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Marginal Consort is a Japanese avant-garde improvisational group comprised of sound artists Kazuo Imai (a student of Japanese free jazz linchpin Masayuki Takayanagi and occasional performer in both Taj Mahal Travellers and Takayanagi’s New Direction Unit), Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii, and Masami Tada (also in group GAP). Formed in 1997, the four members of Marginal Consort attended Takehisa Kosugi’s music classes at the Bigakkō art school in Tokyo in the mid-1970s, where they teamed up with other students to record East Bionic Symphonia’s debut album “Recorded Live” in 1976. Since its inception, each year Marginal Consort holds one (or more when invited) annual concert at spacious venues in which they perform continuously, without interruption, for over three hours. Their extended set explores forms of sound and ways of playing that never coalesce into music but create a group dynamic of ebb and flow, exploration and fluidity. Their performance, which is completely free from abstract, political or sometimes mystical ideas about improvisation, neither contraposes the immediacy of action or anonymousness of sound against music nor dramatises the dialectics between the individual and the whole. Even the general idea of the words “collective”, “improvisation” and “project” do not really tell the way they work. Marginal Consort performed at South London Gallery; St. Elisabeth Kirche, Berlin; Asahi Square, Tokyo; Kotoku Morishita Bunka Center, Tokyo; Mikawadai Junior High School, Tokyo; Super Deluxe, Tokyo; Tokyo Arts and Space, Tokyo; Macao, Milan; Instal 08, The Arches, Glasgow; St. John at Hackney Church (33-33), London; The Substation, Melbourne; Carriageworks, Sydney; Third Edition Festival, Stockholm; nyMusikk, Bergen; Borderline Festival, Athens; On the Boards, Seattle; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; PuSh Festival, Vancouver; Zebulon, Los Angeles; Pioneer Works, New York. ​​​​​​​“A form of sound that does not turn into music and a group that does not produce harmony; individual concepts and group fluidity; individuals who are at once independent entities and components of the whole; coexisting time frames and intersecting rhythms – these are among the images of group improvisation that have occupied my mind since the ’70s. These images neither presuppose specific elements nor regulate the entire process. There always remain, however, the fundamental premises that sounds are separately produced phenomena and that their accumulation forms the whole”. – Kazuo Imai

The first entry in Numero’s Margo Guryan series arrives as a limited edition pic sleeve 45. Side A features the previously unreleased 1966 yé-yé inspired burner “I Ought To Stay Away From You ,” paired with her latter day viral smash “Why Do I Cry.”

Margo Guryan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, and lyricist who witnessed a revolution in jazz and pop music and earned a place in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, yet remained obscure for decades.

Witness to revolutions in jazz and pop, Margo Guryan earned her place in the songwriting pantheon and then some. That she was largely unknown for decades is not the stuff of crushed dreams, but a result of her own choices and priorities. From humble beginnings to the peaks of her 1968 baroque pop masterpiece Take a Picture and the collected Demos to the recent viral ubiquity of "Why Do I Cry", Words and Music captures the entirety of Guryan's career, featuring 16 previously unreleased recordings and a 32-page booklet telling the whole story.

Maria is a trio from Holland and the Czech Republic, who have been producing their own unique post-religious cabaret since 2016. Lyckle, Katerina and Bjorn have amassed seven albums of outsider pop and improvised mayhem over the years. This collection of tracks were mostly made on a farm over a two year period and you can tell the fresh air had a conducive effect on their collective songwriting. A classic sound of drum machines, synth bass, and keyboards holds up Katerina and Lyckle’s vocal interplay alongside Bjorn’s guitars. When the three find their sweet spot, they can conjure up fine slices of whimsical, bleary-eyed pop music that isn’t afraid to smile once in a while and dream big.

