Electronic / Experimental
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Following his run of downtempo Quiet Time offerings, Texan producer Gi Gi moves to Vancouver's Mood Hut and maps his "downtempo sampledelia" logic over a syrupy set of deep-as-fuck, back room rollers. Gi Gi's is motivated by the philosophy of sampling - his 2021 album 'Lumino Pleco' was built from textures snatched from Prince, Miles Davis and Erykah Badu records. But he appears to have settled more assuredly into his role at this stage, coining the "downtempo sampledelia" descriptor probably to stop people like us from perpetually reminding him that trip-hop already happened. To his credit, 'In Lieu' does veer further from the dubwise, slo-mo gear that propped up his last few releases, tightening the beats and sharpening those all-important hazy backdrops. And if you recognise a few of the elements, that's partly the point; Gi Gi bashes together the album like a rickety rope bridge between the contemporary listening bar and a half-forgotten record collection that stacks its 'ardcore vinyl alongside Weatherall productions, electro samba reissues, Chicago house and Alex Patterson's dream diaries. 'Pink Dirt' sounds as if it's burying Kirsty Hawkshaw's voice underneath its powdery syncopations and housey piano stabs and on 'Arque', featherlight string plucks are ducked behind rubbery pulses that Gi Gi excites with fractal psy inflections. And the specters of dub and jungle slow dance on 'Downswept', when Gi Gi marinades his expertly chopped breaks in a bubbling synth. It's the kind of gear that makes the most sense while the summer's still in full swing - balearic doesn't even do it justice.
NPLGNN's BABYLON INNA 'A CAPA MI is a five-track assault of fractured rhythms, damaged bassweight and post-industrial tension. Emerging from the momentum of his lathe-cut series, the record pushes deeper into a landscape of urgency, disorder and decay, where relentless percussion and corroded low-end collide. Drawing comparisons with DJ Scud, Conrad Pack, DJ Gonz and The Bug, these tracks thrive on pressure rather than resolution, turning ruin into a source of raw energy.
Ampoule's Pub returns with a fresh remaster of the classic 'Summer' and a brand new track titled 'The Fragile Root'
'Summer' was originally released 20 years ago on the Vertical Form label - a result of a multitude of completely live and improvised studio sessions, that gently swell and evolve over the tracks 16 minutes.
'Fragile Root' is a brand new track, think vintage idm - intricate rhythms and melodies crossed with massive dub chords.
Mastered by Dubplates & Mastering
Geogaddi is the second studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada, released on 18 February 2002 by Warp Records.
The Moon and the Melodies is a singular record within the Cocteau Twins’ catalog—unusually ethereal, even by their standards, and largely instrumental, guided by the free-form improvisations of Harold Budd, an ambient pioneer who had drifted into their orbit as if by divine intervention. Building on the atmospheric bliss of Victorialand, released earlier the same year, it signaled a possible future for the trio, yet it was a path the Cocteau Twins would never take again. Now, 28 years after it was first released, it has been reissued for the first time—remastered, from the original tapes, by Robin Guthrie himself.
The album was never actually meant to happen; no one can even recall exactly how it came about in the first place. As both Guthrie and Simon Raymonde remember it, the independent television station Channel 4 approached 4AD about a film project pairing musicians from different genres. In interviews in the 1980s, however, Budd, who passed away in 2020, believed that his music publisher had linked him with the Cocteaus after the group had expressed interest in covering one of his songs. In any case, the film never happened. “But we’d spoken to Harold, and we were all quite excited about it—in a very sort of downbeat Cocteau Twins way, where we were rarely excited about anything,” Raymonde recalls. “We’re like, well, let’s carry on and do it anyway—you’ve already booked your flight, let’s just hang out in the studio and see what happens.”
“There was a lot of hilarity,” Guthrie says. “It was strange to have an older man in our life, because Liz and I saw everybody around us—the contemporary bands, the people running record labels, the journalists—as grownups. We were literally kids. I thought, ‘Oh Christ, he’s going to be some pompous, you know, into his classical music,’ and he wasn’t. He was just a big man-child. We clicked in that respect.”
