MUSIC

'Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity' is a poetic inversion of Muzak’s traditional role in stimulating seamless productivity in the workplace. Beginning as a pre-radio music distribution network (1934, U.S.), Muzak was transmitted along electrical wires with the intention of being at once ubiquitous and indiscernible, always present yet easily ignorable. As a pseudo-science the aim was to capitalize on the potential of music to have a psychological effect on listeners, and with the goal of maximum productivity, was employed as a sonic disciplinary force in the work place.

Previously installed for Dystopia Sound Art Biennial (2024), at the Amazon Packing Station located before HAUNT-Frontviews in Berlin, Muzak for the Encouragement of Unproductivity sonically addresses utopic notions of seamless, efficient productivity, inherent to capitalist cultures, and their very real dystopic effects from labour exploitation to the impacts of over-production on the environment. This poetic inversion, further developed as an album, is not meant as a kind of melodic control but rather a reflective space in which to consider the benefits personally, globally and environmentally, of slowing down.

Reverb, essential to the Muzak aesthetic, is programmed (using convolution reverb) with the dimensions of the Berlin Amazon fulfillment centre, DBE2. Amazon fulfillment centers are global contemporary factories, promising a consumer utopia of next day delivery of almost any product imaginable. Inspired by Sam Kidel’s concept of “mimetic hacking”(1), the reverberation characteristics of the DBE2 facility perform a symbolic sonic break-in to the guarded Amazon fulfillment center, a trespass to the flow of production.

Guffond’s ambient Muzak with its drifting horn, clarinet and synth-like modulations is just too down-tempo for upbeat spending. If this is Muzak it is possibly Muzak for the end of the world, thoughtfully seeking transcendence through implied questioning after all avenues for shopping have been exhausted.

Bifuu_ZONE, translated loosely as “a zone of gentle breeze,” is a concept drawn from Tsudio Studio’s personal vocabulary rather than a strict linguistic equivalent. While liminal spaces are often framed through unease, Bifuu_ZONE reimagines them as sites of quiet comfort, restoration, and slow transformation. The project centers on impermanence, erosion, and the subtle ways time reshapes even the most solid structures.The West takes its title literally, drawing inspiration from buildings and environments located west of Osaka. Each track is composed with a specific architectural space in mind, allowing tone, texture, and resonance to emerge from imagined structures rather than narrative progression. The result is a site-responsive ambient work that listens closely to stillness, weathering, and spatial openness. Saxophonist mori_de_kurasu appears on three tracks, introducing breath and human fragility into the album’s restrained sonic palette.This perspective is deeply informed by a Japanese sensibility toward impermanence, an acceptance of loss and change not as absence, but as gentle continuation. Rather than positioning liminal space through anxiety, Bifuu_ZONE gestures toward what lingers quietly after the dream has ended.Beyond the album itself, The West also marks a point of convergence within Tsudio Studio’s broader practice. In March, he will present an exhibition and live performance at Gallery SHUTL in Higashi-Ginza, Tokyo, centered on the idea of “post-liminal space.”Under his primary name, Tsudio Studio has released work through Media Factory, Local Visions, and ULTRA-VYBE, collaborating across Japan, Europe, and the United States. In 2022, the compilation OACL, which he contributed to and mastered through Local Visions, reached #2 on Bandcamp’s global charts. The West is a focused ambient work shaped by space, time, and quiet transformation.

The latest cassette release from Tokyo‑based electronic musician and painter Akhira Sano. Evoking the stillness of late‑night hours and the lingering echoes of memory, it’s a work whose delicate details reveal themselves more and more with each listen.

Following its release in the winter of 2018, "Landmarks", a collaboration between veteran ambient artists Celer and Forest Management, initially drew quiet accolades and a steadfast listenership that has since swelled to unimagined proportions (~20 Mil. streams), resonating with listeners perhaps now more than ever and cementing its status as an experimental classic. Inspired by Paul Theroux's novel "The Mosquito Coast" and Peter Weir's 1986 film adaptation of that book, "Landmarks" sets out 14 tracks in a "stunning hour of music" (The Quietus) that creates a "general sense of foreboding, critique of romantic retreat into individualism and colonialism" (A Closer Listen). The album is now offered on vinyl for the first time (originally out on cassette tape), newly remastered by Stephan Mathieu to enhance the depth and richness of this oneiric soundscape. Both Americans, Celer (Will Long) resides in Tokyo, Japan and Forest Management (John Daniel) in Chicago, USA. "Landmarks" was born of their months-long collaboration, trading music back and forth and reshaping each other's work using a series of patches, tape looping, and electronic manipulation. As a throughline in each piece we hear their distinct voices and cultural contexts blend to unique, often otherworldly effect, conjuring a dreamlike tension that refuses easy resolution. We are hooked by a mood that captured listeners back in 2018 and continues to hold us today in the context of current events, related disquietudes, and a nostalgic longing for solutions that may be more imaginary than real.

