Ambient / Minimal / Drone

Edward Artemiev's re-recording of his score to Andrei Tarkovsky's classic 1972 film Солярис (Solaris), reissued on 180-gram vinyl. When Artemiev recorded this score in Moscow in 1989 and '90, there was no legitimately available releases of the original soundtrack. Artemiev chose to fill that void himself with this recording, released on Torso Kino in the Netherlands as part of a 1990 double-LP set also containing re-recordings of Artemiev's scores to Зеркало (Mirror) (1975) and Сталкер (Stalker) (1979). This set is now long out of print, and Mirumir is pleased to present the collection on two separate LP releases, remastered, with new artwork, and officially licensed by the artist himself.

A thrilling collaboration between major experimental maestros from slightly different sound worlds. Don Cherry, in the middle of a very free-ranging phase, plays his majestic trumpet over the shimmering organ tones of Terry Riley, while Karl Berger adds vibraphone. Heady stuff. Reissue of a rare concert recording from 1975, in an edition of just 500. On Modern Silence.

Roberto Musci, born in Milan in 1956, studied guitar, music and electronic instruments. From 1974 to 1985 he traveled the world studying African, Indian, Arab and Oriental music recording ethnic music “in the field,” studying and collecting ethnic musical instruments from all parts of the world. His self-produced debut album, “The Loa of Music,” is a seminal work of staggering originality and extraordinary beauty in which field recordings, musique concrète, electronics, synthesis and instrumentation are interwoven, drawing on the countless musics from all over the World that he recorded. The subsequent “Water messages on desert sand,” composed with Giovanni Venosta, was nominated for a Grammy in the UK in 1987. In the 1980s 'and 90s' he broadcast ethnic and electronic-experimental music from Rai and Radio Popolare radio stations. He has also composed and played music for videos, commercials, dance, poetry, theater, composed soundtracks and accompanied silent films live. From 1980 to the present, he has played with many Italian and European musicians: Giovanni Venosta, Claudio Gabbiani, Walter Prati, Giorgio Magnanensi, Massimo Cavallaro, Massimo Mariani, Moni Ovadia, Roberto Zorzi, Chris Cutler, Jon Rose David Moss, Steve Piccolo, Elliott Sharp, Keith Tippett and the Third Ear Band. The theme of travel, ethnicities and mysticism are a pivotal point in this new album of his as well, demonstrating once again how music needs absolutely no sharp lines of demarcation. The music is one. It goes from the search for deep meanings in a time spent in a Hindu monastery (Ashram) listening to mantras and studying Buddhist philosophy to space explorations and human settlements on the Moon or Mars wondering how man will live and what he will bring to the new worlds imagining that Sufism, an Islamic mystical religion, will accompany him in the discovery of new worlds. An inspired Roberto Musci is increasingly aware of his hypnotic and visionary language.

Edward Artemiev's re-recording of his scores to Andrei Tarkovsky's classic films Зеркало (Mirror) (1975) and Сталкер (Stalker) (1979), reissued on 180-gram vinyl. When Artemiev recorded these scores in Moscow in 1989 and '90, there were no legitimately available releases of the original soundtracks. Artemiev chose to fill that void himself with these recordings, released on Torso Kino in the Netherlands as part of a 1990 double-LP set also containing re-recordings of Artemiev's score to Солярис (Solaris) (1972). This set is now long out of print, and Mirumir is pleased to present the collection on two separate LP releases, remastered, with new artwork, and officially licensed by the artist himself.

A solo album released in 2017. It is an ambitious work that breaks new ground after more than a year of recuperation from illness, and several concerts have been held overseas, mainly featuring material from this album. While the previous album "out of noise" was an organic acoustic work, this album makes extensive use of analog synthesizers, including vintage ones. Since one of the original production ideas was the soundtrack to a fictional Tarkovsky film, each song strongly evokes the listener's own image of the film. In fact, after the album's release, Shiro Takatani, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Zakkubalan, and others made a film of the album and its songs, which was also presented as an installation. The album includes "andata," a new signature song that has been performed at every concert in recent years. Also, "fullmoon" and "Life, Life" featured readings by Paul Bowles and David Sylvian, respectively, from the film "Sheltering Sky".

