Electronic / Experimental

A unique and brilliant collaboration between the legendary dub/reggae pioneer and German electronic production duo Mouse on Mars (aka Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma). Lee "Scratch" Perry's last ever official album project before his passing in 2019. Recorded in 3 days at Mouse on Mars' Paraverse Studio in Berlin in 2019. Lee, Jan and Andi conducted a revolving cast of musicians and collaborators throughout the complex's different rooms and spaces. Spatial, No Problem. finds the artists breaking new ground - the one thing Lee was sure of was that this shouldn't be just another reggae album. It covers everything from krautrock, ambient, dub, jazz, New Orleans brass and much more.

This is the second album after the transfer of the company, which was released in 1995, and is a compilation of songs created between 1990 and 1994. The album is a work that encompasses the dichotomy and diversity of the Aphex Twin, with acid, noise, and broken beats that could be described as "drill'n'bass," while following the ambient, IDM, and hardcore techno of the early days. The album contains 12 tracks, including the single "Ventolin," which is a strong industrial downtempo explosion, and "Alberto Balsalm," a song that is often mentioned alongside "Xtal. 180g vinyl.

‘Dimension Intrusion’ was the first full-length studio album by Richie Hawtin, who was 22 years old at the time and living in Windsor, Canada. It was first released in June 1993 under the F.U.S.E. name on Hawtin’s own Plus 8 Records imprint and again as the second release of Warp Records seminal ‘Artificial Intelligence’ series. 

The album compiled previously released F.U.S.E. EPs from Plus 8 complemented with new music specially recorded for this release. It would be a fundamental album for the young producer, who was experimenting with different themes and techniques to find his very own sound. Largely inspired by sci-fi movies he used a collection of synthesizers and drum machines, playing with their electronic yet warm sound effects and in turn discovering some of his favorite instruments. 

The tracks on ‘Dimension Intrusion’ range from club focused techno to soundtrack ambience and can be seen retrospectively as experiments leading to what would soon become Hawtin’s trademark acid laced Plastikman sound. 

It was on this album that he first collaborated with his brother, Matthew Hawtin, presenting an original painting completed in 1992 as the album artwork. In fact the album title was derived from this painting’s title ‘Dimension Intrusion’, demonstrating the reciprocal inspiration shared between the brothers. The acrylic painting oscillates between the one and two-dimensional. The composition of geometrical beams in bold primary colors and sharp lines evokes electrically charged movement and progression in and out of different dimensions. The visual tension corresponds with the energetic rhythms of the music, furthermore, the abstract painting and techno music share machine-like precision whilst producing a sensual and emotionally triggering experience. 

Dimension Intrusion’ is an iconic album in the history of electronic music that sets Richie Hawtin on a path of exploration and interest in the connection of audio and visual expression. 

First time reissue. In 1992, Warp's participation in the compilation "Artificial Intelligence", which presented a new way of techno music, attracted attention. Autecha, who embarked on a daring experiment with 1999's Amber, has since become an artist representing IDM/electronica and has remained a solitary presence.

Infamously the first artist signed to Warp that used guitars, Seefeel return with their first full-length album in fifteen years – Sol.Hz - a beautiful, hazy and blissed out collection of fractured melodies and vaporous textures.

In some ways, this can be regarded as Seefeel’s ‘dub’ album – the deceptively cloud-like arrangements of Mark Clifford are somewhat ambient adjacent at low volume, but blasting out of a proper sound system, the cavernous bass undertow and skilful employment of effects are more apparent, messing with the listener’s perception of time and audio placement. As always with Seefeel though, it never drifts too far into cold experimentalism or synthetic texture, the heavily manipulated vocals of Sarah Peacock lending the tracks a vital human element, with processed guitar loops allowing slivers of melody to drift through the trails of delay.

