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Aphex Twin's masterpiece “Windowlicker” was released by Warp in 1999.
From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).
Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.
Latency presents R&B outsider Zsela who joins forces with Daniel Aged (Frank Ocean, Kelela) and film composer Taul Katz on 4 Dreams, a billowing ambient-neoclassical hallucination originally commissioned for the exhibition Seven Heavenly Senses at Hôtel de la Marine, Paris. 4 Dreams consists of four tracks that each unfold as embracive harmonies of cinematic strings, FM synths, muggy bass drones, and Zsela’s soulful vocals. Even though 4 Dreams moves in a different direction than the debut Big For You (Mexican Summer, 2024), the inspiration of soul, jazz and R&B still shines through on the album, as Zsela’s humming vocals, with its jazz-inspired key changes, keep you intrigued. For this release, alongside critically acclaimed producer Daniel Aged and composer Taul Katz, Zsela steps confidently into the field of instrumental composition. This exploration of instrumental and ambient composition can be seen as a continuation of themes previously explored in her collaborations with UK-based artist Actress on the songs 'Angel’s Pharmacy' and 'Remembrance' from the album Karma & Desire (Ninja Tune, 2020). 4 Dreams bears the same atmospheric neo-classical attributes as recent releases by Nala Sinephro, Malibu, Mary Lattimore, and even draws on the legacy of spiritual jazz legends such as Alice Coltrane and Dorothy Ashby. The cover art is a detail of a painting by American visual artist Naudline Pierre, whose practice revolves around appropriating iconography from art history to create her own mythology and dreamlike narratives.
Aspen is very proud to introduce ‘Non Sonett’ by the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble. This ensemble is a pioneering Norwegian chamber group whose work on ECM and Hubro has redefined the boundaries between jazz, contemporary composition and folk music. Across seven albums, the ensemble has developed a highly distinctive language built on restraint, timbral nuance and collective interplay, placing it among the most influential European ensembles of the 21st century. Bringing together some of the finest musicians in Norway, the ensemble draws on a rare collective sensitivity, where each player contributes to a deeply integrated and texturally rich sound world. Non Sonett With Non Sonett, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble opens a new chapter that grows directly out of recent years of work in more solitary and cross-disciplinary contexts. In this period, Wallumrød has developed material for solo performance as well as for dance, allowing ideas to take shape in more fluid and exploratory formats. Some of this material now finds its way into the ensemble, where it is met by the possibilities offered by instrumentation, collective playing, and the distinct voices of the musicians. At the same time, older pieces—originating in entirely different settings—re-emerge here in new forms, reshaped by the ensemble context. A defining aspect of Non Sonett is the way many of the pieces function less as fully determined compositions and more as open frameworks: starting points, suggestions, or “springboards” for music. These structures invite response rather than prescribe outcome, relying on the ensemble’s inherent sensitivity and capacity to realize and transform the material in performance. The result is music that feels both precise and fluid, shaped in equal measure by composition and by the interpretative presence of the players. Central to this album is a continued deepening of Wallumrød’s long-standing interest in ambiguity and in dissolving boundaries between different musical elements and expressive worlds. By placing contrasting materials and associations side by side—sometimes subtly, sometimes more overtly—the music opens up spaces where meanings remain fluid and interconnected. On Non Sonett, this approach is taken a step further, allowing these juxtapositions to play an even more active role in shaping the music’s character and flow. This approach connects closely with the ensemble’s broader artistic trajectory. Over time, the Christian Wallumrød Ensemble has developed a language that is immediately recognizable—marked by reduction, clarity and a deep attention to sonic detail. While each release has its own character, the underlying aesthetic remains consistent: a focus on the inner life of sound itself. Rather than foregrounding gesture or virtuosity, the music draws the listener toward the smallest elements, where meaning emerges gradually through texture, spacing and timbre. The listening experience becomes one of concentration and proximity, where each sound carries weight, and the accumulation of detail forms a larger whole. References may be sensed—to early polyphonic music, Norwegian folk traditions, or more recent experimental practices—but these are absorbed into a singular musical language that resists categorization. As with the ensemble’s recent work, Non Sonett also continues the integration of electronics as a fundamental part of the sound world. Each musician engages with electronic elements alongside their acoustic instruments, creating a layered and dynamic sonic environment. At times, this leads into extended, exploratory passages reminiscent of analogue musique concrète; at others, electronics operate almost imperceptibly, subtly altering and extending the acoustic textures in real time.
