MUSIC

“Gasparyan's playing produces an equal amount of sadness and sweetness in every note, every phrase, and every song. Simply graceful.” All Music

First ever vinyl edition of Djivan Gasparyan’s exquisite second album recorded in 1993, a decade after his classic debut album I Will Not Be Sad In This World. Produced by Michael Brook.

DOWN 2 EARTH, which was established by Toshio Nakanishi as a "Nagomimono" music line within the Major Force label, has finally released the album of the group of gods, known as the pinnacle of exotic music, on analog. !

An exotic work that can be said to be an extension of the Watermelon Group, Toshio Nakanishi, Masayuki Kudo, steel guitar player Genichi Tamura, who is also known for activities such as Little Tempo, and Shunji Mori of Natural Calamity gathered in Bali to record. This album is an exotic sound that has been consistently slowed down in line with the label's concept.
A work that can be said to be the highest peak of domestic exotic music.
Works in 1992

Tracklist:
Side A
1.BEYOND THE JUNGLE (there’s something)
2.MOON HOTEL

Side B
1.DEATH A GOOD ADVISER
2. NUMBERS
3.WHEN THE SKY FALLS

DISC 2
Side C
1.MOVING WATER (GET HOT, GET WET)
2.SLACK BABY SLACK

Side D
1.THUNDER ISLAND
2.SPACE COWBOY
3.VOICES

Living Room (faitiche 28) is the third solo album by Roméo Poirier and, following his much praised Hotel Nota, his debut for Faitiche. The French musician and producer transforms the layering of different times into a free-flowing pulse that sounds both nostalgic and mysteriously ahistorical. Poirier takes music seriously as a time-based art – not just in the sense of duration, but also in the way time is refracted into autobiographical experience, historical dimensions and stages of evolution. By immersing and reflecting himself in these different layers, he creates a succession of new balances between various tempos, iterations and developments. Poirier’s music emerges from a continual questioning and reformulation of his own oeuvre and thus of his own past, drawing on an ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops. “I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process,” he explains: “The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented.” Originally a drummer, Poirier connects his various sources almost without a clearly identifiable beat. He prefers an organic pulse, mutable like the human sense of time and its fluidity. The aquatic feel of certain tracks on Living Room is no coincidence: among other devices, he uses a waterproof loudspeaker and a hydrophone to play back and rerecord tracks in the bathtub. Drawing on a sample collection assembled by his father, also a musician, the human voice enters Poirier’s music for the first time. But it remains free of overly unambiguous signifiers. Besides its link to time, the fascinating thing about music is that it has meaning without needing to be decoded. Living Room goes back to the private but universal origin of human experience: “I liked the idea that a possible quest for a musician could be echoing the first encounter we had with language, in a prenatal state: its prosody, melody and tones, without being cluttered with meaning.”

Léonore Boulanger studied drama, experimental jazz improvisation and Persian music in Paris. Her music reflects her wide interest in African folk and in composers such as George Crumb, Teiji Ito, Harry Partch and singer Meredith Monk. For their fifth album, Un Lièvre Etait un Très Cher Baiser Léonore Boulanger and Jean-Daniel Botta with percussionist Laurent Sériès compose and decompose a set of fragments of the outsider art poetry of Ernst Herbeck from Gugging center in Austria. Small formats for the movement, singed in German as in a Kindergarten Krautrock: imaginary folk, music boxes, r'n'b medievalism, motets and futuristic madrigals set up like hopscotches, Byzantine mathematics.

