MUSIC

and the novelty goes on: mule musiq welcomes another fresh producer to its vast catalogue of music from all around. this time andro gogibedashvili aka saphileaum. he is coming from tbilisi, georgia and already released an impressive body of work, considering he just publishes music since 2016. countless eps and albums, digital, on tape, documenting his feverish creative urge on labels like not not fun records, good morning tapes, diffuse reality, or vodkast. they cover a comprehensive stylistic range from ambient and downtempo to tribal, house, and techno nuances. a deeper shade of soul, precisely fashioned, growing from different playgrounds of inspiration. he was born into a musical family. as a kid he studied georgian folk. in his school rock band, he sang, and the guitar was his love. then electronic music called the tune, and techno hit his heart. in the midst of it all the 26-year-old never lost contact with his spiritual home. “i find deep inspiration in georgian myths and legends, occultism and esoteric teachings, lost civilizations, earth, unity, truth, information, and the secrets of the universe. these things, to name a few, inspire me daily and help me create the music I make.” saphileaum reveals. “exploring together”, his debut album for mule, navigates all these elements through a merry-go-round of gentle driven rhythm zones. fourth-world spheres, balearic tropes, field recording zones, tropical downbeat, tribal percussions, trancing sounds, balafon hums, mallet airs, hooky house – it’s all there, circling the eavesdropper into a dreamland of melodic undercurrents. “my loops come from tribal and cosmic inspirations. tribal, as below, and cosmic as above. the combination of these two, is very interesting to me”, he clarifies, while joking “but, to put it super simply, loops are super handy for djing”. which brings us to the final promotion of “exploring together” - it’s playability. its vast. multifunctional. spiritual. made for gatherings, were all dance time away. lost in music actions, only touched by the hand of rhythm and sound. his ten tracks are created for such flashes, wide spreading a musical narration of illuminating durability. “cosmic, relaxing, fun, tribal, and mystic.”, as saphileaum declares.

In the body of work of Cologne artist Wolfgang Voigt – who, like few others, has informed, shaped and influenced the world of electronic music with countless different projects since the early 1990s -, GAS stands out in particular as a saturnine sound cosmos based on heavily condensed classic sequences. Even after nearly 20 years, the sound of GAS doesn’t seem to have lost any of its luster, as shown by the commanding success of Kompakt’s fall 2016 re-release of the essential back catalogue as a 10xLP/4xCD box set.

The overwhelming feedback from a loyal international fan community and worldwide media outlets attests once again to the sheer timelessness of GAS. Which is why it will feel like hardly a day has passed since the release of the last official album “Pop” nearly two decades ago, when Wolfgang Voigt resumes this specific creative path with the upcoming new full-length NARKOPOP.

Even in the here and now, the unmistakable vibe of GAS immediately hits home, taking the listener on an otherworldly journey with the very first sounds, drawing him or her into an impervious sonic thicket, down to the depths of rapture and reverie. From wafts of dense symphonic mist emerges a floating and whirling feeling of weightlessness, before the listener steps into an eerily beautiful forest of fantasy, pulled in by the allure of a narcotic bass drum.

While earlier GAS tracks were often based on the hypnotic effects of looping techniques, the 10 new pieces on NARKOPOP unfold their magic in a more entwined manner, sometimes with the sonic might of an entire philharmonic orchestra, sometimes as subtle and fragile as the most delicate branch of a tree with many. A main characteristic of Voigt’s oeuvre, the coalescence of seemingly contradictory stylistic aspects such as harmonious and atonal, concrete and abstract, light and heavy, near and far is also a decisive feature of NARKOPOP.

In accordance with the transgressive spirit of his collective work, Voigt carries the aesthetic conceptions of his music over to the realm of the visual. Based on his abstract forest pictures, the GAS artwork addresses Voigt’s artistic affinity to romanticism and the forest as a place of yearning. For the first time, a closer look at the cover of NARKOPOP reveals signs of architectural fragments which hint at another, maybe parallel world behind Voigt’s forest. Truth is the prettiest illusion. 

