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An excellent album of rootsy early Dancehall from Jah Thomas and his Midnight Rock label. Loads of great tracks here, mixed by Scientist, amongst others, with the Roots Radics band providing the rhythms!

The follow up to Dub From The Heart. Recorded and mixed at Conscious Sounds. Produced by Jah Warrior.

For the very first time on vinyl, Jah Wobble's 1997 extraordinary descent into downtempo and world beat science. Released on his now-defunct 30 Hertz label, »The Light Programme« showcased an excellent cast of musicians. On board are historical Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit – with more of his African-induced rhythms – multi-instrumentalist - and The Wire contributor - Clive Bell, conga player Neville Murray, guitar and synth player Mark Ferda and the exceptional harpist Zi-Lan Liao. If you enjoyed »My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts« you’ll fall in love with »The Light Programme.«

Second edition pressing Black vinyl with amended art/metallic sticker.

Uruguayan groove and multicultural sophistication – 40th anniversary special edition, 500 copies, including 20 page booklet. 
With a unique mix of music roots and cosmopolitan sounds Jaime Roos would become one of the most successful and significant artists of Uruguayan music.
Aquello, his third album, recorded in France in 1980 with an impressive cast of international musicians, reflects Europe’s multicultural landscape during the late seventies. Psychedelic folk, afro-candombe, murga, rock, new tango and jazz-fusion are combined in a surprising way in a one-off album that exudes strangeness and sophistication.

In July of 2022, just one month before jaimie branch’s death sent shockwaves around the world, the trumpet player and composer was in Chicago at International Anthem studios putting finishing touches on an album. It was a suite of music she had composed and then recorded with her flagship ensemble, Fly or Die, over the course of a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. In her wake, the album was near complete, with only mixing tweaks, final titles, and artwork to be fully realized. In the months following, her family (led by sister Kate Branch), her band (Jason Ajemian, Lester St. Louis, and Chad Taylor), and her collaborators at IARC banded together to gather memories, texts, emails, photographs, artwork and fragments belonging to jaimie to light the path forward. The goal was always to do what jaimie would have done. Packaged in stunning artwork by John Herndon, Damon Locks, and branch herself, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) is jaimie’s final album with her Fly or Die quartet. From the album's liner notes, written by jaimie's Fly or Die bandmates: “jaimie never had small ideas. She always thought big. The minute you told her she couldn’t do something, or that something would be too difficult to accomplish, the more determined and focused she became. And this album is big. Far bigger and more demanding — for us, and for you — than any other Fly or Die record. For this, jaimie wanted to play with longer forms, more modulations, more noise, more singing, and as always, grooves and melodies. She was a dynamic melodicist. jaimie wanted this album to be lush, grand and full of life, just as she was. Every time we take a listen, we feel the deep imprint of her all over the music, and we see all of us making it together.”

In July of 2022, just one month before jaimie branch’s death sent shockwaves around the world, the trumpet player and composer was in Chicago at International Anthem studios putting finishing touches on an album. It was a suite of music she had composed and then recorded with her flagship ensemble, Fly or Die, over the course of a residency at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in Omaha, Nebraska. In her wake, the album was near complete, with only mixing tweaks, final titles, and artwork to be fully realized. In the months following, her family (led by sister Kate Branch), her band (Jason Ajemian, Lester St. Louis, and Chad Taylor), and her collaborators at IARC banded together to gather memories, texts, emails, photographs, artwork and fragments belonging to jaimie to light the path forward. The goal was always to do what jaimie would have done. Packaged in stunning artwork by John Herndon, Damon Locks, and branch herself, Fly or Die Fly or Die Fly or Die ((world war)) is jaimie’s final album with her Fly or Die quartet. From the album's liner notes, written by jaimie's Fly or Die bandmates: “jaimie never had small ideas. She always thought big. The minute you told her she couldn’t do something, or that something would be too difficult to accomplish, the more determined and focused she became. And this album is big. Far bigger and more demanding — for us, and for you — than any other Fly or Die record. For this, jaimie wanted to play with longer forms, more modulations, more noise, more singing, and as always, grooves and melodies. She was a dynamic melodicist. jaimie wanted this album to be lush, grand and full of life, just as she was. Every time we take a listen, we feel the deep imprint of her all over the music, and we see all of us making it together.”

