Electronic / Experimental

Geneva-based duo Bound By Endogamy delivers a heavy blend of rave, synth-punk, and industrial music. Shlomo Balexert and Kleio Thomaïdes are both prominent figures in the local squat and punk scene, having been involved in numerous projects over the past decade. Following several cassette releases and a remarkable debut 7'' on Lux Records, the band presents a self-titled album that combines raw, growling basslines, crisp analog rhythms, and passionate vocals ranging from breathy to fiercely cutting. On stage, the project consists of drums, a sampler, and vocals. Shlomo handles the drums alongside sharp synthesizers, while Kleio delivers powerful vocals reminiscent of a professional boxer. Expect a fusion of DAF and Kleenex with a hardcore edge.

A muffled cry into the technological darkness, Contemporary Movement slid into the world right as the MP3 was seeping out of college dorms. A 39-minute drift into the void, drenched in Cold War-era reverb and then submerged in four track hiss for good measure. Duster constructed a Brutalist masterpiece on the outskirts of a suburban mall, as if to say, “We were here.” “Music for dark spaces and closed eyelids, deeply psychedelic but without sprawl, ambient music with a serrated edge of punk.”—The Ringer “Warm, fuzzed-out sounds that hit home like a tight, melancholic embrace from your favorite person.”—Viceiframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1682543875/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless>Contemporary Movement by Duster

The third part of Ideologic Organ Music’s trilogy of field recordings of sacred flute music from Papua New Guinea, recorded by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer in the 1970s. A book titled “A Papua New Guinea Journey” consisting of RagnarJohnson’s account of the circumstances behind the recordings will be published simultaneously with this music release.

“The recording of a male initiation ceremony with sacred flutes, bullroarers and ‘crying baby’ leaves was only possible after fifteen months residence during anthropological research. From the same Ommura villages in the Eastern Highlands there are bamboo jews harps, yam fertility flutes and singing. Nama (‘bird’) sacred flutes were recorded in a Gahuku Gama village in the town of Goroka. There are Mo-mo bamboo resonating tubes and singing from the Finisterre Range of Madang. From the Ramu Coast region of Madang there are: Waudang flutes, garamut slit gongs and singing from Manam Island, Maner flutes from Awar village and Siam and Guna flutes and garamuts from Nubia Sissimungum Village. These previously unreleased recordings were made in 1976 and 1979.”
–Ragnar Johnson, London 2021

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Ragnar Johnson's liner notes for the release

This music comes from the Eastern Highlands and Madang provinces of Papua New Guinea. The recordings of the Ommura Iyavati male initiation ceremony, the different bamboo jews harps, yam fertility flutes and singing were the result of fifteen months residence for anthropological research 1975- 1976 and a one month return in 1979. The Iyavati male initiation ceremony with its spirit cries of bamboo transverse blown and water flutes, bullroarers and ‘crying baby’ leaves was recorded at night outside the men’s house with the sounds of instruction and singing from inside the men’s house audible in the background. Nama ‘bird’ transverse blown paired bamboo flutes were recorded in a Gahuku Gama village inside the town of Goroka in the Eastern Highlands. The Mo-mo resonating tubes and singing were recorded at Damaindeh Bau on the Markham Valley edge of the Finisterre Range. The other Madang recordings of long paired bamboo flutes and garamut wooden slit gongs come from the Ramu coast region. There are Waudang flutes, garamuts and singing from Manam Island, Maner flutes from Awar and Siam and Guna flutes and garamuts from Nubia Sissimungum.

The Ommura lived in the Yonura villages of Samura, Sonura and Moussouri which were next to the Obura Patrol Post and in the neigbouring villages of Kurunumbaira and Asara. The1975 Government Census listed a population of 1,140 inhabitants of whom 437 lived in Yonura. The Ommura, the collective name for the inhabitants of these villages, spoke a dialect classified as Southern Tairora. The Obura Patrol Post, established in 1965, was 32 miles from the town of Kainantu in the Dogara Census Division of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The altitude was 4,000 to 5,300 feet on the valley floors and up to 8,000 feet on the mountain ridges. The arrival of steel tools, traded along the Markham Valley, into what was previously a stone age technology, preceded the establishment of the patrol post by about fifteen years. The first government patrol to reach the Ommura area was in the early 1950s and the area was regularly patrolled by the 1960s. Inter-village warfare was endemic.

