MUSIC

German ambient musician.He was briefly a member of the krautrock band Popol Vuh in the early 1970s where he played on the albums Hosianna Mantra and Seligpreisung. *300 copies limited edition.* Member of the krautrock band Popol Vuh in the early 1970s – Voice, Zither, Tambura, Harmonium, Singing Bowls – Klaus Wiese (1942 – 2009) was a veteran e-musician, minimalist, and multi-instrumentalist. A master of the Tibetan singing bowl, he created an extensive series of album releases using them. Wiese also used the human voice, the zither, Persian stringed instruments, chimes, and other exotic instruments in his music. Wiese is considered by some as one of the great ambient or space music artists alongside Robert Rich, Steve Roach, Michael Stearns, Constance Demby, and Jonn Serrie. His musical style is much more appropriately compared to the organic soundscapes of drone and dark ambient music, such as Oöphoi, Alio Die, Mathias Grassow, and Tau Ceti. In the 1990s he founded the Nono Orchestra to play the giant sheetmetal instruments of Robert Rutman. Wiese is known also for his collaborations with Al Gromer Khan, Mathias Grassow, Oöphoi, Tau Ceti, Saam Schlamminger, and Ted de Jong. He collaborated with Deuter on his Silence is the Answer album in 1980 and East of the Full Moon in 2005.

Unavailable for several years and highly sought-after​, Space Afrika’s excellent, career-establishing sophomore album ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’ encapsulates a singular, nocturnal mood that’s still the most distinctive thing in their catalogue. A stunning arrangement of mutable ambient frameworks, it lingers in the air like a stubborn waft of smoke, acting as a clarion call for a bunch of likeminded spirits that up until that moment had been lurking in the manchester undergrowth. What seems like forever ago, way back in 2018, Space Afrika presented a bird’s eye view of the city at night with ‘Somewhere Decent To Live’; their first and only album for the sferic label. Unshackled from the requirements of the dancefloor, but still inspired and feeding off its spirit and romance, the pair acknowledged undercurrents of jungle, dubstep, ambient techno and deep house which fed into their home city’s late night economy for decades, dowsing their tributaries back to dub and rendering the findings as shimmering ambient vapour. Forming cloud-like shapes illuminated by slow pulsing strobes, the vibe is precise but elusive. The pair’s dancefloor urges become completely dissolved in favour of more suggestive downstrokes, underpinned by thick and gloopy subs, leaving the kicks in the club while they float overhead like the dead kid embarking his Bardo in Gaspar Noé’s Enter The Void, evoking the neon romance of a classic Michael Mann night drive. The album weaves through eight interlinked scenes, drifting like spectral flanneurs from the Diversions-like opener uwëm/creãtiõn to intercept telepathic thoughts from Teutonic friends in the percolated and drizzly ambient clag of sd/tl, before arriving at the album’s most arresting moment on the widescreen yet immersive bly and its sublimely smeared timbral thizz… A modern classic.

Piotr Kurek’s new album “Smartwoods” is a sprawling root system of tiny melodic phrases that loop and curl around subtly evolving instrumental thickets. The Warsaw-based producer and composer takes his cues from early music, baroque music and experimental jazz, entangling his influences with filigree traces of contemporary computer music and fueling it with sonic vapors from the near future. Made up of seven distinct segments, the album blurs its acoustic and electronic elements into an illusory hedge of abstract sound. Harp, saxophone, clarinet, double bass, voices and guitar twist into computerized processes and synthesizer chirps, creating an uncanny dreamworld where the real isn’t always what it seems. Each player is entwined with the other to create a living, breathing whole. Like Kurek’s painterly 2021 album “World Speaks”, “Smartwoods” is also inspired by visual art - particularly the whimsical work of Algerian-French graphic designer Jean Sariano. The album cover features artwork by Polish painter Tomasz Kowalski, whose shapeshifting creatures and miniature stories aptly reflect the music’s wild fantasy. The first manifestation of “Smartwoods” – a live show at Unsound in Kraków in 2022 – featured animations by Italian artist Francesco Marrello, who put together a visual treatment for the single “Harps”.

