MUSIC

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."

Carl Stone continues his late career prolific renaissance with a new album of sculpted, tuneful MAX/MSP fantasias. Stone “plays” his source material the way Terry Riley’s In C “plays” an ensemble – with a loose, freewheeling charm connected to the ancient human impulse to make sound, melody, and rhythm from anything. Stone’s unique technique simultaneously focuses and sprays sound like a symphony of uncapped fire hydrants. Is this techno, avant-garde, sound art? It’s simply (or rather fantastically messily) Carl Stone.

Dancehall might have emerged in Jamaica, but over the last few decades the popular genre's tendrils have stretched out across the globe. In Kampala, Ratigan Era is adding a distinct Ugandan twist to dancehall, fusing it with East African humor and hyper-melodic afrobeats elements imported from Ghana and Nigeria. The versatile MC grew up listening to Jamaican music like Vybz Kartel, Busy Signal and Mavado - in his hometown of Kawempe there was almost no way to avoid it - and it blurred into the background, blending with local church music, US hip-hop and radio pop. He developed this diverse range of influences into a completely unique Afro-dancehall flow that simmers between Luganda, patois, Spanish and English, reflecting the melting pot of cultures and dialects that characterizes contemporary Africa.Ratigan broke out with a memorable feature on Pallaso's Ugandan hit 'Nsaba', a track that echoed throughout the country booming from nightclubs, motorcycle loudspeakers or from convenience stores. Now he's assembled his first album "Era", a furiously inventive interweaving of rubbery vocals and memorable chants backed by futuristic beats from Hakuna Kulala's most boundary-pushing producers. Congolese producer Chrisman takes the reins on 'Gorilla Attack', providing a downtempo groove that echoes recent Jamaican chop deployments from breakthrough artists like Skillibeng and Skeng. For his part, Ratigan ducks and dives between Chrisman's gqom-inspired low end womps and corrosive synths, commanding attention with his smart, dextrous flow and tongue-twisting lyrics.The Modern Institute and Golden Teacher's Richard McMaster handles 'Top Strike Force' leaving space in his wiry, minimal beats for Ratigan to flit between anthemic repetitions and ice-cold AutoTuned wails. On stand-out track 'Badman Style', Ratigan's guttural patois is measured against a dizzy trap-dancehall hybrid beat from HHY & The Kampala Unit's Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, aka Lithium Beats, while on the surreal 'Drop it Down', Japanese mad scientist Scotch Rolex brings out Ratigan's cheeky sense of humor with toytown bleeps and laser zaps. MC Yallah collaborator Debmaster appears on 'Gan Dem', meeting Ratigan's double-time raps with soundsystem destroying rolling subs, and veteran US noisemaker Kush Aurora sprinkles magic dust on 'Cool and Deadly', galvanizing the link between global bass mutations, Jamaica and East Africa.And despite the grab-bag of producers and inspirations, "Ratigan" is a strikingly coherent listening experience that accurately snapshots Kampala's colorful froth of sounds and phrases. Ratigan's outsized personality is welcoming and captivating, providing the sights, sounds and smells of the city with a frenetic rhythm that's as intimate and local as it is far-reaching. It might just be the future we so desperately need.

One year after the release of Overmono's debut album “Good Lies,” which reached #11 on the UK charts and is widely regarded as one of the best electronic records released in recent years (“the history of UK rave is distilled to perfection” - The Guardian), the critically acclaimed remix of The Streets' “Turn The Page” is now available as a single on XL Recordings. One year on from the release of Overmono's critically acclaimed debut album Good Lies (“a perfect distillation of UK rave history” - The Guardian), The Streets' remix of “Turn The Page” has been released as a long-awaited single on XL Recordings.

In full aural/metaphysical alignment, Shackleton’s bass heavy cosmic dread and Six Organs’ ritual folksong revel and delight in their massed collage as they become Jinxed By Being. Unfolding small details into a massive space, and then into further lines of dimensional space, they transit at will through our hemispheres with enervating motility, reearranging the definitions of our psychedelic/ritual/transcendental music libraries.

An amazing Krautrock / nature hybrid masterwork. Warm washes of synthesizer, tribal war drums and drones galore all mixed with the sounds of the rainforest, crickets, frogs, even flies - Osmose was originally released in 1978 and found minimalist composer Ariel Kalma using all manner of keyboards, saxophone, harmonium, delays, effects, even circular breathing, to compose gorgeously minimal, softly spacey slow drifting ambient soundscapes, which were then mixed with the sounds of the rainforest (recorded by Richard Tinti).It's a single LP reissue of the double album of 1978.

