MUSIC

A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is a collection of nine solo piano works that explore resistance, resonance, and space with a distinctive spectral sensitivity. These pieces are nocturnes, written deep in conservation in Winter, in a small rural studio in Valens, Canada. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is the follow-up to From Where You Came that was released in May and earned a RA Recommend and The Guardian’s Experimental Album of the Month calling it a "quiet ecstasy from a composer without boundaries".

Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts is the definitive recorded collection of living Chicago DIY legend, Dr. Charles Joseph Smith. Born on Chicago's southside in 1970, Smith is a lifelong resident of the Beverly neighborhood who went on to earn 3 degrees in piano (Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate) and perform as a concert pianist in 5 countries (USA, Italy, Germany, France and Hungary). The album also marks the first archival release from Chicago’s Sooper Records.

All of the music here is being made widely available for the first time. This 90-minute collection is compiled from 30 years of Charles’ self-released original music spanning concert piano, electroacoustic experimentation, electronic beats, free improvisation, and two instrumental sketches of his evolving sci-fi opera, War of the Martian Ghosts (a 2023 electronic realization, and a 2018 piano realization). This double Vinyl / Triple CD Collector’s Edition comes with an extensive Insert Booklet containing 9000 words including poetry, interviews, quotes, 30 archival photographs, and extensive liner notes on the life and work of Charles Joseph Smith written by Sooper co-founder Glenn Curran (edited by Sadie Dupuis). This is a piece of Chicago music history.

Dr. Charles Joseph Smith’s remarkable story begins with a mute child’s gift for music, and the purposeful way he nurtured this talent to become both life practice and raison d'être. Charles recounts this artistic journey in his autobiography, The 88 Keys that Opened Doors, a self-published book that chronicles a life in which music was (and still is) the primary key to overcoming immense challenges posed by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

His career as a musician starts in the church, reaches into the international concert piano circuit, and eventually settles to bear strange fruit in Chicago’s experimental underground. Along the way, Charles Joseph Smith’s compositional voice absorbed and metabolized popular music spanning pop to jazz, the gospel of the church, the canon of the classical conservatory, modern dance scores, and the rule-shattering experimentalism of his city’s DIY subculture, where he has been a mainstay for over 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, Charles has been performing, dancing, and selling his self-published musical and written works in person, often at the local shows he frequents. He is known around Chicago as a living symbol of the power of music, and of the beloved spirit of community at the heart of DIY. This is the definitive collection of his original recordings—though it would be impossible to ever encompass the galaxies of music, poetry, and prose penned by the prolific Dr. Charles Joseph Smith.

