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"Originally released in 1979 on Sly & Robbie's Taxi label, this album was Black Uhuru's second LP. Recorded at Channel One it set forth a new sound in recorded music technology. The songs blend into dub versions and the mixing is simply stunning. The track Shine Eye Gal also features guitarist Keith Richards" (but hey, nobody's perfect). "Hear the meticulous song writing of Michael Rose, joined by Puma Jones & Duckie Simpson, to complete the vocal line-up. Sly & Robbie and the Taxi Gang created a sublime sonic masterpiece at Channel One studio in Jamaica. They were at their absolute peak of their powers, before being launched as global superstars with Grace Jones. Black Uhuru went on to be an extremely popular live outfit, touring endlessly around the world, breaking down barriers and making new inroads to territories previously unknown to Jamaican artists. This Classic reissue is a must for all reggae collectors."

Faitiche welcomes Andrew Black aka blackbody_radiation. His debut album Ultra-Materials gathers six ghostly drones, created with the help of sound masking. Andrew Black, who hails from one of the UK's post industrial North West Milltowns has a sensitive feeling for space and its acoustics. Having trained as a designer and operated within the realms of architecture and public space, it was only natural to extend his interest to manipulating field recordings.

The six pieces collected on Ultra-Materials provide an insight into Black's highly sensitive minimalism: they stand for a subtly meandering mediation on room acoustics and place, which are manipulated with the help of sound masking, among other things - that is, the addition and superimposition of artificially generated frequencies to mask unwanted sounds. 

Sometimes the pieces are reminiscent of warm engine noise, sometimes one thinks of carefully captured natural phenomena. Their strength lies in their elusiveness: free of concrete attributions or musical location, they can unfold their hypnotic pull without revealing anything about their origins. Harmonics at times shimmer, at times warble and at times coexist. It is an attempt to get in touch with our listening abilities.

 

Picking up where "Máquina de Vénus" (Blacksea Não Maya) left off, this is now near 100% DJ Kolt at the controls. Slow, grinding power tools working their way across the complex web of ideas the producer lays down. Truly a next level thing, taking elements from recognized styles such as tarraxo, EDM, even trap, bending their accepted signifiers to suit his own creative mind instead of the crowd pleasing monster that constantly haunts Dance Music. Here we find a wonderful, twisted approach to the dancefloor, one heavy on brain activity, fantastically moody, showcasing music that we long ago quit trying to define.

"Despertar" (again) changes the game, adding secret doors and pathways previously unheard and unthought of. This right here is the mark of a unique producer. You'll have a hard time trying to compare Kolt with any other artist on Príncipe, much less on the outside world. A keen sense of groove filters through all tracks, the dance is never forgotten but you know there are certain demands - you can't just expect a straight line to "a good night out", there's an effort required, you'll have to reach out as well so you can let loose and connect with the universal Master Plan.

The album is all made up of liquid transitions as much as rock-hard foundations, perfectly capable of being explicit when honouring the roots but so committed to a new stance that one may feel thrown off balance by the sheer genius of the compositions. High art with a deep low end. 

Bladder Flask’s debut (in fact only) LP, originally issued by Orgel Fesper Music in 1981, is one of the most eclectic albums of the post-Industrial era. It is both challenging and perplexing… So, put down your puny instruments of normality and breathe in the frenzied fungal spores of Bladder Flask! The fact that Steven Stapleton of Nurse With Wound is a big fan of this album is testament to its greatness: ‘I love Bladder Flask’s One Day I Was So Sad That The Corners Of My Mouth Met & Everybody Thought I Was Whistling and what a great title, perhaps my favourite ever. I must have listened to the album so much in the ’80s. I listened to it again recently and it was like welcoming an old friend.’ Personnel: Richard Rupenus, Philip Rupenus + Sean Breadin, John Mylotte, Nigel Jacklin Recorded at Wrongrong Studio and Spectro Arts Workshop 1980 – 1981 Audio Restoration & Mastering: Colin Potter @ IC Studio

Nurse With WoundのSteven Stapletonもその大ファンであることを公言しているアヴァンギャルド音楽史上に刻む大傑作にして、TNBことThe New BlockadersのPhilip Rupenus & Richard Rupenus、John Mylotte (Metgumbnerbone)、Nigel Jacklin、Sean Breadinらにより結成されたカルト・グループが残した幻の名作。1981年に〈Orgel Fesper Music〉から限定500部でリリースされたBladder Flaskのデビュー作が〈Sonoris〉からCD&LPリイシュー。ポスト・インダストリアル時代における最も多彩なアルバムの一つであり、挑戦的であると同時に当惑させられるインダストリアル/サウンド・コラージュの傑作。Colin Potterの手により〈IC Studio〉でリマスタリング。

