MUSIC

Ricardo Villalobos - modular synths, drum machines, keys Samuel Rohrer - drums/percussion, electronics, modular synths, keys The Ricardo Villalobos / Samuel Rohrer partnership has yielded increasingly interesting results over the past few years, with the former’s remixes of the latter’s trio Ambiq being supplemented by further reinterpretations of Rohrer’s solo work and live meetings at selected events like Berlin’s Funkhaus. As should be the case with any strong collaboration, this partnership has been based on mutual challenge rather than compromise, seeing each participant shuttle key technical and emotive aspects of the other’s work to previously unexpected places. Those who have been closely following this relationship will notice a definite sense of continuity between previous outings and the new collaborative release entitled MICROGESTURES. As with those earlier Villalobos / Rohrer pairings, these five new pieces are defined by a special quality of being many things that once: that is to say, depending on the listener’s own level of focus, these can feel very tightly constructed and disciplined, or playful and freely wandering. That the tracks are equally engaging regardless of one’s chosen listening “mode” is a testament to the level of thought put into them; you could almost imagining the creators poring over some elaborate sketched set of architectural blueprints rather than coolly monitoring the usual multi-track editing software. Altogether the music here is firmly a-melodic and percussive, but within these deliberate limitations there is still a greater variety of individual sounds than most would bother with. Each track is its own observatory of micro-gestures clustering together into a dense communicative fog or a sort of robotic sound swarm. Yet while all these tracks are variations on that theme, each one has its own character and, consequently, its own rewards in terms of the exact sectors of the imagination that it activates. Take for example “Cochlea” and its twin “Helix,” on which the magnetizing, busy layers of percussion are tempered with mischievously disruptive blossomings of digital noise, as well as sampled radio communications (which again bring us back to the idea of listeners’ attentiveness changing the meaning of this music - these curious transmissions can either be taken as a purely aesthetic element or as something to be actively decoded). Club-oriented elements are also not absent from this suite, particularly on “Incus” with its traditional sequenced baseline, crisp synthetic trap and hats, and dizzily sliding set of bell-like tones laid on top. Yet this track, too, is powered as much by its restless desire to deviate as by its rhythmic consistency: throughout the eleven-minute running time, a mass of ambiguous and restless machine sounds build a parallel narrative, and will maybe prompt the occasional glance over the shoulder as they seem to be taking on their own life. “Lobule” rounds out the program with the most rhythmically eventful sound set of the five. What this all adds up to is a confident music which builds that quality from its faith in possibilities rather than firm conclusions: it’s an inspiring addition to both the musical landscape and reality in general.

40th Anniversary Edition - newly remastered from the master tapes, with an additional bonus LP of instrumentals and the previously unreleased “Narration Theme.” 

Daytime Viewing (1979-80) is an extended narrative song, based on a casual analysis of daytime television drama and the audience phenomena such programming addresses. The piece explores the use of fantasy as a survival mechanism against loneliness, illustrating the human compulsion to inflate the mundane to mythological proportions. A central female character weaves tales, using threads of personal experience and the idea of TV as friend, as mantra, and as transformational window between imagined spectacle and the pedestrian plane. 

Originally released as a private cassette edition [recorded, 1982; Chez Hum-Boom release, 1983] documenting the collaborative performance piece of the same name by Jacqueline Humbert & David Rosenboom. This heady, thoroughly enjoyable work was first made available on CD and LP in 2013 by Unseen Worlds. Jacqueline Humbert (aka J. Jasmine) is a songwriter of brains and wit on par with Robert Ashley, with whom she's worked extensively. David Rosenboom's complex, harmonic electronic arrangements are accentuated brilliantly by percussion from William Winant. Daytime Viewing can happily be added to a small but significant group of work that, through lesser-known paths, engaged in an equally revelatory reexamination of the Great American Songbook as Minimalism did with 20th Century composition. 