The Cocteau Twins had recently built their own recording studio in North Acton, in West London. It was the first time they’d had their own space, and they relished their newfound freedom. “We were in this lovely little bubble of making our own music,” Raymonde says. Budd fit right into their bubble world; all four musicians got on immediately. Over pints at the pub, they talked about everything but music, and in the studio, Raymonde and Budd both say that very little, if anything, was discussed, save perhaps for questions of tempo or key.
“Harold would sit down at the piano and start playing something, and then maybe I’d pick up a bass and start playing along with him,” Raymonde says. “They were very much noodles rather than songs. That was the way we tended to work anyway. Work out what kind of mood are we feeling, get a drum beat going, just a two-bar pattern; Guthrie would plug his guitar in, I would plug my bass in, and then we’d just jam for a few minutes and go, ‘Yeah, that was cool, let’s carry on doing that thing or that thing,’ really casually, and then all of a sudden we’d have a song. I know that sounds ludicrous, but that is how we did it, and with Harold it was exactly the same.”
Budd played a Yamaha CP-70 electric grand, and the group came armed with a growing arsenal of gear, like the Yamaha Rev7 multi-effects processor and Lexicon PCM60, perhaps an Ensoniq Mirage. Guthrie used an EBow on his guitars, along with a Gizmo, an electromechanical device invented by Godley and Creme. Guthrie remembers endless experiments in search of new sounds: “Lots of messing around, tuning the guitar strings all the same, getting droney sorts of things—really big, loud, sort of Metallica-like feedback sounds, but then put in the mix so quietly you can hardly hear them the first time you listen. All these psychoacoustic sort of tricks that I liked. It’s all in there, you know. Just being fearless—if it didn’t work out, it was never going to be a record anyway.”
The musicians’ contrasting approaches ended up shaping the album’s somewhat curious format—four instrumentals in Budd’s meandering style, more tone poems than actual songs, and four more structured pieces with verses, choruses, drum machine, and, of course, Elizabeth Fraser’s inimitable singing, as bold and inspired as anywhere in the band’s catalog. There was no conscious decision to have Fraser only sing on four songs. “That’s just what came out of the sessions,” Guthrie says. “It was a lightweight atmosphere making it, because we didn’t actually feel that we were making a record at the time. We were trying out some stuff in the studio, and it just evolved into what it did. Which is, essentially, a recorded version of some people trying out some stuff in the studio.”
The sessions were over in two weeks, maybe three. “And that was already getting a bit long,” Guthrie says, “because some of our earlier records had taken just a couple of days.” They fleshed out the material, he adds, with one more song that the trio wrote in Budd’s absence, after they realized they didn’t have quite enough material for a full album. (“Was I that drunk?” Budd asked, upon hearing the final version of the album, which included a song he had no recollection of making.) As much as it may pain fans to hear it, there is no more extant material from the sessions—no outtakes, no rough drafts, no alternate versions. “For the 13 years I was in the band, we have no spare tracks at all,” Raymonde says. “If after an hour or two a track wasn’t coming together, we’d just get rid of it. If it wasn’t good now, our attitude was, it’ll never be any good. So we’d think, tomorrow’s another day—let’s go to the cinema and come back tomorrow, and see how it goes. Let’s go bowling.”
The other curious thing about the album—the fact that it was credited to all four players under their individual names—followed the same intuitive logic as everything else that went into the record. “It’s because it wasn’t a Cocteau Twins album,” Guthrie says. Raymonde concurs: “It was simple. All four of us have gone into the studio and done something, but it isn’t a Cocteau Twins album.” But perhaps the passage of time has changed matters. These days, on streaming services, you’ll find the album filed chronologically alongside the rest of the band’s work. “What’s interesting,” Guthrie adds, “is that I got the tape boxes from the studio, and guess what it says on it? ‘Cocteau Twins plus Harold Budd.’” Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the group got hung up on a detail that never really mattered. In any case, Raymonde says, “The more credit that Harold gets for the work he did, the more people that find his music because it’s in the Cocteau environment, the better.”
