MUSIC

When they were there they saw a lone woman coming to the door of the Hostel, after sunset, and seeking to be let in. As long as a weaver’s beam was each of her two shins, and they were as dark as the back of a stag-beetle. A greyish, wooly mantle she wore. Her lower hair used to reach as far as her knee. Her lips were on one side of her head. She came and put one of her shoulders against the door-post of the house, casting the evil eye on the king and the youths who surrounded him in the Hostel. He himself addressed her from within. "Well, O woman," says Conaire, "if thou art a wizard, what seest thou for us?” "Truly I see for thee," she answers, "that neither fell nor flesh of thine shall escape from the place into which thou hast come, save what birds will bear away in their claws.” "It was not an evil omen we foreboded, O woman," saith he: "it is not thou that always augurs for us. What is thy name, O woman?” "Calib," she answers. "That is not much of a name," says Conaire. "Lo, many are my names besides.” "Which be they?" asks Conaire. "Easy to say," quoth she. "Samon, Sinand, Seisclend, Sodb, Caill, Coll, Díchóem, Dichiúil, Díthím, Díchuimne, Dichruidne, Dairne, Dáríne, Déruaine, Egem, Agam, Ethamne, Gním, Cluiche, Cethardam, Níth, Némain, Nóennen, Badb, Blosc, B[l]oár, Huae, óe Aife la Sruth, Mache, Médé, Mod.” On one foot, and holding up one hand, and breathing one breath she sang all that to them from the door of the house.

Official remastered edition of COIL's 1998 drone/ambient masterpiece. “4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of COIL history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve time". Inspired by long form ceremonial music of Tibet and other religions, where the intent is to lose oneself in the music – to meditate or achieve a trance state – Time Machines became Drew McDowall, John Balance, and Peter Christopherson’s “electronic punk-primitive” answer to this tribal concept. Starting as a rough demo tape recorded solely by Coil member Drew McDowall, Time Machines started to take full form when McDowall enthusiastically delivered these demo recordings to Balance and Christopherson as sketches for a new Coil project with the primary goal of shifting Coil’s sound further into a more conceptually abstract direction. Largely recorded in 1997 using single takes with minimal post production, these four drones contain every intended fluctuation and tone, along with every glitch of the original – “Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience.”

Official remastered edition of COIL's 1998 drone/ambient masterpiece. “4 Tones to facilitate travel through time.” So begins the listeners’ journey into what has become one of the most treasured and revered pieces of COIL history ever released. Each of the four pieces on Time Machines is named after the chemical compound of the hallucinogenic drug that they were composed for, and the album was meticulously crafted to enable what John Balance referred to as "temporal slips" in time and space, allowing both the artist and audience to figuratively "dissolve time". Inspired by long form ceremonial music of Tibet and other religions, where the intent is to lose oneself in the music – to meditate or achieve a trance state – Time Machines became Drew McDowall, John Balance, and Peter Christopherson’s “electronic punk-primitive” answer to this tribal concept. Starting as a rough demo tape recorded solely by Coil member Drew McDowall, Time Machines started to take full form when McDowall enthusiastically delivered these demo recordings to Balance and Christopherson as sketches for a new Coil project with the primary goal of shifting Coil’s sound further into a more conceptually abstract direction. Largely recorded in 1997 using single takes with minimal post production, these four drones contain every intended fluctuation and tone, along with every glitch of the original – “Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience.”

