Electronic / Experimental

Channeling the Euro-pop sensibilities of Crepuscule and the ethereal goth of 4AD, Vazz arrived in Glasgow just as the Sound of Young Scotland was taking off. Armed with a drum machine, guitar, bass, and Anna Howson’s icy cooing, the duo offered a darker take to a scene dominated by poptimists Orange Juice, Josef K, and Aztec Camera. This 40th anniversary edition of their 1986 mini-album Your Lungs and Your Tongues compiles their complete Cathexis recordings and adds a handful of unissued minimal wave pearls. Colder than Dalwhinnie on the solstice—better bring a parka.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/VahXG1J3AE0?si=QoQJcsuiv7F3611W" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Tara Nome Doyle's latest EP »Agape« marks her return to the music scene after a two-year hiatus following the success of her acclaimed sophomore album »Værmin« (Modern Recordings, BMG, 2022). »Agape« is a profoundly intimate collection of songs documenting TND's emotional journey through grief, commemorating the passing of a loved one. Each track explores different facets of this emotional landscape, showcasing TND's otherworldly performances and unique approach to songwriting. This self-produced EP represents an artistic leap for the Norwegian-Irish songwriter. Skill-fully capturing the arresting beauty of her compositions, TNDs minimalistic arrangements feature the haunting melodies of Norwegian-Scottish cellist Sunniva Shaw of Tordarroch (known for her work with Fay Wildhagen, Liv Jakobsen and Juni Habel). The ethereal atmosphere they create together evokes a distinctly Scandinavian eeriness while TND's dedication to crafting poetic lyrics and vivid storytelling pays tribute to her Irish singer-songwriter roots. The EP's title »Agape« translates to unconditional, selfless love - a sentiment that permeates each of the six tracks. This timeless collection of songs aims to be a comforting and cathartic companion for anyone caught in the throes of grief.

Highly recommended! For all of ambient, balearic and new age fan. The previous work from <100% Silk>, which was also introduced by , just made a record-breaking hit in Bandcamp. Tokyo's notable DJ / producer, who had released a great cassette work from , has released the beautiful ambient / new age gems from . After the popular title from <100% Silk>, New cassette release from with enhanced new age / Balearic colors is very exquisite. Works recorded at home studio, focusing on hardware synths and samplers from the 80's and 90's. It is a work that pursues "images in photographs and movies of locations that have been lost with the passage of time" and "A nostalgia for a place we can never be" The best hidden work. It is as good as, and sometimes even surpasses, the works of modern revival / new age sanctuaries and reissues such as and . At the bottom is the light and quiet view of dance / deep house that is unique to this person. It's too great, it's incredible, and it's just a sigh of admiration.

“Upopo Sanke“ means “Let's sing a song" in the Ainu language. Umeko Ando (1932-2004) was one of the best-known artists of the Ainu, an indigenous, long-suppressed community in northern Japan. She sings their traditional songs together with Oki Kano on the Tonkori harp, who also recorded the album. The two are supported by members of the female vocal group Marewrew as well as Ainu percussionists, a string player and a male singer who provides rhythmic shouts and also throat singing. The call-and-response structure of many of the songs is performed with a mantric quality in a vocal style that is perhaps best described as elastic and breathing. There seems to be a gentle smile in every note and syllable. This music softly hits the heart. Upopo Sanke was recorded on a farm in Tokachi in the summer of 2003. We hear dogs barking, a distant thunderstorm and voices imitating animals. The liner notes that accompany the 2LP release gather the anecdotal memories of Umeko Ando and Oki Kano about the stories of the 14 songs. Oki Kano is a musical ambassador of the Ainu culture who tours worldwide with his Oki Dub Ainu Band and also gives solo concerts, always playing the Tonkori, the five-stringed Ainu harp. The Ainu have suffered from the oppression of their culture and language by Japan, especially since the 18th and 19th centuries. Only recently, in 2008, were the Ainu officially recognized again as an indigenous people culturally independent of Japan. As a result of the marginalization, there are now only a few hundred native speakers of the Ainu language left, making it a particularly worthy object of preservation. "Upopo Sanke" was mixed again in part by Oki Kano, before being mastered and cut to vinyl by Kassian Troyer. The 2LP plays on 45rpm and it sounds fantastic. This album was the second album by Umeko Ando, the follow-up to „Ihunke" and also re-released in 2018 by Pingipung together with Oki Kano.

