MUSIC
7562 products
Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco bring language and composition into close conversation on Today’s Special. Lippard’s playful spoken-word pieces meet Grieco’s viola da gamba, piano and Wurlitzer, with the music mirroring the pitch, rhythm and inflections of her voice. Rather than improvisation, the duo use strict rules and compositional structures, drawing on wordplay, anecdotes, nursery rhymes, colour and borrowed language. Developed through residencies in Rome, Naples and Berlin, the result is sparse, witty and meticulously constructed, with every voice, note and pause serving a purpose.
Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, make raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their city. 'Quiet Storm', the duo's highly anticipated follow-up to their 2021 LP on Dais Records, expands on its predecessor’s sound and scale in every direction as a sprawling, collaborative vision shaped with profound patience and intention. The leap, both technical and emotional, outlines the duo’s development — two polymath producers, composers, performers, and visual artists who’ve met expectations with mastery, embedding their own coming-of-age story within a moving suite of cathartic abstraction. Songs allude to spirituality and the human condition, the tension between boldness and softness, ambition and the inner demons that persist. Contributors include Axelle Fanyo, Alto Aria, Deuén, Klein, RXKNephew, Tony Njoku, Kiala Ogawa, and Kelly Moran. "We challenged ourselves and our own notions of identity, around class and diaspora, and how that is represented across musical genres. We wanted to show the characteristics of our project through the people we chose to work with," says Reid. "We've stayed true to ourselves. It's music from the heart. It's music that has a particular rawness to it, but we've articulated that in a more modern classic structure, there’s a much more critical pronunciation of techniques," says Inyang. "It's a collaborative record because there is always strength and love in collaboration. But with that, we were able to focus more strongly on our personal identity." Five years feels immense following the release of 'Honest Labour', which was named Resident Advisor’s album of 2021, among other accolades from the likes of Bandcamp, Mixmag, and The Guardian, and cemented Space Afrika as a world-class live act. "These things take time," says Inyang, explaining that with the increased visibility came a certain weight. "It’s taken us down a winding road with extreme positives and also negatives, a kind of responsibility that we've held as artists from the Northwest, with our work expanding globally." Naturally, 'Quiet Storm' responds to the moment with deep consideration. He continues, "There’s no compromise in how we’ve made this album. The idea started as a celebration of Black artistry. Our collaborations have been very intentional, as we discovered the pillars of the story– our journey, which is mirrored in the film, where two young boys have taken a risk by following a belief in their talents." If 'Honest Labour' defined Space Afrika’s industrial-noir frameworks, 'Quiet Storm' takes the contrast up several levels with striking textures and sophisticated arrangements. The album is every bit a multidisciplinary effort, with the duo welcoming contributions from cellists, violinists, guitarists, drummers, and more, often writing and arranging lines to realize the vision in its totality. "We always think about the presentation of the music, and as we're writing, we're thinking about the stages that it's going to be on," says Inyang. Reid adds, "It's been a big nod to have these international collaborations, but there’s a British eccentricity coming through this record. We’re connecting the threads between these disciplines and genres, whether rap or classical. We took time away to revisit and rethink how these worlds have inspired us. We saw it as a cathartic practice, to unshackle oneself and step into the unknown, and there is no limit to the ways you can articulate a message and the vessels that they come through." Speaking to the multidisciplinary nature of the project is the involvement of celebrated artist Glenn Ligon, whose work deals with Black identity and queerness. A central inspiration at the onset of recording, Ligon offered his work 'Figure #30' (2009) for the LP's cover artwork, and following the completion of recording, he agreed to provide the project’s name – an unprecedented gesture from the pioneering artist. When provided with the final audio, Ligon immediately thought of "Quiet Storm," the 1970s radio format known for smooth, late-night programming with themes of life and love. 'Quiet Storm'’s sequence brings the listener through various scenes, interludes, and arcs, marked by a sense that its movement is fluid and its characters are fleeting. Into-the-mirror monologues grapple with the existential and the immediate: survival, autonomy, purpose. The album opens with the explosive, string-backed "Vanity" featuring 2025 Grammy-winning opera singer Axelle Fanyo. At first fixated on the crevices of a quiet room, "Vanity" unfurls under Fanyo’s expressive soprano, traversing a wide emotional spectrum from sublime contemplation to poignant, heart-piercing pain. "Vanity" was the first song from the sessions released to the public, as the song is the central piece to the album's film accompaniment, 'Opera Omnia', directed by Valentin Noujaim. Throughout the record, words spoken and sung are placed sparingly to powerful effect. Vanessa Bedoret's bright vocals on "Crying never had a voice ~" break through the swell of thunderstorms. Tender affirmations from Danish artist Alto Aria lift up "From The Heart of Knowing", as saxophone and cello interplay with Kelly Moran on piano. Rochester, NY rapper RXKNephew declares his deep state reality on the woozy "Ballad For A 'G'" as strings, breath and static are exhaled, with co-production by South London’s Klein. The voice of "Validation" delves into the notion of owning who they are, as disorienting strums and city sounds surround, in conversation with plucks from Greco-Canadian harpist Any. "MLN" gets to the beauty and catharsis at the core of Quiet Storm. It’s a