The Ommura were slash and burn cultivators growing sweet potatoes, yams, taro, bananas, sugar cane, various beans, pit-pit, maize, squashes and greens. Arabica coffee was introduced as a cash crop in the early 1970s and young men were sent as plantation labourers to New Ireland.

Every Ommura patri-lineage (okyera) had a mountain demarcating a traditional area of lineage residence and a mythical lineage ancestor (uri). Ommura social life revolved around the staging of various kinds of ceremonies. There were fertility ceremonies to promote the growth of yams, sweet potatoes and pigs. Major events in individuals lives were marked by the enactment of the life cycle ceremonies of birth, male or female initiation, marriage and death. All Ommura ceremonies involved payment of some kind varying in amount from large payments between lineage groups for life cycle ceremonies consisting of traditional valuables, earth oven cooked pig meat and food, and money to small payments of food.

The Ommura practised three types of curing ceremony; Ua-ha in which the illness was chased away by armed men, Vu-ha in which the afflicted were fed a mixture of pork and medicinal herbs and their illnesses were transferred into a device made of sugar cane and washed away by flowing water and Asochia where diviners chewed hallucinogenic tree bark (Galbulimima Belgraveana) to see the cause of the illness and then treat it.

The Ommura performed the following male and female initiations: Nihi Rara the piercing of the nasal septum for male and female children; Kam Karura performed in the women’s house for girls, Ummara and Iyavati performed in the men’s house for boys and the male and female pre-marriage ceremonies performed respectively in the men’s house and woman’s house.
These initiations were enacted to discipline youth into their respective male and female roles with bleeding the nose and beatings with taroah stinging nettles to promote heath. Male and female initiates were instructed to practice the same food taboos and were educated by means of gender specific secret stories and songs. Burlesque mimes of the opposite sex occurred in both and at the end the initiates were decorated in new clothes, ornaments and paint. A feast of pig meat and vegetables had to be given by the father at the end of an initiation ceremony together with a payment to the eldest mother’s brother for his participation.

Nose bleeding was performed to remove the dangerous accumulation of blood that became lodged inside the bridge of the nose at conception in the womb. To strengthen the penis young males had the urethra of the penis bled sometime between the final stage of male initiation and marriage. During the Iyavati initiation the male initiates were beaten with taroah stinging nettles, secret taroah songs were sung and exaggerated mimes of aggressive male sexual behaviour involving the use of taroah were enacted with much chanting of the male ’Wo-Wo’ war cry. Initiates were told what acts and foods were forbidden to them and given instructions regarding permissible sexual relations and their duties to assist their relatives and future wife. Iyavati initiates wore a pair of pigs tusks points upwards through a hole in the nasal septum.

Marriage was centred around the bride price which was given to the wife’s father by the husband, his paternal kin, mother’s brother and relatives. During the marriage ceremony, grooms were warned about the disastrous consequences of contact with female menstrual pollution and brides were warned not to poison a husband in this way.
Peace was made between enemy villages by an exchange of cooked pigs in a ceremony called Obu. A death compensation ‘head’ payment
in traditional valuables or a woman in marriage was the only act that eliminated the need for a payback killing in retribution for a death in war. Inter-village trade was carried out between two individuals rather than groups from different villages, frequently with partners from the lower altitude Bush Markham villages. 

2024 Repress. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.

I wonder if my fascination for clouds (without being an obsession) may have risen at the end of the 80s as, whilst composing Micro-climat, I would regularly wander between the Vercors mountains and the high plateaus of the Monts du Forez discovering, through my eyes, body, breath, active observation and walk, that natural forms when constantly changing and yet swollen with a unity of matter (in this instance, water) open one up to a deep, fundamental breath and a clear field for the mind.
The sky and its forces: our ally.
A model for a natural music which, although fixed, as in musique concrète (a rule of the genre), moreover on a recording tape, will remain charged with such a poetic quality that (isn't it its role or rather its reality?) it will ensure a perpetual renewal for our senses, so as to reach another idea of the world, far more open and richer than what we could have imagined.”
Lionel Marchetti, 2011

Lionel Marchetti is a major figure of the “third generation” of concrète musicians, a term he values. Listening to these works, imbued with poetry and traversed by micro-narratives, one can indeed retrieve the original concrète spirit, the one that draws from the sonic world, with ears wide open, so as to extract a fertile, rich and multiple substance then shaped and conveyed towards a formal and musical abstraction. Lionel Marchetti has mastered this process, but his real distinctive feature is a truly unique talent for setting climates (as one sets traps) and keeping us on constant alert. The two pieces in this record perfectly illustrate the entrancing dimension of Lionel Marchetti's music, whose charm leads us, through each successive listening, to become voluntary captives so as to better liberate ourselves
François Bonnet, Paris, 2020

