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This is the first album by the improvisation group FuzzyToyShip.
The group was formed by Tomonao Koshikawa, a member of the legendary improvisation group Marginal Consort and a former member of East Bionic Symphonia.
Koshikawa has released two excellent works with ato.archives, and this time he presents his long-standing core practice of free improvisation. The work was created with musicians who had never played free improvisation before. Guided by Koshikawa, the musicians play with vigor, as the music flows from chaos to calm, presenting a fresh acoustic voyage.
Excerpt from the tape sleeve:
Beginning in 2022, I started conducting improvisation sessions in a workshop format, in which members of the audience would join the performance during the latter half. Over time, several people among the audience began to demonstrate an understanding of free improvisation, and I gradually developed the desire to form a group with them. Perhaps, in a sense, I was looking for a way to recreate East Bionic Symphonia, a group that I had not actively engaged with fifty years ago.
Tofu is one of the world’s most misunderstood foods. Outside East and Southeast Asia it is often dismissed as weird and flavourless, yet across China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and beyond it has played a lead role in everyday life for centuries. It’s a food of remarkable versatility, capable of endless transformation while remaining instantly recognisable. That paradox lies at the heart of Tofu: Original Soundtrack. Conceived alongside research for a book exploring the history of tofu (Tofu: A Culinary History), the compilation invites artists from around the world to respond not simply to an ingredient, but to its mythology, materiality, history and cultural resonance. The result is a soundtrack to bean curd in all its forms: humble and profound, domestic and cosmic, ancient yet continually reinvented.
Like tofu itself, the compilation constantly changes shape. Tokyo producer aus (Flau Records) opens the album with luminous ambient electronics that explore tofu's uncanny physicality, before Rebecca Burden ventures into brooding electroacoustic territory inspired by ancient Chinese mythology and the destructive power of music itself. twenty eyes drifts through the supernatural world of Japanese fox folklore, while Yumi Iwaki and Tonia Ko transform the chemistry of tofu-making into shimmering modular synthesis and tactile sound art, tracing the mysterious moment at which liquid becomes curd. Yetsuby turns her attention to tofu as comfort food through warm, delicately textured electronics, Stella Chin-Ting Yang blends synthesis with field recordings captured in Thailand and Taipei to celebrate tofu’s endlessly varied textures, and Louie Zong, under his Lookfar moniker, descends into rich dungeon synth inspired by the dank, microbial world of fermented tofu. The journey then returns to reality through Nick Luscombe’s intimate field recording of a working tofu shop in Tokyo, before VGM maestro bo en closes proceedings with an exuberant roll-credits celebration reminiscent of folk festivities.
Featuring an ensemble roster of artists from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK and US, the Tofu OST embraces the same adaptability that has allowed bean curd to travel across cultures while remaining deeply rooted in local traditions. Each contribution offering a distinct perspective, yet together forming a coherent whole: a celebration of one of humanity’s most enduring foods, and of the communities, histories and creative practices that surround it. Whether meditative, playful, uncanny or joyful, these pieces reveal tofu as far more than an ingredient—it becomes a vessel for storytelling, experimentation and shared cultural memory.
Topu Lyo’s debut solo album quiet scenes from tokyo collects sixteen miniatures recorded in his Tokyo apartment using little more than cello and a Roland Space Echo. Extended techniques mimic electronic effects, moving between bowed drones, rhythmic pizzicato and strange, granular-sounding passages. The nearby freeway also became part of the music: traffic seeps naturally into the recordings alongside passing announcements and the city’s daily sunset melody. Sparse and exploratory, the album finds unexpected connections between acoustic cello, environmental sound and electronic production.