Blake Lee has always been fascinated by the unknown, and space, in its isolating, mysterious vastness, embodies this theme immaculately. The open void, captured so memorably by Stanley Kubrick in '2001: A Space Odyssey', is Blake's far-reaching canvas on 'No Sound In Space', a cinematic meditation on the cosmos that's painted in nuanced, emotionally sincere colors. The Los Angeles-based composer has been contemplating his full-length debut since 2021, using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush rather than find himself snared in its traditional aesthetic constraints. Transforming its characteristics with effects and subtle processes, he layers sustained tones and intimate improvisations, creating richly visual polychromatic utopias teeming with unknown life. Since 2011, Blake has been most known for being the guitarist and a music director for Lana Del Rey, notching up three songwriting credits on her acclaimed ‘Ultraviolence’ full length. He sees his solo work as a form of escapism, a place where he can experiment and find comfort and catharsis outside of expectations and formal structure. The album was written instinctively, and Blake made sure he didn't force anything, letting go and getting out of his own way, listening intently as sounds and textures materialized organically. "I didn't want to ruin it by being a perfectionist," he laughs. And his collaboration with Kenyan sound artist KMRU, who runs the OFNOT label and contributes to two of the tracks on the album, occurred similarly organically. Blake was moved to reach out to KMRU when he caught a performance of 'Natur' at Los Angeles' Zebulon in 2022, leading to a prolonged back-and-forth. They didn't meet in person until earlier this year, by which time they'd become firm friends, continuously sharing music and conversation. KMRU had lent a valuable ear to Blake, who sent early playlists of 'NSIS' that, over the months, slowly evolved into the finished album. It's the first release on OFNOT that's not by KMRU himself; the label emerged last year with the release of KMRU's own 'Dissolution Grip', and Blake's debut immediately expands its sonic universe. Alongside the playlists, Blake also provided KMRU with the tracks' raw stems, which he began to edit and expand in his Berlin studio. 'Miura' and 'Waiting' are the result of this process, two sublime abstractions that augment Blake's dreamlike, euphoric tones with KMRU's pebbly distortions and booming low-end rumbles. And this same playful sense of freeness seeps into Blake's other compositions. On the misty 'In A Cloud', he surrounds cascading string tones with soft-focus pads that swell until they're like crashing waves, and on the two 'Echoplexx' pieces, he uses delay and reverb to smudge his sounds until they're viscous residue, the harmonies obscured by whooshes of white noise and distant chimes. The mood is quieted somewhat on 'Moving Air', as Blake's swirling tones form half-heard lullabies, coalescing into a dense, melancholy crescendo, and he fills out the sound with reverberant airport recordings on 'Pan AM', letting pitchy My Bloody Valentine-esque drones warble beneath the transitory chatter. Each track melts into the next, forming a billowing, cryptic narrative that leaves more questions than answers. Blake is constantly searching, and fills his unoccupied space with warmth, perception and sensitivity.

Sacramento, CA duo Blank Gloss’s third album, Cornered, is an exquisite statement of pop ambient starkness, an album that oscillates between lush beauty and spare melancholy. It follows from their 2021 debut for Kompakt, Melt, an album that saw Morgan Fox (piano, synths) and Patrick Hills (guitar) aligned, loosely, with the cosmic pastorale of the ‘ambient Americana’ movement. Cornered feels like a significant step forward, though – by peeling back the layers of their music, they’ve revealed both its restful core and its solemn gravitas. It is unendingly lovely, but with something disquieting at its centre. Cornered was recorded quickly, over two days in December 2020. There’s nothing rushed or haphazard about the album, though; everything has its place, with each sonic element contributing profoundly to these nine miniature dioramas. It signals change, quietly but perceptibly, through the way the duo sculpts their material, building out of loose improvisations that morphed into songs. While there was no plan in mind when Blank Gloss settled into the studio, Fox recalls that “right away we realised that things were sounding and feeling a bit different than any of the sessions we had previously.” That difference can be heard in the increased amount of space Blank Gloss gift to their sound sources. Some of the most moving moments on Cornered come when Fox and Hills strip everything back – see, for example, “Crossing”, which sets pensive piano across a shyly humming drone and quiet arcs of guitar, recalling the driftworks of Roger Eno. Curiously, the album’s distinctive shape and mood develops, at least in part, from a change in instrumentation, with Hills using a MIDI pick-up on his guitar. “This resulted in making things happen a lot quicker,” Fox says. “It also helped create what I think is a bit more sombre, dark feeling to some of the songs.” Elsewhere, on songs like “Salt”, the piano tussles with flecks of guitar, single tones sent out to mingle with the stars, like Morricone at 16 RPM, while Cornered’s centrepiece, the eleven-minute “No Appetite”, lets long arcs of electronic texture breathe and sigh, tangling together in a cat’s cradle of bliss. Throughout, it feels as though the music is blossoming as you hear it, like watching time-lapse footage of flora in bloom. But perhaps the most seductive thing about Cornered is the sense you get, listening, that the music was something unexpected, a visitation. “It almost felt like we weren’t dictating where the music went and how it sounded,” Fox agrees. “We were just there in a room together in December and these sounds were happening, and we were lucky enough to be recording the process.”