Despite all its quirks, The Moon and the Melodies has attracted a passionate fan base over the years. Its most atmospheric tracks routinely turn up in ambient DJ sets. 'Sea, Swallow Me' is one of the Cocteau Twins’ most streamed songs on Spotify, second only to Heaven or Las Vegas’ 'Cherry-coloured Funk'; it has also found new life on TikTok, where it serves as the soundtrack to innumerable expressions of hard-to-express melancholy. For such a low-key affair, the album casts a long shadow—but Raymonde believes the record’s uniqueness stems directly from its humble, unpremeditated origins. “It’s always about making something that’s pleasurable,” he says, “capturing a moment in time between friends that are enjoying making music together. Really, that’s the essence of it—the music was just a reflection of how nice a time we were having in the studio.”
o celebrate 30 years since its original release, Boards of Canada’s Hi Scores returns in a new edition on Warp Records. Originally released on Skam Records in 1996, Hi Scores was Boards of Canada’s first widely available release. The six-track release features some of the duo’s most enduring pieces, including “Turquoise Hexagon Sun” and “Everything You Do Is A Balloon”. For its 30th anniversary, Hi Scores is being reissued by Warp, marking the first time their whole catalogue has been widely available on vinyl at the same time. Hi Scores has not been available on vinyl since 2014 and is newly packaged in a gatefold 12" sleeve, with four 12"×12" prints.
The Melting Hours is a live project by Wata Igarashi and Kuniyuki. WataIgarashi continues to make his mark on the history of techno, whilst Kuniyuki has long been revered as one of Sapporo’s greatest treasures. The two artists, who have long held mutual respect for one another, met whilst performing at the Draaimolen Festival 2025, and this encounter gave rise to The Melting Hours. This is the latest release from Rainbow Disco Club’s label imprint, Beyond Space And Time. ‘Blue Sun’ is imbued with a freshness reminiscent of the ambient jazz masterpieces released by prestigious labels such as ECM and Windham Hill. ‘Liquid Dunes’ sees the organic tones of the flute and percussion melt into over ten minutes of abstract sound textures, whilst the breathtaking ‘Cloud Touch’ awakens amidst a swirling vortex of pulsating downbeats and arpeggios. It is said that ‘Blue Sun’ was created by reconstructing studio rehearsal recordings, whilst ‘Liquid Dunes’ and ‘Cloud Touch’ were crafted from live recordings at Draaimolen 2025. The essence of these works—and indeed of the project The Melting Hours itself—lies at the heart of their improvisational nature. It brings to mind the Rainbow Disco Club event back in 2026, where they wove their sounds amidst fresh greenery and surrounded by listeners under a clear blue sky. It felt as though the pulsating energy was spreading across the dance floor, guided by a session from The Melting Hours that seemed almost like a living creature. The organic breath one senses in this work not only evokes precisely that scene but also allows us to feel the unique, ephemeral nature inherent in this project—and, consequently, the boundless possibilities that stem from it.
“Live (At Open Ground)” by While My Sequencer Gently Bleeps is being released on Funkscapes as a cassette tape and documents a one-hour live set that offers a dense sequence of deep basses, clever drum patterns, and sparkling melodies. Recorded during a Funkscapes night at Open Ground in Wuppertal, the tape brings together well-known pieces as well as several previously unreleased tracks and conveys the immediate flow of the performance on cassette. At the center is Stefan Schwander’s project While My Sequencer Gently Bleeps, whose work is characterized by a playful combination of bass-focused drive, quirky bleeps, and warm harmonies. Schwander, also active as Harmonious Thelonious, A Rocket In Dub, and Antonelli Electr., uses the Elektron Monomachine as his main instrument and pushes its sequencing and sound capabilities to the limit. This approach shapes the characteristic sound of the set, in which loops, modulated bass lines, and pinpoint synth accents interlock organically. As a documentary live release, the cassette captures both the improvisatory energy and the meticulous sound shaping: stripped-down rhythms meet dub-like depth, while melodic fragments lend the set a surprising lightness. “Live (At Open Ground)” thus offers a focused glimpse into the project’s current musical self and its fusion of club aesthetics and experimental sound design.
