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視聴-dj sprinkles & mark fell incomplete insight (2012-2015)(Excerpt 1)
視聴-dj sprinkles & mark fell incomplete insight (2012-2015)(Excerpt 2)
視聴-dj sprinkles & mark fell incomplete insight (2012-2015)(Excerpt 3)
視聴-dj sprinkles & mark fell incomplete insight (2012-2015)(Excerpt 4)
Snowflakes & Dog Whistles: Best Electroacoustic Ambient & Sexpanic 1995-2017 is a double-CD compiling twenty-nine of Terre Thaemlitz' best electroacoustic ambient and computer music works produced between 1995 to 2017, including many special edits only available on this release. The majority of these tracks have been physically out of print for decades, and were originally released on a variety of labels including Mille Plateaux, Daisyworld Discs (Haruomi Hosono of YMO's private imprint), Instinct Ambient, Caipirinha Productions, and of course Thaemlitz' own Comatonse Recordings. The first disc, Snowflakes, focuses on tracks that are more conventionally ambient or perhaps even "pretty." Dog Whistles, the second disc, compiles tracks featuring a chaotic array of samples and sounds that are more overtly related to themes of gender- and sexual variance.
Thaemlitz frames the tracks with a new 9000 word essay spread across two large posters, providing a basic introduction to the underlying topics, ideas, contexts and histories behind electroacoustic ambient - both as a genre in the broader sense, and in specific relation to her own work. From the text:
Most of the questions posed over the years in these tracks remain in tension with contemporary mainstream views, including those coming from the LGBT establishment. In this way, one might say a thread running through my projects is that they remain "unlistenable" to most. Any potential critical use value of these tracks emerges from understanding how they are utterly symptomatic of a particular social system - even in their dissonance. Or, to be more precise, because of their dissonance.
Self-released on Comatonse Recordings with custom packaging hand assembled by Terre herself, the package includes two CDs in an archival vinyl pouch with two double-sided insert cards (100mm x 100mm), phonograph style anti-static inner sleeves, and two 4x4 panel poster insert printed on newsprint (472mm x 472mm).
sample-Terre Thaemlitz & Funk Shui: Superbonus(Excerpt)
sample-Chugga: Deep Space Probe(Excerpt)
sample-Comatonse.000: Pretty Mouth (He's Got One) (Excerpt)
sample-Terre's Neu Wuss Fusion: She's Hard (Excerpt)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 1)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 2)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 3)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 4)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 5)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 6)
視聴-k-s.h.e spirits, lose your hold(Excerpt 7)
A defiant new recording of one of Morton Feldman's most disarming compositions, Apartment House's 'Violin and String Quartet' captures the icy character of the instruments, melting time into fuzzed memory. When Feldman began producing durational works in the late 1970s, he managed to confound even his most dedicated friends and followers. Steve Reich famously lost touch with his cohort during this period, later regretting it when he gave the compositions time to sink in - he eventually conceded that 1985's 'Piano and String Quartet' was "the most beautiful work of his that I know." 'Violin and String Quartet' was written the same year, only two years before Feldman died, and evolves slowly, lasting two and a quarter hours. This fresh interpretation from Apartment House is different from previous recordings, close-miking each instrument to emphasize the tiny variations in sound: the little earthquakes that lend drama to the composition's watery flow. One of Feldman's prettiest pieces, it's aptly elevated by Apartment House's refined technique. If you heard the ensemble's rendition of 'Piano and String Quartet' from 2021, 'Violin and String Quartet' is a worthy follow-up. Their expertise with NYC minimalism is well documented at this point, and feeds into the effortlessness they exude while soldiering through the piece's duration. Billowing clouds of harmony replace any expected "vocal" themes, and the piece hangs in the air, reshaping time rather than commanding attention. Apartment House use microscopic magnification to help us perceive Feldman's original vision; the composer was obsessed with natural reverb and the physical decay of his instrumentation, and gave the composition plenty of negative space for these elements to bleed into the foreground. Here, Apartment House treat the pauses with reverence, leaving the echoes and traces to imprint themselves into the recording. Melodies and phrases twist into bubbling whirlpools of bowed fluctuations that appear and reappear throughout the piece, rhyming with previous segments and creating disarming pockets of sonic deja vu. Feldman asks us to reconsider the act of listening, lulling us into an elevated state. Apartment House give us the experience of hearing the music as if in the same room, concentrating on the bows on the strings and how they interact with the environment. It's a form of meditation that requires focus, but also an ability to release yourself from temporal concerns for a couple of hours - right now, that's never been more important.