“The Concert” is the first discographic collaboration between percussionist Alexandre Babel and visual artist Latifa Echakhch. The record is intimately linked to the eponymous exhibition presented at the Swiss Pavilion during the 59th Venice Art Bienniale. For her exhibition in the Swiss Pavilion, Latifa Echakhch created an orchestrated and enveloping experience, a rhythmic and spatial proposal that allowed the visitor a complete perception of time and of his own body. What is the origin of rhythm? How does the body perceive time? How does the mind rearrange it? Can we substitute one perception for another, the visual for the sound? Can fragments of memory go back in time and recreate a different story? Her proposal entered a dialogue with the building around it, designed by Bruno Giacometti. The artist revisited its architectural programme as well as the prototypical progression of these exhibition spaces, originally defined for the display of classical art. She appropriated the entirety of the spaces, simultaneously exploring continuity, movement and sequence. Their relationship to light, and the different sounds that emerge from them. Yet the exhibition was entirely silent and the musical composition “The Concert” functions as its sound rendering, by following a similar path. This one-sided vinyl is a complementary and inseparable partner piece to the exhibition and its eponymous catalogue, the latter having been published in April 2022 by Sternberg Press. The music features field recordings made at the Swiss Pavilion itself as well as pre-recorded percussion sounds and significant contributions by the Berlin-based musicians Jon Heilbronn, Rebecca Lenton, Theo Nabicht, Nikolaus Schlierf. The record, available only after the closing of Latifa Echakhch’s exhibition offers a concluding phase to the project. The resonance of its sensory score. It reactivates the experience of the physical journey of the installation, without imposing itself as a transcription or an illustration. Through texture, temporality and its totality, the record stands as a resonance of the rhythms that have structured the pavilion, the harmonies that have composed it and the sounds that have inhabited it.

unification of techno and dub reggae. An outstanding universal masterpiece of sound dub/minimal techno released in 1994 by German Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel, repressed in 2023.

unification of techno and dub reggae. The long-awaited 2023 repress of the Rhythm & Sound catalog number 7, which was originally announced in 2002! A one-of-a-kind solitary acoustic space by Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel.

unification of techno and dub reggae. The long-awaited 2023 repress of the Rhythm & Sound catalog number 4, which was originally announced in 1999! A one-of-a-kind solitary acoustic space by Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel.

unification of techno and dub reggae. The long-awaited 2023 repress of the Rhythm & Sound catalog number 3, which was originally announced in 1998! A one-of-a-kind solitary acoustic space by Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel.

A miraculous union of techno and dub reggae, featuring two tracks remixed by Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel, "Remake (Basic Reshape)" (1994) and "The Climax (Basic Reshape)" (2001) under the name Carl Craig-Paperclip People. A universal masterpiece of immersive ambient dub techno, remixed by von Oswald's Basic Channel.

Foam On A Wave is proud to present the first international issue of this chameleonic, shapeshifting record, from one of Hungary's most prolific musician and film composers, János Másik. At times it calls to mind 23 Skidoo, Talking Heads and The Pop Group, at others it sits in its own corner of the room. 1989 was a revolutionary year. For many in the West the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the Autumn of Nations; the End of History and the triumph of progress. In Hungary, the year saw the Round Table Talks establish a new multi-party democracy and the effective end of communist rule after 40 years - Rendszerváltás; 'regime change'. It's hard to ignore these cataclysms while listening to Trance Balance. After all, its initial release was on Hungaropop, 'one of the first privately owned, independent labels launched after the liberalization of the market in Warsaw Pact-era Hungary' (we highly recommend delving further into their remarkable catalogue). Is music always an expression of the shifting political landscape? Or does it exist beyond it? These are all questions that percolate as the needle drops. Freud, a ghost from the Dual-Monarchy, runs in streams through the album sleeve. Trance Balance itself is reminiscent of a trip, transporting the individual through a semi-conscious dreamland. Synthesisers woosh and swirl overhead. The percussion is propulsive. Voices take on the guise of characters, guide-like, beckoning. There are Brechtian interludes where the musical fourth wall is punctured. At points, the listener awakes to playful refrains, bohemian folk song and calypso detours. This is a masterwork of musical surrealism - an act of pure intuition - free and honest. A manifesto in all but words. We'll let you decide how much it has to do with politics.