Primordial Mind forms the mysteries and intensity of inner life into eight mandalic instrumentals where Mas Aya and Khôra, artists who share 15 years of music making, orchestrate an inspired, prismatic palette of percussive and melodic sources. Each composition presented stages a vigorous meshwork of colours and textures, contrasting riveting polyrhythms with towering arrangements for flutes, synths, and processed acoustic instruments. Tendencies which the artists trace in their solo practices are amplified, blended, and refracted sublimely in unison, serving as energetic portals to collective awareness. Combining trans-ethnic scaling alongside a heady brew of rhythmic influences and advanced electronic processing, the recordings on this album operate with a tactility that vaults between free jazz, dub, raga, ambient, and ritual music. Assimilated powers of primal drum patterning and psychoactive, ceremonial melodies, invoke fourth world adjacencies with the work of Don Cherry, Jon Hassell, Popol Vuh et al. There is an alchemical, Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu inflection that guides the record’s narrative, formed through dialogue between the artists over lifelong shared interest in spiritual modalities generally and the tantric approaches of the global east in particular. The album title is derived from an unexcelled esoteric work known as the Kalachakra (Wheel of Time or Time Cycles) Tantra and its associated commentary the Ornament of Stainless Light which detail forms of inner and outer transubstantiation within its complex cosmology and metaphysiology. Mas Aya is the moniker of Brandon Miguel Valdivia, acclaimed Nicaraguan-Canadian composer, producer, and musician whose electronic and jazz inspired works creatively interlace Colombian, Cuban, and a wide array of traditional music. Khôra is the name of the occult entity that uses multi-instrumentalist, producer, and writer Matthew Ramolo to pronounce itself. Returning to Marionette following 2024's monumental Gestures of Perception, Primordial Mind reinforces the rigorous and magical approach to creation which defines Khôra’s two decades of sonic output. Brandon and Matthew met back in 2011 and the pair toured around eastern Europe with Toronto band Picastro in 2013, also performing as a duo with Brandon contributing drums to Khôra's opening sets. After a short spate composing and playing in the ensemble Bespoken together, they continued to discover shared inspiration in psych/art rock, jazz, experimental and electronic music, providing a fertile soil for friendship and collaboration resulting in their collaged, field-recorded album Tangled Roots in 2017. Mythic and talismanic, the duo's Marionette debut weaves a luminous tapestry of organic pulses, offering itself as a support for resonant meditation and a motor for lucid action and intuition.
Carol Maia & Jeremy Gustin’s haunting collaborative album is the result of a long distance partnership during which tracks were traded back and forth across thousands of miles, Jeremy working from his home studio in Brooklyn and Carol from hers in Rio De Janeiro. Later they enlisted support from a number of key players in the Rio scene, Frederico Heliodoro, Paulo Emmery, Ricardo Dias Gomes, and from Brooklyn’s musical community, Will Graefe and Ryan Dugre, to shape this understated masterpiece of sophisticated global pop and quiet experimentalism. It's hard to describe what Carol, Jeremy and their guests have achieved on 'it's nice to see a lake in your eyes', a kind of pop music that stands outside of time and is neither Brazilian, American or of any other recognisable place. Maybe it's risen out of the lake they imagined into being? Maybe it's formed like rain in the thousands of miles of air between Rio and New York? Whatever happened was certainly alchemical as you will hear. Carol told me her writing on this record was greatly influenced by her reading of Marcelo Ariel's poetry book "A água veio do sol, disse o breu" so maybe the best thing to do to describe this music is to let you read one of his poems: A luz do ser é como a água também veio do Sol onde todos os planetas querem entrar Dentro do Sol O ser é imóvel como a gratuidade de um êxtase parecido com a respiração Fora do Sol o ser é móvel Tempo eternidade e tempo cronológico (Translation) The light of being is like water it also came from the Sun where all the planets want to enter Within the Sun Being is immobile like the gratuitousness of an ecstasy similar to breathing Outside the Sun Being is mobile Time eternal and chronological time
Lau Nau (Laura Naukkarinen), Linda Fredriksson and Matti Bye enter the We Jazz Records realm as Kiri Ra! with their new album nen (out 22 May 2026). Kiri Ra! is a trio that creates their sound slowly, in a process of improvisation and discovery. Filtered through the musicians’ long-standing friendship and collaboration, Kiri Ra!’s music is a testament to the joy of creation and invention. Their sound together draws from each of the the artists’ work before, while creating new world of sound. Their music is about letting go and being free to take in the even softest whisper and the most minute sonic particle to complete a mosaic filled with beauty. Kiri Ra! follow their own path with courage, showing how letting go can create new worlds. From Kiri Ra!: "This music does not try to be anything. No pre-determined references, we get into our recording sessions without any verbal communication. It’s more like a state of mind where we are not trying anything, we just see what happens. We create a moment that is unexpected and doesn’t have any locked direction. We are not trying to be anything, We are existing together. This music was made with a lot of time. We drank coffee and tea. Played. Enjoyed pulla and cookies. Played a bit more. We talked. We were slow. It took 10 years to combine the right pieces for the album. We were not in a hurry. Keywords: air, space, love, time, rest, electronic, synthetic, organic, warmth, wood."
