MUSIC

Black Truffle is thrilled to begin 2025 with a rare solo release from Konrad Sprenger, alias of elusive Berlin composer-producer-instrument builder Jörg Hiller. A prolific collaborator, Sprenger has worked extensively with icons of American minimalism such as Ellen Fullman (with whom her recorded the gloriously eccentric song album Ort) and Arnold Dreyblatt (as a core member of the Orchestra of Excited Strings since 2009), as well as releasing their music on his impeccably curated label, Choose. As an instrument builder and installation artist, he has overseen the creation of a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar and, with Phillip Sollmann, a modular pipe organ system designed to be reconfigured from space to space. In much of Hiller’s work, a scientific approach to acoustic phenomena co-exists with a pop sensibility and a sly sense of humour. Nowhere is this unique combination more in evidence than in his slim body of solo work, beginning with the startling diversity of instrumentation and compositional approaches heard on the short pieces of Miniaturen (2006) and Versprochen (2009), followed by the more single-minded exploration of the computer-controlled electric guitar on Stack Music (2017). Set brings together these various strands of Sprenger’s work into a wildly infectious, playful epic, performed by the composer and the mysterious Ensemble Risonanze Moderne. On the LP’s second side, we are also treated to a guest appearance from longtime collaborator Oren Ambarchi, on whose recent solo releases Simian Angel and Shebang Sprenger has made key production contributions. Ambarchi’s signature stuttering, swirling harmonics weave through a sparkling assemblage of electric guitars, acoustic instruments, percussion and electronics—though, given the deft use that much of Sprenger’s recent production work makes of midi-controlled sampled instrumentation, it’s anyone’s guess where the acoustic ends and the digital begins here. As soon as the needle drops on the first side, we are inside a musical world that Set will inhabit for its 33 minutes: sparkling guitar harmonics and palm-muted notes, tuned percussion, crisp electronic drum hits, flashes of horns, and untraceable bursts of synthetic sound are arranged into a skittering polyrhythmic framework calling up the detail-rich percussive constructions of contemporary techno filtered through the pointillism of the post-serialist European avant-garde. Behind this shifting mist of particulate sound, winds and strings sound out held chords, reminiscent of Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning in their epic yet seemingly aimless drift. The relationship between elements is mysterious, appearing both carefully considered and almost random. Though never straying too far from where it begins, as the piece moves along, it spotlights increasingly bizarre instrument choices (shakuhachi and steel drums, anyone?) as well as momentary liftoffs into motorik propulsion. Set is a fascinating, mercurial thing: at once propulsive and fragmented, essentially static in form yet ever-changing in detail, unabashedly egghead in its construction yet sure to get the feet tapping.

more eaze and claire rousay’s collaborations are effortlessly joyful, their music evoking the warmth and respect they have for each other. Their bond goes back to their youthful hometown of San Antonio, Texas where they played in country outfits and noise rock bands respectively, and each pushed their music to extend beyond the traditions and conventions of genre. more eaze (the moniker of violinist/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice) and rousay have spent the past decade pushing boundaries, standing together at the vanguard of genre-shattering music that thrills and surprises with its vulnerability and creativity. no floor weds their prowess as sound designers and masterful skills as composers with their skills as acoustic instrumentalists. Eschewing the auto-tune inflected pop-psychedelia and found sounds of their previous collaborations, no floor is collage music as pastoral melancholia, a lush tour into their own version of Americana.

The duo’s ever-widening sonic scope is centered in their mastery of collage. Known for their extensive use of found sound and hyper pop escapades, maurice and rousay employ a more traditional compositional approach. On no floor the pair created their own elaborate sound world rather than manipulating field recordings. “It was a conscious choice to spend a lot of time making fucked up sounds and then figuring out how they could be beautiful in another context,” notes maurice. “With this record I had no idea what claire would do on each track, and we were both trying to match each other’s ‘freak’ in terms of sound design.” Movements across each piece uncover the ecstatic in nuance. The album’s gentle arc explores feeling with minute gestures and textural swells, carried by maurice and rousay’s enmeshed sonics. rousay’s ostinato guitar patterns and acoustic strums swim through tides of maurice’s pedal steel. Glitching electronics burble in dynamic fits as dramatic strings add waves of tension and release. no floor’s pieces are atmospheric, living biomes that breathe and grow with each passage, rewarding close listens with the revelation of its emotional core.

The five tracks that make up no floor were named for seminal bars in the pair’s shared history, or as the duo humorously refer to them, “Pillars of our debauchery.” no floor is an introspective reflection on the emotional turmoil of youth as much as it is a celebration of a camaraderie forged in that turmoil. Freneticism dances atop the placid textures of pieces like “kinda tropical” and “limelight, illegally”, embodying the playfulness that comes with reveling in kinship at a shared safe space. The more reserved “hopfields” and “the applebees outside kalamazoo, michigan” reflect the less familiar locales of their namesakes, the former a sumptuous special occasion that glimmers with soft light and the latter a slow roil of the uncertainty and strangeness that comes with touring as experimental artists in one’s youth. “As we moved from being very close together to living further away and being involved in different scenes, we had more serious conversations,” notes rousay. “In the past it was more plug and play, where with this record we talked about every aspect before and while working on it.”

