Electronic / Experimental
4015 products
For more than six decades, Beatriz Ferreyra has been building worlds out of sound. Born in Córdoba in 1937 and based in France since the early 1960s, the Argentine composer entered the GRM at the invitation of Pierre Schaeffer in 1963, contributing alongside him to the foundational texts and recordings that would define an entire discipline of listening, among them the Solfège de l'Objet Sonore. From 1970 onward she has worked independently, composing in absolute fidelity to her own ear. Issued by Room40, A Distracted God gathers three works that span more than two decades of Ferreyra's practice. As Lawrence English writes in his note for the release, her compositions inhabit a space between the living world and the subliminal zones of the unconscious - new realities forged piece by piece from fragments of places and things we already know, reedited and refocused until they become something we could not have imagined on our own. Material agnosticism is the through line. Tape manipulation and digital transformation sit alongside one another as expressions of a single patient attention, sound followed wherever it leads, freed from its origin and allowed to guide the composer's curiosity rather than be guided by it. It is this indifference to medium, and the lifetime of listening that underwrites it, that lends the work its unmistakable personal quality. Souffle d'un petit Dieu distrait (Breath of a distracted little God), composed in 1987 and revised a decade later, was an IMEB commission. Tierra Quebrada (Broken Land), for violin and electroacoustic music, was written in 1976 on commission from the French State for the A.C.I.C., Paris. Together they form a microcosm of Ferreyra's wholly consuming practice, the work of a fearless, relentless maker for whom the totality of what sound can do remains forever front of mind. Cut at 45rpm for added playback fidelity. Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space.
Sampling and processing Asuna's arsenal of toy keyboards, computer music pioneer Carl Stone transforms seemingly throwaway sounds into chattering, plunderphonic memories before batting them back to the Japanese producer for further editing. You can tell that 'Imu Plastos' was developed with live performance in mind. Sound artist Asuna, who's released on 12k, Faitiche and White Paddy Mountain, is already notorious for his "100 Toys" and "100 Keyboards" performances, wherein spirals of cheapo instruments are repurposed to create complex, textured electroacoustic compositions. Stone fits into the chain well; they performed together for the first time in 2024 and Stone worked on the audio in real time, taking mental notes for studio sessions that followed. In a more controlled environment, the duo pushed themselves to rethink the process, reversing the flow so that Stone would create the sound and Asuna would sample. The finished album is a set of improvisations from these sessions that keeps rebuilding and deconstructing itself. Early on, you can still hear the creaky source material, but the first two tracks disappear in a matter of minutes - 'As Aural Consent' is the first substantial production and it's far more mysterious, 11 minutes of ratcheting noises and disquieting squeaks. 'A Salsa Nocturne', meanwhile, is a wind tunnel organ jam that you'd never guess was made using a bunch of kid's instruments and on 'Ulina as Ancestor', the duo burrow deep beneath the earth's surface, searching out eldrich resonances and sublime chaos.
cobs, an essential figure of avant-garde cinema, and I had over-a-decade-long collaboration. We first performed fo his Nervous Magic Lantern project at the Argos Festival in Brussels in 2007. Before flying to Europe, Ken invited me to the top-floor loft on Chambers Street in TriBeCa, where Ken and his wife, Flo, have lived and worked since 1965, to experience a private screening. He turned on the apparatus and the image flashed onto the screen: geometric patterns — something of a Rorschach inkblot — rotated as if in a whirlpool, and three-dimensional imagery pulsed with strong flicker. What was weird was that the images did not adhere to the surface of the screen. They stood out, almost floating, like holograms. Then, my eyes started catching physical shapes in the depth of the abstract patterns such as faces, hands, the surface of an oil spill, and they appeared and disappeared like ghosts or doppelgängers. “How does Nervous Magic Lantern work?” I asked Ken. The inventor's answer was something unexpected: "I don't know! I dreamed it and found it through experimentations then stuck to it. I'm not that technical." Well, he is an artist who creates a phantasmagoria of mystery; let the neuroscientists explain the mechanism. The self-made apparatus contains a spinning shutter, a light source, and lenses set in a wooden frame. Ken inserts his hand-painted circular slides between the light and lenses and moved them gently with his hands. The lenses enlarged a tiny portion on the slide, while the