Highly awaited repress of the long sold-out compilation Hearsay I-Land, which encompasses Roland P. Young's 80s foray into synth-pop, dance, funk, soul, and new wave, including the downtempo classic, Ballo-Balla. Includes the I-Land 12" in its entirety, as well as most of the Hearsay Evidence lp.

Origin of the Alimonies is Liturgy’s fifth full-length album and their first to fully integrate Hunter Hunt-Hendrix’s vision of total art, or what she calls Perichoresis, with her musical compositions. The music amplifies a dramatic narrative addressing the question of the origin of all things, which itself aesthetically grounds the content of Hunt-Hendrix’s ongoing philosophical YouTube series on her System of Transcendental Qabala. The album is by far Liturgy’s most meticulous and radical statement, pushing their characteristic synthesis between black metal, minimalism, experimental club music, and 19th–century romanticism to new extremes. Exploring microtonality, free improvisation, polymetric structures and Richard Wagner’s ideas of musikdrama and leitmotif, Hunt-Hendrix employs her unique “burst beat” technique to bind together the rhythmic signatures of metal, experimental club and classical music in the service of speech patterns and narrative flow. Featuring the virtuosic playing of bandmates Leo Didkovsky, Tia Vincent-Clark and Bernard Gann, the entire album also includes flute, piano, harp, strings and horns performed by a 8-piece chamber ensemble drawn from New York’s various avant-garde music scenes. Influenced by kabbalah, German Idealism and French post-structuralism, the opera tells the story of a cosmogonical traumatic explosion between OIOION and SIHEYMN, a pair of divine beings whose thwarted love tears a wound from which civilization is generated, producing the Four Alimonies of the intelligible universe and the task of collective emancipation. Outside the narrative frame, the piece is meant to foster productive discord between the modes of attention and political commitments that implicitly accompany its various genres, as well as to hover in the liminal territory between the music industry, the art world and the contemporary philosophy community, reiterating the message of Jesus via William Blake by belonging nowhere, only half-comprehensible within any established framework, puncturing hypocritical ideologies while crying out in the name of love. The album is accompanied by a new, eponymous album-length operatic video written, directed, shot, edited by and starring Hunt-Hendrix, who uses her evolving body, in the wake of her recent gender affirmation as a trans woman, as the medium for the story. credits released November 20, 2020

Folksongs and Ballads by Tia Blake & Her Folk-Group, is more than just a “lost classic”. As clear and honest as can be, Folksongs and Ballads is a magnetic record, a refuge like only Nick Drake, Nico, and a few others have been able to create. A graceful, delicately minimalist approach to classic Appalachian and British folk songs.The perfect balance between melancholy and daydream. Originally released only in France in 1971, Ici Bientôt is very pleased to present the first-ever reissue on vinyl. When she recorded her only album, Tia Blake was nineteen years old and had just arrived in Paris a year and a half beforehand. She spent most of her time at Disco’Thé, a record shop in the Latin Quarter, a free space, peaceful and inspiring, a hub for students as well as the local artistic community. There, Tia would occasionally sing—when she managed to overcome her shyness. Two young guitarists who were passionate fans of folk music and regulars at the shop began to accompany her, forming “Her Folk Group.” One year later, they cut 11 tracks at Pierre Barouh’s Studios Saravah. Folksongs and Ballads is composed of traditional tunes that have been covered many times, but they’re not the best-known folk standards. A collection of stories ranging from the Middle Ages to the 1960s, bringing together sublimely doleful ballads, lamentations for a lost lover, and an unexpected, brilliant version of the road anthem “Plastic Jesus.” Tia Blake's haunting, unaffected voice captivates and comforts us, wrapping us in its cool embrace. Meanwhile, the tasteful, stripped-down, mellow acoustic arrangements provided by the guitarists, reminiscent of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, occasionally supported by a kena flute, have created the space Tia Blake needed to reinvent these traditional songs. Folksongs and Ballads is a timeless record, deep and unique, a longtime companion for repeated listening, in the vein of works by Sibylle Baier, Bridget St. John and Vashti Bunyan.

