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The first-ever ethnographic acid Western! In a genre-defying film, Zerzura follows a young man from a small village in Niger who leaves home in search of an enchanted oasis. His journey leads him into a surreal vision of the Sahara, crossing paths with djinn, bandits, gold seekers, and migrants. Zerzura is a modern folktale transposed onto an acid Western, equal parts Jodorowsky and Jean Rouch. Written and developed with a local Tuareg cast, Zerzura mixes ethnofiction with the genre picture, exploring themes of migration and exoticism through a collaborative approach. Comes with 12-page booklet. In Tamashek with English and French subtitles; 84 minutes, all region DVD, NTSC format. Limited edition of 1000 copies.
Debut under the AICHER moniker, Defensive Acoustics is a collection of recordings channeling a performance that was presented alongside R. Rebeiro in the worn basement of the Ishiguro Building, an aged and abandoned pharmaceutical store in Kanazawa, Japan in Feb. 2024. Reinterpreted and releasing November 7 on the honourable Downwards Records of Birmingham, England.
"Colossal industrial minimalism from Downwards on a sick debut album from AICHER who deploy sheet-metal percussion and immense bass weight like some ice-cold collab between Valentina Magaletti, Emptyset and Einstürzende Neubauten, captured in an abandoned warehouse in graphic monochrome.
AICHER is the work of longtime label veteran Liam Andrews (MY DISCO, EROS), with additional production from his MY DISCO spar Rohan Rebeiro — an experimental percussionist and erstwhile collaborator of Roland S. Howard and HTRK. Together, they make resoundingly coarse, bullish industrial musick, distilling fascinations with tone and space through eight gristly and darkly sublime cuts, sharpened by production from Boris Wilsdorf of Einstürzende Neubauten and Swans fame.
Through 8 cuts, Defensive Acoustics reveals a clammy touch of reverberant buzz and below-the-belt shudder with a creeping, sensual signature of authority that strongly reminds us of Alan Wilder’s Blasphemous Rumours-era sound design for Depeche Mode, stripped to absolute skeletal fire. Tectonic plates of sound are pushed to an extreme biting point in a sort of structural stress test that feels like an oil rig in action, or perhaps more acutely, junked at harbour.
We go from the lurching buckle of ‘Ascertain’ and bilious atonality of ‘Harness Pleads’, to the vertiginous scale of the title piece and the brutal momentum of ‘An Exhausted Image’ - almost collapsing under its own bass weight, while the pranging girders of ‘Constriction’ makes us think of that 101 version of ‘Stripped’ - propulsive, full of primal energy and clanging, clipped reverb. ‘Possessions’ ends the album with a passage of bleakly romantic ambience, a judicious emotive counterweight to the preceding gnarl.
Powerfully transfixing, heaviest possible gear."
— Boomkat
Aiko Takahashi is a Nova Gorica-based musician, a spirit that has released albums on various labels. Just like the line that separates the two cities where Aiko lives, Gorizia and Nova Gorica, divided between two countries yet united as one, Aiko’s music exists on a boundary. A line that separates silence from peculiar, almost imperceptible sounds. Too quiet to be Ambient, too Ambient to be Sound Art.
Two years ago, after a first complete release on IIKKI with "It Could Have Been A Beautiful", Aiko Takahashi comes back with a second complete album, this time, on LAAPS.
"This album is a delicate, meditative collection recorded between March and November 2024 in Aiko's former studio, a secluded spot near the River Isonzo, between Gorizia and Nova Gorica in Slovenia. The Grass Harp was made specifically for LAAPS, who asked Aiko to create a new complete piece of sounds. As always, it was largely recorded using dense layers of manipulated loops that weave in and out of the recordings, shaping them in a singular way through effects pedals, tape decks, and tape loops. The Grass Harp is a meditation on decay and silence, blending warm soundscapes with soft, playful melodies. That’s Aiko’s signature sound."
