MUSIC

A bearhug of chill-out room gouching gear from MFM spanning the golden era of ‘90s ambient dance music with gems from David Moufang, LFO, Global Communication, Kirsty Hawkshaw, Sun Electric and many more notables of that era. Since the world turned into a big chill out room in early 2020, albeit with a heavy sense of anxiety, this set could hardly be better placed for downtime in the comfort of your own home, rolling out mystic highlights such as LFO’s MDMA-tingle arps and pads in ‘Helen’ and the sublime suspension systems of Global Communication’s remix of ‘Arcadian’, along with Move D’s early nugget ‘Sergio Leone’s Wet Dream’, and the lush pads of his close spar Jonah Sharp’s Spacetime Continuum, plus a strip of killer slow acid in Sideral’s ‘Mare Nostrum’, and the blissed romance of ‘Love 2 Love’ by Sun Electric. One for the lovers and the ravers.

Memphis-raised V.C.R, born Veronica Camille Ratliff, is the LA-based violinist, gospel singer, and multidisciplinary Cinematic Soul artist using music and literature as her primary tools of uplift. The debut album "The Chronicles of a Caterpillar: The Egg" follows V through fantasy storybook-style song narratives that equally touch upon Lord Of The Rings as it does Minnie Ripperton and Tchaikovsky. Veronica's book “The Creative Black Woman’s Playbook” was written and published in 2019 as a primer to her album, with the purpose of celebrating black femininity, honoring black heritage and history, and empowering creative black women internationally. www.creativeblackwomansplaybook.com The album releases April 29th 2022 via Leaving Records All Genre, and features vocal contributions from Pink Siifu plus production from Sudan Archives and Lastnamedavid.

EURYBIA is the second solo album by Italian artist Francesca Heart. The result of a compositional process that began in summer 2020. The work is the product of a series of intimate imaginary projections and aural engagements with a number of geographical sites scattered across the Italian landscape. Places which have resonated with Francesca during various personal travels and pilgrimages, due to their extramundane and often even mystic significance. The most outstanding / iconic being the cloisters and gardens of San Gregorio Armeno’s monastery in Naples and the Nympheum of Villa Giulia in Rome. Indeed the whole record seems to bring the listener constantly together with the overwhelming, tender presence of the surrounding environment. Seemingly permeated with a feeling of refreshing musky moistures or textured with soft, wet soil, EURYBIA reminds us of walking barefoot near the lush architecture of some ancient, overflowing fountain or amidst the continuous flows of shallow rivers’ bedrocks informing the album with strong physical, sensory qualities. Myth, senses, and imagination become anchors of artistic and healing expression as well as forms of romantic escapism from an ever complex world. On the whole, EURYBIA’s seven tracks alternate dense enmeshment of sounds and melodies with sparse, forthright single-instrumental devotional hymns, working as a personal cartography of ephemeral audio monuments to human, transcendental, and mythographic landscapes. Influences connected by means of nuanced ascendance going from classical New Age music and Video Game soundtracks to digital phone ringtones. The fluttering arpeggios used as the main compositional device coalesce together into an experience of relaxing trance which is yet a glaring, audacious work. クレジット

