Electronic / Experimental
4136 products
Spring Back, Ball Forward is the Soda Gong debut from Jung dj, nom de plume of shapeshifting multi-instrumentalist Randy Riback. Following a series of uniformly great self-releases and cassettes on the dearly missed Lillerne Tapes, this collection observes the spacious and angular dynamics of 1990s Midwestern post-rock through the lens of the bedroom electronic music producer. Perhaps surprisingly, amp worship lies at the center of the album: a fascination with the grain, pressure, and emotional charge of amplification and gain, refracted through the strange remove of digital amp modeling. Tubes, speakers, sag, and in-the-red textures are a critical part of the album’s expressive vocabulary, imparting density and colorful saturation while lending even its most weightless passages a vital sense of physical presence. Over the course of twelve tracks, wistful ambience gives way to blunt heaviness and roiling catharsis, underpinned by a palpable sense of loss and grief. The album’s auspicious cast of collaborators further complicates its emotional terrain. Spoken contributions from Natalia Panzer and Angelina Nonaj occupy strikingly different registers: Panzer’s diffuse and oblique, drifting in and out of the music’s contours; Nonaj’s a vivid travelogue, grounding the record in place and lived experience. Elsewhere, Soda Gong veteran Mister Water Wet joins a small constellation of guests whose playing folds naturally into Riback’s arrangements, blurring the boundaries between computer and ensemble music. For all of its attention to texture, process, and the material qualities of sound, Spring Back, Ball Forward is first and foremost an emotionally potent work, possessed of a directness that can feel rare within experimental electronic music. Riback draws from a rich and idiosyncratic musical vernacular, arriving at something deeply felt and difficult to place: a singular statement whose pathos exceeds the sum of its references.
"Take me, I’m yours" is the first collaboration album between Alan Abrahams and Jan Jelinek. Released through the latter’s faitiche, it builds upon multi-layered vocal sketches by the former. The Paris-based artist, primarily known for his work as Portable and Bodycode, supplied Jelinek with multi-layered song sketches that the German artist subjected to a rigorous process of manipulation, excavating the ambiguities of the original material and transforming its rhythms into subtle pulses. "Take me, I’m yours" is neither a typical Abrahams record nor a classic Jelinek album—it is something third, mediating between the physicality of the voice and the abstraction of electronic sound design. The two had crossed paths before really getting to know each other after Abrahams invited Jelinek to play at one of his Süd Electronic parties. The idea of a collaboration emerged slowly. “It started as an experiment, and over the past few years grew from a few tracks into this album,” says Abrahams. He describes recording the basic material as a “tantalizing” process, not knowing how Jelinek would transform his material, some of which was based on wordless chanting, while other tracks were working with lyrical content. However, their mutual trust allowed Jelinek to remove the harmonies, radically reduce the rhythms, and concentrate on Abrahams’ voice. Jelinek heard something “fragile” in this voice, “moments of doubt and dark premonitions.” He points to Forever as an example. “Alan’s original song reminded me of classic vocal house, but his voice seemed to almost break,” he says. “This contradiction made the piece even bigger, because we hear a singer in the moment of an awakening.” He further accentuated such tensions through arrhythmic synth modulations and time-stretching algorithms, while also adding concrete sounds from a variety of sources. With its dedication to both transforming and amplifying the emotional qualities hidden within Abrahams’ pieces, "Take me, I’m yours" functions as a dialogue between those two singular artists.
Roméo Poirier’s Off The Record (faitiche 39) transforms the overlooked detritus of recording sessions into intricate, surreal sound pieces. Across fourteen short works, Poirier builds from accidental studio captures — engineers’ instructions, idle chatter, mic checks, false starts — fragments never intended for release. Drawing on the visual art concept of “Accumulation” pioneered by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri, Poirier assembles more than a thousand found sounds from archival tapes. Voices from old shellac grooves meet digital snippets lifted from YouTube, warped and reconfigured into vivid, shifting collages. The result is a series of miniature worlds where the mundane mechanics of music-making become the raw material for new sonic narratives. By reframing the prelude to performance, Poirier crafts a universal story about creativity in the studio — one that’s at once playful, intimate, and strangely cinematic.