Deeeeeep from the Ariwa archives... all unreleased music on here. Sounding absolutely essential to us. Dates of production uknown at time of writing... The A Side is a Mad Professor produced version of Aisha's 'Give a Little Love', given the UK treatment. The Dub is a proper roller. Side B is the unheard African Message Dub (Parts 1& 2). Recordings ft Jah Shaka on bass, Norman Grant (Twinkle Brothers) on Drums, Sgt Pepper and Mad Professor on the desk. Masterful UK Dub from these key figures.... pulled out of nowhere.
Welsh musician Aisha Vaughan presents The Gate. It is upon us to renew the deep-cut, heavy-weighted melancholy of Celtic New Age for 2024. New Age music from the Celtic/British Isles crossed over into the mainstream in the late 80s - notably with Enya (and her band Clannad), the perhaps now lesser-known instrumental Celtic harp music of Patrick Ball, and the slew of now mostly forgotten various artist compilations that saturated the New Age CD and cassette music market in the early 90s.
The Gate earnestly gives reverence to the landscape that she calls home (as cinematically portrayed consistently in Vaughan’s self-shot videos via her social media). Now living in converted barn in mid-Wales, Vaughan writes and records her music to red kites and eagles hunting in the mountains outside her windows. The notably welcomed layers of ASMR sound design and computer music production supplement the main instrument here - her voice - woven within campfire crackle, wind chime, cricket, bird, harp, flute, synthesizer pad & sfx, and new moon wolf howl to channel celestial guides conjured from her remote homeland.
Using composition as catharsis stemming from a traumatic upbringing where music was banned in her childhood household, and the inherent occult history that surrounds the art form, Vaughan does not shy away from precisely stewarding this particular - often still-overlooked - musical tradition through her generation’s ambient lens.
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Welsh musician Aisha Vaughan presents The Gate. It is upon us to renew the deep-cut, heavy-weighted melancholy of Celtic New Age for 2024. New Age music from the Celtic/British Isles crossed over into the mainstream in the late 80s - notably with Enya (and her band Clannad), the perhaps now lesser-known instrumental Celtic harp music of Patrick Ball, and the slew of now mostly forgotten various artist compilations that saturated the New Age CD and cassette music market in the early 90s.
The Gate earnestly gives reverence to the landscape that she calls home (as cinematically portrayed consistently in Vaughan’s self-shot videos via her social media). Now living in converted barn in mid-Wales, Vaughan writes and records her music to red kites and eagles hunting in the mountains outside her windows. The notably welcomed layers of ASMR sound design and computer music production supplement the main instrument here - her voice - woven within campfire crackle, wind chime, cricket, bird, harp, flute, synthesizer pad & sfx, and new moon wolf howl to channel celestial guides conjured from her remote homeland.
Using composition as catharsis stemming from a traumatic upbringing where music was banned in her childhood household, and the inherent occult history that surrounds the art form, Vaughan does not shy away from precisely stewarding this particular - often still-overlooked - musical tradition through her generation’s ambient lens.
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 373px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2366097953/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://aishavaughan.bandcamp.com/album/the-gate">The Gate by Aisha Vaughan</a></iframe>
“Certain albums hit like howling bullets at pivotal moments, tearing open the face of music to reveal hidden sonic muscles and fusing them back into something both strangely familiar and yet entirely unrecognisable. We believe this is one of those records.” The double album Death of Music delivers 16 crooked vocal pops, some ruthless, others unexpectedly disarming. In some songs, Ajukaja & Mart Avi function like a two-headed saurus swinging its spiky tail to shady pop-house smackers. In others, Ajukaja's serene organ licks descend into subterranean caverns, allowing Avi to float to the surface on their wavelengths and turn his voice into billions of extinct moths, enslaved by the moonlight’s pull. There are songs that face destruction and those that seek to prevent it. One kykeon rap goes, “If you die before you die, then when you die, you don't die!”. Ajukaja & Mart Avi have embraced this notion to create new music that allows them to thrive in the algorithmic wasteland. 13 years in the making, these 66 minutes are packed with lifetimes of truths you didn’t know you needed to know. They are Ajukaja & Mart Avi – two against death.