„Öd“ marks the long-awaited return of Institut für Feinmotorik - the Black Forest collective known for using eight prepared turntables to investigate acoustic micro-phenomena generated by everyday objects - with a new album and their first full-length release on Faitiche. It is also the return of their almost comical understatement as personal artistic principle: „making almost nothing out of almost nothing,“ compressed into the dots on an umlaut. The Öd-nis, the wasteland, is a field that the collective has been ploughing in sound since their first release in 1997. Eight prepared turntables, four mixers, no records, six hands (give or take) merge into what they call the „Octogrammoticum“. A rotating organism of surfaces in friction, fed with the clutter from a drawer: rubber bands or tin foil, CDs, a discarded socket board. Under IFF's scrutinizing stylus, mundane almost-nothings get scratched open to reveal the acoustic density of negative space itself. Last year’s „Adhesive Tape“ drew IFF closer together after an almost ten-year hiatus. An eponymous event series at Berlin's silent green set in motion what would become their most twistedly funky release since „Penetrans“ on Staubgold in 2002. The only thing öd about „Öd" (meaning „barren" or „boring“ in German) may well be its title: layers of improvised play and randomized loops convolve around porous, dubby groove locks, tugging at each other in a call-and-response with howling static that cuts through bulbous ambient techno into a scrap-metal Dixieland phantasm. Stratified yet spacious, these sonic double exposures always hover on the verge of collapsing. What you think you hear might not be what you actually hear. The album’s track titles resemble Conceptual Poetry, extending this psycho-phenomenological gesture into the realm of spoken language. Conceived by renowned poet Dagmara Kraus, they become word molecules - „stern,” „dies,” „lose“ - tilting delicately between German and English, constantly changing depending on the ear’s perspective and pointing back to the deeply unstable fabric connecting meaning and sound. Which also makes „Öd“ an unusual cross-disciplinary collaboration - at least in the field of electronic music. PS: Since its beginnings in Bad Säckingen, IFF has always been more than the sum of its rotating parts, moving tirelessly between multimedia art, theory, solo projects and collaborations. With IFF Expanded, the collective now opens its eight-doored apparatus, inviting artists working with CDJs or samplers to join - an ambitious live format that loosens its former purity law while carrying forward a long-standing curatorial practice. The same thread also runs into the related event series Acephalic Headspace. (Text: Sonja Matuszczyk)
Markus Guentner’s 2001 debut In Moll emerged from the early years of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient series and has since become a cult favourite of 21st-century ambient music. Across its patient, spacious compositions, delicate melodic fragments, soft synth washes, distant bells and deep bass tones create an enveloping, dreamlike sound. Warm yet melancholy, In Moll helped establish Guentner as a distinctive voice in electronic music, earning admirers including Kompakt founders Michael Mayer and Wolfgang Voigt. This 25th anniversary edition also includes a reworked interpretation of the album by Guentner himself.
Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer Grand River (Aimée Portioli) presents Temporary, an album written in the aftermath of personal grief and loss. Released through Editions Mego, it combines resonant guitar, modular synthesis, deep low-end electronics, acoustic passages and heavy percussion, moving between brooding intensity and spacious ambience. Tracks such as 'The crossing of the body, the crossing of the mind' and 'Maybe I am dead and this is paradise' bring guitars into dramatic collision with electronics, while gentler passages introduce harp and acoustic guitar. Its interconnected titles form a meditation on mortality, transience and the heightened value of fleeting experience.
*200 copies limited edition* The music on ‘Remanens’ is the result of a commission by Art Cinema OFF off and B.A.A.D.M to score the short silent film ‘Positano’ made by french actor and filmmaker Pierre Clémenti in 1969. The film itself is an ever-shifting series of glimpses, without much context, of a family vacation to the island Positano. The short cuts are similar to a dream or obscured, residual memories where chronology has fallen apart. The score was reworked into album format on ‘Remanens’, the title being the Swedish word for remanence. The word has several meanings, most commonly residual magnetism left behind in a material. It is consequently used when referring to residue on magnetic tape, as well as data remanence, which is the residual digital data that remains even after attempts have been made to erase a hard drive. The music was reworked with remnant traces of memory in mind, of the film, but also of how glimpses of memories from another life, when the future was undecided, can make a person feel – and how it can unveil one’s own traces of what the future felt like. Linus Hillborg (b. 1989) is a Swedish composer, musician and multidisciplinary artist based in Stockholm. His diverse creative practice spans experimental music across both electronic and acoustic realms, as well as compositions for film, theatre, and interactive installations. In 2021 he released his acclaimed solo-debut 'Magelungsverket' through Moloton, derived from the installation 'Orphan Works' which he built with an obsolete computer game engine. In 2023 he released 'Four Works' through Kali Malone and Maria W Horn’s label XKatedral, which featured a series of instrumental works by himself and Theodor Kentros.
