MUSIC

Six Pianos is a minimalist piece for six pianos by the American composer Steve Reich. It was completed in March 1973. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ – again – emerged in the same year. The piece is scored for glockenspiels, marimbas, metallophone (vibraphone without resonator fans), women's voices and organ. The piece is in four sections, played without a break, marked off by changes in key and meter.

An unusual detour in the Robert Wyatt catalogue, Radio Experiment Rome was recorded in February 1981, when the ex-Soft Machine drummer had been invited to record some material in-progress for a radio broadcast. The tone of these sessions is characterised by a free-roaming experimentation, laying down eight-track recordings of vocals, piano, hi-hat, jaw harp and a variety of analogue tape effects. This is Wyatt unhinged and completely let loose from the agenda of proper album recording: there's no eye on a finished, commercially viable product here, and the scope of the project takes in jazzy soundscapes like 'Heathens Have No Souls', exquisitely melodic piano pieces like 'L'Albero Degli Zoccoli', vaudevillian vocal tuning experiment 'Billie's Bounce' and the politicised rant-poem 'Born Again Cretin', about the imprisonment of Nelson Mandela.

"I'm sitting in a different room than you are now. I'm recording my own voice. By the resonant frequency of the room strengthening itself, my voice is excluding only the rhythmic elements. Repeat recording and playback until completely destroyed. At that point what you hear is the very natural resonance frequency of the room expressed by my voice. I have this movement in my voice. I think of it as a way to smooth out band irregularities, and I'm not conscious of revealing this phenomenon itself. "

A repress of the classic "I'm Sitting in a Room (1969)" by contemporary musician Alvin Lucier (1931-), originally released in 1981.
By repeatedly recording and playing back the sound of voices echoing in a particular space until the voices become indistinct, the work explores the acoustical engineering of the space to reveal its specific frequencies. It is a work that can only be realized by actually being there, and although it can be perceived as a mere acoustic work just by listening to the recorded sound source, its original purpose is a groundbreaking content that allows the listener to embody a vast and infinite space.

1980 super masterpiece. A work released in 1972, in which a wire with a length of 15 meters was pasted, huge magnets were installed at both ends, and the vibration relationship between air and wire was emitted by an oscillator. This CD contains four tracks of about 18 minutes, but it seems that it was actually an installation for 72 hours in a row. A meditative ecstatic continuous sound that changes depending on the ceiling of the place, the flow of air, the comings and goings of people, etc.

An Obscure Sound Documentary from Sado Island — A Compilation Capturing the Present Through 10 Artists Living Within Its Environment

Sado Island, located in the Sea of Japan, is a place where ancient traditions continue to thrive amidst rich natural landscapes. Noh stages still remain across local villages, and practices such as Noh theater and Ondeko drumming are woven into the daily lives of its residents. Surrounded by sea and mountains, the island offers a unique cultural and environmental context for contemporary creativity to emerge. This compilation album, produced in 2025, serves as a sonic documentary capturing the music and people of Sado as they exist today. While rooted in the island’s deep cultural heritage, the album also presents a fresh wave of expression and imagination, offering new perspectives shaped by place, tradition, and personal vision. The album features ten creative units, each contributing original works that reflect the atmosphere and rhythms of life on the island. Included are solo pieces by Yuta Sumiyoshi and Masayasu Maeda, both key members of Kodo—the internationally acclaimed taiko performing arts ensemble known for transcending tradition through innovation. Sadrum brings a raw, organic groove through the use of handmade bamboo drums, crafted from moso bamboo that grows naturally on Sado. Composer Nozomu Sato presents his project Plantar, which showcases a wide-ranging musical language from pop to the avant-garde. Gilles Stassart, a chef and artist who runs the Sado-based restaurant La Pagode, explores the fusion of gastronomy and art in his contribution. Charles Munka, a comtemporary artist recognized for turning scribbled notes from around the world into abstract artworks, offers an ambient mix inspired by the spirit of Noh. Contemporary artist Morito Yoshida, a central figure in the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, contributes a piece reflecting his pioneering vision across art and community. Kota Aoki, known for his experimental paintings and sound works, adds a composition grounded in a personal and deeply aesthetic approach. Miyuki Fukunishi, active in music since the 1990s, explores new possibilities in composition through laptop-based production techniques. The album also features The Fugu Plan?, a collaborative unit led by ukulele player Yuka and bassist Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, whose work is widely recognized through his association with John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Their piece brings a cross-cultural resonance that connects Sado to a broader global soundscape. Beyond the music, the project is also deeply rooted in the island. The album cover features NAMI (“wave”), a photograph by Syoin Kajii—a Sado-based photographer and Buddhist monk—capturing the living rhythm of the sea. The liner notes are written by Noi Sawaragi, an influential art critic and advisor to the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, adding critical depth to the project’s cultural context. A work that captures the very essence of Sado’s present—every element of the album has been created by individuals uniquely connected to the island.