The Keplar label presents the next instalment in a series of reissues from the catalogue of Sasu Ripatti’s seminal Vladislav Delay project. Originally released on Mille Plateaux, the vinyl edition of »Entain« from 2000 omitted two shorter tracks and included all others in an abridged form. With this reissue, the full album as it was pressed on CD is finally made available on vinyl. Besides a new remaster by Kassian Troyer, it was also given new cover artwork by Marc Hohmann that picks up on that of the »Whistleblower« reissue, released in early 2023 by Keplar. This serial visual approach highlights the conceptual continuity between those masterful explorations of the interplay between dub techniques, noise, and repetition.

Japanese obscure dream pop gem! Two elevator bangers to get through the gloomy holiday season by Japanese artist, Sonoko, probably made somewhere in the 90's. Merry ye ye

I see lucid blue flames moving before my eyes. I hear voices melting. Voices somewhere from within. Speaking words I do not know but feel connected to, almost as if I have known the meaning once.. Noises that obscures the multiple pictures hidden in these digital compositions. Iku Sakan have created a set of five tracks that takes the listener on a trip deep into the human psyché. Emotional flickering movements that twists and turns. The albums have a darker, much more intense feel than some of Ikus earlier magical and often hypnotic music. A myriad of different voices creates pulsing patterns and constantly morphing pictures for my inner eye. It's an album that might work as a hack to our lingual structures, pushing limits, pushing possibilities of meaning. A pool of over-saturated information boils and out of the vapor new contours take form. The magical and hypnotic is not gone, I still recognise the softer aspects of Ikus highly detailed hybrid sound design. But I no longer see where it takes me. It excites me. It feels like the world is expanding again, breathing. The sounds on the album asks us questions and points in several directions at once. In the shadows, weeds of lucid dreams grow deeper roots, reaching for my inner ear. The faint sounds on the track Nature Morte reminds me of expeditions to the local witch house ruins as a child. Something almost not there, something felt. History, Memories and the connection between the two seems to have played a part in these compositions. Emotional reactions that plant reactions in other people, all around creating soft movements on the face of our planet. Whether our collective psyché is an open field or an impenetrable dark forest, is of less concern with a key like Omnitopoeia, that works like an enhanced mirror, reflecting the dreams of the words we speak everyday, reflecting the emotional charges of significant places. Unrecognisable but still remembered. OMNITOPOEIA [άmnɪṭəpíːə]

Incorrectly perceived as simply an Autechre side-project, Gescom in fact exists as a platform for a number of aligned artists to work in various different combinations, whilst remaining otherwise-anonymous. Personnel in Gescom has varied from release to release and even track to track. Quote from the Autechre FAQ: "Actually the whole Gescom crew consists of almost 20 people. Sean Booth calls it an 'umbrella-project'."

Bristol’s four-piece outfit Quade announce their debut album, ‘Nacre’, out 17th November via AD93. ‘Nacre’ is the culmination of three years of work from the band, the blueprints of their songwriting and sound firmly established in the sprawling, haunting and yet hopeful record. Traipsing between gothic expansiveness and cosmic psychedelia, the record cannot be pinned down into one recognisable place. By the album’s close, the listener may be left wondering whether it was all a memory or a dream. The recording and production of the record was collaborative, with the band drawing upon the services of Jack Ogbourne and Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy - two divergent pillars of Bristol’s music community - for engineering and mixing respectively.