After studying photography, music, drawing in a Fines Arts school, David Nissen changed direction to get involved in cinema where he works there as director of photography for feature films or advertising, without ever forget about photography. French photographer David Nissen takes us on an atmospheric journey through fog, rain and fading lights. Explaining that he enjoys being in a contemplative state, he says he enjoys walking, driving, listening to music, which inspires him a lot. He is looking for a strong, powerful light, an atmosphere that can tell a story, which will be an invitation to travel through his images. With a background in cinema, it makes sense for him to approach photography like a director in search of the perfect location… the result is broody, sublime, as well as cinematic. His shoots in France and abroad are opportunities to exercise his photographer's eye, to make such personal and intimate series of photos during solitary wanderings in places that each have their own story to tell or to invent. The rare human beings who appear take on the appearance of movie characters whose enigmatic thoughts we would like to know...the visual strength of certain places or architectures, under singular light atmospheres, takes the visitor into a fiction in which he himself becomes an actor is an exchange of glances. Also photographing through impurities or raindrops, his search for materiality gives a thickness that we encounter in painting, his approach to photography is deliberately pictorial and emotional.
For him, cinematography and photography are two passions that merge and feed off each other: Write a story with Light.
« If cinema and photography have a marked tendency to intersect, it is because there are affinities and contrasts between them that bind them by nature. The photographic image being consubstantial with the cinematographic image, there are relations of opposition at the level of the modes of existence of their images for a spectator: on the one hand the animated images, in sequence, projected, temporalized... other, the single fixed image, printed, not temporalized. As a result, everyone can try to approach the other, cinema proves the experience of photographic fixity with the freeze frame, while photography experiences the experience of cinematographic sequentiality with the representation of movement with the effects of shake or spinning in his photos.
A brief historical and technical reminder makes it possible to establish that the similarities are due to the fact that photography is the fundamental material element at the base of cinema: the cinematographic photogram is by nature a photographic image. With the photo, the spectator generally has a close relationship, which allows him to enter into a relationship with it by sight and touch: the photograph is an image that the spectator can hold in his hands to look at it, he is somehow physically "attached" to the image. This attachment is physical, allowed by the small size. With the cinema, the spectator has a relationship of relative remoteness and comes into contact with him by sight and hearing. This distancing, this physical detachment, this border between the viewer and the film that the large format facilitates, the viewer's gaze "plunges" into the image. For the photo, this place is above all a private, intimate, enlightened environment in which it has an assigned place, arranged, collected, hung... the viewer does not really have to move, he can freely choose the moment of reading and manipulate the photo, the viewer has a certain hold over the photo. For the film, the place is often a public space, specially designed and dark, the spectator must move, "we are going to the cinema" take his place and a seated position, motionless, passive. The moment of reading is programmed, the viewer has no control over the film. » David Nissen
Akhira Sano is a Tokyo-based music artist who has recorded since 2019 several albums on labels such as Important Records, IIKKI, and recently 12K among others. Working with electronic, instrumental, and concrete sounds, he crafts immersive assemblages of long overlapping tones and blurred resonance, cut through with textural crunch and hiss.
The latest cassette release from Tokyo‑based electronic musician and painter Akhira Sano. Evoking the stillness of late‑night hours and the lingering echoes of memory, it’s a work whose delicate details reveal themselves more and more with each listen.
Akhira Sano is a Tokyo-based artist working across sound, drawing, installation, and video. His practice finds generative potential for music in life's fleeting incidents, etching meaning from unassuming spaces and resonances. With releases on 12k, LAAPS, IIKKI, and The Trilogy Tapes, Sano has steadily carved out a distinctive voice within minimal and experimental music - one that privileges attentiveness and patience over spectacle.
