Electronic / Experimental

Visionary electroacoustic explorations return as Black Truffle reissues Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, a major work fusing musique concrète and synthesis into emotionally charged sonic landscapes of rare intensity.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet's electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe's impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet's approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O'Malley and Jim O'Rourke.

A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title's meaning is close to the concept of 'Wanderlust', fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls 'climates'. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid 'closeness'; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the INA GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block.

Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous 'scenes', with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies.

Like his friend and collaborator Jim O'Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear this year. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah (Black Truffle, 2020), the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (Black Truffle, 2022). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie’s long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell.The two short pieces that open the record could almost be the two sides of a wild 7” selected to show off what the Ensemble can do. On opener ‘Gerak Maju’, intricately skittering open-snare patterns bounce over clanging metal, chiming bell-like tones and deep gong hits, adapting the rhythm-register connections heard in traditional Gamelan musics—where the lowest pitched sounds are heard least frequently—to a cut-up breakbeat straight off Feed Me Weird Things. ‘Strollabout’ then moves into an entirely different realm of meditative repeating patterns, performed entirely on Chinese, Javanese and Vietnamese gongs. The remaining seven pieces, ranging from three to twelve minutes, offer up a wealth of different percussive, compositional and arrangement possibilities. On ‘Ghostly Klang’, two drumkits mirror each other’s moves, bouncing hats and snares across the stereo field in a way that recalls On the Corner and the jittering hi hat patterns of trap, while slow moving melodies on the tuned instruments add a sense of majesty contrasted by scurrying details in resonant wood. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Uncle’, performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell’s dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal.Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois’ drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a tenth anniversary reissue of Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism, originally released on Editions Mego in 2014. Recorded with a multitude of collaborators in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA, Quixotism presents the fruit of two years of work in the form of a single, LP-length piece in five parts. Quixotism takes the driving rhythmic aspect of works such as Sagittarian Domain to new levels, with the entirety of this long-form work built on a foundation of pulsing double-time electronic percussion provided by Thomas Brinkmann. Beginning as almost subliminal propulsion behind cavernous orchestral textures and John Tilbury’s delicate piano interjections, the percussive elements (elaborated on by Ambarchi and Matt Chamberlain) slowly inch into the foreground of the piece before suddenly breaking out into a polyrhythmic shuffle around the halfway mark, and joined by master Japanese tabla player U-zhaan for the piece’s final, beautiful passages. The pulse acts as thread leading the listener through a heterogeneous variety of acoustic spaces, from the concert hall in which the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra were recorded to the intimacy of crys cole’s contact-mic textures. Ambarchi’s guitar itself ranges over this wide variety of acoustic spaces, from airless, clipped tones to swirling, reverberated fog. Within the complex web Ambarchi spins over the piece’s steadily pulsing foundation, elements approach and recede in a non-linear fashion, even as the piece plots an overall course from the grey, almost Nono-esque reverberated space of its opening section to the crisp foreground presence of Jim O’Rourke’s synth and Evyind Kang’s strings in its final moments. Formally indebted to the side-long workouts of classic Cologne techno, the long-form works of composers such as Éliane Radigue and the organic push and pull of improvised performance, Quixotism is constantly in motion, yet its transitions happen slowly and steadily, often nearly imperceptible, the diverse elements which make up the piece succeeding one another with the logic of a dream. At the time of its first release, Quixotism was clearly a summation of Ambarchi’s work in the years leading up to it. Now, listening back a decade later, it also seems like an arrow pointing to the future, suggesting paths that would be explored further in works to come: the pulsating guitar layers of Hubris, the album-length collaboration with Jim O’Rourke and U-zhaan on Hence, Shebang’s joyous layering and percussive drive. Now sounding better than ever in a new remaster by Joe Talia, the time is ripe to rediscover its quixotic charms.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce the first LP documenting master Khaen player Sombat Simla, the label’s first collaboration with Japanese sound artist, field recordist, and researcher Yasuhiro Morinaga. Simla is known in Thailand as one of the greatest living players of the khene, the ancient bamboo mouth organ particularly associated with Laos but found throughout East and Southeast Asia. His virtuosic and endlessly inventive renditions of traditional and popular songs have earned him the title ‘the god of khene’, and he is known for his innovative techniques and ability to mimic other instruments and non-musical sound, including, as a writer for the Bangkok Post describes, ‘the sound of a train journey, complete with traffic crossings and the call of barbecue chicken vendors’. Aided by a group of Thai friends, in 2018 Morinaga travelled to the Maha Sarakham province in the Isan region, arranging to meet Simla in a remote spot surrounded by rice fields. Then and there, Morinaga recorded the solo performances heard on the LP’s first side. At Morinaga’s request, Simla began with a rendition of the train song ‘Lot Fay Tay Lang’. Beginning with long tones that seem to mimic a train horn, the performance soon moves into a rapid chugging rhythm, interrupted at points by vocal exclamations and the remarkable timbre Simla produces by singing through the khene. To listeners unfamiliar with Thai music, the pentatonic scales and rhythmic chug of many of the pieces can have surprising echoes of the rawest American blues. The range of Simla’s performance is astonishing, moving from compulsive rhythmic workouts on single chords and rapid-fire runs of single notes to gentle sing-song melodies, and using a fascinating array of techniques, including a rapid tremolo that sometimes sounds almost electronic. Later the same day, Morinaga followed Simla to a cattle shed where he met percussionist Mali Moodsansee to play some molam (folk songs found in Isan and neighbouring Laos), with Pattardon Ekchatree joining in on cymbal. At times, these molam songs have a wistful, romantic character quite different from the solo pieces. Backed up by the propulsive hand drums, Simla again dazzles with his melodic fluidity, rhythmic drive, and wild displays of unorthodox technique. As Morinaga writes, ‘It felt like they had been playing together so long that their breathing was perfectly in sync, and it was like listening to the precision of James Brown’s funk’. Accompanied by extensive liner notes by Morinaga detailing the day of recording, this is a stunning document of a master musician, seamlessly integrating tradition and innovation.