Félicia Atkinson’s Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) is approached as a meditation, not as meditative music, but as a reflection on the art of creation: how to inhabit one’s creation, how to convey it, domesticate it and live with it. Drawing inspiration from the artist Georgia O’ Keeffe, both in her work as a painter and in the houses in which she lived in New Mexico, and even in the landscapes that surround them, Félicia Atkinson has composed a piece that evokes and celebrates, in a poetic and holistic way, the mystery of art, the somnambulic oscillation that accompanies the act of creating. Blending fragmentary voices, islands of piano, electronic textures and patterns, and field recordings, Félicia Atkinson’s music is sincere and inspired, a meditation, then, but also a lesson we sometimes forget: being an artist is not an activity, even less a profession, it’s a singular way of approaching the world and, in so doing, densifying it. « Ni envers ni endroit que cette roche brûlante (Pour Georgia O’Keeffe) », de Félicia Atkinson, s’aborde comme une méditation, non pas comme une musique méditative, mais bien comme une réflexion autour de l’art de créer ; comment habiter sa création, comment la porter, la domestiquer et vivre avec. En puisant son inspiration chez l’artiste Georgia O’ Keeffe, à la fois dans son travail de peintre, mais également dans les maisons dans lesquelles elle a vécu, au Nouveau-Mexique, ou même dans les paysages qui les environnent, Félicia Atkinson compose ici une pièce qui évoque et célèbre, de manière poétique et holistique, le mystère de l’art, le balancement somnambulique qui accompagne l’acte de créer. Mêlant voix fragmentaire, îlots de piano, textures et trames électroniques ou encore enregistrements de terrain, la musique que nous offre Félicia Atkinson est une musique sincère et inspirée, une méditation, donc, mais aussi une leçon qu’on oublie parfois : être artiste, ce n’est pas une activité, encore moins une profession, c’est une façon singulière d’aborder le monde et, par là même, de le densifier. — Richard Chartier’s music takes up residence at the frontiers of the audible, on the edge where sound diffracts into an inter-dimensionality where sounds, space, listening and silence recombine in an arborescence of becomings that present themselves to us and then disappear. The space-time in which Richard Chartier’s music unfolds is a stretched space-time, barely emerging in the world of sound. The delicacy, precision and accuracy of the composition Recurrence.Expansion lies precisely in this dialogue between a shape that is exposed and developed in an inspired and masterful way, and the sonic biotope in which this shape develops. It is from such an encounter that the singularity of Richard Chartier’s music emerges, music of attentive listening, but also sensitive, inhabited music, a music of discreet metamorphosis. La musique de Richard Chartier se loge aux frontières de l’audible, dans cette lisière où le son se diffracte dans une inter-dimensionalité où les sons, l’espace sonores, l’écoute et le silence se recombinent en une arborescence de devenirs qui se présentent à nous et disparaissent. L’espace-temps dans lequel se déploie la musique de Richard Chartier est un espace-temps étiré, affleurant à peine dans le monde sonore. La délicatesse, la précision et la justesse de la composition Recurrence.Expansion réside précisément dans ce dialogue entre une forme exposée, déclinée, de manière inspirée et maitrisée, et le biotope sonore dans lequel cette forme se développe. C’est d’une telle rencontre qu’émerge la singularité de la musique de Richard Chartier, musique d’écoute attentive, mais également musique sensible, habitée, une musique des métamorphoses discrètes. —Francois J. Bonnet, Paris, March 2023

MINOS CIRCUIT Minos Circuit is the resonance of a double exploration, that of an instrument, the bassoon - an instrument dear to Dafne Vicente-Sandoval - and that of a listening, of a gaze, almost. The first exploration deconstructs the instrument, tearing it apart, reducing it to an archipelago of sound bodies stimulated by an electro-acoustic device that generates feedback and infiltrates each part of the bassoon, in order to carry out a methodical, systematic examination. The second exploration is the inner one of attention and listening, the one that measures, at each moment, the necessity or not of an intervention in the very act of the musical work, of this subtle balance that is established between composition and observation, between action and contemplation. Minos Circuit est la mise en résonance d’une exploration double, celle d’un instrument, le basson — instrument cher à Dafne Vicente-Sandoval — et celle d’une écoute, d’un regard, presque. La première exploration déconstruit l’instrument, le met en pièce, le réduisant en un archipel de corps sonores stimulés par un dispositif électroacoustique générateurs de larsens qui vont s’infiltrer dans chacune des parties du basson, pour en faire l’examen méthodique, systématique. La seconde exploration, c’est celle, intérieure, de l’attention et de l’écoute, celle qui mesure, à chaque instant, la nécessité ou non d’une intervention dans l’agir même de l’œuvre, de cette bascule subtile qui s’établit entre composition et observation, entre action et contemplation. — TRANSFIGURATION 4 Both a “meditation on musical ruins” and “a study of the material of Richard Strauss’s Metamorfosen”, Transfiguration 4 works on the musical fragment as an expressive and poetic possibility that can be deployed below or beyond simple musical syntax, a syntax that is still too often equated with music itself. What Lars Petter Hagen highlights in this remarkable work is that the power of music lies at its fringes, that is, at the edge of its own disappearance. Transfiguration 4 floats in a particularly moving way in these troubled lands, where nothing is ever resolved, and where everything, however, is suspended, like a stream of blurred memories that memory would summon to form an intuition. A musical intuition. A la fois « méditation sur les ruines musicales » et « étude du matériau de Metamorfosen de Richard Strauss », Transfiguration 4 travaille le fragment musical comme possibilité expressive, poétique, pouvant se déployer en-deçà ou au-delà de la simple syntaxe musicale, syntaxe encore trop souvent assimilée à la musique même. Ce que met en lumière Lars Petter Hagen dans cette œuvre remarquable, c’est que la puissance de la musique se situe à ses franges, c’est-à-dire aux lisières de sa propre disparition. Transfiguration 4 flotte de manière particulièrement émouvante dans ces contrées troubles, où rien jamais ne se résout, et où tout, pourtant, se suspend, comme un flux de souvenirs flous que la mémoire convoquerait pour former une intuition. Une intuition musicale.