D&B torch carriers UVB-76 pay dues to Bristol’s rich trip hop history with Lucid Dreams’ debut LP marriage of OG ‘90s dank with subtle touches of club pressure slowed to cinematic, doom-jazzy vapours RIYL Raime, Tricky, Jabu, Bohren & der Club of Gore. The Lucid Dreams handle signifies Jason Luxton aka Clarity’s marked switch from inch-tight contemporary D&B into roughly-related downbeat interzones surely evoking a putative, nocturnal Bristol for anyone raised on Tricky, Portishead or Massive Attack classics. Seemingly crafted by candlelight and bathed in opiated atmosphere, the album unfurls a midnight soundscape in considerable depth across 15 parts in 64’ - plenty time to roll one (or two) and luxuriate in the LP’s carefully plotted course of dub-swept, smudged bass ’n drums and smoky pall. Like Raime before him, Lucid Dreams ideally inhabits a certain dark slipstream of intrigue that riddles post-punk thru to trip hop and its downbeat descendents, but also factored with a feel for D&B’s psychoacoustic spatial engineering that is key to his music’s appeal. Exquisite attention is paid to the dusty jazz drums and low register spectres shapeshifting its cloistered structures from the Bohren-pced doom shuffle of ‘Smoke & Mirrors’ up to what feels like dark echoes of proto-Goa or sci-fi scores in ‘Reincarnation’. His noirish ‘Reverie’ plays out like a Tricky witching hour special, and ‘Clairvoyance’ feels like Photek or SD on 33-not-45, next to dankest Wild Bunch/early Massive Attack nod ‘Slow-Wave’, and ‘Sleepwalking’ balances Flying Saucer Attack and ‘Mezzanine’ vibes, whilst ‘Transcendence’ holds a fine line of weightless ‘90s noir tension into the high plains drift of a ‘Realisation’ recalling aspects of Memotone’s ‘Warm Shadows’. A real sleeper gem.

Having studied under Takehisa Kosugi in 1975 and participated in the legendary improvisation group East Bionic Symphonia, Tomonao Koshikawa—now also a member of Marginal Consort and an artist who performs experimental music, jazz, rock, Indian classical music, and even Kanze‑school Noh chanting—presents his second solo work, following his ato.archives debut Footprint

'Persistent Repetition Of Phrases' success comes from the attention it pays to the function of 'the loop', not only as a narrative ordering system in modern music, but as a means by which the brain itself recalls and interprets information; it's as old as recorded sound itself, but in this context the repetition of small shards of auditory information becomes an elegy to fading memory and the worn-out synapses of old age. The track titles offer signposts through Kirby's labyrinth of faulty remembrances, pointing their way towards the peculiarities dictating the manner by which the mind stores and attempts to recover information.

Assembling a 'Kwaidan'-style anthology from chewed scraps of noir, horror and dystopian sci-fi movies, billy woods chronicles Black American angst on 'GOLLIWOG', running circles around his peers and arriving on the AOTY for fans of Ka, EARL, Aesop Rock, Westside Gunn or Cannibal Ox. Featuring production from El-P, The Alchemist, DJ Haram, Saint Abdullah, Shabaka Hutchings and others.

The English language is violence, I hotwired it woods coolly quips on 'Jumpscare', tossing out run-on cadences to juggle polyrhythms between beatless double-bass and vaudeville Pan Sonic-esque electrical interferences. Within a track, he fully establishes the concept for 'GOLLIWOG', an album that surveys the full spectrum of horror, splicing together creaking floorboards, ticking clocks, industrial clanks, Herrmann-esque stabs and detuned pianos, maniacal screams and blood-curdling laughs to accompany knotty tales of corporeal terror. It's horrorcore in a sense, cobbling together its scenery with the same congealed raw materials as Necro or Prince Paul, but woods uses the schlocky formula to lighten his death blows, landing some of the deepest lyrical lacerations of his lengthy career so far; 'Dead Body Disposal' it ain't. "Daddy longlegs stride your home like Cecil Rhodes," he nicks, equating the fear of (harmless) spiders with the terror of a real-life boogeyman - the coloniser of Zimbabwe (where woods' father was born), no less. And the track ends with a seemingly throwaway vocal sample: "a horrid sight, the blackest gnome." A description of the titular character from American author Florence Kate Upton's 19th century children's book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg', it's actually a clue to unpicking the album's title. What's fear, exactly, ponders woods, and what's merely ideology? And how does all of this become entertainment, let alone throwaway cutesy fodder for kids?

