Ambient / Minimal / Drone

NUG is the musical collaboration of artists Jordan Juras aka PVAS and Florian T M Zeisig. They previously released their debut album Napping Under God on 3XL (2022). Recorded February 2022 in Hinang, mixed November 2022 in Berlin.

Paige Emery is an ecological artist interweaving music, painting, and plants through healing rituals to explore ways of remembering the Earth. She catalyzes ritual to illuminate the way our practices co-write our cosmologies and to find cyclical resonances that bring us back home. Works such as sound pieces to guide ecological journeys, paintings alchemized with herbal concoctions, ecopoetic tea ceremonies, plant remedies, and starting mutual aid guerrilla gardens with her community are among the ways this practice manifests itself. Intercommunications follows a cyclical journey of healing with plants. The album was seeded from her ritual of singing to her plants every morning after she meditated with them. As an inquiry into communicating with the nonhuman, the songs grew through deconstruction of language layered with sounds of the environment, a communication shaped by honest forms of harmony and chaos, death and rebirth. Each song represents a different state of connecting with plants, while the album as a whole serves as an arc through a healing journey with their medicine - opening, sensing, letting, washing, waking, dancing, calling, following, swelling, enduring, decomposing, which in the end leads to another opening. These states of being sing along with the cycles of nature that we can continue to learn from.

Paige Emery is an ecological artist interweaving music, painting, and plants through healing rituals to explore ways of remembering the Earth. She catalyzes ritual to illuminate the way our practices co-write our cosmologies and to find cyclical resonances that bring us back home. Works such as sound pieces to guide ecological journeys, paintings alchemized with herbal concoctions, ecopoetic tea ceremonies, plant remedies, and starting mutual aid guerrilla gardens with her community are among the ways this practice manifests itself. Intercommunications follows a cyclical journey of healing with plants. The album was seeded from her ritual of singing to her plants every morning after she meditated with them. As an inquiry into communicating with the nonhuman, the songs grew through deconstruction of language layered with sounds of the environment, a communication shaped by honest forms of harmony and chaos, death and rebirth. Each song represents a different state of connecting with plants, while the album as a whole serves as an arc through a healing journey with their medicine - opening, sensing, letting, washing, waking, dancing, calling, following, swelling, enduring, decomposing, which in the end leads to another opening. These states of being sing along with the cycles of nature that we can continue to learn from.

Wind, the natural movement of air - is invisible but perceived through mediums: swaying branches, whistling pipes, blowing hair, clashing wind chimes. Filled with these daily associations with the wind it’s easy to overlook the beauty of the wind itself: an ethereal turbulence of air molecules with their own dynamics, wildly shifting direction and momentum. Celia Hollander’s album 2nd Draft, out November 10th on Leaving Records, is a tribute to the motion of making music: the invisible, forceful current that runs through humanity. In the way wind finds expression in the mediums of leaves, hair or dust, music is an unseeable current with its own energy that finds expression through resonant bodies, vibrating strings, trained fingers, colliding objects and more. 2nd Draft was recorded while Hollander was a composer in residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE in 2022. While working on multiple projects, she decided to improvise on their upright practice piano for an hour everyday. Writers refer to this type of practice as a “free write:” letting words from the unconscious torrentially fill a duration. Hollander compares these sessions to a sitting meditation: at best the hour soars by, and at worst it can feel like a tedious way to spend time. Once back in Los Angeles, she sifted through the recordings, chose excerpts and digitally marinated and simmered morsels of audio until achieving a desired texture, viscosity and aroma. Hollander considers all released music to be drafts: building from a previous piece and working towards something unknowable in the future. 2nd Draft is literally so: a sequel to DRAFT, the 2017 tape on Leaving Records under her bygone moniker $3.33. Both feature improvised piano, an exception to a more digital-composition based process heard in the rest of her discography. Like a draft of wind - a sudden gust, invisible but felt, something from the outside broken through to the inside - these piano free writes are meant to stir the external and the internal, ruffle the energy of a room, provide a refreshing breeze and surprise with spontaneity.

'Persistent Repetition Of Phrases' success comes from the attention it pays to the function of 'the loop', not only as a narrative ordering system in modern music, but as a means by which the brain itself recalls and interprets information; it's as old as recorded sound itself, but in this context the repetition of small shards of auditory information becomes an elegy to fading memory and the worn-out synapses of old age. The track titles offer signposts through Kirby's labyrinth of faulty remembrances, pointing their way towards the peculiarities dictating the manner by which the mind stores and attempts to recover information.

