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Not only have Chicago’s electronic trio Purelink released on labels such as Lillerne Tape Club and Naff, they’ve also contributed a mix for Resident Advisor, marking them as one of the city’s most essential new acts. Their much-discussed release of the year on revered imprint Peak Oil is finally in stock. Centered on serene, minimal chillbient, the record delicately traces faint light seeping into deserted urban spaces and lingering echoes at the edges of a world that has lost its words. Textures dissolved in delay and reverb resonate like distant prayers drifting between city and self, while faint melodies and the sway of sub-bass create a deeply intimate immersion. A work that hovers between ambient and post-club, standing as Purelink’s poetic resistance and a defining statement of their aesthetic.

The latest by Chicago trio Purelink unspools an alchemical suite of fractal ambient, dusted dub tech, and interstitial electronica, born from a spirit of unity and flux: “All hands on the mixer, forever finding the sound.” Since forming in 2020, Tommy Paslaski (aka Concave Reflection), Ben Paulson (aka kindtree), and Akeem Asani (aka Millia) have convened regularly in a shared studio to workshop, swap samples, and hone their collective muse via “the endless possibilities of a laptop,” seeking “something different than we would make on our own.” Distilled from extended compositions prepared and performed across 2022 in Chicago, Kansas City, New York, and Los Angeles, Signs captures their chemistry at its most liquid and immaterial, mapped in mutating systems of glitch, glass, rhythm, and space. It’s music alternately subdued and subterranean, elevated and remote, attuned to the flickering sentience of outer spheres.

We’re thrilled to announce NAFF017, “To / Deep”, by Chicago trio Purelink “To / Deep” comprises four tracks, two of which –Maintain the Bliss and Head On A Swivel– were previously released as a digital-only EP in 2021. Here, Purelink return to form with an updated sound, adding crystalline angularity and dialed precision to their warm, enveloping style. Blissed break abstractions flutter and gasp like shifting light through variegated glass. Rhythms arise within rhythms, the breath resounds throughout. “To / Deep” carries the uncanny feeling that home has changed, or that home is change.

Released by VDE/Gallo, a long-established label based near Lausanne, Switzerland, this 1992 field recording by Patrick Kersalé captures the traditional music of the Aka Pygmies of the Central African Republic. Centered around the Aka people's distinctive polyphonic singing, the album features a variety of indigenous instruments including bowed string instruments, harps, and percussion.

The “Polyphonic singing of the Aka Pygmies of Central Africa” was officially added to the UNESCO List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, but four decades earlier the musicologist Simha Arom had already discovered the music of the Mbenga (Aka/Benzele), Baka and Mbuti (Efé) populations. He described their collective contrapuntal improvisations as being characterised by a level of polyphonic complexity that European music would only reach in the 14th century.

Starting from the 60s, when the records of the UNESCO Collection curated by Arom were released, Central African music has been internationally discovered, studied and used as a source of inspiration by composers such as Christian Wolff, György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Jon Hassell, and Herbie Hancock (with the famous opening track of the album Head Hunters), amongst others.

During its 2014 edition AngelicA hosted a concert by Ndima (a word meaning forest in the Aka language) a group of artists (singers, dancers and musicians) part of the Aka Pygmies tribe.
The concert was a huge success (it had to be replicated on the same night, due to high demand from the public) and like all concerts that are part of the festival it was recorded.
However, for this double album of i dischi di angelica, we decided to use the field recordings that Roberto Monari, sound technician and long-time collaborator of the festival, had carried out a few months earlier while being hosted for several days by two Pygmy tribes Mbenzelé and Aka, and living with them, in the far North of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the North-eastern (Mbenzelé) and North-western rainforests (Aka) of Ouésso in the Shanga region respectively, near the border with the Central African Republic and Cameroon.

The complex musical technique of these populations is learnt orally since early childhood, and it is completely different from that of the surrounding populations: voices (including a peculiar use of yodelling, with an alternation of head and chest voice that creates an individual identity) and hand clapping are enough to create sophisticated polyphonies and counterpoints; occasionally simple string, wind or percussive instruments are used, or quite simply the water in the ponds which is skilfully played with the hands, traditionally by women and children.

The music of the Pygmies permeates every aspect of everyday life: music dedicated to forest spirits, rituals for hunting or to facilitate a rich harvest, nursery rhymes or lullabies for children, songs of grief or entertainment, or relating to divination or sexuality… singing takes place all day, and the rhythm of the stories and the voices is forged and developed – as proved by the original and continuous sequences on these records, which are the fruit of spontaneous events that took place during Monari’s stay with the tribes – in a sound context as rich and diversified as that of the sounds of the equatorial forest in which they live – an environment, and a culture, whose survival is nowadays increasingly endangered.

