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Timekeeper is a collection of temporal impressions. Each track is entitled with a time of day, mapping the ways that changes in energy and emotion form a continuously shifting sense of time. Using a palette of acoustic recordings and digital synthesis, each piece depicts either a temporal field (expansive, unpredictable), wave (swelling momentums) or rope (singular linearity).

A vibrant abstract bossa nova sound in the vein of Tropicália, incorporating hip-hop, soul, reggae, and more!

In addition to Céu, the album was recorded at Linear Labs Studio in Los Angeles, produced by Adrian Younge, one of the founders of Jazz Is Dead, and Pupillo, drummer of the legendary eight-piece Brazilian mixed hip-hop band Nação Zumbi. The album was recorded at Linear Labs Studio in Los Angeles. The album features American female rapper LadyBug Mecca, French senegalese singer anaiis, Loren Oden, a member of the psychedelic soul band Venice Dawn led by Adrian Young, Thee Sacred Souls on vocals Jensine Benitez, French keyboardist and producer Hervé Salters (General Elektriks), and Brazilian national treasure Marcos Valle. Nominated for a Grammy Award in the World Music category, this is Céu's first ambitious album in five years, which continues to captivate audiences at prestigious festivals around the world.

A one-sided 7” single! A great and rare song, never before reissued, an early 80s electric molam classic produced by Surin Phaksiri. This release celebrates “Classic Productions by Surin Phaksiri 2: Molam Gems from the 1960s-80s”, an upcoming EM Records compilation spotlighting this legendary producer; however, this song will not be available on the compilation, so get the vinyl or DL, and don’t miss this groovily swaying paean to the pick-up truck share taxi, performed by Chabaphrai Namwai and molam queen Banyen Rakkaen. Remastered and lacquer cut by D&M Berlin, with English and Japanese lyrics translations. Hop in and let’s go! 

Footnotes: 
‘Songthaew’ is a passenger vehicle in Thailand and Laos adapted from a pick-up or a larger truck and used as a share taxi or bus. This molam tune “Lam Phloen Songthaew Fan Club” is about the period in which Songthaew began to appear as a new means of transportation for people in Thailand.

In 1975, singers Bruce Ruffin, Bobby Davis and Dave Collins - the latter of reggae duo Dave and Ansel Collins - came together to form Chain Reaction, a short-lived UK harmony soul group who recorded their only album Indebted To You for Gull in 1977. This sought after session includes their popular version of Lamont Dozier ‘Why Can’t We Be Lovers’, the sweet soul single ‘’Never Lose Never Win’ and the non album single ‘This Eternal Flame’. Rare groove alert: The electric funk of ‘Hogtied’ is the top of the crème here, with a bass line reminiscent of Aaron Neville ‘Hercules’, a sumptuous clavinet and a majestic wah-wah guitar.

The Chakachas were a Belgian based group of Latin soul studio musicians. Also known as Les Chakachas or Los Chakachas. They started out in the late 50s, recording a playful mixture of Latin music, jazz, and European-style exotica. This same titled album is a much sought after album amongst the connoisseurs.The song "Stories" on this album was featured on the soundtrack of the very popular game Grand Theft Auto V. This song was also covered by the band CAKE.Get your latin groove on.

Lysergic weather front top-loaded via betamax’s hippocampus trapdoor melding Catto’s studio into a rainbow of textures, formless places, and emotional sonics awash with resonant poy-rhythms. Champagne Dub is a mission in space-dub whose ‘crew’ took a few too many wrong turns. “We are here to bring raw metamorphic rock-rituals that escaped our minds.” Mr Noodles, the Peruvian Performance artist cuts an uncomfortable figure in the recording studio. Kinetic energy flowing from a spring of mysteriously paranoid fits of spontaneous movement, Noodles is vulnerable and dangerous. Cryptic words are spunked from the subconscious and lie scattered across the band’s rhythmic engine-room. Ruth Goller’s bass tones geometrically tumble over the cluttered floor of Betamax’s dirty drums and percussion. Turn to Ed Briggs, the medieval sound scientist, convulsing in the corner as his unreliable, self-assembled electronics drain the remaining energy from what seems to be a living but barely-live power source, spewing their sonic debris at the spinning wheels of tape delay.

