Electronic / Experimental

"I feel like 'Home' is a second part of the same book, that the start was in 'Esja', a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where 'Home' will lead me and my music". — Hania Rani Hania Rani is a pianist, composer and musician who, was born in Gdansk and splits her life between Warsaw, where she makes her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works. Her debut album 'Esja', a beguiling collection of solo piano pieces on Gondwana Records was released to international acclaim on April 5th 2019 including nominations in 5 categories in the Polish music industries very own Grammys, the Fryderyki, and winning the Discovery of the Year 2019 in the Empik chain's Bestseller Awards and the prestigious Sanki award for the most interesting new face of Polish music chosen by Polish journalists. Rani also composed the music for her first full length movie "I Never Cry" directed by Piotr Domalewski and for the play "Nora" directed by Michał Zdunik. Her song "Eden" was used as a soundtrack of a short movie by Małgorzata Szumowska for Miu Miu's movie cycle "Women's Tales" If the compositions on Esja were born out of a fascination with the piano as an instrument, then her follow-up, the expansive, cinematic, 'Home', finds Rani expanding her palate: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers, Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed again by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorek in Warsaw ( Ombelico and Come Back Home). Home was mastered by Zino Mikorey in Berlin (known for his work on albums by artists such as Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds). For Rani, 'Home', is very much a continuation of the work she started on 'Esja', "the completion of the sentence" as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. Home opens with the fragment of the short story "Loneliness" by Bruno Schulz, which can be seen as a parable of a journey that does not necessarily mean going beyond the physical door but can signify going beyond the symbolic limits of our knowledge and imagination. "One can be lost but can find home in his inner part - which can mean many things - soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find 'home' anywhere' This is what I would like to express with my music - one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us". — Hania Rani Home is also about the inevitability of change. We never find places exactly how we left them. Time flies and life with it. Just like art and music. Once you started the trip, you will never be back really to the place where you started with. It is a sentiment that is at the heart of Home, not just its themes, but at the heart of Rani's music too. Following the success of Esja it would have been easy for her to stick to the same solo piano formula, but while Rani expresses her surprise and gratitude for the success of Esja, "I wasn't sure how this album - based on Piano and silence - will be received by the audience. The reception was a big surprise to me" it has also given her the confidence to express more of herself as an artist. On Home Rani steps into more of a producer's role, adding strings, bass and drums where needed, exploring the sounds of synths and electronica, but also creating textured layered songs made from acoustic samples, mostly from piano recordings. "I try to explore new genres and discover new artists, I don't want to be stuck in things that I know, I want to learn about things that are still new to me". But perhaps most notable is her singing, Rani has a fragile, beautiful voice, both pure and expressive. Long a feature of her live shows she uses it as another instrument, adding extra layers of melody and emotion to her already deeply expressive music. "I consider voice as another instrument. Maybe if I wasn't so often alone on the stage, I would take another instrument to play the melody that I have in my mind. But while I am alone, singing allows me to have more possibilities at the same time. The human voice has a real magic, nothing carries emotions as easily and powerfully as the voice, and I think being able to bring this atmosphere on stage opens up new possibilities of expression for me". — Hania Rani Home also features Rani's new band, bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmi

All-star quartet Last Exit garnered its reputation with a string of unrelentingly forceful concert recordings in which it pushed the energy style of free jazz to its limits. When the group went into the studio for the only time, though, a very different sort of album resulted—very different not only from all their other output, but even from anything else ever heard from anyone at that time. Because of that, when it was released in 1988, some fans and critics didn't know what to make of it. This was, in a way, understandable, because Iron Path was so far ahead of its time that perhaps only now, over a quarter of a century later, is there an audience prepared for this album's pioneering hybrid of abstract heavy metal, unsettling ambient music, and free improvisation. Back in 1988, "Darkwave" hadn't yet been conceived, much less named and niched. The brutal sonic assault of Last Exit's live albums is not banished; it lurks below the surface on Iron Path, sometimes allowed to break through for a moment of stark contrast. But the unremitting density of texture heard in the quartet's shows is stripped back in favor of more subtle and varied textures, sculpting an atmosphere of moody brooding and sinister suspense. And, of course, the studio also allowed for far greater sonic clarity, putting these virtuoso players in a setting that shows off their masterful command of myriad timbres. In a world that has since become accustomed to hearing Earth, Pelican, Blut Aus Nord, Aphex Twin's Ambient Works sets, and Oöphoi, and artists such as Whote who explore the overlap between them, Iron Path can finally get its due, and an audience schooled to appreciate what it offers.