Ethereal, sensual, subtle. Maria de Fátima is that new favourite singer you think you just discovered, but had actually always been there. This Brazilian muse from Tijuca (Rio de Janeiro) has worked and recorded with artists such as Milton Nascimento, Gilberto Gil, Arthur Verocai, Airto Moreira & Flora Purim, Chico Buarque and Lincoln Olivetti amongst many others. We're immensely proud to bring you a deluxe reissue of her only solo album Bahia com H. Recorded in 1981 in Uruguay where Maria had settled with her then husband and synthesizer wizard Hugo Fattoruso (OPA), who also takes on production duties. The album combines Maria's own compositions with her unique takes on some Brazilian classics by Ary Barroso, Denis Brean and Gilberto Gil amongst others, compositions which gain a new significance with Maria's ethereal interpretation and the blended elements of Candombe, in part provided by the all-star line-up of Uruguayan musicians recruited for the recording. First reissue on vinyl format, preserving the original artwork in its gatefold sleeve, with sound sourced from the original analogue tapes, and with a 12-page booklet with photos from Maria's private archive and liner notes by the mighty producer, journalist, Grammy voting member and living jazz encyclopedia Arnaldo DeSouteiro.

All My People (self-released on 1 March 2019 and distributed by Rush Hour)

The new wave jazz album left in 1987 is the first analog reissue.

Under the sound production by Masanori Sasaji (ex. Mariah), the leftfield-avant-jazz work ('87) that was recorded has been reissued for the first time by reproducing the artwork of the time as much as possible!
Starting with the mysterious opening "Door" reminiscent of Mariah's "Door of the Heart", Avanwave "Meteorite Rain" with vivid organ riffs, and third-world bossa fusion "ASTRUD" with gentle bleak scat. Includes all 10 songs that mix experiments and standards.

Tracklist:
SIDE A
01. Door
02. Crazy 'bout The Boy
03. The Dangerous
04. Astrud
05. Meteor rain

SIDE B
01. My Cup Is Empty
02. Angel In The Night
03. Jumping Without Thinking
04. Jellyfish
05. Temptation

Marika "Politissa" Frantzeskopoulou was a Greek singer from Constantinople, reknowned for her precise, fluid and graceful performances and depth of feeling. Backed by some of the best musicians of the era on lyra, violin, oud, kanonaki and guitar, Marika’s repertoire and techniques drew from Byzantine and Ottoman musical traditions. She possessed an ability to devastate her audience through her expressions of grief, exile, and tragic love, running the gamut of cafe aman, torch songs, lilting and fragile odes to heartache, heavy Piraeus style rebetika, and ecstatic Near-Eastern climaxes, all with a visceral sense of atmosphere, emotion, and fatalism. Marika’s voice is complimented beautifully by her backing musicians, creating a pulsing acoustic foundation over which her voice soars with clarity and purpose. LP version includes a 12 page color booklet with rare photographs, full lyrics, and extensive notes (Bandcamp version includes booklet in PDF format). Produced in collaboration with Tony Klein (Greek Rhapsody, Mortika) and Stavros Kourousis (From Tambouras to Bouzouki) and co-released by Olvido Records (A. Kostis, Alexis Zoumbas).

1986年に残されながらも長年お蔵入りになっていた知られざるジャパニーズ・ジャズ・ファンク（という設定の??）の傑作『Seaside Highway 』が掘り起こされた事で話題を呼んだ、キーボード奏者の葛木マリコとギタリスト兼編曲家/プロデューサーの長谷川ジョーが率いる”City Heights”が残した幻のブギー/シティポップの傑作『Aoyama Nights』が約40年越しの奇跡のアナログ・リリース。1982年から1986年にかけて集まった秋葉原と神田の繁華街出身の若いスタジオ・ミュージシャンたち。アジアの都会的でありながら孤独な広がりにインスピレーションを受けたシティ・ポップ作品をコンセプトに制作されながら、その後の突然の解散により日の目を見ることの無かったとの事。80年代初頭の東京の音楽の坩堝から、ジャズ、ファンク、ブギーの独特のブレンドと、当時の日本の最高級の電子楽器のローカルのタッチを盛り込んだオブスキュア・シティ・ポップの知られざる傑作！

