Ambient / Minimal / Drone

Placenta is the fourth collection of broadly imaginative and highly collaborative Carlos Niño & Friends music released on International Anthem in the last four years. It is also the first new music to be released by Carlos Niño & Friends following the November 2023 release of André 3000’s New Blue Sun – an album which Carlos produced alongside André, while co-writing, co-creating/playing, and co-mixing every song. Placenta is announced on April 11th, 2024, a date chosen because it is the 1st solar return of Moss Niño (a new being in human form, who Carlos and his partner Annelise are Earth parents of). Their experience of pregnancy, labor and delivery were all profoundly impactful for Carlos. Becoming a father again (a whole 24 years after the birth of Azul Niño, who has become a regular artistic collaborator with Carlos) he felt total Inspiration for this set of recordings, and hence it is perhaps the most conceptually-grounded Carlos Niño & Friends album we've yet to present – fully connected to the spirit of family, birth, and "how we get here."

When Carlos Niño is performing with his friends, he is embedded in the present. And from there, it seems like he can see anything: every possible place a song might go, how a sound might evolve, whether or not it will make his listeners and collaborators feel seen and appreciated. He is a maestro of arranging time and space into supportive containers, somehow completely in sync with the moment and beyond all chronology. And over the past couple of years, when the concepts of space and time have dilated and gone sideways for so many of us, Carlos’ attempts to crystallize the moments he and his friends produce and present us with songs ripe with possibility, chance, and the care that radiates naturally among musicians who love and trust one another has felt like an act of profound kindness. In 2020, when the world entered into lockdown, Carlos engaged in his studio in Woodland Hills, CA, where he pored over tapes from past improv sessions. One in particular stuck out, a February 2019 Just Jazz gig with Devin Daniels, Jamael Dean, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, and Randy Gloss. On stage that night, he’d been confused and uncomfortable, he didn’t understand his relationship with an audience. “I had a revelation that night,” he says. “What I present in concert is sonic journeying—not a set of songs, or a program, or a performative energy.” Using the Just Jazz tapes as a guide, he mixed and remixed, overdubbed synthesizer and pulled from his extensive battery of percussion instruments. He invited his collaborators—his friends, though we should all be so lucky to have friends as talented as these—to add their own overdubs, then, working the controls, he turned out a collection of songs that seem to have entire worlds encased within them. He worked with a sense of necessity. “The urgency was to share a message,” he says, “that we would get through this.” It’s a feeling that was made manifest across Actual Presence, and is extended in this new version, entitled EXTRA PRESENCE. When I first heard these songs in 2020, I was astounded by how expertly Carlos was able to guide his listeners through a three-dimensional soundscape. It felt miraculous, as if we were getting a new view of free jazz and new age and hip-hop, being brought into the cells of the music to see how all its constituent parts fit together. The implication seemed to be that every moment of every song—not just these songs, but any song—was ripe with possibility, that decisions were being made at every moment, and that because of that, other decisions might be made. Free jazz and free improv are both predicated on this very idea, of course, but where that sense of freedom often yields dissonance and confusion, Actual Presence seemed to suggest that something like spiritual harmony could be reached on the fly, that it was hidden in everything if you were willing to try and find it. What I didn’t hear then, but hear now, is that this sense of harmony wasn’t just coming from Carlos’ remarkable studio skills. It was inherent in the playing itself, and in the way the players relate to one another. There is an emotional coherence to this music, a collective ache at its core that starts with the majesty of Jamael Dean’s piano and runs through even the smallest of instruments. No matter who’s playing on any given track—or when they were playing it—everyone is watching one another, patiently waiting, not moving forward until everyone is ready. That could feel ponderous, but here it feels generous. You expect “Youwillgetthroughthis” to move out its foyer, but the kalimba finds an interesting groove there, so they all gather around to explore it, which gives a deeply tender organ space to open the song in a completely new direction. It’s music as a series of cleansing exhales, as re-grounding, slowing down to move at a speed that allows it to examine itself. As its title suggests, EXTRA PRESENCE gives us another hour of these explorations. The new tracks were all recorded around the time Carlos was working on Actual Presence and its followup, More Energy Fields, Current, and they show that the sense of possibility that first suggested itself in these songs wasn’t a mirage. Rather than simply remixing old tunes, Carlos opens new doors that reveal new rooms. “Youwillgetthroughthis with Koto” isn’t just augmented by a koto; it’s wound up in a new tension that was barely suggested in the original track. “Luis’ Special Shells,” an Actual Presence highlight, dips us into an subaquatic world painted in inky blues and forest greens, the shells themselves the only clear element that remains from the original. Most strikingly, it’s capped by the 23-minute ambient piece “Recurrent Reiki Dreams,” a dramatic extension of the album’s “Mushroomeclipse.” The track’s length, and the lightly undulating silkiness of its textures, makes it feel as though the entire album has been sliding into this primordial space, as if the whole of EXTRA PRESENCE is something like a symphony. Or maybe like all of those views Carlos and his friends have offered have all been different ways of saying this, variations on a way of articulating a feeling that exists here in its purest form. It’s like staring into the object with which this music has been abiding. What I didn’t hear in 2020 but hear now, as the world has changed and continues to, is that the sound of EXTRA PRESENCE is the sound of being ready to face yourself. Or, more precisely, it’s the sound of what happens when everyone pauses what they’re doing and rallies to support a wounded friend. Yes, these songs are technically dazzling, constantly surprising, and expertly constructed. But at its core, EXTRA PRESENCE is about sitting down, being with, trying to draw from a sensation or a mass that’s much bigger than we can understand. Yes, this is mystical language, but this is mystical music. “It is a way of describing the awareness of Eternal Now,” Carlos says.” “It is a way of expressing the consciousness of Being.”

