Electronic / Experimental
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Sublime downbeat pressure for the horizontally-inclined, from Lyon-based Jonnnah, chasing 2025’s co:clear side with a 2nd session of tumescent ambient textures and rolling pulses that feels like Sa Pa, CS + Kreme or even his near namesake, Jonnine, slipping off the page into deep beatdown hypnagogia... "Conceived as a form of therapy, as much as a reflection and a testimony, the record retraces a process of introspection and confrontation with one’s own history, looking back at origins, DNA, and the invisible ties that connect us to our ancestors, while opening paths toward new connections. The double-sided structure of the album makes this journey tangible. The first side lingers in uncertainty : opaque atmospheres, fragmented rhythms, and restless textures mirror the doubts, questions, and fragile states of self-analysis. The second side, in contrast, embraces clarity and resolution, dense yet luminous soundscapes where reconciliation and acceptance take shape, culminating in The Blue Comet, a piece charged with finality and revelation. Opening with the multipart suite N-zero, symbolizing the beginning of therapy, and closing with O-one, evoking the soul’s original purity, the record traces a complete emotional and spiritual cycle. Between them, the third edition of Insomnia Never Ends once again portrays the struggle between sleep and the irresistible pull of musical distraction, a fragile tension that runs through the album as a whole. The record condenses Jonnnah’s language into something rawer and more direct. Layers of dub and dub sonic resonate against ethereal ambient passages, while techno impulses maintain tension and forward motion. Each piece feels at once intimate and expansive, designed as much for solitary listening as for collective experience. A new chapter in Jonnnah’s trajectory, the album is a document of transformation : from shadow to light, from questioning to acceptance."
After nearly five decades of relentless innovation, Truus de Groot's Plus Instruments project shows no signs of slowing down. The ninth album, Unnoticed, finds the dutch Pioneer diving deeper into the experimental synthesiser palette than ever before, delivering 12 tracks of minimalist, analogue noise and her signature vocals. Recorded at The Ranch in Escondido, Unnoticed showcases her continued evolution as an artist. Often referred to as the "Queen of the Dutch Underground," de Groot is a stalwart of the experimental underground music scene since establishing Plus Instruments in 1978 in Eindhoven. Her journey has taken her from the punk rock explosion of the late '70s Netherlands to the No Wave scene of early '80s New York, where she collaborated with Sonic Youth member Lee Ranaldo and drummer David Linton on the cult classic "Februari-April ’81.” "It always comes from my own initiative; I decide who to play with. I believe that gives it new life each time," she explains. "I was always more into improvisation with a minimal approach, less structured, more groove.” The Plus Instruments project has always been characterised by its ever changing nature and collaborative spirit. She has worked with an impressive roster of artists over the years , spanning continents and genres, including James Sclavunos (Nick Cave), Jim Duckworth (Gun Club), most recently, Miguel Barella and Cosmo Vitelli, who co-writes, produces and adds programming to standout track "Sexy Machine." This creative partnership has opened new avenues for de Groot's explorations, as she continues to plough yet another field of creativity. “My path has been a long and winding road around the world, collaborating with all types of people in a variety of genres and cultures," de Groot reflects. "I am always looking for a new challenge, as I continue to seek exciting ways to express myself creatively through music, words, photography and film.” Now based back in the Netherlands, she continues her work while maintaining the core elements that have made Plus Instruments a touchstone for electronic music innovators. Her influence can be heard in everything from Electroclash to Cold Wave, with younger artists regularly seeking collaboration with the veteran experimentalist. Unnoticed arrives as de Groot enters her sixth decade of music-making, proving that true artistic vision only grows stronger with time.