Kompakt is proud to announce, finally, a reissue of the first, self-titled GAS album. Originally released on electronica imprint Mille Plateaux back in 1996, it’s been unavailable in its original form ever since – the version of GAS included in 2008’s Nah Und Fern box featured several different tracks. Here, however, GAS is restored in all its glory, the debut full-length from Wolfgang Voigt’s most enigmatic, quixotic project. There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up. But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions. GAS feels, also, like a more pliable hint at what’s to come, as the GAS concept really solidified on its successor, 1997’s Zauberberg, and reach its apotheosis on Königsforst and Pop. Those three albums share a very similar palette – blurred, hazy samples, often of classical music, stacked and cross-thatched across a muted 4/4 thud. GAS, then, is an outlier of sorts: it’s more expansive in its remit, lighter in its mood, perhaps more fleet of foot. This, of course, is part of its charm. In clearing space for Voigt, by preparing the terrain, GAS sits both at the edge of the forest, and at the verge of an expansive, wide-eyed future; one where GAS would become truly eternal.

The 2015 edition of Winnipeg’s send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle is pleased to announce the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters? For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch’s phrase, ‘establish silence’. Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don’t often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Alongside metallic, wooden and skin percussion of all kinds, sounded and struck in every conceivable way, we also hear bamboo flute, viola, and Fuchs’ distinctive free-form vocalisations. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. On opener ‘Dessogia I’, the shimmering almost-gilssandi tones of Fuchs’ enormous set of microtonally tuned metal tubes ripples across Fell’s rubbery pulse, which moves up the frequency spectrum as Fuchs becomes more animated and switches to horn. At some points, as on the metallic chiming tones that open ‘Fauch I’, only the unexpected dynamic behaviour of Fell’s sounds distinguish them from Fuchs’ acoustic instruments. At others, like on ‘Queetch III’, the waves of sliding tones and noise textures are bracingly synthetic, joined by piercing squeaks and scrapes from Fuchs’ metal objects. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.

Mamman Sani Abdoulaye, a legendary name amongst Niger’s avant garde, presents a singularly unique recording of minimalist organ music from the Sahara. Dreamy and hypnotic, the sound is unlike anything coming out of West Africa before or since, closer in effect to early electronic experiments of Kraftwerk.Mamman composes in technique that can only be called minimal, relying on the simplicity and space. It is a remarkable manipulation of sound that uses the silence to invoke the emptiness, a metaphoric desert soundscape. Unsurprisingly, his source material is folkloric Nigerien music, and many of the compositions on this record are reproductions of ancient songs brought into the modern age. Interpreting this rich and varied history of Niger’s dance and song for the first time in contemporary music, Mamman electrifies the nomadic drum of the Tuaerg, the polyphonic ballads of the Woddaabe, and the pastoral hymns of the Sahelian herders. Accompanying this repertoire are a few compositions, such as Salamatu, the deeply personal love letter to an unrequited romance.Recorded in 1981 at the National Radio in Niger, shortly after Mamman discovered an old Italian organ, the album was a spontaneous production, recorded in two takes. It was released on cassette but was a commercial failure, and only a handful were sold. The recordings, however, were a success, and became the themes to the National radio for the subsequent 30 years, securing Mamman’s place in the foundation of Nigerien music.Rediscovered in a cassette archive in Niger and digitized on a portable recorder, La Musique Électronique du Niger was reissued in 2013 on limited vinyl. Now restored and remastered from the original tape material by Jessica Thompson, this new edition is available on vinyl, cd, and a color Newbury Comics edition.

