MUSIC

Ten years. Ten years of listening, searching, digging, sharing. Ten years of putting out records we felt mattered—because they told a story. Of a place, a moment, an impulse. Ten years of believing that music, especially the kind that doesn’t fit into any box, deserves more than just attention: it deserves care, time, and deep listening.

Bongo Joe started in Geneva, in a shop that became a label, in a city far more complex than it first appears. Beneath its polished banking façade, Geneva is layered and unpredictable. Beneath the luxury storefronts, the UN buildings, and the watch boutiques, thrives a unique scene shaped by migration, cultural collisions, political struggle, and dissonant sound. It’s here that we learned to improvise, adapt, and stay independent.

This is where the label was born—above all, to put music back at the center, in a time when everything moves too fast, gets monetized, sliced up, and repackaged. In that landscape, we believe a label should remain a space for curation, for storytelling, for quiet resistance — a place where we suggest rather than impose.

Over the past ten years, we’ve built a singular catalogue — a mosaic of archival revivals, contemporary projects, and unexpected encounters. Three main threads have shaped it.

First, the compilation of music from the past. Not to claim it, but to keep it moving. To shed light on forgotten repertoires, marginal histories, musical legacies too rich to be overlooked. To help them exist again, with dignity, and reconnect with new listeners who might never have had access otherwise.

Second, international collaborations. From Geneva, we’ve woven bonds with artists from all over the world — groups from Istanbul, Buenos Aires, London, Baku, Bogotá, Lilongwe, Les Gonaïves, or Amsterdam. Records crafted with love and boldness, in collaboration with like-minded labels, passionate curators, and artists who share our spirit. That international dimension makes us proud — it proves that you can create, exchange, and share sound sincerely, even from a city not exactly known as a musical capital.

And then there’s our local scene. Geneva, always. Because it’s where we live, where we grew up, and where we still believe in a city with a unique voice — full of friction, contradictions, and underground energy. We’ve supported projects from experimental circuits, squats, and clubs. Through our sub-label Les Disques Magnétiques, we’ve expanded the spectrum without losing the thread: defending the margins, giving space to those who don’t fit anywhere else.

Bongo Joe is also a musician. The label takes its name from George “Bongo Joe” Coleman (1923–1999), a street percussionist from Texas who stayed true to his independence for over thirty years. Turning down the offers of formal venues, he chose instead to play in the streets — banging out rhythms on an oil drum with raw charisma. His only album, recorded in 1968 in San Antonio, remains one of our most cherished records. Reissued by our friends at Mississippi Records, it carries a DIY spirit, radical freedom, and lyrical boldness far ahead of its time — a guiding light that continues to inspire us.

Bongo Joe is also a collective story. It’s about people. A team that grew over the years: from Cyril and Vincent at the helm to a tight-knit crew — Juliette, Quentin, Margot, Laurent, Baptiste. Together, we’ve kept this strange, handmade machine running. We’ve hand-stamped sleeves, lost test pressings, pressed the wrong masters on CD, found test pressings again, chased down funding, hauled stacks of records to the post office by bike, crossed our fingers for pressings to arrive on time, cursed at customs delays, botched digital releases, and felt a thrill watching “our” bands play on the stages of major festivals and the most forward-thinking clubs. We’ve been through chaos and joy. Together, we’ve made it this far. And with nearly 150 records in the catalogue, we look back on the road travelled with a mix of pride and disbelief.

This compilation isn’t a summary. It’s not a best of. It’s a trace. A selection among many possible ones. A snapshot of what we’ve tried to do since 2015: believe in music as connection, as memory, as compass. Thank you to everyone who’s supported, followed, or inspired us. Thanks to the institutions who’ve backed us. Thanks to our longtime partners: bookers, fellow labels, record stores, publicists, distributors, printers, engravers, pressing plants, sound engineers, photographers, designers. And most of all, thank you to the artists — without whom none of this would mean anything.

Ten years is a little, and a lot. We’re not done yet.

It was recorded before coming to the United States by Indian classical vocalist Pandit Pran Nath (1918-1996) who had a great influence on the art world such as minimal music-Fluxus such as La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Henry Flynt etc. , 1968 The recording work Ragas Of Morning & Night (released from Gramavision in 1986) in India is finally officially reissued from the label of his direct disciple La Monte Young!