Jeux d’eau is the result of an exploratory collaboration between the experimental ensemble Copenhagen Clarinet Choir and Danish composer and performer Anders Lauge Meldgaard. At the heart of the project is Meldgaard’s compositions and performance on New Ondomo—a Japanese instrument modeled on the pioneering French electronic instrument, the ondes Martenot, but what makes the music truly shine is the Copenhagen Clarinet Choir’s vibrant energy and adventurous spirit, bringing Meldgaard’s vision off the page and into a living, breathing soundscape through their playful and imaginative ensemble performance.

The initial spark for Jeux d’eau was struck during Meldgaard’s visit to the gardens of Villa d’Este in Tivoli, Italy—a place animated by fountains that once inspired Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel to compose piano works of the same title. Echoing these earlier musical impressions, the project channels that lineage into a new sonic journey. Where some composers of the past often sought to define strict structures, Meldgaard’s work on Jeux d’eau instead offers an open framework—one that invites playful interaction and improvisation among the musicians. Recorded at The Village in Copenhagen, the album is a sonic experience where the organic resonance of the clarinet choir intertwines with the unpredictable textures of the New Ondomo and electronic landscape.

The work Jeux d’eau is open yet structured, forward-moving yet richly repetitive, drawing clear inspiration from American minimalists such as Terry Riley and Steve Reich, but rather than simply echoing the work of these pioneers, the music explores fresh terrain infused with a lyrical touch of late-romantic European sensibility, where flowing melodies and rich harmonies soften the rigor of repetition. At the same time, the music resonates with the clarity and delicacy that could be associated with Japanese composers such as Jo Kondo or Sueko Nagayo. The result is a sound world that is playful yet profound, one that continually shifts between pulsating momentum and delicate stillness. With each piece, the ensemble invites listeners into a captivating journey where tradition meets experiment, and where collective performance transforms composition into something vividly alive.

Conceived as a tribute to water and a reflection on the fragile bond between humans and the natural world, Jeux d’eau is both a sonic meditation and a quiet call to action. Through fluid forms and open notations, the work draws listeners into a space where music mirrors the dynamics of nature—demanding real-time awareness, collective sensitivity, and respect for balance. Like flowing water, the music adapts and transforms, reminding us that our environment, too, is ever-changing and in need of care. In this way, Jeux d’eau does more than celebrate nature’s beauty: it asks us to recognize our responsibility to protect the living systems that sustain us, and to pay caring attention to the world we live in.

Holiday resort entertainer Tooper Keps takes a break from entertaining the professional leisure class, and reflects their own world back at them with an EP of otherworldly synths and eerie carnivalesque chansons.

Tooper Keps has fired up his trusty Yamaha PSR-11 and PSS-360 to write his first (and probably last) EP, condensing his favourite chord changes from years of distracting the retired and affluent. The result is a collection of floating song structures that revolve like fairground waltzes, punctuated by modulated effects, cowbells and Tooper’s own bitter tenor. Tapping into his inner goblin, he tackles themes such as property (as theft), Drexler’s gray goo problem, and the ‘merits’ of complaining about a system while also benefiting from it - a typical parasite’s paradox.

“1000 Guest Rooms” finds itself on location in luxury homes, cruise ships and holiday resorts, soaked in Tooper’s own self-loathing while casting a critical eye over the state of the world. While we hurtle towards a future that no one wants, “1000 Guest Rooms” is perhaps the best soundtrack we could hope for.

Art Into Life released a 5CD Anne Gillis archival box in 2015, and to celebrate its 10th anniversary we have created a second edition with newly redesigned packaging. This new edition is limited to 300 copies and comes in a black box featuring a photo from her 1994 installation, Tultim, and an accompanying portrait card.