〈Captured Tracks〉The biggest seller! Along with masterpieces such as "Salad Days", this is definitely an introductory board for this person! Mac Demarco is a current indie pop cult icon from Canada, known for his activities in Makeout Videotape, sampling Sekito Oshigeo's "The Word II", and the popular split single "Honey Moon" with Mr. Hosono. The 10th anniversary edition of the masterpiece "Rock And Roll Night Club" released in 2012 has been released as an analogue. A masterpiece of psychedelic and addictive indie pop that makes you feel like you're listening to Deerhunter's "Microcastle" cassette demo!

Waterfall Horizon, 7038634357’s second album with Blank Forms Editions, was written for live performance and workshopped over successive shows during a 2022 tour. Here, the song forms have begun to crystallize. Hallmarks of the artist’s prior, studio-crafted recordings—slow-burning ambience and obfuscating digital distortion—are pared back, revealing borderline pop inflections. Waterfall Horizon’s more traditional lyrical scaffolds allow verses, chorus, and interstices to flourish, all within a minimized, icy range.

Neo Gibson, born in Virginia and based in New York City, records, performs, and produces as 7038634357. This numerical alias, under which Gibson has been releasing work since 2016, offers a window into the careful ambivalences of the musical project. It conjures the impersonal—the opacity and randomness of data, a number that is hard to remember or even say out loud—while also suggesting a direct line of communication with the artist, down to an area code indexing their biography. 7038634357 uses a restricted palette to achieve music that is formally precise and emotionally direct. Their digital-native approach to production, in which frank melodies cross paths with heavy distortion, contains traces of both trance’s maximalist arcs and a songwriterly intimacy. Expressive details may appear submerged or abraded, subjected to a canny sense of dynamics and textural discretion.

With a particular interest in site-specific performances in non-musical spaces, 7038634357 has performed in a variety of contexts, including the mezzanine of the West 4th Street subway station in New York City and INA GRM/Radio France’s Présences électronique festival. The first 7038634357 vinyl record, Neo Seven, was released on Blank Forms Editions in 2023; previous releases include self-released cassettes and CD-Rs, as well as a pair of EPs on Genome 6.66 Mbp (2018, 2019).

In 2020, when the coronavirus pandemic began, environmental sounds were recorded in the dense forests of Kerala, India, and

in 2023, in the chaotic wastelands of Karachi and Lahore, Pakistan, where suicide bombings still occur, Peshawar,

where suicide bombings still occur in 2023.

This futuristic Asian music, created by blending traditional instruments with electronics and collage, mysteriously blends with Arab and African elements, evoking the scent of the earth despite being rooted in asphalt—a truly unique masterpiece!

The first analog version of the classic hip-hop jam album released in 2005 by Pardon Kimura and KILLER-BONG, the head of BLACK SMOKER RECORDS, is now available for the first time.

XTCLVR’s debut album for Sferic conjures a vivid, disoriented blur of ambient trap and dub techno, shaped under the strain of Ukraine’s wartime curfews and shelling. Written during long nights of uncertainty, these ten tracks navigate a fractured sonic landscape—lush yet anxious, synthetic but emotionally charged.

Unintelligible vocals drift through fogged beats and smeared textures, evoking both the disarray of conflict and the dream logic of post-party comedowns. Tracks like ‘Perspective’ diffuse vocoder lines into gauzy clouds, while ‘Allergen’ and ‘Storm Shadow’ crackle with nervous energy, recalling the destabilised rhythms of Nazar’s Hyperdub output. Guest contributions deepen the haze: BSW948 threads bars through the warped pulse of ‘Night Shift Cut’, OB3TH shimmers through ‘The Wise Mystical Tree’, and Indy appears on the ambient drill-laced ‘Acid Flavour’. Final track ‘Dead Smoke’ sinks into submerged dread, a murky metaphor for psychic fallout.

Fans of Topdown Dialectic, False Aralia, and Sa Pa will find themselves pulled into this blurred and flickering world—part escapism, part document of a brutal reality.

Special Guest DJ — also known as Shy — has spent the better part of a decade quietly reshaping the experimental electronic underground. Operating from Berlin under aliases like Caveman LSD and uon, their work weaves between dubwise ambient, smeared club textures, and lo-fi dream states.

