Electronic / Experimental

The second Be With foray into the archives of revered German library institution Selected Sound is one of our favourites, Sound Inventions from Klaus Weiss Rhythm And Sounds, originally released in 1979. From the notoriously strong mind of Niagara drummer / library-funk overlord Klaus Weiss, Sound Inventions is loaded with tripped out studio funk-freakery, mad samples and swaggering abstract funk grooves. From dramatic deep disco with dark Italo/Moroder leanings to heavy German funk breaks, this is absolutely sensational. Absolute synth-and-string-drenched magic. This re-issue of Sound Inventions has been mastered for vinyl by Be With regular Simon Francis from audio from the original tapes. Richard Robinson has handled reproducing the glossy metallic (iconic) original Selected Sound sleeve. Essential.

Originally recorded and released in 1977, the Instant Composers Pool's Tetterettet is the first classic of the band's larger incarnations. Founded in Amsterdam in 1967 by saxophonist Willem Breuker, pianist Misha Mengelberg, and percussionist Han Bennink, Instant Composers Pool (or ICP) was an independent free jazz label and orchestra that would go on to release over fifty albums featuring such pillars of the scene as Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann, Evan Parker, Jeanne Lee, John Tchicai, and Steve Lacy. Based around the concept that improvisation was, in fact, an act of instantaneous composition, ICP's legacy on improvised and free music is impossible to overstate. The ICP Tentet's Tetterettet is made up of recordings from 14-17 of September, 1977, cut and spliced together by pianist/composer Misha Mengelberg in a style similar to Teo Macero's work with Miles Davis. The first side is taken up entirely by Mengelberg's multi-part title track that breaks in and out of different tempos, with a loose arrangement style owing more than a bit to Charles Mingus' finest work on Black Saint or Ah Um. Traversing across decades and styles from free-jazz funereal marches, to carnivalesque excursions, broken piano rolls, and ear-splitting skronk, ICP Tentet show remarkable skill and chops in both their compositional craft and improvisational symbiosis. There's a playful undercurrent here that finds its home in some previously uncharted land between Mingus and Spike Jones. Featuring numerous ICP regulars along with the brilliant Alan Silva on bass, and a return to the fold of the amazing saxophonist John Tchicai, Tetterettet is one of the best of ICP's larger group recordings; humorous, unnerving, and ultimately, quite beautiful. This limited-edition reissue marks the first time this album has been in print on vinyl since its initial release

For five decades, Harold Budd stood on the forefront of the West Coast avant-garde. Born in Los Angeles, he studied with Schoenberg-pupil Gerald Strang and began teaching at CalArts in 1970. While searching for his own voice, he was influenced as much by abstract expressionist painters as by John Cage and Morton Feldman. In his work, Budd brought delicate, slowing-moving melodies to the foreground – creating a new musical language based on "eternally pretty music" and smooth surfaces. In the early '70s, Budd started an extended cycle of compositions that would comprise The Pavilion Of Dreams. For Budd, the album was a signpost for a new direction in thinking about music: "The Pavilion Of Dreams erased my past. I consider that to be the birth of myself as a serious artist. It was like my Magna Carta." Produced by Brian Eno in 1978, The Pavilion Of Dreams stands toe-to-toe with another minimalist masterpiece also released that year, Steve Reich's Music For 18 Musicians. Budd's gorgeous pieces reveal a lightness of touch that draws the listener in, while sublime voices float in and out as if in a recurring dream. Featuring saxophonist Marion Brown and multi-instrumentalists Gavin Bryars and Michael Nyman, The Pavilion Of Dreams remains a master class in exquisite timbre and shimmering texture. The Pavilion Of Dreams was both the final release on Eno's Obscure imprint and a transition point towards his seminal ambient series. This first-time reissue is recommended for fans of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Jon Hassell and Mark Hollis.

