MUSIC

Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance. Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release. The unmistakable hue of Japan hovers throughout this emotional rich landscape. Subtle field recordings and fragile, abstract motifs drift through the album, all cloaked in a warmth and humanity that only Noriko seems able to conjure. Pon moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure. There are moments of deceptive simplicity where unexpected elements suddenly surface — strange voices emerge on Boku Wa Obaka, Knife of Yonder is a standout: a startling ten-minute unfolding that begins with a warm, almost Eno-esque drift before launching into a soaring mid-section and finally landing somewhere unexpectedly blues-adjacent. Kikoeru Pon is brimming with childlike wonder — a heartfelt ballad that dissolves into domestic field recordings, including sounds of the feline for whom both the album and track are named. A quietly devastating ending that brings the personal nature of the record into sharp focus. There is a deep sense of the human in the way Noriko embraces technology. This is far from cold abstraction; rather, Ponfeels like a colourful photo album, documenting Noriko’s inner world and instincts with remarkable intimacy. Hovering in liminal states between pop, ambient and abstraction, this is a deeply affective and moving release that reveals new surprises with each listen. The emotional range of Noriko’s latest offering inspires hope in a world in disarray. It is both gentle and epic and one which we feel embodies the work of an artist fully at the height of her powers.

Live At Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali sees Grischa Lichtenberger transfigure a forty-minute set into a tactile, visual, and kinetic experience. Industrial clangor, mechanical pulses, and fleeting ambience merge, sculpted with rigor. Issued by Hermit Records as a collector’s vinyl, it stands at the edge between noise, rhythm, and abstraction With Live At Fondazione Museo Pino Pascali, Grischa Lichtenberger distills the art of sound into forty minutes of fiercely organized chaos. Recorded in the unique space of the Pino Pascali Museum in Polignano a Mare and released by Hermit Records, the album is a study in constructive friction—mechanical pulses and ferrous textures recurring, splintering, and coalescing in real time. Lichtenberger's palette draws from the imaginary of Russolo and Brinkmann, yet forges its own path: rhythm and abstraction in an endless handshake, frequency as sculpture, and every crackle a gesture or a mark. This release, limited to a black vinyl edition and including original music and artwork conceived over more than a decade, is purposefully an object as well as a document. No digital footprints, just a testimony pressed in the grooves—an encounter with matter, with noise, with control. Here, listening is not passive; it is as much a process as the performance itself, alive with tension and raw poetics. [Soundohm] An abstract painting with expressionist hues and futurist echoes, a mix between action painting and informal art: this is the first impression from Grischa Lichtenberger's live performance recorded at the Pino Pascali Museum in Polignano a Mare. The artist, based in Berlin, makes the rhythms creak, cuts them with a laser, weaves imaginative harmonic coils, smoothes with electric razors and draws figures with echoes and industrial clangs. Then he uses ferrous materials that, with a precision lathe, are abraded and cause sparks. Suddenly steel springs fall to the ground, generating a cascade effect. In the distance, you can hear the roar of speeding cars and the ringing of bells. Lichtenberger pulps, compresses, dilates, mixes, electrifies, heats up, liquefies: he does all this in just less than forty minutes, treating the sound material with violence, transforming it from time to time, shaping it and succeeding in the arduous task of controlling its effects. It is as if Luigi Russolo, Alva Noto and Thomas Brinkmann were closed in a workshop on the edge of a highway, parodying the famous definition of techno.

Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce the release of Crayola Circles, a collaboration between rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Child Actor. While both artists have long standing connections to Backwoodz, this album marks their first collaboration of any kind and breaks new artistic ground for all parties. Sharif’s previous album, Decay, released on Backwoodz in 2023, was a haunting experimental rap masterpiece, an acid trip in a mental hospital. On Crayola Circles Sharif trades menacing psychedelia for a simmering stew of blacklight expressionism, his verses slipping effortlessly through the swells and tides of Child Actor’s masterful production. No matter how uneasy the waves grow, Sharif is at ease, a truth teller whispering anti-riddles in your ear.This album feels like a new chamber for Child Actor, as well. The producer has been on an impressive run since dropping CINE- a collaboration with rapper Cavalier- on Backwoodz in late 2024. Child Actor has shown up in the liner notes of everyone from Navy Blue (The Sword & The Soaring) to Earl Sweatshirt (Live, Laugh, Love) to ELUCID (Revelator) to Open Mike Eagle (Neighborhood Gods Unlimited), to Ghais Guevara (A Quest to Self-Mythologize), amongst others. On Crayola Circles Child Actor’s production is dynamic, shifting and sliding into new phases and movements in an instant. The beats are full and knotty, leaning into jazz and folk, while remaining tethered to the tender minimalism that is his signature. It’s a difficult balance for any producer, and here it is executed perfectly, placing us in a world of wood and brass, cowhide and undersea piano. On any other record, this soundscape would steal the show — and it very nearly does — but Sharif’s command never wavers, ever in control; a lucid dreamer in an induced coma.There are no guests, no skits, and no interludes. There might not even be songs, instead Crayola Circles seems akin to a great river; singular, traversing forest and jungle, mountain and valley, running from mouth to endless sea.