Mark Barrott and Pete Gooding present the fourth volume in their series of stellar collections, showcasing the sunset sounds spun at Ibiza`s Hostal La Torre. Sets, sequences, of music designed to celebrate the passing of another day and welcome the pleasures of night, as the Sun makes way for Sister Moon. On this occasion, the ceremony starts with a gift from the Golden Girls - a side project of Phil Hartnoll, of Orbital fame. In its original form Kinetic was a prime piece of pumping early `90s trance, here, however, it`s been remixed by David Morley into something far more in line with Belgian rave label R&S` ambient off-shoot, Apollo. Practically beatless, but boasting a big, undulating, bottom-end, it now resembles something from Tangerine Dream`s back catalogue. A slightly kosmische, serene wall of sonically shining sound. The room-shaking riffs are reduced to echoes, while pitter-pattering percussion races. When the familiar hook finally surfaces, it`s accompanied by spirit-stirring, symphonic strings - inducing fierce flashbacks to quality highs, and newly expanded minds and horizons. Man, I can remember the wonder, before it all went pear-shaped. Next up are NO ZU, a sadly seemingly defunct 8-membered musical monster from Melbourne, Australia, who were absolutely amazing live. Banging out a percussive concoction that they called Heat Beat, their funk was / is most definitely post-punk - channelling `80s no wave New York, the Mudd Club, and in particular the band, Liquid Liquid. Slapping basses, car horns, electronic keys, buttons, cowbells, and anything else that came to hand and seemed to fit, while lifting beats and piano parts from Chicago house. The party-starting call and response repartee of Ui Yia UIa finds them shouting out their star signs of criss-crossing compatibility over a muscular slo-mo stomp. Daphne Camf Rest In Peace. Bassekou Kouyate is a Malian maestro on the 6-stringed ngoni. A goat-skin covered “hunters harp”, that via slave traders evolved into the North American banjo. With his group, named after this traditional griot instrument, and Zoumana Tereta on lead vocals, he delivers a dizzying display of dexterity on Bala. Generating a super mellow, spiritual groove, his playing countered by equal virtuosity on balafon and bolon. The voices switching between the sweet and the raw, and the song showering you in savannah sunshine, no matter where you happen to be hanging. American trio, Rare Silk, share their jazz vocal take on Stanley Turrentine`s Storm, where wildlife whistles and chirrups surround soft Synclavier sighs. Slick, smooth, imagine Manhattan Transfer meets Wally Badarou. A marimba doing the mambo, the reeds winding like wafts of smoke carried on warm Caribbean winds. The rhythm that of a gently lapping tide. The Synergetic Voice Orchestra was a one-off, one-time only outfit led by keyboardist / composer, Yumiko Morioka. A follow-up to her highly respected solo piano work, Resonance, the album, MIOS, was a far more ambitious affair, that brought together a collective of 6 musicians and 3 vocalists. The results moving away from new age and modern classical toward pop. The track, Zebra, is a Jon Hassell-esque fusion heat haze / fog. Riding a slowly rumbling thunder-thumbed bass-line. A snake-charming woodwind cutting through the synthetic shimmer, weaving its seductive spell. Family Doggo first appeared as the b-side of Paul Woolford aka Special Request`s balls-out 2020 drum and bass single, Spectral Frequency. “Doggo” in comparison is an oasis of calm, albeit packing some serious sub-woofer worrying boom. Stripped back, speaker-rattling, electro-edged introspection, emotive and euphoric without recourse to arms-in-the-air tropes, it`s bleep`s more sensitive, more thoughtful sibling. The awakening of the morning after the night before`s rush. Margaret Wakeley`s magical Hard To Leave The Island was initially rediscovered and dusted down by the people that power the respected DJ / artist agency, Warm - who took it from Margaret`s 1976 LP, Better Days, and pressed it on a limited 45. A slice of superior soft / yacht rock, it`s a cool cocktail-hour summer holiday serenade. A sophisticated arrangement of brass, jazzy keys, and acoustic strum, topped off by a smart sax solo. Equatorial Sunrise was / is one of the standouts contained on Pauline Anna Strom`s sadly posthumous album, Angel Tears In Sunlight. Describing herself as a Trans Millennium Consort, the San Francisco-based synth pioneer attempted to blur, blend, past, present, and future, with her novel new age music. The song in question sees wind-chimes, marimba, and talking drum conversing in counterpoint - conjuring the Cafe del Mar classic, Richard Wahnfried`s Grandmas Clockwork. Its calming, time-melting timbres creating a comforting analog bubblebath. Aching with synthesized ethereal emissions, while pinpoints of sound echo into infinity, like signals from distant stars. The Vendetta Suite is the pseudonym of Gary Irwin, the former in-house engineer at David Holmes` Belfast-based Exploding Inevitable Studio - a hive of musical activity where Timmy Stewart was also a frequent visitor. The 3 amigos mentioned were all stalwarts of the city`s early `90s house and techno scene. Some 30 years later Timmy remixed Gary`s track, Warehouse Rock, into a highly strung - think Malcolm McLaren`s Deep In Vogue - soundclash of reggae and rave. A four-to-the-floor mediation subjected to devastating washes of delay, where bionic bass, Mikey Dread samples and dub sound-effects are softened by bucolic birdsong. Mark Barrott’s Travelling Music (La Torre Reprise) - an exclusive version of the titular track from his recent E.P. - is all tumbling tones - playful sequences and programmed patterns “blowing” busily, like colourful streamers caught on a tropical breeze. Like the compilation`s opening number, its another ambient, beatless, trance-dancer - suffused with sustained swells and chords that feel like sunrise itself. Composer / pianist Lola Perrin`s Cloud Sky Fade is an unadorned, unadulterated - save a little reverb - rippling river of cascading classical keys. Her piano rolling, reaching crescendos like crashing surf. Licensed from Lola’s 2006 CD, Fragile Light, its worthy of comparison with Keith Jarrett`s ECM output, and Wim Mertens` beloved The Belly Of An Architect score. If you look on Wikipedia, you’ll see that Suzanne Ciani has the affectionate moniker of “Diva of the Diode” - reflecting her huge importance in the history of electronic music. While studying at Berkley University in the `70s Suzanne became firm friends with Don Buchla, and subsequently spearheaded the use of his then ground-breaking modular synthesizer. Moving to New York, where she camped out on Philip Glass` studio floor, Suzanne set up her own company employing Don`s marvelous machine to produce advertising jingles. The success of this business eventually led to Suzanne becoming Hollywood’s first female soundtrack composer. In the `80s, Suzanne then started releasing new age records, one of which, 1986`s The Velocity Of Love, was a favourite of DJ Phil Mison, who made it a Cafe del Mar sunset staple. The beautiful Eighth Wave surely should have been the blissed-out musical backdrop to some `80s art house love scene - summoning as it does silhouettes of cinematic protagonists passionately disrobing though a Vaseline-smeared lens. Their hot clinches politely cutting to close-ups of isolated, moonlit beaches, and untamable, tempestuous tides. JIM is Jim Baron, Crazy P`s Ron Basejam, but in folky, singer / songwriter mode. Coming on like Crosby, Stills & Nash, he covers the Ian Astbury / Billy Duffy penned Phoenix in an ultra-laidback fashion. Turning the gothic rock into a Laurel Canyon-esque lullaby. Singing of love in terms of fire, and flames of desire, backed by acrobatic acoustic picking and sweeping orchestral strings. You could be forgiven for thinking that Antipodean audio auteur, Geoffrey O`Connor, is some forgotten `80s idol - so authentic is his soothing, swooning, romantic synth pop. Her Name On Every Tongue, however, dates from 2014, and can be located on Geoff`s sophomore solo long-player, Fan Fiction. The track`s vocoder harmonies proving perfect for a sing along on a top-down, Californian coastal drive. These righteous solar-worshiping rituals draw to a close with John Foxx & Robin Guthrie`s exceptional Estrellita - a highlight from the pairs 2009 album, Mirrorball - where the former Ultravox! and Cocteau Twins founders collaborate on a sublime shot of shoegaze. Generating a glacial glide of layer upon layer of treated guitar. Grounded by womb-like bass vibrations, while Foxx`s choirboy croon soars. Lending the song a prayer / hymn-like air. It`s as close as rock comes to something sacred. Dr. Rob (Ban Ban Ton Ton)

