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Harmony is a collection of works in which Marc Sabat — a dedicated explorer of just intonation — probes the very essence of harmony through the most simple yet profound medium: the string quartet.
Imagine it’s late afternoon, you’re outside by the lake, and there’s sunlight on the water. This is the peaceful and contemplative scene that Matt Gold and Resavoir set on their collaborative LP Horizon. Across 10 lush and exploratory tracks, it’s the product of two Chicago-based musicians—Will Miller, the acclaimed trumpeter, composer, and producer who’s worked with SZA, Whitney, and more, and Gold, a seasoned multi-instrumentalist and accomplished guitarist—effortlessly combining their distinct sensibilities for something hypnotic and tangibly inviting. What started as a love letter to their shared admiration for ‘60s and ‘70s Brazilian music evolved into a dynamic and sprawling body of work. These sunny and expansive tunes are as immersive as they are endlessly replayable.
Both Miller and Gold attended Oberlin College’s Conservatory of Music together and in the years after graduating, they orbited each other around Chicago’s music communities. “We were showing up for each other as friends and taking an interest in each other's projects, noticing a lot of resonances and similarities working within in our music,” says Gold, who’s collaborated with artists like Makaya McCraven and Jamila Woods and stretched the bounds of jazz and Americana on solo albums Imagined Sky and Midnight Choir. “We had talked so much about eventually working together that it was almost like an ongoing bit at a certain point,” says Miller. Though they had known each other for over a decade, they first had their chance on “Inside Minds,” the breezy lead single on 2023’s Resavoir. While those sessions were remote, two had palpable chemistry.
It wasn’t until Miller left the touring band of the Chicago group Whitney in 2023 that their plans to make music together in person came to fruition. “When I first started Resavoir, I was chasing the desire to produce records and now that I had time to focus exclusively on that, Matt was the first person I called to come to the studio,” says Miller. The two had bonded over an admiration for the Brazilian guitarist Luis Bonfa and songwriter Milton Nascimento, especially the latter’s work with Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter, so they decided to use nylon string guitar as a starting point for these early sessions. “Canopy,” which opens Horizon, was the earliest track. Kicking off with bright acoustic chords, the song slowly unfurls into a slinking groove, samples, and fluttering leads from soprano saxophonist Tim Bennett.
As these initial experiments proved successful, Gold and Miller felt they could broaden the scope of their vision. “We were initially conceiving of it as this acoustic guitar driven record but eventually we wanted to frame it orchestrally and see how many shades and colors we can bring in around that sound,” says Gold. “Dewy” thrives within this orchestral palette of woozy synths, strings from Macie Stewart, Claire Chenette’s oboe, flautist Wills McKenna, and French horns from Lloyd Billingham. “We discovered that our multi-instrumentalist mentalities—using piano and bass, samplers, drum grooves, guitar ideas all as starting points— nurtured the broad orchestration across this record,” says Miller.
“The LP took about a year with on-and-off sessions,” says Miller. “The songs benefit from letting them ferment for a couple months, coming back to it, and seeing what sort of new flavors have developed.” Co-produced by Miller and Gold (and mixed by Dave Vettraino), Horizon proudly reflects the artists’ vast artistic community and musical network in Chicago and beyond. Along with Gold, Eddie Burns (Clairo), Peter Mannheim (Tony Glausi), and Carter Lang (SZA, Lil Nas X) provide drums and percussion throughout. On the dreamlike single “Diversey Beach,” New York songwriter Mei Semones lends vocals and along with her band members Noah Leong and Claudius Agrippa, collaborated on a mesmerizingly conversational string arrangement. “We wrote "Diversey Beach" on the coldest day of the year watching a blizzard coming down out of the window, where the sounds of the cars driving by sounded like waves crashing on a beach,” says Miller. “I sent it to Mei Semones, who I’ve been a fan of for a long time. She's absolutely incredible and it’s amazing what she did with it.”
Horizon is a testament to the feeling of endless possibilities that come from collaboration. It’s a remarkable synthesis of two artists who share musical community and an artist lineage but have carved their own paths in unique ways. Nowhere is this more evident than “Hazel Canyon,” which boasts Gold’s silky pedal steel and a subtly enveloping arrangement that evokes Erasmo Carlos. “Musically, we're always trying to capture a fleeting moment of infinite expanse, feeling the vastness of things while knowing they'll always change,” says Gold. “This record keeps the light reflecting on the water just a little longer -- our collaborative process running through the backbone of these songs and rippling out in so many beautiful directions..”
“Phi-Psonics is a spiritual exploration of being together and connecting,” says acoustic bassist Seth Ford-Young of the immersive project he initiated in East Los Angeles in 2016. For his third long-player under the Phi-Psonics banner, Ford-Young marshalled a series of live recordings at Healing Force Of The Universe records in Pasadena, sculpting fourteen tracks, largely composed in the moment with a fluctuating cast of players, which wonderfully transmit his ideals of community and inner peace.
Ford-Young says of Expanding to One..."We live in increasingly dark times and while I intend our music to be a balm to those who connect with it, I also want the context of our musical conversations to include the outer as much as our inner worlds. The music we make doesn’t exist in a vacuum and the backdrop of injustice and tragedy in our world has to be part of our music.”
