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World music pioneer Adam Rudolph and his groundbreaking Go: Organic Orchestra join forces with Brooklyn Raga Massive to create monumental new album
3LP 130 gram Classic Black vinyl LP (cut and pressed by Leandro Gonzalez at Stereodisk) packaged in a full color swinging gatefold jacket with artwork by Nancy Jackson
The members of the adventurous BRM collective are deeply steeped in the traditions of Indian classical music. They refuse, however, to be restricted by it; the idea behind the collective, birthed in 2012 in a Prospect Heights bar, is to open the often rigid and hierarchical culture of the music to experimentation and cross-cultural collaboration. This collaboration marks the collective’s most ambitious effort to date in the musical movement that the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and New Yorker have recognized as a “Raga Renaissance.”
“This album feels like the culmination of everything I’ve been reaching for throughout my career,” says Rudolph, no small claim from someone who’s been a pioneering voice in jazz and world music for more than 40 years. “Through my music I want to hear the humanity of all these different musicians shine through, and with their voices bring forth something that’s never existed before.”
According to BRM guitarist David Ellenbogen, who co-produced Ragmala, the possibilities offered by Rudolph’s music scratched the very itch that led many of them into BRM’s more exploratory fold to begin with. “I always had a theory that Indian Classical, jazz, West African music and so on could have a synergistic relationship,” Ellenbogen says. “But after spending decades looking through record libraries, I found very few recordings lived up to the potential of these great traditions. I've spoken to other musicians on this album and they said the same thing when they heard these tracks: This is the music we've been searching for."
The Marloes follow up the massive success of their debut album Perak by pressing two of the stand out tunes from the record on a 7”. The A side “Not Today” is right up there with the grooviest feel good songs you could ever play on a Sunday morning. Lead singer Natassya Sianturi reminds us to make space for ourselves no matter what life throws our way. From the message, to the music, to Natassya’s gorgeous voice; this is a cool out, kick back, and enjoy anthem. The B side “Over” starts out with a heavy drum break and evolves into an epic arrangement drenched in layers of gorgeous melodies that perfectly capture the havoc of a love affair that ends abruptly. Natassya’s vocals soar over Raka’s intricate production seamlessly as she tells a tale in three parts; attraction, intimacy, and decline that crescendos to an epic ending.
There’s no mistaking the sultry lilt of Eliana Glass—alternating between an offbeat, searching quality and her poignant, awe-inspiring range. Her piano playing also possesses this stirring push and pull between the otherworldly and painfully human—each melody its own unique, aching realm. Glass’ sparse, meditative music often captures, in her words, the “condensation of everyday life,” an image that suits the bittersweet, ephemeral, and abstract nature of her work. Glass’ debut album, E, arrives via Shelter Press, and not only is it a tender portrait of her lifelong relationship with the piano, it’s also a distillation of entire lifetimes into song.
The Australia-born, Seattle-bred, and New York-based singer-songwriter and pianist learned to sing and play piano by ear as a child. Glass took an immediate liking to her parents’ piano, frequently hiding underneath it and letting her imagination run wild. “I felt protected under the wooden beams, and I remember looking up at the legs, wires, and foot pedals and seeing the instrument in a new way—everything suddenly everted,” Glass recalls. “I like to think about E as recalling this memory in sound.”
Glass spent years learning jazz standards, and she also learned to sing in Portuguese after falling in love with Brazilian music. Glass studied jazz voice at The New School under teachers Andrew Cyrille, Ben Street, Jay Clayton, and Kris Davis, and she began singing in piano/bass/drums quartets around New York City. In the latter half of her studies, she started writing her own songs inspired by boundary-pushing artists like Ornette Coleman, Asha Puthli, and Jeanne Lee. During the height of the pandemic, she lived with her brother Costa (who now records as ifiwereme) and felt drawn to the piano again, and they wrote songs together for the first time. Then, over a four-year span, Glass teamed up with Public Records co-founder and producer Francis Harris (Frank & Tony, Adultnapper) and engineer Bill Skibbe (Shellac, Jack White) to record what became E in various studios in Nashville, Brooklyn, Memphis, and Benton Harbor, Michigan.
