MUSIC

Deeply resonant spiritual music transmitted via piano, organ, and harmonium by beloved composer and Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.

Church of Kidane Mehret collects all the musical work from Emahoy’s 1972 private press album of the same name, alongside two additional unreleased piano recordings, exploring Emahoy’s take on “Ethiopian Church Music.”

Recording herself in churches throughout Jerusalem, Emahoy engages directly with the Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. For the first time, we hear Emahoy on harmonium and massive, droning pipe organ, alongside some of her most moving piano work.

“Ave Maria” is one of our favorite pieces Emahoy ever recorded, her chiming piano reverberating against ancient stone walls. Her familiar melodic lines take on new resonance when played through the harmonium on “Spring Ode - Meskerem.” Two towering organ performances comprise the B Side, combining Emahoy’s classical European training with her lifelong study of Ethiopian religious music.

Nowhere is Emahoy’s unique combination of influences more apparent than on “Essay on Mahlet,” a meditative slow burner in which Emahoy interprets the free verse of the Orthodox liturgy note for note on the piano. This revelatory piece, alongside the dramatic piano composition “The Storm,” comes from another self-released album, 1963’s Der Sang Des Meeres. Only 50 copies were ever produced (and no cover). One of the only known copies was saved from the trash and shared with Mississippi by a fellow nun at Emahoy’s monastery when we visited for Emahoy’s funeral in March of 2023.

We are proud to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation to bring you these rare spiritual recordings in what would have been the artist’s 102nd year.

Available in black and clear vinyl editions. Old-school tip-on jacket with metallic silver foil stamping along with a 12-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes from scholar and pianist Thomas Feng.

Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville experimental-pop duo Total Wife, was born from the edge of sleep. When composer and producer Luna Kupper would begin to fall asleep during late-night mixing sessions, the songs would follow her into the halfway place between dream and lucidity. Like Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, she’d wake with a new perspective on the puzzle she was piecing together. “I’m a psychological mixer — I’m trying to think of how someone’s experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way,” Kupper says. And like a spiral from waking life into dream, the songs on Come Back Down are endlessly self-referential, building whole universes from a single point. Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the band’s own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars.” In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction. In her lyrics, too, main vocalist and co-composer Ash Richter is as straightforward as she’s ever been. She drew on her experience of pandemic isolation to write about connection and disconnection, using her lyrics as a tool for the communication that was missing in everyday life. On the soaring, shoegazey track “peaches”, a storm that forced the cancellation of a recording session became a metaphor for emotional distance. “still asleep” chronicles Richter’s euphoria after Total Wife’s first tour, and watches it begin to curdle into paranoia. “Thank the full moon, my heart is overflowing,” she sings, before: “Is there such a thing as too happy?” The experience of isolation was prompting Richter to think back to her childhood, a time marked for her by solitude and natural play — climbing trees, making mud pies, getting lost in the woods. On tracks like “in my head” and “second spring”, she uses the imagery of nature to recall that time and forge a connection with her lonely inner child. “I feel connected with transcendentalist writing and magical realism — trying to convey things in a concrete way, but with that element of psychology and mystery,” she says. Richter and Kupper, friends from high school, formed Total Wife in 2016, relocating from Boston to Nashville in 2020. Both are visual artists as well as musicians, which they incorporate into their work with Total Wife via layered and purposeful visuals. A DIY streak underpins everything that they do — from handling their own artwork and music videos to recording their own music, releasing tapes through their label Ivy Eat Home, and hosting house shows in the basement they’ve christened Ryman 2. In Nashville they’ve settled into a weirdo scene living under the record industry’s floorboards, a hive of collaborative and creative energy that has made them excited to call the city home. They also assembled a live band for the first time shortly after moving to Nashville, consisting of Ryan Bigelow, Sean Booz and Billy Campbell — injecting their creative process with a jolt of spontaneity and aliveness that has fed back into Come Back Down.

