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Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London’s Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on the esteemed label Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her alias, Whatever The Weather, for a more impressionistic, inward gaze. On Whatever The Weather II, rich worlds of layered textures flow seamlessly from hypnotic ambience, to mottled rhythms, to cut-up collages of diaristic field recordings. The result is a uniquely fractured beauty, born from a compelling union of organic and human elements, processed through a variety of digital and analogue methods.
James titled Whatever The Weather pieces based on an innate sense of their “emotional temperature” at the time of recording, but she notes that often, upon revisiting them, they will feel somewhere else entirely on the thermometer; such are the whims of the environment. Compared to the album’s predecessor and its Antarctic imagery, though, Whatever The Weather II is a warmer outing, as signaled by the desert clime of its cover photo which is once again shot by Collin Hughes, and the package designed by Justin Hunt Sloane. Also common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis (aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James’ complexities, to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience.
“1°C” opens the album with James speaking through thick static, idly pining, “Bit chilly, innit… Can’t wait for it to be summer,” as a bed of granular tones and scattered vocal samples emerges. This ineffable mood carries through “3°C”, where high-frequency oscillations flutter across the stereo field, a vigorous, minimal kick rattles through a broken speaker cone, and spacious synth harmonies burst and fade into mist. “20°C”, the longest entry in the collection, daydreams through a din of conversation and minor-key chords, before blossoming into a series of glitchy, staccato percussion patterns. “8°C” rides a sole, wandering keyboard line adorned with minimal counterpoint. In these moments, James effortlessly draws order from a diffusion of ideas, and an air of playful spontaneity creates the common thread.
In discussing this project, James notes that the first Whatever The Weather LP (Ghostly, 2022) was created concurrently with Reflection (Hyperdub, 2021), and that there was some degree of stylistic cross-pollination between her two musical frames of mind. At the time, she shared her feelings on genre with Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne, noting, “Yeah, I might look different from most people who make IDM, and I’m from a different time period, but I don’t really care about the term being negative or positive. I feel my music is IDM and I do my own spin on it, being inspired by other stuff and fusing it all together.” This go around, she dedicated several months of focused energy to the alias, and to the development of its distinctions: no collaborators, fewer beats, and a process based primarily on instinct and improvisation.
The album’s singular sound arises from James’ favoring of hardware over software, as her battery of synths is modulated, transformed, and reassembled through an array of pedals with few or no overdubs, effectively anchoring each arrangement to its precise moment of creation. The greatest effort in post-production was given to sequencing, on which the artist places the utmost importance; taken as a whole, the suite ebbs and flows with a fitting sense of seasonal flux and naturalistic grace.
The final act of Whatever The Weather II offers some of its most affecting moments, beginning with “9°C”, where the haunting echoes of children on a Tokyo playground break through intermittent bursts of static, steeped in a bath of off-kilter, bubbling tones. Here, James displays one of her many strengths: a fearless approach to sonic collage, elevated by ambitious experimentation and pacing that manages plenty of surprises. Never content to remain in the same sonic space for too long, “15°C” follows with soft pads and glistening countermelodies, abruptly joined by a jarring, cyclical rhythm that mimics a loose part inside a whirring machine. Like much of James’ work, it bears an internal logic that only makes sense in her hands.
Closing track, “12°C”, drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness. In its final moments we hear, for the first time, a languid acoustic guitar and gentle, finger-tapped beat over her pitch-shifted voice, a callback that ends the album with wry ambiguity, and a hint of more to be found beyond the horizon. Whatever The Weather II is full of such passages, where formal composition appears like a film in negative, and conventions are upturned with wit, intelligence, and skill.
Black Editions presents the expanded and definitive edition of White Heaven’s brilliant third album Next to Nothing. Originally released in 1994 by Tokyo’s Noon Disk, the full album was only ever available in a limited vinyl pressing of 250 copies. Since then, it has become one of the most sought-after artifacts of the 90’s Japanese underground and is regarded as a highpoint of Japanese psychedelic rock. Led by vocalist, songwriter and conceptualist You Ishihara, the album finds the group in a phase of refinement. Taking a more intricate and open approach, the music is buoyant and light yet at the same time, nocturnal and introspective. Next to Nothing marks the first time guitarists Michio Kurihara and Soichiro Nakamura appear together on record after having separate turns as lead guitar on the group’s first two albums. The pairing is revelatory as they weave luminous melodic lines, sometimes in parallel, sometimes opening into sustained intricate counterpoint. Bassist Koji Shimura and drummer Ken Ishihara shuffle and swing in parallel with a fluid, sinuous rhythm, while flourishes of synthesizer, mellotron and the introduction of Go Hirano on keyboards and piano deepens the group’s sound with orchestral colors and a soft cinematic haze. Across the album, clear, shimmering guitar tones and gentle chord progressions are layered with bright arpeggiated figures and darker minor-key passages. The songs develop through gradual changes in tone and dynamics as Ishihara's voice reveals a gentle yearning and wistfulness. An extended version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “The Look of Love” serves as the album’s entrancing focal point; Stretching the song’s familiar lounge-pop swagger, the group renders it as a slow-burning, psychedelic meditation crackling with electricity as it drifts into the night. Available for the first time on vinyl in over 30 years and for the first time ever digitally (a truncated four song CD EP was also released in 1994). Remastered and expanded to include a second LP featuring three previously unreleased song versions cut at 45RPM. Presented in a heavy tip-on gatefold with metallic and ink pigment foil stamping, spot colors as well as a gatefold insert. House in a custom vellum wrap with a mirror metallic sticker seal. Lacquers cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Mastering, pressed at Record Technology Inc.
