MUSIC

From Daisuke Hinata, Grammy nominated artist/composer/producer and member of Japanese ambient, environmental, synthpop band INTERIOR.

Daisuke Hinata - Tarzanland (1989)

First Vinyl Release Ever.

Comfy Environmental Music for a Cozy Life and the Heartwarming Companionship of Beloved Pets.

Like Steve Winwood on the Synclavier and Steely Dan on the MPC60.
Or Like John Hughes Meets Japanese Ambient.

*Music You've Never Heard Anywhere Else Before*</p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 373px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1275567063/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://wrwtfww.com/album/tarzanland">Tarzanland by Daisuke Hinata</a></iframe>

TRACE is a collection of 11 unreleased tracks produced by Yutaka Hirose during the Sound Process Design sessions, right after the release of his classic Soundscape series album Nova. Sound Process Design was Satoshi Ashikawa's label, home of his Wave Notation trilogy (Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Music For Nine Postcards, Satsuki Shibano's Erik Satie 1866-1925 and Satoshi Ashikawa's Still Way). Following Wave Notation, Sound Process Design worked with museums, cafes and bars to create site-specific soundscapes, starting with the sound design of the Kushiro Museum. Yutaka Hirose was called to work on sound for these spaces.

Rather than simply providing pre-recorded compositions, Hirose sought to create a "sound scenery". To achieve this, he participated in the conception of the space and paid particular attention to the accidental combination of sounds by placing the speakers and using a multi-sound source, and following the concept of "sculpturing time through sound".

The composer explains: "sculpturing time through sound means that the time, the space itself, the sound played in it, and the audience all become one sculpture. It is close to the idea of a Japanese tea ceremony where you use all of your 5 (or 6) senses to taste the tea."

TRACE: Sound Design Works 1986-1989 is divided into two parts. "Reflection" is based on an ambient soundscape. It narrates "a sleep that starts with the sound of water droplets at dawn and slowly disappears into darkness" and feels like a natural and soothing progression of Nova. It was played at entrances of spaces, at events, in cafes and bars. "Voice from Past Technology" expresses the dream world born out of that sleep and is based on what Yukata Hirose calls hardcore ambient, environmental music with a noise approach. It was played in museums and science centers.

All in all, TRACE is a crucial addition to every Japanese environmental music fan’s collection, alongside Midori Takada’s Through The Looking Glass, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Green, Satoshi Ishikawa’s Still Way, Motohiko Hamase’s Notes of Forestry, Inoyamaland’s Danzindan-Pojidon, and Yutaka Hirose’s very own Nova.

Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments are notable: this is O’Malley’s most extensive recording on steel string acoustic guitar (playing an instrument whose previous owners include Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones) and Pateras return to the prepared piano, which he has rarely employed in recent years, after spending much of the first decade of the 21st century exploring its possibilities. Recorded during O’Malley’s residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva in the summer of 2021, from the first moments of the opening ‘déjà revé’ the music immediately establishes the distinctive landscape of chiming tones and hovering clouds of resonance explored throughout its one-hour running time. Pateras’ preparations create tolling bell-like tones alive with complex overtones, alongside which O’Malley’s open strings and natural harmonics add a sparkling clarity. While Pateras’ music often uses a densely chromatic harmonic language, these duos are remarkable for their modal simplicity. However, the interaction between the pure intervals of O’Malley’s just-intoned strings and the unstable harmonies created by the piano preparations suspends the music in an oneiric state of hazy ambiguity. Without obvious reference to tempo or meter, the music floats in what the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler has called a ‘bottomless sound space’, the temporal placement of events determined by bodily rhythms and the performers’ own listening to (and enjoyment of) the sounds being made. Heard one way, this music can seem striking in its consistency, almost environmental. Attending more carefully, the listener hears the pitch sets and tunings changing throughout the album’s length. Each piece has its own character, subtly distinguished from the others through mood, pacing, and timbre. On ‘déjà voulu’, for instance, O’Malley makes prominent use of slide, the woozy, bending pitches weaving through a series of lush arpeggiated chords from the piano. ‘Déjà senti’, on the other hand, is particularly spare, the gestures spaced out to the extent that they often float in isolation against the background of fading resonance. Much of ‘déjà su’ is built around a slowly pulsing single prepared piano tone, creating an almost ominous tension, whereas the sparkling guitar harmonics and arpeggios of the closing ‘déjà raconté’ have a gently triumphal air. While the music’s calm, rippling surface is immediately entrancing, these seven duos – in the tradition of the best improvised music – also reward close listening, which reveals sonic details and focuses the listener’s attention on how the music unfolds spontaneously from decision to decision, from gesture to gesture. Recorded during a period when O’Malley and Pateras were grieving the loss of recently departed friends and collaborators, these seven duos possess a reflective, at times almost mournful quality. More importantly, though, they are imbued with other qualities that can arise from personal loss: a clarity that allows one to clear away the inessential, to begin again, to renew one’s faith in friendship and music. — Out now on a limited 2xLPs with an etching on fourth side housed in printed heavyweight inner and outer sleeves. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Artwork by María Jesús Valenzuela Vittini, Design by Bartolomé Sanson.

Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast. Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Langage is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Langage is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments. Image Langage is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity. — Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Living Torch, through its unique structural form and harmonic material, is a bold continuation of Kali Malone’s demanding and exciting body of work, while opening new perspectives and increasing the emotional potential of the music tenfold. As such, Living Torch is a major new piece by the composer and adds a significant milestone to an already fascinating repertoire. Departing from the pipe organ that Malone’s music is most notable for, Living Torch features a complex electroacoustic ensemble. Leafing through recordings from conventional instruments like the trombone and bass clarinet to more experimental machines like the boîte à bourdon, passing through sinewave generators and Éliane Radigue’s ARP 2500 synthesizer. Living Torch weaves its own history, its own genealogy, and that of its author. It extends her robust structural approach to a liberated palette of timbre. Living Torch was initially commissioned by GRM for its legendary loudspeaker orchestra, the Acousmonium, and premiered in its complete multichannel form at the Grand Auditorium of Radio France in a concert entirely dedicated to the artist. Composed at GRM studios in Paris between 2020-2021, Living Torch is a work of great intensity, an oeuvre-monde that is singularly placed at the crossroads of instrumental writing and electroacoustic composition. Living Torch proceeds from multiple lineages, including early modern music, American minimalism, and musique concrète. It’s a work as much turned towards exploring justly tuned harmony and canonic structures as towards the polyphony of unique timbres, the scaling of dynamic range, and the revelation of sound qualities. GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), the pioneering institution of electroacoustic, acousmatic, and musique concrète, has been a unique laboratory for sonorous research since 1958. Witnessing the extreme vitality of the music championed by GRM, the Portraits GRM record series extends and expands this momentum with Kali Malone’s Living Torch. The French label-partner Shelter Press is proud to continue the collaboration with GRM, which Peter Rehberg of Editions MEGO set the foundation for in 2012.

In the fall of 2022, celebrated UK chill-out institution Seahawks landed in Los Angeles for the first time in their 15-year history, with plans to record a sweeping new age downtempo “exploration of visionary California.” Instead, they immediately fell ill with flu (Fowler collapsed next to a taco truck; 911 was called), and were bedridden for the better part of a week. Upon recovering, they resituated at the synthesizer sanctuary of Brian Foote (Peak Oil, Kranky, Leech), channeling their post-sickness psychedelia into one of the band’s lushest and most elevated creations to date: Time Enough For Love. Inspired by the “groove and mood” of Harry Nilsson demos, as well as its wider 70’s wavelength – Rhodes, Wurlitzer, wood paneling – Seahawks transposed their classic post-rave ambient exotica onto a warm and woozy Golden State palette. Buoyed by the liquid touch of English maestro Kenny Dickenson on keys, the results rank high among the duo’s smoothest and most multi-sensory voyages. “Sail Across The Moon” delivers on its title, a simmering, phaser-smeared cruise through the beauty of the night. “Messengers” echoes the cosmic lounge of Air’s Moon Safari, shuffling, weightless, and ethereal, while “Falling Deep” reaches for the stars, pure cascading bliss, the ecstatic moment writ large. The album skews steadily more astral as it progresses, drifting towards jazzy, galactic outer reaches. “Like A Grain Of Sand” opens with a spoken sample by the celebrated late American poet Rachel Sherwood (“The children watch, breathless / with the birds / They feel an emanation / from this shuddering place”), before taking flight on a Balearic trip through island house, PM Dawn gold dust, upright bass meditation, and kaleidoscopic light. A remix of the title track by Chicago trio Purelink closes the record in a suitably subdued and skittery state of mind. Time Enough For Love radiates color, complexity, and positivity, infused by the “life enhancing” nature of the band's time in Los Angeles – sunsets, sound systems, and sativa, framed by coastlines and cloudbanks, the city’s mystic sprawl glittering beneath purple dusk.

Ryuichi Sakamoto held a no-attendance online solo piano concert "Ryuichi Sakamoto: Playing the Piano 12122020" on December 12, 2020. The live performance was directed by Rhizomatiks and filmed by Zakkubalan, and was simultaneously broadcast worldwide from a studio in Tokyo. The live performance was a one-night-only event with no archive, making it a rare and precious event that will never be seen again.

