MUSIC

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

Balmat began our journey in 2021 with the release of Luke Sanger’s Languid Gongue. Now, three years later, we turn an important corner as the Norfolk musician rejoins us with Dew Point Harmonics, the first repeat appearance on the label. Sanger’s new album feels like a natural extension of his inaugural record for Balmat: It’s a bewitching collection of esoteric synth sketches that slips unpredictably between consonant repetition, poignant melodies, and gnarled bursts of noise that catch in the ear like burrs in hiking socks. That natural metaphor is perhaps not accidental. Despite having been composed on Sanger’s diverse array of hardware and self-written software, many of the tracks were first conceived while Sanger was hiking in a particularly wild and isolated section of the Norfolk coast. The field recording that opens the album, on “6am Beach Walk,” was taken on one of his many early-morning walks there, in which he and his dog might go for miles without seeing another soul. The album’s title was inspired by the overnight condensation covering the long marram grass in the dunes, glistening in the early light (and drenching everything coming in contact with it) before evaporating in the morning sun. Indeed, the concept of dew point—the temperature at which water vapor condenses into a liquid—feels like the perfect metaphor for Sanger’s music, in which foggy ambience is distilled into glistening quicksilver orbs, transient spheres of perfection eventually absorbed back into the atmosphere. A shapeshifting collection of richly detailed and deeply expressive electronic miniatures, Dew Point Harmonics is both a testament to the mysteries of transformation and an invitation to get lost in the wilderness of your own imagination.

Glory Fades is a song book written using a common collaborative musical language developed by Yair Elazar Glotman and Mats Erlandsson, building intimate musical spaces, primarily focused on acoustic instrumentation with electronic counterparts contributing light and shade. Throughout the eight songs on the record, each piece unfolds according to its own logic while simultaneously reflecting the overarching tonality of the song book as a whole. The music focuses on the topography outlined by a melodic and harmonic modal framework and the exploration of the negative space found in the decay and in between the notes. There is a tension in this music caused by a reduced and stark emotional expression on the surface and the complex structures hidden underneath, where the harmonic material shimmers and shifts, and tempo and time signature modulates imperceptibly. The instrumentation forms a non-traditional chamber ensemble consisting of plucked and bowed acoustic guitars, zithers, bells, double bass, violin and percussion with additional treatments through manipulated tape and reamplification techniques. Mats Erlandsson is part of the vibrantly re-emerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, and is associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound. Utilizing synthesized and recorded analog and digital sound, contaminated field-recordings and extensive tape processing his music slowly unfolds sets of precisely tuned harmonic material while textural properties of the imaginary rooms where the music takes form shifts, shimmers and moves from sparse and open to dense and claustrophobic. In addition to his own artistic practice, Erlandsson holds a position as studio technician at the world-renowned Elektronmusikstudion (EMS) in Stockholm and has frequently presented electroacoustic music and new music from Sweden in concert. Yair Elazar Glotman is a composer and a musician based in Berlin. Glotman trained in classical music as an orchestral contrabass player and in electroacoustic composition. His work for film as well as his independent musical releases are informed by both classical and electroacoustic traditions, and employs a range of improvisation, extended contrabass techniques, and a special interest in textural and spatial compositions and in combining analog and digital processing. His compositions for film began through his close work with the influential, late composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, writing additional music for Mandy (2018) and co-composing Last and First Men (2020). He also collaborated on two oscar-winning soundtracks (Joker and All Quiet on the Western Front). Glotman also regularly releases and performs his own music, which has been released on notable labels including Deutsche Grammophon, Bedroom Community and Subtext Recordings.

Japanese ambient woven with organic minimal sounds and field recordings.