true band effort, a collective slow march featuring British-Nigerian artist Tony Njoku, with guitar and lead bass by Gabriel Evans, London's PIKE on drums, and Copenhagen's GB (Gustav B) on keys and strings. "Someone come and save me from the devil / I’m left outside," sighs Njoku in his processed falsetto as the snare drum snaps. On "Pretty Gospel," the Paris-based Japanese-Congolese artist Kiala Ogawa sings, "In my arms," guiding the listener into a somnambulant trance. The lullabic warmth is a respite from the weather, and world outside– "Another day to dream." The final movement gives 'Quiet Storm' its culminating release. "If This Is Hell" is assembled in a single take as a stream-of-consciousness from NYC’s Kaiuna Odogba aka Deuén, whose relatable array of spiraling brain activity is matched by jazzy, frenetic percussion. The pressure valve opens, as the phased drums and sharp conversational observational dispatched phrases cut abruptly after the line, "I wonder if that’s what heaven’s like?" We are left suspended in the comfort of the album's closer "Regards." Rainfall meets organ, drone, strings, and keys with gun reloads juxtaposed over tranquil hums. Heavy yet hopeful, Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang remind you of their journey so far. An appropriately cryptic and transportive outro for their open-ended opus, 'Quiet Storm' is a landmark level-up, self-produced, self-funded, and manifested out of sheer drive and conviction. Through bent time and low-lit haze, undoubtedly, Space Afrika has arrived.
Space Afrika, the Manchester/Berlin-based duo of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, make raw, intensely detailed, visceral music with shades of ambient, trip-hop, techno, and modern classical, drawing spacious urban dubscapes from the contours of their city. 'Quiet Storm', the duo's highly anticipated follow-up to their 2021 LP on Dais Records, expands on its predecessor’s sound and scale in every direction as a sprawling, collaborative vision shaped with profound patience and intention. The leap, both technical and emotional, outlines the duo’s development — two polymath producers, composers, performers, and visual artists who’ve met expectations with mastery, embedding their own coming-of-age story within a moving suite of cathartic abstraction. Songs allude to spirituality and the human condition, the tension between boldness and softness, ambition and the inner demons that persist. Contributors include Axelle Fanyo, Alto Aria, Deuén, Klein, RXKNephew, Tony Njoku, Kiala Ogawa, and Kelly Moran. "We challenged ourselves and our own notions of identity, around class and diaspora, and how that is represented across musical genres. We wanted to show the characteristics of our project through the people we chose to work with," says Reid. "We've stayed true to ourselves. It's music from the heart. It's music that has a particular rawness to it, but we've articulated that in a more modern classic structure, there’s a much more critical pronunciation of techniques," says Inyang. "It's a collaborative record because there is always strength and love in collaboration. But with that, we were able to focus more strongly on our personal identity." Five years feels immense following the release of 'Honest Labour', which was named Resident Advisor’s album of 2021, among other accolades from the likes of Bandcamp, Mixmag, and The Guardian, and cemented Space Afrika as a world-class live act. "These things take time," says Inyang, explaining that with the increased visibility came a certain weight. "It’s taken us down a winding road with extreme positives and also negatives, a kind of responsibility that we've held as artists from the Northwest, with our work expanding globally." Naturally, 'Quiet Storm' responds to the moment with deep consideration. He continues, "There’s no compromise in how we’ve made this album. The idea started as a celebration of Black artistry. Our collaborations have been very intentional, as we discovered the pillars of the story– our journey, which is mirrored in the film, where two young boys have taken a risk by following a belief in their talents." If 'Honest Labour' defined Space Afrika’s industrial-noir frameworks, 'Quiet Storm' takes the contrast up several levels with striking textures and sophisticated arrangements. The album is every bit a multidisciplinary effort, with the duo welcoming contributions from cellists, violinists, guitarists, drummers, and more, often writing and arranging lines to realize the vision in its totality. "We always think about the presentation of the music, and as we're writing, we're thinking about the stages that it's going to be on," says Inyang. Reid adds, "It's been a big nod to have these international collaborations, but there’s a British eccentricity coming through this record. We’re connecting the threads between these disciplines and genres, whether rap or classical. We took time away to revisit and rethink how these worlds have inspired us. We saw it as a cathartic practice, to unshackle oneself and step into the unknown, and there is no limit to the ways you can articulate a message and the vessels that they come through." Speaking to the multidisciplinary nature of the project is the involvement of celebrated artist Glenn Ligon, whose work deals with Black identity and queerness. A central inspiration at the onset of recording, Ligon offered his work 'Figure #30' (2009) for the LP's cover artwork, and following the completion of recording, he agreed to provide the project’s name – an unprecedented gesture from the pioneering artist. When provided with the final audio, Ligon immediately thought of "Quiet Storm," the 1970s radio format known for smooth, late-night programming with themes of life and love. 