The pieces of no floor are born of the deep connection between more eaze and claire rousay, built from strands of familiarity and surprise, the two buttressing one another as they push themselves as instrumentalists, composers, and artists to unexplored boundaries. The wordless timbral compositions retain the duo’s lyrical approach to their craft. Infused with melody, the pieces are collages of sound and emotion. no floor exemplifies the duo’s shared skills in unearthing new and exciting sound arrangements, evoking the warmth and affection of their friendship and musical fearlessness.

Re-release of Blue Chemise's debut LP, which originally appeared in 2017 as a limited private release of 105 copies. We are proud to make this much sought-after record available again on both physical and digital, with remastered sound by Christophe Albertijn and updated artwork, all true to the original intentions of, and in close collaboration with, the artist. ‘Influence On Dusk’ forms an idiosyncratic cycle of fourteen mysterious, sometimes uncanny electroacoustic compositions, a personal and subdued eruption of 'melancholy of the healthy kind’, suddenly here and suddenly gone… This is the second release on B.A.A.D.M. by the Australian artist Mark Gomes, following his equally atmospheric but more romantic 'Flower Studies' from 2021.

Minneapolis-born saxophonist Cole Pulice, acclaimed for the ambient jazz masterpiece To Live & Die In Space & Time, returns with a long-awaited new album on the spiritually rooted West Coast label Leaving Records. Celestial echoes of modern classical, glacial drones of profound stillness, and a radiant landscape where spiritual jazz and ambient music interweave—this is music that dissolves into the air, where even silence feels sonorous. Pulice’s horn traces ripples that linger long after the notes fade, offering a meditative expanse of emotion, memory, and time. A deeply introspective and prayerful work that resonates with the space between sound and silence.

The 20th Anniversary Edition of "The Creep" by Slomo, this ambient doom masterwork, is now available on vinyl for the first time via Ideologic Organ. This is a storied album of verbal history, and emerged from a figurative long barrow deep within a virtual space of great depth and contemplation, an inverted framing of acoustic space with heavy floors ranging from the wake of COIL to the heaviest Japanese fire of psychedelia to the monuments of drone coagulating in the early 'aughts. A first tiny CDR edition (100 copies) of "The Creep" in 2005 garnered the focus of heavyweights like SUNN O))), Julian Cope, GNOD, the esoteric legendary record store Aquarius, and the Wire. Ideologic Organ is honoured to have been tasked with bringing this to a limited LP for the very first time, and has collaborated with mastering genius Rashad Becker to create a 61-minute single LP in perfect cut. The album will also be distributed widely on all digital channels.

–Stephen O'Malley, Stockholm May 2025

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Doom Metal is often appraised in terms of its sludginess. You might suspect Julian Cope associates Holy McGrail (guitar) and Howard Marsden (synth) of having taken these criteria to heart when they recorded their debut album as Slomo. Initially released on Cope’s Fuck Off & Di label and later reissued by Important, The Creep strains at the very boundaries of Doom. An eerie and evanescent hour-long exercise in bottom-heavy drone, it shares as much with Eno’s On Land as anything by Sunn O))) or Earth, including a comparable attitude towards the wild spots of the British landscape.

Sinking deep into their environment, McGrail and Marsden initiate contact with the pagan spirits lying dormant in the soil, such as the indolent entity of the album’s title and the “Old Rhyme” printed on the sleeve (“In Old England they called me Slaewth the slothful…”), while mimicking the slow, imperceptible processes of growth and decay. The duo’s low-frequency ooze certainly succeeds in evoking the subterranean, but its unhurried rumble also conjures the hidden spaces that flourish against the odds all over the British Isles, from untouched railway verges and motorway laybys to overgrown footpaths where used contraceptives, pornography, Coke cans and crisp packets collect like offerings to the Great God Pan. In more than one sense, The Creep is a fitting tribute to what lies beneath.

-Joseph Stannard, 2012

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The Creep, contextualised.

Just one week after the passing of COIL's Jhonn Balance in late 2004, the 61-minutes of "The Creep" manifested in a Sheffield suburb. Not yet a band and only captured due to happenstance, this first music of Slomo flowed forth without any consideration of it even being "a piece", let alone a release, though it didn't take long for the participants (Chris "Holy" McGrail and Howard Marsden) to realise they'd captured something of distinct colour on account of how often they were listening to it.

Initially dubbed "The Ballad of Jhonn & Sleazy", the pair soon instead ascribed the music to Boleigh Fogou; a prehistoric underground chamber on the Land's End peninsula that both had recently visited and been affected by. "The Creep" took its name from the peculiar side chamber assumed to be of ritual function, having no apparent practical use. This ponderous music chimed perfectly with the fogou; an apparently stolid place that teems with life once you become attuned to its frequency.

Fitting in perfectly alongside other massive single-track albums such as Sleep's "Dopesmoker", COIL's 'Queens of the Circulating Library', Cope's "Odin", and Boris' "Flood", "The Creep" secured a limited release on Cope's Fuck Off & Di CD-R label in 2005 that quickly sold out via supportive outlets such as Southern Lord, Aquarius Records and Stephen O'Malley's Ideologic Organ - then operating merely as a blog and micro-store.

