Electronic / Experimental
4139 products
SQUANDERERS return to deliver "Skantagio", the follow up to their debut album, If a Body Meet a Body (Shimmy-Disc, 2024). “We were in the studio for one day, and performed all pieces on that first LP prior to breaking for lunch. Skantiago contains the pieces we performed after lunch,” says bassist and Shimmy-Disc founder, Kramer. “We may be SQUANDERERS, but we don’t dally. And we don’t labour over our spontaneous inventions while we’re in the studio.”
The official soundtrack to Jean-Cosme Delaloye's documentary about the life and career of Detroit techno pioneer Carl Craig, 'Desire: The Carl Craig Story' is set for digital release on June 20th 2025, with 2x12” Vinyl and CD editions to follow on July 18th 2025.
The collection, coming via his prolific and seminal Planet E Communications, features music from across Craig’s vast catalog, including several tracks that have never previously seen full digital release. Its selections span his many aliases and projects, offering a rare glimpse into the full scope of his groundbreaking career.
Among the rare and remastered tracks featured is No More Words - originally released in 1991, newly reissued on vinyl and available digitally for the first time. A foundational track in the Detroit techno canon, No More Words captures the emotive synths and tight grooves of Craig’s sound that would soon resonate across dance floors worldwide. Its reissue marks a moment of reflection on the genre’s roots and evolution.
Another remastered track from Craig’s extensive archive is The Truth, a deep cut from Craig’s discography under his Designer Music alias, now widely available for the first time a quarter-century after its original release. The film’s end credits are scored by the contemplative Meditation 4, an ambient production previously only available on Craig's 2013 Masterpiece compilation CD for Ministry of Sound.
Iconic remixes such as his Grammy-nominated rework of Junior Boys’ Like A Child is included alongside lesser-known but equally epic remixes such as his sublime 2012 mix of Slam’s Azure, which is employed for the film’s title credits and had previously only seen a limited release. Also featured across the soundtrack’s multiple formats are iconic Carl Craig productions under his 69, Psyche/BFC and Innerzone Orchestra aliases, and collaborations with Moritz von Oswald and Francesco Tristano.
The soundtrack serves as a companion to the new documentary directed by Jean-Cosme Delaloye and produced by Sovereign Films, which follows Carl’s journey from Detroit’s middle-class roots to global stardom, set against the city’s decline and recovery. The film explores his work at the intersection of music, art, and culture, from his collaborations with Bottega Veneta to his Party/After-Party installation, acquired by the Detroit Institute of Arts and exhibited at MOCA Los Angeles.
Featuring interviews with Gilles Peterson, Roni Size, Laurent Garnier, DJ Minx, Kenny Larkin, Moritz von Oswald, and James Lavelle, Desire highlights Carl’s championing of Detroit’s Black creative excellence and the often-overlooked African-American roots of electronic music.
Chicago Underground Duo is the long-running collaborative project of composer/trumpeter/electronicist Rob Mazurek (Exploding Star Orchestra, Isotope 217, New Future City Radio with Damon Locks) and composer/drummer/mbiraist Chad Taylor (jaimie branch’s Fly or Die, Marshall Allen’s Ghost Horizons, Luke Stewart’s Silt Trio). Hyperglyph is their first album in 11 years, and 8th in the absolute cabinet of wonders that is the Chicago Underground Duo.
The pair have played music together in a multitude of formations over nearly three decades, including their ongoing partnership in Mazurek’s large-format-skyward-expressionism vehicle Exploding Star Orchestra, in the expanded Chicago Underground Trio & Quartet (with guitarist Jeff Parker), and in a plethora of other assemblages. The early albums by the Duo have proven to be embryonic blueprints for the avant-jazz / electronic / indie rock hybridizations of the time, making them majorly important moments in the articulation of the “jazz” dimensionality of the then-burgeoning "post rock" sound. That sound, of course, was being transmitted far and wide due to the success of these groups as well as Mazurek’s Isotope 217 project with Jeff Parker, and the Chicago Underground’s frequent collaborators in Tortoise.