Experiences Limited, now 3XL, with a sick new LP from Exael on a highly atmospheric ambient jungle tip, deploying 30 mins of percussive spasms seeping into smoked-out zoners - highly tipped if yr into anything from Lee Gamble to Malibu. Clearing their cache of stray bullets, Exael returns with a gyring plunge into percussive wormholes and low-lit mood enhancers .The tracks are broadly cleft along schisms of dark/light and demonic/angelic, switching from restive propellers to more sublime sensations in a fine testament to their practice - making for prob our favourite Exael release thus far. On the “darker” side, they commit the convulsive, fractious footwork pulses and warped tones of ‘Circle (Squishy Mix)’ in a sort of parallel to 33EMYBW’s insectoid rhythms and combustion systems, while ‘Ice That melts The Tips’ trades in rapid, ice-skating thizz and ‘Ghoul Search (Demonic Attachment Mix)’ fires up the junglist particle accelerator for a proper gauntlet of hyper techstep dynamics. The contrast is epitomised by ’Composure’, arranging flinty breaks on a luscious waterbed of floating pads, before ‘Eidolon’ renders a sort of airborne dembow pressure in the vicinity of Ben Bondy & special guest dj’s xphresh works. ‘L-theanine’ closes the session on a fine tread inside emo ambient styles and flurries on the same spectrum between DJ Lostboi and Teresa Winter, complete with a reverberating, half-buried vocal. All smoke & strobe doozies.