On the A side, the morning Raga Raga Todi, which is full of vitality suitable for awakening, is recorded, and on the B side, the night Raga Raga Darbari, which is swept away by the rhythm of a loose tabla, is recorded. At that time, there is an anecdote that Mr. and Mrs. Lamonte listened to the recording of Pandit Pran Nath around 1968 and fell in love with the voice and passed the seal, but when you see that this sound source was recorded in the same year, it was probably recommended by them in 1986. It was probably released by Gramavision in the year. A masterpiece of pure and crystallized meditative Kirana guarana from Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan (Pandit Pran Nath's master).

“The land of Kanada, Gopal Nayak, the romance of the Mughal courts, Mian Tansen, classicism,
blue notes, imagination, an ancient virtuosic performance tradition handed down for centuries
from guru to disciple, Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, lifetimes of devotion – all of these together
and more make up Pandit Pran Nath ’s Darbari, a masterpiece, a gift to our time. ”

–La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela

Sir Richard Bishop returns with Hillbilly Ragas, a feral and fiery take on solo acoustic guitar that digs into the roots of American Primitive style and rips them up by the fistful. Drawing on decades of exploratory playing across records like Salvador Kali, Improvika and The Freak of Araby, Bishop pares things down to their essence: one man, one guitar, no overdubs, no effects. But simplicity doesn’t mean safety. These nine tracks are anything but tame. Inspired by East Indian raga, rhythm-heavy phrasing and a self-imposed exile from traditional structure, Bishop envisions an uncontacted hillbilly mystic conjuring his own untamed folk music deep in the woods. His goal? To play with abandon, rejecting the polished edges of the American Primitive genre for something darker, stranger and more unhinged. Hillbilly Ragas is an unfiltered excursion into a haunted backwoods sound-world — part ritual, part rebellion, all delivered with the ragged conviction of an artist hell-bent on carving out his own language.

Trailcam is the latest project from Toronto-based artist Rita Mikhael, formerly known as E-Saggila. With Drumlin Loop, she delivers a bold and introspective statement that continues to expand her sonic range. Opening with a hip-hop-inflected instrumental, the record shifts into more abstract, textured terrain—balancing emotional weight with fearless experimentation. True to Mikhael’s uncompromising ethos, Trailcam defies genre and expectation, showcasing her skill for weaving rich detail and restless energy into each composition. Written and produced in Toronto, the release was mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at EnissLab in Rome, with artwork by Trailcam and design by Dominique Saiegh.

The euphonic tics of E-Saggila's music are typically found in symbiosis with the exacting intensity of her rhythmic arrangements, as meticulously deranged as they are. 'Gamma Tag' refreshes expectations by making more space for melodic conditioning and inculcation, whipping ultraviolet harmonics into uncanny plains for a wide range of tempos and cadences. While breaks remain staccato hammers, and kicks are cast to negate cardiac systems, E-Saggila's modulation of rhythmic dynamics is more pronounced, affording a resonance and balance that had previously been mentioned but not yet entirely explored. On more measured pieces, such as 'Amnesiac' and 'Tick', the searing digital signal envelops the horizon line, twisting the mechanics of the tracks until they burst with electromagnetic nectar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