Flora Yin Wong returns with a stunning, highly evocative second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes. Where her debut album ‘Holy Palm’ catalogued exotic personal and spiritual travels captured over a 6 year period, ‘Cold Reading’ details the aftermath; the erosion of fantasy, a breakdown of belief systems, and an overwhelming sense of rootlessness. A surreal, tripped-out listen, it comes highly recommended if you're into Valerio Tricoli, Enya, Bryn Jones, soundtracks to Last Year at Marienbad and Inland Empire - all hyperrealist, concrète sound design and fritzed dream sequences. Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief following an uncanny, dispiriting trip to East and Southeast Asia, Flora Yin Wong read about Giuseppe Tartini’s ‘Violin Sonata in G Minor’, aka the Devil’s Trill Sonata, a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe music heard in a dream. It’s this soporific motif that binds and underpins ’Cold Reading’, in which Flora chases the dragon of fleeting fantasy through sequences of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory. Through 10 parts, Flora crystallises a feeling of ennui that followed those travels, where she was taken to a Bazi reader (a form of Chinese astrology or metaphysics based on time and date of birth), whose augur left her feeling perplexed and alienated. She made a long overdue, ultimately unfulfilling, return with her father to his adoptive family in his hometown Kuala Lumpur, spent nights alone snowed in at a haunted house in Kyoto, and lodged with monks in a South Korean Temple. Images of these episodes flash through the album like a slow strobe, ghosted memories recalled with ever-decreasing fidelity. From her use of the ‘Devil’s Trill’ Sonata in ‘All My Dreams are Nightmares’ through evocations of subtropical humidity in the Bryn Jones-esque, resonant hand-played percussion of ‘Konna’ and ‘Banjar’, to a breathtaking dreampop denouement ‘Nectar Dripping’ and the Enya-like lush of ‘Beautiful Crisis’, Flora blooms her ideas with an open-ended ambiguity so often missing from so called Ambient music, ushering the listener into a soundworld that disturbs and displaces, just as much as it calms.

What is time? Documented here are phone voice memo recordings that range from 2015-2020, re-aligned, chopped up and spliced together. All of us reside in our individually projected reality, but when these individual inner rhythms come into contact with one another, a bigger "time clock" appears. If we can learn to see the world without the constant self surveillance, a new pattern and perception comes into view. And what splendid beauty it is. Dedicated to all the young gods out there.

XKatedral Anthology II is the second installment in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers affiliated with XKatedral working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces written from 2018 to 2020 by composers Kali Malone, Jessica Ekomane, Mats Erlandsson, Theodor Kentros, Wilma Hultén and Maria W Horn. This collection of pieces focuses on the use of synthetic sound and algorithmic composition languages as tools for precise work within the realm of spectral exploration. In addition to this, the electronic instrumentation in many of the pieces is augmented by acoustic instruments.

Daisaku Kume - Violent Cop (Original Soundtrack) Vinyl LP: Limited Edition of 500! Official Reissue / Remastered / 45 rpm Original Soundtrack from 1989’s Japanese crime/drama movie Violent Cop (その男、凶暴につき) composed by Daisaku Kume (久米大作) (keyboardist late 70s fusion bands T-Square and Prism), with superb Erik Satie re-interpretations, melancholic smooth jazz, and modern Western atmospherics. First film directed by (and starring) the one and only (Beat) Takeshi Kitano (北野 武) (Sonatine, Hana-Bi, Kikujiro, Battle Royale, Johnny Mnemonic, Ghost in the Shell)

best japanese jazz pianist “fumio itabashi”,german house producer “henrik schwarz”,
one of best japanese electronic music producer “kuniyuki” made the re-recording of
japanese jazz classic “watarase” together in japan few years ago.
they have played together at montreux jazz festival in tokyo and everyone thought we should make the record together.
now finally we’re going to release this excellent record.
henrik schwarz and kuniyuki made the own version.
the musics are simply gorgeous!