Glass’ experimental, improvisational works evoke the sensual minimalism of Annette Peacock, the joyful mysteriousness of Carla Bley, and the wistful intimacy of Sibylle Baier. Her reverence for leftfield jazz and free improv greats is evident, but it’s always filtered through her signature nascent, naturalistic sound. “Dreams” is a majestic take on Peacock’s spine-tingling 1971 track of the same name, “Sing Me Softly the Blues” is a minimal, arresting reimagination of Bley’s jazz standard with lyrics adapted by Norwegian vocalist Karin Krog, and “Emahoy” is a languorous tribute to Ethiopian pianist, composer, and nun Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and her 2006 compilation Éthiopiques. Glass’ music rests on a tactile, mercurial sound and her vocal brawn and versatility. E’s slippery stabs of double bass and drums tickle the ear canal and accentuate the percussiveness of her distinctive low voice, which blends sonorous, androgynous poise with fluttering delicacy.
E also has an enigmatic electronic bent that heightens the blurry emotions of Glass’ songwriting. From background hiss and windy vocals to kaleidoscopic synths, these subtle, tasteful adornments often came from specialized analog equipment: a 1960s underground echo chamber, a Cooper Time Cube (essentially, the hardware equivalent of processing audio through a garden hose), and a 1940s AEA ribbon microphone. But that doesn’t mean E sounds dated—Glass’ songs bloom with a forward-thinking spirit and ultimately function as vehicles for her heady emotions and fragmented memories and dreams.
For E, Glass challenged herself to channel full lifetimes within each track. Astonishingly, the seductive opening song “All My Life” manages this feat with just its three-word title. Songs like this one, the breathy ballad “Shrine,” and the spare, folky “On the Way Down” brood over past lives and reflect on memories as if disembodied and viewed from above. From missed connections to retired nicknames (“Good Friends Call Me E”), there’s a pervasive sense of disintegration and a fear of lost time. Other tracks like solo piano-and-voice numbers “Flood” and “Solid Stone” engage in more elusive storytelling, marked by brutal imagery and timeless characters. Then there’s “Human Dust,” a tranquil, rhythm-driven rendition of conceptual artist Agnes Denes’ 1969 text—a quite literal summary of a life.
Eliana Glass has come a long way since daydreaming beneath a towering keyboard. Glass’ peculiar vocal alchemy and vivid piano saunters are masterful and wholly her own, and her forthcoming debut full-length is a gift of resonant beauty and rewarding ambiguity. She now performs around New York City with bandmates Walter Stinson (bass) and Mike Gebhart (drums), in addition to solo shows perched in front of a 1979 Moog Opus organ. Also an accomplished visual artist in her own right, Glass is firmly in control of her inspired visions, even if E is spiritually adrift—though that’s kind of the point. As a musician and an improviser, Glass is enamored by and an adept wielder of the search—for meaning, for sounds, for newness, for connection. And just like Krog crooned on “Sing Me Softly the Blues” in 1975: “Life’s so thrilling / if you search.”
“Phi-Psonics is a spiritual exploration of being together and connecting,” says acoustic bassist Seth Ford-Young of the immersive project he initiated in East Los Angeles in 2016. For his third long-player under the Phi-Psonics banner, Ford-Young marshalled a series of live recordings at Healing Force Of The Universe records in Pasadena, sculpting fourteen tracks, largely composed in the moment with a fluctuating cast of players, which wonderfully transmit his ideals of community and inner peace.
Ford-Young says of Expanding to One..."We live in increasingly dark times and while I intend our music to be a balm to those who connect with it, I also want the context of our musical conversations to include the outer as much as our inner worlds. The music we make doesn’t exist in a vacuum and the backdrop of injustice and tragedy in our world has to be part of our music.”