Sacramento, CA duo Blank Gloss’s third album, Cornered, is an exquisite statement of pop ambient starkness, an album that oscillates between lush beauty and spare melancholy. It follows from their 2021 debut for Kompakt, Melt, an album that saw Morgan Fox (piano, synths) and Patrick Hills (guitar) aligned, loosely, with the cosmic pastorale of the ‘ambient Americana’ movement. Cornered feels like a significant step forward, though – by peeling back the layers of their music, they’ve revealed both its restful core and its solemn gravitas. It is unendingly lovely, but with something disquieting at its centre. Cornered was recorded quickly, over two days in December 2020. There’s nothing rushed or haphazard about the album, though; everything has its place, with each sonic element contributing profoundly to these nine miniature dioramas. It signals change, quietly but perceptibly, through the way the duo sculpts their material, building out of loose improvisations that morphed into songs. While there was no plan in mind when Blank Gloss settled into the studio, Fox recalls that “right away we realised that things were sounding and feeling a bit different than any of the sessions we had previously.” That difference can be heard in the increased amount of space Blank Gloss gift to their sound sources. Some of the most moving moments on Cornered come when Fox and Hills strip everything back – see, for example, “Crossing”, which sets pensive piano across a shyly humming drone and quiet arcs of guitar, recalling the driftworks of Roger Eno. Curiously, the album’s distinctive shape and mood develops, at least in part, from a change in instrumentation, with Hills using a MIDI pick-up on his guitar. “This resulted in making things happen a lot quicker,” Fox says. “It also helped create what I think is a bit more sombre, dark feeling to some of the songs.” Elsewhere, on songs like “Salt”, the piano tussles with flecks of guitar, single tones sent out to mingle with the stars, like Morricone at 16 RPM, while Cornered’s centrepiece, the eleven-minute “No Appetite”, lets long arcs of electronic texture breathe and sigh, tangling together in a cat’s cradle of bliss. Throughout, it feels as though the music is blossoming as you hear it, like watching time-lapse footage of flora in bloom. But perhaps the most seductive thing about Cornered is the sense you get, listening, that the music was something unexpected, a visitation. “It almost felt like we weren’t dictating where the music went and how it sounded,” Fox agrees. “We were just there in a room together in December and these sounds were happening, and we were lucky enough to be recording the process.”

