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Tender tonkori melodies, meditative dub excursions and hallowed folk vocals combine on Tonkori In The Moonlight, an 11-track collection of mostly traditional songs performed by indigenous Ainu musician OKI. Born on the Japanese island of Hokkaido in 1957, OKI's released his debut album in 1996 and since then he has recorded 11 studio albums both solo and with his Dub Ainu Band and toured internationally -- from WOMAD in the UK to the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington DC via festival appearances in Singapore, Australia and across Europe. OKI is one of only a handful of musicians who play the tonkori, a five-stringed Ainu harp, which is both the pulse of this record and the force that unifies the disparate sounds he introduces such as reggae, dub, Irish folk, throat singing, African drumming and music from Central Asia. Tonkori In The Moonlight features Umeko Ando and Kila. For fans of: Midori Takada, Siti Muharam, Minyo Crusaders, Les Filles De Illighadad, African Head Charge, Mamman Sani. "Supercool Japanese minimalism" --The Observer. "Like nothing you've ever heard before" --The Wire. "The edgy cool of Jamaica meets the kitsch cool of Japan... charming and compelling" --The Independent.

Sakhalin Rock” was released shortly after OKI, a player of the traditional stringed instrument of the Karafuto Ainu people, traveled to Sakhalin, Sakhalin, the birthplace of the tonkori.
The incomparable album, which includes a Brazilian recording with pandeiro wizard Marcos Suzano, has been remastered by OKI himself for this analog release, and the order of the songs has been changed.
The album also includes “King Futoshi,” a previously unreleased song recorded privately with OKI's former member, Futoshi Ikabe, who passed away last year.
OKI's never-ending love and passion for Ainu music is reflected throughout the album, making it a must-have masterpiece for fans.
The tough and heavy DUB MIX by Naoyuki Uchida and the sharp sound of OKI's tonkori are brought back to life with the warmth and depth that only an analog disc can provide.
This is a must-have for those who want to experience the intense “AINU BEAT” that will not fade away with the passage of time.

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Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, Okkyung Lee returns to Shelter Press with Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, a deeply intimate body of recordings at the juncture of ambient music, minimalism, and the baroque, that stands as radical intervention with what experimental music can be, and the place that organisations of sound occupy in our lives.

For more than two decades, Okkyung Lee has stood at the forefront of the most radical trajectories of experimental music: a virtuosic cellist and improviser, renowned for her creative rigour and emotive depth. Particularly noteworthy for her range, dexterity, and adaptability, over the last five years Lee’s output has revealed unexpected shifts and developments that move far afield from the realms of free improvisation for which she is most well know. 2020’s Yeo​-​Neun, a heart-wrenching, ambient chamber work - drawing inspiration from the Korean popular music of her youth - was issued by Shelter Press to great critical response, followed closely by Teum (The Silvery Slit) - one of a series engrossing electroacoustic works created at Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris - on Portraits GRM, and then 나를 (Na-Reul) in 2021, regarded by Lee as a closing statement of more than two decades living in New York, which set the precedent of her allowing her emotions to fully occupy the forefront of the music for the first time. Marking her return to Shelter press, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities, encounters Lee upturning the apple cart once again, weaving a profoundly intimate artistic statement on completely unexpected terms.

Like its three aforementioned predecessors, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) belongs to broadening shift in Lee’s approach to composing that roughly aligns with her return to her native South Korea, having lived in the United States since her late teens. Infused with a deep reengagement with her own culture and relationship to memory, it is equally a response to those critical challenges and questions provoked by significant life change. Worked on in isolation, and continuously returned to, over the course of four years, the album’s nine pieces began with a simple recognition that experimental music is not always what we imagine it to be. It is a practice and a pursuit - a music for which, at its inception, the outcome is unknown - rather than an idiom defined by certain syntaxes, approaches, and qualities of structure and sound. From this departure point, Lee began to inquire after the utility of music itself: what is it for, what does it do, and what place does it (or can it) occupy in our lives?

This solitary and durational journey, each composition gradually moving through different phases and evolutions over years, led Lee toward uncharted ground: a music that is not only playful, introspective, and seductive, but also intended to provoke a relationship to experimental music beyond its normative expectations. Rather active or deep listening, it pursues passive listening. Rather than a grand statement, it is discreet. Rather than virtuosity, it embraces the elegant and direct. Even more strikingly, for the first time, the music of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) encounters Lee leaving the cello entirely behind.

