Ambient / Minimal / Drone

Umeko Ando (1932-2004) was a folk singer from Japan. She was a representative of the Ainu culture on the Hokkaido Island in the north of Japan. “Ihunke” is her first album which was recorded with the Ainu musician and dub producer Oki Kano in 2000. It was released on CD in Japan only and is finally available on vinyl (2LP + linernotes, DL included). “Ihunke” is following last year’s single “Iuta Upopo” [Pingipung 58, incl. M.RUX Remix] which had been received with overwhelming enthusiasm and was quickly sold out. The 16 Ainu songs on “Ihunke” are delicate, natural gems. They are built on Oki Kano’s Tonkori patterns (a 5-string harp), over which Umeko Ando develops her repetitive, mantric vocals, often in a call-response manner. Oki Kano is one of very few professional Tonkori players who performs worldwide with his Oki Dub Ainu Band. The songs possess a mystical energy – when crows call accurately with Ando’s brittle voice in the first song, it seems like natural powers join in with her music. Her voice sounds like animals of the sky and the forest. Oki Kano: “It was a lot of fun to record with Umeko Ando. Many Ainu hesitate to break from tradition - if Umeko hadn’t been so flexible to work with the younger generation and recording technology, this album would never have happened. Our sessions were intense, and we were proud and happy about making such beautiful music.” Upcoming in autumn: remixes of “Ihunke” by Tolouse Lowtrax, M.Rux, DJ Ground, El Buho Mark Peters, Gama, Andi Otto, and Dreems.

Historical background: Only recently (in 2008) have the Ainu officially been acknowledged as indigenous people who are culturally independent from Japan. This record is an example of how their music has been passed on through generations in the underground Ainu communities while it was oppressed by the Japanese hegemony. It deserves a huge audience.

Oren Ambarchi’s recent Editions Mego release 'Hubris' gets the remix treatment courtesy of electronic music legend Ricardo Villalobos. Villalobos expertly tranforms Ambarchi’s layered web of countless sustained and pulsating palm-muted guitars into a funky, mesmerising and propulsive long-form piece.

German ambient musician.He was briefly a member of the krautrock band Popol Vuh in the early 1970s where he played on the albums Hosianna Mantra and Seligpreisung. *300 copies limited edition.* Member of the krautrock band Popol Vuh in the early 1970s – Voice, Zither, Tambura, Harmonium, Singing Bowls – Klaus Wiese (1942 – 2009) was a veteran e-musician, minimalist, and multi-instrumentalist. A master of the Tibetan singing bowl, he created an extensive series of album releases using them. Wiese also used the human voice, the zither, Persian stringed instruments, chimes, and other exotic instruments in his music. Wiese is considered by some as one of the great ambient or space music artists alongside Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Constance Demby, and Jonn Serrie. His musical style is much more appropriately compared to the organic soundscapes of drone and dark ambient music, such as Oöphoi, Alio Die, Mathias Grassow, and Tau Ceti. In the 1990s he founded the Nono Orchestra to play the giant sheetmetal instruments of Robert Rutman. Wiese is known also for his collaborations with Al Gromer Khan, Mathias Grassow, Oöphoi, Tau Ceti, Saam Schlamminger, and Ted de Jong. He collaborated with Deuter on his Silence is the Answer album in 1980 and East of the Full Moon in 2005.