After their last album six years ago, "Primal Forms," the new album by Phantom Horse, finally arrives. The German duo of Ulf Schütte and Niklas Dommaschk have long established a reputation for expertly crafted, hypnotically slow-burning electronic music, and we do not hesitate to say that "Primal Forms" stands among the epitomes of their discography. The sequencing of "Primal Forms" cannot be underestimated. It is an album in the classic sense. It demands to be listened to in its entirety, which also points to a closer affinity with Krautrock. Likewise, a touch of dub is perceptible, wafting around the songs, which, as usual, bear clandestine titles. It is not unreasonable to see in these compact compositions a clear statement against multitasking. Phantom Horse are not trumpeters of dystopia. They present themselves resolutely, almost stoically, turned away from the world. This turning away is clearly a statement that can be contemplated in the Mariana Trench as well as in comet belts. In any case, it is best experienced in a space without any human beings. This does not mean that grumpy hermits are tinkering with synths behind closed shutters, armed with wooden walking sticks. This is still open minded music with a connection to current developments. The approach itself is what is audible, and with it, Phantom Horse proves once again that their main connection to time is timelessness. In an age of all-encompassing distraction on every sensory, thematic, and semantic level, Phantom Horse explores the possibilities of reduction, searching for simplified melodic arcs without resorting to the vocabulary of classical minimalism. The overall impression is more electronic; the slowly shifting, polyrhythmic compositions repeatedly lead to a peculiar danceability. However, these are perhaps the dances of mechanical birds, undeterred by anything.

On textstar+ Jan Jelinek brings together the material from the CMYK series, four EPs he released between 1999 and 2002 under the pseudonym farben (the German word for both colours and paints), on a vinyl double LP for the first time. The selection of tracks has been remastered from the original tapes, joined by two additional pieces that appeared on compilations during the same period. - A Polaroid. Still life with tangled leads and consumer electronics, late twentieth century. Black and various shades of dirty white are the dominant non-colours. The image’s spatial depth remains diffuse, the links between its elements speculative. A note stuck to the wall (a legend, perhaps, or an all-explaining blueprint in text form?) is impossible to decipher. You can’t see what connects the picture’s signs. You have to hear it. farben says: Every sound is a text. A bearer of meaning in search of a reader. Hoping the ideas inscribed in its autonomous existence will be understood as intended. While its beauty lies precisely in misunderstanding, in reading the coded message a new way every time. A thousand colours of sound, a thousand different ways to hear, to see, to understand. On textstar+ Jan Jelinek brings together the material from the CMYK series, four EPs he released between 1999 and 2002 under the pseudonym farben (the German word for both colours and paints), on a vinyl double LP for the first time. The selection of tracks has been remastered from the original tapes, joined by two additional pieces that appeared on compilations during the same period. Another new element is the Polaroid, showing the origins of a world: Jelinek’s home studio in Berlin at the time. farben says: Move your body! The project has its roots in Jelinek’s love of house as a reductionist vision of soul. Of four to the floor as a proposition that can be accessed anywhere. Of electronic dance music as a realm of possibility that can be continually expanded. farben was written as contemporary house music. As a text about excitement and euphoria. The arrangements were made directly while recording to DAT, on a twelve-channel mixing desk. Several track titles suggest a link to live concerts, coupled with the context of machine music and bedroom recording. Others affirm pop music’s most extravagant stock phrases about various states of love. Jelinek produced the tracks with the aim of making music for dancefloors. An idea that failed very productively. In the locations to which it was originally addressed, the project barely figured. But people did listen, and they listened all the more closely to this music that opened up new acoustic and associative scope for house. farben is the opposite of genre: a music spawning new terms (clicks & cuts, micro-house) that never manage to fully capture it. farben says: Signifiers. The four CMYK EPs are designed as a network of references that cannot be missed but that can also never be precisely deciphered. The vectors of sound, word and image point to Isaac Hayes and Ornette Coleman, to Detroit and the first generation of the Red Army Faction, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. So multifarious that they are distorted to the point of recognition. Overall we hear sonic docufictions whose appealing vagueness derives precisely from this oscillation between clarity and ambiguity, which is also the source of their poetry: the lyricism of the pure circulation of signs. The artwork is based on photographs of former Red Army Faction members, broken down into the four colours of the CMYK model. The motifs dissolve into individual dots of a single colour, so close to the faces that their expressions are only hinted at. Taken together, the individual colours compose a new whole out of fragmentary material, defying definition and thus maintaining their vibrancy. The same occurs on the level of sound. The sampler Jelinek used for these tracks had to be fed with floppy disks, imposing a memory limit of 1.44 megabytes per audio quotation from soul or jazz records. As a necessary consequence of this, the individual references, like the dots of colour, are dissolved into details and abstractions. They appear as splinters that recombine in new ways to create new meanings. The joy of collapsing metaphors. farben says: New departures. Even two decades after its original release, textstar+ does not come across as an epitaph to the modern era. Instead, it appears as a euphoric affirmation of the utopias of the twentieth century, translated into new sound texts via the aesthetic strategies of abstraction, collage, networking and speculation. 1.44 megabytes of history, one thousand signifiers, one album. From “Live ...” to “... Love”.

