MUSIC

The first new studio album from William Basinski since 2020's 'Lamentations'. "In the realm of past-life regression hypnotherapy, there is a concept known as “Life Between Lives,” wherein a sacred exchange of energy occurs between two souls in the spirt world, helping a spirit fully understand and forgive a being who hurt them in a past life. This exchange – called “passing the cup of sorrows” – became the unexpected inspiration for William Basinski’s first new album in six years. While sinking deeper into the daily abyss of our collective negativity bias, William Basinski stumbled upon a video describing the spiritual hypnotherapy exercise known as “passing the cup of sorrows.” Fixed on the glow of a screen that projected mounting anxiety and cynicism at a seemingly interminable pace, Basinski found the testimonials of this fascinating therapeutic practice to be profoundly moving. He sat at his piano, translating the transformation of those traumatic memories of past lives into cathartic tears of the present day. Channeling the quiet curiosity and asymmetrical patterns of pioneering 20th Century composer, Morton Feldman, Passing the Cup of Sorrows is a single 40-minute piece that employs a solitary piano and subtle electronics to truly haunting effect. It recalls fragments of traumatic memories and projects them as fractals in a slow-moving soft focus that’s as eerie as it is enlightened."

Ambient field recordings collected across the Western Sahel. Sounds of desert oases, late night radio broadcasts, village calls to prayer, and riverboats drifting down the Niger river. A nice companion piece to the musical work from the blog, this an hommage to the sounds that don't always find their way onto records.

First new album in nine years by a musical visionary and hugely influential figure in new music. Forty years since its creation, Jon Hassell's Fourth World aesthetic remains a powerful influence on modern electronic music. Continuing his lifelong exploration of the possibilities of recombination and musical gene-splicing, fragments of performance are sampled, looped, overdubbed and re-arranged into beguiling unexpected shapes. Hassell applies the painterly technique of ‘pentimento’ to the arrangements, teasing out texture by the overlaying of sound upon sound, or a carefully timed reveal of the delicate bones pinning the frame of a track together.

The release of this new album also sees the launch of Jon’s own label, Ndeya (pronounced “in-day-ya”), which will be a home for new work as well as well as selected archival releases, including re-presses of classic sides and some astonishing unreleased music.

Happy Today, the third album from guitarist/bandleader Jeff Parker’s long-running ETA IVtet, was recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025. This fresh entry into the IVtet’s catalog captures Parker and the band – including drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson – on record outside of the now-shuttered Highland Park micro-club ETA for the first time.

The performance also captures a distinctly joyful night of togetherness set against the backdrop of dark times. “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family,” Parker says. “Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.”

That joy and camaraderie found in communal space seems to be a major catalyst for the ETA IVtet’s music. The band’s audience is, somehow, an essential part of the formula. Case in point: the show at Lodge Room was actually meant to be the cherry on top of a weekend of studio sessions by the band. Those sessions were intended to be the next album released by the group, its first ever studio record. Upon listening back, though, it was clear to Parker that the Lodge Room performance was the recording that shined brightest and felt most true to the band’s spirit, harkening back to the weekly session the four musicians held at ETA for so many years.

ETA was undoubtedly more than just the namesake of the band. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, it’s where the language of the IVtet’s sound percolated and coalesced over the course of an almost mythical seven-year-long Monday night residency that yielded two critically-acclaimed records—2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy—and an instantly recognizable group sound.

Happy Today is that sound—the IVtet's signature syntax built around long-form, minimalist improvisation—expanding confidently into a larger space while creating the same hypnotizing, deeply-tuned listening effect on visibly enraptured audiences. The album contains two sidelong pieces recorded as the band performed in the round at Lodge Room, surrounded by an audience of 400 or so deep listeners. (The venue, appropriately enough, sits on the same street and just a few hundred feet away from the storefront that used to be ETA.)

The drastic change in venue size, and this document in general, is representative of an expanding demand to experience this band live that has been surging for years, starting with the release of their debut album Mondays. For the subsequent, final year that ETA was open, there would typically be a line down the block on Monday evenings, with far more people trying to catch the show than the club could hold. Even if you could get inside the building, given the limited capacity, the IVtet was a difficult band to actually see play. Couple that with the fact that before the closure of the club in December 2023, the IVtet had never played outside of Los Angeles. Access to the live experience had been extremely limited, and that has seemed to feed a sense of mystery and allure around the band’s music for the many fans of Mondays and The Way Out of Easy.

On paper, the IVtet’s growing audience is something of a conundrum. After all, minimal longform improvisation is likely the precise antithesis of streaming-centered content culture. Despite that, at the show that produced Happy Today, as with any IVtet show, the audience willingly settles into and accepts the band’s pace as they iron out a story which digs deeply into every facet of an idea before investigating a new one. Here the attention economy feels lightyears away, the crowd instead surrendering to that old and very human penchant for listening. With open ears, the crowd stands ready for a big yarn, a long tale, and from the jump there seems to be a trust between performer and audience that mimics the trust between the musicians as they move from detail to detail.