spinning shutter gave the flicker effect. Compared to Ken's other works, which are often filled with unflinching political criticism, the imagery of Nervous Magic Lantern is patently abstract, and it examines how our brain regulates our perceptions. In Jonas Mekas' Movie Journal, Ken once said, “We’re stepping towards a deeper incline, something challenging our notion of the way things are. Something impossible.” Elsewhere he stated, “Eisenstein said the power of film was to be found between shots. Peter Kubelka seeks it between film frames. I want to get between the eyes, contest the separate halves of the brain. A whole new play of appearances is possible here.” Nervous Magic Lantern offers up this sort of play in stunning hallucinations, strange visions dancing on the screen. Ken's request for my music was to play “sounds of daily life.” He explained that the project “is an escape,” and that he felt “guilty not having any messages or reflecting the real world. By using environmental sounds to surround us,” he continued, “I'd like to be rooted in the real world." Around 2014, I noticed that Ken had a sizable collection of cassette field recordings he had amassed over the last several decades. Street noises in Chinatown, conversations with friends, or any sort of uncategorizable sound around him. I was fascinated and decided to use them as a springboard for composing. One of the unique aspects of Nervous Magic Lantern is that the visual stays abstract while the sound is able to adopt meanings or a narrative sense derived from the quotidian sounds. I wanted to emphasize that point and add almost a sense of documentary. More than that, I simply loved the aural depictions of Ken and Flo’s life. Those also trigger my memories with them. Over the years, during summer time, Ken, Flo, and my wife, Makiko, made a habit of going to their favorite restaurant in Chinatown. Other times, Ken and I had morning coffee at a Puerto Rican restaurant just below their loft. Life and art are inseparable, breaking into one another incessantly. Ken is an artist who always envisioned the impossible. I wanted to see if it's possible to present that vision as something universal, something whole, something running through everyone’s life. A soundtrack for life in the depth of illusion. That is perhaps what this album is. This album was recorded as a soundtrack for Ken Jacobs' Nervous Magic Lantern at Spiral Hall, organized by Sound Live Tokyo, on November 3, 2015. It was probably one of our best performances. Before the performance, Ken explained to me the selected slides he uses and the ordering he employs, so that I would better understand the flow. Some slides are black-and-white and some color. For a given performance, Ken selects 10 slides or so. However, he might play with just one slide for the entire show or change the order — there was plenty of room to improvise. On my side, I also had a structure and the order of tapes, quite independent from Ken's visual. But I made the system easy to extend or shorten, duration-wise, in order to respond to Ken's ordering and mood. Lastly, I wanted to mention Flo's role, as she is deeply involved in Ken's creative process; as he says: “This is a mom-and-pop business.” From the first day of working together, she was always there with us and took care of all practical matters. Ken is a dreamer and thinks and works intuitively. But Flo — an exceptionally beautiful woman in and out — is rooted in the real world. Not just a pragmatist, however, Flo advises Ken on artistic decisions. Ken always asks to hear her thoughts, as I did as well. As film critic and their decades-long friend Amy Taubin once described it, "Florence Jacobs is nothing less than a producer of Ken Jacobs' cinema." What a perfect couple, and it was an extremely joyous journey with them!
The new album "Passing Tone" by SOFT, a band of Kyoto's party scene/music culture treasures, is released from their own base of activities, "softribe.
The album was jointly released in 2021 by 17853 Records and TUFF VINYL, presided over by CHEE CHIMIZU, and Crosspoint, presided over by J.A.K.A.M., the release source, and was followed by a vinyl reissue of their 2010 album Soft Meets Pan "Tam (Message To The Sun )", the 11th and latest album released on analog at the memorial timing of the 30th anniversary of the band's formation since "Tokinami" in 2018.
They have collabolated with various musicians in the past, but this album features only one guest musician, PRITTI, an old member, who participates in one song. The album was produced by the three members since the formation of the band, guitarist SIMIZ, drummer PON2, and double bassist UCON, as well as engineer/electronics KND, who is an indispensable part of the Kyoto music scene. Lurking in the background are vibrant sounds, psychedelic acoustics, and dub work in a style similar to that of a live performance. Their 30th anniversary live performances in Osaka and Kyoto, which were a great success, and their Asian tour are also included in this album.