Stylistically, it builds on their 2024 mini-album Squared Roots, in the way that the material has been microscopically dissected and reversioned until it reaches the perfect iteration, shape perhaps being the wrong word for a group who blur the lines between solidity and space to such a radical degree. The much-reappropriated line from The Communist Manifesto, “all that is solid melts into air”, could be used as shorthand to describe the experience of listening to a Seefeel record. The album title Sol.Hz can be translated literally as sun plus electricity, although the exact interpretation is ambiguous and left open to debate, just like Marx’s oft-quoted line.

Aphex Twin's masterpiece “Windowlicker” was released by Warp in 1999.

Comprising more than 5,000 works of contemporary art dating from the 1960s to the present, the collection of the MUSEUMMMK für Moderne Kunst is one of the most important of its kind in the world. With canonical works by Carl Andre, Siah Armajani, Lothar Baumgarten, Thomas Bayrle, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Miriam Cahn, Hanne Darboven, Walter De Maria, Marlene Dumas, Dan Flavin, Katharina Fritsch, Robert Gober, Donald Judd, Ilya Kabakov, On Kawara, Roy Lichtenstein, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Nam June Paik, Blinky Palermo, Gerhard Richter, Reiner Ruthenbeck, Rosemarie Trockel, James Turrell, Bill Viola, Jeff Wall, Franz Erhard Walther and Andy Warhol, the holdings constitute an important source for art-historical research.

Reprinted on the occasion of an exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, this book presents the international Fluxus legacy through sound. With works by John Cage, Philip Corner, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, George Maciunas, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, and others, it explores the interest of Fluxus artists in music and sound through performance, scores, records, and objects from the Luigi Bonotto Collection. Their public events challenged conventional form and content in music, and the approach to music scores was equally radical. Instead of traditional sheet music, they devised notational systems based on graphics, poetry, and the visual arts.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

Primordial Mind forms the mysteries and intensity of inner life into eight mandalic instrumentals where Mas Aya and Khôra, artists who share 15 years of music making, orchestrate an inspired, prismatic palette of percussive and melodic sources. Each composition presented stages a vigorous meshwork of colours and textures, contrasting riveting polyrhythms with towering arrangements for flutes, synths, and processed acoustic instruments. Tendencies which the artists trace in their solo practices are amplified, blended, and refracted sublimely in unison, serving as energetic portals to collective awareness. Combining trans-ethnic scaling alongside a heady brew of rhythmic influences and advanced electronic processing, the recordings on this album operate with a tactility that vaults between free jazz, dub, raga, ambient, and ritual music. Assimilated powers of primal drum patterning and psychoactive, ceremonial melodies, invoke fourth world adjacencies with the work of Don Cherry, Jon Hassell, Popol Vuh et al. There is an alchemical, Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu inflection that guides the record’s narrative, formed through dialogue between the artists over lifelong shared interest in spiritual modalities generally and the tantric approaches of the global east in particular. The album title is derived from an unexcelled esoteric work known as the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time or Time Cycles) Tantra and its associated commentary the Ornament of Stainless Light which detail forms of inner and outer transubstantiation within its complex cosmology and metaphysiology. Mas Aya is the moniker of Brandon Miguel Valdivia, acclaimed Nicaraguan-Canadian composer, producer, and musician whose electronic and jazz inspired works creatively interlace Colombian, Cuban, and a wide array of traditional music. Khôra is the name of the occult entity that uses multi-instrumentalist, producer, and writer Matthew Ramolo to pronounce itself. Returning to Marionette following 2024's monumental Gestures of Perception, Primordial Mind reinforces the rigorous and magical approach to creation which defines Khôra’s two decades of sonic output. Brandon and Matthew met back in 2011 and the pair toured around eastern Europe with Toronto band Picastro in 2013, also performing as a duo with Brandon contributing drums to Khôra's opening sets. After a short spate composing and playing in the ensemble Bespoken together, they continued to discover shared inspiration in psych/art rock, jazz, experimental and electronic music, providing a fertile soil for friendship and collaboration resulting in their collaged, field-recorded album Tangled Roots in 2017. Mythic and talismanic, the duo's Marionette debut weaves a luminous tapestry of organic pulses, offering itself as a support for resonant meditation and a motor for lucid action and intuition.