Murmuration Without End is a collection of rhythmic studies by producer, composer, percussionist & multi-instrumentalist Ben Lumsdaine. Whereas the tracks began as meditative synth drones recorded by Lumsdaine when quarantined in the basement studio of his friend’s home, over time they became multi-textural, poly-rhythmic sound worlds as he disrupted the meters and pulses implied by the synths’ inherent modulations with each instrumental layer added. He also enlisted guest musicians to help him achieve this, including saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi (Bon Iver, Bill Callahan), trumpeter John Raymond (S. Carey, Sara Bareilles), and guitarist Drake Ritter (Durand Jones, Diane Coffee). Inspired by the vibrance of Cuban bata rhythms, Lumsdaine set himself to construct music that has a clear pulse but a fairly indiscernible downbeat, and ultimately makes an articulate artistic expression about finding peace within the unknown. The way he achieves this with an uncommon palette is particularly impressive on Murmuration Without End, especially considering that, as a working musician, Lumsdaine’s primary instrument is a traditional drumkit (hear his drumming on albums by Durand Jones, Chris Schlarb, Anna Butterss, and Bex Burch); but in the context of this album, he challenged himself to completely refrain from playing his drums.

"An arresting suite of drawn-out melodies anchored by De Kol’s majestic, multi-octave vocal range." The Guardian Greece’s ecstatic ritual singer, pianist, and ambient composer Maroulita de Kol announces her debut album Anásana, a record of deeply traditional Hellenic ceremonial cultures interwoven with contemporary experimental colour. Athens-raised, Berlin-based Maroulita de Kol creates music formed from the ancient, pre-Christian rites and practices of Greece, newly re-presented through a contemporary lens. A former student of classical piano and voice, an unbreakable bond with her homeland yielded an extensive and ongoing dive into the mythologies, arts and storytelling of ancestral Greece. These studies eventually guided her to the debut solo works that make up Anásana. The instrumentation and themes of Anásana borrow both from the ancient ecstatic ritual of historical Greece and meditative electronic ambient music. Flowing lines of deeply learned piano technique clothe traditional Hellenic folksong. And while its imagery was unmistakably born in Greece, its tones are inflected by de Kol’s time in Berlin and her immersion in its electronic and experimental scenes. “My music is an act of freedom and beauty,” she explains. “Hymns that aim for the restoration of Women's faith; they can heal the collective wound of the feminine.” De Kol’s voice evokes a Byzantine trance, a gateway into a faraway land, full of magic and mythology, like a priestess of a solemn religion guiding her flock through an arcane, liturgical sacrament. The record takes place in a blissful ancient world of birdsong and salt air, sunbaked caves and blue skies, as de Kol conjures spells in reverence to ancient divinities.

Twin heavyweights Kevin Richard Martin (The Bug) and Joseph Kamaru (KMRU) unite for Disconnect, a powerful study of dread, hope, and profound sonics that marries depth-trawling dub with Kamaru’s voice, ambient sensibilities, and negative space. Kevin Martin first became aware of Kenyan ambient musician KMRU “watching the short 2020 documentary Under The Bridge,” he tells us. “Which, aside from immediately finding Joseph's approach to sound and music so instantly impressive, I also found his spoken voice possessed a captivating, lilting, tonal quality, with his soft-spoken accent.” Following this, Martin dug into Kamaru’s records, and found not only a kindred spirit in skillful exploration of sonic space, but also a fan of The Bug. So began a mutually respectful relationship, initially held in Instagram DMs and reciprocal admiration for each other’s work and eventually blossoming into an invitation sent by Kevin to Joseph to collaborate on a new album. The results - debut collaboration album Disconnect - collect a back-and-forth creative dialogue that started life in Martin’s studio. “I think I surprised Joseph by suggesting he contributes vocals,” Martin tells us. This ability to identify, isolate and exploit the nonstandard is a trait shared by both musicians and employed to devastating effect on Disconnect. Its vocals, sitting somewhere between intonation and spoken word, capture the ear and fizz with simmering power. They are indeed a surprise, coming from a musician specialising in instrumental, field recording-laced ambient musics, but tell intensely evocative stories, weaving poetry into the pair’s grandiose greyscale musical architecture. The record is just as deep, expressive, and arresting as we can expect from Kevin Richard Martin, following his acclaimed rescore of Solaris (released in 2021 on Phantom Limb) and a handful of self-released solo albums that explore a sound just as heavy as The Bug but at a menacingly slower pace. And it is just as evocative and unique as Kamaru’s KMRU canon, each object delicately and purposefully placed so the timbral mosaic builds with shimmering and hypnotic beauty.

