MUSIC

ノイズ界の二大巨頭、Merzbow と Bastard Noise が真正面から激突したコラボ作『Brick Wall Evolution』。Merzbow の流動的で有機的なハーシュノイズと、Bastard Noise の低域重視のパワーエレクトロニクスが融合し、圧倒的な密度と質量を持つ音響が立ち上がる。高周波のきらめきと地鳴りのような低周波が層を成し、混沌と秩序が同時に存在するノイズの地形が刻々と変化していく。タイトル通り、進化した音の壁！！

A Note from Lawrence English TripleAkuma is the third in a series of essential live documents from Merzbow. The stage and the studio are not the same place, and Merzbow has an acute understanding of this juxtaposition. Whilst the sheer density of the music might be maintained across both spheres, the live experience of Merzbow is truly something that exists as profoundly physical and moreover, overtly performative. Merzbow’s live methodologies draw not just from a saturation of frequency at all levels, but a recognition of how frequency can be used to affect the body. Working at the extremes of both low and high sonic energies, he creates a situation within which the fullness of the body can be tested; the aural body, that of our ears (and importantly our mind’s ear), and the physical one (after all, the body itself is an ear). TripleAkuma, recorded in his hometown of Tokyo, captures a particularly fierce and free performance. There’s a morphic and lava-like quality to the sounds he creates here and the very room itself bares into the recording, adding a certain excessive intensity to the way the sounds carry in space, and time. There is no one exposure that could capture the true force and presence of Merzbow live, but each capture, like this one, deepens our understanding of his truly unique and provocative sonic universe.

Blawan releases his long-awaited debut XL Recordings album, SickElixir. Crafted between Berlin, Leeds, Paris, and Lisbon, the 14-track record is his most personal work to date; a manifesto for the way he sees

music and himself. Channeling grief, family trauma, and seismic life shifts, SickElixir expands on the sounds of his recent EPs - BouQ, Dismantled Into Juice, and Woke Up Right Handed - plunging listeners into a

chaotic yet meticulous sonic world that reflects on the past while projecting a bold vision for the future.

Jamie Roberts has been revered in electronic circles for years as an artist with a fastidious approach to creating his own sound, relentlessly drawing from his teenage influences growing up in Barnsley, a post-

industrial town in South Yorkshire. At 14, he started working on a maggot farm and credits the clanging sound of the farm’s industrial mincer as an early influence on his music. After playing in various metal bands,

Roberts’ musical horizons began to expand through visits to the West Indian Centre in Leeds, where he was introduced to the full spectrum of electronic music. He first emerged as Blawan at the turn of the 2010s with

EPs on cult labels such as Hinge Finger and Hessle Audio, earning widespread critical acclaim. He’s consistently experimented, pushing boundaries in his solo projects while collaborating closely with British

producer Pariah on several projects – the live techno act Karenn, the metal-inspired band Persher, and the label Voam. SickExlixir marks the next step in solidifying his position as one of contemporary music's unique, pioneering artists, operating firmly in a lane of his own.

12" in printed reverse board sleeve.

Endlessness is a deep dive into the cycle of existence. The 45-minute album delicately spans 10 tracks with a continuous arpeggio playing throughout, creating an expansive, mesmerising celebration of life cycles and rebirth. Following Sinephro’s critically acclaimed 2021 debut album Space 1.8, Endlessness further elevates her as a transcendent and multi-dimensional composer, beautifully morphing jazz, orchestral, and electronic music.

The album was composed, produced, arranged, and engineered by Sinephro. Performing on the album are Sheila Maurice-Grey, Morgan Simpson, James Mollison, Lyle Barton, Nubya Garcia, Natcyet Wakili, and Dwayne Kilvington, joined by Orchestrate’s 21 string players.