With All Shall Go, Damos Room (the trio of Luke Miles, Nicholas Elson & Huw Oleskar (a.k.a Elijah Minnelli)) delivers a work of deliberate unravelling — a record that resists spectacle in favour of pressure, proximity and slow erosion. For Long Gone Are The Old Traditions, this release marks a natural extension of the label's commitment to sound as atmosphere and atmosphere as doctrine: music that does not decorate space but alters it. Across these pieces, dub is reduced to its elemental properties — weight, echo, absence — while sheets of corroded texture and distant, disembodied vocals drift through a landscape that feels both devotional and terminal. Rhythm appears only as rupture, a disturbance in the grain. What persists is tension — patient, unblinking, almost liturgical in its austerity. In Damos Room's hands, sound becomes residue and invocation simultaneously, a procession of shadows that gathers momentum not through volume but through inevitability. All Shall Go stands as a document of attrition and quiet extremity, aligned precisely with the label's ongoing exploration of the haunted and the unmoored.

Vladislav Delay, primarily known as a highly regarded electronic music innovator, steps ahead with his acoustic jazz quintet, releasing "vd5" on We Jazz Records, 8th May. Echoing the forward-looking vd musical vision always ahead of the curve, the new album does not fit into any specific category, forging a path of its own across the 10 tracks. Recorded at Candybomber Studio in Berlin, the album brings vd together with Maria Bertel, Lucio Capece, Derek Shirley and Max Loderbauer. This is shape-shifting, elastic music that exists left of any given timeline. Based in Hailuoto in Northern Finland, Vladislav Delay has never fit into any preset mould as an artist. His prolific, at times mythical output has elevated him to a veritable legend status in all music cycles appreciating a unique artistic voice. Be it his forward-reaching recent releases as Vladislav Delay on his own Rajaton imprint, his Ripatti alias, or playing metallic percussion with the Moritz Von Oswald Trio, Vladislav Delay always has A SOUND. And that sound is ever-evolving, as his new jazz album shows. What "jazz" is this? There are certainly liquid elements there in the mix, not unlike the ones heard on previous vd productions. Then again, this is acoustic quintet music by and large, but not any specific kind we have ever heard before. Isn't that the whole point of "jazz"? Whatever came before is a springboard, not a limitation.

In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.

Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.

Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.

Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.

Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.

As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.

Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his time in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.

Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.

Carol Maia & Jeremy Gustin’s haunting collaborative album is the result of a long distance partnership during which tracks were traded back and forth across thousands of miles, Jeremy working from his home studio in Brooklyn and Carol from hers in Rio De Janeiro. Later they enlisted support from a number of key players in the Rio scene, Frederico Heliodoro, Paulo Emmery, Ricardo Dias Gomes, and from Brooklyn’s musical community, Will Graefe and Ryan Dugre, to shape this understated masterpiece of sophisticated global pop and quiet experimentalism. It's hard to describe what Carol, Jeremy and their guests have achieved on 'it's nice to see a lake in your eyes', a kind of pop music that stands outside of time and is neither Brazilian, American or of any other recognisable place. Maybe it's risen out of the lake they imagined into being? Maybe it's formed like rain in the thousands of miles of air between Rio and New York? Whatever happened was certainly alchemical as you will hear. Carol told me her writing on this record was greatly influenced by her reading of Marcelo Ariel's poetry book "A água veio do sol, disse o breu" so maybe the best thing to do to describe this music is to let you read one of his poems: A luz do ser é como a água também veio do Sol onde todos os planetas querem entrar Dentro do Sol O ser é imóvel como a gratuidade de um êxtase parecido com a respiração Fora do Sol o ser é móvel Tempo eternidade e tempo cronológico (Translation) The light of being is like water it also came from the Sun where all the planets want to enter Within the Sun Being is immobile like the gratuitousness of an ecstasy similar to breathing Outside the Sun Being is mobile Time eternal and chronological time