'Quiet Storm'’s sequence brings the listener through various scenes, interludes, and arcs, marked by a sense that its movement is fluid and its characters are fleeting. Into-the-mirror monologues grapple with the existential and the immediate: survival, autonomy, purpose. The album opens with the explosive, string-backed "Vanity" featuring 2025 Grammy-winning opera singer Axelle Fanyo. At first fixated on the crevices of a quiet room, "Vanity" unfurls under Fanyo’s expressive soprano, traversing a wide emotional spectrum from sublime contemplation to poignant, heart-piercing pain. "Vanity" was the first song from the sessions released to the public, as the song is the central piece to the album's film accompaniment, 'Opera Omnia', directed by Valentin Noujaim. Throughout the record, words spoken and sung are placed sparingly to powerful effect. Vanessa Bedoret's bright vocals on "Crying never had a voice ~" break through the swell of thunderstorms. Tender affirmations from Danish artist Alto Aria lift up "From The Heart of Knowing", as saxophone and cello interplay with Kelly Moran on piano. Rochester, NY rapper RXKNephew declares his deep state reality on the woozy "Ballad For A 'G'" as strings, breath and static are exhaled, with co-production by South London’s Klein. The voice of "Validation" delves into the notion of owning who they are, as disorienting strums and city sounds surround, in conversation with plucks from Greco-Canadian harpist Any. "MLN" gets to the beauty and catharsis at the core of Quiet Storm. It’s a true band effort, a collective slow march featuring British-Nigerian artist Tony Njoku, with guitar and lead bass by Gabriel Evans, London's PIKE on drums, and Copenhagen's GB (Gustav B) on keys and strings. "Someone come and save me from the devil / I’m left outside," sighs Njoku in his processed falsetto as the snare drum snaps. On "Pretty Gospel," the Paris-based Japanese-Congolese artist Kiala Ogawa sings, "In my arms," guiding the listener into a somnambulant trance. The lullabic warmth is a respite from the weather, and world outside– "Another day to dream." The final movement gives 'Quiet Storm' its culminating release. "If This Is Hell" is assembled in a single take as a stream-of-consciousness from NYC’s Kaiuna Odogba aka Deuén, whose relatable array of spiraling brain activity is matched by jazzy, frenetic percussion. The pressure valve opens, as the phased drums and sharp conversational observational dispatched phrases cut abruptly after the line, "I wonder if that’s what heaven’s like?" We are left suspended in the comfort of the album's closer "Regards." Rainfall meets organ, drone, strings, and keys with gun reloads juxtaposed over tranquil hums. Heavy yet hopeful, Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang remind you of their journey so far. An appropriately cryptic and transportive outro for their open-ended opus, 'Quiet Storm' is a landmark level-up, self-produced, self-funded, and manifested out of sheer drive and conviction. Through bent time and low-lit haze, undoubtedly, Space Afrika has arrived.
Maria W Horn takes inspiration from W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn on Melting Pillars of Snow, a new collection of compositions for contrabass recorder, shō, percussion, electric guitar, voice and electronics. Performed with Anna Petrini, Mattias Hållsten, Magdalena Meitzner and Mats Erlandsson, the album explores shifting landscapes, deep time and fleeting moments through intricate chamber arrangements and electronic processing. Horn also contributes narration, while Michael Gira of SWANS guests on the opening single, 'Scythe of Saturn'.
A major work in François Bayle’s repertoire, Jeîta ou murmure des eaux provides a journey and an immersion into a world of unleashed energies, with the Jeîta cave serving both as a backdrop and a particle accelerator. Here, the cave indeed stands for the concrete source of the composer’s inspiration as much as the mind space where metamorphoses occur. By combining such figurative spaces and immaterial sound projections, François Bayle evokes another subject, an inhabitant of the multiple and symbolic cave: the listening subject, who always reveals himself, implicitly, at the heart of François Bayle’s musical concerns and the path he has always defended: the acousmatic approach. — Œuvre majeure du répertoire de François Bayle, Jeîta ou murmure des eaux propose un voyage et une plongée dans un monde d’énergies libérées, et dont la grotte de Jeîta sert à la fois d’écrin et d’accélérateur de particules. La grotte, ici, est en effet à la fois la source concrète où le compositeur puise son inspiration mais également l’espace mental par lesquelles les métamorphoses adviennent. En mêlant ainsi des espaces figuraux et des projections sonores immatérielles, François Bayle convoque un autre sujet, un habitant de la grotte multiple et symbolique : le sujet écoutant qui se révèle toujours, en filigrane, au centre des enjeux musicaux de François Bayle et de la démarche qu’il a toujours défendue : l’approche acousmatique. François J. Bonnet, Paris, 2025
The Trilogy Tapes back with quietly unhinged classical chamber musics from guess-again specialists Cop Tears, sort of Graham Lambkin does early music vibes, 10/10... Attending to an emergent TTT touchstone of recent times - as in Jack Sheen’s works, thru aspects of Will Bankhead’s What We and Guild mixes - Cop Tears lean into interests in quieter chamber music laced with threads of lo-fi, folk and jazz that tie ‘The Rules of the Game’ to the label’s key corpus. The 13 pieces follow five years from the trio’s ‘Theodor Adorno: Piano Works’, and five again from their debut ‘Thirteen Harmonies (1986) Selections From John Cage’s ‘Apartment House 1776’’, with enchanting slants on cherry picked pieces that endure, some over 600 years later, on the strength of their timeless arrangements. In key with the label's thing, everything is swaddled in ferric gauze - possibly posited on auld tape recorders - and holds a peculiar, homely, discordant charm (including fits of giggles and room noise) for the duration, which never tests the patience. The C.14th, polyphonic chanson Ars Nova masterpiece of Guillaume de Machaut ‘Puis qu’en oubli’ is the set’s oldest, along with ‘Quam pulchra est’, a mid-C.15th work for recorder trio by John Dunstable, placed on the same page with the more angular chamber jazz modernism of ‘Selections from Piano Sonata after a Conversation with Jonathan Gean (2016)’ and their take on the naïf wooze of ‘Children's Music, No. 1, II: Modern Dance (1973)’ by Valentin Silvestrov. Our percy is the dreamy, creaking baroque elegance of ’S’io men vo (1618)’, but it’s best advised to take it all in one at your leisure...