But the sounds being created by this extended family are and were far from static. Just as most of the still-working artists born of that Chicago era have evolved, reconfigured, and grown, Chicago Underground Duo has undergone a number of musical moltings, with the project always in the background of disparate individual aural investigations — always an option, always an outlet. As the project drops off and picks back up, the concurrent personal evolutions of Mazurek and Taylor make the Duo a true reflection of their own lives and friendship.
“Rob is my longest collaborator and also one of my best friends,” says Taylor, who first performed with Mazurek at a club in Chicago in 1988, aged 15.
“When it feels right we do it,” says Mazurek of the gaps in duo activity. “We have worked together and have been friends for a long time. This creates a kind of continuity not only in the music, but in our lives.”
Musically, there are certainly internalized nods here to AACM composers like Wadada Leo Smith, or albums like Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell’s “Mu” and El Corazon, but the songs of Hyperglyph exemplify Mazurek and Taylor’s individualities while also addressing another longtime influence on the Chicago Underground Duo sound — the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost of extreme studio editing in jazz-adjacent music, Miles Davis and Teo Macero’s Bitches Brew, In A Silent Way, and Get Up With It.
“Post production has always been a big part of our process,” says Taylor.
“Sometimes it just flows and we one-take a thing,” Mazurek elaborates. “Other things take time to ferment. We hit those hard in the post production.”
International Anthem engineer Dave Vettraino was indispensable as part of this process, recording and mixing the entire album at IARC HQ in Chicago. “We are very open and free in the studio,” says Mazurek. “Working with Dave is a joy because he is so intuitive and open with his approach as well. We can try anything with him. In this way it is more like a trio than a duo.”
Couple this trio’s take on the now classic cut-and-recut production techniques of Davis/Macero with Mazurek and Taylor’s longtime interest in deep electronic sounds (think Bernard Parmegiani, Morton Subotnick, Xenakis, Eliane Radigue, Plux Quba), transformative processing (think Autechre, King Tubby, Mouse On Mars, Carl Craig) and we can finally get close to understanding just where the duo lands in this lineage — this ongoing narrative each individual finds themselves in whether they see it or not. The Chicago Underground Duo, it seems, sees it.
While the musical language of Mazurek and Taylor can certainly be clocked in the slew of projects that they participate in together, the sound of a Chicago Underground Duo album is singular among them. Hyperglyph is no exception and could even be considered a distillation of that intuitive yet complex sound. A key can be found in the title of the album itself: highly complex geometric structures which can seem overly complex at first but, when thousands are arrayed in 3D space and with user training and adaptation, can significantly enhance perception and information assimilation and lead to new knowledge and insights.
The album opener “Click Song” kicks off with a blown-out horn chant from Mazurek, doubled by tuned bells and nestled into a muscular and symmetrical stereo-overdubbed polyrhythm from Taylor. Synthesized bass pulls our ears along cyclically, dropping in and out to almost severe dynamic effect while Mazurek and the subtle-yet-persistent bells elaborate upon the melody before ultimately departing from their repetitive psalm in favor of improvisation. It’s all held together by the steady, deep, chest-thump boom of Taylor’s kick drum pattern.
“There has always been a lot of African influence in the rhythms we play,” says Taylor. “With this record, specifically, we utilize rhythms from Nigeria, Mali, Zimbabwe, and Ghana.” Taken as a whole, spiritually, this introductory three-minute stomper lives somewhere between a Tuareg wedding and the most hypnotic moments of the click songs of Northern Africa.