A surprising suite of new material from popular kankyō ongaku vanguard Yutaka Hirose, 'Voices' is a chaotic collage of field recordings, rickety beatbox loops, rough-textured samples and psychedelic synths - ambient it ain't. It's fascinating to hear 'Voices' because when you've not seen much new material emerge from an artist since their classic era, the expectation is that they've simply stopped producing. Hirose is best known for his 1986-released 'Nova' album, a record commissioned by the Misawa Home Corporation for use in their prefab houses and rediscovered online (like Midori Takada's 'Through the Looking Glass' or Hiroshi Yoshimura's 'Green') decades later. WRWTFWW Records already reissued that record, bundling it with almost an hour of extra material, and followed it up with an additional archive of Hirose's '80s recordings, but 'Voices' brings us right into the present. So it shouldn't be too surprising that the album is markedly different from its predecessors. You'll get a good idea of what to expect with the 12-minute opener 'Library', a track that sounds like Hirose is scrubbing through his archive of sounds, layering public transport ambiance with movie samples, off-hand vocal takes, radio chatter, jazz stems and squelchy back-room rhythms. Like Akira Umeda's similarly spannered 'Gueixa', it's a head-melting stream-of-consciousness experience, not really music so much as a vortex of sound. Hirose's four 'The Other Side' tracks are more straightforward balearic techno experiments offset by peculiar environmental recordings, and these are peppered through the album - no doubt to lighten the mood. Elsewhere, Hirose gets into grinding, ritualistic IDM on 'Uprising', and threads brittle beats and acidic synths through a dense fog of bird calls and chat on 'Mixture'. He's been busy.

Dale Cornishによる、クィア・クラブ文化と前衛的エレクトロニカを巧みに融合させたフルアルバムが登場。Cornish はこれまで No Bra とのエレクトロクラッシュ、Baraclough 名義でのノイズ・プロジェクト、2010年代のデコンストラクション系クラブ音楽などを手掛け、独自の音楽性を育んできたが、本作では、大胆なクラブ実験と内省的な語りによって、性別適合手術の経験や人間関係の機微を描きながら、ラフで歪んだダンスミュージックや、Cronx語で歌われるビターで切ないバラードを自由に行き来する。音響的には、硬質なクラブビート、歪んだシンセ、微細なノイズ、声やサンプルの細やかな処理が絶妙に組み合わさり、身体的な引力と精神的な内省が同時に味わえる構造になっている。即興性と前衛性を備えたクィア・クラブ・エレクトロニカの最前線を体現し、20年にわたるアンダーグラウンドの経験を詰め込んだ、ユーモアと正直さに満ちた一枚。

Wave Field, released in 1995, was a departure from the first album into new composition methods involving the dirty textures of rock guitar, sounding in the open ears of many listeners (like Jim O'Rourke, who issued the disc in the US on dexter's cigar) as a synthesis of disparate elements — a nexus where Alvin Lucier, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine and Eno blend together. Here, the clangorous potential of the guitar was emphasized, giving a metallic edge to the two extended pieces and "radio edit" coda. The jacket paid subtle tribute to My Bloody Valentine, which, along with the radio edit, suggested a harmony between musical directions as wildly disparate as minimalist experimental and rock. Today, such a paradoxical intent is more widely considered as a part of the artist's purview.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear this year. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah (Black Truffle, 2020), the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (Black Truffle, 2022). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie’s long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell.The two short pieces that open the record could almost be the two sides of a wild 7” selected to show off what the Ensemble can do. On opener ‘Gerak Maju’, intricately skittering open-snare patterns bounce over clanging metal, chiming bell-like tones and deep gong hits, adapting the rhythm-register connections heard in traditional Gamelan musics—where the lowest pitched sounds are heard least frequently—to a cut-up breakbeat straight off Feed Me Weird Things. ‘Strollabout’ then moves into an entirely different realm of meditative repeating patterns, performed entirely on Chinese, Javanese and Vietnamese gongs. The remaining seven pieces, ranging from three to twelve minutes, offer up a wealth of different percussive, compositional and arrangement possibilities. On ‘Ghostly Klang’, two drumkits mirror each other’s moves, bouncing hats and snares across the stereo field in a way that recalls On the Corner and the jittering hi hat patterns of trap, while slow moving melodies on the tuned instruments add a sense of majesty contrasted by scurrying details in resonant wood. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Uncle’, performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell’s dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal.Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois’ drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.

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”

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.” 