Originally released as a hand-numbered CD on New Year’s Eve of 2004, Last Light captures Tor Lundvall’s hushed songcraft at its most ghostly and grayscale, stripped bare like branches bracing for winter. Initially conceived as “a piano album with sparse electronics” (with the working title November), Lundvall’s palette steadily expanded, incorporating synthesizer, samples, bass, metronomes, and his signature spectral vocals. A journal entry from the spring of 2002 proved formative to his evolving vision: “I remember watching the blueish-grey light shimmering outside and hearing distant sounds echoing far away, eventually sinking into silence and stillness.” The album’s 12 tracks are steeped in this sense of autumnal transience, of bearing witness to what fades. The music moves in whispered swells, between dirge, drift, and devotional. Synths chime like slow-tolling bells; percussion shuffles and shivers, icy and isolated; bass traces a low-lidded plod – it’s a mode both austere and seductive, lulling the listener into its landscapes of deepening dusk. Lyrically, Lundvall’s language skews observational and depressive (“through lace curtains / grey light falls / dark clouds gather / in my soul”), with each song like a gauzy glimpse into a different tableau framing winter’s descent: rust-colored leaves, frozen ponds, cold crescent moons. Lundvall has long considered Last Light a “personal favorite” in his discography, and it’s easy to hear why. In texture, finesse, and pacing, it vividly evokes the rare mood of fragile, frosty pastoral noir depicted in his iconic oil paintings. His is an art of the half-seen and half-remembered, of fleeting figures, shapes and shadows, and gathering darkness. Of all that disappears, and the ghosts that never leave: “So I wait / as the years / slowly drain the magic and the light / and the girl / I never loved / haunts me through the dark roads of my life.” Originally released as a limited CD edition of 955 hand-numbered copies on Strange Fortune in 2004 (SF2). Reissued by Dais Records as part of the 5-CD box set "Structures and Solitude" in 2013 (DAIS052). ARTIST STATEMENT: I outlined my earliest ideas for this album in October 2001. My original plan was to record a piano album with sparse electronics. The working title was "November" with the catalogue number EAE006 (later re-assigned to "Insect Wings Volume 1"). I originally wanted the CD artwork to feature details from my Autumn paintings, so trees and rusty leaves would cover the entire package. The inspiration came six months later, from a journal entry I wrote in April 2002 entitled "Lying in Bed - A Strange Evening". I remember watching the blueish-grey light shimmering outside and hearing distant sounds echoing far away, eventually sinking into silence and stillness. "Last Light" is a personal favorite and I feel it's one of my strongest releases. The music differs from my previous works in that the vocals are more up front and the compositions are sparser and more austere. There's a lot going on beneath the surface, however. Several tracks are based on specific locations near my home while others describe the changing light in my bedroom at various times during the day. The title was taken from one of my paintings which, curiously enough, does not appear on the sleeve. Tor Lundvall January 19th, 2005 (Amended March 2018)

Unavailable for several years and highly sought-after​, Space Afrika’s excellent, career-establishing sophomore album ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ encapsulates a singular, nocturnal mood that’s still the most distinctive thing in their catalogue. A stunning arrangement of mutable ambient frameworks, it lingers in the air like a stubborn waft of smoke, acting as a clarion call for a bunch of likeminded spirits that up until that moment had been lurking in the manchester undergrowth. What seems like forever ago, way back in 2018, Space Afrika presented a bird’s eye view of the city at night with ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’; their first and only album for the sferic label. Unshackled from the requirements of the dancefloor, but still inspired and feeding off its spirit and romance, the pair acknowledged undercurrents of jungle, dubstep, ambient techno and deep house which fed into their home city’s late night economy for decades, dowsing their tributaries back to dub and rendering the findings as shimmering ambient vapour. Forming cloud-like shapes illuminated by slow pulsing strobes, the vibe is precise but elusive. The pair’s dancefloor urges become completely dissolved in favour of more suggestive downstrokes, underpinned by thick and gloopy subs, leaving the kicks in the club while they float overhead like the dead kid embarking his Bardo in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void, evoking the neon romance of a classic Michael Mann night drive. The album weaves through eight interlinked scenes, drifting like spectral flanneurs from the Diversions-like opener uwëm/creãtiõn to intercept telepathic thoughts from Teutonic friends in the percolated and drizzly ambient clag of sd/tl, before arriving at the album’s most arresting moment on the widescreen yet immersive bly and its sublimely smeared timbral thizz… A modern classic.

Piotr Kurek’s new album “Smartwoods” is a sprawling root system of tiny melodic phrases that loop and curl around subtly evolving instrumental thickets. The Warsaw-based producer and composer takes his cues from early music, baroque music and experimental jazz, entangling his influences with filigree traces of contemporary computer music and fueling it with sonic vapors from the near future. Made up of seven distinct segments, the album blurs its acoustic and electronic elements into an illusory hedge of abstract sound. Harp, saxophone, clarinet, double bass, voices and guitar twist into computerized processes and synthesizer chirps, creating an uncanny dreamworld where the real isn’t always what it seems. Each player is entwined with the other to create a living, breathing whole. Like Kurek’s painterly 2021 album “World Speaks”, “Smartwoods” is also inspired by visual art - particularly the whimsical work of Algerian-French graphic designer Jean Sariano. The album cover features artwork by Polish painter Tomasz Kowalski, whose shapeshifting creatures and miniature stories aptly reflect the music’s wild fantasy. The first manifestation of “Smartwoods” – a live show at Unsound in Kraków in 2022 – featured animations by Italian artist Francesco Marrello, who put together a visual treatment for the single “Harps”.

