Electronic / Experimental

Riding the rails down to the past and back to the future, Eiko considers the unknown lives that her own family has lived, set to expansive pop travelogues evoking the work of pioneers like Joni and Scott Walker, while pushing further, always further....

Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin share a fascination with rhythm and the myriad of ways it can subdivide within the beat. Using aspects of jazz, world and experimental musics, each tune settles into a deep groove, digging itself via continuous minimal adjustments into an ever-deeper, eternal groove.

Quickly following on from last year's 'Ghosted II', the third Reichian kraut-jazz session from Oren Ambarchi and his long-time collaborators loosens the screws a little, inviting in Americana, dream pop and blues influences and zeroing in on the tiny details.

Ambarchi, bassist Johan Berthling and percussionist Andreas Werliin are familiar with each other at this stage to fully let rip. 'Ghosted III' is their third recorded set in four years, and although they're still led by the jazz-taught instincts that guided their subtle, minimalist-inspired folk-jazz-rock debut, they've unclenched their muscles and let rip this time around. There's a new-found, liberating slackness to opener (and lead single) 'Yek', where Ambarchi daubs his chiming guitar notes over Werliin's jerky rhythms and Berthling's unraveled bassline. Catching the desert dust at first, it hardens into a Tangerine Dream-cum-Philip Glass nu-new age shimmer before it comes to a close. And 'Do' pulls back the bluster even further, reducing Weliin's drums to a faint patter, and filling the gaps with Ambarchi's cosmic pad-like guitars. After the 'TNT'-era Tortoise in dub Leslie-powered euphoria of 'Seh', the trio get back into the groove with 'Chahar', pulling Ambarchi's fictile notes into an orbit of ratcheting drums and repeating bass plucks that concludes with a splatter of xenharmonic guitar tones.

They venture into Americana territory on the long, plodding 'Panj', padding the low end with Ambarchi's swirling organ-esque tones that transform into concertina-ing zaps, and the best is saved for last - 'Shesh' is a dream-pop/post-rock melter that's among the best tracks Ambarchi, Berthling and Werliin have recorded, falling somewhere between Labradford and Talk Talk. Gorgeous.

Nearly twenty-five years after disbanding, Gastr del Sol have unpacked their archive, stringing together an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993-1998 run. This assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances forms a spacious ode to the flux that was their métier; a further set of reinventions that continue to alter the manner in which we hear music, and literally everything else!

Nearly twenty-five years after disbanding, Gastr del Sol have unpacked their archive, stringing together an alternative view to their genre-melting 1993-1998 run. This assembly of previously uncollected studio recordings and beautifully captured unreleased live performances forms a spacious ode to the flux that was their métier; a further set of reinventions that continue to alter the manner in which we hear music, and literally everything else!

O'Rourke does Ishibashi! This Imitiation is her western bow, plus also a progressive sci-fi pop album featuring the best playing on any albums released in Japan in 2012. New music, no matter in what year you hear it!

Gastr Del Sol emerged from the remains of Bastro in 1992 with the brooding, mostly drumless album, ‘The Serpentine Similar’. This represented an unlikely evolution from the fury of Bastro, but evolution was only getting started - and ‘unlikely’ was one of the ongoing principles in Gastr Del Sol’s approach. Before the sessions for the second album, Bundy Brown left the group and David Grubbs asked Jim O’Rourke to come play. 1994’s ‘Crookt, Crackt Or Fly’ tangled the clean lines of the original band in the writing, playing and editing of the music. This was all very fascinating, but it wasn’t until the five songs of ‘Mirror Repair’ that the compelling space of Gastr Del Sol could be fully perceived. ‘Mirror Repair’ was rife with guitar interplay, but Gastr coloured the palette with piano, drums and a sudden and rattling variety of woodwinds, all evoking the obsessive pull of a deep-seeded conviction, an insistent image that one cannot forget in a dense atmosphere with riffs patterning over each other and fading into landscape. The quieting of Gastr Del Sol had been dialling down since the start; here the silences were as essential a part of the sound as the sound was. In a fast five song mini album, length and depth were impossibly extended as part of the many moods of Gastr Del Sol. Albert Oehlen’s cover art provided a perfect counterpart to the sounds within, providing also a shout out to The Red Krayola, where David and Albert met during their mutual involvement with Mayo Thompson. The best in this vein was yet to come - but with ‘Mirror Repair’, Gastr had made something definitive. Now, the bold sounds of nearly twenty years ago are back in the groove, freshly cut for 21st ears to hear. You need ‘Mirror Repair’.

"Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba hails from three decades in the past, yet the simple profile of its abstract/ambient/cutup collage makes it a record that sits quite comfortably in our IDM-informed future. In 1988, Plux Quba was a primal dark horse in the world of pants-forward electronic music -- an obscurity issued with little explanation from the laid-back west coast of Europe: Portugal, of all places! -- though the casual listener could hardly know that from an examination of the LP jacket. The vanguard of electronics in late-80s Europe was being pushed by organizations like Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, HNAS -- and yet, when Christoph Heemann came across this recording, it struck his ears and the ears of fellow listeners like nothing before. Plux Quba was handed around between the principles of the early '90s A-Musik scene: Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert, Georg Odijk, plus interested fellow travelers like Jim O'Rourke, to the intense curiosity of all. To ears that were already saturated with all things kraut, the dark corners of prog and the frontline of experimental and improvised music, it proved elusive. Not simply in how it sounded and how that sound was achieved, but in where it was coming from -- like later Robert Ashley at times; certain stretches of melody recalled some of Eno's ambient pieces -- but mostly, it was a completely alien soundscape! And who was it? Was the band called Plux Quba? The record? The label? These sorts of mysteries are at the heart of records that require close listening and re-listening. As it was absorbed, it grew to be an influence on the Köln sound -- Mouse On Mars, Lithops, and Heemann's many and varied projects -- as well as O'Rourke, Fennesz and many others. Music and sound of this nature have for many years been made available by bands like Autechre, labels like Mille Plateaux -- but for the first ten years of its existence, Plux Quba was rarely heard. O'Rourke reissued it as the first record on his Moikai label in 1998, and it had a good run through around 2005 before the last of the print parts were filled. It's been almost a decade since Plux Quba was available, which is way too long considering that we live in an era where it is necessary to have an LP of this on hand for your contemporary listening distractions. And so, Drag City has stepped in to reissue the Moikai reissue of Nuno Canavarro's classic Plux Quba."

Space Afrika follow last year's heartbreaking x perception-bending mixtape "hybtwibt?" with an anxious patchwork of drill bass, reflective musique concrete and after-hours surrealism >> singular deep headspace exploration to file alongside Mark Leckey, Perila, Burial or Klein. Assembled to accompany a short film from Manchester-born visual artist, poet and filmmaker Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle’s newest is a cinematic audit of identity and ancestry. In the film, Sanoh works hard to visually illustrate an honest and vulnerable picture of her soul. Inyang and Tarelle respond by doing the same with sound, collaging disparate elements together in a way that should be familiar to anyone who heard "hybtwibt?" or their jawdropping RA mix from earlier this year. Warped field recordings, overdriven rhythmic pressure, syrupy pads and disorienting vocals are cut and pasted over each other, generating a living, breathing study of the duo's Northern working class Black British reality. Unlike the duo's acclaimed "Somewhere Decent To Live" full-length, elements mutate and transform: mushy noise bends into street sounds, haunted vocals into echoing drill melancholia and muffled howls into shattered digital remnants. The main event is the full 10-minute soundtrack, that's layered with Sanoh's disorienting and deeply personal poetry and echoes Mark Leckey's recent "In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle". Then the EP is bumped up with three sketches from the same sessions, two of which never made it to the final mixdown. 'Version 3' is a particular highlight, pasting heartbreaking piano and blowtorched vocal loops over winding drill bass > sounds like Burial remixing Unknown T into pure syrup.