Eight distinguished artists wrote and recorded original pieces for this album which joins some dots between vintage, experimental & new ambient, and pays tribute to the relaunched Made To Measure composers’ series

Featuring, by order of appearance:

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, the American modular synth wizard (US)

Christina Vantzou, the Greek-American orchestral composer (US/GR)

Stubbleman aka maverick ambient composer Pascal Gabriel (UK/BE), with Norwegian trumpet player Nils Petter Molvær (NO)

Lucrecia Dalt (COL) + Camille Mandoki (MX) + Matias Aguayo (CL/DE), in a special collaboration

Mary Lattimore, the celestial experimental ambient harpist (US)

Inne Eysermans, the front person from Belgian indie band Amatorski (BE)

Félicia Atkinson, the French experimental musician & visual artist (FR)

Benjamin Lew & Steven Brown (BE/US), with their first collab in over three decades

All tracks were made to measure for this album, and revolve around the loose idea of wordless fiction.

Aside from being such a seductive, fascinating collection of tracks and moods, the album is also modestly aiming at joining dots between certain classic ambient composers (represented here by Benjamin Lew & Steven Brown and Stubbleman, whose work has previously appeared in the Made To Measure series), artists who approach experimental ambient from their pop or club background (Lucrecia Dalt, Inne Eysermans, Matias Aguayo), and eminent exponents of the great new generation of ambient music composers (Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Christina Vantzou, Mary Lattimore, Félicia Atkinson).

The cover of Fictions is a reproduction of a painting by renowned Belgian artist Angel Vergara Santiago (two of his paintings were already featured on covers of early Made To Measure volumes, back in the 1980s).

'Fictions' was curated by Marc Hollander.

Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisation with the environment -- acoustics affected by the architecture, temperature, humidity, and the human presence. For more than ten years, Sauvage has been investigating the sound and visual properties of water in different states, as well as those of ceramics, combined with electronics. Water drops, waves, and bubbles are some of the elements she has been playing with to generate the fluid timbre. Since around 2010, hydrophonic feedback has been an obsession -- an acoustic phenomenon that requires fine tuning depending on the amount of water, a subtle volume control, and interaction with the acoustic space. "Calligraphy" was recorded in a genuine echo chamber, with about ten second reverbs, situated in a former textile factory. Like an endless exercise to draw perfect curves and forms floating in the air, the subaquatic feedback frequencies are pitch-bended with the mass of water sculpted by a hand changing its quantity. "Fortune Biscuit" is about the singing bubbles emitted from the pieces of "biscuit" (porous terra-cotta). Depending on the texture of the surface, each biscuit makes different sound. "Clepsydra" (meaning "water clock") features Sauvage's classical technique, a random percussion with dripping water. Sauvage tunes the waterbowls by adding and removing water, making flowing glissando, to find the balance point in ever-changing tonalities. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. However, slowness dominates throughout the album as a result of favoring the full resonance of the instrument. Hydromancy is a method of divination by means of water. Unpredictable bubbles and water ripples become oracles. Evaporation and acoustic space constantly play a chance operation. All the tracks were live-recorded without electronic effects or editing. Recorded during night or very early in the morning, and the whole album is to be listened to during that period of a day. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. CD version comes in a digipak; Edition of 1000.

James Rushford tops over a decade of solo and collaboratibve work with Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang on this fathoms-deep, psychedelic treat, a next-level arrangement of microtonal drone, decaying concréte fuzz and windswept, somber melancholia recorded for the Shelter Press label.

James Rushford impressed earlier this year with his excellent Black Truffle collab with Will Guthrie "Real Real World", and he here heads further into the nether-realm on 'Lakes From The Louvers’, an album that draws its inspiration from the interplay of shadow and light he observed on the surface of the lake and through his window while at an artist residency at La Becque on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Rushford's detailed sound particles and concrète world-building echo the tantalising shimmer of light on water, with amplified movements, synthesized squawks, pings and harp notes rippling across the length of each track. It’s music that accurately represents the landscape but is far from ambient - instead Rushford sculpts soundscapes that demand patient, attentive listening. 