Otto A Totland's modern compositional elements are most widely recognized as half of the Norwegian duo Deaf Center, where his melancholic, intricate piano work provides haunting relief to the beds of noise and deep strings from Erik K Skodvin. Pinô is the first full-length release by Totland, though his solo work has been released once, as the 5-minute A-side of Sonic Pieces 7inch Harmony From the Past. Otto's previously brief vignettes are now expanded into a fully personal realization of his own style. Initial track Open fills itself with heavy, knowing pauses that quickly become overwhelmed with the desire to understand what's to come. Each silence leads into quick flutters of keys, preparing the listener for a vast terrain of giddy beauty, bleak depths, and true contentedness. Pinô quickly recalls deep winter; in front of a fireplace for days on end, you lose how far along you've ventured into the 18 tracks without any idea how far is left to go. The experience feels inevitable, with no other option but to curl up somewhere cozy and appreciate the sense of timelessness that Totland has created. His album is a haunting modern compositional treasure, expressed through instrumentals completely unique to Totland and captured masterfully by Nils Frahm at Durton Studios. With Pinô, Otto A Totland appears out of the Norwegian landscape, sharing an achievement that will provide a relief during the brooding winter darkness. Though a highly personal endeavor, the recognizable continuation of Totland’s compositions will attract fans of Deaf Center, and the cinematic and classical components of his solo work will hold sway for those familiar with Harold Budd or Dustin O’Halloran.
Roméo Poirier’s Off The Record (faitiche 39) transforms the overlooked detritus of recording sessions into intricate, surreal sound pieces. Across fourteen short works, Poirier builds from accidental studio captures — engineers’ instructions, idle chatter, mic checks, false starts — fragments never intended for release. Drawing on the visual art concept of “Accumulation” pioneered by Arman, Jean Tinguely and Daniel Spoerri, Poirier assembles more than a thousand found sounds from archival tapes. Voices from old shellac grooves meet digital snippets lifted from YouTube, warped and reconfigured into vivid, shifting collages. The result is a series of miniature worlds where the mundane mechanics of music-making become the raw material for new sonic narratives. By reframing the prelude to performance, Poirier crafts a universal story about creativity in the studio — one that’s at once playful, intimate, and strangely cinematic.
Chihei Hatakeyama: electric guitar and sound effects
Shun Ishiwaka: drums and percussion, piano on ‘M6’
Cecilia Bignall: Cello on ‘M3’
Composed by Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka
‘M3’ composed by Chihei Hatakeyama, Shun Ishiwaka and Cecilia Bignall
Originally self-released in 2007 in a limited edition CDR handmade package. Remastered from the original tapes by Stephan Mathieu, artwork by Mathieu Ruhlmann and David Ruhlmann. Note: Some skips, noise, clipping, or other artefacts may occur as they have been preserved from the original recordings. Please support artists by purchasing the digital album, not streaming in excess. Thank you.
And so we come to round 4 of the Long Trax series, the pivotal moment of truth. Four new deep cuts spread across 4 sides of vinyl in dual sleeves, and spun onto disc. An all-analog, hardware machine affair, full of glazed pads and spicy stabs, rhythm composure (composer) sequences, round booming basslines, and narrators from beyond. It’s the real thing, still chugging along.
RGL is a Tokyo-based producer known for his lo-fi house productions and analog-textured dance music, with releases on labels such as Diskotopia and Breaker Breaker. His new work, Untitled, showcases a wide-ranging sonic palette: alongside rhythm-driven tracks, the release also features abstract drone pieces with little or no discernible beat. The result is a work that crystallizes RGL’s distinctive sensitivity to sound and texture. ---------------- Bio: RGL is a Tokyo-based producer and DJ. He is a member of the producer collective COSMOPOLYPHONIC and co-hosts the radio program COOL RADIO with fellow member RLP. In 2025, he released his debut album, Touzan, on the London-based label BREAKER BREAKER.