Following Additive Inverse, Jim O’Rourke and Jos Smolders reconnect across a series of studio sessions spread over three years. Working independently, they build a fluid exchange of material shaped by shared interest in the spectral qualities of sound.O’Rourke initiates the process using his Kyma System, generating source material that Smolders reworks through granular techniques. The results unfold gradually, drifting from dense, enveloping passages into irregular rhythmic forms and more inward, sparse sections.Rather than settling into fixed structures, the pieces remain in motion, with textures shifting from soft and diffuse to brittle and tactile. It’s a patient, exploratory work that emphasises process, detail and subtle transformation over time.

Originally recorded in the early 1990s, inrain's 'Rise' sweeps up the only material from A.R. Kane's Rudy Tambala and Cranes vocalist Alison Shaw, a long-lost bridge between shoegaze, dub, electro and trip-hop. Essential listening if yr into Seefeel, Locust or Zurich. Back in 1991, inrain appeared on Rough Trade's Singles Club series with a brief but brilliant 7" that sounded as if it'd been beamed in from another planet. A.R. Kane had been forward thinking, sure, but these three tracks - 'Grow', '...And Julie Rose' and 'Sleep' - juxtaposed Shaw's dreamy vocals with dubby, spacious electronics and shimmering guitars in a way that wouldn't really rise to prominence until years later. Music From Memory does the heavy lifting here, remastering that original 7" from the original DAT tapes and adding the extra track 'Biology' and an alternate version of 'Sleep' to bump up the package. But it's those original tracks that have us by the throat - we really can't believe they've been so slept on over the years. '...And Julie Rose' sounds like it should have been picked up for a Duophonic release a decade later, while 'Sleep' completely pre-empts Seefeel's 'More Like Space EP' that wouldn't appear for another couple of years. Prophetic stuff.

Sergeant refine their “dj-shadow-in-reverse” approach on Symbols, cutting and reassembling their own material into restless, rhythmic forms. Kraut drums, plunderphonic fragments and dub space collide with a sharper sense of direction.Ferre’s vocals drift through the mix, searching for a way out while leaning into the disorder. Even the details feel alive—a stray flute line cutting through the low-end pull.Amid the chaos, Sergeant sound more in control than ever, turning fragmentation into something direct, playful and oddly infectious.

Music From Memory are thrilled to announce the forthcoming release of ‘Pastoral Blend,’ a new album from the duo of N Kramer and Magnus Bang Olsen (The Zenmenn).

Recorded in Berlin between August 2023 and March 2024, ‘Pastoral Blend’ combines Kramer's improvisational process and mastery of contemporary production techniques with Bang Olsen’s emotive pedal steel guitar playing. The creative process was anchored in capturing various phrases and patterns from the instrument, which were then reshaped, reversed, and layered intricately. This meticulous approach allowed a foundational track to emerge, upon which further arrangements and developments were sculpted. This process, which builds on Kramer's earlier work as Habitat (with J. Foerster, released on Leaving Records), gives the music a gentle asynchronous flow that feels uniquely live and organic.

Merging the warmth and intimacy of instrumental Americana with the glitchy, textural processing reminiscent of early 2000s Max/MSP and influential artists such as Fennesz and Alva Noto, ‘Pastoral Blend’ is a textured drift between analog warmth and digital fragmentation, a delicate equilibrium that duo navigate with remarkable finesse and an air of effortless charm. With titles like ‘Harvest', ‘Agrarian Dawn’, ‘Grasslands’, and ‘Weathered’, Kramer and Bang Olsen evoke a musical vocabulary steeped in themes of landscape, memory, and tradition; a vocabulary that gently alludes to the more familiar and traditional musical structures lying beneath the rich layers of sound. Herein lies the essence of the 'Pastoral Blend’.