Black Truffle is pleased to announce The Mountains Pass, a major new work from Olivia Block. A key player in Chicago’s vibrant experimental music scene since the late 1990s, Block has developed an extensive body of work grounded in a personalised, at times emotive approach to the studio-based practices of the musique concrète tradition, while also encompassing improvisation, orchestral pieces, sound installations, and a sustained engagement with the piano. On The Mountains Pass, recorded by Greg Norman at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio and meticulously edited and constructed over the course of three years, Block pushes into new terrain, introducing her singing voice and drums played by Jon Mueller into flowing assemblages that move seamlessly from ruminative organ tones and fragmented piano airs to explosions of sizzling synths and thundering percussion. Like many of Block’s past works, which include, for example, a sculptural installation using the sound of oyster beds, The Mountains Pass draws inspiration from nature and the animal world. Time spent in a particular mountain range in Northern New Mexico informs this suite of pieces, whose lyrics and titles refer particularly to animal life in the area. Beginning with bursts of white noise and delicate synthetic pops and squeaks, opener ‘Northward’ very soon reveals the special direction the album will take, as lyrical piano lines are joined by Block’s fragile voice, singing words written from the perspective of f2754, an endangered Mexican gray wolf who wandered more than five hundred miles from Arizona to New Mexico in 2022. The fragment of song quickly breaks off, leaving us with a ghostly electronic hum. ‘The Hermit’s Peak’ follows, one of two epic pieces at the album’s core. Beginning with chiming, almost harpsichord-like tones, it moves through episodes of spacious, ruminative piano, Jon Mueller’s sparkling cymbals, stuttering cut-up piano sounds, and a climax of keening organ and trumpet tones (performed by Thomas Madeja). Continuing the exploration of vintage keyboard and synth tones heard on Block’s Innocent Passage in the Territorial Sea (Room 40, 2021), the music sometimes suggests the great outer-limits works of 70s Italian prog figures like Franco Battiato or Arturo Stalteri in the languorous drift of synthesizer, organ, and piano tones and the meticulous yet organic flow of its construction. ‘Violet-Green’ opens the second side with another epic journey, its lyrical content concerning ‘a mysterious bird die-off and a forest fire’. Block’s crystalline voice and rich piano chords at times call up the restrained chamber songs of Janet Sherbourne, but fragmented and threaded through passages of woozy pitch-bent keyboards, hypnotic distant thuds, tinkling bells, and searing distorted synth tones. On ‘f2754’, the freedom of the roaming wolf surges through dense layers of rapid keyboard attacks and long organ tones over a propulsive drum performance straight out of Animal Magnetism-era Arnold Dreyblatt. This distinctive sound world is then reencountered in a darkened mirror image in the uneasy, metallic shimmer of the closing ‘Ungulates’, named in reference to a heard of elk roaming through the mountains. Like Battiato’s Clic or Gastr del Sol’s Upgrade & Afterlife, The Mountains Pass inhabits the underexplored terrain where the beauty of song coexists with a radical formal openness, illuminating the deep musicality and warmth that have been present in Block’s work all along.

Following on from last year’s acclaimed Vrindavan 1982 by rudra veena master Z.M. Dagar, Black Truffle is thrilled to present a pair of archival releases from the Dagar Brothers, among the most revered 20th century exponents of the ancient North Indian dhrupad tradition. The vocal duo of Moinuddin and Aminuddin Dagar (sometimes referred to as the ‘senior’ Dagar Brothers to distinguish them from their younger siblings, Zahiruddin and Faiyazuddin Dagar), belonged to the nineteenth generation of a family of musicians in which dhrupad tradition has been kept alive through patrilinear transmission, each generation undergoing a rigorous education of many years’ duration that can include singing up to twelve hours each day.

Famed for the meditative purity of their approach to dhrupad, the Dagar Brothers helped to keep the tradition alive in the years after Indian independence in 1947, when the royal courts that had traditionally patronised dhrupad musicians were abolished. Many Western listeners were first introduced to dhrupad by the Dagar Brothers’ tour of Europe in 1964-65 and their LP in UNESCO’s ‘Musical Anthology of the Orient’ collection, both organised by pioneering musicologist and scholar of Indian culture Alain Daniélou. Documents from this tour are especially precious, as Moinuddin Dagar passed away in 1966. Unheard until now, Berlin 1964 – Live (released alongside BT114, a newly discovered studio session from the same trip) documents a concert held at the Charlottenburg Palace in September 1964.