American horror as a genre has long broadcast the innermost fears of a nation who wears its ideology so boldly that it almost vanishes. Way back in the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft's racism manifested in stories of an ancient evil lurking beneath the New World's disturbed earth; later on, in the wake of the contraceptive pill and the subsequent free love movement, promiscuity was met with death and mutilation in an endless slew of slasher movies; and during peak neoliberalism, a taste for "torture porn" offset the stasis of safe liberal suburbia. woods accepts the history of horror, and proposes a true Black American Gothic archetype; just like Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' bolted together familiar tropes to signal how psychologically traumatic the Black experience can be within manicured white confines, woods bundles various cultural spikes to fabricate a more dangerous lyrical weapon. On 'BLK ZMBY', the ubiquitous zombie myth - a Haitian folkloric invention that was famously repurposed by George Romero in the '60s as a critique of American capitalism - is used as packaging for a barrage of knowledge that wraps references to Fela, Dune and Usual Suspects in thorny post-colonial theory. In Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead', the Black lead character spends 90 minutes fighting off zombies only to be shot in cold blood by beer chugging rednecks; now, woods' Black zombies have taken over the asylum, ignoring accountability and poisoning the water supply while the third world's corpse is sucked dry. "Zombies go home to platters of prawn and escargot," woods says, not letting Biggie off the hook. "New mothers struggle while the zombies suckle like baby goats."

DJ Haram handles the production on 'All These Worlds are Yours', dilating Shabaka Hutchings' transcendent improvisations with damaged '50s b-movie oscillations, rasping amp distortions and microtonal drones. "Today, I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my own home," woods recounts, accepting the day-to-day wartime horror-tainment we're fed on social media, 'Human Centipede'-style. "Trench fire, silent weapons, body horror, private booth," replies E L U C I D, woods' longtime Armand Hammer cohort. And woods coaxes out some of El-P's best production work in years on 'Corinthians', linking snippets of Lu Xun's 'Diary of a Madman' - that equates the Confucian ethical system with cannibalism - with the breakdown of late-stage Abrahamic morals that'll be closer to home for Anglophone listeners. "Best believe them crackers won't make it to Mars," he quips, double-underlining a verse that muddles St. Paul with Steven King, and Noah with the military industrial complex. By itemizing his own fears in a sequence of 'Cat's Eye'-style vignettes, woods launches hooks into the contemporary façade of terror-as-amusement, a fairground haunted house that's populated with very real demons. It's shockingly effective - the Pulitzer-ready rap album woods has been promising for aeons, and one of the very best things we've heard this year so far.

Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jóhannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets—Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavík) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)—processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings.

“Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance—of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over its duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down—it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Jóhann Jóhannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening… but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother’s medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world—and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Jóhann’s death also kept making itself apparent.

For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Jóhann Jóhannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure—and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Jóhannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Jóhann’s music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Jóhann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.

The disappearing elegies of Afterlife Requiem are not so much music as they are the remains of music. In this way I always work towards the subtraction of meaning. The music is distant and smeared, damaged, ghost-like and haunted, only hinting like a half-forgotten memory of what once existed; a condensed depiction of decay and erasure. I have underlaid the whole of this new piece, from beginning to end, with these disembodied silences from Jóhann’s own work, space, and time. Now gone forever, his recorded silence remains; a monumental vacancy lost to the world. Throughout the piece, and especially in the ‘Memorial Environment’ sections, I also incorporate countless natural-world sounds, everything from volcanic lava to freight elevators to human blood flow to turbine hiss to suicide injections.

Artist Robert Smithson said decades ago: ‘It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found’. For me, this music also measures how time runs out. In fact, time already has run out. Eternity has already begun.”

– Matthew Patton (Those Who Walk Away)

Another massive offering from the one and only Mick Harris, continuing on in his Culvert Dubs Sessions experimentations with a new 2xlp. Once again Mick delves deep into the shadow realm of slow beat, psychedelic heavily textured, grinding dub techno. Eight tracks of absolute industrialized, delay swept, full pressure, sound system shaking murk ridden, dark water dubs. Top form work when Mick lets loose in this wild style, just the right balance of beauty, restraint and brutality. Total heavy weight music!