‘Pastoral Blend’ will be released on LP and digitally on July 4th 2025. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis.

Following June's brilliant 'Rhythm Archives', Holy Tongue's Al Wootton continues his hot streak, landing on Sähkö with half an hour of hazed, immersive rhythmic experiments, tracking from vintage dub(step) to minimal techno and confidently striding thru percussive forms that echo from the Balkans to North Africa. RIYL Shackleton, Azu Tiwaline, Muslimgauze, T++, Deena Abdelwahed.

Ever since he dispatched with the Deadboy moniker a few years back and reached into dubbier, more percussive spaces, Wootton's been figuring out exactly where his dexterous productions fit in.He's been most at home on his own Trule imprint, operating at his own pace and shaping the aesthetics as he goes, and 'Rhythm Archives' felt like a mark in the sand, a record that matched his interest in vintage gear and classic production methods with his dedication to wide-eyed, punkish experimentation. 'CRUX', his first record for legendary Finnish label Sähkö, follows that lead, assembling four long percussive jams that sound as if they've toppled off the timeline - if someone told us it was material rescued from a forgotten reel-to-reel, we'd believe it.

There's an outline of dubstep visible in the background on opener 'Essene' that's enhanced by the Skull Disco-esque sub-undulations and wormhole-splitting tape echoes, but the hollow hand drum runs and hallucinatory effects shuttle the composition into darker, more reflective landscapes. Similarly, the busted drum machine intro of 'Per Incanto' might reference Sähkö royalty Mika Vainio and Hertsi, but the track veers leftwards, muddling the mix with psychedelic African Head Charge-style reverberations and trapped, timestretched string loops. It's gear that's intended for deep, intentional listening; the tracks don't contain too much melodic content by design - Wootton's rhythms are layered and hypnotic, and anything else is there to reinforce the general spirit.

Just check 'Cloister', the EP's low-key stand-out, where the lead line is literally just tuned feedback, placed to disorient even the most abstinent listener, or 'Armen', that distorts its sputtering Bruce Haack-in-dub atmosphere with ghosted groans and faint remnants of a trip-hop undercurrent that never fully reached optimal pressure. If you've ingested all the psilocybin from Shackleton's recent run, this is yr next drop.

Takuro Okada's latest work is the original soundtrack for the film "After the Heat" directed by Hide Yamamoto.

Okada himself plays many of the instruments on the album, including piano and acoustic guitar, and is joined on the album by Kei Matsumaru on saxophone and Hiroki Chiba on double bass. The album was mastered by Jim O'Rourke, whom Okada admires, and features artwork by Toru Kase.

Glorious vinylization of this 2022 duo session, originally issued as a cassette, documenting the first time Suzuki and Noyes ever collaborated. Ayami Suzuki has become known to cognoscenti for her brilliantly imagined vocal improvisations, through recordings with like-minded folks such as French vocalist/polymath Delphine Dora and avant hurdy gurdy player, TOMO. Rob Noyes has developed a parallel reputation as a master third-generation acoustic guitarist in the post-Takoma tradition. Originally based in the U.S. he wisely relocated to Tokyo several years ago. Which is where this meeting took place, And while I initially assumed the music had been composed to some degree. Rob assured me that was not true, He says, “I think the recording can seem like something we took a lot of time with and discussed/composed to some degree, but we actually just agreed to meet at a rehearsal studio. It took a little more than an hour to track it all, without ever having played together before or even really discussing the approach we were going to take. I just tuned my guitar to a different tuning for each one and we let it roll.” The results kinda speak for themselves, but I was blown away by the notion they had never collaborated previously. The intimate nature of their blend recalls such long-time collusionists as Tim Buckley & Lee Underwood or Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille. Rob's delicate instrumental arcs create a perfect net for Ayami's vocals, which are usually wordless (although they always feel weighted with emotional content). It's a mesmeric pairing of voices. Which I can only hope is the first of many. Classic Fevers and Chills is a perfect soundtrack for spring, Unconditionally magical. --Byron Coley, 2026

been thinking bout confession, the third studio album by the Brooklyn-based musician and performer Frances Chang, is a synth- tinged experimental pop excavation of the self and the vast unknown depths it contains. Largely written on a hundred-year-old baby grand piano and recorded between Frances Chang’s home in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and the Maspeth, Queens studio of her longtime collaborator Andréa Schiavelli (co-producer), the album situates the unbridled emotion of Chang’s DIY roots within a complex and poetic sonic landscape that interweaves orchestral arrangements with idiosyncratic electronic and analog interventions.