The long-awaited DJ Sprinkles reworkings of Will Long’s Acid Trax finally arrive on vinyl, beginning with this first instalment in a three-part EP series via Comatonse. Mastered by Terre Thaemlitz and cut by Rashad Becker, EP 1 features DJ Sprinkles’ ‘Acid Dog’ remix – a resoundingly trippy, sensual 11-minute journey of padded subs, shimmering percussion and richly layered 303 tones. One of the most immersive entries in the Sprinkles catalogue, it’s club music with both emotional depth and hypnotic power.

On the flip, Long’s original takes a more minimal approach, delivering a meditative groove that floats raw drum machine rhythms and restrained 303 sequences in wide-open space. Both tracks embrace the ascetic, introspective aesthetics that define this project.

Note: The correct tracks on this 12” are ‘Acid Trax N’ and ‘Acid Dog (DJ Sprinkles Remix)’ – centre labels are incorrect.

Artwork by Terre Thaemlitz.

"A growing, single-minded confidence in his thing practically makes time stand still and places us right in the moment and momentum of the music. Crucially, whilst clearly referencing foundational styles, it’s a masterclass in innovation not imitation" - boomkat

Carrier presents Tender Spirits, the third turn on his eponymous series that explores his abstractions at its most sparse and cerebral.

Space maintains great purpose for Guy Brewer, having experimented with this previously for multiple drum-focused missives as Carrier. On his latest release, he treads deeper into the furthest regions of dub deconstruction, with Tender Spirits offering a serene path to the inbetween.

Across 8+ minutes, Light Candles, To Mark The Way moves towards the muted sublime; a gentle half time’d bliss that ebbs and floats across the enveloping mist. Slow Punctures gradually returns to dusk, eerily surveying the hollowed-out remains of its dub architecture with an off-kilter lurch. Carpathian echoes further in stark reduction, a weightless atonal zone anchored by the abstracted pressure suspended within.

Tender Spirits tracks Carrier at exciting new parallels, unfurling his most ascendant and capacious music to date.

Growing up in Uganda, multi-disciplinary artist Ian Nnyanzi (aka Masaka Masaka) always knew he wanted to make music, he just needed enough time and breathing room to figure out what exactly his contribution had to be. He cut his teeth fashioning rudimentary hip-hop beats at a friend's studio on Makindye, a hill that overlooks Kampala's balmy Murchison Bay, and quickly realized that he wanted more. "Out here, everyone seems okay to listen to the same thing," he explains, and Nnyanzi wasn't interested in following the crowd. During regular commutes across the city, his mind was being cracked open by sounds from Dean Blunt, Slauson Malone, Arca, Jpegmafia and Vegyn; he knew he needed to show Kampala something similarly distinct.

'Barely Making Much' is a sprawling, ambitious album that's as sculptural as it is explorative, reaching through genre membranes and refusing to stay still for a second. Masaka Masaka wrote it over a fragmented two year period at Nyege Nyege's Kampala studio, and tapped into a jumble of interconnected sounds, from jungle and experimental hip-hop to techno and smoked-out, dubwise ambient music. He was particularly absorbed by the loose, open-minded production style he heard from Manchester's Sockethead, who makes an appearance on 'Before I go', a frayed tapestry of stuttering snares and floury breaks that billows into jazzy euphoria.

On 'cut right through', Masaka Masaka bends fictile piano hits through a lattice of Afro-Brazilian-style vocal chops, trap hi-hat rolls and serrated, synthesized bass thumps. Airy and energetic, the track makes an unexpected left turn when the hats transform into insectoid rasps that cushion a woody hand drum patter. Elsewhere, Nnyanzi isn't afraid to go straight for the jugular: on 'elv9t' he sets atmospheric, back room pads against booming, soundsystem-ready Southern rap subs, and on the kinetic 'let me out', he remolds hard techno in his image, knocking the 4/4 kick off grid to perplex seasoned dancers, and hammering the nail in further with swirling, psychedelic synth fuzz.

Even when Masaka Masaka's working in a more contemplative mode - like on the hypnotic title track and the fragile cinematic finale 'it's okay to dance alone' - he maintains the momentum, swirling otherworldly vocal loops and erratic percussion into pools of melted ambience. 'Barely Making Much' is a charming, hyperactive debut that wears its influences on its sleeve, playing like a lysergic, literate mixtape packed with layers and subtle gestures. Cool-headed and mysterious, it exposes the twilit side of the Kampala underground.

Six shimmering new tracks on the downtempo spectrum from the Khotin Industries Northern HQ. Peace to all listeners.

Paris-born electronic music pioneer and 1970s GRM alumni Ariel Kalma joins with multinational New York trio Asa Tone (Kaazi, Melati ESP, Tristan Arp) for a series of intergenerational, electro-acoustic studio conversations, exploring elasticity within rhythm and winds… or as one early listener observed “space and time.”