1st edition of 500 - no repress. Deluxe edition with two booklets. Originally released in 1974. Holidays Records: "Blending Native American references into a body of sonority that draws on free improvisation, experimental electronic music, and spiritual jazz, Pygmy Unit’s “Signals From Earth” - originally self-released by the band in 1974 - forges a singular and almost entirely unknown path, and stands almost entirely on its own in the history of west coast American jazz. First appearing on the San Francisco scene sometime during the early 1970s, almost nothing is know about the Pygmy Unit, a seven piece band steered by Darrel De Vore, who contributed flute, bass, percussion, piano, and vocals to the band's lone LP, first appeared with percussionist Terry Wilson within the psychedelic folk rock band, The Charlatans, who belonged to the legendary Family Dog scene. Jim Pepper, a Native American tenor saxophonist known for being a member of the Mal Waldron Quartet, played with Charlie Haden, Don Cherry, and numerous others, and produced the cult favourite, “Pepper's Pow Wow”, for Embryo Records in 1971. John Celona, who contributes parts on sax, synthesizer, and percussion, would later go on to be regarded as an electronic composer of some note. Of the remaining members, saxophonist Frank Albright, bassoonist Ron Grunn, and percussionist Marvin Kirkland, very little else is known. It seems this LP is more or less all they recorded. While undeniably jazz - riding a remarkable line between avant-garde electronic music, spiritual jazz, and free improvisation - the band was very much a product of the diverse creative ferment that developed in their hometown of San Francisco during the 1960s. Embodying the raw spirit of DIY (many of the instruments used in the recordings were made by DeVore himself, self-described as an “itinerant flute-maker”) the ensemble channels references - via passages of chanting and percussion, as well as conceptual underpinnings - from Jim Pepper’s Native American roots, intuiting them with the soulfulness of spiritual jazz, wild moments of avant-gardism centred around synths and electronic effects, and explosions of wild free improvisation. “Development of new music is a continuous path that grows directionally according to psychoacoustical phenomena available for unification. This record is evidence of that development, containing 12 performance pieces, at 12 separate times in different acoustical spaces with various combinations of musicians and instrumentation. The music is shaped by signals, received and sent by life forms on this planet. It is unwritten, unrehearsed, utilizing new and traditional approaches to energy, motion, and form. Eventually, music develops as a natural extension of the environment in which it exists. It is the aim of the traditions… to signal the universe from the Earth.”

Bristol’s four-piece outfit Quade announce their debut album, ‘Nacre’, out 17th November via AD93. ‘Nacre’ is the culmination of three years of work from the band, the blueprints of their songwriting and sound firmly established in the sprawling, haunting and yet hopeful record. Traipsing between gothic expansiveness and cosmic psychedelia, the record cannot be pinned down into one recognisable place. By the album’s close, the listener may be left wondering whether it was all a memory or a dream. The recording and production of the record was collaborative, with the band drawing upon the services of Jack Ogbourne and Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy - two divergent pillars of Bristol’s music community - for engineering and mixing respectively.

For their second album 'The Foel Tower', Quade holed up in an old stone barn in the cradle of a Welsh mountain valley.

The valley was a stark and windswept backdrop with little daylight, as the band would huddle around crackling fires each evening. “There was very much a feeling of being on the complete fringes of society,” the band says. “The last vestiges of settlement before the unrelenting barren moors that loomed over us.”

It was an environment that would shape the band – a Bristol four piece made up of Barney Matthews, Leo Fini, Matt Griffiths and Tom Connolly – and the record they have made. It’s an album that is as dreamy as it is melancholic, and as quiet and tender as it is forceful and potent – gliding across genres like winds blowing over those wide-spanning Welsh hills – to arrive at something the band half-jokingly, yet somewhat accurately, describe as “doomer sad boy, ambient-dub, folk, experimental post-rock.”

Quade is a band but it’s also a very close-knit group that have been friends since childhood who use this musical vehicle for interpersonal explorations and connections. “We’ve individually experienced a lot of difficulty over the last several years and Quade has represented a space to shelter from these,” the band says. “This means we often communicate extensively with each other about the issues affecting us individually and collectively. These conversations and concerns are central to The Foel Tower.”

In many ways, the making of this record – or any Quade record – goes way deeper than the simple writing, construction and recording of music. It is a profoundly deep and meaningful experience. “A key theme of the album relates to why we connect with specific places in the way that we do,” the group says. “We often remove ourselves to isolated valleys, sheltered from some of the painful personal struggles that we have experienced as a band. These become spaces in which we collectively purge ourselves of some of these difficulties hoping to make Quade a physical and emotional place of solace. This album celebrates these places that we’ve been able to retreat to and recuperate.”

It is a deep, dense record that is stuffed with musical, cinematic and literary influences – from Ursula La Guin and Cormac MacCarthy through to RS Thomas and Yeats – but despite the heavy, introspective and anxious nature of some of the material, it is also a record that is remarkably deft, agile and considered.