APORIAMOR noun 1. The death of love’s contradiction. | “Embody APORIAMOR” Etymology aporia-: an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory. from Greek aporos ‘impassable’, from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage’ -amor: love. Sentimiento intenso del ser humano que, partiendo de su propia insuficiencia, necesita y busca el encuentro y unión con otro ser. Del latín amor. -mor: latin for death. APORIAMOR explores the affective ontological and organic processes of love and lust in the turmoil of an urban existence, through the female lens. It expresses the process of strengthening through heartbreak in its various forms. With her debut EP The Art of the Concrete, elsas knew that by giving that name to a record which was ironically expansive and experimental, she would be calling for a distilled and clearer path further down the line. This is what she’s been incorporating into the sonic world of this new EP, APORIAMOR, signifying the birth of a more matured and distilled version of herself as an artist. With APORIAMOR (“the death of love’s contradiction”) elsas conveys a personal process of healing in the romantic space. Through different experiences of heartbreak, elsas builds a language - a coping mechanism attached to its subsequent artistic expression – that isn’t founded on hardness or a closing-off, but instead, on a playful but profound reckoning, and learning of self-worth. APORIAMOR embraces the complexities of being a lover-girl: of moving through life with an open heart. It celebrates the clarity, sweet hindsight, and detachment that come from processing emotion. APORIAMOR is both an affirmation and a release. elsas makes canonical blends with a forward boundary-bending vision. Her sound in this record is naturally referential of both her Mediterranean heritage and UK alternative music — intrinsic parts of her lived experience. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with artists she deeply admires, each exchange enriching her creative world. The experience of working hand-in-hand with Sampha for the last 3 years and ongoingly has been a core of her evolution as an artist. She has also collaborated in many forms with artists like Florence + the Machine, Little Simz, Jordan Rakei, Jockstrap, Obongjayar, Black Country New Road, Genevieve Artadi (KNOWER) and Duval Timothy. Additionally, her ongoing work with the Idrîsî Ensemble, of which she is a core member, continues to inform her artistic depth. The making of this largely self-produced record unfolded over four years — “it’s a well-kneaded dough,” she says. These songs evolved through exposure to multiple environments: from early writing sessions in her childhood home in the Spanish countryside, to stages across the U.S. while on tour supporting Sampha. Experimentation and modulation are an intrinsic part of elsas’ method, conceiving songs as organisms that respond to their surroundings. Collaborators on this collection of songs include Shrink, Will Lister, Gabriel Gifford, Ethan P. Flynn and more. The record was mixed by David Wrench (a long-time supporter of elsas’) and Nathan Boddy, and mastered by Matt Colton. With APORIAMOR, elsas creates a visual world from the fabulation of the past, as an act of playful historical revisionism in which she embeds herself as both subject and storyteller. The songs function like an archive of her experiences across various years, each one unearthed and presented as some sort of archaeological artifact. Through this body of work, elsas begins to conceptualize herself as a legacy artist: one who honors the archive of her own becoming while emerging as a distinct and resonant voice in today’s musical landscape.
Aspen Edities is pleased to present Aerial, the third album of the experimental quartet Oker. Whereas their album debut Husene våre er museer (2018) and its follow-up Susurrus (2021) focused on collective and individual compositions, Aerial features two longform pieces of fully improvised music, sculpted from the recognizable acoustic sound palette that the quartet has developed across a decade of extensive touring. The titles, Aerial, Equinoctial Tide and Crepuscular Rays refer to meteorological and planetary phenomena, and in Oker’s interplay we hear light, wind, clouds, and tidal cycles transpire as shimmering, roaring, rubbing, coalescing and diverging environments of sound. The sonic stoicism and minimalism in their expression is challenged by frictioning micro-chaoses, combining to create calm, winding paths of musical detail and form. Echoing our planet and its meteorological reality, Aerial yields both consistency and perpetual change.
Kakuhan, a unit of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, has released a self-released CD, which has been sold exclusively at live venues, on "Nakid," a hot label run by Koshiro Hino, who is also well known for his activities with goat and YPY and for running "birdFriend," and has released such powerful artists as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Mark Fell & Will Guthrie. The CD is a self-released CD by Kakuhan, a unit consisting of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, which has been sold exclusively at live venues and has won critical acclaim!
The CD includes a live performance by KAKUHAN, a unit consisting of YPY, Hino Koshiro, and cellist Nakagawa Hiroki, at the "Feldman meets freq 2022" event held at Kyushu University in February 2022.
KAKUHAN's first album "Metalzone", released at the end of 2022, was voted the 5th best release of 2022 by Boomkat and the 5th best album of the year by Music Magazine in the best electronic music category. The CD contains a total of six songs, including the previous night's "Prototype," a song from the same album, and includes a song that can only be heard on this CD.
