MUSIC

Our season's first edition by the mighty Woo is an ode to Sweet Peas. It is a thoughtfully curated collection of ambient, minimalist, and new-age soundscapes designed to be the perfect soundtrack for moments of sowing these seeds, which accompany every release in quiet reflection.

Composed by the renowned duo Woo—Mark and Clive Ives — this is one of a series of five unreleased albums from their archives. The release combines soothing tones from clarinet, guitars, percussion, and electronic elements, creating the perfect soundtrack for gardeners and music lovers alike. Featuring tracks like “Golden Hours” and “Earth Angels,” this album is an ode to the slow, rewarding process of growth and new beginnings. “Like nature, our approach has always been quite random,” the brothers state, “ as with planting seeds the process has a purity that can bring unexpected results.”

Accompanying each release will be a special seed insert chosen by the artist to enhance the tactile and organic experience of the music. These seeds symbolise the potential for growth and connection to the natural world, aligning with the music's meditative and nurturing qualities.

For this release, the brothers have chosen Sweet Peas:
“To our surprise and delight, Sweet Peas can be planted in the autumn and they’ll blossom in the coming spring”

Each release will be in physical form on a recycled cassette, which will precede its digital counterpart by a few months, allowing the music to be experienced in its intended form first.

As Clive puts it: “Much like nature, music is an ever-evolving process. With this project our aim was to achieve an unpredictable organic flow that still feels harmonious.” 

The latest work from London-based electronic artist Brbko arrives via noted imprint Scenic Route. Spanning nine tracks, the album explores themes of afterlife, faith, and growth, articulated with a firm resolve to resist absorption into fleeting trends. Tight, driving beats and shadowed sound design meet avant-garde vocal treatments, traversing the boundaries between experimental hip-hop, grime, ambient, and electronic music. Collaborations with Andrew Aged and Cajm further enrich the palette, as flickering soundscapes capture urban solitude and inner conflict with striking immediacy. A vivid sonic statement, strictly limited to 100 copies.

Long-hidden dub recordings from Nick Barber, better known as Doof and celebrated as a pioneer of ’90s UK trance, finally see vinyl release via esteemed imprint Mysticisms. Spanning four tracks brimming with immediacy and raw energy, each piece was captured through live desk dubbing and on-the-fly improvisation. Title cut “Love Dub So” reworks Augustus Pablo’s classic riddim into a fusion of ambient drift and heavyweight bass pressure. The variations that follow—“Mantra,” “Skunked On Planet Dub,” and “Sticks And Stones”—stretch across dub house, trip-hop, and breakbeat, channeling the fervor of the UK underground at its peak. Mastered anew from the original tapes, this release encapsulates the true essence of dub where tradition and experiment collide.

From False Aralia—the cutting-edge dance imprint that branched out from leftfield powerhouse Peak Oil and has recently become a quiet obsession among core techno heads—comes the fourth entry in their series, a 4-track release by the mysterious electronic sound artist Iri.gram. Evoking the chaos of traffic in noise and grounded in glacial minimal electronics, the record interweaves staccato rhythms with subtle fluctuations. Traversing deep techno, dub ambient, and rhythmic noise, this is a striking experimental soundscape work not to be missed.

Ejigayehu Shibabaw was born in 1974 in Chagni, northwestern Ethiopia and by pursuing a career as a singer, went against her father’s strict, traditional gender roles. As Gigi, she embraced the same musical freedom she had strived for in her personal life, incorporating the Ethiopian church, funk, hip-hop, West and South African music into her work. She first settled in Nairobi, then Addis Ababa, where she quickly established herself as one of the city’s leading singers. A move to San Francisco in 1998 led to a long and fruitful creative partnership with bassist and producer Bill Laswell. 

Around the same time, Chris Blackwell had stepped away from Island Records to start the art house film company and label Palm Pictures. He took an interest in Gigi and together with Laswell, pulled together an all-star cast of musicians for her self-titled US debut album, including Herbie Hancock, Pharoah Sanders and Wayne Shorter. It won international critical acclaim, not just for its musicianship but for making Gigi a “defining voice for the Ethiopian expatriate community”, as journalist Tyran Grillo praises in his Time Capsule liner notes. From the nation-defining 1896 victory over Italian invaders to the quiet revolutionaries who wear simple shemma garments, Grillo believes the themes in Gigi make it “a shower of sunlight on her homeland for those ignorant of its struggles.” 

After its success, Blackwell encouraged them to go back into the studio to rethink the album and Illuminated Audio was born. “Anyone can make a voice sound worldly”, Grillo remarks, “but rare are those who can make one sound inner-worldly.” Gigi was clear with Laswell to give her vocals a minor role “because it’s already been done.” Instead her Amharic verse is fleeting, exhaling through the textures like ghostly fragments; soaring yet muted. Yet the album is still titled under her name, an assertion by Laswell of her central role in the album’s creation. Not only was it a fully endorsed project by Gigi, but she would be present throughout its development, giving feedback on half-finished ideas as Laswell played them back in the studio. “It works perfectly”, she reflected after the album’s release. “We wanted to capture the whole spirit of each track, and Bill’s remixes create a different music language that really puts you in a pleasant place”. 