"Remnants" is an album marked by the ambiguity of presence and absence. The pieces, recorded using minimal equipment in what Suzuki describes as a ritual-like atmosphere, began as a way of processing the loss of her father in 2019. But beyond this, they also come to speak to the ways in which loss changes our relationship with someone, and our experiences of the world. Indeed, the experience of loss is not marked merely by a single event, but is instead a process that unfolds over time. Despite the other's absence, a particular location, the smell of a certain brand of tobacco, a look on a friend's face - traces such as these are enough to bring about a renewed presence. It is through these subtle traces and remnants, encountered over time, that we come to understand loss as not only the acceptance of absence, but the recognition of a continued presence. As Suzuki says, "this is not a solo album." Its creation was instead shaped by an ongoing dialogue, the continued elaboration of a complex and ambivalent relationship. At once melancholic, warm, and embracing, it is this ambiguity, these subtle traces, that Suzuki’s compositions speak to. These are not merely the sounds of mourning, but instead have been shaped by the evolving dialectic of presence and absence into something far more subtle and haunting. (Zefan Sramek, 2026)
Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance. Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release. The unmistakable hue of Japan hovers throughout this emotional rich landscape. Subtle field recordings and fragile, abstract motifs drift through the album, all cloaked in a warmth and humanity that only Noriko seems able to conjure. Pon moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure. There are moments of deceptive simplicity where unexpected elements suddenly surface — strange voices emerge on Boku Wa Obaka, Knife of Yonder is a standout: a startling ten-minute unfolding that begins with a warm, almost Eno-esque drift before launching into a soaring mid-section and finally landing somewhere unexpectedly blues-adjacent. Kikoeru Pon is brimming with childlike wonder — a heartfelt ballad that dissolves into domestic field recordings, including sounds of the feline for whom both the album and track are named. A quietly devastating ending that brings the personal nature of the record into sharp focus. There is a deep sense of the human in the way Noriko embraces technology. This is far from cold abstraction; rather, Ponfeels like a colourful photo album, documenting Noriko’s inner world and instincts with remarkable intimacy. Hovering in liminal states between pop, ambient and abstraction, this is a deeply affective and moving release that reveals new surprises with each listen. The emotional range of Noriko’s latest offering inspires hope in a world in disarray. It is both gentle and epic and one which we feel embodies the work of an artist fully at the height of her powers.
Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.
Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.
Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.
Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.
The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive dee
The Buenos Aires–based producer’s second album on Umor Rex can be read on at least two levels. The most direct traces its origin to the influence of environmental music, as well as to some pioneers of electronic music. The album was recorded in a single session, making extensive use of loops that were later edited and condensed into the six pieces that make up Pequeño clima doméstico. This working method responds to a playful approach that runs through Entidad Animada’s musical intentions, which often start from a specific genre or aesthetic and then filter it through his own language. From a more conceptual perspective, the record proposes music as a tool capable of modifying the perception of a moment. Rather than closed songs, the album functions as a device that allows one to tune a state, transform a space, or alter a mood. In this sense, it engages with the idea of functional music not as a utilitarian background, but as a means to equalize time, slow the pace, and reconfigure the listener’s emotional climate.
Music From Memory are thrilled to announce the forthcoming release of ‘Pastoral Blend,’ a new album from the duo of N Kramer and Magnus Bang Olsen (The Zenmenn).