As the unit name suggests, the various elements of both artists' activities-"electronic music/strings," "contemporary/club music," "traditional/contemporary," "physical/metaphysical," "composition/improvisation"-are literally "stirred" in the performance. It is highly recommended to listen to it together with "Metalzone"!
Yep, it’s a compilation. A marker for the first year of Short Span and a road map into the future maybe. Featuring a mix of artists already heavily involved in the label who’ve had releases out this year. As well as those with future material prepared and awaiting careful hands plating them to metal under the shadow of ski village in Sheffield and then wax in East Lothian some time in 2026. Plus a wider net of friends and admired artists making contemporary music that feels closely connected to the label right now.
There’s a lot of different narratives, meanings, and histories backwards and forwards contained on these two discs and its tempting as the compiler to dig deeply into those and write an accompanying essay...
About how the entire compilation was born from Conna sending over his tune that had started as a playful chop and screw of a Mammo track from General Patterns. How the a.m.p tune has Ben from Purelink loosely playing the keys over it during a party session.
That the Klaus and Mount Kimbie one has been sat travelling from hard drive to hard drive for years with the hope it could be released one day at the right moment. That intermountain is a freshly minted alias for IS and the False Aralia ecosystem. That I reached out to caitlin c harvey after being introduced to her wonderful music via the inspiring Submerge Sessions compilation, which recently collected work from a new school of Detroit music formed in community and tutored by some of the Underground Resistance crew…
But in sum total its just Short Span setting out its table and focusing in on publishing new music. Interesting music. Dialling in on dub and ambient and techno in different forms and qualities that hope to catch the ear and the heart. With some of the most interesting and exciting artists and tune-makers of the moment featuring in here. And a couple of geographic focal points of creativity and shared musical language coalescing in amongst that.
Two discs, two sequences you can listen through in entirety or split into listening sessions. I tried to sequence things so that it flows nicely and suits different moods. A bit of a mixtape.
Rio’s Felinto channel the punkish ‘80s vim and license of Os Replicantes on a pair of crazed, shouty, scrappy calls to resistance, issued in aid of activists in the favelas.
"Fresh from annihilating EU/UK audiences with his steppas tropicalia on the Bokeh Dekalog tour, Felinto presents a crazed vision of Sao Paulo party punk - industrial scuzz, dub squelch, grinding guitars and riot-ready vocals.
Festa Punk is a call to rage, to ritual, to celebration — as forms of resistance against the grim, creeping global fascism. It’s a shout to bend time, to create moments that shake off erased identities and flip the script on a world that treats violence like gospel.
It's also a homage to Brazilian hxc heroes, Os Replicantes, whose classic 'Fest Punk' appeared on the '87 LP Histórias De Sexo E Violência."
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.
The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.
“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”
The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.
Where will the improvisation take place?
How will that space shape the sounds being made?
How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?
How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?
Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?
For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.
Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.
Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.
Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”
On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.
That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.
In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.
The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.
“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.
Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.
Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.
And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.
Following the release of the well received Rave ‘Till You Cry compilation of unreleased versions from the vaults in 2019, Disciples follow it up (a mere 5 years later!) with a new album from Rephlex alumni Bogdan Raczynski, complete with another manifesto style title: You’re Only Young Once But You Can Be Stupid Forever.
A collection of warmly melodic electronic sketches, with tracks alternately drifting beatless on the breeze or underpinned by lo-fi drums, sometimes barely held together with a delicate construction of odd synth patches and ping-pong percussion. Each piece is short and to the point, a record of perfect miniatures. Whilst this description may sound utopian, the album is conceived around themes of late stage capitalist brutality, hyper consumerism, online doom and alogorhithmic apocalypse. Beauty in the face of planetary collapse and 24/7 livestreamed genocide. The theme summed up by the front cover which just features a giant (readable) QR code, that most ubiquitous of modern symbols. We’ve asked Bogdan on several occasions for more background information on the creation of these tracks, but received a different answer each time. One of the below statements might be true, though it’s equally possible that none of them are, just like the real news.
1) All these tracks are a result of Bogdan asking AI to make an EDM album.
2) These tracks originated in a desperate bid by Bogdan to crack the lucrative mood / chill / coffee / gym algorithmic playlist market.
3) All of these tracks were commissioned for a Tesla infomercial but rejected when Elon Musk heard them.
4) The music on this album is over ten years old.