French artist Manon Anne Gillis began creating everyday yet theatrical sound works and performances in the early 1980s. This is the first archival collection of her work, covering her earliest pieces from 1983 under the name Devil’s Picnic up to her installation and exhibition recordings from 2005. This five-CD box set includes all the LP and CD albums released on (CRI)2, DMA2, and Rangehen; her only collaboration with another artist—a 7-inch single with her close associate G.X. Jupitter-Larsen; her compilation contributions up to 1999 (excluding a few whose original masters have been lost); and eleven previously unreleased pieces appearing here for the first time. A dense compilation filled with the imagery of beautiful isolation.

All tracks newly remastered by Colin Potter in 2015. Boxset including disk sleeves with the original artwork and a 20-page booklet.

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

Manon Anne Gillis has been creating music using primitive systems since the 1980s. Her ninth solo album weaves together her voice, breathing, words and sounds using ingenuous methodologies. She has remarked that her sound is not something conceptual and that feeling and immersion matter far more to her than understanding. Her latest collection consists of ten pieces that approach sound as a tactile, sensory experience. She transforms spoken word and singing into blurred noise and irregular repetitions, plunging them into rhythm tracks to create new inner worlds.

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s.

In 1992, the museum mounted a John Cage Memorial exhibition, and this release showcases Hirose’s work on the overall exhibition design and the creation of the sounds that were played in the museum during the exhibition, through a re-edit and reissue of the sound materials.

The sound materials that Hirose created for the exhibition environment were only ever distributed on CDr to members of the curatorial team so this is their first formal release. Hirose’s work for the exhibition was radical in its use of musique concrète and collages of noise and everyday sounds, and in his homage to Cage’s methods, these pieces represent a distinct departure from his normal approach at the time.

The A4 booklet includes texts about the exhibition by members of the team, Hirose’s own description of the pieces, and photographs of the exhibition. (Text in Japanese and English).

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s.

In 1992, the museum mounted a John Cage Memorial exhibition, and this release showcases Hirose’s work on the overall exhibition design and the creation of the sounds that were played in the museum during the exhibition, through a re-edit and reissue of the sound materials.

The sound materials that Hirose created for the exhibition environment were only ever distributed on CDr to members of the curatorial team so this is their first formal release. Hirose’s work for the exhibition was radical in its use of musique concrète and collages of noise and everyday sounds, and in his homage to Cage’s methods, these pieces represent a distinct departure from his normal approach at the time.

The A4 booklet includes texts about the exhibition by members of the team, Hirose’s own description of the pieces, and photographs of the exhibition. (Text in Japanese and English).

In 1973, the Sound Sculpture Show took place at the Vancouver Art Gallery. An LP audio catalogue (with a booklet) of the exhibition, entitled “The Sounds of Sound Sculpture”, was released in 1975 under the supervision of the Canadian sound sculptor John Grayson and US composer David Rosenboom. Grayson had edited an important early book on the field, “Sound Sculpture”. The LP included rare takes of Rosenboom and Grayson, amongst others, playing famous pieces by pioneering sound sculptors including the Baschet brothers and Harry Bertoia, the latter best known for his Sonambient series. It also included some of the few recordings by Stephan Von Huene, who had begun to create his kinetic sculptures, and the profound atmospheric pressure systems constructed by the New York sound artist David Jacobs. The LP comes complete with a booklet of visually arresting photos and other materials about these historic sound sculptures.

A Day of the Sun is a spiritual jazz masterpiece full of poetry by two geniuses of the Japanese musical scene. Masahiko Togashi and Isao Suzuki, pivotal figures in jazz with a unique talent and sensitivity that transcends conventional jazz forms and styles. In addition to being skilled performers they demonstrate extraordinary compositional talent that transcends their sensibilities and wisdom of more conventional jazz. They are together a wonderful combination of techniques, but without the eyes and ears of these two artists, the mutual understanding, friendship and cooperation that only certain artists are able to recreate together, would never have given rise to this music. The album is based on Togashi's drums/percussion and Suzuki's bass, with occasional changes to cello and piano/synths, and is skillfully performed by just the two of them, creating a unique worldview; a performance that far exceeds expectations. The mystical melodies of the East, earthy percussion, and the sensibilities of the two intertwine to create a unique groove, resulting in a universal masterpiece that will never fade away and connects with today's sound makers and DJs. Top sound quality from original master tapes. Includes 4-sided insert with a very interesting interview at the time with the two musicians regarding the record.