Made with producer Jack Ogborne and mixer Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy, there is a pleasing duality to the final sound of the record. One that feels fragile and intimate but also powerful and forceful, as introspective as it is expansive, and a record that is as detailed and textured as it is wide open and spacious.

The album title also pays homage to the place that shaped it so greatly. Within this remote Welsh valley stands the Foel Tower, a stone structure filled with valves and cylinders that can raise and lower the level of the reservoir to draw off water. Which it can then send as far as 70 miles to Birmingham. However, in the late 1800s this land was occupied by local farmers and families in the hundreds until the British Government acquired the land, cleared the valleys, and promptly displaced them in order to begin serving the vastly expanding industrial English city. The band dug into the history and politics of this and wove it into the themes they were already thinking about, using what the Foel Tower stands for as something of a contemporary metaphor. “This tension was something that we wanted to explore without the haughty judgement of our more metropolitan lifestyles,” they say. “And to explore how this specifically relates to ourselves: how can we envisage a genuinely ecological future for ourselves – one that is accessible, affordable and in harmony with endangered rural practices.”

What makes The Foel Tower such an incredible record is that it feels born of a time, place and situation that only existed in that very moment. It’s a snapshot of those 10 days spent in rural Wales and all the feelings and anxieties the band were experiencing at that specific time, magically caught on tape. “The album very much feels tied to this valley for us and the conversations and experiences we shared there,” they say. “It brings up a great deal of poignancy for us, an emblem of some fleeting respite from the strains we all have to experience. But there’s also deep sadness knowing how transient these moments are – in fact, there’s just a great deal of sadness in this album. But it’s also a record that while personal, resigned, and emotionally burdened, is ultimately hopeful.” 

remastered and released by Moritz von Oswald himself in 2004, repressed in 2025. Originally released on Planet E in 1993.

Jeff Jank, designer of the original album and “Gold Chains” edition:
The first time I heard The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, it struck me as a hip-hop equivalent of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money (1968). Zappa’s crazy, chaotic record also happened to feature the first-ever knock-off cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a tradition in graphic arts that continues to this day. The ‘Gold Chains’ collage is my own spin on the tradition, also taking its inspiration from Madlib’s track “Rappcats Pt. 3.”
This alternate cover for Further Adventures was designed Fall 2020. In just a year between then and now we lost three of the heroes in the collage: DOOM, Biz Markie, and Melvin Van Peebles.

LA が生んだレジェンド:MADLIB、永遠にしてもはや幻のプロジェクト:Quasimoto 名義でリリースした2013年のアルバム”YESSIR WHATEVER”が、新たなシルバー・フォイル(銀箔)エディションで限定枚数のLPリリースが決定。メタリック・カラー盤＋ジャケットのQuasimotoのイラストもオリジナル盤同様にステッカー仕様となっております。

ヒップホップからジャズ、ソウル、ワールド、ビートシーンまであらゆるシーンがその動向をチェックしている LA が生んだ真の鬼才 / 最重要プロデューサー:Madlib の別名義プロジェクトが Quasimoto。ソウル、ジャズ、ファンク、ディスコからレゲエ、ワールド、ライブラリー、、膨大なレコードコレ クションから奇想天外なサンプリングソースを大胆に活かして直感的に作られたMadlibのトラックが次々に展開、そこにQuasimotoと Madlib自身が絶妙のコンビネーションでスピーディーにラップを繰り広げる様はまさに圧巻!Madlibのワンアンドオンリーの世界観が生み出すこの極めつけのフィーリングは聴けば聴くほどにハマる! サンプリングによるストレートなヒップホップが持つ無限の可能性を改めて感じさせてくれる。更にマッドな世界観をいっそう際立たせるLAを代表するアーティスト:Jeff JankによるQuasimotoキャラクターのイラストも最高です。