Viola Torros is more than a historical reference - it is an ongoing collaboration between Catherine Lamb and Johnny Chang, centered around the research, arrangement, and interpretation of fragments attributed to the mysterious composer Viola Torros. While the project suggests an archaeological recovery of lost medieval works filtered through Arabic, Byzantine, and Indian modal traditions, the underlying narrative is a playful fiction - Torros herself appears to be a fictional construct, allowing Lamb and Chang to chart their own creative lineage and methodology. The first disc showcases intricate viola duets, blending drone-infused textures and sparse melodic snippets. These “augmentations” are designed to evoke the feeling of ancient music without directly imitating historic forms. Lamb and Chang’s approach is analytical but open-hearted: they highlight the simultaneous existence of cohabiting tones, shifts in intonation, and the delicate emergence of melody from within constrained harmonic frameworks. Supporting musicians - including Bryan Eubanks, Rebecca Lane, Annie Garlid, and others - add subtle color via electronics and voice, dissolving the boundary between composition and arrangement. The second disc steps into contemporary territory: Johnny Chang’s “Citaric Melodies III” is performed by Suidobashi Chamber Ensemble, an octet that blends winds and strings in a gentle network of sustained tension and release. Catherine Lamb’s “Prisma Interius VI for v.t.” completes the set with an immersive harmonic field shaped by her secondary rainbow synthesizer, cello, and layered viola resonance. Throughout the project, Lamb and Chang’s capacity for patience and depth comes to the fore. Their music is slow-moving but never static, alive to the spectral richness of just intonation and the performative possibilities of friction, resonance, and shared listening. By inventing and inhabiting the world of Viola Torros, they offer a model for reconstructing musical heritage - one that values poetic intuition over scholarly certainty and uses creative fiction to generate genuinely new musical experience.
Catherine Lamb captivates with three works for voice and strings, ascetically focussed on timbral thizz and overtones with minimalist but radiant results. Lamb is a noted composer and has collaborated with Eliane Radigue, Julia Holter and Phill Niblock among many others. ’parallaxis forma’ is Lamb’s first solo release since 2021’s ‘Muto Infinitas’ for Another Timbre, and features three works performed by Explore Ensemble and Exaudi Music Ensemble, under the direction of Nicolas Moroz and James Weeks, respectively. All works derive a certain sensuality from her personalised process working with layered phonemes, alternately set to string quartet, a mixed septet of wind, tuned glasses and electric guitar, and more simply layered and left floating in air. Her use of overtones is eerily spellbinding and sure to snag more curious ears. ‘color residua’ pitches a string quartet in asymmetry to Exaudi Music Ensemble’s voices - Juliet Fraser (soprano), Cathy Bell (mezzo-soprano), Michael Hickman (baritone) - in a four part movement where composite melody emerges between the singers and strings. The other work for voice and instruments, ‘parallaxis forma’ (2016) is more tentative - underlining the haunting overtones produced by Berlin-based Australian singer Lotte Betts-Dean. Although ‘pulse/shade’ (2014) sounds like a piece for multiple voices, it features Betts-Dean clear, solo enunciation of the phonemes layered into the release’s most enchanting piece, free like ambient music but with an ascetic rigour key to its appeal.