Lost & found Japanese jazz-funk from 1986 surfaces for the first time on Estonia’s Memme Vaev, featuring overproof levels of wiggly machine funk backed by a driving Italo-acid remix by US-based Estonian JT (DJ Julius Talvik) “With unprecedented prosperity and growing worldwide fame in broadcast, game, and synthesizers, the 1980s Japan entered a golden decade. New genre splashes from technopop, Pacifica, and AOR/City pop merged local sensibilities with jazz-funk and Latin influences. Spiced in sugary US West coast sparkle and boasting naive lyrics with opulent arrangements and cover designs, it beamed millions of listeners on the cosmic journeys of Japan and its connections with Asia. Looking to bet on the city pop phenomenon, a group of young, just out-of-school in-house studio players gathered for ad hoc recording sessions between 1982-1986. Spearheaded by up-and-coming associate producer and arranger HASEGAWA Joe and keyboardist KATSURAGI Mariko their goal was to produce a hit album concept with a musical journey from Japan to Asia and beyond. Just short of wrapping a handful of test-pressings for studio and radio executives and a few tapes of demo recordings, the sessions came to an abrupt halt in 1986 with a striking personal loss. With the band's consequent disbanding and members embarking on their decades-long sessions careers, the original tapes were archived and lost in the Akihabara district for decades… …until Japanese pop culture *connoisseur extraordinaire* and producer Sten SALUVEER aka MILDHANS discovered a rare demo of the original recordings in one of Tokyo's Ebisu district's revered vinyl bars. After a lengthy period of digging and tracings for the original tapes, the lush soundscapes of KATSURAGI Mariko and HASEGAWA Jo are finally here to take you on a jazzy journey to City Heights of Asia.”

Another lost musical treasure unearthed by the Everland-YU imprint! Seven years have passed since this material landed in our hands and we counted the days since we could give it the justice it deserves. Fully licensed and remastered from original master tapes, this chronologically arranged LP is a collection of previously unreleased radio recordings all of which have one thing in common: the unmistakably original musical ideas and vocal performances of Marin Škrgatić (1950-2014). Marin was a Croatian prog-rock pioneer, who as a result of a series of unfortunate circumstances, did not receive much recognition in the dawn of the Yugoslavian prog-rock era. In their prime, his groups were an active and well-acknowledged underground phenomenon, filling stadiums and music halls all over Yugoslavia. This material represents some of the first attempts to record complex progressive rock arrangements in Yugoslavia – sourcing heavily from local folk music, jazz, and classical influences. Interestingly enough, most of the songs presented here were dismissed as being too progressive at that time - by the largest Yugoslavian record company Jugoton. This gatefold LP includes thus far unpublished photos and detailed liner notes about the evolution of Marin’s groups resulting from interviews with former band members with whom we’ve uncovered some of the mysteries of Yugo-prog-rock’s annals.

'Nekkuja' is a place for Herlop's warmest, sweetest sentiments to rise to the surface and crack through the topsoil. She describes the record as a way for her to seek and affirm inner light, and it's undoubtedly her brightest, poppiest statement to date. The forward-thinking, experimental touches that nourished 'Pripyat' are still present, but blessed with a level of positivity that's rare to find in a scene so entranced by darkness and melancholy.

