Electronic / Experimental

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.

Rediscovered and compiled for release shortly before her death in November 2023, Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord presents a never-before-heard recording of composer and artist Catherine Christer Hennix’s early magnum opus. Originally debuted in 1976 at the festival Brouwer’s Lattice at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, The Electric Harpsichord has steadily mystified fans and students of Western minimalist music for its implacable, transformative qualities, and the long-held, relative obscurity of its creator. Like the work of Hennix’s close friend La Monte Young, the piece is set in just intonation and focuses on the transcendental potentials of precise tuning, inspired by their studies with Pandit Pran Nath. Composed of bursts of oscillating, synthetic tones using a carefully retuned synthesizer and a tape-based system for feedback delay, the sounds swirl, twinkle, and appear to bend time, space, and perception. Additional, sustained chords on the sheng, most likely played by her Deontic Miracle bandmate Hans Isgren, are present at the opening of the piece and reemerge towards the end of the recording.The release of Further Selections constitutes the most comprehensive original recording of this foundational work to date. Originally billed as The Well-Tuned Organ during its debut in Sweden, The Electric Harpsichord has developed a legendary reputation, predicated on a twenty-six minute fragment salvaged and circulated by Hennix’s friend Henry Flynt. Promoting its importance on multiple occasions, Flynt aired the work on WBAI radio, organized a pair of tape concerts at New York alternative arts spaces in 1970s, and later penned a 1998 essay which served as the liner notes to its eventual CD release in 2010. For him, this work not only represented a sterling milestone in minimal sonic aesthetics, but also spawned a new genre that he dubbed “hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound environments (HESE),” which in turn inspired his own drone-like compositions. Gradually, interest in the recording led to a spate of archival projects, public performances, and new compositions by Hennix in the 2010s, in turn drawing into focus her multifarious practice, which includes serious contributions towards mathematics, poetry, sculpture, Noh drama, philosophy, and light art. Since 2018, Blank Forms has spearheaded a comprehensive publication effort in support of her work, including the writing collection Poësy Matters and Other Matters (2018); archival recordings like Selected Early Keyboard Works (2018) and The Deontic Miracle’s Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (2019); and recent compositions such as Blues Alif Lam Mim (2021) and Solo for Tamburium (2023).

Neo Gibson records, performs, and produces under the alias 7038634357. Their music is characterized by its formal precision, melodic structure, and an idiosyncratic emotional tenor. Up until this point, it has been primarily self-released on small-batch CD-R’s and performed in intimate settings. Synthesized and recorded entirely on their computer, Neo Seven is their first vinyl record, and perhaps their seventh release depending on where you begin amidst their prolific and fluid output. Within a runtime of just over thirty minutes, Neo Seven contains a spare, beautiful, and raw journey through the artist's emotive, psychologically-charged ambient songwriting. The album’s seven tracks bleed into and out of one another, continually forming and deforming between soundscape, song, and silence. The record opens slowly with Winded, as brief intervals of soft noise, nearly indistinguishable from dust breeding on the turntable, gradually become the ground upon which harmonic form is built. As tones subtly shift across regular lulls of sound, one gets the sense they’re traveling amidst a pulsar in deep space. Neo’s heavily-processed melodies, gated regularly by silence, form the heartbeat of the record, creating an expansive field in which an interior, subjective journey takes place. Square Heart utilizes this motif to rhythmic ends, in what surprisingly develops into an achingly tender pop song, albeit one in which Neo’s robotic, heavily vocoded voice is distant, sullen, and mixed low. As each track explores its own interior logic, complex forms emerge out of simple structures, and layers of oscillations commingle and build upon one another. Rhythmic cuts of compressive texture begin to feel like meteors burning up in the atmosphere or hail upon the windshield. The record begins and ends with Neo’s slowly built-up waves of ambient harmony being cut by grating digital noise. On the final track, Perfect Night, beneath the thrashing, a song-form appears nearly inaudibly. Hidden beneath the noise, Neo’s voice bears a clarity and a softness that is revealed only momentarily, when the noise flitters out cinematically toward the end of the track.