Pontiac Streator mints a solo debut for Brian Leeds’ (Huerco S.) West Mineral Ltd. label with a bouquet of plasmic ambient lobe strokers, dusted with the guest charms of Ben Bondy, Perila, Nikolay Kozlov, and Protozoa Project. Arriving as a more personalised pursuit of the genteel themes that bound his pair of albums with Ulla in 2018-19, ’Sone Glo’ portrays the Philly-based ambient avatar at his most slanted and enchanting with a sandman suite of late night ambient blissouts. It’s an effortless listen, lathering aqueous textures and wistful melodies into a therapeutic hush, blessed with a prized sensuality that has placed him at the bosom of the neo-ambient love-in over the past five years. A good handful of those ambient lovers chime into his sound here too, drizzling whispered vox and smudged hooks into his vaporous matrix with results that ooze across variegated strains of balmy to gruff ambient dembow with a deeply seductive appeal and mind-drift pathos. Streator steers clear of any tricks or stunts in favour of slow-burn textural depth and subliminal rhythmic hypnosis. He cuts straight to the heart on opener 'Atlas Obscura' with Protozoa Project’s soothing glossolalia suffused to a sloshing dembow groove that underlines the whole album’s subtle pressure changes. He patently cares for your downtime, gently EQ’ing the chakras with the tongue-tip lather of ‘Picture of the Woods’, and later placing Perila’s narration over liquid electro pulses on album standout ‘I Want Something’, while Ben Bondy lends a reverberant touch to ‘Purp Thread’ and Folder’s Nikolay Kozlov brings a thawed ambient thizz to ‘Heliacal’. Still, Streator is the inventive star of his own show, effectively doing for dembow what Kassem Mosse did with deep minimal house on the irresistible sway and heavy-lidded pads of ‘Ixora’, before liquifying limbs with the slinky roll of his instrumentals on ‘Surge XL’ and the eyes-down delicacy ‘Red Kings’.

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

Rome’s own disco wizard L.U.C.A. aka Francesco De Bellis is back for his second LP Terra, hot on the heels of his Venus 12” EP earlier this year. In this far-reaching album, the Edizioni Mondo founder explores the deteriorating relationship between Man and Nature, and the dire consequences. The album is split into two themes - part one is Consacrazione (Consecration) and side two is Coscienza (Conscience) - as L.U.C.A. charts a trip through mankind’s psychic universe, and imagines worlds beyond our physical dimension. The opening composition Cities is an uptempo number that slowly comes into focus, as dreamy drum machines emerge from the urban bustle, before settling into a soulful groove as keyboard, upright bass and guitar figures dance across bright percussion. As it builds up a head of steam, the piece gives way to an ambient, tribal breakdown, which is also echoed in the following song, Drum Talk. This second tune sets up in a fourth world dreamscape of drums, synths, and abstracted echo effects, and is peppered with word fragments from the bush of ghosts. By the time we’ve reached the third track, Congiunzione sounds like travelling at singularity speed, beaming in from a future where human consciousness and gaia can finally dance on a cosmic plain. Part two of Terra details how revelation of the spirit can guide the mind, as Time Spirals rises out of a drum motif with a nod to classic ragas, as a disembodied voice asks questions on the nature of corporeality. The sound design is just as front and centre as the sitar and fretless bass, and the song gives way to a richly-layered soup that sounds like the vast space between atoms. It’s this shift from composition to ambience that is the dynamic core of Terra, giving L.U.C.A. plenty of space to showcase his next-level audio and arranging skills. Midway through part two, Giallo Assoluto begins with reverb tails and choral voices before expanding in brightness and texture until the audio field is practically levitating your hi-fi speakers, vibrating them with drones, twinkling keys and shards of digital noise. The closing composition Ritorno al Domani is a perfect balance of optimism and mystery. Tension and release collapse in on themselves as waves of ambient pads crescendo and then break over stretched-out sonic turbulence, before reversed synths bring the listener to a closing door, and the end of the journey. It’s a mind-expanding musical exploration of other worlds and parallel universes which are surely all around us, and in many ways serve to remind us of the marvel that is our own planet.