Avalon Emerson & The Charm is an evolution. Created during an extended break from the hectic blur of her life as a touring DJ, the album is a personal statement of intent from an artist who’s long looked beyond the club for inspiration. It’s also the first time that Emerson has put herself, her emotions and, most notably, her voice fully into the spotlight. Having spent her entire career working more or less alone, Emerson purposely sought out a small cast of like-minded artists to help bring the album to life. Chief among them was UK avant-pop savant Bullion, who executive produced the record and, most importantly, shares both Emerson’s predilection for shimmering pop melodies and her boundaryless approach to music-making. Working together, they cracked open her head and heart alike, creating a space where she could intimately reflect on the people and places she’s loved and left behind. Set for release on Another Dove—a new label that Emerson has launched alongside AD 93 founder Nic Tasker—Avalon Emerson & The Charm places lyrics and emotion at the forefront of its identity.

Six Organs of Admittance takes listeners through an extended narcoleptic journey on Sleep Tones, an all-electronic double album of new ambient work. Mastered by VDSQ labelmate Chuck Johnson, Sleep Tones was made with a specific effect in mind. These new sounds from the Six Organs universe represent an essential creative shift from one of the great guitarists of the 21st century, showcasing his ever-evolving palate. An antidote to modern overload, Sleep Tones provides a welcome stasis. In its physical manifestation, each side of Sleep Tones ends with a locked groove in case of dream state, with no fear of a needle sliding outside the set mood. These sounds lull through speakers and headphones, creating ideal conditions for consciousness drift. All sounds by Ben Chasny. Mastered by Chuck Johnson. Astro and Sky Photography by Joram Young. Design by SEEN Studios. Gatefold edition with spot UV Gloss; pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI.

Memory is malleable. The day you met the person you love, what color shirt was she wearing? At precisely what angle did the sunlight strike his face? How exactly did they glow? These little details are precious, but the strange thing is, the more you cherish them, the more they change. Each recollection is another potential touch point where stories can shift—each replay degrades the truth. Reality’s rough edges smooth, with time. Objectivity is a myth: cameras and recording devices all contort image and sound. There’s no way to know exactly how things were. And yet we still tell the stories, to try to capture how things felt, even though the truth is always slipping through our fingers. Lemon Quartet’s second album Arts Fests eems to unconsciously circle this thematic territory. Full of loose, yet lush repetition, it seems to function like memory—each dizzy melody recalling and rewriting what came before, subtly shaping each piece as time passes. Not that they seem especially concerned with the passage of time anyway. They space out, they work in the realm of feelings, scribbling melodious abstractions that feel familiar. Rich with compassion, harmony, and gestures toward ecstatic—if not objective—truth, it’s full of the sort of pieces that demand you return to them, but sound a bit different each time, new details overtaking familiar comforts. Are you hearing them for the first time? Or just for the first time in a long time? Either way, drift away, and try to remember…

Palto Flats / Putojefe Records present the first ever reissue of the work of American composer Dorothy Carter, master of the hammered dulcimer, zither, and other instruments of the hammer chord zither/psalterium family. A true musical vagabond, Dorothy was born in New York in 1935, though her spiritual pursuit of an expansive musical knowledge would take her to monasteries in Mexico, conservatories in France and London, and the founding of the Central Maine Power Music Company (CMPMC), with new-age/minimalist luminaries such as Constance Demby and Robert Rutman. Dorothy Carter was many things - a virtuoso player, storyteller, historian of Celtic and Appalachian folk music, avid lifelong busker, avant-garde musician, and itinerant troubadour, laying a framework for music that existed both within and outside of standard folk idioms - never better represented than on her 1978 masterwork, Waillee Waillee. Underscored by Bob Rutman’s cavernous bowing of the steel cello, the richness of Waillee Waillee’s sound produces an album unlike any other in her discography. In particular, its two side-ending pieces, “Summer Rhapsody” and “Tree of Life,’’ glide with the shimmering filigree of hammered dulcimer and Dorothy Carter’s ephemeral voice floating over Rutman’s droning buzz of the steel cello. The elements of these two tracks suggest something akin to a transcendental Appalachian raga or whirling cosmic folk music, an effortless combination that serves to add additional substance to the remaining tracks on the album. The title track is one of her most enduring compositions, often performed in stripped down versions throughout her career, and one of her sole recordings featuring a full band, with the contrapuntal interplay of tremulous flute, vibrating steel cello, bass and drums. Lyrically and tonally, her voice would never sound as stirring and refi ned as on this, her most outwardly accessible song. She counted musical colleagues as diverse as Constance Demby, Einstürzende Neubauten and Laraaji, as well as her lifelong artistic partner and friend Bob Rutman, whose imprint is felt throughout the grooves of this record. The master tapes for this recording were fortuitously discovered in Rutman’s Berlin studio, many, many years later. As recounted in Laraaji’s contribution to the liner notes, Dorothy was “someone who really influenced my early zither exploration and vocabulary and inspired my shift toward hammered zither performance and recording,” after encountering him busking on the sidewalk one day in the 1970s. Later, when living in Berlin in the early 1990s, Dorothy would begin work on manuscripts detailing the history of the dulcimer family and providing extensive sheet music, selected material of which is reproduced in the twelve page booklet included with this release. Dorothy would find later success touring and performing in the late 90s with the ensemble Mediæval Bæbes, which she led with British musician Katherine Blake, playing a prominent role on their first four albums.