After his participation in a masterpiece such as Popol Vuh's Hosianna Mantra, in the early 1980s Klaus Wiese produced a series of seminal works in the field of ambient-drone and healing music. The first of these, Baraka, was released on tape by Acquamarin in 1981, and already contained all the aspects of his future research into the mysticism of sound. Wiese shares the path with other German explorers such as Hamel, Fricke, Micus or Deuter, but he focuses his attention on the most essential nature of sounds, on their acoustic purity, which is always infinite spiral, vortex of frequencies and cosmic bath. It takes only a few means (zither, tampoura, cybals, singing bowls) to reach the absolute through vibration. Like the archaic mood of a great universal harmony, the sound suggests a complete state of otherworldly meditation, an enveloping cloud of peace in the eternity of the present. The musician is only the one who distributes and directs the thickenings of ethereal matter, microtonal agglomerates, cascades of celestial harmonics and emotional floods, petals and stems of devotion.

"Dedicated to a united Arab response." - Bryn Jones

フィンランド電子音楽界の生ける伝説であり、Mika Vainioらと共にPan Sonicでも活躍した実験的作家、Ilpo Väisänenによる2022年の12インチ作品をストック。今この時間も繰り広げられ続けている、無視できない殺戮と破壊に対する、鎮静と鎮魂が込められた、力強く瞑想的な、漆黒のポスト・インダストリアル作品。版元は、「自由と独立のために戦うすべての人々に捧げる」ウクライナの新しいレーベルであり、MuslimgauzeやMerzbow、Noémi Büchiの作品も発表している 〈I Shall Sing Until My Land Is Free〉。Noel Summervilleによるマスタリング＆カッティング仕様と盤質も万全。

「この侵略には依然として反対だ。夏は最高だが、一部の人にとってはそうではないのだ。ロシアはウクライナで残忍な戦争を続け、民間人を爆撃し、民間人を殺害し、都市や村を意図的に破壊している。

戦争は続いており、ロシアの戦略はそれを長引かせ、西側諸国がいつかすべてを忘れるようにすることである。プーチンは、エネルギーと食料を武器として使い、我々の団結を破壊しようとしている。

現在、ヨーロッパで大量虐殺が起きていることを指摘したい。ちくしょう、今ここにあると。忘れるな！」
- Ilpo Väisänen

‘2 Sim’ is a phrase the references mobile phones with two sim cards to describe people of mixed heritage, dual nationality or multiple residences. After being called a 2 Sim in conversation with a stranger whilst on a walk through Freetown (a recording of this moment features on the record), Duval began to explore what the 2 Sim experience is in contemporary West-Africa. 2 Sim was created from 2 months of field recordings and interviews with family, friends and peers in Freetown Sierra Leone. These site specific recordings are collaged with solo piano recordings and production recorded in Sierra Leone and the UK. The EP is accompanied by a short film/ music video of the same name which Duval shot and Directed whilst making the record. 2 Sim EP is the second release from Carrying Colour which follows on from 2017’s ‘Sen Am’

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that burrows deep inside. It disorientates and teases, without malice. Its beauty lies in gentle projections, which, though subtle, leave deep impressions, like the wings of a nocturnal moth reflecting dark light. Its path, too, is unpredictable, but such disorientation is not a reflection of chaos. Instead, a mysterious intention appears through an imperious unfolding - its logic escapes us, but nevertheless captivates us. It is the story of a becoming of forms, as well as of their fading away and their appearance as a disappearance . Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher’s work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one. These works, each with their own agenda, evolve with grace and inspiration in their exploration of vast sound worlds, and it is with great pride that we present them in the new collection. Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier 
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

Music Promenade (1964–1969), 20’29


Electroacoustic Music
World premiere for the Théâtre de la musique, March 16, 1970
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Permanent version for four stand-alone tape recorders. A series of colliding realistic sounds and sonic images. Whilst walking, a man is struck by the violence of his surroundings.
 Nature has disappeared in a whirlwind of warfare and industry in the midst of which he encounters a dying folklore and a lost young girl.

The "Installation" version is used to sonify a place in which walkers are free to choose their musical itinerary.

Unheimlich Schön (1971), 15’40


Musique concrète made in 1971 in the studios of the Südwestfunk in Baden-Baden.
Voice: Ilse Mengel.

“How does a young woman breathe when thinking about something else ?”
To be listened to at a low volume.