The slow-moving, deliberate processes that Rushford has been honing over the last 15 years betray a sensitive ear, swerving pretentious, exclusionary art for arts sake nonsense. This is electro-acoustic experimentation with a beating heart, designed to trigger thought and self reflection. Just clap yr ears around 'Hyaline Apples' as it melts buzzing clouds of synth into jagged harp plucks and woodblock percussion, or standout track 'The Bise' and its disquieting haze of microtonal bliss. When the album comes to a satisfying close on 'Dents Du Midi', it feels like the finale of a muticolored odyssey, as tangled synth notes fold in on themselves like an MC Escher painting. Futuristic and ancient, 'Lakes From The Louvers' is a breathtaking album that unspools with the patience it no doubt took to create.

This is one of the best long-lost treasure from the 80s – and it's one long composition filled with raw sounds from the jungle, natural objects and electronic treatment. The idea to evoke a deep journey in the Amazon rainforest has affected various musicians in the history of popular and experimental music, but comparing to other works this rare Amazonia 6891, released only on cassette in 1986, appears as totally original and extreme in his conception. Here, the interest in ethnomusicology of the expert Walter Maioli (mind of Aktuala and Futuro Antico projects) is linked to a precise and comprehensive ecological, botanical, ethological and ethnographic perspective. In fact, starting from the sound recording of the ethnographer Pit Piccinelli's collection of natural objects, the collected material for this work is re-elaborate in different times by the anthropologist and electronic pioneer Fred Gales and by Maioli him-self. The result of this multi-disciplinary approach its 'a long concrete poem of plant organisms, fields recordings of verses and calls of tropical animals futuristically mixed with electronic sounds, as already happened for the great experimental trials of Futuro Antico and Ariel Kalma's Osmose. Listen this imaginative collage look like to entering in a precious cabinet of antiquities and curiosity whose wonders of multi-coloured cellular fragments are shaped in the synthesis of a single universal sound matter. The merger between the wild jungle, the mysterious voices of the Indians and the oscillation of the electronic waves creates a spasmodic tension between amazing and heavenly moments that leaked also obscure paths and alien sequences. So, Amazonia 6891 it's a magic trip into the unknown wild, into abyss of creation of kaleidoscopic floras and faunas, simply a proposal for a synesthetic experience and multi-sensory.

After a 19-year hiatus, Duster came back with their S/T chef-d'oeuvre in 2019. Recorded in band member Clay Parton’s garage (aka Low Earth Orbit), the record bears all the hallmarks of the band’s early work: gaunt basslines, spindly guitars, and melancholy lyrics that lurk in the background.

Jon K and Elle Andrews’ MAL imprint returns with a new LP from one of the London experimental underground's best kept secrets, Rory Salter aka Malvern Brume. His music is rare, eccentric and mysterious - somewhere between Coil's bleak ritual magick and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's most experimental, minimal fringes. Malvern Brume operates just beneath the radar, occasionally turning up at Café OTO lineups and on a smattering of releases for Low Company, Alter, Infant Tree and Kasual Plastik - but he’s never one to shout too loudly about his work. ‘Body Traffic’ is his most interesting set to date, laying bare a process melting found sounds, field recordings and spoken word into throbbing, pulsing rhythms. It’s an evocation of a fraught mindset during the early weeks of lockdown in 2020; sequestered in his flat next to a trainline, the infrasonic - and more audible - rumbles of rolling stock and a nagging sense of dread infecting his ambiguously discomfiting recordings. Operating in a headspace that values world-building and vivid, visual emotionality, Salter’s careful melodies are familiar - the distant, weeping melancholia of 1970s British TV hangs off the recordings like net curtains, and his atmosphere loops into experiments that weave through bare traces of industrial music, blank-faced electro pop, and hedonistic Brummie techno, all reduced to a cinder. The mood is set on the bellyaching resonance and crawling walls of the title tune, while 'Through Beaked Fog Horns' is drowned beneath morning mists: lopsided synth drones choke and drift, percussion mutates into inebriated bubbles, and tape-f*cked environmental whirrs create an atmosphere that’s hard to decipher in one take. ‘Moss Spines Clenched’ follows cryptic stains on peeling flocking, and the icy creep of ‘Tense Branches Waver’ quivers beyond a cracked windowpane. The artist’s voice appears from beneath a cardboard box fort in the imaginary world of ‘Cornered Into Sleat’ as a distant drum beats out a marching thud and traffic squeals are sculpted into chirpy whistles, before ‘Bri Dun’ resolves the eerie tension in an OOBE-like ascent above the dado-rail and across the tracks, watching himself fade into a dissociative bliss. "All chatter falls quiet…” Salter murmurs thru saturation and white noise. It’s a sound that’s gonna stick with us for a while.