Bamanya is responsible for building Africa's first DIY modular synthesizer, a huge wall of home-made modules and FX units that he dubbed, fittingly, The Afrorack. His reason for embarking on this difficult project was simple: as he began to investigate the world of modular synthesizers, he realized it would be difficult to acquire the technology in Uganda. Not only were there relatively few retailers across the whole of Africa, but the modules were often prohibitively expensive. After quick search online, Bamanya realized he could easily download circuit diagrams and buy the required parts locally, so he taught himself electronics and constructed a CV-controlled system that's been evolving ever since. "The Afrorack" is Bamanya's debut album and displays the producer's untethered creativity and restless energy. He's all too aware that these modules were developed with European and American musical styles in mind, so developed his own musical methodology and language to coax the system into suiting his needs. His starting points are often abstractions of acid and techno, but Bamanya curves East African rhythms and different scales into these familiar structures, splintering them into fractal shards. "I believe Africa is at that point where people are getting new tools which were not available to them, and then experimenting with them in a different context, because Africa has its own traditional music," he told Pan African Music back in 2019. This attitude is most evident on 'African Drum Machine', where Bamanya uses a Euclidean rhythm sequencer to divide his CV signals into complex algorithmic patterns that mimic the polyrhythmic structures that exist in many East African musical forms. If you're not listening closely it might sound like 4/4 techno, but focus your attention and you'll hear different layers of drums and jagged oscillators bouncing between each other creating hypnotic new rhythms. Bamanya takes a similar approach on 'Why Serious', fuzzing dubby basslines and plasticky percussive sounds into a frenetic hybrid of abstract electronics and fwd-thinking East African club sounds. At times, Bamanya's meditative, bass-heavy compositions echo the psychedelic sounds of Shackleton or Adrian Sherwood's African Head Charge, particularly on tracks like 'Inspired' and 'Last Modular'. With lysergic tonal shifts and precision-engineered drums, both tracks sound defiantly metallic, but sculpted by a producer who's always completely in control as he introduces risky eccentricities like feline groans and videogame blips. And on less beat-heavy tracks like 'Osc' and 'Rev', Bamanya makes a conscious nod to the history of modular music, approaching the kosmische universe of Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze and Emeralds, augmenting it with East Africa's idiosyncratic rhythmic intensity. "The Afrorack" is the beginning of a conversation that's been long overdue.

Stuart Howard, a.k.a. Lapalux, the UK artist from Brainfeeder who is signed by Flying Lotus, has released the long-awaited reissue of his debut album "Nostalchic" from 2013! The album, which means "refined nostalgia," beautifully blends his beloved R&B and soul with elements of house and hip-hop, and is finished with Lapalux's trademark inebriating swing and deep textures for a poignant and emotional 12-track album. The opening track, "Tape Intro," tells the story. As the opening track, "Tape Intro," tells us, Lapalux is a keen experimenter with cassette tape, looping and layering sounds in the warm format of tape to create textures that are haunting, beautiful, fragile, somehow familiar, and alien at the same time. It is possible. Finally, a masterpiece that will continue to shine brilliantly as a monumental work for the beat generation with a taste for electronica, chillwave, and ambient R&B is finally back!