Both noted for strikingly forward-thinking bodies of solo work dating back to the 1990s, the duo of Andrew Pekler & Giuseppe Ielasi - collaborators for the better part of a decade - reemerge with 'Palimpsests’, their first outing with Shelter Press. Built from deconstructed layers of texture, tone, and arrhythmic percussiveness, the album’s 2 sides distill 6 years of work into 9 splintered, airy reimaginings of minimalism - each surprising, creatively rigorous, and startlingly beautiful - that rest at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic practice and musique concrète. Based in Berlin and Milan respectively, Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi have individually carved singular paths across numerous disciplines within experimental music for more than 20 years, each deploying sampling, synthesis, and acoustic sources to weave their own, distinct worlds of sonorous abstraction. Brought together by years of friendship and a shared devotion to layered texture and complex, fractured structure, the pair first joined their creative energies in 2013, a collaboration that culminated as the LP, ‘Holiday For Sampler’, issued by Planam. 'Palimpsests’, the duo’s second outing, draws its material from a series of improvisations made by the Pekler and Ielasi in Milan during 2015. Over the ensuing six years, those recordings would undergo various transformations - cut, reworked, sampled, and added to by each artist, working at geographic distance between Berlin, Kyoto and Monza - before culminating, like the album’s title suggests, as a unique manifestation of musical palimpsest; “an object reused and altered, while still bearing visible traces of its earlier form”. With each of the album’s compositions nodding toward a city with which Pekler and Ielasi hold biographical connections, 'Palimpsests’ constructs sound as poetic metaphor; a series of ghosts - traces of memory, image, and action - cut and reassembled, in cycling permutations, before been set into action at a glacial pace with layered, transparent forms. Defined by remarkable restraint and pointillistic precision, across the album’s two sides Pekler and Ielasi weave the fractured remnants of their sessions - reduced to glitches and warbling fragments of texture and tonality - into pulsing expanses of spatial ambiance that defy imagism, blur the boundaries between the synthetic and organic - reducing their sources to a series of unknowns - recast the boundaries of electroacoustic practice on markedly singular terms. Shelter Press is thrilled to present 'Palimpsests’, another brilliant outing from the duo of Andrew Pekler and Giuseppe Ielasi. Issued in a limited edition of 500 copies on black vinyl, with artworks on printed inner and outer sleeves by Traianos Pakioufakis.

The work by an up-and-coming producer who made his major debut with Nippon Columbia's album "Mystic Islands Dub" in November 2023, exploring the possibilities of Okinawan folk songs and dub!

He gained attention with his work ``Shima DUB'' (2013), which was based on an old song from his roots in Ryukyu, and has released two 7-inch works to date, ``Oshima Yango-bushi'' and ``Sulukill Kuichar.'' The album “Mystic Islands Dub” was also completed immediately. Harikuyamaku is currently one of the most popular dub producers and is highly trusted as an engineer for Okinawa-based artists such as Yukino Inamine and Ododoafrobeat. This album contains 5 psychedelic to trancey dance tracks that are truly ``kachashi (stirring)'', where high-speed swirling sanshin meets deep electronic & dub.

ダウンビート経由のディープ・ハウス/チルアウト・エレクトロニクス秀逸作！〈Tax Free〉を主宰するベルリンのダウンビート/ブレイクス名手Max Graefによる最新アルバム『Natural Element』が、Space GhostやNu Genea、Zopelarらの作品も知られるダウンビート/モダン・ファンクの一大聖地〈Tartelet Records〉からアナログ・リリース。低音重視の空想と繊細なダンスフロアの冒険をテーマとしたジャンルを超えたリスニング・トリップ。今回は、煌めく才能と伝染的なその魅力的なサウンドを、バックルームのビーンバッグに心地よく収まったサイケデリックで夢見心地のジャムへと落とし込んだものとなっています。

One of Poland’s most innovative and singular electronic producers, Hatti Vatti, lands on Belgian giant R&S Records with a new instrumental album filled with unparalleled and experimental jazz electronica. Having released three other full-length albums, most recently 2017’s ‘Szum’, Hatti Vatti aka Piotr Kaliński returns with the breathtaking freeform sounds of ‘Zeit’. Featuring Rafał Dutkiewicz on drums, Paweł Stachowiak on bass and Piotr Chęcki on saxophone, the nine-track long player brings together a collection of eclectic compositions that defies genre classifications, with echoes of the Japanese ambient scene, krautrock, jazz and dubby UK-bass. Prepare to be dazzled with this collection of absorbing and left of centre productions from the label that brought the likes of Aphex Twin, James Blake and Gabriels to international acclaim.