“The band isn't afraid to explore static spaces,” says Parker. “It seems like the thing is to stay on one idea for a while. Really, for a long time. To kind of exhaust it. And then one person shifts and then the thing moves together.”

“Everybody is constantly dropping crumbs and you can take them or you can leave them,” agrees Bellerose. “There are these little hints, these little moments, and everybody's aware of them.”

“When it is time to change, it can change very quickly,” says Butterss. “If someone suggests a new idea, it can flip in an instant. Everyone's constantly ready to go with it if the moment calls for it.”

“Like Swimwear,” the side-length opener of Happy Today, contains a quintessential example of this distinct IVtet move. The track gets off the ground slowly but deliberately, ramping up tension over the course of its first ten minutes without a moment of harmonic dissonance. The band, rather, steadily pulls at the corners of the rhythm. Here each member steps forward and backward in the sonic space to build a gleefully disorienting group cadence, where the repetitions of the individual overlap in such a trancelike way that even soloistic breaks from Parker’s electric guitar or Johnson’s effected alto sax never manage to snap the tension wire. Bellerose works deep into the rhythmic fascia, employing all manner of auxiliary percussion—strewn across his kit, tucked into his shoe, or wrapped around his legs—all without a hint of novelty. Every micro-choice comes from a place of both curiosity and confidence.

And then the shift: just as the thing is about to come unglued Bellerose opts into a smooth, low-register downbeat groove that Butterss has been auditioning for the previous minute or so. Parker swiftly kicks into an organ-like drone while Johnson and Butterss stay the course. It’s a series of decisions that could go any number of ways depending on the night, like running water pushing into fresh geography, moving from tributary to mainstream, past the levee and into the floodplain. There is no set path; if it went a different direction it would still be the cumulative result of the same water flowing.

That is to say that there are no hard and fast rules to what the IVtet does. Defining the music, in fact, is something that the band takes special care not to do. Living in that mystery, it seems, helps to keep the path open, cleared to push into new and satisfying territory.

“For me, the thing to protect is just where it started from, which was freedom and openness,” says Bellerose. “In the early days of the band Jeff was recognizing how we were all communicating within the structure of playing standards. He's one of the greatest producers I've ever worked with because he has this vision. And a big part of producing is casting—putting the right people in the room. So these shifts, they're completely natural within these improvised pieces that we do because the foundation was there and Jeff knew it. He had already noticed the communication within the band, but wanted to really push it further.”

The key to Parker’s push lies in the generosity to step back, to allow each member an equal voice, and to de-center himself. What we hear on Happy Today is an egalitarian group sound by design, curious and intuitive.

“Everybody's listening in a way where it's not always like ‘I'm going to go with you’,” says Johnson. “But it's always ‘I hear you’. And sometimes it's ‘I hear you and I'm going to stay here and allow the tension of these two things to exist for a while before maybe joining you.’ But the thing that's cool is that everybody’s hearing it. Because of the time that we've spent together there’s a maturity to the listening—a very special version of deep listening.”

“The number of times that we've talked about the music is so few compared to the years and years of playing,” Johnson continues. “I think that's one of the really beautiful things about the band—how organically the way that we play together has come about and evolved over time. Definitely on brand for the music that the band makes too. Slowly evolving, long form development.”

“I learned how to improvise in this band,” reveals Butterss, astonishingly. “I didn't really play improvised music before. So my whole approach to improvisation has been shaped by playing with Jeff, Jay, and Josh. It is a band and it has its own language. I think you could drop the needle on any of the recordings and people would be able to say ‘that's the quartet.’ It's very distinctive and it's developed very organically. We have never talked about it, I don't think.”

“That's our band,” says Parker of “Like Swimwear,” almost with an outsider’s sense of fascination at the recording. He seems to feel the same enchantment and surprise that the audience does while listening, despite being a primary part of the process. “That's it. I mean, that's what the ETA Quartet does.”

It’s a blessing for this band to be so expertly documented in its naturally public, live context. The two sidelong improvisations from Lodge Room that make up Happy Today, as with the recordings that made up the IVtet’s first two albums, are beautifully rendered by engineer Bryce Gonzales—recorded and mixed live, direct to a Nagra tape machine utilizing a compact outboard rig that he built himself, specifically to record this band. Much like the thumbprint originality coming from the players themselves, Gonzales’ capture of the music is its own signature, his mixes a form of sound improvisation themselves.

A major addition to this particular presentation is the full album length film by Charlie Weinmann, documenting the band's performance of Happy Today at Lodge Room, which will be released in tandem with the album. A shadow-laden, almost noirlike capture of the band in its full sprawling glory, Weinmann’s camera makes the joyful reality of seeing the IVtet at work widely accessible for the first time.