Ulla returns with ‘Foam’, a surprise new album unlocking variants of ambient pop and looped jazz/dub styles coiled inside a glitched matrix that reminds us of Huerco S’ ‘Plonk’ as well as Ekkehard Ehlers fractal treatments and those incredible, smudged and disneyfied edits of Celine Dion released earlier this year by elusive outfit Romance. It’s an absorbing, quietly significant album for 3XL, on its most substantial release to date. Responsible for one of contemporary ambient’s finest breadcrumb trails in recent years, Ulla leads on from an acclaimed run of albums toward a more filigree style on ‘Foam’. Deploying fragmented morsels resembling glass-cast confectionary with a burbling vernacular, these ephemeral new works dissolve into a supine, shoe-gauzy and jazzed bliss that’s best compared with Jan Jelinek’s efforts in this dream-staged arena, the subs x piano minimalism of Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s revered collabs, as well as the memory-frothed echo of claire rousay and Co La’s fractal baubles. Aye, it’s a sound close to our hearts and one weft with a certain sort of magic that sparkles on the nerves and imagination with delicacy. Intending it to “feel like a keychain”, the album follows a logic that’s almost algorithmic with its haphazard mutations, but which ultimately displays a more human pulse on pieces like ‘foam angel’, weaving forlorn brass around jazz samples and Ulla’s disjointed voice murmuring unintelligibly like some cyborg liz frazer speaking into the sublime. Effusive solo keys and strings cascade like petals on ‘song’, where familiar leitmotifs become wind-dispersed like seeds. We’re snagged on the bittersweet tang of ‘popping out’, and the unexpected dance between marina’s jazz guitar lilt and the aerosoul thizz on ‘sad face’, while the tongue-tip sensitivities of ‘blush’, and ‘for your love’ sound like Rihanna produced by a Systemisch-era Oval. As tangled and complex as it is filled with improbable ohrwurms, ‘Foam’ is unlike anything we’ve heard from Ulla before, and it just might be the weirdest ambient/pop dislocation of the year so far.

Burial has set two milestones with their masterful debut album "Burial" in 2006 and their second album "Untrue" in 2007, which won the greatest acclaim as "the most important electronic music work of the century". In 2022, Burial will release his first full-length album in 15 years, "Antidawn," and as he continues to reach new heights, he will suddenly release his latest track on a limited-edition 12-inch from XL Recordings.

The Blue Beyond is produced by Touch and Audemars Piguet following Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s commission of two new compositions by Jana Winderen in 2019. 

Edition of 1000 copies, the first 100 copies numbered and signed by the artist. 