2 rare historical recordings (1983 and 1986) originally released as single sides and gathered here for the first time. "Conductor might be my favourite composition and Life & Death Of Pboc might be my most sincere. Conductor was my first composed piece with no obvious reference points ... Life & Death Of Pboc was the second. these two compositions gave me the title Godfather of Dark Ambient."

Dance Ancestral is the latest addition to producer and keyboardist John Carroll Kirby’s fast-growing and distinctive body of work. Dance Ancestral sees the acclaimed solo artist teaming up with Canadian producer Yu Su for an album whose central theme is the “intuitive dance” we perform throughout our lives. More electronically focused than Kirby’s previous albums, the result is a vividly imagined yet eminently listenable instrumental record.

TIZIANO POPOLI - Sull’accordo mimetico
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SV30 / 1st time on LP Limited edition. Side A: 1. Sull’accordo mimetico - Parte 1 (28:00) Side B: 1. Sull’accordo mimetico - Parte 2 (28:00) Total time: 57 minutes Tiziano Popoli: Yamaha Dx7 synth, Korg MS1O-MS50 synth, Akai S900 sampler, tapes, FX.

 Recorded at home on Teac A 3440 4 tracks tape recorder, mixed on Revox 2 tracks. Sull’Accordo Mimetico (On the Mimetic Chord) dates back to the end of the 80’s. It was commissioned by the artistic director of the ParcoScenico Festival, held in Treviso, Italy. Since the area where artists and the public gathered after the Festival was located to a very busy street, Marco asked me for a sound installation that could work as some sort of a defensive barrier for the street noise. I suggested that my work, rather than hiding the noise, should aim to harmonize the disturbances coming from the street within musical structures and forms, without burdening or saturating too much the acoustic spectrum of the place. In this way, I thought about sonic veils, consisting of repetitive – but also light and discreet – harmonic-rhythmic structures. Since the Festival took place in a beautiful centenary park, I also integrated the music with natural sounds and animal calls, always as an attempt to bridge these sound events and the other materials that made up the composition. The human voice constitutes a central element in this musique d'ameublement project, as a constant source of memory of places and times – here with many references to traditional music for children. A pearl of ambient electroacoustic minimalism with field recordings components in which the nostalgia of Maestro Tiziano Popoli shines through in painting landscapes that slowly change to be seen with the ears. Nocturnal, emblematic, Lynchian.

»江戸 Edo« is a cosmic ambient experimental piece conceived in 1977 by Masashi Komatsubara and developed alongside with Hideki Matsutake (a.k.a. Logic System and reductively defined by many as the "fourth member of the Yellow Magic Orchestra"). As a true sound scientist, he pours all his efforts into this record, and aimed at the widest possible use of an electronic instrument that was at the forefront at that time — the Moog IIIc.

Dry was conceived as a new journey among Vini inventions, through rarefied moods and subterranean streams of sound. The fifteen songs (lasting fifty-five minutes) were recorded in Manchester in 1990, Vini sits in on guitar and piano, while Mitchell is on electronic and acoustic percussion, other instruments such as the clarinet (played by Zinnia Mitchell-Williams, Bruce's daughter), harmonica, viola and keyboards are also featured on the session. Here, once again, Durutti Column 's music could be defined as half-way between melancholy rock and 'progressive' New Age.