Apartment House's latest set is a hypnotic rendition of Morton Feldman's towering late-period masterpiece, originally recorded in 1991 by Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi and here performed by Mark Knoop (piano), Mira Benjamin & Gordon Mackay (violins), Bridget Carey (viola) and Anton Lukoszevieze (cello). When Morton Feldman wrote "Piano and String Quartet" in 1985, only two years before he died of pancreatic cancer, he had Kronos Quartet and Aki Takahashi in mind, but the piece has been recorded many times since it was released in 1993, and has been endlessly influential, like much of Feldman's work. On this rendition, the dynamic range is tempered with piano and strings fluttering delicately like a whisper over a silence that feels omnipresent. When notes appear from the void, they do so with purpose, hanging like ghosts before slipping away into the aether. Anton Lukoszevieze, leader of Apartment House, explains why he chose to record the piece: "Piano and String Quartet, one of Feldman’s final works, is a seemingly simple work and yet it isn’t. As Philip Guston, a great friend of Feldman, wrote ‘Frustration is one of the great things in art; satisfaction is nothing.’ The length of the work (nearly 80 minutes) and the erasure of musical memory (What did we just hear?) is in fact its identity. Feldman makes simple statements, a piano arpeggio or a sustained string chord, holds these things and examines them over time. Gradually, as the sun’s light moves across a still life through the day, like a drawn out Morandi painting, the work evolves and indeed dissolves in some sense. Using different transformative processes, Feldman illuminates his basic material and achieves the miraculous, an extended work of great beauty and enigmatic wonder. There are ghosts there, tinctures of late Schubert, Brahms and even Janaček, where beauty is a signature of passing time and an ephemeral focus on hearing and disappearing."
Ockeghem Octets continues Antoine Beuger’s radical series of ensemble pieces, starting from intimate duos and building incrementally to groups of twenty. In this installment, eight performers - including Ryoko Akama (melodica), Kate Halsall (harmonium), Ecka Mordecai (cello), Leo Svirsky (accordion), Seamus Cater (concertina), Sarah Hughes (e-bow zither), Harriet Richardson (flute), and Kathryn Williams (alto flute)- join in a practice of sustained listening and collective restraint. Beuger’s process asks all players to articulate very long, very soft tones, shifting the expressive weight from individuality to ensemble number: it’s their “being eight” that generates the music’s distinct acoustic field. The score divides into fifty pages; the recording captures twenty-five, each a sequence of subtle, indivisible harmonies. The ensemble’s progression is marked by gradual change: balances and colors move so gently that the music feels both static and breathing. Tones intertwine, overlay, and recede, the beautiful monotone occasionally breached by new instrument color or an especially tender inflection. Silence plays as crucial a role as sound, allowing sustained tones to bloom or fade on their own terms. Rather than pursue drama, the music investigates mutual attention, collective tuning, and a sense of coexistence in present time. Beuger’s aesthetic - deeply influenced by reductionist and Wandelweiser traditions - values the ineffable over the exclamatory, proposing that simple means can yield profound effects. Ockeghem Octets unfolds as both a meditation and a social practice, creating a sonic architecture for healing, listening, and non-hierarchical being. Simplicity here is abundant: the piece offers space in which musicians and listeners alike can encounter the fullness of musical experience - its balance, calm, and restorative power.
Harmony is a collection of works in which Marc Sabat — a dedicated explorer of just intonation — probes the very essence of harmony through the most simple yet profound medium: the string quartet.
In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.
Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.
Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.
Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.
Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.
As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.
Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his time in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.
Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.
5-CD box set presenting virtually all of Morton Feldman'smusic for solo piano. Performed by Philip Thomas, who also writes a 52-page booklet that is included in the box (and a pdf of the booklet is included with download sales)
Artwork by David Ainley
Feldman’s late-style aesthetics distilled to their purest form in the chamber work Piano, Violin, Viola, Cello. A quiet labyrinth of abstraction, like an aural equivalent of abstract painting.
A 72-minute realisation of 'Intermission 6' (1953), one of the most open of Feldman's piano works. The piece was realised in October 2024 by Antti Tolvi.
The score consists of a single page with 15 events (chords or single notes) which can be played in any order, and can be performed by one or two pianists. Feldman writes that “The pianist, or pianists, begins with any sound on the page, will hold until barely audible, then proceed to whichever other sound he may choose. Sounds may be repeated.”
Most performances of 'Intermission 6' are between 4 and 10 minutes, but Antti Tolvi extends the piece to a duration more typical of Feldman's later music.
Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.
Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.
Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.
Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.