Rio Arriba is the sophomore album from Chancha Via Circuito, who molds local South American rhythms into global artistry. Rio Arriba bubbles up from the Andes like percussive lava, seething as it is soothing. Layers of drums play out like water and earth battling heat - heat brought by Chancha Via Circuito. Chancha has forged a path from his town outside the urban sprawl of Buenos Aires in the east of Argentina up across the border with Bolivia and into the Northern hemisphere where he's bringing new fans to native drum traditions. In his first release, Rodante, Chancha took cumbia into uncharted territory retrofitting the Latin rhythm for a worldly audience. With Rio Arriba, South American folklore takes the reins and, under Chancha’s steady hand, obscure backwoods rhythms take on a top shelf lifestyle as folklore hits the club. Cumbia made Chancha’s first album Rodante a stand out, Rio Arriba takes his sound primal, rooted in rhythm, but worldwide in scope. With recent remixes of The Ruby Suns (Sub Pop) and Gotan Project (Ya Basta/XL Recordings), Chancha proves his production can cross continents and pollinate. Rio Arriba annihilates the obvious - it's a fresh breeze from the city of good air flooding the urban habitat, sending you dancing upstream.

At once a hazy relic and a digital snapshot of the human experience, Your Day Will Come is the debut album from Chanel Beads, arriving April 19 via Jagjaguwar. The remarkable project announces the arrival of New York-based musician Shane Lavers as a new force in experimental music. After his 2022 singles “Ef” and “True Altruism” marked his breakout on corners of the internet, Your Day Will Come sees Lavers evolving his uncanny and dreamlike sound which he achieves through layering synthetic and real instruments. His songs feel like a memory in which you can’t distinguish between what actually happened or what was a false reproduction in your mind—although the burning emotion remains intact. Your Day Will Come sees Lavers capturing the many contradictions of modern existence and the strange infiniteness of the digital world, as he searches for truth and faith amid competing realities. Though he incorporates the scrappy sonics of post-punk, the gripping sentimentality of pop tunes, and the spectral artifice of electronic music, he blurs lines through unconventional song structures that build into transcendental climaxes. As he intentionally prints his songs down to embed fried artifacts and ghostly remains, the resulting songs have a time-collapsing quality, both transitory and timeless. Lavers first started writing Your Day Will Come during a period of reflection in November 2022. Stuck quarantining in his Brooklyn apartment, he found himself wanting to dig down into the core of who he truly was, apart from fleeting trends or rebounding cultural moments. So during that strange time between winter holidays, he started to write songs that wrestled with an early loss that had rippled throughout his life, foundational to the way he sees himself and the way he relates to others. Many of the lyrics that remained were in response to both internal and external conflicts. They were words that he had to speak aloud to uncover the reality of the situation. Throughout, Lavers weaves in contributions from his live bandmates, singer-songwriter Maya McGrory (Colle) and experimental instrumentalist Zachary Paul, who offer their own layers of feeling that add to the huge emotionality of the album. Accustomed to performing in various bands when he lived in Seattle, Shane began to strip everything back when he started playing shows around NYC, working to locate what felt worthy for him to perform. That mindset informed the writing of the record, in which Lavers forced himself to only keep what felt the most necessary to say. “There was a filter to this record,” Lavers says. “If it didn’t move me while performing, then I couldn’t make it into a song. As much as I wanted to make something that was cool to the touch, I had to make something that made me feel something.” Now, his live shows see all three performers weaving together in absolute cathar