Wilurarrakutu is the brilliant debut from Papunya-based artist Keanu Nelson, an intimate exercise in musical storytelling and reflection. The album's eight tracks, sung in both Papunya Luritja and English, are verses of prose and poetry pulled directly from Nelson's notebooks and set to minimalist, DIY electronic arrangements.The evocative musical backdrops—featuring Casio keyboards, drum machines, and subtle synth flourishes—were created in collaborative sessions between Nelson and Sydney producer Yuta Matsumura. The two met by chance on Matsumura's visit to Papunya last year. Their impromptu jam sessions form the foundation for Wilurarrakutu's low-key sonic palette, influenced in parts by Papunya's strong local gospel music scene as well as the reggae beats often passed around the remote community via USB sticks and mobile phone transfers.Over these soundscapes, Nelson sings of family, friends, heritage, and culture, with a tone that balances joy and melancholy. They're themes and emotions that also echo through his work as a painter at the Papunya Tjupi Arts Centre. In this way, Wilurarrakutu becomes an extension of his art practice - a graceful audio portrait of a place that evokes the resonance of home.

the debut release of shanghai based producer “knopha” on mule musiq. we loved his release “nothing nil” on eating music. our friend yusu introduced him to us and he sent us very beautiful musics. it’s an oriental beautiful new age music. kuniyuki made a magical remix. hope you like it

Masahiro Sugaya began his career in the 1980s, working alongside the environmental music scene of that era while also making a significant impact in stage music through his involvement with Pappa TARAHUMARA.

Over the past 20 years, Sugaya has shifted from traditional composition using instrumental music to creating works for 8-channel multi-speaker systems, incorporating environmental sounds and field recordings. His latest album continues this evolution, featuring collages of environmental sounds within individual tracks. The album is structured to balance past and new works, creating a collage-like representation of Sugaya’s diverse creative output.

"しるしまみれ / Overflowing Signs" offers an experience that navigates freely between Sugaya’s environmental music approach and his practices in field recording and musique concrète, presenting a sequence of sounds that defies easy categorization or symbolism. Additionally, this album marks Sugaya’s first stereo full album release in nearly 20 years.

'Shardcore' is the debut full length from Myriad Myriads, aka Bass Clef, a return to the dancefloor refracted into ten thousand kind shards, revolving. "Those waves! Soon I'm going to try once more to draw something wavelike. But how can you simplify something as complicated as a wave in the open sea to something comprehensible?" Escher Recorded in The Hague. Elektron M:C and M:S / FMR audio RNLA and RNC.

Le Jardin des Plantes, in four parts, for cello and electronics. A place in Paris and a novel by Claude Simon. Memory spaces, a source, a scrying of time. – Anton Lukoszevieze

The soundtrack to “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (winner of the 1983 British Academy Award for Best Original Score), one of Ryuichi Sakamoto's first film scores and masterpieces, is finally being reissued on 180-gram vinyl for the first time in 41 years since its initial release in 1983. The new cutting master has been remastered in 2024 by Heba Cardley, an engineer who has worked on reissues of Ryuichi Sakamoto's works as well as Bjork's. The booklet includes liner notes by Peter Barakan and Junichi Onuma.

Japanese ambient woven with organic minimal sounds and field recordings.

This marks the fourth vinyl release from Japanese ambient artist Tomotsugu Nakamura. His previous vinyl releases with prominent French ambient label LAAPS and other international labels have consistently sold out. This bold project delves into the fusion of sound and music, employing acoustic elements and analog synthesis within a spatial framework.
The sleeve, inspired by ink painting, is the second work from the up-and-coming art label "teinei," dedicated to producing records that double as art pieces for display. (It will be released simultaneously with Haruhisa Tanaka's Nayuta, the inaugural release from the same label.)