Shangaan electro, amapiano & gqom fiends take note: Limpopo’s Serokolo 7 breaks thru with a thrilling introduction to Mapanta; a local, traditional sound he’s revived and modernised, somehow resembling amapiano’s taut log drum rhythms and tense atmospheres, but sped to 180BPM, spliced with toasters and FX bombast glittering with modernist melodic sheen. In other words: 100% zingers! Repped by Björk during her DJ set at this year's Venice Biennale, Serokolo 7's debut is an idiosyncratic, adrenaline-filled reboot of South Africa's lesser-known mapanta sound, stirring its 180BPM rhythms with traces of footwork, gqom and hard techno. South Africa’s scene has perfused every nook of the global club movement for years at this point; whether it's the low 'n slow sound of Durban's gqom, Pretoria's kwaito-rooted Bacardi house or world-dominating log drum-laced amapiano, but head north to the country's border with Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and you'll hear something completely different. In Ga Sekhukhune, a village in the Limpopo province, the Bapedi ethnic group have retained their own unique cultural form, mapanta, a "living communal practice" that has been maintained through weddings and youth gatherings over decades. Although its popularity waned after its peak in the 1980s, producer, DJ and sound-system operator Serokolo 7 has been instrumental in modernising the formula, sharing FL Studio tips and tricks and sound packs in the village to keep the music alive. 'Maramfa Musik Pro' is Serokolo 7's first widely-available set and is a great primer to his contemporary strain of mapanta, and although he augments the traditional rhythms with ideas he's skimmed from other interrelated rhythmic forms, the core elements still remain intact. The unique vocals, for example, are considered invocations, delivered in Sepedi, one of South Africa's 12 official languages. And they can't be cleaved from their ceremonial function, speaking directly to mapanta's importance as a community celebration, calling out to family lines and totems. The rhythms themselves, while similar in some ways to the brittle, high-speed work of Nozinja (who hailed from nearby Giyani), sound as if they've been marinated in their own juices, trance-inducing but simultaneously disrupted by Serokolo's unforgettable oddball production choices, whether it's field recordings, screwed voices or delirious sub-heavy basslines. The album opens with 'Naba Ba Papedi', a bleak uptempo ritual that plays like an unwieldy fusion of gqom (that omnipresent synth drone), footwork (those unmissable rushing snares) and Shangaan Electro, with layered vocal chants and callouts filling in the gaps. Serokolo is a restless producer who's out on his own, something that only becomes fully evident as the set develops with the pneumatic 'Roskae', a fusion of vocal micro-edits and pressurised subs, or the electrifying 'Chunku Manabeng', that excites the core pulse with brain twisting polyrhythms and the occasional log drum smack for good measure. On ’Bonkoko Bagana' Serokolo lightens things up with chiming melodic hooks and a feathery manyalo-style beat. Unsurprisingly, it's this track that Björk made the focal point of her recent Venice appearance - a key cut from yet another truly eye-opening treasure from Nyege.

DJ Plead’s genre-defining album of slow and humid dance music, recorded almost entirely on a Yamaha ‘Oriental’ keyboard in the spring of 2020, finally lands back in print on this new vinyl edition made for anyone who missed it first time round, remastered by Rashad Becker. Giving us full classic/futureshock from the moment we first heard it, it’s one of those albums that’s stitched itself to the very fabric of our being over the last couple of years, becoming a sort of reference against which we’ve measured all weapons made for the sweatiest end of the night. If you’ve ever heard it out, you’ll know what we’re saying - it’s just supremely provocative, unhurried body music. Recorded at his home in Sydney during the height of that first lockdown with a wild creative energy only amplified by strict aesthetic control - almost all of the album was recorded on the one keyboard featured on the cover artwork - it’s ironic that at a time when we basically got several years worth of reflective home listening albums recorded in isolation, Plead made one of the definitive club albums of the 2020’s, even if it’s for the kinda club that keeps it on full slink. Equally influenced by vintage dancehall riddims and the inspirational glow of CS + Kreme's psycho-ambient heartmelters, Plead here dissolves his much-loved hard drum style, dropping the tempo and conserving energy levels across a suite of smutty, tense works, matching his waviest microtonal vamps with the signature, rhythmelodic lilt of his drums in a properly hypnotic style. A hazy introductory piece of autotuned vocals and subs seduces from the front, with feelings spilling out into delirious dancehall pressure with drums on some mad Mahraganat x Timbaland tip, closing on a mesmerising beatless highlight. Perfect music, made for slow dancing.