Title track “Hyperglyph” follows, and begins with a chromatic moving harmony played by Mazurek on the RMI electric piano, an instrument famously utilized on Miles Davis’ groundbreaking Filles de Kilimanjaro. The vibe here, though, is one of unyielding, trancelike repetition. The trumpet introduces the time, with Taylor's chunky smacking rhythm hitting hard from the get go. Eventually, the tune undergoes a transformation, with the back and forth of melody and rhythm hitting a fever pitch. A pitch-shifted trumpet becomes a New Orleans march baritone. Dennis Bovell-style dub sounds enter (or, maybe, reveal themselves) at the start of the song’s final movement, followed by wordless incantations. Swelling and saturated, the track sounds as if it’s about to tear itself apart. Static pulsing merges and overtakes the recorded percussion to present a new rhythm of hissing electronics — the harnessed wailing of the unleashed ghost in the machine. A spiritual awakening from the bowels of the earth.
“Hemiunu”, a Chad Taylor composition, is a waltz based around a simple piano figure repeated throughout. A folk melody from anywhere, the kind that’s been in the air for as long as anyone can remember. One might imagine the melody played clawhammer on an Appalachian afternoon, bowed somberly on the Chinese erhu, or hummed nonchalantly on the factory line. From the jump, Taylor’s percussion threads itself into the sound of a well-worn upright piano as the high register is haunted in wide stereo by that roiling RMI electric piano in octaves, alternately dubby and harplike. Enter Mazurek with another folk-like melodic phrase. Pause. Again. Pause. Leaving room for the now densely waltzing bouquet to bloom before diving deep into laser-sharp Lee Morganesque territory with a wildly vibrating high trumpet cry, but with a tone Mazurek owns completely.
The deeper reference for Mazurek’s most untethered emotional playing is his late friend and mentor Bill Dixon, an extraction most apparent in the three-part "Egyptian Suite.” At the start of part one (“The Architect”) a cyclical pattern from Taylor becomes a bed for Mazurek’s repeating, descending, synthetic-Egyptian scaled theme. This call to action dissolves into the second movement, “Triangulation of Light,” where Taylor’s bowed cymbals set the stage for an exploration of microtonal color with and against the occasional joining and un-joining of tones that stretch the frequencies to their limits from Mazurek's open and half muted trumpet. Like a tornado siren in the distance, breaking through the membrane of storm clouds on the horizon, in search of another siren.
The third and final movement, “Architectonics of Time,” announces itself with free rolling swaths of percussion from Taylor à la Robert Frank Pozar’s mind-bending percussion on The Bill Dixon Orchestra’s classic Intents and Purposes. Here, though, the lineup is limited to two, with no overdubs or post-production. Taylor's singular style and Mazurek's tonal painting coalesce into a maelstrom of intervallic tone and beat before the final repeat of the lead melody from the suite’s first movement. It truly feels like reaching the summit. It’s pure and free duo interaction, the symbiosis of 30 years.
“Succulent Amber,” the final track on Hyperglyph, could fit just as easily on side two of Autobahn. After a brief modular synth-induced pan-harmonic melody shift, a steady kalimba is joined by the gentle intermittent raindrop-melodicism of the RMI electric piano in this understated final duo performance, unadorned by further studio arrangement. It’s a full-on comedown moment after the intensity of “Egyptian Suite,” though rather than winding down or petering out, here the Chicago Underground Duo still manage to point toward some kind of incoming mystery with four sudden-yet-patient ascending chords on the low-register of the RMI electric piano just before the curtains close. The piano notes end on a leading tone, leaving the resolution to the listener.
Once we’ve climbed the mountain, they remind us, we have to deal with what’s on the other side.
After following Luke Blair's work for approaching two decades from his 2007 debut as Lukid on Actress' Werk Discs, we're humbled to present a new album on Death Is Not The End. Following relatively hot on the heels of 2023's Tilt (his first in 11 years, not counting his work with Jackson Bailey under the Rezzett guise) Underloop brings Blair's innate knack for building loops and sound structures further to the surface, while allowing his ear for emotional expression to be dialled up a notch.