Following a chance encounter at Ariel’s studio in the Australian rainforest during the pandemic, Melati & Kaazi began recording long live takes with Kalma, weaving in bioluminescent synth improvisations from Tristan Arp remotely. Revisited a few years later between the members of Asa Tone’s respective homes in New York & Indonesia, “○” is the document of a significant moment in the lives of all the album’s players; an ode to memory and connection in an era of crisis, illuminated via flickering fragments of steel flute, kantilan, modular synthesizer, xaphoon, tenor sax, EWI, field recordings of the surrounding rainforest, and the human voice.

Recorded, written and produced by Asa Tone & Ariel Kalma.
Ariel Kalma: Western Concert Flute, Xaphoon, Tenor Saxophone, Voice
Melati ESP: EWI, Kantilan, Voice
Kaazi: Hydrasynth, Opsix, Percussion
Tristan Arp: Modular Synthesizer, Moog Sub37, Percussion
Additional percussion on *3 by Miles Myjavec

Mixed by Tristan Arp, Kaazi and Ariel Kalma.
Mastered by Jose Arentes at GRAMA, Porto.
Art Direction & Layout : Melati ESP, Kaazi, Biscuit.
 

Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet & electronics) and Lester St. Louis (cello & electronics) work together as HxH (H by H). Their skills have seen them move smoothly across various situations, constantly carving out new terrain and working in new configurations of musicians at a rapid pace. While worth reading, their biographies capture only a part of their complex rhizome.

HxH started about three years ago. The project is a direct response to all their activity with others and more importantly all their future leaning sonic desires. Their debut album STARK PHENOMENA is both their first studio recording and their first physical release. The album is appropriately set to be released by KMRU on his growing label OFNOT. It’s an ideal introduction to their sound world and their approach.

HxH describe their music as “electroacoustic,” but until recently the presence of Black musicians in this field has been greatly overlooked and largely ignored, making this phrase only partially appropriate. What HxH do really is to always be unpredictable. Every gig is a new soundscape. Sometimes you might hear echoes of Autechre or Robert Hood but then the sound-field will open up into a new terrain all their own. Chris and Lester bring together techniques from across the sound spectrum of electronic music and also draw on their deep backgrounds in Jazz, Improvisation, Classical and Noise scenes to create a sound that is true to them. After all, these two have worked with the likes of Bennie Maupin and the music of Black Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. Their rhizome is deep.

One of the ways that their unique approach manifests is in their merging of both acoustic instruments and electronic instruments in real time. This is something few have managed to do – but their spontaneous leanings work in both complex and accessible ways because of their deep understanding of landscape crafting. You can hear this clearly on the track “Pyrex Vision.” Their approach makes it tempting to compare their music to Sun Ra jamming with Laurel Halo – a comparison that would be only partly accurate.

Chris and Lester note that the sounds on STARK PHENOMENA are “imbued with such hopeful, gracious care; one that is far flung from obsessive carefulness or fuck the world carelessness, but more a caring embrace without the fuzziness of nostalgia.”

They note that when they began working together, they would “always come back to speaking on our concepts of an architecture of the expanse,” noting that their live sets often take on the joyfully noisy task of “dreaming big.” For HxH it was essential that STARK PHENOMENA have a quality that is “almost sculptural.” They consider the album “an object to be viewed from all sides.” This kind of thinking has resulted in them directly engaging with numerous sculptors and artists including Torkwase Dyson. Shape wise HxH’s sound fields work in a parallel to Dyson’s black architectural works.

They also note that the opening cut “BEACH” (the opening and longest track from the album) was “written weeks after our first gig in a studio session donated to us by our dear friend jaimie branch.” And that Pyrex Vision “was continually being edited months after sending our ‘final mixes’ to KMRU.” Their sound sources and samples come from studio sessions, live gigs, durational installations, 3am improvised downloads and more.

KMRU notes: "I think there is an in-between layer on this record. I was first caught by the Pyrex Vision track which organically flows between monologue, subtle field recording, and instrumentation. It's such a beautiful track, evoking deep emotion through simplicity. STARK PHENOMENA effortlessly glides in between imaginative mosaics of sounds—free yet complex— unlocking memories within its layers "

Another foggy day in Yorkshire. A steel grey sky. Raindrops tracing one another down the windowpane. Kirk Barley sits in his studio and assembles compositions from scraps of found sound and live instrumentation. Melodies swell, withdraw and repeat like waves. Time slows. Accelerates. Slows again. The light bends, tweaked at the edges. Twisted by rhythms that never quite resolve.

Written, recorded and produced by Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes.

And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognisable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley’s skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilising a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks ‘Vita’, ‘Sprite’ and ‘Descendent’, these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe.