Muir and Caminiti are sick and tired of ambient music's bizarre entanglement with the wellness industrial complex. You know what we're on about here: healing sounds and soothing balms for well-heeled adult babies to jam on Instagram, supported by their aesthetic collection of verdant succulants (modular synth not essential, but preferred). And yeh we fully realize that the world's going to shit, but we're also pretty sure that a guided meditation isn't gonna lead us to salvation, especially when it's accompanied by music that's at best a poor approximation of private press biz that came out four decades ago. Growing up in California, Muir and Caminiti quickly developed a deep suspicion of this kinda snake oil peddling and on "Talisman" fabricate a charm to ward off fakers - a subtly fanged ambient-not-ambient dedication to desert doom, mountain jazz and lysergic experimental forms. The duo split the labor cleanly: seasoned improviser Caminiti handles electric guitar, and Muir works as a sonic alchemist, grinding Caminiti's takes into dust and subliming each note into a thick, vaporous haze. Anyone who's heard either artist's work before will have an idea of where to start, and there are traces of Caminiti's blasted earth recordings as part of Barn Owl, as well as his cinematic solo productions; Muir meanwhile picks up where last year's Ilian Tape-released "Mana" left off, orchestrating a mood that's bleak but not suffocating, and dark but not without cracks of light. The most obvious stylistic comparisons are to Seattle doom metal originators Earth - particularly 2005's country-fried "Hex" - and Norwegian maestro Terje Rydpal, who drove prog, jazz and psychedelic music into new territory in the 1970s and 1980s. Caminiti takes these touchstones and exposes them to the harsh Los Angeles sunlight, further drying out Earth's Pacific Northwestern blues and adding some neon flicker to Rydpal's icy, mountainous naturalism. He also admits he was soaking up pedal steel music at the time, and you can hear the trace of artists like Chas Smith, Daniel Lanois and BJ Cole in his recumbent riffs. A trained sound engineer who's spent the last few years refining his skills in Berlin, Muir looks to the GRM school for his direction, and employs subtle electronic processes, occasionally augmenting them with his own field recordings. This isn't just arbitrary birdsong to blithely suggest the natural world over billowing major chords, but evocative audio snapshots of the burning Californian landscape. It's these small touches that ground "Talisman" and provide it with a brawny narrative backdrop - the duo have created a record that's devotional and melodic, but one that never resorts to cheap tricks or well-worn manipulation. They've instead landed on a sound that's antagonistic but not annoyingly confrontational (we see you power ambient) or exhaustingly conceptual. Diving into one track or another is almost pointless, Muir and Caminiti assembled "Talisman" to be played in a single sitting - it's a mood piece that's unwrenchable from its essential whole. Listening is a chance to escape into another universe for a while, one that takes rough and rugged elements (Muir and Caminiti bonded over their love of contemporary death metal bands like Spectral Voice and Blood Incantation) and refines them into lavish sigils that suggest the confusing unpredictability of our era. Anti-ambient? Maybe.