When they were there they saw a lone woman coming to the door of the Hostel, after sunset, and seeking to be let in. As long as a weaver’s beam was each of her two shins, and they were as dark as the back of a stag-beetle. A greyish, wooly mantle she wore. Her lower hair used to reach as far as her knee. Her lips were on one side of her head. She came and put one of her shoulders against the door-post of the house, casting the evil eye on the king and the youths who surrounded him in the Hostel. He himself addressed her from within. "Well, O woman," says Conaire, "if thou art a wizard, what seest thou for us?” "Truly I see for thee," she answers, "that neither fell nor flesh of thine shall escape from the place into which thou hast come, save what birds will bear away in their claws.” "It was not an evil omen we foreboded, O woman," saith he: "it is not thou that always augurs for us. What is thy name, O woman?” "Calib," she answers. "That is not much of a name," says Conaire. "Lo, many are my names besides.” "Which be they?" asks Conaire. "Easy to say," quoth she. "Samon, Sinand, Seisclend, Sodb, Caill, Coll, Díchóem, Dichiúil, Díthím, Díchuimne, Dichruidne, Dairne, Dáríne, Déruaine, Egem, Agam, Ethamne, Gním, Cluiche, Cethardam, Níth, Némain, Nóennen, Badb, Blosc, B[l]oár, Huae, óe Aife la Sruth, Mache, Médé, Mod.” On one foot, and holding up one hand, and breathing one breath she sang all that to them from the door of the house.

Recorded during 1997 European tour. By this time O'Rourke already reissued Connors' seminal heartbreak album "In Pittsburgh" on his Dexter's Cigar label and produced the guitarist's big-band mash-up with Alan Licht, Hoffman Estates.

“Till Human Voices Wake Us.” Special edition for the 20th anniversary of Umor Rex [cat. URXX-CLXIII]. Originally released in 2014 on cassette and digital only, this album became a key work in our catalog. Now, 12 years later, it is available on vinyl for the first time. This marks the first in a series of four special, limited reissues to be released in 2026. Amini’s album is based on poems by T.S. Eliot, with ambient expressions that at times recall Morricone’s scores. The interplay of textures and electric guitar creates emotional passages, a sense of cold resolution, and the quiet inevitability of an ending. “Till Human Voices Wake Us” was Amini’s first album on a non-Iranian label. Following this release, he has also published work alongside Umor Rex on labels such as Room40, Hallow Ground, and Opal Tapes, among others, and is now considered one of the most prominent figures in Iran’s contemporary music scene. "Already established within Iran’s music scene, Siavash Amini has crafted a powerful signature sound that blends meticulously assembled ambient synthesis with languid electric guitar melodies, recalling Lanois and Eno’s classic Apollo." — THE QUIETUS (Tristan Bath) "Till Human Voices Wake Us—an album of fragile ambient sketches and gentle drones—was something of a “breakout” album for Amini. “This release alone started me on this path that I am on today,” Amini says." — BANDCAMP (interview by Adam Badí Donoval)

The Caretaker returns with a long-in-the-making soundtrack to acclaimed filmmaker Grant Gee's documentary about German writer WG Sebald. 'Patience (After Sebald)' is a multi-layered film essay on landscape, art, history, life and loss - an exploration of the work and influence of German writer WG Sebald (1944-2001), told via a long walk through coastal East Anglia tracking his most famous book 'The Rings Of Saturn'. The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear.

Pianeti Sintetici presents AI-37, entitled ‘Space Opera’. Conceived by Italian artist Davide Perrone, the Pianeti Sintetici (“Synthetic Planets”) project hypothesises the creation of future synthetic worlds as told through sound. Although split across two parts, the album is a singular organism that narrates a journey of boundless cosmic exploration. A sonic tapestry woven of intergalactic atmospheres, Space Opera’s imaginative sound design contributes to a richly spatial and haptic experience. Taking place in the dimly lit crevices of deepest space, a swirling pool of chemical abstractions and extraterrestrial transmissions spumes out from the darkness. Elements weave through broad washes of drones and scintillating textures, contrasting a sparse backdrop with dense and multilayered passages. Composed with the use of modular synthesisers and intense audio manipulations, ‘Space Opera’ comes to life as an entity that transports the listener on an immersive journey into the mysteries of alien worlds.

