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-Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy-, x2 LPs of long-form, lyrical, groove-based free improv by acclaimed guitarist & composer Jeff Parker's ETA IVtet is at last here. Recorded live at ETA (referencing David Foster Wallace), a bar in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood with just enough space in the back for Parker, drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, & alto saxophonist Josh Johnson to convene in extraordinarily depthful & exploratory music making. Gleaned for the stoniest side-length cuts from 10+ hours of vivid two-track recordings made between 2019 & 2021 by Bryce Gonzales, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- is a darkly glowing séance of an album, brimming over with the hypnotic, the melodic, & patience & grace in its own beautiful strangeness. Room-tone, electric fields, environment, ceiling echo, live recording, Mondays, Los Angeles. Jeff Parker's first double album & first live album, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- belongs in the lineage of such canonical live double albums recorded on the West Coast as Lee Morgan’s -Live at the Lighthouse-, Miles Davis' -In Person Friday & Saturday Night at the Blackhawk, San Francisco- & -Black Beauty-, & John Coltrane's -Live in Seattle-.
While the IVtet sometimes plays standards &, including on this recording, original compositions, it is as previously stated largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term. The music is more free composition than free improvisation, more blending than discordant. It’s tensile, yet spacious & relaxed. Clearly all four musicians have spent significant time in the planetary system known as jazz, but relationships to other musics, across many scenes & eras —dub & Dilla, primary source psychedelia, ambient & drone— suffuse the proceedings. Listening to playbacks Parker remarked, humorously & not, “we sound like the Byrds” (to certain ears, the Clarence White-era Byrds, who really stretched it).
A fundamental of all great ensembles, whether basketball teams or bands, is the ability of each member to move fluidly & fluently in & out of lead & supportive roles. Building on the communicative pathways they’ve established in Parker’s -The New Breed- project, Parker & Johnson maintain a constant dialogue of lead & support. Their sampled & looped phrases move continuously thru the music, layered & alive, adding depth & texture & pattern, evoking birds in formation, sea creatures drifting below the photic zone. Or, the two musicians simulate those processes by entwining their terse, clear-lined playing in real-time. The stop/start flow of Bellerose, too, simulates the sampler, recalling drum parts in Parker’s beat-driven projects. Mostly Bellerose's animated phraseologies deliver the inimitable instantaneous feel of live creative drumming. The range of tonal colors he conjures from his extremely vintage battery of drums & shakers —as distinctive a sonic signature as we have in contemporary acoustic drumming— bring almost folkloric qualities to the aesthetic currency of the IVtet's language. A wonderful revelation in this band is the playing of Anna Butterss. The strength, judiciousness & humility with which she navigates the bass position both ground & lift upward the egalitarian group sound. As the IVtet's grooves flow & clip, loop & repeat, the ensemble elements reconfigure, a terrarium of musical cultivation growing under controlled variables, a tight experiment of harmony & intuition, deep focus & freedom.
For all its varied sonic personality, -Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy- scans immediately & unmistakably as music coming from Jeff Parker‘s unique sound world. Generous in spirit, trenchant & disciplined in execution, Parker’s music has an earned respect for itself & for its place in history that transmutes through the musical event into the listener. Many moods & shapes of heart & mind will find utility & hope in a music that combines the autonomy & the community we collectively long to see take hold in our world, in substance & in staying power.
On the personal tip, this was always my favorite gig to hit, a lifeline of the eremite records Santa Barbara years. Mondays southbound on the 101, driving away from tasks & screens & illness, an hour later ordering a double tequila neat at the bar with the band three feet away, knowing i was in good hands, knowing it would be back around on another Monday. To encounter life at scales beyond the human body is the collective dance of music & the beholding of its beauty, together. —Michael Ehlers & Zac Brenner
Pressed on premium audiophile-quality 120 gram vinyl at RTI from Kevin Gray / Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Joe Lizzi, Triple Point Records, Queens, NY. First eremite edition of 1799 copies. First 400 direct order LPs come with eremite’s signature retro-audiophile inner-sleeves, hand screen-printed by Alan Sherry, Siwa Studios, northern New Mexico. CD edition & EU x2LP edition available thru our EU partner, Aguirre records, Belgium.
Jeff Parker synthesizes jazz and hip-hop with an appealingly light touch. The longtime Tortoise guitarist has a silken, clean-cut tone, yet his production takes more cues from DJ Premier than it does from a classic mid-century jazz sound. In the early ’00s, when Madlib ushered a boom-bap sensibility into the hallowed halls of the jazz label Blue Note, Parker conducted his own experiments in genre-mashing in the Chicago group Isotope 217, dragging jaunty hip-hop rhythms into the far reaches of computerized abstraction. More recently, Parker enlivened quantized beats and chopped-up samples with live instrumentation, both as leader of the New Breed and sideman to Makaya McCraven. Inverting rap’s longtime reverence for jazz, Parker has gradually codified a new language for the so-called “American art form” with a vocabulary gleaned from the United States’ next great contribution to the musical universe.
Parker’s latest, the live double LP Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, was largely recorded in 2019, while his star as a solo artist was steeply ascending. Capturing a few intimate evenings with drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and New Breed saxophonist Josh Johnson at ETA, a cozy Los Angeles cocktail bar, the record anticipates his 2020 opus with the New Breed, Suite for Max Brown. Yet Mondays amounts to something novel in 2022: It lays out long-form spiritual jazz, knotty melodies, and effortless solos over a slow-moving foundation as consistent as an 808. The results are as mesmerizing as a luxurious, beatific ambient record—yet at the same time, it’s clear that all of this is happening within the inherently messy confines of an improvisatory concert.
Across four side-long tracks, each spanning about 20 minutes, Parker and Johnson trade ostinatos, mesh together, split again into polyrhythmic call-and-response. Butterss commands the pocket with a photonegative of their lead lines, often freed from rhythmic responsibilities by the drums’ relentlessness. Bellerose exhibits a Neu!-like sense of consistency, just screwed down a whole bunch of BPMs. His kit sounds as dusty as an old sample, and his hypnotic rhythms evoke humanizers of the drum machine such as J Dilla or RZA. You could spend the album’s 84-minute runtime listening only to the beats; every shift in pattern queues a new movement in the compositions, beaming a timeframe from the bottom up. Bellerose’s sensitive, reactive playing, though, is unmistakably live. We can practically see the sweat beading on his arm when he holds steady on a ride cymbal for minutes on end, or plays a shaker for a whole LP side.