Occam Ocean is a series of acoustic compositions made for and with individual instrumentalists by the late French composer Éliane Radigue. Extending the interactive process pioneered in Naldjorlak (2005–2009), Occam Ocean employs a scoreless method of composing in dialogue with each performer. Dating back to 2011, the series has proliferated almost organically, growing out of a musical and social dynamic of combinatoriality and multiplication to a catalog of more than eighty discrete compositions. This body of work stands as one of the most extraordinary late-career outpourings in recent music history. The Occam series was catalyzed in part by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Radigue encountered a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio signals to gamma rays—which impressed upon her the minuscule range of human hearing relative to the seemingly unlimited compass of universal wavelength and frequency. The Occam compositions seem to address this vertiginous confrontation with the infinite; each individual composition elaborates a radically reduced technique or sound process, frequently working outward from only a handful of fundamental tones, to expose the flickering, idiosyncratic spectral behavior of the instrument. The reference to William of Ockham indicates a principled commitment to parsimony; paradoxically, the reduction in material content makes possible an incommensurate richness in perceived acoustical detail. Notable in the Occam series is the inextricable identification of the composition with the performer for whom, and with whom, it was made. The particular sounds and techniques of each individual performer are thus indelibly stamped in the composition; the piece composes the playing of that musician, as much as the musician plays the composition. The time-honored division of labor between performer and composer is thus suspended and reconfigured, proposing a model for new music composition that has not yet been fully theorized or understood. Occam XIII, Occam River XI (presented here in two distinct readings, which reveal subtle variations in instrumental response), and Occam V feature two longtime collaborators of Radigue in solo and duo formations. Charles Curtis, the first instrumentalist for whom Radigue wrote an acoustic composition (Naldjorlak), performs on cello, while Dafne Vicente-Sandoval—whose parallel investigations into her instrument’s complex sounding properties led her to collaborate with Radigue—performs on bassoon. The works were recorded at Temple Saint-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, during a 2024 residency at La Becque, a setting previously explored by the musicians for its distinctive acoustic properties.
Occam Ocean is a series of acoustic compositions made for and with individual instrumentalists by the late French composer Éliane Radigue. Extending the interactive process pioneered in Naldjorlak (2005–2009), Occam Ocean employs a scoreless method of composing in dialogue with each performer. Dating back to 2011, the series has proliferated almost organically, growing out of a musical and social dynamic of combinatoriality and multiplication to a catalog of more than eighty discrete compositions. This body of work stands as one of the most extraordinary late-career outpourings in recent music history. The Occam series was catalyzed in part by a visit to the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, where Radigue encountered a depiction of the electromagnetic spectrum—from radio signals to gamma rays—which impressed upon her the minuscule range of human hearing relative to the seemingly unlimited compass of universal wavelength and frequency. The Occam compositions seem to address this vertiginous confrontation with the infinite; each individual composition elaborates a radically reduced technique or sound process, frequently working outward from only a handful of fundamental tones, to expose the flickering, idiosyncratic spectral behavior of the instrument. The reference to William of Ockham indicates a principled commitment to parsimony; paradoxically, the reduction in material content makes possible an incommensurate richness in perceived acoustical detail. Notable in the Occam series is the inextricable identification of the composition with the performer for whom, and with whom, it was made. The particular sounds and techniques of each individual performer are thus indelibly stamped in the composition; the piece composes the playing of that musician, as much as the musician plays the composition. The time-honored division of labor between performer and composer is thus suspended and reconfigured, proposing a model for new music composition that has not yet been fully theorized or understood. Occam XIII, Occam River XI (presented here in two distinct readings, which reveal subtle variations in instrumental response), and Occam V feature two longtime collaborators of Radigue in solo and duo formations. Charles Curtis, the first instrumentalist for whom Radigue wrote an acoustic composition (Naldjorlak), performs on cello, while Dafne Vicente-Sandoval—whose parallel investigations into her instrument’s complex sounding properties led her to collaborate with Radigue—performs on bassoon. The works were recorded at Temple Saint-Théodule, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, during a 2024 residency at La Becque, a setting previously explored by the musicians for its distinctive acoustic properties.