Across 8 concise vignettes, Chantal Michelle alchemizes acoustic instrumentation with a spectrum of layered feedback and field sounds, depicting fractured beauty amongst a precarious reality. Michelle’s work is characterized by intoxicating juxtaposition and enriched with an array of source material to construct immersive narrative. Much of the work here was recorded during her time in New York City, perhaps a pre-requisite to the heightened tension at play. Opening with lucid choral vocals, a mysteriously seductive anaesthesia disseminates before evaporating into surging feedback, vocals dissolving as quickly as they appeared. It’s this oscillation between states that permeates throughout the work. Whether it’s the esoteric rumbling of acoustic drones, or the radiant fusion of distorted chords amongst the warming sounds of tropical atmospheres, moments of serenity are conjured up in a space so bliss that their endings incite an immediate nostalgia. Fleeting melodies are pierced by shattering cries of feedback; gossamer tones engulfed in saturated noise. Amongst the instrumentation, buzzing field sounds tremor with hyperreal peculiarity and hallucinations shape noise into sounds of the familiar; the rumbling of an overheard aeroplane or the whirring of distant grasshoppers. Similarly, recurring motifs elicit a false sense of security in their subliminal familiarity, soon exposed as echoes, a reverberation of what was left behind. At the approaching climax, the blissful onset anaesthesia has worn off, interrupted by a powerful chorus of deep, gothic synthesis that fuels post-apocalyptic fever dreams, an unnerving and mesmerising symphony. The unresolved tension leaves us in a state of delirium, questioning if the tranquillity we experienced was ever really there. Michelle was immersed in Fleur Jaeggy’s 'The Water Statues' whilst recording, and its imprint is woven into the sonic fabric of 'Broken to Echoes'; a sublime liminal dream-state, pervaded by haunting visions. It’s a view of the world captured from inside the enclosure of a cell membrane. Through translucent mesh, we see the billowing tension of our surroundings, protected only by the most delicate walls.

Labels Theory Therapy and co:clear come together to release the debut album by Italy-based artist CHANTSSSS. ‘Shyness’ suggests something subtle, intricate and ethereal – but it also demands your attention. Over 10 tracks of spacious, sub-aquatic ambience, CHANTSSSS pulls you deep into his vaporous sound world. The songs themselves, a blend of ambient pop, chamber music and pulsing low end rhythms, feel cloaked in mystery. Layers of reverb and zonked vocals float in the atmosphere, moving between and through one another, mist on mist. It’s not necessarily a quiet record, the low end can shake a room if you turn the volume up, but it does feel extremely intimate – proof that some art speaks loudest in its quietest moments. We acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as the traditional custodians of the Country upon which Theory Therapy and Low End Theorists was founded, and recognise that sovereignty has not been ceded. We pay our respects to Elders, past, present and emerging.

The album also features remixes by Kuniyuki, Bartosz Kruczynski, Knopha, Yoshiharu Takeda and more. The album "We hear the last decades dreaming" (SAGCD035) is the first release under the Chari Chari name in 18 years and marks the return of the independent label "Seeds And Ground" by Kaoru Inoue, who has been active as a DJ and producer for over 25 years. In addition to a series of remix EPs (three analog releases) from "We hear the last decades dreaming" (SAGCD035), the first album under the Chari Chari name in 18 years, a new album with additional unreleased tracks has already arrived.

The fascinating team of remixers includes Kuniyuki, a treasure from the north (Sapporo) who has been active overseas, and Chida, a veteran house DJ who has opened up DJ gigs overseas on his own. Chida, a veteran house DJ who has been active in the underground scene for a long time, and Mamazu (Hole & Holland), a DJ/producer who has been very active in the underground scene in recent years. The album also includes two tracks of self-rework by Kaoru Inoue himself.


Also based in Warsaw, Poland, Takeda's rave-revival sound production under the name Earth Trax has become a hot topic, and under his own name, he has been releasing excellent new music on the popular German digger label Growing Bin. "Bartosz Kruczyński, who is based in Warsaw, Poland, and has released two excellent New Age-style albums under the name Earth Trax, and Knopha, a popular underground DJ in Xiamen, China, whose two previously released analog EPs sold out in an instant. The album also includes a number of reworks by overseas artists.

Kaoru Inoue has been a DJ / producer for over 25 years. Following the latest sold-out album, the latest EP, which was inspired by the traditions of the folkways, was released on vinyl from the New Age division of the famous Portuguese label . It is a work that explores one's love for ancient sounds, rituals, and the power of healing music, and includes all five songs produced in Tokyo. After all, a soundtrack full of different abilities that seamlessly travels between the sound of "there", reality and fantasy, different dimensions, and even the equinoctial week.