This new vocabulary takes its lead from a technical approach that Laswell had been perfecting during a furtive creative period at the turn of the millennium. Much like his ambient interpretations of Miles Davis (Panthalassa, 1998), Bob Marley (Dreams of Freedom, 1997), and Carlos Santana (Divine Light, 2001), Laswell approached Illuminated Audio by returning to the original multitrack masters. Gigi wasn’t just reworked, but recomposed into an expansive lattice of instruments, submerged in a watery ambience of dub and trance undercurrents. 

Sonically, this new language that Gigi refers to, is manifested by the original album’s more understated parts being pushed to the fore. Explaining his contrasting methods, Laswell saw Gigi as being “put together in a way that fits”. Contrastingly, in Illuminated Audio, “a lot of things that I featured in the remix weren’t as audible in the original.” Instrumentation laying near-dormant, deep in the mix, are brought to the fore: the acid rock guitar and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone on ‘Tew Ante Sew’, Graham Haynes’ flugelhorn on ‘Nafekeñ’, Laswell’s bass on ‘Kahn’, the melodica in Mengedegna or the floating synths and talking drums in ‘Gud Fella’. 

Brought to his attention by mentor DJ Nori, Hidaka describes Illuminated Audio as a “masterful sonic exploration into ethereal ambience and dub” and made sure this reissue also contained a full remaster to give its “deep musicality” much better dynamics and density in the overall sound. Hidaka admits that Laswell’s music “is sometimes so out-there, it is often misunderstood” and, indeed, to dub album non-believers this might seem like a prolific producer imposing himself on another artist’s work; eternally developing rearrangements that never quite get to its destination. But that’s missing its true power and triumph. This is more than the reissue of a remix, but “a wholly unique musical entity”, as Hidaka describes. Illuminated Audio refers to the illuminated manuscripts that comprise the major part of Ethiopian art and its new compositions stand in proud solitude as a rare body of reworks that both informs and enhances their originals.  

Music From Memory are thrilled to announce the forthcoming release of ‘Pastoral Blend,’ a new album from the duo of N Kramer and Magnus Bang Olsen (The Zenmenn).

Recorded in Berlin between August 2023 and March 2024, ‘Pastoral Blend’ combines Kramer's improvisational process and mastery of contemporary production techniques with Bang Olsen’s emotive pedal steel guitar playing. The creative process was anchored in capturing various phrases and patterns from the instrument, which were then reshaped, reversed, and layered intricately. This meticulous approach allowed a foundational track to emerge, upon which further arrangements and developments were sculpted. This process, which builds on Kramer's earlier work as Habitat (with J. Foerster, released on Leaving Records), gives the music a gentle asynchronous flow that feels uniquely live and organic.

Merging the warmth and intimacy of instrumental Americana with the glitchy, textural processing reminiscent of early 2000s Max/MSP and influential artists such as Fennesz and Alva Noto, ‘Pastoral Blend’ is a textured drift between analog warmth and digital fragmentation, a delicate equilibrium that duo navigate with remarkable finesse and an air of effortless charm. With titles like ‘Harvest', ‘Agrarian Dawn’, ‘Grasslands’, and ‘Weathered’, Kramer and Bang Olsen evoke a musical vocabulary steeped in themes of landscape, memory, and tradition; a vocabulary that gently alludes to the more familiar and traditional musical structures lying beneath the rich layers of sound. Herein lies the essence of the 'Pastoral Blend’.

‘Pastoral Blend’ will be released on LP and digitally on July 4th 2025. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis.

Following June's brilliant 'Rhythm Archives', Holy Tongue's Al Wootton continues his hot streak, landing on Sähkö with half an hour of hazed, immersive rhythmic experiments, tracking from vintage dub(step) to minimal techno and confidently striding thru percussive forms that echo from the Balkans to North Africa. RIYL Shackleton, Azu Tiwaline, Muslimgauze, T++, Deena Abdelwahed.

Ever since he dispatched with the Deadboy moniker a few years back and reached into dubbier, more percussive spaces, Wootton's been figuring out exactly where his dexterous productions fit in.He's been most at home on his own Trule imprint, operating at his own pace and shaping the aesthetics as he goes, and 'Rhythm Archives' felt like a mark in the sand, a record that matched his interest in vintage gear and classic production methods with his dedication to wide-eyed, punkish experimentation. 'CRUX', his first record for legendary Finnish label Sähkö, follows that lead, assembling four long percussive jams that sound as if they've toppled off the timeline - if someone told us it was material rescued from a forgotten reel-to-reel, we'd believe it.

