Electronic / Experimental

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.

Super Tip! Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have orbited each other's work for over a decade, their individual explorations of sustained tones and harmonic space suggesting an inevitable collaboration. When they finally entered McDowall's Brooklyn studio together, what emerged on Magnetism transcends mere musical compatibility. Malone has spent recent years extending the legacy of Éliane Radigue, redefining what electronic minimalism can accomplish through pipe organ and synthesizer. Her compositions stretch single chords into cathedral-sized architectures of sound, tracing harmonic territories that Radigue first mapped in her pioneering electronic works. McDowall brings a different lineage: as a veteran of Coil, he approaches synthesis with the patience of an alchemist, crafting electronic textures that breathe with unsettling life. Magnetism resolves this apparent contradiction through sonic diplomacy. Malone's melodic sensibilities—those long, searching lines that seem to trace the curvature of space itself—find new expression through McDowall's textural arsenal. Where Malone typically builds with mathematical precision inherited from the Radigue tradition, McDowall introduces the controlled chaos he perfected with Coil: digital distortion that pulses like organic matter, synthesis algorithms that decay at the speed of memory. The album's foundation reveals their shared fascination with the spaces between notes. Karplus-Strong synthesis becomes their primary tool, combined with just intonation tuning systems that allow Magnetism to inhabit frequencies conventional instruments cannot reach. But technique serves expression here, not the reverse. Across four extended movements, repetition becomes meditation, saturation a means of transcendence. There's something ritualistic about how these pieces unfold, their harmonic cycles suggesting ancient ceremonies filtered through electronic consciousness. This is music that operates on geological time while pulsing with digital immediacy. The collaboration marks significant evolution for both artists. Malone embraces the productive friction of working with another creative mind, while McDowall discovers in her melodic clarity a redemptive light reminiscent of Coil's more transcendent moments. Together, they've created something that feels both ancient and urgently contemporary—proof that experimental music's most profound statements emerge when distinct artistic visions recognize themselves in each other.

Release 20/1/2023. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece by composer Kali Malone featuring Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns. Malone’s experience with pipe organ tuning, harmonic theory, and long durational composition provide prominent points of departure for this work. Her nuanced minimalism unfolds an astonishing depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener’s attention. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy follows Malone’s critically acclaimed records The Sacrificial Code [Ideal Recordings, 2019] & Living Torch [Portraits GRM, 2022]. Her collaborative approach expands from her previous work to closely include the musicians Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton in the creation and development of the piece. While the music is distinctly Malone’s sonic palette, she composed specifically for the unique styles and techniques of O’Malley & Railton, presenting a framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement throughout the music. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is a durational experience of variable length that follows slowly evolving harmony and timbre between cello, sine waves, and electric guitar. As a listener, the transition between these junctures can be difficult to pinpoint. There’s obscurity and unity in the instrumentation and identities of the players; the electric guitar's saturation timbre blends with the cello's rich periodicity, while shifting overtone feedback develops interference patterns against the precise sine waves. The gradual yet ever-occurring changes in harmony challenge the listener’s perception of stasis and movement. The moment you grasp the music, a slight shift in perspective guides your attention forward into a new and unfolding harmonic experience. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy was created between March and May of 2020. During this unsettling period of the pandemic, Malone found herself in Berlin with a great deal of time and conceptual space to consider new compositional methods. With a few interns left on-site, Malone was invited to the Berlin Funkhaus & MONOM to develop and record new music within the empty concert halls. She took this opportunity to form a small ensemble with her close friends and collaborators Lucy Railton & Stephen O’Malley to explore these new structural ideas within those various acoustic spaces. Hence, the foundation was laid for Does Spring Hide Its Joy. 

In Kali’s own words: “Like most of the world, my perception of time went through a significant transformation during the pandemic confinements of spring 2020. Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight. Time stood still until subtle shifts in the environment suggested there had been a passing. Memories blurred non-sequentially, the fabric of reality deteriorated, unforeseen kinships formed and disappeared, and all the while, the seasons changed and moved on without the ones we lost. Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.” 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy has since been performed live on many European stages, in durations of sixty and ninety minutes. Including at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, the Bozar in Brussels, Haus Der Kunst in Munich, and the Munch Museum in Oslo. Concerts are forthcoming at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Mira Festival in Barcelona, the Venice Biennale, and the Purcell Room at the Southbank Center in London. 