Awesome Alga Marghen re-release presenting "Illuminations", or Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti duo interactions, illuminated with dim red lights. In early 1970 Morton Subotnick asked Charlemagne Palestine to join his soon to be created Media Department at the new “Dream School of the Future” endowed by the Disneys to be called the California Institute of the Arts. Charlemagne and Simone Forti met there in 1970, when La Monte Young asked them to arrange a California concert for Pandit Pran Nath. They decided to try an improvisation session together and Charlemagne invited Simone the first time to the electronic music studio where he worked regularly. Their medium blended as a play of interacting sound waves and solid matter in motion as Charlemagne and Simone shared energy and focus. The three previously unreleased recordings on this LP were made between October and December 1971. The first take titled "Illumination" is for two voices moving in the space with small bells and crystal glasses while Simone Forti plays the molimo, a corrugated tube meant for connecting the gas stove. The second take titled "Wed Oct 13th 1971" has Simone and Charlemagne in a song dialogue as animals do. It was also at Cal Arts that Charlemagne Palestine first encountered a Bosendorfer Imperial Piano of Vienna. He played it often as Simone danced during their "Illuminations". Take three is a song sang in falsetto while playing the Bosendorfer Imperial in an arpeggiated style that predates the "strummings". Listening to these "Three Takes" 40 years later they oooozza timeless carefree mystical magical dreamy atmosphere that evoked the times of the late '60s to early '70s in Charlemagne and Simone part of the California Art Scene. Illuminations were a unique open spontaneous form of performance, ritual and prayer. Edition limited to 365 copies with an essay by both Charlemagne Palestine and Simone Forti, as well photos of the performances reproduced on the LP front sleeve.

Charlemagne Palestine's newest record pairs two energetic works for carillon bells. On side A, a new piece recorded at his studio in Belgium - a high-ceiling, stuffed animal paradise he calls Charleworld - among friends and divinities. On the flip side, Blank Forms Editions' very first and long out-of-print release appears on vinyl for the first time: a cathartic street recording of his 2018 musical eulogy for his late friend Tony Conrad, performed on the bells of St. Thomas Episcopal Church where the two first met. Two mesmerizing "klanggdedangggebannggg" sessions in the Quasimodo of 53rd Street's unmistakable improvisatory style.

Originally released by Sonnabend Gallery in NY in 1974, Charlemagne Palestine's most masterpiece and extremely rare work is a famous masterpiece. A historic masterpiece that begins with the ecstatic meditative organ drone "Two Fiftsh" that lasts about 19 minutes, and the tremolo playing method of the piano echoes endlessly and beautifully. With the remastered specifications released in 2015, the sound quality has been further improved.

"The first vinyl release of Charlemagne Palestine's Godbear, a 1987 solo piano recording originally scheduled to sit alongside Sonic Youth and Swans in the catalogue of Glenn Branca's Neutral Records but eventually released on CD by the Dutch Barooni label in 1998. Although Palestine has worked in an enormous variety of media, his long form performances for solo piano are perhaps his most acclaimed works. Palestine immersed himself in the study of overtones throughout the 1960s, working first with carillons and then with electronic synthesis, searching for the 'golden sound'. Beginning in the early 1970s he continued his exploration of the complexities hidden within seemingly simple tones and intervals on the Bösendorfer Imperial Grand Piano, the 'Rolls Royce' of pianos. With the piano's sustain pedal constantly depressed, Palestine hammers out rapidly repeated notes, allowing a complex cloud of overtones to rise above the percussive texture of the struck keys. Initially working with simple intervals such as octaves and fifths, Palestine gradually expanded the harmonic range of his piano performances over the years, while still retaining their ecstatically single-minded nature. Revisiting his signature piano style in 1987 after several years focusing on visual art, Godbear presents three distinct variations that demonstrate the development of his piano music after the classic recordings of the early 1970s. Occupying the entire first side, 'The Lower Depths' stages a slow descent from the piano's mid-range to the Bösendorfer's cavernous additional low octave, building into a thundering swarm of booming overtones. Breaking entirely with the stereotype of clinical minimalism, Palestine's journey to the depths embraces passages of darkly romantic melody before slowly ascending to its starting point. The version of 'Strumming Music' performed here condenses the developmental arc of the piece into eleven minutes, fanning out from a single octave to a complex harmonic wash that calls to mind Palestine's enthusiasm for Debussy and Ravel. 'Timbral Assault' is like an evil twin of 'Strumming Music,' transforming its insistency and harmonic complexity into aggressive intensity and creeping dissonance, foreshadowing Palestine's later collaborations with Christoph Heemann. A classic release, and one that, because of the variety of approaches surveyed within, serves as an ideal introduction to Palestine's ecstatic and mysterious sound world" --Francis Plagne. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Presented in a deluxe gatefold sleeve designed by Stephen O'Malley.