After a wider CD release in 2006, Slomo followed up "The Creep" with "The Bog" in 2008 – a much denser plunder into the fundament. 2012 brought with it the pair's first live outings and "The Grain", another nod to Land's End with an airier, more agricultural sound and the first signs of creeping automation. 2017's "Transits" captured three spontaneous compositions for time and space and remains a firm favourite among the band's listeners; one of the tracks going on to be remixed by twelve of the band's favourite artists on 2018's 2xCD compilation "Super-Individual: Collective Ritual". The band returned in 2024 with "Zen and Zennor" and live shows with GNOD and a sold-out show at Stone Club, London.

In other's words :

“If the doom metal of Khanate is the ideal soundtrack to the 21st Century Odinists’ hanging upon the tree of Yggdrasil, then the vegetal music of Slomo is the unfolding, nurturing, ever-becoming ur-ooze that titanically irrigates the roots of that sacred tree. Slomo restores our timeless beginnings and fulfils the Ginnungagap… motherfuckers.”

JULIAN COPE

“…seeps into your subconscious, where it flutters like a trapped and burning moth at the back of your brain. Ghostly sounding and ominously rumbling with atmospheric threat, The Creep is an undeniably effective chunk of subterranean echo, whose quaking aftershock could cause sleepless nights.”

THE WIRE

“Uneasy, brooding, and honestly unsettling, this disc slowly works its way out of the speakers and into the psyche. Ingrained, it’s impossible to put it down, lock it away, carry it to the street with the beer and Scotch bottles to be recycled. Inactivated, it defiantly surfaces in the cat’s purr, the Volk’s engine knocks, a fritzing hard drive.”

DUSTED MAGAZINE

Hampus Lindwall is a musical artist active in many fields ranging from contemporary music to experimental and electronic sound / music. He has released many albums, as a soloist and in collaboration and is the titular organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris, since 2005.

At the end of my armA finger, a thread, a vanishing pointWhere nothing can be seen and the air is movingAnnie A, the one-off collaborative project between Félicia Atkinson, Time is Away’s Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney, Christina Petrie and Maxine Funke, arrives on A Colourful Storm with a profoundly inquisitive, exploratory composition evoking questions of inconstancy and reconciliation, vastness and finitude, and the sometimes cruel deception of human perception. Who will conduct our dreams if we never wake?Annie A quietly observes and attempts to compartmentalise the answers. A geographically diverse yet determinedly like-minded ensemble, its seeds were sown during a spring night in London, where time on stage was shared and cherished by Atkinson, Time is Away and Petrie after years of mutual appreciation. Atkinson had found solace in Time is Away’s Ballads, Funke’s Seance and particularly the voice of poet and performer Petrie, whose remarkable delivery, first heard on Ballads, here drifts effortlessly from a wide-eyed stream of consciousness to crystalline sensory expression: “The wind is full of creases / It is shaking the weak threads in the cliff / The coast is releasing teeth and nails into the air”. It is the perfect accompaniment to Atkinson’s hushed tones - a sometimes textural, if not spectral, presence - spoken sensitively like a mother to a resting child, reflecting upon the forces of nature, the fragility of ecology and the surrendering of self to air, rain, and earth.Devotees of Atkinson’s practice will recognise the significance of the natural world in her work, her evocative sonic landscapes formed from a toolbox of keyboard, voice and materials collected from everyday life on the dramatic rocky coast of Normandy, as well as field recordings from places far and wide. She breathes life into liminal spaces, the sound of wind, whispers and the distant clatter of rocks conjuring visions of places both beautiful and eerily familiar. Petrie wanders curiously in these places. “First the Crocus” introduces her desirous cries above a wistful electronic signal, the alternation with Atkinson’s whispers suggestive of each other’s distant presence. “The wind that had not touched land, moving with the warm gyre of the sea / Is now touching land / And is beginning to draw the dust”. What is her fate when this wind touches land? The meeting of the other, the crossing of paths. Their voices, layered and dreamlike, drift and entrance each other with gossamer intensity.Interpreting and arranging the field of sonic accoutrements is Time is Away, whose weaving, layering and sensitivity to detail is likened to the meticulous assembly of an Anni Albers textile. The spirit of Albers guides the piece’s entirety, Petrie’s recounting of her loom and thread a symbol of endurance, vitality and seeking wonder in intricacies: “Every thread needs to pass through the eye of a needle before you begin / I keep wondering, I just keep wondering what will happen”. The piece concludes with a timely appearance by Funke, whose meditation on vulnerability confronts and surrenders herself to the enchanting natural world.

Delicate glitches drifting like particles, ambient textures rising like mist—West Mineral, the seminal imprint founded by Huerco S. and a defining force in the post-2010s “Dubient” movement, returns with another essential release. Sleepdial is the solo project of Denver-based experimental musician Luke Thinnes, known for his releases as Dubharp on 100% Silk and as French Kettle Station on Slagwerk. This debut LP offers a soundworld where blurred drones and error-like noise artifacts linger with echoes of nameless, half-remembered emotions. Navigating the liminal zones between loop and non-loop, structure and collapse, it gently scatters fragments of memory into Dubient silence. A crystalline document of dreamlike introspection—one that glows quietly within the contemporary experimental continuum. Mastered by Rashad Becker.