Created at home on keyboard, computer, and an inexpensive cassette recorder, Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) presents a remarkable form of ambient music - organisations of sound that become their own environment, to be occupied - intended, as the album’s subheading infers, as Background Music For Your Mundane Activities. An expansion of the creative pathways opened by the Korean pop imbued compositions of Yeo​-​Neun, aspects of electronic process explored by Teum (The Silvery Slit), and the emotive foregrounding of 나를 (Na-Reul), each of the pieces presented across the two sides of Just Like Any Other Day (어느날) implies something far greater than the limits of its own temporarily: a mood, provocations of memory and place, mirrors for the solitude within which it was made, and palpable emotion lingering just out of grasp. For Lee, each of the album’s compositions could be continued or looped for an indeterminate duration: straddling a ground between the minimal and the baroque, enveloping the listener in endless cycles of appreciating, repetitive and rhythmical notes, flirting with the melodic and implying a disembodied imagism that borders on the profound.

Remarkably beautiful and direct, Okkyung Lee’s Just Like Any Other Day (어느날): Background Music For Your Mundane Activities represents a radical reconfiguration of experiential music, stripped to its bare essence in defiance of the widely presumed aesthetic signifiers. Unlike anything we’ve heard from her before, this immersive body of intimate recordings not only reveals new dimensions of Lee’s striking range as an artist, but also of how we might regard and occupy music itself: an ambience to lived and felt like a second skin.

Flung is proud to present a major new work by cellist and composer Okkyung Lee with London’s Explore Ensemble: Signals dissolves boundaries between live performance, studio construction, and electroacoustic illusion. Following her 2025 minimalist/ambient album ‘just like any other day (어느날): background music for your mundane activities’ on Shelter Press, Okkyung Lee moves in another direction with London’s Explore Ensemble. Flung is proud to present Signals, a release that eludes categorisation while shifting between electronics, acoustic composition, and improvisation. It places Lee’s improvisational language in dialogue with the instrumentalists of Explore Ensemble’s sextet, whom together become enveloped by kaleidoscopic electronic sound, at times fiercely intense, at others weightless yet immense. As a meta-document of the ensemble’s commission for Lee, Signals takes recordings from live performances in Leuven, Huddersfield, and Luxembourg, restructuring them with additional layers created and edited in the studio. Lee’s hybrid approach blurs the line between real and imagined acoustics, where the listener’s sense of small and huge, near and far, dark and bright, all combine in seemingly impossible ways, restlessly morphing between materialisation and dissolution. The album unfolds in seven sections, one for each of Explore Ensemble’s musicians plus Lee’s own section ‘Wings / First Love’, which ends both sides of the LP (the second instance also called ‘Farewell’). Every section creates a distinct environment that tests the boundaries between instrument and performer — including Lee herself on cello sitting among the ensemble — from ultra close-mic string crackles, to woodwind multiphonic canyonscapes, melodies heard both near and far, and the piano turned inside out. Where Lee renews Signals for every performance by altering the sequence of these sections, on record she commits to a fixed constellation that reinforces both the particularities of the individual musicians and the work itself in a striking of live and studio composite version. A release that feels both self-interrogating and outward- looking, Signals folds Lee’s personal language together with collective form. Each performer’s presence — their sound and intuition — emerges clearly, while Lee’s voice remains central. As she writes: The main focus of making music has been to understand myself through the music. For me the audience is there to immerse themselves in that journey, and maybe discover something on their own. For the last seven years, the world seems to have split into two extreme ends, with no possibility of bridging the gap. Once I felt this sense of hopelessness, I also started to ponder upon the reason for this music's existence when it didn't seem to have any actual relevance to what was happening in the world. Not that the music should have "meaningful reasons for its existence" but how can I express my political stances and beliefs without lyrics or long explanatory texts? With this aspiration, I wanted to create a piece with signals that can generate multiple facets for the performers and the audience. — Okkyung Lee Signals is released by Flung as its first vinyl released in an edition of 300, with accompanying digital version.

Recommended for fans of modern classical music like Another Timbre and Elsewhere! Okkyung Lee is a Korean cellist and improviser who has collaborated with Christian Marclay, Steve Beresford, Phil Minton and many other big names. is out now on Shelter Press! It's from a rather unexpected label. A dreamy chamber music ensemble featuring Okkyung Lee (cello), Eivind Opsvik (bass), Maeve Gilchrist (harp) and Jacob Sacks (piano). The avalanche of sentimental melodies and gentle, melancholic touches, wrapped in a myriad of aspects from chamber to spiritual jazz and folk music, also evoke the beauty of the pull and the aesthetics of "pause" that are common to Japanese environmental music/ambient music by Satoshi Ashikawa and Hiroshi Yoshimura. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.