Jake Muir's latest set of soft-focus, sensual electro-concrète, dissolves X-rated gay sleaze flick soundtracks into a shimmering suite of subdued orchestral flourishes and surreal cosmic psychedelia. Back in 2020, Muir put together a 90-minute mix for Honey Soundsystem, blending tracks from Kelman Duran, DJ Olive, Daniel Lanois and Terre Thaemlitz with obliquely camp dialog samples from vintage gay porn. The idea was to represent queer sexuality in a looser, more experimental manner, grazing the super-sensory pleasure of the bathhouse experience and the illicit joy of cruising without getting too self-serious while doing it. The mix was so popular that Muir followed it up with a weightless sequel two years later, and began developing the concept into a proper album, using more samples of music and dialogue, eventually performing the piece at the esteemed GRM as part of their FOCUS #4 concerts alongside work by Eliane Radigue, Folke Rabe and Chris Watson. The album is split into two side-long pieces that wash and ripple with nervous tension and discreet salaciousness. Opening with a familiar, bombastic theater sting, there are echoes of kosmische music and antique experimental electronics on 'Cruisin' 87', that Muir fashions into ASMR-rich puddles of syrupy, back-room ambience. Occasionally we hear lascivious words thru the fog, men mumbling to each other and giggling before the inevitable occurs. That's beautiful," a voice mutters over a dusky cricket chirp on 'Pipe Dream'. "It is," another replies. Muir's sonic response is suitably explicit, like a 1950s Hollywood jump-cut to a train going into a tunnel; the Berlin-via-Los Angeles sound artist takes the whole-body, mutual release of queer sex and interprets it with heady gestures, peppering jazzy rhythmic frostings into basins of skewered drone and gurgling synth. Muir's sound is colored by the pleasure of physical touch, a mussy flux of high frequency scrapes and caresses juxtaposed with woozy, dubbed-out fondles and thrusts. Who said the GRM was buttoned up?

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

Since he started producing music, Berlin-based American sound artist Jake Muir has been obsessed with sampling. His 2018 album "Lady's Mantle" was based on manipulated chunks of vintage Californian surf rock, and its follow-up, 2020's midnight symphony "The Hum Of Your Veiled Voice" was sourced from a wide variety of old records, and inspired by the work of experimental turntablists like Marina Rosenfeld, Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck. On "Mana", Muir looks back to a misunderstood musical movement. Around 1995, a group of New York producers and DJs - including DJ Olive, DJ Spooky and Spectre - pioneered a genre-dissolving sound by unifying hip-hop techniques with ideas pulled from dub, jungle, ambient music and industrial noise. Badged "illbient", it was a short-lived genre that felt like a high-minded psychedelic cousin of the UK's trip-hop. Muir uses illbient as the springboard for "Mana", utilizing a selection of samples to inform his frothy drones and foreboding atmospheres. He ushers the material into 2021 by diverting it through his own contemporary worldview, attempting to recreate the hyperreal fantasy histories of Japanese RPGs (think "Dark Souls" and "Final Fantasy") and nod to sensual, tactile soundscapes of European industrial labels Staalplaat and Soleilmoon. The result is a magickal, sensory journey that's as physical as it is representational. If the illbient producers were encouraging a burgeoning experimental music landscape to emphasize the tactile feeling of turntablism and sample manipulation, Muir is doing the same with "Mana". Each track heaves and breathes not just with his cultural reference points, but with layered, complicated emotions. We can hear joy, sadness, desire and anguish, obscured by disintegrating noise, hallucinogenic harmonies and sub-aquatic bass. It's electronic music that's rooted not in technology, but in touch. credits

Burnt Friedman has been collaborating with German rock giant Jaki Liebezeit of CAN, who has been a close friend of his for years, and experimental drummer João Pais Filipe, who has worked with Rafael Toral and Lafawndah. João Pais Filipe, a drummer in the experimental field who has worked with Rafael Toral and Lafawndah, has released a split EP on his own Nonplace label. It's another astonishing work...! This is the first time I've ever heard a track from the band, and I can't wait to see what they come up with next... "Out Of Ape" is a trancy, avant-garde electro track that completely removes the distinction between the otherworldly and the real, while filling the track with ultra-colored psychedelia. Eurydike", and the cosmic ambient/tribal dance "Star Wars", which was inspired by Jaki Liebezeit and recorded together in 2004.