On Our Fantasy Complex, they channel that tangled web into a 40-minute suite of fogged-out mood music: sensual, angry, dreamlike. There are trace elements of shoegaze, dub techno and quasi-speed D&B, but it’s more hex than genre exercise — a lucid tangle of textures shaped by peers like Ben Bondy, mu tate, and Arad Acid add an extra dimension.

This isn’t ambient in the blissed-out sense, but a darker, dirtier kind of psychedelia — music that melts the line between introspection and club detritus. From the looming bass pressure of ‘How Long Can I Burn?’ to the dissociative haze of ‘Yoro (pt I & II)’, and finally the crystalline closer ‘Dream’, it’s a record that lingers like smoke.

Lucy Duncombe and Feronia Wennborg compose a modern symphony for virtual choir on 'Joy, Oh I Missed You', muddling sound poetry with Nuno Canavarro and ‘Systemische'-style machine-damaged surrealism. It's mindbogglingly good, like a mashup of Lee Gamble's 'Models', Akira Rabelais' 'Spellewauerynsherde' and Robert Ashley's timeless 'Automatic Writing’ screwed to perfection in a mode that will also appeal if you’re into work by Kara-Lis Coverdale, Nozomu Matsumoto, Theo Burt, Olli Aarni, Sydney Spann, Hanne Lippard.

Duncombe and Wennborg have been chewing over ‘Joy, Oh I Missed You’ for four long years, working their process until they were "queasily intimate" with their arsenal of artificial voice tools. Tracing the history of the technology, from voice synthesisers and chatbots to AI voice analysis tools, the duo experiment relentlessly to develop a digital-age response to IRL extended vocal technique - think François Dufrêne, Yoko Ono or Phew. Less interested in replicating human sounds exactly, they instead test how various tools might cough up their own idiosyncratic tics as they stretch and stutter through attempts to mimic their "fleshware" counterparts.

Duncombe's got prior form here, most recently re-synthesising her voice on the brilliantly oily 'Sunset, She Exclaims' 45 for Modern Love, following a stunner for 12th Isle in 2021. Wennborg brings along experience from her tenure as one half of microsound duo soft tissue, whose 2022 LP 'hi leaves' was a haptic treasure. These approaches mesh remarkably well on their first collaborative full-length, with Duncombe's eerie bio-electronic incantations providing the ideal foil for Wennborg's carbonated hardware processes. It's not completely clear where the human voice ends and the zeroes and ones begin on 'Your Lips, Covering Your Teeth', as rolling cyborg syllables tumble over OS-startup womps and surprisingly svelte outcroppings of glassy, synthetic glitches. The music is surprisingly mannered, a sonic reflection of the cover, where a mouth is pixellated until only colour swatches remain. Duncombe and Wennborg trace the gradual erosion of their voices, leaning into the chaos as their various tools veer off into unique patterns of failure.

What sounds like a far-off, ghosted folk rendition (we're reminded of the Icelandic laments that Rabelais chewed up on 'Spellewauerynsherde') is offset by gnarled, bitcrushed machine faults and pneumatic lip smacks on the brilliant 'Residue', and on 'Brushed My Hair', the duo massage the voice until it sounds like a flute. Assembling stutters and barks and sighs into a celestial chorus alongside time-stretched moans, they create a levitational atmosphere on 'Smell It', freezing the energy from bizarre pitch steps to configure a zonked vocal ensemble.

'Joy, Oh I Missed You’ is an album that, like its source material, constantly morphs, testing the boundaries of its concept repeatedly without bubbling over into conceptual goo. In fact, it's remarkably euphonious, even at its most theoretically abrasive; Duncombe and Wennborg wring out uniquely angelic formations through a process of trial and error that packs a surprising, hefty emotional punch.

Florerntino’s Club Romantico label serves a deadly b2b from Bubbling legends Styn & De Schuurman, rendering the roots and future of the viral, Surinamese-Dutch dance style on a scorching, hour-long mixtape.

Since the late ‘90s, DJ Chuckie’s sped-up dancehall innovations have spawned a very particular sound in Dutch Surinamese communities that would break thru to broader acclaim after percolating blogs and forums in the early 2010s. Subsequent releases by the likes of Anti G and later from De Schuurman and DJ Shaun-D have ensured main stage and club headline slots for the sound, which also regularly lights up Florentino’s globe-trotting DJ schedule.

Time is ripe, then, for this tight as heck history lesson spanning the past 25 years of bubbling, pairing one side of rambunctious tear-out tackle from the early-mid ‘00s, sifted from now-obsolete platforms - MySpace, dead blogsites - and P2P services such as Limewire and Bluetooth for a buckshot side of squeaks, subs, and triplet tattoos suffused with Dutch house influence.