AI-36 comes from Ear to Ear - the debut collaboration between label regular Samuel van Dijk (Multicast Dynamics) and Ukrainian artist Yevgen Chebotarenko. Taken from a series of live recording sessions, the album explores in four parts a markedly darker realm of soundscape music. A cornucopia of abstract morphing scenes and heady synesthesia, the album brims with rich sonic detail and evocative gestures. Deftly blending organic sound textures with an experimental austerity, ‘Live Recordings’ displays potent and accomplished storytelling. The album opens to a grey overcast vista, a natural landscape that slowly melts into a descending chasmic dysphoria. The mood transitions to a drone-based piece on the B-side, characterised by a more psychologically suspenseful framework and exotic blend of sound design. The atmosphere lightens, yet equally pensive as side C takes on a more elemental form, invoking water and its array of microbial and metabolic ecosystems. Brief cathartic moments in the final section pave the way for deeper wayfaring on the D-side. Stray signals and unknowable artefacts skitter across a vast subaqueous domain, a fathomless womb of potentialities that ebbs into eternity.

FELT enters 2026 with a newly established sub label for reissues, retrospectives and oddball adjacent non-FELT material under the anagram catch-all LEFT. First on the agenda is a vinyl issue of a modern classical tape by Danish guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth, founding member of the band Iceage. Initially released on a limited cassette edition and plucked from the vast catalogue of the Copenhagen label Posh Isolation, the solo project Health & Safety can be read as composers meditation on anxiety, depression, insomnia and all the damned things they entangle. Wieth moves across the spectrum with dour, deliberate keys, mangled drone fx, barely-there violin scrapes, erratic chimes and whistles and with a knowing pace that feels akin to a guiding hand. We’re unsure if the form of each piece is meant to directly correlate to the drug so referenced but the quiet fever dream atmosphere of the 25 minutes also blurs each piece into a whole. This quote from Wieth certainly rings true for the highly introspective nature of Health & Safety - “You should be very careful listening to too much music when you're writing an album. It has a tendency to become a little too explicit”

Edward Artemiev's re-recording of his scores to Andrei Tarkovsky's classic films Зеркало (Mirror) (1975) and Сталкер (Stalker) (1979), reissued on 180-gram vinyl. When Artemiev recorded these scores in Moscow in 1989 and '90, there were no legitimately available releases of the original soundtracks. Artemiev chose to fill that void himself with these recordings, released on Torso Kino in the Netherlands as part of a 1990 double-LP set also containing re-recordings of Artemiev's score to Солярис (Solaris) (1972). This set is now long out of print, and Mirumir is pleased to present the collection on two separate LP releases, remastered, with new artwork, and officially licensed by the artist himself.

Post-classical composer, sound artist, and curator Matthew Patton returns with his second album as Those Who Walk Away. Afterlife Requiem is an elegy to friend and collaborator Jóhann Jóhannsson. Drone, electroacoustics, and near-silences extracted from unfinished recordings on Jóhannsson hard drives, underpin two string quintets—Ghost Orchestra (Reykjavík) and Possible Orchestra (Winnipeg)—processed and erased in a doleful durational work. Patton also works again with Andy Rudolph (Guy Maddin) and Paul Corley (Sigur Rós, Ben Frost) on co-production and sound design, to forge a simmering physicality that juxtaposes roiling low-end with haunting movements of ghostly strings.

“Everything I have ever written is a Requiem. Everything an ending. Death is smeared all over this music. My work is about disappearance—of the present, the past, of everything. Afterlife Requiem gets slower and slower over its duration, it is one huge ritardando, time is not just slowing down—it is disappearing. Without even thinking, two related tragedies occurred and came to the surface organically while I was writing, recording, and working: the death of my mother and the death of composer and friend Jóhann Jóhannsson. When I start writing, I am not thinking of anything in particular, I am just writing, composing, recording, and listening… but something always makes itself apparent or pushes itself through in an unforeseen way. After my mother’s medically-assisted death, in clearing out her apartment, I realized that I was also erasing the physical manifestation of her world—and that I was doing the exact same thing with the music I was writing and recording. During this time, Jóhann’s death also kept making itself apparent.