In addition to live concerts, the Funkhaus recordings of Does Spring Hide Its Joy have evolved in parallel as a site-specific sound installation. Malone has also invited the video artist Nika Milano to create a custom analog video work that interprets and accompanies the musical score as a fourth player, creating a visual atmosphere inspired by the sonic principles of the composition. Eight sequential video stills from Milano’s work are featured in the album artwork. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is packaged in a heavyweight laminated jacket with full-color printed inner sleeves with artwork by Nika Milano. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Mastering, the record is pressed in perfect sound quality by Optimal in Germany. 

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.
The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.

Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

-Andy Beta 

On Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou channel their friendship and atmospheric artistry into ceremonial focus. Spoken-word environments and orchestral imagination flow like tributaries into a unified stream, resulting in a collection of dreamlike songs and soundscapes anchored in sea, sky and stone. Through electro-acoustic instrumentation, voice, and environmental sound, Water Poems invites listeners into a subconscious space somewhere between everyday intimacy and the oceanic enigma from which all life unfolds.

On her sophomore album "Germ in a Population of Buildings”, upsammy moves through her surroundings with the curiosity of a place-bending landscape architect. The album is rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift, and the feeling of discovering strange patterns in different ecosystems. Often, the Amsterdam-based artist finds herself zooming in and out beyond a place's most recognizable surface features to inhabit the microscopic and gigantic. Gathering field recordings and evocative environmental sounds, she shapes this source material into vibrating electro-acoustic rhythms and unstable, psychedelic textures. upsammy's debut album, 2020's critically-acclaimed "Zoom", was praised for its careful reimagining of IDM, evolving vignettes that nodded towards the dancefloor without being shackled to its rigid set of rules. On "Germ in a Population of Buildings" her process has evolved considerably; the skeletal trace of IDM is still present but it's been trapped in amber, allowing her unique sonic landscape to develop organically. 'Being is a Stone' is a proof of concept in many ways, layering upsammy's contorted voice in rickety patterns beneath a lattice of fragile rhythms and faintly melancholy synths. It's never immediately obvious where the sounds are coming from - a hiccuping beat might be glass cracking underfoot, and larger pulses could be wet concrete, rusted iron or bent plastic. As the sounds develop they morph into each other, demolishing what came before and building on top of the ornamental wreckage. On the dynamic 'Constructing', upsammy's sound design fluxes through hyperactive bass music structures, abstracting expectations at every turn. Often her sounds are whisper quiet, rattling and vibrating until heavier masonry drops and disrupts the structure. And when discernible rhythms subside into the background, like on the album's eerie title track, they become almost illusory, morphing between the real world and the electronic. upsammy's processed voice works like a bridge between these realms, snaking between stark, whimsical melodies on 'Patterning', arching from AutoTuned detachment into cooing, dreamy intimacy. By considering the harmonies between each location she's visited, upsammy has been able to build a unique topology that's an uncanny digital amalgam of her lived experience. It's a thoughtful alternative in an era more concerned with flatting the landscape than crumpling it and examining its peaks and troughs.

Sooj — a collaborative project between members of Duster and Dirty Art Club. Picking up where their 2024 two-sider Anhedonia II b/w Ecstasy Cowgirl left off, Crusher sees Duster’s slowcore drift dissolve into Dirty Art Club’s sample-heavy, collage-minded production. The result is neither band, nor side project, but something more elusive — a third space built from tape hiss, chopped memory, and late-night signal bleed. Across its runtime, the album avoids the gravitational pull of nostalgia. Instead, it hovers in a liminal present — part collaboration, part escape route.