The fifth LP in the long history of the label comes from another Belgian producer who is ready to fly high. After San Soda, Metrobox, Uni Son and label boss Red D it is now time for Tom Smeyers to step up and take us into his universe of warm grooves and sweet house music…with a twist.Taking in influences from around the full spectrum of electronic music these six tracks represent what Tom is about at the moment. From deepest old school inspired house to more broken beat action right into drum’n’bass territory, with an attention to detail and experienced sound design.As if that wasn’t enough Tom also took care of the artwork to match his music. We here at WPH call that a 360 artist. Welcome to the family Tom Smeyers!DTM Funk: Super Dope!DJ Bone: Really great release. I love every track!Owain K: Classy grooves for dancefloor moves.Séa: Lovely!Simon Caldwell: Beautiful machine house music. Takes me back and takes me forward.Satoshi Fumi: Really love all!Severino Panzetta: Great sound.Ame: Thanks for these.DJ Merci: Top release!Red D: So good I just had to release these J
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視聴-Names Have Been Changed (Sound/Reading for Incest Porn) (Live Version)
Now a 'cult classic' , repressed for 2023 ears on All City Dublin. Onra started the project in August 2006, freshly returned from a trip to Vietnam, the land of his grandparents. A vinyl junkie at heart, he really couldn’t come back to France without bringing back some wax. After hours spent riding on a motorbike through the streets of Saigon, a taxi finally helped him find some Asian records - he almost felt like an explorer discovering a forgotten treasure. He bought 30 records, most of them in poor condition, went back to his crib and started making beats with material that he wasn’t quite used to …
For years, Takuro Okada has carried a quiet question: how can a Japanese musician honor the music of African Americans without simply borrowing it? That search shapes his new album Konoma, a work guided by the idea of “Afro Mingei.” The Tokyo guitarist, producer, and bandleader has lived inside this tension since childhood, drawn to blues, jazz, and funk records that nourished him, yet hesitant in the face of the histories they hold. The concept of Afro Mingei, which Okada first encountered in an exhibition by artist Theaster Gates, gave him a way forward. Gates connected Black aesthetics with Japanese folk craft, both rooted in resistance — “Black is Beautiful” defying racism, the Mingei movement preserving everyday beauty against industrial erasure. That kinship became the compass for Konoma, a record attuned to echoes across cultures and time.
Konoma holds six originals and two covers, all shaped by this dialogue. The elegantly unhurried “Portrait of Yanagi” drifts like a standard half-remembered from another era, while the brief but potent “Galaxy” gestures toward Sun Ra’s late 1970s electric organ experiments, the fractured propulsion of Flying Lotus’s early beat tapes, and the shadowy atmospheres of trip-hop. Okada’s choice of covers sharpens the conversation: Jan Garbarek’s “Nefertite” shimmers with the cool austerity of 1970s ECM, reframing Europe’s own search for identity inside jazz, while Hiromasa Suzuki’s “Love” channels the electric vibrancy of 1970s Japanese fusion, when musicians fused psychedelia, funk, and folk into a distinctly local dialect. Together, they anchor Konoma in a lineage of artists who bent borrowed forms toward something new.
Okada’s life has been shaped by such crossings. He grew up in Fussa, where the Yokota U.S. Air Force base loomed large, learning guitar in rowdy clubs for American servicemen while teaching himself recording at home. That hybrid education led to collaborations with Haruomi Hosono, Nels Cline, Sam Gendel, James Blackshaw, and Carlos Niño, and to a body of work spanning film soundtracks, collaborative projects, and exploratory solo albums. Earlier this year, Temporal Drift released The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line, which features selections from Okada’s expansive archive of recorded material, cementing his reputation as one of Japan’s most adventurous contemporary musicians. With Konoma, co-released by ISC Hi-Fi Selects and Temporal Drift, Okada delivers his most personal and expansive statement yet: a meditation on connection, influence, and the beauty that survives across cultures.
- Words by Randall Roberts
the debut solo album by henrik raabe, guitarist of the german trio wareika, who rose to prominence in the 2000s with their minimal deep house sound. departing from the cool, jazzy deep house he was known for, raabe delivers a uniquely crafted downtempo album that feels like a seamless blend of jazz, afro, dub, new age, and postmodern influences. it evokes the spirit of an imagined encounter between the durutti column and dennis bovell, with virginia astley joining in—reminiscent of the uk sound of the 1980s—yet rendered more minimal and refined, in a distinctly german way. with each listen, the album draws you deeper in. it is poised to become a defining release for mule musiq in 2026
At the latest with the release of the albums "Zauberberg" and "Königsforst", in the mid-1990s, one associates GAS, Wolfgang Voigt's very own artistic cross-linking of the spirit of Romanticism and the forest as an artistic fantasy projection surface, with intoxicatingly blurred boundaries of post-ambient infatuation and the impenetrable thicket of abstract atonality. The distant, iconic straight bass drum marching through highly condensed, abstract sounds taken from classical music by the sampler or modulated accordingly, and the enraptured gaze through pop art glasses into the hypnotic thicket of an imaginary forest, manifested over the years this unique connection of audio and visual, which to understand fully, then as now, would be neither possible nor desirable.