Performers:
Seth Ford-Young - acoustic bass, percussion
Sylvain Carton - tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute, alto flute, bamboo flute, percussion
Randal Fisher - tenor saxophone, flute
Mitchell Yoshida - Wurlitzer 140b electric piano
Zach Tenorio - Wurlitzer 200a electric piano
Gary Fukushima - Wurlitzer 140b electric piano
Dylan Day - guitar
Dave Harrington - guitar
Rocco DeLuca - pedal steel guitar
Minta Spencer - harp
Sheila Govindarajan - Voice
Spencer Zahn - acoustic bass
Josh Collazo - drums
Jay Bellerose - drums, percussion
Mathias Künzli - percussion
Produced by Seth Ford-Young
Recorded February 7, 21 March 6, 20, April 3,17 - 2024
Live at Healing Force of the Universe Records, Pasadena California
Engineered by Seth Ford-Young
Mixed by Seth Ford-Young
KILN return with an opulent new display of hue and swing on Lemon Borealis, a sumptuous gallery of dazzling motifs that display a finely hewn concoction of visual tones and vital pulse.
Across its 12 cuts, this collection utilizes a fresh process of condensing immersive sprawl into compact, punchy and colorful sound. Using aspects of live performance, beatmaking and waveform sculpting, the troika of Kevin Hayes, Kirk Marrison and Clark Rehberg III create evocative and invigorating dioramas, continuing to surprise and enchant listeners after over thirty years into their collaboration.
Deep in waves of Hi-meets-Lo Fi, KILN delivers a panchromatic daymark arranged to biochemically align and stimulate your personal syntax, forging a tapestry of sonic reveries ranging from the aquarium-on-fire radiance of DrnkGrlfrnd, a garden groove of field-recorded percussion in Maplefunk Diptych, to the sizzling guit-noise whiteout of Deacon Rayhand.
Their eighth album, and first for A Strangely Isolated Place, on Lemon Borealis, KILN expands upon the long-explored themes of mosaic texture, subtle melancholy, eroded consonance, and vivid cadence to reveal yet another aperture to their unique magnetic universe.
Lemon Borealis will be available on 12” Transparent Yellow/Ochre Smoke vinyl and digital on July 18th. Lacquer cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich, and featuring artwork by KILN.
This is NEW MANUKE's first album. Shake your hips, shake the world, keep on movin', Maximum volume!
This is NEW MANUKE's first album. Shake your hips, shake the world, keep on movin', Maximum volume!
Extra Stars is a deeply beautiful expression of Gregory Uhlmann’s ever-evolving sound world, and comes at a pivotal juncture in the LA-based composer, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist’s musical journey.
Following a long run of supporting work with artists like Perfume Genius, Tasha, and Hand Habits, alongside an eponymous recorded output largely focused on his more singer-songwriter oriented music, Uhlmann has spent the better part of the last couple years trotting out album after album of groundbreaking instrumental modern music. From the sparse melodies and hushed ambient soundscapes of Small Day, to his much-lauded duo outing Doubles with Meg Duffy, to his perhaps lesser-known but no-less-brilliant duo record Water Map with Dustin Wong, to the lush chamber-jazz interplay of his trio recording with saxophonist Josh Johnson and bassist Sam Wilkes, to the two genre-breaking albums he released as a co-leader of synth-laced trance-jazz quintet SML (2024’s Small Medium Large and 2025’s How You Been), Uhlmann has subtly, if not quietly, established himself as an essential presence in some of the most progressive recordings of our time.
Extra Stars encompasses all he’s learned through all the above. A radiant sidereal serenade, the album’s fourteen miniature infinities swirl serendipitous synthesis and measured, melody-rich song into a panoramic menagerie of sound. For a record that seldom incorporates percussion instruments, the music is distinctly rhythm-forward, while Uhlmann also leans heavily into swaths of pastoral beauty. Extra care was clearly poured into the kind of harmonic depth that’s often missing from vibe-only “ambient” music, making for a delightfully refreshing take on the electronic, processing-heavy 'quiet' sound.
The compositions and production techniques here reflect Uhlmann’s musicality perfectly, surely the result of him being as much a seasoned practitioner as he is an avid listener. If there is a middle ground between Cluster & Eno, Terry Riley’s Shri Camel, and Yo La Tengo’s There’s a Riot Going On, it’s somewhere nearby. Lofty comparisons aside, Extra Stars seems to look beyond reference or imitation. Even the album’s title indicates as much—inspired by a trip to California’s Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, where the reality of the night sky’s starry expanse stretches beyond the boundaries of belief.
We can feel Uhlmann’s gaze past the horizon line from the jump. Album opener “Pocket Snail” kicks off with a slow-ambling synth bass line before opening up into a richly processed, reverberating cacophony of beautiful sliding melodies. Eyes wide open, the small world of the pocket snail begins to burst with new color after a fresh injection of sunlight, but the tonality is more akin to something of a simple torch ballad. It’s an immense clash of big and small, and sets the stage nicely for the delightful vantage point shifting to come throughout the record.