Recorded in a live setting and played with instruments conserved in the collections of the MEG Museum, Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter is Midori Takada’s very own rendition of "Nhemamusasa", a traditional work emblematic of the musical repertoire for mbira of the Shona of Zimbabwe, well known worldwide, thanks notably to its version by Paul F. Berliner included on the famed 1973 album The Soul of Mbira.

The choice of this title by Midori Takada evokes the links between traditional African and contemporary music which are the foundation of this work, and it also translates the resolutely multicultural vision of the artist.

Midori Takada explains: "African music is remarkable for its polyrhythms. Not only are there simultaneously several rhythmic motifs, sometimes as many as ten, but furthermore it may be that the part played by each musician has its own starting point and its own pace, all combining to form a cycle. All the cycles progress at the same time according to a single metrical structure which functions as a reference point, but which is not played by any one person from beginning to end. The structure emerges out of the multi-level parts, all different. With the Shona, the musical system is based on the polymelody: one performs simultaneously several melodic lines which are superimposed, each having its own rhythmic organization. It is truly captivating. In Western classical music, one four-beat rhythm induces some precise temporal framework and regular reference points, which come on the strong beats 1 and 3. But in the logic of the Shona musical system, and in other African music, the melody can begin in the very middle of the cycle and be continued up to some other place in an autonomous manner, as if it had its own personality. It’s very rich."

The album comes with in-depth liner notes that include an interview with Midori Takada, a point of view by Zimbabwean scholar, musician and activist Forward Mazuruse, and background information on the project by Isabel Garcia Gomez and Madeleine Leclair from MEG Museum.

The sleeve features an artwork by celebrated Zimbabwean painter Portia Zvavahera.

Part of the budget for the album was donated to Forward Mazuruse’s Music For Development Foundation whose aim is to identify, nurture, and record young but underprivileged musicians in Zimbabwe.

The self-titled debut album from Portuguese experimental sound unit Amuleto Apotropaico arrives on vinyl via the PERF label. The duo of percussionist António Feiteira and synth player Francisco Oliveira collect and rework two years of concert recordings into four pieces. Skittering live drum strikes intertwine with layers of cello and modular synth textures, creating an aural experience that blurs the lines between musique concrète and jazz. Balancing openness to experimentation with an organic sense of sound, the record conjures depth and immediacy alike—an album perfectly suited for the fringes of urban noise or those late-night hours when perception begins to dissolve.

Release 20/1/2023. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece by composer Kali Malone featuring Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns. Malone’s experience with pipe organ tuning, harmonic theory, and long durational composition provide prominent points of departure for this work. Her nuanced minimalism unfolds an astonishing depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener’s attention. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy follows Malone’s critically acclaimed records The Sacrificial Code [Ideal Recordings, 2019] & Living Torch [Portraits GRM, 2022]. Her collaborative approach expands from her previous work to closely include the musicians Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton in the creation and development of the piece. While the music is distinctly Malone’s sonic palette, she composed specifically for the unique styles and techniques of O’Malley & Railton, presenting a framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement throughout the music. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is a durational experience of variable length that follows slowly evolving harmony and timbre between cello, sine waves, and electric guitar. As a listener, the transition between these junctures can be difficult to pinpoint. There’s obscurity and unity in the instrumentation and identities of the players; the electric guitar's saturation timbre blends with the cello's rich periodicity, while shifting overtone feedback develops interference patterns against the precise sine waves. The gradual yet ever-occurring changes in harmony challenge the listener’s perception of stasis and movement. The moment you grasp the music, a slight shift in perspective guides your attention forward into a new and unfolding harmonic experience. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy was created between March and May of 2020. During this unsettling period of the pandemic, Malone found herself in Berlin with a great deal of time and conceptual space to consider new compositional methods. With a few interns left on-site, Malone was invited to the Berlin Funkhaus & MONOM to develop and record new music within the empty concert halls. She took this opportunity to form a small ensemble with her close friends and collaborators Lucy Railton & Stephen O’Malley to explore these new structural ideas within those various acoustic spaces. Hence, the foundation was laid for Does Spring Hide Its Joy. 