Those fortunate enough to be familiar with Lukid's work as a DJ will be aware of how distinct his ability is to seamlessly disappear into loop-based abstraction and back again seemingly without blinking, and often Underloop feels much like a collection of the sludgey interludes and foggy sketches that underpin his sets. Blending apparently ramshackle melodies and textures and pulling them together into an undeniable whole, Blair's tendency for pairing the simple and the indescribable with an understated vigour is fully on show here.
Conna Haraway follows Spatial Fix with Shifted, a three-track 12” that turns toward propulsion and restraint. Where the earlier record sprawled in dense textures, this one explores sleek momentum and subtle form. Side A holds ‘Redirect’, an eleven-minute collaboration with XENIA REAPER. Built from a late-night Glasgow jam, her luminous synth line drifts against Haraway’s bass and loops, gliding into weight and pulse. On the flip, ‘Detach’ and ‘Duration’ channel a rediscovered love of 4x4 techno. Stripped and detailed, they balance home-listening depth with club-ready swing—poised, fluid, and adaptable. Fans of the Basic Channel axis, Deepchord, echospace [detroit] etc. should check this for sure. Matthew Kent's Short Span label never misses!!
CS + Kreme’s utterly sublime 2nd EP is mercifully made available again, doubling down on their brand of melancholic tristesse with achingly beautiful songwriting gilded by Conrad’s serpentine basslines and elevated by Sam’s slinky atmospheric suspense, with cameo by HTRK’s Nigel Yang. Partner to their 2016 debut, ‘EP2’ can be heard as the other half of what is effectively an album when paired with their eponymous first move. It is a masterclass in slow, dreamy world-building that skilfully distills myriad modes of downbeat suss into songs that warrant play on repeat - just ask any owner of the record or those who’ve drooled over it for nearly a decade; the verdict will surely be unanimous, harmonious. One of a clutch of modern classics on Total Stasis along with likes of Elysia Crampton’s ‘The Light You Gave Me To See You’ and early Ramzi joints, ‘EP2’ would stealthily reveal new aspects to strains of modal downbeat sound that can be heard in context of DIY folk, new age ambient or adult contemporary, and with faintest echoes of off-peak club music in the rearview. But the real magick lies in the way they pare everything back to its most salient substance and allow it to breathe, sway, get lost-and-found in itself. Fair to pick fan fave ‘Roast Ghost (Swimming Thru The Pillars Mix)’ as a highlight, practically undressing the senses with 9 mins of candle-flicker 808 and purling bass with Conrad’s vox luring deep into its glowing lustre. Yet the rest is equally midas-touched, from Nigel Lee-Yang’s plaintive guitar motif on ‘Whip’ firming up the HTRK link, to Sam’s dub wise tekkerz coming into play like prime Massive Attack on ‘Sisters’, and again with Conrad’s bass rolling down the off ramp ‘Portal’ into billowing keys, congas and Jack Doepel’s sax like some detail of a panorama described by The Necks and Bohren Und Der Club of Gore. Don’t sleep, you may be waiting another 8 years…
12th Isle ready the first of many new releases after a break over the first half of 2025. Radx is a new collaborative endeavour between label artists X.Y.R. and Vlad Dobrovolski (½ of S A D) exploring a shared appreciation of vintage 80s & 90s synthesisers, ambient-adjacent furniture music and, er, dragons. Referencing the electronica of artists such as Kim Cascone/Hydrosphere as well as the sci-fi literature of Michael Swanwick where dragons act as living machines, the pair combine various synthesis models, pedals and samplers for an album that sits somewhere firmly between each of their solo works. From the cathedralic ascension of ‘Heavenly Shepherd of Silence’ to the back-room bean bag swirls of ‘Ovgo’s Etheric Mind’ and dense, jungle-like humidity of ‘Liminal Space’, the more ambient-leaning end of the catalogue is built upon further.