Electric guitarist and composer David Torn announces "now i imagine a place not the same," an expansive new double LP out May 29 via Kou Records. Produced by Randall Dunn (Sunn O))), Thurston Moore), the album revisits the raw electricity of Torn’s early processing language while carrying it forward with the perspective of decades of exploration. Visceral yet weightless, it deepens his long-standing dialogue between alternate tunings, looping systems, and touch-sensitive electronics. Melody, noise, and atmosphere move through one another in a continuously shifting field of tone. A pioneering figure in electric guitar processing, Torn has exerted a quiet but far-reaching influence on both film scoring and contemporary electro-acoustic music. In addition to his own scores, he has made formative creative contributions to works by Carter Burwell, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Cliff Martinez, Howard Shore, and Mark Isham. Across these collaborations, his guitar language helped shape a cinematic vocabulary that feels atmospheric, psychological, and texturally alive. Beyond film, Torn’s presence spans an unusually broad range of artists, including David Bowie, Madonna, John Legend, Tori Amos, k.d. lang, Don Cherry, Bill Bruford, Tony Levin, and David Sylvian. His recordings for ECM Records further defined an immersive, spatial approach to processed guitar that continues to resonate across generations. Tracked in close collaboration with Dunn, the sessions privilege immediacy and physical presence. Each piece unfolds as composition-minded improvisation, with Torn treating everything within reach as musical material: strings, pickups, amplifiers, external electronics, voice, resonant surfaces, and the surrounding space itself. As Torn writes: “My approach to these peri-composerly improvisations was pretty basic: everything in my view, grasp, and reach became an instrument for tone and feeling. Strings, pickups, electronics, the amplifiers, even a stone or two — anything could enter the music. Sometimes a sound would appear suddenly; sometimes an accident or interruption would open the door. The important thing was trusting that shape and feeling would emerge, and following it until the music revealed itself whole.” Rather than composing toward fixed outcomes, Torn allows form to emerge through feedback and repetition, absorbing intended and unintended sounds into a living structure. Foundational tools from his formative processing years — alternate tunings, looping logic, tube saturation — return not as nostalgia but as active materials. Intimate yet expansive, "now i imagine a place not the same" captures an artist fully inhabiting his singular language: melodic, exploratory, and grounded in touch and electricity. It is not a retrospective glance backward, but a declaration in the present tense. The physical edition of the record is accompanied by a series of original paintings by legendary fantasy artist Arik Roper, whose work appears across the front cover, gatefold interior, and a commissioned portrait of Torn. The record also includes a concrete poem written by Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O))), Khanate, Burning Witch) in honor of Torn, alongside liner notes by Randall Dunn reflecting on the sessions that shaped the recording.

On their debut self-titled album, Women embraced sonic brashness that deeper examination revealed to be tinted with sly pop melody. With their second album "Public Strain", the band has honed a sound truthful to that reverb drenched noise while allowing the pop sensibilities to surface into clearer focus.This exact balance of delicate and dense is a pervasive thread throughout the album, reflecting the contradiction of the band's environment buried in urban sprawl framed by prairie landscape. Whether twisting through the urgent krautrock of "Locust Valley", an exercise of harmony through simplicity, or climaxing with the bittersweet melody of "Eyesore", the album somehow builds luminous contrast out of a palette of grays.

Wheat and Rust was American composer and electronic musician Tim Story’s fourth and final album for the tiny but influential Norwegian label Uniton/Cicada. It was released in 1987, just on the cusp of the greater renown he would enjoy the following year with his Glass Green record, and a Grammy nomination soon after. Rust Smudges, the artist’s latest work, is an unlikely deconstruction of Story’s own Wheat and Rust, a haunting acknowledgement of time passed and the artistic evolution that has propelled Story, 30 years on, through an unpredictably varied and idiosyncratic career. Rust Smudges is both a distillation of the artist’s recent audio installations that re-contextualize existing material into new forms and experiences, and his unabashed fondness for an audio process that he deprecatingly dubs ‘smudging’. Originally developed simply for his own enjoyment and inspiration, these tone poems are built essentially by submitting harmonically-rich, looped phrases of other people’s music to a process that freezes and ‘smudges’ them. The aural equivalent of watching a movie by viewing only one frozen frame every 5 seconds, with everything in between lost, the hazy apparitions that result cycle through hypnotic, constantly-evolving landscapes both enigmatically abstract and warmly familiar. For Rust Smudges, Story manipulated all 12 pieces of his ’87 release, creating two completely new ambient tracks. It marks the first time the composer has submitted his own recorded music to these unconventional processes, and his pairing of early work with an inherently fragile playback medium crystallizes – and subverts – the distances between youthful exuberance and the inevitable, humbling passage of time. Wheat and Rust’s original tracks proved ideal for the proceedings, Story’s trademark harmonic language was blooming by the late 80’s, creating in the smudges a warmly epic contrast to the icy blurs the digital synths impart. The stately, ambiguous progressions that result are profoundly ruminative - reducing active melodies and intricate arrangements into a deep largo of harmony and timbre the way memory softens sharp narratives into transitory pulses of feeling and recollection. In the process of reworking music from his past, Story manages to put his own melancholy ‘meta’ fingerprint on a cassette culture that was in its first generation when he and his fellow explorers first exploited it in the 70’s, out of necessity rather than choice. Available on digital and in a limited edition of 300 cassettes through Dais records, with an artist edition of handmade box sets (with Rust Smudged dubbed onto the original Wheat and Rust cassettes) available directly from Tim Story.