Accompanied only by Moinuddin’s wife Saiyur on tanpura and Raja Chatrapati Singh on pakhawaj (a large double-headed drum), the brothers present stunning performances of two ragas stretching out over 65 minutes, exemplifying what a journalist at the time called the ‘pristine severity’ of their style. Much of each piece is taken up by the alap, the highly improvised exposition section where the notes of the raga are gradually introduced as the singing builds in intensity. As Francesca Cassio points out in her extensive liner notes, both performances are somewhat unorthodox in beginning with the raga scale being sung in its entirety, ascending and descending; this is probably, as she suggests, a strategy to introduce the European audience to the language of the music they are about to hear. From there, both ragas settle into alaps of breathtaking beauty, with the two brothers trading long solo passages that move gradually from extended held notes at the bottom of the scale to animated melodic variations as it ascends in pitch. Within the atmosphere of meditative attention, the range of melodic, rhythmic, and timbral invention is remarkable. Especially on the opening ‘Rāga Miyān kī Todī’, the final moments of the alap find the voices at a peak of intensity, their microtonal ornamentation taking on an ecstatic, warbling quality. Only once the wordless, free-floating alap is over and the composition proper begins to the brothers sing in unison, joined by the pakhawaj for a rhythmic section that in both ragas develops gradually into a propulsive display of melodic invention and metrical nuance. Accompanied by detailed liner notes and striking archival images, Berlin 1964 – Live is a rare document of these masterful exponents of one of the world’s most profound musical traditions. 

Terry Riley, known for his masterpieces such as "A Rainbow in Curved Air" and "in C", currently resides in Japan. This is a collection of recordings made in Kobuchizawa, Yamanashi prefecture in the early spring of 2020, before he decided to move to Japan, and released on CD in October 2023.

Dream Walker is an album intended for late nights. For those moments when you are ready to let go of your physical self and transcend momentarily into another world. Dream Walker is also an album about someone who can walk between dreams. One who can surpass the boundaries of reality and slip into unseen worlds. A visitor who is writing a sonic story with every step he takes. Dream Walker is also a love letter to all the music I love. I set out to make something that sounded good to my ears with no preconceptions or limitations, so it wears its influences on its sleeve. When you listen, if you start to feel like you know, then you know. Every sound was made with hardware, mostly synthesizers, in 2023. It is also true that it was made by attempting to enter a trance state while recording each of these tracks and letting the subconscious take control to put a touch of otherness in the mix. And that is that. I hope you enjoy this record. It was always intended to end in this form and to find a way into your ears. Believe Walker, believe. –Carlos Giffoni, November 2023

For Anyone That Knows You, an album of mostly piano solos by Josiah Steinbrick, was recorded not for smoothness or posterity but to emphasize the piano as object, the person playing it, and the moment it sounds. On three of the pieces, the saxophone of Sam Gendel hovers over the piano like a faint change in the light, adding resonance and gentle reinforcement rather than counterpoint. Three others are delicate renditions: “Green Glass” interprets an untitled recording by Quechuan folk musicians Leandro Apaza Romas and Benjamin Clara Quispe; “Elyne Road” abbreviates one of Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté’s most tender compositions; and “Lullaby” is an arrangement of a traditional Creole song, originally recorded in 1954 by the Haitian-American guitarist Frantz Casseus.

Carmen Villain returns with the 'Planetarium' EP, the follow-up to her 2013 debut, Sleeper. In the span of the last few solitudinous years, the US-born, half-Norwegian and half-Mexican has honed and nurtured her songwriting and production craft, while still drawing from the gossamer atmospheres of 'Sleeper.' She weaved the hyper-personal songs in peaceful seclusion, creating starry tapestries of field recordings, piano, guitars, programmed drums and synths.

Reissue of Celer's 2008 masterpiece. Remastered by Stephan Matieu.

Originally released on CD in 2009, Engaged Touches has been expanded from the original recordings for a 3LP edition, spanning 5 sides of vinyl, and a 3CD edition of the same expanded version, as well as the original single disc version. All have been remastered by Stephan Mathieu for this special limited edition.