This is the first album by Teno Afrika, a hot project led by Lutendo Raduvha, a 21-year-old young musician who is one of the most important figures in the latest "Amapiano" movement born in South Africa, where homegrown jazz, boogie, Afro-house, kwaito, etc. are rapidly being revived. This is the first album from Teno Afrika, a project led by Lutendo Raduvha, a 21-year-old young musician who is a key figure in the latest Amapiano movement emerging in South Africa. Born in the townships of Gauteng, South Africa, Teno Afrika has rapidly gained momentum over the past five years, evolving into a nationwide mainstream genre of "amapiano," a new genre influenced by kwaito. Having spent most of his life moving back and forth between Johannesburg and various townships in the suburbs of Pretoria, Gauteng, he has incorporated the influences of these areas into this exciting new collection of Afro-dance tracks.

the debut release of shanghai based producer “knopha” on mule musiq. we loved his release “nothing nil” on eating music. our friend yusu introduced him to us and he sent us very beautiful musics. it’s an oriental beautiful new age music. kuniyuki made a magical remix. hope you like it

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

We are pleased to reissue the masterpiece cassette of the early Acid Mothers Temple, which is an exquisite mix of psychedelic and noise that creates an unidentifiable sound. The reason for the mysteriousness of the sound is the editing that forms the composition and development of the sound in a way that would normally be unthinkable, and will reaffirm the uniqueness of Acid Mothers Temple.

(advaita records)

In the fall of 2022, celebrated UK chill-out institution Seahawks landed in Los Angeles for the first time in their 15-year history, with plans to record a sweeping new age downtempo “exploration of visionary California.” Instead, they immediately fell ill with flu (Fowler collapsed next to a taco truck; 911 was called), and were bedridden for the better part of a week. Upon recovering, they resituated at the synthesizer sanctuary of Brian Foote (Peak Oil, Kranky, Leech), channeling their post-sickness psychedelia into one of the band’s lushest and most elevated creations to date: Time Enough For Love. Inspired by the “groove and mood” of Harry Nilsson demos, as well as its wider 70’s wavelength – Rhodes, Wurlitzer, wood paneling – Seahawks transposed their classic post-rave ambient exotica onto a warm and woozy Golden State palette. Buoyed by the liquid touch of English maestro Kenny Dickenson on keys, the results rank high among the duo’s smoothest and most multi-sensory voyages. “Sail Across The Moon” delivers on its title, a simmering, phaser-smeared cruise through the beauty of the night. “Messengers” echoes the cosmic lounge of Air’s Moon Safari, shuffling, weightless, and ethereal, while “Falling Deep” reaches for the stars, pure cascading bliss, the ecstatic moment writ large. The album skews steadily more astral as it progresses, drifting towards jazzy, galactic outer reaches. “Like A Grain Of Sand” opens with a spoken sample by the celebrated late American poet Rachel Sherwood (“The children watch, breathless / with the birds / They feel an emanation / from this shuddering place”), before taking flight on a Balearic trip through island house, PM Dawn gold dust, upright bass meditation, and kaleidoscopic light. A remix of the title track by Chicago trio Purelink closes the record in a suitably subdued and skittery state of mind. Time Enough For Love radiates color, complexity, and positivity, infused by the “life enhancing” nature of the band's time in Los Angeles – sunsets, sound systems, and sativa, framed by coastlines and cloudbanks, the city’s mystic sprawl glittering beneath purple dusk.

Masahiro Sugaya began his career in the 1980s, working alongside the environmental music scene of that era while also making a significant impact in stage music through his involvement with Pappa TARAHUMARA.

Over the past 20 years, Sugaya has shifted from traditional composition using instrumental music to creating works for 8-channel multi-speaker systems, incorporating environmental sounds and field recordings. His latest album continues this evolution, featuring collages of environmental sounds within individual tracks. The album is structured to balance past and new works, creating a collage-like representation of Sugaya’s diverse creative output.

"しるしまみれ / Overflowing Signs" offers an experience that navigates freely between Sugaya’s environmental music approach and his practices in field recording and musique concrète, presenting a sequence of sounds that defies easy categorization or symbolism. Additionally, this album marks Sugaya’s first stereo full album release in nearly 20 years.

This release holds special significance as it captures MC Conrad’s final recording session, completed just days before his passing. On the day of the session, Conrad and DJ Prime Cuts laid down the chorus for Together, with plans for further writing that tragically never came to be. This release is both a tribute and a responsibility for DJ Prime Cuts, honoring Conrad’s last creative contribution and sharing it with the world. Proceeds from the single will go toward the MC Conrad Foundation and a GoFundMe campaign, supporting Conrad’s son and continuing his legacy. A-side Together is a vibrant electro-funk track combining chopped vocals, jazz-infused loops, and MC Conrad’s legendary voice. DJ Prime Cuts’ production masterfully blends the soulful essence of Roy Ayers with innovative, future-forward rhythms. The 130 BPM tempo breaks from Conrad’s typical work, but this track pushes beyond genres, creating a timeless piece that speaks to both artists’ versatility. The B-side, Our Time Is Now, stands as a high-energy tribute to Roy Ayers. It showcases DJ Prime Cuts’ prowess as a producer, blending deep basslines with techno-infused elements to create a track that’s both innovative and nostalgic. Originally conceived as part of the tribute to Ayers, the track celebrates the present moment and is a powerful homage to one of music’s greatest legends. With its infectious rhythm and dynamic production, Our Time Is Now is a must-listen for electronic music fans and Roy Ayers.

Drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist Valentina Magaletti’s explorative percussions join Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia’s singular beat-making for an exciting new collaboration in dance music. From the first beat, listeners are drawn into a world where rhythm reigns supreme and movement is inevitable. The album explores a diverse yet universal musical language through syncopated drum patterns, pulsating marimba lines, and melodic interludes.

'Shardcore' is the debut full length from Myriad Myriads, aka Bass Clef, a return to the dancefloor refracted into ten thousand kind shards, revolving. "Those waves! Soon I'm going to try once more to draw something wavelike. But how can you simplify something as complicated as a wave in the open sea to something comprehensible?" Escher Recorded in The Hague. Elektron M:C and M:S / FMR audio RNLA and RNC.

Taking off from Beaugars Seck’s foundational sabar drum rhythms — recorded by Sam in Dakar in February 2020 — Shackleton has constructed a trio of intricately layered, luminous, enchanted, epic excursions. The second is more dazzled and meandering, with jellied bass, insectile detail, and discombobulated jabbering; the third is more liquid, fleet of foot, and psychedelic, with a grooving b-line and funky keyboard stabs, scrambled eastern strings and hypnotic vocalese. The harmonium in The Overwhelming Yes sounds like Nico blowing in chillily from up the desert shore. The overall mood is wondrous, twinkling with light, onwards-and-upwards; an uncanny, dubwise mix of the ancient and the futuristic. Mark Ernestus’ Version is stripped, trepidatious, mystical, and stranger still, with just a snatch of the original melody, extra distortion and delay, and crystal-clear drum sound. Twenty minutes of startlingly original music, with Shackleton the maestro at the top of his game, and a characteristically evilous dub by Mark Ernestus. Mastered by Rashad Becker; handsomely sleeved. Sick to the nth. Love 4 Ever.

Le Jardin des Plantes, in four parts, for cello and electronics. A place in Paris and a novel by Claude Simon. Memory spaces, a source, a scrying of time. – Anton Lukoszevieze

Masahiro Sugaya, a Grammy-nominated composer whose works have been featured in the Japanese ambient compilation "Kankyo Ongaku" by the US label "Light In The Attic," has received remarkable acclaim from overseas in recent years. The world's first reissue and first LP of the stage music "Sea Zoo" (1988), created for a stage performance by Papa Tarahumara, a performing arts group to which Sugaya belonged at the time!

Masahiro Sugaya has been active as a composer since the early 80's, studying under eminent composers such as Shigeaki Saegusa, Joji Yuasa, and Teizo Matsumura, and also worked as an arranger for NHK Educational TV's "Diary of a Junior High School Student" and for the guitar duo "Gonchichi". This album was produced for the stage performance "Sea Zoo" by the performing arts group "Papa Tarahumara," for which he has worked as a composer since 1987, and was released only in CD format at the time. This album was released only in CD format at the time, and its tracks were included in the Grammy-nominated Japanese new age/ambient compilation "Kankyo Ongaku" by the US label Light In The Attic, and the compilation "Horizon Vol. 1" was released by the US label Empire of Signs, which also reissues leading Japanese ambient artists such as Hiroshi Yoshimura and Inoyama Yamaland. Although there have been reissues of single tracks, this is the world's first reissue of an album, and the first release in LP format! The album includes "Grains of Sand from the Sea" (M2), which is a mixture of delicate piano and soft electronic sounds from "Kankyo Ongaku", and "To the End of the World" (M7), which is full of floating feeling with minimalist soft sequences from "Horizon Vol. 1", This is a historical masterpiece that evokes the essence of Japanese ambient music, which has been reevaluated worldwide in recent years!

Colin Self travels to and from one realm to another on ∞ levity for the nameless ghost in crisis, the Berlin and New York-based artist’s third album, conjuring uncanny voices through their own singular singing style. Material and immaterial, fixities and fluidities, bodies and souls: such distinctions matter little in the looping, ever-crossing world of r∞L4nGc, where radiant, limitless beauty and boundless, inescapable terror are one and the same.