Japanese obscure dream pop gem! Two elevator bangers to get through the gloomy holiday season by Japanese artist, Sonoko, probably made somewhere in the 90's. Merry ye ye

I see lucid blue flames moving before my eyes. I hear voices melting. Voices somewhere from within. Speaking words I do not know but feel connected to, almost as if I have known the meaning once.. Noises that obscures the multiple pictures hidden in these digital compositions. Iku Sakan have created a set of five tracks that takes the listener on a trip deep into the human psyché. Emotional flickering movements that twists and turns. The albums have a darker, much more intense feel than some of Ikus earlier magical and often hypnotic music. A myriad of different voices creates pulsing patterns and constantly morphing pictures for my inner eye. It's an album that might work as a hack to our lingual structures, pushing limits, pushing possibilities of meaning. A pool of over-saturated information boils and out of the vapor new contours take form. The magical and hypnotic is not gone, I still recognise the softer aspects of Ikus highly detailed hybrid sound design. But I no longer see where it takes me. It excites me. It feels like the world is expanding again, breathing. The sounds on the album asks us questions and points in several directions at once. In the shadows, weeds of lucid dreams grow deeper roots, reaching for my inner ear. The faint sounds on the track Nature Morte reminds me of expeditions to the local witch house ruins as a child. Something almost not there, something felt. History, Memories and the connection between the two seems to have played a part in these compositions. Emotional reactions that plant reactions in other people, all around creating soft movements on the face of our planet. Whether our collective psyché is an open field or an impenetrable dark forest, is of less concern with a key like Omnitopoeia, that works like an enhanced mirror, reflecting the dreams of the words we speak everyday, reflecting the emotional charges of significant places. Unrecognisable but still remembered. OMNITOPOEIA [άmnɪṭəpíːə]

Incorrectly perceived as simply an Autechre side-project, Gescom in fact exists as a platform for a number of aligned artists to work in various different combinations, whilst remaining otherwise-anonymous. Personnel in Gescom has varied from release to release and even track to track. Quote from the Autechre FAQ: "Actually the whole Gescom crew consists of almost 20 people. Sean Booth calls it an 'umbrella-project'."

Bristol’s four-piece outfit Quade announce their debut album, ‘Nacre’, out 17th November via AD93. ‘Nacre’ is the culmination of three years of work from the band, the blueprints of their songwriting and sound firmly established in the sprawling, haunting and yet hopeful record. Traipsing between gothic expansiveness and cosmic psychedelia, the record cannot be pinned down into one recognisable place. By the album’s close, the listener may be left wondering whether it was all a memory or a dream. The recording and production of the record was collaborative, with the band drawing upon the services of Jack Ogbourne and Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy - two divergent pillars of Bristol’s music community - for engineering and mixing respectively.

Avalon Emerson & The Charm is an evolution. Created during an extended break from the hectic blur of her life as a touring DJ, the album is a personal statement of intent from an artist who’s long looked beyond the club for inspiration. It’s also the first time that Emerson has put herself, her emotions and, most notably, her voice fully into the spotlight. Having spent her entire career working more or less alone, Emerson purposely sought out a small cast of like-minded artists to help bring the album to life. Chief among them was UK avant-pop savant Bullion, who executive produced the record and, most importantly, shares both Emerson’s predilection for shimmering pop melodies and her boundaryless approach to music-making. Working together, they cracked open her head and heart alike, creating a space where she could intimately reflect on the people and places she’s loved and left behind. Set for release on Another Dove—a new label that Emerson has launched alongside AD 93 founder Nic Tasker—Avalon Emerson & The Charm places lyrics and emotion at the forefront of its identity.