The new quickly, quickly EP finds Portland, Oregon’s Graham Jonson back in his home studio, engrossed in ‘60s psychedelic soul music, imagining some bygone era where it was all about the drum sounds and tape decay. He calls it Easy Listening; the songs are short and inviting, modest yet loaded with ideas. Each started with the drum part, a loose grid for Jonson to paint his idiosyncratic psych-pop across, again playing nearly every instrument. The set follows his 2021 LP, The Long And The Short of It, the 22-year-old musician’s debut on Ghostly International, a coming-of-age jump from the chill beats-oriented corners of the internet to a full-fledged songwriting project with hi-fi sophistication. The moment culminated with Pitchfork’s Rising profile, “quickly, quickly’s Technicolor Pop Bursts Beyond the Algorithm,” and kickstarted the formation of his 6-piece live band for a run of exploratory shows along the west coast. But as the tangible demands for his music pulled him outward and some growing pains in his personal life ensued, Jonson focused his energy back inside; to the comforts of home recording, filling his space with more gear and sessions with friends. Maybe a bit of a droll title for a hard time, Easy Listening briefly pauses for air, offering five of his breeziest basement jams for public enjoyment. That basement is home to racks of synthesizers and an array of drum machines, guitars, bongos, xylophones, and the like. One notable addition to the Easy Listening setup was the Teac reel-to-reel tape machine he found on eBay and hooked up to Ableton. “I used it frequently to add color/texture to the project by running individual instruments through and warping the tape with my finger. After I had finished all the songs, I ran the full mix of every song in a row through the tape to add one more layer of low-fidelity weirdness.” “Colors” opens the portal to Jonson’s retro-tinged dream world; a symphonic section pulls the curtain back to reveal a drum kit spattering rapid fills as the bassline grooves deeply between organ shimmers and hazy hums. The din of what sounds like a ‘60s church service appears here and throughout the collection; the words are blurred by decades of tape mold, adding to an overall hypnotic, disorienting feel. “Satellite,” one of Jonson’s funkiest and catchiest tracks to date, is either a love letter to technology or a tongue-in-cheek song about surveillance. The jazzy percussion taps from the get-go as he peppers clever lines to his subject in the sky, at one point losing his wallet (evoking the comedic tone of Thundercat’s “Captain Stupido”), before riding out on a squealing synth solo. The campy, softly psychedelic “Falling Apart Without You” is in the vein of Stereolab. It started out as a fictional breakup song but ultimately became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only cut from the EP that Jonson and his band have played live so far, it’s easy to picture it translating on stage; the lovesick singer flanked by a tight ensemble on keys, bass, and drums. Next, he slows it down for “Photobook,” the first half is an organ-led ballad for self-improvement — “I think I can, think I can…” Jonson trails off into a rhythmic reverie. We end on the wistful, soulful “Natural Form,” featuring The Long And The Short of It collaborator Elliot Cleverdon on strings. “I can’t say goodbye,” are Jonson’s parting words; it’s a sweet outro, some healing for him, and for us as fans, it’s a lovely place to leave quickly, quickly for now.

Graham Jonson is drawn to the comforts of melody and noise. How the two conspire in tension, tonally and atonally, stirring up memory and mood. This quality animates the technicolor world of quickly, quickly, the psych-pop project that emanates from Kenton Sound, his basement studio in Portland, Oregon. “Everywhere your eye lands, there’s another curio to marvel over,” noted Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne when he visited Jonson’s recording space for a Rising feature just after the release of his “strikingly original” 2021 debut LP, The Long and Short of It. Since then, Jonson formed a live band, released his Easy Listening EP in 2023, got into production projects (for Moses Sumney, Kid LAROI, and SahBabii), and navigated the up-and-downs of a young musician, the sustainability of tours and relationships. While shaped by personal bouts and fallouts, his highly-anticipated full-length follow-up finds Jonson making music that’s universal, open-ended, and rewarding, like great songwriters can do. He set out to make a folk album but couldn’t help coloring it in with noise; a confluence of lush instrumentation and unexpected sounds. Ambitious yet intimate, hi-fi yet homespun, the idiosyncratic songs on I Heard That Noise curve around the contours of everyday life with warmth, wit, and dissonance.

When asked to unpack the inputs of I Heard That Noise, Jonson cites the unpredictable vocal melodies and sound design of Phil Elverum (The Microphones, Mount Eerie), the raw emotion of Dijon, and the timeless cadence of Nick Drake. While drums were the focus of Easy Listening, he challenged himself to think outside of the beat with new material: “to see how much I could do with a song, specifically with production, without having a beat to it… there are moments with drums but it was more about the space in between.” Songs utilize visceral delay and distortion; sometimes, they melt out of frame before the peak or take sharp turns with sudden chord changes or sweeping jolts he likens to “jump scares” in film. “Experimenting with the idea of being comfortable, and then some crazy shit flies at you, takes you out of it for a second, and then maybe brings you back in.” What makes these non-linear choices effective is that Jonson remains a natural pop architect, knowing where to push and pull, add and subtract; and essentially, how to draw in and hold one’s attention.

Themes reach from recent experiences — a breakup followed by “periods of either being miserable or, like, living…trying to better myself” — to childhood memories. There’s a recurring low-frequency hum in his neighborhood; he and his friends have come to know it as the “Kenton Sound” (which gives his studio its name), and they’ve narrowed it down to some industrial testing site nearby. Every time it vibrates, he thinks of that time he heard “that noise” while skateboarding outside his mom’s house. Similar, but louder, scarier, a sky siren of sorts. “I remember all the dogs started barking in the neighborhood at the same time...a really weird, bizarre phenomenon.” The thought pattern, scattered with a cathartic headspace, led him to record the title track, where an abrasive intro dissipates into a sweet piano ballad about remembering and surrendering.