Performers:
Seth Ford-Young - acoustic bass, percussion
Sylvain Carton - tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute, alto flute, bamboo flute, percussion
Randal Fisher - tenor saxophone, flute
Mitchell Yoshida - Wurlitzer 140b electric piano
Zach Tenorio - Wurlitzer 200a electric piano
Gary Fukushima - Wurlitzer 140b electric piano
Dylan Day - guitar
Dave Harrington - guitar
Rocco DeLuca - pedal steel guitar
Minta Spencer - harp
Sheila Govindarajan - Voice
Spencer Zahn - acoustic bass
Josh Collazo - drums
Jay Bellerose - drums, percussion
Mathias Künzli - percussion
Produced by Seth Ford-Young
Recorded February 7, 21 March 6, 20, April 3,17 - 2024
Live at Healing Force of the Universe Records, Pasadena California
Engineered by Seth Ford-Young
Mixed by Seth Ford-Young
Based in the North of England. Ancient Infinity Orchestra is a joyous large ensemble that has communal music-making at the heart of everything they do. And that includes the melodies that flow out of their new album It’s Always About Love which blossom with uplifting improvised contributions that circle around bandleader Ozzy Moysey’s beautiful compositions; generous sonic gifts of healing and repair.
The 15-member Spiritual Jazz ensemble has a distinctive line-up: two double basses, harp, saxophones, clarinets, violin, viola, cello, oboe, flutes, mandolin, congas, piano, drum kit, with bells, shakers and other percussion instruments scattered on the floor of live sets and recording sessions, ready for members to use whenever the spirit takes them. This orchestration, and the overlap between membership and friendship, gives Ancient Infinity Orchestra a sound that is at once expansive and intimate, earthy, and cosmic, constantly shifting yet grounded in shared intention.
Ancient Infinity Orchestra can be described as melody-driven improvised music, made by people who are deep into different types of traditional music, including folk, jazz and classical. “The tunes are a vessel,” he says, “with everyone doing their thing. It exists so that my friends can be musically fulfilled.”
“There is a need for love and connectedness. You pour the love you have into the music and people listening can feel it”
Strut Records proudly presents the official reissue of Hidden Fire Volumes 1 & 2, the final album released by Sun Ra on his El Saturn label in 1988.
Captured live over three nights at the Knitting Factory in New York City, these performances mark the closing chapter of a 33-year odyssey of radical, independent music-making. Originally issued in tiny quantities with minimal packaging and cryptic artwork—often featuring hand-written labels or Ra’s own handmade designs—Hidden Fire was among the most elusive entries in Sun Ra’s vast discography.
Musically, these recordings stand apart from Ra’s other '80s compositions. Here, Hidden Fire plunges into darker, more dissonant territory. Ra performs exclusively onn the Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, pushing its digital sound palette into alien dimensions.
The Arkestra lineup is uniquely configured, featuring a rare and heavy string section with three violins, including the legendary Billy Bang, and the singular space vocalist Art Jenkins, whose eerie textures and vocalisations had not been heard so prominently since the early 1960s Choreographers Workshop sessions. The music is raw, unsettled, and often overwhelming.
“Retrospect / This World Is Not My Home” opens with a palindromic riff that evokes Ellington before unraveling into a stark sermon from Ra, warning of death’s dominion over Earth-bound minds. “Hidden Fire Improvisation” is a furious explosion of tone science, with Marshall Allen, Billy Bang, and John Gilmore delivering fire-breathing solos over relentless drumming and Ra’s cascading synth clusters. “Hidden Fire Blues” offers a warped, electrified version of Ra’s familiar blues feature, led by Bruce Edwards on guitar and Rollo Radford on electric bass, transformed through the haze of DX7 textures. “My Brothers The Wind And Sun #9” evokes the experimental weight of The
Heliocentric Worlds with its crashing percussion, pulsing synth-vocal duets, and string- driven chaos that seems to spiral into oblivion.