Last Resort is an up-and-coming label in London, and also hosts a show of the same name on NTS Radio. G.S. Schray, a popular act on the label and an up-and-coming artist from Akron, Ohio, has released his first album in two years. The album is a masterpiece of new age/ambient jazz that weaves illusions into fantasies, passing from fourth world to Balearic. It's like watching Gigi Masin, Suzanne Kraft, and Joseph Shabason perform together on the horizon of Ibiza as the sun turns red. An exotic ambient trip of the highest order. The late Andrew Weatherall also praised him.

Six Organs of Admittance takes listeners through an extended narcoleptic journey on Sleep Tones, an all-electronic double album of new ambient work. Mastered by VDSQ labelmate Chuck Johnson, Sleep Tones was made with a specific effect in mind. These new sounds from the Six Organs universe represent an essential creative shift from one of the great guitarists of the 21st century, showcasing his ever-evolving palate. An antidote to modern overload, Sleep Tones provides a welcome stasis. In its physical manifestation, each side of Sleep Tones ends with a locked groove in case of dream state, with no fear of a needle sliding outside the set mood. These sounds lull through speakers and headphones, creating ideal conditions for consciousness drift. All sounds by Ben Chasny. Mastered by Chuck Johnson. Astro and Sky Photography by Joram Young. Design by SEEN Studios. Gatefold edition with spot UV Gloss; pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI.

Κλίμα (Klima) is the third album by CV & JAB, the duo of Christina Vantzou and John Also Bennett. An assertive step forward in the two artists' investigations into melodic interplay, acoustic processing and field recordings, the full-length conjures the modus operandi of archaeologists searching for unheard soundscapes. Structured as an itinerant mise-en-abyme, Κλίμα (Klima) summons worldwide submarine circuits and tropospheres populated by sudden findings and progressive re-encounters - hazy dreams amalgamate with mosaics of reality. Catalyzed by a 2021 invitation to perform at the UNESCO world heritage site Santuário Bom do Jesus do Monte in Braga, Portugal, the music of Κλίμα (Klima) then fermented across a period of two years, during which live experiments, cyclical studio sessions, and travels across the Island of Tenerife’s effervescent ambiences gradually contributed to its completion. It is on the volcanic island that the narrative core of the album materialized, prompted by a month of recordings across the radically different microclimates populating the landscape. CV & JAB’s flashing transpositions from desert to rainforest are evoked over ten tracks operating as an abstract audio-guide of the outer and inner realms permeating the pieces. Κλίμα (Klima) is conceived as a rhizomatic composition rather than a sequential excursus; percussion, refracted voices, chirps and gurgles, other-worldly synthetic winks, reverberated piano chords, and yearning flute circumnavigations all surface sometimes in solo, sometimes synchronically to eventually dissipate again. The remote and enigmatic atmospheres that characterized previous CV & JAB albums acquire an intimate intensity in the solo piano excursions - “Klima” and “Lands of Permanent Mist” - and a penetrating emotional resonance with the instrument’s flirtatious entanglements with JAB’s bass flute on “Dwelling” and “Pottery Fragments” or with CV’s flickering plasma voice in “Jetstream”. Suggesting timeless wanderings in ambient études and classical minimalism, the album deploys as a mirage, inducing listeners into a contemplative state through mellifluous repetitions and offshore sci-fi inflections. The palpable depth of the recordings bestows each track with a distinctive density and presence: sounds and chords materialize and dematerialise as landscapes at which we gaze, half-asleep over a long journey. Ten sips of a familiar rapture which ooze a renewed sense of expansion in sound, informed by more than five years of CV & JAB’s continuous sonic wanderings and wonderings together. The labyrinthine and meteorological odyssey becomes tangible in the artwork, realized by the duo’s long-time collaborator Zin Taylor, mind and hand behind their two previous albums’ covers. Κλίμα (Klima)’s simulacra evokes a map in which curves transform into a score with “small systems of differences emerging side by side”. - Vittoria de Franchis, July 2023