Marina Herlop is often described as a pianist, a lingering remnant of her classical training. But what strikes the listener on Herlop’s breakout track miu is the intricate trickery of her voice, tracing rhythmical clusters around the subtlest of musical beds, in a technique inspired by Carnatic music of Southern India. miu, the opening track of Herlop’s new studio album Pripyat, was among the first songs that the young Catalan artist made on a computer, after two albums - 2016’s Nanook and 2018’s Babasha - that brought spectral elegance to the sound of piano and voice. This spirit of adventure continues into Pripyat, Herlop’s first full album produced on a computer, and her most intensely emotional work to date. Listening to Pripyat you can feel the emotional toil and creative endeavour that went into the record. Fans of Nanook and Babasha will recognise the combination of melancholic piano and elegant vocal lines that is found on Pripyat tracks like abans abans. But Pripyat has a far fuller, almost chaotic sound when compared to Herlop’s previous work, with the addition of electronic drums, electric bass lines and a wealth of sublime production effects. Added to this production expertise are songs of incredible grace and poise. Kaddisch is a spectral torch song rendered in emotional 3D by Herlop’s gorgeous voice; ubuntu has a feeling of deep longing and lingering sorrow; and shaolin mantis is like a pop song refracted through disorienting production effects and percussive vocal cut ups. Pripyat is the perfect combination of computer production trickery and intimate emotional release.

Since the early 1990’s, Marina Rosenfeld has produced a substantial archive of acetate test-pressing records, or dubplates, which track across her practice— forming the basis for both improvised music, installations, and scores structured by the politics and aesthetics of turntablism and the material distortions of mechanical sound reproduction. Rosenfeld’s works thread into each other and unfold gradually in various musical forms and sites through their reproduction and interpretation. GREATEST HITS is a project expressly about performing an archive and begins in 2015 at Carnegie Mellon University. Over the course of a three month exhibition, Rosenfeld generated a daily schedule of plays of her entire collection of dubplates, which she exhibited along the walls of a gallery. Written in such a way as to be legible to both SuperCollider and human readers, an accompanying playlist was read daily by people tasked with playing the dubplates and by a computer tasked with anticipating, recording and logging these plays in a software environment. Each full entry in the playlist had three elements listed after the name of the plate (a date // a side (a or b) // and a time of day) separated, in the notation, by double front-slashes //. (An excerpt of the notation and instructions can be found on the printed inner sleeve of the LP). The following year, this playlist served as the score for GREATEST HITS: a reproduction, which premiered as a duo between Rosenfeld and percussionist Greg Fox in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and again in 2019 at MoMA PS1 accompanied by Fox and percussionist Eli Keszler — the live recordings of which serve as the primary materials of this LP and the album cover is a photograph from this concert. Rosenfeld translated the listed date, side, and time of the playlist notation into explicit directions for Fox and Keszler to repeat, pause, introduce dynamics into, or simultaneously integrate aspects of the score. The players’ percussive movements are directed to feature “spirals” - circular patterns from high to low frequencies; “slopes” - oscillating patterns at high to low velocities; “vectors” - expanding or contracting patterns rolls, double rolls and hits; and, “lines” - fluid or stochastic patterns wavering in frequency across a line drawn on a surface. Together, the dubplates, playlist, score, performance, and the resulting INFO release all form a cascading palimpsest of Rosenfeld’s dubplate archive. The dubplates—themselves timeworn and deteriorated acetate recordings that Marina has been producing and collecting since the early 1990’s—are surfaces that have been exhibited, transcribed, written upon, scored, notated, reproduced, and performed. As these surfaces interact with Fox and Keszler impacting the taught surfaces of drum kits, we hear the complex performance of an archive, and on this LP the archive of a performance. Text arranged by Reece Cox from fragments and reflections by Nick Scavo and Marina Rosenfeld. Marina Rosenfeld is a composer and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Working across the disciplinary boundaries of music and visual art, she has created a groundbreaking body of work spanning sound, music and performance, sculpture and installation. Since her landmark composition the Sheer Frost Orchestra in 1994, Rosenfeld has created works for the Museum of Modern Art, the Park Avenue Armory, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the Dia Foundation, and the Fondacion Serralves, among many, many others, and participated in surveys of contemporary art and music including the Whitney Biennial (in 2002 and 2008), the Aurora, Montréal and Liverpool biennials, the inaugural Biennale Son in 2024, the PERFORMA Biennial of Performance, and ‘Every Time A Ear di Soun,’ the radio program of Documenta14. Her work has been featured in recent solo exhibitions by institutions including Museum Art.Plus (2023), Kunsthaus Baselland (2021), The Artist’s Institute (2019), Portikus Frankfurt (2017), and the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (2016), and in festivals including the Holland Festival, Borealis, Ultima, Wien Modern, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Musica Strasbourg, Borderlines, and Tectonics, among many others. As a turntablist, Rosenfeld has performed and recorded improvised music for three decades, including for the Merce Cunningham Company between 2004 and 2008 and with collaborators including George Lewis, Ikue Mori, Ben Vida, and choreographers Maria Hassabi and Ralph Lemon. Her recordings are also on Room40, Shelter Press and 901Editions among others.