2025 repress, gatefold sleeve, gold pantone print, incl. hot foil stamping. Edition of 500 ** After more than two decades, one of experimental noise music's most uncompromising statements returns to vinyl. Mego presents the long-awaited reissue of Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma, first released on CD in 2002 on the original Mego label. This 2LP edition marks the return of a landmark album that has remained a ferocious document of Drumm at his most inventive and unrelenting. The history of Sheer Hellish Miasma is one of resilience to the twists of underground trends that have come and gone since its initial release. Where lesser works have faded into obscurity or been absorbed by the zeitgeist, Drumm's vision has only grown more singular and essential with time. This is not music that seeks to comfort or accommodate - it is an artifact of eternal power that demands confrontation on its own uncompromising terms. Using guitar, tape manipulation, microphones, pedals, analog synthesizers, and subtle computer processing, Sheer Hellish Miasma constructs an overwhelming sonic architecture. This is an album that exists at the intersection of brutal physicality and meticulous composition - a careful orchestration of storming feedback, fractured textures, and unrelenting energy that reveals Drumm's mastery of extreme electronic sound. The album offers a singular vision positioned at the outermost edges of sound art, where conventional musical structures dissolve into pure sonic phenomenon. Each element - from the carefully manipulated guitar feedback to the processed analog textures - contributes to a cohesive statement that transcends the sum of its abrasive parts. For seasoned noise veterans, Sheer Hellish Miasma offers a bracing soundscape filled with exquisitely abrasive textures and hidden details that reward deep, repeated listening. In an increasingly homogenized world of abstract electronic noise, Drumm's work maintains a distinct voice that refuses easy categorization or imitation. For the uninitiated, Drumm's journey through the noisy underworld represents something more challenging - a confrontation with sound pushed to its absolute limits. This is music likely to inspire fear, or in the most optimistic case, a fearful admiration for the composer's uncompromising vision. Sheer Hellish Miasma stands as an abstract noise classic precisely because it refuses the comfortable compromises that allow underground music to be easily absorbed by mainstream culture. This 2LP reissue presents the work in its full, unmediated power - an artifact that has lost none of its capacity to challenge, disturb, and ultimately transform the listener's relationship to sound itself. In an era of endless digital reproduction, the return of Sheer Hellish Miasma to vinyl represents more than mere nostalgia. This is music that demands physical presence, that requires the listener to commit to its durational extremes, and that rewards those willing to submit to its particular form of sonic discipline.
Aging Asian club. 8 duos from Guruguru Brain making music together for the first time, imagining from a distance what future elders might sound like. Some with decades between them, some just a few years. Nobody in the same room: different cities, different languages, different time zones. Slow, drifting, a little wobbly, and still somehow in tune. Which kind of Future Elder will you be?
Chihei Hatakeyama: electric guitar and sound effects
Shun Ishiwaka: drums and percussion, piano on ‘M6’
Cecilia Bignall: Cello on ‘M3’
Composed by Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka
‘M3’ composed by Chihei Hatakeyama, Shun Ishiwaka and Cecilia Bignall
Following up on 2024's Acid Trax double album on Comatose, acid house music is back with Acid Devil, a 2x12" and digital self-published release. Created strictly with an 808 and modified 303, it's a more extreme range, but following the classic format of the acid sound, pioneered in Chicago. The 2x12" is limited to 200 copies and available as reservation only, with the final shipping date TBA, around summer 2026. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu at Schwebung.
Part 2 of the jungle series, it's another 4-tracker for fuzzy Akai hardware samplers, Technics turntable, analog monosynth bass and wide stretches of polysynths. Built with strictly old-school hardware with a loose groove, it's somewhere to get lost, down those night roads, and early mornings in the sky. Soak it up, and let's let time move a little faster.