The soundtrack of the film "Monster," directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda and written by Yuji Sakamoto, with music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Ryuichi Sakamoto held a no-attendance online solo piano concert "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano 12122020" on December 12, 2020. The live performance was directed by Rhizomatiks and filmed by Zakkubalan, and was simultaneously broadcast worldwide from a studio in Tokyo. The live performance was a one-night-only event with no archive, making it a rare and precious event that will never be seen again.

'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.

Long-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.

“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best
tracks of the past five years transcendent.” (Pitchfork)

'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.

Those improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.

“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.

“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”

What’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.

In the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.

'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'. 

'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.

Long-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.

“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best
tracks of the past five years transcendent.” (Pitchfork)

'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.

Those improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.

“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.

“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”

What’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.

In the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.

'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'. 

Huerco S’ West Mineral label returns with lushly amorphous actions by Shiner, Pontiac Streator & Ben Bondy aka Shinetiac; together fused for an immersive flux of vapoured dub, chopped and droned Billie Eilish, and fidgety algorithmic jams.

There's not a single, specific sound you can peg to the West Mineral axis at this stage in the label’s evolution - it's rather a set of shared aesthetics that freely bend into various interconnected shapes. Shinetiac's contemptuous, critic-baiting gear is the ideal example; on their last album, 2023's 'Not All Who Wander Are Lost', skittery, ketamized IDM sparkled over Spice Girls samples and the Foo Fighters' 'Everlong' was transmuted into Sneaker Pimps-style trip-hop. 'Infiltrating Roku City' might be a little less blatant with its out-and-out poptimism, but it takes a similarly dim view of conservative "big ambient" snobbishness. Just a few minutes of 'Bluemosa' should be enough to let you know what's up; the overall character of the sound is hazed, with frozen pads and garbled, dubbed-out voices smudged into a mess of effects and samples. But it sups up different nuances as it wriggles, absorbing scampering breaks, dizzy acoustic guitar strums and half-heard wordless vocals, flipping in the third act to emerge from its shell as minimalist balearic folk-pop - something like Bon Iver doing 'Electric Counterpoint'.

Brooklyn's Shiner, Philly's Pontiac Streator and Berlin-based Ben Bondy navigate the labyrinthine streaming landscape, guided by their own private experiences of mindless doom-scrolling and cruising the darkest corners of YouTube. They formulated 'Infiltrating Roku City' while they were rehearsing last year and spent the winter stitching together various recordings and jams into a layered, dry-witted commentary on our algorithmic reality. Laden with inside jokes and refried memes, it's surprisingly elegant gear; handling the most unseemly elements like sonic recyclers, earnestly repurposing pop and nostalgia to create an atmospheric echo of contemporary reality. 

Screwing Chief Keef's enduring 'Citgo', 'Clublyfe (hulu)' emphasises the original's AFX-pilled euphoria with Robert Miles-style piano hits, replacing Young Ravisu's brittle 128kbps trap rhythm with a glitchy rattle that picks up dembow spikes as it rolls. 'I Hate Being Sober' vaporises the Chicago drill pioneer's 'Hate Bein' Sober', blocking out his voice with glitchy, downsampled interference and elasticated Rhodes. The trio team up with Orange Milk's goo age on the sublime 'Crisis Angel', catching a ray of Malibu's sunshine in the process, and reduce Billie Eilish's voice to a Romance-does-Celine cinder on 'Billie', stretching it to fit next to gassed Future ad-libs and swooping 808 Mafia sub womps. And although the album takes a murky diversion on 'Roku Axes Ultra’, and a cloud-stepping centrepiece ‘Purelink’ in homage to the eponymous dubbed ambient dynamos, it's back on course with 'Jiafei (NETFLIX)', taking aim at TikTok bot videos and welding screams from Florida metal band Underoath to AI-strength vocal curlicues.