Jako Maron was born and raised on Réunion, a small island in the Indian Ocean not far from Madagascar that's governed by the French Republic. The primary musical form to emerge from Réunion is maloya, a percussion-forward call-and-response style that differs from séga, another popular local genre, due to its lack of harmonic elements. Maloya was developed in the 19th century, when enslaved peoples from Madagascar and West Africa were taken to the island by French colonists who wanted to exploit the country's sugar cane and cotton fields; indentured laborers from South India also traveled to Réunion, bringing with them their own musical traditions. The sound then represented Réunion's own Créole musical language, using the keyamb, a sugar cane rattle, the Indian tabla, a barrel drum known as the roulér, a bamboo percussion instrument called the pikér, and other tools. Because maloya was such an emotionally charged expression from a suppressed underclass, it inevitably became associated with political revolution. This was a sound that was developed for and by the workers, and when France made the island an "overseas département" in 1946, maloya became synonymous with independence and freedom. As its popularity increased, so did its perceived danger, and the French government banned the music in the 1960s, only lifting the restriction years later in the 1970s. Once the ban was over, musicians began experimenting wholeheartedly with the form, splintering it into radically different sub-genres. Maron, who was born during the prohibition in 1968, was fascinated by the genre's open endedness and has been working to integrate it with electronic music since the 1990s, when techno and house sounds reverberated across the island from the USA, through Europe, Africa and beyond. Using modular synthesizers and drum machines, Maron offers a completely unique take on maloya. Like Charanjit Singh's disco-cum-acid raga fusions in the early 1980s, or more recently Equiknoxx's innovative and deeply personal fragmentation of Jamaican dancehall, Maron's electro maloya experiments take an initial idea and shuttle it across unfamiliar sonic landscapes. The all-important 6/8 beat is at the core of his music, with electronic thuds, zips and pings standing in for hand drums and congas, while the usually vocal call-and-response elements are handed off to wheezing synthesizers. 'Batbaté Maloya' is an appropriate introduction, with familiar electronic sounds used in surprising patterns - the maloya beat is the most striking element, but Maron adds effects, processes and swing that can't help but inspire comparisons to db reggae and dembow formulations. But he never stays in the same place for long. When Maron edges into minimalism, like on the cybernetic 'Maloya Valsé chok 1', his unsettling mood and noisy, percussive framework harmonizes with similarly prismatic grooves from Pan Sonic, or the Raster Noton catalog. And when he approaches long-form on 'Fanali dann bwa', it sounds as if he's integrating dubstep pressure with psychedelic kosmische sounds, submerging the beat beneath hypnotic synth wobbles and squeals. Maron's relentless examination of maloya and its application within electronic music is endlessly invigorating, and across 15 tracks (four are exclusive to this new vinyl edition) he makes a convincing case for the genre's continuing relevance as unshakable protest music.

Jali Nyama Suso was known and loved throughout his native Gambia and renowned the world over as one of the greatest kora harp players. This recording was the first release of a solo kora and griot music album anywhere. Jali Nyama, whose real name was Mohamadu Lamin Suso, was the eldest of four brothers, and the only one who took up the kora to follow the profession of traditional music and oratory of the Mandinka people, known as jaliyaa. A practitioner of jaliyaa is known as a jali (or if a woman, jali muso). Jaliyaa is multi-faceted, requiring the jali to be a singer, oral historian, genealogist and praiser, with emphasis on one or more of these depending on ability, interest and circumstance. The kora is a 21-string harp, strung today with nylon, but in the past with rawhide. The body is made from a large half calabash covered with cowhide and pierced through by a stout neck of rosewood that also forms the tailpiece. This manner of construction identifies it as a spike harp, a type of instrument unique to West Africa. The traditional role of the kora in jaliyaa is to accompany singing. The kora player himself may sing, or he may accompany a vocal soloist, male or female. In addition, kora players create solo pieces from songs by varying the basic ostinato, by adding improvised passages called birimintingo, and by playing the vocal line on the instrument.