The B-side calibrates the crosshairs to bubbling in the present era and into the future, shelling exclusives by Styn & De Schuurman, plus a closing ace by Styn & DJ Rtje, all rife with carnival drum batteries, hybridised with grimy mid-range and UKF-type string vamps with a wile-out torque that galvanises, future-proofs the sound with a chromed-out zing.

A party in a box, basically!

Today, 4-piece instrumental band Yuuf announce signing to Ninja Tune’s Technicolour imprint alongside news of a forthcoming EP ‘Alma’s Cove’ out 20th June 2025.

Spanning 5 tracks, ‘Alma’s Cove’ is a meditative soundscape which takes the listener on a sonic journey through nature, connection and togetherness away from the stresses of day-to-day life. “Alma’s Cove is a dreamy tropical space free from stress, where you can feel content and present. A sheltered paradise to enjoy at your own leisure” the band comment. “When writing the EP the main goal was to create a space that’s the complete opposite of our London life: stress, anxiety, overwhelm. Reconnect to nature and enjoy the present. A dreamland”

Alongside the announcement Yuuf share the EP’s title track “Alma’s Cove”, out now on Technicolour. Rich with organic textures, shimmering details and psychedelic rhythms, the single invites the audience into the serene world of Alma’s Cove. “The listener is walking around and taking in nature, the sounds, and the views and reveling in its natural beauty”. The single arrives with an official music video, showcasing a full live session filmed during the band's recent trip to Crete.

Mixing international sounds and global influences is central to Yuuf’s ethos. Even its members all hail from different parts of the world – Switzerland, Denmark, France and England. “We naturally blend our diverse musical tastes from around the world to shape the sound of our music”. ‘Alma’s Cove’ is a prime example of this, inspired by classical Spanish guitar, Americana soundscapes and the music of Studio Ghibli.

Yuuf kick-off a UK tour in May, with multiple stops at various summer festivals including Wide Awake Festival, Green Man Festival, Lost Village Festival and Psych Festival. Full tour dates below. The band released their debut EP ‘In The Sun’ in Summer 2024 which has already gained over 1.5M streams on Spotify alone and received support from the likes of BBC 6Music, KEXP, KRCW and IG platform Somewhere Soul (919K followers). Released alongside the EP ‘The Sun’s’ viral live session video now has an impressive 1.8M views, 84k likes and 4k comments on YouTube.

Produced & mixed by Vegyn, all lyrics written by Francis Hornsby Clark.

This is a work synonymous with the Aphex Twin, featuring one of the most popular songs of their career, "Girl/Boy Song".

Under the right conditions, half-remembered dreams can meld seamlessly into hazy present moments. Time spent alone can be an emotional blank canvas, and an opportunity to deconstruct sense and feeling; a patchwork of snippets both rooted in memory and abstracted from reality. The title of ‘quilted lament’ perfectly captures the way Gretchen Korsmo and claire rousay’s overlapping missions come together to do just this. Worn polaroid melodies and snatched everyday noises seem overheard through windows onto the street. They feel emotionally twinned, claire and Gretchen, it’s not always possible to tell where one ends and the other begins. Their musical thoughts and DNA are sewn together into a mini symphony of warmly embracing movements.

Built remotely between pre-existing friends in the underground music scene, the duo layered ideas onto audio files, and sent them back (and forth). And these luscious instrumentals truly do feel assembled by intuition, casually crafted with little need for guidance. “claire and I are both emo,” explains Korsmo. “We are both former texas-dwellers [too] and relate over both the woes and beauties of being in the American DIY experimental music scene.” Buoyant piano keys and hushed layer vocals tracks sit alongside a humming field-recorded scrapbook; a neighbour caught in a moment of private inspiration while street noise elevates; a private hymnal in the bathroom while the washing machine ends its cycle. Both artists take field sounds from a wealth of Zoom and Tascam recordings made in the last half-decade in Santa Fe, San Antonio, Los Angeles, Kamakura, Japan and elsewhere – from a baseball game announcer in Santa Fe, to the sound of a friend eating a juicy peach. At times, the bedroom walls seem to grow thin amid atmospheric creaks and disembodied whispers. Despite its very emo core, this is a recording engulfed in an intense sense of bliss, more at peace than we’ve heard either artist before.