Beautiful string drones drawn in longform by Belgian cellist Gwen Sainte-Rose, evoking the wide rolling natural landscapes of a region nestled between the Ardennes and French Lorraine.

‘Collines, Racines’ is the 5th presentation on By The Bluest of Seas, a new wing of the Okraïna label, renowned for their attention to detail in the packaging which is typically on point here to match the music. On two works reaching well over the 25’ mark Sainte-Rose coils her cello gestures via Loopstation and unfurls ribboning motifs that limn vast vantage points over green scapes of forests and fields. 

She finds just the right balance of textured, biting point discord and harmonious sentiment as the pieces proceed to build upward and outward in the more melodramatic cadence of tension and release to ‘Collines’, whilst ‘Raciness’ feels more nocturnal in its development from sweeping, panoramic post rock intimations thru widescreen scope recalling Richard Skelton, to a magnificent passage of sustained lift into vertiginous heights.  

Refracted's "In Veil" materialises as the third emission in the Titrate series. A gradual unfolding across six passages, each step a study in the dissolution of boundaries. 

Here, time becomes elastic - synthetic textures breathe alongside captured moments of reality, neither demanding prominence nor seeking refuge in the background. Percussion appears as memory rather than rhythm, while drones hover like fog over unknown lands. 

Cut to 180g vinyl and embraced by 350gsm reverse board, "In Veil" doesn't announce its presence but rather seeps into awareness.

Sincere dysphoria is a disarming tonic, and 'Skaeliptom' is steeped in it, if not fortified by it. Quietly appearing on the Periferin label in 2013, Varg's debut recording presents with grave intent filtered through a pacifying melancholic haze. A remastered version now arrives on Northern Electronics.

Originally disclosed on cassette with a ziplocked excerpt of a cindered church, 'Skaeliptom' is a depressive tour of Varg's early experiments. As if bleached unconscious by northern winters, his touch is delicate and remote. Each track is gently struck into motion by a cadaverous reverb that prefigures the bare ensemble of instruments Varg employs. Militantly dejected, the short tether of melody to be found on 'Skaeliptom' is a brilliant funerary bloom that undoes corporeal restraints and authorises us to withdraw.

A Strangely Isolated Place presents a long-lost collaboration between Polish artists Olga Wojciechowska and Tomasz Walkiewicz as Monoparts—a partnership formed many years ago that resulted in an album once destined to remain unreleased.

Olga Wojciechowska, known for her modern-classical masterpieces such as Infinite Distances (2019) and Unseen Traces (2020), as well as her 2022 collaboration with Scanner, breaks all known expectations with Soothsayers. In a dramatic departure, Olga unveils a new and unexpected side, debuting her haunting vocals—a delicate, spellbinding performance that recalls the golden era of trip-hop, and comparisons to the sounds pioneered by Tricky, Massive Attack, and Martina Topley-Bird.

With Tomasz adding layers of depth through intricate beats and electronics, Olga’s voice becomes the emotional core of the record, conjuring an intimate and nostalgic atmosphere.

In Olga’s own words: "This album is like becoming one with the earth itself—feeling the rawness of the wood, tasting the earth in your mouth, and sensing the presence of ancient spirits. The music carries a deep, primal energy, like being part of the forest, with creatures watching you from the shadows."

To complete the journey, ASC lends his signature touch with a stunning drum’n’bass reinterpretation, amplifying the album’s nostalgic essence. Soothsayers emerges as a spellbinding ode to times gone by, in more ways than one. 

The cassette tape version of the 2nd Album by the musical collective Yaryu, known for keeping fixed members to a minimum and swapping participants for each sound production and live performance, continuing to perform freely and improvisationally, is released by Zouenkeikaku.