Music From Memory presents ‘Sleep Machines’, a new collaborative album from UK ambient pioneers O Yuki Conjugate and German producer and DJ Philipp Otterbach. Formed in Nottingham in 1982, O Yuki Conjugate have spent more than four decades developing a singular approach to what they now describe as ‘dirty ambient’. Emerging from the post-punk DIY scene and drawing early inspiration from artists including Cabaret Voltaire, The Durutti Column and Jon Hassell, the group gradually carved out a space between post-industrial electronics, ambient music and Fourth World experimentation. Centred today around founding members Roger Horberry and Andrew Hulme, their work has retained an outsider sensibility throughout its many periods of activity and hibernation. Philipp Otterbach approaches music from an equally open-ended perspective. As a producer, collector and DJ, his work moves freely between drone, dub, techno, house and electronics. His sets and productions share a fascination with unexpected connections, allowing disparate sounds to drift into one another through intuition rather than fixed genre boundaries. ‘Sleep Machines’ began with a chance meeting at The Gun on Well St. in London. Otterbach asked, “Would you be interested in doing a collaboration?” “A collaboration? Sorry, we don't do collaborations,” came the reply. “But wouldn’t it be fun?” “We don't do fun either.” Despite themselves, O Yuki Conjugate tentatively sent over an initial track. An avalanche of ideas quickly came back, and what began as an unlikely proposal developed into 18 months of recording, file-swapping, mixing and repeated reworking between the UK and Germany. Produced by Otterbach, the resulting ten tracks bring together recognisable elements of both sides while gradually dissolving the lines between them. O Yuki Conjugate’s hazy atmospheres, dubwise spaces and tactile rhythms meet Otterbach’s instinct for strange detail, low-slung electronics and shifting forms. Rather than functioning as a collection of separate pieces, the album moves without gaps, unfolding as a single continuous work in which one environment slowly slips into the next. ‘Sleep Machines’ is both O Yuki Conjugate’s first collaborative album and an unlikely meeting point between two generations of musicians whose work has consistently existed at the edges of established forms.

