Ambient / Minimal / Drone
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From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).
Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.
Mohammad Reza Mortazavi returns to Latency with Nexus, a full-length album recorded in Berlin that extends his radical reinvention of Persian percussion. Renowned for pushing the tombak and daf into new territory with unprecedented techniques, Mortazavi now incorporates voice, effects, and electronic treatments into his sound for the first time. These additions deepen, rather than depart from, his lifelong exploration of rhythm and resonance. The record opens with ‘Zendegi’ (‘Life’), built from the chant “Woman, Life, Freedom” as a gesture towards his homeland and beyond. Throughout Nexus, Mortazavi explores connection, transformation, and the unseen forces that shape reality, presenting rhythm as both guide and teacher. The album title itself points to a meeting place where energies, ideas, and times converge, capturing its meditative but exploratory spirit. The cover features artwork by American artist and filmmaker Jordan Belson, whose “visual music” aligns with Mortazavi’s trance-inducing percussion language. His hypnotic live shows have reached the Berlin Philharmonie, Paris Pantheon, and Sydney Opera House, while his rhythmic innovations have earned acclaim across experimental and electronic circles, including collaborations with Burnt Friedman and Mark Fell.
Finally on wax; Shiner, Pontiac Streator and Ben Bondy's West Mineral debut as Shinetiac is a real downtempo pleasure, re-imagining classic Trip Hop with a gooey cybernetic core, hugely recommended for anyone on the line from Hysterical Love Project to Seefeel, Olive to A.S.O., Ulla to Arovane. All three members of Shinetiac are best known for their tenure in the neo-ambient weeds, gathering bounties for 3XL, Quiet Time, Motion Ward and of course Huerco S.'s West Mineral. Anyone familiar with their various side projects and solo deployments will have already clocked their obsessions with classic dreampop, trip-hop and cloud rap, and those influences are fully thrust into the foreground here, with the more trad ambient elements used as little more than decoration. 'Star Frog Dilla' opens the set and combs illusory Olive-like vocal harmonies over a jumble of choppy jazz samples and sirens, with a glitch-heavy beat that harks back to an earlier, simpler iteration of IDM. What makes it so inviting is that Shinetiac fashion a loveletter to pre-internet cultural collisions, pooling their empathetic energies in a lushly amorphous slant on ambient dance strung between classic Trip Hop, HD late ‘90s / early ‘00s electronic music x vaporous hypermodernism. They cycle freely from the curdled reflux of Y2K business in ‘Night Coomy’ to rudely electrified beatdown on another standout, ‘K2 Spiritual’ and its spongiform centrepiece ‘Prayer For Kim Cassidy’ calling to mind the most genteel ends of RDJ, lavishing electro drums over a seemingly dark backdrop and changing the mood immediately. Soon they're in almost balearic territory, turning moonlight into an island dawn with Orbital-esque time-stretched vocal echoes and SFX. The trio increase the tempo on 'Dog Cafe Rioz', working in that double/half-time mode that's been such a fixture on off-piste dancefloors in the last few years and letting languid electric piano phrases form hazy vapour trails. It all builds to 'Everlong', a cover of the Foo Fighters' 1997 anthem that Shinetiac spy through the lens of Sneaker Pimps - whose landmark '6 Underground' arrived only a year prior. It's a form of historical fantasy, imagining an interaction that never happened but maybe should have? Because it works, stripping away the bombast and replacing it with moody low-end pulses and pure vibes.