No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like William Tyler. After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, this adopted son of Nashville emerged at the dawn of the last decade with a string of inquisitive albums that paired the measure of his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for post-modern experimentation, field recordings and static drifts folded beneath exquisite melodies. Tyler dug Chet Atkins and Gavin Bryars, electroacoustic abstraction and endless boogie. His productive little enclave of instrumental music has increasingly followed such catholic tastes, not only ushering new sounds and textures into the form but also critical new voices and perspectives.And on the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear (and, for what it’s worth, all of his records) stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices.Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions (as heard on last year’s staggering “Darkness, Darkness” single, with more to come), Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked longtime friend and producer Jake Davis to help stitch them together and perhaps clean up those imperfections. (Eventually, back in Los Angeles, Alex Somers stepped in to provide the finishing touches.) Davis and Tyler opted to go the other way: embrace the hiss and wobble and, in the end, unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.From the start, Tyler’s music has pulled from the past, drawing old notions and conventions into the revealing light of now. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, Miss., to clean out his late grandfather’s downtown office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, back to Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.Time Indefinite begins with a sampled shard from that antique, as harsh as Merzbow processing the sound of a washing machine. It is a lurid, worrying signal flare: I am here, and things are hard, but I am trying. The piece unfurls like a haunted house still inhabited by real, living people, trying to make do when the world around them seems to be saying don’t. Not 10 minutes later, at the start of “Concern,” Tyler slips into a melody as gorgeous as anything he’s ever found, strings and steel rising like the sun beneath his simple folk waltz. It is a hand on a shoulder, a radiant bit of music that answers: I am here, and things are hard, but we are trying.This seesaw of struggle and survival defines these nine songs and 50 minutes, a map of anguish and belief and the trails that link them. “Electric Lake” is an ecstatic drone that summons La Monte Young to this century, but there is pain beneath its glow. “Howling” is an absolute wonder, its gentle guitar lope and choir of echoing horns and keys recalling the glory days of Windham Hill. But the background actually does howl, latent worry simply waiting to roar back to life. It doesn’t during the supple “Anima Hotel,” but you know it won’t be long now, because it never is—on this album as in real life. “This is a mental illness record,” Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as he is on tape. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” He doesn’t, however, need to tell you that; you can feel it, probably even recognize it from your own experience.Too, Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical references and influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes and legends of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee. In the mid-’80s, he began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. (The record is a nod to this idea, of time’s relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it.) It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler, like McElwee, wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united at least in having them. Time Indefinite is the soundtrack that Tyler’s create.“Held,” the ninth and final track, seems to sigh through a grin as it begins, a welcome reprieve from the plangent drone of its predecessor. It is the benediction at the close of all these goddamned chaotic blues. For what it’s worth, that is Tyler in a nutshell, someone will who smile sheepishly and offer a perfectly silly joke even as he tells you the hardest things about himself. But by the end, that grin blooms into a full smile, Tyler beaming through an acoustic waltz that is a perfect bit of unadulterated beauty. Yes, the machines and strings still whirr in the background, a true-to-life reminder of omnipresent menace. Not right now, Tyler seems to be saying. Instead, the message is clear: I am here, and things are hard and wonderful, and I am still here.

A lingering guitar note. A cushion of a bassline nudging along a hushed cadence unspooling impressionistic poeticism one halting line at a time; the sparse snap of a snare providing punctuation. This is how Boston’s Karate opened their third full-length, 1998’s The Bed Is In The Ocean. Perhaps this was a reaction to the aggressive punk tones that marked their previous album, or maybe they hoped to capture the somnambulant dusk on one of those pristine fall days that make living in a town whose population swells when colleges welcome back students all worthwhile. Then again, Karate never made a point of chasing the same idea twice, and “There Are Ghosts” remains in line with the band’s stylistic intrepidness and unpredictability. Even the group’s lineup appeared constantly in flux. After expanding from a trio to a quartet and employing a dual-guitar attack with 1997’s In Place of Real Insight, founding member Eamonn Vitt hung up his axe to attend medical school. Karate soldiered on as a trio, with mid-stream addition Jeff Goddard’s bass work helping establish a sidewinding path forward through the smoky jazz melodicism and sun-beaten blues brushstrokes that hung in the background of the band’s catalog. In their short time together, Karate helped bolster the national punk ecosystem, a scene in which individual artistic vision was prized but rarely achieved. Their exacting precision and emotive interplay helped recombine the DNA of the dignified grace of slowcore, the hot-and-sweaty atmospherics of the blues, and the high-wire tension of post-hardcore to deliver drawling instrumental curveballs and a furtive riptide climax with a controlled grace on “Outside Is The Drama.” Singer-guitarist Geoff Farina frequently teased out the emotional nuances of each song, his worn-in voice shading in the complexities of his enigmatic lyrics; no matter how difficult it may be to parse his snatched-from-daily-life wisdoms, on The Bed Is In The Ocean Farina sounded like a guy who knew exactly the right thing to tell whoever may be listening. And with Karate’s snaking turns through quasi-punk reveries no one else appeared capable of mustering, it’s comforting to hear it accomplished by a band that knew exactly what they were doing.

