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'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.
Long-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.
“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best
tracks of the past five years transcendent.” (Pitchfork)
'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.
Those improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.
“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.
“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”
What’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.
In the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.
'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'.
'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.
Long-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.
“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best
tracks of the past five years transcendent.” (Pitchfork)
'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.
Those improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.
“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.
“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”
What’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.
In the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.
'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'.
Highly coveted Hawaiian jazz/soul album. The debut album from Mackey Feary’s solo band after departing seminal contemporary Hawaiian group, Kalapana. This LP reads like a who’s who in the local 70s music scene: Nohelani Cypriano (of “Lihue” cult fame), Azure McCall (of Lemuria), Jimmy Funai (who produced Hal Bradbury’s debut), and Gaylord Holomalia (who now runs the island studio where stars record, incl. Kanye West, Jay-Z, Mariah Carey). Unlike other reissues, this Aloha Got Soul pressing includes the full version of “Powerslide” in all its 7-minute glory. An all-time classic must-have record from the Hawaiian Islands.
Discover New Decade Of Dub by Mad Professor and Jah Shaka on Ariwa Sounds. A UK Dub collaboration from 1996, with Phasers set to stun. Musical and restrained throughout. TIP!
Bringing together the elder statesman of the Zulu guitar Madala Kunene and internationally acclaimed Sibusile Xaba, kwaNTU pulls two generations of South African guitar mastery into a single point of focus. Under-represented on recordings outside of South Africa, Madala Kunene (b. 1951), the ‘King of the Zulu Guitar’, is revered as the greatest living master of the Zulu guitar tradition. Sibusile Xaba, whose collaboration with Mushroom Hour Half Hour reaches back to his first recording in 2017 (Open Letter To Adoniah/Unlearning), has garnered international acclaim for his unique voice and virtuoso guitar stylings, which bring together multiple South African guitar lineages in an original, spiritualised fusion. Collaborating with Mushroom Hour and New Soil for kwaNTU, the two players come together to weave a filigree sonic fabric which reaches down to the heartwood of Zulu guitar music but moves resolutely outward, building on the past to create a deeply rooted statement about present conditions and future travels. kwaNTU – which can be roughly translated ‘the place of the life-spirit’ – is also conclave of teacher and student, as Xaba has been taught by Kunene for the last decade. Meditative, rich and sonically sui generis, kwaNTU finds these two musicians linking up within the inimitable space of sound and spirit that they share through Kunene’s teaching.
The great masters of South African music have not all had equal exposure. For many years the generation of musicians who were exiled during apartheid took centre stage, as the regime made it very difficult for those at home to be heard. More recently, a new cohort of important voices, especially in jazz, has broken through to international consciousness. But for the generation of musicians in between – those who shone like beacons in the most difficult final years of apartheid and immediately afterward – international recognition has been slow in coming.
Madala Kunene, ‘the King of the Zulu Guitar’, is among this number. A revered figure for current generations of South African musicians, Kunene began his recording career in 1990, at the bitter end of apartheid, with a now classic self-titled LP for David Marks’ storied Third Ear imprint. Born in 1951 in Cato Manor, near Durban, he had determined to be a musician from early childhood, and by the time he first entered a recording studio he had already had a long career as a popular performer. His virtuoso absorption and transformation of the venerable Zulu maskanda guitar tradition and his richly spiritualised approach to music immediately marked him out as someone special, and in the years that followed, Kunene cemented his position as one of South Africa’s musical elders. He is without doubt the grand master of the Zulu guitar tradition, but his sound and sensibility ranges far beyond it into varied sonic terrain, and he has collaborated with a wide range of musicians both at home and abroad. Now in his mid-seventies, he remains a shining light for those that are making music in contemporary South Africa.
‘He is really an amazing person,’ says the guitarist Sibusile Xaba, who has been mentored by Kunene for over a decade, and now invites a collaboration with him on kwaNTU. ‘As a mentor, he's really powerful in showing us the way. For us to have this opportunity to make music together and have a project together is really a blessing to me.’
Xaba himself grew up in Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, where his mother had been in a band and his father sang in a church choir, and from early childhood Xaba played homemade tin guitars. He only later realised that music was his calling. ‘I just loved music. I was fortunate. My parents loved music. And when it was time for me to leave home and go to study outside Newcastle, I knew that music was what I wanted to do. There was no second option. It was just music.’ Moving to Pretoria to study music formally, Xaba committed himself to his craft, developing a unique style that draws on both US jazz masters such as Wes Montgomery and Jim Hall, and the rich and varied heritage of the South African guitar, from inspirational jazz players such as Allen Kwela and Enoch Mthalane, to the music of the Malombo groups and Dr. Philip Tabane (Xaba has previously collaborated with Dr. Tabane’s late son, Thabang), and the Zulu guitar tradition embodied by Kunene.