Signals Aligned is Lord Of The Isles’s fifth album and his second contribution to his own Dusk Delay imprint.
Signals Aligned stands as a sonic testament to the intersection of science, spirituality, and the vast unknown. Inspired by pioneering theories on the nature of anomalous phenomena, viewing them not as extraterrestrial but as a complex, multidimensional enigma.
There’s a consistent theme of “discovery through distortion.” Truth is often obscured by layers of misinformation, disinformation, and misperception. The music plays with the concept of clarity and distortion, revealing hidden textures beneath shifting layers of sound.
The sound palette is vast and ethereal, incorporating elements of noise, shimmering synths, and organic textures. There’s a sense of both wonder and unease that mirrors theories on the strange and unexplainable.
Our season's first edition by the mighty Woo is an ode to Sweet Peas. It is a thoughtfully curated collection of ambient, minimalist, and new-age soundscapes designed to be the perfect soundtrack for moments of sowing these seeds, which accompany every release in quiet reflection.
Composed by the renowned duo Woo—Mark and Clive Ives — this is one of a series of five unreleased albums from their archives. The release combines soothing tones from clarinet, guitars, percussion, and electronic elements, creating the perfect soundtrack for gardeners and music lovers alike. Featuring tracks like “Golden Hours” and “Earth Angels,” this album is an ode to the slow, rewarding process of growth and new beginnings. “Like nature, our approach has always been quite random,” the brothers state, “ as with planting seeds the process has a purity that can bring unexpected results.”
Accompanying each release will be a special seed insert chosen by the artist to enhance the tactile and organic experience of the music. These seeds symbolise the potential for growth and connection to the natural world, aligning with the music's meditative and nurturing qualities.
For this release, the brothers have chosen Sweet Peas:
“To our surprise and delight, Sweet Peas can be planted in the autumn and they’ll blossom in the coming spring”
Each release will be in physical form on a recycled cassette, which will precede its digital counterpart by a few months, allowing the music to be experienced in its intended form first.
As Clive puts it: “Much like nature, music is an ever-evolving process. With this project our aim was to achieve an unpredictable organic flow that still feels harmonious.”
人気作『風物詩』や『In A Landscape』といった実験的テクノの大傑作でも知られるベルリン拠点のサウンド・アーティスト、Sa Paの最新12インチ作品が新鋭レーベル〈Short Span〉から登場！この人の特徴である幻想的で重厚な音響が4つの新たな方向へと展開。サブベースと濁ったアトモスフィアが絡み合う8分間のビートレス・トリップ"Captigon"、グリッドレスなドラムパターンと断片的なヴォーカルサンプルが交錯する抽象的なリズムトラック"So Simple"、13分に及ぶミニマル・テクノのグルーヴに熱処理されたベースラインが絡む"Boredom Memory (Extended Memory)"（サブウーファーでの再生が推奨！）など、全体を通して、ダブ・テクノ、アンビエント、実験音楽の要素が融合し、内省的で深遠な音世界を構築した秀逸タイトル！
Ejigayehu Shibabaw was born in 1974 in Chagni, northwestern Ethiopia and by pursuing a career as a singer, went against her father’s strict, traditional gender roles. As Gigi, she embraced the same musical freedom she had strived for in her personal life, incorporating the Ethiopian church, funk, hip-hop, West and South African music into her work. She first settled in Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, where she quickly established herself as one of the city’s leading singers. A move to San Francisco in 1998 led to a long and fruitful creative partnership with bassist and producer Bill Laswell.
Around the same time, Chris Blackwell had stepped away from Island Records to start the art house film company and label Palm Pictures. He took an interest in Gigi and together with Laswell, pulled together an all-star cast of musicians for her self-titled US debut album, including Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter. It won international critical acclaim, not just for its musicianship but for making Gigi a “defining voice for the Ethiopian expatriate community”, as journalist Tyran Grillo praises in his Time Capsule liner notes. From the nation-defining 1896 victory over Italian invaders to the quiet revolutionaries who wear simple shemma garments, Grillo believes the themes in Gigi make it “a shower of sunlight on her homeland for those ignorant of its struggles.”
