MUSIC

RAMZi is returning home with these eight sonic quests, reanimating the dormant FATi Records, Phoebé’s own label. Feu Follets (Fire Sprites) are fireflies, flickering balls of light dancing in the dark shadows, found in fields, forests, chaparral, and scrublands, the many different landscapes of RAMZi’s whimsical adventures.

A refracted audiobook soundtracking the bathing culture of the Ottoman Baths in Budapest, cut-up from Dalia Neis’ metaphysical thriller ‘The Swarm’ ( The Elephants Press, 2023). theelephants.net/ephemera/the-swarm This is the fourth iteration of their Trans-Danubian odyssey, beginning in Dali Muru & The Polyphonic Swarm’s LP, before drifting into book form, radio show, and now audiobook. This audiobook is an updated, revised version of the original NTS show broadcasted in January 2022.

Rod Modell presents "Lanterns" - an epic journey through an evolving sonic landscape propelled by the churning momentum of reverb-soaked percussion. Red Lantern is an ode to the eerie red glow that once beckoned sailors to the port of Amsterdam - on one side, the gentle thud of a bass drum rolls beneath haunting yet uplifting pads whilst on the reverse, bubbling bass underpins echoes of a shoreline that shifts in and out of focus. Blue Lantern merges dub techno and ambient experimentation, showcasing Modell's impressive talents in sound design and the diverse influences that span his 25-year career as a musician. Warm, thunderous kicks rumble beneath restrained hints of percussion, creating an immersive soundscape allowing for music and space to envelop the listener, with the result both enticing and unsettling in equal measures. Words by Martin Gould.

2021年に〈Companion〉より登場したオーストラリア・メルボルン出身のインディ・ポップ/エクスペリメンタル・アーティスト、Kae Tama KitzlerによるプロジェクトKiTAがオランダ・アムステルダムの先鋭的レーベルであり、Maoupa MazzocchettiやSmersh、Zaliva-Dといった面々をそのカタログに擁する〈Knekelhuis〉からデビュー・アルバム『Ceramic』を発表。夢見心地で瑞々しい空気と温かくも儚げな幻想に揺れ、遠く未来へと眼差すチルアウト・アンビエント/エレクトロニクスを全3曲収録。気持ちいいいです。Wouter Brandenburgによるマスタリング仕様と盤質も万全となっています。

Out of time, alone sometimes, wide awake, thinking, I must have been here before? In a dream, or vision of a memory, and it’s hard sometimes, but I wrote this for you to ease. Something to carry with you on and on, seasons change, but the bite of Scorpio remains…. ‘So let it go, don’t be a cell to yourself.’ ‘Scorpio’ and its dubby anagram, ‘Ether,’ are brought to you by hoodie x james K. Made together, from across the ocean, this 10″ comes in the balm of heat, just before the fall. _____________________________________________ hoodie is Naemi and Shy: Naemi is a Berlin-based artist whose work encompasses a broad range of sonic aesthetics and philosophies of musical composition by way of a handful of aliases. They are most known for their work as exael, which seeks to examine the digital fragmentation of identity of contemporary life by way of alchemical reconfigurations of genre and composition. Their focus in the past few years has slowly shifted more into the vein of classic songwriting, implementing more organic instrumentation and vocals, via collaborations such as Hoodie and Baby Bong, as well as material released under their own name. Special Guest DJ/Shy "if you know, you know” 3XL cowboy, party rockin' head knockin', cyberdub hi-fi, bass n sci-fi, fast/slow, outer rim/inner edge. Michigan born, Berlin based. Resident DJ at kwia. Parties Past Present and Future: Headbangers Ball, luckY lottO, spin cycle, Dance Tutorial and Vague Music. aka Caveman LSD, fka uon, aka DJ paradise, as xphresh w/ Ben Bondy, hoodie w/ Naemi, sofa w/ Ulla. Part of cypher & thru on Appendix.Files, Critical Amnesia & Ghostride The Drift on xpq? A version of James K was born. Comprised of bones, reactive metals and a larynx with freckled eyes that catalyzes that mix, she can now see through all the schemes. This is the truth. When she chews gum, it's not clear which one of her personas does it. Since their first release in 2013, describing them separately is grunt work as they switch places, cosplay each other and would most likely lull you into a lonesome dream. Together, they know how to produce, sound, film and edit. Thus, they are brought to the table, performing and DJing in clubs and theaters, along composers and children alike. They release on Incienso, AD 93, PAN, among others, and continue to operate her label She Rocks! K provides shows for NTS, has collaborated with artists such as Yves Tumor, Beta Librae, Drew McDowall, crimeboys, and slayed her band SETH twice. She produces music that makes temporary haven for indomitable lyrics – and these are in constant flux. You can check what they are here: [917 908-1173]. It's only a part of her fairly detailed world. A world that she abandons and then builds upon.

Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism.

Following 2017’s acclaimed 2LP “Patterns of Consciousness”, “Ecstatic Computation” is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.

Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.

NOTON is pleased to announce the release of Subterraneans, a collaborative EP featuring Alva Noto, Depeche Mode’s Martin L. Gore and William Basinski’s cover of David Bowie’s homonymous song. Recorded in 1975, Subterraneans is the closing song of David Bowie’s 1977 album Low. The composition was initially intended for the soundtrack to the 1976 science fiction drama film The Man Who Fell to Earth. This song has a personal meaning to me. It was partly recorded in West Berlin at the Hansa Studio. According to Bowie, “Subterraneans” refers to the people who remained in East Berlin and lived in East Germany after the wall was built. In 1977 I was twelve years old and among the “Subterraneans” the song evoked. It still resonates within me, forty-five years after its original release.” – Carsten Nicolai A tribute of the three artists to Bowie’s work, the EP features an instrumental version and an edit by Alva Noto on electronics with Depeche Mode’s Martin L. Gore on the vocal and William Basinski on the saxophone.
 Composed by David Bowie Cover art designed by Carsten Nicolai Mastering by Bo @ Calyx

Celebrating 25 years since its release, ‘Time Was GIGANTIC… When we were kids’, the seminal 1998 album by The Durutti Column is released on vinyl for the first time, and reissued on CD. The band and lead member Vini Reilly were one of the first signings to Antony Wilson’s Factory Records, and ‘Time Was GIGANTIC…’ was the final Factory Records release for The Durutti Column and the last release for the label before it closed. Formats are double heavyweight vinyl and digipak CD. Both formats are re-mastered and feature 5 bonus tracks: It’s Your Life, Babe - Kiss of Def - In the City - New Order Tribute - Drinking Song (version) . The new edition features extensive liner notes by Factory Records and band expert James Nice, and the original artwork has been revisited by the original designers 8VO (Mark Holt and Hamish Muir).The band (and in particular the guitar playing of Vini) has developed a cult following over the past 40 years with fans of the band including Brian Eno, John Frusciante (who called Vini “the best guitarist in the world”, The Avalanches, The Chromatics, Jonny Marr and John Cooper Clarke to name a few.

Artwork by Eyrie Alzate Additional Artwork by Alexandra Ragg Mastered by Joseph Buchan

Alum of Belgium’s legendary Insane Music series and Hawai’s ’SNX’ boxset, Patrick Stas takes his Stroom bow with a posthumous archival survey of melancholic delicacies made under multiple pseudonyms. The haunting work of Patrick Stas (1995-2020) is emblematic of the early ‘80s Belgian tape scene’s creative fecundity and dare-to-differ DIY discipline. As a musician and co-founder of tape label Home Produkt, he was a key part of a home-brewed movement whose rhizomic organisation forged links between outlier artists across the region and would naturally lay the roots for independent, experimental musicks to follow. Although originally intended for release in 2018, ‘If Paul K .'s Life Was a Movie, This Would Be the Soundtrack of His Death’ sadly sees the light of day as a posthumous dedication to his personalised oeuvre as Stas passed away in late 2020, leaving these 10 songs as spellbinding testament to a creative life well lived. Pulled from exceedingly rare cassettes and unreleased demos, the cherry-picked goods spell out Stas’ web of styles spanning gloaming post-punk goth with early band General Thî et les fourmis to his wavey organ dub as Albert Et Guido and solo kinks under the Paul K alias. Each imparts a fine flavour of various aspects to Stas’ musical personalities, but linked by a puckered taste for neo-gothic lowlands vibes that resonate his peers such as Bene Gesserit, Tara Cross or Enno Velthuys and share a certain twist of foggy nostalgia for Belgian ballrooms that dials up comparison to noted mayo admirer Leyland Kirby in his Intrigue & Stuff phase, even with protoplasmic traces of new beat in its slow pacing typical of Belgian dance music.