He begins the understated opener “2019-07-08 I” with feather-soft brush swirls, but on the second cut, he sets Mondays’ stride, as a simple bell pattern builds into a leisurely rhythmic stroll. Thirteen minutes in, the mood breaks. Bellerose hits some heavy quarter notes on his hi-hat; Butterss leans into a fat bassline; saxophone arpeggios, probably looped, float in front of us like smoke rings lingering in the air. It’s a glorious moment, punctuated by clinking glasses and a distant “whoo!” so perfectly placed we become aware of not only the setting, but also the supple knob-turns of engineer Bryce Gonzales in post-production. Anyone who’s heard great improvisation at a bar in the company of both jazzheads and puzzled onlookers knows this dynamic—for some, the music was incidental. Others experienced a revelation.
Lodged in this familiar situation is the question of what such “ambient jazz” means to accomplish—whether it wants to occupy the center of our consciousnesses, or resign itself to the background. The record’s perpetual soloing offers an answer. Never screechy, grating, or aggressive, each performance is nonetheless highly individual. Even when the quartet settles into an extended groove, a spotlight shines on Johnson, Butterss, and Parker in turn, steadily illuminating a perpetual sense of invention. Their interplay feels almost traditional, suggesting bandstand trade-offs of yore, yet the open-ended structure of their jams keeps it unconventional.
Mondays works in layers: Its metronomic rhythms pacify, but the performers and their idiosyncratic expressions offer ample material to those interested in hearing young luminaries and seasoned vets swap ideas within a group. In 2020, Johnson dropped his first record under his own name, the excellent, daringly melodic Freedom Exercise, while Butterss’ recent debut as bandleader, Activities, is one of the most exciting, undersung jazz releases of 2022. Akin to Parker’s early experiments with Tortoise and Chicago Underground, Johnson and Butterss’ recordings both revel in electronic textures, and each features the other as a collaborator. Mondays captures them as their mature playing styles gain sea legs atop the rudder of Parker’s guitar.
The only track recorded after the pandemic began, closer “2021-04-28” sculpts the record’s loping structure, giving retrospective shape to the preceding hour of ambience. In the middle of the song, Parker’s guitar slows to a yawn; the drums pipe down. After a couple minutes of drone, Bellerose slips back into the mix alongside a precisely phrased guitar line strummed on the upper frets, punctuated by saxophone accents that exclaim with the force of an eager hype man. Beginning with a murmur, the album ends with a bracing statement, a passage so articulated that it actually feels spoken.
Mondays drifts with unhurried purpose through genres and ideas, imprinted with the passage of time. The deliberate, thumping clock of its drumbeat keeps duration in mind, and, as with so many live albums, we’re reminded of how circumstances have changed since the sessions were recorded. Truly, life is different than it was in 2019—and not just in terms of world politics, climate change, the threat of disease, or the reality that making a living in music is harder than ever. Seemingly catalyzed by COVID-19’s deadly, isolating scourge, jazz has transformed, hybridized, and weakened tired arguments for musical stratification and fundamentalism. Even calling Mondays a “live” album is a simplification, considering how Parker and other top jazz brains have increasingly availed themselves of the studio—including, in a sparing yet dramatic way, on Mondays.
Near the end of the first track, the tape slows abruptly. The plane of the song opens to another dimension: This set, Parker seems to be saying, can be manipulated with the ease of a vinyl platter beneath a DJ’s fingers. Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room. --Daneil Felsenthal, Pitchfork, 8.4 Best New Music
Turn to Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and you’re in another world. Recorded live (it’s apparently Parker’s first live record) between 2019 and 2021 at a bar in Los Angeles’ Highland Park neighborhood that’s named for the principal setting of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest(and Parker’s ETA 4tet named, in turn, for the room). As producer Michael Ehlers points out in a press sheet, It is “largely a free improv group —just not in the genre meaning of the term.” Mondays… will include all the things that free improvisation leaves out, modes, melodies, key centres and regular (though often multiple) rhythms; in effect, the musicians are free to include the conventionally excluded.
It’s a kind of perfect opposite of Eastside Romp – clear tunes rarely define a piece, there’s no solo order, actually few solos, no formal beginnings or endings – instead substituting the extended jam for the tight knit composition. It’s a two-LP set, each side an excerpt from a long collective improvisation, a kind of electronic jazz version of hypnotic minimalism with Parker and saxophonist Josh Johnson both employing loops to build up interlocking rhythmic patterns and a kind of floating, layered timelessness, while bassist Anna Butterss and drummer/ percussionist Jay Bellerose lay down pliable fundamentals.
Often and delightfully, it answers this listener’s specific auditory needs, a bright shifting soundscape that can begin in mid-phrase and eventually fade away, not beginning, not ending, like Heaven’s Muzak or the abstract decorative art of the Alhambra. It can sound at times like, fifty years on, Grant Green has added his clear lines to the kind of work that over 50 years ago filtered from Terry Riley to musicians from jazz, rock and minimalism. Though the tunes are described as excerpts, we often have what seem to be beginnings, the faint sound of background conversation and noise ceding to the music in the first few seconds, but the “beginnings” sound tentative, like proposals or suggestions. The most explicit tune here is the slow, loping line passed back and forth between Parker and Johnson that initiates Side C, 2019 May-05-19, the earliest recording here.
The music is a constant that doesn’t mind omitting its beginnings and ends, but it’s also, in the same way, an organism, a kind of music that many of us are always inside and that is always inside us. All kinds of music stimulate us in all kinds of ways, but for this listener, Jeff Parker’s ETA Quartet happily raises a fundamental question: what is comfort music, what are its components, and could there be a universal comfort music? Or is comfort music a universal element in what we may listen for in sound? Modality, rhythmic and melodic figures/motifs, drone, compound relationships and, too, a shifting mosaic that cannot be encapsulated? The thing is, any music we seek out is, in our seeking, a comfort, whether it’s a need for structures so complex that we might lose ourselves in mapping them, or music so random, we are freed of all specificity, but something that may have healing properties.
This is not just bar music, but music for a bar named for art that further echoes in the band’s abbreviated name. Socialization is enshrined here. There’s another crucial fiction, too, maybe closer, The Scope, the bar in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 with its “strictly electronic music policy”. Consider, too, the social roots reverberating in the distant musical ancestry, that Riley session with John Cale, Church of Anthrax, among many … or the healing music of the Gnawa … or the Master Musicians of Jajouka with Ornette Coleman on Dancing in Your Head. And that which is most “natural” to us in the early decades of the 21st century? … Jamming, looping, drones…So perhaps an ideal musical state might be a regular Monday night session with guitar, saxophone, loops, bass and drums…the guitarist and saxophonist using loops, expanding the palette and multiplying the reach of time, repeating oneself with the possibility of mutation or constancy. In some long ago, perfect insight into a burgeoning age of filming and recording, Jay Gatsby remarked, “Can’t repeat the past? Why, of course you can!”