Following the unpublished works of the Ukrainian/Estonian musician Valentina Goncharova, Volume 2 of Shukai’s archival project sits in direct contrast to the solo works of Vol. 1. Spending her youth studying classical music first in Kyiv and then in Leningrad, Valentina began her musical career with rigorous compositional study and concert violin performance. This long player of duets as such casts a light on Goncharova’s experiences with early free jazz, democratic improvisation and introductions to pure electronic sound. Where Vol. 1 explored her home studio experiments and flirtations with musique concrete and new age, this volume seeks to give audience to similarly DIY recordings developed in collaborative environments away from the conservatoire. Properly documenting sessions revolving around smoky jazz cafes, art galleries, salons and theatre venues across Riga and Tallinn, these seven pieces add to the historical narrative of the soviet era avant-garde and show the broader spectrum of Valentina’s work. We begin in Riga with an adapted score for a delicately unfolding violin drone, voice and saxophone performance produced by Valentina and Alexander Aksenov. Describing the nineties as temporarily narrowing the content of cultural life and thus nullifying the interest of free improvisation in both Tallinn and Riga, Valetina’s bond with the multi-instrumentalist and theatre director Aksenov led to decades of close friendship and several demo recordings such as ‘Reincarnation II’. Their initial chance meeting at a jam session set in motion various cross-country performances and experimental theatre works. With its focus on extended harmony, it is perhaps ‘Reincarnation II’ that most recognisably follows on from Shukai’s first volume. Across the rest of the disc are collaborative duets with Sergei Letov and Pekka Airaksinan respectively, the three tapes with Letov an example of recordings as a ‘rehearsal process’. These evenings spent in Moscow apartments and St. Petersburg art studios challenged Goncharova’s preconceptions of musical expression; “I was surprised by his (Letov’s) artistic language. He composed here and now music that was so intellectually advanced that it was quite comparable to the compositions of my fellow students. Only, to achieve such a result, it took months for them. So, for the first time, I took part in free jazz collective creativity” (2020). Atypical violin/saxophone techniques and light, difficult to place percussive textures interplay across the three duets with Letov, the sense of spatiality alluding to the very nature of the recordings. They strike ultimately as private, freeform experiments with sound, never intended for the listener but documenting a practice which explores the dichotomy of improv’s ‘non-professionalism’ and its potential freedom from trained performance. Just one curious corner of Valentina’s musical path, they are included as a deliberate variance to the tapes with Pekka Airaksinen, an already well-regarded composer, early synthesiser fanatic and Finnish radical. At their time of meeting, Pekka had diverted his attention from punk-indebted noise and free jazz groups to a pursuit of spiritualism via contemporary electronic technologies. Already familiar with the ‘Buddhas of Golden Light’ LP, Valentina found in his work an attraction to the sacred and, after an encounter at a 1988 Helsinki festival dedicated to futurist art and literature, she prepared to visit his studio. After a failed attempt to record a joint album, fragments of the tapes are presented here, highlighting Goncharova’s first real experience of electronic music making in a compositional sense. The result is a marriage of stunning organ tones, processed violin murmurs and progressive minimalism a la Terry Riley or La Monte Young. Fragmented guitar and additional keyboard patterns push and pull through delay units in unison with Valentina’s two violins, at times mimicking the howl of the wind or even the human voice. Once again, the duality of the indistinguishable unfamiliar vs. the harmonic familiar. Recordings 1987-1991 Vol. 2 completes Shukai’s dive into the sound world of an important yet overlooked artist working within Soviet era electroacoustics.

Historically informed violin player, prize-winning street musician, new age experimentalist, chamber ensemble performer and conservatoire deviant. The career of Valentina Goncharova (b. Kyiv 1953) shares parallels with those associated with the broader new music movement of the 20th century and the dissemination of home recording technologies. Valentina’s was a youth spent immersed in the world of classical music study under soviet rule, first in Kyiv and later in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) from the age of 16. With the supervision of professors M. Vayman and B. Gutnikov she learned concert violin and developed alternate playing styles alongside skilled pianists. A student of the Leningrad conservatoire during the years 1969 through to 1983, her repertoire included music for violin and later expanded to contemporary music composition. The improvisatory nature of free jazz and then budding experimental rock circles also intrigued Valentina during this period in Leningrad. Departing from the rules of the conservatoire, she briefly performed in underground rock clubs alongside future members of the industrial group Pop- Mechanika (Popular Mechanics). This perpetual state of flux is central to the variety found within ‘Recordings Vol. 1’, though as opposed to any degree of uncertainty Valentina’s practice is one in flux by way of earnest curiosity. Pushing further into an exploration of solo electro-acoustic sounds, she took to home taping on a modified Olimp reel to reel recorder. Intrigued by the manipulability of dubbing and the fresh sounds of DIY effects chains, Goncharova developed pickups alongside her husband Igor Zubkov. Her infatuation with the music of Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ganelin Trio and Pierre Boulez channels through considerations of space and erratic sound design, the three movements of ‘Metamorphoses’ embodying this textural approach to musique concrete. The compositional skills developed in Leningrad unfold in the romantic gestures of ‘Higher Frequencies’, whilst manipulated cello combines with synthesise keys across ‘Passageway To Eternity’. The slow, pulsating drone soundscapes recall the likes of Robert Rutman’s US Steel Cello Ensemble or even deep listening pioneer Pauline Oliveros. The juxtaposition of written notation and improvisatory flare is central to Goncha- rova’s sound world. This period of home recording documents a confluence of minimalism, free form and flirtations with new age tropes (inc. bell chimes and cavernous vocal mantras). Experimenting with unusual performance techniques, such as shouting into amplified cello strings, Valentina’s home studio functioned as a place to foster full artistic and creative freedom away from any academic strictures. Relocating to Estonia in 1984, and in parallel to the deeply personal music of ‘Recordings Vol. 1’, Valentina performed at jazz festivals and gave classical concerts across Eastern Europe. In a sense, the recordings on these discs offer only a glimpse into her lifelong body of work. Over the past few decades she has taught at Tallinn Music College, expanded and updated post- Soviet popular music repertoire, collaborated with the Russian Philharmonic Society of Estonia and given concerts and charity events alongside the Catholic Church. Hers is a life dedicated to the exploration of sound, a career forged through careful study and ceaseless intrigue. In a time where technological interconnectedness has allowed for music of the past to be continually mined and evaluated through new lenses, Shukai present an artist whose tendency for private home-taping had allowed recordings to go unheard for thirty years.