“I’ve been partying since 1984,” says Jamal Moss, the living Chicago legend known by his dedicated cult following as the one, the only, Hieroglyphic Being. “40 years later, it’s drastically different - everybody’s angry!” So sets the stage for Dance Music 4 Bad People, the artist’s first album for Smalltown Supersound. Tapping back into the same cosmic frequencies responsible for the prolific house virtuoso’s most vital work, the album sees Moss coaxing nine anthems for those up to no good from out of the ether. With driving drum machine workouts and low-slung synth sexuality, Hieroglyphic Being pays homage to human fallibility, drawing focus on the revolutionary potential of house music and club culture that is so often lost to the chaos of the present. “I have yet to walk into a club and see everybody hug and say: Let’s forgive each other, let’s move forward and make the world a better place,” he levels. “With all these conversations about sexuality, ethnicity, politics, whatever, when you walk into an environment with the music, you are supposed to celebrate all of that. Let it be and come together.” As the tongue-in-check title suggests, Moss looks to the eternal quality of his art to throw moral compasses into disarray, speaking truth to the evil energies that have permeated the club industrial complex of today while challenging black and white notions of good and bad that are so easily instrumentalized for the persecution of those at the fringes. For Moss, this is a tension he has observed since he started hearing the sound pioneered by Ron Hardy at the legendary Muzic Box, back when Chicago house music was born. “Back then, especially during the Reagan era and the police brutality of the so-called crime and crack epidemic, the one thing I noticed in my community was that house music actually helped us escape from all that negative stuff and make everybody in the environment support each other more.” Experiencing house as a great leveling force, the origins of the cosmic dance prophet the Hieroglyphic Being would become can be traced back to the club as an essential site of acceptance. “If there was anybody of a certain walk of life, politically, sexually, ethically, financially, we didn’t care,” he asserts. “We were just there to be free of all that shit.” It’s this loose vitality that Moss understands to be in severely short supply in the dance music scene today. “Festivals and clubs profess to propagate safe spaces, but you’ve probably seen it firsthand: you look around and a good percent of people in the club are not happy.” Taking aim at the entire ecosystem, from the malaise and malcontentedness of modern audiences to the false solidarity and commodification of minority positions within the commercial entity of dance music, Moss offers up the raw, unrefined power of the tracks collected on Dance Music For Bad People as an antidote to these evil forces. You can hear this negativity fleeing in fear from the surging drums of ‘U R Not Dying Ur Just Waking Up’ and ‘Dispatches From The B4 Life,’ or teased into submission by the sensual low end gurgle of ‘The Secret teachings Of The Ages’ and the ambling bassline of ‘Reality Is Not What It May Seem.’ On the dense cacophony of ‘The Art Of Living A Meaningless Existence,’ Moss sounds ready for spiritual war, armed with restless sequencing and bursts of high voltage static. But it’s Moss’s ability to capture fleeting moments of transience that provide us insight into the esoteric knowledge hinted at by his track titles. The lysergic tempo change of ‘I Am In A Strange Loop’ stretches out its rippling organ to revel in its celestial detail, while the nervous, metallic twangs of ‘Awakening From the Daydreams’ are gradually tempered by soft, crystalline flourishes. This same shimmer shines through the blown out wall of sound of ‘The Map Of Salt & Stars,’ illuminating the shade with stark clarity. These are glimpses of a master at work, constantly tweaking his sound towards a purer feeling and his thought to a higher understanding. As the American empire crumbles, the Hieroglyphic Being strides forward with a clear vision to broadcast a sage warning. “If you let other people dictate to you how you are supposed to feel about someone else, it goes into a dark space, especially when there’s nothing good you can say about them,” he says. “Get out of your comfort zone and reach out to people so you can learn more about them.” Though this temptation to judge can be irresistible, Moss believes in the primordial power of the Chicago house sound. Rather than condemn some as bad and others as good, Dance Music 4 Bad People helps us all to recognise each other through the smoke and strobe light. The Hieroglyphic Being speaks through the sound with a message of optimism and hope. “Everybody should be loved, adored, respected, no matter the path you take.”

Cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu’s key 1980’s works are collected and reissued for the first time on new career retrospective Fossil Cocoon, binding ambient, abstract punk, music concréte and purist songwriting into a single unified artform. Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums in the span of a few years. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as “the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”. Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. [Tadashi] Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of brazenly, addictively weird Japanese outsider music over a period of five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching astronomic prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery. Conversely, label boss Tadashi Kamada is no longer in the public eye, and not even known to have any personal online presence. He is, writes one observer, “unlikely even aware of his cult following”. Only extensive retroactive cataloguing (ardently fuelled by the cratedigging detective work of German collector Jörg Optiz) can offer any remaining memorial to his extraordinary achievements with DD. Records. Koshiro Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student of Yamaguchi University and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, Yoshimatsu was introduced to the Japanese communications magazine PUMP by his classmate and future bandmate F. [Fumie] Yasumura. In the classified ads he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of the aforementioned Tadashi Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town. From their correspondence bloomed an intensely symbiotic new friendship, initially trading homespun cassettes by mail and eventually co-forming a cassette-sharing postal society named The Recycle Circle. The Recycle Circle also included the idiosyncratic saxophonist T. [Takafumi] Isotani, a member of the university’s Light Music Club, with whom Yoshimatsu (now singing, and playing guitar, bass guitar, and synthesisers, as well as programming drum machines) went on to form the unique experimental band Juma. With fluctuating line-ups, Juma managed to compose, record, and release six albums (all via DD. Records) in a single year - 1981 - before disbanding. Yoshimatsu then graduated from Yamaguchi University and relocated to Hiroshima to pursue his passion for filmmaking, all the while continuing to release his own solo music on Kamada’s now-burgeoning label. Yoshimatsu’s first solo record was the mysteriously titled pʌls, released in 1981 while still a member of Juma, and receiving the distinction of being the third entry to DD. Records’ cassette catalogue numbers. It was not until the seventeenth that we see Yoshimatsu credited again as a solo artist, this time with the strange and delicate collage album Mirror Inside. Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work - solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates - we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records (such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura, represented here in “Violet” and “Escape”) are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar (and its namesake track on this collection), combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming. Deeper still, “Pastel Nostalgia”, from the 1983 album of the same name, marries childlike piano with a wailing siren tone and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials. Elsewhere, Yoshimatsu floats between ambient, rock guitar, new wave, industrial, musique concréte, abstract punk, vocal music, instrumental music and pure songwriting, all bound into a single, unified experience by his distinctive compositional voice. Compiling Fossil Cocoon was a task. Not only to pare down Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue into a neat collection, but also to compress these enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, guiding us through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied album, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy. Koshiro continues to reside in Hiroshima, and continues to work in film. James Vella Phantom Limb February 2024, Brighton, UK

Japan’s cult, half-forgotten goldmine DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time, they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their social and creative circles. Each of their cassette releases came with abstract, xerographic artwork, often created by the musician themselves, while the label’s recorded output encompassed avant-punk, Cubist ambient music, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and anything else their roster cared to throw at them. Housed in sleeves of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more, these records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Two facets of DD. Records shine through even this unique story: firstly, they were friends. Founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada formed the label alone, but it wasn’t long before he was joined by like-minded allies T. [Teruo] Nakamura, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu, K. [Keiichi] Usami, and T. [Takafumi] Isotani, among a few others. All were contributors to Kamada’s tape-trading network The Recycle Circle, formed at the University of Yamanashi, most of its members at the time around 20 years old. Their bond was a love of exploratory sounds and a hunger for deeper excavations into the tunnels and caves of experimental music. “An independent, private circle where members who owned expensive records or rare imported vinyl with limited distribution could send a cassette tape and a return postage stamp to dub the record back to each other for free,” Usami explains, in interview with Jon Dale for Bandcamp Daily. Secondly, the aforementioned cassettes remained almost entirely unavailable to the world outside Japan, with only a single US retailer engaged to carry the releases. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.” A German archivist, Jorg Öpitz, is primarily (and almost exclusively) responsible for the entire English-language directory of the label’s output, cataloguing online surviving and lost cassettes with completist dedication. Largely autodidactic, and almost always hermetic, this company of hobbyist and amateur (and in many cases, totally untrained) musicians rarely performed live. Many of them collaborated remotely, sending home-recorded tapes and collaged artwork in the post. “[We were] isolated from the rest of the [Japanese] indie movement,” Usami remembers. Strangely, and sadly for many, Tadashi Kamada has completely retired from public view. According to one-time collaborators, it is likely he is unaware of the cult following his label has garnered over the decades. Some sources point to a successful career in consumer electronics, a family, and a contented indifference to his early experiments in record label curation. But no-one seems certain about these details, none of which has harmed the image of a label that revels in mythmaking. An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl was rare. Only a handful of Kamada titles - presumably self-funded - were released on vinyl, right at the start of the label’s life, and it is not until 1985 and Disk Musik that the format reemerges. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices. There are endless and curious gems within. Opening with the fried psych-folk, dreamy vocals, and toybox percussion of trio サーカディアンリズム [Circadian Rhythm], Disk Musik’s stall is set out as much to bewilder as it is to beguile. Following, comes musician and painter Kumio Kurachi’s project Kum, with its homespun, acoustic glam-stomp always on the verge of falling to pieces, but revealing genuine songwriting chops and earworming melodic detail beneath the knowingly applied layers of hauntology, noise, and humour. Later, Tomomichi Nishiyama sends intergalactic plates spinning into black holes of solarstorm feedback with 10T track “Israel”, while T. Isotani’s “½ Orange” provides a welcome return to earth, an edenic utopia of plantasic blossoms and blooms. Across an extended duration (over fifty minutes on a single disc!), Disk Musik is relentless in its invention, wildly varied in its expression, and entrancing in its telling of a story truly unique in the world of independent and alternative music. Where else could Tadashi Tsukimoto’s rambling outsider folksong marry Yip/Jump primitivism to the scorched Casiotone ambience of “In and Out” by Takahiro Kuramoto’s Mask? While extensive efforts were made to contact every musician featured on Disk Musik, some are no longer within reach of known DD. Records associates. Keiichi Usami, Kumio Kurachi, and Teruo Nakamura all gladly approved the reissue of this compilation in the absence of their peers, and were vitally helpful throughout the curation process, offering insights into the history and significance of each artist and track featured here. We could not have done it without them. Usami-san, Kumio-san, Teruo-san: thank you. “Everyone has the right to make and enjoy music,” Tadashi Kamada once wrote. This spirit of inclusivity and equality underpins DD. Records and its gleefully weird catalogue, and we are grateful for it.

