Electronic / Experimental

Sweet Company is the second album by Jabu. Where their first LP, Sleep Heavy, was an unflinching exploration of grief, dark and disembodied, Sweet Company’s deep, sedative soul feels like more of a lovers’ outing: optimistic, becalmed, looking outwards as well as inwards, and longing for the kind of human connections where ego and self-consciousness might dissolve. It is perhaps also an exhortation to love and accept yourself, to recover a lost innocence and peace – that paradise which has always been lost. Released via their own do you have peace? label, Sweet Company is on the one hand a very intimate and private-sounding work - the sound of life played out in a room, a bubble, a home, a head. The rhythms of everyday domesticity: listening to the plants, cars in the street, voices through the wall…. going to work, not going to work, sleeping heavy or not sleeping at all. Wavering on the brink of a revelation, of something just beyond the material world, while you wait for the kettle to boil. The core Jabu trio of producer Amos Childs and vocalists Jasmine Butt and Alex Rendall is present and correct. Sweet Company has the exhilarating sweep and confidence of a collaboration between people who trust and understand each other implicitly, and, secure in that knowledge, are able to give the absolute best of themselves to us. As before, Jasmine’s voice is a textural, painterly instrument, layered and blurred into abstraction, resisting the limits of language; the songs she sings on are portals into vast internal landscapes where the normal rules of gravity are suspended, every sound is smothered in a cathedral-like resonance, and you're both fearful and hopeful that you might never find your way back out again. Alex takes a more narrative, confessional and no less engaging pop tack: as on the gauzy, decelerated 2-step of ‘Lately’, with his masochistic, self-mocking entreaties to “be cruel to me […] I like it when you make a fool of me”. Childs has a true hip-hop fiend's ear for a striking sample, and how to loop it to most hypnotic and rapturous effect, but here takes things to ever more powerfully uncanny and auteurish places, drawing inspiration from the voidal bliss-outs of shoegaze (AR Kane’s amniotic dream-pop epic 69 is one influence cited) and the space-time disturbances of dub, commanding both a raindrops-on-cobwebs delicacy and an immense, oceanic pressure. His productions seem to resist linear progression - instead they move by a kind of unstoppable diffusion, like weeds reclaiming an unkempt garden, or alien flora patterning the sea-floor and coral-caves of the subaquatic level of a computer game which may exist only in your, or his, imagination. Perhaps it's Daniela Dyson, the British-Afro-Colombian artist who contributes her vivid, energising poetic mysticism to two tracks, who best sums up Sweet Company's ambition and effect: “Me quiero perder en los momentos tan puros en su esencia que Las Horas mismas se detienen para ser testigo de nuestro amor” (I want to lose myself in the moments so pure in their essence / that The Hours themselves stop to bear witness to our love…). For a precious half an hour, we're invited to celebrate the smallness of our lives - and the limitless grandeur which that smallness contains. When it ends, we step back from the brink but things aren’t quite the same anymore: we’re haunted by what we briefly almost knew.

Futoshi Moriyama is an Osaka-based electronic music producer who began his musical career in the early 2000s improvised music hothouse of Osaka’s Shinsekai Bridge, an important venue for the “Kansai zero sedai” (Kansai Zero Generation), which sprang up in the wake of The Boredoms’ world-wide success. Kazuhisa Uchihashi was the axis of this Bridge scene; his workshops allowed a generation the freedom to develop their own voices. Moriyama’s early improvisational work often saw him using cheap samplers to surprising ends, but since then his work has moved in a more composed direction, while still investigating electronic sound. This particular release, which appeared initially in 2015 as a cassette on the Birdfriend label, run by Koshiro Hino (aka YPY), was a year in the making. All of the music was composed with software instruments, spurred by a desire to move beyond his previous work, and can be heard as a home-recorded orchestral music.

On the A side Akie mixes everything from ambient interludes to raw drum machine workouts in an almost diaristic way with sections of field recordings and voice notes fading in and out. B side sees Lil Mofo repurposing everything from dad rock to Chain Reaction 12”s, using the echo chamber as a instrument and means of connecting seemingly disparate sounds & genres. Definitely one for a late night drive with no destination / or an intimate vision quest in the living room in front of the space heater.