This is a new intersection of field ambient and improvised sound. ARBORE, a collaborative project by French-born, Berlin-based sound artists Diane Barbé and Laure Boer, will be released by Somewhere Press, an underground sound venue in Glasgow! Rough field recordings and improvised noise/sound sculptures interweave the spiritual and the animal. The faint footsteps deep in the forest, the noise of creaking metal, and the rippling breathing can all be considered sensory reorganization devices that awaken non-human senses.

Originally released in the early ’80s on the obscure German imprint Giraffe Rec, this elusive one-off LP by shadowy Düsseldorf-based unit Mentocome now sees an official analog reissue via Amok Age! A document of impersonal silence and machine-born noise, buried deep in the cassette underground and post-wave detritus of the time. Rust-laden echoes in the vein of Werkbund or Peter Rehberg, brooding industrial drones, and sinking minimal rhythms conjure a cold, mechanical poetry. At times evoking the empty claustrophobia of a U-boat’s inner hull, elsewhere revealing moments of rain-drenched piano reminiscent of early Robert Haigh. Less a record than a phantom cartography of unseen urban heartbeats, linking directly to the spectral soundworlds of the Creel Pone lineage.

Last year's collaboration album with Ulla, a popular female experimental writer in the United States, was very good, by Perila, a Berlin-based DJ/producer who is also known as the co-founder of The latest album is released in vinyl from . A masterpiece of a gloomy electroacoustic/drone ambient that unfolds surrealism with a cool and vast soundscape reminiscent of the polar environment, deep introspection and sadness! Mastering specification by master craftsman Rashad Becker.

repressed! jeff parker's magnificent first solo album -slight freedom-, a new york times best albums of 2016. 2nd edition pressed on premium 120-gram audiophile vinyl by RTI, presented in a retro flipback jacket.

slight freedom, jeff parker’s first ever solo record, presents the first opportunity to hear the guitarist in fully self-revealed circumstances. recorded 2013 & ’14 in the hollywood hills as he relocated from chicago to los angeles, parker combines the dark tonal palette & percussive attack he’s long been known for with real-time processing elements & field recordings, deftly crafting a unique world of solo guitar music --multilingual, mysterious, alive with extraordinary sonic events, with a sturdy intelligence in charge & a raw homestyle vibe. the record is yet another defining moment for parker in 2016, a year that already includes a brilliant ensemble album (the new breed) & tortoise’s 25th anniversary tour & record (the catastrophist).

parker’s title composition sets the album’s cavernous mood. terse lines & ricocheting loops morph into a gnarly ambient section that resembles neil young droning out over a vg+ copy of discreet music. parker creates a different sort of ambient space in his take on frank ocean’s 'super rich kids,' bending the melody around a bossa nova rhythm into a moodsville tone poem. parker makes an extraordinary long-form statement out of chad taylor’s ‘mainz,’ a piece he first recorded with taylor & chris lopes on the album bright light in winter. twice the length of the trio recording, the multi-layered soliloquy finds parker leaping from the high rung to damn near orchestral heights, pushing his techniques & concepts to their breaking points. it’s one of the great solo performances you’ll hear from a musician this year. to say “lush life” comes with formidable baggage is an understatement. parker achieves instant classic status with a rendition that sounds beamed-in from a decommissioned satellite --burned out, covered in space grit, yet still formally nuanced & beautifully reflective of strayhorn’s world-weary lyrics.

twenty years into the game it’s a joy for eremite to present work by an artist who’s clearly taking his music to the next level.

After another long period of silence, Deaf Center return with two long-form, hypnotic pieces recorded in an intimate setting. “Reverie” can be seen as a follow up to 2014’s “Recount”, which saw two pieces of music created around their live-sets in different periods. This time, we are treated with a contemporary, raw live performance from October 2024 in Rabih Beaini’s studio, Morphine Raum in Berlin, during the 15th anniversary celebration of Sonic Pieces. This was the first concert from the two old friends since 2019. As always, the duo favours improvisation, and what emerged on this evening turned out to be a truly magical encounter between the two, with Otto A Totland on piano and Erik K Skodvin on guitar, cello, electronics and processing.

In “Rev”, deeply effected piano motifs reverberate and echo in the depths of the room, evolving through looping and electronics into a blissful, mesmerising cloud of (dis)harmony. The sound is reminiscent of the 7inch "Vintage Well" mixed with the basic elements of 2011's "Owl Splinters”. “Erie”, on the other hand, begins almost jazz-like as a piano and cello duo, slowly transforming into a full-bodied organ drone. Towards the end of the piece, the piano motifs from before repeat and vary, for then to slowly settle into gentle melancholy, supported only by a low, rumbling ambient shadow. The immediate duality of the two performers has rarely been so strongly felt, Totland’s deep melodic feeling is underscored by Skodvin’s abstract ambience and processing. Dark versus light, loud versus quiet - this has always been at the core of what makes Deaf Center a special project.

Although this is a live performance, the quality and scope of the album are more akin to a real studio recording. A welcome stop on the path towards the next chapter in Deaf Center’s history, and a great way to forget everything and for a moment get lost in reverie.

“I did this piano/Rhodes recording, played live, without overdubs. I believe your approach to sound could match very well these tracks….”

That’s how Giovanni Di Domenico’s collaboration with Rutger Zuydervelt started, though the first seeds were planted when the duo did a short live improv together in 2019, and Giovanni joining Hydra Ensemble on stage in 2022.