«I met Simone through Dr. Richard Alpert, a professor at Columbia University who went to India to study with a Hindu guru and he himself became a guru afterwards called Baba Ram Dass. Coming back to US he brought Pandit Pran Nath with him. It was a time when everybody was experimenting. All came with a lot of orientalism because people were into timelessness, meditation and being stoned. It was in that atmosphere that I met Simone because she also knew Pran Nath. Around that time I moved from NY to California to work with electronic music at the newly invented school California Institute of the Arts. Simone was also living in LA and even though she was not officially connected to CalArts she knew many of the artists who were teaching there. It was in the halls of CalArts that Simone first approached me around the possibility to have Pran Nath invited to LA. In summer 1970 Simone was invited by Allan Kaprow (one of the Deans of CalArts) to do an evening of dance at the Pasadena Art Museum. One day she came to me and said “I’ve been given this commission to do a piece and I’d like to do it with music and I was wondering if you would want to do it with me?”. So I replied “Well why don’t you come to the electronic studio where I work and see how it goes? I’ll put on some sounds, we’ll make some space and see how you feel”. It immediately clicked!!!! So we decided to perform a duet together. In January 1971 in Pasadena we did our first “Illuminationss”. I played the piano, I sang a little bit, she moved a little bit when I was singing, I moved when I was singing. A Jewishy-kinf-of singing. Not only singing, but singing and running, singing and falling. I did all what eventually became my “Body Music”. Simone was also doing it but coming from a different tradition. All of a sudden we were doing a new kind of jamming together. Everybody in the audience loved it because it was so dreamy and they found amazing how a man and a woman can act in that strange, very dreamlike oriental way as in trance,,,,,together. This kind of collaboration between man and woman was uncommon at that time. Mostly other artists were doing very structural works while our performances were totally like we were on magicness drugs. Our performances had certain fixed elements like the piano or some electronics. It turned out we liked red lights so we started to always do it in red light. We liked to do it in a resonant spaces. It became more an approach than a piece, because there were never two Illuminations that were alike.» - Charlemagne Palestine «The aspect of Charlemagne’s music that most inspired my imagination was his melodies. Sometimes their texture of repetitions and evolving variations are so close that the term melody doesn’t seem to apply. What most determined our “Illuminations” was Charlemagne’s way of letting the elements in the music develop only very gradually. Once, just before a performance, Charlemagne sang to me, “Simoney don’t worry, you will dance and sing all right.” And of course I did as we walked arm in arm circling the wide-open space, a grand piano to one side shining black and covered with Teddy Bear deities, Charlemagne reflecting his childhood time as devotional cantor, and I, my childhood time striding along in the Tuscan hills, belting out Italian folksongs with my cousins. And sometimes when Charlemagne drew clear, high tones from his brandy snifter we would play our voices together more softly. Our recurring melodies were mostly Charlemagne’s. But I brought one too, with a song about not drifting away into the beyond.» - Simone Forti

An exploration of misplaced desire and all-consuming romantic obsession, told through a series of beautifully constructed leftfield pop songs. La Porte, the second studio album by Charlotte Kouklia aka Charlène Darling, finds the artist and her group building a self-contained musical world via French and English language vocals, and a minimalist backing of guitar, organ, bass and drums.

At times recalling the feminist post-punk of The Raincoats, the avant songcraft of Brigitte Fontaine, or the psychedelic vignettes of Cate Le Bon, in truth Charlène Darling sounds like herself. The arrangements are playfully experimental, dubbed out percussion bubbling over the stripped back instrumentation, or rough tape edits disrupting lush harmonies, but never losing sight of the earworm hooks that make these songs so addictively listenable. Step through the door and walk right in.

Charlotte is one quarter of the band Rose Mercie. After a beguiling series of DIY tape and CD-R releases, her first widely distributed solo album, Saint-Guidon, was released in 2019.

Queer country rock from south of the Mason-Dixon line. High school folkie Charles Brown teamed up with regional rural rock rascals Sleepy Creek, triggering an unrequited inter-band love story and this album's melancholy title track. This 15-song LP gathers Brown's solo and band work from 1976-'82, and Jon Freeman's accompanying essay dissects the origin story of this private press pioneer.

