MUSIC

'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.

Long-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.

“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best
tracks of the past five years transcendent.” (Pitchfork)

'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.

Those improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.

“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.

“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”

What’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.

In the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.

'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'. 

Alabaster DePlume often asks a simple question: what do people need? In his work, at his shows, in his collaborations, the Mancunian singer-saxophonist and poet-philosopher poses this to the people around him. What are people looking for? In recent years, the same reply kept coming up: healing, healing, people need healing. But why, and what does it mean to heal, especially in a world where the very idea is often commodified and sold as a luxury? If people were coming to his music for something so mysterious, he ought to figure it out. Maybe he ought to try some healing himself.

“For a long time, I've always tried to give responsibility for my value to someone else,” DePlume told me on a recent phone call. It seemed he’d become so caught up in the work of forging connections, and thinking about the effects of his work on others, that he’d lost a sense of himself. “I was working on that,” he explained.

This experiment in healing included slowing down, reading, reflecting, and even taking up the practice of jiu-jitsu. DePlume wrote poetry, too, including the book 'Looking for my value: prologue to a blade', seventy pages of verse rooted in its title’s great search, in finding strength of self within a community, alongside meditations on the paradox of the blade. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in the introduction. “Healing is the forming of a whole, and a whole is singular, more itself, as in more one, as in more alone.” A blade could be used to attack, to shave, to sever, but it could also be used to cut oneself loose—in the process of getting free.

“What's the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep,” he told me. “And so what's the opposite of looking for my value? It is knowing my value. It simply is there. My dignity is there. I don't need anyone else to know my dignity, or me, to know it. I know it first. I can't seek it from another. I stand for it.”

Selections from the poetry book ultimately became the lyrics across half of the tracks on 'A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole', DePlume’s latest full-length work for the reliably great International Anthem label: eleven songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism. In sum, it documents his learning of the fact that dignity and self-determination are prerequisites for becoming whole, which is to say, for healing. If a blade were broken it would not serve its purpose; it must be unbroken, it must be whole, to be of use.

In the Alabaster DePlume songbook, the celestial ease of his instrumental tracks can sometimes feel like a trojan horse for a voice that is disarmingly honest about the heaviness of existence. Opener “Oh My Actual Days” is true to form in that sense, with DePlume’s tenor sax and Macie Stewart’s ghostly strings playing together like a slow march towards an inner reckoning, one that’s beautiful because it is true. The punchy and contemplative “Thank You My Pain” makes a rhythmic refrain from his titular lyric, inspired by the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, who urged the importance of listening to one’s own pain. “Hello my little pain, I know you are here,” Nhất Hạnh would say. “I am home to take care of you. I do not want to cover you up with consumption anymore.” While writing A Blade, DePlume “watched loads of him on YouTube.”

Then there’s the gorgeous swell of “Invincibility,” an ode to self-respect that feels a bit like a choir of angels led by a trickster, a group contemplating: how do we live with the forces that seek to destroy us? The whole song feels like a heavy exhale, or like the feeling of reaching the surface after a long while underwater. “If I meet with my feelings, they cannot destroy me,” he told me. “When I allow myself to embody them, physically, then I live through that feeling and I meet with it and I make peace with it and I find that my feeling is me, and I welcome it. It is a sense that I cannot be destroyed by my feeling. I am invincible.”

“Form a V” is the closest DePlume comes to a monologue, and also his song most indebted to his jiu-jitsu practice. “I’ve only been doing it for the past two or three years,” he told me. “But now I don’t know how you get by without it.” The song takes inspiration from a tradition where a whole dojo will stand in the shape of a V, facing just one lone individual, who is then attacked quickly and repeatedly by each of the others. “The title is a challenge to the world,” DePlume explained. “Go on, form a v—I am ready.”

Across the first half of the record, when the sax comes in short phrases, it feels like a highlighter over lines in DePlume’s poetry book. Other times, it plays out like an extension of his voice. “Playing the saxophone feels like singing,” he said. A transfixing run of instrumentals on the second half of the record includes “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity,” an anthem for self-possession. “Believing in yourself feels ridiculous,” he says. “It's ridiculous, but that's what it takes. That's what's required. To stand for yourself is absurd. Let us do the absurd that is standing for ourselves. There is this prayer going on in the background—you can't quite tell what the words are, but it's basically, I'm praying for my sovereign dignity but I don't need to pray for it. It's not going to be given to me. I already have it.”

Where DePlume’s previous material was drawn from collective sessions, improvisation, and editing, A Blade was tightly composed, arranged and produced by DePlume himself. From there, he brought his compositions to a cast of players and co-arrangers, including Macie Stewart (strings), Donna Thompson (backing vocals), and Momoko Gill (strings and backing vocals), for sessions at the collective arts space Total Refreshment Centre, where he has long been involved.

Born Gus Fairbairn, DePlume is a man of many past lives. He played “rock band type music” as a teenager, and started playing improvised music around 2008. He is compelled by how improvising allows him to “put faith in others.” He taught himself the saxophone around the time that he became employed as a support worker assisting men with mental disabilities; he once called playing music with them “one of the best breakthroughs for me as an artist.” His debut as Alabaster DePlume came in May 2012, while he was still living in Manchester. He moved to London in 2015 and took up residency at Total Refreshment Centre, where he was encouraged to put on a monthly concert, leading to the series Peach, releasing a namesake album that year, too. His music, from the start, has been imbued with his politics and values; he was maybe arrested once during a protest with the environmental group Extinction Rebellion. His proper international breakthrough came in 2020 with 'To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1', after nearly a decade of steadily releasing records.