The iconic soundtrack to all time best seller and frankly, possible best game ever Minecraft is back. This time around versions Alpha and Beta have been repackaged into one holy cassette union, showcasing C418's enchanting compositions and ambient collages, gently pieced together from soft piano, electronic pads and atmospheric, ghostly sounds.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce the release of Crayola Circles, a collaboration between rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Child Actor. While both artists have long standing connections to Backwoodz, this album marks their first collaboration of any kind and breaks new artistic ground for all parties. Sharif’s previous album, Decay, released on Backwoodz in 2023, was a haunting experimental rap masterpiece, an acid trip in a mental hospital. On Crayola Circles Sharif trades menacing psychedelia for a simmering stew of blacklight expressionism, his verses slipping effortlessly through the swells and tides of Child Actor’s masterful production. No matter how uneasy the waves grow, Sharif is at ease, a truth teller whispering anti-riddles in your ear.This album feels like a new chamber for Child Actor, as well. The producer has been on an impressive run since dropping CINE- a collaboration with rapper Cavalier- on Backwoodz in late 2024. Child Actor has shown up in the liner notes of everyone from Navy Blue (The Sword & The Soaring) to Earl Sweatshirt (Live, Laugh, Love) to ELUCID (Revelator) to Open Mike Eagle (Neighborhood Gods Unlimited), to Ghais Guevara (A Quest to Self-Mythologize), amongst others. On Crayola Circles Child Actor’s production is dynamic, shifting and sliding into new phases and movements in an instant. The beats are full and knotty, leaning into jazz and folk, while remaining tethered to the tender minimalism that is his signature. It’s a difficult balance for any producer, and here it is executed perfectly, placing us in a world of wood and brass, cowhide and undersea piano. On any other record, this soundscape would steal the show — and it very nearly does — but Sharif’s command never wavers, ever in control; a lucid dreamer in an induced coma.There are no guests, no skits, and no interludes. There might not even be songs, instead Crayola Circles seems akin to a great river; singular, traversing forest and jungle, mountain and valley, running from mouth to endless sea.

Mei Semones’ sweetly evocative blend of jazz, bossa nova and math-y indie rock is not only a way for her to find solace in her favorite genres, but is an intuitive means of catharsis. “Blending everything that I like together and trying to make something new – that's what feels most natural to me,” says the 23-year-old Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter and guitarist. “It’s what feels most true to who I am as an artist.” ‘Tsukino’, Mei’s debut, self-released EP, is being released physically for the first time ever on Bayonet Records! The EP will be released by itself on CD & Tape formats, and will be included in a vinyl pressing on the B-side of Semones’ landmark EP, ‘Kebutomushi’! Plinking guitar tones and asymmetrical time signatures exemplify Semones’ forays into angular indie rock more now than ever before. Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Semones began playing music at a young age, starting out on piano at age four before moving to electric guitar at age eleven. After playing jazz guitar in high school, she went on to study guitar performance with a jazz focus at Berklee College of Music. College is where she met her current bandmates, including string players Noah Leong and Claudius Agrippa, whose respective viola and violin add softness and multidimensionality to Mei’s intricate guitar work. After releasing a slew of singles and an EP in 2022, coinciding with her move to New York City, Mei and her band have since gone on to collaborate with post-bossa balladeer John Roseboro and embark on their first-ever tour with the melodic rock outfit Raavi. Semones chronicles infatuation, devotion, and vulnerability in her songs, complete with sweeping strings, virtuosic guitar-playing and heartfelt lyrics sung in both English and Japanese, that have all become part of her sonic trademark: ornately catchy, genre-fusing compositions serving as the backdrop to tender lyrics touching on the universalities of human emotion.

This is the debut album by Wu‑Tang Clan, the hip‑hop group that emerged from Staten Island, New York, in 1993.

Madvillain, a super popular hip-hop duo consisting of MF Doom & Madlib, has stocked a cassette version of the monumental masterpiece released by in 2004! This gritty analog texture, the stagnation beats that Madlib keeps throwing in, and the drunken Doom flow just intoxicate the listener. There is no moment like yawning, and a terrifying finish that does not make you feel any gap from beginning to end. Please enjoy one of the centuries that represents hip-hop in the 2000s with the sound quality of cassettes!

"Drawing" cover, aka "Old Donuts," the unofficial name for the original edition of J Dilla's Donuts 2/LP with an illustrated sleeve, the way the vinyl was originally released in 2006.