A deeply confounding trip into the sublime from master of contextual dream-weaving Nozomu Matsumoto on perhaps his most heart-piercingly beautiful work to date, including a 13 minute choral section that might just be the most stunning piece of pseudo-classical/liturgical alchemy we’ve heard all year. Huge recommendation for followers/lovers of Kara-Lis Coverdale, Ryan Trecartin or Mica Levi’s ‘Zola’ score Leading on from his ’Remain Calm’ album to accompany visual components by regular collaborator Nile Koetting, ‘Immunotherapy’ offers therapeutic solace through a personalised form of Japanese environmental music. A conceptual continuation of themes explored on 2018’s ‘Climatotherapy’ and 2020’s ‘Sustainable Hours’; Nozomu’s 3rd solo vinyl release reprises his uncanny ability to evoke a reflective headspace with a blend of classical ambient tropes, text-to-speech synthesis, and a contemporary cinematic vernacular that’s both nuanced and moving. In 2022, against the backdrop of global warfare, a pandemic, and ecological collapse, Nozomu’s work grasps the nettle with a sober lucidity to make time and space for his, and your, wellbeing. ‘Immunotherapy’ carefully evokes its own temporality and atmospheric conditions via a grandiose but intimate palette of strings, keys, blissed chorales, and electronic webbing which provide the bed for narration by Amazon’s vocaloid, Polly. The results create an unusual duality - a human/inhuman intimacy rooted in some uncertain semi-robotic near-future that references the original ‘80s era of classic Japanese ambient music, which itself emerged as a soothing response to the headlong rush of a technologically enhanced/enchanted society. Across six parts in 22 minutes, ‘Immunotherapy’ resolves from the initial inset of a panic attack in public, via passages reflecting on “diseases of affluence” thru to spine freezing synth pads and an extraordinary denouement of emotive Koto and shearing synthesis on ‘Vertigo’ before entering a final state of blissed stasis on that closing 13 minute ‘Filippo Pacini’ section - a haunting ode to the c.19th Italian anatomist that uncannily reminds us of Kara-Lis Coverdale’s collaboration with Yasuaki Shimizu - a sound that feels all-too-human despite it’s synthetic contours. A whirlwind of emotion, right on the cusp of bliss and melancholia.

Long playing second release by the ever busy RS Produções, showcasing an update of the crew's particularly moody dance beats. Their debut "Bagdad Style" featured only the main core of Narciso and Nuno Beats but RS is expanded with Farucox for this album, adding more oblique ryhthms to the whole. The crew seems to be happy the bleakest and most stressful days of COVID are past them, celebrating the fact with a self-evident title and the opening prayer by Narciso, redirecting God's blessings to the whole family of RS DJs and producers. What we experience on the 13 tracks (including interludes) is a burst of energy. If not exactly extroverted, it communicates a commitment to the purest strain of batida and, for those able to detect hidden feelings, this music might convey some melancholic undertones true to this part of the world. Beats and off-beats invite your most abstract dance moves and even the album´s most melodic piece is "headless" (Farucox's spacey afro house "Sem Cabeça"). The slow moving tarraxos are uncompromising but never emotionally detached. "Bolor" by Narciso might be the most demanding moment here, with so many crashing elements that, when reviewing the listening experience, we feel a direct connection to a very unique underground expression of dance music. A good part of its power resides in the dislocation of our senses to a different tuning and the consequent opening up of possibilities. This means access to different territories, vibes and points of view. The idealized way of the world.