We might even repeat the present or the future. --Stuart Broomer,
Eight songs originally released 1996 by Moll Tontrager Records and re-released on CD 1999 by The Catamount Company. ******************************************** Sarah Hennies, NPR June 15, 2023 "Strange evocations of country living are to be found on 1996's Notes Campfire." Like country music classics before, Souled American's 1996 release, Notes Campfire, is preoccupied with loneliness, longing and loss. There are cult bands and then there's Souled American. In 1988, the Illinois group arguably invented "alternative country" with the album Fe. While the alt-country sound is widely recognized as Southern roots rock with an indie-punk sensibility largely defined by Uncle Tupelo's No Depression released two years later — Souled American's early music feels as if it was formed in a vacuum, inspired by the timestretching space of reggae. But over the course of the following decade, Souled American's music grew increasingly slow, insular and esoteric. Although Fe, Flubber and Around the Horn are inarguably more accessible, upbeat and even sometimes fun, if you've never heard this music before, it actually makes sense to start at the end. Since the release of Notes Campfire in 1996, it's almost as if Souled American never existed: The band's albums have long been out of print, there have only been a handful of performances in the last 27 years (including the tiny towns of Laporte, Colo., and Centennial, Wyo.), there are no known live videos, and a long-running Facebook group of ardent fans boasts less than 100 members. Not for nothing, diehards have attempted to resurrect interest: In 1997, Camden Joy created the "Fifty Posters About Souled American" project (he ended up making 61); in 1999, tUMULt reissued Souled American's first four albums on CD; in 2006, The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle penned an essay about how Souled American's Flubber changed his life. Now, thanks to the efforts of longtime fan Tom Adelman (aka writer Camden Joy), the band's full discography is available digitally for the first time ever via Bandcamp. Driven by guitarist Chris Grigoroff's plaintive guitar strumming and Joe Adducci's skillful but idiosyncratic bass playing (consistently described as sounding "underwater") — not to mention the duo's nearly identical voices — Notes Campfire and its companion Frozen are atmospheric, languid and strange evocations of country living. It's a wonder that these songs work at all. The music is slow and loose with little regard for a consistent beat; the lyrics are poetic and frequently profound, but often cryptic and stunted. What ties it all together is the sound: Guitars twinkle and Adducci's bass slides and glides in and out of chord progressions in support of drawling, yearning and ultimately shockingly powerful voices. The eight-minute "Flat" burbles and gurgles along, always moving forward but going nowhere, evoking the landscape and feeling of their home in southern Illinois. Album highlight "Born(free)" spends most of the song repeating one line: "There's no love at all." On "Deal," Grigoroff sounds so beaten down ("The weight on me / I'm so weary") that he can't even sing in complete sentences. It's here that the band strays from Hank Williams; Souled American's narrators aren't so lonesome they could cry, they are loneliness itself. From the very beginning, the band members seemed to have the foresight that they would shrink and turn in on themselves. When Jamey Barnard left after the third album Around the Horn, Souled American simply continued as a trio with no drummer. Same with guitarist Scott Tuma — who, as a solo artist, has a sizable discography of folk-infused atmospheric music — when he split in 1996, Souled American became a duo. Reportedly, Grigoroff and Adducci have been working diligently on the follow up to Notes Campfire ever since. In a 2009 post to the Facebook fan group, Adducci's wife gave hope to its tiny but rabidly obsessed fan base: "They are working on it." Like country music classics before, Notes Campfire is preoccupied with loneliness, longing and loss, but also shares a title with the perky opening track of Souled American's debut album that begins, "I heard about your love, so you're alone today." Notes Campfire gives the impression that we've arrived back at the beginning and also reached the end. Where does the band go if they've turned inside out? What comes after when nothing is left? We've been waiting more than a quarter century to find out. Sarah Hennies is a composer based in upstate New York. She is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College.
For the first time this century, two missed masterpieces are coming available on vinyl. The band Souled American formed in Chicago in 1986 and recorded a total of sixty-six songs between 1988 and 1996. Though not ever popular themselves, their evolving hybrid of roots/rock music heavily influenced many more popular bands to come, among them Wilco, The Jayhawks, The Feelies, Califone, Counting Crows, The Mountain Goats, and Cracker. Their records became legendary, unavailable for decades. Some got to the Internet in 2023. Their last two albums Frozen and Notes Campfire will now be re-issued in limited, hand-crafted, 30th Anniversary Editions with a fresh abundance of stories, technical information, musician credits, and cartoons that detail the unexpected origins surrounding these two early classics of “ambient Americana.” These records sound at once both old and new with brilliant melodies and profound performances stacked in unusual patterns like soft-hued bricks.
Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O'Rourke's fifth collaboration remixes live material from their 2023 European tour. Pareidolia weaves improvised performances from France, Switzerland, Italy & Ireland into a dynamic sound collage, blending computer-generated textures with flute & harmonica. A meditation on perception & randomness.
For this collaborative release, Eiko Ishibashi & Jim O'Rourke edited and remixed material captured at shows they played during a lovely two week tour through France, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland in April 2023. Pareidolia shapes an ideal collage from the best resonances and relationships from those nights. A dynamic medley of colour and shape to pulse through earbuds, speaker cones and the air around you, appealing to your suggestibility, wherever you find it - "the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern; to see shapes or make pictures out of randomness."
Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O'Rourke toured Europe for two weeks in 2023, a wonderful passage through France, Switzerland, Italy and Ireland. Pareidolia, the duo's fifth collaborative release, is a remix made up of resonances from those shows. The movement of sound in each performance and the relationships of sound between them; a dynamic medley of colour and shape to pulse through earbuds, speaker cones and the air immediately surrounding you. Improvisation is the preferred collaborative mode for Eiko and Jim. They both prepare separately, without discussing anything beforehand. The dialogue in the moment determines the performance; anything that takes place is a possible point of departure, allowing for a unique experience each time they play. These 2023 shows marked the first time Jim and Eiko had played together outside Japan. Perhaps the flow of parts unpacked from their respective computers was inspired by the experiences of the tour: the nature of the assembled audience, the quality of the meal on the day at hand. Additionally, Eiko played flute and they both played a bit of harmonica intermittently throughout the performances. These live acoustic signals were routed back to the hard drives, to provide further material to play with — and as they travelled, recordings of the previous nights' shows were among the materials for the next performance. With all this to play with, there was much fun to be had every night. Pareidolia's final mix is one further rearrangement of the elements — comping — say, a bit of Jim from Paris against Eiko in Dublin for a minute, before bringing them both back into the same room for a spell before another set of interactions comes into play. The choices and edits represented here make yet another unique dialogue, as well as a kind of 'best' version of what they were doing on the tour.