There's an outline of dubstep visible in the background on opener 'Essene' that's enhanced by the Skull Disco-esque sub-undulations and wormhole-splitting tape echoes, but the hollow hand drum runs and hallucinatory effects shuttle the composition into darker, more reflective landscapes. Similarly, the busted drum machine intro of 'Per Incanto' might reference Sähkö royalty Mika Vainio and Hertsi, but the track veers leftwards, muddling the mix with psychedelic African Head Charge-style reverberations and trapped, timestretched string loops. It's gear that's intended for deep, intentional listening; the tracks don't contain too much melodic content by design - Wootton's rhythms are layered and hypnotic, and anything else is there to reinforce the general spirit.

Just check 'Cloister', the EP's low-key stand-out, where the lead line is literally just tuned feedback, placed to disorient even the most abstinent listener, or 'Armen', that distorts its sputtering Bruce Haack-in-dub atmosphere with ghosted groans and faint remnants of a trip-hop undercurrent that never fully reached optimal pressure. If you've ingested all the psilocybin from Shackleton's recent run, this is yr next drop.

Johnny Sais Quoi makes his entrance to Music From Memory with the 7-track EP entitled ‘Love On Ice.’ Channeling the spirit of Italo-pop and New Wave, ‘Love On Ice’ was crafted in the whirlwind of spontaneity and energy that changing circumstances often bring. Born from transition and exploring themes of leaving, arriving, coming together, and breaking up, ‘Love On Ice’ serves as an outlet to process, escape, and celebrate the challenges of a new life.

Johnny crafts exquisite dancefloor-focused pop—familiar yet unique, imbued with his own touch, a distinctive sensibility, and a knack for infectious hooks. The opener, ‘No Guilty Pleasures,’ sets the tone immediately as Johnny works his magic with a palette of synths, drum machines, picked guitar, and processed vocals. The title track, ‘Love On Ice,’ delivers a classic Italo-infused dancefloor bomb, featuring a driving synth bass line overlaid by hypnotic arpeggios. There is much here for the dancer, but ‘Love On Ice’ also ventures beyond the dance floor; the closing tracks ‘Ref 23’ and ‘Let's Find A Home’ are prime examples, both showcasing Johnny’s depth and range with their melancholic, mellow atmosphere.

‘Love On Ice’ will be released on September 18th on vinyl LP and digitally.

At long last, Takao is back with his long-awaited second album, seven years in the making. His 2018 "Stealth" was (and still is) a much-loved set, mixing elements of ambient and environmental music; with this new release Takao breaks free of the gravitational pull of these earlier influences and strides confidently forward. "The End of the Brim" jettisons some of the more abstract elements of his previous work, embracing a “universal listenability” and a more concrete intensity, with a focus on supple rhythms and strengthened senses of melodic development and harmonic sophistication. This musical growth can be linked with Takao’s admiration of composers Ken Muramatsu and Toshifumi Hinata, who are generally associated with commercial “production music” and easy listening. Another contributing factor is his private study with veteran keyboardist Ichiko Hashimoto of Colored Music. The ten tracks here include three vocal tracks, with three different singers (Yumea Horiike, Cristel Bere, Atsuo Fujimoto of Colored Music) and seven keyboard-led pieces. The vocal pieces are integral parts of the album’s flow, rather than typical “songs” driven by the name and personality of the singer. All of these factors, plus the veteran presence of engineer Hiroshi Haraguchi, known for his work with Haruomi Hosono, who mixed half of the album's tracks, along with the use of excellent old-school synths, aligned with Takao’s forward-looking vision, have combined to give us an album with a unique sense of timelessness. A spotlight illuminating future paths for pop music, available on CD/Vinyl LP/Digital, with English/Japanese lyrics, and liner notes by Yuji Shibasaki.