Even the quieter moments—such as “Hidden Fire II,” a duet between Ra and ArtJenkins—feel thick with unease and shadowy beauty. These performances represent a Sun Ra less concerned with cosmic joy or outer-space swing, and more focused on conjuring portals to the unknown.
Remastered from original sources and presented with archival photos, new liner notes by Paul Griffiths, and restored artwork inspired by the original Saturn editions, this reissue offers a definitive window into the last creative surge of one of music’s most visionary figures across two Vinyl LP’s.
Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new solo album by Eiko Ishibashi, her first for the label, following on from the duo recording Ichida alongside bassist Darin Gray. Hyakki Yagyō (Night Parade of One Hundred Demons) was produced for the ‘Japan Supernatural’ exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney focusing on ghost stories and folklore from the Edo period onwards. As with The Dream My Bones Dream (Drag City, 2018), the album is a response to troubling questions about Japanese history, and the influence of the past upon the present, but finds Ishibashi shifting further away from her earlier piano-led songwriting and showing a deepening interest in electronics and audio collaging.
The two sidelong parts of Hyakki Yagyō feature layered synthesisers, acoustic instrumentation, recited verse and field recordings, at times densely mixed but always with a subtle interplay of changing elements. The influence of European and American forerunners as diverse as Alvin Curran, David Behrman and Strafe Für Rebellion can be traced, yet at the same time Ishibashi evokes the flute and string sounds associated with Japanese storytelling, and draws directly on the subversive literary tradition of Kyoka (‘mad poetry’) with a verse by the 15th-century poet Ikkyū Sōjun repeated throughout the album. Revisiting what has gone before, re-thinking what is possible musically, as a way of articulating what else might be possible in the future.
As Ishibashi’s liner notes make clear, the album reflects an attention to persistent dangers, myths and evasions in Japanese culture – as well as the lurking uncertainties that might threaten positive change. This would seem to be manifested in the emerging melodies soon met by dissonance, erratic collisions and near silence, as well as the eerie manipulation of the double-tracked vocals. Ishibashi’s underlying concerns ring true more widely of course. Hyakki Yagyō is a work of multiplicities, and mystery, a landscape where nothing is as it seems at first, and everything is vulnerable to sudden violent interruptions.
The album was produced with regular collaborators Jim O’Rourke (double bass) and Joe Talia (percussion), and features dancer and choreographer Ryuichi Fujimura performing Ikkyū’s satirical tanka. O’Rourke’s immersive mix creates a three-dimensional effect, with Ishibashi’s various sound sources enmeshing and interacting in captivating ways.
Pressed on coloured vinyl and presented in a deluxe package with an inner sleeve featuring an artist portrait and liner notes from Eiko Ishibashi.
Cover and label design by Shuhei Abe.
Back cover design by Lasse Marhaug.
Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke.
Soul Media, led by Jiro Inagaki, played a pivotal role in the development of jazz rock in Japan. This album, “Memory Lane,” recorded in 1980, is their final release under that name. Inagaki commented on this work, saying, “We created this album while anticipating the future of fusion music.” Indeed, the sound is completely distinct from the typical fusion genre. The mellow and emotional “Memory Lane,” the stormy yet refreshing “I Will Give You Samba,” and the groovy and edgy “Take My Hand.” The sound created alongside his close friend Ken'ichi Maeda, looking toward the future, boasts an extraordinary level of perfection in every aspect—the songs, arrangements, and performances. It remains a fresh and vibrant masterpiece even when listened to today.
Text by Yūsuke Ogawa (UNIVERSOUNDS/DEEP JAZZ REALITY)
'Mita Koyama-cho' offers a fresh perspective on today’s ambient music scene, blending acoustic and electronic elements into a rich, evocative soundscape. Murakami, a multi-instrumentalist, weaves together acoustic and jazz guitar, saxophone, fretless bass, and an array of keyboards—including vintage synthesizers, Mellotron, and acoustic piano. The result is a fusion of jazz, new age, folk, Brazilian music, and even 1970s progressive rock.