Painting a Picture / Picture a painting is -as the title suggest- an album of two long-form pieces, swapping the working method for each - one takes Giovanni’s recordings and has Rutger processing and adding to it, while the other one started with Rutger creating its foundation (with manipulated sounds of the first piece), and Giovanni building upon it. This resulted in two meandering tracks that are clearly linked, like two sides of the same coin.

The cover, a painting of an empty canvas, is made by Christiaan Kuitwaard. A beautiful and ultimately fitting visual addition to this mysterious release.

"Generative sonic backdrop for bus stations. Designed to enhance space and portray a mod of progressiveness, grandeur, and ethereal calm. A slowly shifting static backdrop designed to enhance modern architecture, rather than compete with it. Sounding as if the structure itself was resonanting. Hovering sound-fields that utilizes sonic phenomena proven to induce states of calm. Can be presented as a multichannel, polyrhythmic installation with different components of the composition emanating form different areas within the structure, and elements constantly shifting in relationship to other elements, creating an organic sonic-tapestry that never repeats the same way. In essence, the soundscape becoming a living organism with unpredictable behavior. Inspired by avant-garde bus station designs such as Domitianus Arquitectura's station in Rio Maior, Portugal; Bluck & Morgen's Busbahnhof Poppenbuttel in Hamburg, Germany; and Metaraum Architect's bus station in Pzorzheim, Germany." - Rod Modell

"Generative sonic backdrop for bus stations. Designed to enhance space and portray a mod of progressiveness, grandeur, and ethereal calm. A slowly shifting static backdrop designed to enhance modern architecture, rather than compete with it. Sounding as if the structure itself was resonanting. Hovering sound-fields that utilizes sonic phenomena proven to induce states of calm. Can be presented as a multichannel, polyrhythmic installation with different components of the composition emanating form different areas within the structure, and elements constantly shifting in relationship to other elements, creating an organic sonic-tapestry that never repeats the same way. In essence, the soundscape becoming a living organism with unpredictable behavior. Inspired by avant-garde bus station designs such as Domitianus Arquitectura's station in Rio Maior, Portugal; Bluck & Morgen's Busbahnhof Poppenbuttel in Hamburg, Germany; and Metaraum Architect's bus station in Pzorzheim, Germany." - Rod Modell

In the 90's, Rafael Toral was considered "one of the most talented and innovative guitarists" and was a favorite of the members of Sonic Youth. In 1998, he released his early masterpiece on Perdition Plastics, an experimental label run by Kurt Griesch of Illusion Of Safety (whose roster includes RLW, Kevin Drumm, MIMEO, His Name Is Alive, etc.), and now it's available for the first time in vinyl on Black Truffle, run by Australian mastermind Oren Ambarchi. Recorded at Noise Precision in Lisbon between December 1997 and April 1998, this is probably their fourth album. It is a masterpiece of drone/ambient with a unique sense of emptiness, built around minimal electronics and feedback loops with a melancholic atmosphere. Remastered by Tral himself, with a new design by Lasse Marhaug. In addition to David Toop's liner notes, which were included on the original CD release, the album also includes new liners by David himself.

Beautiful string drones drawn in longform by Belgian cellist Gwen Sainte-Rose, evoking the wide rolling natural landscapes of a region nestled between the Ardennes and French Lorraine.

‘Collines, Racines’ is the 5th presentation on By The Bluest of Seas, a new wing of the Okraïna label, renowned for their attention to detail in the packaging which is typically on point here to match the music. On two works reaching well over the 25’ mark Sainte-Rose coils her cello gestures via Loopstation and unfurls ribboning motifs that limn vast vantage points over green scapes of forests and fields. 

She finds just the right balance of textured, biting point discord and harmonious sentiment as the pieces proceed to build upward and outward in the more melodramatic cadence of tension and release to ‘Collines’, whilst ‘Raciness’ feels more nocturnal in its development from sweeping, panoramic post rock intimations thru widescreen scope recalling Richard Skelton, to a magnificent passage of sustained lift into vertiginous heights.  

This album, crafted entirely within a subharmonic framework and meticulously processed through tape manipulation, stands as Concepción Huerta’s sharpest work to date—undoubtedly her most abrasive, intense, and exhilarating. Her signature remains intact: a practice deeply rooted in drone, musique concrète, and hauntingly visceral textures—a kind of soundtrack that evokes powerful, image-driven narratives.

Conceptually, Huerta’s sonic vision evokes an image of open veins, not human veins, but those of the earth itself, the open veins of Latin America. These nervures are, in truth, rivers of lava; fury transmuted into fire coursing beneath the land until it erupts. The album is, in a way, a reflection on dispossession, resource extraction, and colonization. But beyond being a historical commentary—one that some might relegate to a forgotten past—it is also a reminder of the present, of how these practices persist in contemporary, postmodern guises.

It serves as both a tribute to the literary work of Eduardo Galeano, one of the most influential voices of Latin American leftist thought, and a howl from the Lacandon jungle in Mexico, resonating with the Zapatista struggle, the resistance of the Guaraní people in Paraguay and Argentina, and the voices of Indigenous communities across Latin America.