KAKUHAN haven't released much, but what's out there is some of the most astonishing hybrid electroacoustic music that's emerged in the last few years. Owing as much to Autechre as it does to Arthur Russell, it's dizzyingly psychedelic music that flits between wild free improvisation and obsessive, micro-edited precision, unclassifiable rhythmic and tonal experimentation that nods to the renaissance era and the contemporary dancefloor sometimes in the same breath. And in 2023, not long after the release of their now-classic debut album "Metal Zone", KAKUHAN were invited to perform live at Unsound in Kraków. The duo were offered the opportunity to collaborate with a local artist, so after serious consideration decided on percussionist and musicologist Adam Gołębiewski, a veteran improviser who's performed and recorded with everyone from Yoko Ono and Thurston Moore to Mats Gustafsson and Ken Vandermark.

Hino and Nakagawa were struck by Gołębiewski's unique tone and his very specific, immediately recognizable approach to drumming, realizing immediately that the collaboration would stretch their concept even further. "Personally, I was looking forward to hearing how Hino's rhythmic sequences and Adam's percussion would interact," says Nakagawa. But it's Gołębiewski's interaction with his cymbals particularly that bridges a gap in KAKUHAN's sound, existing in the space between Nakagawa's cello and Hino's stuttering samples. In fact, the performance was so successful that the trio headed to Kraków's KPD Studio shortly afterwards, dubbing an exclusive session with engineer Rafał Drewniany that would become "Repercussions". The session's vision is captured perfectly by the album cover, a painting from Polish artist Alicja Pakosz that shows a knife edge splitting a jet of water. It's the relative sharpness of Gołębiewski's sound that defines this project, cutting through Nakagawa and Hino's musical rituals and creating something new in the process.

Using a bow to extract eerie metallic resonances from his kit, Gołębiewski often sounds like another string player, punctuating Hino's exacting rolls and Nakagawa's blood-curdling pizzicato echoes with knife-edge squeals on opening track II. And when the flurries of beats vanish completely on VII, Gołębiewski and Nakagawa are left to create xenharmonic ambience with their scraped, atmospheric drones, letting Hino's low-end rumbles and boiled textures suggest a rhythm from the periphery. Nakagawa's cello practically sings on 'IV', sounding more like woodwind or bird calls than strings, and Gołębiewski acts as a cracked mirror, replying with uneasy scrapes and acrobatic rhythmic bursts that neatly augment Hino's complex electroid sequences. Not jazz exactly, it's hallucinatory expressionism that straddles the line between harmony and dissonance, control and chaos or human and computer.

Street Druid merges acoustic, manipulated and electronic sound using saxophone, synth, voice, guitars & drum machine, and features drum kit from Mercury-nominated artist, Moses Boyd.

It features artwork by Byzantia Harlow. It is at once tender, psychedelic and fierce. It is not interested in genre or category. It lasts just under 45 minutes.

A prelude for the future, hands join to cast a peace spell. Consciousness is vast water seeking divine essence and meaning where colours merge and refract. The street druid walks through the night, a benevolence in the darkness, guiding you home. Immersed in noise, life can feel empty, like hollow vessels, a sentient interlude. At times we are found in Gaia's rhythm, kinetic and rebuilt, transcending through the impact of sound on the body. Every moment is a new change, a new challenge, a new life, we must ride the wave if we are not to be caught adrift or drown. Trying to keep hope intact, we must not retreat into fear, recognise we all live here in Longville and stop the fire before it engulfs us all.

Akashaplexia is the culmination of Merzbow and John Wiese’s decades-long partnership, offering over three hours of new music across four CDs. Recorded together in Tokyo, the album balances Merzbow’s psychedelic intensity and Wiese’s meticulous sonic architecture, presenting a vast and intricately detailed landscape of noise, improvisation, and unpredictable dynamic shifts.​