With an intuitive sense of melody and arrangement, Murakami layers warm cassette textures, vintage amp tones, and intricate string and saxophone orchestrations. 'Mita Koyama-cho' is a deeply personal tribute to the musician’s family and the Tokyo neighborhood they once called home—demolished in 2024 due to corporate redevelopment.
Internationally acclaimed harpist Alina Bzhezhinska and Ibiza-based producer Tulshi announce their collaborative album ‘Whispers of Rain’
The album delves into the architecture of memory and human emotion, using rain as a central metaphor for life’s cycles: the cleansing of loss, the blossoming of renewal and the profound inner strength cultivated in moments of serene introspection. To celebrate the release, Alina will be hosting a listening party at Brilliant Corners, London on Monday 23rd June, followed by an album launch show at The Vortex, London on Monday 7th July. The live performance will feature Tulshi, Tony Kofi & Ni Maxine.
With album singles “Whispers of Rain” and “Across the Sea”, this LP expands on the pair’s seamless fusion of organic and electronic elements. Alina’s expressive harp, deeply rooted in jazz and classical traditions intertwines with Tulshi’s inventive production, drawing from ambient deep tech and dub-inflected electronica.
“Journey Home”, is a poignant meditation on closure and self-discovery. It mirrors the arc of the album, bringing the listener full circle, both thematically and sonically. Reflective and expansive, the track captures the emotional weight of returning to a place that has changed, while questioning if home is truly a destination or a state of being.
Born from a shared creative vision on the tranquil side of Ibiza, ‘Whispers of Rain’ was shaped by the island's natural beauty and a deep connection to the life that surrounds us. After years of travel, both Alina and Tulshi found inspiration here, turning movement into stillness. In 2022 Alina and Tulshi were introduced by a mutual friend, their first session was entirely unplanned, an afternoon of spontaneous improvisation in Tulshi’s home studio in Ibiza. “It was a beautiful sunny day and my three-year-old was playing outside while Alina and I jammed inside,” Tulshi recalls. “Her harp was running through granular effects and large reverbs and the result was “Child’s Play”, you can even hear the children’s voices in the background if you listen closely.”
That improvisational energy became the foundation of the album. Tulshi initially experimented with house beats but ultimately stripped everything back to allow Alina’s harp to lead the way. “I always say as a producer, you have to sit back and let the music tell you what it wants to be,” he explains. Alina adds, “I loved the way Tulshi felt the music, we instantly had a strong creative connection. Our collaboration was built on trust, we each understood how to complement the other’s sound without overpowering it.” Their process was supple, allowing the compositions to evolve organically into a body of work that feels deeply personal, yet universally resonant.
The album’s narrative deepens with tracks like “Nomad’s Nocturne” which introduces darker, restless energy, reflecting themes of displacement and the uncertainty of movement, with Alina’s bold harp clusters and Tulshi’s live tabla guiding the piece. “Whispers of Rain” emerged from a moment of sunlit rain in Ibiza, where Alina and Tulshi found themselves in a state of pure flow, translating the rhythm of falling droplets into sound. “Warm Days, Cold Nights” juxtaposes earthy folk and blues tones with a brooding synth pad, expressing the emotional contrasts of a traveller’s path; “Starling” dissolves the boundaries between harp and synth, creating a soaring, immersive soundscape; “Across the Sea” explores the bittersweet experience of finding a new home while feeling the pull of what’s been left behind. Tulshi’s glitch-infused production mimics the fizz and crackle beneath ocean waves, as Alina’s fluid glissandi mirrors the movement of the tide.
“Although it’s not a UFO case, there are those who insist on interpreting it as such, creating narratives and situations that don’t correspond to reality.”
– Claudeir Covo, ufologist, during the 1st Brazilian Forum on Exobiologism and Holism, 1998.
Sensational Conversations is a phantasmatic dialogue between two people who have never met — a freewheeling exploration across different languages, geographies, and states of mind. An artifact that could be interpreted as an alien signal, but in fact, it is just the sound of two people trying to stay in motion.