Before his prolific activity in the field of music therapy, Agostino Nirodh Fortini also embarked on his own path in electronic music. In the early eighties he was a close collaborator of Walter Maioli and Fred Gales, at the time of the pioneering label Sound Reporters. “Suoni Immaginari”, released only privately on cassette in 1988, contains a wide range of keyboards and lots of ethnic field recordings assembled with an absolutely modern praxis ahead of its time. Nirodh imagines his planetary odysseys as a complex of harmonic devices, nebula storms, glassy explosions and gravity-free falls. His operational horizon reflects further cultural ideas and suggestions; not only the artifice between natural sounds and the programmed machine but also the intrusion of arabesque dreams and jungles contaminated by invading insects and mad pipers. These are spectral symphonies which can have analogies with the fourth world of Hassell and Eno.

A new ship of fools sails on Bolombia lands! These strange people seem to celebrate the whole jazz universe and african idioms, but they've never been in Africa. The great continent, more than physical, is a mental place of encounter and psychedelic skids. Neurotic and schizoid sorcerers, a furious wind drags them towards the total effervescence of the groove: an unprecedented cauldron of dangerous substances, hybrid styles and influences mixed with secret recipe. Their music is an explosive bubble of expressions, a feverish, impulsive and unstoppable ritual. A cosmic attitude, such as Heliocentrics or Embryo, marries the majestic and floating sounds of synths and psych organs, acidified by toxic dub sparks and deadly funk forays. A crazy horn section travels without maps from Sun-Ra and Ethiopian echoes, hard-bop reminiscenses, to sudden and virulent Balkanisms, making this soup an indecipherable combination of flavors.

This is a masterpiece that throws a huge stone into the re-evaluation of the Italian underground scene! Recorded from 1986 to 1989 by Walter Maioli, a solitary artist / flute player from famous Italian groups such as Aktuala, Art Of Primitive Sound, Futuro Antico and Gruppo Afro Mediterraneo, and a music therapist named Agostino Nirodh Fortini. The unreleased album that had been released has been unearthed and released by Black Sweat, a famous label that digs into the depths of the Italian underground scene! This work was born after an endless quest for psychoacoustics and botany, and is a super masterpiece alongside the phantom masterpiece "AMAZONIA 6891" that was reissued in 2016. It is already an overwhelming masterpiece from the opening song where the solitary meditation drone sound that projects the appearance of vegetation in the natural world and its freshness as it is as a fill record material is amplified infinitely. A beauty that calms the mind and calms down in the latter half, which depicts the natural beauty of water and develops in a healing and ambient manner. The sound that can be heard cyclically is also an index for all people, pointing to what humans should be. Includes a 4-page insert. Limited to 500 sheets.

Based in the Brazilian capital of São Paulo, the TORMENTA collective has long offered an alternative vision of the city's rich and colorful musical heritage. Operating as an ongoing series of DIY parties, creative agency and record label, TORMENTA has welcomed challenging sounds into São Paulo and released music from a cross section of Brazilian artists, including Fkoff1963, 177th & Digestivo. Their musical output is unrestrained: pop edits and unhinged hard dance rubs against errated heavy metal and lifted ambient drone. Anything's possible, as long as there's a social conscience and a middle finger to expectation. In 2019, TORMENTA put together a short film for the online edition of Nyege Nyege Festival. Since the crew is made up of obsessive horror movie fans, the direction was clear. "O Som do Labirinto" (The Labyrinth's Sound), is a terrifying and psychedelic audiovisual experience that's centered around a journalist attempting to examine a series of mysterious gatherings. Casting a side-eye to VICE's notorious series of fish out of water documentaries, the film drags its protagonist to hell through a series of grueling mental trials, all accompanied by TORMENTA's bloody toolbox of tortuous sounds. This full-length soundtrack finds the collective exposing their deep horror movie knowledge and finally flexing their film score muscle. The crew's ragged club DNA is still present, but mainlined into a Frankenstein's monster of John Carpenter synths, haunted piano loops and gruesome Lustmord-esque dark ambient drones. Alada's 'Running' straps a familiar hoover bass to bloodcurdling low-end rumbles and sparse, propulsive kicks; MTMA's 'O Pesadelo' sounds like broken clocks and music boxes at the "Evil Dead" cabin; 177th's 'Together' is a nightmarish beatless rave anthem that's like Lorenzo Senni on a bad trip; and Bruxax's 'Scream' is a full-on sludge metal freak-out that could sit alongside a Rob Zombie movie. The "O Som Do Labirinto OST" is Brazilian experimental club music in corpse paint holding a jack-o-lantern and weilding a bloody knife. Be afraid.