With Happy Today the reach of Parker’s IVtet extends further than ever before, but the essential formula, if there is one, remains the same. The anchor seems to be in variations on an almost alchemical communication—a feeling of connection between band members, sure, but also between the band and the audience. It’s an ongoing trust exercise, born organically in the corner of a small room in Los Angeles and flowing outward at exactly its own natural pace. It’s social music with a clear ability to move those willing to listen. Happy Today is an invitation to become part of the exchange and experience the joy of deep listening.

‘Hall of Life’ is an EP by the artist bambinodj. It’s his second release on OST. To quote bino, it’s “a sanctuary” — a zone of infinite sky and slow-drifting currents. It’s a place of outstretched hands and horizons without end, of long sighs and levitation. Not a getaway, but an invitation to rise above. It’s the sound of an artist in pursuit of a conduit to something both immediate and higher. The ambient balearia of opener ‘Deep Blue’ is instant immersion. It flings open the windows to a panoramic expanse, cinematic in scope and lush in texture. Five minutes of concentrated ego death; unbound, paradisiacal. A drumless reconstitution of a sound that’s unmistakably bino’s. It’s followed by the one-two kiss of ‘Drummyfeb’ and the Mikey Enwright-elevating ‘Seastar’, which transplant drums inspired by Afro-Caribbean and Latin rhythms onto tingling synths. ‘Spellfall’ plays host to artist Merely, marrying bursts of distortion to juddering beats, electrifying cascades of piano, and shredded guitar. Pure energy; unearthly light refracted on ocean. ‘Unfurling’ and ender ‘Windwoods’ ebb and flow between tension and a cautious optimism, shedding the strictures of the artist’s earlier ‘trancehall’ pigeonholing. It’s fitting — ‘Hall of Life’ is something unto itself, framing a world of its own —a world that rejects escapism and embraces connection. It all feels right.

2026年リプレス！ドイツ・ハンブルクを拠点にニューエイジ・リバイバルを牽引したBasso主宰の名門レーベル〈Growing Bin Records〉や、ギリシャ系ニューエイジを掘り起こした〈Into The Light〉などからのリリースや、アンビエント・ダンス・ユニットEarth TraxやPtakiなどの名義でも活動するポーランド・ワルシャワのバレアリック／アンビエント鬼才ことBartosz Kruczynskiによる最新ソロアルバム、今回も凄い才能＆内容！16年リリースの『Baltic Beat』が当店でも大ヒットを記録した人気アクトによる、4年振り最新アルバム！温かみのあるビブラフォン、張り詰めたアルペジオ、重なり合うストリングス、孤独なディレイチェーンなど、アンビエントの重なり合うスタイルに、常に独自のスピンを加えてきた名手による、安定のバレアリック／アンビエント作品！

Sa Pa explores the murkier edges of dub techno and deep house on Rhythm From Ambient, the second release on his Dub Techno For Life label.The title track rolls through heavy dub pressure and gravelly percussion, while ‘Rhythm’ reworks an industrial techno piece originally intended for Sa Pa’s 2015 MDR EP. ‘Last Dance’ stretches into deep house territory with a slow-burning, dubbed-out pulse, before ‘Bo Riddim’ closes things down with deep sub-bass, heavy drums, loose percussion and fragmented melodies. Another experimental outing from Sa Pa, moving between dub techno, house and stranger electronic terrain.

The landmark work from Steven Hitchell—better known for his Deepchord and Echospace projects—returns under his Intrusion alias. Originally released in 2008 and later expanded into a two-disc CD edition in 2014, this long-awaited reissue brings the second disc to vinyl for the very first time via echospace [detroit]. Evocative deep dub techno visions such as “A Night To Remember” and “Under The Ocean” sit alongside iconic pieces like “Tswana Dub (Phase90 Restructure)”—also featured on Deadbeat’s classic mix Radio Rothko—while overlooked gems “Love In Lofi” and “Never Forget” finally get their due. The set also includes the live recording “Kingston’s Burning Dub [Live in NYC]”, balancing archival significance with immersive sonic force. Remastered by none other than Stefan Betke, aka Pole, who lends even greater depth to its already profound resonance.

Over the past decade, Chaos In The CBD, the brotherly production duo of Louis and Ben Helliker-Hales, have captivated global audiences with their spectral, jazz-inflected deep house sound. With over 100 million streams worldwide, the New Zealand-born, London-based artists are set to release their highly anticipated debut album, A Deeper Life on May 9, 2025 via the label head’s very own In Dust We Trust imprint.