Ulla’s 28912 label returns with a gorgeous bouquet of lowercase wonders that'll cast a gentle spell over anyone on the line from Vincent Gallo to The Humble Bee, Sofie Birch to Tenniscoats. The fourth release on the label following Naemi's 'Breathless, Shorn' and Ulla's own 'Hometown Girl', and its ‘Other Girl’ companion piece, 'Puff' is a new album from Justin Cantrell aka J and the Woolen Stars, a core member of Naarm's underground scene as part of local supergroup Picnic, and the brains behind the excellent Daisart and se Dessaisir Publishing labels - we recommend you check in on both if you haven't already done so. ‘Puff’ is a glistening pool of lush refractions and music-box lullabies, featuring an array of acoustic instruments and fragile foley sounds that are gently peeled away until all we’re left with are the faded outlines of half-remembered songs. A sound that roots itself in the prophetic machinations of artists like Fennesz and the languid Japanese minimalism of Fourcolour or Moskitoo, 'Puff' strikes a delicate balance, sounding as bewitchingly informal as a Tenniscoats set, but also consistently muddling the perception of high and low-brow sound. Cantrell's skill lies in a sort of sonic conjuration, bamboozling the brains of those of us who grew up listening to stepped-on audio via ramshackle RealMedia streams by alchemising the content, turning found sound into gold. Just tell us you don't get chills from hearing the bitrate-impaired acoustic guitar on 'Dirty like an angel', set against a backdrop of windy, harmonic detritus. It's both meticulously contrived and gloriously off-the-cuff, like one of Vincent Gallo's classic 'When'-era demos reduced down to 96kbps. Similarly, 'She knows just what to say' provokes faint memories of folk music, with impromptu fiddle parts gently steamrolled to create a sound that’s nothing short of exquisite, like pressed flowers rediscovered in an old, discarded book. Even the more palpably electronic elements are hand sculpted in a way that belies the era we're living in - it's music for a digital age that sounds oddly unplugged, flawed and human. An unmistakably lovely antidote to the opiating nostalgia of our time.
New album of peaceful explorations by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. This, their second record, maintains the space and long tones that made their debut, "All Is Sound" a successful anecdote to the loud and fast times we live in. It also expands their musical palate with powerful rhythmic elements.
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio have been breaking new ground with healing / meditation music that also honors their roots in Gospel and Blues...and hints at forward looking Spiritual Jazz. Through their Cello, Saxophone, Piano and Flute playing they bring a new sound to the table. Ancient to the future.
Saphileaum has spent the past decade in passage between notable houses of atmospheric sorcery - Mule Musiq, Not Not Fun, Slow Life, Constellation Tatsu - and of course Good Morning Tapes, who now host their 3rd meeting, ‘Heavenly Hills’. A definitive chapter in his ten year saga, it is flush with symphonic strings and sky born keys, breezily urged by percussion that straddles chill out and folk zones. That said there’s also a Balearic - or should that be Black Sea? - appeal to its title tune, that lingers in the glistening wake of ‘Your Grace’, to the shimmering breaks of a parting piece ‘Alarko (Cosmic Eagle)’, falling into the space between Boards of Canada's cult-inspired hauntological nostalgia and Shackleton's hallowed ethno-dub. “The tracks in the album were written with the inspiration of the kingdom of Shambhala in the Himalayas. I'm deeply fascinated and touched by it. Even the album title, holds the idea of its Heavenly nature and the tracks are like individual, elemental parts of it. The album is not a journey into Shambhala, but rather a play and a dance with its energy, image and presence in my world. Alarko (Cosmic Eagle) is dedicated to my grandfather, Temur Tsiklauri, and I dedicate the whole album to my country Georgia, which I deeply love.”
Japanese bamboo flute maestro and goat (JP) cohort Rai Tateishi makes an impressive debut statement with his holistic attempts to transcend the limits of ancient instruments to reveal gently delirious insights comparable with Jon Hassell, Phew, Bendik Giske, FUJI|||||||||||TA.
‘Presence’ is a triumph of improvised, elemental musicality that distills aspects of myriad folk traditions in pursuit of the artist’s own truth. For 40 minutes of singularly weird, locked-in performance, Rai Tateishi diverges his formative training in the shinobue (a bamboo flute) to applications for its elder sibling, the shakuhachi, and its distant relatives in the khene mouth organ of Northeastern Thailand and Laos, and even the Irish flute, with remarkable results returned from each.
Piece to piece, Tateishi adapts a spectra of unusual and extended instrumental experiments to articulate uniquely animist sound arrangements, with judicious use of a ring modulator and delay effects only subtly altering his sound in real-time, gelling the harmonics and smoothing off its contours. Some 15 years of studies and accreted knowledge of histories, timelines, and spirits are deftly tattered in the air and rebound in precisely complex ribbons that become all the more impressive by virtue of its in-the-moment recording.