The record offers edits of two sound compositions for installations, “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux” (2019) and “The Art of Listening: Under Water” (2019). “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux” was first presented at Art Basel in Basel from 13 to 16 June 2019. A live performance of the piece was given at HEK (House of Electronic Arts Basel) on 11 June 2019. “The Art of Listening: Under Water” (2019) was first presented in the Rotunda, Collins Park, Miami Beach, in the context of Art Basel in Miami Beach, from 4 to 8 December 2019. “The Art of Listening: Under Water” installation was made in collaboration with Tony Myatt. It travelled to the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, from 3 to 13 February 2022 Commissioned by Audemars Piguet Contemporary Winderen’s practice focuses on sound and knowledge production. The artist seeks to raise awareness of the environmental issues we face as a society. Audemars Piguet Contemporary collaborated with Winderen on two new sound installations compositions. The first, “Du Petit Risoud aux Profondeurs du Lac de Joux”, was developed during two field trips to Le Brassus in the Vallée de Joux, at the heart of the Swiss Jura, where Audemars Piguet has been based since 1875. On these trips, Winderen captured sounds in the waters of the Lac de Joux and in the Risoud forest. When Audemars Piguet Contemporary invited the artist to present a second composition for exhibition in Miami Beach, Winderen proposed a site-specific sound environment. For “The Art of Listening: Under Water”, Winderen used sounds recorded in the Atlantic Ocean in the Miami area, as well as sounds from the Barents Sea around the North Pole and the Tropical Oceans to expose the constant underwater presence of human-created sound today. In both pieces, the artist offers a unique opportunity to listen closely to the underwater inhabitants of a specific region and to reflect on how human activity interacts and interferes with aquatic and also terrestrial life in a seemingly beautiful and visually calm environment. Jana Winderen often draws the fish, amphibians and plankton she meets. This release also consists of a drawing of two fish that probably would never meet; the pike from the freshwater Lac de Joux in the Jura Mountains and the snapper from the saltwater environment by Miami. About Audemars Piguet Contemporary Audemars Piguet Contemporary supports contemporary artists who wish to explore a new direction in their practice, providing them with a platform to evolve creatively through a commission. Audemars Piguet Contemporary’s team of in-house curators support the artist along each step of the commission, from inception to development to exhibition, giving artists the freedom to experiment and develop a work that might not have been otherwise possible. The resulting artworks belong to the artists and contribute to their body of work.

Tucked in the heart of Koreatown lies The Libra Hotel—the titular architecture of Nick Malkin’s new album and site of his musical and psychogeographic exploration. Unlike most musical “site-specific” studies, Malkin remains wholly ambivalent to the documentarian approach, instead sharpening an auteur-like focus on the site as a conceptual and highly expressive backdrop. The Libra is musically explored as a space that houses a noir fragmentation of identity—the exhausted trope of a complicated protagonist walking through rain-soaked street corners and fumy neon lights—where an inner monologue is rendered in both miniature and at a cosmic scale. Casting aside stifling tropes around field recording, ambient, and improvised music, Malkin’s work finds its own unique fidelity and emotional core through the assembly and reassembly of memory. Nearly every sound on the album—from frayed saxophones, lambent pianos, and dissected jazz drum kits—are multiplied, shattered, and reconstituted into shapes that adorn The Libra in a motion-blurred fog. The narrative of the Hotel suddenly appears as if out of the mist, with intersecting characters interacting within its walls by happenstance. Adminst the languid set pieces, wraith-like sonic grains gravitate around wide subbass beams that give structural form to The Libra, a narrative tension like when a scene is shot from hundreds of different perspectives: an image both luminous and veiled. Much like Sinatra’s own spatial residency immortalized on “Live at The Sands,” “At The Libra Hotel” showcases an exuberant view of entertainment, hospitality, and a form of masculinity, one that can quickly detourn into darkness. Knowing this, Malkin extracts a melancholic core out of The Libra locale. The flickering shadows of American decadence are shown in their ephemeral honesty, lines that trace how even in everyday life virtue is tested, sanity is tested, even reality is tested within the confines of desire, within the night. The album is draped in fleeting textures, carefully arranged with a trance-like microtonality, the faint inflections and articulations of a jazz band cascading into dissipated stillness. Voicemails about changed locations and covert eavesdropping on guests' whispered conversations provide an atmosphere of missed connection and voyeurism—a purloined letter of desire receding into a vanishing point. Like the music itself, The Hotel, a chapel perilous at the intersection of desolation row, the center of it all, yet simultaneously at the edge of town, becomes a structure between libidinous virtuality and actuality—our inevitable half-light. Ultimately, the pensive atmosphere of “At The Libra Hotel,” powerfully asserts a plea for the kinds of intimacy only possible in transient spaces. Here, memory cascades into a force that feels like something supernatural, perhaps even religious, yet always subject to the infidelity of our imagination. Here, the album opens into its primary psychodrama, the transient nature of subjectivity itself and how this becomes fractured in the tumult between our commitments and desires. Within this nocturnal space, to quote Louise Bourgeois, "you pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