The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive dee
Extra Stars is a deeply beautiful expression of Gregory Uhlmann’s ever-evolving sound world, and comes at a pivotal juncture in the LA-based composer, producer, guitarist and multi-instrumentalist’s musical journey.
Following a long run of supporting work with artists like Perfume Genius, Tasha, and Hand Habits, alongside an eponymous recorded output largely focused on his more singer-songwriter oriented music, Uhlmann has spent the better part of the last couple years trotting out album after album of groundbreaking instrumental modern music. From the sparse melodies and hushed ambient soundscapes of Small Day, to his much-lauded duo outing Doubles with Meg Duffy, to his perhaps lesser-known but no-less-brilliant duo record Water Map with Dustin Wong, to the lush chamber-jazz interplay of his trio recording with saxophonist Josh Johnson and bassist Sam Wilkes, to the two genre-breaking albums he released as a co-leader of synth-laced trance-jazz quintet SML (2024’s Small Medium Large and 2025’s How You Been), Uhlmann has subtly, if not quietly, established himself as an essential presence in some of the most progressive recordings of our time.
Extra Stars encompasses all he’s learned through all the above. A radiant sidereal serenade, the album’s fourteen miniature infinities swirl serendipitous synthesis and measured, melody-rich song into a panoramic menagerie of sound. For a record that seldom incorporates percussion instruments, the music is distinctly rhythm-forward, while Uhlmann also leans heavily into swaths of pastoral beauty. Extra care was clearly poured into the kind of harmonic depth that’s often missing from vibe-only “ambient” music, making for a delightfully refreshing take on the electronic, processing-heavy 'quiet' sound.
The compositions and production techniques here reflect Uhlmann’s musicality perfectly, surely the result of him being as much a seasoned practitioner as he is an avid listener. If there is a middle ground between Cluster & Eno, Terry Riley’s Shri Camel, and Yo La Tengo’s There’s a Riot Going On, it’s somewhere nearby. Lofty comparisons aside, Extra Stars seems to look beyond reference or imitation. Even the album’s title indicates as much—inspired by a trip to California’s Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest, where the reality of the night sky’s starry expanse stretches beyond the boundaries of belief.
We can feel Uhlmann’s gaze past the horizon line from the jump. Album opener “Pocket Snail” kicks off with a slow-ambling synth bass line before opening up into a richly processed, reverberating cacophony of beautiful sliding melodies. Eyes wide open, the small world of the pocket snail begins to burst with new color after a fresh injection of sunlight, but the tonality is more akin to something of a simple torch ballad. It’s an immense clash of big and small, and sets the stage nicely for the delightful vantage point shifting to come throughout the record.
“Lucia” is named after a quaint lodge nestled amongst the cliffside drama of Big Sur, and the tune’s musical rendering of an intimate yet expansive perspective perfectly fits its namesake. The steady thump and chime of Uhlmann’s guitar repetitions sit atop a field recording of the distant, heavy-winded ocean crash of the Cabrillo Highway coast, held even steadier by harbor bell metallic clank percussion and a firm yet pillowy cluster of electric organ chords and mellotron-like leads. Enter saxophonist Alabaster DePlume, the track's lone feature, with his signature breathy reed work. Here DePlume’s vibrato-heavy tenor sax wandering adds a secret-among-friends intimacy to a sonic scene that could go for miles. DePlume hums low in multitrack as Uhlmann leads the steady pulse on, encountering syncopated harmonic pings, fluttering recorder flourishes, and the little bustling sounds of the rural Pacific shoreline. Earworms must live in the ocean air, because it’s tough to get any element of “Lucia” unstuck once it’s in, and the whole thing is all tied up in a bow in just under three and a half minutes. Equally playful and introspective, “Lucia” is the potential soundtrack to a close reading or a thousand yard stare. If Jim Henson dreamt Link’s Awakening this would be the sound he heard.