After its success, Blackwell encouraged them to go back into the studio to rethink the album and Illuminated Audio was born. “Anyone can make a voice sound worldly”, Grillo remarks, “but rare are those who can make one sound inner-worldly.” Gigi was clear with Laswell to give her vocals a minor role “because it’s already been done.” Instead her Amharic verse is fleeting, exhaling through the textures like ghostly fragments; soaring yet muted. Yet the album is still titled under her name, an assertion by Laswell of her central role in the album’s creation. Not only was it a fully endorsed project by Gigi, but she would be present throughout its development, giving feedback on half-finished ideas as Laswell played them back in the studio. “It works perfectly”, she reflected after the album’s release. “We wanted to capture the whole spirit of each track, and Bill’s remixes create a different music language that really puts you in a pleasant place”.
This new vocabulary takes its lead from a technical approach that Laswell had been perfecting during a furtive creative period at the turn of the millennium. Much like his ambient interpretations of Miles Davis (Panthalassa, 1998), Bob Marley (Dreams of Freedom, 1997), and Carlos Santana (Divine Light, 2001), Laswell approached Illuminated Audio by returning to the original multitrack masters. Gigi wasn’t just reworked, but recomposed into an expansive lattice of instruments, submerged in a watery ambience of dub and trance undercurrents.
Sonically, this new language that Gigi refers to, is manifested by the original album’s more understated parts being pushed to the fore. Explaining his contrasting methods, Laswell saw Gigi as being “put together in a way that fits”. Contrastingly, in Illuminated Audio, “a lot of things that I featured in the remix weren’t as audible in the original.” Instrumentation laying near-dormant, deep in the mix, are brought to the fore: the acid rock guitar and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone on ‘Tew Ante Sew’, Graham Haynes’ flugelhorn on ‘Nafekeñ’, Laswell’s bass on ‘Kahn’, the melodica in Mengedegna or the floating synths and talking drums in ‘Gud Fella’.
Brought to his attention by mentor DJ Nori, Hidaka describes Illuminated Audio as a “masterful sonic exploration into ethereal ambience and dub” and made sure this reissue also contained a full remaster to give its “deep musicality” much better dynamics and density in the overall sound. Hidaka admits that Laswell’s music “is sometimes so out-there, it is often misunderstood” and, indeed, to dub album non-believers this might seem like a prolific producer imposing himself on another artist’s work; eternally developing rearrangements that never quite get to its destination. But that’s missing its true power and triumph. This is more than the reissue of a remix, but “a wholly unique musical entity”, as Hidaka describes. Illuminated Audio refers to the illuminated manuscripts that comprise the major part of Ethiopian art and its new compositions stand in proud solitude as a rare body of reworks that both informs and enhances their originals.
At long last, Takao is back with his long-awaited second album, seven years in the making. His 2018 "Stealth" was (and still is) a much-loved set, mixing elements of ambient and environmental music; with this new release Takao breaks free of the gravitational pull of these earlier influences and strides confidently forward. "The End of the Brim" jettisons some of the more abstract elements of his previous work, embracing a “universal listenability” and a more concrete intensity, with a focus on supple rhythms and strengthened senses of melodic development and harmonic sophistication. This musical growth can be linked with Takao’s admiration of composers Ken Muramatsu and Toshifumi Hinata, who are generally associated with commercial “production music” and easy listening. Another contributing factor is his private study with veteran keyboardist Ichiko Hashimoto of Colored Music. The ten tracks here include three vocal tracks, with three different singers (Yumea Horiike, Cristel Bere, Atsuo Fujimoto of Colored Music) and seven keyboard-led pieces. The vocal pieces are integral parts of the album’s flow, rather than typical “songs” driven by the name and personality of the singer. All of these factors, plus the veteran presence of engineer Hiroshi Haraguchi, known for his work with Haruomi Hosono, who mixed half of the album's tracks, along with the use of excellent old-school synths, aligned with Takao’s forward-looking vision, have combined to give us an album with a unique sense of timelessness. A spotlight illuminating future paths for pop music, available on CD/Vinyl LP/Digital, with English/Japanese lyrics, and liner notes by Yuji Shibasaki.