With Synthetic Hearts, Tubatsi Mpho Moloi, Msaki and Clément Petit issue an invitation to the listener and lover to journey to another place. Here, hearts, experiences, and sounds meet, shift and evolve across an inventive nine track album. Experimental, playful and complex, the project merges voices, instruments and sounds, across geographies and genres, creating sparse, yet lush atmospherics that spin on the universal themes of love. As skilled musical shapeshifters, Synthetic Hearts melds Msaki and Moloi’s folk sensibilities with electronic elements, as Petit teases out distinct textures from his cello across the record. Together, they look inward, in an introspective and conversational project that teases out emotions held within – towards considering what is shared and private in the messiness of our relationships with ourselves and others. On Synthetic Hearts, love, longing, confusion, sorrow, despondency and queries are opened up and negotiated in songs that vibrate with their naked, honest and tender vulnerability.

Previously unreleased extended single mixes.

"Another stone cold classic from the vaults of Taxi Records. The Cool Ruler, aka singer songwriter Gregory Isaacs. Perfectly crafted songs and precise rhythm construction by the Taxi Gang at Channel One Studio. Each song drifts seamlessly into percussive dubs with subtle sonic landscapes sculpted by the engineers Maxie & Ernest Hookim at the mixing board."

Felicia Atkinson and Jefre Cantu-Ledesma's Limpid As The Solitudes cuts through sound-making techniques to enter a new zone of sonic revelations. The record recalls the turn-of-the-century Mille Plateaux glitch era, the warmth of La Monte Young's drones, acousmatic non-space recordings made by GRM artists, 4AD's floor-gazing guitar sound, and blissfully diverse field recordings. But, one could equally equate it with entirely different recording sources. Limpid As The Solitudes has a widescreen sound that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Warm, comforting and also unsettling in unpredictable ways. Deliberate yet exploratory, it's a record composed of opposites and contrasts, following historical guidelines yet also throwing them out of the window. To describe the album as ambient would indicate passive engagement with the sound; leave it to play in the background and one could miss a lot of the joy. Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma describe the record as a series of postcards - things and sounds that happen vertically as a slow ascension, vessels communicating in dreams. In this collaborative recording, there is a feeling of "becoming" - a concrete sound turns into a electronic sound that turns into a spiral-like melody which then furls/unfurls at the same time. The album title as well as track titles, are all verses stolen from Sylvia Plath's poems, Atkinson notes, "like dropped pearls from a lost collar." Trying further to capture the record's poetic impulses, it reflects "Empathy to objects and nature's elements, meteorological states, seasons that answer to your heart, granular etchings carved and sustained to create a blurred sentimental landscape. The finale is more optimistic than Plath's poetry. Love and lyricism win, the music soaring from deep water to interstellar galaxies." The cover is another key, an image by Julien Carreyn of a young woman wearing destroyed jeans, playing with bubble wrap. The image is intended to give the viewer an eerie 1990's feeling that echoes the recording and films by Hal Hartley or Wong Kar Wai. Be sure to come back to this record more than once; it's then that it's power will work. Recall the sound of a lover, a garden once walked through, an echo of a record once loved. To be appreciated, "Limpid As The Solitudes" requires immersion as if in a hot spring, letting the sounds float and alter perceptions and memories. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at D+M. Printed photographs by Julien Carreyn on glossy inner and outer sleeve.