Akashaplexia stands as the first full-length studio collaboration between Merzbow and John Wiese, captured in December 2024 at Sound Studio Noah, Tokyo. This box set - designed by John Wiese and elegantly housed in a casewrap slipcase - is remarkable in both ambition and presentation, packing more than three hours of newly forged material on four separate discs. The album’s creation is rooted in a history that stretches over 25 years, encompassing live sets and mail collaborations that have shaped a deep mutual vocabulary between the artists.​ From Smegma to Sissy Spacek, Wiese has paired with Merzbow through varied musical guises. Both artists maintain core positions within experimental sound and improvisation. Merzbow continually evolves: from his early days of acoustic tape work and improvisatory noise, through the extremes of the 1990s, into an era marked by digital sound and a blend of crude metal scrapings with heady psychedelia. Wiese, for his part, navigates the terrain between rigorous composition and volatile concrète techniques, mixing electronic surges with refined tape collage, and driving performances that stretch the boundaries of sonic drama.

On Akashaplexia, Merzbow’s layered, dynamic noise architecture collides and interlocks with Wiese’s textural sophistication and firey manipulation. The result is a rich landscape where raw, energetic blasts are counterbalanced by moments of deliberate compositional control and intricate collage. Tracks move fluidly between abrasive crescendo and atmospheric detail, giving listeners a chance to experience both artists’ strengths in full scope. Thresholds of sound are tested and extended, expectations upended, and each piece invites attention to both the smallest detail and the overall immersive force of the album. This set marks a new pinnacle for both Merzbow and John Wiese, and for the wider world of experimental music. Akashaplexia is not only about noise but the construction and transformation of sound itself - where raw intuition and calculated artistry become indistinguishable, and the music, in all its extremity, reveals new terrain.​

*2025 reissue* Ralf and Florian (original German title: Ralf und Florian) is the third studio album by the German electronic band Kraftwerk. It was released in October 1973 and it saw the group moving toward their signature electronic sound. This work introduces greater cleanliness in the sounds and intensifies the use of electronic instrumentation, namely synths (Mini Moog, the EMS AKS and Farfisa), drum machines and, for the first time, a prototype vocoder. The formation thus approaches the stylistic code of the best-known works, starting from Autobahn, the latter considered to be the true debut of Kraftwerk. In 2008, Fact named it among the 20 greatest ambient albums ever made.

A very welcomed reissue for this rare Jackie Mittoo album, originally released in 1979 on unknown label, Rite Sound inc. The original release was sold without a jacket, adding a mysterious vibe to the whole thing. The dubby effects-intensive sound of the album extends from "Russian Satelite" to the whole side A, with "Harder Than The Rest," "Stepping Tiger," and "World Of Love" being an excellent triptych of note. The thrill of Jackie's crazy keyboards intertwining with the floating dub sound like a heavenly space is beyond description. Space is the place.

The strength of the Akira soundtrack lies in its unique blend of traditional Japanese instruments and futuristic electronic sounds. Shoji Yamashiro weaves together an eclectic mix of influences, creating a sonic landscape that mirrors the dystopian and cyberpunk themes of the movie. The use of traditional chants, taiko drums, and Shakuhachi flutes alongside electronic synthesizers and orchestral elements generates a hauntingly mesmerizing atmosphere that perfectly complements the visuals on screen. The composer also drew from the chants of Noh, traditional Japanese theater. Combined with polyrhythmic drum machine beats and synths tuned to gamelan microtonal scales, these styles give a sense of ritualistic tension to the dystopian world of Akira.

New from Modern Love; diamond-cut club fancies x tripped-out energies from a longtime pal of the label, oiling the wheels before a full album drops later this year. Nothing But Fixes spans the A like some lost Gerald whitelabel; 12 minutes of expressive, golden era romance spiked with absolute delirium on the drums. On the flip, Carinho loosens the hips with the kinky swivel of his Lisbon locale, Dojo lifts a half-step fidget, and Echochrome cuts thru liquid Eski, spiked with expressive trills.