Recorded in Berlin between August 2023 and March 2024, ‘Pastoral Blend’ combines Kramer's improvisational process and mastery of contemporary production techniques with Bang Olsen’s emotive pedal steel guitar playing. The creative process was anchored in capturing various phrases and patterns from the instrument, which were then reshaped, reversed, and layered intricately. This meticulous approach allowed a foundational track to emerge, upon which further arrangements and developments were sculpted. This process, which builds on Kramer's earlier work as Habitat (with J. Foerster, released on Leaving Records), gives the music a gentle asynchronous flow that feels uniquely live and organic.
Merging the warmth and intimacy of instrumental Americana with the glitchy, textural processing reminiscent of early 2000s Max/MSP and influential artists such as Fennesz and Alva Noto, ‘Pastoral Blend’ is a textured drift between analog warmth and digital fragmentation, a delicate equilibrium that duo navigate with remarkable finesse and an air of effortless charm. With titles like ‘Harvest', ‘Agrarian Dawn’, ‘Grasslands’, and ‘Weathered’, Kramer and Bang Olsen evoke a musical vocabulary steeped in themes of landscape, memory, and tradition; a vocabulary that gently alludes to the more familiar and traditional musical structures lying beneath the rich layers of sound. Herein lies the essence of the 'Pastoral Blend’.
‘Pastoral Blend’ will be released on LP and digitally on July 4th 2025. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis.
The MerKaBa Brotherhood are Roman Norfleet (The Cosmic Tones Research Trio, Be Present Art Group) and Andre Raiah (Brown Calvin of Brown Calculus) The duo draw from esoteric texts, sacred imagery, and mystic thought, shaping sound into space, tone, and pulse. It's a spare and almost geometric record featuring Sax, keyboard and percussion. The album turns sound into a working language - textures as diagrams and melodies as signals. There is much to be learned and even more to be unlearned.
Originally released on CD in 2009, Engaged Touches has been expanded from the original recordings for a 3LP edition, spanning 5 sides of vinyl, and a 3CD edition of the same expanded version, as well as the original single disc version. All have been remastered by Stephan Mathieu for this special limited edition. Please support artists by purchasing the digital album, not streaming in excess. Thank you.
Originally released in 2009, Capri is a concept album composed of fragmented vignettes, lost minutes and scenes from an idyllic imagining. A collection of brief moments, suspended shimmers, and frail settings, Capri was never meant to be more than its own thin veneer; a naked and subtle wash of saturated and semi-transparent colors, rolling as gently as ocean waves against rocky beaches, of fading afternoon sunlight, of momentary experience. Peaceful yet isolated, quiet yet collapsing, they are fading moments without definite borders, directions, or conclusion. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu from the original tapes, and expanded to include the complete recordings excluded from the 2009 CD edition, this collection is finally present in its complete form in the deluxe edition as a black vinyl 3xLP, and 2CD. All music by Danielle Baquet and Will Long, 2007-2008.
The transcendental guitar master's 1971 debut, remastered for all your sabbath needs. 37 minutes of ambient guitar witchcraft and the perfect soundtrack for third eye awakening, light alchemy, or human sacrifice. You could start a cult with this thing.
There is a certain solace to be found in minimal music—a contemplative joy that emerges through sustained repetition and subtle variation. Solo Three, the slyly absorbing new album from Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, embodies that hypnotic charge while boldly reimagining a distinct selection of contemporary classical works.
Hall’s affinity for minimalism began decades ago, when as a jazz-studies drummer at the University of Michigan he first encountered Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The piece altered his trajectory completely. Years later, amid a creative lull, he revisited that formative work by attempting a solo reconstruction. Working alone in his home studio, Hall painstakingly recreated Reich’s intricate, interlocking architecture—supplanting the piece’s orchestral palette with his own keyboards, guitars, and synths—and performing every part himself without loops, programming, or sequencers.
That recording, released on Western Vinyl in 2020, arrived during the fraught early months of lockdown and resonated deeply with listeners. Pitchfork praised it for making “a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit,” and it won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record. Even Reich himself wrote to congratulate Hall, saying he had “reinvented the piece.”
Heartened, Hall next turned to Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, a sprawling work of Dutch minimalism built on repetition and euphoric harmony. His 2023 interpretation was hailed by Bandcamp Daily as “mesmerizing as patterns emerge, coalesce, and retreat,” and the New York Times highlighted Hall in a feature on ten Holt’s growing influence. The project led to a years-long collaboration with New York’s Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion, confirming Hall’s place as an inventive new voice bridging classical and contemporary practice.