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

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

boycalledcrow is the alias of Chester-based sound artist Carl M Knott (Wonderful Beasts, Spacelab). Knott, a former folk musician, uses his myriad acoustic influences to create unique, strange and beautiful compositions. We're excited to be able to bring you the latest wonderful album from Chester's boycalledcrow, after some superb releases for labels such as Mortality Tables, Waxing Crescent Records and Subexotic Records. Knott's music doesn't sit easily in any pre-existing genres, being at once strange and experimental, yet melodic and somehow comforting. His music is intimate and evocative, deeply personal, and manages to be both bucolic and yet totally 21st century, like Kraftwerk's robots dreaming of sheep. The songs and sounds on “eyetrees” are inspired by a rich family life and the wonderful times spent with his wife and kids, both at home and out in nature. Knott said of the album and its inspirations: “We enjoy spending time in the woods with our young children, creating stories about the "eye tree”. This tree, with thousands of eyes, watches over us and cares for us like family. We make fox medicine and cherish these blissful moments. The music reflects these times, seen through the colors of an old, fuzzy reel—orange, red, and yellow with blurred edges, like an old photo scorched by the sun. I feel a deep spiritual connection to the countryside; the hands of Arcadia cradle me when I feel sad. Some of the album was created during times of sadness when I felt death was close and the lines between worlds were blurred. This feeling—that anything can happen and that life is delicate and can be taken away in a flash—permeates the music. The song titles are stories and memories of my family, filled with hazy pinks, yellows, reds, and oranges. Wonky acoustic guitar, broken electronics, and a warm, otherworldly space."

Mark Templeton is a Canadian media artist and the founder of Graphical, an audiovisual label dedicated to publishing his own musical and image based experiments. Mark’s audio compositions are constructed from reel-to-reel tape loops and sampled cassettes that are contrasted with contemporary sound techniques. In his published photobooks, he incorporates his own 35mm pictures and found images, focusing on intangible fantasies and realities. During his audiovisual performances, he utilizes digital instruments while projecting his own photographs, VHS footage, Super 8 film, and other sampled video. 

Mark Templeton’s reinterpretation of outdated media as musical instruments makes him a compelling artist for the Faitiche label roster. For his debut on Faitiche, he browsed his old hard drives and invited Andrew Pekler to listen through and co-produce a selection of Mark’s unreleased works. The compositions act as a series of snapshots: a look back at a decade of archived sounds, re-envisioned and re-imaged for Faitiche.

 The album contains nine tracks that follow an AB song structure. Each piece begins with verse A, transitions into verse B, and then ends. This simple formula creates a dichotomy that is also present in Mark’s diptych photographs, featured in the artwork. Throughout the album, both juxtaposition and inherent connections are simultaneously at play. One way or another, Two Verses provides a beginner’s guide to Mark Templeton's highly idiosyncratic catalog.

Exploring late-night, after-hours meditations on sound; ‘Everything Above The Sky (Astral Travelling with Luke Una)’ is a new compilation by the titular DJ, promoter and enigmatic cultural curator. Off the back of the E Soul Cultura phenomena, this compilation comes at a timely point in Luke’s rich career as he soars the heights of playing all over the world. Avoiding any chance of his sound being pigeonholed, Luke has put together a tracklist of songs and music that have a transcendental feel, after coming off the grid, going back to source, outside the city walls . Music has long been believed to aid out of body experiences and many of us have searched long and hard for a combination of those elusive ingredients that might alleviate some of the monotony of everyday life, our daily routines and obligations, and those things that seem to block us from the spirit of the universe. In this collection, Luke selects music with all the right ingredients in just the right quantities, allowing the listener to engage in an esoteric journey of enlightenment through sound. Being a prolific collector of music, Luke initially delivered enough tracks to compile several compilations, making the licensing process the biggest effort to date for the label. The music moves softly and slowly, never becoming too intrusive, exemplifying the wonderful elevating properties of simple songs played from the heart. Luke’s Everything Above The Sky manifesto reads, “Astral Travelling in the meadowlands with acid folk, spiritual jazz, around midnight hocus pocus, cosmic psychedelic soul, magical spellbound whirling swirling love songs, Brazilian ballads of light into machine soul gospel utopia dreaming, Balearic bossa, Outer Space ancient African drum, the breath of trees, escaping the big bad modern world, gathering round winter fires, walking amongst the bracken in Padley Gorge in late summer twilight, overlooking the Hope Valley, escaping ego, detaching and finally letting go amongst the stars with the slowly floating people. It’s beautiful beyond. Everything above the Sky”. Beginning his career as an original Sheffield house young blood in the mid 1980s, Luke’s move to Manchester and partnership with Justin Crawford saw the birth of Electric Chair, a cornerstone cult night in the UK underground club scene. Then came Electric Elephant, a Croatian festival paying homage to their wild eclecticism from Balearic to Brazilian to É Soul, house, disco and techno. Luke’s much loved, long-running Homoelectric night and more recently Homobloc sell out festival for 10,000 souls has been at the forefront of Manchester’s LGBTQ+ cultural landscape. Luke’s Friday evening show on Worldwide FM captured imaginations and became a cult four-hour must-listen monthly journey for fans all over the world. Today, Luke remains, as ever, at the forefront of a changing milieu, pairing the momentous legacy of Manchester’s 80s and 90s scene with the delivery of what today’s club communities need to get down.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