Arranged, produced, mixed and mastered by Ivan Dubious (April, 2024) __________________________________ A - Ivan Dubious "Flamboyant" AA - Wilbur "Impassive" __________________________________ (c)+(p) Ivan Antezza 2024 __________________________________ nunkirec.bandcamp.com
Live At Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali sees Grischa Lichtenberger transfigure a forty-minute set into a tactile, visual, and kinetic experience. Industrial clangor, mechanical pulses, and fleeting ambience merge, sculpted with rigor. Issued by Hermit Records as a collector’s vinyl, it stands at the edge between noise, rhythm, and abstraction With Live At Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, Grischa Lichtenberger distills the art of sound into forty minutes of fiercely organized chaos. Recorded in the unique space of the Pino Pascali Museum in Polignano a Mare and released by Hermit Records, the album is a study in constructive friction—mechanical pulses and ferrous textures recurring, splintering, and coalescing in real time. Lichtenberger's palette draws from the imaginary of Russolo and Brinkmann, yet forges its own path: rhythm and abstraction in an endless handshake, frequency as sculpture, and every crackle a gesture or a mark. This release, limited to a black vinyl edition and including original music and artwork conceived over more than a decade, is purposefully an object as well as a document. No digital footprints, just a testimony pressed in the grooves—an encounter with matter, with noise, with control. Here, listening is not passive; it is as much a process as the performance itself, alive with tension and raw poetics. [Soundohm] An abstract painting with expressionist hues and futurist echoes, a mix between action painting and informal art: this is the first impression from Grischa Lichtenberger's live performance recorded at the Pino Pascali Museum in Polignano a Mare. The artist, based in Berlin, makes the rhythms creak, cuts them with a laser, weaves imaginative harmonic coils, smoothes with electric razors and draws figures with echoes and industrial clangs. Then he uses ferrous materials that, with a precision lathe, are abraded and cause sparks. Suddenly steel springs fall to the ground, generating a cascade effect. In the distance, you can hear the roar of speeding cars and the ringing of bells. Lichtenberger pulps, compresses, dilates, mixes, electrifies, heats up, liquefies: he does all this in just less than forty minutes, treating the sound material with violence, transforming it from time to time, shaping it and succeeding in the arduous task of controlling its effects. It is as if Luigi Russolo, Alva Noto and Thomas Brinkmann were closed in a workshop on the edge of a highway, parodying the famous definition of techno.
Undisputed grime heavyweight and sublow architect Jon E Cash is spotlighted on an overdue retrospective hustling rare plates back on vinyl for 1st time in decades - utterly essential tackle for UK ‘nuum fiends on the line from jungle to UKG, grime and dubstep. A serious VIP for Sneaker Social Club and the grime scene at large, ’SUBLOW’ scrolls back a quarter century to grime’s earliest days - before it even had a name - when artists such as Jon E Cash, Jammer, and Wiley were reshaping prevailing UKG styles and patterns in their own image, coming out with something rudely altered in translation - or by their technical limitations. While the latter melded Jamaican sound system inspirations of dancehall and jungle into their grimy prototypes, Jon E Cash would bring a ruggeder swerve, carried over from his early ‘90s days as part of the pivotal Britcore hip hop sound with Construction, and prevailing traces of later ’90s R&B and D&B, to his take on the 140bpm framework, with the exaggerated bass levels of his productions, and their bashy drums, bestowing the sound its mantle, SUBLOW, and soon recognised as a whole subgenre in its own right. These are sacred plates for grime, a key part of its DNA, and Sneaker Social Club are doing the Lord’s work by saving you a month’s rent in Zone 3 if you were to pick them up individually. All from the fascinating interzone 2000-2004, when the sound was shaped as an ecology of pirate radio, white labels, and raves, it’s burstign at the seams with legendary gear from the murky steez of ‘Hoods Up’ thru the NSFW intro of his absolute steamer ‘Kettle’, brukking out the digi-dub style horns on ‘War’ and ‘Battle’, or ramping R&B with speedy G pressure on ‘All About the Sex’, not to mention his Timba-turned-horny Terminator turn ’Spanish Fly (V.I.P.).’ If you ask us, it’s one of the hardest reissues/compilations of 2025, bar none, and a strong example of how much perceptions of grime have changed over the decades, from outlaw genre to something to be fetishised, archived, admired as distinguished cultural artefact, rather than feared and legislated against.