Presented with no overdubs, the six works were recorded by label head and KAKUHAN/goat lynchpin Koshiro Hino across three days of adventurous improvisation capturing the breadth of Tateishi’s vision in a mix of succinct flights of fancy and one durational wonder where he really cuts loose. An opening piece of rapid percussive fingering and rasping sets the tone for increasingly intricate explorations of the shinobue, and bluesy cadence of a reedy Thai khene - antecedent of the shō - whipped into headier harmonic overtones, whilst his 5th piece for Irish flute best recalls Ka Baird or Michael O’Shea’s lysergic impishness, and a 13 minute closing piece most boldly fucks with folk and jazz traditions, in-depth and with the genre short-circuiting audacity of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Landing in the wake of prism-shaking works by Will Guthrie & Mark Fell, goat (jp) and Kakuhan; Tateishi’s ‘Presence’ more than lives up to NAKID’s impressive levels, unflinchingly operating by its wits with a verve and dare-to-differ moxie that gets at it from the first hit to the last, harnessing the kind of skill and ingenuity that’s distinctive but still strikingly minimal and overwhelmingly physical. It's a remarkable achievement.
"Tranquilizer" by Oneohtrix Point Never is a limited-edition clear vinyl compilation exploring his early experimental and ambient works. The album showcases Daniel Lopatin’s signature blend of dreamy textures, fractured melodies, and sonic abstraction. A must-have for fans of avant-garde electronic music and OPN’s formative soundscapes.
An addendum to Makaya McCraven's critically-acclaimed 2018 release Universal Beings, which The New York Times said "affirms the drummer and beatsmith's position as a major figure in creative music," Universal Beings E&F Sides presents fourteen new pieces of organic beat music cut from the original sessions, prepared and produced by Makaya as a soundtrack to the Universal Beings documentary film.
Directed by Mark Pallman, the Universal Beings documentary follows Makaya to Los Angeles, Chicago, London and New York City for a behind the scenes look into the making of the artists breakthrough album, taking the viewer through the story of Makaya's life, his process and the community of musicians that helped bring this project to life. The Universal Beings documentary and Universal Beings E&F Sides album release July 31st 2020.
Named one of the best albums of 2018 by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR, Stereogum, Billboard, SPIN, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, and more, Universal Beings was recorded at four sessions in New York, Chicago, London and Los Angeles, and features some of the best "new" jazz players from those hot bed cities: Brandee Younger, Tomeka Reid, Dezron Douglas, Joel Ross, Shabaka Hutchings, Junius Paul, Nubya Garcia, Daniel Casimir, Ashley Henry, Josh Johnson, Jeff Parker, Anna Butters, Carlos Niño and Miguel-Atwood Ferguson - all of whom feature on Universal Beings E&F Sides.
Infamously the first artist signed to Warp that used guitars, Seefeel return with their first full-length album in fifteen years – Sol.Hz - a beautiful, hazy and blissed out collection of fractured melodies and vaporous textures.
In some ways, this can be regarded as Seefeel’s ‘dub’ album – the deceptively cloud-like arrangements of Mark Clifford are somewhat ambient adjacent at low volume, but blasting out of a proper sound system, the cavernous bass undertow and skilful employment of effects are more apparent, messing with the listener’s perception of time and audio placement. As always with Seefeel though, it never drifts too far into cold experimentalism or synthetic texture, the heavily manipulated vocals of Sarah Peacock lending the tracks a vital human element, with processed guitar loops allowing slivers of melody to drift through the trails of delay.
Stylistically, it builds on their 2024 mini-album Squared Roots, in the way that the material has been microscopically dissected and reversioned until it reaches the perfect iteration, shape perhaps being the wrong word for a group who blur the lines between solidity and space to such a radical degree. The much-reappropriated line from The Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air”, could be used as shorthand to describe the experience of listening to a Seefeel record. The album title Sol.Hz can be translated literally as sun plus electricity, although the exact interpretation is ambiguous and left open to debate, just like Marx’s oft-quoted line.
Aphex Twin's masterpiece “Windowlicker” was released by Warp in 1999.
Comprising more than 5,000 works of contemporary art dating from the 1960s to the present, the collection of the MUSEUMMMK für Moderne Kunst is one of the most important of its kind in the world. With canonical works by Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Lothar Baumgarten, Thomas Bayrle, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Miriam Cahn, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, On Kawara, Roy Lichtenstein, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall, Franz Erhard Walther and Andy Warhol, the holdings constitute an important source for art-historical research.