On this LP you hear two kanteles built by the Master Luthier Rauno Nieminen. One of them is a copy of a historical instrument built by the folk poet Ontrei Malinen in 1833. It is carved from single piece of pine, and it has five bronze strings. The other one is carved from a single piece of spruce. Its lowest seven strings are bronze, and highest three strings are English iron. On most tracks the two kanteles are played simultaneously. For me, playing these instruments is searching for meaningful ways to interact with wooden objects from another time. By choosing a set of 5 to 15 frequencies and plucking them, I'm able to think, feel, and imagine more than I could without the instruments. the patterns that emerge from the vibrating strings give temporal shapes to thoughts. The music on this album is improvised. It was recorded at home after dark and outdoors in daylight during 2020-2022. No overdubs or edits were made afterwards. On the last track the kantele is accompanied by detritus gathered from the forest floor. Tuokioita translates to moments. This music is about coloring time. Dedicated to Mia, who also came up with the album title. - Olli Aarni

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

“Do you dream too?” Tomemitsu’s Martin Roark asks on his sophomore album with Friends of Friends Music out September 20, 2024. The question is also what stemmed from the album title, ‘Dream 2’, a shorthand written in the lyrics. ‘Dream 2’ is quite possibly Tomemitsu’s dreamiest LP, if not his most diverse. It is brimming with both new territory and nods to his past. This record reveals a more buoyant side to accompany his traditionally spaced out productions. Since his 2013 release of ‘m_o_d_e_s’, Tomemitsu has combined calm with chaos to create chilled out nuggets of pop containing an ear for ambience in odes to offbeat artists from genres of all sorts. “Creators like Thelonoius Monk, Joao Gilberto, Daniel Johnston, Brian Eno, Bill Withers, Arthur Russell… they were all immediately inspiring to me. I think I’ve come to appreciate the ‘solo project’ness of tomemitsu without realizing how much i was nodding along to the loneliness of my favorite artists.” says Roark. For ‘Dream 2’, Tomemitsu also added a slew of analog and digital gear, processors and synthesizers, to his private Laveta Loca studio elevating the aural output from his hyper lo-fi origins.