The Weeks Island project began in 2018 when, itching for something during a break from his gig playing guitar for the Grammy-winning Cajun group Lost Bayou Ramblers, Jonny Campos ventured to his bandmate's house and recorded a series of deep, amoebic, ambient pedal steel passages across two afternoons. It wasn't all heavy, though: he paid that bandmate, Kirkland Middleton, in Cane's chicken strips.The tracks on Droste are named for bodies of water that no longer exist, their names wiped from maps thanks to the disintegrating shorelines of Southern Louisiana. That feeling of impermanence hangs over this record - the tracks don't so much begin and end as slip in and out of your consciousness. It can be a serene passive listen or a deep one that marinates long after the runout.Droste originally appeared on Nouveau Electric Records, run by another Rambler, Louis Michot, in 2020, digitally and on cassette. DFA picked it up via an connection from LCD Soundsystem's Korey Richey, and began a years-long process to cut the record to vinyl, a task made difficult by the sharp pedal steel and waves of harmonic distortion that color the music. After more than a few tries and the addition of three brand new tracks, Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service nailed it, and it was pressed beautifully at Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA.

Super sweet sleepover core from the turn of the millennium. When not at the mall or elementary school, Jessica, Ayden, Janet, and Mary created a suburban Spice World all their own, singing, dancing, and making videos in anticipation of a global pop takeover. Summer 2000 expands their home-burned Y2K CD-R Stardust, encapsulating girl group R&B, trip hop, Eurofunk, and pool party heartbreak into a revealing portrait of millennial girlhood. Party til 2, sleep til 1, come on baby let's have some fun.

The 006 on the imprint is "Versions Vol. 2" a new mixtape written and produced by NPLGNN Messing around with a big bunch of samples NPLGNN chops, resynthesizes and assembles them in a no-nonsense sonic collage flux 100% Sound-System fuckery Around 42 mins through MCs toasting, pitched amens, dub glitches, screwed recordings and moody red-eyed interludes

Originally released in 2018 in a very limited series of 50 cassettes the 003 of the Japanese legend Yousuke Yukimatsu is now repressed and restyled for a 2024 150 units edition. Six years later Yousuke has skyroked and now known all around the world for his amazing DJ skillz and unique music taste. We told you so back then and we are so happy to see that happen. --- 2018 press release: Founder of Zone Uknown, Dommune selector and recent affiliate of Asian Dope Boys, Yousuke Yukimatsu (Osaka, 1979) is a key figure in the Japanese electronic culture. If you see him playing is impossible to don't get caught by his unique and somehow visceral style of DJing. For MBE series he recorded 90 minutes of music made strictly by Japanese artists offering us an extraordinary wide-eyed perspective on the far east electronic culture. Imagine to be in Osaka or in Tokyo in an overcrowded obscure underground small cave listening to some sweating freaks playing distorted noise, or sitting on a bamboo mat in a machiya while Shigeo Tanaka is playing the yumi, or being in the Hozen Ji temple reaching the ascension with the chants of the priests, or getting lost into a cyberpunk scenario with DJs spinning dark techno into a foggy warehouse with just a low strobe light on.. well you can just get a glimpse of what this tape is.

Reissue of Bass music inspired new roots classic!

Downtempo, Psychedelic, Techno … Using the Turkish psychedelic project Insanlar as a jump off point, Honest Jon’s have enlisted Ricardo Villalobos to turn out one of his grandiose remix projects that gels so naturally with more exotic sound sources.

De Leon returns to Mana, following their 2018 LP, offering a suite of new material that adds further waypoints to the map of their cryptic soundworld, deepening and expanding the direction of travel they began within the Aught collective. The dual legacies of Javanese gamelan and minimalist composition remain clear touchstones on this second, untitled album, which employs architectures of repetition and microtonality and evokes the musical heritage of the Bay Area whilst folding in the arid landscapes of Tucson, Arizona, where its compositions were conceived in part. Featuring a broad vocabulary of source material, notably Daniel Schmidt’s gamelan at Mills College and the spherical gongs on the album’s cover, combined with a homespun collection of prepared instruments and faint vapours of synthesis, De Leon crafts a distinct signature sound that evades alignment with conventions of academic composition and contemporary electronica but nods to both as it carves out its unique direction of travel. This album inscribes itself into a tradition of works that enable listeners to perceive deeper valences of time and psychedelic aesthetics of scale. Percussion and metallophones fluctuate within the virtual space of the recording and the sounds avoid stasis, rather undulating restlessly or flickering in and out of perception in a manner consistent with the mercurial sensibilities of their early De Leon recordings.

Moritz von Oswald, who has laid the groundwork for a deep interaction between genuine Jamaican dub and Detroit-style classic techno through his collaborations with Mark Ernestus, dub techno legend =Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, is creating ambient techno. Moritz Von Oswald Trio, a legendary trio teamed up with Max Loderbauer of Sun Electric, the pioneer of , and Vladislav Delay, a master of avant-garde electronic music from Northern Europe and Finland. The fifth album "Sounding Lines" released in 2015 from London's prestigious is in stock!