David Goren is a radio producer and audio archivist based in Brooklyn, NY. For several years he's researched New York City’s pirate radio community, producing “New York City’s Pirates of the Air” for the BBC World Service & "Outlaws of the Airwaves: The Rise of Pirate Radio Station WBAD” for KCRW’s Lost Notes podcast. More recently, Goren has been cataloguing his meandering across his local pirate radio frequencies via the Brooklyn Pirate Radio Sound Map (BPRSM) - tracing the lingering connections between unlicensed radio broadcasting and Brooklyn's local neighbourhood culture in the digital age. Brooklyn Pirates: Neighbourhoods in the Sky, 2014-2021 pulls together a clutch of cut-up recordings captured by David on the BPRSM, traversing the dial across raucous soca jams & kompas, through to Grenadian election news, Haitian funeral announcements and ads for Jamaican patty shops & spiritual healers - plus broadcasts from Turkish, and Orthodox & Sephardic Jewish pirate stations to boot. Covering a period between the mid-2010s right up to earlier this year, the B side in particular captures the uniquely idiosyncratic and hyper-local reactions of the Brooklyn pirates to the global disintegration of the early 2020s - the coronavirus pandemic, George Floyd, the US election and more - acting as a vital document of social history demonstrating the value of DIY community broadcasts during a period of worldwide lockdowns and the wholesale breakdown of politics.

"Axacan" is the fourth album from Daniel Bachman for Three Lobed and his first album in three years. It was recorded in 2020 at various locations in Virginia. It will be pressed on two 140 gram 12" records in Virginia by Furnace and housed within a full color gatefold jacket bearing new photography by Bachman. As a part of the Three Lobed Recordings 20th Anniversary series it features an OBI strip bearing an essay about the LP by Aquarium Drunkard's Tyler Wilcox.

In mulling over their career, it’s staggering to realize that Sonic Youth not only delivered a healthy slab of releases as a unit but also have a myriad of shelved material still waiting for broader ears. While the group’s current Bandcamp abode lays out a generous amount of it, a bunch more has yet to surface. And it’s a massive mountain to chip away at in the sense of the group output alone; individual members’ projects are a whole other game, needless to say. "In/Out/In" ably delivers a new slab of mostly-unheard Sonic righteousness, with a scope on the post 2000-era band in especially zoned/exploratory regions. The 80’s and 90’s continually saw Sonic Youth reminding everyone that their jams ran free alongside song craft and visible development album to album; there were Peel excursions, dipping toes into soundtrack work starting with 1986’s "Made In USA", and of course great impromptu expansive takes of tried and true previous material onstage. The millennial establishment of home turf studio spaces in NYC then NJ greatly egged on forays into improvisation and composition on their own clock as evidenced in "Goodbye 20th Century" and the plethora of SYR releases that trickled out side by side between major release albums. At this juncture they had already created a cultural template for a whole new breed of rock heads who, in turn, entered a feedback loop to SY itself, which cultivated more of its own new moves informed by the very fandom they had for their acolytes all the while pushing the band outward to uncharted fields. Jim O’Rourke’s residency had already influenced the band’s material in part into denser, longer, meditative paths. Mark Ibold’s entry for their swan song "The Eternal" also allowed for more of this exploration with Kim Gordon having more room to commit to third guitar. However "The Eternal" also took more cues from Ibold’s bottom-end swing and perhaps dialed back the expansiveness of the "NYC Ghosts and Flowers" and "Sonic Nurse" era a notch in a cool way, making it one of the best group efforts for me, anyway. Perhaps this fueled some of these tracks here, in an already comfortable zone with a new lineup and new drive to take sideroads to even more outer realms. "In/Out/In" reveals their last decade to be still heavy on the roll-tape and bug-out Sonic Youth. Not all recorded in one session but rather spread out over 2000-2010, the sequencing here is especially well thought out. Opening with the 2008 “Basement Contender” we get a super-unfiltered glimpse of the band at Kim and Thurston’s Northampton house creating a gentle springboard of Venusian choogle, with phased Lee lappings at cascading Thurston figures forming a simmering soundtrack. “Machine” offers another instrumental track from "The Eternal" sessions and is a steamy exercise in stop-start rhythmic grunt amidst a jungle of chiming and upward spiraling chord progressions. We’ve also got the extended score offering “Social Static” from the Chris Habib/Spencer Tunick film of the same name, draping white sheets of noise over your head then descending into a gauzy maw of car-alarm guitars and ambient-yet-disruptive turbulence that eventually subsides into a smoky coda. Two more tracks round out the set both culled from a Three Lobed box set of various artists from 2011 called "Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them": “In & Out” quietly resembles Can in a cave with dripping stalactites of Kim’s wordless tone rumble and was recorded at a soundcheck in Pomona California and their home Hoboken turf in 2010. “Out & In” from 2000 was done in their late downtown NYC studio and serves to close out this LP’s last 12 minutes as a reminder of what they got up to with O’Rourke there. More gentle time shift chord framework erupts into molten fury three minutes in, before mutating into the sonic equivalent of a slowly collapsing star. Casting an audio net over the entire instrumental/outtake oeuvre of Sonic Youth’s long history isn’t something easily committed to a single release without a doubt. Hearing these tracks in comparison to, say, 1986’s "Made In USA" material shows the massive leaps they took over the years. Whereas ’86 showed them freshly discovering their go-with-the-flow instrumental abilities for a soundtrack, their last decade showed them complementing the ambience with assured twists and turns that only came to be through their inimitable and rooted telepathy. That, plus the freedom to compose in more comfortable environs other than dank Ludlow Street rental spaces (hard to believe "Daydream Nation" was created in a claustrophobic practice basement) most assuredly was a component in their continued paths of discovery. Shifting on the drop of a dime from quiet/deep forays into full on noised-out Autobahn stomps with Steve Shelley at the wheel, they painted detailed and varied brush strokes and continually created organic sounds that undoubtedly carried the signature sound of the band, while ringing loud with their continual drive to free themselves from just that. Enjoy this capsule. -Brian Turner, 2021-

