeth Anderson’s critically lauded debut feature film which premiered at Sundance 2024, the Showtime documentary NYC Point Gods produced by Coodie and Chike and Kevin Durant and Kiin a three part companion film directed by Fenn O’Meally and written by Letitia Wright and Tamara Lawrance.
A storyteller in the broadest sense of the word, Blades’ extensive inter-disciplinary experience marks him out as an artist in his own right, bringing an exciting and fresh approach to feature film composition. 

Jameszoo (Mitchel van Dinther) returns to Brainfeeder with a wonderfully cinematic album embarking on adventures on the fringes of jazz and contemporary classical. Imbued with the same spirit of adventure and experimental outlook as his previous work on the label, ‘Music for 17 Musicians’ is a new work written for and performed by the renowned Dutch ensemble Asko|Schönberg, percussion group HIIIT and Jameszoo’s own “blind” group: Niels Broos (organ), Petter Eldh (electric bass) and Richard Spaven (drums). Much like in 2019 when he worked with the Grammy-winning Metropole Orkest and Jules Buckley to adapt his album ‘Fool’, ‘Music for 17 Musicians’ is a largely acoustic piece diving deeper into and reflecting on the ideas behind his 2022 album ‘Blind’. With 16 musicians and a self-governing disklavier taking center stage this album documents the Dutchman’s foray into contemporary classical music. The title is a nod to Steve Reich’s masterful 1978 album on ECM ‘Music for 18 Musicians’.

“Late in 2022 I was approached by Dutch contemporary music ensemble Asko|Schönberg to ask if I would be interested in writing a new piece for them,” explains Mitchel. “Apart from the fact that I thought this group of fantastic musicians would be a lovely fit for music in the spirit of ‘Blind’, I also always loved the idea of expanding on and continuing a process… being able to show more than one side to a work.”

One of the principal ideas underpinning ‘Blind’ was the notion of active objective listening. “In music and other arts there is a heavy emphasis on the artist,” says Mitchel. “Which composer, which soloist, which performer… and the shifting emphasis between them all colours what we hear. Is it possible to create something that bypasses this?” In reality his explorations only threw up more questions, but this only fuelled van Dinther’s desire to explore further. How is the listener’s perception affected when you try to detach the composer/musician/artist from a work?

Van Dinther started out by working with self-playing robotic instruments to embody the music without the use of human hands. “This created something visually special but was ultimately just a magic trick to fool myself as all these instruments were merely citing what I was giving them as input. There were no autonomous choices being made by these instruments whatsoever, which made me wonder, would it be possible for an instrument to experience some sort of freedom within the context of my music?”

Deciding to focus on a single instrument, van Dinther gave a player piano a pivotal role in his compositions. However, for this concept to work this player piano would need the capacity to make autonomous musical decisions whilst performing (in the way a human improviser or a soloist would do). The player piano is an instrument invented in the late 1800s mainly used for reproducing piano music at home, but there is also a strong tradition in contemporary ensemble

music written for these machines. You can communicate with a modern player piano instructing it what notes to play and when to play them by sending it MIDI information. MIDI is a digital language used for these kinds of musical instructions.

Excited by the possibilities herein, van Dinther contacted a couple of expert friends Hendrik Vincent Koops and Jan van Balen and asked if they wanted to help create this. They opted for making a set of algorithms that could communicate and instruct the player piano through generating custom MIDI. “We created a chain of musical rules per song… rules we thought would be interesting within this context,” explains Mitchel. “We created custom datasets for all of this with the help of fantastic musicians like Kit Downes, Matthew Bourne and Niels Broos. Vincent and Jan decided they wanted to write and script these algorithms mostly by using Markov models and LSTMs. (Markov models and LSTMs are models used in statistical and self learning systems to analyse and generate data). Vincent and Jan ultimately made this dream into a reality!”

When it came to the music written for the rest of the ensemble Mitchel wanted to create something that would showcase some of the specific capabilities of the fantastic musicians. Pieces that would build on the foundation of ‘Blind’ but quoting it freely more so than directly citing it. “I knew I wanted to invite musicians from my own group (Richard

Spaven, Petter Eldh and Niels Broos) and I wanted to extend the percussion section by inviting my friend Frank Wienk from percussion group HIIIT. I sat down with the music and started working on all different parts occasionally helped by my friends and longtime collaborators Niels Broos and Petter Eldh. To help me with the final arrangements I asked Stefan Behrisch with whom I worked on the music that became the 2019 album ‘Melkweg’ with Metropole Orkest and Jules Buckley.”