Seoul’s Uman Thurman & Yetsuby, aka Salamanda, meditate on the inner life of a basil plant with a delicately flavoured suite of pottering pulses and harmonised warmth in a fine tradition of Far Eastern ambient electronica that chimes with label mates at GMT and the likes of E Ruscha V or Woo. “The album moves through a full day in the plant's life opening with ‘introduce my atom which is my favorite one’, an act of quiet self-declaration in morning light, before settling into the unhurried rhythmic pulse of ‘to to ki toki tok’- the drip of water, the tick of a clock, the slow beat of photosynthesis. ‘allez, pousse!’ - one of the standouts in this journey - carries the basil's gentle will to grow, to push, to tilt toward the sun, while ‘hungry snail’ captures a moment of creaturely encounter on the glass: an uninvited visitor, moving slowly, wanting. As the afternoon deepens, 'Basil's Ritual' traces the daily ceremony of light and warmth, repeated with calm devotion from root to leaf. Night falls across 'Basil's Dream', and in the stillness something like sleep arrives - the plant resting, imagining tomorrow's sun. The album closes with ‘the blue wine’, a final mysterious reverie in which the basil seems to contemplate its own fate, somewhere between acceptance and wonder.”

Off-the-chain, polymetric & polystyle mixtape madness from Berlin-based French DJ, Marylou, on Bristol’s inimitable Accidental Meetings - FFO DJ/ rupture, Demdike Stare, Tutu, Marjai. Marylou, an affiliate of Morphine and Ominira, goes sick on ‘AMX008’ with 100 mins of dot-joining suss, tessellating futurist club styles with vintage breakcore, folk, dub, spoken word and ethnographic recordings via rudely disciplined, jazz-taught sensibilities. Trust, it’s a lot! For the duration Marylou plays deep into Accidental Meetings’ wide-open, rooted yet recombinant remit, following her nose where it goes with an extraordinary feel for the flow and juxtaposition of ostensibly, mutually exclusive styles and patterns. It takes some moxie to nail this sort of thing without sounding like a mess, and Marylou clearly constructs something properly beguiling that fucks with expectation at every turn. It will take at least a few goes to fully unravel, gauge this madness, and you’ll have a great time doing so.

Carlos Giffoni reconnects with Thurston Moore for the first time in years, blazing through two sides of loose-limbed axe noise, oscillator worship and hard-phased, Spacemen 3-style feedback. Giffoni's been on a roll recently. Since the No Fun founder returned to the scene with 'Vain', a genius set of synth mutations that appeared in iDEAL back in 2018, he's been slowly ramping up the activity, dropping the celestial 'Dream Walker' on Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ in 2024 and following it with 'Pendulum', a bumper compendium of collaborations, just a few weeks back. For those who remember Giffoni's first trip round the block, he was always able to hold his own chopping it up in person, not just by mail. Just scrub through his early catalog and you'll see collabs with Nels Cline and Chris Corsano, Merzbow, Jim O'Rourke and Lasse Marhaug, and of course, Thurston Moore. The two rekindle their thing on 'IGUANA', picking up where 2001's fabled '4 Guitars Live' performance left off. Here, Giffoni straddles a tabletop synth and FX while Moore attacks his signature Jazzmaster with a drumstick and a screwdriver - vibes fully intact. Moore is on blistering form, sounding as if he's taken a step back to refresh his approach since the early '00s when he could be spotted moonlighting on any number of basement-adjacent noise sides. Sawing at his strings and turning the guitar into a shrieking resonator, he leaves only faint vapours of the classic Sonic Youth sound as opiating accents on his animalistic wails and rumbles. On the opening half, his whammy-assisted shreds are balanced out by Giffoni's off-world whirrs and airlocked vibrations, building a dense wall of noise towards an unexpectedly elegiac conclusion. At some point, Giffoni's rasping churr transforms into a simmering shudder and Moore's into hymnal drones - squint a bit and you could almost call it pretty. Of course, they ramp things up on the flip, dissolving the melancholia with smokey white noise and twangy, post-Derek Bailey chimes that Giffoni accompanies with aggy oscillations. Like every great taped noise set, the recording quality is crucial - 'IGUANA' was captured from the pit by Guillermo Hernandez Avendano, the dad of Lia Miranda who provides the cover photo. It's that kinda show.