Since his recording debut as Choir Boy in 2016, Adam Klopp has crafted nostalgic anthems, tapping the sound of swirling 1980s synth noir and captivating, cinematic songs sweeping with pensive sorrow and glowing hope. As a former member of the Mormon faith, Klopp spent his youth both in the pews of his place of worship, but also churning through DIY punk venues, before leaving the sect in the thick of a mission in Tahiti. The duality of faith and fiction are central to the lush explorations on his debut album Passive With Desire. Recorded at Provo, Utah's Studio Studio Dada, the album's tracks permuted as bedroom sketches, awash with camp, the sting of loss, and allusions to halcyon days of nocturnal, electronic driven pop. Retaining elements of Klopp's original demos, Passive With Desire was recorded with a full band and polished with trumpet, strings, as well as archival samples calling back to Klopp's hazy youth. Engineered by Klopp, Bret Meisenbach, and Stephen Cope, Passive With Desire is the entry point to Choir Boy's world of emotive wit, novella kissed lyricism, and bouncy, synth-forward takes on traditional song writing bound by the universal themes of loss, desire, evolution, and exploration.

THE PLAIN TRUTH=we drifted through it, arguing.every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.we sat down together and wrote it in one room,and then sat down in a different room, recording.NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.the sun setting above beds of ashwhile we sat together, arguing.the old world order barely pretended to care.this new century will be crueler still.war is coming.don’t give up.pick a side.hang on.love.

THE PLAIN TRUTH=we drifted through it, arguing.every day a new war crime, every day a flower bloom.we sat down together and wrote it in one room,and then sat down in a different room, recording.NO TITLE= what gestures make sense while tiny bodies fall? what context? what broken melody?and then a tally and a date to mark a point on the line, the negative process, the growing pile.the sun setting above beds of ashwhile we sat together, arguing.the old world order barely pretended to care.this new century will be crueler still.war is coming.don’t give up.pick a side.hang on.love.

The inimitable GYBE returns with another soundtrack for our times. As the heretical anarcho-punk spirit of the title implies, Godspeed harnesses some particularly raw power, spittle and grit across two riveting 20-minute side-length trajectories of noise-drenched widescreen post-rock: inexorable chug blossoms into blown-out twang, as some of the band’s most soaring, searing melodies ricochet and converge amidst violin and bassline counterpoint. Field recordings and roiling semi-improvised passages frame these fervent epics, and two shorter self-contained 6-minute pieces find the band at its most devastatingly beautiful, haunting and elegiac. Poignant atmospherics, noise-drenched orchestration, drone, hypnotic swingtime crescendos, inexorably-layered towers of distorted clarion sound: STATE’S END encapsulates every beloved facet of the band. Twenty-five years on, this new album is as vital, stirring, timely and implacable as any in Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s storied discography. Recorded and mixed by Jace Lasek, the veteran award-winning indie producer (and co-founder of The Besnard Lakes) who works with Godspeed for the first time on this recording.

This long-playing record, a thing we made in the midst of communal mess, raising dogs and children. Eyes up and filled with dreadful joy - we aimed for wrong notes that explode, a quiet muttering amplified heavenward. We recorded it all in a burning motorboat. 1. UNDOING A LUCIFERIAN TOWERS - Look at that fucking skyline! Big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks! Imagine all those buildings much later on, hollowed out and stripped bare of wires and glass, listen - the wind is whistling through all 3,000 of it's burning window-holes! 2. BOSSES HANG - Labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously! Kicking at it, but barely hanging on! Also - the proud illuminations of our shortened lives! Also - more of us than them! Also - what we need now is shovels, wells, and barricades! 3. FAM / FAMINE - How they kill us = absentee landlord, burning high-rise. The loud panics of child-policemen and their exploding trigger-hands. With the dull edge of an arbitrary meritocracy. Neglect, cancer maps, drone strike, famine. The forest is burning and soon they'll hunt us like wolves. 4. ANTHEM FOR NO STATE - Canada, emptied of it's minerals and dirty oil. Emptied of it's trees and water. A crippled thing, drowning in a puddle, covered in ants. The ocean doesn't give a shit because it knows it's dying too.