Rivet’s new album for Editions Mego is an uplifting and joyous affair coming in the wake of tragedy and disenchantment. It is yet another rebirth from an artist willing to take a step back and reprise the current situation he is in. Mika Hallbäck has a long credible history in the Swedish underground. First recognised for his industrial techno works under the Grovskopa moniker he worked privately on more experimental works that eventually came out as On Feather and Wire, an album released on Editions Mego in 2020. After much acclaim for this bold new direction that blended electronic abstraction, pop and industrial forms into a heavy synthetic trip two tragedies struck. One was the passing of label boss Peter Rehberg and then the passing of his dog Lilo, who was as close as a companion one could have. These events led to the release of the more unsettling follow up L+P-2 (Lilo and Pita minus two) on Midnight Shift Records in 2023. Peck Glamour sees Rivet return to the reawakened Editions Mego with an album of optimism inspired by reconciliation with loss and further explorations of new mental/sonic realms.

Hallbäck defines his approach as not being married to any particular machine, instrument, process or genre. However he holds a particular affinity to sampling, of which, he says, provides the dirt and grit amongst what would otherwise be pristine, generic machine music. The contemporary crate digging method of scouring obscure download music bogs for unique sounds was his preferred research practice.

Peck Glamour is an album full of tracks brimming with the excitement of exploration. It's the results of a mind informed by punk, industrial, techno, dancefloor, disappointment, trauma and rebirth. Here the synthetic and authentic is viewed simply as the same means of human rationale and expression.

The opening, ‘Catch Up to Light’, sets the scene with ecstatic and odd fluorescent vocals sliding amongst crystalline likembe whilst synths swirl amongst the external festivities. ‘Orbiting Empty Cocoon’ is somewhat a homage to the alien sound worlds of The Orb, one which takes the listener deeper into a mind melting array of teased potential as visual elements are executed in a mask of audio wizardry and euphoric staccato rhythms, the later being a nod to Singeli music. ‘Patitur Butcher’ is more dance frontal utilising the Ghatam drum and a YouTube rip of a Chinese language lesson. ‘Plastic Bag Putain’ was made during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and should be clear of its intent. ‘All that Heaven Allows’ is a marimba cover of an imaginary Love Parade anthem. 'Kyrie Geire’ potentially briefly fills the void left by the demise of Coil. The entire trip of Peck Glamour is sewn up with ‘We left before we came’ whereby extraneous recordings of double bass player Gregory Vartian-Foss (tuning/strumming/moving the bass) are superimposed with local field recordings to create a gorgeous bed of sounds acting as an exciting exit music to this sharp collection of cinematic ear excursions.

Twenty-four years on from its original release, Monolake's seminal Gravity receives its first vinyl pressing courtesy of Field Records. Occupying its own space at the intersection of dub techno, minimal and electronica, it's an ageless album of staggering vision and technological prowess which has matured into an all-time pillar of electronic music. This edition, remastered by the album's key architect Robert Henke, follows on from the recent reissue of Monolake's first album, Hongkong.

Arriving just after the turn of the millennium, Gravity marked a turning point for Monolake. With co-founder Gerhard Behles moving on to other ventures, Henke produced most of the album solo and journeyed deeper into spatial exploration and the dub-informed principles that underpinned their project from the start. Minimalism and negative space run through the whole record, from the keen slithers of percussion pinging through lattices of delay to the hypnotising pulse of subliminal basslines anchoring the tracks. Gravity is a record which hangs on techno's linearity as a form of meditation, but the crystalline clarity of the mix allows every micro-fluctuation in rhythm and sound to cut through.

Compared to a lot of overly sterile digital music released in the early 2000s, Gravity endures thanks to the warmth and texture Henke elicited from his processes — even when leaning into none-more-digital effects like bit reduction. He described the ninth-floor view over Berlin from his studio at night as a key influence on the sound of the record, but the space Gravity shapes out feels thrillingly implacable. Unbound by the standard conventions of time and space, Gravity stands proud as a true original and finally gets the ceremonious vinyl pressing it so richly deserves.

Highly recommended! For all of ambient, balearic and new age fan. The previous work from <100% Silk>, which was also introduced by , just made a record-breaking hit in Bandcamp. Tokyo's notable DJ / producer, who had released a great cassette work from , has released the beautiful ambient / new age gems from . After the popular title from <100% Silk>, New cassette release from with enhanced new age / Balearic colors is very exquisite. Works recorded at home studio, focusing on hardware synths and samplers from the 80's and 90's. It is a work that pursues "images in photographs and movies of locations that have been lost with the passage of time" and "A nostalgia for a place we can never be" The best hidden work. It is as good as, and sometimes even surpasses, the works of modern revival / new age sanctuaries and reissues such as and . At the bottom is the light and quiet view of dance / deep house that is unique to this person. It's too great, it's incredible, and it's just a sigh of admiration.