The Vinyl Factory presents a brand new Ryoji Ikeda release. music for strings comprises three works written between 2020 and 2023, commissioned by Ensemble Modern, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ, and DTzM, and built entirely around the physical behaviour of bowed strings.
“In 2016, I had a series of audiovisual concerts at a festival in Kyoto. Ensemble Modern from Frankfurt was there, performing a large piece by Heiner Goebbels. We became friends, and years later, in 2021, they commissioned me to create a new piece for their 2023 season,” Ikeda explains. “Through a workshop with their players, I decided to focus exclusively on strings”.
REFLECTION [for string nonet], op.13 has all nine players locked into a seven-eight rhythm, but staggered so the parts seem to answer each other.
PRISM [for string nonet], op.14 takes the idea of white light splitting into a spectrum and applies it to sound, with Ikeda working through almost the entire pitch range of the ensemble, pulling out clusters of notes the way a prism pulls out colour.
MIRROR [one for two], op.12 is built on a sheet of music where the staff notation is mirrored, allowing it to be read simultaneously from both the normal and opposite directions. As a result, two players share the single notation, performing together while reading it in opposite directions.
“For many years, I had ideas for MIRROR [one for two] that exists only as a dream. It seems simple, but it is extremely difficult to make sense of due to its very restricted rule. At the start, I decided to tackle this piece,” says Ikeda.
“Another dream of mine was to form a string ensemble arranged linearly on stage. Usually players perform in a semicircular formation to see each other. A linear formation, however, denies this visual connection. The challenge was implemented with PRISM [for string nonet] and REFLECTION [for string nonet].”
Performed by Ensemble Modern and recorded by SWR, the work premiered in Amsterdam on 8 February 2024 before its UK premiere at the Barbican on 20 February 2026.
Guess-again specialists Death Is Not The End reissue Earle Brown’s 1974 solo debut of otherworldly concrète, notably featuring piano by live electronics pioneer and Cage foil, David Tudor, contributing to its uncanny magnetic tape soundscapes. ‘Music by Earle Brown’ features compositions written 1952-1963 during the years after its maker moved to New York to be closer to kindred spirits Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, whom he met years prior when they performed in Denver where he was teaching the Schillinger technique of composition. In New York, his style of open form composition would influence Cage’s own developments guided by indeterminacy, which in turn exposed Brown’s music to Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, and whch led him to work with Morton Feldman, as heard on their 1962 split side - Brown’s first recording credit, for Time Records. The four works speak to the pivotal emergence of new music during that era. In chronological order, ’November 1952’ features a stop/start angularity, shards of keys and persuasive detonations precisely performed by David Tudor, gripping in its embrace of negative space, contrasting with the fractious concrète cut-up tones of ‘Octet I’, a 1953 piece composed and executed entirely by Brown and comparable as much with Stockhausen’s early electronics as the oddities emerging from Pierre Henry’s studio around that same time. Forward ten years to the album’s long-form bookends, where he conducts an acoustic octet in the fever dream-like play of dissonance and queered pitches on ‘Novara’ (1962), and conducts many of the same performers, and joins them on magnetic tape, for ‘Times Five’ (1963), a fascinating electro-acoustic whorl of rich colours and icicle rhythms that slips off the page into sustained, pitch bent notes with an effect that must have felt radical at the time, and still represents the curiosity and freedoms of the New York School of composers.
Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.
Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.