For Afterlife Requiem I have taken short abandoned fragments from Jóhann Jóhannsson's hard drives and placed these disembodied audio ghosts in alternating sections within my own music, leaving them impure—and in the process blurring the distinction between making and un-making. After his death, I had been given these hard drives from Jóhannsson's Berlin studio to listen to. This music was abandoned, in various states of formation and dissolution: an index of decayed and dead memories, forgotten and now existing only within a series of interlocking mechanical parts which in time will themselves fail and disappear, like everything else. For months, I listened to these remains of Jóhann’s music obsessively, trying to discover clues about Jóhann before he died. Many times I would find that he had left the recording device going long after the recorded music was over. He seemed to be unaware that the music had ceased or didn't register this was the end of the music or maybe he was distracted by something else. But I found these long silences profoundly emotional and touching.

The disappearing elegies of Afterlife Requiem are not so much music as they are the remains of music. In this way I always work towards the subtraction of meaning. The music is distant and smeared, damaged, ghost-like and haunted, only hinting like a half-forgotten memory of what once existed; a condensed depiction of decay and erasure. I have underlaid the whole of this new piece, from beginning to end, with these disembodied silences from Jóhann’s own work, space, and time. Now gone forever, his recorded silence remains; a monumental vacancy lost to the world. Throughout the piece, and especially in the ‘Memorial Environment’ sections, I also incorporate countless natural-world sounds, everything from volcanic lava to freight elevators to human blood flow to turbine hiss to suicide injections.

Artist Robert Smithson said decades ago: ‘It is the dimension of absence that remains to be found’. For me, this music also measures how time runs out. In fact, time already has run out. Eternity has already begun.”

– Matthew Patton (Those Who Walk Away)

Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder. An evolution of her early 1980's Edinburgh-based punk band The Freeze, she launched the project upon moving to London, inspired by the crossroads of exploratory UK post-punk and early European industrial. Her work thrives on chance and transformation, collaging elements of noise, balladry, soundtrack, catharsis, and improvisation. After a series of celebrated albums for the Midnight Music label as well as collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins, Cinder migrated to the United States, becoming involved with various underground techno collectives around the Midwest and West Coast. Subsequent relocations to Hong Kong and Japan further expanded Cindytalk's horizons, resulting in a fruitful partnership with Viennese experimental institution Editions Mego, for whom she released five full-lengths of swooning, granular atmosphere. 2021 finds her as engaged as ever, at the precipice of long-awaited back catalog reissues alongside multiple new works, guided by her lasting love of discovery and deviation: “new pathways always being uncovered.”

The 3rd album by Scottish industrial enigma Cinder aka Cindytalk began life as the soundtrack to an experimental film by English director Ivan Unnwin entitled Eclipse (The Amateur Enthusiast's Guide To Virus Deployment), and was originally slated for release via Factory Records' video division, Ikon. Inspired heavily by Alan Splet's eerily disembodied sound design in David Lynch's Eraserhead, the collection's 15 pieces seethe between field recordings, wistful piano vignettes, and lurking metallic haze – a hybrid palette Cinder characterized at the time as “ambi-dustrial.” Unfortunately Ikon collapsed on the eve of the project's completion so the film was never distributed, but the Midnight Music imprint repackaged Cindytalk's score as an LP in 1990 under the name The Wind Is Strong... (full title: The Wind Is Strong - A Sparrow Dances, Piercing Holes in Our Sky).

Long out of print, the album remains one of the most elusive and adventurous in the Cindytalk discography, a mix of musique concréte, haunted reverie, and desolate beauty. Even unaccompanied by their intended visuals, this is overtly cinematic music, conjuring forests at dusk and shadowed corridors, equal parts remote and reflective. Cinder cites a belief that “all sound is music,” which fully manifests here, utilizing tape hiss, ticking clocks, flicking flames, and distant whispers as evocative accents in tapestries of luminous negative space.