LINTD, a pseudonym of Iyunoluwanimi Yemi-Shodimu, a notable musician from Nigeria, based in Manchester, will release his latest work in 2025 on vinyl from HEAD II, the cutting edge of the London underground. A strange work that can be called a modern dark audio fairy tale, with a strange fusion of gothic sensibility and experimental structure. The acoustic space woven between decadent and mysterious narration, strange beats, distorted melodies and silence is like a dark fable drawn with sound. A sharp and solitary strange work that reminds us of the narration x acoustic structure after Dean Blunt and even the illusion of The Shadow Ring.

Cortex of Light, a notable Italian trio that includes the leftfield techno genius Piezo and the experimental ambient genius xàr num, has released their debut album from 3XL, the label headed by special guest DJ uon! A futuristic therapy sound where environmental sounds and electronic sounds intertwine. Drone sounds, deconstructed rhythms, and grids of drowsy reverberation are sewn together, and the sound seems to trace the membrane of the city. It is the afterimage of a club, the architecture of a sleepless night, and an optical abstract sound image. While resonating with mysterious labels such as bblissss, West Mineral, and Motion Ward, the unconscious underflow that is characteristic of 3XL runs throughout the entire album, making this a prayer for modern sounds.

If Surround can be listened to as music that’s as close to air itself, allowing us to enter each listener’s sound scenery, or as something that exists within a new perspective, expanding the middle ground between sound and music, and transforming it into a comfortable space, it would be much appreciated. — Hiroshi Yoshimura Originally released as an album in January 1986, Surround was recorded by Yoshimura as a commission from home builder Misawa Homes, intended to function as an “amenity” designed to enhance the company’s newly built living spaces. In his original notes for the album, Yoshimura recommends that Surround be placed in the same family of sounds “as the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup.” And, as he suggests, “with the addition of city noise from outside the window,” you may hear Surround in a completely new way. A pioneer in the field of environmental music, Yoshimura’s previous works included Music For Nine Post Cards (1982), originally produced to be played back inside a museum space, and designing sound environments for public spaces and subway systems. Surround was recorded almost concurrently with the acclaimed and popular GREEN (1986); the two albums are described by Hiroyoshi Shiokawa in his liner notes as being Yoshimura’s yin and yang. 12月上旬入荷。遂に満を持して登場。あの『Green』を凌ぐ人気を誇る、長年失われていた吉村弘最高峰のアンビエント・クラシックこと1986年作品『Surround』が〈Light in the Attic〉配給の〈Temporal Drift〉レーベルより待望の公式アナログ再発！日本の環境音楽のパイオニアであり、都市/公共空間のサウンドデザインからサウンドアート、パフォーマンスに至るまで、傑出した仕事を世に残した偉才、吉村弘。その最難関の音盤として君臨してきた幻の一枚が、今回史上初の公式アナログ・リイシュー。ミサワホームから依頼されて録音された作品で、これらは同社の新築居住空間をより充実させるために設計された「アメニティ」として機能することを目的としていた環境音楽作品。吉村自身による当時のライナーノーツに加え、オリジナル・プロデューサーであった塩川博義氏による新規ライナーノーツも同封（日／英）。 MASTERPIECE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The 20th Anniversary Edition of "The Creep" by Slomo, this ambient doom masterwork, is now available on vinyl for the first time via Ideologic Organ. This is a storied album of verbal history, and emerged from a figurative long barrow deep within a virtual space of great depth and contemplation, an inverted framing of acoustic space with heavy floors ranging from the wake of COIL to the heaviest Japanese fire of psychedelia to the monuments of drone coagulating in the early 'aughts. A first tiny CDR edition (100 copies) of "The Creep" in 2005 garnered the focus of heavyweights like SUNN O))), Julian Cope, GNOD, the esoteric legendary record store Aquarius, and the Wire. Ideologic Organ is honoured to have been tasked with bringing this to a limited LP for the very first time, and has collaborated with mastering genius Rashad Becker to create a 61-minute single LP in perfect cut. The album will also be distributed widely on all digital channels.

–Stephen O'Malley, Stockholm May 2025

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Doom Metal is often appraised in terms of its sludginess. You might suspect Julian Cope associates Holy McGrail (guitar) and Howard Marsden (synth) of having taken these criteria to heart when they recorded their debut album as Slomo. Initially released on Cope’s Fuck Off & Di label and later reissued by Important, The Creep strains at the very boundaries of Doom. An eerie and evanescent hour-long exercise in bottom-heavy drone, it shares as much with Eno’s On Land as anything by Sunn O))) or Earth, including a comparable attitude towards the wild spots of the British landscape.