Guess-again specialists Death Is Not The End reissue Earle Brown’s 1974 solo debut of otherworldly concrète, notably featuring piano by live electronics pioneer and Cage foil, David Tudor, contributing to its uncanny magnetic tape soundscapes. ‘Music by Earle Brown’ features compositions written 1952-1963 during the years after its maker moved to New York to be closer to kindred spirits Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, whom he met years prior when they performed in Denver where he was teaching the Schillinger technique of composition. In New York, his style of open form composition would influence Cage’s own developments guided by indeterminacy, which in turn exposed Brown’s music to Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, and whch led him to work with Morton Feldman, as heard on their 1962 split side - Brown’s first recording credit, for Time Records. The four works speak to the pivotal emergence of new music during that era. In chronological order, ’November 1952’ features a stop/start angularity, shards of keys and persuasive detonations precisely performed by David Tudor, gripping in its embrace of negative space, contrasting with the fractious concrète cut-up tones of ‘Octet I’, a 1953 piece composed and executed entirely by Brown and comparable as much with Stockhausen’s early electronics as the oddities emerging from Pierre Henry’s studio around that same time. Forward ten years to the album’s long-form bookends, where he conducts an acoustic octet in the fever dream-like play of dissonance and queered pitches on ‘Novara’ (1962), and conducts many of the same performers, and joins them on magnetic tape, for ‘Times Five’ (1963), a fascinating electro-acoustic whorl of rich colours and icicle rhythms that slips off the page into sustained, pitch bent notes with an effect that must have felt radical at the time, and still represents the curiosity and freedoms of the New York School of composers.
Often credited as the father of multi-media theatre, Alwin Nikolais (1910-1993) took complete creative control over his productions - including cutting-edge approaches to lighting and costume that transformed human bodies into shifting sculptural shapes, while also composing wildly innovative electronic music as accompaniment. After initially experimenting with musique concrète and tape manipulation (as demonstrated on the 1959 LP Choreosonic Music of the New Dance Theatre of Alwin Nikolais) Nikolais became the first owner of Robert Moog's synthesizer at the Audio Engineering Society convention in New York in late 1964. Relying heavily on the Moog and later the Synclavier synth/sampler, these 21 tracks document Nikolais' highly-prescient compositions across the mid 1960s through to the late 1980s - existing not only as extensions of his other-worldly choreographic pieces, but standalone pieces of foundational mid-century American electronic and experimental music.
Otto A Totland's modern compositional elements are most widely recognized as half of the Norwegian duo Deaf Center, where his melancholic, intricate piano work provides haunting relief to the beds of noise and deep strings from Erik K Skodvin. Pinô is the first full-length release by Totland, though his solo work has been released once, as the 5-minute A-side of Sonic Pieces 7inch Harmony From the Past. Otto's previously brief vignettes are now expanded into a fully personal realization of his own style. Initial track Open fills itself with heavy, knowing pauses that quickly become overwhelmed with the desire to understand what's to come. Each silence leads into quick flutters of keys, preparing the listener for a vast terrain of giddy beauty, bleak depths, and true contentedness. Pinô quickly recalls deep winter; in front of a fireplace for days on end, you lose how far along you've ventured into the 18 tracks without any idea how far is left to go. The experience feels inevitable, with no other option but to curl up somewhere cozy and appreciate the sense of timelessness that Totland has created. His album is a haunting modern compositional treasure, expressed through instrumentals completely unique to Totland and captured masterfully by Nils Frahm at Durton Studios. With Pinô, Otto A Totland appears out of the Norwegian landscape, sharing an achievement that will provide a relief during the brooding winter darkness. Though a highly personal endeavor, the recognizable continuation of Totland’s compositions will attract fans of Deaf Center, and the cinematic and classical components of his solo work will hold sway for those familiar with Harold Budd or Dustin O’Halloran.
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.
The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.
“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”
The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.
Where will the improvisation take place?
How will that space shape the sounds being made?
How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?
How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?
Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?
For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.
Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.
Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.
Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”
On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.
That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.
In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.
The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.
“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.
Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.
Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.
And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.
AGON is the directorial debut of Giulio Bertelli. It follows a triptych of female athletes as they prepare and then compete in LUDOJ 2024, a fictional Olympic Games, in their personal disciplines - judo, fencing, and rifle shooting. Informed by the historical figures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Nadezhda Durova, these women are portrayed against the political, social, technological and physical contexts that dominate the highest level of sports competition and performance. AGON explores a contemporary account of the contradictions of these sports, which began as peacetime practices for war, as their disciplines are institutionally sanitised, recast as wholesome global entertainment, and ultimately dematerialised altogether in new digital arenas. The events at LUDOJ are conducted not in sports arenas but on soundstages, with no live audience. These spartan spaces are populated only by athletes, sports officials, and film crew, capturing every audio-visual layer of information. Within this environment, every mat crash, sword clash and gunshot is experienced in exacting detail. Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley. “I saw a material parallel between the sportsperson and the musician. That you have these tools which you carry through life, which hold complex histories of use. These techniques and traditions are studied, and combined with contemporary technologies to unlock new potentials. As Alex Sokolov is to her gun, Jean-Luc Guionnet is to his saxophone. From this model sprung many ideas, which lay the foundation for the score: applying the gestural language of the fencing epee to Ute’s bow; the ‘tuned air’ of both the rifle and the saxophone; taking the judo concept of barycentre and applying that to a form of rhythmic gravity with Seijiro. It was a rich seam” – Tom Wheatley “Where realism and fiction are blurred in the world of AGON, Tom accomplished the same for the score, obfuscating the boundary between the acoustic landscape of the film and the music, respecting the theoretical framework of the film itself.” – Giulio Bertelli AGON premiered at Venice Film Festival 2025, was awarded the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Independent Production, and the FIPRESCI Award (International Federation of Film Critics). It is a MUBI/Match Factory production.