To celebrate the announcement, Chaos In The CBD have shared the atmospheric lead single ‘Love Language’, featuring fellow New Zealander Nathan Haines on Saxophone. It’s an undeniable standout moment on the album—moody, ethereal, and naturally soothing. Speaking on the track, Chaos In The CBD explains: “‘Love Language’ is a track that suits almost any setting, evoking the laid-back, easygoing rhythm of life in New Zealand. Perfect for a road trip to the beach or those magical moments at an after party when the sun reappears. Love Language feels like a reflection of the journey that brought it to life and we hope you enjoy it as much as we do.”

The 14 track LP marks a significant evolution in Chaos In The CBD’s artistic journey. Known for their signature sound epitomised by their breakout EP Midnight In Peckham on Rhythm Section, the duo’s debut album unites live instrumentation and vocal collaborations for the first time, fusing together key musical influences such as Ambient, Soulful house, R&B, Jazz & Balearic into a melting pot of an epic journey that will surely become a future classic. If Midnight In Peckham was the duo’s coming of age; then their debut album is Chaos In The CBD coming full circle. It features contributions from legendary figures such as Josh Milan of Blaze, Lee Pearson Jr., Stephanie Cooke and UK grime MC Novelist, among others.

Though they’ve been based in London for over a decade, Louis and Ben (aka Beans) have never stopped feeling at one with their homeland. A Deeper Life is nostalgic for their nature-filled youth, exploring the magical coastline and lush rainforest of New Zealand. “The title refers to our childhood, which was idyllic,” says Ben. “It was just the sun, the sand, the sea, waterfalls, birds and fish...” The result is an international dance sound that feels unmistakably like Chaos and ebbs and flows from the beach party to the club to the afterhours. “It’s laid-back but still driving at the same time; it’s club ready, but still deep,” Ben explains. It’s also distinctly Balearic: The brothers found a particular affinity with 90s Ibiza chillout music, being from such a “chill place” themselves. “In its own way, New Zealand is incredibly Balearic, but without the party side” says Ben.

The brothers hope that their debut evidences their deep appreciation of 90s house music, from David Morales’s Red Zone mixes and Kerri Chandler to DJ Sprinkles, Larry Heard and beyond. “We didn’t go to the school of hard knocks, we went to the school of Carl Cox,” they wrote in one of their typically hilarious posts on Instagram. But while they’ve built a meme-driven online personality for their social media accounts, their album shows a deeper side to them too. “We joke around but we want this album to be taken seriously,” says Louis. “It’s music from all around the globe, and there’s a deep meaning to how it flows and sticks together”.

For Chaos In The CBD, A Deeper Life is more than an album—it’s a celebration of their roots, their community, and their enduring bond as brothers. “This is a love letter to home and the feeling of being within nature,” says Louis. “It’s also an ode to a slower pace of life.” The album is an invitation to journey through their world: from the beaches of New Zealand to the heart of London’s dancefloors, and everywhere in between. A Deeper Life is set to be both a club-ready triumph and a reflective escape for listeners worldwide.

Multi-instrumentalist, producer & composer memotone (Will Yates) announces the release of his album Warm Shadows and a homecoming on Accidental Meetings. The record will arrive on May 15th and the album shows a glint of itself through the single ‘Round The Bend’ which features Jabu's guest. Warm Shadows sees Yates’ discography continuing to flourish and traverse into new territory once again, his ever-growing sound palette commands total attention throughout the LP, within the album sees delicate collaborations with Lithuanian artist Ugné Uma, Jabu’s guest and percussionist, Typesun. Memotone (Will Yates) is a learn-by-playing multi-instrumentalist and producer, working with minimal, ambient and contemporary classical music. Predominantly an improviser, recent years have seen memotone lean towards a more free-form approach, exploring jazz, drone and more meditative music, also showing a keen interest in sound design and textural experimentation. Will has released music with various labels over the years to critical acclaim, most notably; World of Echo, The Trilogy Tapes, Sähkö Recordings, Accidental Meetings, Patience/Impatience & Black Acre.

Takashi Kokubo, one of Japan’s leading ambient musicians and sound designers, is best known for creating sounds such as the Earthquake Early Warning alert and payment confirmation tones. From his “Aeon Series” released in the 1990s, the highly popular title *Wind Oasis II: A Tale of Forest and Water* is finally being reissued!

Reissue of Celer's 2008 masterpiece. Remastered by Stephan Matieu.

Mothers of All is Mark Gomes' second album as Blue Chemise for Students of Decay, following 2018’s acclaimed Daughters of Time. Though built from very different materials, it shares its predecessor's economy, sense of proportion, and fascination with the ways domestic life can open onto larger and less easily defined realms. Where Daughters of Time evoked tender, if alien, nursery songs, Mothers of All takes the form of spectral salon music heard at a temporal and geographic remove. These pieces feel fundamentally receptive, with Gomes allowing his chosen fragments to retain their own histories - both personal and aesthetic - while revealing unexpected tonal relationships through their idiosyncratic arrangement. The resulting music is at once deeply personal and strangely unmoored, a space where the intimate and the distant occupy the same plane. What lingers about this project as a whole is the paradox that the most private experiences can also be the least singular: that family, memory, and devotion become most legible at the point where they cease belonging to any one life.