和製コズミック・サイケ／アンビエントの秘宝。今年2月7日に逝去した日本の音楽シーンにおける最大のレジェンドのひとり、Magical Power Makoが、1993年に自主制作で発表した知られざる音宇宙『Next Millennium Vibrations』が、アートワークを新装し、リマスタリング仕様でCD再発！祈りのようなシンセサイザーの波動、メディテイティヴな旋律、そして内面宇宙を旅するようなスピリチュアルな浮遊感。クラウトロック〜ニューエイジ〜環太平洋の民族音楽までを呑み込みながら、誰にも似ていない独自のサイケデリックなサウンドスケープを形成。極私的な録音の中に潜む、未だ聴かれぬ「次の千年」の響き。まさに未来への密やかな手紙です。

Salamanda and Tristan Arp lend effervescent reworks to key numbers off the gossamer-spun debut of ambient electronica by Singapore/London’s Yingtuitive, all flyaway strands of gamelan, flickering pulses and 8-bit circuitry given an emotive warmth and quiet strength...

“Singapore-born, London-based producer yingtuitive introduces herself with Letters To Self 寫情書, a deeply personal debut LP arriving on Will Hofbauer’s Third Place.

A classically trained pianist whose musical identity draws from Southeast Asian traditions, electronic experimentation, and diasporic reflection, yingtuitive crafts soundscapes that feel both intimate and expansive. The project is accompanied by two stunning reworks from esteemed creators: South Korean ambient duo Salamanda, known for their lush, meditative textures, and US artist Tristan Arp, celebrated for his organic, shape-shifting productions.

“Every musical moment in this album is essentially a letter to my self in some form…” - yingtuitive

Across eight original compositions, Letters To Self 寫情書 unfolds as a sonic diary, a search inward, a series of tender emotional missives to the self. Gamelan-inspired textures glimmer alongside field recordings captured in Singapore and the UK, while delicate, improvised piano passages echo memories of home. These elements intertwine with fragments of film samples and experimental electronics, resulting in tracks that glide through ambient, ethereal, and blissful terrains. It’s music that floats and envelops, as though nature itself had grown into sound, serene and rich in emotional resonance.

Written during a period of deep reflection, the album meditates on identity, homesickness, belonging, and the overwhelming noise of the world outside. Each piece feels like a still moment within chaos, a soft conversation between past and present selves, where harmony emerges from internal conflict. From angelic piano melodies to glitchy bursts of experimentalism, yingtuitive bridges her Singaporean roots and UK influences with blissful grace. Letters To Self 寫情書 marks not just a debut release, but the formation of a unique musical voice, gliding between cultural languages with honesty, vulnerability, and quiet strength.”

Latency present És pregunta, the second album from Catalan vocal duo Tarta Relena. Founded by Helena Ros Redon and Marta Torrella i Martínez, Tarta Relena explores the rich vocal traditions of the Mediterranean, singing in languages such as Classical Greek, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Catalan, Ladino, and more. Their music blends sacred and secular influences, drawing inspiration from flamenco, lyrical song, traditional music, and electronic experimentation.

És pregunta dives into themes of tragic contemplation, portraying the tension between natural and human forces grappling with mysterious and inevitable consequences. The album is a conceptual journey through fate, knowledge, and the struggle to reconcile our future selves with present realities. Influenced by Mediterranean folk, Georgian laments, and the mystic works of 12th-century visionary Hildegard von Bingen, Tarta Relena crafts a vibrant sonic world where the past and future converge.

Renowned for their captivating live performances, Tarta Relena has enchanted audiences at festivals like Sónar, Le Guess Who?, Mutek, Big Ears, and Primavera Sound. Their stage presence is enriched by subtle electronics and rhythmic patterns played on a ceramic amphora, creating a unique texture to their vocal artistry. Collaborations with artists such as Marina Herlop and Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés have further pushed the duo to explore new dimensions of contemporary folk music. For Tarta Relena, folk is a living tradition – deeply rooted in the past but always evolving.

Tarta Relena will debut És pregunta live at Unsound on October 2, 2024.

« Time and distance collapse in the music of Tarta Relena. With little more than their two voices, Helena Ros and Marta Torrella connect the far corners of the Mediterranean, drawing on traditions stretching back more than a thousand years. This is music of primal essence and unnameable

longing, full of frequencies that seem to tap an ancient ache in one’s bones.» – Pitchfork

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

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

The 5-CD set ‘The Way of Raku’ is a grand experiment that shatters conventional musical concepts. Electronic music and soundscapes merge, inviting the listener's consciousness into an infinite universe. With this work, composer Eloa pursues the ‘path of sound’ and opens up new horizons of aural experience. In this work, the composer Eloa combined Western musical traditions with Eastern thought to create a unique musical world.