‘Desire’ is the sophomore full-length album by TLF Trio. On ‘Desire’, the group presents their signature, contemporised chamber music through their main instruments: piano, cello and electric guitar; now enhanced by a pervasive use of sampling and a distinct use of silence as musical material.
The album is an aesthetic voyage in a musical landscape of minimalism, classical music, free improvisation, left-field-electronica, and references to pop and house music. It blends into a sound that is experimental and unpredictable – yet at the same time strangely familiar and self-explanatory.
The album’s ten pieces balance an open-ended improvisational intimacy with a tight compositional intention. Each track's repetitiveness operates as a trickling plateau of layered sentiments of times and spaces through the sampling of different acoustic rooms, the playing in specific styles and the curated selection of sounds and instrumentations; a collage of memories and associations patched together to create new meanings.
On Cooked, Oren Ambarchi folds his all‑star studio jam aesthetic into something gloriously unhinged. Two side‑long epics twist piano ripples, synthetic “voices,” mutant trumpet tones, electric Miles haze and digital pyrotechnics into a foot‑tapping, brain‑scrambling, joyously cuckoo ride that still feels meticulously shaped. Tip! Tip! Tip! Cooked extends Oren Ambarchi’s recent run of large‑scale studio constructions, but this time he lets his most irreverent impulses sit right at the center of the frame. Where 2022’s Shebang revealed how far his trance‑logic grooves could stretch, this new album comes “a la – yet so far from” that predecessor, nudging the template into stranger, more cartoonish territory without sacrificing the care that underpins his work. The record is built as two side‑long pieces, each a little ecosystem where a rotating cast of international collaborators makes the foot keep tapping even as the ear and brain struggle to process what’s just happened. Long‑time listeners will recognize the tension at play here. Beneath Ambarchi’s triple‑digit discography of hypnotic minimalism, there has always been a vein of joyously wayward exploration: riffs that arrive out of nowhere, synthetic mischief, sudden genre swerves. Cooked is a landmark because it allows that “gloriously cuckoo sensibility” to flood into one of his most high‑profile solo statements. Surrounding himself with players from Australia, Germany, Japan and Sweden – among them Joe Talia, Johan Berthling, Will Guthrie, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, Michiko Ogawa, Marcus Pal, Fredrik Rasten, James Rushford, Andreas Werliin and Konrad Sprenger – Ambarchi layers, edits and recombines performances in a way that recalls Edgar Froese’s spiraling synth rock, Steve Hillage’s cosmic guitar flights, and the studio‑obsessed pop alchemy of Godley & Crème, yet never feels like pastiche. “Hidden Tableau,” the opening side, sets the tone. It begins disarmingly with Eiko Ishibashi’s gentle piano ripples, then immediately swerves with the entrance of a groaning synthetic “voice” – a ghost in the machine conjured and steered by Konrad Sprenger, also at the production helm here as he was on Shebang. For the first half of the piece, this moaning, morphing presence becomes an unlikely soloist, a concerto for artificial throat and delicate backdrop of piano, organ‑like washes and Ambarchi’s signature shimmering Leslie‑soaked guitar. As Joe Talia’s drums slip in with a beautifully flexible swing, harmonies puff into woozy clouds, and the synthetic voice stretches toward something like a mutant trumpet, blurring instrumental identities. Then comes the left turn: intricate guitar patterns and filigreed synthetic arpeggios overtake the scene, locking into a kind of motoric, nimble drive that feels both inevitable and inexplicable. Somewhere in this lattice might be Jim O’Rourke on synth – or it might be Ambarchi’s endlessly re‑routed guitar, as his recent work has taught us that almost any sound could be traced back to his instrument. The piece never quite settles, instead gliding through phases that feel like snapshots from different histories of experimental rock and electronic music, stitched together by an internal logic that’s more dreamlike than schematic. The second side, “Sleight of Hand,” foregrounds Ambarchi’s Swedish comrades, especially Johan Berthling on double bass and Andreas Werliin on drums. It opens with glistening layers of electric 12‑string guitar, immediately invoking electric Miles Davis touchstones – the weightless yet charged atmosphere of “Feio,” or the slow, suspended reimagining of David Crosby’s “Guinnevere.” Berthling’s sparse, punctuating bass lines become anchor points in an almost weightless field of detail, while Michiko Ogawa’s sho and James Rushford’s array of acoustic keyboards thread flickers of timbre and harmony through the haze. The music feels like hovering above a shifting landscape: nothing quite locks, yet everything relates. Midway through, the whole construct is abruptly overwhelmed by a knotty, hyper‑complex “solo” from Marcus Pal on digital synthesis – a blistering, pointillist eruption that seems to teleport the record into an alternate timeline where Allan Holdsworth traded his SynthAxe for Xenakis’s UPIC system. Rhythmic and harmonic shapes flash past too quickly to grasp, yet their density adds a new, vertiginous layer to Ambarchi’s world. As Will Guthrie’s drums and percussion build around it, the music reaches a peak of sizzling intensity, then veers sideways into a gently surreal coda: Zawinul‑esque chords glimmer, Fredrik Rasten’s guitar drifts over a sprightly rhythm box, and the uncanny, bird‑like whistling of Isak Hedtjärn floats above, turning the closing minutes into a sunlit, slightly absurd stew.