On a phone call in the fall of 2024, we barely speak about any of this though. For at least an hour, we mostly just speak about his recent trip to Palestine, and how could we not? DePlume had traveled to Bethlehem in the spring for a conference hosted by a local Lutheran pastor, before meeting up with musicians from a community arts space, the Wonder Cabinet, and the independent radio station, Radio Alhara. “Palestine is a place where people make records,” he says. “I want to normalize the dignity of that. It's not like, oh, I'm going to make a thing about Palestine. I am just there, and I'm making a thing.”

At the end of 2024, DePlume prefaced A Blade with a collection of recent works: the poetry book and a three-track EP partially recorded in Bethlehem, and in collaboration with Palestinian musicians. There’s “Honeycomb” and “Cremisan,” both recorded during his “Sounds of Places” residency at Wonder Cabinet; “Cremisan” documents the conclusion of a daylong performance presented by Wonder Cabinet and Radio alHara, June 1, 2024, described as “a cry from the Cremisan Valley (Bethlehem, Palestine) to Rafah (Gaza).” The EP’s final recording, “Gifts of Olive,” references the soul-wrenching poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023.

To suggest that dignity is a human right we are all entitled to is to say: by nature of being alive, every human life has worth. Contemplating the very concept of human dignity also raises the daily indignities that are so normalized in a world of suffering. The lack of access to clean water, air, housing, healthcare. Without the basic necessities of life, we cannot know dignity. And how can people know dignity if they are living under a constant state of military attack, if they are living as the target of a genocide?

“The album was written before the genocide started, but I had Palestine on my mind all the time,” DePlume explains. “This question of dignity, sovereignty, and the work of healing. It has a relevance in what's being perpetrated there by the Israeli state, and taking responsibility for my place in that. I pay my taxes here in the United Kingdom—I am contributing to, as a white Englishman, the country that brought the Balfour Declaration, that brought the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that supports and enables the colonization and the settler-colonial project in Palestine. It is my issue, and I have a position where I can speak about it.”

“Dignity” has roots in the Latin dignitatem: worthiness. And instilling the plain truth of every human life’s worth has been a recurring commitment in DePlume’s work. “They can’t use us on one another if we don’t forget we’re precious,” he sang in 2022, summing the emotional core of his 2022 album 'GOLD', concerns of shared humanity that play out into the new works as well.

“We make stories in our lives,” DePlume says. “Oh, I need my story. Oh, something bad happened, and I need to heal upon that. Then I will be healed and all will be good, happily ever after. But no, it is work that needs doing all the time. We all are wounded in our many different ways. And there are degrees of healed, or wounded. Basically, we are either doing one thing or we're doing the other. How do I know I am not destroying myself? I only know that when I am working on healing.” 

Yes, your eyes tell you the truth – this is the first new record by Zero Kama released since 2008 live vinyl! During these 16 years Zoe Dewitt was active with book publishing, Zero Kama and Korpses Katatonic reissues, lectures, scientific research, exhibitions, and rare but bright live shows. However, most of us have forgotten our dreams of seeing new releases of Zero Kama.

Originally, "What is a Body" is the 50-minute background soundtrack for Zoe Dewitt's lecture performance in the anatomical theatre of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in 2015. Exclusively based on samples from "The Secret Eye of LAYLAH" it takes you to the same Zero Kama you always known - dark ritual music with transcendent drones and tribal parts. The music is not to talk about but to listen and disappear in.

Black vinyl, colored vinyl, and the DigiCD. The vinyl comes with a big booklet about the record conception and the lecture by Zoe Dewitt.

Half asleep you hear a guitar echo through the early morning haze, you're so zonked you cant tell if its a dream or if the droney reverb is coming from real life, you sit up, now starting to understand what is afoot. Thats right, its the errant kings of slowcore Duster returning with yet another surprise release - In Dreams. Disintegrated, half remembered melodies permeate this record like a slow tide of static soaking into a discarded slice of sponge cake, proving somehow inventive and nostalgic at the same time, in other words Duster on top form.

Thoughts of You, as a phrase, might immediately associate one with feelings of love, endearment, fantasy or even obsession. These are the very sentiments that lay as cornerstones in Salvator Dragatto’s debut LP for Colemine Records. The allure and drama of black & white photography have always played a vital role in how Salvator (aka Joseph Reina) not only views the world but how he hears music. Parallels in film processing to his own recording methods started becoming more and more apparent as the record was being formed; Limitations in exposures rivaling limitations in tracks. Film grain and dust sediments rivaling tape hiss and dirty EQ pots. What most would consider to be imperfections, Dragatto leaned into and found inspiration. This record is an homage to the likes of André Kertész, Robert Frank, Jean-Luc Godard and René Groebli, who’s works have impacted Dragatto’s world so greatly both visually and sonically. Thoughts of You is an unabashed reflection of the noir. From the powerful thematic horn lines to the gentlest string passages, this record is a collection of themes and vignettes that explore the emotions set upon by black and white imagery.