Jeff Jank, designer of the original album and “Gold Chains” edition:

The first time I heard The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, it struck me as a hip-hop equivalent of Frank Zappa & The Mothers of Invention’s We’re Only in It for the Money (1968). Zappa’s crazy, chaotic record also happened to feature the first-ever knock-off cover of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a tradition in graphic arts that continues to this day. The ‘Gold Chains’ collage is my own spin on the tradition, also taking its inspiration from Madlib’s track “Rappcats Pt. 3.”

This alternate cover for Further Adventures was designed Fall 2020. In just a year between then and now we lost three of the heroes in the collage: DOOM, Biz Markie, and Melvin Van Peebles.

Madlib's original Bad Character emerges again. Yessir Whatever is 12-tracks recorded over roughly 12 years, produced entirely by Madlib.

Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce the release of Crayola Circles, a collaboration between rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Child Actor. While both artists have long standing connections to Backwoodz, this album marks their first collaboration of any kind and breaks new artistic ground for all parties. Sharif’s previous album, Decay, released on Backwoodz in 2023, was a haunting experimental rap masterpiece, an acid trip in a mental hospital. On Crayola Circles Sharif trades menacing psychedelia for a simmering stew of blacklight expressionism, his verses slipping effortlessly through the swells and tides of Child Actor’s masterful production. No matter how uneasy the waves grow, Sharif is at ease, a truth teller whispering anti-riddles in your ear.This album feels like a new chamber for Child Actor, as well. The producer has been on an impressive run since dropping CINE- a collaboration with rapper Cavalier- on Backwoodz in late 2024. Child Actor has shown up in the liner notes of everyone from Navy Blue (The Sword & The Soaring) to Earl Sweatshirt (Live, Laugh, Love) to ELUCID (Revelator) to Open Mike Eagle (Neighborhood Gods Unlimited), to Ghais Guevara (A Quest to Self-Mythologize), amongst others. On Crayola Circles Child Actor’s production is dynamic, shifting and sliding into new phases and movements in an instant. The beats are full and knotty, leaning into jazz and folk, while remaining tethered to the tender minimalism that is his signature. It’s a difficult balance for any producer, and here it is executed perfectly, placing us in a world of wood and brass, cowhide and undersea piano. On any other record, this soundscape would steal the show — and it very nearly does — but Sharif’s command never wavers, ever in control; a lucid dreamer in an induced coma.There are no guests, no skits, and no interludes. There might not even be songs, instead Crayola Circles seems akin to a great river; singular, traversing forest and jungle, mountain and valley, running from mouth to endless sea.

Two turntables and a microphone. There is a truth in the clarity of that simple coda, a truth that also belies the breadth of what is possible within its confines. Sometimes you gotta get reminded. I Guess U Had To Be There, the new album from NYC rapper ELUCID and veteran producer Sebb Bash, is one of those ones. So fresh it sounds like it was made tomorrow, but bet money you could put this on in '89 and get heads bopping.

There are moments in music when masters of their craft cross paths at the height of their respective powers - records like Madvillainy, Liquid Swords, Dr. Octagonecologyst, and Hell Hath No Fury - where the result is more than the sum of its parts. ELUCID and Sebb Bash find themselves in this heady, seemingly effortless ephemera on I Guess U Had To Be There. Everything is both familiar and groundbreaking. The beats shift and flip under ELUCID's feet but he tightropes it all, delivery nimble as a mountain goat, producer and rapper moving in perfect synchronization. Some shining stars make memorable appearances: billy woods, Breezly Brewin, Estee Nack, Shabaka Hutchings. But this is a two-man show, and the duo keep the spotlight where it belongs. I Guess U Had To Be There is a captivating, convention-defying listen and a high-water mark for two of the best artists in the genre.

Two turntables and a microphone. There is a truth in the clarity of that simple coda, a truth that also belies the breadth of what is possible within its confines. Sometimes you gotta get reminded. I Guess U Had To Be There, the new album from NYC rapper ELUCID and veteran producer Sebb Bash, is one of those ones. So fresh it sounds like it was made tomorrow, but bet money you could put this on in '89 and get heads bopping.