Quite the opposite. The album GAS - DER LANGE MARSCH once again invites us to follow the deep sounding bass drum, to give in to its irresistible pull into a psychedelic world of 1000 promises. In the process, the journey leads us past stations of memories sounding from afar, from "Zauberberg" to "Königsforst" and "Pop", from "Oktember" to "Narkopop" and "Rausch", back and forth, now and forever.
Way. Destination. Loop. Forest loop.
OKTEMBER is the second EP release under Wolfgang Voigt’s mythical GAS project (it follows "Modern“ on Profan, 1995). The 2 compositions were originally released in 1999 on Mille Plateaux, and then reissued partially in 2016 on GAS “BOX”. OKTEMBER is finally released on Voigt's own label KOMPAKT, pressed on 180 gram vinyl in its original artwork.
This reissue features “Tal ‘90“ (instead of the original A side) – a predecessor to the GAS project originally recorded in 1990 under the alias TAL, it was released as a part of the Pop Ambient 2002 collection. With its sampled strings, horns and guitars, "Tal 90” soundtracks a more uplifting side to what is typically accustomed to being the sound of GAS. The title track “Oktember” is a dense, hypnotic affair that conjures a unique vision of dub techno that few have been able to replicate.
A monumental soundtrack to uncertain times.
Being pioneers with a new album created in no more than 6 months, THE ORB are bound to be exposed to fan expectations running high, while quizzical questions about little fluffy clouds and the good old times take over. It's especially jarring as the duo of accomplished soundsmiths Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann has become known for its genre-bending curiosity and surprising sonic detours, exploring experimental soundscapes as well as club-friendly beats. The funny thing is, though, that whatever the context, you know a track from THE ORB when you hear it. Case in point: COW / CHILL OUT, WORLD!, their latest full-length offering - a masterful ambient album that branches out in many directions, but unmistakably sounds like THE ORB in either ear (and probably to your third ear, too).
"The idea was simply to make an ambient album", Dr Paterson explains, "we didn't look back and study earlier recordings, but wanted a more spontaneous approach, a focus on THE ORB today, our vibe in 2016." In contrast to their much-acclaimed previous full-length MOONBUILDING 2703 AD (KOMPAKT 330 CD 124) - which took years to prepare and finetune -, the new album was produced over the course of only five sessions in six months, directly following the like-minded ALPINE EP (KOMPAKT 339): "it got so spontaneous that a track like 9 ELMS OVER RIVER ENO (CHANNEL 9) consisted only of material collected at North Carolina's Moogfest in May – second-hand records from local stores, field recordings, live samples from gigs that we liked, and of course an excursion to the Eno River, which actually exists. This geographic intimacy and the spontaneity are among the top reasons why we love this album so much."
Herr Fehlmann sees the duo's relentless gigging schedule as a formative influence on the new album: "the countless performances we've played in the last years - probably up to 300 - have brought us closer as a musical unit. The spice of our concerts is improvisation - a fertile process that we’ve brought to the studio, where we operate with very simple rules of engagement (in this case "ambient") and go wherever the flow takes us." It's an approach that one might expect from traditional acoustic instrumentation, not necessarily an electronic set-up, but for THE ORB it works wonders: "we're quite happy and also a little bit proud that we've reached this level of unscripted levity with purely electronic means. We're finessing ourselves, sort of, always looking for the next sonic surprise that leaves us rubbing our eyes about how the heck we got there."