Melt is the debut full-length album by Blank Gloss, the Sacramento duo of Patrick Hills and Morgan Fox. Attentive listeners will recall their lovely contribution to Kompakt’s Pop Ambient 2021, “Of A Vessel”, which reappears here; others might know their 2020 mini-album, January, released on the stylish Miami label Night Young. With Melt, Blank Gloss make a heavy contribution to Kompakt’s ongoing explorations of the hundreds of hues of Pop Ambience. A lush dream of an album, it’s a remarkable index of the gilded eternities that you can magic from a reduced tonal palette: glistening guitars, ruminative piano, warps and weaves of subtle drone and hum. The two members of Blank Gloss met through their shared involvement in punk and experimental music. Fox’s band had recorded at Hills’ Earthtone studio a number of times; they hit it off and made the decision to explore making music together. Their initial explorations resulted in their mini-album, January; for Melt, they aimed for something more minimal and improvised. “We tried to go into it without many preconceived notions,” Fox recalls. “We tried not to overthink what was happening or spend too much time hyper-focused on any one thing. We found it more enjoyable to make and to listen to when we just let whatever was happening happen.” This process freed Fox and Hills to make music that’s guided by intuition, inhabiting the moment and reaching for the next surprising possibility. The long reels of e-bow guitar that wind through opener “Those Who Plant” ease the listener into an album that says plenty by doing less: witness the dream scripts that play out through pieces like “Hollowed Out” and “Of A Vessel”, the gentle weightlessness of “Almost Home”, or the clusters of guitar, expressive yet restrained, that sculpt “Rags” into being. It’s an album that feels sui generis, somehow, much as it clearly sits within a number of fields – pop ambient, touches of new age and drone music. Some provisional clues, though, for music that echoes Melt’s loveliness: the humble ambience of the artists on Cold Blue Music; the eventless horizon of Bark Psychosis’ “Pendulum Man”; the emotive pointillism of Labradford; some of the snippets of song that drift through Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook’s Sleeps With The Fishes. Like all of this music, Melt embraces a radical ambiguity, one that allows the listener to enter the frame and inhabit the corners of the duo’s music. There’s pleasure and joy here too, of course – you can hear it in the ease of the playing and the beauty of the melodies that Blank Gloss carefully dapple across the tonal field. Reflecting on the sessions for Melt, Fox sums it up perfectly: “Being able to sit together in the little room and document the process of experimentation and bouncing ideas back and forth was really fun and rewarding. I hope that comes through on the album.”

In music, form is sometimes so intimately connected to experience as to speak meaning more compellingly than any word could. On After the Town was Swept Away, out September 5th on Leaving Records, BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, finds in rhythm a new vocabulary of self-collection. Confronting both grief and joy, its twelve tracks of tape loop manipulation festoon and murmur — the imperfect cyclicality of tape itself at once a metaphor for the record’s meditations on time, and the actual physical support shaping its sounds. Composed in the aftermath of two quickly succeeding life-changing events for the artist — the birth of his first child, Ellis, in November 2023, and the loss of his mother after a two-year battle with cancer in January 2024 —, the sounds of After the Town was Swept Away were born of unmaking and remaking. The composition process was mostly one of revision: early drum machine sketches were emptied out and degraded, whole songs restructured, tape loops stacked to digest a complex rhythmical biography. Rooted in early experiences in jazz and a long-held love of house and drum & bass, BlankFor.ms’ beat allegiances surface in ways that are never obvious, a vehicle for reinterpreting one’s times anew. Commanding such an articulate rhythmical language, the music of After the Town was Swept Away speaks thus in intense, affectionate, at times uneasy tones. We feel this deeply on lead single "Formed by the Slide". Against the offbeat loops of quietly loose, layered held-tone vocals — by composer, vocalist and friend of the artist, Ella Joy Meir —, rhythm emerges in noisier surges as if answering their achingly beautiful call. It is the sound of experience in its barest form: when life speaks, we respond as we can. After The Town Was Swept Away was born from love — not just in tender musing, but through actual, felt communion. This is true, for example, of the triptych titled after Kinship, the Highland Park yoga studio where, in 2024, experimentalist Colloboh hosted BlankFor.ms for an impromptu performance to a routine by yogi Meg Shoemaker, from which the three tracks were assembled. But the influence of others — both musical, as with jazz drummer Marcus Gilmore and pianist Jason Moran, with whom BlankFor.ms recently released a collaborative album, and more intimately personal — is felt throughout the whole record, bound together in rhythm. Could it be otherwise? Tape loops have a way of preserving and altering the past at once, marking and unmarking sounds and their sources. The beats on After the Town was Swept Away — pensively yet felicitously — come to terms with just that, their rethreaded rhythms making room for unexpected, unhoped for recollection — a way to survive the flood of experience.