In 1991, Yuji Takahashi and Mamoru Fujieda collaborated in staging a sound installation at the Sezon Museum of Art in Tokyo, making extensive use of the new artistic possibilities provided by the advent of personal computers. In this installation, a culmination of their investigations into the aesthetic use of new technology, these two renowned leaders of Japanese experimental music used sensors and transducers on objects and in the space itself, via MIDI conversion, to trigger pianos, synthesizers and samplers. The four pieces here were recorded for a cassette-only release timed to coincide with the exhibition. This release continues the EM Records investigation of the “cyber-occult” movement in early-90s Japan, in which the new personal digital technologies allowed access to previously hidden worlds, opening new realms for exploration. In the words of Takahashi, quoted from the original leaflet for the “Ikebukuro Cyber Café” event: “In the flickering time of everyday life, the translucent coordinate axes of the dark cyber space appear and disappear like a shimmering shimmer.” This hints at the quirky yet evanescent beauty of a very intriguing historical document which also happens to sound great. It is available on CD and DL with Japanese and English notes written by Koji Kawasaki, a leading researcher of Japanese electronic music.

With 'Respire', Stockholm's Sonja Tofik presents a collection of works that cluster around themes of disunion and contemplation. In two halves, tiers of synthetic materials are layered into sullen reveries with organic components and concrète treatments, and as the obscurity of their genesis reaches a crescendo, these delicate and foreboding compositions find further means of communication the more they blister and bloom.

Danieli presents his new ep on Alpenglühen. Berglüster is an emotional high-concept EP with 4 tracks that work well together or individually. The artist from Aachen, owner of whispering signals, transports us into his sonic realm and offers us probably his most mature and honest work to date. Berglüster is not typical club music, we actually found ourselves facing contemplative lab techno. The hazy atmospheres, the lowpassed kickdrums and the cinematic pads reminds of the golden years of intelligent dub techno but with a more sophisticated and modern approach. Those who love the music of Deepchord, GAS or Porter Ricks will find here a delight to be added to their collection. As usual, this is an only vinyl release. 200 copies pressed.

AI-36 comes from Ear to Ear - the debut collaboration between label regular Samuel van Dijk (Multicast Dynamics) and Ukrainian artist Yevgen Chebotarenko. Taken from a series of live recording sessions, the album explores in four parts a markedly darker realm of soundscape music. A cornucopia of abstract morphing scenes and heady synesthesia, the album brims with rich sonic detail and evocative gestures. Deftly blending organic sound textures with an experimental austerity, ‘Live Recordings’ displays potent and accomplished storytelling. The album opens to a grey overcast vista, a natural landscape that slowly melts into a descending chasmic dysphoria. The mood transitions to a drone-based piece on the B-side, characterised by a more psychologically suspenseful framework and exotic blend of sound design. The atmosphere lightens, yet equally pensive as side C takes on a more elemental form, invoking water and its array of microbial and metabolic ecosystems. Brief cathartic moments in the final section pave the way for deeper wayfaring on the D-side. Stray signals and unknowable artefacts skitter across a vast subaqueous domain, a fathomless womb of potentialities that ebbs into eternity.