On Cooked, Oren Ambarchi folds his all‑star studio jam aesthetic into something gloriously unhinged. Two side‑long epics twist piano ripples, synthetic “voices,” mutant trumpet tones, electric Miles haze and digital pyrotechnics into a foot‑tapping, brain‑scrambling, joyously cuckoo ride that still feels meticulously shaped. Tip! Tip! Tip! Cooked extends Oren Ambarchi’s recent run of large‑scale studio constructions, but this time he lets his most irreverent impulses sit right at the center of the frame. Where 2022’s Shebang revealed how far his trance‑logic grooves could stretch, this new album comes “a la – yet so far from” that predecessor, nudging the template into stranger, more cartoonish territory without sacrificing the care that underpins his work. The record is built as two side‑long pieces, each a little ecosystem where a rotating cast of international collaborators makes the foot keep tapping even as the ear and brain struggle to process what’s just happened. Long‑time listeners will recognize the tension at play here. Beneath Ambarchi’s triple‑digit discography of hypnotic minimalism, there has always been a vein of joyously wayward exploration: riffs that arrive out of nowhere, synthetic mischief, sudden genre swerves. Cooked is a landmark because it allows that “gloriously cuckoo sensibility” to flood into one of his most high‑profile solo statements. Surrounding himself with players from Australia, Germany, Japan and Sweden – among them Joe Talia, Johan Berthling, Will Guthrie, Eiko Ishibashi, Jim O’Rourke, Michiko Ogawa, Marcus Pal, Fredrik Rasten, James Rushford, Andreas Werliin and Konrad Sprenger – Ambarchi layers, edits and recombines performances in a way that recalls Edgar Froese’s spiraling synth rock, Steve Hillage’s cosmic guitar flights, and the studio‑obsessed pop alchemy of Godley & Crème, yet never feels like pastiche. “Hidden Tableau,” the opening side, sets the tone. It begins disarmingly with Eiko Ishibashi’s gentle piano ripples, then immediately swerves with the entrance of a groaning synthetic “voice” – a ghost in the machine conjured and steered by Konrad Sprenger, also at the production helm here as he was on Shebang. For the first half of the piece, this moaning, morphing presence becomes an unlikely soloist, a concerto for artificial throat and delicate backdrop of piano, organ‑like washes and Ambarchi’s signature shimmering Leslie‑soaked guitar. As Joe Talia’s drums slip in with a beautifully flexible swing, harmonies puff into woozy clouds, and the synthetic voice stretches toward something like a mutant trumpet, blurring instrumental identities. Then comes the left turn: intricate guitar patterns and filigreed synthetic arpeggios overtake the scene, locking into a kind of motoric, nimble drive that feels both inevitable and inexplicable. Somewhere in this lattice might be Jim O’Rourke on synth – or it might be Ambarchi’s endlessly re‑routed guitar, as his recent work has taught us that almost any sound could be traced back to his instrument. The piece never quite settles, instead gliding through phases that feel like snapshots from different histories of experimental rock and electronic music, stitched together by an internal logic that’s more dreamlike than schematic. The second side, “Sleight of Hand,” foregrounds Ambarchi’s Swedish comrades, especially Johan Berthling on double bass and Andreas Werliin on drums. It opens with glistening layers of electric 12‑string guitar, immediately invoking electric Miles Davis touchstones – the weightless yet charged atmosphere of “Feio,” or the slow, suspended reimagining of David Crosby’s “Guinnevere.” Berthling’s sparse, punctuating bass lines become anchor points in an almost weightless field of detail, while Michiko Ogawa’s sho and James Rushford’s array of acoustic keyboards thread flickers of timbre and harmony through the haze. The music feels like hovering above a shifting landscape: nothing quite locks, yet everything relates. Midway through, the whole construct is abruptly overwhelmed by a knotty, hyper‑complex “solo” from Marcus Pal on digital synthesis – a blistering, pointillist eruption that seems to teleport the record into an alternate timeline where Allan Holdsworth traded his SynthAxe for Xenakis’s UPIC system. Rhythmic and harmonic shapes flash past too quickly to grasp, yet their density adds a new, vertiginous layer to Ambarchi’s world. As Will Guthrie’s drums and percussion build around it, the music reaches a peak of sizzling intensity, then veers sideways into a gently surreal coda: Zawinul‑esque chords glimmer, Fredrik Rasten’s guitar drifts over a sprightly rhythm box, and the uncanny, bird‑like whistling of Isak Hedtjärn floats above, turning the closing minutes into a sunlit, slightly absurd stew.