In music, form is sometimes so intimately connected to experience as to speak meaning more compellingly than any word could. On After the Town was Swept Away, out September 5th on Leaving Records, BlankFor.ms, aka Tyler Gilmore, finds in rhythm a new vocabulary of self-collection. Confronting both grief and joy, its twelve tracks of tape loop manipulation festoon and murmur — the imperfect cyclicality of tape itself at once a metaphor for the record’s meditations on time, and the actual physical support shaping its sounds. Composed in the aftermath of two quickly succeeding life-changing events for the artist — the birth of his first child, Ellis, in November 2023, and the loss of his mother after a two-year battle with cancer in January 2024 —, the sounds of After the Town was Swept Away were born of unmaking and remaking. The composition process was mostly one of revision: early drum machine sketches were emptied out and degraded, whole songs restructured, tape loops stacked to digest a complex rhythmical biography. Rooted in early experiences in jazz and a long-held love of house and drum & bass, BlankFor.ms’ beat allegiances surface in ways that are never obvious, a vehicle for reinterpreting one’s times anew. Commanding such an articulate rhythmical language, the music of After the Town was Swept Away speaks thus in intense, affectionate, at times uneasy tones. We feel this deeply on lead single "Formed by the Slide". Against the offbeat loops of quietly loose, layered held-tone vocals — by composer, vocalist and friend of the artist, Ella Joy Meir —, rhythm emerges in noisier surges as if answering their achingly beautiful call. It is the sound of experience in its barest form: when life speaks, we respond as we can. After The Town Was Swept Away was born from love — not just in tender musing, but through actual, felt communion. This is true, for example, of the triptych titled after Kinship, the Highland Park yoga studio where, in 2024, experimentalist Colloboh hosted BlankFor.ms for an impromptu performance to a routine by yogi Meg Shoemaker, from which the three tracks were assembled. But the influence of others — both musical, as with jazz drummer Marcus Gilmore and pianist Jason Moran, with whom BlankFor.ms recently released a collaborative album, and more intimately personal — is felt throughout the whole record, bound together in rhythm. Could it be otherwise? Tape loops have a way of preserving and altering the past at once, marking and unmarking sounds and their sources. The beats on After the Town was Swept Away — pensively yet felicitously — come to terms with just that, their rethreaded rhythms making room for unexpected, unhoped for recollection — a way to survive the flood of experience.

DJ Python’s Worldwide Unlimited net Lisbon legend Blastah for a bag of sensuous, playfully animated dembow, drill and kuduro mutations that sit ever so sweetly beside the label’s gems from Sangre Nueva and Henzo. Blastah blesses his debut firmware with a dreamily memorable set of six concise, lowkey burners that hover around reggaeton’s 100-110BPM brackets. Over the years he’s developed an online penpal relationship with Brian Piñero aka DJ Python, naturally leading to this shared conception of romantic club music with a mutable bent that lends itself just as easily to end-of-night slow jam sections as low lit bedrooms. The vibe is perfectly sensuous and set in woozy soft focus, from the Elysia Crampton-esque, dusky fusion of R&B pads and soundsystem stabs on ‘Raining’ to the neck-caressing nod to Timbaland and Timberlake in its ‘Closer’. A heartical deep house dembow sound is echoed on ‘Cendres’, and a prime fusion of US drill softened with subtropical appeal shapes ‘Unknown’ and the slinky, subbass-gilded minimalism of ‘Call’, while ‘Fish Friends’ most clearly betrays his taste for late night Lisbon tarraxho. Up-to-the-moment, inch-tight, timeless pearls for the dancehall lovers.

Blawan releases his long-awaited debut XL Recordings album, SickElixir. Crafted between Berlin, Leeds, Paris, and Lisbon, the 14-track record is his most personal work to date; a manifesto for the way he sees

music and himself. Channeling grief, family trauma, and seismic life shifts, SickElixir expands on the sounds of his recent EPs - BouQ, Dismantled Into Juice, and Woke Up Right Handed - plunging listeners into a

chaotic yet meticulous sonic world that reflects on the past while projecting a bold vision for the future.

Jamie Roberts has been revered in electronic circles for years as an artist with a fastidious approach to creating his own sound, relentlessly drawing from his teenage influences growing up in Barnsley, a post-

industrial town in South Yorkshire. At 14, he started working on a maggot farm and credits the clanging sound of the farm’s industrial mincer as an early influence on his music. After playing in various metal bands,

Roberts’ musical horizons began to expand through visits to the West Indian Centre in Leeds, where he was introduced to the full spectrum of electronic music. He first emerged as Blawan at the turn of the 2010s with

EPs on cult labels such as Hinge Finger and Hessle Audio, earning widespread critical acclaim. He’s consistently experimented, pushing boundaries in his solo projects while collaborating closely with British

producer Pariah on several projects – the live techno act Karenn, the metal-inspired band Persher, and the label Voam. SickExlixir marks the next step in solidifying his position as one of contemporary music's unique, pioneering artists, operating firmly in a lane of his own.