Music From Memory is pleased to announce the upcoming release of ‘Salt And Sugar Look The Same’, a collaborative album from Tim Koh and Sun An. Tim Koh is an American multi-instrumentalist and visual artist born and raised in Los Angeles. He has been touring, releasing music and showing art works internationally for nearly two decades. Sun An is a Southern California-based graphic designer, art director, and sound designer who has self-released music since 2012. ‘Salt And Sugar Look The Same’ plays somewhat like a dreamlike collage; across 18 short compositions, finger-picked guitars melt with electronics and warped samples to create a form of American Primitivism bent and refracted through Tim and Sun’s unique lens. Their collaborative journey unfolded gradually, exchanging snippets via email over the span of a year or so, Sun in LA and Tim in Berlin. Amidst personal struggles and uncertainties, the act of recording and composing became a refuge, a safe space where they could navigate life's complexities together. Though they didn't converse much, mostly just sending music, their musical dialogue spoke volumes, shaping a narrative that evolved naturally over time. As they shared their musical ideas, they discovered a profound sense of connection and understanding with one another. The music became a conduit for healing, bridging the gaps between them and offering comfort in times of need. Their musical influences and backgrounds anchored them. From reminiscing about past scenes to exploring cultural intricacies of being Korean American in Los Angeles, infused with a natural sense of shared identity, their collaboration reflected a mergence of old and new memories into a hallucinatory, dream-like experience. Across the 18 compositions that make up the album, incense emerges as a poignant motif, symbolizing the passage of time. Each incense stick becomes a vessel carrying the essence of moments gone by, while the holder becomes the custodian of these ephemeral memories. ‘Salt And Sugar Look The Same’ invites the listener on a boundary-transcending journey of introspection, joy, and pain, creating an experience that lingers long after the last note fades.

Hailing from Hiroshima, Meitei, unveils the final chapter of his transformative Kofū trilogy. “Kofū III” marks the apex of a musical journey that began in 2020, unraveling an introspective exploration of the artist's psyche while delving deep into the essence of Japanese culture. This latest release invites listeners into the innermost sanctums of Meitei's existence — a passage filled with serenity, self-discovery, and the triumphant conquest of personal demons.

Meitei's journey has been deeply intertwined with his surroundings. His move from bustling Kyoto to the tranquil rural town of Onomichi in Hiroshima wasn't just a change of location but a profound shift in his life. Navigating through the ebbs and flows of mental well-being, Meitei found solace in the quiet, low-key energy of Onomichi, where he began creating his distinctive brand of "ambient" music dedicated to resurrecting ‘lost Japanese moods’.

"Kofū III" is not just a collection of songs; it's a window into Meitei's mind, where he reflects on ‘the Japanese mental landscape,’ as experienced during the period of his return to his hometown. This album stands as a testament to Meitei's evolution, from his tentative inner quest to a state of deep healing.

"Kofū” and its precursor, "Kwaidan,” germinated in the solitude of Onomichi, embodying the mysterious, vanishing essence of Japan that Meitei unearthed in the shadows of his hometown. With "Kofū III," this exploration reaches its zenith, weaving musical landscapes that transcend temporal bounds. Each track vividly paints bygone eras and vignettes, all while drawing on the rich tapestry of Japanese literature and mindscapes.

Meitei introduces listeners to the tranquil Hiroshima countryside in 'Reimei,' while 'Hiroshima' reflects upon the city's transformation. It explores Meitei's intricate relationship with the city and contemplates the ever-changing visage of contemporary Japanese progress.

Within the sonic fabric of "Kofū III," "Shisei" brings listeners to Japan's past, when tattoos bore the name "Shisei." Fueled by Junichiro Tanizaki's "Shisei" narratives, the song paints a sensual tale of a tattooed man adorning a woman with a spider tattoo.

Meitei's authenticity shines through in "Kofū III," where complex emotions metamorphose into a kaleidoscopic fusion of lo-fi bliss. In "Yume-jūya," Meitei recounts a peculiar dream and the lingering anxiety it left behind. Also, inspired by the famous Japanese writer Soseki Natsume's "Yume-jūya," Meitei's interpretation offers his own perspective on this comical and bizarre tale.

"Edogawa Ranpo" stands as a mind-bending loop track that pays homage to the genius of the lesser-known Japanese author Edogawa Ranpo, a pioneer of the mysterious and bizarre. This experimental piece melds folklore, electronic rapture, and distortion, echoing Meitei's fascination with Ranpo's work since his elementary school days.