It is often said that we find it hard to stare at the light, however, the universe never lights out. This first premise from As Above, So Below is the base point for the setting of what follows. A group of rabble-rousing guerillères from the commune decide to go bowling. They had entered the forest, followed its winding paths, and emerged blind after staring at the universe for too long. No longer able to find their way by observing the stars, they now have to climb on the houses and feel the vernacular roofing to find out in which direction they’re heading. They get to the bowling alley all amped up. The punters insist on lighting their cigarettes - they’re not interested in matches but rather in the cardboard cover that attaches them. The only striking going on is the sound of the skittles getting scattered, syncopating with saturated basslines, mixed vocal techniques, heavy fx, and feeding into an arsenal of bells and percussions. They start stomping on the alleys as if this was a housewarming party and they had to break in a newly laid wood floor. Moving in circles, they eventually fall through it and end up in a room where the light has been swallowed. A band including none of its original members is performing, they can only hear a warm yet throbbing hum. They soon realise the massive rolling sub is getting louder and louder and adjusting its pitch. The dust their feet was lifting is slowly sweeping around the floor and gathering in patches and lines, drawing out the Chladni figures they had seen in their dreams, experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, they inscribe them on a loquat leaf.

After nearly two years, Okonski returns with Entrance Music — an album that finds the trio at the height of their improvisational prowess and celebrating the spontaneous and meditative. On the heels of 2023’s debut Magnolia, pianist and leader Steve Okonski has reconvened long-time musical collaborators (Durand Jones and the Indications bandmate Aaron Frazer on drums and bassist Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery) for another session in the spirit of artists like the Bad Plus, Gerald Clayton, and The Breathing Effect. Ultimately Entrance Music serves as an invitation to early hours, where songs linger in the doorway, announcing their presence before returning to the air, in a meticulous drift into the next.

Recorded over a five day session, Entrance Music was one of the first albums committed to tape at Portage Lounge, Terry Cole’s studio in Loveland, OH. “It was a new setup, but with Terry behind the dials it was very familiar,” says Okonski. “I can’t emphasize enough how much Terry feels like a fourth member [of the band] because of the space he’s curating, the energy he is bringing, and the production ideas.” The energy and sound created with the Colemine labelhead at the helm makes for a listening experience equally at home with ECM or Stones Throw catalogs.

From the rippling notes of the pastoral opener, “October,” Entrance Music is lush with anticipation, both band and listener feeling the tension in the tranquility — where the interplay of jazz improvisation and boom bap beats never shortchanges the musicianship but the talent is ever in service of the song.

While the band does not play together as often as they would like, not much time is needed for the three to lock in. Montgomery’s bass opening to “Passing Through” bends and moves with a singular meditative grace before piano and percussion joins the daylight filling a room with breath and light. If Magnolia resonated with last calls and late nights, Entrance Music counters with early mornings and first cups of coffee.

Whereas much of the debut resonates with his time in New York, Entrance Music “feels a little less ‘on the streets at 2 A.M.’ and a little more nature-based…a little more ethereal,” says Okonski. “It’s definitely age, environment, and family — all of that does come through in the music.” <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 439px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3410800866/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://okonski.bandcamp.com/album/entrance-music">Entrance Music by Okonski</a></iframe>

After nearly two years, Okonski returns with Entrance Music — an album that finds the trio at the height of their improvisational prowess and celebrating the spontaneous and meditative. On the heels of 2023’s debut Magnolia, pianist and leader Steve Okonski has reconvened long-time musical collaborators (Durand Jones and the Indications bandmate Aaron Frazer on drums and bassist Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery) for another session in the spirit of artists like the Bad Plus, Gerald Clayton, and The Breathing Effect. Ultimately Entrance Music serves as an invitation to early hours, where songs linger in the doorway, announcing their presence before returning to the air, in a meticulous drift into the next.

Recorded over a five day session, Entrance Music was one of the first albums committed to tape at Portage Lounge, Terry Cole’s studio in Loveland, OH. “It was a new setup, but with Terry behind the dials it was very familiar,” says Okonski. “I can’t emphasize enough how much Terry feels like a fourth member [of the band] because of the space he’s curating, the energy he is bringing, and the production ideas.” The energy and sound created with the Colemine labelhead at the helm makes for a listening experience equally at home with ECM or Stones Throw catalogs.

From the rippling notes of the pastoral opener, “October,” Entrance Music is lush with anticipation, both band and listener feeling the tension in the tranquility — where the interplay of jazz improvisation and boom bap beats never shortchanges the musicianship but the talent is ever in service of the song.