The Way of Music is not just a musical work, but a meditative experience that takes the listener's consciousness into the abyss. It encourages the flow of time, the expansion of space and a dialogue with the self.

‘The Way of Raku’ eschews any visual elements and appeals solely to the sense of hearing. The listener is immersed in a flood of sound, weaving his or her own story.

「ヴァシュティ・バニヤンを例に出したくなる英国自主フォークのような質感の琴とハープのアンサンブルに伝統的な歌唱法による自作自演の歌、エレガントな笙のドローンが重なる、信じられない和洋の折衷。「西洋化」「近代化」「ポップス化」「洗練」という言葉は決して雑に扱うべきではないが、この雨田光平の「新春譜」は伝統・土着と西洋音楽それぞれへの距離の取り方において、考えうる最高レベルの古今東西融和の成功例であり、我が国にも「パッタナー」（※タイ語で変革、発展の意）が在ったことを示す証拠となる1曲だ。あと数年後には「日本のポップス史」を扱う本の第一章にはこの曲の記述が載ることになるだろう。つうか載ってるべきでしょう！」（俚謡山脈）

「新春早々、実は食えないニセのおせち料理を食わされった！って悪夢が満載です！！ …でもオイシイでしたね！」（中原昌也）

「とても昭和30年に作曲された作品とは思えない。新春のヒリッと張り詰めた清らかな凛とした空気の中を、柔らかにほぐされ、ゆっくりと呼吸しながら、その瑞々しさを少しずつ身体に浸透させながら、身を清めてじっくりと浄化されるかのような、そんな音の処方箋的メディテーショナルな響きと心地よさに完全に魅了されてしまった。めくるめくミュージックコンクレート的な場面展開ストーリーテリング、エレクトロニクス・ダウンテンポ・アブストラクト・ダビーなSUGAI KENによる伝統への愛情伝わる和イマジナリー・コズミックなリワークとの対比も非常に興味深く面白い。」（COMPUMA）

EM Record's release of little known koto auteur Kōhei Amada continues the label's tireless mapping of multi-hued human expression, sitting outside genre convention and confusing record store clerks everywhere. "Shinshunfu" is sectioned into two parts: a more recognizable duet between koto and Irish harp, and a complete 180 into an elongated vocal piece repellent with droning shō and taiko drum bass hits. This concoction brings up familiar scents: Lou Harrison's small ensemble harp pieces, or a Japanese recasting of the Medieval troubadour songs performed by transcultural-minded early music groups like Studio der frühen Musik or Hespèrion XXI. Yet these comparisons are merely abstract, "Shinshunfu" exists at a crossroads, a form both distinctly Japanese and distinctly "other", a complex blend of folk strains that is deep with emotional resonance and hard to place even for aficionados of Japanese traditional music.

Sugai Ken's rework renders the source material almost unrecognizable, pushing even further in the non-deterministic, GRM-like meta-concrète direction of his recent work, jump-cutting in high definition between synthetic birdsong, haunted vocoded voice and arresting, back-of-the-head foley. Of "Shinshunfu", only the drone of the shō and the occasional taiko hit appear in plain view. The exploration sits comfortably in the idiosyncratic sound world that Ken has been prolifically constructing for himself in the last few years (what he has come to call "Japanese electronic-folklore"), just as brilliant as one would expect. (Spencer Doran/Visible Cloaks)

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「考えうる最高レベルの古今東西融和」（俚謡山脈）を人知れず成し遂げていた幻の傑作であり、現代のアーティストや作家達を惹き付けてやまない秘曲、京極流箏曲「新春譜」。作者、雨田光平の貴重な自演と電子音楽の名工、SUGAI KENによるリワークをカップリングしてお届けする必殺の1枚。