Abby Sundborn is quiet observer. An active composer, performer, improviser and collaborator within Melbourne’s fertile DIY underground, she equally appreciates time spent on the other side of the stage, attentively listening, imagining and finding beauty in her surroundings. Classically trained but intuitively inclined, Holding Pattern is perhaps the clearest distillation of Sundborn’s musical vision - one that is rooted in intimacy and vulnerability, and pays homage to countless memories both shared and in solitude. A time-dilating piece for cello and voice performed to a small audience, it is fragile music with a deceptive intensity that unravels far beyond the confines of the dimly lit space in which it was performed. The atmosphere is tense and palpable, held in seemingly infinite suspension by small yet deliberate gestures that delicately overlap. It feels decidedly human. Sundborn’s considered bowing and pizzicato are laid bare with little processing or intervention, and the composition at large feels beautifully curious and explorative. Holding Pattern is Sundborn’s first piece that features so prominently her voice. At its apex lies ‘Shed’, a title symbolising the “breaking of habitual patterns” that can lead to one’s life becoming too routine and unconsciously self-destructive. The interplay between her cello and voice is mantric and entrancing, and portrays an emotionally attuned composer with deft sensitivity to space and time. “I knew I wanted to make something that felt warm and focused, but not so much that you can’t get out.” Always self-observational and never rushed, Sundborn seemingly utilises negative space as moments of reflection - her voice a vessel for ascension and grief that drifts slowly into the distance. Sundborn’s work is rigorous yet free-flowing, and has seen light on a diversity of labels, including Altered States, Daisart and Absorb. Holding Pattern is her first appearance on A Colourful Storm, following time shared on stage and in collaboration with Tony Buck (The Necks), Jonnine (HTRK) and Lisa Lerkenfeldt (Shelter Press).

Two of the acts boldly leading Texas music into the future have now delivered a second chapter of their groundbreaking collaboration, further extending the region’s sonic possibilities. Singer/songwriter Leon Bridges, from Ft. Worth, and trailblazing Houston trio Khruangbin have joined forces for the Texas Moon EP, a follow-up to 2020’s acclaimed Texas Sun project. While the five new songs are clearly a continuation of the first EP, they also have an identity all their own—Bridges calls it “more introspective,” while Khruangbin bassist Laura Lee says it “feels more night time.” When Texas Sun was released, AllMusic called the results “intoxicating” and Paste noted that “their talents and character go together so well.” Now comes the next stage—a set of songs that touch on themes like love, faith, and death while exploring new dimensions of inventive, hypnotic grooves. Significantly, both parties’ musical directions were clearly affected by their time working together. Khruangbin’s most recent album, Mordechai, moved their own vocals much further forward, a change they readily admit was a direct result of working with Bridges. Meanwhile, since these recordings began, in addition to his genre-defying album Gold-Digger’s Sound, Bridges has put out several other challenging, shared tracks, including work with John Mayer, Lucky Daye, and Jazmine Sullivan. Texas Moon represents a genuine and rare achievement, with two of the most respected and innovative acts of their generation truly collaborating to create something new. “As far as an essentially instrumental band, these guys are kind of the top for me,” says Bridges. “I’m honored to have been the first singer that they’ve incorporated in their music.” “It feels really special to me,” says Lee. “It’s not Khruangbin, it’s not Leon, it’s this world we created together.”

Portland's finest practitioners of Great Black Music offering to the planet! All Is Sound could not be a more apt title for this. Through saxophone, cello, piano, and flutes The Cosmic Tones Research Trio created a truly beautiful record. All Is Sound breaks new ground. At its heart, it's healing/meditation music, but the Gospel and Blues roots are in there too...as well as hints of forward-looking Spiritual jazz. As sincere a record as you could ever hope for. Music is indeed the healing force of the universe.

We’ve just received a stash of mysterious dead‑stock cassette tapes from Ural Thomas — a living legend who witnessed the golden age of ’60s soul and made a stunning comeback in his 80s.

“No second-guessing, no overthinking. The way I want to live my life is by doing the things that are important to me, and I think everyone should live that way,” says Mei Semones of her strengthened self-assurance. Through continuously honing in on her signature fusion of indie rock, bossa nova, jazz and chamber pop in a way that highlights her technical prowess on guitar, the 24-year-old Brooklyn-based songwriter and guitarist is quickly establishing herself as an innovative musical force. Since the release of her acclaimed 2024 Kabutomushi EP, a series of lushly orchestrated reflections on love in its many stages, Mei has gone on to tour extensively across the US, cultivate a dedicated following, and write and record her highly anticipated debut album, Animaru. Inspired by the Japanese pronunciation of the word “animal” in Japanese, Animaru is the embodiment of Mei’s deeper trust in her instincts – a collection of musically impressive tracks that see Mei sounding more adventurous, more vulnerable and more confident than ever before.