A sequel to last year's sublime 'Spectral Evolution', 'Traveling Light' is a suite of weightless, uncannily beautiful jazz standards, transformed into orchestral drones and electronic chirps by Toral and his virtual band. It's flawless material that draws a clear line from Billie Holiday through Clara Rockmore, Fripp & Eno and Alvin Lucier to MBV and Gastr del Sol and beyond. Unmissable gear, from one of the scene's unassailable legends. Culture never emerges from a vacuum. It accumulates and evolves, building on what occurred before and gleaning influence from what happened nearby; the more cultural threads converge, the more complex, nuanced and developed the resulting braids become. Toral acknowledged this fact quite brazenly on last year's 'Spectral Evolution', bringing over a decade of impenetrable off-world experimentation to a halt and shoving his bare hands into the creative soil that inspired iconic tomes like 1995's 'Loveless'-inspired masterpiece 'Wave Field' and the meditative Éliane Radigue-cum-Rhys Chatham 'Violence of Discovery And Calm of Acceptance'. Taking a dip in the pool of concepts that eddy underneath rock music's labyrinth of caverns, he referenced Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, turning vintage progressions into idiosyncratic contemporary gestures. And on 'Traveling Light' that basic theme is expanded again; here, Toral takes six recognizable early 20th century standards and applies a very similar treatment, augmenting them with additional "canonical jazz sounds" from clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flautist Clara Saleiro. Playing guitar and bass with his self-built ensemble of electronic devices (that includes a modified theremin), Toral lets his influences float even closer to the surface here, picking out familiar jazz and exotica flourishes, early electronic echoes and organ-esque polyphonic sustained tones that stretch across hundreds of years of musical history. On opener 'Easy Living', a Ralph Rainger composition from 1937 that's been recorded by Billie Holiday, Bill Evans and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others, the original chord sequence is slackened by Toral's sustained guitar tones and sine waves, but not blurred completely into impressions. This time around we're treated to more tangible shapes: Toral's cheeky, expertly rendered riffs, horizontal exotica-inspired rhythmelodic chimes, intimate woodwind breaths that pull us back to the '30s and squealing pitches that can't help but remind us of Clara Rockmore's Robert Moog-produced milestone 'The Art of the Theremin'. It feels like being chucked in the American cultural petri dish while new organisms mutate around you - everything's recognisable somehow but novel, peculiar. Lovingly valve saturated strums, bent by Toral's whammy, introduce 'Body and Soul' (a 1930 standard that's best known for being recorded by Frank Sinatra) before they're met by alien chirps from his arsenal of generators. But it's the willowy harmonies that buoy this one, echoing the haunted choral drones that prop up centuries of European sacred music. Toral's very specific with his references; when Amado's tenor moans whisper around the dense polyphonic hums, there's a tacit acknowledgement of the enduring influence of African American spirituals and gospel on folk, blues, jazz, country, rock 'n roll and R&B. The album's most affecting segment comes at the conclusion though, with 'My Funny Valentine' and 'God Bless the Child', easily two of the most conspicuous compositions of the era. On both, Toral hovers between clarity and abstraction, overlaying bone-dry fingerpicked improvisations on the former that scrape over Chicago's musical timeline, from "hot jazz" to post-rock, and finishing the album with Fennesz-like distortions that crack and dissolve into Saleiro's levitational flute tones. It's astonishing stuff, honestly - maybe not as immediately startling as 'Spectral Evolution', but refined, polished and concentrated in every way. You're unlikely to find a more moving set this year, that's for sure.

A sequel to last year's sublime 'Spectral Evolution', 'Traveling Light' is a suite of weightless, uncannily beautiful jazz standards, transformed into orchestral drones and electronic chirps by Toral and his virtual band. It's flawless material that draws a clear line from Billie Holiday through Clara Rockmore, Fripp & Eno and Alvin Lucier to MBV and Gastr del Sol and beyond. Unmissable gear, from one of the scene's unassailable legends. Culture never emerges from a vacuum. It accumulates and evolves, building on what occurred before and gleaning influence from what happened nearby; the more cultural threads converge, the more complex, nuanced and developed the resulting braids become. Toral acknowledged this fact quite brazenly on last year's 'Spectral Evolution', bringing over a decade of impenetrable off-world experimentation to a halt and shoving his bare hands into the creative soil that inspired iconic tomes like 1995's 'Loveless'-inspired masterpiece 'Wave Field' and the meditative Éliane Radigue-cum-Rhys Chatham 'Violence of Discovery And Calm of Acceptance'. Taking a dip in the pool of concepts that eddy underneath rock music's labyrinth of caverns, he referenced Duke Ellington and George Gershwin, turning vintage progressions into idiosyncratic contemporary gestures. And on 'Traveling Light' that basic theme is expanded again; here, Toral takes six recognizable early 20th century standards and applies a very similar treatment, augmenting them with additional "canonical jazz sounds" from clarinetist José Bruno Parrinha, tenor saxophonist Rodrigo Amado, flügelhorn player Yaw Tembe and flautist Clara Saleiro. Playing guitar and bass with his self-built ensemble of electronic devices (that includes a modified theremin), Toral lets his influences float even closer to the surface here, picking out familiar jazz and exotica flourishes, early electronic echoes and organ-esque polyphonic sustained tones that stretch across hundreds of years of musical history. On opener 'Easy Living', a Ralph Rainger composition from 1937 that's been recorded by Billie Holiday, Bill Evans and Rahsaan Roland Kirk, among others, the original chord sequence is slackened by Toral's sustained guitar tones and sine waves, but not blurred completely into impressions. This time around we're treated to more tangible shapes: Toral's cheeky, expertly rendered riffs, horizontal exotica-inspired rhythmelodic chimes, intimate woodwind breaths that pull us back to the '30s and squealing pitches that can't help but remind us of Clara Rockmore's Robert Moog-produced milestone 'The Art of the Theremin'. It feels like being chucked in the American cultural petri dish while new organisms mutate around you - everything's recognisable somehow but novel, peculiar. Lovingly valve saturated strums, bent by Toral's whammy, introduce 'Body and Soul' (a 1930 standard that's best known for being recorded by Frank Sinatra) before they're met by alien chirps from his arsenal of generators. But it's the willowy harmonies that buoy this one, echoing the haunted choral drones that prop up centuries of European sacred music. Toral's very specific with his references; when Amado's tenor moans whisper around the dense polyphonic hums, there's a tacit acknowledgement of the enduring influence of African American spirituals and gospel on folk, blues, jazz, country, rock 'n roll and R&B. The album's most affecting segment comes at the conclusion though, with 'My Funny Valentine' and 'God Bless the Child', easily two of the most conspicuous compositions of the era. On both, Toral hovers between clarity and abstraction, overlaying bone-dry fingerpicked improvisations on the former that scrape over Chicago's musical timeline, from "hot jazz" to post-rock, and finishing the album with Fennesz-like distortions that crack and dissolve into Saleiro's levitational flute tones. It's astonishing stuff, honestly - maybe not as immediately startling as 'Spectral Evolution', but refined, polished and concentrated in every way. You're unlikely to find a more moving set this year, that's for sure.