Arriving at the third edition of the jungle series, we're relying yet once again on oldschool techniques, limited memory, and an absolute defiance of progression, unless we consider consistent values of anarchy a benchmark. A testament to tenement tagging, with bulletin synth lines, rubberized basslines, and an ever-changing palette of drum breaks, here we arrive at a place where we once were, and never were. Limited edition 12", mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Edition of 200 copies.
And so we come to round 4 of the Long Trax series, the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glazed pads and spicy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.
A pure shakuhachi work by Katsuya Nonaka, a shakuhachi player and organic rice farmer whose deep relationship with nature forms the very foundation of his musical express
Seefeel’s Loz.s is a companion EP to the recently release Sol.Hz LP. "Brazen Haze (Suspension 1)" is a newly recorded studio version of the first track on the album, based on the live arrangement Seefeel worked up for their 2026 European live dates. "nth" and "Ray Decay" are brand new tracks. As a vinyl 12", it's very much a game of two halves - one beatless side of shimmering drone, and one side featuring two rhythmic excursions, somewhat techno adjacent but with their signature dreamy haziness present and correct.
The soundtrack to Ubisoft’s popular game *Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory*, composed by Brazilian electronic musician Amon Tobin, has been reissued to commemorate the 20th anniversary of its release. Originally released in 2005 on *Ninja Tune*, the album has been highly acclaimed as a cinematic electronic work that transcends the boundaries of video game music, capturing the game’s themes of stealth, suspense, and explosive action.
The long-awaited CD version of the album includes two newly remastered bonus tracks that were only included on the cassette tape version! Japan’s KAKUHAN deliver a futureshock jolt on their incred debut album ‘Metal Zone’ - deploying drum machine syncopations around bowed cello and angular electronics that sound like the square root of Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’, Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, Beatrice Dillon’s ‘Workaround’ and Mica Levi’s ‘Under The Skin’ - or something like T++ and Errorsmith dissecting Laurie Anderson’s ‘Home Of The Brave’, her electric violin panned and bounced relentlessly around the stereo field. It really is that good - basically all the things we love, in multiples. While "Metal Zone" might be their debut, KAKUHAN are hardly newcomers. Koshiri Hino is a member of goat (jp), releasing a run of records under the YPY moniker, and heading up the NAKID label, while Yuki Nakagawa is a well known cellist and sound artist who has worked with Eli Keszler and Joe Talia among many others. Together, they make a sound that’s considerably more than the sum of its parts - as obsessively tweaked, cybernetic and jerky as Mark Fell, frothing with the same gritted, algorithmic intensity as Autechre's total-darkness sets, stripped to the bone and carved with ritualistic symbolism. The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KAKUHAN follow their 'nuum inclinations, snatching grimey bursts and staccato South London shakes and matching them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place. It's not a collision we expected, but it's one that's completely melted us - welding obsessive rhythmic futurism onto bloodcurdling horror orchestration - the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era. By the album's final track, we're presented with South Asian microtonal blasts that suddenly make sense of the rest of the album; Nakagawa erupts into Arthur Russell-style clouded psychedelia, while wavering flutes guide bio-mechanical ritual musick formations. It’s the perfect closer for the album’s series of taut, viscous, and relentless gelling of meter and tone in sinuous tangles, weaving across East/West perceptions in spirals toward a distinctive conception of rhythmic euphoria with a sense of precision, dexterity and purpose that nods to classical court or chamber music as much as contemporary experimental digressions. Easily one of the most startling and deadly debuts we’ve heard in 2022; the louder we’ve played it, the more it’s realigned our perception of where experimental and club modes converge - meditative, jerky, flailing genius from the outerzone. Basically - an AOTY level Tip.