For us at home, the sense of inevitability in the parts as they flow together might suggest structure; happily, this occurs without Eiko and Jim really committing to anything of the sort. Their available sound sources could present as a hot-wired noise onslaught, with all faders up full. Endless possible interpretations to be had on either side of the experience! This is one of several ways that the LP title and sequence of song titles come into play. Listeners hearing something more should have a good look in the mirror and perhaps consider the old saying: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you."
A sequel to last year's sublime 'Spectral Evolution', 'Traveling Light' is a suite of weightless, uncannily beautiful jazz standards, transformed into orchestral drones and electronic chirps by Toral and his virtual band. It's flawless material that draws a clear line from Billie Holiday through Clara Rockmore, Fripp & Eno and Alvin Lucier to MBV and Gastr del Sol and beyond. Unmissable gear, from one of the scene's unassailable legends. Culture never emerges from a vacuum. It accumulates and evolves, building on what occurred before and gleaning influence from what happened nearby; the more cultural threads converge, the more complex, nuanced and developed the resulting braids become. Toral acknowledged this fact quite brazenly on last year's 'Spectral Evolution', bringing over a decade of impenetrable off-world experimentation to a halt and shoving his bare hands into the creative soil that inspired iconic tomes like 1995's 'Loveless'-inspired masterpiece 'Wave Field' and the meditative Éliane Radigue-cum-Rhys Chatham 'Violence of Discovery And Calm of Acceptance'. Taking a dip in the pool of concepts that eddy underneath rock music's labyrinth of caverns, he referenced Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, turning vintage progressions into idiosyncratic contemporary gestures. And on 'Traveling Light' that basic theme is expanded again; here, Toral takes six recognizable early 20th century standards and applies a very similar treatment, augmenting them with additional "canonical jazz sounds" from clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flautist Clara Saleiro. Playing guitar and bass with his self-built ensemble of electronic devices (that includes a modified theremin), Toral lets his influences float even closer to the surface here, picking out familiar jazz and exotica flourishes, early electronic echoes and organ-esque polyphonic sustained tones that stretch across hundreds of years of musical history. On opener 'Easy Living', a Ralph Rainger composition from 1937 that's been recorded by Billie Holiday, Bill Evans and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others, the original chord sequence is slackened by Toral's sustained guitar tones and sine waves, but not blurred completely into impressions. This time around we're treated to more tangible shapes: Toral's cheeky, expertly rendered riffs, horizontal exotica-inspired rhythmelodic chimes, intimate woodwind breaths that pull us back to the '30s and squealing pitches that can't help but remind us of Clara Rockmore's Robert Moog-produced milestone 'The Art of the Theremin'. It feels like being chucked in the American cultural petri dish while new organisms mutate around you - everything's recognisable somehow but novel, peculiar. Lovingly valve saturated strums, bent by Toral's whammy, introduce 'Body and Soul' (a 1930 standard that's best known for being recorded by Frank Sinatra) before they're met by alien chirps from his arsenal of generators. But it's the willowy harmonies that buoy this one, echoing the haunted choral drones that prop up centuries of European sacred music. Toral's very specific with his references; when Amado's tenor moans whisper around the dense polyphonic hums, there's a tacit acknowledgement of the enduring influence of African American spirituals and gospel on folk, blues, jazz, country, rock 'n roll and R&B. The album's most affecting segment comes at the conclusion though, with 'My Funny Valentine' and 'God Bless the Child', easily two of the most conspicuous compositions of the era. On both, Toral hovers between clarity and abstraction, overlaying bone-dry fingerpicked improvisations on the former that scrape over Chicago's musical timeline, from "hot jazz" to post-rock, and finishing the album with Fennesz-like distortions that crack and dissolve into Saleiro's levitational flute tones. It's astonishing stuff, honestly - maybe not as immediately startling as 'Spectral Evolution', but refined, polished and concentrated in every way. You're unlikely to find a more moving set this year, that's for sure.
Writing a consideration of any portion of Pajo's voluminous catalog is quite the challenge. With the glaring exception of one rainbow colored cutout circa '03, it's been one love affair after the next for me and just about every record he's graced. Yet I find myself returning to make late night headphone excursions into the depths of Live From A Shark Cage on a regular basis, reliving my favorite moments like a ripe, juicy eructation of chili cheese fries in the middle of the night, or reveling as I have in the deja vu-like discovery of some clever plot twist unearthed for the Criterion edition of Brazil. The temptation is here to call it his Zoso, or even Who's Next, but that's unfair to all parties involved, and I'll leave such profane comparisons to the recently graduated music directors of college radio stations polluting the various interweb channels that pass for music journalism in this digital age we inhabit. Rather, Shark Cage deserves to be exalted in the same breath as Maggot Brain, The Payback, Stormcock or Miles' Pangea: modern masterpieces of minima built on subliminally insinuating rondos and vamps that echo not just Dave's own biorhythms, but a microcosmic take on the ur-pulse of the universe. In an era where the referential Lexicon shifts so rapidly that notions of classics and beau ideals scarcely linger as long as the sulfurous flatulence of your cubicle-mate, Shark Cage resounds as the beacon of fortitude in a sea of aural effluvia. If you are uninitiated, avail yourself. If you've been to the fountain, quench yourself again. - Bundy K. Brown
SCULPTURES is composer and pianist Derek Hunter Wilson’s third solo album, an ode to the ancient and contested shorelines of the Pacific Northwest. Deeply embedded in place, the six longform pieces that make up the album reflect the artist’s journey through grief (including losing his father) and the passage of time, each one built upon loops created from extended sessions with harpist Joshua Ward. Like the foggy, moss-encrusted locations that inspired the album, Sculptures has a timeless feel to it, shadowed by the rumblings of a colonial system in decay. Award-winning poet Mathias Svalina composed a poem in honor of the album, entitled “A Dream for Sculptures”: "The roof of the church collapsed long ago. Vines cover the stone walls, thick, old columns of rough, dark bark & new shoots so thin & so green they almost seem, when the breeze shakes them, to be more light than plant. Tall grasses & thorny things twist through the weather-warped pews, the air thick with plant-wet breath. Each architectural feature of the church has been smoothed & vagued by growth, all but the altar, which sits on a square slab of white marble. You walk to the altar, stepping through the tangles of scrub & burr as smoothly as crossing a salt flat. You rise onto the slab of marble. The air thinner & dry. And from here you can hear it, the insistent creeping & creaking of never-ending growth, wordless with want. A small gold bowl has been left on the altar. In the bowl sits three blue flowers. The petals have been tied back with thin silver, each petal tightly overlapping another, the bloomed flowers have been forced back to buds. You lift one blue flower to your nose. It smells of old coins, shiny from centuries of fingers, of corroded batteries. Vibration rises through your feet. And again. And again. There is something beneath the altar, trying to get out. You press your shoulder into the altar & push with all your might. Your every tendon & muscle strain. Your lungs burn. Sweat streams from your face. And finally, the altar moves, only a touch & then it grinds forward, revealing a hole. Beneath the altar the cold seas splashes, wave after wave of icy saltwater churning up. You take a deep breath. You close your eyes. You dive in."