“Lucia” is named after a quaint lodge nestled amongst the cliffside drama of Big Sur, and the tune’s musical rendering of an intimate yet expansive perspective perfectly fits its namesake. The steady thump and chime of Uhlmann’s guitar repetitions sit atop a field recording of the distant, heavy-winded ocean crash of the Cabrillo Highway coast, held even steadier by harbor bell metallic clank percussion and a firm yet pillowy cluster of electric organ chords and mellotron-like leads. Enter saxophonist Alabaster DePlume, the track's lone feature, with his signature breathy reed work. Here DePlume’s vibrato-heavy tenor sax wandering adds a secret-among-friends intimacy to a sonic scene that could go for miles. DePlume hums low in multitrack as Uhlmann leads the steady pulse on, encountering syncopated harmonic pings, fluttering recorder flourishes, and the little bustling sounds of the rural Pacific shoreline. Earworms must live in the ocean air, because it’s tough to get any element of “Lucia” unstuck once it’s in, and the whole thing is all tied up in a bow in just under three and a half minutes. Equally playful and introspective, “Lucia” is the potential soundtrack to a close reading or a thousand yard stare. If Jim Henson dreamt Link’s Awakening this would be the sound he heard.
“Burnt Toast” is an essential example of Uhlmann’s penchant for using the guitar to make non-guitar sounds. That’s not to say that what is occurring here is a simple act of processing. Rather, Uhlmann has a distinct and instantly recognizable ability to play the instrument itself in a way that lends to drastic and realtime tonal transformation. Clocking in at a lean 1:25, it’s a quick and lively skip through a blend of complimentary and warring syncopations—another hallmark of Uhlmann’s style—topped with synthetic glissandos and stereo-image warbles placed just so. What really makes it gel, though, is the harmonic simplicity that the transformative madness is serving. At the end of the day, the basic structure of “Burnt Toast” is an uncomplicated chord progression.
That essential simplicity, leaning into tonal expressions of quiet joy and deep longing, could be the most relevant throughline in Uhlmann’s work. On Extra Stars it’s likely best exemplified on “Days,” a serene 7+ minute track born in the nerve shattering confusion of 2020. “It was made in my old apartment and felt like a way of self soothing by playing the same chords over and over again,” says Uhlmann. The result is a wisping, languid, near free-time drift through a progression that manages to maintain its directness despite its slow-building reverberated accompaniment. Like a Harold Budd take on the somber fingerpicked elegance of Frantz Casseus, “Days” wanders through the speakers with an almost nostalgic air. A grandmotherly wall organ melody sings around dancing piano notes as chattering synthesis renders itself percussive amongst the steel string comfort of Uhlmann’s electric guitar. It’s the kind of recording that could go on forever and maybe, somewhere, it’s doing just that. On Extra Stars, though, it acts as a spiritual centerpiece, rejuvenating the listener as it fades out slowly, cleansing and leaving us ready for more.
“Back Scratch” is collage-cut from a series of piano improvisations and post-composed with pitch-shifted percussion contributions from Uhlmann’s SML bandmate Booker Stardrum. Uneven loops syncopate in chance mode while the barrage of high-register notes conflate with Stardrum’s stickwork to cement a rhythm dense enough to nearly become a drone. The impulsive comparison to the intensely rhythmic zither dance of Laraaji would be understandable, but mostly inaccurate. “Back Scratch” is produced in a markedly raw, un-reverberated manner—and it’s precisely that stark wonkiness that separates it from something like Day Of Radiance and makes it more akin to a basement DIY crack at Reich’s Drumming. That said, its brevity and singularity among the wildly diverse Extra Stars tracklist means that it might be (just maybe) more actual fun to listen to than both of those records.
The guitarless moments on Extra Stars shine as brightly as those that highlight Uhlmann’s primary instrument, but even those departures display themselves distinctively, especially when he invites and directs a collaborator. The labcoat synth silliness and percussive b-ball bounce of “Dottie,” for instance, contrasts sharply from the unbridled beeswarm rhythm composite of “Worms Eye” despite the implementation of the same tools and techniques—likely due to the co-production presence of synthesist Jeremiah Chiu (another SML bandmate) on the latter. Regardless, there’s no mistaking an Uhlmann composition and there’s no mistaking when he’s at the helm. For instance, while Chiu’s presence can certainly be felt on “Voice Exchange,” its outlandish rhythm focused take on the pitch-shifted vocals of longtime Uhlmann collaborator Tasha couldn’t be further from the other Chiu co-productions on Extra Stars.
The ability to maintain a recognizable voice across vast stylistic shifts, while employing the talents of those who also possess singularly recognizable voices, is not something that is heard often and it’s Uhlmann’s ability to recognize what makes each collaborator unique that makes it work here. A great example is “Bristlecone,” which finds him directing the powerful low-end command of Anna Butterss’s bass and the multiphonic mystery of Josh Johnson’s processed alto. The composition and arrangement are supported at every turn by Uhlmann’s SML bandmates without the result ever wandering away from something we can hear as distinctly his. Like David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, or Miles Davis, Uhlmann uses collaboration to both support and transform. To reinforce and evolve. With Extra Stars he has delivered such a promising collection of instrumental concepts following an extended period of vast, high-level artistic output. There’s no doubt that it will continue to be a joy to experience that evolution in real time.
Groggy, engrossing new work from Ulla under their newly minted U.e. tag, riffing to the sublime on a set of (mostly) acoustic reveries that tap into the kind of smokey vapours favoured by the likes of Vincent Gallo, Voice Actor, Jonnine. Oh aye, it’s a special one.
