Electronic / Experimental

‘i,i’ is Bon Iver’s most expansive, joyful and generous album to date. If 'For Emma, Forever Ago’ was the crisp, heart-strung isolation of a northern Winter; ‘Bon Iver’ the rise and whirr of burgeoning Spring; and '22, A Million', a blistering, "crazy energy" Summer record, ‘i,i’ completes the cycle: a fall record; Autumn-colored, ruminative, steeped. The autumn of Bon Iver is a celebration of self acceptance and gratitude, bolstered by community and delivering the bounty of an infinite American music.The sales and accolades are well-known - multiple Gold albums, multiple Grammys, chart-topping collaborations and festival headlines. But even more significantly, with each release Bon Iver quietly shifts the state of modern music. From the boundaries of folk, to the rules of autotune, to production work for others, Bon Iver’s fingerprint finds its way across the mainstream every time. Vernon has always been a master collaborator, and on ‘i,i’ that desire becomes maximal, with guests ranging from Moses Sumney and Bruce Hornsby to Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Here, the music - and band, and themes, and creative space - are bigger than ever.

22, A Million is part love letter, part final resting place of two decades of searching for self-understanding like a religion. And the inner-resolution of maybe never finding that understanding. The album's 10 poly-fi recordings are a collection of sacred moments, love's torment and salvation, contexts of intense memories, signs that you can pin meaning onto or disregard as coincidence. If Bon Iver, Bon Iver built a habitat rooted in physical spaces, then 22, A Million is the letting go of that attachment to a place.

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

DFA no doubt owes a very large part of its existence to the incredible, indelible Liquid Liquid, so it is with great and humble honor that we release this 12” from the New York no wave legends, a double a-side package featuring sorta-new versions of classic Liquids tracks. This torrential take on “Bellhead” was recorded and produced by James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy in 2004 and originally appeared on DFA”s “Compilation #2.” It’s an all-timer percussion workout, bursting at the seams with marimba, drums, and, yes, all manner of bells, a far cry for the see-saw slouch of the original. The other side is a heretofore unreleased instrumental remix of “Optimo,” which (bear with us here) was rerecorded by the Liquids in 2008 and then remixed by Optimo (Espacio), the Glaswegian duo who are named in tribute to the song in question. If you followed that, then you know. If not, just remember that we’re all showing up here because of how important and essential this band remains.

Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 is the culmination of Chapter Music’s ongoing reissue series for Jeremy Dower.

"Reclusive Melbourne electronic figure Jeremy Dower announces a quarter century-spanning compilation of previously unreleased music, split into halves to showcase his unpronounceable 90s ambient techno project Tetrphnm, as well as the wistful faux-jazz recordings made subsequently under his own name.

Inspired at first by austere German techno such as Monolake and Mouse on Mars, Jeremy’s sound world grew to take in influences as various as The Sea and Cake, Joao Gilberto, Jaki Liebezeit and Alain Goraguer. But Jeremy worked through these touchstones all alone on the other side of the world, improvising systems of “subtractive composition” via cheap 90s sound cards, 12 bit samplers and banked noise gates. His music evolved in a parallel but separate world to genres later called IDM or Microhouse, but really it sounds like nothing but Jeremy Dower – magically inventive, touching and personal. Efficient Space comped a Tetrphnm track on their much-loved 2018 compilation of 90s Australian electronica 3AM Spares. But Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 is your first chance to explore Jeremy Dower’s compelling musical history with the depth it deserves."

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.

MUST!!!!! Blank Forms, a curatorial platform and non-profit organization dedicated to the presentation and preservation of experimental performance, is proud to announce the arrival of its latest collection of works by Catherine Christer Hennix and Masayuki Takayanagi. Don Cherry (1936-1995), a pioneer of free jazz as the right-hand man of Ornette Coleman, and his wife, Swedish visual artist/designer Moki Cherry (1943-2009), have been attracting attention for their collaborations with Coltrane. Don's music, Moki's art, and the family's life in the Swedish countryside of Tågarp were integrated into one comprehensive entity in the miraculous reissue of Organic Music Theatre. This reissue features the historic premiere of the piece at the 1972 Festival de Chateauvallon in Chateauvallon, southern France, mastered from tapes recorded during a live broadcast on public television. It is a mastered reissue of a tape recorded live on public television. The performance marked the beginning of a communal and "mystical" period that would culminate in soundtracks and other works. Performing in this outdoor amphitheater were such luminaries as Moki Cherry, Christer Bothén, Gérard "Doudou" Gouirand, and Naná Vasconcelos, as well as Swedish friends who accompanied them on their trip to France, and Copenhagen Christiania A dozen or so adults and children participated, including Swedish friends who accompanied me on my trip to France and Det Lilla Circus (The Little Circus), a Danish puppet theater based in Copenhagen Christiania. It was truly a breathtaking sound world!

Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.

This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

DUB FOREVER blends Reggae, electronic texture, his own vocals and references to classics — Bach's Air on the G String, Gossec's Gavotte, the traditional Japanese song January 1st, and more.Limited to 500 copies.

TRACKLIST
A1. SOFT feat. ALCI  Akebono - DUB  06:32
A2. SOFT  Floating Life - KND DUB  05:58
B1. SOFT feat. ALCI  Akebono - J.A.K.A.M. RMX  04:00
B2. SOFT feat. ALCI  Akebono - DAICHI RMX  08:29

SML is a Los Angeles based quintet featuring Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann.

'Spontaneous Music Live' contains two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded live at Los Angeles venue Zebulon during SML's December 2025 three-night residency, just weeks after the release of the band's second album HOW YOU BEEN. It was recorded and mixed live to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales (the same engineer/wizard known for his gorgeous live captures/mixes of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet).

Between HOW YOU BEEN and their 2024 debut SMALL MEDIUM LARGE (both of which were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced) the band has developed a reputation for records that are heavily fused, polished, and punchy. The medium is on full post-modern display on those LPs, and the band’s post-production knife can be responsible for much of the perspective — the tastiest morsels collected, arranged, and rearranged just so.

But the source material from both those albums were live recordings. Long-form, unwieldy, ebbing and flowing. On top of that, every performance the band has ever done has been fully improvised in that spirit. So in the sphere of live performance the band’s esteem has grown down a different path — one of linear, hypnotic, expansion. It’s a perceived split persona shared by some of SML’s most inspiring conceptual bedfellows: compare the extended madness of Can’s 'Live in Paris 1973' to the relative tight form of 'Future Days' from the same year; the speed-funk chaos of Miles Davis’ 'Dark Magus' to the heavily deconstructed 'On The Corner' or 'Big Fun'.

'Spontaneous Music Live' removes the curatorial perspective and pulls the curtain back on that search-pluck-reconstruct editing process. What we’re left with is the psychedelic realism of the band in situ, in their home town, collectively improvising, fully in-the-moment, mining for that moment of discovery. We hear, in macro, each nugget of sound which could be the basis for a future SML album track, spattered amongst the collective chaos-and-control like stars in the night sky.

SML is a Los Angeles based quintet featuring Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann.

'Spontaneous Music Live' contains two side-length pieces of unedited improvisation, recorded live at Los Angeles venue Zebulon during SML's December 2025 three-night residency, just weeks after the release of the band's second album HOW YOU BEEN. It was recorded and mixed live to analog tape by Bryce Gonzales (the same engineer/wizard known for his gorgeous live captures/mixes of Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet).

Between HOW YOU BEEN and their 2024 debut SMALL MEDIUM LARGE (both of which were heavily edited, shaped and post-produced) the band has developed a reputation for records that are heavily fused, polished, and punchy. The medium is on full post-modern display on those LPs, and the band’s post-production knife can be responsible for much of the perspective — the tastiest morsels collected, arranged, and rearranged just so.

But the source material from both those albums were live recordings. Long-form, unwieldy, ebbing and flowing. On top of that, every performance the band has ever done has been fully improvised in that spirit. So in the sphere of live performance the band’s esteem has grown down a different path — one of linear, hypnotic, expansion. It’s a perceived split persona shared by some of SML’s most inspiring conceptual bedfellows: compare the extended madness of Can’s 'Live in Paris 1973' to the relative tight form of 'Future Days' from the same year; the speed-funk chaos of Miles Davis’ 'Dark Magus' to the heavily deconstructed 'On The Corner' or 'Big Fun'.