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that burrows deep inside. It disorientates and teases, without malice. Its beauty lies in gentle projections, which, though subtle, leave deep impressions, like the wings of a nocturnal moth reflecting dark light. Its path, too, is unpredictable, but such disorientation is not a reflection of chaos. Instead, a mysterious intention appears through an imperious unfolding - its logic escapes us, but nevertheless captivates us. It is the story of a becoming of forms, as well as of their fading away and their appearance as a disappearance . Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher’s work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one. These works, each with their own agenda, evolve with grace and inspiration in their exploration of vast sound worlds, and it is with great pride that we present them in the new collection. Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier 
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

Jon Porras possesses a rare acuity for locating the pulse of a sonic landscape and carving out its emotional core. His work has long drawn from the friction of organic forms and electronic processing, but Achlys finds him moving further into texture, erosion, and weight. This is music steeped in collapse—not as spectacle, but as slow process. These pieces do not unfold, they gather. Guitar, sub-bass, modular synthesis, and processed noise accumulate like sediment, layering into compositions that move more like weather systems than traditional songs.Framed around the language of filmmaking, Achlys invokes overlapping frames, blurred edits, and disjunctive pacing. Porras cites the textural depth of the film 'El Mar La Mar' as a key influence, particularly its use of layered sound to evoke emotional density. The album navigates a sequence of fractured sonic vignettes: crumbling environments, monumental silence, and landscapes both real and internal. Structure becomes permeable. Each piece gestures toward both presence and disappearance.Central to the record is a tension between form and formlessness. Fingerpicked guitar compositions were written, recorded, and then pushed through modular processing chains, where their original structure became blurred or buried. Often, multiple pieces were written in isolation and layered without synchronization, allowing intentional dissonance to guide the resulting textures. The approach favors drift and friction, with melodies ghosting through blurred intervals, creating tension between memory and distortion.The album begins with "Fields," where faint guitar phrases are immersed in hollow, resonant tones that feel more remembered than played. Warmth flickers at the edges, filtered and remote, like light pushing through soot. On "Holodiscus," elegiac lines drift across a soft undercurrent of dissonance, quietly resisting the pull toward collapse. The title track slips between clarity and distortion, turning harmonic fragments into a shimmering lattice of decay. Throughout the album, sustained tones stretch time into a blur, while processed guitar gestures emerge and recede like echoes from adjoining rooms. Each piece carries an emotional imprint without insisting on direction, leaving behind textures that feel both tactile and unsettled.Much of Achlys was composed during violet mountain storms. Living in a forested elevation high above sea level, Porras describes listening to trees sway under pressure, their movements generating both deep, low-end resonance and fragile, intricate patterns of creaks and rustles. This duality of scale—immense and minute—filters into the record's sonic palette. On "Sea Storm," the low end churns and pulls downward, scattering guitar fragments in its wake. "Before the Rite" swells with abrasive density and distorted harmonics—a moment of near-overwhelm held right at the edge. The sounds remain suspended, refusing to resolve.Achlys moves through a territory of shifting thresholds—where light and shadow, structure and erosion exist side by side without dissolving into opposition. Rather than aiming for clarity of conclusion, the album offers a cyclical form of emergence and erosion. It is sonically dense yet spacious, emotionally resonant but untethered from narrative. Nothing here is fixed. Everything carries the trace of having been something else. While some fragments fade and others linger, all of them shape the atmosphere.

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.