In the spring of 1999, Charles Curtis, Alan Licht, and Dean Roberts brought an unconventional mix of drone, improvisation, and experimental rock on an eleven-stop tour of Europe. The concept was straightforward, yet novel: each night, they would improvise a single piece while sustained sine waves played for the duration of the concert. May 99, culled from three shorter pieces recorded for a radio program at Amsterdam’s VPRO near the end of the tour, represents an early high watermark in the collision of minimal and rock sensibilities that started to become prevalent in the late 90s and is an ear-opening listen even for those familiar with the musicians’ other projects. May 99 combines resonant sine waves in the style of eminent downtown New York composer La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music with scratchings, scrapings, and warblings produced by Licht and Roberts’s guitars, Curtis’s cello, and a variety of electronics. Just as sine waves hold together these sundry improvisations, a shared tendency toward the minimalistic—Licht’s performances with the Blue Humans, collaborations with Loren Connors, and solo guitar records; Roberts in the band Thela and his solo project White Winged Moth; and Curtis performing with Young and his own Trio—brought together three musicians with very different backgrounds, creating fertile ground on which they generated the album’s unclassifiable sounds.

Disques Ocora, a French label dedicated to capturing and publishing the sounds of folkloric culture from around the world, is held in the highest possible regard in the realms of professional and amateur ethnomusicology. Instigated in 1958 by Pierre Schaeffer, the founder of musique concrète, Disques Ocora's sterling reputation is largely built on composer and musicologist Charles Duvelle's pioneering field recordings, as well as his now-iconic photographs and graphic design. Charles Duvelle's work is indisputably one of the most important contributions to the human understanding of the rich biodiversity of our planet's music and language. In 1977, his field recordings from Benin were selected by Carl Sagan for inclusion on the Voyager Golden Records, which were carried into outer space by the Voyager spacecraft to stand as an example of humanity's highest musical expressions for the universe's unknown listeners. Sublime Frequencies' most ambitious project to date, this 296-page fine-art photography book comprises an exhaustive collection of Charles Duvelle's field photography from 1959 to 1978 (188 black-and-white and 58 color photographs), demonstrating that this master musicologist had an equally unerring eye for photography; Includes a photo index listing the details of each photograph. It also contains an exhaustive interview with Charles Duvelle by Hisham Mayet, detailing the history of the label and offering Duvelle's unique insights into the discipline of field recording (French and English facing text). The package includes two full-length CDs of archival recordings (some of which have never been published) selected, compiled, and fully annotated by Duvelle himself. Most of the tracks on CD one (Africa) are complete versions of truncated tracks from OOP Ocora LPs. CD two, which includes performances by Sohan Lal, Kheo Oudon, and Madurai Ramaswami Gautam, is focused on material from Asia (music from India and Laos), with two long tracks that have never been released (a third track is a complete unedited version). The material focuses on the five regions surveyed during his time with Ocora: West Africa, Central Africa, Indian Ocean, Pacific Islands, and SouthEast Asia. It includes "Disques Ocora / Charles Duvelle Discography, 1959-1974", a complete overview illustrated with 94 full-color album thumbnails, "The Prophet Collection, 1999-2004" a discography of Duvelle's post-Ocora label illustrated with 41 full-color album thumbnails, "Eastern Music in Black Africa", a 17-page report prepared by Charles Duvelle at the request of UNESCO (February 1970), and a review of the Ocora catalogues (1964-1973). In a tribute to Disques Ocora's exquisite design sensibility, the book is printed on 170 gsm Lumisilk matte art paper and bound in grey buckram with gold foil stamping on the cover and spine. The front cover includes a tipped-on glossy photograph by Charles Duvelle. Hardcover book; 10"x10"; 296 pages; 4.5 lbs. Produced and edited by Hisham Mayet.