Francesco Messina is perhaps best known for his collaboration with fellow composer Raul Lovisoni on the album Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, originally released on seminal Italian label Cramps in 1979. Along with contemporaries Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca and Giusto Pio, Messina would help reshape the world of modern composition with an organic rawness and haunting beauty. In 1979, Messina was asked to perform at the Teatro Quartiere in Milan. As the composer writes in the liner notes, "Due to the limited availability of key technical features, it would have been too complicated to perform Prati Bagnati, and therefore I opted for these three pieces instead. We had never actually tried them all together, so I thought about renting a recording studio the previous afternoon. In that way, we could rehearse in a suitable place and use the opportunity to record the music on tape." Unreleased for over thirty years, the recordings on Reflex have an unadorned, almost improvisational feel. "Untitled" (featuring Lovisoni's plaintive flute) and "I Nuovi Pescheti" are full of meditative piano passages that lend an aura of new age, while the title track is more insistent with unfurling chords layered in real time via a reel-to-reel tape machine, resembling Steve Reich's mesmeric phase-shifting works of the '60s. A central figure within the Italian avant-garde, Francesco Messina gracefully expands his country's contribution to Minimalism. This first-time vinyl release is recommended for fans of Joanna Brouk, Luciano Cilio and Charlemagne Palestine.

Ike Yard remain a legendary band of early '80s New York City – at once immensely influential, yet obscured by a far-too-brief initial phase. Their debut EP, the dark and absorbing Night After Night, sounds almost like a different group, so rapidly would Ike Yard evolve towards the calmly menacing electro throb of their self-titled LP.

Originally released on Factory in 1982, the album put Ike Yard's indelible mark on the synth-driven experimental rock scene then emerging all over the planet. While historical analogues would be Cabaret Voltaire's Red Mecca or Front 242's Geography, opening track "M. Kurtz" makes starkly clear that Ike Yard is a far heavier proposition.

With a thick porridge of bass, ringing guitar and strangled/stunted layers of voice, these six pieces are densely packed and perversely danceable. "Loss" sounds like a minimal techno track that could have been made last week, while "Kino" combines Soviet-era imagery with sparse soundscapes à la African Head Charge's Environmental Studies.

Ike Yard somehow pull off the toughest trick in modern music: making repetition hypnotically compelling through subtle variation. The effect of Ike Yard's first LP can be heard in many genres – from industrial dance labels like Wax Trax to electro-punk bands and innumerable European groups (Lucrate Milk, Red Lorry Yellow Lorry, etc.).

The fact that the cover artwork does not include any photos of the band, but rather features the original catalogue number (FACT A SECOND) only further illustrates the release's importance and Ike Yard's timeless mystique.

Deadbeat and Om Unit combine forces to explore their shared love of dubbed-out electronics. Starting a thread from Montreal to Bristol, this mini LP is rooted in the tradition of dub and techno, but with tinges of roots and acid as well as the etheric ambience they are both known for. Root, Stalk, Leaf and Bloom is contemplative but heartfelt, with a sense of momentum and positive purpose. Hailing from Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, Gacha Bakradze (@gacha) is one of the national scene’s leading electronic music exponents. He returns to Lapsus Records with his new album 'Obscure Languages', his second release for the Barcelona label. Following the superb LP 'Word Color' [Lapsus Records, 2018], which appeared in several ‘album of the year’ lists for publications such as Pitchfork and XLR8R, the prolific producer now presents 'Obscure Languages'. This new piece of work could well be described as a sound continuation from his previous album and maintains a powerful narrative at its core. ‘Obscure Languages' delves into the world of cinematic soundscapes, replete with microscopic details and fragments that showcase a luscious IDM style audio palette, laced with ambient, avant-techno, bass and sound design.

Continuing on from the last album, here's a recommendation. The Tara Clerkin Trio, a Bristol-based unit with Tara Clerkin at the core and various other members, is the latest release from the label division of London's World of Echo record store. Building on the avant-garde musical vision of their previous album, the Tara Clerkin Trio's new album is a slow-burning sublimation of Bristol's signature trip-hop, dub, chamber music, ambient, downtempo, and contemporary jazz into another dimension. This album is an epoch-making fusion of Bristol's outsider pop music and Chicago's experimental jazz.