The roots of Angolan popular music explored in the meticulous guitar studies of Mário Rui Silva 1980s albums. 

Whether on mesmerising acoustic ballads or hypnotic groove-led tracks, the music of Angolan guitarist, researcher and intellectual Mário Rui Silva has a beguiling, melancholy quality, woven into the dynamics of his deft guitar playing. 

Rhythmically complex yet supremely effortless, the music collected here stems from three albums Mário released in Luanda in the 1980s that reflect his diverse range of influences, from traditional Angolan and West African rhythms to European jazz and classical instrumentation. 

It is united by a sense of low-key beauty, whether on the chugging opener ‘Kazum-zum-zum’, the jazz-funk keys of ‘Lembrança Dum Velho’, or the twinkling, late-night poly-rhythms of ‘Kizomba Kya Kisanji’. 

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Born in Luanda, Angola in 1953, Mário dedicated his life to Angolan popular music. His fifty-year career has seen him live between Angola and Europe, rub shoulders with Cameroonian musicians Francis Bebey and Ewanjé, record the seminal album Angola ’72 with fellow Angolan musician Bonga, and draw influence from Brazilian guitarist Baden Powell. 

It was the teaching of Angolan legend and Ngola Ritmos co-founder Liceu Vieira Dias that Mário gained a technical, political and spiritual understanding of Angolan musical culture. In the hands of Liceu, the traditional Angolan semba and kazukuta rhythms of the 1940s and ‘50s helped create an emancipatory sense of national pride and collective agency that awakened its listeners to the racism and tyranny of colonial rule, underpinning the country’s push for independence in the process. 

What might sound like the intonations of Brazilian influence are what Mário attributes to the “African rhythms taken by the slaves [which] gave rise to other musical cultures” around the globe. Instead, this music emerged from a collective instinct to assert a cosmopolitan Angolan identity free from the patronising falsehoods of Lusotropicalism. 

“There was a need within me to contribute in doing new things,” Mário describes. “In the sense of solidifying the music of Angola that was the result of the meeting of two cultures, and wanting to value the Angolan part whenever possible.” 

A selection from Mário’s three 1980s albums, Sung’Ali (1982), Tunapenda Afrika (1985) and Koizas dum Outru Tempu (1988) have been compiled here as a 2xLP release by Time Capsule’s Sam Jacob and Kay Suzuki. Together, they provide a snapshot of one man’s journey to the core of his nation’s music, charged with the search for a culture uprooted by colonialism. 