Hylic by J.TRIPP distills post-millennial tensions, taking us to the edge of unfamiliarity and then pushing us back, inward, to find comfort in artificial intimacy. At first, it awakens a sense of disorientation - as if there were something we can’t quite grasp. As the listening deepens, the album begins to feel like the cohesive soundtrack to a metropolitan simulation - one where reality as we know it morphes into something new. At some points, soft and expansive; at others, sharp and distorted. Although its sonic world echoes urban landscapes, folk and pop sensibilities start to emerge - the human-like nature of the music feels suspended, while voices thread indistinct, siren-like messages, anchoring us to a melody that guides us through a hostile environment. Laic (feat. Lutto Lento) is our portal - we stomp into a dusty land without gravity, metallic sand in our eyes and mouth, and an echoing, child-like song in our ears. Static shocks propel us toward the next space, Gelid, a sparring between bells-loaded guns with no winners. The pace speeds up, then stretches down again, warping the walls around us in Skirr. We’re running inside a factory - machines pumping steam, shiny drops falling from the ceiling - until we stop again, feeling our heartbeat racing, head turning. Wend takes us back to the hazy atmospheres of Laic: a slow-motion, romantic dance in the quicksands. Then Comesss (feat. Enhancement), with its sticky textures and choir of mellifluous, distorted vocals and the odd bass slap, slashes and reverses reality. In contrast, Melic is a balm - the otherworldly lullaby, backed by the cooing of synthetic doves, is enchanting but wicked. We hesitate to indulge in it for long and step into Lithic, an endless ascension built on electric keys, strings and stomping beats, before entering the almost-fantastic realm of Whilom again - where a waterfall of dissonant flutes decompose into buzzing synths under the rumble of fake thunder. The conclusion of this lucid vision is Thole, where rattlesnakes slither at our feet - or is it the steam pushing through the underground’s iron grates? - and the memory of a song brings us back to a pop idea of emotions. Across nine tracks, Hylic reminds us that we’re already living the future we have been raving about - and that, perhaps, it’s already slipping away.

To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. An act beneath language. Through this reintegration, the ear becomes a quiet form of resistance.

Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello). Rather than a formal structure, the composition unfolds through intuition led by breath, resonance and subtle intelligence. What emerges is an acoustic ecology: an ongoing negotiation between perception and expression. An ethical act that reorients us toward the elemental.

Paired with "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness", a companion suite of domestic fragments and temporal drift, the album unfolds as a dialogue between the inward persistence of what is felt and the outward pull of what remains unresolved. A continuum that traces the porous boundaries between the intimate and the infinite. Through electronics, field recordings, and acoustic instrumentation, Vantzou maps atmospheres charged with psychic and temporal residue. "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness" unfolds as a precisely sequenced constellation of sonic impressions gathered across nearly a decade, where the real and the imagined bleed into one another, like the mutable moods of places where time folds, drifts and reassembles itself.

Time here is embodied, a porous medium through which perception drifts and reforms, stretches, contracts, and suspends itself, blurring the boundary between presence and impermanence. Within this fluid temporality, intuition replaces structure; sound becomes a site of renewal rather than arrival. Each resonance carries the trace of what has passed and what is yet to unfold, an ever-shifting threshold where listening becomes a form of existence and time reveals itself as both instrument and witness.

The two side-long pieces are presented alongside digital renderings by the Belgian visual artist Eva L’Hoest, a longtime collaborator, extending this sensorial language into image. Her surreal images, containing fragments of Greek iconography - a sphinx in a coffee cup, votive ears, arrangements of laurel leaves - mirror Vantzou’s sonic landscapes in texture and tone. In Vantzou’s work, sound becomes a portal to states of perception where time bends and consciousness softens. The Reintegration of the Ear listens not only to the world but through it — a quiet, expansive meditation on presence, transformation and the invisible architectures of relation.