This is the Italian electronic producer’s debut album for Munich’s Ilian Tape label; for a record coming out of post-industrial Turin, its aesthetic is surprisingly luminous. The roster of Munich’s Ilian Tape may be headlined by locals like the Zenker Brothers and Skee Mask, but the label’s Italian contingent has long been one of its biggest strengths. Turin natives Stenny and Andrea first connected with the crew in 2011, when the former organized an Ilian Tape night and spent a couple of days driving the Zenker Brothers around his hometown. The following year, both Stenny and Andrea debuted on the imprint, and the two have been part of Ilian Tape’s core membership ever since, sharing similar trajectories and helping to solidify the label’s distinct brand of broken techno. In 2019, Stenny leveled up when he released his debut full-length, Upsurge, which impressively brought together angular breakbeats, dalliances with drum’n’bass, and headier ambient sounds. Now it’s Andrea’s turn to tackle the album format, with excellent results. His productions have always fallen toward the dreamier end of the spectrum, and he’s leaned into that here; it’s not often that Ilian Tape releases could be described as shimmering, but the album’s palette is a lot closer to Café del Mar than Cafe OTO. The sparkling arpeggios of aqueous opener “Attimo” and the dreamy synths that idle atop the peppy breakbeats of “LS September” are just two of the LP’s more Balearic elements, but golden hues and languid melodies drift and linger throughout. For a record coming out of a cold, post-industrial corner of northern Italy, Ritorno’s aesthetic is surprisingly luminous. Despite its sunny overtones, there’s plenty of low-end weight in the album’s foundation. The fluttering basslines of “TrackQY”—the LP’s most obviously club-ready tune—sound like something lifted from late-’90s drum’n’bass, while the crunchy wobble of “Liquid” is a classic dubstep throwback. There’s an abundance of DJ material, yet the album is practically devoid of staid, linear rhythms. Cribbing from house, techno, electro, breakbeat, jungle, trip-hop and IDM, Andrea’s hybrid creations have a lot in common with the more intriguing strands of bass music coming from UK outposts like Timedance and Livity Sound. From the soaring jungle mutation “Drumzzy” to the shuffling serenity of “Isabelle’s String,” the drum programming taps into a unique sort of organized chaos, with loose-limbed beats regularly teetering on the edge of collapse but somehow never losing the groove. Ritorno is Italian for “return,” and it’s easy to detect a ’90s vibe in its cosmic inclinations and freewheeling rhythms, which hark back to a sunnier, more lighthearted era when genre lines were less defined and the electronic music world wasn’t quite so balkanized. But Ritorno isn’t a strictly nostalgic effort, and the production is unmistakably modern, even as Andrea criss-crosses through numerous styles and eras. Outside of his long-running affiliation with Ilian Tape, he has never been locked into any particular trend or scene; instead, he has quietly developed his own artistic vision during years spent working in the background. That patience has paid off: Ritorno is a remarkably confident and cohesive work. Nearly a decade in the making, it’s Andrea’s first big statement, and proof that this low-key Italian producer has something valuable to add to the conversation.

Chicago legend BOO WILLIAMS' "DEPTHS OF LIFE" fuses classic melodic deep house with spacey acid and hard swung rhythms in BOO's signature style. it includes 10 crisp signature tracks, wrapped in a cosmic view of jazzy moods and hypnotic melodies. Also available on vinyl double LP at your favorite wax shops very soon!