At the core of "Kofū III" lies "Heiwa," originally titled "1945," encapsulating Meitei's profound reflection on peace education in his hometown and the weighty significance of acknowledging historical tragedies. Its renaming as "Peace" symbolizes his personal odyssey towards understanding and reconciliation.

As Meitei concludes his Kofū trilogy, global listeners are invited to embark on this voyage to unearth the hidden treasures of Japanese culture and the depths of the human soul. "Kofū III" is a meditation on the intangible threads that bind us to our past - a portal to Japan's veiled history, capturing the essence of Japan's elusive spirit through the enigmatic landscapes of Meitei's inner terrains.

"Kofū III" is slated for release on December 1, 2023, in 180g LP, CD, and digital formats via KITCHEN. LABEL. Both LP and CD format are presented in a debossed sleeve with obi strip and include an accompanying 32-page booklet. This album is mastered by Chihei Hatakeyama in Tokyo, Japan. 

On their debut LP “Pome” for Quiet Time, Liai has given us a stunning work of expertly crafted rhythmic ambience, inspired by the intimacy and solitude of the midwestern countryside. Having grown up in rural Missouri, Liai channels the mixed feelings that can accompany solo contemplation in nature - expansiveness, sentimentality, vulnerability and eeriness. This deeply personal set of tracks took 3 years to make, revealed in the precision of sound design and use of space. The work feels at once familiar and organic, yet technical and futuristic, almost alien - a product of digital melodies, granular processing and frequent sampling of their own previous works.

Air is the central element in Antonina Nowacka's third solo album Sylphine Soporifera. The title names an imaginary species and the land they inhabit, inspired by the unreal desert landscape of Paracas and the undulating tree-less hills of the Outer Hebrides, and comes from the writings of Rudolf Steiner, who describes creatures called Sylphs as the spirits of the air, and the Latin word sopor which means deep sleep. As with all her releases, Nowacka's other-worldly vocals coming as if from beyond the veil, at once haunting, alien and utterly entrancing. "The voice is the most beautiful and resonating instrument,” she says. “When I sing I feel I create a field in between myself and the air in front of me," she explains. "It is not just that I'm singing – something in the space in front of me is happening, and I merge with this sphere.” She conjures and is inspired by open environments and infinite landscapes: places full of light and air, manifested here in the sound of ocarinas from Budrio in Italy, whistles from Mexico, simple bamboo flutes from Nepal, alongside tremulous zithers, synthetic Hawaiian sounds from a vintage organ and the uncanny wind instrument presets from a 90s synth. Nowacka’s first album was informed by vocal sketches made in caves in Indonesia, later recorded at a fortress in Poland; she studied Hindustani music in India with vocalist Shashwati Mandal, fell in love with early Cumbia in Mexico and Peru, and has more recently found inspiration in the landscapes of Italy. Hers is a new New Age soundworld that finds its origins everywhere and nowhere. Sylphine Soporifera gathers these sounds, visions and experiences into an album permeated with a sense of hope and fulfilment, that feels like sitting in an enlivening white beam of afternoon sunlight, as dustmotes swirl in the stillness. Text by Jennifer Lucy Allan

The second LP by Tokyo ambient conceptualists UNKNOWN ME began as a commission for historic Japanese cosmetic conglomerate Shiseido, conjuring audio approximations of seasons and scents, but soon flowered into its own refracted environment: Bitokagaku. Translated as “beauty and science,” the album is the foursome’s first composed solely with software, reflecting the collection’s utopian, laboratorial muse.

From levitational electronica (“A Rainbow in Meditative Air”) and vaporous downtempo (“Dancing Leaves”) to planetarium reverie (“Kitsune No Yomeiri”) and A.I. IDM (“Retreat Beats”), the music moves like weather patterns in a bio-dome: dazzling, microcosmic, and delicately calibrated. Percolating synths crossfade with field recordings from Shiseido’s research division; the sound of streams and distant birds blur into a processed haze; clinical voices read lists of precious stones. It’s a vision of new age as soft robotics, of serenity streamlined by sentient systems.

UM’s team of engineers (Yakenohara, P-RUFF, H. Takahashi, and Osawa Yudai) cite an eclectic swath of inspirations behind Bitokagaku – molecules, stars, Kenji Miyazawa, Akira Kurosawa, even “the sparkle of rainbows” – but their guiding artistic principle is as ancient as it is eternal: “beauty.”