This long-playing record, a thing we made in the midst of communal mess, raising dogs and children. Eyes up and filled with dreadful joy - we aimed for wrong notes that explode, a quiet muttering amplified heavenward. We recorded it all in a burning motorboat. 1. UNDOING A LUCIFERIAN TOWERS - Look at that fucking skyline! Big lazy money writ in dull marble obelisks! Imagine all those buildings much later on, hollowed out and stripped bare of wires and glass, listen - the wind is whistling through all 3,000 of it's burning window-holes! 2. BOSSES HANG - Labor, alienated from the wealth it creates, so that holy cow, most of us live precariously! Kicking at it, but barely hanging on! Also - the proud illuminations of our shortened lives! Also - more of us than them! Also - what we need now is shovels, wells, and barricades! 3. FAM / FAMINE - How they kill us = absentee landlord, burning high-rise. The loud panics of child-policemen and their exploding trigger-hands. With the dull edge of an arbitrary meritocracy. Neglect, cancer maps, drone strike, famine. The forest is burning and soon they'll hunt us like wolves. 4. ANTHEM FOR NO STATE - Canada, emptied of it's minerals and dirty oil. Emptied of it's trees and water. A crippled thing, drowning in a puddle, covered in ants. The ocean doesn't give a shit because it knows it's dying too.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GYBE) returns with its first single LP-length release since the group's earliest days in 1997-99. 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' clocks in at a succinct 40:23 and is arguably the most focused and best-sounding recording of the band's career. Following Godspeed's return from a long hiatus at the end of 2010 to begin playing live shows again, and with the hugely acclaimed 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!' release in 2012 marking their first new release in a decade, the group slowly and steadily put the new album together through late 2013 and 2014. This mighty slab of superlative sonics is shot through with all the band's inimitable signposts and touchstones: huge unison riffage, savage noise/drone, oscillating overtones, guitar vs. string counterpoint, inexorable crescendos and scorched-earth transitions. 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' finds Godspeed in top form; a sterling celebration of the band's awesome dialectic, where composition, emotion and 'note-choice' is inextricable from an exacting focus on tone, timbre, resonance and the sheer materiality of sound.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GYBE) returns with its first single LP-length release since the group's earliest days in 1997-99. 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' clocks in at a succinct 40:23 and is arguably the most focused and best-sounding recording of the band's career. Following Godspeed's return from a long hiatus at the end of 2010 to begin playing live shows again, and with the hugely acclaimed 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!' release in 2012 marking their first new release in a decade, the group slowly and steadily put the new album together through late 2013 and 2014. This mighty slab of superlative sonics is shot through with all the band's inimitable signposts and touchstones: huge unison riffage, savage noise/drone, oscillating overtones, guitar vs. string counterpoint, inexorable crescendos and scorched-earth transitions. 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' finds Godspeed in top form; a sterling celebration of the band's awesome dialectic, where composition, emotion and 'note-choice' is inextricable from an exacting focus on tone, timbre, resonance and the sheer materiality of sound.

A full decade ago, Godspeed You! Black Emperor released Yanqui U.X.O. with no publicity or press availability, no marketing plans, no cross-promotions or brand synergies, driven by word-of-mouth from a passionate and committed fanbase galvanized by the group's sonic vision and its dedication to unmediated, unsullied musical communication.To suggest that such simple principles and goals have become harder to maintain and enact a decade later is an understatement, but Godspeed is looking to try all the same. The band wants people to care about this new album, without telling people they should, knowing full well that these days, anti-strategy risks being tagged as a strategy.The band has been blazing its own path again since 2010. We think they have made a new record that maintains if not exceeds the standards of their previous work. After almost two years of post-hiatus practicing, playing and touring, Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend! delivers two mighty sides of music that are definitively stunning, immersive and utterly true to the band’s legacy. The future looks dark indeed, but on the evidence of this new recording, Godspeed appears wholly committed to staring it down, channeling it, and fighting for some rays of sound (and flickers of light) that feel hopeful and true.