French lifeguard and sonic artist Roméo Poirier’s long sold out debut tape finally gets a vinyl reissue. Plage Arrière is a deep sea meditation on a constellation of Greek beaches across three islands. Trumpets, echo-clicks and Harold Budd-esque shimmer piano whirl together on these sand-caked missives, tumbled and re-engineered by their surroundings like seaglass. Plage evokes the sub-aqeaous ambitions of Jürgen Müller, or Jan Jelinek inspecting a coral reef. The album has been remastered for vinyl by Sam Annand of Esk. Building on its original artwork, the vinyl edition features new photography by Roméo himself. Released alongside our friends SWIMS.

Andrew Chalk has spent more than 40 years crafting quietly influential ambient and experimental music, from the industrial edges of his early work to the delicate guitar, keyboard and collage pieces of recent years. Mystical Obscurant captures the breadth of that journey in a concise collection of new recordings. Gentle guitar meditations, hazy piano sketches, environmental sounds and subtle loops all feature, revealing a musical language built on patience, atmosphere and suggestion. Despite drawing on different phases of his career, every piece shares the same understated beauty, inviting listeners into slow-moving, deeply absorbing soundscapes.

Otto A. Totland and Erik Skodvin turn the contrast down even further on their fourth album, journeying through nuanced shades with electroacoustic atmospheres that dilate time. RIYL Angelo Badalamenti, Laurel Halo, Biosphere, Richard Skelton. With each subsequent album, Deaf Center have chipped away at some of their signature sound's decorative elements, getting closer to the emotional and stylistic core each time. Since the beginning, they've been inspired by low-lit, noir-esque atmospheres, but where their earliest material hinged around distinct, memorable themes, usually played by Totland on piano, they've evolved to emphasise the mood itself. Indeed, Totland's playing is more languid and measured than ever here, creating a tidal ebb that laps against Skodvin's measured strings and subtle synth tones rather than a fulcrum for each track to pivot around. The two part title track is maybe the best example of their arc; the first part is remarkably gauzy, with each instrument used as ambiance. Pianos shimmer into darkness and oscillators whirr and feed back in the distance as if they're being pulled away by a malfunctioning tape echo. By the long second part, though, we've been transported back to the 'Pale Ravine' era - the moody electroacoustic textures are all but gone and Skodvin has traded his synths for cello, playing in short, sharp strokes against Totland's assertive notes. But even this is fleeting, before the track has finished, its instrumentation is drowned by dissonance and distortion that prepares the palate for 'I Myst', a glitchy, cinematic highlight that'll appeal to fans of Ryuichi Sakamoto's collaborations with Alva Noto. Stick around and you'll hear the duo's first track with a guest musician, too. On 'Further', they invite Berlin-based British composer and producer Simon Goff, who's worked with Hildur Guðnadóttir and Jóhann Jóhansson, among others, to play violin and viola over their frozen soundscapes.

Faitiche presents Beispiel (German for example, also suggests playing together), a joint project by Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek. Muster is their first album. Free electronic music, the result of spontaneous improvisations. “Meaning” is a concept that is overused in connection with music. Muster does not call for the same kind of air quotes. With its title, German for patterns/exemplars, Beispiel’s album frees itself from the ballast of teleological semantics. There is no overarching theme, no preparation, no reading list, no reason for this music. Just two facts: Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek have known each other a long time and appreciate each other’s work; and they share a love of modular synthesizers and of experimental set-ups designed to capture surprise. Bretschneider and Jelinek got together for their first joint session in 2016 and the years that followed brought more such meetings at Jelinek’s studio for open-ended musical dialog – at irregular intervals and with no clear objective. The improvisations were recorded in two stereo tracks: one track for Bretschneider’s audio, one for Jelinek’s. After each session, the recordings were processed separately, the options essentially limited to cutting and altering the frequency range. The nine pieces for Muster were selected from the resulting material. This approach reflects an ideal: music is when you play your first note without knowing what the third or fourth will sound like. When your 290th note still sees you leaving the beaten track, and when curiosity grows as the piece unfolds. Duping is part of Beispiel’s practice. Improvisation is about disagreement. It’s a matter of addressing the right issues. What’s happening here? What’s mine, what’s yours? Are “why” and “where next” legitimate questions? Muster is an exemplary work. Nine suggestions for what can be. Nine ideas for possibilities of listening. Arno Raffeiner

Editions Mego welcomes KMRU back to the fold. Kin is Nairobi born, Berlin based, sonic wizard Joseph Kamaru’s second release on Editions Mego, following on from the classic 2020 release Peel. Since the release and subsequent praise for Peel, the artist has been a staple on the electronic scene performing on numerous stages and festivals worldwide in tandem with a flood of media recognition. Kin could be construed as the second child following Peel. The project came out of initial discussions with Peter Rehberg about what a Peel sequel would sound like. Kamaru is quick to clarify that Kin is not that record; “I'll know when that record will come and when I'll make it. It's already happening... or maybe it lives within both of these Mego records”.