2023 marks the tenth year of Music From Memory; a decade of groundbreaking archival releases, cross-generational collaborations and long-standing creative partnerships with our ever-expanding community of artists. To celebrate this milestone, earlier this year we asked our roster of artists to submit a piece of music for an anniversary compilation. As submissions gradually came in, we were blown away by what we received and slowly began to piece them together into what was to become “10”. Featuring work from artists who were present during the formation of the label, such as Gigi Masin, Joan Bibiloni and Michal Turtle, as well as artists like The Zenmenn, RAMZi and Dea, who have helped the label expand over subsequent years, “10” serves as a natural bookmark of where we are musically, whilst simultaneously reflecting on the label's rich musical past. In keeping with the Music From Memory ethos, the music of “10” spans both time and space, with submissions ranging from Vito Ricci's 'Da Hamptons' (1985) to Yu Su & J. Wilson's 'Mitti Atar' (2023). It crosses the globe, with a total of 10 countries represented across 17 tracks. The final result is an immersive musical compilation that flows perfectly from start to finish. Tragically, during the last few weeks of finalising MFM066, label co-owner Jamie Tiller passed away in a sudden accident. “10” was always intended to be a way to reflect on the journey of Music From Memory. The fact that it is now also one of the last releases that the team all worked on together adds a whole other level of reflection and makes it all the more special.

Music From Memory are happy to announce the return of Gaussian Curve. Gigi Masin, Jonny Nash and Marco Sterk’s much-loved trio are back for the first time since their 2016 sophomore album 'The Distance', presenting two new tracks entitled 'Winter Sun' and 'Fever Dream'. Both tracks originate from recording sessions that took place in Amsterdam in 2016 for 'The Distance'. Despite not finding a place on the final album and being left as unfinished sketches for six years, the tracks represent an important part of the Gaussian Curve story which the band felt compelled to complete. Coinciding with the decision to perform a handful of live shows in 2022, they finally revisited the sketches, mixing and arranging them with the goal of giving them the full release that they deserve. The trio’s trademark sound hits from first moments of 'Winter Sun'; a lush slow builder with all the classic GC ingredients; Nash’s airy and spacious guitar lines interplay with Masin’s warm rhodes, underpinned by Sterk’s subtle use of electronics and the minimal rhythm of a CR-78 drum machine. On 'Fever Dream', the trio subtly expand their palette; a gently building 303 bass line and 808 rhythm form the foundations of the piece, with Masin’s vocals adding to a slow-burning intensity. Arguably a fuller sound hinting at new areas of exploration for the trio, but unmistakably Gaussian Curve. MFM67 will be released in 12” vinyl and digital format, comes with artwork by Qiu Yang, design by Steele Bonus.

Music From Memory is excited to introduce the self-titled debut album of Habitat Ensemble, a new musical collective headed up by musician Marius Houschyar. The collective originates deep in the south of the Czech Republic, on the border with Austria, amongst the idyllic hills and fields of a village called Maříž, where a summer school of outsiders and creatives have been gathering since the 1990s. Enriching each other through intercultural exchange, summer school participants have created a unique gathering of artistic expression and interdisciplinary research. Originally grown out of the idea of translating the unique energy of the community and its environment into a musical journey where each member makes their own individual contribution, during the summer of August 2022, Habitat Ensemble became an exciting vehicle for connection and co-creation. Whether it be musical experimentation, composition, poetry, song or dance, Habitat Ensemble, having started as a series of multidisciplinary workshops, slowly developed into a unique musical recording. The album serves to conjure the unique nature, community, experimentation surrounding the school and the collective’s search for harmony across all of these, both musical and spiritual. MFM065 will be released in LP and digital format, comes with artwork by David McFarline, and is expected to release in November 2023.

Sirens is the first collaborative LP of Kara-Lis Coverdale (Tim Hecker, L/B) and LXV (David Sutton). Following their respective solo cassette releases Aftertouches (2015) and Spectral Playmate (2014) on Sacred Phrases, Coverdale and LXV debut on Umor Rex with a collection of multi-textural and multi-source electronic music rich in narrative, melody, and spectral intrigue. Inspired by the link between seduction and violence, Sirens comprises a series of timbrally vast anamorphic pieces that poise the voice as a newly imagined tool of multiplicity. Processes of sample manipulation, signal processing, routing, and source design inform instrumental writing and performance in feedback until intertwined, flickering between states of conflict and consonance. Apparitions of the schitzophrenic voice are at one moment fractured and cold and at the next full of warmth and vivaciousness, embodying velvet rituals of romanticism in the digital age. Ultimately, Sirens is music for ambitious dreamers: surreal sound portraits sound like the warmth of the world laid over an ice cold virtual altar. LXV’s vocal truncations and fleshy sound palettes depict the archivation of the breath and aural fantasies of the flesh which Coverdale sets amongst a vast and unconfined landscape of deeper and unknown force. Harmonically active and dynamic orchestrations underpin post-sacred tonalities while brooding pipe organs, sphinx flutes, and hailstorms of metallic percussion characterize uniquely disjointed discussions between disparate compositional ontologies. At times violent and at others serenely peaceful and seductive, these pieces, at their most powerful moments illuminate a felt space between cybernetic energy and the body.