Sortilège is the new album from esteemed producer and DJ Preservation and ascendant talent Gabe ‘’Nandez. The two artists first linked on Aethiopes, Preservation’s 2022 collaboration with billy woods, where Nandez was featured alongside Boldy James on one of the album’s standout tracks. “Sauvage” became the catalyst for Sortilège, as the New Orleans-based producer and New York-based rapper gradually began exchanging ideas—first long distance, then in February 2024, when Nandez flew to New Orleans for two weeks, ready to work.

“It was smooth, very synergetic,” ‘Nandez explains. “We listened to mad music—Boot Camp Clik, Scaramanga, Cuban Linx—and I was asking questions about all types of shit, trying to soak up game and history, which I did.”

The two also bonded over their shared francophone ancestry: Preservation is half French and ‘Nandez is half Malian. These connections made their way into the music as well, via both aesthetics and sample sources, and that sort of exchange courses through Sortilège, bridging the generational, geographical, and cultural gaps between the two artists with a record that feels a world unto itself. Esoteric, yet blunt and uncomplicated as a fistfight, Sortilège erases the line between urbane and urban. It’s a movie in a lucid dream, A Clockwork Négritude projected against the wall of a construction site. Mixed-use residential.

Tracing this arc, fellow travelers Armand Hammer, Koncept Jack$on, Ze Nkoma Mpaga Ni Ngoko, and billy woods all make appearances. Oh, and there are drums everywhere: drums that will rattle a hooptie and drums that whisper threats. Somehow, over the course of 14 tracks, Preservation seems to find his way to every instrument imaginable—yet each beat has room to breathe. Amidst this breakbeat symphony, ‘Nandez’s unmistakable baritone glides purposefully, ever forward, a bristling warship in troubled waters. Every time the bass thumps, ‘Nandez counterpunches. This is a record for heavyweight speakers and clunky headphones.

Sortilège can be translated as either:

Magical / Supernatural: Act of witchcraft, magical spell, charm, or curse.

Figurative / Literary: Symbolic enchantment, inexplicable fascination, often caused by a person, work of art, or an atmosphere.

We like to think it names the force at work within and between these songs.

Respekt! Sex Tags Mania, Karolin, Laton, Tage Tombola, Don Papa - The Genuin Of Moss Hip-Hop, Engvaal & The Rygge Family, Lene B., Kambo Super Sound & Family, The Endless Dynamic of Dynamo Dreesen, Brian Not Brian - Going Good And Axin' It Fo' Real - Salik Zia, SVN, Nupi & General Elektro, Bjørn Torske, L.A. Morillo, Fit Detroid, Skatebård, A-Bucci, Camila 575, Dåple-Pera, Benji, Atle, Vilunki 666, Queens Only - Madteo - Keeping It A Level Higher Than The Rest, Geir & Søssa, Rat Salad, Mor & Jerry, Eupraxia, Ringvold Gasta, Unit 6Q, DJ Gilb'R & Versatile Crew With I:Cube, Sähkö & The Keys Of House Life, Winklez, Peng! Ossia, Nell & The Dennis Bros., Roland Lifjell, Paleo & The Bhakti Crew, "70 CPS" Bailey, Bodhi Beats, Pyramide Phillips, Samir M'Kadmi, Thug Records, Audio-In Crew, King 909, Graff Et Grill, Paint House, 411, Nbm, Done, Pol, Sol, Yre, Culos, Kvam, Sau 2, Coats, Buba, 1999, Tmb, Crew - Skredderåsen, Moss! It's Not What You Play - But How You Play. Recorded and digitally edited at the 6th-EonMANIA-fract2 STD between 2012-2014. Original session for Side B recorded at Pyramide Studio, Frankfurt 2010. Vocals on Side C recorded at Inna Di Bu Studio, Moss 2013. Graffiti Can't Be Stopped