Chicago-based composer, improviser, multi-media artist and underground legend, Rob Mazurek, joins forces with modular-synth maestro and light magician, Alberto Novello for a blacklight invocation that hurls us out into new and uncharted sound-dimensions.Born of a chance encounter, Alberto Novello and Rob Mazurek's improvised collaboration, Sun Eaters, was recorded in a single afternoon at Dobialab, an experimental artist run space in Northern Italy. Alberto provided a loose rhythmic and timbral bedrock over which Rob Mazurek sketched and weaved delicate harmonies with trumpets, adding atmosphere with bells and sampler.Sun Eaters is a dizzying space ritual, a totally out exercise in telepathic collaboration and psychedelic sound.

Recorded in Villa Sarkia (Sysmä, Finland) and Kisustudio, Vallila (Helsinki,Finland) during the years 2017-2020.

On Minimalistic ethio 80’s and 90’s from audiotapes የሐር ሽረሪት, DJ Mitmitta threads together lo‑fi synth jams and cassette‑era instrumentals from unsung Ethiopian bands, where battered Casios and drum machines sketch hypnotic, pastel‑toned echoes of wedding halls and roadside bars.Minimalistic ethio 80’s and 90’s from audiotapes የሐር ሽረሪት is a love letter to a very specific corner of Ethiopian music history: the moments on old cassettes when the singer leaves the room and the backing band just keeps going. Curated by DJ Mitmitta, the compilation gathers a “lovely bunch” of mostly instrumental cuts from various groups working in the 1980s and early ’90s, all of them leaning on Casio keyboards, drum‑machines and cheap synthesized timbres to stretch a mood across the standard 60‑minute tape. Some of these tracks began life as filler - end‑of‑album jams laid down to round out running time - yet heard together they reveal a parallel universe of minimal, hypnotic ethio‑electronics that was hiding in plain sight on the B‑sides and fade‑outs of the cassette era.The focus is squarely on groove and atmosphere rather than virtuoso display. Simple pentatonic keyboard lines snake over rigid drum‑machine patterns; bass figures loop with small variations until they become a kind of trance; cheap synth brass and organ sounds approximate the colours of traditional ensembles in an unmistakably 80s palette. What might have been background in its original context moves to the foreground here, letting the listener hear how these bands translated classic Ethiopian modal language into a bare‑bones, garage‑electronic idiom. There’s a homespun futurism to it all: you can feel the constraints of the machines and the tape, but also the pleasure of musicians pushing those limits just enough to make the dancefloor—or the living room—sway.Mitmitta’s selection highlights a cast of names that deserve to be said out loud. Among the players whose tapes are tapped here are ይስሃቅ ባንጃው (Yishak Banjaw), ዘሪሁን ወዳጆ (Zerihun Wdajo), እልፍነሽ ቀኖ (Elfenesh Kano), ቴዎድሮስ መኮንን (Tewodros Mekonnen), ወሰንየለህ መብራቱ (Wesneylehe Meberatu), ስፈልግ አያሌው (Seflege Ayalew) and ታደሰ ላቀው (Tadsse Lakew) - artists better known, if at all, for vocal releases, but whose bands clearly relished the chance to stretch out when the mic was off. Here, their anonymous interludes become the main feature, revealing shared aesthetic threads: unhurried tempos, gently melancholic melodies, a fondness for repetition that never quite tips into monotony.The physical edition underlines the project’s tactile, cassette‑culture roots. Cover art comes from Skinny Digital, given grain and texture through risoprinting by If By Magic in Helsinki, Finland, while each copy is dubbed onto recycled tapes by Jouni “Kasettijeesus” Kontulainen. That choice isn’t just a retro affectation; it echoes the very conditions that produced the music in the first place, when blank cassettes were precious, nothing was wasted, and “extra” minutes became a playground for minimal synth experiments in an Ethiopian idiom. Spooling through these tracks now, you hear not only a treasure‑trove of lo‑fi ethio grooves, but the sound of time itself stretching and fraying on magnetic tape - a small, crackling portal back to another listening culture.

Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.

Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.

Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.

Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.

The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive dee

"I feel like 'Home' is a second part of the same book, that the start was in 'Esja', a musical prelude to a real plot. I feel Home is a story with an ending, so the next book can tell a totally different one. I am constantly looking for new ways of expression. I am curious where 'Home' will lead me and my music". — Hania Rani Hania Rani is a pianist, composer and musician who, was born in Gdansk and splits her life between Warsaw, where she makes her home, and Berlin where she studied and often works. Her debut album 'Esja', a beguiling collection of solo piano pieces on Gondwana Records was released to international acclaim on April 5th 2019 including nominations in 5 categories in the Polish music industries very own Grammys, the Fryderyki, and winning the Discovery of the Year 2019 in the Empik chain's Bestseller Awards and the prestigious Sanki award for the most interesting new face of Polish music chosen by Polish journalists. Rani also composed the music for her first full length movie "I Never Cry" directed by Piotr Domalewski and for the play "Nora" directed by Michał Zdunik. Her song "Eden" was used as a soundtrack of a short movie by Małgorzata Szumowska for Miu Miu's movie cycle "Women's Tales" If the compositions on Esja were born out of a fascination with the piano as an instrument, then her follow-up, the expansive, cinematic, 'Home', finds Rani expanding her palate: adding vocals and subtle electronics to her music as well as being joined on some tracks by bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmijak. The album reunites her with recording engineers, Piotr Wieczorek and Ignacy Gruszecki (Monochrom Studio) and the tracks were again mixed again by Gijs van Klooster in his studio in Amsterdam and by Piotr Wieczorek in Warsaw ( Ombelico and Come Back Home). Home was mastered by Zino Mikorey in Berlin (known for his work on albums by artists such as Nils Frahm and Olafur Arnalds). For Rani, 'Home', is very much a continuation of the work she started on 'Esja', "the completion of the sentence" as she puts it. The album offers a metaphorical journey: the story of places that become our home sometimes by chance, sometimes by choice. It is the story of leaving a place that is familiar and the journey that follows it. Home opens with the fragment of the short story "Loneliness" by Bruno Schulz, which can be seen as a parable of a journey that does not necessarily mean going beyond the physical door but can signify going beyond the symbolic limits of our knowledge and imagination. "One can be lost but can find home in his inner part - which can mean many things - soul, imagination, mind, intuition, passion. I strongly believe that when being in uncertain times and living an unstable life we can still reach peace with ourselves and be able to find 'home' anywhere' This is what I would like to express with my music - one can travel the whole world but not see anything. It is not where we are going but how much we are able to see and hear things happening around us". — Hania Rani Home is also about the inevitability of change. We never find places exactly how we left them. Time flies and life with it. Just like art and music. Once you started the trip, you will never be back really to the place where you started with. It is a sentiment that is at the heart of Home, not just its themes, but at the heart of Rani's music too. Following the success of Esja it would have been easy for her to stick to the same solo piano formula, but while Rani expresses her surprise and gratitude for the success of Esja, "I wasn't sure how this album - based on Piano and silence - will be received by the audience. The reception was a big surprise to me" it has also given her the confidence to express more of herself as an artist. On Home Rani steps into more of a producer's role, adding strings, bass and drums where needed, exploring the sounds of synths and electronica, but also creating textured layered songs made from acoustic samples, mostly from piano recordings. "I try to explore new genres and discover new artists, I don't want to be stuck in things that I know, I want to learn about things that are still new to me". But perhaps most notable is her singing, Rani has a fragile, beautiful voice, both pure and expressive. Long a feature of her live shows she uses it as another instrument, adding extra layers of melody and emotion to her already deeply expressive music. "I consider voice as another instrument. Maybe if I wasn't so often alone on the stage, I would take another instrument to play the melody that I have in my mind. But while I am alone, singing allows me to have more possibilities at the same time. The human voice has a real magic, nothing carries emotions as easily and powerfully as the voice, and I think being able to bring this atmosphere on stage opens up new possibilities of expression for me". — Hania Rani Home also features Rani's new band, bassist Ziemowit Klimek and drummer Wojtek Warmi