Few years ago, an idea germinated while reading The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. An idea not driven by the narrativity of the book, but by the traces and the aura invoked in it. That was it: an audible auratic journey trough the memories of a place lost in the heights of the swiss mountains.

A century after the events depicted in the book, we went where the story took place, trying to capture the remaining sounds that could have been heard at the time, and the ghosts who might have still wandered around.

Zauberberg is based on these captures, on recordings of the music played by Hans Castorp (the novel’s main character), on acoustic/electronic instrumentation and digital processing. The result is an evokation of time and duration, an exploration of what remains and what is lost, a meditation of the dissolution and persistence of the aura surrounding everything.

Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space. Cellist Leila Bordreuil and organist Kali Malone join in a work of austere, ritualistic presence, where the granularity of air, the vibration of strings, feedback, and subdued sine waves intersect in sculptural form.

Minimal in means yet expansive in effect, the music slowly unfolds like beads on a thread, punctuated by silence and deep breaths. Bellows whistle within feathered string harmonics, interference patterns pulsate throughout the chapel, and the environment itself becomes part of the composition, with ringing church bells and motorcycles passing in the distance.

Performed live in single takes, the music balances patience and intensity, composure and chance. The collaboration reveals new terrain: more tonal and composed than Bordreuil’s work, more textural and raw than Malone’s.

Music for Intersecting Planes is both severe and tender, an elemental convergence of cello and organ that resonates with the timeless intrigue of acoustic phenomena

A discreet but essential figure in the field of musical creation, Horacio Vaggione has been crafting an ambitious, precise and highly significant body of work for over the last fifty years, coupled with a demanding research activity. This disc offers four purely electroacoustic pieces which illustrate, each in their own way, this singular and fascinating grammar developed by Horacio Vaggione, a complex but fertile grammar which establishes a very special relationship between structure and texture, between matter and formula, to create a fascinating musical space, made up of polyphonies and metamorphoses.

In the 1970s, Robert Cahen turned to the burgeoning field of video art, where he became a pioneering artist. He was originally trained in musique concrète, his creative background, and joined the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in 1972. The pieces on this record were composed in the GRM studios between 1971 and 1974. They testify to a lively inspiration and imagination combined with a precocious formal mastery that already carries the seeds of later developments, which the artist cleverly and inventively deployed in the field of visual arts.

« Sphæra » (1984/89), 42’09 « ... this spherical shape being the most perfect of all and the most similar to itself, for he thought similarity to be infinitely more beautiful than dissimilarity. » Platon, Timaeus Between 1984 and 1989, my acousmatic work was focused on processing and merging the four fundamental substances. Each « element » gradually became articulated with the others, thus crystallizing my subjective perception of their materiality. Over the years, helped by the enthusiasm of a Greek friend who propelled me into the Socratic universe, what started out as an exploratory path has become a circular, spherical unity, in which each occurrence simultaneously belongs to one of the four substances as well as the whole. These four sections, of uneven durations, embody the different resonances of each « element » upon my imagination. The movements are ordered compositionally and range from the intangibility of the air to the extreme density of the earth. In Eterea, the dual nature of air, a space for the dissemination of sounds and an environment for mobile masses, shaped the work and the development of its forms. Whether it be the vast expanse of particles as organised movement or the displacement of sources in our three-dimensional perception, ethereal air fills the space and drives the immaterial motions and gestures. Aquatica locates the materiality of water in relation to its amazing extremes: from the drop to the ocean, an extensive journey unfolds through the various phases of the reinvented liquid. Still waters, deadly waters, raging waters follow one another, leading to the aerial fusion of a primordial equilibrium eventually retrieved. Then comes Focolaria and the unsteady fires, the elusive and wild will-o’-the-wisps that open and adorn the gates leading to the depths of the earth. The land of Terra is devoid of atmosphere, a land of matters before the advent of life. The sounds of the original matter merge and evolve into purer forms. The motions trigger progressions towards new equilibriums of forces, the ultimate fusion, the very last attempt, needed for the emergence of life. The sphere is now complete, the world ready for creation… Daniel Teruggi

FRACTALS (1981), 21’26

Composed at the GMVL from December 1979 to September 1981, this work was commissioned by Fnac.