The Reintegration of the Ear will be released by Editions Basilic on February 20th, 2026 as an edition of 300 LPs with printed inner sleeves.

Text: Melis Özek

John Also Bennett (JAB)’s Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2 compiles two volumes of minimal music conceived as infinitely looping and morphing compositions for “save rooms” - temporary safe spaces within video game maps. The compositions primarily stem from a week spent at work in a former military barn in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco, spurred on by multimedia artist and Bennett’s frequent collaborator Peter Burr (for whom a handful of the pieces on these albums were initially composed). Consumed with the idea of music that could create an effortless sense of stasis, yet never exactly repeat itself, Bennett spent days alone in the remote, empty barn composing endless loops, experimenting with phasing techniques, and melding with the surrounding ambience. The groundwork was laid for over 11 compositions, a few of which at that time were finished. But in early 2020, faced with a pandemic-canceled tour and non-refundable plane tickets, Bennett digitally released a premature version of Music for Save Rooms containing two finished ‘Save Room’ pieces plus various unreleased odds and ends - a synthesized version of Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”, “Still Inside the Deku Tree”, an alto flute piece and live staple referencing Koji Kondo’s classic score for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and “Utopia and Oblivion”, a work for a virtual just intonation piano & DX7. Bennett presents here a definitely mixed, mastered, and expanded version of Music for Save Rooms (now Music for Save Rooms 1), alongside Music for Save Rooms 2, a fully realized album of new music stemming directly from those original sessions in Marin County. Composed almost exclusively for a Yamaha DX7, Roland D-50 and JV1080, Music for Save Rooms 2 differs from its predecessor - instead of a collection of disparate works centered around the theme of stasis, the album presents a more cohesive narrative, with shorter tracks relative to its predecessor’s more long-form pieces. Opener “Sky Music'' contains as much silence as it does sound - effortless chords float into view and then sizzle into nothingness. “Power Plant”’s glissando vocal pads and deep percussion hits seem to create a regenerative space, while “Out Back” and “Ambling'' both hint at some distant, foggily recollected liminal place. “Glass Castle” is perhaps more explicit with its imagery, combining the sounds of a glass harmonica and fragile vocal pads with alternatively gorgeous and dissonant piano motifs that utilize a tuning system developed by Iannis Xenakis. Boiled down over years to only its essential parts, Music for Save Rooms 2 is a tour through the mind’s eye of an artist searching for an elusive place, somewhere deep in the open world of our collective consciousness.

kwes. returns to Warp after 8 years with his second album ‘Kinds’ - an expansive, intuitive composition set inspired by memory, colour and his kids, who also helped create the album artwork.

Tidal Perspectives is an album by Giovanni Di Domenico, Pak Yan Lau, and John Also Bennett. Recorded across a single afternoon in Brussels, Belgium, the album’s four parts are a rippling alchemy of processed Rhodes piano, sizzling ceramics, and liquified bass flute, a rare meeting of three unique voices from the contemporary music landscape that manages to flow with the effortless inevitability of the oceanic tides. Giovanni Di Domenico, an accomplished composer and prolific collaborator who has released albums with Jim O’Rourke, Eiko Ishibashi and Akira Sakata, among many others, initiated the collaboration with Bennett after the two met at a record fair in Saint-Gilles, Belgium and bonded over a shared inquisitiveness for unconventional sonic combinations. Along with Pak Yan Lau, a Belgian-born sound artist and improviser who has developed her own rich and unique sonic footprint, the trio entered the studio with little, if any, discussion beforehand, jumping right into playing without preconceived structures. The resulting recordings had a depth of sound and emotional resonance surprising even them, with finished pieces emerging from single live takes and minor edits. Bennett, known for his solo work as well as his collaborations with Christina Vantzou as CV & JAB, gives us here a taste of his bass flute in free flowing form. Unconstricted by concept, joyfully and lazily bouncing off the melodic shimmers of Di Domenico’s Rhodes, Bennett uses his flute’s pitch information to trigger long tones that emerge like rays of light piercing through low hanging clouds - moments of clarity among a clicking world of sonic stimuli. Meanwhile, Lau’s crackling and sometimes dissonant contributions on prepared piano, live hydrophone, and custom ceramic sound objects balance out the triangle, adding a sense of microcosmic intrigue that allows the music to seamlessly ebb and flow between moments of comfort and foggy uncertainty. The album’s title track and climax, the eighteen minute “Tidal Perspectives”, drifts in with some kind of clarity, Lau’s glinting tonal waves edging in just beyond the horizon lines drawn by Di Domenico’s Rhodes and Bennett’s bass flute. But like the tidal flows of the Atlantic that inspired its title, just as you begin to perceive what’s happening, the currents have already taken you out to sea.