Last spotted on production duties for Yungwesbster’s ‘II’ as well as turns for Nostalgians and Dj Loser’s Magdalena’s Apathy.. Seattle-based Jaqueline Lawson aka Matryoshka shows serious emotional range on her debut album, channeling Burial, Shinichi Atobe, Space Afrika, Malibu and Surf Gang, seemingly all at once…. Matryoshka has already built a reputation as a producer for DJ Loser's Magdalena's Apathy imprint as well as work for the Nostalgians, an under-the-radar ambient rap collective featuring Yungwebster, Mdb, tnotsobad, Nopaprr and ogpra1. Her musical roots - dubstep, trance and hard dance - tell some of the story here, but she transmogrifies those influences into haunted, Basinski-esque memories like the gaseous traces and decelerated remnants of the club. On album opener 'Lifelover’, Burial's hazed interludes spring to mind, or perhaps the 4am cityscapes of Space Afrika's now mythical 'Somewhere Decent to Live’. Background ambiance simmers below Lawson's pensive FM pads, but once she establishes the mood, things take an unexpected turn with a pitch-bent bassline that might have been lifted straight from a 6LACK loosie, and a rhythmic pulse that traces the thin red line of Shinichi Atobe. If it's dub techno, it's a strand that hasn't been codified quite yet. 'Surface Tension' uses deep, Maybach Music-coded bass womps to twist through her skittering slow rhythms and sadcore pads. But it’s Matryoshka’s harmonic instinct that stands out; if you heard the airy 'otr' or 'fantasize' from Yungwebster's 'II' you'll know exactly what we mean, and she takes it even further here, weaving cinematic, languid harmonies that bridge the gap between Steve Roach and Future. Check 'Where the Dancers are Spinning' with its levitational, almost orchestral sweeps that Lawson counterbalances with thudding subs, or the brief title track, an Akira Yamaoka-style save room loop that dissipates into a dreamy, dissociated fog, for further proof. Then there's the second side's centrepiece 'Parted by the Sea', where a ratcheting Chain Reaction-style rhythm builds to a tense crescendo only to get splintered unrecognisably in the second half, its broken pieces pillowed by Lawson's billowing time-stretched chords.

For the very first time on vinyl, Jah Wobble's 1997 extraordinary descent into downtempo and world beat science. Released on his now-defunct 30 Hertz label, »The Light Programme« showcased an excellent cast of musicians. On board are historical Can drummer Jaki Liebezeit – with more of his African-induced rhythms – multi-instrumentalist - and The Wire contributor - Clive Bell, conga player Neville Murray, guitar and synth player Mark Ferda and the exceptional harpist Zi-Lan Liao. If you enjoyed »My Life In the Bush Of Ghosts« you’ll fall in love with »The Light Programme.«