Properly mesmerising, deep, minimal and dubby techno-house mutations by Brian Leeds (Huerco S., Pendant) in Loidis mode, shuffling a custom production palette to dead sexy effect across nearly 2 hours of prime material tipped FFO Villalobos, Anthony Naples, Marc Leclair, Shinichi Atobe, Wolfgang Voigt . A reliable font of modern ambient and dance musics since the early 2010s, Brian Leeds continues to come into his own as Loidis with his most personal love note to the ‘floor. ‘From The Toolkit Of Lovers’ spans a dozen tracks that take their sweet time to stretch out and absorb heads within fine-lathered, hands-on arrangements of robust subs gelled with writhing textures and hypnagogic hooks. Offered as his “meditation on life, love and dub”, it works a damn treat for minds in lucid or altered states and bodies in motion, working from the toes to the nose with the same sort of sensuality and grooving impetus that gained cult acclaim to his RA.965 mix and preceding album ‘One Day’, also for Anthony Naples & Jenny Slattery’s Incienso. Call it micro-house, dub techno, or just plain old hypnotic dance music, the results see all Leeds’ circles bleed into a definitive album statement slanted to off-peak hours when mind and body are still whirring. It plays out with loose sequencing primed for sinking into, or equally well as a bevy of aces for discerning DJs. The lip-biting micro-funk of ‘TT Stunt’ follows the clipped strut and 3D-dubbing of ‘Towlift’, a filtered, discoid house zinger in ‘Possession Centre’, and exquisite vocoder processing in ‘Horse on Wheels’, next to the restless bassline of’ Running Rich’, and Villalobos levels of detail in the corkscrewing drums and fruity pucker of ’Shopgirl Keepsake’. The final one-to of subaquatic dub house ‘The Lowest Word’ and compressed pulses to ‘I Would Be Glad To Be On It’ see off an immaculate 2 hours in Leeds’ presence - no doubt a hard act to follow for whoever has the aux cord at the afters.

Engineered by Patrick Flegel, aka Cindy Lee, WHIMM's latest album is the Toronto-based post-punk duo's most expansive statement, splicing noise jams with electro experiments, industrial tracks and minimalist curveballs. Mounir Al Shami and Andrew Matthews have been working under the WHIMM moniker for years at this stage. What was originally a project that materialized in fits and starts has evolved into a very serious outlet for the duo, who now use it to dump each and every one of their ideas and concepts. In the space of the first few tracks even, they hover from theme to theme without any care for proper coherence: opener 'Five in Decline' is a sludgy, basement punk freak-out, assisted by Flegel's oversaturated production, while 'Returnal' sounds like an off-cut from a Coil session, with the duo's haunted vocals harmonies set to acidic arpeggios. By the time we're at 'A Death Remembered', the fusion of dub techno, synthwave and sacred music hardly seems surprising - it just makes sense. And Matthews and Al Shami hardly take their foot off the gas. They integrate bolshy church organ into the playlist with 'After the Last Sky' and on the title track hint at Vangelis's late-period gear, setting their voices to droning analog tones and shimmering guitars. It's a lot to take in for a single sitting, but there's no doubting their voracious musical appetite - the finale 'After the Last Sky (Reprise)' even comes for The Caretaker's haunted bag.

Portugal-based percussionist Gabriel Ferrandini spent years honing his skills in various free jazz ensembles, where he demonstrated his absorption of the styles of pioneering rhythm liberators like Sunny Murray and Milford Graves while forging his own energetic and agile sound. During this time, Ferrandini performed with everyone from Evan Parker and Alexander von Schlippenbach to Thurston Moore and Dirty Beaches' Alex Zhang Hungtai. At some point, the percussionist grew restless and began taking a more compositional approach, using his drums as primary sources from which to produce spectral tones and timbres via electronic manipulation. In Ferrandini's hands, cymbals become generative instruments with endless reverb tails and choir samples are distilled into vapor. With its subtle evocations of light and color and meticulous editing, Romance suggests an almost cinematic scale. The strings and grainy synthesizer of "Crying Game" lend an air of giallo dread to the deep sub-bass rumbles; "Afters Lisboa" processes cymbal crashes through a Leslie speaker to create a siren-like Doppler effect; "Fallen Angels," one of the few tracks to feature Ferrandini's mostly untreated percussion work, stacks layers of reverb effects of varying lengths (an old Autechre trick) to add friction and give the spatialized sounds a dissociative quality. Album highlight "Cova da Vaporwave" utilizes creative sidechaining, warbly VHS-like tones and drums amplified through a Fender Twin to gather apocalyptic momentum. Romance is a formidable artistic statement, establishing Ferrandini as one of the most vital composers on the contemporary avant-garde music scene. He is influenced by Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, whose passionate yet dissonant chromatic approach can be detected throughout the album's seven uncanny tracks.