Indie / Alternative

(Limited quantity/ Black vinyl With Japanese obi) This album was recorded at Oxford and Abbey Road Studios at the same time as “Wall Of Eyes” and features a string arrangement by the London Contemporary Orchestra. Produced by Sam Petz Davies, who has previously worked on “Wall of Eyes,” Thom Yorke's latest solo album “Confidenza,” and Radiohead's “A Moon Shaped Pool,” the album was mastered by Greg Calbi, the same producer used for “Wall of Eyes. The album artwork was created by Stanley Kalbi, who also did the artwork for “Wall of Eyes”. The album artwork was also painted by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke during recording, and several songs from “Cutouts” were premiered during The Smile's UK tour in March 2024, despite the high pace of production, releasing two albums in a year, The album is truly a super band in its own right, clothed in an extraordinary sense of scale by the explosion of its insatiable creativity and artistry.

版元完売。Theo Fabunmi Stonn (404 Eros) & Jon Phonics (Astral Black)の2名が主宰しているロンドンの気鋭レーベルであり、Lunch Money LifeやVanessa Bedoretといった面々による先鋭的な作品を送り出してきた〈Scenic Route〉のショーケース的コンピ盤をストック。レフトフィールドでサイケデリックなテイスト抜群のドリーム・ポップやインディ・フォーク、オルタナティヴR&Bを中心に、知られざる現行の地下アクトたちを一挙20組紹介した意欲的な1本！

“Rocky Top Ballads” is the debut album of Copenhagen singer/songwriter and producer Fine. Woven around Fine's voice, with guitars, drums, samples, and synthesisers, the album visits both country and folk moods but with an underlying electronic world counter weighing. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Fine.

Distant Call is a collection of early demos that were worked into finished productions appearing on Haha Sound, Tender Buttons and The Future Crayon.

The album also includes two songs discovered by James after Trish’s passing: “Come Back To Me” and “Please Call To Book” which was her response to Broadcast's 2006 ‘Let’s Write A Song’ project, where fans were asked to submit lyrics on a postcard which would then be worked into a finished song.

Distant Call is a closing of the door on Broadcast and will be the last release from the band.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

Colemine Records is proud to present a brand new 45 from Aaron Frazer featuring two tracks from his debut LP. The funky and drum heavy “Bad News” has a timely message at a time when people willfully ignore the warnings about everything from climate change to systematic racism. Frazer recorded the tune in Nashville and he brought together a bevy of talented musicians, including members of The Memphis Boys, who backed Dusty Springfield on “Son of a Preacher Man” and Aretha Franklin on “Natural Woman." On the flip, "Done Lyin’" shows Aaron's vulnerability throughout the song. Heavy and tough production from Dan Auerbach paired with Frazer smoothly singing his heart out is a match made in sweet soul heaven.

SAICOBAB is a one-of-a-kind NEW HIGH WAVE artist. The title of this album "NRTYA" is Sanskrit for "DANCE". It is a quaternistic dance music that expands raga (melody) and tala (beat) into the realm of the imaginary!

YoshimiO _ Vocalization
HAMA _ Req
YOSHIDADAIKITI _ Electric Sitar, Electric Bass Sitar, Electric Bass Tanpura
Resonant String Speaker
*All handmade instruments by YOSHIDADAIKITI
TATEKAWA YO2RO _ Drums

Music by SAICOBAB
Recorded in 2020-2021, Engineerd by KABAMIX
Mixed by YoshimiO & KABAMIX in 2022
Mastered by Sarah Register @SR Mastering,NYC
Art works by OOIDO SYOUJOU + YoshimiO, Design by QOTAROO
Photo by HOMMA TAKASHI

Like the days of Steely Dan or Harry Nilsson releasing a classic album every year (or less) comes Mac DeMarco's Another One, a Mini-LP announced one year after the release of the meteorically successful Salad Days. Written and recorded during the downtime between a relentless touring schedule, Another One is an eight-track release that expands the arsenal of Mac's already impressive catalog, showing the maturity of Mac's progression as songwriter: it's a bit more refined, a bit more sophisticated, but nonetheless retains the guts and soul of classic Mac. Despite working at the same pace as artists like Creedence and The Rolling Stones, coupled with an equally unending schedule of touring and press, it's odd that Mac is labeled as a slacker. With two full-lengths and two EPs released and hundreds of sold out shows performed in the last several years, a recent late night television debut on Conan following a special performance on The Eric Andre Show, it seems, as Mac nears his 25th birthday, there's not a slack bone in the man's body. Great songwriters don't need to reinvent themselves; they just need to keep going and let the songs out in the world. Thus, here's Another One.