Available for the first time on vinyl, Accidental Music 1987-1991 was produced in cooperation with the artist for Mid-Air Museum and chOOn!!. Remastered for vinyl and digital and featuring liner notes from Mark Griffey. Ultravillage is a collective and burgeoning community of new age music devotees, private press fanatics and underground ambient, minimal and progressive electronic aficionados. Their website at ultravillage.com is fast becoming the go to guide for the most obscure entries in the American new age and minimal music canon – a crucial hub for diggers, archivists and label runners recovering lost sounds from by-gone eras. Mark Griffey, the man behind Ultravillage, has recently made the venture into releasing albums, with the intention of reissuing forgotten personal masterpieces of 1980s and 90s private press synth culture on new label Mid-Air Museum. MM’s first vinyl record release is a collaboration with Scottish reissue label chOOn!!. Together, they present Accidental Music 1987-1991 by Charles Esposito, a career retrospective of the experimental composer from Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The cinematic and the sacred swirl around on Accidental Music, which gives new life to intriguing self-released tapes that Esposito put out in the 1980s and 90s. Heard by few on its original release, the music featured on this compilation ranges from Palace of Lights percussive sonics to an almost minimal techno palette, a meeting of pop and twisted electronics with the hypnotic immediacy of ancient ritual. Accidental Music 1987-1991 develops a series of resonant harmonic spaces, by adding layers of instruments and played objects. Rather than work as acoustic maps of specific locations, these pieces eddy and gather into positive physical presences. But Esposito’s real strength lies in creating depth of field. The foreground might be dominated by glassy chimes or resonant prayer bowl-like timbres, but beyond it a series of sonic veils seems to recede towards murky imperceptibility. There’s also a kind of surreal decorum at play, passages that sound like an immaculately laid dinner table being shaken by an earth tremor while the tinkling complaints of the silver, glass and muffling linen are scrupulously recorded. Available for the first time on vinyl, Accidental Music 1987-1991 by Charles Esposito is an exploration into many inner worlds and dreamscapes, an analogue mirage of avant-garde gems. Produced in cooperation with the artist for Mid-Air Museum and chOOn!!. Remastered for vinyl and digital and featuring liner notes from Mark Griffey.

International Anthem is proud to present 'Step on Step', a double LP collection of home recordings marking the de-facto eponymous debut album by enigmatic producer, arranger, and composer Charles Stepney (1931-1976). The music that makes up Step on Step was created by Stepney alone, in the basement of his home on the Southside of Chicago, sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before his untimely death in 1976. A Chicago born and bred arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Stepney is known for his work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Deniece Williams, and Ramsey Lewis, and as a staff producer for Chess Records in the 1960s, where he was an essential creative force behind seminal recordings by Rotary Connection, Minnie Riperton, Marlena Shaw, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Terry Callier, The Dells, The Emotions, and many more. In the decades since his passing, the presence of his name in liner notes and on vinyl labels has become a seal of quality for record collectors, music historians, and aficionados, while his sound has been used by countless samplers in the hip-hop world including Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest, The Fugees, MF Doom, and Madlib. But in comparison to the post-mortem renown of his sound, or the music he created and the artists he supported while he was alive, Stepney is a greatly underappreciated figure… a genius relegated to the shadows. One of the signature elements of his “baroque soul” sound is the epic, expansive, orchestral expression of his horn and string arrangements (in many cases brought to life by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), as heard on Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs,” or Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul,” or Terry Callier’s “What Color Is Love.” Hence making it even more special that his de-facto debut LP Step on Step, which sees its first wide release nearly five decades after his death, is a collection of stripped-down 4-track tape recordings featuring Stepney, alone, performing all instruments with minimal means. It is, as said by Chicago culture historian (and author of Step on Step liner notes) Ayana Contreras, “the uncut funk,” an unprecedented depiction of an imbued composer imagining and conceiving music (some of which would eventually become massive studio productions) in its primal state. Step on Step features 23 tracks, most of which are original compositions by Stepney that were never again recorded by him or any other artist. It also features prototypical, seedling-style demos of Stepney compositions for Earth, Wind & Fire, including “That’s The Way of The World,” “Imagination,” and “On Your Face,” as well as the original version of “Black Gold,” which would eventually be recorded by Rotary Connection (as “I Am The Black Gold of The Sun,” with lyrics by Richard Rudolph). And in addition to the wordless croons of Stepney original and early single “Daddy’s Diddies,” Stepney’s actual voice is heard on a couple occasions across the album, testing microphones and inputs on his tape machine. All of the otherwise unrecorded, previously unnamed original compositions contained on Step on Step were given their titles by Stepney’s daughters Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté Stepney, whose voices are also heard throughout the album, telling stories and sharing memories about their father. The Stepney Sisters, who produced this album over many years, have long been engaged in efforts to celebrate their father’s legacy and bring his work into brighter light. They’ve cherished the tape reels left behind by their father in the basement of their home, transferring the audio on multiple occasions, and originally compiling the recordings for an ultra-limited CD on their own DIY label (The Charles Stepney Masters) in the early 2010s. “We always talk about how we were trying to develop this and would go to different people and they would go ‘what is this raw stuff…’ It was just the first level of something that became something really great,” says Chanté. “To get this type of intimate look into an artist’s process is really unknown and unheard of… so I just really appreciate the opportunity to give this. I am very happy for my Dad that we’re able to share this with the world in this way, with this amount of respect.” This new double LP collection on International Anthem presents “a genuine, beautiful, deeply emotional and personal effort by three women to reconnect with their father and validate their own memories of his passion and brilliance,” says label co-founder Scott McNiece. And it’s a long-overdue fulfillment of Stepney’s unsatiated plan to release a solo album – which he once vowed to his daughters that he would do, and that he would name it: “Step on Step.”