Featuring guest appearances from numerous bands, including Japan's leading guitarist Takuro Okada, vocalist J.C from んoon, flutist Wakana Ikeda who also participated in the new release of Triple Fire, and psychedelic legend Hajime Kawabata of Acid Mothers Temple, as well as Dhidalah, Sundays & Cybele, PSP Social, and Kumagusu. Despite these collaborations, the album embodies the improvisational nature of spiritual jazz, the fervor of psychedelic rock, and the spirituality of traditional Japanese music, all wrapped in the transparent textures of ambient music. "For Damage" is ambient, jazz, rock, and new age, while simultaneously stepping into a realm that is none of these.

This work was released as an LP and CD in a joint effort by Centripetal Force in the US, Cardinal Fuzz in the UK, and Ramble Records in Australia, but had almost no distribution in Japan. This cassette tape version marks the first physical release to be distributed domestically.Additionally, the cassette tape version includes a download code for the unreleased track collection "Animals in the Forest of Symbols." 

Becoming a fish, we move up the river from its lukewarm, lazy mouth. Eventually, the current grows cold and the mountains steep, and before long, your consciousness skips over the headwaters to the sky where the stars shine brightly. Connecting the second album “For Damage,” released in four countries around the world, and the first album “Bongaku” is “Estuary,” the 1.5 album by the improvised music group Yaryu. This is a spiritual sound work woven from improvisations performed by Takuro Okada, Wakana Ikeda (The Ratel), and many other musicians.

Silky and serene chamber music-like acoustics spun by flute and alto saxophone, the sad exoticism of pure Japanese music brought about by the sound of the Koto, Hawaiian New Age reminiscent of a deserted beach, and passing through numerous sound fields along the riverbank, the torrent of psychedelics and spirituality continues onward.

The cassette version will include a DL code for this title. 

New age for the suburban city, spun from a poor planting in the suburbs or from an apartment room along the national highway. "Suiyu" is the first album by Hajime Orikawa, a musician living in Chiba.

From side A, which is composed of home recordings and environmental sounds in a room at home, and contains a lo-fi yet theological resonance, to the title track "Suiyu" which exceeds 15 minutes and where various instruments such as autoharp, electronic piano, Moog synthesizer, organ, and tenor saxophone beautifully blend with a free-spirited singing voice like a wild rabbit running through the fields, the melancholy of the suburban city floats gently.

The cassette version includes a DL code for “Ikkojiteki,” a collection of outtracks, along with a DL code for "Suiyu". 

An autoharp tone evoking Laraaji and an elegance akin to Hozan Yamamoto. The album "Bongaku" by Yaryu embodies a fusion of psychedelic spirituality and the physicality of Asian culture. It features an ever-shifting ensemble of musicians, akin to a river's perpetual cycle.