Beautiful, ephemeral ectronica from Berlin’s OCA, presented by the ace Metrón label behind Meitei’s japanese ghost stories and a deep ambient dive by Georgia. Lucidly influenced by Japanese environmental ambient styles, OCA’s ‘Aging’ follows from the duo’s 2018 tape ‘Preset Music’ for Constellation Tatsu with a longing exploration of decaying melodies and blushing harmonics structures sure to light up the pleasure centres of anyone following new, Jap-inspired ambient innovations from the likes of Nozomu Matsumoto or Kenji Yamamoto to Visible Cloaks and Yamaneko, or even the breezy dimensions of Gas. Thru 10 vignette-like prisms OCA radiate pure light and good vibes from every pore, treading the finest line between introspection and nostalgic reverie in a way that acknowledges a sort of shared dream or waking life experience common to many listeners. Hailing from Bavaria, the duo’s Yo van Lenz and Florian T M Zeisig operate at a strolling pace and state of mind that almost feels like a lighter take on Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas or Love Inc. creations, had he had a headful of inspiration from anime soundtracks and japanese ambient rather than Wagner and the likes of Prefab Sprout’s soft rock. As the album title implies, this is maybe a central issue of ‘Aging’, as where Voigt looks to the romantic pop and classical inspiration of his youth, OCA take theirs from a shared but slightly different pool of ‘80s cues; clear to hear between the languorous swoon of ‘I Believe In You’, the piquant strings and grin-inducing choral percolations of ‘Time With Your Dog’ (what a title!), the spirit-easing relief of ‘Making The last Train’, and shared-memory-jogging beauties such as ‘Baby’s First Blade of Grass’.
That sought-after collab between New York producer Eden Aurelius and Ben Paulson of Purelink, operating here as Ring, originally issued as a lathe cut 10" dubplate, this is a limited run 12" edition runs at 2 tracks, 23 minutes of the good stuff, new from Chicago's Dub Techno specialists Kino Disk. Smeared to a gauzy bliss, ‘Rotation’ operates at the horizontal axis for 25 mins of knackered goodness where the most expansive post-rock terrain meets ambient electronica and dub as method. ‘Rotation 1’ teases the simplest gestures of warm, harmonised chords and sunken percussion into forms describing the motion and translucence of jellyfish, before the B-side subtly firms up the shape around moonlit, hash burp figures and subs that slosh around the ankles, while percussion clanks like mast rigging in the harbour.
12th Isle keep up an ace 10th anniversary streak with their best in recent memory; Igaxx’s suite of deep-diving ambient pearls, swimming from beatdown electronica to 4th world and new age ambient, via sleepwalking dream dancers. FFO Move D’s ‘Kunststoff’, Terre Thaemlitz, early CS + Kreme EPs, Ramzi, Eden Aurelius... Modern ambient’s Scottish pie(eye)d pipers invite Tokyo’s Igaxx to take the reins on ‘New Lights’, where he follows a string of self-released gems on his Ladybug label, and the likes of Macadam Mambo and Paesaggi Records, with an effortlessly absorbing 40 mins of breezy downbeat heat. This guy patently knows how to froth up a damn strong beatdown groove throughout ‘New Lights’, paying equal attention to atmospheric pressure and rhythm programming discipline with a sexy sensuality that pushes all the right buttons for late night listening needs (late night meaning literally anytime in Glasgow). Glowing with a vintage sodium orange candescence, rather than dimmer LED’s, ‘New Lights’ shimmies between shadows of classic and contemporary beatdown with a really classy élan. ’Something Like Astral’ sets the tone with lustrous subs harnessed to distant snare crackshots and acid contrails in a floating architecture, where ‘Zutto Mae’ follows with elegant play of 4th world light like Ramzi meets Spencer Clarke. He hits a high water mark of pensile early ‘90s ambient on the chef’s kiss of ‘Atmosphere’, and steers that sound along natural vectors into gently heart-in-mouth suspension of ‘Motion’, and balmy downbeats shades away from Wally Baradrou in ‘Air to Spare’. The ticklish 808 frisson of the title piece and beat-less armchair AI thought bubble/hash burp of ‘Cosmic Being’ is the ideal way to see off this wee gem.