Music From Memory is delighted to present ‘Elevations’, a new album from Manchester based artist Tom Burford, aka Contours. Drawing heavily on his background as a drummer and percussionist, ‘Elevations’ began as an exploration of the Balafon, a Malian tuned percussion instrument, before organically growing into its final form; a delicate suite of compositions centered around rhythmical interactions of percussion, synthesizer and strings. Recorded during the pandemic and the period following, the album reflects a desire to lose oneself in the expanse of nature - the title ‘Elevations’ being a direct nod to the mountainous area of Cumbria where Tom grew up. The album also represents the joy of creating with friends; it features performances from several of his musical contemporaries, many of which were recorded at his home in Manchester. Slowly taking shape, the final result is a record that seamlessly blends electronic and acoustic, operating at the intersection of Minimalism, Jazz, Fourth World and Contemporary Classical music.

2001’s »Anima« was the third album released by Sasu Ripatti under his Vladislav Delay moniker and marked a turning point in the stylistic development of the prolific producer. Clocking in at roughly 62 minutes, the single piece draws on dub aesthetics while working with Musique concrète-like methods through the liberal use of samples to create a dreamlike logic. Muffled voices, lush chords, subtle rhythms and indefinable sound events are not so much integrated into a composition with a predetermined outcome but rather engage with each other freely in a constant sonic flow, forming constellations in one moment before moving on to connect with other elements in the next one. »Anima« marked the first time Ripatti was using a DAW in his working process, creating a piece constantly in motion that subtly evolves over time. This vinyl reissue on the German Keplar label follows up on the 20th anniversary edition of 2000’s »Multila« and will be complemented by a ten-minute long version of the original piece, previously only available on the CD version released by the artist on his own Huume label in 2008. After the release of his »Ele« and »Entain« albums in 1999 and 2000, respectively, Ripatti took the 1998 independent movie »Hurlyburly« as a conceptual starting point to experiment with different gear and production methods. »Until then I had worked with an old MSQ-700 MIDI sequencer and an Ensonic EPS16 sampler/sequencer that had one or two MB of sampling memory and mixed the music live on a Mackie, which was very limiting arrangement-wise,« says Ripatti. Loading a slightly shortened version of the film into his DAW however allowed him to play along to it with the DrumKAT MIDI controller, triggering and playing all the sounds that can be heard on »Anima« while also contributing synths, bass and other sounds during repeated playthroughs before mixing a total of six stereo tracks together. »This way, after I had edited out most of the few parts that had music in them, I was in the movie; almost like an extra character playing music,« explains Ripatti. »This was certainly the most organic way in which I have ever made music, and I have never again approached another record like this.« While »Anima« sounded like an unusual Vladislav Delay record at the time of its release, it also prefigured many of the developments Ripatti would go through in the course of his long career. Combining visceral immediacy with a sense of abstraction, it is far more than a mere missing link in his discography but rather a conceptually and musically outstanding piece of work that remains as engaging as it was 21 years ago.

Carrying Colour presents 'Sen Am', the third album by Duval Timothy. The album is the product of Duval spending the last two years living between London, UK and Freetown, Sierra Leone. 'Sen Am' is a Krio phrase that means 'send it' or 'send him/her Throughout the record friends and family from Sierra Leone appear through Whatsapp voice notes that speak over solo piano and layered instrumental compositions. Also featuring: 6pac, Aminata, Aruna, Emmerson & Sydney. The LP was recorded in London (UK), Bath (UK), Freetown (SL), Tokyo (JP), Kyoto (JP). Recorded and engineered by Duval Timothy Copyright Duval Timothy

(Limited quantity/Includes Japanese obi/Includes Japanese commentary)Richard D. James, a.k.a. the Aphex Twin, released "Selected Ambient Works Volume II" in 1994 at the age of 22, a major ambient album that has gone down in music history. This monumental work, which was also the first album for the Aphex Twin after they moved to WARP, is now being released in a new expanded edition with additional material to mark the 30th anniversary of its release.