'Spontaneous Music Live' removes the curatorial perspective and pulls the curtain back on that search-pluck-reconstruct editing process. What we’re left with is the psychedelic realism of the band in situ, in their home town, collectively improvising, fully in-the-moment, mining for that moment of discovery. We hear, in macro, each nugget of sound which could be the basis for a future SML album track, spattered amongst the collective chaos-and-control like stars in the night sky.

SML is the quintet of bassist Anna Butterss, synthesist Jeremiah Chiu, saxophonist Josh Johnson, percussionist Booker Stardrum, and guitarist Gregory Uhlmann. Their second album, How You Been, finds the supergroup of prolific composer/producers pushing ever further into the hyperrealist, collectivist approach to music creation nascently explored on their debut Small Medium Large, which was lauded as “awe-inspiring” by Glide, “exuberant” by the Los Angeles Times, and “an exciting milestone” by Pitchfork.

How You Been represents a breakthrough in the musical language of the group. This new work was crafted via extensive post-production of recordings from a handful of shows in a similar fashion to their debut, but whereas Small Medium Large was constructed from analog tapes of the band’s very first (and very modest) shows at bygone Highland Park LA venue ETA, How You Been was built with a higher level of self-awareness and a far deeper pool of source material.

Behind the thrust of the first album’s success, the band approached every performance in late 2024 and early 2025 as a generative opportunity to hone their sound and document their expansion across a new landscape of audiences, venues, and cities. Despite the premeditation driving their commitment to record every moment, the band started every show without musical direction, improvising intuitively, completely. Within every performance is an impressive display of the band’s total trust in one another and confidence in their own instincts.

As SML has evolved and spread out in space-time, their fluencies, both as an improvising unit in performance and as a production team in the studio, have sharpened. At inception the band inspired disparate but distinctive artist comparisons like Essential Logic, Oval, Herbie Hancock’s Sextant, and electric Miles Davis, as well as assorted genre touchpoints like Afrobeat, kosmiche, proto-techno and new-jazz. With How You Been their work manages to both collapse and explode such derivatives, displaying a new, high resolution version of SML, fully-flowered into a new strain of sound, bound to incite its own copycats in due time.

“SML might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter.” - Pitchfork

It’s important to note that SML’s sound wasn’t created in a vacuum. The band is part of an extensive community of creative musicians who collaborate in a multitude of ways, and that community has proven to be essential to a growing family tree of innovative, genre-expanding music. Los Angeles in the 2020s is a musical Petri dish in the same way that Cologne & Dusseldorf were for the birth of Krautrock; Canterbury for progressive rock in the late 60s; NYC for No Wave & the Downtown sound in the late 70s and 80s; Chicago for genreless, Tortoise-adjacent sounds in the 90s. The musicians of SML represent the core of a new school within the Los Angeles jazz and improvised music scene that seems to breed infinitely overlapping combinations, including Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet and Expansion Trio, the Uhlmann Johnson Wilkes trio, Anna Butterss’s own band (as heard on 2024’s Mighty Vertebrate), and various other solo and ensemble projects encompassing every single member of the SML, respectively.

On How You Been the curatorial challenge of the capture-cut production employed by SML is met by the delightful happenstance of each member being a seasoned producer on their own merit. Accordingly, SML’s perspective on what is a moment to expand upon with the post-producer’s knife and glue is five-strong. Each member’s proclivities, penchants, and predelections get their chance to filter the always-evolving elements of the group concept.

“Chicago Four” uses a live recording from treasured Chicago haunt The Empty Bottle as its foundation. It begins with interlocking synth and percussion loops before the entry of Uhlmann’s wobble-effected electric guitar melody and Butterss’s picked bass counterpoint. Stardrum’s swinging traps slide in, catching up to a couple of added percussion layers, before Johnson adds distorted chordal hits that sound like hard horn samples from a golden era Bomb Squad or Rakim beat. It all intertwines perfectly and makes an otherworldly vehicle for Johnson and Chiu’s cascading keyed melody, which soars above and between, complimenting either side of a hypnotically shifting, infectiously repeating modulation.