For Chantal Michelle, composing music is a form of choreography. Within surreal sonic environments, distinct sounds form relationships—moving together, then drifting apart—in a process of continuous reemergence across the auditory field. This ever-shifting constellation gestures toward the fragility and mutability of perception, a recurring focus in Michelle’s work. Trained as a dancer from an early age, Michelle brings a heightened spatial sensitivity to her practice: an intuitive understanding of how forms coexist and move through three dimensions, and an appreciation for the beauty found in unlikely juxtapositions of materials and ideas. Since establishing her solo career in 2021, she has gained international recognition for her patient, meticulous recordings, often developed in tandem with installations, multi-channel compositions, and sound sculptures. Within these subtly disorienting sonic architectures, new relationships can emerge, new boundaries can be drawn, and listeners are invited into an experience of time that resists linearity.
All Things Might Spill, Michelle’s first album for Shelter Press, is an examination of sustained tension and the mystifying experience of time dilation in the moments just before a rupture or collapse. The music inhabits a space of instability, and even as it uses continuous tones and defined melodic phrases, there’s an air of irresolution—like a moment of unease suspended indefinitely. Much of the album was recorded during the winter months of 2024 in Berlin, with many early-morning hours spent immersed in a space of subtle disquiet. Light is said to spill into darkness, and this transitional time, heavy with expectation, can be heard in the music.
On “Presence of Border,” vaporous voices twist and entwine as they float above ambiguous harmonies that seem to extend into an infinite distance. Two short pieces, “Magnetic Field I” and “Magnetic Field II,” contain processed recordings of a tromba marina played by Argentinian sound artist Alma Laprida. The juxtaposition of scratchy tones and wispy harmonics creates tambura-like drones that draw the listener towards an elusive center. Later in the album, “Drying of Frozen Soils” features modal clarinet lines by Severin Black that are initially almost imperceptible within the foggy, synthesized backdrop before emerging into a ghostly counterpoint. A similar relational structure of obscurity and clarity defines the title track, where wordless vocals pierce a noisy field recording captured on a ferry crossing the East River from Brooklyn to Manhattan.
This is music with a spacious terrain and a dense atmosphere. Change is slow, but dramatic, each shift meticulously charted to evoke feelings of wonder and anticipation while retaining a sublime sensitivity to how individual sounds relate to the motion of their surroundings. Michelle masterfully abandons narrative, composing in three dimensions. We are left with the ambiguity of the word “might”—the lingering possibility of the energetic rush of the breach, the spill, now at the horizon, now imminent, somehow both at once.
Michelle's practice has been shaped by rigorous study and recognized by a wide array of arts organizations worldwide. She received her MFA from Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in 2024, and has since been awarded the 2026 Villa Aurora Artist Grant, the 2025 Arbeitsstipendium Ernste Musik und Klangkunst from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture, and was selected for the 2026 GMEA residency in Albi, France. Her work has also been supported by the US-based Foundation for Contemporary Arts and the Sonic Art Research Unit in the UK and has been presented at the Royal Academy of Arts in the UK, Fridman Gallery in New York City, and MUTEK Mexico.
New album of peaceful explorations by The Cosmic Tones Research Trio. This, their second record, maintains the space and long tones that made their debut, "All Is Sound" a successful anecdote to the loud and fast times we live in. It also expands their musical palate with powerful rhythmic elements.
The Cosmic Tones Research Trio have been breaking new ground with healing / meditation music that also honors their roots in Gospel and Blues...and hints at forward looking Spiritual Jazz. Through their Cello, Saxophone, Piano and Flute playing they bring a new sound to the table. Ancient to the future.
DUMB TYPE is a multimedia performance art group based in Kyoto that was formed in 1984 and continues to be active at the forefront of the art scene. We are excited to announce the simultaneous release of two cassette book works produced by musician Toru Yamanaka and the late Teiji Furuhashi, a central figure of the group, for works from the early DUMB TYPE Theatre era: "Every Dog Has His Day (recorded in 1985)" and "Plan For Sleep (recorded in 1986)," now available for the first time on vinyl.
Since the founding of DUMB TYPE, Yamanaka has primarily been responsible for music production, while the late Furuhashi played a crucial role in translating Yamanaka’s compositions into stage direction. Their collaboration began with previous groups ORG and R-STILL, and was influenced by the NEW WAVE and progressive rock trends they were pursuing at the time, as well as by artists like Laurie Anderson, Meredith Monk, and Robert Wilson, who fused minimal music and avant-garde performance. Moreover, their bold incorporation of cutting-edge sampling and house music during that era laid the foundation for DUMB TYPE's sound, marking an important intersection in the history of minimalism, ambient music and performance art in Japan.
In the performance of this work, "Plan for Sleep" (1986), created simultaneously with “Every Dog Has His Day” (1985), Yamanaka took on the role of sound operation. The performance begins with a minimal piece where the tones of the electronic organ and striking phrases from the piano and saxophone race forward in syncopation. Following this, various sound fragments drift over a deafening industrial beat reminiscent of machine noises. There are also pieces that transform the typing sounds of a typewriter into rhythm, showcasing a range of experiments inspired by the then-novel sampling technology, beautifully intertwining with the physicality of the performance.
Additionally, influenced significantly by film music, Yamanaka incorporates a rich tapestry of colors through melancholic melodies that evoke various scenes, from secular jazz to other influences. This work constructs a uniquely original and sophisticated worldview that stands out even when surveying the canon of avant-garde performance art from around the globe in the postmodern era.
Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok’s »Uncontrollable Thoughts« on Morr Music is the duo’s debut joint release. The Netherlands-based Georgian composer and the German sound artist from Berlin first met in 2019 in the context of a workshop programme that took place in Tbilisi, and later worked with Eto Gelashvili, Hayk Karoyi, and Lillevan on the massive »Glacier Music II« music and book project, released in 2021. This led them to engage in a less conceptually driven form of musicking and real-time composition that corresponds with their respective environments. They draw on traditions such as minimal music or late 1990s and early 2000s electronica to integrate subtle beats with elegiac organ drones, playful melodies with lush textures. The first document of an ever-shifting intergenerational dialogue, »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is a product of mutual listening outside time.Though Chkheidze and Lippok had access to professional studios, they chose to rent a simple rehearsal space, equipped with only the bare essentials—bass and guitar amps as well as a small PA—to maintain immediacy in their working process. The music they made together corresponded to and drew on the respective possibilities and shortcomings of this studio, much like their collaboration in general is characterised by the care with which they approach each other's talents and ideas. While both had loosely defined roles—Chkheidze was responsible for the free-flowing beat programming and the evocative distortion came courtesy of Lippok, for example—they individually contributed in different ways to their joint process, which is as free of hierarchies as it is limitless. Hence, the duo’s focus on spontaneity and out-of-the-moment emergence makes them organically move beyond tried and tested conventions, resulting in music that seems to suspend time altogether.When the first chimes on »Bird Song« announce a piece that sets rattling kickdrums against a backdrop of layered drones and rhizomatically entangled melodic elements, it becomes clear why »Uncontrollable Thoughts« carries this title: The album follows the constant detours of the subconscious of its makers, letting them explore moments of ecstasy such as on »Rainbow,« melancholy with »Field,« and the interplay of suspense and release through the ten-minute-long title track. But the different pieces also tie into one aother in various ways. The dirge-like organ drones on which »Rainbow Road« ends reappear in the beginning of »Uncontrollable Thoughts,« much like Chkheidze’s gentle yet emphatic piano chords on »Field« seem to provide the starting point from which the artist develops the striking motifs of the final piece »Opening«, whose title itself suggests that the record as a whole can and should be enjoyed as a loop. All this creates a unique, idiosyncratic temporal logic.While there is much that sets Chkheidze and Lippok apart as solo artists, the major shared leitmotif in their respective bodies of work is the sonic engagement with space. »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is hence best understood as an extension of this practice; as an album that maps the geographies of their minds in motion, tracing musical movements as they melt into each other.
Anushka Chkheidze + Robert Lippok’s »Uncontrollable Thoughts« on Morr Music is the duo’s debut joint release. The Netherlands-based Georgian composer and the German sound artist from Berlin first met in 2019 in the context of a workshop programme that took place in Tbilisi, and later worked with Eto Gelashvili, Hayk Karoyi, and Lillevan on the massive »Glacier Music II« music and book project, released in 2021. This led them to engage in a less conceptually driven form of musicking and real-time composition that corresponds with their respective environments. They draw on traditions such as minimal music or late 1990s and early 2000s electronica to integrate subtle beats with elegiac organ drones, playful melodies with lush textures. The first document of an ever-shifting intergenerational dialogue, »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is a product of mutual listening outside time.Though Chkheidze and Lippok had access to professional studios, they chose to rent a simple rehearsal space, equipped with only the bare essentials—bass and guitar amps as well as a small PA—to maintain immediacy in their working process. The music they made together corresponded to and drew on the respective possibilities and shortcomings of this studio, much like their collaboration in general is characterised by the care with which they approach each other's talents and ideas. While both had loosely defined roles—Chkheidze was responsible for the free-flowing beat programming and the evocative distortion came courtesy of Lippok, for example—they individually contributed in different ways to their joint process, which is as free of hierarchies as it is limitless. Hence, the duo’s focus on spontaneity and out-of-the-moment emergence makes them organically move beyond tried and tested conventions, resulting in music that seems to suspend time altogether.When the first chimes on »Bird Song« announce a piece that sets rattling kickdrums against a backdrop of layered drones and rhizomatically entangled melodic elements, it becomes clear why »Uncontrollable Thoughts« carries this title: The album follows the constant detours of the subconscious of its makers, letting them explore moments of ecstasy such as on »Rainbow,« melancholy with »Field,« and the interplay of suspense and release through the ten-minute-long title track. But the different pieces also tie into one aother in various ways. The dirge-like organ drones on which »Rainbow Road« ends reappear in the beginning of »Uncontrollable Thoughts,« much like Chkheidze’s gentle yet emphatic piano chords on »Field« seem to provide the starting point from which the artist develops the striking motifs of the final piece »Opening«, whose title itself suggests that the record as a whole can and should be enjoyed as a loop. All this creates a unique, idiosyncratic temporal logic.While there is much that sets Chkheidze and Lippok apart as solo artists, the major shared leitmotif in their respective bodies of work is the sonic engagement with space. »Uncontrollable Thoughts« is hence best understood as an extension of this practice; as an album that maps the geographies of their minds in motion, tracing musical movements as they melt into each other.
Living in the present is an album built around the work of American minimalist poet, Robert Lax (1915-2000) who is widely praised for his artistic concept of reduction, in which a pause becomes as important as the things said.
The album brings together the sound of Robert Lax reading his poetry, narrative field recordings by Nicolas Humbert and subtle yet imaginative timbres by Carina Khorkhordina (trumpet) and Miki Yui (electronics) who is also behind the final mixing of the album.
Living in the present is drawing from an archive of audio recordings originally made by film maker Nicolas Humbert while shooting a film on Robert Lax entitled Why Should I Buy A Bed When All That I Want Is Sleep?, ( Nicolas Humbert and Werner Penzel, Germany, 1999) The film was made on the Greek island of Patmos where Lax has lived withdrawn for 3 decades.
More than 25 years after the premiere of Why Should I Buy A Bed When All That I Want Is Sleep?, Humbert, Khorkhordina and Yui are revisiting the original audio material and patiently open worlds within worlds, pointing to new harmonic textures and isolating timbres, synchronizing different layers of time and traces of various locations into a new composition in its own right.
In some ways this album feels like an expansion of the work Humbert and Penzel did with Lax across six years, between 1993 and 1999, where they developed a unique intimacy in their textual-visual collaboration. On two long pieces, for each side of the album, “Where do i begin” and “One moment passes, another comes on” respectively – Yui’s electronics and Khorkhordina’s trumpet interweave beautifully with Humbert’s field recordings, in a manner that shadows the reflective reduction of Lax’s poetry. Indeed, it's no surprise that Lax’s poetry draws musicians into its orbit; it offers the curious a welcoming reduction in which only individual words and syllables represent the essence of language.
Lax’s poetry is notable for its qualities of near-stillness and its capacity to pause the reader’s thought, asking them to hold the sensuality of language for an extended, quietly revelatory moment. His readings on this album share a similar cadence, interested in settling with syllables, with single or several words, for an extended time.