It is this deft ambiguity and vague tiptoeing around the concrete that encapsulates the ambiguous sound world of Kamaru’s vision.

Kin was started early 2021 in Nairobi with Kamaru exploring his noisier palette of sounds encompassing distortions reminiscent of the sounds he would muster from in his youth when playing guitar. He paused making this record for a year as soon as Peter died, then slowly returned to it through 2022 resulting in the immense new work we have here.

The charms within Kin lay as Easter eggs revealing the true identity behind the colourful sonics only after multiple deep listens. With Trees Where We Can See sets the tone by way of a warm swaying melody inviting the listener in for further investigation. In 2022 KMRU and Mego stalwart Fennesz toured the USA together resulting in a strong friendship and also, the second track here, Blurred. A neat Mego/Editions Mego loop as such. Blurred arranges twangy guitar strums alongside glistening glaciers of shimmering drones. They Are Here represents a darker hue as melancholic clouds of shadowy noir tap directly into the listener's nerve stream. Maybe takes a detour into a bristling euphoric electronic storm whilst We Are screeches in a pattern formation not unlike a highly abstracted Aphex Twin forcing its way out of a hard drive. By Absence concludes proceedings, operating as both exit music and a portal to further sonic investigation with acoustic bellowing residing amongst a kaleidoscopic backdrop.

Kin is a trip that rewards close repeated listens as all the colours and textures, nuance and narratives unveil themselves. This isn’t a record to be glossed over, magic rewards concentration.

Kin is a record to be Played slow and LOUD.

For Pita.

Editions Mego welcomes KMRU back to the fold. Kin is Nairobi born, Berlin based, sonic wizard Joseph Kamaru’s second release on Editions Mego, following on from the classic 2020 release Peel. Since the release and subsequent praise for Peel, the artist has been a staple on the electronic scene performing on numerous stages and festivals worldwide in tandem with a flood of media recognition. Kin could be construed as the second child following Peel. The project came out of initial discussions with Peter Rehberg about what a Peel sequel would sound like. Kamaru is quick to clarify that Kin is not that record; “I'll know when that record will come and when I'll make it. It's already happening... or maybe it lives within both of these Mego records”.

It is this deft ambiguity and vague tiptoeing around the concrete that encapsulates the ambiguous sound world of Kamaru’s vision.

Kin was started early 2021 in Nairobi with Kamaru exploring his noisier palette of sounds encompassing distortions reminiscent of the sounds he would muster from in his youth when playing guitar. He paused making this record for a year as soon as Peter died, then slowly returned to it through 2022 resulting in the immense new work we have here.

The charms within Kin lay as Easter eggs revealing the true identity behind the colourful sonics only after multiple deep listens. With Trees Where We Can See sets the tone by way of a warm swaying melody inviting the listener in for further investigation. In 2022 KMRU and Mego stalwart Fennesz toured the USA together resulting in a strong friendship and also, the second track here, Blurred. A neat Mego/Editions Mego loop as such. Blurred arranges twangy guitar strums alongside glistening glaciers of shimmering drones. They Are Here represents a darker hue as melancholic clouds of shadowy noir tap directly into the listener's nerve stream. Maybe takes a detour into a bristling euphoric electronic storm whilst We Are screeches in a pattern formation not unlike a highly abstracted Aphex Twin forcing its way out of a hard drive. By Absence concludes proceedings, operating as both exit music and a portal to further sonic investigation with acoustic bellowing residing amongst a kaleidoscopic backdrop.

Kin is a trip that rewards close repeated listens as all the colours and textures, nuance and narratives unveil themselves. This isn’t a record to be glossed over, magic rewards concentration.

Kin is a record to be Played slow and LOUD.

For Pita.

KMRU is the moniker of Joseph Kamaru, a sound artist, and producer based in Nairobi. One of the leading exponents of the burgeoning experimental music scene in Nairobi and beyond he was listed by Resident Advisor as one of ’15 East African Artists You Need To Hear’ in 2018 and is a regular performer at the fabled Nyegenyege Festival having also presented live performances at CTM festival and Gamma Festival. Peel is KMRU’s first release for Editions Mego. exquisite mix of field recordings and electronics unravelling at a repetitive and leisurely pace to expose a rich tapestry of sound that has been revered for it’s ability to cross borders with the sheer undertow of emotional content. The subtle calming atmosphere within Peel belies the compositional prowess as layers of delicate sounds wrap around each other creating a hybrid new form ambient musics both captivating through it’s textural depth and kaleidoscopic patterns. The track titles lend themselves to the themes and mood set within: Why are you here, Well, Solace, Klang, Insubstantial and the title track. This is a deep heartfelt journey with a new strong voice being expressed through the means of organically presented electronic ambient sounds, one which reveals further layers on repeat listens.

