Electronic / Experimental
4135 products
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.
“All possible processes. All channels open. Twenty-four hour alert." This Heat’s eponymous debut album, also known by fans as the 'blue and yellow', is a masterpiece of experimentation. This Heat's exploratory practice was based on extended collective improvisation that incorporated not just guitar and drums, but also viola, melodica, organ, household objects, and broken toys. They used tape machines to stretch the fabric of time and creative mic placement to warp space. They were fuelled not just by formal restlessness but also by rage at consumer society. Although widely considered to be Post-Punk’s finest, This Heat had actually begun performing at the start of London’s punk era. They developed new strange and volatile strains of avant-garde music that time has proved to be hugely influential, a blueprint for much that would follow. Featuring material recorded as early as their first public performance on 13th February 1976 and compositions that appear on the 1977 BBC Peel Sessions, their debut album was finally released in 1979.
Rabit takes his DJ Screw worship to heavily absorbing trip hop levels on a magnum opus of codeine-soaked tape loops and creeping vapours, including a guest spot from Lolina. By any measure it’s his strongest solo LP - huge RIYL Tricky, BoC, Croww, The Caretaker, Andy Stott, Basinski, Lynch & Badalamenti. In the decade since a debut album on influential witch-house label Tri Angle, Rabit has become a singular figure at the intersection of US rap, weightless grime and experimental electronic music, defining his sound on a string of crooked albums, DJ Screw-indebted mixtapes, and jams with everyone from Chino Amobi to Croww, besides production work for Björk and Boy Harsher. Perhaps notable by his absence in recent years, the Texan producer has clearly spent his time well in the studio, refining and adapting his process and distilling thoughts to analog tape loops for ‘Stranger in a Strange Land’; a heavily immersive half hour of sublimated, super groggy pressure that we’ve spent months wrapped up in and can 100% confirm its sandman potency. Logically, he derives from a formula of DJ Screw x Basinski x ‘Old Tapes’-era BoC something that transcends the sum of its parts, yielding a real go-to album primed for wake ’n bake times or, conversely, the far ends of the night - basically liminal music for heavy lids, carefully sequenced in a way that quietly displays all his stripes and unfolds its function with uncanny efficacy. Feels like a spoiler to say, but the closing ‘Ghost’ piece of chopped ’n screwed Badalamenti vibes, slowing and dusting a snippet of ‘Twin Peaks’-type intrigue & stuff, is arguably his finest moment in 14 years of releases, and the perfectly memorable kiss-off or denouement to an album that remains lodged in mind long after it’s finished. No doubt, it’s one of the year’s great albums so far.
Treasured slow motion trance rustlers Full Circle rack up a decade of remixes for the likes of Vox Populi!, 10LEC6, Tapan, and Die Orangen, plus a trove of unreleased goodies, on this limited edition mixtape, further to their much-adored albums and mixes for Good Morning Tapes and Offen Music. The eternal sunrise of late ’80s / early ’90s Goa dance & European proto-trance guides Alexis Le Tan & Joakim’s cult duo on their by-now trademarked style of chopped & screwed x Mediterranean drug chug hypno-bullets, pulling a broad range of source material into their own world of hazed offbeat grooves and arps with a rare je ne sais quoi that’s made their catalogue a proper cult property, fulfilling a need for this type of aerobic mysticism on modern dancefloors. As with their slew of Good Morning Tapes mixes and LPs it’s all arranged with a slick, sick, effortless aerodynamic, glyding between the likes of their subcontinental-slanted rework of fellow French psych-o-nauts Vox Populi!, and the remix for Die Orangen that really placed them on the map back in 2019. It’s never hurried, always zoned-in, flowing with a careful attention to the good of your trip and heavy as you like. The frisson is real!
After slaying with her cold fusions of ’90s R&B, ’00s brukfunk and footwork on 2024’s ‘Concentrate’ EP and last year’s ‘Come Alive’ album, NZO returns with a deadly hyper-jiggy session for DDS - huge one FFO Various Production, Beatrice Dillon, Dolo Percussion, Rian Treanor, Akufen, El-B. Captured at Rotherham Minster (the finest perpendicular church in Yorkshire, don’t u know) for SoYo’s annual electronics music showdown, No Bounds, NZO’s custom-built results brim with an unusual grasp of the funk, prompting a uniquely jittery rush offset with a wicked refusal of rhythmic anticipation that does crazy things with your limbs. With the finest grasp of ghost snares and the confidence to slap and tickle drums where others wouldn’t, she deftly dances thru fresh routes of rhythmic pursuit. Low-key, this sort of experimental ingenuity betrays her background in the sciences, as much as a keen ear for offbeat and upfront dance musics - effortlessly joining and short-circuiting oblique dots between Timbaland x The Neptunes’ rugged nuance, El-B’s whipsmart torsion, RP Boo’s legwork and Beatrice Dillon’s precision-tooled arrangements, all gelled with daring confidence in her own thing. We can't tell you if NZO's a DJ or nah, but she approaches her set with a serious understanding of how to take control of your limbs, linking rhythms, samples and melodic phrases as if she's grandstanding on four CDJs. She rushes towards euphoria with truncated R&B coos that she expertly threads between dub stabs and garage-y organ vamps, keeping the jerky rhythms intact throughout. And just when you think you've tapped in, sugar-sweet vocals and brassy fanfares cut into a shudder of drums, an 'ANTI EP'-era AE bass whoosh comes out of nowhere to remind you where you are. NZO patches together an authentically Yorkshire-coded reaction to New York's post-GHE20G0TH1K evolution, the self-consciously p2p-driven movement that helped shape visionary DJs like Total Freedom and Juliana Huxtable. But she’s less conspicuously "deconstructed" than her predecessors and champions Sheffield's avant history, referencing Warp's early run, Mark Fell's continuous influence and the perpetual grind of heavy industry, blending these elements with her spectrum of influences from further afield. Freaky, hyper-articulated movers need to check it at the nearest opportunity, trust.