Featuring Xavier Charles, Angharad Davies and more, this long-unheard score by drone master and guru of Tibetan-electronic synthesis Eliane Radigue (1932–) finally resurfaces after six decades. Written in 1963–64 and produced by Rhodri Davies, the work received its long-awaited premiere at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2023. Based on graphic notation derived from the Fibonacci sequence, the score is interpreted by strings, winds, harp, and guitar, summoning Radigue’s signature deep drones without the use of electronics. Layers of sound unfurl with subtle fluctuations and spiral resonances, offering an experience at once hushed and cosmic in scope. A prophetic precursor to her later Occam series, and an elemental masterpiece that awakens a prayer-like focus at the very source of Radigue’s art.

Sublime ethereal minimalism from Hiroyuki Onogawa on this retrospective compilation album for Mana, the first dedicated release and remaster of his soundtrack compositions. The album August in the Water: Music for Film 1995-2005 plots a decade of Onogawa’s compositions for films by the renowned filmmaker Gakuryū Ishii (formally known as Sogo Ishii). Ishii’s left-field and trailblazing cinema has proven highly influential - Crazy Thunder Road (1980) is frequently cited as the starting pistol for the Japanese cyberpunk genre [1] - and unfathomably difficult to source outside of Japan. This, coupled with the mysterious and artistic nature of the films, has seen him build a cult-like following. Most of his oeuvre remains undistributed outside Japan, though Third Window Films has recently taken great strides toward making some titles available internationally. This retrospective publication, sequenced into an album by Onogawa himself, spans a fertile period of collaboration with Ishii, through soundtracks for three remarkable films: August in the Water (1995), Labyrinth of Dreams (1997), and Mirrored Mind (2005). Each feels texturally and sensually linked with the spiritual, ambient, dreamlike quality that lingers in Onogawa’s music. The sound Onogawa conjures for these films is elegant and patient, often minimal or essential in form, but saturated in a poetic emotion and atmosphere that feels strange and otherworldly, touched by the metaphysical in subtle ways. Boundaries are crossed between New Age and science fiction, locating a blissfulness, melancholy and paranoia within the same spectrum, and moving toward an enchanting sense of mood and colour. It’s notable that the compositions on this album straddle the millennium, and the mix of divine and uncertain themes in the music carry that currency. New listeners might hear links to Mark Snow’s compositional work for the X-Files and Millennium, or other celebrated future-facing and future-fearing Japanese anime or cyberpunk. Onogawa’s music adds great depth and tenor to the sensory experience of the films themselves, but it stands just as strongly as a listening experience on its own terms, a virtuosic example of ambient that changes in hue when turned in the light. Remarkably, and in similar circumstances to Ishii, Onogawa’s work has never been widely available outside of (always highly enthusiastic) underground fan posts, usually sourced from extremely limited and private CDs limited to Japan. This retrospective seeks to remedy that, and hopes to achieve recognition for Onogawa as one of the great composers of the last three decades. Onogawa continues to work in film, both in the creation of soundtracks, and now as a producer and director. He composed the music for Koji Fukada’s Harmonium (2016), which won the Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as for Fukada’s A Girl Missing (2019). As a director, he received the Grand Prize for Best Short Film in the Noves Visions category at the Sitges Festival in 2022 for Flashback Before Death (Guu) [2], co-directed with Rii Ishihara. This release includes liner notes specially commissioned by writer Tony Rayns, and words by Gakuryū Ishii.