A new year, label, album and handle for Ulla, a multifaceted artist who has draped our pages with wonder, under numerous aliases and collabs, for almost a decade. On ‘Hometown Girl’ they distill transience and flux into a quiet set of chamber works subtly resembling the room recorded nuance of their ‘Jazz Plates’ side with Perila - here taken a step further into more elusive, low-lit dimensions.
In a mode that’s wistful and melancholic, listening to the album’s dozen discrete pieces feels like leafing thru a journal of hand-written notes, reflecting on the feelings that come with separation from loved ones and displacement from familiarity. Ulla performed and recorded all of the instruments themselves, lending a tangible tactility to layered arrangements of woodwind, keys, strings, drums and voice, lightly speckled with electronics and perfused with open window field recordings.
They locate a crackling frisson of personality in the voice notes and day-dreaminess of their mottled inscapes, gauzily demarcating lines between past and present selves. In that aesthetic and approach we can also hear similarities to Jonnine’s blue-skied ‘Southside Girl’ or crys cole’s poetic sensuality, often leaning into the domestic surreal.
A frayed, opening salutation ‘Good Morning’ signals a delirious half hour in Ulla’s company, variously swaying to the downstroked jazz swing of a ‘Lavender (NF)’ spritzed with clarinet, whilst ‘Froggy Explorer’ stirs the air like Jan Jelinek on a barely-there tip. The Basinski-esque fritz of degraded loops really snags the imagination along with a twinkling nightlight ‘Ball’, as the album opens out into its most fully resolved songs with a closing couplet of disarming wonders ‘Drawing of Me’, and a blurry ‘Mute’ that feels like Ulla 〜almost〜 reveals too much before retreating back into the shadows.
2025 repress. "Out-of-print LPs from the critically acclaimed electronic experimental singer/songwriter. Unavailable since 2012.'This sound / synapse transposition is as haunting as it is beautiful -- surely Grouper's best.' --Tiny Mix Tapes. 'If past Grouper releases have inhabited abyssal trenches and damp backwoods, here Harris takes us journeying across constellations and stars. Two of the most beguiling albums of the year, exquisitely realized and singularly evocative.' --The Quietus. 'This music feels both spacey and expansive and also oddly intimate and grounded, the work of someone who has mastered her tools and knows how to get the most out of them.' --Pitchfork. 'Harris finds a way to dive deeper in simple and unassuming ways.' --NPR."
Trilogie de la Mort is a work in three parts for anologue Arp synthesizer. The first third of the work, Kyema is inspired by The Tibetan Book of the Dead and invokes the six intermediate states that constitute the existential continuity of the being. Kailasha, the second chapter, is structured on an imaginary pilgrimage around Mt. Kailash, one of the most sacred mountains in the Himalayas. Koumé, makes up the last part of the trilogy and emphasizes the transcendence of death.
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1998. Double CD of all five of Elaine Radigue's songs in tribute to the Tibetan saint and poet from the 11th century. Two of the tracks dates from Radigue's first release in 1983, two are previously unreleased and the final 62-minute track was previously issued as a sole CD in 1987. The material is performed by Radigue (synthesizer and recording), Robert Ashley (English voice), and Lama Kunga Rinpoche (Tibetan voice). Radigue was born in France and has studied under Pierre Shaeffer and Pierre Henry; her musical has an extremely organic and mystical electronics vibe, and has been previously documented on Phill Niblock's XI label, as well as Metamkine and Lovely. Milarepa is a great saint and poet of Tibet who lived in the 11th century. Through years dedicated to meditation and related practices in the solitude of the mountains, Milarepa achieved the highest attainable illumination and the mental power that enabled him to guide innumerable disciples. His ability to present complex teachings in a simple, lucid style is astonishing. He had a fine voice and loved to sing. When his patrons and disciples made a request or asked him a question, he answered in spontaneously composed free-flowing poems or lyric songs. It is said that he composed 100,000 songs to communicate his ideas in his teachings and conversations.
Retrospection is rare for HTRK, the Melbourne-based duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, who marked their 21st year as a band in 2024 with a series of performances, installations, and long-overdue catalog represses. But back to the present, before more tour dates in 2026 and on the heels of their first new songs in several years (Summer 2025’s “Swimming Pool” b/w “Puddles On My Pillow”), HTRK close this chapter with String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK), the first full-length collection of HTRK covers and remixes from friends and contemporaries. Across two decades of music, HTRK have risen slowly to become your favorite artist’s favorite artist. The Guardian posits, “Few Australian bands have been as influential…with their idiosyncratic mix of atmospheric electronic and guitar-based squall for the past 21 years.”
Amidst the reissues, including the newly announced Psychic 9-5 Club, HTRK revisits their body of work and grapples with notions of legacy and lasting expression. They turn to some of their biggest fans for answers. String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK) invites new interpretations from Coby Sey, Double Virgo, Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley, Laura Jean, LEYA, Liars, Loraine James, NWAQ, Perila, Sharon Van Etten, and longtime collaborator, Zebrablood. The contours of HTRK’s singular, smoldering songcraft extend and distort in the hands of others, part peer tribute, part fun-house reflection; the effect is befitting of a band devoted to raw emotion, self-discovery, and unrestrained creative vision.