Maria W Horn takes inspiration from W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn on Melting Pillars of Snow, a new collection of compositions for contrabass recorder, shō, percussion, electric guitar, voice and electronics. Performed with Anna Petrini, Mattias Hållsten, Magdalena Meitzner and Mats Erlandsson, the album explores shifting landscapes, deep time and fleeting moments through intricate chamber arrangements and electronic processing. Horn also contributes narration, while Michael Gira of SWANS guests on the opening single, 'Scythe of Saturn'.
Buh Records presents Anthology 2: Works for the Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments, a double album that deepens the exploration of the work of Bolivian composer Cergio Prudencio (La Paz, 1955) and his inseparable bond with the Experimental Orchestra of Native Instruments (OEIN), the project he co-founded in 1980 and of which he is now emeritus director. Like Anthology 1, widely praised by the international music press, this second installment continues to reveal the conceptual, aesthetic, and sonic magnitude of one of the most radical contemporary-music endeavors to emerge from Latin America. The OEIN is a unique ensemble within the international musical landscape. Its approach begins by embracing the traditional instruments of the Andean highlands in all their dimensions: their materiality, modes of sound production, tuning systems, cultural contexts, and the Indigenous philosophies that sustain them. It is grounded in central principles of Aymara music—arca-ira alternation, the formation of large “troops” of instrumentalists, and the communal energy of wakiña—integrating them into a creative process that articulates both tradition and contemporaneity. For Prudencio, these foundations are living structures that allow for the projection of an ever-expanding musical thought. Anthology 2 brings together works composed between 1989 and 2014 and performed by the OEIN and its chamber ensemble. Cantos crepusculares (1999), written for the Donaueschingen Festival, unfolds a sonic continuum in which successive atmospheres evoke the shifting light of twilight. Cantos ofertorios (2008), conceived during residencies in Bellagio and completed in La Paz, incorporates multiphonics, massive textures, and a performative gesture referencing the prayers and offerings of Aymara yatiris.
Tejiendo Nubes Contra la Muerte brings together poet and visual artist Cecilia Vicuña with Colombian pianist and composer Ricardo Gallo and the trio Hombre de Barro, featuring Ernesto "Teto" Ocampo, Urián Sarmiento, and Juan Manuel Toro. The album is rooted in a shared concern for the care of life, water, and the environment, finding in Vicuña's poetry a meeting point between contemporary creation and ancestral knowledge. The music was created collectively and spontaneously during the recording session. Gallo plays piano and synthesizers, Ocampo guitar, flutes, and harmonica, and Toro cello and flutes, while Vicuña's voice moves between spoken word, chant, whisper, breath, and silence. The result is an open, intuitive work in which improvisation becomes a space for dialogue between different forms of knowledge and sensibility. Cecilia Vicuña is a Chilean poet and visual artist based in New York. In the mid-1960s, she developed the concept of "Precarious Art" to name what disappears. The album features a selection of poems from Cloud Net, a book that addresses climate change through a perspective connected to Indigenous knowledge and dates back to the late 1990s. For the past decade, Vicuña and Ricardo Gallo have collaborated on poetic and sonic explorations encompassing recordings, live performances, installations, sound works, and videos. Gallo, a composer and improviser based in New York, maintains close ties to Bogotá's vibrant music scene. The members of Hombre de Barro combine extensive musical careers with research into Colombia's diverse musical traditions. Ocampo developed a profound body of research into Indigenous music; Sarmiento documents and records rural musical traditions through his label Sonidos Enraizados; and Toro has researched the music of the Inga people and other communities in southern Colombia. The album was recorded in La Calera, in the mountains outside Bogotá, in July 2022. A little over a year later, Teto Ocampo passed away; the album is dedicated to his memory. The session was supported by producer Julián Gallo and later mixed and mastered by Marc Urselli in New York. The cover features a work by Vicuña originally created for the Cloud Net exhibition, with the complete design by Raúl Zea. The LP includes an insert containing the poems performed on the album, in both Spanish and English translation.
Etherworld is proud to announce a new Merzbow album, "Vapor Hoof" on CD. Our previous Merzbow album, "Electric Salad" came out on the Etherworld label in 1996. Now taking preorders for "Vapor Hoof" [Catalog No. EtW007]. This pulse-warping, mind-smashing new release by Masami Akita is coming to stores on Friday, July 17, 2026. Preorder your CD today. Find out what noise really sounds like after 30 years of silence.