The album’s title refers to the creation story of the Yoruba people, a West African ethnic group with a revered tradition. Songs on Primordial Waters tell stories of deities and divinities, with Jamael drawing a through line between his tradition’s origins and contemporary jazz. “Èṣù” is a jazz interpretation of a traditional Yoruba spiritual melody, and “Ṣàngó” tells the story of the popular king deity, god of thunder and lightning. These sit alongside songs inspired by Jamael’s black Los Angeles community. “Galaxy In Leimert”, influenced by Alice Coltrane’s “Galaxy Around Olodumare,” pays celestial homage to Jamael’s rapidly-gentrifying South L.A. neighborhood, Leimert Park. Jamael’s hip-hop influence comes through in the album’s second half, with Jamael assuming his hip-hop alter ego Jasik to rap over beats he created entirely by sampling the jazz material on the first half of the album. Jamael invited his regular collaborator, vocalist Sharada Shashidar, and Mekala Session from his local music community to perform on the album. Jamael is a seasoned collaborator: he currently leads music collective The Afronauts, has participated in the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra, and has played with the likes of Kamasi Washington, Thundercat, Miguel Atwood-Ferguson and Carlos Niño.

A 22-year-old genius jazz pianist who also works with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Carlos Niño, including his grandfather legendary soul jazz drummer Donald Dean, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and more. A young Jamael Dean who needs attention to be influenced by. The long-awaited official debut work is fully released from the prestigious ! Currently, he leads the music group The Afronauts and participates in the legendary black jazz "Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra". It is a two-part album consisting of 10 hip-hop songs produced under the name of his own nickname "Jasik" using jazz performances by his group and beats sampled from them. Sharada Shashidhar and Mekala “Mickey” Session, who are also enrolled in Brooklyn's female singer and have collaborated with Jamael Dean many times, participated. The title comes from the Genesis of the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group. Both sides are fertile and superb!

A split sided album on clear vinyl with Chris Watson and Georgia Rodgers, pairing two artists whose works here show different but complementary new forms in the use of field recording in composition. Both were originally multi-channel installations before the release of these stereo versions.