‘I was really in love with the jazz guitar, I really admired it, and I was digging a lot in that direction,’ says Xaba, recalling his first encounter with Kunene’s music, over a decade ago. ‘And then one day on my timeline, Kunene popped up, and I was like – “What's this sound?” I was so connected to it. It really touched me deep. I started checking out his records, and then I found out he's from the same region as I am, which is Zululand.’ After Kunene played a show at the Afrikan Freedom Station in Johannesburg, Xaba make contact with him, and visited him at home in Durban. They struck up a friendship, and Xaba became the elder’s student, as Kunene began to pass on his knowledge and his inimitable way of playing.
kwaNTU is a tribute to this relationship and the deep learning that has defined it. The album was recorded in Zululand in the town of Utrecht, at a cultural centre called Kwantu Village, which gives its name to the album. ‘It's such a broad word,’ Xaba says, ‘but the elders teach us that Ntu is basically an energy, almost chi, an energy, a force that all living beings have within them. It's a living energy, so kwaNTU is like, almost the place of this energy.’ The two men sequestered themselves for five days of jamming, improvising and planning, and then the session was recorded in one take over a single night, with Gontse Makhene joining on percussion and backing vocals and Fakazile on vocals. Other voices and overdubs were later added in the studio in Johannesburg.
The result is a rich and meditative recording that finds two generations in a deeply engaged dialogue. Teaching and passing on his knowledge, the elder Kunene has brought Xaba into a space of sound and knowledge that they now share; Xaba’s own practice of deep communion with nature and his dedication to his musical craft make him the perfect interlocutor for Kunene. The result is an album that foregrounds the two musicians engaged at the highest levels of responsive listening, sympathetic unity, and collaborative concentration. Bringing an elder statesman of South African music to an international listening audience for the first time in decades by pairing him with one of South Africa’s most important new voices, kwaNTU is a meeting of generations and a powerful demonstration of musical lineage and continuity.
‘Before music, there is sound,’ Xaba observes, speaking of Kunene’s unique approach to music. ‘And sound is like a common compartment…it's not restricted to particular people or particular geographic places, you know what I mean? It's sound. Everybody can hear it. So when he constructs that sound into music, I think everybody resonates with the energy behind his construction of sound into song. Here at home, we really love him for preserving our history through the guitar, through his stories as well the music, the songs that he writes. We really, really admire him.’
For their third album on Bongo Joe, Madalitso Band takes a new direction.
After two records capturing the raw intensity of their live performances, the Malawian duo ventures for the first time into the possibilities of the studio — without ever compromising their signature style or energy.
Armed with their handmade babatone, a guitar, and their interwoven voices, Yobu and Yosefe craft a sound at the crossroads of banjo music, kwela, gospel, and African folk. An acoustic trance that’s both minimal and vibrant, deeply rooted in tradition yet undeniably fresh and contemporary. On Ma Gitala, they add new textures: layered vocals, playful percussion, melodic surprises, and guests from their close and family circles.
Always guided by instinct, the band reveals a more intimate and narrative side of their universe — full of memories, spontaneity, and close-knit complicity. An album that captures the joy and creativity of two artists who turned the street into a stage, and the stage into a playground.
For their third album on Bongo Joe, Madalitso Band takes a new direction.
After two records capturing the raw intensity of their live performances, the Malawian duo ventures for the first time into the possibilities of the studio — without ever compromising their signature style or energy.
Armed with their handmade babatone, a guitar, and their interwoven voices, Yobu and Yosefe craft a sound at the crossroads of banjo music, kwela, gospel, and African folk. An acoustic trance that’s both minimal and vibrant, deeply rooted in tradition yet undeniably fresh and contemporary. On Ma Gitala, they add new textures: layered vocals, playful percussion, melodic surprises, and guests from their close and family circles.
Always guided by instinct, the band reveals a more intimate and narrative side of their universe — full of memories, spontaneity, and close-knit complicity. An album that captures the joy and creativity of two artists who turned the street into a stage, and the stage into a playground.
Madteo is one of the great eccentric visionaries of Electronic Music and his new album Misto Atmosferico E Ad Azione Diretta on Unsure once more happens to be a mind-bending piece of art. Misto Atmosferico E Ad Azione Diretta shifts between focused gritty grooves and the long freeform associative adventures that you haven’t heard before, never static, sometimes overwhelming, always on edge.
The opener Cans People is an archaic rave monster, To Know Those Who is non-linear dub techno, Nocturnal Palates expands the Filter House universe and Rave Nite Itz All Right hits you hard and strange (yet subtle, in a way). The last two tracks then let loose; Madteo manipulates time, space and sounds to create the psychedelic secrets of Luglio Ottantotto. And Emo G (Sticky Wicket) explores the outskirts not only of House or Techno or whatever but music in general, a 15-min-trip through the low frequencies, the rumble, the dark hearts and the enchantment. Breathtaking. Bring The Voodoo Down.
The only studio album by Madvillain (MF DOOM & Madlib) – widely regarded as one of the best hip-hop albums of all time.
“Inexhaustibly brilliant, with layer-upon-layer of carefully considered yet immediate hip- hop, forward-thinking but always close to its roots.” - Pitchfork
This new version includes upgraded packaging combined with audiophile sound quality for the ultimate listening experience.