Much needed reissue of Stephen Hitchell’s sleepwalking dub house trips, faithfully remastered by Pole for posterity and optimal immersion. FFO Maurizio, GAS, Shinichi Atobe. Echospace’s Stephen Hitchell is in his element as Intrusion on two durational treks deep into the studio haze. Also found in much longer versions on original release, back in 2015, ‘A Gentle Embrace’ appears here thru13 min timeframes ideal for long blends in-the-mix, or more simply enjoyed on their own, floating and soporific terms. The original puffs up a sublime architecture of diffused fumes and rolling, velvet-coated bass that yearns upward, outwards with a gorgeous sense of deferred gratification that he tempers to an even more light-headed feel in the B-side reduction, whisking the choral pads and chords to cirrus wisps and beatific harmony.

Sturdy dub techno pressure by Detroit don Stephen Hitchell [Echospace] in cv313 mode, freshly presented in faithful remasters by Pole and ready to deflate 2nd hand prices. 2015’s ‘Fading Lights’ finds Hitchell aiming for the midst of the ‘floor with a strikingly heavy yet elegant grasp of Detroit x Berlin tekkerz comparable to Maurizio as much as Mike Huckaby, but still stepped in signature layers of electroacoustic FX. The title track lays down quaking kicks under shuddering metallic chords with a propulsive muscularity clearly intended for the club, rather than home listening, reserving extra layers of thicc subs for when the pressure demands. ‘Magenta’ is likewise helmed by a massive, shuddering bass drum buried deep under a murk that builds with natural stealth to a sort of amniotic sublime offset with a frisson of storm-building threat.

Named for Bach's Inventions - played on piano growing up - Inventio carries a Baroque sensibility: trilling polyphonic textures and lush vocal harmonies rising above it all. Sonic touchstones include Björk, Elizabeth Fraser, and the kulning-style singing of Lena Willemark. Made across three years in Sweden, the album was built without Murex knowing it would become one. Collaborators including Pelle Westlin, Isak Hedtjärn, and Elvira Anderfjärd gave the work what Murex calls "extra arms." All music videos are directed by Murex herself.

Crucial listening if you're into Still House Plants, caroline, Tara Clerkin Trio, Moonshake or even This Heat, London-based duo Curbside Lambsear's debut upsets the foundations of post-rock, slowcore, noise and folky prog by adroitly integrating electronics and studio techniques; there's songs in there, but there's far more going on than that. Made up of caroline violinist Magdalena McLean and The Umlauts' Annabelle Mödlinger, both Austrians who found themselves in London, Curbside Lambsear arrive fully formed. Best friends, they met while studying in Vienna before properly connecting years later when they were moving in the same musical circles. They were both motivated by London's unstuffy experimental pop scene, particularly Mica Levi and their acolytes, but also obsessed with fringe post-rock like Tarwater and Duster, so they decided to develop something far enough away from their regular ensembles that they could work on a signature sound. Indeed, the EP emerges from a course of experimentation when McLean and Mödlinger decided to adapt on the go, fixing a sound while they learned new instruments, shared poems and voice notes and getting themselves comfortable with the process of working in a DAW. Where this might have lead to a sequence of demos, McLean and Mödlinger were confident enough and skilled enough to rustle up one of the best post-rock EPs we've heard in a while. The chugging, processed guitars and loping drums of opener 'No Ordinary Word' might lock into the capital's underground family tree at first, down the line that gave us Dome, Disco Inferno and Bark Psychosis, but McClean's effortlessly cool, insouciant vocal delivery puts it alongside gear from Tirzah or Raisa K. And on the keyboard mashed 'Jjochstubn', the duo spend a good four minutes pulling apart the traces of a song; "the winter takes it all," McClean hums, the voice timestretched across crooked, slowed-down drums and buzzing A/C on-the-fritz soundscapes. Even when the tempo picks up, the smoke doesn't fully clear - Curbside Lambsear thankfully don't seem particularly interested in clean sounds. Best of all is 'Avril', where McClean's casual words are dropped over euphoric noise, hyper-compressed drums and feedback forming what might as well be a pop song. Brilliant stuff, beginning to end.