While the band does not play together as often as they would like, not much time is needed for the three to lock in. Montgomery’s bass opening to “Passing Through” bends and moves with a singular meditative grace before piano and percussion joins the daylight filling a room with breath and light. If Magnolia resonated with last calls and late nights, Entrance Music counters with early mornings and first cups of coffee.

Whereas much of the debut resonates with his time in New York, Entrance Music “feels a little less ‘on the streets at 2 A.M.’ and a little more nature-based…a little more ethereal,” says Okonski. “It’s definitely age, environment, and family — all of that does come through in the music.” <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 439px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=3410800866/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://okonski.bandcamp.com/album/entrance-music">Entrance Music by Okonski</a></iframe>

The studio at 122 West Loveland Avenue was not an unfamiliar space for Steve Okonski, the leader of his eponymous trio Okonski. Ever since the Colemine label set up shop in Loveland, Ohio it has been a host to a number of groups passing through town, including Durand Jones and the Indications who all of this trio’s members have connections to. After setting aside some time in winter of 2020, Okonski, trained initially as a classical pianist, invited Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery and Aaron Frazer to work on an album that was initially planned to be beat driven and fully composed trio instrumentals. After finishing this first session with some improvisations, a second week was booked in the summer of 2021 to try and capture some more of that spontaneous energy. During this session, the tracks were all improvised and recorded live to a Tascam 388 during several late nights at the Colemine HQ. They were structured to allow the group’s collective intuition to fully shape the melodies and arcs of the music. The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

The studio at 122 West Loveland Avenue was not an unfamiliar space for Steve Okonski, the leader of his eponymous trio Okonski. Ever since the Colemine label set up shop in Loveland, Ohio it has been a host to a number of groups passing through town, including Durand Jones and the Indications who all of this trio’s members have connections to. After setting aside some time in winter of 2020, Okonski, trained initially as a classical pianist, invited Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery and Aaron Frazer to work on an album that was initially planned to be beat driven and fully composed trio instrumentals. After finishing this first session with some improvisations, a second week was booked in the summer of 2021 to try and capture some more of that spontaneous energy. During this session, the tracks were all improvised and recorded live to a Tascam 388 during several late nights at the Colemine HQ. They were structured to allow the group’s collective intuition to fully shape the melodies and arcs of the music. The album opens with Runner Up, where a triumphant yet melancholic melody in the piano leads to a more reserved B-section driven by the drums and bass of Frazer and Montgomery. As you journey through the remainder of the album you are met with a plethora of evoked and explored emotions. The calmness one has walking down a moonlit street after midnight, the connection one has for a person who comes into their world for just a moment or a lifetime, and the nerves and catharsis one feels when starting upon a new, unknown journey. Magnolia closes with Sunday, a track that was recorded late into the night at the close of their first recording session. Without the spontaneity of Sunday, the remainder of Magnolia would likely have never come to fruition. Magnolia was composed from the heart and from the spirit of those in the studio those late nights in Loveland. It is the culmination of an emotional and artistic release that was not afforded or recognized before the band sat at their instruments, and because of that it is introspective, meditative, spiritual, and new.

Colombian-born artist Juan Carlos Torres Alonso, aka OKRAA, presents his third sonic exploration on A Strangely Isolated Place titled, La Gran Corriente. This album marks a profound shift in Juan's creative journey, where themes of portals, the illusion of time, and the paradoxes of self-discovery converge into a powerful auditory experience.

Following a transformative visit to Bogotá in May 2023, Juan underwent an introspective journey that inspired a new direction in his music. This experience, which he describes as an encounter with "an infinite current behind or inside of everything," led to a complete reimagining of his work. Abandoning previous demos, Juan embraced a liberated creative process that was both challenging and exhilarating.

La Gran Corriente is characterized by its innovative production techniques, eschewing fixed grids and BPMs in favor of fluid, organic structures and combining influences from Juan’s other production alias, ‘Laudrup’. This approach not only opened up new creative possibilities but also led to numerous "happy accidents," resulting in a body of work that is as unpredictable as it is cohesive.

At the heart of the album lies a poem written by Juan during production, a text that echoes the themes woven throughout the music. Translated loosely to English, the poem reflects on the nature of reality and time, with lines like "the land of oblivion is not real" and "the great current reminisces; time is an illusion." These words serve as both a guide and a reflection of the album’s deeper meaning.

La Gran Corriente is a record that invites the listener to unlearn and to immerse themselves in a sonic current that is both infinite and transformative. It’s a testament to the power of creative reinvention and the relentless pursuit of deeper truths through music.