Deepchord have emerged from the shadows of their Motor City lair in a big way this year, unleashing their dubby techno constructs upon the public at a feverish pace. Previously appearing earlier this year on a hyper-limited triple-pack, their landmark ‘Vantage Isle’ album has been re-released on CD in an expanded fashion.

Awash in effervescent sheets of reverb and echo that evoke images of Detroit’s decaying urban landscapes as they dissolve into the ether, there’s a certain physicality to the album’s sonic vistas that is lacking from the output of other producers mining similar territory. Where contemporaries such as Deadbeat and Mikkel Metal gloss over the dub with a digital sheen, DeepChord wring their sounds from tangles of live wires and sputtering banks of effects, molding and shaping them by hand until they coalesce into living organisms. It’s a sonic space with one foot in the past and the other firmly planted in the not-so-distant future.

Often resembling a cross between Berlin’s Basic Channel collective and Detroit’s techno lineage, ‘Vantage Isle’ is less an album of individual tracks than a compilation of remixes. Working from a limited sonic palette rooted in the signature warmth of the analog technologies of yore, the collection plays out in true dub fashion as each of the artists involved offers their own versions of the same rudimentary riddim. The effect is similar in fashion to Rhythm & Sound’s classic ‘See Mi Yah’ series, with the basic template examined and reexamined from different angles.

Despite being cut from the same aural cloth, each of the tracks occupies its own niche, with the artist’s stamp firmly imprinted on the final product. The three DeepChord mixes feature lumbering rhythms underpinned by devastatingly deep bass pulses set adrift amid a sea of tumbling chords and skittering delay. Echospace – the collaborative project between Soultek and DeepChord’s own Rod Modell – is well represented with five reshapes showcasing their signature style, which is simultaneously both more ambient and more techno-oriented than anything DeepChord has committed to tape. Labelmate CV313 also impresses, turning in a complimentary pair of tracks that demonstrate the mysterious producer’s aptitude for producing storming waves of driving beats over a milky smooth ambience.

But it’s the contribution from Convextion that really stands out. Paring the beat down to a pulsing mass of kick drums and ruptured bursts of static, the Texas-based producer weaves writhing clusters of chords into the mix as yawning pads bathe everything in a warm, static-fried glow. It’s creepy stuff, but it’s also the visionary highlight of an album that stands tall not just among the glut of contemporary dub techno releases, but among the classics of the genre as well. All in all, ‘Vantage Isle’ is a tremendous achievement that will most likely be held up as a high water mark of the genre for years to come.
-Resident Advisor

Michigan’s Rod Modell makes immersive techno. It doesn’t quite fit into any specific genre mold, so his subtle, nearly anonymous tracks can slip by unnoticed. It’s easy to get lost in the microbial hiss, goopy dub timbres and rumbling muffle to miss the bass writhing in the fuzz or percussive tics cracking the drone.

On Vantage Isle Sessions, he again partners with Soultek’s Steven Hitchell as DeepChord. This new disc comprises 12 remixes by the duo of the elusive "Vantage Isle,” a track so impermanent it appears there was never a proper, original version. The 13th remix, smack in the middle of the disc’s sequencing, comes from the sole outsider: Gerard Hanson (Convextion). It may also be the best thing here. His version is by far the most submerged; strands of shuffling dust pile up on a cyborg samba, immersed in a hail of cut-ups, stray clicks and extended chords. Modell and Hitchell’s "Echospace Spatial Dub" is far more immediate. The closest thing to a straight dance cut, its bass is crisp and dry, looped in a slinky cycle that rattles along a taut trot, leaving the dub FX to plop and squish on the periphery.

The "Echospace Reshape" could pass as early-’90s ambient rockers Seefeel remixed by a Warp glitch-termite of comparable vintage. It’s a radian eight-minute sprawl that, thankfully, can’t decide whether it struts or churns, jets spurting and bass paddling in mutual confusion. The "Echospace Glacial" mix is practically a symphony of aquatic audio, complete with cascading water. The "cv313" reductions are the most surprising. The first applies a more variegated rhythm, its spatter and chipped blips a relief from the disc’s constant numbing throb. The second, the album’s closer, is all crackling froth and organ spume, blissfully coursing through the stereo field.

Modell is in solo mode on the weirder Incense and Black Light. From its title on down, this album has an after-hours feel. There’s more water, but now it sounds like it’s pebbling apartment windows instead of draining along sewer canals. A recurring bongo-like smatter, muted and almost incongruous, adds to the bedroom vibe. It’s as if some vintage space-age bachelor pad LP is spinning absent-mindedly with the volume turned way down. Only the tinniest percussion pops through the silence. Chimes shimmer, hi-hats lisp, steam crackles. Modell’s music always seems to be in this suspended animation, adrift and afloat in a majestic emptiness.
-Dusted Magazine