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has shared a new single, 'Someone Close' which is out now via Ninja Tune.

Shepherd has also today announced that 'Someone Close' will be released on vinyl alongside the three other new tracks he's shared this year: 'Grammar', 'Vocoder' and 'Problems'. All four will be available on limited vinyl for the first time on 16 December.

'Grammar', 'Vocoder' and 'Problems' were met with widespread praise including a Best New Track from Pitchfork and a glowing review from Resident Advisor describing Shepherd as "one of electronic music's undisputed MVPs". 'Someone Close' changes track completely, something Shepherd has done effortlessly across his career, capping off a run of releases that have showcased the many strings to his bow yet still holds together seamlessly.

Following a summer of festival sets at Glastonbury, Coachella and Field Day, this Autumn/Winter Shepherd will take things back indoors. With an upcoming show on an incredible bill from The Warehouse Project he'll follow up with a marathon open-to- close set at London’s brand new 25,000 square-foot club HERE on New Year’s Day 2023.

From "Pressure Sounds", a prestigious label known for its archival reissues of precious and high-quality reggae/dub sound sources, a collection of treasured recordings by his beloved disciple Patrick Andy, produced by Yabby Yu, has appeared. The work is based on an unreleased treasured tape compiled by Vivian Yabby Yu Jackson, The Best Of Patrick Andy. This treasured tape contains three previously unreleased tracks, one previously unreleased dub, and stereo mixes of several singles previously only available in mono. "Living In Mount Zion" and "You Don't Want Me" were only monaural on previous 7-inch releases, but this album is completely stereo, featuring Yabby You's unique horn and rhythm track panning. He also showed a production trick to switch left and right. A precious collection of treasured sound sources created by an encounter between a wonderful singer and a legendary producer.

Over the 23 years since Loren Connors’ Airs was first published, it has drawn a thick circle of fans. Gently recorded to cassette tape in 1999, (with wonderfully subtle multi-tracking), Airs is comprised of a series of brief electronic guitar poems. Intimately composed with the patience and purposeful hesitation we have reverently come to expect from Connors. Lyrical melodies recur in different forms throughout the LP, as shifting figures in a dream. Shadowy and sunken, the tone evokes an overcast seascape. The album feels singular; woven along as one flowing piece. 