Fractals are mathematical oddities that, when crossing our path, turn the smallest island into an immensity to be explored.
FRACTALS is a series of short studies, all based on the same sound source. Seeking in the sound and its very logic a proposal upon which a construction is elaborated, each Fractal remains open and is a mere fragment of itself.
FRACTALS, music pieces sculpted in four dimensions, are vast microcosms that can only be inhabited by the mind. Each Fractal can be approached from several angles, far, near, etc. Some can be listened to at different speeds, forwards or backwards.
FRACTALS: amorphous and endless music pieces whose centre is everywhere and circumference nowhere.
FRACTALS are available in stereo (34'32), in 8 tracks for concerts, and as "spare parts" (separate mixing tracks open to new combinations).

Brain Fever (2017), 18'00

Wherever you may be in the forest of South India, the Brain Fever bird, together with the Seven Sisters, literally gets into your head. Whether it be early morning, daytime, or nighttime, amidst the stridulations of insects, its song utterly reflects Indian life: sonorous, noisy, insistent, dense, overcrowded, mobile, swarming, frantic, overheated, deprived of rest and sleep.
Brain Fever echoes sonic images caught in the Aurovillian forest, near Pondicherry, and rich fragments of improvisations made in Lyon on analog sound synthesis or feedback devices, the kind I used to do in the first GMVL studios.

Brain Fever is dedicated to Sofia Jannok, a musician and sàmi singer.

Violostries (1963/64), 16'39

Premiered and recorded in April 1965 at the Royan Festival - France, by Devy Erlih (violin) & Bernard Parmegiani (sound projection).

Violostries represents the intersection of several musical research directions, presented as two simultaneous dialogues - composer/performer and instrument/orchestra.

After a short introduction tutti very spatialized:

1. Pulsion/Miroirs: multiplied by itself, the violin is projected into the four corners of the sound space.

2. Jeu de cellules: concertante piece for violin and audio medium, the latter being made up of very tightly woven microsounds.

3. Végétal: slow and invisible development following a continuous time, resulting from an internal and permanent processing of the matter.

Capture éphémère (1967, 1988 version), 11'48

This work was composed in four tracks in 1967 for quadraphonic diffusion.

Remixed in stereo in 1988.

Premiered at the Studio 105 of the Maison de la Radio, Paris, May 1967.

Sounds - noises that circulate as time unfolds - continue to exist despite our recording them.

Breaths, fluttering wings: ephemeral microsonic sounds streaking space, sound scratches, landslides, bounces, vertigo of solid objects falling into an abyssal void, multiple snapshots forever frozen in their fall. As many symbols leave inside us the permanent trace of their ephemeral brushing against our ear.

Some day, a desert, a sound, then never again....

Somewhere, in my head and body something still resonates... resonance, what could be more ephemeral.

La Roue Ferris (1971), 10'45

Premiered at the Festival des chantiers navals, Menton, on August 26, 1971.

Sound projection: Bernard Parmegiani.

La Roue Ferris (Ferris wheel) spins, merging with its own resonance, stubbornly perpetuating its variations. It only sketches a regularly evolving movement around a constant axis. Each of its towers generates thick sonic layers that penetrate each other, producing a very fluid interweaving. The crackling of the origin eventually metamorphoses into sonic threads whose lightness recalls high-altitude clouds, cirrus clouds, haunted by the cries of swifts twirling in the warm air. The wondrous arises and dies off, leaving us with an illusion of duration.

Music Promenade (1964–1969), 20’29


Electroacoustic Music
World premiere for the Théâtre de la musique, March 16, 1970
« Hétéro-Concert »
»


Permanent version for four stand-alone tape recorders. A series of colliding realistic sounds and sonic images. Whilst walking, a man is struck by the violence of his surroundings.
 Nature has disappeared in a whirlwind of warfare and industry in the midst of which he encounters a dying folklore and a lost young girl.

The "Installation" version is used to sonify a place in which walkers are free to choose their musical itinerary.