‘Music for 17 Musicians’ is released on Friday 30th May on vinyl/digital formats via Brainfeeder Records. A strictly limited hand-painted and numbered LP edition (of 200) by Mitchel’s longtime friend Philip Akkerman is available exclusively via Bandcamp/Brainfeeder Store.

Jamila Woods has a voice and lyrical sensibility that transcends generations, and so it makes sense to have this lush and layered album that bounces seamlessly from one sonic aesthetic to another. This was the case on 2016's HEAVN, which found Woods hopeful and exploratory, looking along the edges resilience and exhaustion for some measures of joy. Her new album, Legacy! Legacy! is the logical conclusion to that looking. From the airy boom-bap of "Giovanni" to the psychedelic flourishes of "Sonia," the instrument which ties the musical threads together is the ability of Woods to find her pockets in the waves of instrumentation, stretching syllables and vowels over the harmony of noise until each puzzle piece has a home. The whimsical and malleable nature of sonic delights also grants a path for collaborators to flourish: the sparkling flows of Nitty Scott on "Sonia" and Saba on "Basquiat," or the bloom of Nico Segal's horns on "Baldwin." More than just giving the song titles the names of historical black and brown icons of literature, art, and music, Jamila Woods builds a sonic and lyrical monument to the various modes of how these icons tried to push beyond the margins a country had assigned to them. On "Sun Ra," Woods sings "I just gotta get away from this earth, man / this marble was doomed from the start" and that type of dreaming and vision honors not only the legacy of Sun Ra, but the idea that there is a better future, and in it, there will still be black people.  Soul music did not just appear in America, and soul does not just mean music. Rather, soul is what gold can be dug from the depths of ruin, and refashioned by those who have true vision. True soul lives in the pages of a worn novel that no one talks about anymore, or a painting that sits in a gallery for a while but then in an attic forever. Soul is all the things a country tries to force itself into forgetting. Soul is all of those things come back to claim what is theirs. Jamila Woods is a singular soul singer who, in voice, holds the rhetorical demand. The knowing that there is no compromise for someone with vision this endless. That the revolution must take many forms, and it sometimes starts with songs like these. Songs that feel like the sun on your face and the wind pushing flowers against your back while you kick your head to the heavens and laugh at how foolish the world seems.

Nothing But Net presents “Perceptions”, the debut LP from Los Angeles producer/beat maker Jamma-Dee aka Dyami O’Brien. Jamma-Dee has been a figure in the west coast modern funk and boogie scene, both as an accomplished DJ and music producer, having released records under his own name and producing for the likes of Joyce Wrice, Mndsgn and others. From a musical upbringing in Los Angeles, Dyami’s adolescent obsession with record digging and beatmaking eventually led him to Dam-Funk’s renown Funkmosphere parties where he built friendships with key players in the LA funk scene and began to make a name for himself as a DJ and producer. In the second half of the 2010’s he released a series of EPs on Arcane and hosted the legendary Soul In Paradise show on NTS radio. His first full-length, “Perceptions” is a long time in the making. Beginning with studio experiments nearly a decade ago, a version of the album found its way to producer and Nothing But Net label boss Onra, who helped guide the project to completion. The album artwork was created by outsider soul music conceptualist and painter, Mingering Mike, whom O’Brien felt compelled to reach out to after discovering his work years earlier. Thematically, the artwork, record, and its title touch on very modern themes: the alienation of life in a world of instant-gratification, an overly-connected society of masks, distorted realities and shifting identities. Musically, “Perceptions” is the culmination of a life lived under the groove. Featuring a long list of collaborators, including Benedek, Mndsgn, Koreatown Oddity, the legendary Craig T. Cooper and fellow NBN labelmate, Devin Morrison, the double album touches on all of O’Brien’s musical influences. Album opener “Up N Down” sets the scene with it’s syrupy g-funk impressionism, before “Jamma’s Jam” bounces out of the speakers through an auburn-colored sunset haze of lush Rhodes chords and sparkling vibraphones. “It Takes A Freak” and “Datafile Groove” shuffle westward, re-imagining New Jack Swing grooves through a distinctly Californian lens. Elsewhere, the album touches on classic deep house rhythms (“Tic Toc” and “Silly”) and crystalline, downtempo R&B and UK street soul (“Joy”, “Saturday”).“U.R.” features legendary L.A. guitarist Craig T. Cooper laying down a network of stunning, silken guitar lines with absolute class. Over the course of these 15 tracks, Jamma Dee consolidates, renovates and perpetuates the sound of his influences. “Perceptions” is a masterclass in modern funk and soul production.