Sakura is without doubt the most loved and lauded entry in Susumu Yokota’s catalogue.
The music unravels like cascades of petals falling from the eponymous cherry blossom trees. Yokota intended to ‘express ki-do-ai-raku (the four emotions; joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness) through music’, and throughout Sakura, the effect fluctuates between profound tranquillity, hesitation, melancholy and joy with ease, addressing the fickle nature of human emotion, while transcending the inclination to label moods entirely.
Sakura became Yokota’s best selling album. It was greeted with universal acclaim, lauded by Philip Glass and Brian Eno and launched Yokota internationally.
‘A bittersweet beauty, heightened by the sadness that all things must one day end.’ - Martyn Pepperell
Mesmerising album of Yokota’s earliest sonic explorations that demonstrates his unique vision and sublime transcendence of boundaries.
‘Image 1983-1998’ is a collection of short miniatures, composed in two different time periods. Tracks 1-5 were recorded with guitar and organ between 1983-4 and tracks 6-12 were composed through 97-98, being inspired by the earlier material.
A musical scrapbook, or sonic design board. The sleeve notes give an insight into Yokota’s belief in a close connection between music, memory and his active imagination: ‘Encountering Acid House made me visualise music – I could clearly see the sounds sparkling… this experience led me to create electronic music.’
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.
"Four Corners" is a compilation that showcases the various facets of American West Coast minimalist composer Jeff Bruner, with pieces from the 1970s to the 2020s displaying a cohesive set of aesthetic concerns. Bruner has a kinship with the composers Harold Budd and Daniel Lentz, the latter being a mentor to Bruner, and one can hear a relationship with the music of other minimal/post-minimal composers such as John Adams and Terry Riley. 1979’s “Magic Mbira”, a key piece in this collection, particularly highlights a Riley-esque element, and with its skillful use of tape delays reminiscent of Lenz's "cascading echo system." Bruner and his mbira piece also have musical affinities with Roland P. Young and his classic Isophonic Boogie Woogie, in their shared melodic and structural concerns, as well as a desire to perform their compositions in a wider range of performance spaces, away from traditional recital halls. Another side of Bruner is revealed in the funhouse-mirror “Reggae Foes”, a deconstructionist calypso-reggae tune and skewed Black Ark filtered through Cunningham/Toop’s General Strike. The remaining two pieces are melancholy beauties of solo instrumentation: “Cold Rain and Snow” is a fretless gut-string banjo re-imagining of an American folk song; “Remembrance in a Pale Room” is a lovely piano piece dedicated to Lentz. Bruner has built upon a tradition, altering and adding to it with his individual vision, giving us this collection of intriguing and beautiful music. Available on CD/Vinyl/Digital, and the physical version includes E/J liner notes by Jeff Bruner, rare photos & the score for "Magic Mbira”. ----------------------------------------- "I first came across Jeff’s mysterious "Reggae Foes" 45 in the mid-2000s at the legendary Logos book/record store in Santa Cruz, California (RIP) - the kind of generic sleeve and label that gives you nothing more than a font and some scant shards of text to go by (luckily this text was “A Flying Saucer Came Down and Burnt My Baby's Neck”). What I heard upon bringing it home felt like some kind of alternate-timeline post punk calypso, unknowingly adjacent to the deconstructions occurring at the Black Ark or in David Cunningham’s early productions. When I finally talked to Jeff many years later, I was even more surprised to learn that he was also entrenched in southern California’s post-minimalist composer scene in the 1970s alongside many of my compositional heroes, work which this compilation presents for the first time. Couldn’t think of a better place for it to be transmitted from than EM!" (Spencer Doran/Visible Cloaks)
"Four Corners" is a compilation that showcases the various facets of American West Coast minimalist composer Jeff Bruner, with pieces from the 1970s to the 2020s displaying a cohesive set of aesthetic concerns. Bruner has a kinship with the composers Harold Budd and Daniel Lentz, the latter being a mentor to Bruner, and one can hear a relationship with the music of other minimal/post-minimal composers such as John Adams and Terry Riley. 