＜京極流＞は明治に創設された箏曲の流派であり、その二代宗家である雨田光平は福井県生まれの彫刻家／画家／作曲家で、日本に本格のハープ奏法（注記）を持ち帰ったハープ奏者でもある。京極流は箏曲界のスーパースター、宮城道雄らの「新日本音楽」に先立ち（※雨田と宮城は親交が深かった）、黛敏朗、諸井誠、武満徹らが台頭するよりも前、歌唱と演奏の両方で古今東西の均整の取れた合体に成功していた驚くべき例で、誤解を恐れず字義のまま言えば日本式＜シンガー・ソングライター＞の始原といえる。

この「新春譜」は画家・青木繁の描いた古の神々のイメージを創作源に、雨田が昭和30年頃に作曲し、京極流箏曲が福井県無形文化財に指定された後、昭和45年に出版した自主制作LP収録のヴァージョンで、琴、笙、ハープを含めた6名で合奏・歌唱したものだ。

対するSUGAI KENのリワークは現代音楽／RVNG／HIPHOPをメビウスの環のようにつないだ作品で、リワークというよりはもはやオリジナル新曲と言っていい。

京極流箏曲と「新春譜」を考察した切れ味鋭い解説も必読！

"My career has been a lesson in patience," says Annahstasia, having cultivated her musical language between blazes of intimacy and independence across different lives, locations, and iterations, loves lost and gained, expectations evaded and recreated. The rising troubadour's proximity to love — for and from others, in society at large, and deeply within herself — guides the spirit of her soulful, poetic folk songcraft. Love is the elemental constant, alongside her distinctly resonant voice, shading the singer-songwriter's music since her earliest self-taught recordings, back when a 17-year-old Annahstasia Enuke was discovered and propelled into the pressures of an industry that nearly stifled her greatest strengths. Artistic resilience, gratitude, and dedication to process have yielded Tether, Annahstasia's full-length debut on art-forward indie label drink sum wtr, a collection of beaming torch songs, orchestral hymns, and astral anthems that feel lived-in, drawn from the human experience and the spectrum of love.

Annahstasia assembled the pieces of Tether slowly and with deep intention; she's carried these songs with her on the road, sang them for friends and strangers, and evolved them over time alongside her personal revelations. "The song is written, and then I have to live with it and see if I really believe what I'm saying," she explains. She brought material to sessions at the storied Valentine Studios in Los Angeles, joined by producers Jason Lader (ANOHNI and the Johnsons, Frank Ocean, Lana Del Rey), Andrew Lappin (Cassandra Jenkins, L'Rain, Luna Li), Aaron Liao (Liv.e, Moses Sumney, Raveena) and a range of accomplished musicians, including featured guests aja monet and Obongjayar. The recording became instinctual, done only in live takes to capture the feeling of the room, the community of the music. The sequencing was just as essential; she arrived at a flow with shifting energies and poignant arcs. The instrumentation swells, at times understated and others supremely lush, and through each arrangement, Annahstasia's voice rings true, open-hearted, and free. "I've come into the power of my voice as a medium," she says. "As a tool of expression, I am able to shape the emotional space around me."

Lyrically, Annahstasia embraces the nuance of poetry, inviting listeners to engage in words laced with meaning, whether ruminations on romance or social constructs. She sees the opener "Be Kind" more as a poem than a song, "a reflection upon the beauty of the mundane and the grandeur of everyday life…a reminder to myself and others to be kind to each other." The track's minimalist atmosphere picks up where 2024's Surface Tension EP left off, with her vocals left bare and up-front, exploring the capacity of her gift with newfound latitude as strums, strings, and keys enter the frame.

The palette expands for "Villian," welcoming drums, brass, and horns into a sweeping nod to healing. "We are all made of both shadow and light. From some angle, we have all been the villain of the story," she adds, suggesting that often, the only way to move on is through understanding that "we are all trying our best, negotiating survival." At its triumphant peak, above gospel-like shouts, she delivers the reprise with a smile: "Take it / Take it back / This dull knife of memory / I still hear your voice inside my head / Says that I'm the villain of the story."