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal.

While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (The Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after.

Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

A glorious debut that undeniably set a high watermark, Luz Bel is finally available again, faithfully remastered by Mikey Young and featuring bilingual liner notes from John Gómez, the authoritative ear behind Outro Tempo.

Originally released in 2017, PHANTOM BRICKWORKS is an ongoing ambient/drone project by Stephen James Wilkinson a.k.a. Bibio. The work explores the human echoes still present in various sites around Britain. Wilkinson has visited these locations, observed their gradual decline, and responded with improvised and composed music. New in 2024, a sequel titled PHANTOM BRICKWORKS (LP II) is a 10-track LP, mastered by Guy Davie and vinyl cut by Hendrik Pauler. The new record draws attention to new sites - some are intriguing, vast scars on the natural landscape, others survive only in local memories, historic clips and photographs. A few remain submerged from ordinary sights, while some exist purely as legends and stories.

The first new music from the post-emo trio in two decades. Out of the brain of Geoff Farina spills 10 new tales from their unlikely reunion, tracked with long-time Karate collaborator Andy Hong. Make It Fit crams 35 minutes of Wes Montgomery homage, Fugazi dub plate party rocking, Lynott lyricism, and Clash city crooning into a graceful seventh album.

Step inside the world of Ginger Root. Cameron Lew makes it easy to do so; every considered detail is his own manifestation, written, designed, and executed as an all-encompassing diorama of sound and sight. A multi-instrumentalist, producer, songwriter, and visual artist from Southern California, Lew has crafted his project steadily since 2017, inviting a fervent and growing legion of fans into storylines drawn across mediums: captivating albums with accompanying films and globe-spanning tours. The Ginger Root sound — handmade yet immaculately polished synth-pop, alt-disco, boogie, and soul — takes shape through Lew's lens as an Asian-American growing up enamored by 1970s and '80s music, specifically the creative and cultural dialogue between Japanese City Pop and its Western counterparts from French Pop to Philly Soul to Ram-era McCartney. He spins his retro-minded influences and proliferates savvily in the present, synthesizing a songwriter's wit, an editor's eye, and a producer’s resource into something singular and modern. SHINBANGUMI, his long-awaited third LP, and Ghostly International debut set for physical release in 2024 with a visual album component, translates roughly to a new season of a show. It finds Lew more poised, idiosyncratic, and intentional than ever in a new chapter of life, unlocking "exactly what Ginger Root should sound and feel like," he says. "In terms of instrumentation and musicality, it's the first time that I felt very confident and comfortable with what everything should be comprised of. On the more personal side, I'm coming out of the last four years of writing, touring, and living as a different person; SHINBANGUMI is a platform to showcase my new self." In parallel with the songs and his real-life artist story, unfolding across the sequential music video series, Lew resumes the conceptual narrative from his 2022 EP Nisemono, which follows Ginger Root as a newly-fired music supervisor in 1987 starting his own media conglomerate, Ginger Root Productions. "If you watch music videos one through eight, you'll be presented with a story that’s comparable to a traditional movie; something I've always wanted to do.” Splitting sessions between locations in Japan and back in Orange County, Lew paid extra attention to SHINBANGUMI’s track arrangement, tapping his close circle for input, including members of his live band and his longtime video collaborator, David Gutel. He sees the album’s arc in multiple acts, mapping the chronological listen with "just the right amount of like front-end punch and then letting you breathe, then sending you even faster in the middle section, and so on…I wanted to grab you by the collar in a good way and then not let you go until the last song." "No Problems" acts as the opening title sequence and a bridge to new terrain, with its singable basslines, swaggering guitar riffs, and clever keyboard hooks calling back to past fan favorites now with expanded scope. "All the sonic logos of Ginger Root are in this song," Lew says. "Better Than Monday" pokes fun at our universal dread of the week’s reset and plays with expectations, starting in a crunchy lo-fi space before blasting into hi-fi splendor, a super-charged, bass-bending stomp that rides out on his reprise, "It's the waitin' that you do (whatcha doin?)." What makes Ginger Root special is the project's ability to weave influence beyond pastiche into a bigger picture, exploring that rarified pop pleasure center where referential meets refreshing. "There Was A Time" honors the homespun melody-making of his favorite solo Beatle (early ‘70s Paul). Thinking about the song's utility within the overall sequence, like a scene break, Lew sought to write a lighter pop song. It doubles as the sweet wind-up for "All Night," a four-on-the-floor burner, a Ginger Root club cut albeit still with live instrumentation, inspired by his friend's seemingly endless night out in Paris. "This was my one attempt at writing a track that you can bump all night, but being the introvert that I am, I couldn't write it about me." With "Only You," Lew delivers his first straightforward take on the oft-cited genre: "I wanted to sit down and be in the mindset of, if I were to write a true City Pop song, what would I want it to sound like?” The result is an anthem brimming with deep bass disco grooves, shimmering synth glissandos, and a howling outro from the school of Prince and Chaka Khan. Meanwhile, the infectious and uncharacteristically guitar-driven "Giddy Up" stems from Lew’s love for The B-52s and Devo. Unpacking the message, he adds, "It could be a relationship with something, a passion, a project or whatever. If you want to do it, you gotta giddy up, buckle in, pull your boots up, and go for it." For "Kaze," recorded on a dusty drum kit in a karaoke bar in the middle of Tokyo's Asakusa district, he evokes the Tin Pan Alley sound of a hero, Harry Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra). Lew considers "Show 10" the spiritual heart of the record, the track that reminded him why he keeps Ginger Root going. Towards the end of his last album season, Lew recalls one night when tour fatigue was setting in, feeling like he didn't want to play the same set again: “I remember walking out into the crowd and seeing all the people who had high hopes for this show. I was like, man, you know, I've got to give it 10. I've got to show people my best." And with SHINBANGUMI, he has.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