There are moments in music when masters of their craft cross paths at the height of their respective powers - records like Madvillainy, Liquid Swords, Dr. Octagonecologyst, and Hell Hath No Fury - where the result is more than the sum of its parts. ELUCID and Sebb Bash find themselves in this heady, seemingly effortless ephemera on I Guess U Had To Be There. Everything is both familiar and groundbreaking. The beats shift and flip under ELUCID's feet but he tightropes it all, delivery nimble as a mountain goat, producer and rapper moving in perfect synchronization. Some shining stars make memorable appearances: billy woods, Breezly Brewin, Estee Nack, Shabaka Hutchings. But this is a two-man show, and the duo keep the spotlight where it belongs. I Guess U Had To Be There is a captivating, convention-defying listen and a high-water mark for two of the best artists in the genre.

"For A Fleeting Moment" is the result of the dialogue between the Swiss photographer Simone Kappeler and the Japanese musician Tomotsugu Nakamura initiated by IIKKI, between March 2023 and May 2024.

the complete project works in two physical imprints:

a book and a disc (vinyl/cd)

it should be experienced in different ways :

the book read alone

the disc listened to alone

the book and the disc read and listened to together.

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Tomotsugu Nakamura is a musician and graphic designer residing in Tokyo, Japan. His primary artistic practice is to compose music with some fragments of minimal acoustic and electronic tones and some field recordings. In Concert, he he has played with various genre of musicians and his works have been released by Kaico, Audiobulb Records, and more recently by the French label LAAPS.

After studying photography, music, drawing in a Fines Arts school, David Nissen changed direction to get involved in cinema where he works there as director of photography for feature films or advertising, without ever forget about photography. French photographer David Nissen takes us on an atmospheric journey through fog, rain and fading lights. Explaining that he enjoys being in a contemplative state, he says he enjoys walking, driving, listening to music, which inspires him a lot. He is looking for a strong, powerful light, an atmosphere that can tell a story, which will be an invitation to travel through his images. With a background in cinema, it makes sense for him to approach photography like a director in search of the perfect location… the result is broody, sublime, as well as cinematic. His shoots in France and abroad are opportunities to exercise his photographer's eye, to make such personal and intimate series of photos during solitary wanderings in places that each have their own story to tell or to invent. The rare human beings who appear take on the appearance of movie characters whose enigmatic thoughts we would like to know...the visual strength of certain places or architectures, under singular light atmospheres, takes the visitor into a fiction in which he himself becomes an actor is an exchange of glances. Also photographing through impurities or raindrops, his search for materiality gives a thickness that we encounter in painting, his approach to photography is deliberately pictorial and emotional.

For him, cinematography and photography are two passions that merge and feed off each other: Write a story with Light.

« If cinema and photography have a marked tendency to intersect, it is because there are affinities and contrasts between them that bind them by nature. The photographic image being consubstantial with the cinematographic image, there are relations of opposition at the level of the modes of existence of their images for a spectator: on the one hand the animated images, in sequence, projected, temporalized... other, the single fixed image, printed, not temporalized. As a result, everyone can try to approach the other, cinema proves the experience of photographic fixity with the freeze frame, while photography experiences the experience of cinematographic sequentiality with the representation of movement with the effects of shake or spinning in his photos.

A brief historical and technical reminder makes it possible to establish that the similarities are due to the fact that photography is the fundamental material element at the base of cinema: the cinematographic photogram is by nature a photographic image. With the photo, the spectator generally has a close relationship, which allows him to enter into a relationship with it by sight and touch: the photograph is an image that the spectator can hold in his hands to look at it, he is somehow physically "attached" to the image. This attachment is physical, allowed by the small size. With the cinema, the spectator has a relationship of relative remoteness and comes into contact with him by sight and hearing. This distancing, this physical detachment, this border between the viewer and the film that the large format facilitates, the viewer's gaze "plunges" into the image. For the photo, this place is above all a private, intimate, enlightened environment in which it has an assigned place, arranged, collected, hung... the viewer does not really have to move, he can freely choose the moment of reading and manipulate the photo, the viewer has a certain hold over the photo. For the film, the place is often a public space, specially designed and dark, the spectator must move, "we are going to the cinema" take his place and a seated position, motionless, passive. The moment of reading is programmed, the viewer has no control over the film. » David Nissen

Nobody brings the ruckus quite like the Japanese. IKKII records invited Masaya Ozaki & Kaito Nakahori to join forces with visual artist Erwan Morère to create a hazy landscape of distorted violins on one of 2017’s most trying ambient noise efforts. Mythologies is limited to 300 copies, all fitted with beautiful hand-made artwork. Highly recommended for those who love drones in all colors of noise.