Continuing their exploration of São Tomé and Príncipe with DJ Tom B., Les Disques Bongo Joe proudly announces the release of África Negra Anthology Vol. 2. We've carefully selected and remastered 13 standout tracks for this volume, digitized from studio tapes by their tour manager. The album includes a booklet with updated liner notes and vintage photos of the group. África Negra, established in the early 1970s by Horacio and Emidio Pontes, is São Tomé and Príncipe's most renowned musical group. Their blend of Puxa and Rumba, infused with Leonildo Barros' guitar riffs, Armando Tito's bass lines, and vibrant percussion, gained them recognition beyond the archipelago. This volume offers a glimpse into their musical journey, featuring unreleased sessions from 1979 and 1990, showcasing lead vocalists like João Seria and Sergio Fonseca. Reformed around Leonildo Barros and Antonio Menezes since 2008, the group has released three albums since 2012 and resumed touring in recent years, with João since 2014. Their performances continue to captivate audiences with energetic rhythms, graceful harmonies, socially charged poetry, and distinctive dance moves, supported by their Lisbon-based tour manager, Afonso Simoes (Filho Unico), who facilitated the excavation of these tracks. Since the tragic passing of Joao Seria on May 4, 2023, followed by national funeral honors, 90s lead vocalist Sergio Fonseca has rejoined the group, accompanied by Iju, a renowned younger São Toméan vocalist, delivering an engaging show. Pacheco, known for his devastating bass riffs and unique style of playing, has also returned, having lived in Cape Verde since 1987 and recently resettled in São Tomé. This anthology is dedicated to the memory of General João Seria, Gabriel João, Sep 1, 1949 - May 4, 2023.

Guitarist Lee Underwood’s syncretic blend of jazz, folk, and blues was a tremendous force behind Tim Buckley’s genre-stretching late 60s/early 70s music – but his 1988 acoustic guitar opus California Sigh has remained a unsung footnote to his story. Until now! This first time vinyl-edition reveals Lee’s free-floating acoustic moods, with synths and co-production from ambient avatar Steve Roach, as a soulful work of tranquility and transcendence.

“Trash Can Lamb” is a new solo album from Akron, OH-based multi instrumentalist Keith Freund. For the better part of twenty years, Freund has been producing intimate, shape-shifting music on his own and as part of collaborative projects such as Trouble Books, Lemon Quartet, and Aqueduct Ensemble. Here, he concocts a heady, homespun broth of analog synthesis, bit-reduced sampling, piano, standup bass, saxophone, and location recordings, arriving at a loose and evocative set of songs. Throughout the album, we hear 8-bit experimental delays mangling airy acoustic materials, denaturalizing them into primitive loop structures while retaining their golden-hued, melodic cores. The sputters, hisses, and croaks of handmade electronics nuzzle up to wistful piano and saxophone ruminations; the pure pandemonium of chaotic triangle wave patching and filtered noise settles into the serenity of a backyard dusk full of spring peepers (or maybe they’re crickets…). It’s in the space between the ragtag and rough-hewn and the romantic and yearning that Freund situates these compositions; it’s a peek inside a workshop that sits atop the trees, branches scraping on the windows, bluejays who just won’t knock it off, a table fan spinning slower and slower, its cheap blades covered in dust.

At first, Gia Margaret called her new album ‘Romantic Piano’ to be a bit cheeky. Its spare, gentle piano works share more spirit with Erik Satie, Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou and the ‘Marginalia’ releases of Masakatsu Takagi than they do with, say, a cozy and candlelit date night. But in that cheekiness lies hidden intention: across the gorgeous set, “Romantic” is suggested in a more classic sense, what the Germans call waldeinsamkeit. Its compositions conjure the sublime themes of the Romantic poets: solitude in nature; nature’s ability to heal and to teach; a sense of contented melancholy. "I wanted to make music that was useful,” says Margaret, vastly understating the power of the record. ‘Romantic Piano’ is curious, calming, patient and incredibly moving — but it doesn’t overstay its welcome for more than a second. Margaret’s debut, ‘There’s Always Glimmer,’ was a lyrical wonder, but when an illness on tour left her unable to sing, she made her ambient album ‘Mia Gargaret’ (another cheeky title!) which revealed a keen intuition for arrangement and composition not fully shown on ‘There’s Always Glimmer’s lyrical songs. ‘Romantic Piano’, too, is almost totally without words. “Writing instrumental music, in general, is a much more joyful process than I find in lyrical songwriting,” she says. “The process ultimately effects my songwriting.” And while Margaret has more songwriterly material on the way, ‘Romantic Piano’ solidifies her as a compositional force. Originally pursuing a degree in composition, Margaret dropped out of music school halfway through. “I really didn’t want to play in an orchestra,” she said of her decision, “I really just wanted to write movie scores. Then, I started to focus more and more on being a songwriter. ‘Romantic Piano’ scratched an old itch.” ‘Romantic Piano’ does indeed touch on a rare feeling in art often only reserved for the cinema — a simultaneous wide-lens awe of existence and the post-language intimate inner monologue of being marooned in these skulls of ours. How very Romantic!