'The Will of Tongues' is the new studio album by Sarah Davachi, and it is certainly her most ambitious to date, spanning over two hours of music across three LPs. The album features five new solo compositions for historical pipe organs (recorded across the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands), a suite of three choral pieces, a collection of “interludes” for various microtonal ensembles (strings, brass, woodwinds), and a longform chamber piece for string trio, organ, and tape. The latter two pieces were commissions from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, while the choral work was commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland.
In addition to Davachi performing on organ throughout, 'The Will of Tongues' also features an incredible group of musicians and ensembles from across the USA and Europe, including Whitney Johnson (viola), Eyvind Kang (viola), Lucy Railton (cello), Diapason (an experimental/microtonal brass ensemble based in Los Angeles, consisting of Nev Wendell, Nicholas Ginsburg, Mattie Barbier, and Mason Moy), Phaedrus (a Renaissance flute consort based in Switzerland, consisting of Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, and Luis Martinez Pueyo), and Chamber Choir Ireland (conducted by Nils Schweckendiek).
'The Will of Tongues' engages the numerous compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade especially – including iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure, all rooted in the minimalist tradition from which she operates – but with a more pointed and intentional touch than in previous forms. Across its thirteen tracks, ideas hocket from one ensemble or instrument to the next, slowly shifting in balance over the course of what is unmistakably a demanding length.
As a combined body of work, however, the music on this album seeks to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening, and for the awareness that such listening can serve as a kind of imaginative negative space; one that critically promotes confrontation and creation rather than escape. This collection of music is not easy listening, and it’s not meant to be – when long durations and a reduction of materials are at play, the ear and the mind are forced to truly face the reality of sound itself and the significant mental spaces that it continually gives rise to, which can carry deep wells of meaning if the listener is willing to journey there. 'The Will of Tongues' is thus a celebration of iterative listening and of extreme engagement, of intimate aural experience and its vast psychic horizons.
Nothing expresses us beyond death, and I sometimes cried out: “that is how the will of tongues is made!”
From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).
Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.
Sacro Bosco (“Sacred Grove”) is the starting point for Anna von Hausswolff’s new album All Thoughts Fly, incoming on Southern Lord on 25th September. Here in solo instrumental mode, the entire record consists of just one instrument, the pipe organ, and represents absolute liberation of the imagination. All Thoughts Fly radiates a melancholic beauty, and is distinguished by fluid transitions of contrasting elements; calmness and drama, harmony and dissonance, much like the place that inspires the music. Sacro Bosco is a garden, based in the centre of Italy, containing grotesque mythological sculptures and buildings overgrown with vegetation, situated in a wooded valley beneath the castle of Orsini. Created during the 16th Century, Sacro Bosco was commissioned by Pier Francesco Orsini, some say to try and cope with his grief following the death of his wife Guilia Farnese, others speculate the purpose was to create art. About the album Anna explains “there’s a sadness and wilderness that inspired me to write this album, also a timelessness. I believe that this park has survived not only due to its beauty but also because of the iconography, it has been liberated from predictable ideas and ideals. The people who built this park truly set their minds and imagination free. All thoughts fly is a homage to this creation, and an effort to articulate the atmosphere and the feelings that this place evokes inside of me. It’s a very personal interpretation of a place that I lack the words to describe. I’d like to believe Orsini built this monumental park out of grief for his dead wife, and in my Sacro Bosco I used this story as a core for my own inspiration: love as a foundation for creation.” The accompanying video for the first single "Sacro Bosco" is, just like the music, an interpretation of the park with an imaginary twist. Directed by Gustaf and Ludvig Holtenäs.