Another Interplanetary Star Creature team up for a Chicago <-> Tokyo expedition across a fusional soundscape ranging from bossa nova lounge to pre-vaporwave exotica; new age city pop to minimal library boogie. June Chikuma is best known now for her ground breaking Video Game soundtrack throughout the late 1980s and early 90s, most notably the now cult-classic status Bomberman Hero OST for Nintendo. During this same period of the late , she produced many recordings for a wide variety of clients including Japanese Public Transit Commercials, Video Game Arcades and VHS Nature Documentaries. We reached out to June in 2019 with the hopes of combing her archives to present the modern listener base here on Earth. We selected a nice mix of tracks as entry point in June's work. These tracks have been rescued from obscurity, remastered and waxed up for contemporary universal enjoyment. Hear Chikuma & Co. interpret influence's from Kraftwerk to Steely Dan, Herbie Hancock to Eric Dolphy, and Composers Ali Sriti to Paul Hindemith across a legendary line up of hardware synths ranging from Yamaha DX7, Korg Polysix, Roland D-550, and Oberheim Matrix-1000.

¡ÆA sea of clouds casting silent shadows on frozen time A sky of flickering waters curling over the immense permanence Fractured light shrouded in mist dissolving into shaded pigment The frontier of solitude melting in the winds of patient eternity.¡Ç

Le Manteau D'Etoiles is the fifth album by Andrew Chalk & Timo Van Luijk, the UK/Belgium project of Elodie, and was recorded live in Leuven, Belgium in November 2012. The album is based on a live performance in Leuven, Belgium in November 2012. The four-piece ensemble includes Tom James Scott on piano and Jean Noel Rebilly on clarinet, two of Andrew Chalk's most recent collaborators. The deepening of each of the two core members in their solo works is also evident here, with the peaceful beauty of the water in "Cristaux De Lumiere," the simply transparent "L'Aurore," which needs no explanation, and "Le Manteau d' Etoiles," which whispers of Elodie's forest psychedelia. Etoiles," which transcended time and scene, one could not help but listen to the great big improvised picture scroll of light that transcended time and scene. The dignified wind and keyboard colors of the two guests were also wonderful. This is a great example of Elodie's ever-deepening and matured musical vision. This is one of the best works of this project.

A vinyl reissue of a 2016 cassette-only release by Andrew Chalk x Timo Van Luijk's unit Elodie, featuring Tom James Scott on piano. A beautiful work, ambient and avant-garde, but with the depth that only Elodie can bring to life. Limited edition of 300 copies.

Eclectic ensemble of 18 instrumental arrangements evoking an epic and existential 
soundtrack determined by the power of momentary destiny and reflective sentiment. 

Originally released on LP in 2014

The long-awaited repress! The world's first compilation that covers the miracle of Spanish NEW WAVE-ambient-progressive music, the masterpiece of Finis Africae, and the footprints of 17 years!
This is a must-listen work with a number of spiritual, deep, afro and ambient spiritual organic grooves!

Spiritual Afro, NEW WAVE, Ambient Dance Music! A number of miraculous sound sources that include African music, contemporary music, natural sounds from NEW WAVE and field recording, and even jazz and folklore tastes from Spain. It seems that he was influenced by many music genres, but the music is a beautiful combination of ambient and spiritual extracts, and the track with the synthesizer has a new age that is similar to that of IASOS! Great content that would not have been possible without an aesthetic eye for sharp music. 16P booklet included. Commentary posted in Spanish / English / Japanese.

Two sheets to the wind, Perishable, not tinned, Two hands the better, Wet weather and feather. Wilson Tanner come to shore with a new album of floating melodies, lightly salted. Throwing electroacoustic conventions overboard, Andrew Wilson (Andras) and John Tanner (Eleventeen Eston) recorded this new work aboard a 1950s riverboat with a resourceful array of weatherproof electronic instruments and a long extension lead. These eight compositions pull in a by-catch of maritime folklore; of Siren and Selkie, Seagull and engine oil slick. A change of course from their debut album 69 (Growing Bin Records, 2016), the ambient temperature drops as II casts out to sea in uncertain weather and returns to the safe harbours of Port Phillip Bay. The seafarers head out to My Gull’s poised optimism. The birds watch but do they listen? By the arrival of Loch and Key, the shoreline has dissolved completely, the boat floating in serene infinity as the rest of the world spins. Conditions soon take a treacherous turn on Killcord Pts I-III - a 12 minute odyssey that battens down the hatches as these sailors eye merciless waves and blinding ocean spray, jointly channelling Berlin-school electronics and sea legs. In the aftermath, the waterlogged bleeps of Idle survey the damage as our parched crew sound the distress signal and ultimately descend into delirium. Known for navigating individual courses as solo musicians, Wilson and Tanner’s collective storytelling is saturated in detail, buoying between tension and harmony. II modestly stands as some of both artists’ most accomplished material.