Anenon returns with a highly anticipated new album ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’, bearing his most personal, expressive, and arresting works to date. Anenon is the ongoing solo studio and live project of Brian Allen Simon, whom since 2010 has released multiple albums and EPs to critical acclaim, including the highly revered ‘Tongue’ (2018) and ‘Petrol’ (2016). "I feel a kinetic and messy honesty that doesn't exist in any of the other music I've ever made. There is also a sense of being settled, of calm. There is no faking it here.” ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’ is direct, efficient, and unwavering in its immediacy. Anenon departs from the electronics of previous works, and embarks on a reductive, almost entirely acoustic approach consisting of piano, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, and field recordings. All of the music was improvised with everything recorded as either a first or second take with no edits. Any layering happened fast and in the moment, and yet the sonic architecture of the whole feels both planned and refined. The opener ‘Untitled Skies’ acts as prologue with flourishing solo tenor saxophone and sustained piano lines, before dampened footsteps and bird calls from field recordings echo — a scene is set. The album's undeniably emotive and nocturnal title track follows with sharp poignancy, inspired directly from an ongoing deep connection and dialogue to his LA surroundings. “I would take evening walks in my neighborhood, and I felt in awe of what I deemed an autumnal milky quality of light at dusk. This light felt like a seemingly unending flash, and was something that I wanted to evoke in the playing and meshing of instruments.” Simon shifts focus on ‘Maine Piano’, a beguiling solo piano piece ahead of ‘Night Painting I’, which features further breathy saxophone and bass clarinet counterpoints, embellished with immersive field recordings. Brian also confronts the subject of personal loss and anguish with a deep sincerity as a solemn through-line pervades the album's 11 tracks. Notes are eloquently delivered with grace and the message is one of hope with a palpable human quality. Non-diegetic field recordings were taken in Maine (USA), London (UK), and the Auvergne (FR), and reveal evocative and personal interactions as heard in the album's centre points. ‘As it is When it Appears’ glows with the ambience of French voices resounding an evening's interplay before a spaciously muted piano overtakes. The rained in ‘Champeix’ captivates with a seductive and wild romanticism, played out by its connective saxophone and piano layers, each gliding up and down their respective scales. Swirling bass clarinet lines vigorously pour out of ‘Night Painting II’, and ‘Endings (Solo)’ hits with a virtuosic, yet tender tenor saxophone take. The album closer ‘Sightless Eyes (N16)’ brings everything full circle — after an intro of 5 AM NE London birds singing, piano, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet coalesce in expressive tactilities; a sonic image of an intuitively robust and in the room harmony. The production of ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’ began in the autumn of 2022, and was recorded at home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, informed in part by an acoustic collaboration with the artist Susan Cianciolo during the vernissage of her 2022 Paris exhibition, RUN 14: FIELD of existence, as well as solo performances mostly at casual non-venues such as wine bars and inns around Europe that same year. It was the combination of these experiences that led Brian to pursue this immediate approach of improvised acoustic instrumentation. Moons Melt Milk Light is a hyper-personal statement contained in a visceral beauty, a compact record of threadbare honesty and musical prowess seldom found in the musical art form. It is a search for light out of dark, for the tangible and tactile, and yet like most art of staying power, the results remain ephemeral and elusive, a beauty just out of reach. “Loss has been a constant (in my life), and I wanted to express a deep acceptance of this, but also a pervasive feeling that these kinds of sadnesses are what beauty is derived from, that it doesn't come from perfection. I find the idea of perfect beauty completely banal. Tension matters.”