Ultimately, Living in the present unfolds with unforced grace and poetics – one moment passes, then another comes on. (Jon Dale)
A decade after its release, A Fragile Geography returns transformed. This limited edition cassette accompanies the AFG10 anniversary reissue, offering an inspired re-envisioning of Rafael Anton Irisarri’s landmark compositions. Reworks presents distinctive readings of these pieces, with each artist leaving their personal mark on the material. The titles remain unchanged, with the sole exception of “Hiatus,” reborn here as “Ausencia.” Together, these reimaginings extend the emotional cartography of the album into new terrains.
KMRU reframes “Displacement” with expansive, glimmering layers that open into meditative ambient landscapes. Nairobi born and Berlin based, he is known for morphing field recordings into vivid aural experiences, often capturing the texture of footsteps, foliage, and distant city life and weaving them into contemplative soundscapes. In this version he introduces subtle new sounds, including stringlike synths that trace and heighten the piece’s emotional arc. The result invites close listening, offering enveloping tones where the organic and the synthetic gently collide and flow.
Penelope Trappes renders “Reprisal” as a voice-led invocation of the delicate and the intimate. Her wistful vocals bloom with fragile sorrow, rising over shimmering strands of strings to create a sound world at once sacred and shadowed. She is adept at channeling inherited grief into music that is transcendent and otherworldly. The interplay of her voice, the strings, and her use of space and depth draws those qualities into Irisarri’s orbit, imbuing “Reprisal” with the same spiritual weight and clarity that define her most powerful work.
Kevin Richard Martin (a.k.a. The Bug) transforms “Empire Systems” into a cavernous “Iced Mix,” driven by polyrhythmic double bass motifs and sculpted from subterranean pressure and negative space. Known for pushing sound to its physical limits, Martin brings the stark intensity of his dub and noise infused practice into Irisarri’s architecture. The track seethes with harmonic distortion and erupts in white noise rhythms, its brooding low end depth and icy reverberant textures amplifying the tension. Vulnerability and force are set in stark relief, as silences feel as heavy as the bursts of sound themselves. The result is a stark study in atmosphere, restraint and impact, reframed through Martin’s singular lens of sonic mass and low end intensity.
On Side B, Mabe Fratti opens with a cinematic, dreamlike, Lynchian reimagining of “Hiatus” in her native Spanish (“Ausencia”). She threads cello and voice so wondrously that her rendering feels at once hauntingly beautiful and disquieting. Emotionally charged melodies shift in unexpected directions, while her soft, intimate vocals hover above Irisarri’s brooding synth textures. Fratti’s gift for blending experimental and avant pop sensibilities with visceral, emotionally powerful expression shines resplendently here. She gives voice to Irisarri’s reflections on the passage of time and his growing desire to reconnect with his familial roots.
Abul Mogard stretches “Persistence” into a vast drone elegy. A master of patient sound sculpting, Mogard layers evolving waves of analog synths into a dense shroud that radiates its own internal light. Gradual surges of tone and subtle harmonic shifts emphasize the piece’s endurance and inevitability. Irisarri’s original composition, in Mogard's hands, becomes a rumination on time’s unrelenting flow. Melancholy and transcendence coexist in equal measure in this engulfing, cathartic rework.
William Basinski and Gary Thomas Wright close the cycle with a spectral version of “Secretly Wishing for Rain.” Basinski’s field recordings of Reseda rainfall and birdsong, which open and close the rework, add a personal touch and evoke the imagined sound of a grainy film reel flickering to life. The piece suspends Irisarri’s yearning for the Pacific Northwest, lodging it hazily between memory, place and an unreachable dream. It feels like a fading recollection, half forgotten and half felt. A final gesture that dissolves the album into vapor, leaving the listener adrift in its lingering afterglow.
Mastered with great care by Stephan Mathieu and featuring a remixed version of the original artwork by Daniel Castrejón, this edition refracts the language of the original through new prisms. Less a return than a passage, across time, across interpretation, into uncharted emotional realms.
A beautiful album re-emerges from realms of mystery! The long- awaited vinyl reissue of a Japanese neoclassical/experimental/new age/electronic music classic, originally released in 1978. ”Crystallization” is a work of unwavering perfection, whose sparkle has become even more brilliant over time, in the midst of the new age music revival that has emerged in recent years and the rediscovery of Japanese environmental music so-called Kankyō-ongaku. This was SAB's first and only solo album, recorded at his home and a studio in Osaka by a 19-year-old musical prodigy who, after the album's release, left Japan for the U.S. to follow the teachings of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and has never been heard from again. Two other musicians provide instrumental contributions, but the majority of the album was recorded and produced by SAB himself with multiple recordings & overdubs of various instruments, captured and crystallized on magnetic tape. The arrangements and instrumentation on this album show the influence of Brian Eno and the Obscure label of the time, but SAB's weave of electronics, field recordings and conventional instrumentation simultaneously avoids those influences and sits outside any direct electronic music lineage; it has achieved the status of a new classic for audiences in the 2020s. This reissue of the second release on the legendary Osaka label Vanity Records, run by the eccentric producer Yuzuru Agi, is a 24bit/48kHz A/D transfer from the original 1978 master tapes, high-quality cutting. Comes with Japanese/English liner notes, a lot of rare photos.
"Minami-kaze α Wave (Southerly wind alpha wave)“ is a very rare ‘vocal piece’ that Henry Kawahara has produced, and released under the name HMD (H Music Deperception) in 1993. The song is a vocal version of the cyber-occult exotic instrumental piece "Nanpu“ included in the compilation “Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm: The Essential Henry Kawahara” [EM1197TCD/DLP]. This track is a rare example that proves he had also a genius for producing ‘pops’ in the general sense of the word, and which seems to have challenged head-on the pop songs produced by Haruomi Hosono or Tetsuya Komuro in the 80s-90s.
The Henry Kawahara project on EM Records was developed only with the enthusiasm of proving Kawahara's existence if he is to be erased as nothing in the current art context, and we have confirmed that there are a lot of supporters all over the world for our opinion when we released "Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm" (several articles and interviews have been given). This single is a 'prescription' for the sequel, tentatively titled "Cybernetic Defiance and Orgasm 2: Other Sides of Henry Kawahara," which is currently in the process of being prepared. This 7” is a limited one-off release, not included in the compilation.
![Takao - Stealth [2026 repress/original artwork] (LP)](http://meditations.jp/cdn/shop/files/a0453915452_10_{width}x.jpg?v=1775196337)
![Takao - Stealth [2026 repress/original artwork] (LP)](http://meditations.jp/cdn/shop/files/0042087992_10_{width}x.jpg?v=1775196337)
Takao‘s new album is a rare attempt to recreate a previously released album. He has re-recorded his debut album "Stealth" and presents it here as a completely new work. This is a 50-minute full-length album with two new tracks, "Moon" and "Seven Sands". This new "Stealth" is subtitled 'Gold Edition'.