“A sultry haze of shimmering ambient electronics and sparkling, effects-heavy guitar. Just what the ambient doctor ordered." - Electronic Sound

"Consumed in its entirety Late Spring is a soothing breeze, teleporting you directly to a grassy field in the sunshine – as transfixing as any record released thus far in 2021." - The Vinyl Factory

"The record sounds exactly like what you would expect with a name like Late Spring; it is a meditative, hypnotic look at the human condition and its emotional spectrum, as it attempts to grasp undefinable." - Far Out Magazine

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Japanese musician Chihei Hatakeyama is set to release his new album ‘Late Spring’ on 9th April 2021. An album of a humble nature, ‘Late Spring’ gently unfolds as a shared journeying experience through a series of rich and outstanding encounters.

An extract from the liner notes by Nick Luscombe:

"For an artist who typically works quickly, Hatakeyama considers Late Spring to be one of the more time-intensive records of his career – he started working on it in 2018, and completed it towards the end of 2020. For Late Spring, Hatakeyama re-examined his approach to musical performance, using a new amplifier and microphone set-up to playback and record his guitar and synthesisers. From the cathedral organ-like opener Breaking Dawn with its sub-aqua resonances, to the subtle drift of the closing track Twilight Sea, this record is a masterpiece of dense and beatific melodies. Drawn from evolving synthesised sounds and shimmering slow motion guitars, it combines these with occasional sonic elements that are best described as evoking computer code running through the veins of the machines like artificial blood."

Chihei Hatakeyama is a sound artist, mastering engineer, and record label founder who was born in 1978 and lives in Tokyo. He has performed for years under his given name and also as one half of the electroacoustic duo Opitope alongside Tomoyoshi Date. From his first full-length album ‘Minima Moralia’ (“Excellent” 8.1 Pitchfork) in 2006, through the subsequent 70+ albums that followed, Hatakeyama has created a mighty canon of work. His catalogue is spread across a number of highly-regarded labels, including Kranky, Room40 and his own White Paddy Mountain imprint. His release rate is unquestionably impressive, but what is even more striking is the continual high quality of each alluring album.

A more conceptual Mallsoft work that combines a unique mellowness with a psychedelic, surreal atmosphere, digital psychedelia, and nostalgic sentimentality to create a bittersweet, mysterious worldview.

牧歌的ニューエイジ・フォーク大傑作『Pentimento and others』を残した人物であり、サンフランシスコ拠点のフォークロック・バンド、Citayのメンバーとしても知られるニューヨークを拠点とするギタリスト/作曲家のEzra Feinbergによる最新アルバム『Soft Power』が〈Tonal Union〉からアナログ・リリース。当店お馴染みの名ハーピストMary Lattimoreに、シューゲイズ・ドローン/アンビエント名手Jefre Cantu-Ledesma、マルチ奏者のRobbie Leeといった面々と共に精巧に作り上げた親密でゆとりのある珠玉のアンビエント・フォーク作品！限定300部。