Portals is an album of minimal electric piano improvisations by UK-based multi-instrumentalist & composer Robert Stillman. Inspired by American ‘new-age’ luminaries like Laraaji, Iasos, and Stephen Halpern, Stillman’s layers of playful, meditative electric piano figures, saturated by warm tape hiss & psychedelic delay effects, are occasionally accompanied by “found sound” field recordings, creating a compelling yet calming listening experience. Portals was recorded at home in Broadstairs, Kent during the winter of 2016-2017 & originally released on cassette in December 2017 by Orindal Records. Three subsequent represses followed, & Portals became the most repressed cassette release in Orindal’s 11 year history. This new vinyl edition, co-released by UK label KIT Records, is remastered by Matt Barnhart & includes bonus track “Portal 8 (The Stranger).” Here’s Robert Stillman’s original statement on the original cassette release of Portals: Portals is an album of multi-tracked improvisations on Fender Rhodes electric piano. The music’s repetitive structure is intended to encourage a state of ‘no-mind’ in the listener, acting as a gateway out of thoughts and into the present moment. Headphones are recommended for the ideal listening experience.

This unique work was released in 1982 as the final chapter in Brian Eno's Ambient series that began in 1978.

Deadstock cassette version of the masterful second album, released in 1992, which was hailed by All Music as "the commercial and artistic peak of the ambient house movement" and was #1 on the UK charts at the time. sealed with a small drill hole.

Donato Dozzy and Milanese veteran Stefano Ghittoni mint a new series on Dozzy's Mage Circe Musica imprint, channeling Daniele Baldelli's cosmic disco manifesto and exploring screwed rhythms, psychedelic electronix and blunted dub atmospheres. So good - imagine a half-speed Shinichi Atobe or Rrose spliced with GRM-damaged concréte FX and percussion courtesy of Konono No.1. Basically it's peak Dozzy syrup - Tip! Alicia Carrera and Donato Dozzy's Maga Circe Musica label has quickly established itself as an outlet for some of the most impressively tight experimental slop we've heard in ages. Dozzy and Ghittoni's first La Petit plate is no different, using the enduring influence of Northeastern Italian electronic music (think Baldelli and Marco Dionigi) to help transform and repurpose dub techno, folk, ambient music, jazz and global sounds. If Baldelli and Dionigi were best known for pushing disco's tempo down to a crawl, Dozzy and Ghittoni do the same with their wealth of diggers' influences, dipping hollow 4/4 percussion and syncopated hand drums to a chug on 'Sukia' and slowly building an atmosphere with low-slung bass and spooked electronics. Imagine holding down the pitch slider on a Badalamenti score and a Funkadelic 12” playing at the same time, for the gist. On 'Lanquidity' the duo pull in horizontal dub pads and place them against a resinous thud and swirling dub FX, played slower than it should be and somehow operating in the same gloopy zone as Newworldaquarium to emphasise mood and texture over technical trickery. 'Niento’ is even better, using smeared LM1 claps for a sort of assymetric, purple funk played at -8 while taking a fourth world-inspired rhythm and welding it to lysurgic synth drones and nipped kicks - it's a mid-point between vintage bleep techno, cosmic disco and rhythmic psychedelia. 'Le Petit' is over too soon, but gives us plenty to chew on: anyone who enjoys Dozzy's genre-agnostic DJ sets or the fertile area between hazy ambience and half-speed dancefloor zones - this one’s a killer.