Released in 2001, *Drawn From Life* is a rare ambient instrumental project by Brian Eno and J. Peter Schwalm.

On June 29th, 2023, Jeremiah Chiu walked into the Vintage Synthesizer Museum (VSM) in Highland Park, Los Angeles, with no plan more specific than “let’s fire this stuff up and see what happens.” Exploring the VSM’s vast collection of classic, rare and staple synthesizers, he would sequence, trigger, and layer the machines together with help from VSM founder/curator Lance Hill. Hill recalls: "Jeremiah arrived before the engineer showed up. We talked for maybe 5 minutes before he started programming a sound and sequence into the Gleeman Pentaphonic. By the time the engineer showed up, Jeremiah had built several other parts around the Gleeman that weren't synced by any control method but sounded like they were just calling and responding to each other. They plugged the Tascam 388 into the patch bay, and hit record. Jeremiah played with it, and that was it. First piece written and recorded in under an hour. It felt natural, fun and free. And that's pretty much how the rest of the session went. Constant ecstatic motion. It was the funnest non-HipHop session I've ever worked on." The resulting album – In Electric Time - was recorded in just two days, and edited to completion in the two days following. It was captured fully analog by engineer Ben Lumsdaine, who ​​contributes performances on a few tracks himself. Cooper Crain (of Bitchin Bajas) makes an appearance as well; but ultimately the collection is an intuitive expression of organic electronic music conceptualized and created in-context by Chiu alone, as he calls on a lifetime of work in sound synthesis to paint a fulgent, refreshingly undercut sequence of cinematic sketches and in-process themes. In some ways, In Electric Time reflects the directness of Raymond Scott’s electronic studio recordings — with sharp cuts and room chatter — and, in others, it conjures the in-the-moment magic of Harmonia. About the work, Chiu says: “The approach to the improvisations was to embrace the mixer setups at VSM — where a section of synthesizers are all routed to a single mixer/patchbay — and to start at one end of the studio and work our way around the six different sections. I began with the synths I was most familiar with — or had spent years researching — and was fairly certain I could reign in quickly. When working with vintage gear, there's always a sweet spot where the instrument sings in a unique way. This may be the idiosyncrasies of its filter and how it resonates, the action of the keys, the ability to trigger and use control voltage to sequence, or the unique onboard features. I love finding the moments where a melody or rhythm appears in an unexpected way — at times feeling more like archaeology than sculpture. I was quite improvisatory with the editing as well, often pulling bits from distinctly different sections in dialogue with each other, in order to maintain the raw, spontaneous feeling. I loved hearing moments in the recordings when Ben started or stopped tape, so a take that was running long and beyond its moment would hit directly against a fresh idea.”