You might say that the sound of Deepchord results from one of techno's rock-hardest truths: Jack into the primordial 4/4 throb, the universal language of kick-drum, and the rest of your track's sonic spectrum is fair game for experiments of the maddest science.
Deepchord's lab book in this case is a dark-art manual for contacting the Jamaican-dub spirit world, a volume its Detroit-based progenitor Rod Modell was most likely handed by someone from Berlin's Basic Channel label. In its heyday, Basic Channel's style was often tagged "heroin house," a term coined ostensibly to account for the fleeting subgenre's pulsing silvery narcosis. If an opiate reference leaves you cold, however, you can think of it as "scuba house": dance jams for the diving bell. Let's face it, though. All along calling the sport scuba "diving" has been a way of covering up what it really is, and the properties it shares with Deepchord: the sensation of sitting at the bottom of the ocean for a long time and savoring the healing properties of otherworldly ambience. Along those lines, "Deepchord" and "Echospace" would be great brand names for long-range Navy Seal audio espionage gear, the kind you could use to make spine-tingling underwater field recordings of the sort of drifty, murmuring echoes and chthonic subbass tremors, that permeate Vantage Isle. And while the Deepchord/Echospace universe promotes a carefully vintage style, purist should note that it's not wholly analog. Mitchell professes his love for early digital synths, like the landmark Yamaha DX7. As he says in an interview with Resident Advisor, it's a hardware sound, one that distinctly separates it from the kind of computer-software plug-in steez that's the current benchmark for convenient techno production. Released on triple-pack last year as the latest and most epic of Echospace's near-cultishly coveted vinyl productions, it takes material played live at the Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2001, and in the great spirit of electronic musical anonymity, allows it to be devoured by a wolf-pack of various pseudonyms and collaborations. If you simply heard the album and didn't read about it, you wouldn't know it was the same dubby minimal techno track thirteen times.

That's a testament to the unexpected broadness of palette that is left after it's been decided that you're amputating music down to its barest filtered flicker. The original dubby excursion gets eaten up, obliterated, leaving behind a beatless void on the fourth track, gets resurrected via hardcore throb on the standout seventh track, morphs into a refined and alluring nightclub pulse on the eleventh. Despite all the diversity, Vantage Isle does not, however, span the full geographical expanse of Deepchord's The Coldest Season, which went from tundra to valley to desert plain. Instead its sequence of inspired variations creates a pulsing, silvery rainforest of microcosmic depth. The listener ends up in a position kind of like the protagonist in Kafka's "A Country Doctor," who on first inspecting his young patient finds no physical incursion, only upon a second closer glance to discover a grotesque wound in the same place where there was just bare skin. Such is the effect of this strand of minimal electronics: With its enshrouded maternal heartbeats and diaphonous synths burbles it can lurk in the background of your aural space interminably, only to reach out and smack you without warning. Great for drug addicts, OCD-sufferers, and anyone else with over-acute hearing and/or insomnia.
-Prefix Magazine 

"Moondog's jovial H'art Songs was the first release not to incorporate his name in the title, but the record that forever proved his genius. A rare vocal album recorded by Moondog when he was in his sixties, these ten art songs blur the boundaries between classical and pop music. Moondog called this series of art songs 'H'art songs' -- Hardin's art songs. The musical content is on a higher level than most popular music, but has an appeal to a wide range of tastes, from the pop to the classical listener. This collection of piano pop songs written and recorded in 1977 made Moondogs' stunningly eclectic discography even more chaotic musically, it also featured some of his most mesmerizing wordplay. Telling tales that can be interpreted as metaphors for how to live -- sometimes political, sometimes autobiographical, sometimes nature loving - they are always intriguingly poetic, and helped push this album to the very top of all Moondog's releases."

Agartha, Personal Meditation Music is a 7 CD boxed set, originally released on cassette in 1986, at the height of New Age, as an aid for meditation and alignment. Bringing to mind 20th century composers like Eliane Radigue, La Monte Young or even Brian Eno's Shutov Assembly, the time-stopping, enveloping, electronic music contained in this series sounds eerily modern, mysterious and moving. Characterized by deep analog drones, rising overtones, floating frequencies surfing on sine-waves and intervals with mystic modulation, this is truly moving, vibrational music.

In Agartha, the individual notes of each Harmonic Triad proceed in a fashion that is neither improvisational nor chance-based, nor is it generative. Instead the music flows outward as if being transmitted— or channeled — from a place outside human consciousness. There is a profound sense of cosmic depth expanding ever outward as the music fills the listener with waves of emotion, and a palpable somatic response is felt, although there are subtle differences with eachunique Triad.

Each disc is individually packaged in original replica sleeves and housed in a heavy duty cardboard clamshell box. Digitized and remastered by Jessica Thompson. Liner notes include extensive instructions for use from the original text and an essay by library music scholar David Hollander.

The original edition of Agartha, Personal Meditation Music, featured one track 30 minute track per tape repeated on both sides. Subsequent editions had unique Side B tracks on all but two of the 7 volumes. We have included all tracks in this boxed set.