Cut it up. Stick it back together wrong. This is Magazzini Criminali at their most deliriously inventive - a Florence-based theater collective that understood William Burroughs's cut-up method as an operational principle for sound itself. Released in 1983, Notti Senza Fine is their second LP, a document where theater becomes indistinguishable from electronic collage, where the stage disappears into tape loops and reassembled vocal fragments. Federico Tiezzi (director, electronics), Sandro Lombardi (text, voice), and Marion d'Amburgo (voice) weren't making songs. They were assembling something else entirely. Unlike Crollo Nervoso three years earlier, Notti Senza Fine cuts loose from theater - the cut-up accelerates into something almost vertiginous, fragments layering so densely you can barely trace their origins. The screams of Antonin Artaud collide with voices and instrumental shards from everywhere - tribal percussion that sounds like field recordings, sax, synthesizers - meshing and fading into each other without resolution. What the jazz critic and cultural theorist Franco Bolelli called "planetary music" emerges: no stage, no narrative, just Lombardi, Tiezzi, d'Amburgo, and Julia Anzilotti moving through a constantly shifting sonic terrain. Like Henri Chopin's sound poetry pushed through the entire world's radio frequencies at once, voices become texture rather than meaning. The track titles - Tangeri 400 Km. Nord, Honolulu Vento Solare, Kabul-Febbre, Al Hoceima 1943 - map locations that barely hold shape in the sound. The album itself becomes an "object-significant" - distinguished not just as a vehicle for music but as a physical thing. Jon Hassell's processed Fourth World trumpet runs through the mix like a ghost signal you're always about to recognize - his voice sampled and appropriated, transformed beyond recognition into the general chaos. Three years later, fresh from winning an Ubu Award for scoring Magazzini Criminali's Sulla Strada at the Venice Biennale, Hassell would become a direct compositional collaborator - commissioned to write the music, not sampled from. But here in 1983, on Notti Senza Fine, his presence is something more spectral: stolen, recombined, cut into material that refuses to cohere. There's an ironic swagger to it, a specifically Italian 80s irreverence toward the very idea of "proper" experimental music. The samples don't announce themselves solemnly. They arrive like overheard conversations in a crowded room, fragments refusing to cohere into meaning. Sudden jolts. Radio noise. Voice becoming pure texture. What results isn't theater music or electronic composition - it's something closer to sonic gossip, art half-amused by its own pretensions. The original Riviera Records pressing (RVR-4) has been nearly impossible to find for decades. Originally destined for the Cramps label, the album eventually emerged on this small Roman independent - Riviera Records, founded just the year before by Amedeo Sorrentino, Federica Roà, and jazz musician Maurizio Giammarco. Mario Schifano handled the cover design, his graphic work bringing visual weight to what might otherwise remain theater ephemera. This is collage as genuine refusal. Not quotation, not homage - transformation. The practice that would eventually feed into everything from industrial noise to contemporary sample culture, but arriving here as something stranger: theater that understood cutting and pasting weren't metaphors but literal sonic tactics.

Viva is the second album by the German band La Düsseldorf, realized in 1978 and it is considered its most successful release. Indeed, the album contains both the singles "Rheinita", which was their most successful single, and "Cha Cha 2000"; an expansive and utopian piece that mixes repetition, piano passages, chants, and electronic textures into a kind of dreamlike manifesto for a more ideal society. Probably the band’s most famous song. The album represents a combination of modern electronic textures, pop clarity, and krautrock experimentation which has secured Viva a lasting place in the history of German experimental rock. This vinyl reissue is the first after fifteen years.

Anichy & Lyemn reduce electronic sound to patient, glowing essentials: slow harmonic rhythm, canons, repetitive phrases and gently shifting layers, across two unreleased remix pieces that treat minimalism less as a genre tag than a way of feeling time stretch and fold.Tip! Rather than chasing maximal impact, Anichy & Lyemn opens in a low glow, letting electronic minimalism breathe through slow harmonic rhythm, canons and looping cells, as layers slide over one another in patient, hypnotic shifts that prize focus and detail over spectacle.The opening track takes its cue from the glassy, urban side of minimalism - the world of long, bright arpeggios, additive patterns and quietly insistent pulse that once colonised loft spaces, galleries and, later, cinema screens. Here those ideas are rerouted through contemporary electronics: stacked keyboard figures become soft-synth constellations, their outlines blurred by filter movement and subtle modulation. As the canons unfold, each entry is processed differently so that the same phrase appears as a series of related but not identical voices. The effect is like watching a skyline through passing weather systems: the architecture remains, but its emotional charge keeps changing.The second piece turns toward the earthy, process-driven strain of minimalism that grew out of tape experiments, hand-played percussion and non-Western rhythmic thinking. Instead of directly echoing that history, Anichy & Lyemn translate it into a digital ritual of offsets and micro-shifts. Short electronic cells - clicks, muted mallet tones, distant pads - are set running in overlapping loops of slightly different lengths, so that the resulting pattern is never quite the same from one minute to the next. Phase-like relationships appear and dissolve; accents migrate; what began as a simple lattice of pulses gradually thickens into a dense but breathable web of sound. Underneath it all, the harmonic pace remains unhurried, each change arriving like a new room opened within the same building.Crucially, Anichy & Lyemn is not a technical exercise but an emotional one. By committing to repetition and restricted materials, invite listeners to tune into nuance: the way a delayed entry in the canon can feel like an echo of a thought, or how a tiny detuning between layers can introduce a note of unease.