Ethereal dream gloom from a voice so unique they had to create an entirely new genre to contain all four octaves. Mixing classical music with synthesizer and acoustic guitar, Happy Rhodes' "ecto pop" never quite broke outside upstate New York, but that didn't stop gothic-americana queen Marissa Nadler from reinterpreting "Where Do I Go" in 2018. Both the original and cover have been paired here, housed in an elegant black and silver sleeve, with embossed braille lettering for the visually impaired.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce Tender Membranes, the label’s first release from Swedish-Finnish sound artist and electro-acoustic composer Marja Ahti. Active for a decade in the Finnish underground music scene, in recent years Ahti has developed a distinctive approach to patiently unfolding electro-acoustic constructions, documented on a string of solo releases and collaborative projects with Judith Hamann and her husband Niko-Matti Ahti. Working with concrete and instrumental sounds, field recordings, and electronics, Ahti favours neither disjunctive collage nor monolithic consistency; rather, her work is composed of organically unfolding sequences of details and textures, which, as she says, ‘can stretch out or cut fast as long as they have a sense of inner stillness’, a sense that she connects to moments of heightened attention in everyday life. Tender Membranes consists of four lengthy pieces, partly inspired by the image of the senses and mind as membranes allowing for the passage between inner and outer spaces, sensation and its causes, creating a world. Ahti’s unhurried pacing encourages this sense of listening as an opening or surrender to sound, which can often create the impression that the listener is moving through a space zooming in on details. The opening Shrine (Aether) exemplifies this aspect of Ahti’s approach: a bell clears the air with a single long tone, followed by the ambience of outdoor spaces, crackling electronics, an archival recording of a horsefly on a windowpane. Dozens of these moments, varying in length, density, and intensity, move past the listener’s attention, momentarily brought into focus then slipping away. Like those of the masters of the French musique concrète tradition, Ahti’s sounds are not often recognisable, though they might suggest proximity or distance, open environments or closed spaces, the urban or rural, day or night. In Ahti’s work, we do not encounter spectacular metamorphoses à la Parmegiani but rather a state of ambiguity where the listener is often unsure what is organic and what is inorganic, where the careful productions of the synthesizer might end and sounds discovered in the environment begin. What Ahti calls her ‘poetic way of experiencing and organising the familiar and the unfamiliar’ is sustained throughout Tender Membranes, but each piece has its own character. On Dust / Light, human presence is more overt, as what appear to be whispers, singing, and distant speech thread between high frequencies, untraceable drips and pops, and metallic shimmers. In all this there is a melody that you can sing and to which you may dance makes more prominent use of musical instruments, gaining a sombre beauty from half-buried piano chords and organ tones. On the closing Oh Fragrant Witness, a delicate cloud of subtly bending pitches is repeatedly disrupted by a resounding, almost ominous mass of low tones, at once a strange detour from much of what has gone before and an almost classical finale. Arriving in a sleeve reproducing contemporary Finnish photographer Sini Pelkki’s fragmented visions of the everyday, Tender Membranes is a balm to reawaken tired ears.

Did you come here to serve art and make sacrifices for its sake? Or to exploit your own personal ends? Over the past five years, Mark has forged a unique identity in underground drum’n’bass, alloying traditional junglist motifs and luminous electroacoustic ambience to devastating effect. Developing his sound through a series of singles and EPs on A Colourful Storm and Berghain’s Unterton imprint and collaborating with likeminded peers in both classical and soundsystem spheres, A Colourful Storm presents the culmination of his work and debut album: a two-part study in rhythm, timbre and texture of monolithic scale. Mark’s ambitions had been clear from the outset. Integrier Dich Du Yuppie (2017) and The Least Likely Event Will Occur In The Long Run (2018) are not titles of fleetingness but statements of grave philosophical heft. The relationship between—and division of—people, place and power animated Mark’s production and has remained a pertinent theme throughout his work: the mechanics of force, the cunning of reason, the invisible but crucial hand of chance. Within these groundbreaking sides lies a synergy between splintering rhythmic elements and extraordinary atmospheric passages—the latter most deeply explored in Not Kennt Kein Gebot! (2022), a heart-on-your-sleeve mixtape pitting post-Second Viennese School disciples like Luigi Dallapiccola against an era-fusing suite of compositions from Radulescu, Zemlinsky and Monteverdi. This direction is also explored on Mark's monthly NTS Radio show, True As Few. Bridging the sonic qualities of post-tonal composition and soundsystem frequencies is nothing new—the oeuvre of Christoph de Babalon immediately comes to mind—but here, Mark attempts to meet both poles on their own terms through two meticulously arranged longform pieces. Any suggestion of connection to dance music history has been thrown out for rhythmic arrangements that skirt the contradiction between strict logical coherence and human perception. What on the surface seems hostile reveals a welcoming catacomb of connections between elements that stake their claim, disappear, merge and finally reappear—their return sculpted by the intricate mediation of similar and dissimilar elements. The album is deeply personal, too. Following a Stanislavski-led path through fragments of his pre-maturity music history, Mark connects memories of free jazz drumming and modern percussion ensemble performance with the joy of choral singing, ad hoc kitchen-sink group improvisation and those moments where life seems to swing on a hinge of musical feeling.。