In Kali’s own words: “Like most of the world, my perception of time went through a significant transformation during the pandemic confinements of spring 2020. Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight. Time stood still until subtle shifts in the environment suggested there had been a passing. Memories blurred non-sequentially, the fabric of reality deteriorated, unforeseen kinships formed and disappeared, and all the while, the seasons changed and moved on without the ones we lost. Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.” 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy has since been performed live on many European stages, in durations of sixty and ninety minutes. Including at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, the Bozar in Brussels, Haus Der Kunst in Munich, and the Munch Museum in Oslo. Concerts are forthcoming at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Mira Festival in Barcelona, the Venice Biennale, and the Purcell Room at the Southbank Center in London. 

In addition to live concerts, the Funkhaus recordings of Does Spring Hide Its Joy have evolved in parallel as a site-specific sound installation. Malone has also invited the video artist Nika Milano to create a custom analog video work that interprets and accompanies the musical score as a fourth player, creating a visual atmosphere inspired by the sonic principles of the composition. Eight sequential video stills from Milano’s work are featured in the album artwork. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is packaged in a heavyweight laminated jacket with full-color printed inner sleeves with artwork by Nika Milano. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Mastering, the record is pressed in perfect sound quality by Optimal in Germany. 

Divine Comedy stands as a magnum opus crafted by two of the foremost composers of their era, boasting a musical ambition akin to Dante’s poem and its visual interpretation by Sandro Botticelli or Gustave Doré. For a long time, this triptych was presented as a two-sided work in which Bernard Parmegiani’s Hell and François Bayle’s Purgatory responded to and extended each other, guided by Michel Hermon’s voice through the listener’s imagination. Because Paradise, a mixed piece co-composed and performed live, had never been released on record before. Indeed, fifty years after its premiere, Paradise is unveiled to our ears, thereby rounding off the very first complete edition of the Divine Comedy.

Carl Stone continues his late career prolific renaissance with a new album of sculpted, tuneful MAX/MSP fantasias. Stone “plays” his source material the way Terry Riley’s In C “plays” an ensemble – with a loose, freewheeling charm connected to the ancient human impulse to make sound, melody, and rhythm from anything. Stone’s unique technique simultaneously focuses and sprays sound like a symphony of uncapped fire hydrants. Is this techno, avant-garde, sound art? It’s simply (or rather fantastically messily) Carl Stone.

Jessica EKOMANE « Manifolds » Entirely computer-generated, Manifolds is a work that explores the multiple possibilities of polyphonic writing, extending it to the “multiphonic” universe where sources and timbres diffract themselves in the listening space. The different voices of the composition no longer follow the traditional parallel trajectories of musical dialogue, but find themselves propelled as if into a particle accelerator, a “collider” freed from all formal rhetoric to reach a state of liberation of energies that is truly confounding. It is then that, in the multi-layered universe of sonic electrons, as if against its own will, a “chant” of overwhelming humanity is revealed. Laurel HALO « Octavia » (2022) Octavia, a piece for piano and electronics, explores the relationship between melodic motifs and textures in a singular way, intermittent moments of melody, harmony and sound materials connecting and disconnecting, to indicate a series of nets or webs, swaying in and out of one another. These sonic nets gently float, spin and merge, and the effect is one of gently floating over an abyss. The work is inspired by the “spiderweb city” of the same name in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: “Below there is nothing for hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; further down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed….Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.” — François J. Bonnet, 2023

The long-awaited LP reissue of the insane masterpiece "My Hometown is Far Away Like a Story," which was produced by poet Taeko Tomioka and the young Ryuichi Sakamoto, and made a name for itself in music history! The cover by Nobuyoshi Araki, also known as Araki, is a must-have!

The poet Tomioka Taeko's insane masterpiece "Monogatarinoyouni Furusatohatoi" (originally released on CD by Victor in 1977 and P-Vine in 2005) is finally coming to light on a limited edition analog LP! It's too avant-garde and fantastical to be called psychedelic. A masterpiece of insanity that will drive the vestibular canals of all who listen to it crazy!
The music was produced by a young Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the cover was photographed by Nobuyoshi Araki, also known as Araki.

Interstitial Spaces is Martin Brandlmayr’s debut release on Faitiche. In this award-winning radio collage, the well-known drummer and composer (Radian, Polwechsel) explores the quiet moments in music and film recordings.