Mei’s newfound assertiveness comes in part from her experiences in the past year, as 2024 was a transformative year for the Mei Semones band. They shared bills with the likes of Liana Flores, Elephant Gym and Kara Jackson, among others, and Mei transitioned to doing music full-time. Amidst the frequent touring, Mei and her five-piece band recorded the album in the summer of 2024 at Ashlawn Recording Company, a farm studio in Connecticut operated by their friend Charles Dahlke. To these sessions, she brought a batch of tracks that, not unlike Kabutomushi, are sophisticated declarations of non-romantic love: love of life (“Dumb Feeling”), love of family (“Zarigani”), love of music and her guitar (“Tora Moyo”). Animaru exemplifies Mei’s enchantingly wide range as a songwriter and musician, including some of the most challenging and most straightforward songs Mei has ever written.

Though her music might inherently evoke feelings of romance and softness, the crux of the album lies in Mei and her band’s skillful balance of tension and release. Often within individual tracks, there will be moments of pared-back acoustic guitar adorned by Mei’s infectious vocalizations that, in a moment’s notice, transform into orchestral swells of sweeping strings and complex guitar rhythms. Album opener “Dumb Feeling” is a prime example, a bossa/samba blend complete with indie rock sensibilities in the choruses as Mei details her contentment with her life in New York City. Mei actively seeks out musical challenges throughout Animaru, like on “I can do what I want,” the album’s most technically ambitious track. But she still manages to make the quickly cascading guitar harmonics and odd meters sound like a breeze to play, her breathy, lilting voice cutting through the track’s energetic dynamics. It epitomizes the album as a whole – she sings of doing things her own way, on her own terms, in hopes of inspiring others to make the same active switch in their own lives.

The simpler moments on Animaru are equally as captivating as when Mei is shredding on guitar or her bandmates are carrying out an intricate arrangement. “Donguri,” a stripped-down jazz duo performance between acoustic guitar and upright bass, is the simplest song Mei has ever written, brought to life by Mei sweetly chronicling (mostly in Japanese) what she imagines life would be like as a woodland creature living in the forest. The album’s penultimate track also encompasses themes relating to the titular “animaru.” Translating to “crayfish,” the bright, effervescent “Zarigani” is a nostalgic expression of love for her twin sister, with Mei singing “We’ll always have each other / I love you like my guitar / I love you like no other.” Family is one of the primary loves of Mei’s life, with her mom, Seiko Semones, making all of her album and single artwork. Despite Animaru being a statement of Mei’s autonomy and confidence at this point in her life, it's the various loves that she surrounds herself with – her family, her friends, her band, her music – that empower her to do things her own way. 

As Green-House, musicians Olive Ardizoni and Michael Flanagan engage human nature and the natural world through joyous, dynamic synthesis. Overlaying frequencies and expressions like camouflage, their deeply layered collaborative process begins with either artist; Ardizoni is often drawn to melody, Flanagan to harmonics. The power lies in how their ideas helix together, achieving a depth greater than the sum of its parts. For their first LP with new label home, Ghostly International, Green-House grows and refines their vivid instrumental songcraft with uncharted, genre-defying freedom and movement, a more active, percussive, and emotion-filled energy, marked by flowing bodies of sound and sweeping vistas. Hinterlands tunes into the beauty of the world with defiant, radical sincerity.

Since 2020, across a catalog of acclaimed releases via the scene-creating Los Angeles imprint, Leaving Records, the duo has pursued a curiosity in environments, reaching for innate and faraway spaces by way of organic and synthetic instrumentation, high-definition sound design, and “idiosyncratic melodies crafted with the patient and methodical hand of a gardener,” writes Pitchfork. Green-House doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. Ardizoni and Flanagan aren’t aligned with New Age ideologies or spirituality, and the ambient tag feels increasingly limited given all that’s going on in their songs, which skew closer to the realms of IDM or even modern classical on their new album. What remains inherent is an open sense of wonder, “the idea of legitimizing certain emotions within music that often aren’t taken seriously in art, like happiness and joy,” says Ardizoni, whose eclectic personality shines through even without lyrics.