“Trash Can Lamb” is a new solo album from Akron, OH-based multi instrumentalist Keith Freund. For the better part of twenty years, Freund has been producing intimate, shape-shifting music on his own and as part of collaborative projects such as Trouble Books, Lemon Quartet, and Aqueduct Ensemble. Here, he concocts a heady, homespun broth of analog synthesis, bit-reduced sampling, piano, standup bass, saxophone, and location recordings, arriving at a loose and evocative set of songs. Throughout the album, we hear 8-bit experimental delays mangling airy acoustic materials, denaturalizing them into primitive loop structures while retaining their golden-hued, melodic cores. The sputters, hisses, and croaks of handmade electronics nuzzle up to wistful piano and saxophone ruminations; the pure pandemonium of chaotic triangle wave patching and filtered noise settles into the serenity of a backyard dusk full of spring peepers (or maybe they’re crickets…). It’s in the space between the ragtag and rough-hewn and the romantic and yearning that Freund situates these compositions; it’s a peek inside a workshop that sits atop the trees, branches scraping on the windows, bluejays who just won’t knock it off, a table fan spinning slower and slower, its cheap blades covered in dust.

An amazing Krautrock / nature hybrid masterwork. Warm washes of synthesizer, tribal war drums and drones galore all mixed with the sounds of the rainforest, crickets, frogs, even flies - Osmose was originally released in 1978 and found minimalist composer Ariel Kalma using all manner of keyboards, saxophone, harmonium, delays, effects, even circular breathing, to compose gorgeously minimal, softly spacey slow drifting ambient soundscapes, which were then mixed with the sounds of the rainforest (recorded by Richard Tinti).It's a single LP reissue of the double album of 1978.

Alga Marghen very proudly presents Opus 17, a major turning-point in the sonic oeuvre of Eliane Radigue. Finished in 1970, it was the last work composed with feedback materials. From that experimental period, Opus 17 preserves a plastic character: a music made of rough sonic phenomena, at once harsh and granular, possessing a quality of materiality and tactility. Its vibrations structure the air surrounding the listener with densities, thicknesses, indeed with palpable movement. Her compositions are frames which let us hear these phenomena, open frameworks from the sonic installations of her Endless Musics and here reinserted in the five scenes making up Opus 17. In 1970, in her studio of very rudimentary means, she developed a completely unique body of work centered on sounds produced by feedback. Opus 17 has the quality of showing off the sum of the achieved techniques and methods. Eliane Radigue's music has never been rooted in ideas but in practice, the intimate experience of things in the wild which she has known how to tame. This dialog both intense and poetic which she keeps up with the solid matter of sound finds a remarkable concretization in Opus 17. It is to be underlined that with Opus 17 Eliane Radigue inaugurates a technique of composition which will be her footprint, her trademark: imperceptible transformations. For that she has developed a technique of meticulous mixings, based on the slow passage from one section to the next. Imperceptible all during the piece, we pass, ceaselessly and without noticing the changes, from one frequency flux to another. Time is suspended, smoothed out, stretched. It is this technique which Eliane Radigue will be essentially using for all the electronic works to come and which she will never cease to refine and render always more subtle. Opus 17 is the great panoramic voyage through material sound, its electronic phenomena detailed as if in a microscope. As Rhys Chatham recalls: "Eliane Radigue (...) had just moved to New York and had the idea of acquiring an analog modular synthesizer, which is why she worked at NYU in order to try out the possibilities of the Buchla 100 series which we had there. One day, while gossiping, she invited me to her loft, which was just on the corner. She had me listen to a piece composed in France; the piece called 'Opus 17'. (...) What I heard changed to course of my life as a composer. (...) That piece, impressive source of inspiration, gave the impression of being in a grand cathedral, both for the sensation of immensity of being in such a large cathedral, as for the effect of being so close to God." Opus 17 was created at the artistic center of Verderonne on May 23, 1970, for the Fête en blanc (i.e. White Festival) organized by the visual artists Antoni Miralda, Joan Rabascall, Dorothée Selz and Jaume Xifra. Previously unreleased,

‘2 Sim’ is a phrase the references mobile phones with two sim cards to describe people of mixed heritage, dual nationality or multiple residences. After being called a 2 Sim in conversation with a stranger whilst on a walk through Freetown (a recording of this moment features on the record), Duval began to explore what the 2 Sim experience is in contemporary West-Africa. 2 Sim was created from 2 months of field recordings and interviews with family, friends and peers in Freetown Sierra Leone. These site specific recordings are collaged with solo piano recordings and production recorded in Sierra Leone and the UK. The EP is accompanied by a short film/ music video of the same name which Duval shot and Directed whilst making the record. 2 Sim EP is the second release from Carrying Colour which follows on from 2017’s ‘Sen Am’

TRACE is a collection of 11 unreleased tracks produced by Yutaka Hirose during the Sound Process Design sessions, right after the release of his classic Soundscape series album Nova. Sound Process Design was Satoshi Ashikawa's label, home of his Wave Notation trilogy (Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music For Nine Postcards, Satsuki Shibano's Erik Satie 1866-1925 and Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way). Following Wave Notation, Sound Process Design worked with museums, cafes and bars to create site-specific soundscapes, starting with the sound design of the Kushiro Museum. Yutaka Hirose was called to work on sound for these spaces.