With Solo Three, Hall brings this trilogy to a sweeping close. Instead of focusing on a single composition, he weaves together multiple works by several visionary composers: Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Spiegel, and a return to Steve Reich. The result is a rich, varied homage to American minimalism—at once reverent and exploratory. Branca’s “The Temple of Venus Pt. 1” unfolds in oscillating organ and prepared piano; Palestine’s “Strumming Music” becomes a meditative blur of felted piano and guitar; Spiegel’s “A Folk Study” is recast with acoustic warmth in lieu of electronics; and Reich’s “Music for a Large Ensemble” closes the album with a 16-minute, kaleidoscopic rush of overlapping melodies and jubilant rhythmic patterns.
True to his method, Hall performs and records every part himself, layering instruments one by one like sonic bricks. The approach is deeply human and quietly defiant in an age of faceless automation. “It’s just so much more compelling to actually play every note,” Hall says. “Those micro-differences between takes create a sort of living, breathing magic.”
That living, breathing magic fills every corner of Solo Three. It’s both a reverent ode to the composers who shaped Hall’s musical identity and a vivid reminder that minimalism’s hypnotic beauty—its patience, precision, and quiet emotional power—still speaks urgently to the present moment.
- Zach Schonfeld
Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jóhannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets—Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavík) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)—processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings.
“Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance—of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over its duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down—it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Jóhann Jóhannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening… but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother’s medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world—and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Jóhann’s death also kept making itself apparent.
For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Jóhann Jóhannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure—and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Jóhannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Jóhann’s music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Jóhann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.
The disappearing elegies of Afterlife Requiem are not so much music as they are the remains of music. In this way I always work towards the subtraction of meaning. The music is distant and smeared, damaged, ghost-like and haunted, only hinting like a half-forgotten memory of what once existed; a condensed depiction of decay and erasure. I have underlaid the whole of this new piece, from beginning to end, with these disembodied silences from Jóhann’s own work, space, and time. Now gone forever, his recorded silence remains; a monumental vacancy lost to the world. Throughout the piece, and especially in the ‘Memorial Environment’ sections, I also incorporate countless natural-world sounds, everything from volcanic lava to freight elevators to human blood flow to turbine hiss to suicide injections.
Artist Robert Smithson said decades ago: ‘It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found’. For me, this music also measures how time runs out. In fact, time already has run out. Eternity has already begun.”
– Matthew Patton (Those Who Walk Away)
Mieko Shiomi is known both for her avant-garde musical activities with the Group Ongaku collective during her student years and for her participation in Fluxus from 1964 onwards. The Fluxus Festival held in Venice in 1990, to which she was invited, became a pivotal event that brought about a major shift in her subsequent work. That same year, she self-released a cassette requiem in memory of Fluxus founder George Maciunas.
This tape work combines original compositions performed on synthesizer harpsichord and organ with recordings of her own voice played backwards. These sound sources were taken to a studio and edited together with environmental sounds recorded at the Venice venue. The piece also incorporates the voices of key Fluxus artists including La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Eric Andersen, Willem de Ridder, and Ken Friedman. Making use of the specific properties of tape, the piece integrates unique ideas and structures and occupies a distinctive place among Shiomi’s oeuvre.
The ambient lofigaze soundtrack for interdimensional travel. Compiled from hissy cassettes 4-tracked between 1991-'95, lovesliescrushing's sophomore album xuvetyn originally released in 1996, now achieving the patina of legend some 30 years later. This double LP edition is housed in a tip-on jacket illustrated with Melissa Arpin Duimstra and Scott Cortez's abstract photography, plus a lyric sheet translating the expressive glossolalia. "A disorientingly beautiful cloud of neon drones and voices from the other side. Music that will envelop you, that you can disappear inside of." -Jefre Cantu-Ledesma
In the words of Emma Warren:
Alabaster DePlume is not doing things properly, and this makes him very happy.
DePlume is a Manchester-born, London-based bandleader, composer, saxophonist, activist and orator. He’s a resident at the legendary London creative hub Total Refreshment Centre, a recording artist for the off-grid, Scottish Hebridean island label Lost Map, and now the latest arrival into Chicago-based International Anthem’s growing family of progressive musical explorationists. Whilst much of his music contains vocals – often whispered imperatives – this is a collection of instrumentals, drenched in feeling and recorded over four albums and eight earth years in cities across the UK.