These days I try, whenever possible, to write like a Japanese Calligrapher - prepare the room, the ink and paper and then the make the act of creation as spontaneous as possible.

I desire therefore, a release mechanism that mirrors this creative process as closely as possible, giving me the freedom to share music quickly and directly with people that care.

This first Bandcamp focused release is music from a soundtrack I was commissioned to write for a Japanese documentary ‘Jōhatsu…the art of evaporation’. I have no idea if it will ever see the light of day, (post pandemic funding issues), but one of the conditions of my contract was the ability to release the music myself should the documentary remain unreleased by the end of 2021.

Regardless of its origins, this is the music I wish to make, the emotions I wish to capture and share…the ideal of living simply with Kindness, Grace & Gratitude.

I hope that this achieves that connection with you.

Mark Fell & Gábor Lázár’s masterclass in shearing computer hyperfunk is one of its decade’s best; a peerless exploration of displaced dancefloor meter and warped chromatic tone, with mind and body-bending results. Finally re-issued in new artwork to sate demand. Still in a zone of its own, ‘The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making’ is the result of Mark Fell’s trip to Budapest in 2014, where he and his acolyte, Gábor Lázár practically unravelled the vernacular of contemporary computer and club musics and re-stitched them into brilliantly new & devious designs. Decimating elements familiar to 2-step, footwork, electro, flashcore and f*ck knows, they arrived at a mutual conclusion of sleekly turbulent minimalism in 10 jaw-dropping permutations that dance in the integers of rave music. In the process they effectively re-programmed limbic and motor systems in-the-moment with a wickedly diffractive sense of rhythmic anticipation and shockingly crisp sound for a pinnacle of modern experimental dance music. With benefit of hindsight, we can now hear this album as a watershed moment for both artists, and this style of production. Since its release, Mark has notably moved away from the sound to work with acoustic instrumentalists, while Gábor has firmly picked up the baton and run with it on the likes of 2018’s ‘Unfold’ album, and more recently ‘Boundary Object’ with Planet Mu. It’s not hard to hear it as a logical peak of Mark’s practice in this mode, solo and with SND, as much as a springboard for Gábor’s future work, while also catalysing a new wave of operators ranging from Rian Treanor to Kindohm, Kirk Barley’s Church Andrews, and Rhyw, who’ve all harnessed these sort of energies to their respective wills. No doubt the tunes still scare the shit out of DJs with their spasmodic flux, but brave cnuts will recognise the genius on show and let instinct kick in, finding proper club shockers in the slippery 2.1 step whorl of ‘Track 2’ and the scudding dancehall accelerationism of ‘Track 6’, while advanced adventurers will get theirs in the greased straightjacket laser-intensity of ‘Track 7’ or the devilish dexterities of its closing 12 minute zinger. It’s all just blindingly strong stuff for insatiable ravers and computer music neeks alike, properly future-proofed by its makers’ unyielding tenacity and visionary ingenuity.