As the resident bass player for renowned Manhattan comedy club Catch A Rising Star, Lloyd George Mair, Jr. worked alongside a host of iconic entertainers and comedians from the past 50 years inc. Robin Williams, Jerry Seinfeld, Andy Kaufman, Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy, Larry David, Chris Rock and plenty more. This was a creatively vibrant and socially dynamic period in New York’s history marked by the unique meeting and synthesis of post-disco, post-punk and early hip-hop; shaped by a hybrid party culture in which cross-cultural music scenes (Afrika Bambaata, Anita Sarko) collided with artistic ones (Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat) as well as intellectual spheres (Sylvère Lotringer, Antonio Negri) on NYC’s dance floors (Danceteria, Mudd Club), offering unique social and sonic possibilities of interaction, openness and exchange. As the 1980s progressed, together with increasingly tough Reaganomics, the crack epidemic, real estate inflation, demographic shifts and musicians and clubs catering to increasingly segregated audiences, the synergistic elements that first set the scene apart weakened severely from 1984 onwards. However, thanks to a dedicated underground, the forward-looking sensibilities of Mair, Jr. found an audience, gripping the imaginations of a select group of collaborators and peers from the so-called ‘cassette culture’ movement. These were not simply ‘demos’, but fully realised art projects primarily traded with other like-minded artists around the world. All kinds of folk found this a simpatico space to make music, think aloud, drift in and out of focus. Mair, Jr. started recording a dizzying array of home-baked cassettes, most of which remained unreleased or traded internationally. Captivated by the promise of possibility, his sound totally embraced the plastic potential of MIDI and digital, in all their unreal perfection. The sound of placeless, dream-like environments: movie sets, photo shoots, videogame backdrops. Dense webs of flickering neon, laser-strafed minimalism and thick saw-wave synths. This expansive second volume of rarities is drawn from Mair, Jr’s ‘Selected Rhythm Tracks 1988-1994’, a hidden archive of introverted electro-minimalist songwriting culled from over 30 years of private and unreleased cassettes. There's the boogie of the opening ‘Rhythm Track’, rendered in such perfect hi-res, it approximates digi-Motown via sci-fi Library Music soundtracks. ‘The Escape’ strings the most plastic of trumpets over an avant-funk stroll that’s so laidback you feel like it must be hiding something. The Afro-tropicalia of ‘Winefride XL’ is a beatific series of polyrhythmic kalimba lines that you can imagine gathering and drifting over and over again, like tides. There’s a distinct cinematic quality in Mair, Jr’s sequencing, and most of all on the outro to the blissful sweet-sour synth spirals of ‘Winefride LIV’, which sounds like Angelo Badalamenti scoring Perry Henzell instead of David Lynch. Available for the first time on vinyl and produced in cooperation with the artist’s estate for chOOn!!, a label specialising in obscure, archival and forgotten releases.

At the turn of the 1980s, L.G. Mair, Jr. was coercing young electronic gear into odd new timbres by day and masquerading as a consummate bass guitar hero by night - a regular fixture at the legendary NYC comedy club Catch a Rising Star, where he was the house bass player – regularly performing alongside a host of iconic comedians from the past 40 years inc. Robin Williams, Andy Kaufman and Chris Rock. His early music was born out of improvisation, often recorded between acts at Catch and he soon began issuing a dizzying array of home-baked cassettes. In the 1980s, cassettes were the ultimate guerrilla media, from home-dubbed compilations to private releases in editions of 100 copies, tapes offered a chance to redraw established evolutionary accounts. It was probably no coincidence that Mair, Jr. thrived in this realm – a continuum which offered him the seductive prospect of both escape and compensation, insight and freakout. In 1992, Mair, Jr. released ‘Music for Winefride’, which on its 30th anniversary remains, in its own unassuming way, a revelatory work of electro-minimalism. It swings between beautifully suspended chords, avant-funk tropes and mesmeric loops for its entire duration, yet this never feels like a confrontation or a challenge. Neither is it tedious; the apparent stasis on the surface of the music invites the listener to look beneath and discover the detail teeming below. The album is warm, approachable and often startlingly melodic. Perhaps most important of all in understanding why its influence has proved so enduring amongst obscure music enthusiasts - you can dance to it. Mair, Jr. recorded hundreds of cassettes during this period, most of which remained unreleased or traded with like-minded artists around the world. Nevertheless, the music he made at this time was some of his most melodic, accessible and at times brazenly brilliant. The sound of off-centre dub rumblings, Kosmische synthesis and sweat-stained Library funk telescoping into modern sounds like Reichian minimalist rhythm and spartan proto-Techno - a dizzying and unexpected cosmic tapestry. Available for the first time on vinyl and presented over two expansive volumes, the ‘Selected Rhythm Tracks 1988-1994’ of L.G. Mair, Jr. reveals a hidden archive of pulsing echojams, avant-funk meditations and introverted electro-minimalist songwriting culled from over 30 years of unreleased cassettes. Produced in cooperation with the artist’s estate for chOOn!!, a label specialising in obscure, archival and forgotten releases.