"To Material Past", Sano's debut for SWIMS, carries this thread with a 30-minute expedition built solely using glockenspiel tones and field recordings from his local neighbourhood. This is a night walk with no map or end point; Sano follows irregular, coiling fragments that extend to form a tessellating luminous whole - like a subliminal mass of tree roots quietly shifting the concrete slabs beneath our feet.
Under this faded gauze of gestures and interactions, Sano's glockenspiel interjects like a grandfather clock, softly marking the partitions that make up a day's collected experience; clicking and chiming like the sleeping brain, as it sifts and catalogues a lifetime's ephemera of thoughts, faces and puzzles.
cobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschach inkblot — rotated as if in a whirlpool, and three-dimensional imagery pulsed with strong flicker. What was weird was that the images did not adhere to the surface of the screen. They stood out, almost floating, like holograms. Then, my eyes started catching physical shapes in the depth of the abstract patterns such as faces, hands, the surface of an oil spill, and they appeared and disappeared like ghosts or doppelgängers. “How does Nervous Magic Lantern work?” I asked Ken. The inventor's answer was something unexpected: "I don't know! I dreamed it and found it through experimentations then stuck to it. I'm not that technical." Well, he is an artist who creates a phantasmagoria of mystery; let the neuroscientists explain the mechanism. The self-made apparatus contains a spinning shutter, a light source, and lenses set in a wooden frame. Ken inserts his hand-painted circular slides between the light and lenses and moved them gently with his hands. The lenses enlarged a tiny portion on the slide, while the spinning shutter gave the flicker effect. Compared to Ken's other works, which are often filled with unflinching political criticism, the imagery of Nervous Magic Lantern is patently abstract, and it examines how our brain regulates our perceptions. In Jonas Mekas' Movie Journal, Ken once said, “We’re stepping towards a deeper incline, something challenging our notion of the way things are. Something impossible.” Elsewhere he stated, “Eisenstein said the power of film was to be found between shots. Peter Kubelka seeks it between film frames. I want to get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain. A whole new play of appearances is possible here.” Nervous Magic Lantern offers up this sort of play in stunning hallucinations, strange visions dancing on the screen. Ken's request for my music was to play “sounds of daily life.” He explained that the project “is an escape,” and that he felt “guilty not having any messages or reflecting the real world. By using environmental sounds to surround us,” he continued, “I'd like to be rooted in the real world." Around 2014, I noticed that Ken had a sizable collection of cassette field recordings he had amassed over the last several decades. Street noises in Chinatown, conversations with friends, or any sort of uncategorizable sound around him. I was fascinated and decided to use them as a springboard for composing. One of the unique aspects of Nervous Magic Lantern is that the visual stays abstract while the sound is able to adopt meanings or a narrative sense derived from the quotidian sounds. I wanted to emphasize that point and add almost a sense of documentary. More than that, I simply loved the aural depictions of Ken and Flo’s life. Those also trigger my memories with them. Over the years, during summer time, Ken, Flo, and my wife, Makiko, made a habit of going to their favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Other times, Ken and I had morning coffee at a Puerto Rican restaurant just below their loft. Life and art are inseparable, breaking into one another incessantly. Ken is an artist who always envisioned the impossible. I wanted to see if it's possible to present that vision as something universal, something whole, something running through everyone’s life. A soundtrack for life in the depth of illusion. That is perhaps what this album is. This album was recorded as a soundtrack for Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern at Spiral Hall, organized by Sound Live Tokyo, on November 3, 2015. It was probably one of our best performances. Before the performance, Ken explained to me the selected slides he uses and the ordering he employs, so that I would better understand the flow. Some slides are black-and-white and some color. For a given performance, Ken selects 10 slides or so. However, he might play with just one slide for the entire show or change the order — there was plenty of room to improvise. On my side, I also had a structure and the order of tapes, quite independent from Ken's visual. But I made the system easy to extend or shorten, duration-wise, in order to respond to Ken's ordering and mood. Lastly, I wanted to mention Flo's role, as she is deeply involved in Ken's creative process; as he says: “This is a mom-and-pop business.” From the first day of working together, she was always there with us and took care of all practical matters. Ken is a dreamer and thinks and works intuitively. But Flo — an exceptionally beautiful woman in and out — is rooted in the real world. Not just a pragmatist, however, Flo advises Ken on artistic decisions. Ken always asks to hear her thoughts, as I did as well. As film critic and their decades-long friend Amy Taubin once described it, "Florence Jacobs is nothing less than a producer of Ken Jacobs' cinema." What a perfect couple, and it was an extremely joyous journey with them!