Featuring artwork by Peter Skwiot Smith, La Gran Corriente is available on gatefold colored vinyl 2LP, mastered by Taylor Deupree / 12k Mastering, with full release on 30th October 2024.

Venezuelan composer Oksana Linde presents Travesías, her second album released by Buh Records, featuring pieces created between 1986 and 1994 in her private studio in San Antonio de Los Altos, Venezuela. These compositions belong to the same creative period as the works included in her acclaimed debut album, Aquatic and Other Worlds (Buh, 2022). The pieces “Mundos Flotantes,” “Horizontes Lejanos,” and “Arrecifes en el espacio” were expressly composed for the concert Travesía Acuastral, presented by Linde in February 1991 at the Casa Rómulo Gallegos during the 3er Encuentro de la Nueva Música Electrónica. This event, produced by Maite Galán in collaboration with the group Musikautomatika, was a milestone in the development of an experimental electronic music scene in Venezuela, which at the time was one of the most vibrant in Latin America. The name Travesía Acuastral reflects the surreal imagination that inspired much of the artist’s work. These ideas, centered on extraordinary ways of perceiving reality, also connected with alternative meditation practices such as Reiki, which attracted Linde’s attention from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s. This period followed her departure from her career as a chemical researcher due to severe health issues. During this time, she composed a series of pieces for meditation sessions, four of which are included in this compilation: “Luciérnagas en los manglares,” “Estrellas I” and “II,” and “Kerepakupai vena.” The latter references two words from the Pemón Indigenous community in southeastern Venezuela, meaning Salto Ángel [Angel Falls]—the name of the world’s tallest waterfall, located in the state of Bolívar. Born in 1948 in Caracas to Ukrainian immigrant parents, Oksana Linde’s career is an example of resilience and innovation. After leaving her work as a chemist due to health problems, Linde turned to music, experimenting with synthesizers to create an evocative sound universe. She produced a substantial amount of recordings during the 1980s, many of which remained unpublished until the release of Aquatic and Other Worlds. Since then, Linde’s work has been compared to artists such as Isao Tomita and Suzanne Ciani. Travesías further establishes her as an essential figure in electronic music and continues to unveil one of the most fascinating musical archives of Latin American electronic music.

On Ola Tunji, Ola Tunji channel a luminous strain of spiritual and free jazz: collective meditations where Ornella Noulet’s fierce, tender saxophone rides a young quintet’s searching interplay toward something like secular devotion. Ola Tunji introduces a young French quintet, now rooted in Brussels, who treat spiritual and free jazz not as museum pieces but as living, breathing practices. Performing under the same name as their debut, Ola Tunji draw explicitly on lineages traced by John Coltrane, Pharoah Sanders and Albert Ayler, yet their music feels less like homage than continuation. At the centre stands 24‑year‑old Ornella Noulet on saxophones, whose sound can sear or soothe, splitting the air with grainy cries one moment and tracing supple, hymn‑like lines the next. Her phrasing carries the authority of a much older player, but the group’s dynamic makes clear that this is a collective endeavour: each piece is a conversation, not a vehicle for solo display. The ensemble around her amplifies and complicates that vision. Roman Raynaud’s guitar moves between haloed chords, wiry single‑note patterns and restrained distortion, shading the music from prayerful to urgent in a few strokes. At the piano, Loïc Lengagne supplies both harmonic ground and splintered commentary, alternating spacious, modal voicings with clustered runs that tug the improvisations into new shapes. Anthony Jouravsky’s bass acts as the music’s deep spine, sometimes walking or vamping with earthy swing, sometimes holding long tones that turn the band’s meditations into slow‑moving tides. Behind them, Egon Wolfson’s drums pivot fluidly from incantatory rolls and cymbal washes to fractured, free‑time exhortations, keeping the energy in constant, breathing motion. The band describe their pieces as “collective meditations,” and that ethos runs through the EP. Themes tend to emerge slowly, as if discovered rather than imposed, before opening into broad fields of improvisation where love, compassion, joy and serenity are less stated than enacted in sound. The quintet search together for a deeper sense of humanity, trusting that sustained listening and risk in the moment can summon something larger than any individual. Even at their most turbulent, there is a core of warmth and intention that anchors the music, a sense that the goal is not virtuoso display but shared elevation. Originally issued as a self‑released digital EP on Bandcamp, Ola Tunji quickly travelled far beyond its modest origins. International listeners tuned in to the group’s intensity and sincerity, with platforms such as All About Jazz praising the recording for its freshness and emotional clarity, while Bandcamp itself spotlighted it as a jazz highlight. What might have remained a local calling card instead became an underground word‑of‑mouth success, signalling the arrival of a band ready to step onto a larger stage. As the quintet prepare their first full‑length album, W.E.R.F. records now grants this remarkable debut its first vinyl pressing, giving these collective meditations the tangible weight they deserve and inviting a wider audience into their circle of sound.