Jonson has a knack for interludes and outros, and he’s in full stride here; the opener’s ambient wobbles snap into the stomp of “Enything,” which at one point swelled with so much information he needed to get a new computer. Above bright and jagged guitar lines, harmonized with backing vocals from friend and past tourmate Julia Logue, Jonson playfully rattles through everything he’d do (“for you”). He’s quick to admit he often dreads the process of writing lyrics, yet the loose wordplay of “Enything” is proof his subconscious runs clever.

On “Take It From Me,” subtle sonic flourishes surround acoustic strums and tender keys as Jonson recalls the resignation of a night when a relationship’s end was imminent (“a great storm is coming over the hill.”). He explains, “I've always found peace in knowing that other people, even if I don't know their exact experience, may have the same feeling that I do.” The mantra-like reprise of “Take It from Me” carries that notion, a soft reassurance before the song washes away.

Kenton Sound’s ceiling can attest to the truth of “I Punched Through A Wall.” Jonson says in reality, the act emerged from a silly intrusive thought. The image (“The silhouette of myself”) lent a figurative scene to wrap real angst around. “I feel love like a cannon ball / I like being ripped apart,” he sings over one of the record’s sweetest, most pop-forward arrangements. As the chorus takes its final pass, a gentle piano phrase gets clipped by an outburst of power chords and feedback, repeating the lines twice as loud.

“Raven” crosses fable-like fiction with the sad story of a friend who lost his way; and just when the track’s innocent country twang settles in, he pulls the rug out with near-metal levels of heavy. The juxtaposition gets to the heart of I Heard That Noise. By excavating the extremes of his sound, Jonson not only brings the best out of himself but introduces myriad ways to engage with his music, which grows ever more inviting and boundless. 
<p><iframe seamless="" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=824606394/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;">I Heard That Noise quickly, quickly</iframe></p>

ortland, Oregon-based musician Graham Jonson started early: playing piano as a toddler, finding the music of J Dilla in fifth grade, and self-releasing singles by age 16. First appearing under the name quickly, quickly in 2017, his project’s profile has since grown fervently with fans in the beats-oriented corners of SoundCloud, YouTube, and Reddit. Some of his early tracks tally north of 10 million plays on Spotify. The figure isn’t meant to flex as much as it is to point out that Jonson’s work has resonated without the traditional industry levers; he is a wunderkind DIY internet success story, but, by his own assessment at the present age of 20, he’s only now getting serious. With The Long And Short Of It, his Ghostly International debut, Jonson reinvents his project as a full-fledged songwriter, vocalist, and arranger, playing nearly everything from drums to keys and guitar. The resulting sound straddles jazz, hip hop, R&B, and psych-pop while suggesting a wholly genre-less path forward. Recorded during and after a short-lived move to Los Angeles, songs find Jonson cool and comfortable, navigating the planes between anxiety and apathy, distance and desire with lyrical vulnerability and introspection. A student of the Stones Throw catalog (his favorite is Madlib’s Quasimoto), Jonson remains rhythm-driven at heart, trusting his instincts in this new palette of organic instrumentation and verse-chorus structure. Tracks glide and bump with tasteful care to tempo as his scene-building and storytelling knack comes into focus. Jonson’s past material often suited passive listenership, the kind of bedroom-produced beat music that offers secondary utility and function as a companion to primary activities. The Long and Short of It showcases an evolutionary step into a style that uses chops cultivated in that niche that demand a more active listenership. That attention is rewarded with earworms, dazzling production flare, and earnest, genre-spanning songwriting. Opener “Phases” launches on the radical wisdom of the album’s sole vocal feature, courtesy of renowned poet and activist, Sharrif Simmons, who contributes a psychedelic poem spanning cosmic existentialism — something he wrote off the cuff during a session. As the fiery spoken word unfolds, a frenzy of drum grooves from Micah Hummel and strings from Elliot Cleverdon rise higher into the mix, all setting the stage for Jonson’s debut at the mic and keys. The back half of “Phases” shifts into a hypnotic instrumental, the drums interlocking on guitar lines, pausing for a spacious break before reassembling twice as potent, riding into a blissful, cathartic saxophone solo by Haily Naiswanger. The next track, “Come Visit Me,” was penned for Jonson’s girlfriend, a simple, sweet homesick plea for her company in Los Angeles, where he was secretly struggling to adjust. Ultimately he would move back to Portland after 11 months and scrap much of the music he wrote in LA, unhappy with the material’s reliance on sampled drum breaks and synths. He held onto a few bits though, including this tender dispatch, building it out into a bass-grooving slow jam, adding a verse from his perspective two years later. “Shee” was written on his girlfriend’s guitar and every line glows with uncomplicated adoration. He is captivated in this daydream, which drifts off into a haze of strums and hums. We wake to the looping drums of “Leave It.” Above the pattern, layering piano and guitar, Jonson pokes holes in himself — his “cognitive dissonance,” being “too jaded” to see what’s right in front of him – the notions blurring back into that haze on an outro of sublime ambient psych-jazz. Jonson returns to the piano for “I Am Close To The River,” the place he goes to break a creative rut, as he was the morning this bittersweet melody entered his mind. He says the song is loosely based on a psychonautic experience he had along the Willamette River. Once home, he put the song to paper, over time arranging a bucolic mix of shimmering chimes, saturated percussion, and orchestral strings from Elliot Cleverdon. A highlight on the record’s b-side, “Everything is Different (To Me)” features all the traits of the new quickly, quickly in one ambitious suite: a catchy guitar loop, a classic hip-hop drum break, a swell of strings, and sly chord progression changes, all in clever contrast to Jonson’s lyrics detailing bouts with lethargy. The album ends on a series of questions in the poignant “Wy,” a delightful resignation. Jonson, lonely in LA, spins the hypochondriac wheel and checks off concerns that seem to plague internet dwellers; his neck hurts, his hands are shaky, his stomach feels off. He dismisses his need to self-diagnose and opts to lean into the moment through music. A billowing outro builds on airy synths, his contemplative guitar strums, and a soothing water droplet sound. The comedown is “Otto’s Dance,” a brief instrumental reverie nodding to one of his favorite Brazilian albums, Milton Nascimento and Lô Borges’ Clube Da Esquina. That’s The Long And Short Of It, a summary of transition, self-validation, and a great leap forward in a young artist’s life.