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.
The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.
“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”
The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.
Where will the improvisation take place?
How will that space shape the sounds being made?
How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?
How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?
Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?
For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.
Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.
Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.
Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”
On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.
That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.
In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.
The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.
“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.
Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.
Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.
And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.
The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.
“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”
The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.
Where will the improvisation take place?
How will that space shape the sounds being made?
How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?
How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?
Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?
For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.
Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.
Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.
Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”
On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.
That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.
In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.
The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.
“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.
Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.
Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.
And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.
Disc 1 contains 4 new WW songs (1 song remixed and remastered), Disc 2 contains re-editing of up-and-coming German creators / skaters and DJ slingshots, and Koshiro Hino (YPY) + Yosuke Yukimatsu (YY). Includes reconstruction by the new unit YYPYY. In fact, Wicked Witch, who has been playing music for a long time, has desolate acid funk, "Funky by U" like Indian base music, "Under Your Spell 2016" and stoned. The condition is overwhelming (I do not know what the aim is again this time). DJ Slyngshot is an experimental and 80s flavour hard beat re-edited with a mix of early Chicago house / old school / techno. On the other hand, Hino and Yukimatsu are metamorphosis tunes that dragged WW into another dark side (
And so we come to round 4 of the Long Trax series, the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glazed pads and spicy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.
It's time for the 5th album of the Long Trax series, featuring six new tracks produced in an A/B style, cut onto 3 vinyl records and compiled onto a single CD. Staying all-hardware, with drooping synth pads and Rhodes piano, rhythm machines, space echo and spring reverb, and featuring 3 new narrators here to put us in our place. Stay independent, and anti-AI. All music by Will Long Artwork by Tsuji Aiko Mastered by Stephan Mathieu A Long Trax Productions release
It's time for the 5th album of the Long Trax series, featuring six new tracks produced in an A/B style, cut onto 3 vinyl records and compiled onto a single CD. Staying all-hardware, with drooping synth pads and Rhodes piano, rhythm machines, space echo and spring reverb, and featuring 3 new narrators here to put us in our place. Stay independent, and anti-AI. All music by Will Long Artwork by Tsuji Aiko Mastered by Stephan Mathieu A Long Trax Productions release
Arriving at the third edition of the jungle series, we're relying yet once again on oldschool techniques, limited memory, and an absolute defiance of progression, unless we consider consistent values of anarchy a benchmark. A testament to tenement tagging, with bulletin synth lines, rubberized basslines, and an ever-changing palette of drum breaks, here we arrive at a place where we once were, and never were. Limited edition 12", mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Edition of 200 copies.
Following up on 2024's Acid Trax double album on Comatose, acid house music is back with Acid Devil, a 2x12" and digital self-published release. Created strictly with an 808 and modified 303, it's a more extreme range, but following the classic format of the acid sound, pioneered in Chicago. The 2x12" is limited to 200 copies and available as reservation only, with the final shipping date TBA, around summer 2026. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung.
視聴-Acid Trax N (All Alkalis are Bases but All Bases are not Alkalis) remix by DJ Sprinkles
視聴-Acid Trax B (Acid Dog) remix by DJ Sprinkles
視聴-Acid Trax A
視聴-Acid Trax H
視聴-Acid Trax S (w/DJ Sprinkles)
A new exclusive duo of A/B sides pressed to vinyl, in a limited edition; "Behind the Times" is a forerunner of the upcoming full length "Long Trax 4", to be released in 2025.
Packaged in a classic reverse board sleeve, with original artwork by Tsuji Aiko, pressed on 180g black wax. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Limited edition CD, self-released and independent. Comes in a reverse board, 6 panel package including all 6 drawings.
Includes the tracks Chartreuse, Rose, Lavender, Lime, Grey, and Violet.
Limited edition CD, self-released and independent. Comes in a reverse board, 6 panel package including all 6 drawings.
Includes the tracks Turquoise, Black, Stone, Gold, Silver, and Pearl.
Sublime private-press piano improvisations channeled from another world by Willem Nyland. Remastered from the original tapes and reissued for the first time, with in-depth liner notes by Matt Marble of the American Museum of Paramusicology.
A Columbia-educated chemist by profession and a self-taught pianist by affinity, Willem Nyland (1890-1975) is known as a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Greek-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff.
In the mid/late 1960s, a split with Gurdjieff led Nyland to start his own group in upstate New York. There, after a Friday night lecture on “The Work” and a shot of brandy, Nyland would launch into remarkable piano improvisations on a specially tuned baby grand, sometimes playing for over an hour. Each improvisation was meticulously recorded and cataloged, a major part of Nyland’s teachings. 16 of these recordings were released as standalone LPs on Nyland’s own Gauge Hill Press, with artwork by Hungarian American decorative artist Ilonka Karasz, Nyland’s wife of over 50 years.
These records, with their cascading, deeply emotional playing and beautiful cover art, have become highly coveted by collectors and “paramusicologists.” Each contains depths of spiritual information and lyrical, almost visual instrumental storytelling. Nyland deftly and subtly shifts moods and tones throughout these truly inspired extended improvisations.
Piano Studies 337 is a particularly tempestuous performance that Nyland himself recommended to Ansel Adams as a good starting place for his music. So we’ve teamed up with Psychic Sounds and Nyland’s family to bring #337 to the world. Remastered from the original tapes and pressed to high-quality vinyl at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, the record includes extensive liner notes and faithful reproduction of the original artwork. Hopefully the first of more to come!!!!