Songs for Nothing was written upon Olan Monk’s return to the west coast of Ireland. The album is imbued with the influence of sean-nós singing, Irish language songs in the “old style” that often proclaim tales of love, loss and landscape; and also heavily indebted to the late Sinéad O’Connor’s confessional songwriting. Reconstructing these influences through their unique perspective has resulted in a fragmentary album veering between collaged pop, machinic rock and slow airs, “dedicated to Conamara and all who have called it home”. The western, Atlantic-facing edge of Ireland has a particular feeling and energy, one that permeates the release: the granite pulsates, the ocean and sky reflect intensities, seaweed rots on shingle shores, plants bloom, ancient trees come up for air from the drowned forest in Galway Bay, the sun splinters through the low clouds.

Released in 2021, Country Tropics was the first offering from Old Saw. At the time, no one was really certain who was behind the lush and textured arrangements of a soon to be beloved ensemble of New England based musicians. 5 years and 4 albums later, the group announced that their fall 2025 double album, The Wringing Cloth, would be their last. An outpouring of affection and adoration for what the group had accomplished followed, with many noting just how unique a space Old Saw occupied within an increasingly saturated sphere of Americana drone music It’s with great pride and enthusiasm that we announce this 5th year anniversary pressing of Country Tropics to coincide with the group making a U-turn and rather than closing up shop, they are planning their very first live performances slated for later this summer across the northeast US. Country Tropics has been highly in demand over the years and it feels appropriate to give it new life 5 years after its release, featuring deluxe packaging and wider global distribution. ***below album description from initial release*** Devotional music and its devotees all do a bit of "buying in"; that while one's on the ground reality may appear anything but celestial, through this music, one can reach ecstatic space, ecstatic peace. However, devotional music is not solely concerned with a skyward glance - what does it look like to raise up the rust, look upon fractured branches, gaze at the density of a low fog across a field? Instead of us looking up at the land, what if the land was looking back at us? Old Saw brings together a brigade of New England silt sifters to raise up the land not as excavators, but as preparators. Tending and caring for the simple mess that our world discards. Throughout "Country Tropics" four pieces, the crew stretches and bends chords to their resting place before setting forth towards a new one. Fiddle drone, wistful tape loops of pedal steel, pipe organ hums, and clattering bells call us to scenes of observation, a water tower, a mechanical bull rental agency, a back porch, a taxidermy shop, a local church choir, a garden with singing vines, voltage hum of the electric fence on Pulp mill bridge road. The funny thing about devotion is the absence of sight, of source. We place trust in the guide or guides to bring us to a place of seeing, feeling, and hearing. The music on "Country Tropics" calls out to those in search of such places, but also doesn't demand we conjure some fantastical, celestial vision of understanding. Rather, Old Saw points our gaze downward towards the terrafirma unconsidered, and guides our hands into the dirt.

“It rained more days than it didn’t. The beds of silt turned up notched pieces of quartzite and flint. Water came up through the floorboards in the sixteen-sided candle room. The house was empty except for what the flood brought in. Miles on the river of salt and silver in first light.”

***

The final document from the New England collective Old Saw is available as a 2xLP via Lobby Art Editions, with photography by Dylan Hausthor. Many of the known personnel from the last records circle back here on The Wringing Cloth to close out the ride with their signature fog and low burning momentum.

Like the sharpshooting carnival contestant who knows that the winning practice isn’t to aim for the red star itself, but rather to shoot out a perimeter around the star and thus remove it, Old Saw have historically dealt with forms by tracing their boundaries rather than going for the target outright. If the first three records hinted at but never touched song-shaped forms, The Wringing Cloth makes at least glancing contact while retaining the layered haze and drawl that threads their sound together.

Contrary to the often-used ambient tag, Old Saw shows up here in a markedly active and sculpted form — manipulating, unwinding, and pivoting with a strange and warped precision. What has always been uncanny about this music is that it arrives in a state at once familiar and obscured, like a memory weighed down with sensory information but no identifying details to place it. The Wringing Cloth walks off further into that geographical dream without time or language until it’s just a speck of light.