Although Cinder included the subtitle “A Cindytalk diversion” in the sleeve notes, The Wind Is Strong... is crucial to the project's canon, demonstrating the depth and versatility of her unique ear and intuition. She describes each album as a direct response to the previous one, and in that sense The Wind marks a bold break from the coiled song-oriented post-punk of 1988's In This World, venturing into unknown, unnamed terrain, and finding foreboding new futures to call her own.

Irrflug are:

Mark Kanak - Concept, sound design, electronics, noise, lyrics

Ian King - Voice

BoBo - Voice

Ella Sturmvogel - Voice

Also featuring:

Blixa Bargeld Voice on “Pulse” and “She lights the earth with her silver”

recorded March 2025 for the “Lügendetektor” sessions

at AndereBaustelle Tonstudio in Berlin by Boris Wilsdorf

Text on “Spirals” taken from WB Yeats “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz”

Text on “She lights the earth with her silver”, Ovid (translation Mark Kanak)

Recorded at Die Höhle, Berlin-Niederschöneweide 2024-2025

Mastered by Ilari Larjasto

Cut by Stefan Mitterer at Manmade Mastering Berlin

Front sleeve painting by Arsi Keva

Painting disobeyed by Tanja Koljonen

Graphic design by Tommi Grönlund

Sähkö Recordings 2025

PUU-61

During the transitional period in which Coil’s primary leadership (Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson and John Balance) reorganized their creative direction by taking on new membership in the group through their inclusion of Drew McDowall, Coil took a drastic turn towards the metaphysical unknown. Employing the subtle handiwork of Coil’s “real life” members, as well as cleverly guised aliases and spiritual collaborators, the band chose to filter their identity through a the nome de guerre, 'Black Light District', setting the precedent of Coil’s future exploration of otherworldly influence. Recorded during the Winter of 1995/96, 'Black Light District' leans more on their formal avant-garde pursuits and academic interests rather than their industrial pedigree resume. Starting off with an obvious nod to John Cage with their introductory “Unprepared Piano”, the tone is prepared in exactly the same way… unpredictable. Conceptually abstract, Black Light District shows Coil’s old guard disregarding the pop rhythms found on previous albums, such as Love's Secret Domain, and fully embracing their experimental electronic trajectory. Subtle patterns of looping melancholy and malaise are placed delicately underneath ghostly electronic timbre. Approaching their creative method as something from the beyond, another realm in which sounds blur and performers seemingly appear from the ether.

Since 1992, Robin Storey (founding member of the pioneering post-industrial band Zoviet*France) has been creating innovative and thought-provoking music under the Rapoon moniker. Drawing inspiration from his early days with Z*F, he continues to push the boundaries of ambient, industrial, and world music genres, earning him a dedicated following across the globe.

Originally available in 1994 as a limited-edition DAT tape through Staalplaat Records, Cidar was later included as a bonus CD in the reissue of another Rapoon classic, Fallen Gods. Now, after years of anticipation, fans can experience this mesmerizing work as a stand-alone release—remastered and expanded with three previously unreleased tracks from the original 1994 recording sessions.

Cidar showcases Robin’s signature sound - a seamless blend of Z*F-inspired drones and loops intertwined with vibrant African percussion and hauntingly beautiful Asian string instruments. This combination creates an immersive, trance-like atmosphere that transports listeners into a world of meditative sonic exploration.

With its enchanting rhythms and deeply textured layers, Cidar stands as a testament to Robin's unparalleled ability to craft music that defies genre boundaries while remaining instantly recognizable. Fans of both Zoviet*France and Rapoon will find themselves drawn into the hypnotic sounds of this timeless masterpiece.

The standalone release of Cidar marks an important milestone in the history of experimental music, offering audiences worldwide the opportunity to rediscover or experience for the first time one of Robin Storey's most influential works.

Since 1992, Robin Storey (founding member of the pioneering post-industrial band Zoviet*France) has been creating innovative and thought-provoking music under the Rapoon moniker. Drawing inspiration from his early days with Z*F, he continues to push the boundaries of ambient, industrial, and world music genres, earning him a dedicated following across the globe.