“I've been thinking a lot about Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. That was a really important touchstone in my mind,” says ANOHNI of her sixth studio album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross. “A couple of these songs are almost a response to the call of What's Going On, from 2023. They are a kind of an echo from the future to that album from 50 years ago.”

As the British-born, New York-based artist’s first full album since 2016’s HOPELESSNESS, ANOHNI explains that the creative process was painstaking, yet also inspired, joyful, and intimate, a renewal and a renaming of her response to the world as she sees it.

A record its creator acknowledges is inextricably both personal and political, and one that is full of heartfelt music that also questions its own right to be heard, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross demonstrates music’s unique capacity to bring harmony to competing, sometimes contradictory, elements.

“For me, there's no heavenly respite; creation is a spectral and feminine continuum, and our souls are an inalienable part of nature.”

In 2022, having sought producer recommendations from Rough Trade Records’ Jeannette Lee and Geoff Travis, ANOHNI began working with Jimmy Hogarth (Amy Winehouse, Duffy, Tina Turner) noting his sensitivity towards soul music. Having always helmed and written her previous records – bar HOPELESSNESS, for some of which, producers were invited to submit instrumentals – this kind of collaboration was a first for ANOHNI. “There was a great ease to this songwriting process,” she says of her writing and recording sessions with Hogarth. “I loved making this record in a way that I've never done before.”

Bringing in with her several years of texts, ANOHNI and Hogarth shared musical ideas and sketched out a series of demos with Hogarth playing guitar. Hogarth then assembled a studio band – including guitarist Leo Abrahams and string arranger/instrumentalist Rob Moose – to record the full album.

“Many of the recordings on this record – like“It Must Change”and “Can't” – capture the first and only time I have sung those songs through. There's a magic when you suddenly place words you have been thinking about for a long time into melody. A neural system awakens. It isn't personal and yet is so personal. Things connect and come alive.”

Hogarth’s intuitive guitar leads the listener across ten songs, touching on elements of American soul, British folk and experimental music. ANOHNI places her heart on the line and in a groove in the opening track “It Must Change,”describing systems in collapse with a note of compassion for humanity: “The truth is I always thought you were beautiful in your own way / That’s why this is so sad.”“Scapegoat” waivers between tenderness and instrumental brutality, “Take all of my hate into your body / It doesn’t matter what you’ve got to give / or why you want to live / You’re my scapegoat / It’s not personal.” The primordial, Kali-esque curse “Rest” positions the record at moments in conversation with experimental rock of the 1970s: “Rest like the enemy of all that sees / Rest like the enemy of all that breathes / In the poison ocean blue / She’ll come home to you.” “Go Ahead” presses melody through dissonance. “You are determined to take me down / Go ahead kill your friends / I can’t stop you.” My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross shape shifts through its subject matter: the loss of loved ones, inequality, alienation, privilege, denial, ecocide and the tidal power of Earth, isolation, Future Feminism, and the intention that we might yet transform our ways of thinking, our religious ideas, our societal structures, and our relationships with the rest of nature.