Co-produced with Carlos Niño and scoring a 7.5 on Pitchfork, Jamael Dean is a prodigious 20-year-old jazz pianist and producer who has collaborated and performed with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Carlos Niño. Jamael Dean's debut album is out now on the prestigious Stones Throw label. Influenced by his grandfather, the legendary soul-jazz drummer Donald Dean, as well as Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, and Herbie Hancock, Dean is one of the most sought-after artists of the new generation. From the ethereal horn section, to the kaleidoscopic piano, to the chill-out microcosmic collage of sound, the vibes are tremendous. A chaotic cosmic soul-jazz masterpiece that mixes beat music, hip-hop, ambient and electronica. This is a masterpiece of chaotic cosmic soul jazz that mixes contemporary jazz, beat music, and experimental music, reaching out to listeners of many genres!

He has collaborated and performed with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Carlos Niño. Jamael Dean is a 20-year-old jazz pianist & producer who is influenced by legendary soul jazz drummer and his grandfather, Donald Dean, as well as Sun Ra and Alice Coltrane, and his latest cassette is out now on the prestigious Stones Throw label. Dean's debut album, co-produced by Carlos Niño, was a hit at Stones Throw, and he's back with a 30-minute cassette album of three lengthy tracks. The album features jazz singer Sharada Shashidhar (Leaving Records), with whom he collaborated on his debut, viola player/arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, who has also worked with Masaaki Hara of dublab.jp's "rings" and "Alpha Pup," and Aaron Shaw. Aaron Shaw, and other gorgeous musicians. With soaring piano, a sacred horn section, and Shashidhar's lustrous vocals, this is a masterpiece that updates Alice Coltrane and Herbie Hancock to the present day, while blasting out tremendous soul jazz vibes!

A 22-year-old genius jazz pianist who also works with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Carlos Niño, including his grandfather legendary soul jazz drummer Donald Dean, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and more. A young Jamael Dean who needs attention to be influenced by. The long-awaited official debut work is fully released from the prestigious ! Currently, he leads the music group The Afronauts and participates in the legendary black jazz "Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra". It is a two-part album consisting of 10 hip-hop songs produced under the name of his own nickname "Jasik" using jazz performances by his group and beats sampled from them. Sharada Shashidhar and Mekala “Mickey” Session, who are also enrolled in Brooklyn's female singer and have collaborated with Jamael Dean many times, participated. The title comes from the Genesis of the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group. Both sides are fertile and superb!

The album’s title refers to the creation story of the Yoruba people, a West African ethnic group with a revered tradition. Songs on Primordial Waters tell stories of deities and divinities, with Jamael drawing a through line between his tradition’s origins and contemporary jazz. “Èṣù” is a jazz interpretation of a traditional Yoruba spiritual melody, and “Ṣàngó” tells the story of the popular king deity, god of thunder and lightning. These sit alongside songs inspired by Jamael’s black Los Angeles community. “Galaxy In Leimert”, influenced by Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy Around Olodumare,” pays celestial homage to Jamael’s rapidly-gentrifying South L.A. neighborhood, Leimert Park. Jamael’s hip-hop influence comes through in the album’s second half, with Jamael assuming his hip-hop alter ego Jasik to rap over beats he created entirely by sampling the jazz material on the first half of the album. Jamael invited his regular collaborator, vocalist Sharada Shashidar, and Mekala Session from his local music community to perform on the album. Jamael is a seasoned collaborator: he currently leads music collective The Afronauts, has participated in the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra, and has played with the likes of Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Carlos Niño.