Anne, the second album By Toronto saxophonist and composer Joseph Shabason, is a tonal essay on degenerative illness. Delicately and compassionately woven with interviews of Shabason’s mother from whom the album takes its name, Anne finds its creator navigating a labyrinth of subtle and tragic emotions arising from his mother's struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Across the nine vivid postcards of jazz-laden ambience that comprise the album, Shabason unwraps these difficult themes with great care and focus revealing the unseen aspects of degenerative diseases that force us to re-examine common notions of self, identity, and mortality.

Shabason’s uncanny ability to manoeuvre through such microscopic feelings is mirrored by his capacity to execute a similar tightrope-walk through musical genres. His music occupies a specific space that is as palpable as it is difficult to pin labels to. On Anne’s second track “Deep Dark Divide” rays of effected saxophone shine behind clouds of digital synthesizer that echoes the sound of jazz in the late 80s, but with a Jon Hassell-esque depth of sensibility that consciously subverts the stylistic inoffensiveness of that era. There is detail and idiosyncrasy beneath Shabason’s dawn-of-the-CD-era sheen that elevates the album far beyond a mere aesthetic exercise.

Still, the sounds on Anne are not so experimentally opaque as to stand in the way of the album’s through-line of sincerity and emotionality. When dissonance is employed it is punctual and meaningful, like on album-middler “Fred and Lil” where a six-minute cascade of breathy textures builds suddenly to an agitated growl, only to abruptly give way to Anne Shabason speaking intimately about her relationship to her own parents. Snippets of such conversations see her taking on something like a narrator role across Anne while the sound of her voice itself is sometimes effected to become a musical texture entwined into the fabric of the songs without always being present or audible. The subsequent piece “Toh Koh” then drifts into playful disorientation as a lone female voice echoes the two syllables of the title, recalling the vocal techniques of composer Joan La Barbara, or even the light-hearted mantras of Lucky Dragons. From here the album veers back onto its aesthetic thoroughfare with “November” where Shabason lays muted brass textures atop a wavepool of electric chords provided by none other than the ambient cult-hero Gigi Masin, one of Anne’s many integral collaborators.

The serene tragedy of the album distils itself gracefully into the ironically titled album closer “Treat it Like a Wine Bar” wherein flutters of piano and mournfully whispered woodwinds seem to evaporate particle by delicate particle, leaving the listener with a faint emotional afterglow like a dream upon waking. There is a corollary to be drawn here with what it must be like to feel one’s own mind and body drift away slowly until nothing remains, while the collection of memories and abilities that we use to denote the “self” softens into eternity. On Anne, it is precisely this fragile exchange of tranquillity and anguish that Joseph Shabason has proven his singular ability to articulate. 

Honour’s debut album is a ligament stretching from Lagos to London and to New York, curling across the diaspora and brushing the darker hues of blues, hip-hop, free jazz, ambient, gospel with Christian mythology and Yoruba folklore. As cinematic as it is painterly, Àlàáfíà is a meditation on themes of life, death and love that pulls inspiration from the poetic profundity of God, remembered dreams, unexpected casual conversations, field recordings, literature, ephemera, and personal archives. The result is an impressionistic vision in Black and Blur that both exhausts and implicates language and that sublimates boundaries between everywhere and nowhere; history and the present; the individual and the universal.