If there’s one specific component that grounds “Sky Flesh”, it’s the focus. Italian musician and sound designer Marta De Pascalis flexed her technical muscle on 2020’s “Sonus Ruinae”, layering various sounds and processes in an attempt to touch the sublime. In contrast, “Sky Flesh” is a single thought, composed using just one instrument: the Yamaha CS-60. A slimmed-down sibling to the gargantuan CS-80 – the analog synthesizer used by Vangelis to create his iconic “Blade Runner” score – the CS-60 was released in 1977, a few years before the MIDI protocol was introduced to help standardize production methods. MIDI would change the electronic music landscape completely, offering a level of control that De Pascalis consciously relinquishes, preferring to highlight expressiveness and timbre, elements more readily associated with acoustic instruments. The album arrives as much of the wider experimental scene busies itself with algorithmic composition and AI-assisted modeling; De Pascalis chooses to work instead like an organologist, harnessing the CS-60’s mercurial magic to suggest deeper truths about our evolving relationship with machines. Currently based in Berlin, De Pascalis grew up in Rome, where she was surrounded by atrophied ruins that piqued her interest in decay and memory. Over her last three albums, she used tape loops and advanced synthesizer techniques to create a unique sound world that’s guided by her musical philosophy, rather than a specific aesthetic. As she’s developed her technique and confidence, her music has become even more idiosyncratic, and at this stage in her career, she’s stripped her sound down to its core elements, focusing on emotion, narrative, and mystery. Using timbres that recall a time when electronic music still waved towards the future, De Pascalis’ melodic content is rooted in early and Renaissance music, almost cleaving it from history entirely. Fittingly, “Sky Flesh” is released on acclaimed Italian composer Caterina Barbieri’s burgeoning light-years label, the ideal platform for her labyrinthine, cosmic vignettes. De Pascalis introduces us to the album with a triptych that establishes her sonic landscape immediately. On “voXCS60x”, “The Shapes We Buried” and “Blue to Blue”, she presents the CS-60 in all its malleable glory, running its serrated, ring-modulated oscillations through booming reverb and reducing them to vapors. Despite not working with MIDI sequencing, De Pascalis exerts a remarkable level of command, bending her compositions into abstract shapes without sacrificing their evocative earworms. It’s an almost ritualistic process that centers on a musician who’s not only in dialog with technology but with the cosmos itself, channeling its puzzles through her machines. This soul-searching is most evident in “Yueqin”, a dreamily ornate, moonlit composition that breathes through filigree melodic flourishes and triumphant fanfares, signaling a distant romance in the heavens. De Pascalis takes a brief detour on “Commas Light” and “Cut Off Horizon”, investigating tonality in miniature and coaxing expression out of her delirious runs of notes with uncommon ease. It makes the conclusion of “Làsciati” and “Equal to no Weight” hit that much harder, the former a dissonant dance into psychedelia and the latter an almost ten-minute cloud of obscured harmony. With all traces of the CS-60’s sound humbled by tides of noise, it’s an apt finale, climaxing with suggestive echoes that pointedly disappear into silence. With “Sky Flesh”, De Pascalis doesn’t freeze time, but expands its reach, offering a fresh perspective on cosmic music that’s steeped in riddles and wonder.

Italian sound artist Marco Shuttle debuts on Astral Industries with AI-39. Alluring and evocative, ‘Sonidos y Modulaciones de la Selva’ is a journey deep into the Amazon rainforest, seeking to capture its power and vastness, but also a rumination on the problem of its impending destruction.

In this album Shuttle sees the continuation and further ripening of an ongoing creative process, utilising both audio and visual documentations as source material. On this occasion most of the field recordings were taken in the Tupana Arü Ü nature reserve in the Amazonas region of Columbia, between Leticia and Puerto Nariño.

For the compositional process Shuttle employs a distinctly minimalist approach, achieving highly rich and articulate soundscapes with relatively little. Painting with an almost impressionistic stroke, the depth of imagery is underpinned by a strong experimental leaning and a sophisticated musical language.

Within its wild freeform, the seamless interplay between nature and the machines sees them merge into a mysterious dance - a liquifying sequence of scenes that shimmer with flora, fauna and the unmistakable aliveness of the jungle. A procession of sputtering and cavernous pulsations, sprawling biologies and hidden mysteries, the jungle as an entity, a spirit, begins to emerge. With all its peculiarities and strangeness, it reveals a world of seeming chaos, yet underneath it all a thread of something innately conscious.

Although it could be considered a form of sound diary, the scope spans much further than a standalone creative work. Within its intoxicating montage of shifting forms, ‘Sonidos y Modulaciones de la Selva’ stands as a sonic ethnography, and a contemplation on time, space, and our evolving relationship with nature.

Ongoing large-scale logging, agriculture and infrastructure projects are leading to significant deforestation in the Amazon, and continues to threaten biodiversity, the global environment and the livelihoods of indigenous communities. Part of the proceedings from this release will be donated to Amazon Watch (amazonwatch.org), a nonprofit organisation that works to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin.