5) The music on this album was made in a furious weekend of creative inspiration in early 2024.
The QR code on the cover takes listeners to an ever-evolving page on Bogdan’s website which may delve into some of these theories in more detail, or ignore them completely.
We leave you with Bogdan’s text in the booklet that accompanied Rave ‘Till You Cry as the closest we may ever get to some kind of logical reasoning:
“Burn the damned art labels. Ambiguity is wonder. Information is an affront to expression, a death knell to spontaneity. For if an explanation is required, then a connection has failed to be made. Art should be like an overtone, resonating invisibly with your history to form an ethereal experience. Either it hits you or it’s wrong time, wrong place. To hell with the dawdling interviews and vanity shots. One turns to music precisely because it least resembles what’s in the mirror. Put away the arrogance and pride, and boast and bias. With each word uttered, your mystery wanes. Your shimmer dims. In my nostalgia, your light show is drowned out by the ricochet of soundwaves. Art is best when all else is drowned out. Black as though the moon forgot to come out. Let the night cover my flailing humanity like a veil. Gangly arms tangled, feet aflutter, yet all but silent against the din. This is not an escape. This is me screaming, happily, inside, out through my fingertips. This is my beck and call. Carefully assembled to drw forth some other form of you. May we partake in this moment together, for just a little longer.”
A sequel. An escalation. Pressure spikes from bar one: future-facing, low-latency. A firmware update for the body. Cuts bite into cuts. Fragments swarm, collide, die out. Drums stumble until they speak; samples crop up without names and leave without warning. Momentum is the one and only rule. Unpredictable, gridless, post-genre. From TikTok feed to vinyl: born digital, cut for the floor. The glitch grows a body, develops a nervous system. Match it or get out of the way. Damned be the ones that are stuck on tradition.
unification of techno and dub reggae. An outstanding universal masterpiece of sound dub/minimal techno released in 1993 by Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel, repressed in 2025.
FELT enters 2026 with a newly established sub label for reissues, retrospectives and oddball adjacent non-FELT material under the anagram catch-all LEFT. First on the agenda is a vinyl issue of a modern classical tape by Danish guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth, founding member of the band Iceage. Initially released on a limited cassette edition and plucked from the vast catalogue of the Copenhagen label Posh Isolation, the solo project Health & Safety can be read as composers meditation on anxiety, depression, insomnia and all the damned things they entangle. Wieth moves across the spectrum with dour, deliberate keys, mangled drone fx, barely-there violin scrapes, erratic chimes and whistles and with a knowing pace that feels akin to a guiding hand. We’re unsure if the form of each piece is meant to directly correlate to the drug so referenced but the quiet fever dream atmosphere of the 25 minutes also blurs each piece into a whole. This quote from Wieth certainly rings true for the highly introspective nature of Health & Safety - “You should be very careful listening to too much music when you're writing an album. It has a tendency to become a little too explicit”
Cult digidub mutators Froid Dub slow their steez to deeply knackered, ghostly levels on a follow-up to joints with Krikor and Ransom Note. Back with Parisian patrons Delodio, the pair bring a deep studio knowledge earned since the ‘90s (and their days together as Bosco) to a half hour of purposefully sluggish pressure slanted at the earliest or latest hours of the night/day. With Black Roots Players’ ‘Slow Tempo’ riddim possibly in the back of their mind, they keep it all heavily downbeat and rent with a psychoacoustic nous that draws lines between The Black Ark, GRM, and DJ Screw. ‘Deep’ feels like the onset of a space cake, all super blunted vox and wiggy synths, and ‘The Swap’ snaps tightly to slowed digidub templates, next to echoes of ’Slow Tempo’ in the cranky chords of the title tune. They really let the bass flare in acres of space on the spangled zingers ‘Too Digital’ and an acidic ‘Love’, whilst crossing lines with Full Circle’s proto-goa trance in ‘Diggin’’ and the swampy motion of ‘No Sense’.