Joseph Shabason, Matthew Sage, and Nicholas Krgovich form a pretty perfect triangle, musically and geographically. Based out of Toronto, Colorado, and Vancouver respectively, the three convened at Sage’s converted barn studio at the foot of the Rockies to diagram their kindred ability to extract grandeur from the most passable of life’s daily details. On his own, saxophonist Joseph Shabason warps late 80s adult-contemporary and smooth jazz aesthetics into tidepools of fourth-worldly sound design that are infinitely more self-aware and emotionally honest than any of their distant reference points. M. Sage, in a parallel sense, blends his skills as an instrumentalist with synthesis and field recordings to create auditory reflections of the natural world that are as whimsical as they are profound. Sitting cozily between these two heartfelt experimentalists is singer Nicholas Krgovich, whose observational slice-of-life poetics paint a relatable face onto his collaborators’ calm expressionism, both guiding and highlighting its deep sense of affect. The resulting album, prosaically titled Shabason, Krgovich, Sage warmly invites sound artist Matthew Sage into the world of wry and melancholy micro-miracles that Shabason and Krgovich established on 2020’s Philadelphia, and 2022’s At Scaramouche. Album opener “Gloria” is a perfectly balanced representation of the trio’s individual abilities. Sage’s slowed and watery zither bleeds in from the edges of the canvas, laying ground for breathy woodwinds and harmonica that pantomime a distant locomotive. Speaking directly to the sonics at play, Krgovich melodically narrates, “Penny, did you hear that train whistle? Theo, did you hear that owl hoo?”. Even from this first moment, the intimate dynamic is so palpable that the listener falls unwittingly into the backstory of Shabason, Krgovich, Sage. “After connecting with Nick and Jos through DMs since 2020, it felt like a fun experience awaited us as potential collaborators,” Sage recounts. “I had built my barn studio, and I think it looked appealing to them to make an adventure out of coming to the Wild West to make music with me.” After spending the majority of a decade immersed in Chicago’s legacy of jazz and experimental electronic music, Matthew Sage moved back to his home state of Colorado to raise a child in a more casually agrarian atmosphere, and to work in the kind of setting that led to his 2023 album for RVNG, Paradise Crick. It was here at the cusp of the Rocky Mountains that the initial push of Shabason, Sage, Krgovich began, in person. Making sense of the trek, Shabason adds “I have realized that making music with people who live very far away is a real possibility. As long as we can get into one space together for a short amount of time, the collaborative magic that is needed to make a record is totally possible.” The three artists’ fingerprints are equally visible across the album. There is soft textural detritus floating freely in the air, punctuated by glassy electric keys and rubberized basslines. The sparseness in the placement of all the elements leaves them subject to ghostly visitations from a whispery saxophone, and a gentle guitar that peers around the corners of Krgovich’s free-verse musings. The album’s midpoint “Don” passes overhead like pollen on the breeze, constantly drifting out and back across pockets of completely empty space. “Old Man Song” turns a rare B-side by Low into an even gentler end-of-life reflection that is sweetened by Krgovich’s falsetto during the track’s wordless chorus. As nebulous as that may seem on paper, the hidden songcraft slowly surfaces over the course of each piece, exemplified by the closing track “Bridget”. There are plenty of other moments of the album that bear discernible rhythms below the fogline, but it’s here that they rise up into a full-on groove under Krgovich’s lyrical fourth wall breaks in which he details everything from Joseph’s studio habits to seeing “Cats” at the theater with his sister. Despite the song’s relative density and pop sensibility, a careful use of space still reigns supreme. On the eleven-minute “Raul”, Krgovich comes close to unintentionally codifying this approach as he sings “The container shrinks, and shrinks again, with every day, the relief that comes from not wanting more...” Truly, the most abundant virtue on Shabason, Krgovich, Sage is patience. The trio interacts without interrupting one another, contently waiting their turns, all locked onto the same distant point on the horizon yet unconcerned with when they might actually arrive. The groundwork laid by Shabason & Krgovich on their previous joint offerings is omnipresent, but it’s amplified by the joy Sage must have felt shepherding them to his idyllic and intimate new homebase. Prior to meeting up with Sage, the pair’s music often dealt with the beauty of The Great Indoors, but their new host and collaborator has smartly refocused their lenses on the small wonders of wilder localzes. Like magic, Shabason, Sage, and Krgovich have not just musically photographed their surroundings, they’ve managed to reproduce them exactly. The sharp open air, the quiet thrill of an escaped routine, the self-reflective thought-loops during a twilit moment at the edge of a field, all of it’s here on Shabason, Krgovich, Sage. Through the trio’s skillful ease, the listener is there, too.