Music From Memory are excited to present 'hyphea', a new album by Montreal based artist Phoebé Guillemot aka RAMZi. Featuring ten mind-melting tracks ‘hyphae’ is RAMZi’s latest sonic quest and is based around sketches she originally made as a score for a documentary about mushrooms called 'Fun Fungi' (directed by Frederic Lavoie). Recorded between November 2021 and May 2022, writing 'hyphea' began as an attempt to transcend boredom and frustrations imposed by severe restrictions during the pandemic. For Phoebé the album was a way to reconnect with her alter ego RAMZi; who's energy brought her back to uniquely mystical feelings and hope for future magical adventures. RAMZi is a wild spirit from the forest and refers to a parallel autonomous world that keeps evolving. In Phoebé’s own words: “The music remains as a doorway to that world. It has never been about me, I always see that entity bigger than myself. The process of writing 'hyphea' was rather intuitive. I don’t think about styles of music before producing tracks. Those are more like an adventure in itself, each one set in a different ecosystem.”

Demdike Stare reunite with guitarist Jon Collin for a new album of concréte dreamweaving performed on tape, pedals and a homemade Swedish nyckelharpa - a type of keyed fiddle. More psychedelic than either of the trio's previous records, 'Minerals' drops the blues to dive headfirst into the smudged folk wellspring, touching on the pastoral ambience of Andrew Chalk via Loren Connors’ immersive drift and Tongue Depressor's subterranean drone expeditions. With the trio all hailing from the Pennine moorlands just above the manc sprawl, Jon Collin & Demdike Stare’s shared musical expression understandably reflects a parallax purview that follows leylines between lusher nooks of the inner city and windswept, barren landscapes. Never ones to play it straight, the Swedish Nyckelharpa - a sort of hybrid viola/hurdy gurdy - is deployed deep into a mix of oblique soundscaping, seeping into a swirl of field recordings, screwed spoken word and phosphorescent drones pinging with tape delay. Split into two distinct sides, the album opens with a scrape of wood and metal that introduces us to the nyckelharpa. Scratching its surface and strings, Collin reveals its peculiar tonality, while Demdike cut through its dissonant textures. Like ancient campfire rituals recorded to decaying 1/4" tape, the music on ‘Minerals’ feels as if it's in dialog with the past, shuttled into the present by abstract processes. By the side’s third act, resonant gongs billow around pitched wails that eventually collapse into silence. The second side is more spirited, opening with a thumbed kalimba cut through reverberant strings that recall Arthur Russell's iconic echo-drenched recordings. Through elaborate concréte techniques, Collin's ancient fiddle dissolves into a ferric gloop that’s slowly pulled apart like toffee, taking it to a place where you can no longer really tell what you’re listening to or how it was made. In fact, unlike pretty much everything we’ve heard from Demdike before, the material here feels mechanical rather than electronic, making for one of the most impactful, unusual releases in the vast sprawl of their catalogue thus far.

The Caretaker returns with a long-in-the-making soundtrack to acclaimed filmmaker Grant Gee's documentary about German writer WG Sebald. 'Patience (After Sebald)' is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss - an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book 'The Rings Of Saturn'. The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear.

Bastian Epple makes an eagerly anticipated return to marionette under his elusive MinaeMinae guise that imagines rich sonic architectures for the journeying spirit to voyage to. Räumlichkeit is Epple’s debut album and third release to date following Gestrüpp from 2020, venturing further into melodic electronic nostalgia and percussive beat oriented soundscapes. Spanning fifteen vignettes that trapeze through uncharted winding trails and familiar spaces, the album’s recordings evoke a scenic state of mind. The tracks simulate a room or nested rooms where the breathtaking views of nature and contrasting brutalist structures are explored with an equal sense of curiosity and wonder. Taking the listener down unpredictable paths that are rooted within the music itself, Epple is as much present in the creation as the listening experience which gives the recordings an immediacy and a live element of unfolding before your ears, unfamiliar each time. This novel viewpoint is very much at the core of Räumlichkeit, poetically contemplating the concept of spatiality and how that, in turn, influences the receiving of those fleeting moments. Apart from the world building qualities of the recordings, it's the speed of travel that also impacts the perception of the journey, and Epple tends to manipulate time at a fully immersive rate that grips the mind and body.