“You know how they always said that light was the opposite of darkness? / It’s just fire in darkness, creating life / So those opposites, they don’t exist / It’s just an idea that someone told you” (“It Must Change”)

ANOHNI’s voice is sensual and smoothed, selectively reaching to the edges of what it can contain. “I don’t want you to be dead, I can’t accept it,” she cries out at the climax of “Can’t.” “We’re not getting out of here / No one’s getting out of here / This is our world,” she murmurs on “It Must Change.” “How sweet the vista, the portal view / On my way to black and blue,” she grieves on “Sliver of Ice,” a remembering of some of the last words Lou Reed shared with her.

A portrait of gay rights activist Marsha P. Johnson taken by Alvin Baltrop features on the cover of My Back Was a Bridge For You To Cross, reflecting a 25-year relationship with the memory of Johnson that ANOHNI has held space for in the presentation of her own work. Paintings by Sylvester Hustito, a Zuni Two Spirit artist from New Mexico, depict another crucial vision of America, from a queer, indigenous historical point of view. On “You Be Free,” ANOHNI sings from with heartbreak about the passing of trans intergenerational knowledge: “Done my work / My back was broke / My back was a bridge for you to cross / Then I wished in the aftermath / That the Earth would take my life / Like she took the lives of my Mother and my Sister.”

“I'm careful with the emotional pathways I am drawing. The stories we tell ourselves are the basis of our cultural mythologies, and often a foreshadowing of our destinies. We live in a world where story-telling has become another abuse of power, a threat, fake news, anti-female, anti-nature,” ANOHNI says of her intentions as lyricist. The album artwork states simply ”IT’S TIME TO FEEL WHAT’S REALLY HAPPENING”. In some ways it feels as if she is reaching across her life’s expression, and has found a moment of unique composure, wearing her long exploration of disarming intensity, but with the maturity of a painter choosing colors.

On listening to My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross, one is reminded of music’s power and ability to articulate the political and the personal concurrently. “As much as I was British or American, I was identified as a non-viable part of family, community, church, society. At moments I was deemed not worth protecting, as being expendable, on account of my femininity. Ultimately that was a gift for me because it brought me unique insight into the societies I found myself having to navigate. It forced me to be more willing to look at who and where I really was.”

With “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology),” Marvin Gaye made a visionary plea for the environment in 1971, a gesture that ANOHNI has echoed across her own output, from “Rapture” in 1992 and “Another World” in 2009, to “4 Degrees” and “Why Did You Separate Me From The Earth?” from her last record HOPELESSNESS in 2016.

ANOHNI’s approach since her last record has shifted from someone tasked with challenging global denial, to an artist seeking to support others on the front lines. “I want the record to be useful. I learned with HOPELESSNESS that I can provide a soundtrack that might fortify people in their work, in their activism, in their dreaming and decision-making. I can sing of an awareness that makes others feel less alone, people for whom the frank articulation of these frightening times is not a source of discomfort but a cause for identification and relief.”

“I see myself as a part of a process. I know that I'm not there, but I feel that someone in the future might know how to get there. An innovation in our way of dreaming or thinking might help us get back home. I hope that this record is another step in that direction. As problematic and broken as it might be, maybe there's an element in this music that's going to be useful to a future iteration of us. They're going to be able to distill what's right about it and make something better out of it. So I do my work hoping that someone's going to be able to pick it up and take it further, that it can be a source of something positive at some later point in our evolution – if we're lucky to continue to have an evolution.”

“We are each moving through massive impersonal systems that we feel powerless to change. And yet we're being asked in this moment to pull back the curtain and recognize these systems for what they are - not the preordained will of a god, but something we created over centuries. If we can’t do this collectively, we will forfeit our remaining ability to influence our trajectory. We have to dismantle systems that are destructive, and yet upon which many of us are dependent. Whether it’s because of malevolence, or fear, or addiction… ultimately it’s been one big survival strategy. We've never been faced with a challenge this consequential before as a species. Because of their structural hatred of Femaleness, Abrahamic religions and capitalism can only realize an apocalyptic future, rather than facilitate the emergence of a life-sustaining sensibility that might allow us to continue to exist as a part of Nature. So that's a challenge that we're facing now.” 