“Special thanks goes to Marco Cruz from Amazon Jungle Trips and to Aberlardo and Manuel (who is also the narrator of the story at the end of Part 2), the indigenous guides who took me deep into the forest and made me experience its overwhelmingly powerful beauty. This record is dedicated to Colombia and all the fantastic people I met in this wonderful country” - Marco Shuttle 

A sought-after Dub Techno classic originally released on Berlin’s legendary Chain reaction in 2001, remastered from vinyl for this edition in 2015 by Matt Colton.

A massive personal favourite of Demdike Stare's, Shinichi Atobe's 'Ship Scope' was Chain Reaction's penultimate release in 2001 and, with the benefit of hindsight, also one of the label's most sublime offerings. Phase fwd to 2015 and DDS rightly put it back into circulation with this necessary reissue arriving in the wake of Atobe's much loved archival salvage, 'Butterfly Effect', which caused quite a ripple in late 2014.

Notable not only for its unusually dreamier tone - especially when compared with the rest of the CR#'s - but also for its happily lost-at-sea feel, connoting a deeply romantic and almost shoegazy late '90s / into-the-'00s deep techno aesthetic that would essentially become washed away with the advent and normalisation of mnml techno's pristine production values.

Quite simply, it's a must-have for followers of the romantic streak in Ross 154, Convextion and classic Chain Reaction - do not miss!

An air of ancient ritualism cloaks Modern Love’s midnight meeting between UK producer MOBBS and French-Egyptian spellcaster Susu Laroche, carving out a channel between hexed trip hop and shoegaze that’s one part DJ Screw, one part MBV, operating within a long shadow of influence cast by Curve, Leila, Cocteau Twins, Nearly God.

Clasping chiral energies on their debut collab, MOBBS brings a history spanning shadowy production work for big name artists to the grimly stylised vein of performance art and musick explored by Susu Laroche, an Egyptian-French with strong binds to chthonic contemporary London. 

Their maiden sacrifice heightens the senses to blends of monotonic, sandalwood scented incantations and carpet-burned downbeats swept in slurred dub. Songs are subtly variegated in tone to spell out shifting plays of light evoking bedsit antechambers and warehouse innards lit by iPhone candle or extractor hood and emergency light bulbs on their last lumens. 

It's music that's as elaborately serrated and blemished as early MBV, but positioned in a vastly different cultural landscape, drawing from hip-hop, drone, psych and basement noise. The pair’s range of cultural obsessions maintains a precarious balance between shadowy histories and an asphyxiating present; all too often, when the past is projected it's thru a mollifying, nostalgic lens, so their critical, prudent hybrid sound is a vital, chilling corrective.

From the bell-ringing, chain-rattle jag of ‘Throne’ thru the sleepwalker drift of ‘Roam’, and concrete plangency of ‘Forest’, the marriage of MOBBS’ illusive textures with Laroche’s feel for analog image and film (as evinced in her art for the likes of Blackhaine and Mica Levi) imprints their sound in gauzy layers that leave fleeting impressions on the mind’s eye. At their heaviest, Laroche’s arcane declarations descend in impressive enactments, undressing the excesses of over-glossed trip hop to reveal and revel in the sound at its starkest, sexiest, for new waves of washed up souls.
 

On their most explicit venture into music for moving image, Miles Whittaker & Sean Canty rudely fracture piano and vocal recordings by US filmmaker-musician Kristen Pilon in a short-circuiting of style and pattern that arguably amounts to some of their best yet on DDS. Yup it’s uncanny dream-within-a-dream type gear, landing somewhere between their commissions for Gruppo Di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza and creeping classics by The Caretaker.

Shredding up definitions of electro-acoustic opera, spectralist chamber musique and concrète rave, Demdike hit square between the eyes/ears of film music vernaculars on a startlingly strong addition to their unique oeuvre, now in its 16th year of elusive psychoacoustic strafes and jump-cuts across putative borders. The 13-part, hour-long album dislodges source material made for the experimental film ‘To Cut and Shoot’, by Kristen Pilon, an NYC-based musician and filmmaker, to farther refract the film’s themes of serendipity and the nature of ghosts and dreams with a flickering flux of sound-imagery and aleatoric weirdness appropriate to her original meditations, but also freely messing with their forms. 