Album centerpiece "Slow" emerges from a chance connection with London-based Nigerian musician Steven Umoh, aka Obongjayar. After exchanging DMs, Obongjayar came to one of her shows, and the two artists talked for hours afterward; "he was like a lost brother," she says. Later, they wrote and demoed the track in the living room of her Airbnb in London, where they huddled around a single ribbon microphone. "I'm just playing the guitar, and our eyes are locked; it was very sensual and intense." Emboldened by one another, their voices orbit and coalesce, trading verses on the signals the universe sends us ("I heard it on the wind / To go slow"), harmonizing the last stanzas ("What's the worst that can happen / If we just let it happen"). Without proper album plans at the time, the song sat for a while; then, in another cosmic chance, Obongjayar happened to be in town during the Tether sessions. Annahstasia reflects, "It was a beautiful experience to have us all in the room. The artistry, the moment, a real acceptance of African art where these two Nigerian musicians are coming together and making something very tender and pretty outside genre expectations."

Later, Annahstasia finds a kindred spirit in aja monet, the NY-based surrealist blues poet and her new labelmate, who lends stunning prose and voice to "All is. Will Be. As it Was." Given only the prompt of "open air," monet wrote the lines on the ride to the studio. Together with Annahstasia on guitar and Ashley Fulton on piano, they captured the piece in its purest form as if bottling a breeze.

Annahstasia described the EP prelude to this culminating set as a "romantic war," and the artist truly thrives amidst and after drama. She taps into a punk sensibility for "Silk and Velvet" — "I'd say it's punk in the sense that it is really dry, really stark and selectively dissonant." A clashing of cello and piano mirror pointed lyrics about "living with the hypocrisy of having revolutionary ideologies but consumerist tendencies." The tension comes full circle on "Believer," a song she's been trying to get right for years, now finally recorded in the right place with the right people. Nearly every instrument on Tether returns in full force; towering percussion, jagged guitar lines, and howling singers encircle Annahstasia at the mic as she enters a fantasy of rock stardom. "I love how in making a record, you get to make a film and pick which direction to take it. Now I have this version that I blast in my headphones, play air guitar, and pretend I'm performing it for 100,000 people." The sheer power of Tether is the result of patience, and it's not hard to picture such a dream realized in good time. 

 

Steeped in equal parts golden age hip-hop sensibilities and lost 60s and 70s film scores, the debut LP from Leroi Conroy weighs in heavy and has been years in the making. The first two tracks from the album were released in 2017 as a 45, which were sampled in the years that followed by DJ Premier, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Macklemore, Phantogram, and more. But after its release, Terry Cole aka Leroi Conroy spent much of his time growing his indie soul label Colemine Records and producing records for others (Okonski, Parlor Greens, Wesley Bright, Black Market Brass, Kendra Morris, Rudy De Anda, Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio, Andrew Gabbard) as opposed to his own. Now, eight years after many of the rhythm tracks were put to tape on the trusted Tascam 388, Leroi Conroy’s debut LP, A Tiger’s Tale, will be released. The album is conceptualized as a hypothetical soundtrack to an alternate telling of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. The narrative here being man’s quest to tame and bend nature to his will...and nature’s response. The album is a mix of triumphant instrumental scores alongside absolutely grim, dark, and at times dissonant moody tracks. The underlying element of hip-hop’s sample culture is obvious throughout and there’s no doubt many of these tracks will be flipped in the years to come. Sonically, the record fits right in the cut alongside many other Colemine instrumental artists: dirty lo-fi drums, blaring horns, wah guitar, Hammond organ, and plenty of cinematic sprinklings like flute, nylon guitar, and vibraphone. Drums are courtesy of Cole’s longtime collaborator Rob Houk and are truly the backbone of the record. And with a couple of features from Colemine artists Kelly Finnigan and Jimmy James, the record is truly a family affair. File under: To Be Sampled

This work consists of sound and a collection of AI-generated images. The image collection compiles the AI-generated images used for projection during the Merzbow Free Noise concert held at WWW in Shibuya, Tokyo on January 6, 2025. The use of such visuals is rare for Merzbow in recent years, and the use of AI-generated images in a live performance is a first attempt.

The concert was structured in two parts, and one of the rehearsal recordings of a track performed in the first part is the first track on the

CD, “Peacock Analogy.” It features a live mix of computer sounds recorded on CD with Sonicware’s Texture Lab, Oscillator etc. The

second track, “Tenbyo Caterpillar 1,” is one of Merzbow’s most recent studio recordings. It overdubs multiple layers of noise electronics,

computers, and more.