Unheimlich Schön (1971), 15’40


Musique concrète made in 1971 in the studios of the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden.
Voice: Ilse Mengel.

“How does a young woman breathe when thinking about something else ?”
To be listened to at a low volume.

Mapache presents the first solo album by Tim Bernardes, singer and composer of Brazilian band 0 Terno. A magical Chamber Pop album that can be totally explained with just a word. Beauty. Sao Paulo talented jack-of all trades, Tim Bernardes Recomegar shines exquisitely from head to toe. So, cut off the overheads, turn on a lamp or light a candle, perhaps some incense, and listen to it. Might we suggest starting with “Quis Mudar” a breathtaking folk song punctuated by crystalline eruptions of strings and horns. Bernardes’ voice is truly next level. – J. Steele, Aquarium Drunkard

In the Fall of 2022, Phil Cook found himself living alone in a small home at the edge of field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont. For most of Cook’s life he lived near the hearts of the towns he had called home, near the groan of traffic and hubbub of coffee shops. Such close quarters helped make the gregarious Cook a prolific collaborator, from co-founding Megafaun to working with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and endless others. But Cook’s closest neighbor now was a trailhead, so he went and listened, enraptured first by the stillness and then by the manifold birds. He began leaving his windowsill slightly cracked each night, so that the dawn chorus greeted him. Cook began recording these tangled bird songs, and he slowly joined them. With the sun finally high, Cook would listen to the day’s recordings and improvise in real time on the instrument that remains the first and most steadfast love of his musical life, the piano. When Cook left that cabin after a year, he moved into a home of his own in Durham, with plenty of space for his two boys to play and for something he’d never actually owned—a proper piano. Over the next several months, Cook spent untold hours drilling down on these pieces. During lessons with the Southern gospel great Chuckey Robinson, the pianist had challenged Cook to sustain fewer notes, to stop clouding and crowding his melodies by using the instrument’s pedals as crutches. His music suddenly had more clarity, with the sounds and the feelings they ferried given more room to function. Cook dug into the danger and delight, into the idea that we twist our bodies into knots trying to understand what is best for our hearts. In April 2024 Cook returned to Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley where he was raised. His lifelong friend and bandmate, Justin Vernon, had just finished an overhaul of April Base, the studio compound where Cook has worked on more than a dozen records during the last 15 years. Cook asked Vernon to produce Appalachia Borealis as simply as possible—merely to listen and offer feedback in two extended afternoon sessions, to talk about the right takes and make sure that they’d captured the heart. It, of course, got more complicated, as they experimented with the process. Vernon would add or subtract the bird songs to Cook’s headphones, seeing how they impacted his playing. Or they would route his notes through a massive reverb chamber, Cook responding in gossamer improvisations. Appalachia Borealis is a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, it reflects not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side. You can sometimes still hear the birds whose tune and time helped to inspire so many of these songs. Even when they’re not within earshot, their essence remains.

Limited white vinyl specifications. This is the second solo album since the masterpiece "Recomecar" by Tim Bernardes, the vocalist / guitarist of São Paulo's soul / guitar rock band O Terno, who is attracting attention as the bearer of the new generation of Brazilian music. His father is Maurício Pereira, a musician who is also a member of Os Mulheres Negras, which was also recorded in the Brazilian compi "Outro Tempo: Electronic And Contemporary Music From Brazil 1978-1992" of , and his unusual musical sense is the same. Outstanding in the generation. It has been praised by the original Tropicália, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa and Tom Ze, as well as recent free folk music such as Fleet Foxes and Devendra Banhart from outside Brazil, as well as David Byrne. He also participated in O Terno's 7inch release on in Japan with Shintaro Sakamoto and Devendra Banhart. Love songs, sadness songs, change songs, and inclusive singing voices resonate with emotions and provide healing. Expected work that will be able to enjoy the talent that can be called the flag bearer of this Neutropicaria!

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).