Yuri Suzuki, the sound artist and designer known for creating works that explore the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces, has become completely captivated by that silver box. Toting that infamous box and relentlessly diving deep into the swamp of Acid House, he drops a new album after nearly six years in LP format. On this record, Suzuki's finely honed squelchy old-school 303 sound, tightly mastered by the sound alchemist Rashad Becker, unfolds with precision and points toward another possible tomorrow. Each track is a sketch, carrying you through a timeless landscape of rhythm and texture and reaffirming Suzuki's unique command over sound and space.

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

Jana IRMERT « Portals » Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity. Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert.7038634357 « Rope » With uncommon mastery and precision, Rope unfolds in a suspended time that seems nonetheless ominous. As its title suggests, Rope explores the formal figure of the rope, as an interweaving of synthetic and natural fibres that hold and amalgamate, held together by the forces of tension and friction. The rope itself, as Neo Gibson explains, is knotted at regular intervals along its entire length, so that you can hang on to it. Rope unfolds slowly, evolving from the threshold of the perceptible towards denser, more ballasted electronic textures, but always on the brink of an upheaval to come. Then a melodic motif appears, seeming to carry within it an impossible consolation. In this respect, Rope balances strikingly between formal elegance, sonic gravity and an emotional charge that is almost uncontainable.

François J. Bonnet – Banshee
Banshee is an ear directed towards the edges of the old world, where these infinite fines terrae cut and fractalize into coasts, harbours, fjords, peninsulas and archipelagos. Drawing its raw material from recordings made in the Inner Hebrides, Banshee tightly weaves a fabric where the sonic avatars of fauna, flora and climate merge with the human presence, its tools and its culture. Thus, a small boat cleaving through a loch becomes the voice of the mountains and wilderness, and the howling of the wind on the moors becomes the lament of a Banshee, harbinger of death, messenger of the Other World.

Sarah Davachi – Basse Brevis
Co-commissioned by Radio France and INA grm, Basse Brevis by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi was premiered at the Présences 2024 festival, which was dedicated to Steve Reich. Drawing on her own minimalist approach, Sarah Davachi explores, with extreme care, the weavings and complex relationships between the timbral, spatial and durational components of music. Using developments that can be appreciated over time, the composer manages to create music that is extremely precise, subtle and lively. But what is striking, and particularly evident in Basse Brevis, is that such an approach, both abstract and restrained, is nonetheless at times utterly poignant. The work combines moments of formal exploration with moments of pure emotion in a perfectly mastered fashion, creating a gentle tension as it swings between two modes of listening that navigate indecisively within both instrumental and concrete approaches, tracing, in parallel, a diagonal of sound that unfolds around perception, sensation and feeling. 

François J. BONNET « Banshee » (2024)

Music composed from materials collected on the Isles of Mull, Staffa and Skye, Inner Hebrides, August 2022

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi / Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle
Photo by Didier Allard © INA / Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley

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Sarah DAVACHI « Basse Brevis » (2023)

Performed (electric organ, synthesizer, Mellotron) and recorded by Sarah Davachi at home in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi / Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle
Photo by Sean McCann / Sleeve design by Stephen O’Malley

2025 edition. Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code is the 2019 breakthrough album of the acclaimed composer’s pipe organ pieces. Her temporally informed studies of harmonics and intonation breathed life into a suite of compositions which leaves the heart moved and mind still. This 2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track Sacrificial Code III.

Pitchfork praised the album for its "time-stretching properties" and "clean minimalism". Resident Advisor described the album as an "exercise in concentration, restraint, and focus". Tiny Mix Tapes emphasized the "intensity and intimacy" of the album, pointing out how Malone's close miking technique brings out every textural detail of the organ, creating a highly focused and immersive listening experience.

48k/32bit master by Rashad Becker

The music on Horse Lords’ Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! feels both impossibly detailed and eminently human. The album’s twelve pieces are layered and interwoven, tonally and rhythmically complex––moiré-like patterns of interaction and tessellation that play out for both mind and body, full of sonic warrens with an inescapable groove. An electrifying leap forward for the band’s shared language, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! aims to liberate the listener into a spiritual, ecstatic, and utopic dimension of sound.