They welcome influences from all over; moments on Hinterlands evoke hypnagogic folk, tropical synth-pop, pan-flute mountain music, jazzy lounge, film scores, library sounds, and other forms of paradise-world-building. The duo simply makes the music they want to hear, earnestly dreaming of idyllic settings, their hope borne of necessity.

Like any artist living in Los Angeles, the 2025 wildfires disrupted any semblance of normalcy in creative life. However, they give careful consideration to how ever-looming environmental and political anxiety may relate to the project. “There's freedom in music, not requiring nuance in order to share an emotion or a fantasy or a utopian ideal with others,” Ardizoni says. “I'm an anarchist and an artist. I don't have to explain that. I can just put the emotion in and hope that it can be used as a tool, to be comforting or inspiring for people.”

As their third LP, Hinterlands is notably fuller, bigger-feeling than past work; brimming with kaleidoscopic guitar lines, bubbling synth textures, and an orchestral radiance that often registers as more than just two people. They bring up biomimicry — learning from and adapting alongside nature — as a formative notion. “When we’re talking about mimicry, it is also like projecting yourself as being larger in a certain way, in a sonic sense, sounding like a full band, but also as people, interconnected with a broader world,” says Flanagan. “This record is us letting go a little bit as well, giving ourselves the freedom to just write and see what happens, to let the music grow naturally.” Ardizoni adds, “We try to utilize what’s right in front of us, just being in an urban environment and making do with what's there in order to continue to foster that connection we have to the natural world.”

Ardizoni and Scott Tenefrancia shot the images that appear within the droplets of the LP’s artwork on a trip to Yosemite and the Inyo National Forest; Flanagan later magnified the scenes through the water with macro photography, using the droplets as a series of lenses. The striking visual serves as a fitting metaphor for music that straddles the organic and the digital — a collection of auditory microcosms developed through imaginative fusion.

It begins in the languid heat of “Sun Dogs”, which nods to the coastal sway of Haruomi Hosono's Pacific album and Paradise View soundtrack with washes of keys, horns, and strings. “Sanibel” is pure shoreline bliss, named after the Florida island a young Ardizoni would visit, growing up on the nearby Cape Coral Island (“my first real experiences as a human exploring nature”). “Farewell, Little Island” borrows its title from the 1987 short animated film directed by Sándor Reisenbüchler, which depicts the drowning of a village by modern technology. The track’s buoyant, spiraling guitar samples, their first time exploring the effect, reminded them of the film’s paper-cut animation and of how the story balances serene splendor with tragedy.

“Dragline Silk” conjures a curious trip. Built on a bed of ascending synth and guitar chords bathed in spring reverb (stemming from their shared love for Jessica Pratt’s latest album) and named after the natural phenomenon of spiders that use static electricity to sail through the atmosphere, the track soars with grandeur. The Hinterland suite is the album’s centerpiece, three tracks traversing wide hilltop terrain, with flute and guitar playfully surveying the scene (“Hinterland I”) before more contemplative strums and astral synth and woodwinds take hold (“Hinterland II” and “III”).

Hinterlands’ sequencing takes the listener from sea to mountains to somewhere more abstract and fantastical; late highlight “Under the Oak” possesses an otherworldly calm on warbled keys, followed by “Bronze Age”, even more subdued. “Valley of Blue” ends the movement in melancholy, overlooking a blue flower field with swells of synthetic strings and oboe in the style of Final Fantasy (Ardizoni originally called it “Memory of a Chocobo”). These traces of sadness permeate the otherwise effervescent collection, reminders that, behind the wonder, lies often profound worry (after all, Sanibel Island was nearly wiped out in 2022). Green-House makes sense of these feelings through their art, with genuine tenderness and refreshing conviction.

Big Crown Records is proud to present the sophomore full-length from Les Imprimés, Fading Forward. Spearheaded by self-taught multi-instrumentalist and producer Morten Martens, the album explores mortality, escapism, and a myriad of experiences associated with love.

Martens made a tremendous impression with his highly acclaimed 2023 debut Rêverie and has since cultivated a diehard fanbase whose demographics are as wide-ranging as the influences that shape his music. He mixes tones from ’60s and ’70s soul with arrangement nods to doo-wop records, takes drum energy from hip-hop, and covers the whole thing with vocal stylings drawn from ’90s and 2000s alternative. But it is Martens’ lyrics, emotion, and delivery that truly bring everything together and help him stand out from his peers. There’s an infectiousness and pop sensibility in the writing, executed with the utmost class and taste, giving Les Imprimés the rare quality of immediate attraction that only deepens with repeat listens.