With ‘Terrain,’ Joachim Spieth presents the fourth long player on his Affin imprint. The follow-up album to ‘Ousia’ (2021), ‘Terrain,’ reflects on the human relationship with nature. The album title is a reference to a musical language that layers Spieth’s music production practices and intimacy with nature. ‘Terrain’ was forged in deep solitude.“ It’s an interplay of euphoric flashes and introspection” – says Spieth. The eight compositions take the listener into a captivating cascade of sonic textures resembling internal states fluctuations and emotional release. The tension between the organic warmth and static curves broads tones into liquified roars and empty spaces. Unlike Spieth’s previous albums, ‘Terrain’ holds more intimate gestures and emotional sensibility. Soothing frequencies here are intended to create a state of awareness in the listener. It is a work of conceptual and emotional beauty, evoking a form of spatial imagery that is as grounding as elevating.

On "Decades On Divided Stars" Brock Van Wey, aka bvdub, presents his first album on Affin, each of its tracks spanning his trademark Odyssean length, with a sonic and emotional density second to none. You are lost... losing your sense of time... of self. Yet finding your inner existence in its inwardly-folding galaxies. Your thoughts and emotions revolve, as planets caught in gravitational pull, before you suddenly awake, as if from a dream, unaware of how much time has passed. Only the stars will tell...

ロンドン拠点のプラットフォーム/レーベルの〈Titrate〉からは、Pagan Redなるミステリアスな同地の作家と思われるアクトによるデビュー・アルバム『Materia』がアナログ・リリース。微かに包み込んでいくようなドローン・サウンドに、無重力的なパーカッション、臨場感あふれる音の共鳴を特徴とする3編の実験的な作品が収められたエレクトロアコースティック作品に仕上がっています。名匠、Noel Summervilleの手によるマスタリング&デラックス180g重量盤仕様。

Max Würden returns with his second album on A Strangely Isolated Place after 2019’s ‘Format’, experimenting with a new style of music creation on ‘Landmark’. Landmark sees Max Würden combine and integrate various external forces into his usual studio production process. Inspired by many paintings of powerful landscapes found in thrift stores throughout his hometown of Cologne, Max set out to bring various elements together as one whole over time - allowing an organic process of experimentation and collage. Short phrases of music and field recordings that weren’t originally meant for each other were realized in isolation, such as sounds from his Klangkiste (sound box) built by Max himself, guitars, an old out-of-tune Schimmel piano, and samples of early jazz and classical music. These separate elements eventually, over time, connected and came together as Landmark - a recognizable moment and formation. The collage of elements found throughout ‘Landmark’, expresses a number of different vantage points from which to gaze and focus your attention. From the more storied and instrumental-based ‘Reprise’ and ‘Range’, to the wide-scape visions of ‘Summiteer’, or the off-world portrayals in ‘Stereo A’ and ‘Stereo B’. Max can be found depicting a montage of intricately detailed moments that invite you to stand and ponder their storied creation, be it emerging from found sound, synthesizers, guitars, samples, or simply his own production sorcery. Landmark is available on gatefold 2LP gold vinyl and digital, mastered by Rafael Anton Iirsarri and featuring original photography by Max Würden, and artwork by Noah M / Keep Adding. There will also be a very special limited framed painting edition (10), created by Max, available to purchase on the ASIP website.

Dennis White, Charlie May, and Dave Gardner return with their second outing as Quiet Places on A Strangely Isolated Place, expanding upon their deep and suitably hypnotic long-form compositions across four continuous sides of wax. Minimal in context and retaining the untitled track approach, the trio of producers, well versed in a variety of music styles between them, leave the music and the subliminal messages contained within as the descriptor. Finding moments of melody amongst the wide landscape of abstract sounds and samples is the only glimpse of reality you’ll find down here. Quiet Places Volume 2 is available on limited edition gatefold 2LP pressed on marbled vinyl, mastered and lacquer cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich and featuring artwork by Noah M / Keep Adding.