This album, crafted entirely within a subharmonic framework and meticulously processed through tape manipulation, stands as Concepción Huerta’s sharpest work to date—undoubtedly her most abrasive, intense, and exhilarating. Her signature remains intact: a practice deeply rooted in drone, musique concrète, and hauntingly visceral textures—a kind of soundtrack that evokes powerful, image-driven narratives.

Conceptually, Huerta’s sonic vision evokes an image of open veins, not human veins, but those of the earth itself, the open veins of Latin America. These nervures are, in truth, rivers of lava; fury transmuted into fire coursing beneath the land until it erupts. The album is, in a way, a reflection on dispossession, resource extraction, and colonization. But beyond being a historical commentary—one that some might relegate to a forgotten past—it is also a reminder of the present, of how these practices persist in contemporary, postmodern guises.

It serves as both a tribute to the literary work of Eduardo Galeano, one of the most influential voices of Latin American leftist thought, and a howl from the Lacandon jungle in Mexico, resonating with the Zapatista struggle, the resistance of the Guaraní people in Paraguay and Argentina, and the voices of Indigenous communities across Latin America.

In the 16th century, a book titled Visión de los vencidos (The Broken Spears) was published in Mexico, compiling Nahuatl texts that presented the unofficial history, the account of the defeated. Concepción Huerta’s album El Sol de los Muertos (The Sun of the Dead) is not a call to action nor a reactionary manifesto, but an invitation to reflection, a historical reexamination. It urges us not to accept the official narrative at face value and serves as a warning, to remain vigilant and, within our capacities, resist the resurgence of fascism and colonialism in all its modern forms.



Romanian composer, conductor, and musicologist Iancu Dumitrescu is often described as one of the leading figures of spectral music, yet he has produced a body of powerful works resonating with explosive sound and friction that places him very much in his own universe. Dumitrescu studied under his compatriot, the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, who rarely left behind concert recordings. From him Dumitrescu absorbed phenomenology and conducting techniques, incorporating them into his own compositional style.

In 1976 he founded the Hyperion Ensemble, leading it in numerous concerts both within Romania and internationally. In 1990 he established the independent label Edition Modern together with Ana-Maria Avram, through which he released more than thirty recordings over many years. In recent years, however, the publication of new recordings had slowed to a trickle.

This work marks a long-awaited new release: a recording of the concert performance of Libelocus, a three-part work performed in London in 2016. It brings together the distinctive style of this singular spectralist—from explosive ensemble passages to electronic music, all contained within the natural flow of a live performance. Moreover, this is the first LP featuring newly recorded material under his own name to be released in thirty-seven years.

Sound Reporters was a Dutch publishing company that specialised in anthropology, religion, and history, releasing unique documents of the cultural multiplicity of human societies and their importance. These recordings were originally released on cassette in 1988, and consist of field recordings made on the Greek island of Amorgos, part of the Cyclades island group in the Aegean Sea. The release was jointly credited to the painter Harry Van Essen, who lived for several years on the island and recorded its soundscapes, and also to the ethnomusicologist and founder of Sound Reporters, Fred Gales, who mixed the recordings.

The recordings consist of sketched amalgams of local sounds from Egiali, a port in the northeast of the island. The first half is a soundscape deeply rooted in the island people’s daily lives, alternating sounds of the sea with popular music, recitations of poetry, the sounds of fishing boats, people playing boardgames, a party. The second half takes us out of the village and into the mountains, unveiling the island’s unadorned natural environment: the sounds of cicadas, the buzz of honeybees, the bells of the large herds of goats left out to pasture, etc.

(Limited edition/High quality UHQCD)Richard D. James, a.k.a. the Aphex Twin, released "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" in 1994 at the age of 22, a major ambient album that has gone down in music history. This monumental work, which was also the first album for the Aphex Twin after they moved to WARP, is now being released in a new expanded edition with additional material to mark the 30th anniversary of its release.