Hailing from Kristiansand, Norway, Martens plays nearly every instrument on Fading Forward, produces and arranges the album, and of course sings. “It’s soul music, but I don’t exactly have the soul voice,” Morten explains humbly. “But I do it my own way, in a way that’s mine.”

Album opener “You & I” is Morten’s homage to his partner, who sticks it out “through the chaos and the blunders” with him. Punchy drums and cascading pianos make this one a proper two-stepper and an anthem for those lucky enough to find someone who understands them and helps them through the parts of life where they need it most. “Again & Again” slows the pace and deals with the heavier side of love and life, as Martens professes his resilience through the mishaps, heartbreak, and letdowns of love affairs gone wrong. “Untainted Love” brings the sweet side of new love center stage with a tune that plays on the title of the Gloria Jones classic. “Get Lost” leans into the metaphysical with an invitation to leave reality behind and spend time with Les Imprimés, where there’s room to dream. “Only Love” is built over a gritty drum break, with a chorus that is simple yet profound, and an arrangement that gives it the energy of a mantra. The album turns to the dancefloor on “With You,” an uptempo, uplifting tune about a fleeting encounter that leaves you pining for more. Martens longs for her, but joyfully—as if simply remembering that such a connection is possible is exactly what he needed. Martens is joined by guest vocalist Ama Li on “Miss the Days,” a slow-burning ballad that reckons back to simpler times when love felt easier. Fading Forward closes on a wholly somber note with “Paradise,” a tune that wishes freedom and peace to a friend who passed away.

In the small town of Kristiansand, Norway, there is a huge talent who spent much of his life laying low and playing in the background. Signing to New York’s Big Crown Records inspired Morten Martens to begin sharing his own music. The response to his debut Rêverie pushed him out of the studio and onto the stage, serving as inspiration to push his artistry to new heights—heights that are fully realized on Fading Forward.

Homer Steinweiss has an incredibly storied career in music that started when he was just a teenager. He's drummed for nearly every "retro soul" group that mattered and his distinctive stickwork helped blend the raw-but-receptive soul sound back into the mainstream via the likes of Amy Winehouse & Sharon Jones. He’s now one of the most in demand drummers in the world, playing with Jonas Brothers, Clairo, Solange, Adele, and Bruno Mars to name a few. With his debut solo release Ensatina, Homer is stepping to the forefront as both musician and producer. His new record is a reflection of who he is now and a testament to how struggle often brings about a needed change. In 2020 Homer had to reckon with considerable emotional turbulence; at the same time that his band Holy Hive broke up, a personal relationship of 20+ years fell apart putting Homer in an uncertain place mentally. The fallout was significant enough for him to seek professional help. "I was going through these super manic highs and then very depressive lows," Homer describes. "And being in all that, it's just so tough to imagine that the other side is there, that it'll be ok." But, with time, professional help, and support from friends and family, Homer made it through and has been forever changed. This album is a product of that period of his life. The first song from these sessions, “Now That It’s Over” perfectly sums up Homer’s triumph through those tough times. It's a song of changing perspective and contemplation with haunting vocals from Hether and Flikka. "Paul (Castelluzzo—aka, Hether), as a friend, saw me through these highs and lows," Homer points out. "I only had the one line, 'Now that it's over, I'm alright,' but he felt that lyric so much that he wrote all these sections and lyrics and basically completed the song. It was like he was writing to me." Hether also features on album standouts “Deep Sea”, a modern love song, “Start Select”, a juxtaposition of inspiration and melancholy, and “Forever and Ever and Ever and Ever” which is an incredible contemporary take on the B side soul ballad. Homer uses his innate gift for bringing seemingly opposing energies together on “Racecar Driver”, pairing the vocals of Hether & long time friend and collaborator KIRBY to make a genre challenging banger. KIRBY also graces the album opener “Rollin’”, an airy, warm-weather invoking song that her raspy voice perfectly compliments. He puts his drumming front and center on “So Get Up!”, a bottom heavy infectious track that MINOVA’s vocals turn into an instant hit that is sure to smash speakers. On “Wishing Well” & “Hide It Behind the Light I’m Shining Through” Homer is joined by girl named GOLDEN, who’s unique voice effortlessly finds the pocket in each tune. The man on trumpet, and fellow Big Crown label mate Dave Guy, puts his incomparable playing on the album closer “Goldie” which Homer says is the part of the movie where the credits roll. Making this album was a refuge for Homer and it put him back on track. Ensatina is a glimpse into the different energies and influences that make Homer tick. To say he was always much more than a drummer would be an understatement, and this first solo offering is just the beginning of his next chapter.