Notes From The Forest Floor was originally premiered in a different form in July 2015 at the ICA as part of an evenings event dedicated to the work of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. It was recorded in La Selva tropical rain forest reserve in Costa Rica.

Line Of Parts was originally premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2019 as part of the Huddersfield Professional Development Programme for Female Composers of Electronic Music project. It was recorded in the Cairngorms and North London.
artwork by Chris Bigg
photography by Chris Watson/Georgia Rodgers

This is the first analog reissue of a masterpiece that was originally released only on CD by 12k in 2004. The publisher is Germany's Keplar, which has recently reissued masterpieces by Vladislav Delay, Giuseppe Ielasi, Arovane and many others. This is the ultimate in ambient music, where minimalism and nostalgia melt together in the universal and timeless longing of electronica. It is truly one eternity. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut by Loop-o, the quality of the vinyl is perfect. Limited edition of 500 copies.

Italy's New Age / World label Black Sweat reissues 80 years of unknown electronic music from Italy.
A cassette work of a project called Futuro Antico. A meditation synth and a bewitching flute unfold, which is good because it has a gentle, violent, piercing sound. It's also reminiscent of Terry Riley and Don Cherry's legendary live performances in Cologne.

This is a great masterpiece that further updates the boundaries of what can only be described as his unique style. As a member of the famous hip-hop crew, Origami, he has been active with Nanorunamonai. In 2021, he released his self-produced full-length album. This is an instrumental version of sibitt's self-produced full-length album "SHINGANGINGA" released in 2021.

Two songs from the 1988 work "Iran" in "Narcotic", which was released on CD only in 1997 by the now-deceased British master Muslimgauze, who has repeatedly attacked Arabic / dub through day and night music. An edited version of the work is now available from the well-established prestigious , which represents the Dutch experimental music world! A radical and refreshing mix of elements such as tribal, ambient, glitch, and fill record. Non-standard trance music that mixes consistent tribal beats, distortion, unique textured noise, and minimal jam with darbuca and tambourine to create an enigmatic, euphoric and eerie sound with exotic madness. .. Limited to 500 copies.Narcotic is perhaps one example of an album in both camps of the muslimgauze spectrum, it denotes the expertise acquired in oriental percussion by Bryn Jones after a crescent development and practice through action, part Tribal, part Ambient with shades of texturized noise, glitch details and field recordings, as result the listener is inside this intoxicant atmosphere of exotic madness, where the basic musical premise constituted by the consistent tribal beats from darbukas and tambourines contrasting radically with the eerie sounds from organic noise, distortions and minimal jams.

Definitely ahead of their time, A.T.R.O.X. were one of the first bands to move beyond typical new wave styles and introduce strong electronic elements, not too far from works of their contemporaries Tuxedomoon and Minimal Compact. "When we recorded Water Tales I was thinking of the sea as the only escape for mankind. I proposed this idea to the rest of the band and all of them were just thrilled". Probably it is the only new wave concept-album that was ever released. The sound, compared to the first album, is more influenced by the lessons of Eno and David Byrne, who were enriching their compositions with amazing and intriguing musical phrases and rhythms. Of course, we did not forget the lessons of NEU! and Faust. The Andreoni brothers and Marchini were both brilliantly creative and yielding, and they were responsible for all the musical themes upon which Benvisi carved the acoustics. Water Tales is a sincere album, then the season changed and suddenly we were 'every man for himself' almost without realizing it." --Francesco Paolo Paladino