Rather than simply providing pre-recorded compositions, Hirose sought to create a "sound scenery". To achieve this, he participated in the conception of the space and paid particular attention to the accidental combination of sounds by placing the speakers and using a multi-sound source, and following the concept of "sculpturing time through sound".

The composer explains: "sculpturing time through sound means that the time, the space itself, the sound played in it, and the audience all become one sculpture. It is close to the idea of a Japanese tea ceremony where you use all of your 5 (or 6) senses to taste the tea."

TRACE: Sound Design Works 1986-1989 is divided into two parts. "Reflection" is based on an ambient soundscape. It narrates "a sleep that starts with the sound of water droplets at dawn and slowly disappears into darkness" and feels like a natural and soothing progression of Nova. It was played at entrances of spaces, at events, in cafes and bars. "Voice from Past Technology" expresses the dream world born out of that sleep and is based on what Yukata Hirose calls hardcore ambient, environmental music with a noise approach. It was played in museums and science centers.

All in all, TRACE is a crucial addition to every Japanese environmental music fan’s collection, alongside Midori Takada’s Through The Looking Glass, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, Satoshi Ishikawa’s Still Way, Motohiko Hamase’s Notes of Forestry, Inoyamaland’s Danzindan-Pojidon, and Yutaka Hirose’s very own Nova.

WRWTFWW Records is proud to announce the highly anticipated official reissue of holy grail album MKWAJU by acclaimed Japanese percussionist Midori Takada’s MKWAJU ensemble, sourced from the original masters and available in two versions: a vinyl LP cut at Emil Berliner Studios (formerly the in-house recording department of Deutsche Grammophon) and a digipack CD.

Originally recorded in February and March 1981 and released by fabled Japanese avant-garde label Better Days (home of Ryuichi Sakamato’s debut album, Yasuaki Shimizu’s Kakashi, Colored Music self-titled LP and many more) MKWAJU is the fruit of the collaboration between Takada’s crew and world-famous composer/musical director Joe Hisaishi, the man behind most of of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli anime soundtracks and over 100 other films scores, including Takeshi Kitano’s Sonatine, Hana-Bi, and Kikujiro. The ensemble’s transcendental wonder is, in fact, the first-ever Midori Takada album and the first-ever Joe Hisaishi-produced album. Historic.

Led by Midori Takada on marimba, gong, vibraphone, and tom tom, MKWAJU is an inventive and riveting take on Eastern and Western minimalist traditions, African rhythms, and early electronica. Drawing from its jazz-rooted polyrhythmic improvisations in the most inventive ways, the album covers a wide spectrum of sounds, from colorful dance floor-ready percussion pieces that stand somewhere between proto-techno and experimental synth-pop, to cinematic ambient landscapes and ethereal drone delicacies. The feverishly sought-after full-length is a stepping-stone in Midori Takada’s career and an all-around pioneering album.

Alongside Takada and Hisaishi (who not only produced the album but also played synthesizers), personnel on MKWAJU includes famed Japanese musicians Yoji Sadanari and Hideki Matsutake of KI-Motion fame, Junko Arase (heard on Satoshi Ashikawa’s legendary Still Way - Wave Notation 2), and Pecker (whose stacked resume boasts collaborations with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Jun Fukamachi).

Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.

Faitiche is delighted to release a short version of the radio play Zwischen (German for ‘between’). Devised and produced by Jan Jelinek for German public broadcaster SWR2, Zwischen brings together twelve sound poetry collages using interview answers by public figures. Each collage consists of the brief moments between the spoken words: silences, pauses for breath and hesitations in which the interviewees utter non-semantic sound particles. These voice collages also control a synthesizer, creating electronic sounds that overlay and merge with the voices to make twelve acoustic structures. We all know the speaker’s fate: you falter, you mispronounce, there are breaks, silences and false starts. This results in delays, a language noise compared by Roland Barthes to the knocks made by a malfunctioning motor. Such gaps can be disconcerting, standing as they do for a failure of the speaker’s rhetorical skills. But what happens when they become a constitutive, poetic factor? Zwischen consists of twelve answers to twelve questions. The answers were all recorded in interview situations. From the speech of the interviewees – all eloquent public figures – the pauses are extracted and edited together. The result is a series of sound collages of silence. But this silence is deceptive, as it is only meaning that falls silent. What remains audible is an archaic body language: modes of breathing, planning phases, seething word particles in search of sense that can break out into onomatopoeic tumult or drift off into sonorous noise. In a further step, each of the twelve collages controls a modular synthesizer via its amplitude and frequency. Supposedly defective speech acts conduct synthetic sounds and the speakers regain their composure – not via the spoken word, but through sound. The opening questions in the various interviews are answered by: Alice Schwarzer, John Cage, Hubert Fichte, Slavoj Žižek, Joseph Beuys, Lady Gaga, Ernst Jandl, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Marcel Duchamp, Friederike Mayröcker, Yoko Ono and Max Ernst.