Latency presents R&B outsider Zsela who joins forces with Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Kelela) and film composer Taul Katz on 4 Dreams, a billowing ambient-neoclassical hallucination originally commissioned for the exhibition Seven Heavenly Senses at Hôtel de la Marine, Paris. 4 Dreams consists of four tracks that each unfold as embracive harmonies of cinematic strings, FM synths, muggy bass drones, and Zsela’s soulful vocals. Even though 4 Dreams moves in a different direction than the debut Big For You (Mexican Summer, 2024), the inspiration of soul, jazz and R&B still shines through on the album, as Zsela’s humming vocals, with its jazz-inspired key changes, keep you intrigued. For this release, alongside critically acclaimed producer Daniel Aged and composer Taul Katz, Zsela steps confidently into the field of instrumental composition. This exploration of instrumental and ambient composition can be seen as a continuation of themes previously explored in her collaborations with UK-based artist Actress on the songs 'Angel’s Pharmacy' and 'Remembrance' from the album Karma & Desire (Ninja Tune, 2020). 4 Dreams bears the same atmospheric neo-classical attributes as recent releases by Nala Sinephro, Malibu, Mary Lattimore, and even draws on the legacy of spiritual jazz legends such as Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. The cover art is a detail of a painting by American visual artist Naudline Pierre, whose practice revolves around appropriating iconography from art history to create her own mythology and dreamlike narratives.
Aspen is very proud to introduce ‘Non Sonett’ by the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble. This ensemble is a pioneering Norwegian chamber group whose work on ECM and Hubro has redefined the boundaries between jazz, contemporary composition and folk music. Across seven albums, the ensemble has developed a highly distinctive language built on restraint, timbral nuance and collective interplay, placing it among the most influential European ensembles of the 21st century. Bringing together some of the finest musicians in Norway, the ensemble draws on a rare collective sensitivity, where each player contributes to a deeply integrated and texturally rich sound world. Non Sonett With Non Sonett, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble opens a new chapter that grows directly out of recent years of work in more solitary and cross-disciplinary contexts. In this period, Wallumrød has developed material for solo performance as well as for dance, allowing ideas to take shape in more fluid and exploratory formats. Some of this material now finds its way into the ensemble, where it is met by the possibilities offered by instrumentation, collective playing, and the distinct voices of the musicians. At the same time, older pieces—originating in entirely different settings—re-emerge here in new forms, reshaped by the ensemble context. A defining aspect of Non Sonett is the way many of the pieces function less as fully determined compositions and more as open frameworks: starting points, suggestions, or “springboards” for music. These structures invite response rather than prescribe outcome, relying on the ensemble’s inherent sensitivity and capacity to realize and transform the material in performance. The result is music that feels both precise and fluid, shaped in equal measure by composition and by the interpretative presence of the players. Central to this album is a continued deepening of Wallumrød’s long-standing interest in ambiguity and in dissolving boundaries between different musical elements and expressive worlds. By placing contrasting materials and associations side by side—sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly—the music opens up spaces where meanings remain fluid and interconnected. On Non Sonett, this approach is taken a step further, allowing these juxtapositions to play an even more active role in shaping the music’s character and flow. This approach connects closely with the ensemble’s broader artistic trajectory. Over time, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble has developed a language that is immediately recognizable—marked by reduction, clarity and a deep attention to sonic detail. While each release has its own character, the underlying aesthetic remains consistent: a focus on the inner life of sound itself. Rather than foregrounding gesture or virtuosity, the music draws the listener toward the smallest elements, where meaning emerges gradually through texture, spacing and timbre. The listening experience becomes one of concentration and proximity, where each sound carries weight, and the accumulation of detail forms a larger whole. References may be sensed—to early polyphonic music, Norwegian folk traditions, or more recent experimental practices—but these are absorbed into a singular musical language that resists categorization. As with the ensemble’s recent work, Non Sonett also continues the integration of electronics as a fundamental part of the sound world. Each musician engages with electronic elements alongside their acoustic instruments, creating a layered and dynamic sonic environment. At times, this leads into extended, exploratory passages reminiscent of analogue musique concrète; at others, electronics operate almost imperceptibly, subtly altering and extending the acoustic textures in real time.