Silly track titles that are mostly in-jokes with my little brother, a.k.a. DJ Denim. A cliché unfair record deal. A conspicuously missing title track. A pretentious looking poem in French about the stupidity of poets. A grid of pillows on the cover that the Japanese audience mistook for bags of heroin, resulting in myths about my being a heavy user. Super nineties Photoshop swirls. A graphic overlay of a UFO turning into an oyster shell that opens to reveal a mountain inside? Those are just a few of the embarrassing things I had to come to terms with when preparing this thirtieth anniversary restored and expanded edition of my first full-length album, Tranquilizer. Originally released in 1994 by the New York label Instinct Records, Tranquilizer is admittedly a bit of a shit-show. The album followed up on my 1993 self-released vinyl EP debut, Comatonse.000, featuring "Raw Through a Straw" on the A-side, and "Tranquilizer" on the B-side. I put out that EP mostly for the experience of pressing a record, with no expectation of people actually buying or listening to it. Lacking a distributor, I loaded up my backpack and lugged copies to all the local record shops, a few of which took some on consignment. As I later found out, most shops never pay for consignment sales, nor return unsold copies, so in the end I basically gave away most of them for free. Then, to my complete surprise, David Mancuso began regularly playing the A-side, transforming it into a Loft house classic. Equally surprising, the B-side caught the attention of ambient producers like Mixmaster Morris and Bill Laswell. Those random bits of buzz caught the attention of Tak Uchida, a US-based buyer for the Japanese vinyl distributor Cisco Music, which would remain the leading supporter of Comatonse Recordings vinyl releases until they went under in 2008. All of that was just enough hype to catch the attention of Instinct, which offered me a textbook fucked up two album record deal. Not wanting to be taken for a sucker, I came in for a contract negotiation meeting with my bona fide real McCoy idiot lawyer who didn't give me an ounce of good advice, the paperwork was signed, and Tranquilizer was underway to becoming a reality. Instinct's plan was simple: grab control of as many tracks as possible on the off chance I (or anyone else they signed) might be the next Moby, who was their cash cow. With typical music industry sleight of hand, the album's title track "Tranquilizer" was cut and released separately on a compilation, contractually requiring me to come up with additional tracks to fill the album. So that solves the mystery of the missing title track. The majority of tracks on this album were actually already done before signing with Instinct. I recorded them as a hobbyist between 1993 and 1994 using heavily edited Korg M1 and E-MU Vintage Keys synthesizers, and two Casio FZ-10M samplers. Despite the silly titles and hobbyist approach, there were social messages to be heard. Many of them stemmed from my longstanding interests in constructivism, industrial ambient records, disco, and queer subcultures. All of these put me at odds with the new age spiritualism and "zippy" techno-hippy raver hooey that dominated ambient music in the US. For example, the opening track "040468," which is the date of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, features a recording of the police radio during the chase and escape of his assailant James Earl Ray. Recorded at a time when King's "I Have a Dream" speech was still being dubbed over house anthems ad nauseam, it was an antithetical choice pointing away from dreams toward hideous reality. As one would expect, all of this was lost on music journalists who - assuming nothing could be more than a simplistic projection of the musician's ego - usually mistook the title for my birthday. "Fat Chair" is a critique of the colonialist fantasies latent in most ethno-ambient music of the time. Rather than taking the listener on a soothing armchair journey to a third world paradise, it focuses on a recording from the Nigerian-Biafran war during the late 1960s, in which a Western journalist's meddling gets a Biafran hostage killed. "A City on Springs" takes its title from a line in a constructivist manifesto calling for the prioritization of engineering over art. While I have never shared constructivism's optimistic faith in humanity's ability to achieve social equality, be it through communism or other means, it did inspire my career long criticism of the social and economic functions of art and music. And "Hovering Glows" features a monologue from a Hal Hartley film about scratched records as a metaphor for abusive family ties. I had planned on including a text on these themes in the original CD booklet to Tranquilizer, but Instinct quickly made it clear that wasn't going to happen. They feared it would alienate their audience. In response, I wrote the "anonymous" little poem against poetics above. Initially in English, I asked my friend/day-job-co-worker/Comatonse-Recordings-label-mate Erik Dahl to translate it into French so that the staff at Instinct would be less likely to understand it. In the end, they included it as a graphic element adding a bit of romantic flair. Still, it left me feeling dissatisfied. Two years later I managed to insert more meaningful imagery into the design of my second-and-last album for them, Soil, but I still was not allowed to include any text. In this thirtieth anniversary edition, disc one depicts the full-length album as I had initially intended it to be released, restored to include the title track, "Tranquilizer." Due to CD time constraints, this meant removing "Meditation of the Mountain Oyster." I also replaced the ending track "Fina•Departure" with its longer, original version. For the completists out there, the 1994 album versions of both tracks appear in their entirety on disc two. Additionally, the second disc includes a rare vinyl mix of "Hovering Glows," featured on Instinct's Untitled Ltd. Edition Ambient Double Vinyl Pack (US: Instinct Records, 1994, EX-291-1). Another rarity is "Get In and Drive," which found limited release through the compilations Muting the Noise (DE: Innervisions, 2008, IV CD02), and Comp x Comp (JP: Comatonse Recordings, 2019, CxC). "20min. Epoch," "Fina," "Fina•Departure (Original Long Version)," and "Hovering Glows (Little Guy Mix)" all get their first proper hi-fi physical release here, having been included as hidden MP3 bonus tracks in my Dead Stock Archive: Complete Collected Works (JP: Comatonse Recordings, 2009, C.018). Considering how few copies of the Archive exist, they are sure to be new to most peoples' ears. Last (and perhaps least?), "Pome" and "Day Off" are previously unreleased. Oh, in case you were wondering, Little Guy was the name of my cat. He loved sitting like a loaf in front of my speakers to feel the 808-style bass hits in "Hovering Glows." - Terre Thaemlitz, 2024

Lamin Fofana takes inspiration from Aimé Césaire’s 1950 poetry collection Corps Perdu, translating its ideas into exploratory electronic music built from processed melodies, fragmented rhythms and sound. Developed through reading and listening sessions in Paris, Barcelona, Tunis and New York, the album forms part of Fofana’s wider engagement with Black Studies and writers including W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant and Suzanne Césaire. Its ten pieces follow Césaire’s imagery of scattering, upheaval and metamorphosis, connecting literature, sound and performance.