Running Out Of Time return with a bass-heavy desert combat 12-inch. It's time for cashing back, no more BS.

DON'T MISS!

Outside of the international house underground, where his early ‘90s works for the Far East Recording label he co-founded with Shinichiro Yokota are rightly celebrated as bona-fide classics, Soichi Terada is best-known for his work composing music for video games. Yet until now, few of his productions for video games have been released outside of Japan, especially on vinyl. Apes In The Net, a six-track EP featuring music composed for the popular PlayStation 1 series Ape Escape, sets the record straight. It not only showcases Terada’s quality as a composer and producer, but also his versatility. Like much of Terada’s work on the Ape Escape series, the tracks featured don’t explore deep, New York and New Jersey influenced house sounds, but rather his lesser-celebrated love of jungle and drum & bass – a sound he fully explored on 1996 album Sumo Jungle. “The producer of the Ape Escape games heard that and got in touch,” Soichi remembers. “They asked me to make the soundtrack, and then work on the music for the sequels after that. I used to love making music with AKAI hardware samplers, synthesisers, and computers, so I played and recorded the tracks using almost the same methods as I did when I made house music. Using breakbeats and audio samples with a sampler was the most useful way to make the soundtracks.” The six tracks on show, which were originally recorded in the ‘90s but reconstructed and remastered for Japan-only CD and digital releases over a decade ago, mix elements of Terada’s familiar deep house style – think warming chords and pads, memorable melodies, and emotive musical motifs – with blistering D&B breakbeats, 16-bit synth sounds, electronic bleeps and undeniably weighty basslines. They’ve stood the test of time and arguably sound just as fresh now as they did at the turn of the millennium.

Grace & Raffaella is the first collaborative release by ML and Vittoria Totale. Over nine tracks, the album strikes a deceptively minimalist tone, taking in a ton of musical as well as literary references. An elegy on a journey back to the present, with all the hushed intensity of an informed fever dream, Grace & Raffaella has a magic-realist feel. Its vocal parts serve as loopy self-fulfilling prophecies. Cut off from the sun, the gorge grows darker. Using an electroacoustic sense of spacing, as well as abstracted current-day club influences, with scraps of background noise fading in and out, this album's use and treatment of a snippet-like narrative is its core aesthetic. A digital gleam drenches the spoken bits into instances of subtle surrealism. Like a kitchen sink drama stripped of all deadweight. We are on the edge of relinquishing all control here. Rip up your diary and let go of the language of the old ones. Grace & Raffaella is a seductive slice of modern hyper-pop that defines its own intentions over and over again.

Coming in October. A groundbreaking compilation album showcasing Japanese techno-pop for a new era—『TECHNO KAYŌ VOL. 1 - JAPANESE TECHNO POP 1981–1989』—compiled by none other than Dubby, one of Japan’s most renowned record diggers and the mastermind behind the influential record shop ONDAS (a key force in the post-obscure revival alongside Organic Music and Revelation Time), and Antal, head of Rush Hour. From the neo-classical/mutant funk gem “Last Battle” by Kazuo Ōtani (of SHOGUN fame), originally featured on the obscure film soundtrack Koiko no Mainichi, to the balearic house anthem “MicroWave” by Kyōko Koizumi—culled from the now-revered cult LP KOIZUMI IN THE HOUSE—this album masterfully weaves post-balearic and obscure city pop perspectives. A curated deep dive into the rich and underrated legacy of Japanese techno-pop, brought vividly to life in the context of 2025.