Four electroacoustic works by Ivo Malec composed between 1961 and 1982, from the early Dahovi to Week-end, gathered by Recollection GRM and reissued on vinyl for the very first time. LP version. Composed over a period of twenty years, these four electroacoustic pieces by Ivo Malec reflect the richness of his sonic universe and reveal the unique power of his musical writing. His strength lies in an ability to harness emerging sounds and techniques (ranging from complex editing to early computer music and electronic synthesis) and develop them through an exploratory approach, giving rise to musical ideas of rare clarity. This sense of determination, not only in terms of the future of sounds but also of musical forms, is what makes Ivo Malec an essential composer on the contemporary music scene and a key figure in the GRM's repertoire. (François Bonnet, Paris, 2025) A collection of seminal works of musique concrète composed between 1961 and 1982, reissued for the very first time, in a debossed printed sleeve. Side A: Luminétudes (1968), Recitativo (1980). Side B: Dahovi (1961), Week-end (1982).

Howie B and Hiraki Sawa's 3 Sticks is an audio-visual collaboration built around repetition, rhythm and transformation. Recorded live at Konk Studios in London, it begins with the simple sound of wood striking wood before unfolding into a layered interplay of analogue visuals and electronic sound. Moving through three distinct phases, 3 Sticks shifts from euphoric, groove-led passages into more dissonant and reflective territory before arriving at a restless, dystopian finale. Drones, percussion and evolving textures create a constantly changing dialogue between sound and image. Inspired by the writings of D.T. Suzuki, the project explores ideas of selfhood, impermanence and interconnectedness, drawing on both Eastern and Western perspectives. The result is a collaborative work that blurs the boundaries between music, visual art and performance.

SKRSINTL return alongside Low End Activist for a cross-continental celebration of soundsystem pressure that muddies vintage dancehall grit with saturated clubwise fidelity. You already know! Last spotted re-convening with wzdryAV on the vaporized 'Orbit Flares', SKRS exercise that sub-bothering brawn on 'In Muzikon', calling on Bristol-born, Berlin-based raver (and boss of Sneaker Social Club) Low End Activist to add his signature sheen. If you copped LEA's Peak Oil-released 'Airdrop' sessions, you'll already know how well suited the producer is to repurposing memories of dancefloor past and he applies that knowledge to dancehall on 'In Muzikon', letting Phillipines-born vet SKRS follow the instincts that guided cult classics like 'Ragga Preservation Society' and 'LoversDedicationStation'. The duo's dedication to bass propels the mini-LP from the beginning, with pressurized subs underpinning a mesh of expertly tweaked flutes, digi-dub twangs and SKRS' usual emcee deployments on opener 'MUZIKON I'. And the record hardly loses a lick of momentum from there. The pair introduce a haze of oily psychedelia on 'MUZIKON II', adding eerie sci-fi oscillations and scurrying percussion, but by the third chapter, they're operating in full view of the speaker stacks, hitching their pitch-wound vocal echoes and sampled plucks to wobbling sines that'd trouble the sturdiest cones. Even the spiraling 'MUZIKON V', the duo's wooziest outerzone voyage, eventually drops into a pneumatic, retching stepped beat after spending most of its duration anticipating the lurch with goggle-eyed keyboard melodies and brassy low-end rumbles.

Underpinned by spoken folktales stretching from Indonesia to Poland, a new collaborative EP from Warszawa/Berlin-based Jerzy Mączyński and London-based Flora Yin-Wong arrives via Accidental Meetings. Demons rising from the wind, unknown beings lurking in the forest – the record conjures a landscape built from heady layers of saxophone and the tormented strings of zither, harp, and kemence. Recorded across two intense studio sessions, the EP also features idiosyncratic contributions from London-based guest vocalists and musicians Aga Ujma and Laila Sakini. Flora Yin-Wong is a London-born experimental sound artist and writer of Chinese and Malaysian heritage, known for weaving field recordings and traditional instruments. Her album »Holy Palm« (Modern Love) and book »Liturgy« (PAN) cemented her as a singular voice in experimental music today. Jerzy Mączyński is a Polish saxophonist, producer, and composer whose jazz training feeds into genre-melting work spanning kosmische, prog, industrial techno, and minimalism. One of his collaborations is a record of free jazz and rhythmic cubism with Chicago’s Hieroglyphic Being.