"if you liked Light In The Attic’s crucial box set I Am The Center, do not sleep on this." Quietus <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 472px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1116134619/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://imprec.bandcamp.com/album/agartha-personal-meditation-music-1985-7-cd-box">Agartha: Personal Meditation Music (1985) 7 CD Box by Meredith Young-Sowers</a></iframe>

Great news for fans of electronic music: Reiger Records Reeks is set to release a new 5-CD box set dedicated to Roland Kayn’s Cybernetic Music. The collection is based on the original recordings from the Lydia and Roland Kayn Archive, which were sensibly remastered by Jim O’Rourke,

The box set includes the tracks from legendary opuses MAKRO I, II, III, created at the Institute for Sonology, and Elektroakustische Projekte, featuring works like Cybernetic I, II, and III, which were recorded at the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, alongside Entropy PE31, Monades, and Eon. These pieces – previously available only on rare out-of-print vinyl editions – highlight both Kayn’s innovative approach to musical structures and his significant impact on the development of electronic and cybernetic compositions.

Recent years have seen the release and reissue of dozens of hours of Roland Kayn’s music, on several labels and in both physical and digital formats. Our interconnected yet chaotically imbued age seems to be the setting in which Kayn has truly found his audience. The scene is now set for one of the most momentous works in his oeuvre to return to the shelves. ‘Infra'. One of the titanic cybernetic works Kayn originally released on the Colosseum label in early 80s, ‘Infra’ (1978-79) has come to occupy a very special place in the hearts of fans lucky enough to have copies of the original vinyl box sets. Now lovingly remastered from the original archive masters by Kayn devotee Jim O’Rourke, ‘Infra’ has finally found its way to CD for a new generation of admirers to discover.

Fresh transmissions from the sacred Temple of 5 Gate... This time it's 8 new tracks from London producer Xterea. TIP! Limited run of CDs…complete with download code.

Rediscovered and compiled for release shortly before her death in November 2023, Further Selections from the Electric Harpsichord presents a never-before-heard recording of composer and artist Catherine Christer Hennix’s early magnum opus. Originally debuted in 1976 at the festival Brouwer’s Lattice at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, The Electric Harpsichord has steadily mystified fans and students of Western minimalist music for its implacable, transformative qualities, and the long-held, relative obscurity of its creator. Like the work of Hennix’s close friend La Monte Young, the piece is set in just intonation and focuses on the transcendental potentials of precise tuning, inspired by their studies with Pandit Pran Nath. Composed of bursts of oscillating, synthetic tones using a carefully retuned synthesizer and a tape-based system for feedback delay, the sounds swirl, twinkle, and appear to bend time, space, and perception. Additional, sustained chords on the sheng, most likely played by her Deontic Miracle bandmate Hans Isgren, are present at the opening of the piece and reemerge towards the end of the recording.The release of Further Selections constitutes the most comprehensive original recording of this foundational work to date. Originally billed as The Well-Tuned Organ during its debut in Sweden, The Electric Harpsichord has developed a legendary reputation, predicated on a twenty-six minute fragment salvaged and circulated by Hennix’s friend Henry Flynt. Promoting its importance on multiple occasions, Flynt aired the work on WBAI radio, organized a pair of tape concerts at New York alternative arts spaces in 1970s, and later penned a 1998 essay which served as the liner notes to its eventual CD release in 2010. For him, this work not only represented a sterling milestone in minimal sonic aesthetics, but also spawned a new genre that he dubbed “hallucinogenic/ecstatic sound environments (HESE),” which in turn inspired his own drone-like compositions. Gradually, interest in the recording led to a spate of archival projects, public performances, and new compositions by Hennix in the 2010s, in turn drawing into focus her multifarious practice, which includes serious contributions towards mathematics, poetry, sculpture, Noh drama, philosophy, and light art. Since 2018, Blank Forms has spearheaded a comprehensive publication effort in support of her work, including the writing collection Poësy Matters and Other Matters (2018); archival recordings like Selected Early Keyboard Works (2018) and The Deontic Miracle’s Selections from 100 Models of Hegikan Roku (2019); and recent compositions such as Blues Alif Lam Mim (2021) and Solo for Tamburium (2023).

he unbelievably prolific Haruomi Hosono is one of the major architects of modern Japanese pop music. With his encyclopedic knowledge of music and boundless curiosity for new sounds, Hosono is the auteur of his own idiosyncratic musical world, putting his unmistakable stamp on hundreds of recordings as an artist, session player, songwriter, and producer. Born and raised in central Tokyo, his adolescent obsession with American pop culture informed his early forays into country music, which he would revisit later in his career. Hosono made his professional debut in 1969 as a member of Apryl Fool, whose heavy psychedelia was somewhat at odds with his influences, which leaned towards the rootsy sounds of Moby Grape and Buffalo Springfield. The latter was one of the main inspirations for his next group, Happy End, whose unique blend of West Coast sounds with Japanese lyrics proved to be highly influential over the course of three albums. After the band’s amicable break up in 1973, Hosono began his solo career with Hosono House, an intimate slice of Japanese Americana recorded inside a rented house with recording gear squeezed into its tiny bedroom. Hosono’s solo career would take many twists and turns from this point forward, with forays into exotica, electronic, ambient, and techno, culminating in the massive success of techno pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). Released in September 1978, a mere two months before YMO’s debut, Cochin Moon is a clear precursor to the groundbreaking synth and sequencer-dominated sounds that would come to define the iconic trio. Credited to Hosono and Pop Art legend Tadanori Yokoo (who created the cover art), Cochin Moon is a fictional soundtrack to a journey into unknown worlds, inspired by Hosono and Yokoo’s trip to India. Initially the album was to be a kind of ethnographic musical document, using found sounds and field recordings made by Hosono himself. Instead, after Yokoo introduced Hosono to the sounds of Kraftwerk and krautrock during the trip, Cochin Moon became something much stranger. Created almost entirely on synthesizers and sequencers with the help of future YMO collaborators Ryuichi Sakamoto and Hideki Matsutake, the music on the album is the perfect encapsulation of Hosono’s concept of “sightseeing music,” transporting the listener to an exotic place that may or may not exist. This highly sought-after album sees its first-ever official release outside of Japan. Admired by artists ranging from Van Dyke Parks to Mac DeMarco, Hosono continues to forge ahead as he heads into his fifth decade as a musician. With the re-release of his key albums for the first time outside of Japan, his genius will be discovered by a whole new generation of fans around the world.