When a British alt-soul and art-pop duo collaborates with Filipino musical royalty, the result is a blinding flash of artistic spirit that transcends geographical and generational barriers. For Margate-based act Thandii, a chaotic whirlwind of a trip to Manila allowed Graham Godfrey and Jess Berry to explore a new cultural context of song-writing. After several prolific years of self-released albums together, they took the opportunity to channel Graham’s Filipino heritage through an ambitious and somewhat zany project proposed by the label Sama Sama Records: for Thandii to make their next album with the most recorded drummer in the Philippines, Jun Regalado. Now in his late 70s, Jun Regalado has recently gained more recognition internationally after the reissue of his track ‘Pinoy Funk’ (from the Soundway compilation Ayo Ke Disco in 2024), along with the discovery of nearly 500 album appearances that are now finding themselves in the collections of younger generations. And on Coco Okayo - the first time he has collaborated outside of his contemporaries - Regalado effectively passes the torch. Not only does Thandii take inspiration from the 70s ‘Manila Sound’ movement, the sound of Manila itself is inescapably embedded in the album via the local recording studio. It was “like stepping into a time-warp”, the duo say. “Period correct pre-amps, compressors and instruments recreated the tones of the era, and combined with Sir Jun’s magical sound and touch – it created an authenticity so completely right for the moment.” In exploring a sound born of the diaspora with roots in British soul music, Coco Okayo makes full use of the polymath abilities of both Jess and Graham. While they provide vocals, percussion, flutes and production, they still manage to carve out space for regular Margate collaborators (including keyboardist Steve Pringle, Graham’s bandmate in Pigeon), as well as tapping Filipino connections in the United States such as Wyn Avillas and Ian Santillano. “I felt like the melodies and flurries of flute poured out of me during this whole process - it was quite freeing and explorative and unlike any album we’d made previously”, says Jess. The resulting album dances around genres and influences, from OPM to soul, disco-funk and trip-hop, refusing to be categorised as any one thing and yet cohesive in its sound. Thandii likes to dub it MAR-NILA. “It’s a new genre coming from Filipino diaspora artists paying tribute to the Manila sound of the 70s,” say Thandii, “but combining it with modern day post-punk-disco, beat-driven-art-pop music coming from the small seaside town of Margate”. Whichever way the listener might interpret it, it’s clear that Coco Okayo is not stuck between worlds, but rather, has built a utopian world of its own.
Echoes of Impermanence sees David Granström’s previously established strict hermetic minimalist musical topography undergo a major shift with the introduction of the electric guitar, which instigates a breaking of the sealed crystal walls of the composer’s previous work within music of long duration and precise digital synthesis, bringing forth a riff-laden spirit previously lingering below the surface. The album was recorded at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion EMS as well as in the composer’s own studio with the help of Mats Erlandsson and features a guest appearance by long-time collaborator and XKatedral co-founder Maria W Horn performing on the Hurdy-Gurdy on the title track. David Granström is a composer and musician from Umeå in the northern part of Sweden. His hometown is a stronghold of extreme musical expression and consequently Granström grew up playing guitar in a metal band and started to compose music within that context which eventually evolved into solo projects, having access to studio facilities adjacent to the rehearsal space. Granström initially found his personal musical voice within the context of electroacoustic composition utilizing his advanced programming ability to manifest a sound and formal structure governed by algorithmic processes. The resulting musical work is characterized by harmonic simplicity and spatiotextural complexity, employing sounds of synthetic and acoustic origin in combination with strict digital synthesis techniques.
Amina Hocine and Espen Sommer Eide contribute two extended compositions created for the GRM acousmonium. Hocine’s ‘X3’ combines sine waves, field recordings and her self-built foghorn organ in a slowly evolving piece inspired by Danish mystic Martinus Thomsen. Eide’s ‘Until The Fish Eyes Shine’ draws on his work as Phonophani, bringing elements of late-1990s Tromsø ambient techno into an experimental electronic setting. Both pieces explore the relationship between sound, space and time, moving from delicate electronic details to expansive, otherworldly passages. Artwork by Stephen O’Malley.
electronic music. Jules Négrier's An Iris Crackled Like Eyelids unfolds in two movements, moving from raw emotion and shifting harmonics into tangled rhythms and strange electronic sounds. Maria W Horn's All Solids Melt Into Aether pits computer-generated tones against an organ pushed to its limits, creating a compelling struggle between precision and instability. Both works find beauty in tension, with sounds constantly changing, collapsing and finding unexpected forms. Artwork comes courtesy of Stephen O'Malley.