“The semi-classical drums/sax/piano trio Mammal Hands mutate into a high-volume rave act” The Guardian Mammal Hands are pleased to announce the release of their highly anticipated fourth album ‘Captured Spirits’, released 11th September via Manchester tastemaker record label, Gondwana Records. Consisting of saxophonist Jordan Smart, pianist Nick Smart and drummer and tabla player Jesse Barrett, the trio have forged a growing reputation for their hypnotic fusion of jazz and electronica and have recieved glowing recommendations from the likes of The Guardian and Gilles Peterson. Drawing on their love of electronic, contemporary classical, world, folk and jazz music, Mammal Hands take in influences including Pharoah Sanders, Gétachèw Mekurya, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Sirishkumar Manji. Forming in Norwich in 2012, brothers Nick and Jordan along with Jesse, developed their distinctive and polished sound with their meteoric live shows and release of three critically acclaimed albums: ‘Animalia’ (2014), ‘Floa’ (2016) and ‘Shadow Work (2017). Landmark live performances have included shows at The Roundhouse London, the main stage at Field Day Festival, La Cigale Paris, Montreal Jazz Festival, Hamburg Elb Jazz, Athens Technopolis and Unit Tokyo. Teaming up once again with trusted producer George Atkins (Wiley, The Courteeners) at 80 Hertz Studios in Manchester, ‘Captured Spirits’ explores themes including existence and displacement. “The name has multiple readings but was first inspired by something Jordan was reading about past experiences of ancestors being caught and coded into our DNA and having an effect on who you are today. This ties in with themes that we have touched on before relative to identity and the collective unconscious (‘Shadow Work’). It also toys with the idea of feeling contained/trapped and the need to break out of something and also the idea of people being spirits that are "captured" in a body”, says Nick. Opening with the melodic rhythmic patterns of ‘Ithaca’, the tempo picks up with the mesmerising ‘Chaser’, as heavy percussion and Nick’s frenetic keys draw the listener deep into Mammal Hand’s distinctive soundsphere. North Indian influences dictate the meditative ‘Versus Shapes’ with Jesse’s transcendental tabla playing taking centre stage while the dark and moody ‘Spiral Stair’ relies on a multitude of colliding and intersecting shapes and sounds. All three members of the band contribute equally to the writing process: one that favours the creation of a powerful group dynamic over individual solos. “I think with this record, there was a strong and renewed sense of collective enjoyment and appreciation for the process and each other's contributions. After a long period of touring and a slow build up to the actual recording sessions we were able to mull over ideas for long periods, build on lessons from the past and pull our playing connection to an even deeper place. Realising each other's visions for the whole and clearly understanding how they intersect”, says Jesse. That vision is also realised by longtime collaborator and artist Daniel Halsall who designed the artwork for ‘Captured Spirits’. His strong instinctive feel for the band’s visual world is a key component to understanding the music. “Our work with Dan over such a long period of time now has become integral to the bands aesthetic and he always seems to grasp the themes and ideas that we send for each album and distills them into something striking and engaging that really complements the music. This is really important with instrumental music, as we need to be able to convey our ideas without being too literal or definitive and give the listeners space for imagination and to take their own journey when they listen to the music and look at the artwork”, says Jordan. Elsewhere across ‘Captured Spirits’, ‘Riddle’ and ‘Rhizome’ are rich in texture and heavy on groove and both compositions showcase a complex, emotional range and demonstrate three like-minded musicians with a dazzling understanding of jazz, electronica and cinematic rhythms. “Music has the capacity to fill so many spaces in our lives, as I think fundamentally it is a more direct form of communication than even language. In this way it can be refuge, it can be social, it can be revelatory, it can be memory, it can be what we need at a given point in time”, says Jordan. The high intensity of the trio’s live shows is recreated with the spiritual jazz-influenced ‘Into Sparks’ as Jordan’s sax exhibits an unrestrained energy and freedom but it’s left to ‘Little One’ to bring down the curtain on arguably their most accomplished album to date, a soothing, breezy gift to Jesse’s new daughter.

One of Poland’s most innovative and singular electronic producers, Hatti Vatti, lands on Belgian giant R&S Records with a new instrumental album filled with unparalleled and experimental jazz electronica. Having released three other full-length albums, most recently 2017’s ‘Szum’, Hatti Vatti aka Piotr Kaliński returns with the breathtaking freeform sounds of ‘Zeit’. Featuring Rafał Dutkiewicz on drums, Paweł Stachowiak on bass and Piotr Chęcki on saxophone, the nine-track long player brings together a collection of eclectic compositions that defies genre classifications, with echoes of the Japanese ambient scene, krautrock, jazz and dubby UK-bass. Prepare to be dazzled with this collection of absorbing and left of centre productions from the label that brought the likes of Aphex Twin, James Blake and Gabriels to international acclaim.