Written, produced, recorded between 2018 & 2022 in France and the United Kingdom. Special thanks to the palace builders, the ones who supported me and generously helped crafting this record ; Florian, Oliver, Madelen, Paul, Joshua, Melek, Igor, Jackmichaelking user on freesound . com, Ulysse, Antoine, Derek, Charles, Ailton, Kristina & Josh. And extra thanks to my loved ones, you know who you are ♡

Lucy Duncombe embroiders her signature vocal synthesis on a remarkable cover of Bonnie Beecher’s one-off, cult ballad ‘Come Wander With Me’, a pearlescent gem exemplary of Modern Love’s guess-again, gotta-get-‘em-all 7” shellings - RIYL Maria Chavez, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Laurie Anderson, Nozomu Matsumoto, Niecy Blues. Highly regarded for a pair of innovative releases with 12th Isle, Lucy Duncombe is an experimental singer and artist who uses technology to deftly abstract songcraft in ways that uniquely pique the imagination. With ’Sunset, She Exclaims’ Lucy diversifies Modern Love’s 7” series via a trio of works that embody influences ranging from doo wop to avant garde and pure pop forms, in a style of melismatic sound poetry weft with Jacquardian intricacy. It’s a truly precious, beguiling and evocative record that will reward repeat plays for eons to come, much in the manner of contemporary classics such as Kara-Lis Coverdale’s ‘Grafts’, or Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. The star of this short story is no doubt ‘Sunset, She Exclaims’, where Lucy reframes Jeff Alexander and Anthony Wilson's haunting ballad, ‘Come Wander With Me’, used as a titular device in The Twilight Zone’s swansong episode, 1964, and which has since notably featured on Vincent Gallo’s ‘Brown Bunny’(2003). In Duncombe’s larynx and motherboard, the song is dissected and reworked as a glossolalic froth of hiccuped melody blooming into crepuscular harmony. Its effect is practically hormonal; affective as indole in, as she puts it, "reducing the stench of the real”, whilst distilling the saccharine sadness of the original to a synaesthetic, dream-nudging whiff of nostalgia. Once you prize yourself away from that A-side, Lucy’s B-side only lures deeper into blurred hyper-pop fantasy. The precedents of Maria Chavez’s experimental sound poetry and Niecy Blues’ raw soul hover around ‘Ghosting’ and ‘Ghosted’, teasing the parameters of avant-pop into plasmic refrains, foregrounding the usually unwanted parts of vocal performance - glitching digital artefacts and errant detritus - in a way that makes the mind’s eye saccade, tracing the half-heard glowworms nestled in its bush of ghosts. Fine-tuned ears will surely recognise the sort of brilliance on show here, and will no doubt revel in its gauzy glaze, which prizes oneiric ambiguity, ephemerality, the supernatural, over anything more corporeal.

The entire album is permeated with ethereal, lo-fi sounds, creating a superb ambient/drone masterpiece that is melancholic and introspective, yet filled with sweet, meditative charm!

Kieran Hebden is arguably at the height of his career so far, making Three his most highly anticipated Four Tet album yet. Since the 2020 triple drop of Sixteen Oceans, Parallel, and 871, Hebden has been pretty much ubiquitous in the scene, from all dayers with Skrillex and Fred again.. to revered collaborations with Madvillain, Burial, Thom Yorke, and William Tyler. And as multifaceted as the cover design by Jason Evans and Matthew Cooper would imply, Three capitalises on a busy decade in progress with an amalgamation of all things we love from Four Tet: ambient sonics meeting crisp club beats, glorious MIDI instruments paired with noise and intricate texture, celebrations of his eclectic influences from hip hop, folk, electronic and abstract sound art that coalesce ever so sweetly into a concise tracklist bursting with life. There’s always a sense of brightness and joy to the feasts of electronic articulations that Hebden prepares, where gauzy psychedelic guitars open a hypnagogic portal to boom bap inflected grooves and mosaics of choral synths. The cerebral, enigmatic moments of scribbling glass plucks amplified into distorted ethereal waves are offset by rejuvenating pools of ambience, lax downtempo beats with reverb throws like skipping stones, and rosy hued melodies swaying and slingshotting across the scales. For the ravers, there’s the battery acid soaked electro rhythm of ‘Daydream Repeat’, evidence of the dance muscles Hebden’s been flexing with his KH singles as a roiling throttle is overtaken by idyllic glittering harps, flipping the track from sweat-drenched heater to luscious euphoric aftermath. For the romantics, there’s the frothing drums and subtle snatches of vocals commanding space all over the album, capturing a full, heartfelt sense of depth that hums, buzzes, and vibrates in the awestriking closer ‘Three Drums’. Whether you’ve just become acquainted with Four Tet or you’ve known him for a lifetime, Three is a stunning work from an inimitable talent.