International Anthem is proud to present 'Step on Step', a double LP collection of home recordings marking the de-facto eponymous debut album by enigmatic producer, arranger, and composer Charles Stepney (1931-1976). The music that makes up Step on Step was created by Stepney alone, in the basement of his home on the Southside of Chicago, sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before his untimely death in 1976. A Chicago born and bred arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Stepney is known for his work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Deniece Williams, and Ramsey Lewis, and as a staff producer for Chess Records in the 1960s, where he was an essential creative force behind seminal recordings by Rotary Connection, Minnie Riperton, Marlena Shaw, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Terry Callier, The Dells, The Emotions, and many more. In the decades since his passing, the presence of his name in liner notes and on vinyl labels has become a seal of quality for record collectors, music historians, and aficionados, while his sound has been used by countless samplers in the hip-hop world including Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest, The Fugees, MF Doom, and Madlib. But in comparison to the post-mortem renown of his sound, or the music he created and the artists he supported while he was alive, Stepney is a greatly underappreciated figure… a genius relegated to the shadows. One of the signature elements of his “baroque soul” sound is the epic, expansive, orchestral expression of his horn and string arrangements (in many cases brought to life by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), as heard on Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs,” or Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul,” or Terry Callier’s “What Color Is Love.” Hence making it even more special that his de-facto debut LP Step on Step, which sees its first wide release nearly five decades after his death, is a collection of stripped-down 4-track tape recordings featuring Stepney, alone, performing all instruments with minimal means. It is, as said by Chicago culture historian (and author of Step on Step liner notes) Ayana Contreras, “the uncut funk,” an unprecedented depiction of an imbued composer imagining and conceiving music (some of which would eventually become massive studio productions) in its primal state. Step on Step features 23 tracks, most of which are original compositions by Stepney that were never again recorded by him or any other artist. It also features prototypical, seedling-style demos of Stepney compositions for Earth, Wind & Fire, including “That’s The Way of The World,” “Imagination,” and “On Your Face,” as well as the original version of “Black Gold,” which would eventually be recorded by Rotary Connection (as “I Am The Black Gold of The Sun,” with lyrics by Richard Rudolph). And in addition to the wordless croons of Stepney original and early single “Daddy’s Diddies,” Stepney’s actual voice is heard on a couple occasions across the album, testing microphones and inputs on his tape machine. All of the otherwise unrecorded, previously unnamed original compositions contained on Step on Step were given their titles by Stepney’s daughters Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté Stepney, whose voices are also heard throughout the album, telling stories and sharing memories about their father. The Stepney Sisters, who produced this album over many years, have long been engaged in efforts to celebrate their father’s legacy and bring his work into brighter light. They’ve cherished the tape reels left behind by their father in the basement of their home, transferring the audio on multiple occasions, and originally compiling the recordings for an ultra-limited CD on their own DIY label (The Charles Stepney Masters) in the early 2010s. “We always talk about how we were trying to develop this and would go to different people and they would go ‘what is this raw stuff…’ It was just the first level of something that became something really great,” says Chanté. “To get this type of intimate look into an artist’s process is really unknown and unheard of… so I just really appreciate the opportunity to give this. I am very happy for my Dad that we’re able to share this with the world in this way, with this amount of respect.” This new double LP collection on International Anthem presents “a genuine, beautiful, deeply emotional and personal effort by three women to reconnect with their father and validate their own memories of his passion and brilliance,” says label co-founder Scott McNiece. And it’s a long-overdue fulfillment of Stepney’s unsatiated plan to release a solo album – which he once vowed to his daughters that he would do, and that he would name it: “Step on Step.”