Quiet Voices is a collaborative musical and sound art project, mixing ambient & electronic music, cinematic atmospheres & spoken word, founded by Jean-Yves Leloup, featuring musical pieces he composed with Hélène Vogelsinger, Villeneuve & Morando, Wild Anima, François-Eudes Chanfrault and Maxence Cyrin. Most of the composers involved in this project are all working in the field of cinema, composing music using electronic and acoustic instruments. All these musicians are also working in the field of modern classical, ambient and electronic music. Through the use of spoken voices (some of them coming from films), the Quiet Voices project can be heard as a tribute to the power and emotion of cinema. Each track can be heard as a short film, or a scene, fostering the listener's imagination. All the pieces from the record are dealing with the themes of time, memory, death or loss, and often dealing with the idea of an imaginary intermediate dimension between life and death. Jean-Yves Leloup is a Paris-based french sound artist/DJ, curator and music writer. He is the curator of various music exhibitions (Electro at Paris Philharmonie, London Design Museum and Düsseldorf Kunst Palast) and the author of various books such as " Digital Magma ", " Global Techno ", " Techno 100 ", " Music Non-Stop " and t " Ambient Music : avant-garde, new age, chill-out & cinema " (2021). He teaches sound in cinema at Paris Esra cinema School, and has released four albums with the RadioMentale duo.

Saved from the dust of time, here is a truly rare and obscure piece of vinyl by one of the most enigmatic bands in the whole history of British progressive jazz. Originally released in 200 copies in 1973 and reissued here for the first time, Quincicasm's only release stands as a brilliant document of the '70s British underground electric jazz scene. Somewhere at the crossing of open form jazz and art rock explorations. Ken Eley - saxophone, Dick Pearce - flugelhorn, Julian Marshall - vibraphone, keyboards, Malcolm Bennett - bass guitar, flute, Michael Ormerod, Nigel Smith - drums, percussion, Katy Zeserson - vocals. RIYL: Soft Machine, Nucleus.

Pulse is Qur'an Shaheed's debut for Leaving Records —as a pianist, poet, and vocalist from Pasadena, based in Inglewood— she fuses formal classical training with a deep commitment to improvisation. Guided by spurts of instinctual, jazzy vocalization and lyrics that incant dreams of an exalted future, Pulse transcends genre, capturing a journey toward presence, revelation, and a liberated poetics of sound. Through this album, Shaheed offers looping reflections on transformation and acceptance, revealing the fruitful arc of her artistic growth.

Shaheed's musical journey began in a family of musicians, led by her mother, Sharon, a pianist and music school owner, and her father, Nolan Shaheed, who toured with Stevie Wonder and was Marvin Gaye’s music director. Introduced to the piano at the age of four, she trained rigorously, laying a foundation of discipline and technical skill that has now evolved into a freer form of spontaneous, genre-defying expression. Shaheed’s musical practice is an extension of her world—playful, bold, undaunted. A fluid approach to fashion—colorful, deconstructed pieces, geometric piercings, and intricate tattoos—mirrors their creative philosophy, where compositions dissolve into iridescent soundscapes.