1979’s “Magic Mbira”, a key piece in this collection, particularly highlights a Riley-esque element, and with its skillful use of tape delays reminiscent of Lenz's "cascading echo system." Bruner and his mbira piece also have musical affinities with Roland P. Young and his classic Isophonic Boogie Woogie, in their shared melodic and structural concerns, as well as a desire to perform their compositions in a wider range of performance spaces, away from traditional recital halls. Another side of Bruner is revealed in the funhouse-mirror “Reggae Foes”, a deconstructionist calypso-reggae tune and skewed Black Ark filtered through Cunningham/Toop’s General Strike. The remaining two pieces are melancholy beauties of solo instrumentation: “Cold Rain and Snow” is a fretless gut-string banjo re-imagining of an American folk song; “Remembrance in a Pale Room” is a lovely piano piece dedicated to Lentz. Bruner has built upon a tradition, altering and adding to it with his individual vision, giving us this collection of intriguing and beautiful music. Available on CD/Vinyl/Digital, and the physical version includes E/J liner notes by Jeff Bruner, rare photos & the score for "Magic Mbira”. ----------------------------------------- "I first came across Jeff’s mysterious "Reggae Foes" 45 in the mid-2000s at the legendary Logos book/record store in Santa Cruz, California (RIP) - the kind of generic sleeve and label that gives you nothing more than a font and some scant shards of text to go by (luckily this text was “A Flying Saucer Came Down and Burnt My Baby's Neck”). What I heard upon bringing it home felt like some kind of alternate-timeline post punk calypso, unknowingly adjacent to the deconstructions occurring at the Black Ark or in David Cunningham’s early productions. When I finally talked to Jeff many years later, I was even more surprised to learn that he was also entrenched in southern California’s post-minimalist composer scene in the 1970s alongside many of my compositional heroes, work which this compilation presents for the first time. Couldn’t think of a better place for it to be transmitted from than EM!" (Spencer Doran/Visible Cloaks)
Straight out of the local mud of the city of Antwerp comes this next Souvenirs from Imaginary Cities slab of free-flowing bits of electronic wonder : Schönen Abend by Simon B. Just in time to ease you out of this endless winter and right into springtime. Like the previous hit by Purple Uncle, this flower takes some time to bloom and fill up your head and body with it's ear wormy fragrance. It's hazy and cinematic, makes you think of Italian electronic pioneers and their library magic, Patrick Cowley's School Daze and Haruomi Hosono in some kind of gothic manner. It's quite stripped and lush at the same time, rhythms like minimal mechanics make you fly above the river and land just outside reality. It's a nice place where soft jazz tingles right around the dark corner, and that particular mix of exotica and melancholia — the trademark of this port city's best electronic auteurs is definitely in the air. The river still shines, but she’s deeply poisoned. The old town has lost every bit of fresh air but keeps on digging for old gold. This bitter pill is served with delicacy and lightness, the wound is dressed up seductively — feet in the mud, head in the air. Stuff is sensuous, with quiet places reminding of the good side of those times when the big wheel stopped turning ever so madly. A strange quietness whistles through the leaves. Some things take time to unfold. In or out of C. Four years in the making, this is the solo debut LP of Simon B, a longtime contributor to Antwerp's improvised music scene (Groovecats Deluxe, Wij Blij Trio ). Primarily a double bass player, he also has a deep-felt passion for offbeat electronica and the rainbowy side of American minimalism, which takes front here. You can hear the tenor and soprano saxophone of Adia Van Heerentals on 4 tracks, deepening out Simon's naturally flowing compositions and playing around with his melodies. You may know her from Bodem and her strong presence in the Belgian jazz scene lately. The smoky voice on the last track belongs to Nina-Joy Thielemans, she is part of Particals, a trio working with live electronics and field recordings, releasing an lp on Ultra Eczema later this year. Simon's electroacoustic experiments — using a clarinet and some outboard effects — were important tools in finding the very specific colour of this record. There's this airy character, like wind blowing through old layers of bricks and over the river, anchored with a deep sense of bass, gathering ages of dust and memories in these eight elegantly wobbling tracks, forming a perfect whole that’s really coming together in one deep listening from A to Z. The centrepiece is perhaps "Came to Me", instrumental and reprise with vocals, but no fillers on this one. Every part of the mystery is needed to come to its end and back again. It's a record that works in the morning, to open up a day and in the quiet corners of the night, with it's sleazy quirkiness, smiling towards you from the right corner of the eye. A perfect compagnon for your long-form wandering habits, light reflections on a wet surface obsessions, coffee slurping in the morning and the forgotten art of beachcombing. Quite essential these days, witnessing a world going apeshit.