London hyper-connector label Accidental Meetings hustle exclusive work by Jay Glass Dubs’ Wild Terrier Orchestra, Rupert Clervaux, Susu Laroche, Bruce, Luke Lund, FUMU, Ausschuss, Dijit, memotone, Giant Swan’s Robin Stewart and more in aid of charity for victims of the Pakistan floods Converging from myriad disciplines, the artists on board all channel a certain mix of self-reflective solemnity, intensity and optimism into their musics here. We’re particularly struck by the cold tonal abstraction and grind of Bruce’s away day ‘Self Doubt’, and likewise the haunting shape of Abu Ama’s trampling Arabic drums, charred drone and ululations on ‘Away With You’, the anxious grapple of FUMU on ‘Tougher than Dartmoor Tundra’, and a pair of meditative wonders pivoting around Dimitris Papadatos in the autotuned dub prayer ‘The Creatures in Defence’ as Jay Glass Dubs with X. YPNO, or the radiant microtonal ritualism to ‘Osman Takas’ by his Wild Terrier Orchestra. Egypt’s Youth affiliate Dijit also charms with the sitar-laced illbient downstroke of ’Sharq’, MAL’s Ausschuss lays down gravelly drill shades away from Mobbs in ‘True Partner’, and Angel Hunt serves a set highlight of Arabic-inflected 2-step on ‘Rainham Steel’, chiming with club-adjacent tackle in Luke Lund’s Beau Wanzer-esque grinder ‘Imposter (Bristol Action)’, the Muslimgauze-like percussive rattle of Rupert Clervaux an HMOT’s ‘Zum F/F’, plus Livity Sound paralleling rhythmic workout from Saskia and the restless uptempo slug of Robin Stewart .iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 373px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2639086951/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless>Islands by Merope

The 3th album by MEROPE (2018) with arrangements of Lithuanian folk songs and own compositions. A unique trio sound with a blend of acoustic instruments, voice, el. guitar and electronics. Naktes presents a world full of wonder, inspired by the atmosphere of the night. After the release of Merope 'Salos' (STRLP-051 / gran21) we decided to repress Merope's previous album Naktes too. A collaboration with Stroom & granvat.

Here is a hidden gem from the 1990s, a sparkling cyber-ambient-Mandarin pop collection produced by Henry Kawahara, the master of cyber-occult music, with silky vocals from Shanghai-born vocalist Xiao Yun Wu. Originally released on CD in 1994 on Kawahara’s own HMD label, the Xiao Yun project was launched by Kawahara and his trusted colleague Keisuke Oki, who plays keyboards on the album. Kawahara handled the production, along with guitar, keyboards and programming. And of course, the crowning glory is the voice of Xiao Yun: lovely, floating, ethereal. The singer arranged the songs, which range from versions of previously released Kawahara solo pieces to Mandarin pop classics. All songs are given Kawahara’s cyber-occult sheen, which may evoke visions of the cosmopolitan Asia of near-future science fiction. Available on vinyl and digital download, this album will transport you, via 1994, to a sparkling future. 

Xiao Yun are 
Xiao Yun Wu: vocals 
Henry Kawahara: keyboards, guitars and computer programming 
Support: Keisuke Oki (keyboards) and Keiichi Hasegawa (percussion) 
Produced and engineered by Henry Kawahara 
Arranged by Henry Kawahara and Xiao Yun 
Recorded at Ecosystem Sonic Division/Fukuoka, 1993-1994

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji.

“With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.