Maybe the most unexpected pairing, beloved songwriter Sharon Van Etten takes on “Poison” from Work (work, work) (2011) in her inimitable style. A cult favorite from the band’s darkest period, defined by sludgy 808 beats, eerie synth arpeggios, and vaporous guitar noise, “Poison” remains just as urgent and piercing here. “My little oxide joyride / Plastik pick me up / Where we gonna go / You decide…” Van Etten delivers with a pinch more clarity, underscoring the romance beneath Work’s bleakness.
Loraine James, HTRK's Ghostly labelmate in her Whatever The Weather alias and a past collaborator with Standish (James' 2019 Nothing EP), re-examines "Dream Symbol" from 2019 LP Venus In Leo. The original track found Standish revisiting her childhood home in a recurring dream, craving afternoons of innocence and the way the sun kissed her skin. James' glitchy treatment adds more dust and static to the scene, as well as her own voice, to Standish's verses, creating a doubling, duet-like feel.
The immensely talented duo of Kali Malone & Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O)))) encircle “Siren Song” from Rhinestones, the revelatory 2021 album that drew cues from the intimacy and brevity of Western folk, skewed through a narcotic, nocturnal lens. While the original was obscured in transition, a stark 49-second vignette of finger snaps and riffs, Malone and O’Malley stretch the moment to nearly six minutes suspended on organ drone and the trance-inducing mantra.
Double Virgo, Sam Fenton, and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi of post-punk outfit bar italia, tackle Marry Me Tonight’s "Rent Boy." The 2009 track found HTRK at their heaviest. Double Virgo strips it all back to strings, chimes, and strums as the two voices riff on Standish's wordplay. Alexandra Zakharenko, aka Perila, smoothes out the industrial edges of "HA", another cut from Marry Me Tonight; the hushed and hazy rendering allows various lyrical layers to seep into the echoed mix. Experimental legends and fellow Aussies Liars reimagine MMT's "Waltz Real Slow" as an outsider ballad or a tender Western drift; alien-like vocals cross stately chords that unravel to feedback in the final march.
Zebrablood gives “Soul Sleep” (Psychic 9-5 Club) a shuffling and blurry breakbeat remix, and Dutch dub techno fan favorite NWAQ deepens the drone of rarity “Female Jealousy” (Lilac EP). Rhinestones’ "Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings" becomes otherworldly in LEYA’s harp-backed version, while “New Year’s Day”, another standout from Venus In Leo, is mainlined into a folk standard by fellow Melbourne native Laura Jean.
Coby Sey reinvents Leo’s “Mentions”, lending his airy, soulful cadence to lyrics that outline a lack of physical intimacy in the social media age. Regarding the track, the acclaimed British musician adds that he first came across HTRK during the Myspace era, “My love for HTRK's music has existed for a long time.” This may be the case for many. HTRK’s indelible impact on underground music spans far beyond its initial reception. The ripples permeate time in such a way that they have positioned the band as a perfect candidate for the present round of renewed appreciation.Retrospection is rare for HTRK, the Melbourne-based duo of Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang, who marked their 21st year as a band in 2024 with a series of performances, installations, and long-overdue catalog represses. But back to the present, before more tour dates in 2026 and on the heels of their first new songs in several years (Summer 2025’s “Swimming Pool” b/w “Puddles On My Pillow”), HTRK close this chapter with String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK), the first full-length collection of HTRK covers and remixes from friends and contemporaries. Across two decades of music, HTRK have risen slowly to become your favorite artist’s favorite artist. The Guardian posits, “Few Australian bands have been as influential…with their idiosyncratic mix of atmospheric electronic and guitar-based squall for the past 21 years.”
Amidst the reissues, including the newly announced Psychic 9-5 Club, HTRK revisits their body of work and grapples with notions of legacy and lasting expression. They turn to some of their biggest fans for answers. String of Hearts (Songs of HTRK) invites new interpretations from Coby Sey, Double Virgo, Kali Malone and Stephen O'Malley, Laura Jean, LEYA, Liars, Loraine James, NWAQ, Perila, Sharon Van Etten, and longtime collaborator, Zebrablood. The contours of HTRK’s singular, smoldering songcraft extend and distort in the hands of others, part peer tribute, part fun-house reflection; the effect is befitting of a band devoted to raw emotion, self-discovery, and unrestrained creative vision.
Maybe the most unexpected pairing, beloved songwriter Sharon Van Etten takes on “Poison” from Work (work, work) (2011) in her inimitable style. A cult favorite from the band’s darkest period, defined by sludgy 808 beats, eerie synth arpeggios, and vaporous guitar noise, “Poison” remains just as urgent and piercing here. “My little oxide joyride / Plastik pick me up / Where we gonna go / You decide…” Van Etten delivers with a pinch more clarity, underscoring the romance beneath Work’s bleakness.
Loraine James, HTRK's Ghostly labelmate in her Whatever The Weather alias and a past collaborator with Standish (James' 2019 Nothing EP), re-examines "Dream Symbol" from 2019 LP Venus In Leo. The original track found Standish revisiting her childhood home in a recurring dream, craving afternoons of innocence and the way the sun kissed her skin. James' glitchy treatment adds more dust and static to the scene, as well as her own voice, to Standish's verses, creating a doubling, duet-like feel.