Now available for the first time on Vinyl, Sittin' By The Road Captures Blaze Foley on his earliest known recordings. Simple, straightforward and strong, the album contains a dozen tracks recorded during Blaze's 'treehouse' days in Georgia. Recorded in the mid-1970s on a home reel-to-reel machine, these songs showcase Blaze's talent in early form. Includes many of Foley's classic tunes plus three songs that did not appear on previous albums.

An epic B2B2B mixtape from NYC, brought to life by longtime Bredrens and frequent collaborators Zebrablood, Rainstick, and Marcus Burrowes.

The 90-minute mix is heavily spiced with tuff digi dubs, conscious deep cuts and Blazer edits, all dubbed and bass-maxxed by BLZR to nourish you with raggamuffin upfulness.

We love it when family return to ZamZam and #92 welcomes back Blind Prophet & Ishan Sound in their first cross-pond collab. Begun in 2019 when Joe & Cris met in Portland for the first time, “The Labyrinth” is a phantasmagoric dream of intertwining melodic figures, buoyant mid-range synth work, bright percussion and piping flutes over a driving steppers riddim. Playful, even spritely, but belying a menacing core. Flipping the key and darkening the vibe substantially, “Minotaur Dub” strips out the lighter tones, pulsing and pushing through dark tunnels of reverb and echo, deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of refracting drums and relentless bass, the sound of pursuit, predator and prey. Fusing the spectral with the functional, the mythic with the technological, this release is for deep forest dances and subterranean sessions alike. This one is ruff… and tuff!! Strictly limited to 700 copies for the world. No digital, no repress. Art, design, & screen print by Polygon Press. Mastered by Sam at Precise, pressed at Third Man. Releasing end of July, 2023.

Re-release of Blue Chemise's debut LP, which originally appeared in 2017 as a limited private release of 105 copies. We are proud to make this much sought-after record available again on both physical and digital, with remastered sound by Christophe Albertijn and updated artwork, all true to the original intentions of, and in close collaboration with, the artist. ‘Influence On Dusk’ forms an idiosyncratic cycle of fourteen mysterious, sometimes uncanny electroacoustic compositions, a personal and subdued eruption of 'melancholy of the healthy kind’, suddenly here and suddenly gone… This is the second release on B.A.A.D.M. by the Australian artist Mark Gomes, following his equally atmospheric but more romantic 'Flower Studies' from 2021.

First making waves with the almost cult level ‘Hype Williams’ project, and then more recently solo and as part of the group Babyfather, the new 8 track LP sees Dean Blunt step back into the shadowy role of producer for a new band called Blue Iverson. It’s a vibesey one, this; digging a vein of smoke-hazed living/bedroom feels in eight parts that could almost be passed off as a Dam-Funk jam. Well, almost, but there’s still something off kilter and economical about the fidelity and mixing of the recording that hints it’s from the UK, or is even made to sound like the private pressed soul obscurities picked out by PPU. Hotep strongly reminds of those lush soul bits from Yves Tumor’s Serpent Music or even selected Letherette cuts released on Alex Nut’s namesake label. The image of Lauryn Hill on the sleeve is a cherry on the cake.