Airs is perhaps the most approachable and beautiful in all of Connors’ catalog, seducing strangers and familiars just the same. Forlorn wonderment; a human quality that makes this such an enchanting record. It is the humble simplicity and the directness of the guitar inflection that conveys such truth. The stark grace of Connors’ playing resonates here for all to embrace.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of Recital, we present Autumn Fair. A group LP comprised of 44 guest players (full list below), curated and edited together by Sean McCann. Autumn Fair aptly embodies the feeling of Recital as a record label; the infusion of abstract sound art and sentimental beauty – performed by both younger and older generations of artists. Oren Ambarchi - guitar, Ed Atkins - paper shredder, Jason Bannon - family, Derek Baron - keyboard, Karla Borecky - upright piano, Andrew Chalk - guitar, crys cole - birds, Loren Connors - guitar, Philip Corner - grand piano, Maxwell August Croy - whistle, Sarah Davachi - electronics, Aaron Dilloway - SFX, Delphine Dora - voice, Giovanni Fontana - voice, Scott Foust - trumpet, Peter Friel - impression, Malcolm Green - camera, Judith Hamann - cello / voice, Mark Harwood - speech, Forest Juziuk - voice, Johnny Kay - tapping, Kajsa Lindgren - hydrophone, Rob Magill - guitar, Lia Mazzari - whip, Molly McCann - flute, Sean McCann - editing / voice, Nour Mobarak - voice sampler, Azikiwe Mohammed - interview, Charlie Morrow - MIDI piano, Kiera Mulhern - SFX, Zachary Paul - violin, claire rousay - SFX, Michel Samson - violin, Troy Schafer - strings, Eric Schmid - tone generator, Ben Schumacher - SFX, Tom James Scott - keyboard / SFX, Asha Sheshadri - reading, Patrick Shiroishi - winds, Sydney Spann - voice, Matthew Sullivan - instruments, Flora Sullivan-Kelly - percussion, Connor Tomaka - SFX / synth, Alex Twomey - upright piano. I wont go into too much detail on the album itself, but after many twists and turns, the album concludes with “Recital Program,” an intense track that manically collages two-second excerpts from every Recital album to date. I extend a sincere ‘thank you’ for all the incredible support for Recital over the past decade.

Smoke Point is a duo composed of Brian Foote (Peak Oil, Leech, Kranky) and Sage Caswell (Spring Theory). With their self-titled debut LP on Geographic North, the Los Angeles-based duo takes a captivating cruise through heady ambient drifts and ruthlessly rhythmic loop dreams. Foote and Caswell first teamed up to create a series of improvisational atmospherics throughout a multi-room art gallery. The pair conceived of a sprawling, dynamic experience with tones, rhythms, and textures that varied from room to room, yet were inextricably tuned and melded together. Visitors could serve as a sort of human crossfader, moving through the gallery and dialing up or down aural aspects as they pleased. And although the collaboration came together to create music for a specific physical space, the concept was never fully realized until what is now the duo’s first record. Smoke Point brings five extended, cruise-controlled exercises that calmly violate the Venn diagram's overlap between boundless dance music and unfathomable ambiance. But beyond the boundaries of an album as a set of songs, Foote and Caswell cracked things wide open and recontextualized the album as an actual DJ tool onto itself; ambient leaning and melodically focused. To achieve this, Smoke Point offers a bounty of loops in the form of endless locked grooves on the vinyl edition and brief but equally utilitarian snippets on the digital edition of the LP.

Andrew Chalk is known for his work on the legendary project Mirror (1999-2004) with Christoph Heemann, and is a master of building drones from England. The long-awaited analog reissue of the extremely rare work "Higan/Sad Distribution", which was voluntarily released in 2016 as a limited edition cassette of 100 copies and sold out immediately.

Hailing from Łódź, Poland, Justyna Banaszczyk aka FOQL was raised in the post-industrial decay of the city beloved by David Lynch for its abundant, knackered architecture (think ‘Eraserhead’, or run go check his warehouse photo studies). ‘Wehikuł’ translating to ‘Vehicle’, echoes its provenance and dark surreality across eight cuts of intricate post-techno pulses webbed with brooding synths that lend a fine new stripe of influence to MAL’s unpredictable ‘Rebel Music’ agenda, perfectly in step with its off-road vectors.

A long-awaited repress of Detroit's H-Fusion's 2019 2LP masterpiece, which has been featured on Theo Parrish's Sound Signature and Derrick May's Transmat. The long-awaited repress! In the midst of the rave techno frenzy, Urban Tribe, Omar-S, Aaron Dilloway, and The Automatic Group mingle to create a psychotic, sagging monster of a record. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering. Limited to 500 copies.