Memory is malleable. The day you met the person you love, what color shirt was she wearing? At precisely what angle did the sunlight strike his face? How exactly did they glow? These little details are precious, but the strange thing is, the more you cherish them, the more they change. Each recollection is another potential touch point where stories can shift—each replay degrades the truth. Reality’s rough edges smooth, with time. Objectivity is a myth: cameras and recording devices all contort image and sound. There’s no way to know exactly how things were. And yet we still tell the stories, to try to capture how things felt, even though the truth is always slipping through our fingers. Lemon Quartet’s second album Arts Fests eems to unconsciously circle this thematic territory. Full of loose, yet lush repetition, it seems to function like memory—each dizzy melody recalling and rewriting what came before, subtly shaping each piece as time passes. Not that they seem especially concerned with the passage of time anyway. They space out, they work in the realm of feelings, scribbling melodious abstractions that feel familiar. Rich with compassion, harmony, and gestures toward ecstatic—if not objective—truth, it’s full of the sort of pieces that demand you return to them, but sound a bit different each time, new details overtaking familiar comforts. Are you hearing them for the first time? Or just for the first time in a long time? Either way, drift away, and try to remember…

Absolutely essential. Deluxe 2LP edition of this impeccable album from 1988. The spot glossed Gatefold jacket features artwork including archival photos & drawings from Woo’s archives as well as liner notes by Clive Ives (one half of the band). Issued for the first time in its entirety on vinyl, spread over two LPs, and remastered from newly discovered hi-quality DAT sources, we’re thrilled to present the definitive version of Woo’s most fully-formed album. A cosmic testament to the healing power of love, utilizing vocoded clarinets, pastoral guitars, homespun folk lullabies, and lilting electronics, coalescing into a an hour plus long journey through their otherworldly soundscapes. A prime entry point to Woo’s sound, containing some of their most beloved songs, such as ‘Make Me Tea,’ ‘It’s Love,’ ‘Hopi’ and many others, and also including a never-before heard bonus track – the vocal version of ‘It’s Love.’ Into The Heart Of Love was originally self-released on cassette in 1988, with a wider cassette release in 1990. Compiled from home recordings from the preceding years, and released during a transitional point for the band, the Ives brothers see this album as their most complete work, offering space to the listener to stretch out and immerse themselves into the warmth of their sound. Woo is the uncategorizable project of Clive and Mark Ives from Brighton, UK. Since the 1970s, the duo have been recording a plethora of eclectic sounds, most falling under the blanket genre of new age, but spiraling out toward notions of ambient sounds, jazz, and other spiritual takes on modern music. They received some acclaim for their early releases, including 1982's Whichever Way You Are Going, You Are Going Wrong and 1989's It's Cosy Inside, but their work began to receive renewed appreciation during the 2010s, when labels such as Drag City and Palto Flats reissued the band's albums. The brothers remained active all the while, digitally self-issuing material.

Palto Flats / Putojefe Records present the first ever reissue of the work of American composer Dorothy Carter, master of the hammered dulcimer, zither, and other instruments of the hammer chord zither/psalterium family. A true musical vagabond, Dorothy was born in New York in 1935, though her spiritual pursuit of an expansive musical knowledge would take her to monasteries in Mexico, conservatories in France and London, and the founding of the Central Maine Power Music Company (CMPMC), with new-age/minimalist luminaries such as Constance Demby and Robert Rutman. Dorothy Carter was many things - a virtuoso player, storyteller, historian of Celtic and Appalachian folk music, avid lifelong busker, avant-garde musician, and itinerant troubadour, laying a framework for music that existed both within and outside of standard folk idioms - never better represented than on her 1978 masterwork, Waillee Waillee. Underscored by Bob Rutman’s cavernous bowing of the steel cello, the richness of Waillee Waillee’s sound produces an album unlike any other in her discography. In particular, its two side-ending pieces, “Summer Rhapsody” and “Tree of Life,’’ glide with the shimmering filigree of hammered dulcimer and Dorothy Carter’s ephemeral voice floating over Rutman’s droning buzz of the steel cello. The elements of these two tracks suggest something akin to a transcendental Appalachian raga or whirling cosmic folk music, an effortless combination that serves to add additional substance to the remaining tracks on the album. The title track is one of her most enduring compositions, often performed in stripped down versions throughout her career, and one of her sole recordings featuring a full band, with the contrapuntal interplay of tremulous flute, vibrating steel cello, bass and drums. Lyrically and tonally, her voice would never sound as stirring and refi ned as on this, her most outwardly accessible song. She counted musical colleagues as diverse as Constance Demby, Einstürzende Neubauten and Laraaji, as well as her lifelong artistic partner and friend Bob Rutman, whose imprint is felt throughout the grooves of this record. The master tapes for this recording were fortuitously discovered in Rutman’s Berlin studio, many, many years later. As recounted in Laraaji’s contribution to the liner notes, Dorothy was “someone who really influenced my early zither exploration and vocabulary and inspired my shift toward hammered zither performance and recording,” after encountering him busking on the sidewalk one day in the 1970s. Later, when living in Berlin in the early 1990s, Dorothy would begin work on manuscripts detailing the history of the dulcimer family and providing extensive sheet music, selected material of which is reproduced in the twelve page booklet included with this release. Dorothy would find later success touring and performing in the late 90s with the ensemble Mediæval Bæbes, which she led with British musician Katherine Blake, playing a prominent role on their first four albums.