Music From Memory returns with their penultimate release of 2016, this time bringing together a compilation of works by the Italian composer and musician Roberto Musci. While studying guitar and saxophone in his hometown of Milan, Musci developed a deep fascination for non-western music and set out to travel across India, Asia and Africa, which he would do extensively between 1974-1985. During his many journeys Roberto would become deeply embedded in each unique world of rhythms, scales and approaches to making and performing music. Throughout this period of travel he would make many field recordings as well as collect and study many traditional and indigenous instruments that he would then later combine with synthesizers and electronics on his return to Italy.
Combining personal documents of music and sounds deeply connected to the history and cultures of those lands, with his own explorations and experiments with cutting edge sound technology Roberto Musci would develop through his music a very unique and at times wholly mystical space, where ancient and modern would evolve into a new musical language.
As well as making his own music, during the 1980’s and 1990’s Roberto would also regularly broadcast radio shows of experimental and indigenous music on Italian radio stations such as Rai and Radio Popolare. Deeply connected to the arts he would also compose and perform numerous pieces of music for theatre, dance and performance art pieces as well as soundtracks for film and television.
‘Tower of Silence’ brings together a double LP of material from Roberto Musci’s solo recordings commencing with the Loa of Music sessions from 1984 up until later very recent works. The compilation also includes a number of collaborative pieces, many performed and written in collaboration with Giovanni Venosa, such as material taken from their ‘Water Messages On Desert Sand’, which as an album was Grammy-nominated in in the UK in 1987. A unique and at times intensely mesmerising musical world ‘Tower of Silence’ offers an introduction to the work of a unique and visionary artist.
Smerz remixed by ML Buch, Clairo, Astrid Sonne, Molina, Erika de Casier, MIKE + Zack Sekoff feat. Elias Rønnenfelt & Fousheé, Clarissa Connelly, Toxe and more... Smerz use 'Big City Life EDITS' to temper the foundations of what's developing into a bonafide movement, linking early vanguards like Clairo and Toxe with modish scroll-pop exponents ML Buch, NEW YORK, Astrid Sonne and Erika de Casier. Smart, extant biz - and a good way to take the temperature on a scene that's rapidly finding its feet. When they debuted (on SoundCloud, of course) in the mid 2010s, Catharina Stoltenberg and Henriette Motzfeldt sounded as if they were out on their own, meshing subtle club deconstructions with a kind of listless, languid half-pop that sounded familiar but fitting in an era when the millennial obsession with arduous performance was about to topple from the edge of a cliff. For a new generation who'd been forced to acclimatize at an early age to their terminally online reality, their older cousins' preoccupation with bells and whistles was beginning to wear thin - a listless, twee and dreamy alternative was beginning to materialize. Simultaneously inspired by the experimental pop fringe (think Jessy Lanza), the free mixtape-fueled R&B/rap mainstream and their state sponsored Scandi musical education, Smerz characterized this new wave; indeed, when they released their latest album 'Big City Life', they were basically veterans, having spent the last few years engineering a sound that propelled them from Copenhagen to all the way to Seoul, co-producing K-pop group NewJeans' 'Get Up' EP with fellow Scandinavian Erika de Casier. Now they were part of a sui generis movement, alongside Pitchfork faves like ML Buch, Clarissa Connelly and Astrid Sonne. 'Big City Life EDITS' presents 14 remixes of the album, one for each track provided by crooked web of their friends and contemporaries - with an extra cut tacked on from Stoltenberg and Motzfeldt themselves. And they do a good job of using their stems to goad their loose scene into showing its scope. In typically irreverent fashion, they launch the record with a mix from Danish duo Yrdloop, one of the set's least starry inclusions. Still, founded by Rhythmic Music Conservatory alumni, Yrdloop immediately lay out the contextual landscape, transforming the piano-led 'Big dreams' into an iridescent mesh of instrumental vamps, Oneohtrix-inspired FM exhalations and shimmering acoustic strums. Sonne meanwhile replies to Smerz's killer edit of 'Say you love me' with her dusty, casually reflective cover of 'Easy', and NEW YORK add some essential Stateside absurdity to 'Imagine This', showing that there's DNA outside of Scandinavia. The majority of the reworks might cluster around Copenhagen - tracks from Fine, Molina, Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Haploplus+ and Clarissa Connelly - but this only allows the sound to harden around its core elements. Danish-Chilean singer-songwriter Molina adds a dubby, South American lilt to 'Roll the dice', and ML Buch provides radio-friendly, cybernetic soft-rock glam to 'But I do', while Fine backs up the homespun 'Rocky Top Ballads' with a suitably Mazzy Star-inspired cover of 'A thousand lies'. There's no real genre present, but there's a tangible vibe - an omnivorous appetite for music that culminates in restraint and nonchalance, not hyperactive DAW-powered extravagance. The inclusion of Clairo, who features on Smerz and VVTZJ's edit of 'You got time and I got money', is a canny acknowledgement of the American lo-fi pioneer's enduring influence and even Toxe, who helped blur the lines between experimental club music and pop with her STAYCORE collective, turns up to extend the sleepy 'Street style' beyond its original frame. If you're interested in studying the evolution of pop and the avant-garde, 'Big City Life EDITS' gives you a surprisingly clear, succinct overview.