Weaving between self-built zithers, drones, clarinets, slide guitars and drum machines, ‘Sun Arcs’ presents a unique sound space formed by an inventive approach to acoustic folk and jazz. The starting point of ‘Sun Arcs’ saw Jason travel for a week alone to Andersabo, a cabin set in the Swedish woods just outside of Unnaryd, known also as the music project, festival and residency space which has been run by Dungan since 2016, hosting artists like Sofie Birch, Johan Carøe and Ellen Arkbro. Whilst writing 1-2 pieces per day, a conscious decision was made to leave behind everyday distractions and shut out the outside world to instead focus on the natural passage of time as Dungan recalls: “My only sense of time came from these daily walks out in the woods with my dog, and an awareness of the sun’s path as it moved across the sky each day.” The album’s immersive world unfolds with the opener ‘Dallas’, a musical synthesis of these two disparate spaces (Texas and Denmark), the touchstones of Dungan’s life. A folk-esque single acoustic builds to a flowing arrangement of clarinets, organ and cello drones coupled with percussion. ‘Green-Yellow Field’ chimes in as the first of two solo oriented zither recordings twinned with the dreamlike title track ‘Sun Arcs’, both densely rich as cascading and overlapping harmonic tones resound. ‘Bloom’ emerges with a krautrock psyche before an eruption of cello drones, slide guitar and free-ranging zither playing, ushering in the anticipation of spring. “The title and the feel of the song comes simply from my summers in Sweden – when the plants and insects are opening up everywhere, and there’s this almost too-intense feeling of life outside.” With half of the recordings conceived in Andersabo, Jason returned to Copenhagen to form the album's centre piece ‘Rain Cycle’ which features a tempered Roland drum machine alongside shifting zither improvisations. ‘Writing’ explores the shimmering harp-like qualities of sweeping playing figurations with Dungan mapping out adjusted tuning “zones” on the zither for unconventional but creatively liberating effects. ‘Fur’ captures the feeling of openness and the momentum of time, seeing Dungan perform waves of solo clarinet, often in one takes and embellished with textural drones, a zither solo, and layers of guitar. ‘Wavelength’ the album's closer is fondly inspired by the film works of Michael Snow and Don Cherry’s seminal live album ‘Blue Lake’ (1974), as it builds out from a drone-generated zither chord and features an alto recorder solo. Dungan found a deep connection to Cherry’s stripped back performance ethos, focusing on the core beauty of minimal instrumentation creating a genre-less meeting between folk and jazz. A dialogue is formed between the solo and the bandlike performances, interlinked in a geographical duality with all finding a sense of commonplace as musical sketches of visited landscapes. The bountiful instrumentation ebbs and flows as further layers emerge with Dungan constructing his material by recording and reviewing, adding and subtracting. Musically it portrays a life led by an American person living in Scandinavia, responding to both the local music and landscape while looking back to American influences. Dungan concludes: “Both places feel like “me”, I think on some level the music is always some kind of self-portrait.” ‘Sun Arcs’ depicts the intricate balance of nature’s cycles and the paths outlined by the seasons, from a winter dormancy to a warm sun drenched scene. The album scales new heights and further defines Dungan’s musical narrative, inhabiting a unique space in left-field, improvised and experimental music, bearing his most accomplished compositions to date. A singular and visionary expression, drawing on an array of instruments and sound worlds with a renewed sense of joy and discovery. The album's rich tapestry was mixed by Jeff Zeigler (Laraaji, Mary Lattimore, Kurt Vile / Steve Gunn) and mastered by Stephan Mathieu (Kali Malone, KMRU, Félicia Atkinson).

Volume 8 in the ongoing FRKWYS series on RVNG Intl. is a double album-length collaboration between Blues Control and Laraaji.

Following the "fodder first" tradition of previous FRKWYS installments, Vol. 8 was birthed over e-mail dialogue between RVNG and Russ Waterhouse and Lea Cho of Blues Control. Blues Control's evolved output gracefully arcs with influence and innovation that gleams electronic, New Age, and hard rock terrains. Laraaji's name came up early in that conversation and felt intrinsic to Waterhouse and Cho's own musical calling.

After learning various instruments in his formative years and studying composition at Howard University, Laraaji eventually found his musical conduit in an electronically-modified zither. Laraaji's 1979 album Celestial Vibration (recorded as Edward Larry Gordon) places the stringed instrument at the forefront on two side-length excursions in rhythmic ambiance. The 1980 album Ambient 3: Day of Radiance, produced by Brian Eno for his ambient record series, further documented Laraaji's zither explorations alongside Eno's soundscaping. Laraaji continues to pursue music both in its recorded form and as a healing tool.

Blues Control and Laraaji convened at Black Dirt Studio in upstate New York on December 9th, 2010. Over the course of a single studio day, the three musicians (accompanied on certain jams by Laraaji's "musical friend" Arji Cakouros) improvised on several themes, providing nearly four hours of material and the basis for FRKWYS Vol. 8. After meticulous note taking, sharing, and rough edits among Blues Control and Laraaji, the album was fully fleshed out.

Without context, it's hard to imagine that these musicians never creatively collaborated before this juncture. The dynamic breadth (and breath) of the album feels both effortless and epic, a line usually straddled only after years of playing together. It's clear a cosmic force is at play, and that this playfulness is the creative mediator of the music.

Geogaddi is the second studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada, released on 18 February 2002 by Warp Records.

Boards of Canada's masterpiece single. released in 2000.

A classic. Boards of Canada's 1998 masterpiece, their first album.

A classic. Boards of Canada's 1998 masterpiece, their first album.