1993 debut album by the trio of Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns. Unavailable on vinyl and CD since original release. Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Colton, contains “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix)” for the first time on the 2LP edition.
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Eric Broucek was the ur-engineer of the most fertile era of DFA Studios, from about 2003 to 2008 (no one knows anything precisely about that time, as it’s all lost in the fog of chaos). His hand was on all of the remixes, LPs, dance 12s. He was there in that over-designed gear dungeon almost every day, recording, mixing, struggling to not roll his eyes at Tim and me. And somewhere in that fog, he quietly dropped limited runs of three 12-inch delayed reaction bombs on his own label Stickydisc Recordings—two under the name Babytalk, and one as Watussi with another DFA regular, Morgan Wiley.
Back in the day, Eric did not want his music released on DFA. He wanted to forge his own identity, which he did, sending out music that wandered from the DFA path with its uniquely wonky, upended and understated power. His music is so unlike everything else of that era, so profoundly singular, that it still sounds completely out of time.
A few years back, I started DJing the tracks again, and saw how the world was still surprised by what Eric had made, and the idea of this compilation was born.
So, in the end, Eric, we totally got to release your records anyway. We heart you, man.
-James Murphy
Pick a small spot (a point) in front of you (a small knot of wood, a dog down the way). And tightly focus on this spot. And now slowly unfocus your gaze. Widen your gaze. Pan out without moving your eyes. Take it all in.
A smeared and pixelated surface, swelling of contour and light. (Monet’s seepages of light, Altman’s overlapping nomadic dialogue.) Once you have unfocused with little to no center of attention, slowly close your eyes. And please feel very free to notice the light. All of the light that your eyes knocked back as you dilated your focal point. This exercise can be repeated a few times. Unfocusing does not always come easily. And it is probably best to not put too much effort into it. Best to not employ too much pressure.
And we will not put too much pressure on this exercise to help us explain away the humidly, saturatedly psychedelic canopy of moan-‘n-twang and slackelastic-groove of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sasquatch Landslide.
Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”
Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.
There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognizable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.
A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.
Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty
Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025
Ten years after it was originally released, billy woods' sprawling fifth album - a claustrophobic road movie that chews over war, death and disappointment - finally gets a new lease of life.
The timing's great on this one, that's for sure. woods' 'GOLLIWOG' seems like a shoo in for album of the year, so what better time to dig up one of his best deep catalog offerings? 'Today, I Wrote Nothing' wasn't an easy sell at the time; it'd appeared shortly after 'Dour Candy', the rapper's celebrated collaboration with Blockhead, and 'Race Music', his first Armand Hammer album, but didn't just retread the same territory. Where 'Dour Candy' was tight and direct, 'Today, I Wrote Nothing' was sketchy and experimental, a collection of 24 eclectic ideas and asides rapped over dusty, jazz-inflected beats, ghosted soul samples and creaky field recordings. In many ways, it makes more sense now after albums like 2022's 'Aethiopes' and 'GOLLIWOG' have prepared listeners for woods' sharp, philosophical tongue and salty taste in beats.