A mutant beat manifesto from Miami luminaries Jonathan Trujillo (Jonny from Space) and Pablo Arrangoiz (El Gusano, DJ Fitness, Baüzer Vep), Crespi Drum Syndicate’s Colada Talk follows the duo’s debut on Sonido Isla with a freshly freaked collection of percussive oddities. Rooted in foundational clave rhythms and avant-garde experimentation, Crespi Drum Syndicate emerges from the amphibious underbelly of Miami’s Latin-infused club scene with their singular electro-acoustic vision. Extensive live recording sessions, free improvisation, and a ritualistic studio practice — countless hours spent twisting and rearranging sounds from found objects and Buchla modular systems — coalesce into new rhythmic forms. Atonal saxophone, bass clarinet, and slide whistle further expand upon Trujillo and Arrangoiz’s ever-evolving sonic palette, while NYC’s AceMo lends a hand on the heavily syncopated “Siu,” and closer “Boubow” might be the duo’s most hook-driven production to date with its mangled pop vocal and lewd drum-line bounce. Landing somewhere between Steve Reich’s polyrhythmic “Six Marimbas,” Moebius & Plank’s industrial Krautrock sessions, and Ricardo Villalobos’ hypnotic techno minimalism, Colada Talk delivers on a world of subtropical rhythmic futurism and experimental body music that’s as heady as it is culo-shaking. -Phil Cho
Crying Outcast returns with its third release, landing close to home with legendary dub innovator The Rootsman. Bradford’s own and a true pioneering force in experimental dub since the 90s, The Rootsman’s influence can be deeply traced throughout the underground. Roots Return gathers three essential works from his catalogue, including collaborations with Celtarabia and Russ (The Disciples) as Pachakuti, alongside a light-headed reinterpretation from label head Miles J Paralysis.
John Howes continues his micro-dub techno work as Paperclip Minimiser, landing on Blank Mind with Topology Transform. Drawn from the same sessions as his recent album, these three tracks extend his finely tuned, system-led approach. Based in the UK’s North West, Howes builds custom tools via Cong Burn, shaping a sound that threads broken techno, clicks-and-cuts minimalism and UK bass. The A side pairs fast, detailed percussion with a more open half-time counterpart, while the B side moves into a beatless ambient stretch. Across the record, precision meets warmth, with each track reinforcing a cohesive, carefully engineered sound world.
Go Hirano - Piano, Pianica, Windchime, Percussion, Electronics, and Effects
Tracks A1, A2, A4, B1, B4 recorded live in October 2020 at Pianola Records, Tokyo
Piano Tuning and voicing by Emi Hatakeyama
Recorded by Makoto Oshiro
The remaining tracks were recorded in the late 1980's-2019 and remixed in 2019
Introducing Luka Lickshot aka Luke Palmer aka the Wolverhampton Wolverine, reggae DJ and genre warping producer of all things low end inclined. In previous incarnations Luke has released hypnagogic house for labels such as Workshop and Third Ear, but with his debut LP release ‘Shots Fired’ he takes a sharp turn into the leftfield. Sonically triangulating early 80s Manc post punk existentialism, 90s darkside trip hop and UK (On-U) sound system culture, the result is something like a more ruffneck Massive Attack jamming with Dome in the Black Ark. ‘Shots Fired’ was forged in an underground Peckham hideout, under strict parameters of time and space, fusing conventional instrumentation with digi know-how, improvised vocals, one take licks and dub fx. Pretty much impossible to pigeonhole the ten tracks but adjacent to / resonant with Giulio Erasmus, DJ Marcelle, Tricky, ‘Hex’….
Laputa, a title taken from the fantastical floating island of Gulliver's Travels is aptly named as 'The album that never landed' for, apart from a limited touchdown in Japan, Laputa was never released. This mystical world is a summation of Yokota's journey so far, a complex and at times challenging work but immeasurably rewarding. Beguiling and bewitching in equal measure. Over fifteen undulating sonic fugue states, he guides listeners round a liminal world, made up of familiar materials but formed in a way defying all laws of perspective and physics. Background murmurings give way to almost uncomfortably foregrounded chattering, and one perceived soundstage segues into another impossible tableau of sonic apparitions, some recognisable in form, but all boldly decontextualised and arranged in expertly cluttered amalgams. Laputa's obscurity was a prime reason Lo Recordings decided on the Skintone retrospective. Falling as it did between The Boy and the Tree on The Leaf Label and our own debut of Symbol. It was something of an audio crime that the album had never been properly explored and discovered. Lo Recordings hope Laputa can now ascend to its rightful place... hovering above us.