The last notes of a piece of music fade out in the space. The pianist and the violinist remain frozen in place, holding their breath. The sound engineer sits silently at the desk. Once he has switched off his tape machine, the dull drone of a ship’s horn is heard in the distance. Otherwise, not a sound. Or was there something else hidden in the white noise?

Interstitial Spaces is based on short excerpts from music recordings, films, TV adverts and field recordings. Brandlmayr takes these quiet scenes, intervals in which nothing seems to happen, and brings them into the foreground, subjecting them to a microscopic spotlight. Moments in which one hears only the space itself, or the subtle presence of someone in the space: faint breathing, footsteps and the soft creak of a chair. We also hear preparations for an orchestra rehearsal: the musicians are all busy tuning their instruments, talking to each other, the concert has not yet begun.

This leads to a shift in perception: incidental details hidden in the hubbub of voices or in the silence suddenly take on a leading role. In the empty spaces, we discover various shades of noise, sharpening our awareness of sonic peculiarities. In a gentle rhythm, Brandlmayr’s radio collage offers a sequence of strange, not immediately identifiable sounds that are woven in the second part into a dense structure. At the end, the carefully captured sounds are released back into the empty space. Interstitial Spaces is a bold spectacle that celebrates the eventful uneventfulness.

Japanese bamboo flute maestro and goat (JP) cohort Rai Tateishi makes an impressive debut statement with his holistic attempts to transcend the limits of ancient instruments to reveal gently delirious insights comparable with Jon Hassell, Phew, Bendik Giske, FUJI|||||||||||TA.

‘Presence’ is a triumph of improvised, elemental musicality that distills aspects of myriad folk traditions in pursuit of the artist’s own truth. For 40 minutes of singularly weird, locked-in performance, Rai Tateishi diverges his formative training in the shinobue (a bamboo flute) to applications for its elder sibling, the shakuhachi, and its distant relatives in the khene mouth organ of Northeastern Thailand and Laos, and even the Irish flute, with remarkable results returned from each.

Piece to piece, Tateishi adapts a spectra of unusual and extended instrumental experiments to articulate uniquely animist sound arrangements, with judicious use of a ring modulator and delay effects only subtly altering his sound in real-time, gelling the harmonics and smoothing off its contours. Some 15 years of studies and accreted knowledge of histories, timelines, and spirits are deftly tattered in the air and rebound in precisely complex ribbons that become all the more impressive by virtue of its in-the-moment recording.

Presented with no overdubs, the six works were recorded by label head and KAKUHAN/goat lynchpin Koshiro Hino across three days of adventurous improvisation capturing the breadth of Tateishi’s vision in a mix of succinct flights of fancy and one durational wonder where he really cuts loose. An opening piece of rapid percussive fingering and rasping sets the tone for increasingly intricate explorations of the shinobue, and bluesy cadence of a reedy Thai khene - antecedent of the shō - whipped into headier harmonic overtones, whilst his 5th piece for Irish flute best recalls Ka Baird or Michael O’Shea’s lysergic impishness, and a 13 minute closing piece most boldly fucks with folk and jazz traditions, in-depth and with the genre short-circuiting audacity of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Landing in the wake of prism-shaking works by Will Guthrie & Mark Fell, goat (jp) and Kakuhan; Tateishi’s ‘Presence’ more than lives up to NAKID’s impressive levels, unflinchingly operating by its wits with a verve and dare-to-differ moxie that gets at it from the first hit to the last, harnessing the kind of skill and ingenuity that’s distinctive but still strikingly minimal and overwhelmingly physical. It's a remarkable achievement.

Featuring Xavier Charles, Angharad Davies and more, this long-unheard score by drone master and guru of Tibetan-electronic synthesis Eliane Radigue (1932–) finally resurfaces after six decades. Written in 1963–64 and produced by Rhodri Davies, the work received its long-awaited premiere at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2023. Based on graphic notation derived from the Fibonacci sequence, the score is interpreted by strings, winds, harp, and guitar, summoning Radigue’s signature deep drones without the use of electronics. Layers of sound unfurl with subtle fluctuations and spiral resonances, offering an experience at once hushed and cosmic in scope. A prophetic precursor to her later Occam series, and an elemental masterpiece that awakens a prayer-like focus at the very source of Radigue’s art.