All-star quartet Last Exit garnered its reputation with a string of unrelentingly forceful concert recordings in which it pushed the energy style of free jazz to its limits. When the group went into the studio for the only time, though, a very different sort of album resulted—very different not only from all their other output, but even from anything else ever heard from anyone at that time. Because of that, when it was released in 1988, some fans and critics didn't know what to make of it. This was, in a way, understandable, because Iron Path was so far ahead of its time that perhaps only now, over a quarter of a century later, is there an audience prepared for this album's pioneering hybrid of abstract heavy metal, unsettling ambient music, and free improvisation. Back in 1988, "Darkwave" hadn't yet been conceived, much less named and niched. The brutal sonic assault of Last Exit's live albums is not banished; it lurks below the surface on Iron Path, sometimes allowed to break through for a moment of stark contrast. But the unremitting density of texture heard in the quartet's shows is stripped back in favor of more subtle and varied textures, sculpting an atmosphere of moody brooding and sinister suspense. And, of course, the studio also allowed for far greater sonic clarity, putting these virtuoso players in a setting that shows off their masterful command of myriad timbres. In a world that has since become accustomed to hearing Earth, Pelican, Blut Aus Nord, Aphex Twin's Ambient Works sets, and Oöphoi, and artists such as Whote who explore the overlap between them, Iron Path can finally get its due, and an audience schooled to appreciate what it offers.

After their last album six years ago, "Primal Forms," the new album by Phantom Horse, finally arrives. The German duo of Ulf Schütte and Niklas Dommaschk have long established a reputation for expertly crafted, hypnotically slow-burning electronic music, and we do not hesitate to say that "Primal Forms" stands among the epitomes of their discography. The sequencing of "Primal Forms" cannot be underestimated. It is an album in the classic sense. It demands to be listened to in its entirety, which also points to a closer affinity with Krautrock. Likewise, a touch of dub is perceptible, wafting around the songs, which, as usual, bear clandestine titles. It is not unreasonable to see in these compact compositions a clear statement against multitasking. Phantom Horse are not trumpeters of dystopia. They present themselves resolutely, almost stoically, turned away from the world. This turning away is clearly a statement that can be contemplated in the Mariana Trench as well as in comet belts. In any case, it is best experienced in a space without any human beings. This does not mean that grumpy hermits are tinkering with synths behind closed shutters, armed with wooden walking sticks. This is still open minded music with a connection to current developments. The approach itself is what is audible, and with it, Phantom Horse proves once again that their main connection to time is timelessness. In an age of all-encompassing distraction on every sensory, thematic, and semantic level, Phantom Horse explores the possibilities of reduction, searching for simplified melodic arcs without resorting to the vocabulary of classical minimalism. The overall impression is more electronic; the slowly shifting, polyrhythmic compositions repeatedly lead to a peculiar danceability. However, these are perhaps the dances of mechanical birds, undeterred by anything.