Discovery Zone’s Library Copy Do Not Remove is a sonic document of an immersive multimedia program originally written for and performed inside of the historic Zeiss-Groß Planetarium dome in Berlin, Germany. The album invites listeners into an eternally expanding “circular library,” an information network containing everything that ever was or will be. Passing through holographic chambers of memory, replication, and recognition, Library Copy Do Not Remove offers a reflection from the infinite mirror that lies at the boundary of the known universe.

During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? The result is aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with friends decorating this space alongside him.The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities’ first half begins with the junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame “Tem” and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and shakers on “Can Tangle.” There is a hard-won joy to these numbers, as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead end but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became a kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores across Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener “Nu Male Uno” to the uncanny amorphousness of closer “Felt Like Floating.” All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm, like the loping strut at the center of “Midpoint” and the head-nodding pulse that winds through “Persurverance,” winkingly misspelled to suit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are springboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New Age references—shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring flutes—that circle through “Midpoint” or the dub-indebted delays and gamelan hymns that bubble up through “Persurverance.” This is deeply multivalent music, each number’s propulsive core counterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness and joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here, tangling toward infinity.In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund reached out to friends—Califone’s Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album’s insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, this is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.

A Good Year is the collaborative project of producer and former Liss drummer Tobias Laust Hansen and filmmaker-turned-musician Albert R. Hildebrand. Play. moves between acoustic instrumentation, synthetic textures and loose-limbed rhythms, balancing baggy drums, bass-heavy electronics and understated guitar work with a reflective, road-trip atmosphere. Across the record, tender vocal performances and layered production give the songs a shifting sense of scale, from intimate sketches to expansive, anthem-like moments. Contributions from Horse Vision, Koilwood, Tiffi M, Quiet Light, Late Verlane, Alba Akvama, Suisse Air and MØ add further depth to its blurred mix of organic and electronic sounds.

“Eero : Eesu” is a spiritual and experimental sound‑art work by Adey Omotade, a Lagos‑born artist whose experiences across Paris, Johannesburg, Berlin, Côte d’Ivoire, and other places inform his unique fusion of Yoruba traditions with contemporary sonic practices.

“Perfect Answer,” the latest release from US underground innovator Evanora Unlimited, is a singular pop record where destruction and lyricism coexist. Featuring striking guest appearances from Maria M, RockangelZ, She Diamond, and Taraneh, each track takes on its own distinct personality, giving the album a depth and dimensionality that grows with every listen.

Following The Pocket of Fever, Ambient Sans presents the second part of Masahiro Sugaya’s visionary collaborations with avant-garde performance group Pappa TARAHUMARA, founded by Hiroshi Koike in 1982. The company fused dance, theatre, music and visual art into abstract stage environments, with Sugaya’s music serving as their emotional and conceptual core.

Music From Alejo was his first full score for the troupe—a refined work where repetition and silence mingle with luminous synthesizers and drifting melodic fragments. More structured than The Pocket of Fever, it balances modern composition with subtle inflections of Japanese tradition, evoking a sense of movement suspended between dream and reality.

Reissued for the first time on vinyl, the album includes a printed insert with an exclusive interview and photographs from Sugaya’s home in Japan. A vital rediscovery for admirers of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada and Brian Eno, it captures a quietly radical moment in Tokyo’s 1980s experimental scene.

‘Desire’ is the sophomore full-length album by TLF Trio. On ‘Desire’, the group presents their signature, contemporised chamber music through their main instruments: piano, cello and electric guitar; now enhanced by a pervasive use of sampling and a distinct use of silence as musical material.

The album is an aesthetic voyage in a musical landscape of minimalism, classical music, free improvisation, left-field-electronica, and references to pop and house music. It blends into a sound that is experimental and unpredictable – yet at the same time strangely familiar and self-explanatory.

The album’s ten pieces balance an open-ended improvisational intimacy with a tight compositional intention. Each track's repetitiveness operates as a trickling plateau of layered sentiments of times and spaces through the sampling of different acoustic rooms, the playing in specific styles and the curated selection of sounds and instrumentations; a collage of memories and associations patched together to create new meanings.