"Generative sonic backdrop for bus stations. Designed to enhance space and portray a mod of progressiveness, grandeur, and ethereal calm. A slowly shifting static backdrop designed to enhance modern architecture, rather than compete with it. Sounding as if the structure itself was resonanting. Hovering sound-fields that utilizes sonic phenomena proven to induce states of calm. Can be presented as a multichannel, polyrhythmic installation with different components of the composition emanating form different areas within the structure, and elements constantly shifting in relationship to other elements, creating an organic sonic-tapestry that never repeats the same way. In essence, the soundscape becoming a living organism with unpredictable behavior. Inspired by avant-garde bus station designs such as Domitianus Arquitectura's station in Rio Maior, Portugal; Bluck & Morgen's Busbahnhof Poppenbuttel in Hamburg, Germany; and Metaraum Architect's bus station in Pzorzheim, Germany." - Rod Modell

The Montreal duo Library L’Amour weave a delicate, dream‑like synth‑pop romance on Premier Caprice. The EP gathers four songs recorded by Yasmine Ixe and Richard Ryan Wenger over the course of their three‑and‑a‑half‑year relationship.

Luciano Cilio was born in Naples, Italy, in 1950. He studied music and architecture and, in the late '60s, collaborated with local artist Alan Sorrenti, American expat Shawn Phillips and various avant-garde theater groups. A virtuoso guitarist and self-taught composer, Cilio released only one LP before his untimely death at the age of 33.

Dialoghi Del Presente (1977) is a work like no other, one that sounds both ancient and ahead of its time. Produced by Renato Marengo, it features a series of muted tableaux for strings, woodwinds, guitar, chorus, piano and percussion. Cilio carves out a space where subtle, repetitive phrases yield – almost imperceptibly – to breathtaking silence.

As Jim O'Rourke writes, "These recordings sound as if they were to please no one but himself; they feel self-contained, introspective, and determined ... You can feel in the music a sort of necessity that can be rarely found, like in This Heat's debut or Nick Drake's Pink Moon."

While each subsequent "quadro" grows more abstract, Cilio draws the listener into an expansive, pastoral soundscape. The closing piece, "Interludio," begins with a plaintive guitar, which is joined by haunting strings and woodwinds before concluding, poignantly, as the album began, with Cilio and his guitar, alone once more.

Superior Viaduct's edition reproduces the original sleeve design. Sourced from the original master tapes. Recommended for fans of Johann Johannsson, Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, Arvo Part and Popol Vuh.

Two years after he first appeared on Balmat with 1977, Mike Paradinas returns with 1979. The sense of continuity between the two records is clear, and not just from their titles. Both capture the Planet Mu head venturing into the wilderness, seeking something—half-formed memories, thoughts caught in midair—in some of the most abstract, searching music he has released. Just like 1977, 1979 surveys a synth-heavy array of ethereal soundscapes, ominous crevasses, and strange, psychedelic fugues. Like its predecessor, the new album’s atmospheric cast sets it apart from much of the work Paradinas has released as µ-Ziq on Planet Mu. It’s not strictly an ambient record, but it’s close, as close as this famously mutable artist ever comes to inhabiting a particular genre. Paradinas’ inspiration for the record began on visits to the Spanish cities of Ávila and Majadahona, where his family hails from. That might account for the sense that there are spirits flitting through this music, presences you can intuit if not quite grasp. But 1979 is also a record to meet on your own terms, and to find your own meanings in. It’s a stunning record, every track a world unto itself: the mysterious contours of “Majadahonda at Dawn”; the playful melodic fillips of “Clari”; the airy melancholy of “Galletas”; the full-scale breakbeat abandon (yes, you read that right) of “Houzz 14,” the rarest of dancefloor detours for Balmat. There are echoes of classic braindance and isolationist ambient and golden-age IDM; there are easter eggs and recurring themes and hidden symmetries. Every time we listen, we discover something new. Despite what the title might suggest, it’s less a trip back in time than a portal to another universe, a destination for(to?) which only Mike Paradinas knows the exact coordinates. –Philip Sherburne, Balmat

Lost Coast: Some Visionary Music from California (1980-1992) assembles little-known sounds from California’s metaphysical underground. Each recording is stylistically different—dream pop, guitar soli, fourth world, avant-electronic—but they are held together by a regional ethos of the “visionary.” This is music that sees through the mind’s eye and conjures new worlds.

Some people say that California is where “the nuts stop rolling”—where those too eccentric to fit in elsewhere often find themselves. What was meant pejoratively is easily reclaimed as a celebration of the free-thinking and the freely-freaking. Until the turn of the millennium, all manner of seekers rolled westward until they hit the pacific. Stationed along this edge, music was a way to roll still further, imagining territories unencountered and wavelengths as yet unheard.