Calmly atmospheric electro-acoustic and new age ambient trips by Santilli, recorded on Eora land in Australia and faithfully echoes aspects of Waak Waak Djungi's hypnotic music or even The Necks’ soundscapes. "The Eora-based multi-instrumentalist is one half of Angophora, but his solo work exists in the lineage of electro-acoustic visionaries like Steve Tibbetts. With each subsequent release, Santilli strikes the balance between mining his well-defined personal aesthetic and expanding his vision. The instrumental palette of this record is centered around guitar and synthesizer, bolstered by an incredible array of idiophones and membranophones. There is no shortage of spellbinding moments, like the glacial synths that pan across “Mirrors”, the cascading beauty of “Colours” or the woodland symphony of “Hollow” - the latter even recalls the environmentally-focused work of Waak Waak Djungi’s Peter Mumme. There’s a common thread across this album in the way it evokes the expanse of nature that Santilli spends much of his time in. All 9 tracks feel like a glimpse into an exquisitely realized scene and across all of them, Santilli's music is suffused with an unhurried sense of ease. The music here feels immersive and panoramic as a result, and we’re grateful to share a glimpse into the worlds Santilli captures."

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.

“A sultry haze of shimmering ambient electronics and sparkling, effects-heavy guitar. Just what the ambient doctor ordered." - Electronic Sound

"Consumed in its entirety Late Spring is a soothing breeze, teleporting you directly to a grassy field in the sunshine – as transfixing as any record released thus far in 2021." - The Vinyl Factory

"The record sounds exactly like what you would expect with a name like Late Spring; it is a meditative, hypnotic look at the human condition and its emotional spectrum, as it attempts to grasp undefinable." - Far Out Magazine

-----

Japanese musician Chihei Hatakeyama is set to release his new album ‘Late Spring’ on 9th April 2021. An album of a humble nature, ‘Late Spring’ gently unfolds as a shared journeying experience through a series of rich and outstanding encounters.

An extract from the liner notes by Nick Luscombe:

"For an artist who typically works quickly, Hatakeyama considers Late Spring to be one of the more time-intensive records of his career – he started working on it in 2018, and completed it towards the end of 2020. For Late Spring, Hatakeyama re-examined his approach to musical performance, using a new amplifier and microphone set-up to playback and record his guitar and synthesisers. From the cathedral organ-like opener Breaking Dawn with its sub-aqua resonances, to the subtle drift of the closing track Twilight Sea, this record is a masterpiece of dense and beatific melodies. Drawn from evolving synthesised sounds and shimmering slow motion guitars, it combines these with occasional sonic elements that are best described as evoking computer code running through the veins of the machines like artificial blood."

Chihei Hatakeyama is a sound artist, mastering engineer, and record label founder who was born in 1978 and lives in Tokyo. He has performed for years under his given name and also as one half of the electroacoustic duo Opitope alongside Tomoyoshi Date. From his first full-length album ‘Minima Moralia’ (“Excellent” 8.1 Pitchfork) in 2006, through the subsequent 70+ albums that followed, Hatakeyama has created a mighty canon of work. His catalogue is spread across a number of highly-regarded labels, including Kranky, Room40 and his own White Paddy Mountain imprint. His release rate is unquestionably impressive, but what is even more striking is the continual high quality of each alluring album.