Limited edition LP Translucent green vinyl. Musica Elettronica Viva, or MEV for short, was formed in 1966 in Rome by Allan Bryant, Alvin Curran, Jon Phetteplace, Carol Plantamura, Frederic Rzweski, Richard Teitelbaum and Ivan Vandor. From the very beginning the group was based on musical freedom and the shunning of convention. Using contact microphones to record and manipulate sound wherever it could be found – from box springs to vibrators – and improvisationally combining those recordings with tenor sax, homemade synths and the very first Moog to trek cross the Atlantic, MEV made some of the most imaginative and abrasive sounds of the time.  

Recorded in live performance at the Academy of Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin on October 5, 1967, Spacecraft is made up of a single piece of the same name – a slow building, jarring and disquieting work that reveals the entire MEV ethos in its lone half hour. As group member Alvin Curran put it “The music could go anywhere, gliding into self-regenerating unity or lurching into irrevocable chaos - both were valuable goals. In the general euphoria of the times, MEV thought it had re-invented music; in any case it had certainly rediscovered it.” Our Swimmer is pleased to present this first ever vinyl issue of MEV’s Spacecraft, an early piece from the most free-spirited group of the 20th century avant-garde. Translucent green vinyl.

Grouper’s Liz Harris quietly released this album of primordial soundscapes a few weeks ago under the new Nivhek alias. After selling out overnight, this new edition has now been made available via Superior Viaduct’s W.25th label.

"Opaque assemblages of Mellotron, guitar, field recordings, tapes and broken FX pedals by Pacific Northwest musician Liz Harris, created during and after two contrasting residencies in the Azores, Portugal and Murmansk, Russia and combined with pieces made at home in Astoria, Oregon. The collection’s unique dual design functions as a forked path, existing independently of one another but with roots intertwined.

She cites her score for Hypnosis Display as a compositional reference point, inspired by “interior mnemonic device landscapes” and “curiosity around a sadness.” In pacing, palette and poignancy, these sides rank among Harris’ most stark, primordial work: fragile, feverish, ominous and otherworldly. She describes this music as “a requiem, a ritual, to unlock and release feelings,” a sense of shadowy masses, moving backwards, in spirals, massive doorways opening chaotic forces, “a toxic concentrated reduction of something much darker bubbling beneath.”

Her artistry for mapping richly detailed inner worlds is nowhere more expressive and enigmatic, vibrations and voices gliding dimly out of the void, “wraithlike and ethereal, their existence in the mist questionable.”

ニューエイジ〜アンビエント・リスナーにも！オリジナルは、名キーボーディスト = Philippe Besombesも参加した電子音楽グループ"Pôle "が運営していた仏の〈Pôle Records〉より75年に発表。元祖トイポップことフランス前衛ポップの大スター、Pascal Comeladeの別名義Fluenceの唯一作が、世界各地のアンダーグラウンドな音楽史を現代へと再提示する名門〈Superior Viaduct〉傘下の〈États-Unis〉より復刻リリース！仏南部の都市、モンペリエで74年から75年にかけてレコーディング。豊穣な実験精神と深遠なるプログレッシヴネスを湛え、時代性を超越した印象的な音世界へと昇華。フリップ&イーノ～リシャール・ピナス、ポポル・ヴーの幻影さえも付き纏うヴァナキュラー&コスミッシェなサウンド全開に、オブスキュアな電子音楽観を披露した傑作。ナンバリング入り限定750部。