“Burnt Toast” is an essential example of Uhlmann’s penchant for using the guitar to make non-guitar sounds. That’s not to say that what is occurring here is a simple act of processing. Rather, Uhlmann has a distinct and instantly recognizable ability to play the instrument itself in a way that lends to drastic and realtime tonal transformation. Clocking in at a lean 1:25, it’s a quick and lively skip through a blend of complimentary and warring syncopations—another hallmark of Uhlmann’s style—topped with synthetic glissandos and stereo-image warbles placed just so. What really makes it gel, though, is the harmonic simplicity that the transformative madness is serving. At the end of the day, the basic structure of “Burnt Toast” is an uncomplicated chord progression.
That essential simplicity, leaning into tonal expressions of quiet joy and deep longing, could be the most relevant throughline in Uhlmann’s work. On Extra Stars it’s likely best exemplified on “Days,” a serene 7+ minute track born in the nerve shattering confusion of 2020. “It was made in my old apartment and felt like a way of self soothing by playing the same chords over and over again,” says Uhlmann. The result is a wisping, languid, near free-time drift through a progression that manages to maintain its directness despite its slow-building reverberated accompaniment. Like a Harold Budd take on the somber fingerpicked elegance of Frantz Casseus, “Days” wanders through the speakers with an almost nostalgic air. A grandmotherly wall organ melody sings around dancing piano notes as chattering synthesis renders itself percussive amongst the steel string comfort of Uhlmann’s electric guitar. It’s the kind of recording that could go on forever and maybe, somewhere, it’s doing just that. On Extra Stars, though, it acts as a spiritual centerpiece, rejuvenating the listener as it fades out slowly, cleansing and leaving us ready for more.
“Back Scratch” is collage-cut from a series of piano improvisations and post-composed with pitch-shifted percussion contributions from Uhlmann’s SML bandmate Booker Stardrum. Uneven loops syncopate in chance mode while the barrage of high-register notes conflate with Stardrum’s stickwork to cement a rhythm dense enough to nearly become a drone. The impulsive comparison to the intensely rhythmic zither dance of Laraaji would be understandable, but mostly inaccurate. “Back Scratch” is produced in a markedly raw, un-reverberated manner—and it’s precisely that stark wonkiness that separates it from something like Day Of Radiance and makes it more akin to a basement DIY crack at Reich’s Drumming. That said, its brevity and singularity among the wildly diverse Extra Stars tracklist means that it might be (just maybe) more actual fun to listen to than both of those records.
The guitarless moments on Extra Stars shine as brightly as those that highlight Uhlmann’s primary instrument, but even those departures display themselves distinctively, especially when he invites and directs a collaborator. The labcoat synth silliness and percussive b-ball bounce of “Dottie,” for instance, contrasts sharply from the unbridled beeswarm rhythm composite of “Worms Eye” despite the implementation of the same tools and techniques—likely due to the co-production presence of synthesist Jeremiah Chiu (another SML bandmate) on the latter. Regardless, there’s no mistaking an Uhlmann composition and there’s no mistaking when he’s at the helm. For instance, while Chiu’s presence can certainly be felt on “Voice Exchange,” its outlandish rhythm focused take on the pitch-shifted vocals of longtime Uhlmann collaborator Tasha couldn’t be further from the other Chiu co-productions on Extra Stars.
The ability to maintain a recognizable voice across vast stylistic shifts, while employing the talents of those who also possess singularly recognizable voices, is not something that is heard often and it’s Uhlmann’s ability to recognize what makes each collaborator unique that makes it work here. A great example is “Bristlecone,” which finds him directing the powerful low-end command of Anna Butterss’s bass and the multiphonic mystery of Josh Johnson’s processed alto. The composition and arrangement are supported at every turn by Uhlmann’s SML bandmates without the result ever wandering away from something we can hear as distinctly his. Like David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, or Miles Davis, Uhlmann uses collaboration to both support and transform. To reinforce and evolve. With Extra Stars he has delivered such a promising collection of instrumental concepts following an extended period of vast, high-level artistic output. There’s no doubt that it will continue to be a joy to experience that evolution in real time.