The album will be released on February 13, 2026
Strut proudly presents the debut album from producer, songwriter and multiinstrumentalist, Momoko Gill. Fresh from her critically acclaimed collaboration Clay recorded with cult electronic artist Matthew Herbert, Momoko steps forward in her own right for the first time with her remarkable debut solo album.
Momoko has long been one of the UK electronic and jazz scene’s best-kept secrets. A self-taught drummer, producer, songwriter, and vocalist, she has brought her unique touch to collaborations with Alabaster DePlume, Matthew Herbert, Coby Sey, Tirzah, and Nadeem Din-Gabisi (her musical foil in An Alien Called Harmony). Extensive touring behind the drum kit, at the keys and in front of the mic have honed her compositional and production instincts.
With Momoko, Gill emerges into the spotlight with an album that is entirely her own. Throughout, you can hear the stylistic flavours of jazz musicians as much as singer-songwriters, experimental artists and electronic producers. Though Gill rejects imitation, sculpting her sound through feel and expression rather than tradition. Based in London and having grown up in Japan and the US, Gill channels her breadth of perspective through her musical ideas and storytelling, with a unique voice developed through instinct, collaboration and solitary study.
The album’s eleven tracks take in a wide spectrum with the jazz-infused groove of ‘No Others’ and harmony-drenched, reflective ‘Heavy’ contrasting with the dark, confrontational sound of 'Shadowboxing' leading into an eerie left-field instrumental beat, ‘Test A Small Area' and the impressive 50-person choir on ‘When Palestine Is Free’ (which includes heavyweights Shabaka Hutchings, Soweto Kinch, Alabaster DePlume, Coby Sey, Marysia Osu and more). It is a deeply personal and poetic recording and showcases the full uncompromising range of Momoko’s vison, presented in her own voice.
Momoko was produced by Momoko Gill, recorded at Total Refreshment
Centre, mixed by Matthew Herbert and mastered by Alex Gordon at Abbey Road Studios.
consciousness through ecstatic dance. Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors were a world unto themselves.
Despite featuring an extraordinary cast of musicians (with credits including Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Miles Davis, Santana, Stevie Wonder, Milton Nascimento and much more) and selling hundreds of thousands of albums, the music of Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors remains largely unheard beyond their sphere. Conceived as live, improvised soundtracks to Roth’s transcendental dance workshops, musical acclaim was never on the agenda.
Instead, for a passionate dancer and spiritual polyglot like Gabrielle Roth, movement was a means through which to channel a wide spectrum of teaching, from experimental psychology to psychedelic counter-culture. It was from this heady mix that she devised a movement meditation known as 5Rhythms, which came to define her life’s work.
As “guide and catalyst”, Roth would dance to inspire the percussion-led instrumentals that would in turn fuel her 5Rhythms workshops, stimulating a secular form of ecstatic dance with roots in Native American shamanic traditions, Afro-Brazilian Candomblé and Yoruba drumming.