“Peacock Analogy”

The title “Peacock Analogy” is based on the fact that when a peacock painting was used as a reference image to generate a dilapidated cityscape, buildings and metal structures in the shape of peacocks were created. This phenomenon seems to have occurred due to a combination of several factors in AI image generation. From the peacock image, the AI learned the peacock’s unique shapes (e.g., the spread of its feathers, the shape of its neck, the overall silhouette, etc.). When generating the cityscape, the AI may have attempted to apply the learned peacock shape patterns to the city’s buildings and metal structures. In this case, because the prompts were vague expressions such as “dilapidated city” and “metal structures,” the AI was likely strongly influenced by the reference image of the peacock.

“Analogy” is the process by which AI recognizes similarities between different concepts and transfers patterns from one concept to another. In this case, the AI may have recognized similarities between the shapes of peacocks and the shapes of buildings and metal structures and applied the peacock shapes to the buildings and metal structures. In this way, AI image generation can produce unexpected results.

“Mimesis”

Mimesis is an art theory proposed by the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, the concept that works of art imitate the real world or nature. Traditional art has emphasized faithfully reproducing reality or expressing an idealized reality. AI art generates images by learning from vast amounts of image data and recognizing patterns within it. In this point, AI can be seen as “imitating” existing images.

Furthermore, mimesis in AI art can be considered part of a creative process. By generating new images based on learned data, AI can expand human creativity and open up possibilities for new artistic expressions.

“Imitation” also carries negative connotations such as “copycat” or “fake” Because AI learns from existing data to generate images, there are various opinions, such as that its originality is low, or that because AI can generate a large number of images in a short time, its scarcity is low, or that because AI has no emotions, its artistry is low.

Is AI art like mass-produced “junk art”? Is AI art something that “resembles art but is not”?

Discussions continue on how AI art will change the traditional concept of art, how it will expand human creativity, and whether AI-generated images are art in the first place, who the creator is, and where the copyright lies.

MASAMI AKITA

*A Part of Text by AI-assisted with Gemini (Google).

Volume 9 of "Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance" presents a captivating exploration of sound through three evocative tracks: “Quiet Night,” “Spring Breeze,” and “Star’s Shine.” The album opens with “Quiet Night,” where synths engage in a calm struggle, creating an atmospheric tension that invites deep contemplation. As the piece unfolds, it balances tranquility with subtle shifts, drawing the listener deeper into its soundscape. Next, “Spring Breeze” transitions from a rhythmic pulse to a thrilling eruption of frenetic noise reflecting the chaotic energy of nature awakening in spring. Finally, “Star’s Shine” delivers a harsh yet beautiful sonic experience that glimmers like a bright star against the backdrop of silence, leaving a lingering impression. Housed in an elegantly crafted birchwood box, this limited edition is individually numbered, emphasizing its rarity and artistic value. The thoughtful attention to detail, including a mini-LP format and beautifully designed inserts, ensures that Volume 9 is not only a remarkable auditory experience but also a cherished item for collectors and enthusiasts alike.

Volume 8 of "Nine Studies of Ephemeral Resonance" invites listeners to delve into a vibrant and eclectic auditory landscape through four richly textured tracks: “Coolness,” “White Dew,” “Grass Leaves,” and “Monkey's Voice.” The album opens with “Coolness,” where a gently plucked electric piano gradually disintegrates into increasingly synthetic sounds, culminating in a refreshing wall of noise that invigorates the senses. Following this, “White Dew” and “Grass Leaves” continue to explore the realm of noise, weaving intricate layers that challenge and engage the listener. Finally, “Monkey's Voice” introduces a pulsating heart at its core, featuring splashes of bleeping sounds that shift from calm reflections to frenetic bursts of energy. Beautifully presented in a finely crafted birchwood box, this limited edition is individually numbered, enhancing its sense of rarity and value. With meticulous attention to detail, including a mini-LP format and elegantly designed inserts, Volume 8 stands as not only a significant artistic endeavor but also a treasured collectible for sound enthusiasts.