The immensely talented duo of Kali Malone & Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O)))) encircle “Siren Song” from Rhinestones, the revelatory 2021 album that drew cues from the intimacy and brevity of Western folk, skewed through a narcotic, nocturnal lens. While the original was obscured in transition, a stark 49-second vignette of finger snaps and riffs, Malone and O’Malley stretch the moment to nearly six minutes suspended on organ drone and the trance-inducing mantra.
Double Virgo, Sam Fenton, and Jezmi Tarik Fehmi of post-punk outfit bar italia, tackle Marry Me Tonight’s "Rent Boy." The 2009 track found HTRK at their heaviest. Double Virgo strips it all back to strings, chimes, and strums as the two voices riff on Standish's wordplay. Alexandra Zakharenko, aka Perila, smoothes out the industrial edges of "HA", another cut from Marry Me Tonight; the hushed and hazy rendering allows various lyrical layers to seep into the echoed mix. Experimental legends and fellow Aussies Liars reimagine MMT's "Waltz Real Slow" as an outsider ballad or a tender Western drift; alien-like vocals cross stately chords that unravel to feedback in the final march.
Zebrablood gives “Soul Sleep” (Psychic 9-5 Club) a shuffling and blurry breakbeat remix, and Dutch dub techno fan favorite NWAQ deepens the drone of rarity “Female Jealousy” (Lilac EP). Rhinestones’ "Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings" becomes otherworldly in LEYA’s harp-backed version, while “New Year’s Day”, another standout from Venus In Leo, is mainlined into a folk standard by fellow Melbourne native Laura Jean.
Coby Sey reinvents Leo’s “Mentions”, lending his airy, soulful cadence to lyrics that outline a lack of physical intimacy in the social media age. Regarding the track, the acclaimed British musician adds that he first came across HTRK during the Myspace era, “My love for HTRK's music has existed for a long time.” This may be the case for many. HTRK’s indelible impact on underground music spans far beyond its initial reception. The ripples permeate time in such a way that they have positioned the band as a perfect candidate for the present round of renewed appreciation.
22nd anniversary reissue of what is for us one of the greatest albums of the late 20th century, originally released on Rephlex in 1998, now painstakingly remastered by Rashad Becker after being unavailable on any format for more or less two decades. If you’re into anything from Prince to A Guy Called Gerald, Tirzah to Jai Paul, Autechre to Rick Rubin - this really is an all-time great.
When you make a record that doesn’t conform, expect to divide opinion. ‘Like Weather’ was released in 1998, on Rephlex - run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James - an often great label that had a following that couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl - let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn’t fathom about ‘Like Weather’ is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM or Trip Hop, genres it has so often been awkwardly lumped in with, but something else that cant quite be categorised - even two decades later.
‘Like Weather’ echoes the world-building energy of Prince’s ‘Sign O The Times’ - every track is a self contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions - it’s full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you’re into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album, know that this here is the aesthetic, spiritual blueprint). It feels analog, then digital - it’s R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist - attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it’ll just find something else to slide into.
In 2020 we reckon it’s time to re-appraise ‘Like Weather’ as one of the great overlooked albums of our age, made by a female auteur operating in an overwhelmingly male-dominated scene at the turn of the century. Now newly remastered by Rashad Becker (a long, 6 month process - trust that a lot of work has gone into it) - it sounds fucking amazing, one of only a handful of records that have never left our side since we opened our doors in 1998.
So yeah, we could write a long thing here about Leila’s background playing keyboard for Bjork, her meeting with the Rephlex lads, the Aphex connection etc etc, but ‘Like Weather is a record that needs no hype - for real - listen to it and you’ll know.
'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' is a poetic inversion of Muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless productivity in the workplace. Beginning as a pre-radio music distribution network (1934, U.S.), Muzak was transmitted along electrical wires with the intention of being at once ubiquitous and indiscernible, always present yet easily ignorable. As a pseudo-science the aim was to capitalize on the potential of music to have a psychological effect on listeners, and with the goal of maximum productivity, was employed as a sonic disciplinary force in the work place.
Previously installed for Dystopia Sound Art Biennial (2024), at the Amazon Packing Station located before HAUNT-Frontviews in Berlin, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity sonically addresses utopic notions of seamless, efficient productivity, inherent to capitalist cultures, and their very real dystopic effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment. This poetic inversion, further developed as an album, is not meant as a kind of melodic control but rather a reflective space in which to consider the benefits personally, globally and environmentally, of slowing down.
Reverb, essential to the Muzak aesthetic, is programmed (using convolution reverb) with the dimensions of the Berlin Amazon fulfillment centre, DBE2. Amazon fulfillment centers are global contemporary factories, promising a consumer utopia of next day delivery of almost any product imaginable. Inspired by Sam Kidel’s concept of “mimetic hacking”(1), the reverberation characteristics of the DBE2 facility perform a symbolic sonic break-in to the guarded Amazon fulfillment center, a trespass to the flow of production.
Guffond’s ambient Muzak with its drifting horn, clarinet and synth-like modulations is just too down-tempo for upbeat spending. If this is Muzak it is possibly Muzak for the end of the world, thoughtfully seeking transcendence through implied questioning after all avenues for shopping have been exhausted.