“Upopo Sanke“ means “Let's sing a song" in the Ainu language. Umeko Ando (1932-2004) was one of the best-known artists of the Ainu, an indigenous, long-suppressed community in northern Japan. She sings their traditional songs together with Oki Kano on the Tonkori harp, who also recorded the album. The two are supported by members of the female vocal group Marewrew as well as Ainu percussionists, a string player and a male singer who provides rhythmic shouts and also throat singing. The call-and-response structure of many of the songs is performed with a mantric quality in a vocal style that is perhaps best described as elastic and breathing. There seems to be a gentle smile in every note and syllable. This music softly hits the heart. Upopo Sanke was recorded on a farm in Tokachi in the summer of 2003. We hear dogs barking, a distant thunderstorm and voices imitating animals. The liner notes that accompany the 2LP release gather the anecdotal memories of Umeko Ando and Oki Kano about the stories of the 14 songs. Oki Kano is a musical ambassador of the Ainu culture who tours worldwide with his Oki Dub Ainu Band and also gives solo concerts, always playing the Tonkori, the five-stringed Ainu harp. The Ainu have suffered from the oppression of their culture and language by Japan, especially since the 18th and 19th centuries. Only recently, in 2008, were the Ainu officially recognized again as an indigenous people culturally independent of Japan. As a result of the marginalization, there are now only a few hundred native speakers of the Ainu language left, making it a particularly worthy object of preservation. "Upopo Sanke" was mixed again in part by Oki Kano, before being mastered and cut to vinyl by Kassian Troyer. The 2LP plays on 45rpm and it sounds fantastic. This album was the second album by Umeko Ando, the follow-up to „Ihunke" and also re-released in 2018 by Pingipung together with Oki Kano.

Kompakt is proud to announce, finally, a reissue of the first, self-titled GAS album. Originally released on electronica imprint Mille Plateaux back in 1996, it’s been unavailable in its original form ever since – the version of GAS included in 2008’s Nah Und Fern box featured several different tracks. Here, however, GAS is restored in all its glory, the debut full-length from Wolfgang Voigt’s most enigmatic, quixotic project. There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up. But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions. GAS feels, also, like a more pliable hint at what’s to come, as the GAS concept really solidified on its successor, 1997’s Zauberberg, and reach its apotheosis on Königsforst and Pop. Those three albums share a very similar palette – blurred, hazy samples, often of classical music, stacked and cross-thatched across a muted 4/4 thud. GAS, then, is an outlier of sorts: it’s more expansive in its remit, lighter in its mood, perhaps more fleet of foot. This, of course, is part of its charm. In clearing space for Voigt, by preparing the terrain, GAS sits both at the edge of the forest, and at the verge of an expansive, wide-eyed future; one where GAS would become truly eternal.

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.

No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like William Tyler. After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, this adopted son of Nashville emerged at the dawn of the last decade with a string of inquisitive albums that paired the measure of his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for post-modern experimentation, field recordings and static drifts folded beneath exquisite melodies. Tyler dug Chet Atkins and Gavin Bryars, electroacoustic abstraction and endless boogie. His productive little enclave of instrumental music has increasingly followed such catholic tastes, not only ushering new sounds and textures into the form but also critical new voices and perspectives.And on the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear (and, for what it’s worth, all of his records) stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices.Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions (as heard on last year’s staggering “Darkness, Darkness” single, with more to come), Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked longtime friend and producer Jake Davis to help stitch them together and perhaps clean up those imperfections. (Eventually, back in Los Angeles, Alex Somers stepped in to provide the finishing touches.) Davis and Tyler opted to go the other way: embrace the hiss and wobble and, in the end, unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.From the start, Tyler’s music has pulled from the past, drawing old notions and conventions into the revealing light of now. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, Miss., to clean out his late grandfather’s downtown office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, back to Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.Time Indefinite begins with a sampled shard from that antique, as harsh as Merzbow processing the sound of a washing machine. It is a lurid, worrying signal flare: I am here, and things are hard, but I am trying. The piece unfurls like a haunted house still inhabited by real, living people, trying to make do when the world around them seems to be saying don’t. Not 10 minutes later, at the start of “Concern,” Tyler slips into a melody as gorgeous as anything he’s ever found, strings and steel rising like the sun beneath his simple folk waltz. It is a hand on a shoulder, a radiant bit of music that answers: I am here, and things are hard, but we are trying.This seesaw of struggle and survival defines these nine songs and 50 minutes, a map of anguish and belief and the trails that link them. “Electric Lake” is an ecstatic drone that summons La Monte Young to this century, but there is pain beneath its glow. “Howling” is an absolute wonder, its gentle guitar lope and choir of echoing horns and keys recalling the glory days of Windham Hill. But the background actually does howl, latent worry simply waiting to roar back to life. It doesn’t during the supple “Anima Hotel,” but you know it won’t be long now, because it never is—on this album as in real life. “This is a mental illness record,” Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as he is on tape. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” He doesn’t, however, need to tell you that; you can feel it, probably even recognize it from your own experience.Too, Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical references and influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes and legends of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee. In the mid-’80s, he began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. (The record is a nod to this idea, of time’s relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it.) It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler, like McElwee, wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united at least in having them. Time Indefinite is the soundtrack that Tyler’s create.“Held,” the ninth and final track, seems to sigh through a grin as it begins, a welcome reprieve from the plangent drone of its predecessor. It is the benediction at the close of all these goddamned chaotic blues. For what it’s worth, that is Tyler in a nutshell, someone will who smile sheepishly and offer a perfectly silly joke even as he tells you the hardest things about himself. But by the end, that grin blooms into a full smile, Tyler beaming through an acoustic waltz that is a perfect bit of unadulterated beauty. Yes, the machines and strings still whirr in the background, a true-to-life reminder of omnipresent menace. Not right now, Tyler seems to be saying. Instead, the message is clear: I am here, and things are hard and wonderful, and I am still here.

Cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu’s key 1980’s works are collected and reissued for the first time on new career retrospective Fossil Cocoon, binding ambient, abstract punk, music concréte and purist songwriting into a single unified artform. Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums in the span of a few years. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as “the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”. Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. [Tadashi] Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of brazenly, addictively weird Japanese outsider music over a period of five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching astronomic prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery. Conversely, label boss Tadashi Kamada is no longer in the public eye, and not even known to have any personal online presence. He is, writes one observer, “unlikely even aware of his cult following”. Only extensive retroactive cataloguing (ardently fuelled by the cratedigging detective work of German collector Jörg Optiz) can offer any remaining memorial to his extraordinary achievements with DD. Records. Koshiro Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student of Yamaguchi University and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, Yoshimatsu was introduced to the Japanese communications magazine PUMP by his classmate and future bandmate F. [Fumie] Yasumura. In the classified ads he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of the aforementioned Tadashi Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town. From their correspondence bloomed an intensely symbiotic new friendship, initially trading homespun cassettes by mail and eventually co-forming a cassette-sharing postal society named The Recycle Circle. The Recycle Circle also included the idiosyncratic saxophonist T. [Takafumi] Isotani, a member of the university’s Light Music Club, with whom Yoshimatsu (now singing, and playing guitar, bass guitar, and synthesisers, as well as programming drum machines) went on to form the unique experimental band Juma. With fluctuating line-ups, Juma managed to compose, record, and release six albums (all via DD. Records) in a single year - 1981 - before disbanding. Yoshimatsu then graduated from Yamaguchi University and relocated to Hiroshima to pursue his passion for filmmaking, all the while continuing to release his own solo music on Kamada’s now-burgeoning label. Yoshimatsu’s first solo record was the mysteriously titled pʌls, released in 1981 while still a member of Juma, and receiving the distinction of being the third entry to DD. Records’ cassette catalogue numbers. It was not until the seventeenth that we see Yoshimatsu credited again as a solo artist, this time with the strange and delicate collage album Mirror Inside. Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work - solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates - we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records (such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura, represented here in “Violet” and “Escape”) are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar (and its namesake track on this collection), combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming. Deeper still, “Pastel Nostalgia”, from the 1983 album of the same name, marries childlike piano with a wailing siren tone and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials. Elsewhere, Yoshimatsu floats between ambient, rock guitar, new wave, industrial, musique concréte, abstract punk, vocal music, instrumental music and pure songwriting, all bound into a single, unified experience by his distinctive compositional voice. Compiling Fossil Cocoon was a task. Not only to pare down Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue into a neat collection, but also to compress these enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, guiding us through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied album, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy. Koshiro continues to reside in Hiroshima, and continues to work in film. James Vella Phantom Limb February 2024, Brighton, UK