A lingering guitar note. A cushion of a bassline nudging along a hushed cadence unspooling impressionistic poeticism one halting line at a time; the sparse snap of a snare providing punctuation. This is how Boston’s Karate opened their third full-length, 1998’s The Bed Is In The Ocean. Perhaps this was a reaction to the aggressive punk tones that marked their previous album, or maybe they hoped to capture the somnambulant dusk on one of those pristine fall days that make living in a town whose population swells when colleges welcome back students all worthwhile. Then again, Karate never made a point of chasing the same idea twice, and “There Are Ghosts” remains in line with the band’s stylistic intrepidness and unpredictability. Even the group’s lineup appeared constantly in flux. After expanding from a trio to a quartet and employing a dual-guitar attack with 1997’s In Place of Real Insight, founding member Eamonn Vitt hung up his axe to attend medical school. Karate soldiered on as a trio, with mid-stream addition Jeff Goddard’s bass work helping establish a sidewinding path forward through the smoky jazz melodicism and sun-beaten blues brushstrokes that hung in the background of the band’s catalog. In their short time together, Karate helped bolster the national punk ecosystem, a scene in which individual artistic vision was prized but rarely achieved. Their exacting precision and emotive interplay helped recombine the DNA of the dignified grace of slowcore, the hot-and-sweaty atmospherics of the blues, and the high-wire tension of post-hardcore to deliver drawling instrumental curveballs and a furtive riptide climax with a controlled grace on “Outside Is The Drama.” Singer-guitarist Geoff Farina frequently teased out the emotional nuances of each song, his worn-in voice shading in the complexities of his enigmatic lyrics; no matter how difficult it may be to parse his snatched-from-daily-life wisdoms, on The Bed Is In The Ocean Farina sounded like a guy who knew exactly the right thing to tell whoever may be listening. And with Karate’s snaking turns through quasi-punk reveries no one else appeared capable of mustering, it’s comforting to hear it accomplished by a band that knew exactly what they were doing.

With creative and powerful song structures and excellent vocals, this Massachusetts band is definitely one that should not be overlooked. With indie rock grooves containing flavors of emo and jazz, Karate explores beautiful new territory with a passion and energy that flows like a river. From dark and energetic breakdowns like "It's 98, Stop" to passionate stop/start wailers like "New New," In Place of Real Insight shows quite a bit of maturity from their first, self-titled LP. Karate definitely runs through all sorts of emotions in a way unlike most. ~ Blake Butler Mastering specifications at d Studios.

The original is a $$$BIG$$$ ultra-rare record sought after by collectors all over the world! Indian fusion disco jazz masterpiece released in 1982 by Rupa Biswas on a local label in Kolkata, West Bengal, India, featuring traditional instruments such as sarod and tabla. A superb record that falls somewhere between Bollywood and Balearic! The funky and psychedelic sound is dynamically surged by sarod and synthesizer, and the ethnic and bewitching vocal work is excellent. The funky and psychedelic sound with dynamic surges of sarod and synthesizers and the ethnic and bewitching vocal work are excellent. It's no exaggeration to say that this is the pinnacle of frontier grooves. The fact that it was produced by Aashish Khan, a sarod player who is a master of Indian classical music, should not be overlooked. A must-have for prog and psychedelic lovers as well as DJs!

Eccentric Sweet Soul explores a refined corner of soul music that came into focus in the late 1960s and 1970s, running parallel to — but distinct from — the harder, funk-driven sounds dominating the era. Curated and released by Numero Group, the collection captures a style built on warmth, melody and poise, favouring elegance over urgency.

Often described as sweet soul, this sound softened the genre’s edges without losing emotional depth. Arrangements lean towards symphonic ease and lowrider calm, while vocals are intimate and unforced, designed to linger rather than overwhelm. It’s music shaped for slow moments and repeat listens, its appeal undimmed decades on.

The compilation brings together defining voices of the style, including Majestic Arrows, Timothy Wilson, The Exceptional Three, Ujima, Family Connection, Third Generation, Sweet Breeze and The 5 Stepping Stars. Together, they map a lineage that feeds directly into what’s now understood as modern soul: tender, melodic and quietly assured.

"The only boogie record you'll ever need to own."