Primordial Mind forms the mysteries and intensity of inner life into eight mandalic instrumentals where Mas Aya and Khôra, artists who share 15 years of music making, orchestrate an inspired, prismatic palette of percussive and melodic sources. Each composition presented stages a vigorous meshwork of colours and textures, contrasting riveting polyrhythms with towering arrangements for flutes, synths, and processed acoustic instruments. Tendencies which the artists trace in their solo practices are amplified, blended, and refracted sublimely in unison, serving as energetic portals to collective awareness. Combining trans-ethnic scaling alongside a heady brew of rhythmic influences and advanced electronic processing, the recordings on this album operate with a tactility that vaults between free jazz, dub, raga, ambient, and ritual music. Assimilated powers of primal drum patterning and psychoactive, ceremonial melodies, invoke fourth world adjacencies with the work of Don Cherry, Jon Hassell, Popol Vuh et al. There is an alchemical, Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu inflection that guides the record’s narrative, formed through dialogue between the artists over lifelong shared interest in spiritual modalities generally and the tantric approaches of the global east in particular. The album title is derived from an unexcelled esoteric work known as the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time or Time Cycles) Tantra and its associated commentary the Ornament of Stainless Light which detail forms of inner and outer transubstantiation within its complex cosmology and metaphysiology. Mas Aya is the moniker of Brandon Miguel Valdivia, acclaimed Nicaraguan-Canadian composer, producer, and musician whose electronic and jazz inspired works creatively interlace Colombian, Cuban, and a wide array of traditional music. Khôra is the name of the occult entity that uses multi-instrumentalist, producer, and writer Matthew Ramolo to pronounce itself. Returning to Marionette following 2024's monumental Gestures of Perception, Primordial Mind reinforces the rigorous and magical approach to creation which defines Khôra’s two decades of sonic output. Brandon and Matthew met back in 2011 and the pair toured around eastern Europe with Toronto band Picastro in 2013, also performing as a duo with Brandon contributing drums to Khôra's opening sets. After a short spate composing and playing in the ensemble Bespoken together, they continued to discover shared inspiration in psych/art rock, jazz, experimental and electronic music, providing a fertile soil for friendship and collaboration resulting in their collaged, field-recorded album Tangled Roots in 2017. Mythic and talismanic, the duo's Marionette debut weaves a luminous tapestry of organic pulses, offering itself as a support for resonant meditation and a motor for lucid action and intuition.
In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.
Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.
Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.
Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.
Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.
As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.
Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his time in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.
Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.
"Remnants" is an album marked by the ambiguity of presence and absence. The pieces, recorded using minimal equipment in what Suzuki describes as a ritual-like atmosphere, began as a way of processing the loss of her father in 2019. But beyond this, they also come to speak to the ways in which loss changes our relationship with someone, and our experiences of the world. Indeed, the experience of loss is not marked merely by a single event, but is instead a process that unfolds over time. Despite the other's absence, a particular location, the smell of a certain brand of tobacco, a look on a friend's face - traces such as these are enough to bring about a renewed presence. It is through these subtle traces and remnants, encountered over time, that we come to understand loss as not only the acceptance of absence, but the recognition of a continued presence. As Suzuki says, "this is not a solo album." Its creation was instead shaped by an ongoing dialogue, the continued elaboration of a complex and ambivalent relationship. At once melancholic, warm, and embracing, it is this ambiguity, these subtle traces, that Suzuki’s compositions speak to. These are not merely the sounds of mourning, but instead have been shaped by the evolving dialectic of presence and absence into something far more subtle and haunting. (Zefan Sramek, 2026)
Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance. Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release. The unmistakable hue of Japan hovers throughout this emotional rich landscape. Subtle field recordings and fragile, abstract motifs drift through the album, all cloaked in a warmth and humanity that only Noriko seems able to conjure. Pon moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure. There are moments of deceptive simplicity where unexpected elements suddenly surface — strange voices emerge on Boku Wa Obaka, Knife of Yonder is a standout: a startling ten-minute unfolding that begins with a warm, almost Eno-esque drift before launching into a soaring mid-section and finally landing somewhere unexpectedly blues-adjacent. Kikoeru Pon is brimming with childlike wonder — a heartfelt ballad that dissolves into domestic field recordings, including sounds of the feline for whom both the album and track are named. A quietly devastating ending that brings the personal nature of the record into sharp focus. There is a deep sense of the human in the way Noriko embraces technology. This is far from cold abstraction; rather, Ponfeels like a colourful photo album, documenting Noriko’s inner world and instincts with remarkable intimacy. Hovering in liminal states between pop, ambient and abstraction, this is a deeply affective and moving release that reveals new surprises with each listen. The emotional range of Noriko’s latest offering inspires hope in a world in disarray. It is both gentle and epic and one which we feel embodies the work of an artist fully at the height of her powers.
Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.
Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.
Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.
Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.
The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive dee