Bruno Tonisi’s debut album began as a gesture of contact: reaching out to one of his longtime heroes, legendary New York rapper and producer Sensational. What followed wasn’t a conventional collaboration, but something far more peculiar — an exchange that feels like a coded message, picked up on a staticky radio frequency, halfway between two broken worlds.
The album deconstructs hip hop until it becomes something else entirely: at times, an abstract sound collage in a similar vein as GRM's; at others, a dirty, low-slung loop that could’ve emerged from some long-lost NYC basement tape. No matter how far it ventures into atmospheric or unearthly territory, there’s always a kind of tension anchoring it — a pulse, a streetwise roughness, a refusal to drift too far from lived experience.
With intense spectral processing, distorted beats, fractured voices and half-lit conversations, the album creates a terrain that constantly shifts underfoot. At first, it’s disorienting. But as you acclimatize yourself to its logic — its unstable rhythms, its errant signals, its sudden emotional clarity — the landscape begins to feel strangely navigable.
And through all of this, one thing remains clear: hustling creates connections. Beneath the abstractions and distortions one finds a shared drive — a low-key urgency in both Bruno and Sensational, each of whom find ways to keep on moving, keep on creating, keep on reaching out. Sensational Conversations may sound like science fiction, but its engine is deeply real.
What we’re hearing isn't necessarily what it seems — and it is precisely therein that some form of truth may lie.
Sonor Music Editions proudly presents this restored issue of Maestro Sandro Brugnolini's Overground. This elusive masterpiece in library music captures the most impressive work, alongside Underground (1970), of the Italian composer and alto sax player.
Sandro Brugnolini was a prominent member of the Modern Jazz Gang, a famous Italian jazz group, during the 1950s and 60s, which also included Amedeo Tommasi, Cicci Santucci, and Enzo Scoppa. The group was active from 1956 to 1965 and produced some remarkable albums such as Miles Before And After (1960) and the original soundtrack from Gli Arcangeli (1962), which featured the renowned American jazz singer, Helen Merrill. Subsequently, he recorded many of the genre's most iconic releases, including Feelings (1974), albeit uncredited, and ventured into Psychedelic Lounge Funk and Progressive Jazz Beat tunes.
Overground was released on Sincro Edizioni Musicali in 1970 as the soundtrack to Enrico Moscatelli and Mario Rigoni's documentary Persuasione, commissioned by Ente Provinciale Per Il Turismo Di Trento, a local tourism board in Italy, with music composed by Sandro Brugnolini and Luigi Malatesta featuring some of the best musicians in Italy at the time like Angelo Baroncini and Silvano Chimenti on guitars, Giorgio Carnini on piano and organ, Enzo Restuccia on drums, and Giovanni Tommaso on bass and effects. The music spans from underground Psychedelic Prog. Rock with swirling organs, trippy effects, and distorted fuzz guitars to sophisticated Lounge grooves with Avant-garde orchestrations.
The music has been transferred and remastered from the original master tapes. It has been lacquer cut in stereo by Jukka Sarapää at Timmion Cutting and packed in a thick cardboard sleeve featuring a fully restored painting by Umberto Mastroianni licensed by Centro Studi dell’Opera di Umberto Mastroianni.
オリジナルは10万円以上で取引される事もある骨董的な希少盤！Wolfgang Daunerの某作に負けず劣らず凄いジャケをしています。Eberhard WeberやWolfgang Daunerといった実に豪華な面々を起用したJoki Freund Sextetが1964年に〈CBS〉に残した欧州コンテンポラリー・ジャズ/ポスト・バップの幻の名盤『Yogi Jazz』が〈Tiger Bay〉よりアナログ・リイシュー。Eberhard WeberとKarl Theodor Geierをベースに、Peter Baumeisterをドラムに、Wolfgang Daunerをピアノに迎え、1963年11月20日にフランクフルトで録音された、欧州ジャズ作品でも人気の高い一枚にして長く失われていた金字塔的名作！