Modern Love’s 7” series returns with a 45 special from Chicago’s Sun God, delivering a pair of chrome-burn acid jak and cosmic house tear-outs fired to spangle the dance. Screwed, exceptional music for the club. A follow-up to Jamal’s album ‘Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ (Modern Love, 2022), this rare 7” outing hails the Chi house don at his mind-bending best, plotting coordinates for the outer limits of club music whilst firmly tethered to its fundamentals. Never one to follow the grid, Jamal makes the template his own with a hands-on approach that translates decades of experience - from dancing to Ron Hardy in the ‘80s, being an apprentice of sorts to Adonis in the ‘90s, and then thru countless performances and almost innumerable releases ever since - into uniquely transcendent shapes. Coming on like Sun Ra strapped with a 303, ’It Is My Fault, My Fault Alone’ yields the chewiest acid and spitting, hot oil rhythms articulated with the sort of fervour and psychosexual thrust that underlines all of Jamal’s best work, and here emphatically brought to to the boil via a maze of knotted drums and frayed synths that join dots between Prince and Armando in an effortlessly asymmetric style. The B-side ‘Be Fearless In The Pursuit Of What Sets Ur Soul On Fire’ only ramps the pressure with a frenetic arrangement anchored to a modulated kick and synced to psychedelic synths that roll with seemingly endless momentum. At the risk of sounding like yoghurt-weaving rave casualties; Jamal is once again utterly attuned to the type of cosmic frequencies and aerobic mystic needs that have been lost in translation by successive waves of dry-ass posers and dancers who don’t like to get their kicks dirty. And for that, we eternally salute him.

Rare private press Jazz-Funk with breaks and some spiritual influences reminiscent of Brother Ahh at times. They cover Stevie Wonder’s “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” plus play originals that include “Sweet Heritage,” “Free Will,” “One of a Kind (Love Affair),” “Serene Beauty,” and “In the Fall of the Year.” This is a beautiful sounding record with elements of straight Jazz, Soul/Jazz, and some funky stuff including some Free and Afro-centric influences.

The main man is Jaman himself (J.E. Manuel) on keyboards, who in the past had worked with R&B bands and many people in the Jazz world (Turrentines, Bostic, Stitt, Joe Farrell, Lenny Welch, Ethel Ennis).

The duo’s third album of instrumental guitar recordings pushes their sinuous compositions into labyrinthine new shapes, interlocking and interlocutory, supported by a cast of stellar collaborators. Interwoven among the dazzling original pieces is a fascinating array of covers, ranging from traditional Breton dance tunes to a deconstruction of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance.

Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands is an autobiographical record, comprised of four songs that Hoff refers to as ambient media. Each track is composed from sources drawn from his own involuntary aural landscape, specifically musical earworms and tinnitus frequencies. Neither sound nor a daydream, the earworm (or stuck song) emblematizes music as a commercial form—immediate, ubiquitous, and persistent. Likewise, tinnitus is inaudible and unscrupulous, manifesting across a spectrum of frequencies at will. The cognitive swirling of these phenomena provides an ambivalent, internal soundtrack that scores a person’s movement through the world. Those suffering from tinnitus or those who have grown accustomed to the “Tinnitus Effect” in movies will likely recognize the buzzing pitches on the record, but will likely not recognize the songs. Distorted and distilled, Shadows Lifted from Invisible Hands features altered versions of four commercial pop songs: Blondie’s “Heart of Glass,” David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” Madonna’s “Into the Groove,” and Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day.” Having been haunted by these songs on and off for years, Hoff tweaks the tracks, transposing and recomposing them for orchestral instrumentation. Speaking back to these involuntary echoes, these tracks go to great lengths to obfuscate their sources; to be sure not to simply re-introduce each earworm, as though they were samples. Otherwise, what’s the point? No one needs another stream. Besides, earworms are not music, although we perceive them as such. They are non-cochlear and exist as an affective force that is neither subjective nor objective, which is to say they are an invasive—and alien—phenomenon. Like tinnitus, they are aggravated by economic, social, and environmental forces as well as emotional states, mental health, and aging. Hoff doesn’t underplay his own struggles with mental health in discussing the record—noting a long history of depression and its acuteness over the last few years, which serve as the backdrop to the composition of this record. Scratch any pop song hard enough and you’ll find sadness underneath it. Subdermal, the songs on this record evoke a type of ephemeral weariness and despair. By recasting the original songs through their shadowy doubles, Hoff provides a window into the dark core of pop music. At the center of which lies capitalism’s desperate attempt to replicate itself through a cheap high built on echoing refrains. Just below the surface the listener finds a hangover of shadows dancing through the mind. — James Hoff is an artist living and working in New York. His work encompasses a variety of media, including sound, video, painting, and publishing. Hoff’s multidisciplinary approach begins at the user level—the level at which we interact with consumer technologies, media, and data. He has worked with computer viruses, inaudible data signals, ear worms, culture bound illnesses, dead zones, and hacked google maps as tools and framing devices for works that reimagine and expand the creative potential of digital and cultural networks beyond their economic and corporate-engineered use value. By exploiting and manufacturing technological and cognitive glitches, Hoff illuminates the social, political, and historical context of the software and media that we interact with on a daily basis. Hoff co-founded Primary Information in 2006 to publish historical and contemporary artists’ books. The organization has published hundreds of titles, including facsimile editions of Art-Rite, Broken Music, Black Art Notes, Cornelius Cardew’s Stockhausen Serves Imperialism, Godzilla: Asian American Art Network, The New Woman’s Survival Catalog, and Womens Work as well as new works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, DeForrest Brown Jr, Tony Conrad, Dara Birnbaum, Constance DeJong, Alexandro Segade, Martine Syms, and Flora Yin-Wong, among many others. He has exhibited and performed at Artists Space, Bergen Kunsthall, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), The Centre d’Art Contemporain (Geneva), Hessel Museum of Art, ICA London, The Kitchen, Kunsthall Oslo, The Royal Theatre of La Monnaie, MassMOCA, MoMA/PS1, Museum of Contemporary Art (Denver), and the Onassis Cultural Center, among many others.