After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. A key figure in tsapiky as a guitarist and composer, and a driving force behind a genre he helped define, Damily has long expressed himself through the voices of the singers accompanying his bands. With Fanjiry, he takes a singular step forward: for the first time, he carries his compositions himself through singing — not by claiming the role of a singer, but as a natural extension of his playing and personal storytelling. Known for igniting village ceremonies and carrying the fever of Toliara far beyond Madagascar’s shores, he makes a shift here — not away from trance, but deeper into its core. Recorded and mixed in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog sound engineer Peter Deimel, Fanjiry reduces tsapiky to its essence: a single guitar and a single heartbeat. Damily plays alone, yet fills the entire space — bass, rhythm, melody, breath and pulse merging into a dense, vibrating and constantly moving sound. Each riff becomes architecture, each harmonic opens a door onto memory, childhood landscapes, and those nights when music heals, connects, and pushes back the dark. Free of nostalgia and frozen folklore, Fanjiry unfolds as an intimate territory where tsapiky naturally converges with memories of village life in the 1980s — the Pecto, Radio Mozambique, East African 7-inch records, Malagasy national hits — alongside possession rituals and the practices of local healers. Added to this is a second life lived far from Madagascar, which has allowed Damily to explore the depths of his guitar more freely, pushing his sound further, beyond constraints. Raw and precise, suspended between earth and sky, the album is born from gesture and necessity. Its title — the last star visible before dawn — captures that fragile moment when a single guitar can hold an entire world and still move forward. With Fanjiry, Damily does not step back — he opens the horizon. A solitary record reaching toward others, where intimacy becomes universal and the dance begins again, softly, before sunrise.
Following Léve Léve Vol. 1, this second volume continues a long-term exploration of the popular music of São Tomé and Príncipe, with a clear focus on rhythm, movement and dancefloor energy. Curated by Tom B., Léve Léve Vol. 2 brings together emblematic recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, carefully restored and remastered, designed as much for close listening as for DJ use. The compilation deepens and completes the first volume by returning to key groups such as Sangazuza, Conjunto Equador, Africa Negra and Pedro Lima, while also unveiling previously unreleased or hard-to-find tracks. Across the record, puxa and socopê rhythms unfold with remarkable intensity, capturing these bands at the height of their powers: tight arrangements, driving grooves and a strong sense of collective momentum. Beyond celebration, Léve Léve Vol. 2 also reflects a precise cultural and political context. Several songs reference Luso-African independence struggles, spirituality, love and everyday life, anchoring this music in a history shaped by resistance, circulation and hybridization. Recorded in São Tomé, Luanda or Lisbon — often with the involvement of key figures from the Lusophone diaspora — these tracks reveal a modern musical landscape that has long remained under-documented. Conceived as a living record rather than a static archival object, this compilation speaks equally to DJs and curious listeners. It once again affirms Bongo Joe’s approach: bringing powerful, popular and complex music back into circulation, without nostalgia or exoticism, and making it fully present today.
January 2nd, 2023. Aside from being the second of a new year, it was a pretty ordinary night at ETA in Los Angeles, where guitarist Jeff Parker - alongside his ETA IVtet with saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose - had been holding down a regular Monday gig since 2016. At the time, nobody knew it was the first gig of the last year that ETA would be open for business.
Over seven years of holding down that residency, Parker’s ETA ensemble evolved from a band that played mostly standards into a group known for its transcendent, long-form (sometimes stretching out for 45 minutes or more) journeys into innovative, often uncharted territories of groove-oriented, painterly, polyrhythmic, minimalist and mantric improvised music.
With that musical growth, the crowds for Parker and his band at ETA grew across the years too. What started as a sparse gathering of weeknight drinkers, friends, family, and Chicago expats (coming to get a shot of nostalgia for the atmospheres Parker used to create at Rodan across the ‘00s and early ‘10s) grew into a Los Angeles nightlife staple with a packed house and a line down the block for every show.
By January 2023 interest in Parker’s music was stronger than ever, coming off successes with the December 2021 International Anthem/Nonesuch release of Forfolks – a collection of solo guitar works – and the October 2022 Eremite release of Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, a double LP chronicling the ETA IVtet’s distinct, expansive approach to improvisation across four side-length tracks recorded and mixed live by engineer Bryce Gonzales.