150 copies on Crystal Red Vinyl, deluxe edition 3LP Box, silver print on deluxe Fedrigoni Ultra Black paper, released with the full approval of the Sun Ra Estate. * Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of release that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music, via stellar LPs by Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, Jean-Yves Bosseur, James Rushford, Delivery Health, Henning Christiansen, Four Horsemen, Maria Monti, and whole lot more. With every subsequent release, Holidays has seemed to manage to up their game, and this is unquestionably the case with their latest, Sun Ra’s “Live in Rome 1980”, capturing the Arkestra in incredible form and arguably the label’s most ambitious endeavour to date. Issued as an astounding 3xLP vinyl box set, with a 24-page booklet loaded with stunning photos, in a very limited edition of 150 copies, it encounters Ra’s legendary band entering their fourth decade of activity (1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s) in a rollicking storm of spiritual jazz, free improvisation, heavy grooves, and their defining take on Afrofuturism. Simply put, it’s hard to think of a better live recording of the Arkestra than this. Born Herman Poole Blount in Alabama during 1914, Sun Ra first emerged on the Chicago jazz scene during the late 1940s. One of the great avant-garde composers of his generation - leading the way on piano, organ, and (eventually) synthesizer - beginning in the mid-1950s and lasting until his death in 1993, led the Arkestra, a band through which a near countless number of important artists passed and collaborated with, and many remained for the duration of their careers, notably Marshall Allen, John Gilmore and June Tyson. Known for their wild costumes and theatrics, Ra’s eccentric image and claims that he was from Saturn was deeply political, imagining an alternate social order, history, and future for African Americans that rests as a pioneering force in the Afro-Futurist movement. While Sun Ra and his Arkestra can best be located within the broader movements of avant-garde jazz of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s - particularly as innovators of free and spiritual jazz in their evolving forms - the composer was notoriously hard to pin down on creative terms. He was a visionary titan whose work traversed nearly half of the 20th Century, continuously pushing the idiom of jazz at every turn, ingesting and incorporating the entire history African American music - the blues, R&B, soul, gospel, ragtime, hot jazz, swing, bebop, free jazz, and fusion, etc. - into his work, without any division or hierarchy, producing roughly 100 full lengths bear his name, beginning with 1957’s “Jazz By Sun Ra Vol.1”, and stretching well beyond his death in 1993. Despite how much was captured and released, remarkably, rare and previously unheard recordings continue to emerge and amaze into the present day, notably Holidays’ latest, “Live in Rome 1980”, capturing the Arkestra in incredible form at the dawn of a new decade. Recorded live at Teatro Giulio Cesare on March 28, 1980, comprising an astounding 27 compositions, including the highly celebrated “Astro Black”, “Mr. Mystery”, “Romance of Two Planets”, “Space Is the Place”, “We Travel the Spaceways”, and “Calling Planet Earth”, over the collections of six vinyl sides. High among the greatest live gigs by the Arkestra captured on tape, carefully mastered by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio, “Live in Rome 1980” is a near perfect snapshot of the band’s versatility and range, including many of their most notably and famous songs, as well as striking renditions of the Horace Henderson penned Benny Goodman number “Big John’s Special”, Fletcher Henderson’s “Yeah Man!”, and Django Reinhardt's "Limehouse Blues”, displaying Ra’s willingness to address and rework the entire, diverse history of jazz in a single go. Heard in its totality, perhaps what makes “Live in Rome 1980” most striking is the way in which the concert plays out. Roughly the first half encounters the band locked in some of the most out-there, free jazz fire that can be imagined, weaving a startling sense of interplay and furious energy into a brilliant tapestry of writhing sonority, the likes of which were only really achieved by this band. The second half, with only moments of exception that return to the furious energy of the first, is a very different affair, easy toward the vocal standards, led by June Tyson’s vocals and the joyous collective chanting of the band, for which they have become so widely celebrated, threading the sounds of off kilter big band swing with heavy grooves and imagines of outer space. Absolutely engrossing and creatively enthralling from the first sounding to the last,