Once more, THE ORB's trademark playfulness is on full display on COW / CHILL OUT, WORLD!, and it doesn't limit itself to the multi-layered sampling and psychedelic sound composites that the duo has become known for - you'll find it in the album title as well. The simple invitation (or order?) to chill out (relax? Calm the eff down?) is converted into an acronym – and the cow that you might expect to find on a Pink Floyd cover or with iconic UK chill-out/dance pranksters The KLF. It's not so much an obscure trope coming full circle as a perfect example for THE ORB's multitimbral approach to sound and meaning - a compelling, immersive journey to diverse places and impressions. Each track title is a conceptual work in its own right, playing with multiple references, some of which remain highly personal and mysterious. But the greatest feat of THE ORB's latest outing might just be how all this semantic doodling never gets in the way of the actual listening, at all times directly relating the artists' sonic vitality and cheerful nosiness. Chill out world! and treat yourself to an outstanding new ambient experience from THE ORB.
Thomas Fehlmann remains as one of the most endearing and respected artists on Kompakt. He has inspired generations of fans and musicians over the course of his 30+ year career. From his early days as part of the legendary band Palais Schaumburg, and the pioneering Detroit/Berlin act 3mb (With Juan Atkins and Moritz Von Oswald), to his longstanding membership with The Orb, combined with his contributions as a solo artist to esteemed imprints R&S, Plug Research and of course Kompakt, where we have proudly released two full length solo albums: Visions Of Blah (Kompakt CD 20/Kompakt 67) and Honigpumpe (Kompakt CD 59 / Kompakt 157), his musical works have been prolific, not to mention four singles and a full serving of tracks found on our Pop Ambient and Total collections. Now, after 3 years, Fehlmann returns with 'Gute Luft'…
Black Truffle is pleased to present Even Colder Spring, the latest release from the mysterious and wildly prolific Cities Aviv (a.k.a. Wilbert Gavin Mays, who also records as African-American Sound Recordings), a rare appearance from the artist outside his own D.O.T. Audio Arts label. For over a decade, Cities Aviv has twisted hip-hop conventions into the most skewed and splayed forms, layering and lacerating twitching loops, extreme production techniques and his mercurial vocal stylings into hermetic décollage. Across 16 tracks, Even Colder Spring charts Mays’ restlessly experimental approach: what sound like fully formed productions are interrupted suddenly after seconds; interjections of field recordings cue unexpected shifts; details drown under layers of fuzz. His vocal delivery takes in rhythmically intricate rap, barely articulate murmurs and freely melodic song, the latter often with a disorientating lack of connection to the track’s harmonies. The lyrical shifts are as paratactical as the musical movements. Apocalyptic visions of social and cultural uniformity alternate with reflections on mortality, glimpses of everyday life and head-scratching one-liners: ‘Maybe Mars is bougie?’ His reference points are as surprising as ever, the Dante quotes of previous releases joined here by a tracked named after Henri Bergson’s idea of the élan vital. Australian listeners, in particular, might be especially taken aback to hear ‘Closing Door’ open with the phrase ‘the tyranny of distance’. While Mays’ work can sometime be claustrophobically bleak, the productions here are often sparkling, at times touching on the shimmer of private-issue New Age sounds and the more playful end of krautrock. The instrumental ‘Martine Drift’ could almost be a snatch of Cluster’s Zuckerzeit caught through dial-up internet. The distant echoing drums of ‘L_area’ cross Persona’s Som with lo-fi IDM, while closer ‘Final Heaven’ dissolves a cloud of loops across almost seven minutes into ecstatic, rippling distortion. The graphic design, at the artist’s request closely modelled on the format of Corwood Industries, offers as good a clue as any to what awaits the listener on Even Colder Spring: a world at once impossibly opaque and intensely personal.