A reissue of the classic 1977 vocal fusion album that has been the source of many hip-hop samples. It features Narada Michael Walden (Whitney Houston, Herbie Hancock, George Benson) on drums. Long out of print, and coveted by collectors, Chiaroscuro provides an official faithful reissue.

Jame’s Newton’s 1977 self-released solo-debut, ‘Flute Music’ is an unheralded gem of the 70’s jazz underground. An album that showcases a diverse range of styles and fervent cross-pollination, while retaining a clear sense of direction and cohesion. An artist funnelling their wild expression into multiple facets of “The New Music”, crafting an auspicious and artistic debut. Newton would later go on to record with revered jazz labels like India Navigation and ECM, and collaborate with fellow creative luminaries like Sam Rivers, Anthony Davis, Andrew Cyrille, David Murray, and John Carter. But ‘Flute Music’ captures Newton’s fiery creativity and experimental nature in its earliest blossom. The album’s opener, Arkansas Suite, finds Newton’s flute unaccompanied, but densely layered. Folding and cascading upon itself, he creates a ricocheting web of dense woodwind harmonics. The effect is deeply immersive and meditative. From first blush, it seems this could be an album of blissful new age. But after this track, Newton’s influences explode outwards. On the same LP side, Darlene’s Bossa welcomes a full band into the fold. The track expounds upon a latin-jazz groove as if the group were seasoned experts of the form. The next track once again finds Newton’s flute on its own as he upends Duke Ellington’s jazz standard, Sophisticated Lady. And finally, on the sidelong b-side track, Poor Theron, the band is suffused with free-jazz electricity - quietly roiling in the midst of musique concrete clatter, and exploding into a din of spiritual fervor. Flute Music pushes in many directions at once, and yet it revolves firmly around a singular smoldering core. That core is Newton’s unmistakable talent and musicianship. His flute anchors the whole affair, whether it’s in cascading sheets of unaccompanied wind, or flitting between the breathmarks of his backing band. With ‘Flute Music’, James Newton casts himself as a potent force on the creative-jazz scene, and the rest of his career has certainly given credence to that promise. Reissued for the first time since its scarce private-press issue in 1977, Morning Trip are exceedingly proud to present the debut solo work by a renowned and prestigious jazz luminary.