- JS

Oleksandr Yurchenko (1966—2020) was a Ukrainian musician and illustrator. In 1990s and 2000s he took part in different bands from Kyiv, such as Electricians, Yarn, Blemish, Suphina’s Little Beast etc., and he also collaborated with Svitlana Nianio and Katya Chilly. Yurchenko is one of the brightest representatives of the Ukrainian independent scene in 90s. Meanwhile, he is one of the most mysterious musicians of this era, being a private person, especially in the late 2000s, when Oleksandr had to leave music because of his illness, but he focused on doing book illustrations and graphic works. In 2010s some of his early records were published, and he was asked for an interview, but he refused, suffering from a serious disease at that time. In April 2020, Oleksandr Yurchenko died, leaving behind a great musical legacy. His main work, “Count to 100. Symphony #1,” was documented in August 1994. Oleksandr used strings instrument of his own invention. Yurchenko took the longboard to make the instrument, installed guitar pickups and 4 strings, and played on it with a bow. It was lost in the 2000s, but the musician remembered that it looked like a long zither. The recording session was held by Oleksandr at home, using guitar delay effects, loops, and Oreadna portable cassette recorder. He tuned the instrument in a special tone, improvising on it for 25 minutes. This drone symphony can be compared with the works of such avant-garde composers as Glenn Branca. However, it sounds innovative, especially for Ukrainian music. Despite it, Yurchenko could not publish this work officially in the 90s and made only a few copies for his own friends. At the beginning of the 2000s, he decided to edit the original version of the symphony. Oleksandr tried to restore the recording a bit, using some effects to make the sound more massive and clear. At the end of the work on this project, Yurchenko left this version in his archive but decided to publish the original recording in the late 2010s. “Intro” is the most mysterious recording from Yurchenko’s archive. Nobody could remember where and when it was recorded, so we can assume that it was made at the beginning of the 90s like a sound experiment because it was found on cassette tape with others recordings of the band Yarn. Also, there is a suggestion that it might be a Casio SK-1 sampler and some old Soviet keyboards. Merta Zara was a family project of Yurchenko and his wife, Svitlana Neznal. They had only one home recording session in 1994. Oleksandr was playing an electric cello of his own invention, and Svitlana was playing on mandolin and singing. As a result, they recorded only one track, "Dress," which appeared on the cassette compilation "Skhovaysya" in 1995. Apart from it, they recorded a few instrumental playbacks, which were found on cassette tape in 2021. Yurchenko was a big appreciator and knower of Central Asia’s music, and it influenced his own music, including Merta Zara, where traditional music and his melodist skills are intertwined. Playbacks were recorded in the beginning of 1995. It was also a home session, making instrumental playbacks for the album “Znayesh Yak? Rozkazhy” (Know How? Tell Me), recorded in collaboration with Svitlana Nianio. It should be assumed that Oleksandr used the same instrument and effects as he used during the “Count To 100” session. Some of these playbacks survived in his archive, but the rest of them were lost. The first one is an 8 minutes drone composition, which was played on a string instrument with a female voice on the background, and the second is the weird track where whirligig was used as an accompaniment. So, we can consider these recordings not only as playbacks but as Yurchenko’s solo stuff. Solo recordings of Oleksandr Yurchenko, made in 1994—1995, are paying attention, especially in experimenting with sound, searching the new ways of creative freedom, and they give a possibility to learn more about the Ukrainian experimental scene in the 90s.

Oliver Coates' Throb, shiver, arrow of time is a portal into somatic chiaroscuro, aglow with the embers of imperfect memories and smudged with the plumes of internal echoes, which augment in vast, mercurial dimensions. The ten compositions of Throb, shiver, arrow of time find weightless melodies soaring across after-image gradients, while Coates reaches further to collapse the digital into the analogue and vice versa, allowing serendipity to reorganize the material and push out against the confines of flatness.

Tennessee's Oliver James, a time-capsule of classic R&B sound, returns to the Colemine label with two new tunes pressed onto one must-have 45. The A-side features his first new track since 2022. '1-2-3' is an upbeat soul stomper à la Memphis and Stax. Nick DeVan and Vincent John (Eraserhood Sound) co-wrote the track; they finalized the instrumentals but were stumped on the lyrics. That's when James was called in, and he used his time working at a church to shape the lyrics that eventually became this number. The B-side was a collaborative effort with Nashville's gritty-funk ensemble The Gripsweats. It's an earnest song with lyrics inspired by James & DeVan's commiseration. "I'm no stranger to love that I used to know'," laments James; his favorite line of the song. Cushioned by lush string and horn arrangements, 'Nothing Is Forever' is a melancholy and heartfelt foil to the A.