In the 16th century, a book titled Visión de los vencidos (The Broken Spears) was published in Mexico, compiling Nahuatl texts that presented the unofficial history, the account of the defeated. Concepción Huerta’s album El Sol de los Muertos (The Sun of the Dead) is not a call to action nor a reactionary manifesto, but an invitation to reflection, a historical reexamination. It urges us not to accept the official narrative at face value and serves as a warning, to remain vigilant and, within our capacities, resist the resurgence of fascism and colonialism in all its modern forms.



The first release to document the solo cello work of musician and composer Lucy Railton, the 40-minute composition Blue Veil recorded at Église du Saint-Esprit in Paris invites listeners into the realm of precision-tuned states of resonance: states made manifest through Railton’s careful traversal of her cello's most subtle acoustic characteristics as they harmonically interlock with mind’s embodied modalities of attention and imagination.
Blue Veil arises out of, is sustained in and finally dissolves back into Railton’s momentary presence with her intimate connection to the cello, a way of hearing that allows for a deeper engagement with harmonic resonance, one that opens a space for immediate encounters of mind and sound.
Railton’s exploratory practice of harmonic perception emerges from a focus on the physical qualities of intervallic and chordal sounds, their textural qualities, degrees of friction, and inner pulsations. Composing in the moment guided by resonances within the cello’s body, her own, and their shared vibrational space, Railton moves through Blue Veil by giving sounds what they ask for: sounds of pure texture manifesting as a move through temporal transparency, sounds of rough texture marking regions of dimensionally dense space.
Railton’s creative and highly refined use of just intonation harmony deforms sound's inner movements in ways that suggest a mode of listening that actively supplies imagery of sounds implied or completely absent rather than merely savouring those fully present. This active mode of “listening-with”, playfully and semi-metaphorically referred to by Railton as “sing-along music”, allows listening to reflexively participate in the music’s movement as it gradually passes through richly saturated domains of harmonic imagination. And just as the precision-tuned tones of Blue Veil lose their individuality when fusing multifaceted uniformity, listening’s structures of reference and recognition dissolve into nameless waves of intensity, continuously unfolding themselves upon and merging with the listener.
Blue Veil is the result of a deep exploration of the inner worlds of tuning, an undertaking in turn informed by and emerging out of Railton’s realisations of the music of Catherine Lamb and Ellen Arkbro, her collaborative work with Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley as well as her interpretive practice in performing the work of Maryanne Amacher, Morton Feldman and others. 

To be heard with ears half bent, or with one side facing what Maryanne Amacher calls “the third ear”.

The great reverence in which the Tanpura is held by Indian classical music, its transcendental but occulted place in the tradition alongside its normal function as a drone, made a strong impression on the composer such that it has taken decades to formulate even a simple Tanpura Study.

The fundamentals, the Om, as well as the overtones, the music of the spheres -all these have their valid rights, but in Tanpura Study they are embedded in a series of gestures, what I call signatures, on the melodic level.

In Tanpura and Harpsichord, there is an encounter of overtones with chords braided into pun-notes, what Gerard Grisey calls “degrees of transposition”. Taken together, this amounts to a non-spectralism in which, contrary to first impressions, there are no fundamental frequencies, even in the bass.

Ajaeng Ajaeng: with respect to European string instruments, the technique col legno affords the direct encounter of wood and string, opening the way to a more tactile conception of the sustained sound, while bringing the materiality of the bow and its practices into question. In violin, viola, cello bows, Pernambuco wood offers an ideal example of extraction, colonialism, deforestation.

With the Ajaeng, a Korean musical instrument, the situation is more complex. The dialectic of court to folk music, always political, always incendiary, may be heard here in the encounter of forsythia and silk, of Dae Ajaeng to So Ajaeng, and on a broader level of Dang Ak (Tang Dynasty music) to Hyang Ak (native Korean music) and their representations.

Alternating music and sound, overtone arrays mingled with noise, marked by the bow change, in flamelike patterns which flicker, emerge, and fade again. A slow down structure, also formalized in Time Medicine, seems to produce a long decrescendo, with the technique of the players drawing out the flicker patterns in a kind of game.

The point here is not to produce a drone but to delve into the question of life in sound. This apparent emergence of life is due to the apparatus, what Marx calls a “social hieroglyphic”, which brings forsythia and silk together in technique, cultivated by practices which are themselves sustained by the real relations of student to teacher to student.

The recording engineer too, by placing one mic below and one above each Ajaeng, bifurcates the listening space; the mix, one Ajaeng in each speaker, again produces a bifurcated image of the sound. Thus the sound is split in four directions, to be reconstituted in the cochlea, but with the center of the body as the real target.

This music is made for meditation. On retreat in 2019 I had a revelation: there is no difference between the prayer, the hearing, and the void. There is nothing original in this idea; Wonhyo and many sages have thought it before.

—Eyvind Kang, April 2020 

FELT welcomes back Civilistjävel! with Följd, the follow up to last year’s Brödföda. 7 tracks further chronicling his melancholic murk, ever drifting towards that faint dub glow. Features a collaboration with Thomas Bush.

Uncanny are the nocturnal sounds that ebb patiently from Tomas Bodén and his machines. His music continues to uncover equal parts beauty and dread from isolation, a purposeful slow pace guiding those gentle noises through the arctic air surrounding its author. No matter the weather, these expressions as Civilistjävel! continue to find a loving home on Fergus Jones’s FELT imprint.