Dreams are made and displaced on Mark Fell & Rian Treanor’s oneiric electro-acoustic inception 'Last Exit', borne from long days in the family garden, and assembled into a mesmerising masterpiece of minimalist modal rhythm and atmospheric exploration, into rapt smallsound detailing in breathtaking form. It’s a bit like listening to Virginia Astley’s ‘From Gardens Where We Feel Secure’, with washes of Autechre seeping into the mix from outside. ‘Last Exit…’ originally appeared in a different form as a cassette release for our Documenting Sound series in 2021, and was edited this year by Mark and Rian for this new expanded and altered edition, mastered by Rashad Becker. It renders a painterly,psychedelic, and diaristic depiction of sublime atmospheric tension, occasionally ruptured by their typical, asymmetric rhythm impulses in a form that rudely transcends their respective aesthetics. Across four parts, they kern, juxtapose and diffract synthesised percussion and field recordings into polymetric arrangements riddled with timbral nuance of a highly unpredictable nature. While patently inflected with nods to Indonesian gamelan, Ugandan folk, Indian Carnatic classical, Morton Feldman-esque minimalism, free jazz improvisation and a sort of rhythmic cubism that speaks to their mutual, voracious listening habits and tastes, the results are arguably without direct compare. Attentive listeners will recognise, however, that ‘Last Exit’ effortlessly transcends their respective styles, achieving a new high watermark of imaginary future-hyperfolk expressed in a sort of personalised but highly relatable meta-musical language. Seriously, they’re working beyond known conventions here; opening to a sublime frisson of Feldman-esque keys, birdsong and distant car engines, and closing to a combo of just-intoned drone and wafts of distant ballroom music. The 80 minutes in between feel like returning to a dream, with flashes of FM strings dabbed to sloshing rhythms and domestic detritus, tilting into a nervously tentative tension ruptured with abstract dance dynamism and angular free jazz ballistics. The rejigged recordings also reflect the fidelity of memory recall, expressing an altered perspective on their time spent in the multigenerational family’s Rotherham garden during spring/summer 2020, replete with their mum/grandmother on piano and overheard singing and in convo, but now fraught with a more melancholic, distempered quality that makes for a genuinely unforgettable listening experience. A long-form isolationist fantasy, consider it crucial listening if yr into Robert Ashley's 'Automatic Writing', Graham Lambkin, Autechre or Nuno Canavarro.

Finally compiled on CD, Mark Fell & Will Guthrie’s Infoldings / Diffractions is an inspirational, almost 80 minute long study in four parts, informed by Gamelan and South Indian Carnatic musics. Essential listening if you’re into Autechre, Michael Ranta, The Necks, Milford Graves. Infoldings / Diffractions combines synthesis and acoustic percussion in unpredictable, pointillist arrangements where Guthrie plays against patterns derived from Max MSP patches by Fell. The album’s four longform expositions are in this sense different to the man-machine concept of Fell’s acclaimed ‘Intra’ album, where he triggered performances by Portugal’s Drumming Grupo De Percussão to play a metallophone designed by Iannis Xenakis. Here, the pair find common and sometimes contrasting purpose in a probing of rhythmic signatures, with groundbreaking results. Recorded at HFG, Karlsruhe (where Fell is guest professor), and finished later in respective isolation, the pieces were edited from iterations of call-and-response between Fell’s rhythmic patterns and Guthrie’s overdubs. They effectively propose beguiling solutions to electronic music’s problems with grid-lock, using generative processing to make physical actions seem unfeasibly effortless, while melting the computer’s clock to a real-time, free-hand syncopation. Taking the influence of gamelan and fusing it with the fractal computer music that Fell has obsessively picked-at over the last four decades, the duo zoom into a sound that’s completely captivating; mutating into polyrhythmic outer-realms and eerie universes of microtonality that are hard to fathom in a single sitting. There are trace echoes of free jazz hanging from the rafters, the post-everything chatter of Humcrush and Food drummer Thomas Strønen’s mind-expanding solo material or even Autechre at their most confounding. The genius here is that just as you convince yourself that the music could only possibly have been generated by a computer, Guthrie’s unmistakably human flex edges into focus - playing with perception and expectation in the most wild, liquid way imaginable.