Bifuu_ZONE, translated loosely as “a zone of gentle breeze,” is a concept drawn from Tsudio Studio’s personal vocabulary rather than a strict linguistic equivalent. While liminal spaces are often framed through unease, Bifuu_ZONE reimagines them as sites of quiet comfort, restoration, and slow transformation. The project centers on impermanence, erosion, and the subtle ways time reshapes even the most solid structures.The West takes its title literally, drawing inspiration from buildings and environments located west of Osaka. Each track is composed with a specific architectural space in mind, allowing tone, texture, and resonance to emerge from imagined structures rather than narrative progression. The result is a site-responsive ambient work that listens closely to stillness, weathering, and spatial openness. Saxophonist mori_de_kurasu appears on three tracks, introducing breath and human fragility into the album’s restrained sonic palette.This perspective is deeply informed by a Japanese sensibility toward impermanence, an acceptance of loss and change not as absence, but as gentle continuation. Rather than positioning liminal space through anxiety, Bifuu_ZONE gestures toward what lingers quietly after the dream has ended.Beyond the album itself, The West also marks a point of convergence within Tsudio Studio’s broader practice. In March, he will present an exhibition and live performance at Gallery SHUTL in Higashi-Ginza, Tokyo, centered on the idea of “post-liminal space.”Under his primary name, Tsudio Studio has released work through Media Factory, Local Visions, and ULTRA-VYBE, collaborating across Japan, Europe, and the United States. In 2022, the compilation OACL, which he contributed to and mastered through Local Visions, reached #2 on Bandcamp’s global charts. The West is a focused ambient work shaped by space, time, and quiet transformation.
“Morette ite, Hissori ne.”, the debut album by Marewrew, returns in a newly remixed and remastered edition. This landmark recording, which brings Ainu traditional songs into the present, has been revived with updated artwork and is being released on vinyl for the first time.
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.
In 2023, sound artist and composer Weston Olencki toured across the American South. Beginning in their hometown in South Carolina, they snaked a circuitous path from the mountains of West Virginia to the banks of the Mississippi River. As the miles accumulated, so did the initial seeds of new work. Instruments and artifacts they acquired hitched a ride in the backseat, while songs and sounds filled their portable recorder: water in its various states, the familiar insectoid buzz of those summer nights, trains cutting through the landscape, the traditional music that lived alongside the communities that kept it. Olencki took it all in, and over time, found ways that these experiences coalesced into a bramble-like perspective of time, where past, present, and future intersect in ways both barbed and beautiful. Broadsides, Olencki’s newest solo full-length is the multilayered result of this journey. The album follows their landmark release Old Time Music from 2022, which presented radical interpretations of traditional tunes from Appalachia and throughout the South alongside original compositions that drew significantly on archival recordings. On Broadsides, Olencki rejects delineations between the unmoored avant-garde and the rootedness of one’s cultural heritage, revealing their porous and intertwined nature. “My mother was a quilter. Her mother before that,” they write in the album’s liner notes. “Quilting, like music, is a practice of embedding knowledge and remembrance into the very core of the thing you are making. It’s not just about the materials, but how they’re reassembled, recontextualized, stitched, woven to form new patterns - the minutiae of craft holding significance to those looking to find it. Stories woven from stories, never told the same way twice.” Like all great road trips, Broadsides unfolds slowly and continuously, with moments of dramatic reverie punctuating the endless melt of highway in the rearview. We’re immediately confronted by the uncanniness of revisiting old haunts, as Southern storms break through the initial churn of the freight locomotives of Alabama. Olencki’s interpretation of the bluegrass standard “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” captures the euphoria of melancholy in motion. The permutational plucks of banjo are bounced around the frame by a computer, its pitches determined within algorithmic sequences and transcriptions of classic three-finger licks. The tonalities of old-time are smeared and stretched until all that’s audible is the insistence that Heaven might be real. In the album’s second half, “Omie Wise,” a murder ballad made famous by Doc Watson, follows an interlude recorded on the river in North Carolina in which the titular character’s body was laid. Ghostly echoes of a dozen other renditions float through the substrata as Tongue Depressor’s Henry Birdsey accompanies them on the pedal steel guitar. The album’s central composition, “all my father’s clocks,” is a profound meditation on entropy and impermanence. The sound of their father’s extensive clock collection ticks away as Olencki pulls a bow across the length of an autoharp sourced from a rural strip mall. The instrument was left as detuned as it was found, the resonance of its deep bass drone and clanging high-end the result of years of neglect and the warping effects of Southern humidity. Historically, broadsides were an early form of broadcasting, an often-musicalized telling of current news pasted in the public square. The name was later taken up by Sis Cunningham and Gordon Friesen in the 1960s, whose Broadside magazine published songs and social commentary when American folk music resurfaced as an urgent way of communicating the multifaceted politics of its time. Olencki borrows the phrase to recall both this old form of songmaking and that later prominent reexamination of traditional music’s role in modern life, but also to draw attention to the fragmented and machine-mediated way heritage is diffused in this very different, but no less pivotal, moment. As a sanitized past is used as justification for current violence and domination, we can turn to these artifacts to better understand the history of ourselves, but only if they are consciously pushed to evolve. Broadsides represents one personal, striking vision of what far-flung futurisms could be respun from these high, lonesome sounds: a reflection of the unbridled joy and deep sorrow inherent to living together through time, and a desire to push further into the untold and unknown.