Respekt! Sex Tags Mania, Karolin, Laton, Tage Tombola, Don Papa - The Genuin Of Moss Hip-Hop, Engvaal & The Rygge Family, Lene B., Kambo Super Sound & Family, The Endless Dynamic of Dynamo Dreesen, Brian Not Brian - Going Good And Axin' It Fo' Real - Salik Zia, SVN, Nupi & General Elektro, Bjørn Torske, L.A. Morillo, Fit Detroid, Skatebård, A-Bucci, Camila 575, Dåple-Pera, Benji, Atle, Vilunki 666, Queens Only - Madteo - Keeping It A Level Higher Than The Rest, Geir & Søssa, Rat Salad, Mor & Jerry, Eupraxia, Ringvold Gasta, Unit 6Q, DJ Gilb'R & Versatile Crew With I:Cube, Sähkö & The Keys Of House Life, Winklez, Peng! Ossia, Nell & The Dennis Bros., Roland Lifjell, Paleo & The Bhakti Crew, "70 CPS" Bailey, Bodhi Beats, Pyramide Phillips, Samir M'Kadmi, Thug Records, Audio-In Crew, King 909, Graff Et Grill, Paint House, 411, Nbm, Done, Pol, Sol, Yre, Culos, Kvam, Sau 2, Coats, Buba, 1999, Tmb, Crew - Skredderåsen, Moss! It's Not What You Play - But How You Play. Recorded and digitally edited at the 6th-EonMANIA-fract2 STD between 2012-2014. Original session for Side B recorded at Pyramide Studio, Frankfurt 2010. Vocals on Side C recorded at Inna Di Bu Studio, Moss 2013. Graffiti Can't Be Stopped

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force lick another deadly shot of tumbling, tucked-up senegalese mbalax, making their 1st outing of ’16 and a 3rd 12” together in this line-up since 2015.

We’re all over the sloshing Walo Walo Version something rotten. It’s an utter joy to reprogramme yourself to its tangled syncopation, picking out and anticipating particular patterns with uncertain limbs, revelling in its wickedly stumbling, uniquely resolved meter. If, like us you’re nuts for drums, that lone, hingeing clap will leave you equally rapt, and then there’s a locked groove…

Flip side is also amazing: Ndiguel Groove resets the rhythm to a loping, shoe-laces-tied sort of house bustle sprinkled with lissom guitar and suspended in Mark’s mixing trickery, before turning up a denser original mix of Walo Walo Rhythm riding that Prophet 5 bassline and talking drums ‘aaaard.

Recorded circa 1995/96, mostly in John Fahey’s room at a Salem, Oregon boardinghouse, the performances on Proofs and Refutations prefigure the ornery turn of the page that marked Fahey’s final years, drawing another enigmatic rabbit from his seemingly bottomless musical hat, making confoundingly delightful demands upon your listening (and thinking) ears.

Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.

Freedom to Spend has restored Ernest Hood’s nostalgic masterpiece with the same care with which he viewed his source material, offering a remastered version of Neighborhoods transferred from the original tapes, expanded across four vinyl sides (the original version was crammed on two). The new edition reproduces Hood’s celebratory liner notes in full, alongside new liner notes by Michael Klausman.