A few years ago, the saxophonist, keyboardist, synthesist and musical polymath Josh Johnson was still a fairly well-kept secret in the music world. He was constantly showing up alongside Jeff Parker, Marquis Hill, Jamire Williams, Carlos Niño, Makaya McCraven and others, but often in the shadows, always supporting.
Lately Johnson has been harder to miss. He has helped shape the sound of Parker’s renowned ETA IVtet; served as the producer of Meshell Ndegeocello’s Grammy-winning album, The Omnichord Real Book (2023); co-leads all-star creative ensembles like SML, the Openness Trio and a collective with Sam Wilkes and Gregory Uhlmann; and this year, as the producer of Flea’s Honora and the musical director of his band, appeared on The Tonight Show and NPR’s Tiny Desk. Still, Johnson has yet to bring his solo work fully into the spotlight.
On October 23, Animative, Johnson’s third album under his own name and his first for International Anthem/Nonesuch, arrives to turn up the wattage on his artistry. More than any release to date, Animative shows why musicians and a growing community of listeners know this Chicago native and longtime L.A. resident to be one of the most imaginative electroacoustic musicians today, not to mention one of the most stunningly versatile. On Animative, the harmonically rich, loops-inflected sound Johnson has been developing — first with a full band on 2020’s Freedom Exercise, then on 2024’s immersive solo album, Unusual Object — comes together in a life-affirming LP of lowkey improvised brilliance and technological ambition.
Animative erases any distinction between being a jazz record led by a saxophone player and an experimental electronics record by a solo artist. Effects and digital overlays are at work in more ways than the ear can track, even when what you hear first is an unaltered saxophone sound. Meanwhile, undiluted improvised brilliance on the saxophone seeps in at unexpected moments. Johnson puts sophisticated technologies to work on nearly every track, often using the saxophone to control a sampler or a drum machine, triggering changes in a loop or an effect. But it’s always in service of a feeling — working to escape the trap of mastery. “I'm looking to make it feel more human,” Johnson says.
When running his alto sax through a harmonizer, Johnson is often varying and altering the intervals as he goes, so that the harmonies don’t just move in parallel lines or a single key, but curl and swarm. He also sometimes adjusts the effects on individual notes within the harmonized sound. Listeners to the recent, effects-laden, overdubbed saxophone experiments of Sam Gendel, another Los Angeles saxophonist-producer (including with Wilkes), will note the distinctiveness of Johnson’s approach. Fans of Lea Bertucci, Travis Laplante, and other experimental reed players pushing the structures of solo work will find a similarly rich complement in Johnson’s blend of looping, effects and sax improvisation.
Johnson’s reserved and thoughtful nature made the album’s title something of a puzzler to his friends. “I said the name to a few people, and they were like, ‘Animated is not how I would describe you,’” he laughs. “But I'm really thinking about it from the perspective of causing animation, giving spirit, or connecting with spirit.” He thinks often of the lessons of Wayne Shorter, one of his teachers, who instilled in him a sense of reverence for the mystical, and emphasized the musician’s duty to “conjure and transport.” And as he put together Animative, Johnson also had in mind the West African philosopher Maladoma Somay’s writings, and the “non-Western ways of thinking about time and being” they propose. He was inspired too by Italo Calvino’s inventive, often-dreamlike short fiction. “The way he uses the vehicle of short story is so gorgeous,” Johnson said. “It influences the way I write.”
Animative’s first track, “Idiophone,” which he’d been workshopping through multiple versions in concerts leading up to the recording session, fundamentally reimagines the saxophone’s musical identity. “I’m really interested in putting the saxophone in a different role besides soloist,” Johnson says. “The saxophone is also the drum. ‘Idiophone’ is me wanting to access the feeling of a percussion ensemble.”