To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. An act beneath language. Through this reintegration, the ear becomes a quiet form of resistance.
Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello). Rather than a formal structure, the composition unfolds through intuition led by breath, resonance and subtle intelligence. What emerges is an acoustic ecology: an ongoing negotiation between perception and expression. An ethical act that reorients us toward the elemental.
Paired with "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness", a companion suite of domestic fragments and temporal drift, the album unfolds as a dialogue between the inward persistence of what is felt and the outward pull of what remains unresolved. A continuum that traces the porous boundaries between the intimate and the infinite. Through electronics, field recordings, and acoustic instrumentation, Vantzou maps atmospheres charged with psychic and temporal residue. "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness" unfolds as a precisely sequenced constellation of sonic impressions gathered across nearly a decade, where the real and the imagined bleed into one another, like the mutable moods of places where time folds, drifts and reassembles itself.
Time here is embodied, a porous medium through which perception drifts and reforms, stretches, contracts, and suspends itself, blurring the boundary between presence and impermanence. Within this fluid temporality, intuition replaces structure; sound becomes a site of renewal rather than arrival. Each resonance carries the trace of what has passed and what is yet to unfold, an ever-shifting threshold where listening becomes a form of existence and time reveals itself as both instrument and witness.
The two side-long pieces are presented alongside digital renderings by the Belgian visual artist Eva L’Hoest, a longtime collaborator, extending this sensorial language into image. Her surreal images, containing fragments of Greek iconography - a sphinx in a coffee cup, votive ears, arrangements of laurel leaves - mirror Vantzou’s sonic landscapes in texture and tone. In Vantzou’s work, sound becomes a portal to states of perception where time bends and consciousness softens. The Reintegration of the Ear listens not only to the world but through it — a quiet, expansive meditation on presence, transformation and the invisible architectures of relation.
The Reintegration of the Ear will be released by Editions Basilic on February 20th, 2026 as an edition of 300 LPs with printed inner sleeves.
Text: Melis Özek
John M. Bennett’s BLANKSMANSHIP is a totemic representation of something impossible: a linguistic object containing a totality. Written and recorded in the early 1990s and released as a sound poetry cassette and chapbook, BLANKSMANSHIP begins and ends with a ten word mantra, distilling the poem’s ten cantos that act as phases of an extended meditation. Performed by the author accompanied only by minimalist shakuhachi flute and bell, a narrative emerges from a mythic place, spoken by a single voice that eventually multiplies into a horde of selves. The author states that BLANKSMANSHIP refers to a state of mind, the "empty yet swarming void from which the poem’s voice arises, as if it were the voice of completeness itself". An unheralded masterpiece of avant-garde writing, this is a poetry that has its roots in the most ancient and enduring forms of poesis. Remastered from original tapes, the LP includes a 24 page poetry booklet containing the full text of BLANKSMANSHIP. Edition of 200 copies.
John Also Bennett (JAB)’s Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2 compiles two volumes of minimal music conceived as infinitely looping and morphing compositions for “save rooms” - temporary safe spaces within video game maps. The compositions primarily stem from a week spent at work in a former military barn in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco, spurred on by multimedia artist and Bennett’s frequent collaborator Peter Burr (for whom a handful of the pieces on these albums were initially composed). Consumed with the idea of music that could create an effortless sense of stasis, yet never exactly repeat itself, Bennett spent days alone in the remote, empty barn composing endless loops, experimenting with phasing techniques, and melding with the surrounding ambience. The groundwork was laid for over 11 compositions, a few of which at that time were finished. But in early 2020, faced with a pandemic-canceled tour and non-refundable plane tickets, Bennett digitally released a premature version of Music for Save Rooms containing two finished ‘Save Room’ pieces plus various unreleased odds and ends - a synthesized version of Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”, “Still Inside the Deku Tree”, an alto flute piece and live staple referencing Koji Kondo’s classic score for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and “Utopia and Oblivion”, a work for a virtual just intonation piano & DX7. Bennett presents here a definitely mixed, mastered, and expanded version of Music for Save Rooms (now Music for Save Rooms 1), alongside Music for Save Rooms 2, a fully realized album of new music stemming directly from those original sessions in Marin County. Composed almost exclusively for a Yamaha DX7, Roland D-50 and JV1080, Music for Save Rooms 2 differs from its predecessor - instead of a collection of disparate works centered around the theme of stasis, the album presents a more cohesive narrative, with shorter tracks relative to its predecessor’s more long-form pieces. Opener “Sky Music'' contains as much silence as it does sound - effortless chords float into view and then sizzle into nothingness. “Power Plant”’s glissando vocal pads and deep percussion hits seem to create a regenerative space, while “Out Back” and “Ambling'' both hint at some distant, foggily recollected liminal place. “Glass Castle” is perhaps more explicit with its imagery, combining the sounds of a glass harmonica and fragile vocal pads with alternatively gorgeous and dissonant piano motifs that utilize a tuning system developed by Iannis Xenakis. Boiled down over years to only its essential parts, Music for Save Rooms 2 is a tour through the mind’s eye of an artist searching for an elusive place, somewhere deep in the open world of our collective consciousness.