Situated just a few miles north of Houston, Cut and Shoot is a relatively insignificant Texas town with an unforgettably bizarre name. Pilon grew up not far from Cut and Shoot, and it's there where she ran into 65-year-old machinist and motorcyclist Robert Lewis Stevenson, better known as Bobbo, who's pictured on the album's cover. The meeting occurred a few months after Pilon recorded her improvisations on piano, strings and voice in the basement cellar of the Halle in Manchester, with Bobbo providing the necessary narrative heft the trio needed to inspire an experimental film and its accompanying soundtrack. 

Responding to Kristen’s initial piano and operatic vocal recordings, Demdike return a volley of discrete parts tilting from typically cantankerous mayhem to quieter, more clandestine buzzes sliced with crazed interstices of the imagination, all marbled with the plasmic contrails of the paranormal which have long been peculiar to their work. With a poetic flair reflecting Pilon’s own phrasing and melding of mediums, Demdike unfold and expand her melodic fragments into temporal mazes, variously resembling the most messed-up ends of The Caretaker in ‘A Grave Fall (January)’, but also liable to skew into buckshot club turbulence, as with ‘Belly Up’, or the bittersweet bruk contortions of ‘Twist’. 

The storyline wickedly frays and loops into itself with a non-linearity that recalls the mid-to-latter stages of Lynch’s ‘Mulholland Drive’ or waking from a sweaty fever dream only to pitch back into its thorny bush of ghosts, often within the space of one track. It’s testament to the ever-tighter binds of Demdike’s symbiotic vision that the results nevertheless hold a thread of logic that weaves in everything from their Jon Collin jams to reams of mixes and Gruppo edits with an unresolved, open-ended quality that still keeps us on our toes, perhaps more so than ever here.

Long time friend of the label and Stones Throw alumni ‘Rejoicer’ joins forces with longtime collaborator, fellow Apifera band member and renowned pianist Nitai Hershkovits to present a new moniker and concept piece “Cinema Royal” - a delicate yet audacious album that quietly commands attention. Having previously collaborated on works for Raw Tapes and beyond, this body of work exists more on the modern classical plain with splices of ambient and jazz woven into the musical fabric of the compositions.

Led by piano, the album features a dizzying array of orchestral, percussive and traditional string instruments from around the world- flawlessly combined in a way that might sound contrived, but just fits effortlessly..

The fact that it’s such an easy listen distracts from its complexity. Synthesisers cozy up to Afro beat indebted drums , East Asian zithers swim amongst classical string arrangements whilst Ethio- jazz keys dance atop restrained but irresistibly funky drum machine patterns. Inspired to create a cinematic energy they saw the essence of Fellini in their album cover choice, striving to create an album that could exist as a film score.

The album exudes a sense of ease, a feeling of lightness that speaks to the virtuosic abilities of the players.The sense of fun is infectious and the playful improvisation is energising. Conceptually inspired by a simple drum loop and single take via the piano the two exist working in a deeply involved flow with collaborations from friends to enhance the initial piano melody.

Speaking on the process, Nitai remarks, “Cinema Royal emerges from years of collaborative writing and recording. Our initial experience with a complete one piano take on a drum loop was in Flying’ Bamboo, a collaboration with MNDSGN and animator Felix Colgrave that garnered millions of views on YouTube. Nearly a decade later, we revisited this unique method of improvising a single piano take throughout the album. We love Emahoy Tzegue, Ennio Morricone, Nino Rota, Lalo Schifrin and lots of music from the ECM catalog. There’s a lot of Africa, too - from Ebo Taylor, Pat Thomas, Felt Kuti, and Ghana high-life, to more niche stuff from the Awesome Tapes from Africa’s catalog “

Rejoicer and Nitai have a rare synergy and have channeled it to create something that speaks without words, or rather - whispers, and in this quiet exclamation we are drawn in to listen closer and closer.