On “Aughts Hymnal,” he manipulates the horn to sound more like an organ. On “Strays,” extending the influence of Billy Strayhorn in a futuristic direction, he allows some of the harmonies felt by the listener to remain unplayed. “If you were to go in and analyze it, all those pieces aren’t fully there. But your ear is filling it in, because the feeling is there,” he says. “I’ve been thinking a lot about how, if I want them to be felt, that might mean making them less legible in a certain way, which actually puts the feeling first.”
While he has become deeply affiliated with the burgeoning L.A. jazz scene, Johnson still finds powerful inspiration in the legacy of his Chicago hometown. Of particular importance is the example set by Eddie Harris, who precedes him not only in the city’s saxophone lineage but also as a multi-instrumentalist, composer and 360-degree artistic thinker. “I’m inspired by him as a conceptualist, and somebody who navigates a lot of different spaces,” Johnson says. Among pianists, his pantheon is topped by another brilliant eccentric: Mal Waldron. “In music that is so often centering virtuosity,” Johnson says, Waldron demonstrated “a different way of existing.”
Like Harris, Johnson always leads with a strong musical concept, but he relies upon a collaborative community to execute it. The album’s personnel include Ben Lumsdaine on drums, Macie Stewart on violin, Marquis Hill on trumpet, and Paul Bryan on bass and co-producing the album with Johnson.
While working on “High Step,” a slightly churchy, slightly off-kilter groover, Johnson felt Meshell Ndegeocello’s bass would be a perfect fit. She performs as a guest on the track, occupying the bass chair — a supporting role she rarely plays.
“Mill” is a quieter tune that seems designed to warm up the memory banks—reminiscent of Aphex Twin or Joe Zawinul balladry, or more recently the work of Johnson’s frequent collaborator Jamire Williams—as a clean saxophone sound pairs with subtly processed lines in a mix of unison and harmony. Finally, the last note molders into silence.
/ / / /
Johnson spent his earliest years in Maryland before his family moved to the Chicago suburbs when he was young. He didn’t take to his piano lessons, finding that he was happier teaching himself. It was only after starting to play the saxophone at age eleven that he fell completely in love with music. Soon after, his parents bought him a stack of jazz records; the sound that caught his attention most was the saxophone of Lester Young.
“I was like, ‘This dude is talking to me,’” Johnson says. “That's what it felt like.” He was as fascinated by the intellect and swagger he heard inside Young’s playing as he was by the “vocal qualities” of the saxophone. “It can whisper, it can scream, it can be really textured. I was still playing piano and keyboards, but the saxophone was what captured me,” he says.
Johnson went on to earn a bachelor’s in music from Indiana University, making the nearly eight-hour round trip from Bloomington to Chicago on weekends to participate in his hometown jazz scene. After graduating, he spent a couple of years living and working in Chicago before attending grad school at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz (now the Herbie Hancock Institute) in Los Angeles, studying under Shorter and Hancock.
He found himself surrounded by an L.A. jazz scene that was in bloom creatively and culturally. While Kamasi Washington and Terrace Martin’s careers filled the foreground, a vast network of musicians was intermingling jazz, ambient, dance music, hip-hop, minimalism, and more at venues around town. Before long, Johnson was near the center of nearly all of it. He was energized by the exchange between different music scenes and artistic disciplines in those years, particularly on gigs he played with Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, Mark de Clive-Lowe, and Jamire Williams.
“There was a lot going on, and a lot of places to play, and a lot of cross-pollination all coming about very organically,” he remembered. “I think that really encouraged me, because there were all these people just finding different ways to combine a lot of their interests. There was room to make a path.” Originally expecting to return to Chicago or head to New York after the Monk Institute, Johnson chose to stay put. “Part of what kept me in L.A. is that I felt like, ‘I'm interested in all these different things. If I was to move to New York right now, I might need to spend a long time just following this one path of the saxophone lineage.’”