A classic. Boards of Canada's 1998 masterpiece, their first album.

1993 debut album by the trio of Andrew Weatherall, Jagz Kooner and Gary Burns. Unavailable on vinyl and CD since original release. Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Colton, contains “Smokebelch II (Beatless Mix)” for the first time on the 2LP edition.

<iframe style="border: 0; width: 100%; height: 406px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=1463976360/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless="">&lt;a href=&quot;https://warprecords.bandcamp.com/album/sabresonic-remastered&quot;&gt;Sabresonic (Remastered) The Sabres Of Paradise&lt;/a&gt;</iframe>

After a two-decade interlude, Jim O’Rourke’s Moikai returns with Spectral Evolution, a major new work by Rafael Toral. Making his name in the mid-1990s with influential guitar drone platters like "Sound Mind Sound Body" and "Wave Field" (both reissued by Drag City in recent years), Toral has never been one to rest on his laurels repeating his past glories. In the early years of the 21st century, Toral laid the guitar aside, along with the focus on extended tones that had defined much of his music until that point. He began his ‘Space Program’, a thirteen-year investigation of the performance possibilities of an ever-expanding set of custom electronic instruments, played with a fluid phrasing and rhythmic flexibility inspired by jazz. Dedicated to honing his skills on these idiosyncratic instruments, Toral has performed with them extensively both solo and in many collaborations, including in his Space Quartet, where his mini-amplifier feedback integrates seamlessly into the frontline of a classic post-free jazz quartet rounded out with saxophone, double bass, and drums. Since 2017, Toral’s work has been entering a new phase, often still centred around the arsenal of self-built instruments developed in the Space Program, but with a renewed interest in the long tones and almost static textures of his earlier work; he has also, after more than a decade, returned to the electric guitar. Spectral Evolution is undoubtedly Toral’s most sophisticated work to date, bringing together seemingly incompatible threads from his entire career into a powerful new synthesis, both wildly experimental and emotionally affecting. The record begins with a brief ‘Intro’ that sets the stage for the unique sound world explored throughout the remainder of its duration: over sparkling clean guitar figures, Toral stages a duet between two streams of modulated feedback, seeming less electronic than like mutant takes on a muted trumpet and an ocarina. This segues seamlessly into the stunning ‘Changes’, where a dense array of Space instruments solo with wild abandon over a thick carpet of slowly moving chords, growing increasingly chaotic over the course of eight minutes yet always fastened to the lush harmonic foundation. On these and many other moments on the record, Toral manages the almost miraculous feat of having his self-built electronic instruments (which in the past he had seen as ‘inadequate to play any music based on the Western system’) play in tune. In an unexpected sidestep away from any of his previous work, the chord changes that underpin many of the episodes on Spectral Evolution are derived from classic jazz harmony, including takes on the archetypal Gershwin ‘Rhythm changes’ and Ellington-Strayhorn’s ‘Take the “A” Train’, albeit slowed to such an extent that each chord becomes a kind of environment in its own right. Threading together twelve distinct episodes into a flowing whole, "Spectral Evolution" alternates moments of airy instrumental interplay with dense sonic mass, breaking up the pieces based on chord changes with ambient ‘Spaces’. At points reduced to almost a whisper, at other moments Toral’s electronics wail, squelch, and squeak like David Tudor’s live-electronic rainforest. Similarly, his use of the guitar encompasses an enormous dynamic and textural range, from chiming chords to expansive drones, from crystal clarity to fuzzy grit: on the beautiful ‘Your Goodbye’, his filtered, distorted soloing recalls Loren Connors in its emotive depth and wandering melodic sensibility. The product of three years of experimentation and recording, and synthesizing the insights of more than thirty years of musical research, "Spectral Evolution" is the quintessential album of guitar music from Rafael Toral.