Mondays introduced the world to the ETA IVtet’s signature sound with a gathering of unnamed recordings from dates between 2019 and 2021. Parker’s new ETA IVtet offering stays true to that formula in some ways – as he returns to Gonzales’s archive of analog captures to gather four long recordings totalling around 80 minutes – while zooming in on a more particular moment in his journey. The Way Out of Easy provides us a macro-lens view of the ever-refining, infinite organic essence of the ensemble as they stretch out across a single night of soundmaking on January 2nd, 2023.
The engineer Gonzales is well known for the high-end audio gear he builds as Highland Dynamics, and even designed a custom mixer to be able to record the ETA IVtet, specifically, while only taking up a single space at the bar. In his liner notes for The Way Out of Easy, he colors his process and approach: “There are many different ways to make recordings and they all have their place. But for this band, the most important thing to consider is: not doing anything to get in the way of what they are saying to each other.” He refers to the simple schematic he used for capturing these performances – “basically only 4 level controls for one microphone per player” – which allows us an incredibly pure, honest, transparent and transporting experience of the music as it unfolds and is created in real time.
The set begins with an extended take on Parker’s composition “Freakadelic” – a tune he originally recorded for his 2012 Delmark release Bright Light in Winter. The B-side piece “Late Autumn” finds Parker swaying in alliterative, arpeggiating cycles, using just a few plucked notes as he lays the compositional foundation. At first it almost sounds like an echo of the humble tunes he wrote alone with his guitar on Forfolks, but in this space his ensemble joins him to help build a beautifully multi-textured, gently-shifting four-dimensional construction out of a simple idea. On “Easy Way Out,” Butterss’s bobbing bass line leads, paddling the ensemble into a placid expanse of tender psychedelia while Bellerose dusts off the drums like an archaeologist unearthing ancient artifacts.
It had become customary for the IVtet to end their shows every week with a standard or a tune – a practice that Parker embraced for wanting to give the audience something warm and familiar to take home after a long night of taking them out on creative limbs. Some of Parker’s more common calls were “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Burt Bacharach, “1974 Blues” by Eddie Harris, or “Peace” by Horace Silver. In this set, the IVtet closes not with a familiar song, but a familiar sound in the form of a dub/reggae groove (given the name “Chrome Dome” by Parker in post), developing spontaneously out of lyrical ad libs by Johnson on solo saxophone.
In early December of 2023, ETA co-owner Ryan Julio was forced to make a sudden announcement that the venue would permanently shutter at the end of the year. On December 23rd, Parker and the band played at ETA for the last time.
On July 22nd, 2024, the ETA IVtet gathered to perform together for the first time since then, playing for a sold-out crowd of several hundred listeners – a smiling Ryan Julio among them – at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Gonzales was there, recording with his compact analog setup just behind the band on stage. The space may be gone but its spirit lives and the music moves forward into new vessels.
Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda’s devotion to spirituality was the central purpose of the final four decades of her life, an often-overlooked awakening that largely took shape during her four-year marriage to John Coltrane and after his 1967 death. By 1983, Alice had established the 48-acre Sai Anantam Ashram outside of Los Angeles. She quietly began recording music from the ashram, releasing it within her spiritual community in the form of private press cassette tapes. On May 5, Luaka Bop will release the first-ever compilation of recordings from this period, making these songs available to the wider public for the first time. Entitled ‘World Spirituality Classics, Volume 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda,’ the release is the first installment in a planned series of spiritual music from around the globe; curated, compiled and distributed by Luaka Bop.
This powerful, largely unheard body of work finds Alice singing for the first time in her recorded catalog, which dates back to 1963 and includes appearances on six John Coltrane albums, alongside Charlie Haden and McCoy Tyner, and 14 albums as bandleader starting with her Impulse! debut in 1967 with ‘A Monastic Trio.’ The songs featured on the Luaka Bop release have been culled from the four cassettes that Alice recorded and released between 1982 and 1995: ‘Turiya Sings,’ ‘Divine Songs,’ ‘Infinite Chants,’ and ‘Glorious Chants.’ The digital, cassette and CD release will feature eight songs. The double-vinyl edition features two additional songs, “Krishna Japaye” from 1990’s ‘Infinite Chants, and the previously unreleased “Rama Katha” from a separate ‘Turiya Sings’ recording session.