A site-specific sound piece created by Akio Suzuki, a master of sound art, with a transcendent echo space.
Since the 1960s, Akio Suzuki, a pioneer of sound art, has focused on "listening" and has visited numerous echo spaces such as caves, tunnels, palaces, and oil tanks in search of places of resonance, calling himself an "echo man." This work is a record of the master's being led to a 40-second otherworldly world of reverberation inside the embankment of Uchinokura Dam, located deep in the mountains of Shibata City, Niigata, and recording without an audience. Stones, bamboo, sponges, hand mirrors, combs, cardboard, glass bottles, and his own voice. Everyday objects and bodies are instantly transformed into "sound instruments," and performances are performed in various ways, such as hitting, rolling, rubbing, spinning, blowing, and pulling, and an acoustic sound piece is created with the unique reverb effect of natural reflections in a huge concrete space without any electrical amplification. The scene transforms into both micro and macro scenes, evoking us, the audience, the infinite universe.
Retrieved from long-forgotten reel-to-reel tapes and cassettes, this collection of prehistorical traces unveils some of the meanders which eventually led to the inception of legendary experimental pop outfit Aksak Maboul, founded in 1977 and still active in 2025.A bildungsroman of sorts, the story begins in 1969, when 19-year-old Marc Hollander and Paolo Radoni form a band to play a strange mixture of psych rock and free jazz. Called Here and Now (no connection to the later UK band of the same name), the band soon becomes a wild tentet and, after winning an amateur contest and being involved in the whirlwind around the mythical Amougies festival, lands a record deal with then-prestigious French label BYG Records (but ends up not releasing anything).More musicians join the collective (including future Aksak Maboul members Vincent Kenis and Denis Van Hecke), which dissolves in 1972.From 1973 to 1977, Marc Hollander engages in a series of solo recordings and collabs, in which further threads which will make up the fabric of Aksak Maboul’s music are explored.In the course of seventeen tracks and 80 minutes* of music nurtured by the fertile upheavals of that era, we are taken for a stroll through moments of free rock, improv, quasi-kraut, modular and ambient electronics, piano pieces, percussion and various experiments and sketches, which hint at what Aksak Maboul later became, and at what it has not (but could have) become…*on the digital and CD versions. Two tracks, as well as the two additional excerpts of a 1969 live set by Here and Now, are left out of the vinyl format.All tracks recorded in and around Brussels, 1969-1977Assembled & edited by Marc Hollander, 2025Restored and mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung MasteringFeaturing Marc Hollander, Vincent Kenis, Paolo Radoni, Chris Joris, Pico Berkowitch,Denis Van Hecke, Stefan Liberski, Somore Sainte-Jules, John Van Rymenant and others.
Written and recorded in 1980-83 by (Aksak Maboul & Crammed Discs founder) Marc Hollander and (Honeymoon Killers/Aksak Maboul vocalist) Véronique Vincent, this trailblazing avant-pop album album predated certain hybrid musical trends which may have emerged later on (think pop meets proto-techno, with African, Middle-Eastern, dub, jazz & cinematic French flavours…)
The album remained unfinished and unreleased for 30 years, and finally came out for the first time in Oct 2014.