Ghanaian hiplife phenom Yaw Atta-Owusu presents charming results of his first studio session since 1994’s sleeper hit ‘Obaa Sima’, which found an overdue, cult audience via the blogosphere as one of Awesome Tapes From Africa’s earliest and greatest drops in 2015. If you weren’t snagged on the ohrwurming keys, vox, and groove of the title tune to Ata Kak’s ‘Obaa Sima’ in 2015, you probably weren’t going to the right clubs and checking the right sites. 10 years later it still kills and is set to be joined by this fresh haul from the Bishop Beatz recording studio in Kumasi, Ghana, where Ata Kak laid down ‘Batakari’, his 1st recordings in three decades, recapturing the moxie of his original sound on six cuts that betray time and space travelled within more ambitious arrangements of signature fast chat factored by layered harmonies and rhythmic variegation. “Honed in studios around Kumasi over the last several years, the songs feature the rapper-singer’s acrobatic rap, signature scatting, dramatic drums and even traditional Akan harp. The compositions are more ambitious than his earlier work, with more complex arrangements and layered harmonies. Ata Kak’s new songs are also the natural expression of a restless artist—he is a prolific poet and author of a half-dozen books, as well as an active gardener and busy painter. Born in Ghana in 1960, Ata Kak wasn’t always involved in music. But his travels and openness to the world lead him into the music industry. While living in Germany, he was invited to play drums in a reggae band and subsequently played in highlife bands in Ontario after moving to the Toronto area. He recorded “Obaa Sima” there at his home studio and released it in Ghana in 1994. He didn’t participate in music much in the intervening years until “Obaa Sima” was reissued in 2015. He started performing his song live with the help of a brilliant cast of London-based musicians and has toured three continents and played to thousands of fans in venues of all kinds.”

Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow is the second album from funk innovators Funkadelic, arriving in 1970 mere months after their trailblazing debut. Famously originating from a single LSD-fueled marathon session, the record saw the band honing their songcraft, while still allowing plenty of space for mind-bending exploratory jams. It marked the official introduction of legendary keyboardist Bernie Worrell, and would go on to chart at No. 92 on Billboard's Pop chart. Remastered direct to lathe from original master tapes by Dave Gardner (all analog).

*199 copies limited edition* Aka Meme by Merzbow was first released on Music-Cassette in 1983 on Masami'a own label ZSF Produkt and on V2 Uitgave (a Sub-label of V2 Organisation). Tape was later re-released in other two editions but is long time sold-out and impossible to find. Finally OEC is going to re-release that special tape once more. This is Industrial-Noise from the very first era made by the master of Japanoise. Recordings are mixing many different sounds that range from: ritual-sounds / vocals / found-sounds / treated-guitar / many different rythms / noise.... and a wired and wide range of other bubbling & rumbling sounds! A total merzexperience!

A new ambient/new age masterpiece is born, a must-have for those who love Japanese 80's ambient music/ambient by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Gigi Masin, H.Takahashi, Mary Lattimore, etc.! Constellation Tatsu, a famous label from Oakland, California, has been pushing the new age revival from the underground cassette scene, along with Rotifer, Inner Islands, and Leaving Records. From Constellation Tatsu comes the debut album by Loris S. Sarid, a musician and sound designer from Rome, Italy, now based in Glasgow, Scotland. This is the arrival of an up-and-coming artist who has managed to keep Hiroshi Yoshimura, H.Takahashi and Joseph Shabason on his toes, and is even looking ahead to the future. This is a piece of "environmental music for plants," created as a musical tribute to a tomato farm, inspired by the small tomatoes I tended on the windowsill of my apartment this winter. This year, Leaving released Green-House's debut EP, "Six Songs for Invisible Gardens," which was based on the concept of "communication between plant life and the people who grow it. A work! It is described as "a tribute to the casual courage in simplicity, and the beauty and lightness of casual things".