Innercity Griots, the second album from Freestyle Fellowship, is perhaps *the* essential West Coast left-field rap album of the early ’90s. Released in 1993 on 4th & Broadway, it’s a towering, progressive hip-hop masterpiece that expanded rap’s boundaries through lyrical elevation and production innovation. Their talent was ahead of everybody else by light years. This is pure b-boy jazz. The original single vinyl LP is now hideously scarce, and of course the sound suffers from not being officially released as a double. This Be With re-issue fixes both problems, and for completeness also includes “Pure Thought” from the CD version of the album. This incredible display of imaginative hip-hop sounds better than ever. Freestyle Fellowship were some of the earliest technically dazzling rappers to come out of California. Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E., Aceyalone and Self Jupiter - along with DJ Kiilu - forged their famed lyrical dexterity in the ultra-competitive crucible of the Good Life Cafe. Founded in Leimert Park, South Central LA in December 1989, this earthy health-food store and cafe was where the city’s finest microphone fiends would gather to showcase their freestyle skills at the Thursday night open-mic.

Epiphany  i-ˈpi-fə-nē  (1) a manifestation of the essential nature of something (usually sudden) (2) an intuitive grasp of reality through something (usually simple and striking) (3) an illuminating discovery or disclosure.
All three definitions apply perfectly to this span of music recorded at London’s ICA in July 1982. It’s a miracle of group interaction, wonderfully paced, moving steadily between moments of mounting intensity and tension. The passage about halfway through — when Derek Bailey’s harmonics ring out above a sheen of inside piano tremolos and shimmering electronics, topped off by Julie Tippetts’ soaring vocalese — is simply sublime. After which it’s fun to try and tell the two pianists apart. Are those runs Ursula Oppens, with her formidable technique honed from years performing some of the twentieth century’s most difficult notated new music, or are those Keith Tippett’s crunchy jazz zigzags? Are those intriguing twangs from one of Akio Suzuki’s invented instruments or could they be Fred Frith’s or Phil Wachsmann’s electronics? Bah, who cares?

There’s plenty of room for the more delicate instruments too, like Anne LeBaron’s harp picking its way gingerly through a pin-cushion of pings and scratches from Bailey and bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa. Of course, some performers are instantly recognisable: Tippetts, as lyrical and flighty on flute as when she sings, Phil Wachsmann, sinuous and sensitive on violin, and trombonist George Lewis, who, as John Zorn once put it, swings his motherfucking ass off.

So many magical moments abound, from the opening dawn chorus of Tippetts’ voice and Frith’s guitar swooping through a rainforest of exquisite piano cascades, to the Zen calm of the closing moments.

Epiphany, indeed.

Inspired by how she feels at the moment, what direction she’s facing, the people she’s surrounded by, and the energy of the location, YoshimiO uses the piano and her voice to create sound. izumikiYoshi uses a microphone to pick up the raw sounds created by YoshimiO and feeds it through his modular synthesizer, where the sounds undergo spectral processing and modulation. These electronic tones are combined and mixed again with YoshimiO’s live sounds in a spontaneous manner, to output the sounds that were only in their imagination. That is how the music of YoshimiOizumikiYoshiduO is created.

Continuing the reissue campaign of legendary synthesizer artist Enno Velthuys, we are proud to offer the Different Places LP. The original tape from 1987 was the second tape Enno produced for EXART and it was his last work before he disappeared into obscurity. By this time, he became disillusioned by the cassette network and his mental condition sadly deteriorated. With Hessel Veldman, label owner of EXART, getting more interested in experimental music, they were both moving into different places and eventually lost contact. Enno was a perfectionist, always looking for better equipment. When listening to the original master tape of Different Places it turned out it had a real nice, clean sound. Definitely an improvement over some of his earlier material. While mastering these songs for vinyl in 2021 we tried to stay as close as possible to Enno’s original intentions. Different Places is probably his most coherent work and includes some magical chord progressions. Shades of Erik Satie and Hiroshi Yoshimura mixed with immersive, spacious, cosmic ambient. Melancholic but less claustrophobic when compared to predecessors Glimpse of Light or Landscapes in Thin Air.

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.