Japan’s cult, half-forgotten goldmine DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time, they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their social and creative circles. Each of their cassette releases came with abstract, xerographic artwork, often created by the musician themselves, while the label’s recorded output encompassed avant-punk, Cubist ambient music, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and anything else their roster cared to throw at them. Housed in sleeves of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more, these records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Two facets of DD. Records shine through even this unique story: firstly, they were friends. Founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada formed the label alone, but it wasn’t long before he was joined by like-minded allies T. [Teruo] Nakamura, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu, K. [Keiichi] Usami, and T. [Takafumi] Isotani, among a few others. All were contributors to Kamada’s tape-trading network The Recycle Circle, formed at the University of Yamanashi, most of its members at the time around 20 years old. Their bond was a love of exploratory sounds and a hunger for deeper excavations into the tunnels and caves of experimental music. “An independent, private circle where members who owned expensive records or rare imported vinyl with limited distribution could send a cassette tape and a return postage stamp to dub the record back to each other for free,” Usami explains, in interview with Jon Dale for Bandcamp Daily. Secondly, the aforementioned cassettes remained almost entirely unavailable to the world outside Japan, with only a single US retailer engaged to carry the releases. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.” A German archivist, Jorg Öpitz, is primarily (and almost exclusively) responsible for the entire English-language directory of the label’s output, cataloguing online surviving and lost cassettes with completist dedication. Largely autodidactic, and almost always hermetic, this company of hobbyist and amateur (and in many cases, totally untrained) musicians rarely performed live. Many of them collaborated remotely, sending home-recorded tapes and collaged artwork in the post. “[We were] isolated from the rest of the [Japanese] indie movement,” Usami remembers. Strangely, and sadly for many, Tadashi Kamada has completely retired from public view. According to one-time collaborators, it is likely he is unaware of the cult following his label has garnered over the decades. Some sources point to a successful career in consumer electronics, a family, and a contented indifference to his early experiments in record label curation. But no-one seems certain about these details, none of which has harmed the image of a label that revels in mythmaking. An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl was rare. Only a handful of Kamada titles - presumably self-funded - were released on vinyl, right at the start of the label’s life, and it is not until 1985 and Disk Musik that the format reemerges. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices. There are endless and curious gems within. Opening with the fried psych-folk, dreamy vocals, and toybox percussion of trio サーカディアンリズム [Circadian Rhythm], Disk Musik’s stall is set out as much to bewilder as it is to beguile. Following, comes musician and painter Kumio Kurachi’s project Kum, with its homespun, acoustic glam-stomp always on the verge of falling to pieces, but revealing genuine songwriting chops and earworming melodic detail beneath the knowingly applied layers of hauntology, noise, and humour. Later, Tomomichi Nishiyama sends intergalactic plates spinning into black holes of solarstorm feedback with 10T track “Israel”, while T. Isotani’s “½ Orange” provides a welcome return to earth, an edenic utopia of plantasic blossoms and blooms. Across an extended duration (over fifty minutes on a single disc!), Disk Musik is relentless in its invention, wildly varied in its expression, and entrancing in its telling of a story truly unique in the world of independent and alternative music. Where else could Tadashi Tsukimoto’s rambling outsider folksong marry Yip/Jump primitivism to the scorched Casiotone ambience of “In and Out” by Takahiro Kuramoto’s Mask? While extensive efforts were made to contact every musician featured on Disk Musik, some are no longer within reach of known DD. Records associates. Keiichi Usami, Kumio Kurachi, and Teruo Nakamura all gladly approved the reissue of this compilation in the absence of their peers, and were vitally helpful throughout the curation process, offering insights into the history and significance of each artist and track featured here. We could not have done it without them. Usami-san, Kumio-san, Teruo-san: thank you. “Everyone has the right to make and enjoy music,” Tadashi Kamada once wrote. This spirit of inclusivity and equality underpins DD. Records and its gleefully weird catalogue, and we are grateful for it.

Respekt! Sex Tags Mania, Karolin, Laton, Tage Tombola, Don Papa - The Genuin Of Moss Hip-Hop, Engvaal & The Rygge Family, Lene B., Kambo Super Sound & Family, The Endless Dynamic of Dynamo Dreesen, Brian Not Brian - Going Good And Axin' It Fo' Real - Salik Zia, SVN, Nupi & General Elektro, Bjørn Torske, L.A. Morillo, Fit Detroid, Skatebård, A-Bucci, Camila 575, Dåple-Pera, Benji, Atle, Vilunki 666, Queens Only - Madteo - Keeping It A Level Higher Than The Rest, Geir & Søssa, Rat Salad, Mor & Jerry, Eupraxia, Ringvold Gasta, Unit 6Q, DJ Gilb'R & Versatile Crew With I:Cube, Sähkö & The Keys Of House Life, Winklez, Peng! Ossia, Nell & The Dennis Bros., Roland Lifjell, Paleo & The Bhakti Crew, "70 CPS" Bailey, Bodhi Beats, Pyramide Phillips, Samir M'Kadmi, Thug Records, Audio-In Crew, King 909, Graff Et Grill, Paint House, 411, Nbm, Done, Pol, Sol, Yre, Culos, Kvam, Sau 2, Coats, Buba, 1999, Tmb, Crew - Skredderåsen, Moss! It's Not What You Play - But How You Play. Recorded and digitally edited at the 6th-EonMANIA-fract2 STD between 2012-2014. Original session for Side B recorded at Pyramide Studio, Frankfurt 2010. Vocals on Side C recorded at Inna Di Bu Studio, Moss 2013. Graffiti Can't Be Stopped