“No, without listening at doors, the ear captures noises here and there and unexpected sounds without choice, but remains attentive to the messages of each one picked up over the years. It gathers surprises and impressions, bringing them together in a simple mix. In waking up these ear memories again, which were mostly recorded on magnetic tapes, I am very happy about the collaboration of Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O'Rourke in playing on this mix tape.” Brunhild Ferrari

AGON is the directorial debut of Giulio Bertelli. It follows a triptych of female athletes as they prepare and then compete in LUDOJ 2024, a fictional Olympic Games, in their personal disciplines - judo, fencing, and rifle shooting. Informed by the historical figures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Nadezhda Durova, these women are portrayed against the political, social, technological and physical contexts that dominate the highest level of sports competition and performance. AGON explores a contemporary account of the contradictions of these sports, which began as peacetime practices for war, as their disciplines are institutionally sanitised, recast as wholesome global entertainment, and ultimately dematerialised altogether in new digital arenas. The events at LUDOJ are conducted not in sports arenas but on soundstages, with no live audience. These spartan spaces are populated only by athletes, sports officials, and film crew, capturing every audio-visual layer of information. Within this environment, every mat crash, sword clash and gunshot is experienced in exacting detail. Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley. “I saw a material parallel between the sportsperson and the musician. That you have these tools which you carry through life, which hold complex histories of use. These techniques and traditions are studied, and combined with contemporary technologies to unlock new potentials. As Alex Sokolov is to her gun, Jean-Luc Guionnet is to his saxophone. From this model sprung many ideas, which lay the foundation for the score: applying the gestural language of the fencing epee to Ute’s bow; the ‘tuned air’ of both the rifle and the saxophone; taking the judo concept of barycentre and applying that to a form of rhythmic gravity with Seijiro. It was a rich seam” – Tom Wheatley “Where realism and fiction are blurred in the world of AGON, Tom accomplished the same for the score, obfuscating the boundary between the acoustic landscape of the film and the music, respecting the theoretical framework of the film itself.” – Giulio Bertelli AGON premiered at Venice Film Festival 2025, was awarded the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Independent Production, and the FIPRESCI Award (International Federation of Film Critics). It is a MUBI/Match Factory production.

Adroit jazz guitar, prog rock fantasia, and Japanese environmental music all rest comfortably behind Leo Takami's Next Door. The follow up to the acclaimed Felis Catus & Silence, Next Door finds Takami ruminating on passages — of time, seasons, consciousness. Through music, Leo contemplates daily events and finds beauty in ordinary moments. He also seems to be questioning the value of being stuck in the world, allowing his mind to wander towards something beyond it. His music is earnest, deeply personal and introspective, and is sort of akin to Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker or Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. On “As If Listening” Takami takes inspiration from a Van Gogh art show organized chronologically, articulating the sense of “enlightened resignation” that is intrinsic in the act of creativity. “Beyond” is a dream of otherworldly nostalgia, a watercolor of past lives. His music is a hazy cinema of memory, the soundtrack to a cherished memory that may have never really happened, but still radiates in the mind like the sun on an unusually warm winter day.

Takashi Kokubo, one of Japan’s leading ambient musicians and sound designers, is best known for creating sounds such as the Earthquake Early Warning alert and payment confirmation tones. From his “Aeon Series” released in the 1990s, the highly popular title *Wind Oasis II: A Tale of Forest and Water* is finally being reissued!

Takashi Kokubo, one of Japan’s leading ambient musicians and sound designers, is best known for creating sounds such as the Earthquake Early Warning alert and payment confirmation tones. From his “Aeon Series” released in the 1990s, the highly popular title *Wind Oasis II: A Tale of Forest and Water* is finally being reissued!

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.