Weaving between self-built zithers, drones, clarinets, slide guitars and drum machines, ‘Sun Arcs’ presents a unique sound space formed by an inventive approach to acoustic folk and jazz. The starting point of ‘Sun Arcs’ saw Jason travel for a week alone to Andersabo, a cabin set in the Swedish woods just outside of Unnaryd, known also as the music project, festival and residency space which has been run by Dungan since 2016, hosting artists like Sofie Birch, Johan Carøe and Ellen Arkbro. Whilst writing 1-2 pieces per day, a conscious decision was made to leave behind everyday distractions and shut out the outside world to instead focus on the natural passage of time as Dungan recalls: “My only sense of time came from these daily walks out in the woods with my dog, and an awareness of the sun’s path as it moved across the sky each day.” The album’s immersive world unfolds with the opener ‘Dallas’, a musical synthesis of these two disparate spaces (Texas and Denmark), the touchstones of Dungan’s life. A folk-esque single acoustic builds to a flowing arrangement of clarinets, organ and cello drones coupled with percussion. ‘Green-Yellow Field’ chimes in as the first of two solo oriented zither recordings twinned with the dreamlike title track ‘Sun Arcs’, both densely rich as cascading and overlapping harmonic tones resound. ‘Bloom’ emerges with a krautrock psyche before an eruption of cello drones, slide guitar and free-ranging zither playing, ushering in the anticipation of spring. “The title and the feel of the song comes simply from my summers in Sweden – when the plants and insects are opening up everywhere, and there’s this almost too-intense feeling of life outside.” With half of the recordings conceived in Andersabo, Jason returned to Copenhagen to form the album's centre piece ‘Rain Cycle’ which features a tempered Roland drum machine alongside shifting zither improvisations. ‘Writing’ explores the shimmering harp-like qualities of sweeping playing figurations with Dungan mapping out adjusted tuning “zones” on the zither for unconventional but creatively liberating effects. ‘Fur’ captures the feeling of openness and the momentum of time, seeing Dungan perform waves of solo clarinet, often in one takes and embellished with textural drones, a zither solo, and layers of guitar. ‘Wavelength’ the album's closer is fondly inspired by the film works of Michael Snow and Don Cherry’s seminal live album ‘Blue Lake’ (1974), as it builds out from a drone-generated zither chord and features an alto recorder solo. Dungan found a deep connection to Cherry’s stripped back performance ethos, focusing on the core beauty of minimal instrumentation creating a genre-less meeting between folk and jazz. A dialogue is formed between the solo and the bandlike performances, interlinked in a geographical duality with all finding a sense of commonplace as musical sketches of visited landscapes. The bountiful instrumentation ebbs and flows as further layers emerge with Dungan constructing his material by recording and reviewing, adding and subtracting. Musically it portrays a life led by an American person living in Scandinavia, responding to both the local music and landscape while looking back to American influences. Dungan concludes: “Both places feel like “me”, I think on some level the music is always some kind of self-portrait.” ‘Sun Arcs’ depicts the intricate balance of nature’s cycles and the paths outlined by the seasons, from a winter dormancy to a warm sun drenched scene. The album scales new heights and further defines Dungan’s musical narrative, inhabiting a unique space in left-field, improvised and experimental music, bearing his most accomplished compositions to date. A singular and visionary expression, drawing on an array of instruments and sound worlds with a renewed sense of joy and discovery. The album's rich tapestry was mixed by Jeff Zeigler (Laraaji, Mary Lattimore, Kurt Vile / Steve Gunn) and mastered by Stephan Mathieu (Kali Malone, KMRU, Félicia Atkinson).

“She can snap a heart like a twig” - Pitchfork “Truly otherworldly music” - Stereogum Chapter is pleased to announce the first ever vinyl reissue of this classic overview of Connecticut songwriting icon Kath Bloom’s 1990s recordings, originally released on CD in 2005. Kath’s musical career began in the late 70s and includes a revered series of collaborations with avant-garde guitarist Loren Connors. Compiled from long out-of-print, self-released cassettes and CD-Rs, Finally was the first release to bring Kath’s solo music to wider attention in the 21st century, and she has since been covered by the likes of Pitchfork, The Wire and Aquarium Drunkard. It includes the exquisite Come Here, as heard in a pivotal scene in Richard Linklater’s beloved 1995 film Before Sunrise. In fact, this reissue features new artwork matching the fictitious LP Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke marvel over in a Viennese record store. The reissue includes five bonus tracks via download card, rescued from a hissy 1987 demo tape. These late 80s versions of Kath’s songs with synth, sax, fretless bass and bongos, including a never before heard version of Come Here, are sublime! Kath’s music was covered by the likes of Bill Callahan, Devendra Banhart, Mark Kozelek, Meg Baird on Chapter’s 2009 tribute album Loving Takes This Course. Covers from this release have also been featured in Paolo Sorrentino film Youth and recent Netflix smash series Sex Education. Still performing across America and the world, Kath is a living legend of fragile folk and heartbreaking songwriting.