Having crested the west coast modular-ambient wave in just a few releases- including 2018's Sharing Waves on the influential LA experimental imprint Leaving Records- Sean Hellfritsch has swapped the mossy analog synth improvisations of his prior output for refined melodic arrangements dressed in sprightly dawn-of-digital textures. Big Earth Energy plumbs the depths of Hellfritsch's multimedia mind and naturalist heart, spinning an impressionistic narrative world off of cultural touchstones like the PC game MYST, and the work of Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi. Inspired by the aforementioned, and guided by Hellfritsch's experience as an animator and filmmaker, Big Earth Energy is the soundtrack to a hypothetical video game with a pointedly ecological premise, and a twist of psychedelic charm. In Hellfritsch's imagined virtual journey, the player assumes the perspective of a treefrog sixty-five-million years ago, hopping epochs with each new level, forming a comprehensive picture of the massive hanges the planet has gone through over the eons. The ultimate goal of the game is not to amass resources, defeat enemies, or gain power, but to fully witness the unfolding of one of the biggest systems of energy imaginable- or as the album's creator puts it- "to explore the incomprehensibly vast energetic expression and mystery that is Earth." Big Earth Energy is steeped in exploratory RPG intrigue, possibility, and contemplation, lovingly overlaid with Miyazaki-an sentiments and aesthetics. The through-composed, organic, meandering synthesis heard on previous Cool Maritime albums has been fully replaced by meticulous polygonal arrangements that recall the computerized sheen of late 80s work by composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa- using true-to-period gear no less. Even given it's referentiality, Big Earth Energy comes off as forward-facing where so much reminiscent music remains fixed to a bygone moment in pop culture. Hellfritsch has created a musical world where the endless verdancy of the biosphere finds it's parallel in the golden age of early 1990s video games, and late 80s Japanese environmental music, all while pointing to a hopeful planetary and artistic future that vindicates the motives of all of these muses.

As one of the very few true 'Godfathers' of Ambient Music, Laraaji has forged a unique path forward (always, always forward) since his groundbreaking 1980 LP for Eno's Ambient label, "DAY OF RADIANCE'. It remains one of the eternal pillars of the genre. His extraordinary contributions to modern music over the course of four decades highlight his lifelong dedication to the belief that Peace can be achieved through audio serenity. Kramer's work in Ambient Music is less universally known, but no less pioneering. His most recent Shimmy-Disc LP, 'Music For Films Edited by Moths', suggests that his immersion in the genre is now complete. Cerebral yet simple, intoxicating yet tranquil, Kramer's newest and more elusive body of work gently heralds what lies ahead. His commitment to quiet music is complete. LARAAJI & KRAMER - "AMBIENT SYMPHONY #1" is the first window into their collective muse - a collaborative LP of shimmering clarity and vision, defying all expectations for the fans of each of these two diversely pioneering artists. Containing three 'Movements' (along with an additional 4th Movement on the digital release), this first Ambient Symphony is a beatific exercise in the sublime, unfolding dreams to waking life. Quiet music has never been so colorfully detailed, or so nakedly honest. Ambient Music has a new beginning.

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.
The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.

Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

-Andy Beta 

XKatedral proudly presents the split full-length album Four Works by Stockholm based composers Linus Hillborg and Theodor Kentros. Four Works consists of two pieces by each composer with music written and recorded during 2019-2021. Two pieces for organ and electronics, a piece for violin and electronics and a piece for bass clarinet and electronics. Since both composers on this release mainly operate within the field of electroacoustic music these four pieces deviate from the composer's ordinary practice to a certain extent. However, they still retain an imprint shared with both composers' larger body of work.

Ex Wiish is a fleeting dream. The new musical project of Ben Shirken, a sound artist and composer based in New York City. Shirken is the founder of record label & performance series 29 Speedway which features improvisational electronic music, 4-point guerrilla sound installations, live multimedia performances and has hosted Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Poncili Creación, Debit, Pent, James K and various other New York-based artists. Shirken also produces for and plays modular synths in acclaimed free jazz group ‘Nu Jazz’ with Dan Orlowski of electronic hardcore staple Deli Girls. Their debut record, “Shards of Axel'', is out on Incienso June 23, 2023. Born from a story-based video game composition; the listener finds themselves as the disoriented main player respawned into a harrowing, metallic landscape, wandering through cable ridden labyrinths, caught in progress traps as digital noises grind past submerged cityscapes.