Percussionist Tim Barnes has had a lengthy career flying as close as possible to the sun, notably performing and recording with Jim O’Rourke, Wilco, Sonic Youth, Stereolab, Silver Jews, Tony Conrad, John Zorn, Faust, Tower Recordings, Alan Licht and many others.

Diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s in 2021, Lost Words is the first of two recordings undertaken after Tim’s diagnosis. These new collabs were coordinated and produced by Ken (Bundy) Brown (Tortoise, Gastr del Sol, Pullman) and feature Joshua Abrams, Oren Ambarchi, David Daniell, John Dieterich, Darin Gray, Glenn Kotche, Tara Jane O’Neil, Jim O’Rourke and Ken Vandermark among others. Tim’s stalwart rhythmic zeal is the lynchpin and common ground across these tracks that span a wide swath of styles.

Eric Broucek was the ur-engineer of the most fertile era of DFA Studios, from about 2003 to 2008 (no one knows anything precisely about that time, as it’s all lost in the fog of chaos). His hand was on all of the remixes, LPs, dance 12s. He was there in that over-designed gear dungeon almost every day, recording, mixing, struggling to not roll his eyes at Tim and me. And somewhere in that fog, he quietly dropped limited runs of three 12-inch delayed reaction bombs on his own label Stickydisc Recordings—two under the name Babytalk, and one as Watussi with another DFA regular, Morgan Wiley.

Back in the day, Eric did not want his music released on DFA. He wanted to forge his own identity, which he did, sending out music that wandered from the DFA path with its uniquely wonky, upended and understated power. His music is so unlike everything else of that era, so profoundly singular, that it still sounds completely out of time.

A few years back, I started DJing the tracks again, and saw how the world was still surprised by what Eric had made, and the idea of this compilation was born.

So, in the end, Eric, we totally got to release your records anyway. We heart you, man.

-James Murphy

Pick a small spot (a point) in front of you (a small knot of wood, a dog down the way). And tightly focus on this spot. And now slowly unfocus your gaze. Widen your gaze. Pan out without moving your eyes. Take it all in.

A smeared and pixelated surface, swelling of contour and light. (Monet’s seepages of light, Altman’s overlapping nomadic dialogue.) Once you have unfocused with little to no center of attention, slowly close your eyes. And please feel very free to notice the light. All of the light that your eyes knocked back as you dilated your focal point. This exercise can be repeated a few times. Unfocusing does not always come easily. And it is probably best to not put too much effort into it. Best to not employ too much pressure.

And we will not put too much pressure on this exercise to help us explain away the humidly, saturatedly psychedelic canopy of moan-‘n-twang and slackelastic-groove of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sasquatch Landslide.

Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”

Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.

There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognizable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.

A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.

Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty

Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

Did You Enjoy Your Time Here…? is the new studio album from Backwoodz Studioz artist PremRock (perhaps best known as ½ of ShrapKnel; the sobering yin to Curly Castro’s furious yang). DYEYTH picks up where Prem’s pensive Backwoodz debut, 2021’s Load Bearing Crow’s Feet, left off; clear-eyed, heartfelt, and unsparingly witty. The album boasts production from Sebb Bash, Blockhead, YUNGMORPHEUS, Child Actor, Controller 7, ELUCID, Small Professor, Jeff Markey, & Fines Double while Prem’s longtime collaborator Willie Green weaves everything together. Lyrically Prem is aided and abetted by some of the world’s best, Pink Siifu, billy woods, Cavalier, Nappy Nina, Illogic, AJ Suede, Mary Esther Carter and of course Castro. Each guest extracts the best out of the mixture and producing fruitful collaborations not merely guest verses. Featuring original artwork inspired by the record from Chicago artist Gabe Karagianis. The best turns of phrase are the ones that provide more than one meaning. Like staring at an abstract painting, words can mean different things to different people. A question or phrase that either elicits an extended existential pondering or simply a shrug. Could be in reference to the entirety of one’s life, spending 90 minutes in an establishment or 5 years in a romantic relationship.The brief exhilarating high of a designer drug, or the automated survey at the end of an online transaction. It is a simple but stealthily loaded question. Well, did you?

Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce a new album from Kenny Segal and K-the-I??? Genuine Dexterity is the title of this record, but it is also an equally apt description of their artistic skill sets; Kenny’s ability to tailor his production to each project is well established, and K-the-I???’s acrobatic style easily renders dense rhymes weightless. Together they have made an album that pogo sticks over genre conventions to deliver a daring and immersive listening experience. “Genuine Dexterity is an album made in order to display my many facets, whether it be my mood, growth or the adventures that formulate my present-day outlook,” the rapper explains, “Letting everything come naturally to me and to never force the envelope. It’s also about the direction the universe is heading towards whether I like it or not” Rapper/Producer Kiki Ceac, best known by his stage name K-the-I???, was at the forefront of the mid-00’s experimental hip-hop wave that laid the groundwork for much of the alternative rap music that followed. Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kiki moved to Los Angeles around the same time that fellow East Coast transplant Kenny Segal was beginning to make noise under the Project Blowed umbrella. Despite moving in the same circles for many years, they had never worked together until Genuine Dexterity- which, ironically enough, came about after Kiki moved back to the East Coast. “Sometimes a vocalist will just spark a whole wave of creativity in me, and that’s what happened with Kiki,” Segal says, “last year I sent him two beats to use on a different album and when he sent the songs back it was obvious we had something special and needed to do more” Genuine Dexterity features Armand Hammer, Open Mike Eagle, ShrapKnel, Fatboi Sharif, Self Jupiter, and Jesse the Tree but K-the-I??? is the undisputed ringmaster of this circus. It has been a decade since Kiki’s last album and yet he has returned to the game at the height of his powers. He has always been an unorthodox lyricist and remains so here, but in his time away from the spotlight, his style has grown in many ways. “Maybe I’m calmer nowadays, I don’t feel the need to ALWAYS shout like I used to. My vocabulary has grown, and my flow is more polished,” Kiki writes, before adding that one thing that has not changed is the intricacy of his writing. Meanwhile, Kenny Segal’s customized soundscapes whisk Kiki’s styles to places they haven’t been before, and he never fails to find a pocket in which to ply his craft. Genuine Dexterity, if you will.

If Paradise was half as nice…by Fabio De Luca Googling “paradise house”, the first results to pop up are an endless list of European b&b’s with whitewashed lime façades, all of them promising “…an unmatched travel experience a few steps from the sea”. Next, a little further down, are the institutional websites of a few select semi-luxury retirement homes (no photos shown, but lots of stock images of smiling nurses with reassuring looks). To find the “paradise house” we’re after, we have to scroll even further down. Much further down. It feels like yesterday, and at the same time it seems like a million years ago. The Eighties had just ended, and it was still unclear what to expect from the Nineties. Mobile phones that were not the size of a briefcase and did not cost as much as a car? A frightening economic crisis? The guitar-rock revival?! Certainly, the best place to observe that moment of transition was the dancefloor. Truly epochal transformations were happening there. From America, within a short distance one from the other, two revolutionary new musical styles had arrived: the first one sounded a bit like an “on a budget” version of the best Seventies disco-music – Philly sound made with a set of piano-bar keyboards! – the other was even more sparse, futuristic and extraterrestrial. It was a music with a quite distinct “physical” component, which at the same time, to be fully grasped, seemed to call for the knotty theories of certain French post-modern philosophers: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Paul Virilio... Both those genres – we would learn shortly after – were born in the black communities of Chicago and Detroit, although listening to those vinyl 12” (often wrapped in generic white covers, and with little indication in the label) you could not easily guess whether behind them there was a black boy from somewhere in the Usa, or a girl from Berlin, or a pale kid from a Cornish coastal town. Quickly, similar sounds began to show up from all corners of Europe. A thousand variations of the same intuition: leaner, less lean, happier, slightly less intoxicated, more broken, slower, faster, much faster... Boom! From the dancefloors – the London ones at least, whose chronicles we eagerly read every month in the pages of The Face and i-D – came tales of a new generation of clubbers who had completely stopped “dressing up” to go dancing; of hot tempered hooligans bursting into tears and hugging everyone under the strobe lights as the notes of Strings of Life rose up through the fumes of dry ice (certain “smiling” pills were also involved, sure). At this point, however, we must move on to Switzerland. In Switzerland, in the quiet and diligent town of Lugano, between the 1980s and 1990s there was a club called “Morandi”. Its hot night was on Wednesdays, when the audience also came from Milan, Como, Varese and Zurich. Legend goes that, one night, none less than Prince and Sheila E were spotted hiding among the sofas, on a day-off of the Italian dates of the Nude Tour… The Wednesday resident and superstar was an Italian dj with an exotic name: Don Carlos. The soundtrack he devised was a mixture of Chicago, Detroit, the most progressive R&B and certain forgotten classics of old disco music: practically, what the Paradise Garage in New York might have sounded like had it not closed in 1987. In between, Don Carlos also managed to squeeze in some tracks he had worked on in his studio on Lago Maggiore. One in particular: a track that was rather slow compared to the BPM in fashion at the time, but which was a perfect bridge between house and R&B. The title was Alone: Don Carlos would explain years later that it had to be intended both in the English meaning of “by itself” and like the Italian word meaning “halo”. That wasn’t the only double entendre about the song, anyway. Its own very deep nature was, indeed, double. On the one hand, Alone was built around an angelic keyboard pattern and a romantic piano riff that took you straight to heaven; on the other, it showcased enough electronic squelches (plus a sax part that sounded like it had been dissolved by acid rain) to pigeonhole the tune into the “junk modernity” section, aka the hallmark of all the most innovative sounds of the time: music that sounded like it was hand-crafted from the scraps of glittering overground pop. No one knows who was the first to call it “paradise house”, nor when it happened. Alternative definitions on the same topic one happened to hear included “ambient house”, “dream house”, “Mediterranean progressive”… but of course none were as good (and alluring) as “paradise house”. What is certain is that such inclination for sounds that were in equal measure angelic and neurotic, romantic and unaffective, quickly became the trademark of the second generation of Italian house. Music that seemed shyly equidistant from all the rhythmic and electronic revolutions that had happened up to that moment (“Music perfectly adept at going nowhere slowly” as noted by English journalist Craig McLean in a legendary field report for Blah Blah Blah magazine). Music that to a inattentive ear might have sounded as anonymous as a snapshot of a random group of passers-by at 10AM in the centre of any major city, but perfectly described the (slow) awakening in the real world after the universal love binge of the so-called Second Summer of Love. For a brief but unforgettable season, in Italy “paradise house” was the official soundtrack of interminable weekends spent inside the car, darting from one club to another, cutting the peninsula from North to centre, from East to West coast in pursuit of the latest after-hours disco, trading kilometres per hour with beats per minute: practically, a new New Year’s Eve every Friday and Saturday night. This too was no small transformation, as well as a shock for an adult Italy that was encountering for the first time – thanks to its sons and daughters – the wild side of industrial modernity. The clubbers of the so-called “fuoriorario” scene were the balls gone mad in the pinball machine most feared by newspapers, magazines and TV pundits. What they did each and every weekend, apart from going crazy to the sound of the current white labels, was linking distant geographical points and non-places (thank you Marc Augé!) – old dance halls, farmhouses and business centres – transformed for one night into house music heaven. As Marco D’Eramo wrote in his 1995 essay on Chicago, Il maiale e il grattacielo: “Four-wheeled capitalism distorts our age-old image of the city, it allows the suburbs to be connected to each other, whereas before they were connected only by the centre (…) It makes possible a metropolitan area without a metropolis, without a city centre, without downtown. The periphery is no longer a periphery of any centre, but is self-centred”. “Paradise house” perfectly understood all of this and turned it into a sort of cyber-blues that didn’t even need words, and unexpectedly brought back a drop of melancholic (post?)-humanity within a world that by then – as we would wholly realise in the decades to come – was fully inhuman and heartless. A world where we were all alone, and surrounded by a sinister yellowish halo, like a neon at the end of its life cycle. But, for one night at least, happy.