Luaka Bop teamed with Alice’s children to find the original master tapes in the Coltrane archive. The recordings were prepared for re-mastering by the legendary engineer Baker Bigsby (Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, John Coltrane), who had overseen the original sessions in the 80s and 90s. The compilation showcases a diverse array of recordings in addition to Alice’s first vocal work: solo performances on her harp, small ensembles, and a 24-piece vocal choir. The release is dotted with eastern percussion, synthesizers, organs and strings, making for a mesmerizing, even otherworldly, listen. Alice was inspired by Vedic devotional songs from India and Nepal, adding her own music sensibility to the mix with original melodies and sophisticated song structures. She never lost her ability to draw from the bebop, blues and old-time spirituals of her Detroit youth, fusing a Western upbringing with Eastern classicism. In all, these recordings amount to a largely untold chapter in the life story of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda.
In addition to the recordings, GRAMMY-winning music historian Ashley Kahn has written extensive liner notes on the collection. The package also includes a series of interviews with those who knew Alice best, conducted by Dublab’s Mark “Frosty” McNeill, and an as-told-to interview between musician Surya Botofasina (who was raised on Alice’s ashram) and journalist Andy Beta. 2017 marks what would have been Alice’s 80th year of life, as well as the 10th anniversary of her passing. Alice will be celebrated at events throughout the United States, Europe and South America in the coming year. With this in mind, the time is right to bring this meaningful piece of Turiyasangitananda’s legacy into focus.
Ambre Ciel is a composer and singer who hails from Montreal, Canada and is a purveyor of dreamy, expansive, spacious music that draws influence from contemporary classical influenced artists, as well as the impressionist world and American minimalists.
Ambre who sings in both English and her native French, hails from a family of singers and artists, “I started my journey learning violin at six and began experimenting with pedal effects and looping melodies later on”. University followed with a focus on composition and recording. “That’s when I started exploring composing and songwriting more deeply—both the world of sounds in itself and songs built mostly with layers of violin and voice. It was also during this time that I returned to my ‘first’ instrument, the piano, which opened more harmonic possibilities.”
Her debut album still, there is the sea, represents a beginning, a first and imperfect attempt to create this other world that was living in her mind. She has crafted a beautifully refined album making a lot of space for strings arrangements and other acoustic instruments, as well as her own beautiful voice.
“Phi-Psonics is a spiritual exploration of being together and connecting,” says acoustic bassist Seth Ford-Young of the immersive project he initiated in East Los Angeles in 2016. For his third long-player under the Phi-Psonics banner, Ford-Young marshalled a series of live recordings at Healing Force Of The Universe records in Pasadena, sculpting fourteen tracks, largely composed in the moment with a fluctuating cast of players, which wonderfully transmit his ideals of community and inner peace.
Ford-Young says of Expanding to One..."We live in increasingly dark times and while I intend our music to be a balm to those who connect with it, I also want the context of our musical conversations to include the outer as much as our inner worlds. The music we make doesn’t exist in a vacuum and the backdrop of injustice and tragedy in our world has to be part of our music.”
Performers:
Seth Ford-Young - acoustic bass, percussion
Sylvain Carton - tenor saxophone, baritone saxophone, flute, alto flute, bamboo flute, percussion
Randal Fisher - tenor saxophone, flute
Mitchell Yoshida - Wurlitzer 140b electric piano
Zach Tenorio - Wurlitzer 200a electric piano
Gary Fukushima - Wurlitzer 140b electric piano
Dylan Day - guitar
Dave Harrington - guitar
Rocco DeLuca - pedal steel guitar
Minta Spencer - harp
Sheila Govindarajan - Voice
Spencer Zahn - acoustic bass
Josh Collazo - drums
Jay Bellerose - drums, percussion
Mathias Künzli - percussion
Produced by Seth Ford-Young
Recorded February 7, 21 March 6, 20, April 3,17 - 2024
Live at Healing Force of the Universe Records, Pasadena California
Engineered by Seth Ford-Young
Mixed by Seth Ford-Young