Following their recent solo releases Soniscope (Dauw) and Cells #5 (SAUNA 064CS), Berlin-based multi-instrumentalist Midori Hirano and Tokyo based string experimentalist Atsuko Hatano have teamed up for their first collaborative full-length: Water Ladder. An intense, multilayered continuation of earlier collaborations (Atsuko was featured on Midori's debut LP back in 2006), the foundation for this new collaborative album was laid when they shared stages in Berlin (Ausland) and Japan in 2019. Working remotely at first, they later recorded parts of the album in Nara's snoihouse (using omnidirectional polyhedral speakers). "As we rallied back and forth with our recordings in the process of creating this album, unanticipated fluctuations and irregularities emerged, coming together into a kind of music with a unique resilience and buoyancy that cannot be confined to existing molds. It was as though we had built a Water Ladder to bridge the gap between us," explains prolific composer and viola player Atsuko Hatano, who's been busy recording solo and with colleagues such as Jim O'Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi, Mocky, Tatsuhisa Yamamoto, Takeo Toyama, and Anzu Suhara (Asa-chang and Junrei). Kyoto-born, Berlin-based Midori Hirano, who's also been releasing music under her MimiCof moniker, adds multiple instruments to the ever-changing sonic landscapes of Water Ladder -- an album defined by suspenseful and seemingly suspended compositions that often feel like floating in midair, a sensation the musicians compare to "that distinctive feeling you get from riding a high-speed elevator, where you can no longer tell whether you're going up or down." Devoid of birdsong, the late summer air is nevertheless full of buzzing, whirring, hissing sounds on foreboding album opener "Summer Noise," a cinematic intro with slow-moving piano chords and an ominous build-up over the course of its sprawling eight minutes. Elsewhere, sudden bursts of viola cut through nighttime peace ("Nocturnal Awakening"), followed by "Cotton Sphere" -- which makes the sensation of floating in midair complete: harmonies and melodies rise and form to fall apart again. Whereas the title track truly explodes half-way in, the final "Cascade" brings closure to the electro-acoustic six-track collection: the floating continues. "Water cannot retain its form on its own, and can take any shape as effected by external forces. Its movements cannot be captured by eyesight alone: A body of water that appears to be crashing down into a deep, bottomless waterfall could actually be rising up very slowly into midair," says Atsuko. "This is an invitation for you to cross the ever-transforming Water Ladder built between Midori and myself."

An important title is coming from Constructive, a new offshoot of SN Variations, a hot label in the UK that includes Chris Watson, Richard Skelton, and Lucy Railton. The latest album released just a few days ago was one of the strongest of the year, and now we have another new release. Last Afternoon" is a masterpiece of this year by Japanese composer Takuma Watanabe, who is known for his many film scores and collaborations with big names such as Relativity, UA, and David Sylvian. This is a rework of that album by Vladislav Delay aka Delay. Against the backdrop of tranquil and languid ambience, a mass of intense sounds pours out. Designed by Joe Gilmore of SUPERPANG, a new sanctuary for current Italian experimentalism, and mastered by Joe Talia! Limited to 500 copies.

Emily A Sprague’s Hill, Flower, Fog is an illumination of consciousness across six modular meditations. A place, a poem, and a homespun ode to existing in “this cone of time in our universe,” Hill, Flower, Fog channels the here and now and fosters a far-reaching connectedness, or lifeline, from the everyday to the cosmos.

ジャパニーズ・シンセ・プロッグの先駆け的存在であるFar East Family Bandでの活躍でも知られ、自身の音楽を「ヒーリング・ミュージック」と題して、膨大な数の作品を大いに編み出した日本屈指のニューエイジ・ミュージック作家/ミュージック・セラピスト、宮下富実夫。1999年に残された最後の未発表音源がアナログ・リリース。66年に音楽家としてのキャリアを始動、69年には東京のロック・ミュージカル「Hair」にも結成メンバーとして参与、伊藤詳や深草アキ始め、多くのニューエイジ作家を輩出したジャパニーズ・サイケデリック/プログレ・バンドの金字塔、Far East Family Bandを結成。同バンドは、今もその威光衰えることのない、4枚の傑作アルバムを残しています。高校の頃には黒帯になるほど、空手に熱中したことから東洋思想にも関心を持ち、さらにステージでの負傷を鍼治療のみ(!)で癒してからは東洋医学にも接近していくことに。本作はNHKが日本の名瀑を紹介する番組に関連して日本を代表する名瀑こと那智の滝にて宮下が奉納した演奏から得たインスピレーションをもとに制作。リバイバル以降の現行ニューエイジとも遜色ないセンスに満ちた響きを聞かせる、音楽の音絵巻のような極上アンビエント作！

Natural Selections are proud to present “Kismet”, Benoit B’s long-awaited debut LP: a dream journal of short stories collected between Berlin and Athens. “Kismet” is a comprehensive mirroring of the french producer’s playful and inimitable style, a clever balance of analog warmth and digital precision resulting in a lucid fantasy. Shuffling subaquatic pads and sharp silvery drums into highly detailed arrangements, Benoit B takes the listener on a singular voyage through his signature sound.