Six years have passed since Swiss-based duo Klaus Johann Grobe’s last long player “Du bist so symmetrisch” (2018) and you’ll hear they’ve come a long way. “Io tu il loro”, their fourth album for Chicago-based Trouble In Mind Records was written over two weeks in a cabin at the very end of a remote Swiss valley, where - pretty much at the same place - Klaus Johann Grobe came up with their whole debut full-length “Im Sinne der Zeit” album in 2014. What started out as simply making music again quickly turned into seriously making a new album. Once decided, the whole thing was finished rather quickly and recorded once again at David Langhard’s Dala Studio at the end of 2022. “Io tu il loro” is a record that cannot be done by endlessly fiddling around with hundreds of ideas and sounds. All it needed was a real break (Dani and Sevi didn’t work on any Grobe-related stuff until they met up in the mountains in 2022). It’s an album with a blurry vision and soft limitations. You can somehow feel them looking back on all their work forgivingly and then moving on to what felt right. So here we are with nine tracks full of embracing warmth, so melancholicly welcoming you don’t know if you want to smile or cry. Some might call it timeless, some might call it dad-rock... well, it certainly isn’t disco for the masses, it’s more like, “If I can’t make myself dance after four beers, I can as well go home.” So, no disco? No syncopated synths? No German? No reverb? Where’s The Grobe? Take your time, you’ll notice Klaus Johann Grobe aren’t gone, they just took a turn before driving yet into another unknown.

On the third day at Betty’s, Chris Rosenau woke up with a hangover. The night before, Nick Sanborn had played an all-electronics duo set with GRRL in the basement of a Durham club called The Fruit, so Rosenau—his friend for two decades, occasional collaborator for half that span—had tagged along. They were, they half-joke, the two oldest people in the club, so they went at least a little bit hard. Flip this record over, and there’s Rosenau that night, vodka and soda (with limes, please) in hand and looking delightfully impish. The next morning, in the middle of making their second record together, they were a little slow to wake, even slower to fully rise. In October 2017, Rosenau had flown from Wisconsin to North Carolina to spend a weekend recording with Sanborn in his little home studio. After years of knowing one another, their collaboration seemed inevitable but also accidental, a music-festival lark that had immediate chemistry. As they were rehearsing with the windows and doors open in those first perfect days of Southern autumn, they realized they were actually already making a record. They kept the working mixes and titles from that weekend, as well as the bird songs and traffic sounds that drifted into the microphones. The result was 2019’s Bluebird, a little five-track wonder that made you feel like you were sitting in the living room between the two, smiling as they found their wordless rapport. Two years later, as soon as Sanborn had set up the basics at Betty’s, his residential studio in the woods near Durham, Rosenau returned. They had fun during round two, but the sessions were neither as carefree as that first attempt nor more focused in a way that felt compelling and new. The pair decided to shelve those pieces for then and try again when the time seemed right. (They have, by the way, returned to those tracks fondly; expect to hear them in the future.) Then there was a pandemic. There were tours. There were other records. There was life at large. By the time Rosenau ventured back to Betty’s to try again, in February 2023, four years had flashed past. Both Sanborn and Rosenau came prepared this time by, well, un-preparing. Rosenau borrowed an unconventional guitar tuning he’d never tried (DAEAC#D) from a friend. And Sanborn dismantled his live Sylvan Esso rig, rearranged it, and added new bits, hoping to eschew any muscle memory for a real-time exchange with Rosenau. They instantly knew it was working, with none of the past’s second-guessing in tow. On that first day, a Thursday, they made “Ghost Sub” and “Harm.” On that second day, they had a false start with a piece called “Kay,” Sanborn’s synths not quite fitting beneath Rosenau’s riff, before moving on to make “Deltas.” (Once again to the cover: That’s the chord structure alongside Sanborn’s setup, superimposed on Rosenau’s face.) Back to that third day. When the pair finally got back to bleary-eyed work, they decided to give “Kay” one more go. Sanborn set the electronics aside and sat down at the piano. There was a false start, preserved here, but what followed was a sublime aubade, like waking up tired only to be stunned and stirred by the light suddenly outside. It is the sound of stirring to life and loving it there, and it is the little jewel at the center of the six songs they recorded that weekend, the six songs presented here in the exact order they made them. They finished “Two” just before Rosenau split for the airport on Sunday afternoon; it is a long goodbye, sweet and sentimental and sad, a last talk from two friends who have enjoyed their time together. At the end of “Gentleguy,” the first track on Bluebird, Rosenau, after a long pause, says, “I think that’s pretty good.” His voice is pitched up by a trace of uncertainty, as if “think” and “pretty” are the most important bits of that sentence. When “Deltas” wobbles to its beautiful end toward the middle of Two, Rosenau comes in again, his voice almost boisterous: “That was…” The tape cuts, but you don’t need to hear what he says to know what he says. That was good, perfect, the thing we were looking for, just right, pal. This is the way Two feels start to finish—two friends, firm on their footing with one another, digging into their beautiful exchange. Grayson Haver Currin Bar-K Ranch, Colorado October 2025