“Brood Board SHROOM” is a temporary touchdown on an alien planet where rhythm moves in timeless, breath-like undulations, with repetitions cut from a very different cloth than the lock-step polyrhythmic grooves of “Chicago Four.” The track’s opening lines evoke the soft throbs of the beloved ambient works of Aphex Twin (or perhaps a Robitussen-drenched take on Steve Reich’s Different Trains), before frothy curtains of textured sound drape into the mix, overlaying like distant, minimalist symphonies in a gentle, synthetic recreation of free time — slackening and accelerating as each layer of tonal pulses hovers to front-and-center or retreats into the distance. It’s a gut feeling rather than an academic exercise, and it’s all in the service of forward motion. “Plankton” occupies a similar space albeit in bite-sized form, centering Buterss’s low end melodicism and high-string visitations surrounded by skittering tonal chatter from their bandmates.

Of course, SML’s experiments with this kind of pulsating freedom are heavily balanced by muscular turns and body mechanics fit for the dancefloor. “Taking Out the Trash” is a perfect pace-setter for How You Been, a punchy nugget encapsulating the essence of SML. Chiu’s percussion synth establishes the groove before Stardrum and Butterss drop in on a heavy breakbeat. Uhlmann comes in with a searing, plucked staccato funk line on his guitar that would give Glenn Branca and Larry Coryell something to high five about. Things eventually trip into a total breakdown, with only the perc synth still looping. When the band explodes back in, the key has changed, and Johnson is letting loose on a wailing, distorted saxophone solo.

“Is there a way to dim the lights a little more?” Chiu asks at the start of the album’s closer “Mouth Words.” Moments later SML takes us out with a mid-tempo 4/4 groover dressed in swelling glissandos and punctuated by insistent, rapid-fire phrases from Johnson’s alto. As the final tune dissolves into a layer of arpeggiated chirps and sampled crowd sounds, Chiu’s voice is back again to say what we’re all thinking: “Very good. Thank you.”

Geogaddi is the second studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada, released on 18 February 2002 by Warp Records.

The Campfire Headphase is the third studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada. It was released on 17 October 2005 by Warp Records.

The lead single here is 'In A Rut' available separately or as part of the preorder.

Forged from the fire of internal struggles, Loraine was wrestling with confidence and a desire for change when she embarked on this album. A guiding hand came through producing 2025's 'Clandestine EP' with singer Anysia Kym, which gave her the experience of a more 'pop' setting and the tools and insight to work her instrumentals into more conventional shapes. This notes a shift from the more club driven sounds and on the other hand, winding instrumentals, into more precise song forms. Her production on Detached From The Rest Of You is stripped to the bone, soundscapes of clicks and glitches that draw inspiration from Aoki Takamasa and Ryoji Ikeda and the 'clicks and cuts’ early 2000’s era of electronic music. Here, often with not much more than sparse keyboard chords to fill in with subtle colouring, she uses the space around the sounds and vocals to draw in the listener. Detached from the Rest of You is succinct and direct, 'Loraine half-jokingly calls this album her 'IDM popstar album’'. ‘I'm using my voice a lot more, and putting it higher in the mix than I usually would, I guess I'm growing some confidence.'

Loraine's albums always centre herself and her intimate angst. Here at the start, she drops into a loss of confidence, slowly climbing out and accepting her foibles, carrying the message in the method as she sings and raps / talks in an unpretentious way.

More than previously Detached From The Rest Of You trusts her guests to diverge in their contributions, she also duets with Sydney Spann on the first single In A Rut.

Chicago-based experimental musician Fire-Toolz (Angel Marcloid)—who has garnered attention for her genre-spanning style that contrasts tranquility with intensity, ranging from braindance, jazz fusion, ambient, grind, vaporwave, to extreme metal—has signed with Warp and released her latest album, *Lavender Networks*!

*Lavender Networks* marks the Warp Records debut for Nu Age pioneer Fire-Toolz. Born in Maryland and based in Chicago, she also produces and engineers for other artists, having contributed to No Joy’s latest album *Bug Land*, which garnered attention after being selected for Pitchfork’s Best New Music.

The album features contributions from Zola Jesus, Brothertiger, Nailah Hunter, Lipsticism, Jennifer Holm, and Sling Beam. It depicts a cybernetic journey racing at the speed of fiber optics, exploring themes of the logic of dreams, laughter through tears, and the truth of emotions through absurdity.