Sinking deep into their environment, McGrail and Marsden initiate contact with the pagan spirits lying dormant in the soil, such as the indolent entity of the album’s title and the “Old Rhyme” printed on the sleeve (“In Old England they called me Slaewth the slothful…”), while mimicking the slow, imperceptible processes of growth and decay. The duo’s low-frequency ooze certainly succeeds in evoking the subterranean, but its unhurried rumble also conjures the hidden spaces that flourish against the odds all over the British Isles, from untouched railway verges and motorway laybys to overgrown footpaths where used contraceptives, pornography, Coke cans and crisp packets collect like offerings to the Great God Pan. In more than one sense, The Creep is a fitting tribute to what lies beneath.

-Joseph Stannard, 2012

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The Creep, contextualised.

Just one week after the passing of COIL's Jhonn Balance in late 2004, the 61-minutes of "The Creep" manifested in a Sheffield suburb. Not yet a band and only captured due to happenstance, this first music of Slomo flowed forth without any consideration of it even being "a piece", let alone a release, though it didn't take long for the participants (Chris "Holy" McGrail and Howard Marsden) to realise they'd captured something of distinct colour on account of how often they were listening to it.

Initially dubbed "The Ballad of Jhonn & Sleazy", the pair soon instead ascribed the music to Boleigh Fogou; a prehistoric underground chamber on the Land's End peninsula that both had recently visited and been affected by. "The Creep" took its name from the peculiar side chamber assumed to be of ritual function, having no apparent practical use. This ponderous music chimed perfectly with the fogou; an apparently stolid place that teems with life once you become attuned to its frequency.

Fitting in perfectly alongside other massive single-track albums such as Sleep's "Dopesmoker", COIL's 'Queens of the Circulating Library', Cope's "Odin", and Boris' "Flood", "The Creep" secured a limited release on Cope's Fuck Off & Di CD-R label in 2005 that quickly sold out via supportive outlets such as Southern Lord, Aquarius Records and Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ - then operating merely as a blog and micro-store.

After a wider CD release in 2006, Slomo followed up "The Creep" with "The Bog" in 2008 – a much denser plunder into the fundament. 2012 brought with it the pair's first live outings and "The Grain", another nod to Land's End with an airier, more agricultural sound and the first signs of creeping automation. 2017's "Transits" captured three spontaneous compositions for time and space and remains a firm favourite among the band's listeners; one of the tracks going on to be remixed by twelve of the band's favourite artists on 2018's 2xCD compilation "Super-Individual: Collective Ritual". The band returned in 2024 with "Zen and Zennor" and live shows with GNOD and a sold-out show at Stone Club, London.

In other's words :

“If the doom metal of Khanate is the ideal soundtrack to the 21st Century Odinists’ hanging upon the tree of Yggdrasil, then the vegetal music of Slomo is the unfolding, nurturing, ever-becoming ur-ooze that titanically irrigates the roots of that sacred tree. Slomo restores our timeless beginnings and fulfils the Ginnungagap… motherfuckers.”

JULIAN COPE

“…seeps into your subconscious, where it flutters like a trapped and burning moth at the back of your brain. Ghostly sounding and ominously rumbling with atmospheric threat, The Creep is an undeniably effective chunk of subterranean echo, whose quaking aftershock could cause sleepless nights.”

THE WIRE

“Uneasy, brooding, and honestly unsettling, this disc slowly works its way out of the speakers and into the psyche. Ingrained, it’s impossible to put it down, lock it away, carry it to the street with the beer and Scotch bottles to be recycled. Inactivated, it defiantly surfaces in the cat’s purr, the Volk’s engine knocks, a fritzing hard drive.”

DUSTED MAGAZINE

In November 2022 world-renowned kora player Ballaké Sissoko and acclaimed guitarist Derek Gripper spend just three hours recording a wordless album together. The kora and guitar in the hands of masters - a session where New Ancient Strings meets One Night On Earth. “Musically we tested each other,” says Sissoko, explaining that the most magical aspect of their initial encounter was the spontaneity of the whole thing. “We have the mastery of our instruments, the technique and a good ear. Derek is very curious, that’s very important.” “He’s just such a good listener,” says Gripper about Sissoko. “It’s not what he plays, it’s how he plays it. He’s an amazing interpreter, the prime master of timbre.” “It’s a remarkable album,” says Lucy Duran, professor of Music at SOAS. “It’s the furthest away that Ballaké has gone from his own idiom and it’s brilliant – not world music, it’s in a totally different realm, entering new territory”