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal. While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after. Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

The follow up to their well received debut album ‘Moot!’, the record draws influences from alternative guitar music in its many forms, using electronic manipulations and sampling techniques to redefine it's context, not settling on any one style but moving through them in search of new connections. By exploring these relationships, Moin delivers another collage of the known and unknown, punctuated by words that are just out of reach.

A serendipitous conversation brought the project to life. Moot! allowed the group to re-appreciate the recording process, using a combination of live recording and studio techniques. The album spans psych, alternative rock and post-punk mixed with their signature electronics and sampling practice. The record was made as an experiment, to be enjoyed, not as spectacle.

“Do you dream too?” Tomemitsu’s Martin Roark asks on his sophomore album with Friends of Friends Music out September 20, 2024. The question is also what stemmed from the album title, ‘Dream 2’, a shorthand written in the lyrics. ‘Dream 2’ is quite possibly Tomemitsu’s dreamiest LP, if not his most diverse. It is brimming with both new territory and nods to his past. This record reveals a more buoyant side to accompany his traditionally spaced out productions. Since his 2013 release of ‘m_o_d_e_s’, Tomemitsu has combined calm with chaos to create chilled out nuggets of pop containing an ear for ambience in odes to offbeat artists from genres of all sorts. “Creators like Thelonoius Monk, Joao Gilberto, Daniel Johnston, Brian Eno, Bill Withers, Arthur Russell… they were all immediately inspiring to me. I think I’ve come to appreciate the ‘solo project’ness of tomemitsu without realizing how much i was nodding along to the loneliness of my favorite artists.” says Roark. For ‘Dream 2’, Tomemitsu also added a slew of analog and digital gear, processors and synthesizers, to his private Laveta Loca studio elevating the aural output from his hyper lo-fi origins.

Etran de L’Aïr the STARS OF THE AÏR, the longest running wedding band in AGADEZ, capital of Tuareg guitar, return with a new album of sun-schlazed desert sound! Their first album, No.1, brought their music to critics and fans. Their second album, Agadez, sent them into the international touring circuit. And now they're back with 100% SAHARA GUITAR, ready to take on the world, with those swinging melodies, like a sandstorm blowing in from across the sea. Etran de L’Aïr are 100% SAHARA, and that goes same for the band, all sons of AGADEZ, including brothers Moussa, Abdoulaye, and Abdourahamane, and their dear friend, the youngest of the group, Alghabid. All the brothers write and play guitar, swapping out instruments while Alghabid keeps the FOUR ON THE FLOOR. In 100% SAHARA GUITAR, Etran de L’Aïr are back to claim the throne, with their first studio album! And what a sound it is. Recorded in sunny studios on the WEST COAST, the brothers take that old Agadez sound to new levels, adding even more guitars into the mix, weaving layers of reverb-laden melodies and shimmering harmonies into a tapestry of sound. How much guitar can they fit into one record? The answer is 100%.

Japanese musician Hakushi Hasegawa/長谷川白紙 proudly announces their new album Mahōgakkō/魔法学校 for LA-based Brainfeeder Records, out July 24th. As part of the announcement, Hasegawa shares a new single and video – “Boy’s Texture” – serving as the album’s second single after last year’s “Mouth Flash (Kuchinohanabi)”. The news arrives alongside Hasegawa’s grand gesture of revealing their face to fans for the very first time, unveiling a new side of the elusive and compelling artist.

“Boy’s Texture” sprints with all the energy of springtime. A warm, easygoing guitar forms the track’s main center, a through line as skittering synths, pounding drums, and a chorus of voices swirl around it. The video, directed by Gauspel (Brandon Saunders), explores the desire to find a missing piece of yourself in the wild. “Most people hold this preconceived notion that your being will be complete upon this revelation and that the broken pieces that comprise you will find their final puzzle piece,” he explains. “But there is no such grand revelation, just self-reflection… just you.”

Mahōgakkō, translating to “Magic School,” also seeks to make sense of a chaotic, vibrant world by letting itself get swept up in it. A balance of pop and pandemonium, the album is one of extremes, where chipmunk-pitched voices square off against percussion set to speed metal’s tempo and volume. Noise and melody, cutesy and aggressive, acoustic and electronic — all come to a head in a process Hasegawa calls the Explanatory Ratio.