Henry House is a recurring dream song. Combining closely tuned instruments and sinetones, tape-music editing techniques, field recordings, and voice, this eighty-minute, five-part song cycle is an evolutionary step away from the spontaneity of the free jazz/noise aesthetic usually found in the music of Nate Wooley. Henry House expands on the ecstatic, durational work found in Wooley’s Seven Storey Mountain, a six-part composition that has been premiered over the last ten years by an ensemble that now includes multiple drummers, guitarists, a twenty-one-person choir, and the composer on amplified trumpet. But its ritual is more serene, more natural, slower. Henry House is the first long-form piece that doesn’t feature Wooley’s trumpet. It is also the first to be constructed around his poetic writing. Wooley weaves a strange funeral mass for a fictional everyman from isolated phrases culled from essays, poems, and non-fiction written by Wendell Berry, John Berryman, Joseph Mitchell, and Reiner Stach. After organizing the fragments into a dream narrative, Wooley rewrote the text dozens of times, manipulating the stitched-together story until only glimpses of its sources remained. These texts become a slowly developing story of care and too much care in living. They are spoken by Mat Maneri and Megan Schubert and set amidst masses of instruments. The outer and middle movements explore the interactions between slowly shifting sine tone frequencies and massed, slightly detuned instruments—vibraphones, brass, pianos—to affect a warmly wobbling harmonic pad that undulates and revolves under Maneri’s performance of the text. The remaining movements move quickly, combining field recordings with hard cuts of Schubert’s singing voice constructed into a massive, tape-affected choir interspersed with her readings.

Meditations bestseller! An encounter between an illusionary ambience that lets you experience an organic space and a classical house that shines deeply. The style is different, but the content is quiet, spatial, and artistic, and it is a universal content that is similar to Larry Heard's world view. It's a deep and radical masterpiece that silently tells us that house is an art and a noble message. A folded poster is attached to the PVC sleeve.

Actress marks an auspicious 20th year releasing music with a vinyl edition of his RA mix; a near hour-long collage or braque of some 100 unreleased cuts trawling his HD and traversing its depths of brisk 313 techno, silver haze synth noise and flashes of neo-classical beauty. Trailing ’Statik’ back in spring ’24, 'Дарен Дж. Каннінгем' is practically on par with the album for levels of engrossing and gritty noirish atmospheres, scattering a breadcrumb trail of puckered keys and teasing rave signals that go deep into the forest of his mind/sound at a strident pace that buckles into offbeats and practically stumbles, groggy and spangled to the close. As with all his work, an underlying, artful narrative thread ties it all together in an abstract storytelling style that has served him incredibly well thus far and continues to pique the imagination of listeners across the fields of hazed electronics and dance music who may not necessarily listen to one or the other style, yet can’t help but be snagged by his restless equilibrium of those vibes.

“I think one of the most exciting things about the reintroduction of Horizon Unlimited is the fact that young folk love our music, and are surprised at the upbeat tempo, and the lyrics, which are not only of today, but also very futuristic as well. Horizon Unlimited was our last album with Decca that came out in 1979. It’s been a long time since then and this really is part of a much longer story, but amongst one of the most significant things I remember was that we, The Lijadu Sisters, paid for all the studio and band session fees. At the time, this was unusual, and not the arrangement we had with that record label. We were originally meant to record at Decca West Africa in Lagos, but when we got to the studio, no one had told us that it was being upgraded – from eight tracks to twenty-four. So, we brought everyone to London and made the album there instead.” –Yeye Taiwo Lijadu

Sound artist and filmmaker Joshua Bonnetta wants to know what happens when a human listener exits a landscape. How might the soundscape differ? How is our presence affecting the recording? His ambitious long-form work The Pines I-IV, released on February 28, 2025 via Shelter Press and The Dim Coast, looks to interrogate some of these questions, capturing the sonic life of a single pine tree in upstate New York over the course of a year via remote recordings, edited into four hours of audio which will be released as a 4CD set with essay by acclaimed nature writer Robert Macfarlane and a foreword by curator jake moore, who suggests the forest knows when it is being listened to. 

 

 

Macfarlane's luminous essay proposes that this project offers an answer to the question of whether a tree in a forest makes any sound at all if nobody is there to hear it. Bonnetta turns that question around - entangling it in the surrounding environment, to ask what sort of noise it and other plants and animals make when there is no human listener; asking what sounds come to the fore when we step out of the frame, and in what ways a microphone might alter the way we listen in the environment. 

 

 

A total of 8760 hours of audio were captured by a microphone strapped 10ft up a tree's trunk in Tioga County, which was then reworked into a single hour of sound for each season, each of which captured events in and around the tree's branches and immediate environment. We hear weather and wildlife; coyotes and owls; the creaking of branches under the weight of snow and ice - all act as a window into the sound of this place absent of humans; a time lapse of the audible world around the circumference of a single tree. The microphones used, and the methods of editing, are tech borrowed from conservation bioacoustics and passive acoustic monitoring, which offered Bonnetta a way to engage much more deeply than any standard field recording would. 