On textstar+ Jan Jelinek brings together the material from the CMYK series, four EPs he released between 1999 and 2002 under the pseudonym farben (the German word for both colours and paints), on a vinyl double LP for the first time. The selection of tracks has been remastered from the original tapes, joined by two additional pieces that appeared on compilations during the same period. - A Polaroid. Still life with tangled leads and consumer electronics, late twentieth century. Black and various shades of dirty white are the dominant non-colours. The image’s spatial depth remains diffuse, the links between its elements speculative. A note stuck to the wall (a legend, perhaps, or an all-explaining blueprint in text form?) is impossible to decipher. You can’t see what connects the picture’s signs. You have to hear it. farben says: Every sound is a text. A bearer of meaning in search of a reader. Hoping the ideas inscribed in its autonomous existence will be understood as intended. While its beauty lies precisely in misunderstanding, in reading the coded message a new way every time. A thousand colours of sound, a thousand different ways to hear, to see, to understand. On textstar+ Jan Jelinek brings together the material from the CMYK series, four EPs he released between 1999 and 2002 under the pseudonym farben (the German word for both colours and paints), on a vinyl double LP for the first time. The selection of tracks has been remastered from the original tapes, joined by two additional pieces that appeared on compilations during the same period. Another new element is the Polaroid, showing the origins of a world: Jelinek’s home studio in Berlin at the time. farben says: Move your body! The project has its roots in Jelinek’s love of house as a reductionist vision of soul. Of four to the floor as a proposition that can be accessed anywhere. Of electronic dance music as a realm of possibility that can be continually expanded. farben was written as contemporary house music. As a text about excitement and euphoria. The arrangements were made directly while recording to DAT, on a twelve-channel mixing desk. Several track titles suggest a link to live concerts, coupled with the context of machine music and bedroom recording. Others affirm pop music’s most extravagant stock phrases about various states of love. Jelinek produced the tracks with the aim of making music for dancefloors. An idea that failed very productively. In the locations to which it was originally addressed, the project barely figured. But people did listen, and they listened all the more closely to this music that opened up new acoustic and associative scope for house. farben is the opposite of genre: a music spawning new terms (clicks & cuts, micro-house) that never manage to fully capture it. farben says: Signifiers. The four CMYK EPs are designed as a network of references that cannot be missed but that can also never be precisely deciphered. The vectors of sound, word and image point to Isaac Hayes and Ornette Coleman, to Detroit and the first generation of the Red Army Faction, to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. So multifarious that they are distorted to the point of recognition. Overall we hear sonic docufictions whose appealing vagueness derives precisely from this oscillation between clarity and ambiguity, which is also the source of their poetry: the lyricism of the pure circulation of signs. The artwork is based on photographs of former Red Army Faction members, broken down into the four colours of the CMYK model. The motifs dissolve into individual dots of a single colour, so close to the faces that their expressions are only hinted at. Taken together, the individual colours compose a new whole out of fragmentary material, defying definition and thus maintaining their vibrancy. The same occurs on the level of sound. The sampler Jelinek used for these tracks had to be fed with floppy disks, imposing a memory limit of 1.44 megabytes per audio quotation from soul or jazz records. As a necessary consequence of this, the individual references, like the dots of colour, are dissolved into details and abstractions. They appear as splinters that recombine in new ways to create new meanings. The joy of collapsing metaphors. farben says: New departures. Even two decades after its original release, textstar+ does not come across as an epitaph to the modern era. Instead, it appears as a euphoric affirmation of the utopias of the twentieth century, translated into new sound texts via the aesthetic strategies of abstraction, collage, networking and speculation. 1.44 megabytes of history, one thousand signifiers, one album. From “Live ...” to “... Love”.

Following Additive Inverse, Jim O’Rourke and Jos Smolders reconnect across a series of studio sessions spread over three years. Working independently, they build a fluid exchange of material shaped by shared interest in the spectral qualities of sound.O’Rourke initiates the process using his Kyma System, generating source material that Smolders reworks through granular techniques. The results unfold gradually, drifting from dense, enveloping passages into irregular rhythmic forms and more inward, sparse sections.Rather than settling into fixed structures, the pieces remain in motion, with textures shifting from soft and diffuse to brittle and tactile. It’s a patient, exploratory work that emphasises process, detail and subtle transformation over time.

Sergeant refine their “dj-shadow-in-reverse” approach on Symbols, cutting and reassembling their own material into restless, rhythmic forms. Kraut drums, plunderphonic fragments and dub space collide with a sharper sense of direction.Ferre’s vocals drift through the mix, searching for a way out while leaning into the disorder. Even the details feel alive—a stray flute line cutting through the low-end pull.Amid the chaos, Sergeant sound more in control than ever, turning fragmentation into something direct, playful and oddly infectious.