Finally on wax; Shiner, Pontiac Streator and Ben Bondy's West Mineral debut as Shinetiac is a real downtempo pleasure, re-imagining classic Trip Hop with a gooey cybernetic core, hugely recommended for anyone on the line from Hysterical Love Project to Seefeel, Olive to A.S.O., Ulla to Arovane. All three members of Shinetiac are best known for their tenure in the neo-ambient weeds, gathering bounties for 3XL, Quiet Time, Motion Ward and of course Huerco S.'s West Mineral. Anyone familiar with their various side projects and solo deployments will have already clocked their obsessions with classic dreampop, trip-hop and cloud rap, and those influences are fully thrust into the foreground here, with the more trad ambient elements used as little more than decoration. 'Star Frog Dilla' opens the set and combs illusory Olive-like vocal harmonies over a jumble of choppy jazz samples and sirens, with a glitch-heavy beat that harks back to an earlier, simpler iteration of IDM. What makes it so inviting is that Shinetiac fashion a loveletter to pre-internet cultural collisions, pooling their empathetic energies in a lushly amorphous slant on ambient dance strung between classic Trip Hop, HD late ‘90s / early ‘00s electronic music x vaporous hypermodernism. They cycle freely from the curdled reflux of Y2K business in ‘Night Coomy’ to rudely electrified beatdown on another standout, ‘K2 Spiritual’ and its spongiform centrepiece ‘Prayer For Kim Cassidy’ calling to mind the most genteel ends of RDJ, lavishing electro drums over a seemingly dark backdrop and changing the mood immediately. Soon they're in almost balearic territory, turning moonlight into an island dawn with Orbital-esque time-stretched vocal echoes and SFX. The trio increase the tempo on 'Dog Cafe Rioz', working in that double/half-time mode that's been such a fixture on off-piste dancefloors in the last few years and letting languid electric piano phrases form hazy vapour trails. It all builds to 'Everlong', a cover of the Foo Fighters' 1997 anthem that Shinetiac spy through the lens of Sneaker Pimps - whose landmark '6 Underground' arrived only a year prior. It's a form of historical fantasy, imagining an interaction that never happened but maybe should have? Because it works, stripping away the bombast and replacing it with moody low-end pulses and pure vibes.
Japanese bamboo flute maestro and goat (JP) cohort Rai Tateishi makes an impressive debut statement with his holistic attempts to transcend the limits of ancient instruments to reveal gently delirious insights comparable with Jon Hassell, Phew, Bendik Giske, FUJI|||||||||||TA.
‘Presence’ is a triumph of improvised, elemental musicality that distills aspects of myriad folk traditions in pursuit of the artist’s own truth. For 40 minutes of singularly weird, locked-in performance, Rai Tateishi diverges his formative training in the shinobue (a bamboo flute) to applications for its elder sibling, the shakuhachi, and its distant relatives in the khene mouth organ of Northeastern Thailand and Laos, and even the Irish flute, with remarkable results returned from each.
Piece to piece, Tateishi adapts a spectra of unusual and extended instrumental experiments to articulate uniquely animist sound arrangements, with judicious use of a ring modulator and delay effects only subtly altering his sound in real-time, gelling the harmonics and smoothing off its contours. Some 15 years of studies and accreted knowledge of histories, timelines, and spirits are deftly tattered in the air and rebound in precisely complex ribbons that become all the more impressive by virtue of its in-the-moment recording.
Presented with no overdubs, the six works were recorded by label head and KAKUHAN/goat lynchpin Koshiro Hino across three days of adventurous improvisation capturing the breadth of Tateishi’s vision in a mix of succinct flights of fancy and one durational wonder where he really cuts loose. An opening piece of rapid percussive fingering and rasping sets the tone for increasingly intricate explorations of the shinobue, and bluesy cadence of a reedy Thai khene - antecedent of the shō - whipped into headier harmonic overtones, whilst his 5th piece for Irish flute best recalls Ka Baird or Michael O’Shea’s lysergic impishness, and a 13 minute closing piece most boldly fucks with folk and jazz traditions, in-depth and with the genre short-circuiting audacity of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.
Landing in the wake of prism-shaking works by Will Guthrie & Mark Fell, goat (jp) and Kakuhan; Tateishi’s ‘Presence’ more than lives up to NAKID’s impressive levels, unflinchingly operating by its wits with a verve and dare-to-differ moxie that gets at it from the first hit to the last, harnessing the kind of skill and ingenuity that’s distinctive but still strikingly minimal and overwhelmingly physical. It's a remarkable achievement.
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.
‘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.
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.
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
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
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.