 

 

The Pines I-IV is not bombastic sonic work, but is subtle, often contemplative and sometimes soothing, as when rushes of rain sweep over the landscape, or a flock of geese pass overhead. It is not about exotic renderings of place or or mythically veiled field recording, but about accessing a new way of listening to something familiar, by removing a human presence and extending the listening window beyond usual human capacities. Bonnetta purposefully chose a site he already knew, and which he had easy access to, but which might show itself differently when captured with durational sound recording technology. "For over a decade I taught in Ithaca" he says "and spent a lot of time exploring southern central New York, but never made any projects there. We decided to relocate to Munich a couple years back and before I left I wanted to document the sounds of this environment that I spent so much time in and had come to love. This technology afforded me the opportunity to be able to keep a record across a year and when I started to listen back I was surprised with results and began to devise a system to edit the work. There are several great bioacoustics applications which can analyze and interpret the data but I wanted to manually browse and edit the materials so that I could collect sounds outside of what the applications might traditionally identify: mainly weather and the sounds of the tree itself. The Dim Coast saw the potential in the work as an installation and publication and helped me realize that there might be a project outside of it just being a personal document."

 

 

He returned every few weeks to collect and replace storage cards and batteries, editing lengthy audio files using a combination of listening and looking at the visualized audio spectrum. He spent time listening to re-familiarize himself with the soundscape and then scanned the visual data for 'events' in the files, a method of analysis more typically used by scientists mapping bird and wildlife

Limited 25 copies CD-R Signed.

Limited 25 copies CD-R Signed.

Ever since my childhood, women artists have been particularly inspiring to me. It started with rock music and electronica, evolving into where I am today.
When I first listened to "L'Île re-sonante", it changed my world. That a woman created this and pioneered something timeless was mesmerising for me. I love this piece so much that I dedicated a whole episode to it on my podcast with Jono Podmore - Talk to the Chip:  www.mixcloud.com/talk_to_the_chip/talk-to-the-chip-episode-3-l%C3%AEle-re-sonante-%C3%A9liane-radigue/
The sonorities and harmonics that gradually evolve into a beautiful ethereal world of sounds with ARP 2500 and field recordings - simple but also sophisticated. 
Then I further delved into the work of Eliane Radigue. She had been creating ambient electronic music long before the term "ambient" was coined. That she is still around us is such a valuable thing and we should all make her feel that. I am honoured to contribute to this even if it is little - the little I can do by getting inspired and creating a work as part of a series that has her name in it. It is truly an honour. Her music and approaches keep on inspiring mine. I am grateful that sheexists.

Track titles have references to sky objects and physical phenomena as well as events that affect me in my life as I observe my environment, while listening to the sounds, sometimes alongside music such as those created by Radigue herself. These include dramatic facts and stories that happen to some sky objects. Each track is connected to one another. In this manner, they make a whole track together as in a concept album. I do not use a lot of equipment when I make music. I like to keep my setup minimal and make the best of limitations, pushing the boundaries. In doing so, I used my own Max/MSP patches to process the sounds usually with granular synthesis, FM synthesis, and wavetable synthesis. I also used my Game Boy and electric guitar as my main instruments. There are also glimpse of field recordings blended with music. My absolute pitch means that I hear musical sounds in anything I hear or listen to and this influences my approach to field recording and everyday sounds, which is something I tried to capture in this album.

-- Elif Yalvaç <iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 307px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2187791330/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://elianetapes.bandcamp.com/album/vection">Vection by Elif Yalvaç</a></iframe>

Saltern presents a thrilling new live recording of Naldjorlak for solo cello, composer Éliane Radigue’s first piece for an acoustic instrument, paired with a remastered version of the long out-of-print, original 2006 recording. Composed in 2005 in close collaboration with cellist Charles Curtis, Naldjorlak marked a striking shift in the music of Radigue, who has since composed exclusively for instrumentalists with her celebrated Occam series. This album brings together two complete performances by Curtis, recorded nearly 15 years apart (Paris in 2006 and Los Angeles in 2020), drawing attention to the evolution of the piece and to its inherent mutability. The sound and spirit of Naldjorlak are centered around the re-tuning of the entire cello to the wolf tone, a uniquely unstable frequency, creating a haunting, almost feedback-like resonance within the instrument itself.

From Gascia Ouzounian’s liner notes: “Even as it expands conceptions of what sound is, and thus what music can be, to understand Naldjorlak only as music would be to limit its scope. It is music, but it is also physics and philosophy. Naldjorlak is a detailed investigation of the physical properties of resonating bodies and dynamic systems; it is a meditation on the condition of instability; it is a metaphysics of chaos and uncertainty.”

"In bringing these recordings together, the album presents the composition as a living, breathing document, illustrating how Radigue’s music embraces time’s unpredictability in both structure and performance." —Vanessa Ague, Pitchfork 
<iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 241px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=958261425/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://saltern.bandcamp.com/album/naldjorlak">Naldjorlak by Éliane Radigue</a></iframe>

Naoki Zushi - Live CD reissue with bonus track, mastered to suit the CD format! The original member of Hijokaidan, Naoki Zushi, one of the most prominent underground guitarists in Japan and currently active in Nagisa Ni Te, will reissue a CD of a trio of live performances at the 2006 Gyuune Autumn Festival. It features performances demonstrating the quintessence of Japan's psychedelic underground, represented by “les rallizes denudes” and “Fushitsusha.” A heavy psychedelic version of “May a flower bloom” is remarkable; it makes you feel intense passion, completely different from the delicately blooming beautiful version that decorates the end of the 4th album. It is a masterpiece that Zushi himself said, “It might be the best live performance of this song.” The lyrics, which seem to ask the universal question since the birth of human beings of where human beings came from and where they will go, are also wonderful, and you should listen to each word.