On Följd, he naturally develops on the inclinations found on Brödföda. XIII’s unsettling warble melts into the dusky spurts of XIV. Further on, the dew-glowed ambience of XV precedes XVI’s dub trudge which casts a hypnotic grey shadow. XVII’s wind-swept acid redux then quietly transitions into the stunning introspective drone of XVIII before closer XIX comes into view, its positive dawn enacted through Thomas Bush’s croons lilting amongst organs, guitars and tempered sound design.

Civilistjävel! continues to emote a great deal with very little, a reliable abstract practitioner that posits Följd as an arresting audio tale within his celebrated oeuvre.

This compilation introduces the sound pieces created by the Latin American experimental filmmakers and

is curated by the film artist Tetsuya Maruyama.

Tetsuya Maruyama

Born in 1983 in Yokohama, Japan and currently based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Graduated from the University at Buffalo's School of Architecture in 2007 and from the Visual Language Department of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro's School of Fine Arts in 2024. His work spans film, text, performance, sound, ideas, and installation, without prioritizing any particular medium.

Maruyama’s practice is rooted in re-contextualizing ordinary elements and textures, presenting them as ephemeral records of everyday observations. As an independent programmer and researcher, he has curated screenings of Brazilian experimental cinema across the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Japan, and Canada. He is also the founder of Megalab, an artist-run film lab based in Rio de Janeiro. His works are distributed by Light Cone, a nonprofit organization dedicated to experimental cinema in Paris.

Artist bio:

Ж

Ж (São Paulo, 198-) film-designer, programmer, educator & editor

Has a non-specialised and situated practice that explores the energetic, material,economic, political, and emotional cycles of (semio)capitalism. His work uses various strategies, materials, and media to reveal how these forces shape perception,memory, and subjectivity, especially in the context of our current ecological crisis.

His artistic propositions have taken the form of films, video installations, counter-spaces, writings, performances, and public space interventions, all aimed at reintegrating artistic practice into specific social and political contexts.

John Melo:

Visual artist, designer, and teacher of audiovisual arts. Graduated from the MAE (Master's in Technology and Aesthetics of Electronic Arts) at the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), Argentina. Interested in the relationship between arts, technology, ancestry, and transdisciplinary and experimental work. Studies non-linearity in artistic creation processes, poetic thinking, magical thinking, spirituality, and political and social actions, with a deep interest in pedagogy. Their work combines creative languages such as installation, sculpture, illustration, writing, sound, and video primarily. Previously a tutor in the training program for self-taught artists at the Museum of Modern Art in Bogotá (MAMBO PFA)

In 2022, founded SEPAE (Seminar of Editing and Experimental Audiovisual Thinking). Also involved in"Colectivo Tal Cosa," a transdisciplinary project combining biology, sound

exploration, intuition, and non-linear thinking in creative processes. A member of "2 horas de diferencia coletivo," a space connecting Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia for projects that conceptually link the three territories. Part of the art collective "Blanco Conejo" in Bogotá, aiming to share, promote, and experiment with contemporary

modes of creation.

Rodrigo Faustini:

Rodrigo Faustini is a Brazilian artist and researcher, based in São Paulo/ Campinas. His practice focuses on mediation, materiality and noise in audiovisual forms. His work has been exhibited at Centro Cultural Kirchner, Images Festival, Bienal de la Imagen en Movimiento, Annecy international animation festival, Vienna Shorts, Festival de Cine de la Habana, and others.

Francisco Álvarez Ríos:

Francisco Álvarez Ríos (1991 - Ecuador) is a filmmaker, curator, archivist, and visual and sound artist. He currently serves as the director and curator of the Festival Internacional de Cine Contemporáneo Cámara Lúcida

As a filmmaker, he explores reality and its escapes, focusing on the demystification of the image beyond the literal recording of the real. His current practice delves into moving images, sound interpretation, film installation, and performance film—practices that coexist and interact within the less-defined territory of the contemporary expanded cinema.

Martín Baus:

Multimedia artist, filmmaker, musician, researcher and teacher. My artistic practice investigates the relationships between history, materialism and perception, converging my interest in the political dimensions of listening, the reappropriation of archives, and the procedures of translation between materialities such as celluloid,sound and text. I’m a member of CEIS8, a collective for experimentation with film formats and photochemical processes based in Santiago de Chile, and co-director along with Andrés Baus, of the independent record label Radio Fome, which releases improvisation-based music and sound pieces. I’m interested in aurality as a tool for a radical pedagogy from Latin America, as well as methodology for artistic and practice-based research.

I enjoy engaging with the sonic realm from non-audible or non-sonorous approaches, therefore, I’ve done poetry books related to listening and wording, text installations that engage with opaque language translation procedures, publications around the links between salsa rhythms, migration and working-class struggles, and fictional writings that speculate on the future of sound archives and digital archeology.

Lucía Malandro:

Lucía Malandro is a renowned Uruguayan filmmaker dedicated to the preservation and restoration of cinematic and photographic heritage.

A graduate of the Escuela de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba, with a specialization in Documentary Directing, she continued her studies with a master’s degree at Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola at the University of the Basque Country, Spain. As the founder of the Archivistas Salvajes collective, Malandro has taken initiative to rescue a little-known legacy: Cuba’s underground cinema of the 1970s and 1980s, a clandestine movement that emerged on Havana’s rooftops in response to official restrictions.