Using anything from a Sioux pony drum to East African kihembe and Japanese Kabuki drums, Gabrielle’s lawyer-turned-drummer husband Robert Ansell set the foundational rhythms for The Mirrors’ recordings, each of which would then feature a rotating cast of friends and professional musicians.
“The secret of everything we’ve done is that we never told anybody what to play,” Robert shares. “Instead of our albums being a musical vision of one person like me or Gabrielle, they were the musical vision of a whole bunch of people.”
At times the recordings have a Middle Eastern flair, at others, West African and spiritual jazz modes come to the fore. Hints of kosmische musik, proto-house and electronic ambience are laced like LSD through the organic rhythmic structures. This was kaleidoscopic ambient music to stir the body and free the mind.
In practice, the task of synthesising these different elements fell to Scott Ansell, Robert’s son and a recording engineer whose credits now include Nile Rogers, Duran Duran, Grace Jones. With meticulous attention to detail he captured and translated the dynamic energy of each drum onto record. Their sessions became legendary, and with access to the best studios in the NYC, The Mirrors sparkled.
Despite being initially overlooked by the burgeoning ‘80s New Age market, which preferred pipes and gongs to The Mirrors’ heavy-grooving drums, Robert Ansell set up Raven Recording to self-release the music, creating a vast sonic archive of sixteen albums over almost forty years.
The breadth of Raven’s catalogue is such that curator Pol Valls had to cut an initial selection of sixty-six tracks down to the eleven featured here. What crystallises is a stunning, mind-altering collection which spans, in Pol’s words, “a variety of genres, styles, and vibes within their catalogue, whether it is emotional, esoteric, spiritual, melancholic, hypnotic, dark, or at times a combination of these elements together.”
Music for immersive and intimate environments, Gabrielle Roth & The Mirrors were born from the dance. In the hands of the right DJ, at the right time, in the right place, they might just return there.
Diving deeper into the story of Japanese reggae pop, Tokyo Riddim Vol. 2 explores an electronic, new wave and often experimental sound unlike anything Japan or Jamaica had ever heard before.
The first time Ryuichi Sakamoto left Japan, he did not go to the United States or Europe - he went to Jamaica. It was 1978, YMO were about to release their debut album, but Sakamoto was in Kingston, invited to play synths for Japanese idol singer Teresa Noda at Dynamic Sound Studios in a band alongside Neville Hinds and none other than Rita Marley. It’s not a story many know, but one which would spark Sakamoto’s fascination with dub and mark a new chapter in the ongoing Japanese love affair with reggae.
The Teresa Noda tracks they cut - ‘Tropical Love’ and ‘Yellow Moon’ - bookend this second volume of Time Capsule’s Tokyo Riddim compilation, which tells the wider story of how a fascination with Jamrock swept Japan, adding a dash of lime to that sweet city pop sound, embracing a globalised musical palette and creating a whole new genre in the process.
For some, like Sakamoto, a diversion into reggae was part of broader fascination with new sounds and styles, tipped into the global disco of homage and appropriation that made Japanese music of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s some of the most creative and undefinable in the world.
You had iconic shape-shifter Yosui Inoue, who toyed with reggae, afro-beat and electro-Balearic, (and whose For Life Records released several tracks on this comp), and Kay Ishiguro, who enlisted J-reggae originator Pecker on the ambitious Stevie Wonder-esque ‘Red Drip’.
Then there were the Compass Point devotees - producers and musicians alike who were enthralled by the sound of the Bahamas studio and drew on the detached cool of Grace Jones - as heard in the music of Juicy Fruits, and the disco noir of Casablanca-signed femme fatale Yuki Nakayamate. Sometimes, as was the case with Risa Minami, the J-reggae influence said more about Japan than it did about Jamaica.
But where Tokyo Riddim Vol. 1 focused on the city pop sound, this compilation goes further, digging out the more experimental collaborations and hybrids exemplified by Tomoko Aran, who in working with Yusuaki Shimizu and Mariah emphasised just how far reggae had travelled to be recast into something entirely new on the other side of the world.
Perhaps more than anything, in connecting the dots between Tokyo and Kingston, between Jamaica and Japan, the Japanese reggae was building a musical language that existed outside of the paradigms of US and European cultural hegemony - an encounter shaped by commerce, capital and creativity that is now being recognised more broadly for the first time.