Tennessee's Oliver James, a time-capsule of classic R&B sound, returns to the Colemine label with two new tunes pressed onto one must-have 45. The A-side features his first new track since 2022. '1-2-3' is an upbeat soul stomper à la Memphis and Stax. Nick DeVan and Vincent John (Eraserhood Sound) co-wrote the track; they finalized the instrumentals but were stumped on the lyrics. That's when James was called in, and he used his time working at a church to shape the lyrics that eventually became this number. The B-side was a collaborative effort with Nashville's gritty-funk ensemble The Gripsweats. It's an earnest song with lyrics inspired by James & DeVan's commiseration. "I'm no stranger to love that I used to know'," laments James; his favorite line of the song. Cushioned by lush string and horn arrangements, 'Nothing Is Forever' is a melancholy and heartfelt foil to the A.

A note from Olivier I was waiting for the bus to arrive at the stop when the rain started pouring. I quickly escaped into a chapel nearby, and that’s where the idea of this album came to be. Inside the chapel, I was reminded of the scent of Mauritius, where my father was from, and the pillars of dampen woods mixed with the ritualistic frankincense. The rain continued to hit violently on the metallic church roof as the road outside grew overwhelmed with angry drivers, honking their way through, their frustrations echoing through streets of skyscrapers in Hong Kong. They sounded like a piece of nostalgic happening, infusing sounds that I was most familiar with in this sacred architecture. This was when I decided to compose a series of work, featuring eclectic sounds of my city. Also inspired by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto, whom I revere, his exercise of restraint and Eastern philosophy led me to explore the ambience that made up my daily life, experimenting and reconstructing them with familiar instrumentations. In “Tropical Church", you will experience music composed of piano, ambient electronics, shakuhachi, Chinese yuan, guzheng and spoken words, which I think represent my feelings for home — Hong Kong. And to me, home is an old church that harbours a myriad of unspoken emotions, flowing from the West to East. Complex history hidden within the dampen pillars, the sounds of the city and the footsteps of the everyday people that liven up the streets. Most notably in the first track, “I am afraid of”, voice recordings of anonymous strangers were collected describing their deepest fears. I’m most touched by the answers as they’ve shown me the same fears of death, love and being alone we all share.

On this LP you hear two kanteles built by the Master Luthier Rauno Nieminen. One of them is a copy of a historical instrument built by the folk poet Ontrei Malinen in 1833. It is carved from single piece of pine, and it has five bronze strings. The other one is carved from a single piece of spruce. Its lowest seven strings are bronze, and highest three strings are English iron. On most tracks the two kanteles are played simultaneously. For me, playing these instruments is searching for meaningful ways to interact with wooden objects from another time. By choosing a set of 5 to 15 frequencies and plucking them, I'm able to think, feel, and imagine more than I could without the instruments. the patterns that emerge from the vibrating strings give temporal shapes to thoughts. The music on this album is improvised. It was recorded at home after dark and outdoors in daylight during 2020-2022. No overdubs or edits were made afterwards. On the last track the kantele is accompanied by detritus gathered from the forest floor. Tuokioita translates to moments. This music is about coloring time. Dedicated to Mia, who also came up with the album title. - Olli Aarni

led by guitarist seiji hano, the jazz group om released only one album — solar wind, a landmark work that stands as one of the greatest achievements in japanese ethnic jazz. now, this masterpiece is finally being reissued.

their sound, seemingly a response from japan to ecm artists such as oregon and codona active during the same period, is refined yet imbued with a distinctly japanese sense of wabi-sabi — melancholic, nostalgic, and deeply resonant.

from “windmill,” featured on studio mule’s compilation midnight in tokyo vol.2, to every other track, solar wind is a flawless album with not a single weak moment — a true masterpiece of japanese jazz.

With their incredible fifth album, OM wisely expand on the dilated visions of their mighty 2009 LP 'God Is Good'. Assisted by long-time engineering collaborator Steve Albini, among others, on 'Advaitic Songs' they incorporate richer, ornate strains of string drone and vocals into their sharply defined aesthetic while remaining devoted to the stripped down, ritualist practice and near-religious philosophy which has taken them thus far. It's a stunning achievement, using doom-drone as a bedrock on which to erect totems of timelessly spiritual affect and purpose. From the vaulted reverb space of opener 'Addis' to the closing funeral march of 'Haqq al-Yaqin' the clarity of their intent and execution is just astonishing, creating the sort of rarified sonic space in which it almost only feels right to cleanse oneself before entering. 'Advaitic Songs' is the exceptional document of a duo dawning on the peak of their imaginative powers and at once progressing themselves, and their related scene with genuinely progressive, yet elemental majesty. Strongly recommended.