Alum of Belgium’s legendary Insane Music series and Hawai’s ’SNX’ boxset, Patrick Stas takes his Stroom bow with a posthumous archival survey of melancholic delicacies made under multiple pseudonyms. The haunting work of Patrick Stas (1995-2020) is emblematic of the early ‘80s Belgian tape scene’s creative fecundity and dare-to-differ DIY discipline. As a musician and co-founder of tape label Home Produkt, he was a key part of a home-brewed movement whose rhizomic organisation forged links between outlier artists across the region and would naturally lay the roots for independent, experimental musicks to follow. Although originally intended for release in 2018, ‘If Paul K .'s Life Was a Movie, This Would Be the Soundtrack of His Death’ sadly sees the light of day as a posthumous dedication to his personalised oeuvre as Stas passed away in late 2020, leaving these 10 songs as spellbinding testament to a creative life well lived. Pulled from exceedingly rare cassettes and unreleased demos, the cherry-picked goods spell out Stas’ web of styles spanning gloaming post-punk goth with early band General Thî et les fourmis to his wavey organ dub as Albert Et Guido and solo kinks under the Paul K alias. Each imparts a fine flavour of various aspects to Stas’ musical personalities, but linked by a puckered taste for neo-gothic lowlands vibes that resonate his peers such as Bene Gesserit, Tara Cross or Enno Velthuys and share a certain twist of foggy nostalgia for Belgian ballrooms that dials up comparison to noted mayo admirer Leyland Kirby in his Intrigue & Stuff phase, even with protoplasmic traces of new beat in its slow pacing typical of Belgian dance music.

Carlos Giffoni crash lands on Room40 with an ambitious new album of collaborations with Lea Bertucci, Greg Kelley, Mabe Fratti, Zola Jesus, Ben Chasny (aka Six Organs of Admittance) and Sepultura drummer Iggor Cavalera. Since 2010, when Giffoni was a relatively prolific member of New York's nu-noise elite, heading up the No Fun label (and the legendary festival), he's only released two albums: 2018's 'Vain' and 2024's meditative addition to the Ideologic Organ catalog 'Dream Walker'. Giffoni wrote the outline for 'Pendulum' in 2024 and 2025, quickly sending off the sketches to a handful of friends, some of whom he's been working with for decades. Under-sung hero of the New England noise/improv scene Greg Kelley turns up on the title track, for example, and opens up Giffoni's pitchy synth drones with a brassy fanfare that's a million miles away from his work with Nmperign (or on Kevin Drumm's extreme music milestone 'Sheer Hellish Miasma', fr). We don't remember if Chasny ever played No Fun Fest, but he was certainly knocking around at that time. So his contribution to 'Axis', gurgling synth sequences that follow Giffoni's own, close a loop between noise, psychedelic synth music and folk that the nomadic, genre-hopping underground mainstay has been signaling towards for years. And elsewhere, Giffoni sends out the signal to more recent contacts, roping in Guatemalan prodigy Mabe Fratti to offer her touch to album highlight 'Dermis' and tapping the unstoppable Lea Bertucci for some of her immediately recognizable tape manipulations on 'Dos'. Fittingly, it's old hand Cavalera, who's seemingly on a mission to collaborate with the entire scene right now, who plays us out, roughing up 'Whirlwind', Giffoni's muckiest cut in years, with the kind of laptop-bent noise that kept us going back to his Merzbow collab 'Nocturnal Rainforest' last year. Did we mention the whole thing's mixed and mastered by Jim O'Rourke? Well worth a peep.