Produced by Spencer Hartling at his Altadena studio, “Wiggle World,” Pulse reveals the synergy between Shaheed and Hartling. His tape looping and improvisational production imbue the record with a transfixing vibrancy and otherworldly glitches, showcasing a palpable collaboration that is equal parts immersive and omnivalent, with each element harmoniously intertwining to elevate the overall sound. “Spencer really helped solidify the demos that I had created. He truly added the magic. I had seen him perform a few times, and I loved his improvisation,” Shaheed shares. The album also features Maia Harper on flute and harp, adding hypnotic textures that deepen its emotional scope.

Pulse builds on the groundwork laid by her 2020 release, Process, but ventures far beyond, embodying the vulnerable evolution that Shaheed describes as “meeting myself where I was,” in reverberant explorations of longing and imagination. The album’s title lays the conceptual groundwork for an immersive aliveness echoed track after track. This record emerged from Shaheed’s desire to create fluid music that reflects the evolving self, unconstrained by convention or expectation. Beginning with late-night demo sessions, she experimented outside of digital audio workstations, using her keyboard and a Roland SP-404 sampler to craft each track. Shaheed’s ethereal vocals, shifting from dreamlike whispers to bold intensity, blend among jagged keys and neo-soul elucidations. “Improvising let me be free of expectation,” Shaheed reflects. “I wanted to make something that wasn’t bound by themes.”

Lyrically, Pulse traces the limits of felt presence and weaves threads of sempiternal connection, using poetic reflections written in Shaheed’s phone's notes app. Each track extends an invitation to both meditate and move. Tracks like “Dream” resonate with premonition and discernment: “I still dream. You can’t take away the things that I know. In my mind I know, I know.” Forging an effortless path for listeners to enter a portal of psychic reconfiguration and reflection. “I wanted each track to feel like a different window into my mind,” she says. Diaristic fragments and collaged production cues offer a window beyond Shaheed’s mind, calling into a transformative world. In “Doo Doo Doo,” listeners are invited to imagine an expanded existence through an unflinching manifesto: “I’m not here to help you. I’m not here to pull you up (no no no). I’m not here for you. I’m here for me. Enough for the jobs that won’t even pay me.” Simultaneously in devotion to self and critique of labor exploitation, Shaheed connects varied pieces—verse by verse—to a coherent future vision where liberation starts now.

Shaheed draws inspiration from movement, breath, and community: “Finding my flow—that’s when inspiration comes.” The record’s eleven tracks illuminate Shaheed’s resolve for wide-ranging, innovative musical techniques that merge intuitive composition with methodical devotion. Pulse is a spirited, unflinching approach to a new sound from Shaheed, inviting listeners into a field of lucid vision and resonance, capturing Shaheed’s voice in its most liberated form.

PSYCHEDELIC ROOTS FROM ADDIS ABABA from the sizzling Addis Ababa nightlife scene, this group shines an experimentalism based in the virtuosity of rooted traditions. swirling masinko (one-stringed fiddle), wah-wah violin, bass krar grooves, heavy riffs of goat skin kebero beats, and powerful mellismatic lead African diva vocals, QWANQWA keeps the people rapt in celebratory attention.

A key document of the late ’70s experimental music scene in Kansai, Japan, R.N.A. Organism’s R.N.A.O Meets P.O.P.O (first released by legendary Osaka label Vanity Records in 1980) is a hallucinatory trip of dubby bass, churning guitars, sputtering rhythm boxes, twisted vocals and unidentifiable sound effects. With the vinyl out of print for decades now, Mesh-Key is honored to present this deluxe, fully authorized reissue, sourced from the miraculously well-preserved, original reel-to-reel tapes. Carefully remastered by Stephan Mathieu, this album has never sounded better.

A key document of the late 70s experimental music scene in Kansai, Japan, R.N.A. Organism’s sole LP “R.N.A.O Meets P.O.P.O”, released by legendary Osaka label Vanity Records in 1980, was a hallucinatory trip of dubby bass, churning guitars, sputtering rhythm boxes, chattering vocals and unidentifiable sound effects. But it turns out that producer Kaoru Sato (later of EP-4) and the band had initially submitted an even more tweaked out set of mixes to the label which were largely rejected for being too extreme. As luck would have it, those original mixes were archived on (recently unearthed) cassettes and are now available for the first time, 40-plus years after they were recorded, on the 2LP set “Unaffected Mixes plus."