Bryn Harrison writes music that deliberately disorients. The British composer—obsessed with "time, memory, and cyclic structures"—follows Feldman's lead, creating perceptual labyrinths where past bleeds into present and nothing stays quite where you expect. Towards a slowing of the past, a 45-minute tour de force for two pianos and electronics, achieves disorientation through sheer density: a whirlwind of notes that somehow maintains "delicacy and deftness of touch."

Mark Knoop and Roderick Chadwick—both veterans of Harrison's intricate demands—navigate this terrain with staggering precision. The piece descends inexorably, dropping two octaves over its duration while decelerating to half its original tempo. Pre-recorded electronic sounds (originally conceived as live electronics) run backwards, pitch-shifted and speed-adjusted, evoking what Harrison calls "feelings of immobility, redundancy or even complete stasis." Midway through, everything halts: a two-minute sustained chord in the electronics, a startling caesura that "changes everything while changing nothing save perception."

Marc Medwin, writing for Dusted Magazine, compares it to Radigue's droning palimpsests or Schoenberg's third orchestral piece: "The music teems with sonic undercurrent in a superficially static frame." Each note, he observes, is "suffused with color, each sonority a frequency kaleidoscope." Off Shelf notes how the music "hits different on each listen—and sometimes doesn't hit at all," making more sense as you sit with it, "much like the emotions it conveys."

Harrison explains his title's seeming contradiction: "Music is well placed to create distortions of memory or to confuse our sense of presentness, pastness and futurity. I particularly like titles that contain a sense of contradiction or impossibility." The work demands what Medwin calls "the encapsulation of concentric occurrence framing and framed by the static multidirectionality of memoried experience."

Knoop and Chadwick spent years preparing. "With a work like this, the devil's in the detail," Harrison notes. "The writing is highly textual and requires clarity and precision and a special kind of touch." They devised strategies for accented grace notes—gauging stress and emphasis across registers—and slightly off-kilter rhythms. The result, recorded at St Paul's Hall, Huddersfield, is what Another Timbre calls "extraordinary, virtuosic work"—music like "being caught up in a whirlwind, swirled round and round."

Medwin's conclusion: "The best way to come to terms with it all is to listen again."

Regardless of the confluence of events that led to this dream pairing, there’s a strong hint of clear-minded innovation to Promises. The debut collaboration LP from electronic musician Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points and legendary saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, backed to a lavish fullness by The London Symphony Orchestra, feels like the murmurs of an entirely new language for jazz, quite distinct from either participant’s prior output — in fact, it seems to illuminate a hidden lexicon we didn’t know either artist had in the first place.

We say jazz, but Promises truly defies categorisation with its moody atmosphere and indeterminate music-like patience. The nine movements of the LP gently cradle a circular note pattern in the way of a minimalist classical piece, as a flood of synth and string drones gradually fill the empty spaces in-between. As this deep meditation progresses, Sanders recalls his adventurous past work with the Coltranes by undergoing his own inner journey, his sax flitting between conversational licks, esoteric mouth sounds and white-hot fury, bobbing against the rising tide of electronics, organs and orchestra swells.

Regardless of the confluence of events that led to this dream pairing, there’s a strong hint of clear-minded innovation to Promises. The debut collaboration LP from electronic musician Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points and legendary saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders, backed to a lavish fullness by The London Symphony Orchestra, feels like the murmurs of an entirely new language for jazz, quite distinct from either participant’s prior output — in fact, it seems to illuminate a hidden lexicon we didn’t know either artist had in the first place.

We say jazz, but Promises truly defies categorisation with its moody atmosphere and indeterminate music-like patience. The nine movements of the LP gently cradle a circular note pattern in the way of a minimalist classical piece, as a flood of synth and string drones gradually fill the empty spaces in-between. As this deep meditation progresses, Sanders recalls his adventurous past work with the Coltranes by undergoing his own inner journey, his sax flitting between conversational licks, esoteric mouth sounds and white-hot fury, bobbing against the rising tide of electronics, organs and orchestra swells.