Originally available in 1994 as a limited-edition DAT tape through Staalplaat Records, Cidar was later included as a bonus CD in the reissue of another Rapoon classic, Fallen Gods. Now, after years of anticipation, fans can experience this mesmerizing work as a stand-alone release—remastered and expanded with three previously unreleased tracks from the original 1994 recording sessions.

Cidar showcases Robin’s signature sound - a seamless blend of Z*F-inspired drones and loops intertwined with vibrant African percussion and hauntingly beautiful Asian string instruments. This combination creates an immersive, trance-like atmosphere that transports listeners into a world of meditative sonic exploration.

With its enchanting rhythms and deeply textured layers, Cidar stands as a testament to Robin's unparalleled ability to craft music that defies genre boundaries while remaining instantly recognizable. Fans of both Zoviet*France and Rapoon will find themselves drawn into the hypnotic sounds of this timeless masterpiece.

The standalone release of Cidar marks an important milestone in the history of experimental music, offering audiences worldwide the opportunity to rediscover or experience for the first time one of Robin Storey's most influential works.

Having defined a multi-dimensional sonic universe on their acclaimed eponymous debut album, composer/filmmaker Chris Hunt and Korn's James "Munky" Shaffer abandon the familiar and drift towards a kingdom of recursion on EXINFINITE, staring down a tangled mass of mirrored wormholes that hum with eldritch ambiguity. VENERA's sophomore full length is darker, heavier and more percussive than its predecessor, but there's something more intimate wired into its circuitry that's harder to define - something mystical, mysterious and melancholy. Songs materialize from the void only to be dissolved by acidic synths or pierced by Hunt's whetted beats, while Shaffer's dense, tortured riffs are offset by euphoric, time-dilated vocals from FKA twigs, Dis Fig and Chelsea Wolfe. Following their encounter with vastness, VENERA have peered inward, ruminating on the limits of existence and excavating their most deeply buried emotions.

VENERA emerged in 2022 when Hunt and Shaffer veered into their own musical territory after recording with Albanian artist Xhoana X. Improvising together and experimenting with cinematic, sci-fi-inspired sound design, the duo realized the collaboration had potential, so they began developing and evolving the sound further, bringing in assistance from former Mars Volta drummer Deantoni Parks, Queens of the Stone Age's Alain Johannes, post-punk duo VOWWS and LA noise rock legends HEALTH. And after their debut album appeared on Mike Patton's Ipecac imprint in 2023, VENERA kept deconstructing and rebuilding their approach to songwriting, swapping out ambient Eno-esque atmospheres for blown-

out beats and dense textures, and figuring out how to extend the narrative they'd opened up without retreading old ground.

On 'Tear', the duo's new direction can be heard clearly as Shaffer's primal guitar noises are reformed into eerie widescreen expositions that Hunt punctuates with pneumatic kick and snare cycles. Broken up by airlock hisses and luminous synths, the track proposes a backdrop that VENERA continuously transmute, reforging the concept as the album develops. Cult singer-songwriter Wolfe adds a gothic American flavor to the crepuscular 'All Midnights', crooning powerfully over VENERA's vacuum packed rhythms and gaseous synths, and Berlin-based noisemaker Dis Fig follows work with The Body and The Bug on 'End Uncovered' lending breathy, emotionally layered tones to Shaffer and Hunt's tape-damaged industrial pops and whirrs. They launch squelchy, decelerated techno into occult noise reflecting pools on the slithering 'Asteroxylon', and Hunt replies to Shaffer's reverberating plucks with foghorn groans on the ominous, pensive 'uuu773'.

'EXINFINITE' perpetually builds momentum until it hits 'Caroline', an intense collaboration with FKA twigs that isolates her most unearthly tones. Initially curling her words around ominous electrical distortions and mangled, ghostly voices, twigs launches into a charged operatic cry that Shaffer and Hunt meet with skittering cybernetic beats and dense walls of guitar noise. It's this track that fully cracks open VENERA's concept, merging the synthetic with the natural and prompting dysphoria, loss of self and infinite regress. So the blood-curdling noise and sinister ambiance of 'Decreation' acts like a dissociated coda. In the 'EXINFINITE', destruction and death are not overcome, they're intensified until they metamorphose completely.