“I have movies in my head” describes Tobias Freund the source that inspired his new album to fill it with a fantastic life of its very own. Consequently, each of the eight tracks represents a scene out of a fictitious short film, some of them with a claustrophobic and tense atmosphere while others appear light and hopeful on the screen of imagination. What they have in common is an adventurous spirit that is inherent in and played out by three main characters: repetitive electronic and acoustic patterns, voices from far away and field recordings of obscured origin. All the episodes combined introduce this “Hall Ov Fame” as a psyche-cinematic event which resonates with “ambience in its natural shades” to evoke the whole range of sensations that make a proper, suspenseful mind movie.

2022 Miasmah edition of the now classic debut album by Deaf Center, originally released on Type records in 2005. Full-lenght album version, includes the tracks that were previously only on the CD edition + a 20 minute side of unreleased material from the same timeframe. Released as a gatefold 2xLP with original extended artwork. ‘Pale Ravine’ is the debut full-length realization of Erik K Skodvin and Otto A Totland under the Deaf Center moniker. More recently known for solo recordings under their own names on the Sonic Pieces label. The album, back then made in their mid 20ies, is an other-wordly sound collagé to Norwegian nature, theatricality and old silent films. The two musicians have looked deep into their own family histories to piece together a dusty and nostalgic epic, blending elements of classical and electronic music with an array of field recordings and a lot of fog.

Black Truffle proudly presents The Refrain from Melbourne-based artist Francis Plagne, whose growing catalog of collaborative and solo releases range from song-based work to abstract audio collages. Closely aligned with Plagne's Moss Trumpet LP (released by Penultimate Press in 2018), The Refrain’s two side-long tracks mix sounds of the mundane with the otherworldly; rising, receding and overlapping. The result feels like being led through a series of scenes devoid of context or direction. Furthermore, it’s hard to define the scenes as either inviting or disconcerting, as they’re often both at the same time. As the record progresses sounds reappear and are juxtaposed so as to only hint at the familiar. A hall of mirrors, perhaps? Completed in 2020 using material recorded from 2012-2020, the record uses tapes of shelved, unfinished, and forgotten projects that featured field recordings from various locations, domestic sounds of plastic bottles, bubble wrap, creaking chairs, voice, and instrumental recordings, including an appearance from crys cole on Casio. These pieces were re-amped, processed and edited, then additional instrumental pieces featuring synths, guitars, plastic saxophone, melodica, and percussion were added, the results shaped into drifting, episodic assemblages. Although essentially a tape piece, The Refrain presents as a crude, non-idiomatic composition that feels both timeless and transitory. It’s a million miles from the polish and rigour of GRM, perhaps more in line with Jacques Bekaert’s eponymous Igloo LP, or Costin Miereanu’s Luna Cinese. The Refrain could be read as a psychedelic Krapp’s Last Tape; one man’s response to listening through forgotten and discarded tapes, reflecting, reconciling, and forging a new path. A potent tonic for these absurd times." -- Nick Hamilton, August 2021

japanese living legend electronic music producer “takayuki shiraishi”, this album is his debut album on legendary experimental music label in osaka in late 70’s to beg 80’s which was run by yuzuru agi when shiraishi was high school student. shiraishi had a big influence from the music of post punk, new wave ,kraut rock…, this album is his unique mixture of that kind music style. one of the most demanded alternative music album in japan is finally reissued. remastered from original tape and mastering by kuniyuki takahashi.

Prime improvisations from masters of the genre such as Fred Frith, Keith Tippett, Derek Bailey and Ursula Oppens on this unearthed treasure where violin, guitar, double bass, flute and sax (the latter compared to a flock of geese) all vying for attention. The music is both ear hurtingly spiky and humorously daft as the musicians seemingly go into battle with their various instruments.