Lost Coast is a commemoration of the people who made these journeys and a resurrection of recordings they made little effort to broadcast. While some pieces were originally released with modest distribution, others were only shared among friends or never shared at all. All tracks were found on cassettes in flea markets, barn sales, rural thrift stores, and even stranger places—outside a gem and mineral shop, for example, and on the ranch of a retired mescaline dealer.

Regardless of their obscurity, these recordings are eminently listenable. California, after all, is a place where the strange and the pleasurable are frequent bedfellows.

Stroom’s Swedish recruit channels the saucer-eyed spectres of early ambient techno - HIA, Biosphere, FAX - thru a frosted lens of isolationist detachment, with well weathered results akin to Civilistjävel! or 1991.

A prevailing breeze of ‘90s ambient sentiment fills the sails of ‘Maidstone’, the Velv.93 debut for Stroom. His follow-up to a series of more club-edged turns, solo and with Acronym for his Velv label and mutism, notably sheds the rolling grooves in favour of letting it all drift quietly outwards across an hour of contemplative airs blessed with nuanced harmonic resonance.

The spirits of the elders are sifted for salient, flickering filaments that endure in the modern day, teasing out pads and acidic synth lines into soft tissue structures. In procession from the fluttering motifs and choral keen of ‘Lobelia’ to the crankier ambient noise of ‘Naked Eye’ we hear the glow of ‘90s ambient and its descendants in decay with a declension of energies.

Knackered pulses nudge the icy melody of ‘True Blue’ into what feels like a screwed 1991 on ‘Star Grain’, and echoes of Swedish organ minimalism on its title piece, with ‘Medway’ lighting a lone beacon of obfuscated shoegaze, and ‘Aging Cycle’ perhaps best betraying that sunken bridge between OG ‘90s ambient and where it’s shored up decades later.

Recorded in Naples historic recording studio Auditorium Novecento ‘notes from the air’ is the second Ciro Vitiello full-lenght album, that turns around the ambiguous figure of the seagull, a coastal apparition both ridiculous and divine, foolish and sacred, graceful in flight yet uneasy on land, something that knows more than it shows, carrying both wonder and threat in its gaze. The album breathes through that tension, the desire to fly and the fear of falling, the suspicion of having already crashed somewhere unseen. Wind, creaking ropes, invisible currents: these become signals from another uncoding state, reminders that air can be both home and haunting. The record lingers in suspension. Each track feels like a fragment carried by wind, a message blurred, a memory misplaced, something approaching meaning but never arriving. The record drifts between orchestral gestures and dream-pop/post-rock shadows, guided by Ciro Vitiello’s fascination with shoegaze textures and cinematic atmospheres, and features contributions by Heith, Renato Grieco, Stefano Costanzo, Caraluce and Daniel Kinzelman. Vocal features include Martyna Basta, Heith and Antonina Nowacka, alongside Ciro’s own voice.

Farming, often associated with toil and drudgery, can also be a surprisingly sensual and playful activity. The rhythm of the seasons, the tactile experience of working the land, and the shared sense of accomplishment can all contribute to a heightened sense of intimacy and pleasure. Consider the act of planting seeds. The gentle touch of fingers on delicate seedlings, the anticipation of growth, and the nurturing care required can create a deeply satisfying and sensual experience. Harvesting, too, can be a sensual affair, as one plucks ripe fruits and vegetables from the earth, feeling their warmth and succulence. Beyond the physical aspects, farming can also foster emotional intimacy. Couples can work together in the garden, sharing laughter, sweat, and a sense of shared purpose. The feeling of accomplishment that comes from growing one's own food can also strengthen bonds and create a sense of shared pride.

“Sinsekai,” the 1994 masterpiece by Tanzmuzik, a Japanese techno/ambient/IDM unit formed by Akiwo Yamamoto and Okihide Sawaki, who were based in the Kansai region and helped shape the dawn of Japanese techno. The album blends YMO-inspired lyricism with elements of European techno, creating a unique musical identity, while its soft and dreamlike soundscapes envelop the entire record.

Petre Inspirescu returns with a four-part suite of mesmeric, long-form compositions. Spanning two 12" records, each track occupies a full side - unfolding with the patience and precision of serialist structures. Drawing from minimalism and contemporary classical traditions, this is introspective electronica in its most refined form - hypnotic, elegant, and quietly expansive.