Following the reissues of Brother Ah's three studio albums in 2016, Manufactured Recordings is proud to present Divine Music, a collection of three unreleased albums from this jazz visionary: The Sea (1978), Mediation (1981), and Searching (1985). Moving from rich spiritual jazz to more meditative ambience, Divine Music explores Brother Ah’s unique sound and musical vision and includes an extensive interview with Brother Ah by Pitchfork and Resident Advisor contributor Andy Beta. Recommended for fans of Laraaji, Alice Coltrane, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, Popul Vuh, and the recent new age renaissance. The renowned French horn player known as Brother Ah (aka Robert Northern) is one of the most prolific and respected musicians in the history of jazz music, with a recorded output spanning more than 40 years. Born in 1934 and raised in the south Bronx, Brother Ah was playing jazz trumpet as early as fifteen years of age and emerged in the late ‘50s and established himself as a skilled and consistent session musician. Brother Ah recorded well into the '60s with some of the most illustrious names in the genre, including Donald Byrd, Dizzy Gillespie, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Gil Evans and, perhaps most influentially, Sun Ra. In 1969, Ah formed his own group, The Musical Sound Awareness Ensemble, and released several works under his own name from 1974 onward.

My Garden, a collection of songs written, recorded and produced entirely by Kirby, is a pure distillation of his sound — soulful, spiritual, and evocative. Demonstrating perfectly why Kirby is the go-to collaborator for artists ranging from experimental auteurs Bat for Lashes and Connan Mockasin to pop megastars Harry Styles and Kali Uchis, and R&B innovators Solange and Frank Ocean, My Garden is also a testament to the clarity and singularity of Kirby's vision.

PPU's first long-play LP highlights some of the early beginnings of one of our favorite producers, UKU KUUT. Written and recorded at UKU's home studio in Los Angeles and Stockholm between 1982 & 1989. Some tracks co-written with Maryn E. Coote, famous jazz vocalist who had her beginnings in 1960s Soviet Union. "That's my MOM" recalls UKU, "I remember when I was little, sitting under the mixing board at her sessions". Growing up in studios, UKU's love of music production began early, and over the years he has amassed a vast collection of domestic and soviet electronic gear. In true PPU style this LP is a mix of UKU KUUT's raw cassette demos, forgotten masters and unreleased magic.

Bamanya is responsible for building Africa's first DIY modular synthesizer, a huge wall of home-made modules and FX units that he dubbed, fittingly, The Afrorack. His reason for embarking on this difficult project was simple: as he began to investigate the world of modular synthesizers, he realized it would be difficult to acquire the technology in Uganda. Not only were there relatively few retailers across the whole of Africa, but the modules were often prohibitively expensive. After quick search online, Bamanya realized he could easily download circuit diagrams and buy the required parts locally, so he taught himself electronics and constructed a CV-controlled system that's been evolving ever since. "The Afrorack" is Bamanya's debut album and displays the producer's untethered creativity and restless energy. He's all too aware that these modules were developed with European and American musical styles in mind, so developed his own musical methodology and language to coax the system into suiting his needs. His starting points are often abstractions of acid and techno, but Bamanya curves East African rhythms and different scales into these familiar structures, splintering them into fractal shards. "I believe Africa is at that point where people are getting new tools which were not available to them, and then experimenting with them in a different context, because Africa has its own traditional music," he told Pan African Music back in 2019. This attitude is most evident on 'African Drum Machine', where Bamanya uses a Euclidean rhythm sequencer to divide his CV signals into complex algorithmic patterns that mimic the polyrhythmic structures that exist in many East African musical forms. If you're not listening closely it might sound like 4/4 techno, but focus your attention and you'll hear different layers of drums and jagged oscillators bouncing between each other creating hypnotic new rhythms. Bamanya takes a similar approach on 'Why Serious', fuzzing dubby basslines and plasticky percussive sounds into a frenetic hybrid of abstract electronics and fwd-thinking East African club sounds. At times, Bamanya's meditative, bass-heavy compositions echo the psychedelic sounds of Shackleton or Adrian Sherwood's African Head Charge, particularly on tracks like 'Inspired' and 'Last Modular'. With lysergic tonal shifts and precision-engineered drums, both tracks sound defiantly metallic, but sculpted by a producer who's always completely in control as he introduces risky eccentricities like feline groans and videogame blips. And on less beat-heavy tracks like 'Osc' and 'Rev', Bamanya makes a conscious nod to the history of modular music, approaching the kosmische universe of Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze and Emeralds, augmenting it with East Africa's idiosyncratic rhythmic intensity. "The Afrorack" is the beginning of a conversation that's been long overdue.