Enter Demi-Monde: A “half world” of botanical sounds and surreal impressions assembled as four tracks for Munjebel’s first release on Mesma Records. Oscillating between Ambient, Fourth world and Environmental Music, Demi-Monde is a peaceful yet captivating promenade into organic and percussive synth scapes — melancholic, escapist and contemplative. Munjebel is the joint project of Royer (Lobster Theremin, Closer) and Aurèle (Demi-Monde, Rinse, Cracki).

Koki Nakano’s new album, Oceanic Feeling, is a celebration of ambiguity. The album’s title is borrowed from an expression coined by the French writer and musician Romain Rolland in 1927. In a letter written to Sigmund Freud, Rolland described the oceanic feeling as “the sensation of eternity, a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole”. While this concept of oneness permeates Nakano’s whole album, the music also deals with his inability to fully live in this so-called "oceanic feeling", capturing thus the composer’s longing, frustration and ultimately search for harmony within his own limitations.

Originally issued by Crammed in 1987, this is one of the most sought-after releases in our legendary Made To Measure series. Known for his numerous albums, soundtracks, and collaborations with an impossibly broad array of artists (from Ryuichi Sakamoto and DJ Towa Tei to Van Dyke Parks, Björk, Manu Dibango and Elvin Jones), composer, saxophonist and producer Yasuaki Shimizu also released several electronic music productions during the '80s, which are currently generating a lot of interest (a.o. his recently reissued Mariah project).

"Music For Commercials" is a brilliant and inventive collection of short pieces, initially conceived as soundtracks for Japanese TV commercials (and bearing sweet titles such as “Seiko”, “Sharp”, “Honda” etc). These twenty-three tracks (each clocking in at two minutes or less, except one longer piece composed for a computer-animation short) abound with hit-and-run sound collages, twittering computers, and energetic ricocheting between myriad styles of music. This album has achieved near-mythical status in the last few years, which have seen artists such as Oneohtrix Point Never sing its praise.

Our fourth release comes in the form of a collection of rich, pulsating ambient/dub techno from Pan•American - the solo project of post-rock trio Ladbradford's front man Mark Nelson. Drawn to the incredible depth and texture of these tracks, we hope to shine a light on Mark's more exploratory electronic work, reminiscent of Jan Jelenik, Fennesz and Vladislav Delay. Through the Pan•American moniker, Mark has been able to embrace the possibilities of sampling and other musical technologies in order to exercise his interests in more remote genres like dub and techno. This collection comprises Mark's dreamiest, most sumptuous and blissed-out tracks taken from 3 obscure releases on labels traversing Zedelgem, Lon don and Portland - (K-RAA-K)³, Veritcal Form and BSI Records. Across these imprints, their output spans IDM, electronica, lo-fi, experimental dub and beyond and have been a music al home to the likes of Pub, Muslimguaze, and King Jammy and more. Mark's work sits at a confluence of these broad influences, shedding the sound of his post rock past for a more rhythmic, computer-based approach, which culminated in 2002's The River Made No Sound. As ever, the music is an emotional outpouring, progressing slowly through phases between stillness and movement, darkness and light. With a string of recent releases on Longform Editions and his long-term home Kranky, Mark continues to write and perform worldwide at festivals and prestigious venues such as London's Cafe Oto and Public Records in Brooklyn, NYC. The increasingly personal and reflect ive nature of his music has seen him come full circle to a more organic sound, as exempli fied by his latest LP, The Patience Fader.

Ship to Shore PhonoCo., in conjunction with Sony Music Entertainment, is proud to present Hirokazu Tanaka & Keiichi Suzuki’s original soundtrack to the 1994 Super Famicom classic MOTHER 2: ギーグの逆襲 (MOTHER 2: Gyiyg Strikes Back!). MOTHER 2, released as EarthBound in the West, is revered as one of the most offbeat and memorable RPGs. Citing influence from artists such as Brian Wilson, Frank Zappa and John Lennon, Suzuki and Tanaka created a diverse soundscape quite unlike anything that came before it. Remastered specifically for vinyl and released outside of Japan for the first time ever, MOTHER 2 is a must have for video game music and soundtrack fans.