2nd wave dub techno staple Stephen Hitchell meets new wave producer Federson in a back ’n forth of timeless originals and versions. San Francisco’s Chris Kelly, aka Federsen’s Alt Dub label hosts this passing of the baton/torch with CV313 and Echospace figure Hitchell a sits 2nd release after the ‘Positive Charge’ EP christened the vessel in earlier ’24. Federsen fronts the session with a smoky, night-driving dub of CV313’s ‘Skycrossing’ in properly classic Maurizio style, especially that scooping bassline, whilst shutting it down with the more air-stepping levity of his dusted congas and distant dub chords to ‘Skyway’. CV313’s original ‘Skycrossing’ places his mastery of constantly shifting, ever the same, dynamic within its unfurling envelopes, alongside a remix of ‘Skyway’ that plunges upward, outward into billowing electro-acoustic dub techno dimensions.

In many ways, DJ Black Low’s debut album, Uwami, shows the signs of an artist’s first offering in any musical genre. Showcasing fluency in a broad range of styles and stuffing a number of ideas to the record’s brim is the 20 year-old producer’s attempt to both introduce himself to a wide listenership and stamp a recognizable sound in their minds. In other ways, somewhat out of the young South African producer’s control, Uwami goes against the grain. The 11-track album released on the Awesome Tapes From Africa imprint comes at a time when South African electronic music is being fundamentally disrupted. Amapiano, the electronic music movement which first gained popularity with a small, core group of followers, now dominates the mainstream. Well-known and pervasive, amapiano borrows from a diverse palette of musical styles which are popular in South Africa’s largely Black townships- jazz, kwaito, dibacardi, deep and afro house among them. Instead of pandering to the seemingly insatiable local appetite and growing global penchant for amapiano though, on Uwami DJ Black Low seeks out the limits of the sound du jour and tries to stretch them. Asked how he generates ideas for his songs, Sam Austin Radebe said, “Usually when you make music from the heart, the ideas for making songs come easily. Ideas come from everywhere.” DJ Black Low mainly works in Fruity Loops, the production software, for his instrumentals. But the software doubles as a place for him. “Even when I am sitting and doing nothing,” he says, “I can go in there and be inspired…Some of the songs that I made were modified from old projects of mine.” On his solo productions, he uses the samples and compositional norms that make amapiano hits the bedrock on which to experiment and improvise. With collaborators, DJ Black Low improvises within the boundaries of listener-friendly grooves. He was discerning when choosing vocalists for the songs on the project. “I am more of a producer, lyrics come from the vocalists that I work with. I usually make a beat and then send it to people that I work with. They write something for the beat and I will decide which lyrics I use on which songs. If the vocals are sharp, I’ll include them.” Vocalists on the record use different South African languages including SePedi, Setswana and isiZulu. DJ Black Low has four completely solo productions on Uwami, “Downfall Revisit,” “Vula Vala,” “60 Days No Sleep” and “Stiwawa Quitter.” In “Downfall Revisit” he introduces the listener to the high-pitched keyboard melodies which are something of a signature. On the record’s last two tracks, “60 Days No Sleep” and "Stiwawa Quitter,” he is solo again. He is not veering from the amapiano realm, but exploring something distinctly new which for a brief moment exists simultaneously with amapiano. The sound he creates has foundations of what could easily have progressed into captivating amapiano songs on their own. But he uses improvised but structured electronic percussion and distortion sounds to drive the tracks in a particular direction. What remains is something like a deconstructed amapiano. “Vula Vala” borrows its title and refrain from popular amapiano producer Kabza De Small’s 2019 hit of the same name. DJ Black Low says that Kabza De Small’s success inspired him because they come from the same city, Hammanskraal, Pretoria. DJ Black Low showed an early interest in music, particularly in producing. “I’ve liked music a lot from a young age,” he says “I used to produce hip-hop and commercial house before I started producing amapiano. When I started out, I used to listen to a lot of commercial house. I used to DJ at places in my neighborhood, parties and weddings. I wasn’t getting big gigs.” For a young producer living in the townships of the greater Pitori area of South Africa’s Gauteng province, there were few avenues available for Radebe to pursue a career in music. His trajectory shows the vulnerability of this pursuit. “I had started producing in 2013 and it so happened that I lost my equipment in 2014. I couldn’t afford to buy equipment. In 2017, a friend of mine who had been making music found a job and decided to quit music. He gave me his equipment and I was able to start producing again. That’s when I started getting back to it. I tried to pick up where I had left off, with hip hop and commercial house but I found that amapiano was the popular music. I liked it, so I started producing it.” Solid for its ability to showcase DJ Black Low’s individual creativity and experimentation, Uwami is a promising debut. Most interesting , though is the producer’s ability to harness his improvisation and experimentation into compelling grooves when he collaborates with others, as he does so readily on this recording.