Stuart Howard, a.k.a. Lapalux, the UK artist from Brainfeeder who is signed by Flying Lotus, has released the long-awaited reissue of his debut album "Nostalchic" from 2013! The album, which means "refined nostalgia," beautifully blends his beloved R&B and soul with elements of house and hip-hop, and is finished with Lapalux's trademark inebriating swing and deep textures for a poignant and emotional 12-track album. The opening track, "Tape Intro," tells the story. As the opening track, "Tape Intro," tells us, Lapalux is a keen experimenter with cassette tape, looping and layering sounds in the warm format of tape to create textures that are haunting, beautiful, fragile, somehow familiar, and alien at the same time. It is possible. Finally, a masterpiece that will continue to shine brilliantly as a monumental work for the beat generation with a taste for electronica, chillwave, and ambient R&B is finally back!

Ulla returns with ‘Foam’, a surprise new album unlocking variants of ambient pop and looped jazz/dub styles coiled inside a glitched matrix that reminds us of Huerco S’ ‘Plonk’ as well as Ekkehard Ehlers fractal treatments and those incredible, smudged and disneyfied edits of Celine Dion released earlier this year by elusive outfit Romance. It’s an absorbing, quietly significant album for 3XL, on its most substantial release to date. Responsible for one of contemporary ambient’s finest breadcrumb trails in recent years, Ulla leads on from an acclaimed run of albums toward a more filigree style on ‘Foam’. Deploying fragmented morsels resembling glass-cast confectionary with a burbling vernacular, these ephemeral new works dissolve into a supine, shoe-gauzy and jazzed bliss that’s best compared with Jan Jelinek’s efforts in this dream-staged arena, the subs x piano minimalism of Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s revered collabs, as well as the memory-frothed echo of claire rousay and Co La’s fractal baubles. Aye, it’s a sound close to our hearts and one weft with a certain sort of magic that sparkles on the nerves and imagination with delicacy. Intending it to “feel like a keychain”, the album follows a logic that’s almost algorithmic with its haphazard mutations, but which ultimately displays a more human pulse on pieces like ‘foam angel’, weaving forlorn brass around jazz samples and Ulla’s disjointed voice murmuring unintelligibly like some cyborg liz frazer speaking into the sublime. Effusive solo keys and strings cascade like petals on ‘song’, where familiar leitmotifs become wind-dispersed like seeds. We’re snagged on the bittersweet tang of ‘popping out’, and the unexpected dance between marina’s jazz guitar lilt and the aerosoul thizz on ‘sad face’, while the tongue-tip sensitivities of ‘blush’, and ‘for your love’ sound like Rihanna produced by a Systemisch-era Oval. As tangled and complex as it is filled with improbable ohrwurms, ‘Foam’ is unlike anything we’ve heard from Ulla before, and it just might be the weirdest ambient/pop dislocation of the year so far.

Early morning mist in the mountains, the lakeside ripples in the stillness. On rainy days, open the window and lie in bed. The moment when a margin is created in me. I want to feel these senses forever. » iu takahashi is a sound artist and composer living in Yokohama. She produces her works using her own voice and field recordings since 2018. This is her sixth releases.