The music of "To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1" contains naturally elegant orchestration wrapped around something visceral and primordial. Swirled inside the 11 pieces are shades of Japanese Min’yo folk, Celtic folk, the Ethio-jazz of saxophonist Getatchew Mekurya and hints of the pan-human ‘ancient music’ that sat underneath Arthur Russell’s melodies on First Thought, Best Thought. The music is filled with space, inspired, he says, by computer games and Japanese animation, particularly Joe Hisaishi’s soundtrack for Studio Ghibli’s Castle In The Sky.
The record combines new compositions alongside bygone instrumentals and understated lullabies that feel like they’ve been picked from between the cracks of civilisation. These songs were collected from albums "Copernicus," "The Jester," and "Peach" – under-the-radar records that preceded his critically acclaimed 2019 release The Corner of a Sphere. The new tunes feature Dan ‘Danalogue’ Leavers of The Comet Is Coming and Sarathy Korwar alongside a host of London’s finest musicians.
To Cy & Lee… has a suitably individual genesis. DePlume was working for Ordinary Lifestyles, a charity in North Manchester which supports people with disabilities to live in their own homes and to live fulfilling lives. Specifically, he was working with the titular Cy and Lee. His job was to get the guys socialising and he did this by making up songs with them. They’d make up melodies together, humming tunes in the house when they needed something calm, or when they were haring round the city in a battered car. DePlume would record these impromptu sessions in his phone, then go to the studio and use the material as starting points for songs.
He also ran music sessions for Cy, Lee and their friends. “People would focus on a central point, tuning in to one another. There are things we can’t put into words, which can be expressed with sound and music. These guys have fewer words than us, some of them have none. When we put some feelings into a music expression – that’s liberation.”
It’s a method he uses in live shows wherever possible, placing himself and the musicians in the round. The aim is to maximise the creative benefits that a community of players and listeners can bring to the music. It’s a collectivist and humanist approach to making music that sits underneath everything he does. This is music made for a reason, and those reasons include – to paraphrase some of the catchphrases he uses both on stage and in conversation – mixing people up, asking everyone to be as much themselves as they possibly can and the hardcore encouragement expressed in his most popular line, shouted back at him by audiences wherever he goes: “You’re doing very well!”
Practically, he purposefully brings together players of different skill levels and different backgrounds so they have to interact differently, placing them in unusual situations in which to record. “I wanted to destroy the idea of correct so we were playing it different ways for fun. We had a very magical time playing the tunes”. This is activism expressed through gorgeous music that breaks down barriers by encouraging that most powerful emotion: connectedness.
One source of these gorgeous instrumentals is "Peach," an album that later bestowed a name upon legendary monthly sessions he’d run once he’d moved to London. The music was recorded in the middle of the room at Antwerp Mansion, around a big dinner cooked for 60 people.
“The dinner made the air vibrate in the way it did. We did it a certain way, for fun, getting people to shout out instructions – ‘make it like a hangover!’ ‘Make it like a barrel rolling down the ice!’ And we did it that way. You’ve got people eating and drinking around you and they might shout out anything. You can let go and respond.”
The two new pieces were recorded at London’s now-famous Total Refreshment Centre with Danalogue (on piano) Sarathy Korwar (drums), Chestnutt (of Snapped Ankles, on synth), Donna Thompson (voice) and James Howard (guitar). They had a day to record, and DePlume was in post-gig exhaustion. His saxophone was as battered as he was and was failing to play certain notes. “When something is broken or absent or missing, you go around it and that’s what makes it good,” he says. “Then it belongs to that moment. I want to make things that belong to the moment.”
DePlume’s politics might be more evident in vocal songs from his live repertoire when he’s reshaping advertising slogans into a call to arms or encouraging activism on “I Was Gonna Fight Fascism,” but his commitment to the cause is as palpable through the instrumentals of Cy & Lee... This is music designed to respond to what Russian revolutionary poet Mayakovsky described as a “social command.”
“I like the idea that we’re not just doing frivolous decoration. We’re doing work for society. I like to listen for what needs to be said.”
“Years ago I played a bit of sax in other people’s gigs. I realised I was waiting for someone to give me permission to do my own thing. I noticed that no-one will ever give you permission to do your awesome shit, because they don’t know what it is. It’s impossible for them to give you permission. Who gave me permission to talk to you like this? I gave myself fucking permission.”
Alabaster DePlume is not doing things properly. Hallelujah.