Swedish-Finnish sound artist Marja Ahti returns to Black Truffle alongside Iceland-based American clarinetist John McCowen, whose innovative polyphonic technique provides the direction for 'Errands', imprinted by Ahti's processed field recordings and sinewaves. 'Errands' opens with the perfect dupe: a snippet of a recorder performance of Messiaen's 'O sacrum convivium!' that lasts just a few seconds before the sounds are morphed with elongated, buzzing resonances. The framing is crucial: although Ahti and McCowen are both aware of expectations within the confines of often stuffy electroacoustic music, they were keen to approach it in their own way, following a traditional philosophy while taking in very different elemental components. The two met in Stockholm in 2024 when they performed at Edition Festival and recorded the set in Reykjavik, where Ahti gathered many of the album's incidental recordings. And she didn't record the puffins or the crashing tides, she wandered around the streets, capturing the humdrum ambiance that makes the city so particular. McCowan is best known for his approach to the clarinet, a usually monophonic instrument that, via an extended technique, he's been able to transform radically. And it's those wavering multiphonic moans that anchor 'Errands', integrated seamlessly with Ahti's similarly treated sine waves. 'Errands' isn't a drone record though; the two sound artists concoct a surprisingly action-packed narrative on 'Chorales', punctuating their elongated tones with piano and bringing the recorders back in the final act. On 'Physical Display', the duo's restrained drones metamorphose into high-pitched, kettle-boiling squeals that foreshadow the next movement, when the space opens up to capture a host of familiar sounds before simmering down to almost nothing. At its most peaceful, the piece reveals its most intimate elements: rainfall, distant engines, stifled breaths, plucked strings.

Showcasing contemporary Algerian sounds led by the gasba, a traditional reeded flute, 'My Heart is Dust Before Him' is a collaboration between Hive Mind and Oran's Édition Ahlem imprint. In the Berber language, "gaspa" means "reed", and references the wind instrument that's central to some of the region's most gripping Bedouin folk and ceremonial music. On this 10-track anthology, Hive Mind plucks tracks from Édition Ahlem's recent catalogue; the label emerged in Oran from a record store and puts out cassettes since the early '90s. These selections are a little more contemporary and examine how the gasba forms have mutated and evolved in the last couple of decades, reacting to production changes while retaining the unique sound of the flute itself. There's plenty to explore here, from the dimly lit distortions of Cheikh Tahar Oueld Marhoum's 'Naachak Fiha Ou Magoulhach' and Cheba Negouane's rai-adjacent 'Ychafouni Maghbounat' to Cheikh El Waal's woozy organ-led 'El Galb Maamar' and Mohamed Ain Larbaa's unexpectedly funky 'Sratli Khatra Kheleft L3ahed'.