Since 2019, she has directed several short films focused on the reuse and revaluation of cinematic and photographic archives, earning recognition at prestigious international festivals. Additionally, she has contributed as a film critic to various publications, including the official newspaper of the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2023.

Malandro has worked on the restoration of archives at the Cinemateca Portuguesa and has contributed to research and archival projects such as Piezas Cinéticas and Vanguardia Scópica, collaborating with institutions like Gordailua, the Basque Film

Ivonne Sheen Mogollón:

My projects are developed as experimental audiovisual, photographic and sound works, publications, texts, curatorial work and organization of cultural initiatives. From a personal and critical voice, I explore questions and reinterpretations about my surroundings, structures, archive images, my family history and the hegemonic learning that we assimilate. I am interested in self-management and the collective creation of spaces and experiences. I currently live in between Cologne, Germany, and Lima, Peru. My film Animal Within co-directed with Rebeca Alvan has been showcased in different platforms and festivals in Latin America, Europe and the USA. I am co founder of Taller Helios and associate collaborator of Isole_islas.

Javier Plano:

Javier Plano is an artist and university professor that works and lives in Buenos Aires. He has a college degree in Electronic Arts from UNTREF, where since 2014 he has been teaching courses about time based media and audiovisual performance arts. He’s currently doing a master’s degree in Sound Art at UNTREF. In 2007, he begins to produce video works and installations, participating in various festivals and exhibitions organized by institutions locally and abroad. He has received numerous distinctions for his works, among others an honorable mention in the MAMbA / Fundación Telefónica Award for Arts and New Technologies, the 3rd prize in the UNTREF award to the Electronics Arts, and three different honorable mentions at the National Salon of Visual Arts. On 2016, he has his first solo exhibition, titled "Test Patterns", in the MACLA (La Plata, Argentina). That same year he attends an artistic residence program on Signal Culture (NY, USA), with a scholarship granted by the Department of Cultural Affairs of Argentina. In 2019, he does his first solo exhibition in Buenos Aires at the Eduardo Sívori Museum, and wins a Scholarship of the Fondo Nacional de las Artes to develop a new project.

Pablo Mazzolo:

Pablo Mazzolo (Argentina) is a filmmaker and educator born in Buenos Aires in 1976. He works exclusively in analogue film formats exploring the optical and chemical properties of the medium, with a particular focus on human and natural landscapes. His work has tackled themes such as indigenous sovereignty, the spectre of military dictatorship, extinction and environmental catastrophe.

He received an MFA from the University of Buenos Aires (2001). His films, including Diego La Silla (2000), Oaxaca Tohoku (2011), El Quilpo sueña cataratas (2012), Fotooxidación (2013), and Ceniza Verde (2019), have been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and galleries internationally, including Arsenal Institute for Film and Video Art, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Melbourne International Film Festival, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Block Museum of Art, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Brooklyn Museum, The Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, TIFF Wavelength, International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Edinburgh International Film Festival, Punto de Vista Festival, Frontera Sur International Non-Fiction Festival, Museo Tamayo, Valdivia International Film Festival, FAMU International, The Latin American Museum of Art Buenos Aires, Chicago Underground Film Festival, San Francisco Cinematheque, The Friedl Kubelka School for Independent Film, (S8) Mostra de Cinema Periférico, and Cinemateca Madrid, among many others.

His film Conjectures (2013) won Grand Prize, Media City Film Festival (2013); Fish Point (2015) was awarded the Kodak Cinematic Vision Award, Ann Arbor Film Festival (2016); and Cineza Verda (2019) was awarded Grand Prize, Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (2019). Mazzolo is Professor at the National University of Quilmes, works as a freelance documentary film editor, and teaches workshops on visual perception and image creation to young people living with autism. He lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Rosana Cacciotore:

Experimental filmmaker, documentary filmmaker, photographer, teacher, and

audiovisual researcher. Graduated in social communication with a master's and a PhD degree (thesis defense) in literary theory from UFSC/BR. She has taught film and visual poetics courses, had films screened in national and international festivals, and participated as a debater, curator, judge, and reviewer in festivals, shows, and film notices. She has a book and articles published.

In experimental work, I usually make the sound myself; I think it is part of the creation process. About sound in these works, I assume sound is an image that produces meaning (or sensation) as a sign independent of the image.

Our first album we made together, "The Days After", was initially released on Three Poplars in 2003. Then, afterwards in 2007 it was re-issued with a new version of the second track, "Flaxen", on Faraway Press.

After having found the earliest version of 'The Days After' in my archives last autumn, there was an excitement that grows with the beginning of something in the creative process and the sparkle of an idea that can never be recreated. Furthermore, there was a moment when trial and error emit a spark like the striking of a flint.

I thought it was worth releasing, and Andrew agreed.

Then, we asked that our most trusted mastering engineer, Denis Blackham, bring the album to a new life. Denis' amazing mastering skills made the album what it should be: a powerful piece of work that feels fresh and full of energy.

It's been 23 years since then. We have come a long way together. It's been a long road, but we've been there for each other every step of the way. That's why the album is called 'The Years After'. Actually it's 'Twenty-three Years After', but that's my personal story.

I couldn't be happier.

Daisuke Suzuki

Tokyo March 2025