 

Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties presents the soothing, hallucinatory side of Stone’s slow-evolving, time-bending composition. While we can’t always identify the source, we can hear that his sounds come from somewhere, and that there is a “correct” or “complete” version of them in theory; and so we can hear when they are being changed. What drives Stone’s music is the flow that he draws out of those differences: the way an Indonesian gamelan morphs into a chorus built from one female vocalist over the course of “Mae Yao”’s twenty-three minutes, the surprise emergence of a Mozart chorus out of the synths and skip-glitches of “Sonali,” or the slow, ambient evolution of “Banteay Srey”. “Woo Lae Oak,” issued in a single side edit for the first time, is an exception. Its samples – a tremolo string and a bottle being blown across the top like a flute - are simple in the extreme. Yet the Stone hallmark is clearly present, he locates the inherent emotional properties of the sounds – the tingling anticipation of the string and the calm nobility of the wind – and takes them into unexpected expressive territory.

    
Entering its 26th year of activity, the morphing, Los Angeles based experimental outfit, Sissy Spacek, joins Shelter Press with Entrance, among the project’s most captivating outings to date. Encountering the duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma joined in various configurations by an incredible cast of collaborators - Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky, and C Spencer Yeh - collectively transformed into a series a deeply intimate and delicate gestures of musique concrète, Entrance radically repositions the possibilities presented by group improvisation outside of time and place.

Founded at the end of the last millennium, the Los Angeles based project, Sissy Spacek, initially emerged from the knotted, fiery context 1990s American noise and grindcore, producing sheets of visceral sonority that quickly set the scene on its head. Going through numerous evolutions, before eventually settling as a duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma - joined by a rotating and often recurring cast collaborators - over the last 25 years the band has continuously entered states of evolution that have defied the expectations of its own context, seeding the sonic extremes noise with subtle and sophisticated approaches to free improvisation and musique concrète.

Fiercely positioning its efforts within the outer reaches of contemporary experimental music, while resisting the constraints of a singular sound or proximity, Wiese regards Sissy Spacek as being primarily centred around the practice of musique concrète and the pursuit of extremes. From its earliest releases - collage treatments of material gathered from the band’s full throttle practice sessions - the project’s conceptual framework has continuously evolved within a deeply engaged process of experimentation, not only reworking tactical approaches, but also definitions and perception regarding the location and action of their work. In recent years, this has led to an increasingly varied and diverse output. Percolating within, is a thread marked by a striking sense of delicacy and intimacy, driving forward while doubling as an unexpected challenge, in real time, to perceptions connected to the band’s past. Entrance is the most recent of these.

Embarking upon the four compositions that comprise the finalized four sides of Entrance, Wiese and Mumma enlisted longstanding collaborators, Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, and C Spencer Yeh, as well as new initiate, Ralf Wehowsky (of the seminal German electronic noise collective P16.D4), requesting a contribution of sounds from each, determined by a general set guidelines that dictated certain qualities the given sonorities, while allowing for the expression of each player’s distinct creative voice. The sets of resulting recordings were then chopped, harvested, manipulated, and reassembled as the four tape compositions that make up the album - Web Of Unfolding Appearance, Figure Of Reflected Light, Trancher And The Inheritors, True Dimension (From The Opaque - Spike) - each blurring the lines of authorship and clear creative proximity in remarkable ways.

Where historical gestures of musique concrète tend to draw upon non-instrumental sound sources - regarding its sonorous material as raw elements, unburdened by inherent meaning or association, to be transformed and imbued with musicality - Sissy Spacek turns this position on its head. Entrance comprises works of musique concrète that not only draw upon instrumental sound sources, with all their possible meanings or associations, but also individual characters and personalities of their players, crediting each resulting piece to its respective configuration of contributors.

As such, Entrance is an effort of sound collage defined by a rare sense of intimacy and humanity: four pieces that often take on the resemblance of group improvisation, but have, in fact, been assembled outside of time and place. Bent under the ever-present hand of Wiese’s tape treatments and manipulation, each of the album’s four compositions unfurl startling states of sonic abstraction and percolating texture, marked by a striking sense of hard-shifting structure, that culminate as tense, driven manifestations of ambient music: scrapes, squeals, rattles feedback, rolling drums, bouncing tones, whispers, bent electronics, electric artefacts, and seemingly everything else under the sun, configured into immersive, sublime mediations in sound from the most improbable events.