WRWTFWW Records is proud to announce the worldwide reissue of Midori Takada’s solo album from 1999, Tree of Life, available on vinyl for the first time ever in a new audiophile mix by the Japanese percussionist herself, and in full half-speed-mastered glory. The 180g LP comes in a heavy sleeve with a beautiful design by Kohei Sugiura. Tree of Life is also available in CD (digipack) and digital formats. Originally recorded in September 1998 at legendary Ginza (Tokyo) studio Onkio Haus (founded in 1974 and where Ryuichi Sakamoto’s "Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence" and many more were recorded) and released on CD only for the Japan market in 1999, Tree of Life is Midori Takada’s best kept secret, a lost gem of minimalism and percussive ambient. The album is separated in two parts, the first one finds Takada exploring her trademark environmental soundscapes with precise mastery of marimba, drums, and bells, notably on the magnificent fan-favorite "Love Song Of Urfa". The second half is a collaboration with Chinese virtuoso Erhu player Jiang Jian Hua, allowing Midori Takada to unveil new layers of her artistic mind with a slightly more theatrical approach and a beautiful crystallization of complex simplicity. The entire album was given a fresh new audiophile mix by Midori Takada herself and was mastered at Emil Berliner Studios, with half speed cutting for the vinyl version, to ensure an audio presentation aligned with the Japanese pioneer’s vision. This Tree of Life reissue follows two newly recorded Midori Takada albums, Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter and You Who Are Leaving To Nirvana, both available on WRWTFWW Records, along with her 1983 masterpiece, Through The Looking Glass.

September 23rd is the first release in William Basinski’s new Arcadia Archive series. Recorded in September 1982 in his first loft in the pre-gentrified DUMBO neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, September 23rd is a recently unearthed early entry in what has become a hugely inspirational and influential catalog. Built from a piano piece that Basinski composed in high school in the mid-1970s, September 23rd quickly evolved into a vastly different work. As Basinski explains: “The original piano recordings were made on on a piano belonging to my downstairs neighbor, John Epperson – later known more famously as world-renowned drag artist, Lypsinka – at 351 Jay Street aka Casa Degli Artisti, our first loft in New York. It was recoded with a little portable (probably Radio Shack) cassette deck sitting on the piano as I improvised a piece I had been working on since high school. It was pretty terrible, but when I did the John Giorno/William Burroughs cut-up technique, suddenly I had something to put through the Frippertronics loop and feedback loop tape delay system – and boy did I get results. A very prolific time for a young, wacked-out queen in NYC.”

Release date Feb. 9th. Kali Malone's anticipated new album "All Life Long" is a collection of music for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet composed by Kali Malone, 2020 - 2023. Choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble and conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L'Immaculée-Conception in Nantes. Brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. Organ music performed by Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs at Église Saint-François in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden. Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Time is a crucial factor: letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a chance to find a space of reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Though awe-inspiring in scope, the most remarkable thing about Malone’s music is the intimacy stirred by the close listening it encourages. Malone’s new album All Life Long, created between 2020 - 2023, presents her first compositions for organ since 2019’s breakthrough album The Sacrificial Code alongside interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone’s compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes. At the same time, the works for organ, performed by Malone with additional accompaniment by Stephen O’Malley on four different organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, underscore the mighty, spectral power that those rigorous operations can achieve. All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across its 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition’s internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony. The titular composition “All Life Long” appears twice on the album, first as an extended canon for organ and again in the final quarter, compactly arranged for voice. In the latter, Malone pairs the music with “The Crying Water” by Arthur Symons, a poem steeped in language of mourning and eternity. For organ, “All Life Long” moves with a patient stateliness, the drama concentrated in moments when shifting tonalities generate and release dissonance and ecstasy. For voice, each word is saturated with feeling, the singers swooping gracefully downward to capture the melancholy of the narrator’s relationship to the timeless tears of the sea. “Passage Through The Spheres,” the album’s opening piece, contains lyrics in Italian pulled from Giorgio Agamben’s essay In Praise of Profanation. In it, Agamben defines profanation as, in part, the act of bringing back to communal, secular use that which has been segregated to the realm of the sacred, a process Malone enacts each time she performs on church organs. This is not music of praise, or of spiritual revelation, but it is an artistic enactment of translating the indescribable. It carries the gravity of liturgical chant, and its fixation on the infinite, but draws its weight from the earthly realm of human experience. A music that draws the listener into the present moment where they can discover themselves within the interwoven musical patterns that can come to resemble the passage of days, weeks, years, a lifetime.