=From the 2018 album commentary=
“Stealth” is the aptly-titled debut album from Tokyo-based composer/producer Takao. Gliding in under the radar with thirteen slyly sweet and subtle miniatures, these pieces are refreshing light-explosions of gentle harmony and modestly grand melodies. Fans of New Age and tonal minimalism will enjoy this music, but its brevity reveals a pop-influenced aesthetic as well, and the level of care and detail in the arrangements and recording evinces a nuanced, surprisingly mature sensibility. There’s a blossoming brightness and elegant simplicity that even calls to mind gentle ghosts of Satie and Debussy.
Released in 1983 on a miniscule run of 300-self-financed LP’s, Dennis Taylor’s ‘Dayspring’ remains a lost masterwork of transcendental instrumental guitar. An important missing link between the 60’s folkloric experimentalism of John Fahey and Robbie Basho, and the new age atmospherics mined by William Ackerman and Michael Hedges in the early 80’s. Though Taylor’s guitar playing remains crisply unadorned on these 10 tracks, his technique and his compositions stretch beyond the folk roots of the genre. He crafts a soundworld that is both immersive and familiar. His pastoralism has a spaciousness - a pianistic drift - that feels truly timeless. Taylor cut his musical teeth through the 60’s and 70’s playing with garage rock bands, and later finding his footing in the world of jazz/folk fusion. Sometime in the early 70’s, Taylor found his most profound inspiration to date when he witnessed a live performance from Takoma Records luminary, Leo Kottke. Enraptured by Kottke’s ability to fill the room so completely, with the sound of just one instrument, Taylor was determined to follow a similar path. Thus, he began composing music for solo guitar. He spent nearly a decade writing and honing his pieces, finally entering a studio in 1982 to commit them to tape. Taylor likened the recording experience to “a living room concert.” He recorded each song in a single take, in the order they appear on the album. Paying out of pocket for the recording sessions, studio time was at a premium, so Taylor had arrived prepared. And the results speak for themselves. Dennis Taylor’s guitar playing is clean, precise, and masterfully proficient. And yet, ‘Dayspring’ is not merely a document of technical ability. His compositions are deeply expressive. Taylor’s deft fingerpicking is married to achingly beautiful melodicism. His arpeggios chime and roll with painterly expression. Across the breadth of ‘Dayspring’, Dennis Taylor strikes a perfect balance between wistful nostalgia and bold expansion. Though Taylor initially hoped to release his album with new age progenitors Windham Hill, he ultimately decided to release the album on his own. He self-financed a pressing of 300 LP’s, which were largely distributed locally in his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska. And now, Morning Trip is supremely proud to bring this album back to light. An important missing piece in the expansive tapestry of instrumental guitar music, finally restored on its original format.
There are constellations within the grooves of Cymbalom Solos. Innumerable points of light, rendered audible in glowing, radiant sound. There are entire worlds too - undiscovered, yet familiar - both terrestrial and celestial. There are moments of quiet comfort and exultant discovery. And all of it conjured by one man with a handful of ancient and invented instruments, recorded mostly-live, with precious few overdubs. Michael Masley has been a fixture of Berkeley, California, since he arrived from Michigan in 1982. Even today, he remains a common sight, working as a street performer - catching the attention of passers-by as he summons otherworldly overtones from a coterie of arcane instruments. This is how he met fellow east-coast transplant and musical voyager, Barry Cleveland, in 1983. Cleveland was enraptured by the sound of Masley’s wildly innovative bowhammer cymbalom. The cymbalom is an ancient instrument, similar to a zither or hammered-dulcimer - originating in Eastern Europe in 1874, but with primitive early examples dating back as early as 3500 BC. Yet Masley’s approach to the instrument was wholly original. Masley replaced the two traditional cymbalom hammers, with bowhammers - an invention wherein he fitted each of his fingers with it’s own combination hammer/bow device, which allowed him to both strike the strings, and bow them like a violin. Outfitted with his bowhammers, Masley was able to wrest startlingly new sounds from a centuries-old instrument. In 1985, after performing together for a couple years, Cleveland produced Masley’s first solo endeavour, Cymbalom Solos. With the help of Cleveland’s timely production, Masley’s technique reached its zenith. His complex and beautiful compositions combined elements of Eastern-European classical, new minimalism, and celtic/folk music, yet the end result falls squarely within the world of new age kosmiche. Music of the spheres, conjured by earthbound strings. Masley estimates that he sold tens-of-thousands of cassette copies of Cymbalom Solos over his years of performing. And now, Morning Trip is distinctly proud to offer it on vinyl for the first time ever - an album of startling, imaginative beauty, by a brilliant American folk artist.
From the visionary collaboration of Japanese New Age master Ken-ichiro Isoda and electronic music magician aus (Yasuhiko Fukuzono). Minimalism distilled, ambient environmental music that soothes the mind and kindles the spirit.
Drawing on Isoda’s deep legacy (notably his legendary work on Oscilation Circuit – Série Réflexion 1 from mythical label Sound Process) and fused with aus’ spellbinding melodies, Interwoven is ethereal healing sound: lingering piano, soft cinematic synths, field recordings that feel like whispered memories, while flutes and saxophone pass by, bringing a subtle breath of wind and the warmth of human touch.
This is music for those who cherish the delicate beauty of life — and for fans of Satoshi Ashikawa, Midori Takada, Satsuki Shibano, Hiroshi Yoshimura, Takashi Kokubo, Brian Eno… lovers of nature, reflection, and daydreams.
Interwoven is a collaboration that bridges their generation and the physical distance between them.
Tokyo based producer aus works with synthesizers and electronic processing, while ISODA, living on Hachijo Island, writes scores for wind instruments, harp, and other acoustic instruments.
The project began with aus’ sketches like images of water, the sea, and islands, but gradually shifted into an exchange of sound without explanation. That trace of anonymity created a kind of freedom that neither had in their own work.
ISODA is known not only as a leading figure in Japanese ambient music, but also for his work as a music producer & composer for contemporary music, and game music creator. aus brings a distinctly current sensibility shaped by his background in electronic music.
A work that crystallizes the delicate ambient and electronica that Maps and Diagrams excels at into a quiet homage to nature. Warm cassette‑tape textures blend with gently wavering electronic tones, creating a serene sonic world where wind and light seem to drift slowly through a forest.