Queens Of The Circulating Library stands alongside Time Machines and Nurse With Wound’s Soliloquy For Lilith as a post-industrial pinnacle of sensory-warping long-form drone. Crafted by the distilled duo of Thighpaulsandra and John Balance, the 49-minute piece unfurls in swirling, cyclical waves, tidal as much as textural, channeling the spirit of levitational minimalism pioneered by La Monte Young. Touted as the first part in "a continually mutating series of circulating musickal compositions” upon its initial release in 2000, the album remains a compelling case study in Coil’s exceptional capacity for mutation and extremes. The theatrical introductory monologue delivered by Thighpaulsandra’s mother – a career opera singer, in her 80’s at the time of recording – sets the stage for a grandiose ascension. Written by Balance, the text is declamatory but dreamlike, refracted through megaphone echo: “Return the book of knowledge / Return the marble index / File under "Paradox" / The forest is a college, each tree a university.” As her voice fades, the lulling synthetic infinity deepens, congealing into transient crests of volume and haze, like slow-motion surf misting in moonlight. Thighpaulsandra describes their aesthetic intention as a “bliss out,” static but shape-shifting, an amniotic drift towards an eternal vanishing point. A supreme sonic embodiment of the slogan on the sleeve of Time Machines, two years prior: "Persistence is all." Dais-exclusive Lenticular Limited Editions : Come in lenticular plastic jacket that animates when tilted, using frames of projections from Coil's live performances during the era.

The first-ever official vinyl edition, completely remastered by Josh Bonati. The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Weston-super-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

In 1980, Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of (then-) Throbbing Gristle travelled to New York City to meet up at the fortified apartment, known as The Bunker, of famed beat writer and cultural pioneer William S. Burroughs and his executor James Grauerholz. Genesis and Sleazy started the daunting task of compiling the experimental sound works of Burroughs, which, up until that point, had never been widely heard. During those visits, Burroughs would play back his tape recorder experiments featuring his spoken word “cut-ups”, collaged field recordings from his travels and his flirtations with EVP recording techniques, pioneered by Latvian intellectual Konstantins Raudive. Over the following year, P-Orridge, Christopherson and Grauerholz spent countless hours compiling various edits, each collection showcasing Burroughs sensitive ear and experimental prowess for audio anomaly within technical limitations. In early 1981, Burroughs had relocated to Lawrence, KS to escape the violence and manias of New York City life. There, P-Orridge and Christopherson put the finishing touches on the record that would be known as Nothing Here Now but the Recordings. Released in Spring 1981, the album would end up as the final release on Industrial Records, brought about by the dissolution of Throbbing Gristle. It was quietly out of print until 1998, when John Giorno and the Giorno Poetry Systems included the album on a retrospective CD box set, which compiled the majority of Burroughs's seminal recordings. In 2015, Dais Records worked closely with the Estate of William S. Burroughs to finally re-release, for the first time in 36 years, a proper vinyl reissue of William S. Burroughs Nothing Here Now but the Recordings to celebrate the centennial anniversary of William S. Burroughs. For the 2023 edition, Dais has remastered the audio with renowned engineer Josh Bonati, and restored the original artwork with a new dedication to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson. Releasing in tandem with Break Through In Grey Room

“BLADE N” is the long-awaited new album from Japanese rapper Karavi Roushi, who appeared on the Japanese hip-hop scene with his debut solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. This, his second solo album, is a collaborative release with Aquadab, the Japanese track maker/sound designer who co-produced “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. The album showcases the preternatural mind-meld between rapper and track maker.Karavi Roushi came before the public as a member of Nagoya hip-hop collective Hydro Brain Gang on Nero Imai's album “Return Of Acid King” (2017). He then launched the label Super Lights with Aquadab and released his first solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa” in 2019 with graphic design by Takara Ohashi. Although an unknown newcomer, the album reached #15 on the iTunes Hip Hop Japan album chart and received plaudits not only for its music but also for the artwork by Ohashi. After the album, Karavi Roushi dropped his first collaboration tune with Aquadab on “S.D.S =Zero=” (2020), a compilation of Generation Z Japanese underground artists produced during the Covid pandemic. That tune, “Tokyoite”, became a favorite of the participating artists."BLADE N” was created by the three-person team of Karavi Roushi, Aquadab & Ohashi. Consciously developing their musical methodology, they intentionally use instrumental tracks to interrupt the rappers' voices and flows, something which has traditionally been avoided, and explore the possibility of creating a style that puts the rapper and track maker on equal footing in complex, woven tracks. On the album, Karavi Roushi's paranormal voice, which sometimes sounds like a mutant synthesizer, adds incisiveness, and in the artwork Ohashi visually extracts the story world hidden in “BLADE N”, giving the cover art the same impact as that of “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”.