A sublime secret portal to ‘90s ambient bliss is re-opened with a first vinyl reissue of Jon Tye (Seahawks, Lo Recordings) & Pete Smith’s (The Hypnotist) maiden voyage as MLO, distilling their shared love for Satie, Debussy and Cage thru to Soft Machine, Incredible String Band and Eno in gorgeous, air-spun forms. Re-upped to sighs of relief from those who balk at steep 2nd hand prices for a decent copy, ‘Io’ represents ‘90s UK ambient at its rose-tinted, dreamy and pastoral best, hence the cult status of its original Rising High pressing for those in the know. One of three LPs produced by the duo around mid-decade, it endures for modern needs on the basis of its elusive, perfumed waft and a quietly suggestive carousel of motifs that melt on mind with rare tactility. Start to finish they most beautifully read the room’s need for this type of glacially slow burn sound-bathing, effectively colouring the eyelid-flickering dreams of post-club ravers with richly synaesthetic tones and iridescent shimmers that, 32 years later, still conjure a late stage pill belly effect to our sensibilities on a sober Tuesday afternoon. Residual gurns and tingly frissons should be expected in passage from the gossamer soft arps and cosmic awn of ‘Wimborne’ thru the panoramic 17 min poise of ‘Lagoon / Moon Over Lagos’, and spectral sublime of ‘Ghost’, to a two-part finale that leaves the sensation on tip of tongue. Really a no brainer. Don’t fight the feeling.
A sublime secret portal to ‘90s ambient bliss is re-opened with a first vinyl reissue of Jon Tye (Seahawks, Lo Recordings) & Pete Smith’s (The Hypnotist) maiden voyage as MLO, distilling their shared love for Satie, Debussy and Cage thru to Soft Machine, Incredible String Band and Eno in gorgeous, air-spun forms. Re-upped to sighs of relief from those who balk at steep 2nd hand prices for a decent copy, ‘Io’ represents ‘90s UK ambient at its rose-tinted, dreamy and pastoral best, hence the cult status of its original Rising High pressing for those in the know. One of three LPs produced by the duo around mid-decade, it endures for modern needs on the basis of its elusive, perfumed waft and a quietly suggestive carousel of motifs that melt on mind with rare tactility. Start to finish they most beautifully read the room’s need for this type of glacially slow burn sound-bathing, effectively colouring the eyelid-flickering dreams of post-club ravers with richly synaesthetic tones and iridescent shimmers that, 32 years later, still conjure a late stage pill belly effect to our sensibilities on a sober Tuesday afternoon. Residual gurns and tingly frissons should be expected in passage from the gossamer soft arps and cosmic awn of ‘Wimborne’ thru the panoramic 17 min poise of ‘Lagoon / Moon Over Lagos’, and spectral sublime of ‘Ghost’, to a two-part finale that leaves the sensation on tip of tongue. Really a no brainer. Don’t fight the feeling.
An album by a little-known guitar duo released in 1999. Their songs—composed solely of guitars and making heavy use of harmonics—are beautiful pieces that evoke an ambient-like tranquility; during their live performances at the time, they even collaborated with 8mm film projections. However, while the album received high praise from a select few, the overall response was very limited. At the time, the indie scene had not yet re-evaluated ambient sounds, and there were virtually no other groups performing such simple instrumental music live. I believe this made the music extremely difficult to categorize and left it in a precarious position. However, once Japanese ambient music began to be re-evaluated globally in the 2010s, this album was rediscovered, and the remaining stock of CDs sold out instantly. Amid calls for a reissue, we’d like to unleash this music anew with this first-ever vinyl release. KENKEN—now known as URBAN VOLCANO SOUNDS—also makes a guest appearance. Whether you want to take your time exploring this little-known hidden gem or use it as everyday background music, this acoustic guitar instrumental album creates beautiful moments that seep into the very air around you.