Newly remastered version of Oren Ambarchi’s long out-of-print classic Hubris originally released on Editions Mego in 2016. Expertly remastered by audio wizard Joe Talia who worked with the original mixes, highlighting the myriad details of the audio with forensic precision, previously unheard up until now. From the 2016 press release: Hubris continues the exploration of relentless, driving rhythms heard on Ambarchi’s Sagittarian Domain (2012) and Quixotism (2014). Where those records looked to Krautrock and techno for their starting points, the sidelong opening track here begins from the perhaps unlikely inspirations of disco and new wave, drawing particularly from Ambarchi’s love of Wang Chung’s soundtrack to William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. Leaving behind the song-forms of these reference points, Ambarchi weaves a sustained and pulsating web of layered palm-muted guitars from which individual voices rise up and recede, eventually setting the stage for some lush guitar synth from Jim O’Rourke. Arnold Dreyblatt collaborator Konrad Sprenger contributes overtone-rich motorized guitar, pushing the piece into a satisfying intersection of shimmering minimalism and rhythmic drive that smoothly builds up until the entrance of Mark Fell’s electronic percussion in its final section. After a short second part, in which Ambarchi, O’Rourke and crys cole pay tribute to the skewed harmonic sense of Albert Marcoeur with a track built from layered guitar figures and abstracted speech, the long final piece pushes the concept of the first side into darker and denser areas. Joined by electronics from Ricardo Villalobos and the twin drums of Will Guthrie and Joe Talia, the layered guitars of the first piece are transformed into a raw and tumbling fusion-funk groove that calls to mind early Weather Report or even the first Golden Palominos LP. As this stellar rhythm section rides a single repeated chord change into oblivion, a series of spectacular events emerge in the foreground: first, aleatoric synthesizer burbles from Keith Fullerton Whitman, then slashing skronk guitar from Arto Lindsay, until finally Ambarchi’s own fuzzed-out harmonics take center stage as the piece builds to an ecstatic frenzy. Few artists could hope to include such an incredible variety of collaborators on one record and still hope for it to have a unique identity, but Ambarchi manages to do just that, crafting three pieces that emerge directly out of his previous work while also pushing ahead into new dimensions. Players: Oren Ambarchi, crys cole, Mark Fell, Will Guthrie, Arto Lindsay, Jim O’Rourke, Konrad Sprenger, Joe Talia, Ricardo Villalobos, Keith Fullerton Whitman.
Black Truffle is pleased to announce Melopea, presenting two new pieces highlighting the incredible voice of Amelia Cuni (1958-2024), the great Italian singer, based in Berlin in later life, whose mastery of the classical Indian dhrupad developed in parallel with a commitment to contemporary experimental approaches. After two stunning archival releases documenting traditional dhrupad performances in India in the 1990s (BT079 and BT092), the two side-long pieces here embody the freedom with which Cuni explored new contexts and settings for her singing. Both make use of a long recording of Cuni singing the pentatonic Raag Bhoop (or Bhopali) made in 2012 by her partner Werner Durand in Berlin. ‘Melopea’ began from Cuni and Durand’s superimposition of this recording with violinist Silvia Tarozzi and cellist Deborah Walker’s performance of Éliane Radigue’s ‘Occam River II’.
Inspired by the beauty of this chance encounter (and other experiments with non-synchronous collaboration during the pandemic years), Tarozzi and Walker recorded independently, without hearing Cuni’s voice but ‘having her present in memory’. Tarozzi and Walker’s bowed strings places Cuni’s magisterial performance in a new context, emphasising, as Radigue commented upon hearing the initial layering of her piece with Cuni’s voice, a shared ‘searching toward the partials, overtones, these natural constituents of acoustical sounds in their richness’. Beginning with whispered bowed harmonics, the violin and cello swap the stability of dhrupad’s traditional tanpura drone for a slowly evolving, uneasy web of harmonic interactions recalling some of Harley Gaber’s work, sometimes sitting on dissonances for long periods or allowing changing interference patterns to come to the fore. Primarily focusing on her lower register, Cuni’s performance demonstrates her mastery of microtonal pitch subtleties, elegant sweeping glissandi and meditatively unhurried pacing.
The continuation of the same recording by Cuni forms the foundation of ‘Bhoop-Murchana’, with Anthea Caddy on cello and Werner Durand on soprano saxophone. In contrast to the randomised layering of the first piece, here Durand and Caddy have carefully selected pitches based on the raag Cuni sings, using the ‘Murchana’ form, which uses the constituent notes of the raag as tonics of new raags, retaining the same interval structure. Both players who have developed tones of striking depth and harmonic purity on their instruments, Caddy and Durand’s patient long tones are simultaneously rigorously grounded in the physical properties of sound and possessed of an immaterial, floating quality. Combined with Cuni’s voice and, near the piece’s end, her contributions on hammered and plucked tanpura, the effect borders on miraculous. To surrender to this music is like slipping into an onsen pool, feeling the instantaneous release of every tension. Accompanied by liner notes from Durand, Tarozzi and Walker, Melopea is both a moving tribute to the profound art of Amelia Cuni and, for the uninitiated, a perfect introduction to it.