“BLADE N” is the long-awaited new album from Japanese rapper Karavi Roushi, who appeared on the Japanese hip-hop scene with his debut solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. This, his second solo album, is a collaborative release with Aquadab, the Japanese track maker/sound designer who co-produced “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”. The album showcases the preternatural mind-meld between rapper and track maker.

Karavi Roushi came before the public as a member of Nagoya hip-hop collective Hydro Brain Gang on Nero Imai's album “Return Of Acid King” (2017). He then launched the label Super Lights with Aquadab and released his first solo album “Kiyosumi Kurokawa” in 2019 with graphic design by Takara Ohashi. Although an unknown newcomer, the album reached #15 on the iTunes Hip Hop Japan album chart and received plaudits not only for its music but also for the artwork by Ohashi. After the album, Karavi Roushi dropped his first collaboration tune with Aquadab on “S.D.S =Zero=” (2020), a compilation of Generation Z Japanese underground artists produced during the Covid pandemic. That tune, “Tokyoite”, became a favorite of the participating artists.

"BLADE N” was created by the three-person team of Karavi Roushi, Aquadab & Ohashi. Consciously developing their musical methodology, they intentionally use instrumental tracks to interrupt the rappers' voices and flows, something which has traditionally been avoided, and explore the possibility of creating a style that puts the rapper and track maker on equal footing in complex, woven tracks. On the album, Karavi Roushi's paranormal voice, which sometimes sounds like a mutant synthesizer, adds incisiveness, and in the artwork Ohashi visually extracts the story world hidden in “BLADE N”, giving the cover art the same impact as that of “Kiyosumi Kurokawa”.

Somtam Samurai GOLD”, the ultimate hyper-enhanced mini-album featuring the very popular killer tune ‘Somtam Samurai’ featuring stillichimiya from the JUU4E masterpiece album ‘New Lukutun’ (2019), with the participation of Monaural mini-plug! The album is a mini album with a DL code! Limited release on LP with DL code!

The third album from the renowned Thai producer/rapper JUU4E is “IS”. The “be” verb. A celebration of existence and openness after the deadly constrictions and restrictions of Covid, fusing “global” hip-hop and pop rhythms with “local” Thai instruments and lyrics. A further fusion and celebration exists in the lyrics themselves, which feature a Buddhist worldview joyously infused with the emotional and physical pleasures of the world. A work of both enlightenment and dance. JUU4E, born in Bangkok, now living Khon Kaen, Northeastern Thailand, is a loved and respected Thai hip-hop OG, affectionately known as “Master JUU” among Thai hip-hop fans. This release, with songs recorded 2023-24, sees the continuation of JUU4E’s fruitful collaboration with Japanese co-producer Young-G of stillichimiya/OMK fame, who also contributes liner notes. Available on CD or digital, with liner notes in Japanese and English, and lyrics in Thai, Japanese and English. Get together with your friends, play it loud, and celebrate!

This is the second collaboration on Offen by the French post-industrial experimental artist Thierry Mérigout of Geins't Naït, composer and multi-instrumentalist Laurent Petitgand, and the UK composer and sound designer Robin Rimbaud AKA Scanner, whose prolific catalogue includes scores for dance works by the London Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham, and who has performed and installed his music in venues ranging from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and a hospital morgue in Garches.
Vitio is a repository of memory: Coastal plateaus and city streets evoked and cracked open by glowering basslines and jumbled rhythms made for ragged walking. Thierry and Laurent have been collaborating together since 1987, the year after Thierry co-founded Geins’t Naït while at the Architecture School of Nancy. Their work together is dense and textural, influenced by Situationists and Surrealists; the raw loops of Geins’t Naït meeting the musicality of Petitgand, a soundtrack composer for film, dance and theatre who has worked closely with director Wim Wenders. Thierry and Laurent first collaborated with Scanner on OFFEN015, a set of otherworldly collaged slow-mo soundscapes. Here, on tracks like Vitio and Austral, threads of sampled dialogue interweave with melodic fragments or repeating piano lines, like the sun breaking through above a tangle of golden wrack and rockweed. On Acid and 63, divine industrial shoegaze sweeps across the windscreen like water washed from trees. Elsewhere, on SIO, submerged clicks surface amid foghorn-like electrostatic charges, an introspective aeromancy. On J’Appartiens, stabs of samples dart back and forth over the ominous time keeping of a sparse beat and pulsing bass. On Sunday and NNSS, we, the invisible listeners, rise to the surface, where there is rain. Both the sounds of NNSS and the rainfall were installed in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, as captured in a lovely video made by Thierry’s daughter. Beneath the rain, in a building designed by SANAA architects, paving stones can be seen. Beneath the stones - we can only guess - a cloud.