One of L.A.’s headiest spaces in those years was ETA, the Highland Park bar where Jeff Parker’s ETA IVtet—which includes Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose—played weekly. “I guess it's like any sort of long-running gig in that it sort of takes on a life of its own,” Johnson says. “In those early days, there were a lot of different people who would come in there: other musicians, but also visual artists and painters, dancers, skateboarders from the various tributaries of Jeff’s world, stuff like that. There was this beautiful kind of overlap.”
In the past decade-plus, Johnson has become an essential collaborator to Carlos Niño, Nate Mercereau, Louis Cole, aja monet, Gregory Uhlmann, Anna Butterss, Matthew Stevens, and Sam Wilkes, among others.
When not playing in a group led by someone else, Johnson has often gravitated toward co-led ensembles like SML (with Butterss, Uhlmann, Jeremiah Chiu, and Booker Stardrum), the Openness Trio (with Mercereau and Niño), or his collaborative trio with Uhlmann and Wilkes.
Meanwhile, he also maintains a connection to the leading Chicago musicians of his generation, continuing to play in bands led by Marquis Hill, Makaya McCraven, and Joel Ross.
In addition to his jazz bona fides, Johnson’s musical versatility has been informed by an impressive resume of pop music work, including with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Harry Styles, Miley Cyrus, Chris Cohen, and Ezra Furman. Johnson served as musical director for Leon Bridges from 2018 to 2022, in which time he directed a performance with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, for which he arranged fourteen of Bridges’ songs.
For Johnson, every collaboration is a chance to connect and extend his practice. Much of the spirit of Animative has been informed by lessons he gleaned from recent work with Ndegeocello in particular. “We all have certain assumptions that we come into writing or making music with. Working with her, some of those things were broken down for me immediately,” Johnson says. “It opened me up to not just consider more of what’s coming in externally, but to also let more of the variety that's inside of me come out.”
“dm studies 000 - 004” is the first official music release by Daito Manabe, a visual artist, programmer, and composer who has continued to push the boundaries of music, technology, and visual expression. Originally released exclusively at the venue of the new festival “Future Frequencies Festival,” which Manabe co-organized in 2026, the CD is now available to the general public. Comprising five tracks, *dm studies 000 - 004* is an avant-garde electronic music work created around themes of contrasting concepts such as “chaos and order” and “humanity and process.” It explores the intersection of classical mathematical principles, beautifully and intricately constructed kinetic sound design, and club music, presenting Daito Manabe’s unique and cutting-edge musical universe.
Beautiful, ephemeral ectronica from Berlin’s OCA, presented by the ace Metrón label behind Meitei’s japanese ghost stories and a deep ambient dive by Georgia. Lucidly influenced by Japanese environmental ambient styles, OCA’s ‘Aging’ follows from the duo’s 2018 tape ‘Preset Music’ for Constellation Tatsu with a longing exploration of decaying melodies and blushing harmonics structures sure to light up the pleasure centres of anyone following new, Jap-inspired ambient innovations from the likes of Nozomu Matsumoto or Kenji Yamamoto to Visible Cloaks and Yamaneko, or even the breezy dimensions of Gas. Thru 10 vignette-like prisms OCA radiate pure light and good vibes from every pore, treading the finest line between introspection and nostalgic reverie in a way that acknowledges a sort of shared dream or waking life experience common to many listeners. Hailing from Bavaria, the duo’s Yo van Lenz and Florian T M Zeisig operate at a strolling pace and state of mind that almost feels like a lighter take on Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas or Love Inc. creations, had he had a headful of inspiration from anime soundtracks and japanese ambient rather than Wagner and the likes of Prefab Sprout’s soft rock. As the album title implies, this is maybe a central issue of ‘Aging’, as where Voigt looks to the romantic pop and classical inspiration of his youth, OCA take theirs from a shared but slightly different pool of ‘80s cues; clear to hear between the languorous swoon of ‘I Believe In You’, the piquant strings and grin-inducing choral percolations of ‘Time With Your Dog’ (what a title!), the spirit-easing relief of ‘Making The last Train’, and shared-memory-jogging beauties such as ‘Baby’s First Blade of Grass’.