“The balance is probably the only thing in my work that is intentional and very important to me,” shares Hasegawa. “In many of my songs, I use a scale that I personally call the ‘Explanatory Ratio’ to guide my work. This is not a sophisticated musical theory at all, but simply a subjective scale that looks at the balance of sounds that are explainable to me and sounds that are not explainable to me, and whether or not they are distributed in the ratio that I set for each piece.”

Mahōgakkō finds Hakushi pushing their boundaries to the absolute limit, with hyperspeed jungle and breakcore traded up for the even more pummeling onslaughts inspired by Tanzanian singeli so that they become just another texture in the wild sonic landscapes. And just when your senses are bordering on overloaded, Hakushi gifts you a moment of sweet reprieve before the roller coaster sets off again with hectic syncopations and harmonic jumps not for the faint of heart.

Impressively, the eye of this maelstrom revolves solely around Hasegawa, who taps only a few select collaborators to enliven their vision. Those who caught lead single “Mouth Flash (Kuchinohanabi)” will recall bassist Sam Wilkes added depth to the track juxtaposed against Hasegawa’s high-pitched singing. The lone featured vocalist rapper KID FRESINO lends his voice to “Gone,” where FRESINO’s determined flow seems to ground the skittering drums from spiraling out of control. NYC-based jazz composer Miho Hazama likewise lends her own form of control to “KYŌFUNOHOSHI”, guiding horns and saxes brought in by Yohchi Masago, Ryo Konishi, and Tomoaki Baba (J-Squad).

With Mahōgakkō there is no doubt that this is the sound of a once-in-a-generation artist not just breaking boundaries for Japanese music but global music culture and it will leave you with no doubt that Hakushi Hasegawa is only really just getting started. 

Prospect Hummer, 2005 EP by Animal Collective featuring Vashti Bunyan on three tracks, is reissued on black vinyl

The second part of Matador’s reissues of the essential early records by Texas’s Butthole Surfers continues with three of their most insane slabs -- 1985’s ‘Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis,’ 1987’s ‘Locust Abortion Technician’ and 1988’s ‘Hairway to Steven.’

The period during which these records were first issued parallels the Buttholes’ transition from being weirdo Texas outcasts to becoming internationally recognized smut-kings of the American underground. In 1985 they were still the sole province of hallucingen-soaked punk rock freaks. By 1988 they had toured Europe, had records licensed internationally, and bought a house in Driftwood Texas to serve as their home base. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

‘Hairway to Steven’ is a blast, ranging from the blood-smeared guitar-overload of “Jimi” to the acoustic guitar-based sing-along sweetness of “I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas” to the Fugs-like ranting of “John E. Smokes.” Yet somehow, the album managed to get the straight media to actually notice. For all its strangeness, ‘Hairway’ got rave notices in places that had never paid the band any attention previously. It was the Buttholes’ last album of the ‘80s and marks the beginning of their ascendance into something akin to commercial success. Not that the band actually imagined anything at all like that occurring.

The second part of Matador’s reissues of the essential early records by Texas’s Butthole Surfers continues with three of their most insane slabs -- 1985’s ‘Cream Corn from the Socket of Davis,’ 1987’s ‘Locust Abortion Technician’ and 1988’s ‘Hairway to Steven.’

The period during which these records were first issued parallels the Buttholes’ transition from being weirdo Texas outcasts to becoming internationally recognized smut-kings of the American underground. In 1985 they were still the sole province of hallucingen-soaked punk rock freaks. By 1988 they had toured Europe, had records licensed internationally, and bought a house in Driftwood Texas to serve as their home base. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

‘Hairway to Steven’ is a blast, ranging from the blood-smeared guitar-overload of “Jimi” to the acoustic guitar-based sing-along sweetness of “I Saw an X-Ray of a Girl Passing Gas” to the Fugs-like ranting of “John E. Smokes.” Yet somehow, the album managed to get the straight media to actually notice. For all its strangeness, ‘Hairway’ got rave notices in places that had never paid the band any attention previously. It was the Buttholes’ last album of the ‘80s and marks the beginning of their ascendance into something akin to commercial success. Not that the band actually imagined anything at all like that occurring.

Thee Marloes, by way of Surabaya, Indonesia are Natassya Sianturi on vocals, Sinatrya Dharaka on guitar, and Tommy Satwick on drums. Their unique sound mixes elements of their local culture and music with influences of Soul, Jazz, and Pop.