ドイツのミュージシャン/作曲家のDaniel Rosenfeldが変名C418にて製作した傑作！物理世界とピクセル化された世界の両方で響くサウンドを描き上げた『マインクラフト』のオリジナルサウンドトラック盤『Minecraft Volume Beta』が〈Ghostly International〉からアナログ・リプレス。前作『Alpha』には未収録の楽曲だけでなく、ゲーム内では使用されたなかった楽曲も収録したC418自身のオリジナル・アルバム的一枚！牧歌的で穏やかなサウンドスケープに仕立てられた前作と比してよりダークで内省的な側面もクローズアップされた魅惑のアンビエント/エレクトロニック・ミュージックが収められています。

Prajñāghoṣa's debut ambient album on Into The Deep Treasury is a narrative, a musical poem, an attempt to share the story of a transformative odyssey — an outer and inner journey marked by higher aspirations, spiritual growth, and a profound connection with the world.

Coming with a 8 pages booklet

Throbbing Gristle revisits TGCD1, long out of print, now available on vinyl for the first time ever via Mute. This release includes the original sleeve notes by all the members of the band, uncovering the story and ethos behind TG’s independent record label, Industrial Records. Formed in 1975, Throbbing Gristle, aka Chris Carter, Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson (1955-2010), Cosey Fanni Tutti, and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950- 2020), fully delivered on punk’s failed promise to explore extreme culture as a way of sabotaging systems of control. Their impact on music, culture, and the arts has been immeasurable and still felt today. Originally released on Mute’s imprint, The Grey Area, in 1986, TGCD1 comprises forty-two minutes of studio recordingscaptured at their own Industrial Records Studio on a TEAC 8-Track in 1979. Initially serving as an exclusive piece of unreleased material for TG’s first-ever CD release, the record’ dark and harsh droning sound stands as a significant chapter in their discography, showcasing the band during, arguably, their most formative era. TGCD1 is reissued alongside The Third Mind Movements - both vital additions for dedicated Throbbing Gristle and industrial music fans.