Just check the Willie Green-produced 'Sleep' with its El-P-cum-BoC synths and rickety rhythms, or the Wire-sampling 'Scales', that skips from Shakespearean "murder-by-numbers" to a psychedelic instrumental workout. "Gas station, vacuum, rental car," woods slurs over a truncated loop of Captain Beefheart's 'White Jam', recounting a long, dangerous drug run. "Back in the back of the bar, demons spar." You can practically taste the blund smoke and gasoline as woods motors from place to place, spinning country in cheap motels on 'Bicycles' and trading macabre anecdotes around the campfire on the vaudeville 'True Stories'. Basically, if you've only heard 'GOLLIWOG', this'll be an easy second step into woods' vast canon.
Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…? is the new studio album from Backwoodz Studioz artist PremRock (perhaps best known as ½ of ShrapKnel; the sobering yin to Curly Castro’s furious yang). DYEYTH picks up where Prem’s pensive Backwoodz debut, 2021’s Load Bearing Crow’s Feet, left off; clear-eyed, heartfelt, and unsparingly witty. The album boasts production from Sebb Bash, Blockhead, YUNGMORPHEUS, Child Actor, Controller 7, ELUCID, Small Professor, Jeff Markey, & Fines Double while Prem’s longtime collaborator Willie Green weaves everything together. Lyrically Prem is aided and abetted by some of the world’s best, Pink Siifu, billy woods, Cavalier, Nappy Nina, Illogic, AJ Suede, Mary Esther Carter and of course Castro. Each guest extracts the best out of the mixture and producing fruitful collaborations not merely guest verses. Featuring original artwork inspired by the record from Chicago artist Gabe Karagianis. The best turns of phrase are the ones that provide more than one meaning. Like staring at an abstract painting, words can mean different things to different people. A question or phrase that either elicits an extended existential pondering or simply a shrug. Could be in reference to the entirety of one’s life, spending 90 minutes in an establishment or 5 years in a romantic relationship.The brief exhilarating high of a designer drug, or the automated survey at the end of an online transaction. It is a simple but stealthily loaded question. Well, did you?
Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce a new album from Kenny Segal and K-the-I??? Genuine Dexterity is the title of this record, but it is also an equally apt description of their artistic skill sets; Kenny’s ability to tailor his production to each project is well established, and K-the-I???’s acrobatic style easily renders dense rhymes weightless. Together they have made an album that pogo sticks over genre conventions to deliver a daring and immersive listening experience. “Genuine Dexterity is an album made in order to display my many facets, whether it be my mood, growth or the adventures that formulate my present-day outlook,” the rapper explains, “Letting everything come naturally to me and to never force the envelope. It’s also about the direction the universe is heading towards whether I like it or not” Rapper/Producer Kiki Ceac, best known by his stage name K-the-I???, was at the forefront of the mid-00’s experimental hip-hop wave that laid the groundwork for much of the alternative rap music that followed. Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kiki moved to Los Angeles around the same time that fellow East Coast transplant Kenny Segal was beginning to make noise under the Project Blowed umbrella. Despite moving in the same circles for many years, they had never worked together until Genuine Dexterity- which, ironically enough, came about after Kiki moved back to the East Coast. “Sometimes a vocalist will just spark a whole wave of creativity in me, and that’s what happened with Kiki,” Segal says, “last year I sent him two beats to use on a different album and when he sent the songs back it was obvious we had something special and needed to do more” Genuine Dexterity features Armand Hammer, Open Mike Eagle, ShrapKnel, Fatboi Sharif, Self Jupiter, and Jesse the Tree but K-the-I??? is the undisputed ringmaster of this circus. It has been a decade since Kiki’s last album and yet he has returned to the game at the height of his powers. He has always been an unorthodox lyricist and remains so here, but in his time away from the spotlight, his style has grown in many ways. “Maybe I’m calmer nowadays, I don’t feel the need to ALWAYS shout like I used to. My vocabulary has grown, and my flow is more polished,” Kiki writes, before adding that one thing that has not changed is the intricacy of his writing. Meanwhile, Kenny Segal’s customized soundscapes whisk Kiki’s styles to places they haven’t been before, and he never fails to find a pocket in which to ply his craft. Genuine Dexterity, if you will.