Tearing apart the sound of the cello and zooming in to its atomic particles, Max Eilbacher and Lucy Railton muddle the real and the virtual on 'Indifferent Rocks...', dreaming up a mind-altering study of authenticity and isolation that constantly challenges aesthetic expectations. Originally commissioned by New York's ISSUE PROJECT back in 2022 for their "Distant Pairs" series, where the organisation matched two artists to consider the implications of isolation post-COVID, 'Indifferent Rocks are Rearranged into a Dam' uses the concept of distance to inspire almost every aspect of its construction. Railton and Eilbacher's separation is represented in the method itself, with mics placed in the middle of a quadraphonic setup; the gap between the acoustic source material and the preternatural result; the cello and the digitally re-synthesised simulation. Over almost half an hour, the duo engage in a surprisingly blithe deception, daring listeners to dissect the material and figure out what's actually going on. And for the first few minutes at least, that's not an easy task. Eilbacher's reduced, spectralised drones slowly reveal a familiar back-and-forth of a bow; might it be cello funnelled through some pedals, or a simulation? Or both? It doesn't get any easier to parse as the piece evolves, either. The sonic spectrum is enhanced with booming low-end and eardrum-piercing high end animations, but it remains cryptic, occasionally sounding like pure synthesis and occasionally close to Railton's bewitching last album 'Blue Veil'. Pattering rhythms materialise from the sidelines and in the stark middle section, raw staccato notes are spray-painted with digital gloss, then repeated, swallowed and regurgitated by unseen entities. Somehow, the process feels as mischievous, as rigorous and as texturally engaging as those vital early GRM experiments that posed the initial questions about electronic and acoustic music we're still attempting to answer. The aesthetic is very different, but the philosophy is the same - Railton and Eilbacher implore us to experience sound just like they do, not in one defined place or another, but in a third space where anything's possible.

Mark Fell follows Nite Closures with Servitude In Context, another set of fiercely unconventional computer music built for movement. Drawing on decades spent exploring electronic dance music, Fell works with clashing tempos, asymmetric rhythms and tightly controlled digital percussion. ‘Actutations #1 (extended)’ plays with acceleration and deceleration, while ‘time-slur’ and ‘Taut manifold’ push into fractured rhythmic territory. ‘Low energy mantra’ brings hints of gamelan and footwork before ‘anode’ and the 12-minute ‘3 lost contours (pts 1-5)’ send things into increasingly wild, restless motion.

XKatedral Anthology II is the second installment in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers affiliated with XKatedral working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces written from 2018 to 2020 by composers Kali Malone, Jessica Ekomane, Mats Erlandsson, Theodor Kentros, Wilma Hultén and Maria W Horn. This collection of pieces focuses on the use of synthetic sound and algorithmic composition languages as tools for precise work within the realm of spectral exploration. In addition to this, the electronic instrumentation in many of the pieces is augmented by acoustic instruments.

XKatedral Anthology I is the first in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by XKatedral affiliated composers working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces dating from 2010 - 2020. Four of the works included here were originally released on cassette early on in the label's history, while the two remaining pieces are presented by the label for the first time.

Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our current times, it could be interpreted as human frailty in the face of nature’s unyielding dominion. Conversely, it could represent the persistence of human spirit and resourcefulness in the midst of catastrophe and upheaval. The album opens with 'Beginner’s Mind' – a semi-improvised motif develops into an impressionistic refrain. This is followed by "Twilight Flowers" and "Waltz On Treated Wire" – intimate, monochrome piano portraits. Later tracks such as "Lost Albion" and "Signs Of Life" build on skeletal piano motifs with subtle electronic washes, textures and field sounds. The album ends with the elegiac "On Terminus Hill" where a stately piano refrain explores a series of sparse harmonic variations evoking a sense of closure.

September 23rd is the first release in William Basinski’s new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog. Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains: “The original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson – later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka – at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York. It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system – and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.”

LIMITED EDITION OF 5000 180 GRAM OPAQUE DARK BLUE VINYLProduced by Brian Paulson at River North Recorders in Chicago and released by Touch and Go Records in April of 1991, the six songs on Spiderland methodically mapped a shadowy new continent of sound. The music is taut, menacing, and haunting; its structure built largely on absence and restraint, on the echoing space between the notes, but punctuated by sudden thrilling blasts of unfettered fury. It is a sound that no one had heard before and that no one will ever forget. The eerie, now-iconic black and white cover photo of the four-band member’s heads breaking the surface of the water was taken by their friend Will Oldham. Spiderland spawned a whole new genre, frequently called Post-Rock, and came to be regarded as one of the most important and influential records of the past thirty years. SLINT broke up shortly before Spiderland was released. Band members went on to play in Tortoise, the Breeders, Palace, The For Carnation, Papa M, Evergreen, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.