A note from Cleared Our approach to making records has always involved an exchange of individually created sounds, which are joined together through live improvisation, studio recording, and the use of diagrammatic visual scores. Over the last several years, we have been interested in expanding very small fragments of these discreet pieces of audio into long-form compositions. This process has resulted in a new approach to how we build tracks from the ground up. In this particular workflow, one of us is largely responsible for supplying the main cache of sounds, and the other is responsible for the processing and sequencing of those sounds. As we developed this kind of working relationship, the nature of the material has ventured into a palette that is more electronic. This is perhaps a result of the "collage" aspect of how the audio is arranged inside of a digital environment, as well as our continued discovery and use of new digital processing tools. We are constantly attempting to extract as much as possible out of an initial collection of audio, which typically includes field recordings, synthesis experiments, bits of acoustic instrumentation, and found sounds. In many instances the original sounds are manipulated far beyond their recognizable characteristics, which creates new and unexpected results. We also share a great personal interest in utilizing sounds with different levels of fidelity, as we both enjoy the unique traits inherent in various recording formats. The artifacts and destructive compression of antiquated digital recorders, and the pristine qualities of modern studio technology both contain, in different ways, our own intimate relationships to such devices and spaces. We believe this is reflective of how we associate and remember sound, which is through the peripherals of its delivery. In the context of Cleared, this interest is pursued to further the poetic and gestural features of our music, and to create records that are infused with visual imagery, memory, and the physical environments in which we find inspiration. Lustres is the most detailed and refined output of our studio practice using this method of exchanging sound material. The four tracks present a mood that, for us, is indicative of a kind of rolling celestial atmosphere. Simultaneously, there exists both a subterranean and starlit quality about the music. To us, it is not unlike the imagined terrain of a distant meteor or orbiting asteroid, alternating between the extremes of light and temperature as its path is slowly carved in a dark vacuum. It is music for contemplation and quiet reflection, as these are the states of listening we have come to greatly appreciate in our personal lives, and as the space in which we are most happy to have our music experienced. Lustres is a document being released as we near 15 years of the Cleared collaboration, and we hope it offers listeners a chapter of our story that, while rooted in our past material, advances the core discipline of what we have always pursued as our central theme: Patience.

For more than six decades, Beatriz Ferreyra has been building worlds out of sound. Born in Córdoba in 1937 and based in France since the early 1960s, the Argentine composer entered the GRM at the invitation of Pierre Schaeffer in 1963, contributing alongside him to the foundational texts and recordings that would define an entire discipline of listening, among them the Solfège de l'Objet Sonore. From 1970 onward she has worked independently, composing in absolute fidelity to her own ear. Issued by Room40, A Distracted God gathers three works that span more than two decades of Ferreyra's practice. As Lawrence English writes in his note for the release, her compositions inhabit a space between the living world and the subliminal zones of the unconscious - new realities forged piece by piece from fragments of places and things we already know, reedited and refocused until they become something we could not have imagined on our own. Material agnosticism is the through line. Tape manipulation and digital transformation sit alongside one another as expressions of a single patient attention, sound followed wherever it leads, freed from its origin and allowed to guide the composer's curiosity rather than be guided by it. It is this indifference to medium, and the lifetime of listening that underwrites it, that lends the work its unmistakable personal quality. Souffle d'un petit Dieu distrait (Breath of a distracted little God), composed in 1987 and revised a decade later, was an IMEB commission. Tierra Quebrada (Broken Land), for violin and electroacoustic music, was written in 1976 on commission from the French State for the A.C.I.C., Paris. Together they form a microcosm of Ferreyra's wholly consuming practice, the work of a fearless, relentless maker for whom the totality of what sound can do remains forever front of mind. Cut at 45rpm for added playback fidelity. Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space.

Sampling and processing Asuna's arsenal of toy keyboards, computer music pioneer Carl Stone transforms seemingly throwaway sounds into chattering, plunderphonic memories before batting them back to the Japanese producer for further editing. You can tell that 'Imu Plastos' was developed with live performance in mind. Sound artist Asuna, who's released on 12k, Faitiche and White Paddy Mountain, is already notorious for his "100 Toys" and "100 Keyboards" performances, wherein spirals of cheapo instruments are repurposed to create complex, textured electroacoustic compositions. Stone fits into the chain well; they performed together for the first time in 2024 and Stone worked on the audio in real time, taking mental notes for studio sessions that followed. In a more controlled environment, the duo pushed themselves to rethink the process, reversing the flow so that Stone would create the sound and Asuna would sample. The finished album is a set of improvisations from these sessions that keeps rebuilding and deconstructing itself. Early on, you can still hear the creaky source material, but the first two tracks disappear in a matter of minutes - 'As Aural Consent' is the first substantial production and it's far more mysterious, 11 minutes of ratcheting noises and disquieting squeaks. 'A Salsa Nocturne', meanwhile, is a wind tunnel organ jam that you'd never guess was made using a bunch of kid's instruments and on 'Ulina as Ancestor', the duo burrow deep beneath the earth's surface, searching out eldrich resonances and sublime chaos.