Innervzm II, a companion to 2022’s Innervzm, is a sprawling, meditative collection from Los Angeles-based producer, drummer, and sound architect, Raays. The EP’s title derives from a conversation between Raays and Leaving labelmate Deantoni Parks regarding “archeology of self” as a creative methodology. Innervzm, as a concept, connotes the kind of soul work that necessarily precedes and renders outward action possible, meaningful, and effective. The Innervzm II EP blends musique concréte, field recordings, and improvisational synthesis, documenting Raays’ methodical, ritualistic, and materially grounded approach to composition. Each of the EP’s six tracks was seeded by a discrete instance of deep listening (of the Pauline Oliveros variety) in environments ranging from Raays’ own backyard of Ernest Debs Pond to the thundery night time forestscapes of Michoacán. If regarded sincerely as the ever-present music of this world, how might a listener interpret the spatial and melodic interplay of, say, birdsong and the distant hum of traffic? And how might that same listener respond, musically? Innervzm II provides one such example: a keen spirit, intermittently (generally for no more than ten minutes at a time) tuning into the sonic chaos, deciphering the elements (for it is only ever really seemingly chaos), then immediately distilling this experience into song. Aided by an hourglass (as much a talisman as an actual timekeeper), and abiding by a sort of “first thought / best thought” approach to completing a track in a single sitting, Innervzm II constitutes a snapshot of an artist in an especially fruitful and transitory period of exploration. As a self-described “optimistic futurist,” the tapestry Raays weaves is indeed soothing and consoling, deftly melding the organic and the analog. A persistent albeit oscillating flutter on “Beneath Your Surface” suggests the slow-motion beating of a hummingbird’s wings. The subtle warble hidden within the EP’s opener, “Equiinox” conjures the rainbow artifacts of a VHS sunrise. Though “textural message” is the title of track five, these pieces might very well all be considered textural messages, replete as they are in soil and static, dredged (lovingly) from some place just beyond the frame of knowing. Innervzm (dubbed “Full of vibrant life” by New Age luminary Laraaji) will be paired with Innervzm II for a joint physical cassette release in June, and Raays will soon join longtime experimental/ambient luminary, The Album Leaf, as an opener and drummer on a global tour. Which is all to say, Raays is diligently tending the garden, to our collective benefit.

Rachika Nayar's fragments (expanded) is a collection of sonic miniatures constructed from guitar loops created in the familiar comforts of her own bedroom. These cyclical, meditative pieces stem from an intimate part of Nayar's creative practice, revealing a deep source of self-exploration and restoration. A collision of midwestern emo and post-rock influences with virtuosic minimalist guitar, fragments (expanded) provides an intimacy between Nayar and those listening in parallel spaces, activating our collective past and shared unconscious experience. This expanded vinyl edition adds a full extra side of previously unreleased pieces and includes a high quality multi-format digital download.

There’s a lived-in quality to the sound of Racine’s Amitiés. Named after the French word for friendship, the Montréal-based Quebecois artist follows an extended time spent indoors to contemplate what it means to be isolated and in one’s own body, while also staying connected. The album is a follow-up of sorts to Quelque chose tombe (“Something Falls”), released in February 2020 and a kind of accidental prophecy for the crisis that was to come. Amitiés disintegrates before your very eyes. Opening with a roughshod iPhone recording of Racine playing his parent’s harmonium, the creaky acoustics of "Mon amour je ne guéris jamais" slowly degrade into digital simulations of dreadful organic beauty. That track and the rest of the LP gives the feeling of an abandoned building; a sense of frayed, earthiness dusted with the wisdom of time. And yet, it’s almost entirely made from simulations. Clipped Native Instruments violin patches punctuate the churning atmospherics of “Arête coincée dans une amygdale”. The lonely gongs and bells of “Grosso” resonate in a gust of synthesised ambient. Vocal plugins and the very occasional YouTube samples of a recorded voice are sped-up, glitched, pitched and scrambled into indecipherability. These vocal apparitions rise and fall into the sonic ether like individual ghosts of human contact. They’re bold and expressive, deeply melancholy and yet full of the potential for joy and an awareness of life’s beauty. It’s in this dearth of social interaction—the heady psychosis of too much solitude—that Amitiés’s tone and mood lies. A score for the numb dissociation from internal chaos and alienation, the album’s sense of acute distress is assuaged only by the small network of collaborators and influences it draws from. Long-time friend and peer Justin Leduc-Frenette (aka Keru Not Ever) contributes drum programming to “Mon amour je ne guéris jamais”. A last-minute reworking of the untitled “Sans titre” by German duo Arigto matches the weight and timbre of Racine’s sooty post-classical soundscapes. Ultimately, Amitiés is a very human response to an inhuman environment. It’s an intimate homage to friends and the mysterious effects of distance, while somehow finding healing in hardship.

Days and nights, living in the clarity of mind and voice: Radio Hito's pensive compositions get stripped down to the bare elements while still retaining the solemn power of truth. The words of others gain meaning of their own through a contemplatively personal rendition, organized as seven tracks whose simplicity manages to brim with endless poetic possibility. This exclusive live was streamed on the occasion of KRAAK Ullakolla Festival at the legendary Habbo Hotel at the end of December, a couple of days prior to the end of the most iconic internet technology: Adobe Flash Player. Special thanks go to KRAAK & Ullakolla people - Gabriela, Pauwel, Samuli - and Maoupa Mazzochetti.