ZULI's widest-reaching and most ambitious album to date, 'Lambda' is a conspicuous left turn for the Berlin-based Egyptian producer. Draped in gauzy, granulated textures and woven with enigmatic vocal flourishes from collaborators MICHAELBRAILEY, Coby Sey and Abdullah Miniawy, it's a vivid, soul-searching set of polychromatic reflections that sets fire to the boundaries between ambient, trip-hop, industrial music, chamber pop and symphonic noise. In some aspects, 'Lambda' reveals ZULI's softer side; gone are the earth-shaking chopped rhythms and stop-start outbursts of corroded static that characterized his last full length, 'Digla Dive - Live'. But peer beneath the brain burrowing vocal melodies, mangled instrumental loops, anxious poems and subtle, harmonic synth washes and a new kind of intensity lurks in the shadows. Since his early releases on Lee Gamble's UIQ label and his 2018 breakout 'Trigger Finger', ZULI has notched up major global acclaim for his futuristic, kinetic musical diversions. He cut his teeth supplying beats to local rappers back home in Cairo, soon shifting his attention to the city's burgeoning dance underground, promoting events, DJing prolifically and tirelessly supporting the scene's most experimental fringe. In 2019, ZULI teamed up with Rama to curate the irsh series of video transmissions, evolving the project into a label shortly afterwards. And now situated in Berlin, the duo have extended the concept to encompass an ongoing sequence of genre-averse club nights. All this experience and constant creative motion is etched into the foundations of 'Lambda'. It's an album that plays liberally with euphoria, but feels constantly precarious, intrepidly peering out from its tense internal world. Lead single '10000 (Papercut pt. 1)' is one of the album's most unexpected cuts, featuring a soaring falsetto vocal from Hamburg-based British composer and performer MICHAELBRAILEY. "What do I have to show for it?" he asks suggestively, while ZULI replies with seismic bass rumbles and celestial, harp-like chimes. Building towards a crippling, dense crescendo, the track is among the weightiest ZULI's ever produced, replacing his signature beats with industrial metal drones and razor-sharp electronics. Brailey also shows up on the symphonic 'Syzygy', singing sweetly until he stretches his voice into mutant echoes, augmenting the chorals with powdery, granulated hisses and surreal piano phrases. On 'Plateau' meanwhile, ZULI works alongside virtuosic multi-instrumentalist and singer Abdullah Miniawy, who calls to the heavens as digitally pulverized strings quiver in the background. And cult British artist Coby Sey adds his unmistakable tones to 'Ast', mouthing tense, thoughtful words over mangled music box jingles and ecstatic pads. When he's not straddled by his collaborators through, ZULI is free to make some of his most personal gestures. He fashions a phantasmic, pitch-fluxed robotic croon on 'Trachea', curving it around half-speed hip-hop clacks and cinematic drones, then driving it into walls of impermeable noise on 'The Horn'. And the album's most revealing moment comes with the short 'Fahsil Qusseer', when ZULI recites a poem written by his father. Stretching his voice and a tape-saturated break like elastic, ZULI mimics the emotional push-and-pull of the protagonist, who overcomes their anxiety to escape into the outside world, only to retreat immediately back to the safety of solitude. The track puts the whole of 'Lambda' into sharp focus - through the walls of noise and exuberant, intoxicating waves of ambience, ZULI finds solace in limbo between the manic extremes.