When the world's chatter is hushed to a whisper and emptiness replaces clutter, time falls away completely, exposing a vast, open canvas for the imagination fill with reflection, contemplation and abstraction. On their first collaborative album, released via Caterina Barbieri's light-years label, Grand River and Abul Mogard gaze longingly into the abyss, capturing atemporality, splendour and tranquility with confident, impressionistic sonic strokes. Dynamic and poignant, 'In uno spazio immenso' balances on a knife-edge between booming, operatic grandeur and soft-focus simplicity, casting as much light on the subtle outlines and illusory rhythms as it does its dense, almost overpowering textures. Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, has been evolving her unique musical language since she released 'Crescente' on Donato Dozzy and Neel's Spazio Disponibile imprint in 2017. A trained linguist, she uses her instrumentation and advanced processes to challenge cultural perceptions, portraying emotions and moods rather than fixed, visual images. Abul Mogard meanwhile is just one of veteran Italian producer Guido Zen's many aliases, and over a series of acclaimed albums for labels like Ecstatic, Houndstooth and VCO, he's muddled fiction with stark reality, shaking kosmische synth fantasies into post-industrial ambience and blissful shoegaze memories. Working together, Portioli and Zen find unity in intensity, freezing their discrete concepts and techniques into a glacial emotional expanse. On opening track 'Dissolvi', they peer out hand-in-hand over a colossal, reverberant landscape, conducting booming basses, evaporating voices and brassy synthetic swells that pick out the formidable topography. Beatless but not without rhythm, the composition moves at its own pace, twisting time and form to suggest the duo's obliquely hypnagogic narrative. And with each action, there's inevitably a reaction: 'Frantumi di luce' is a hushed refraction that simmers with intrigue, decorating its subtle, flickering pulse and dazzling rays of thoughtful ambience, while 'Altrove, lontano' transports listeners into a different locale entirely, cloistering its meditative mood with angelic choral echoes and evocative strings. The album's most devastating track, 'Archi' is an apex of sorts, a collision of widescreen electroid oscillations and overdriven drones that careens into a grinding industrial beat, and 'Sulle barcane' is its serene inverse, a breathy exhalation fashioned from cryptic environmental recordings, static washes and weightless pads. But 'In uno spazio immenso' isn't a story about Portioli and Zen, exactly, it's an invitation to listen to an inner voice that's different for each listener. Space is whatever we want it to be, and how we decide to fill it is a choice that's dependent on the depth of the imagination.

Forest Law's debut album, "Zero," is a vibrant journey blending Balearic funk with urban Tropicalia, showcasing his adept guitar playing, old-school sampling, and UK-styled beats alongside his mellow yet sombre vocals. Recorded across eclectic locations from Icelandic fish net factories to a garden shed in Romford, this innovative release marks a new chapter for the multi-instrumentalist producer. Released in collaboration with the UK home for jazz and electronic sounds, Total Refreshment Centre, Zero is Forest Law’s first release since his debut EP on Brownswood Recordings four years ago, marking a new and exciting chapter for the up-and-coming talent. Crafted over seven years, "Zero" is deeply influenced by Law's experiences, from immersive stays in Porto where he delved into Portuguese music to an artist residency in a remote Icelandic fishing village. The album was finished, and recorded in his garden shed in Romford, East London. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition about a boy from Essex, who fell in love with international music, discovered the world, and then produced a musical treatise about his adventures from his shed.

Forest Law's debut album, "Zero," is a vibrant journey blending Balearic funk with urban Tropicalia, showcasing his adept guitar playing, old-school sampling, and UK-styled beats alongside his mellow yet sombre vocals. Recorded across eclectic locations from Icelandic fish net factories to a garden shed in Romford, this innovative release marks a new chapter for the multi-instrumentalist producer. Released in collaboration with the UK home for jazz and electronic sounds, Total Refreshment Centre, Zero is Forest Law’s first release since his debut EP on Brownswood Recordings four years ago, marking a new and exciting chapter for the up-and-coming talent. Crafted over seven years, "Zero" is deeply influenced by Law's experiences, from immersive stays in Porto where he delved into Portuguese music to an artist residency in a remote Icelandic fishing village. The album was finished, and recorded in his garden shed in Romford, East London. It’s a beautiful juxtaposition about a boy from Essex, who fell in love with international music, discovered the world, and then produced a musical treatise about his adventures from his shed.

Church Andrews and Matt Davies weave intricate patterns from Fibonacci sequences on new mini-album, Yucca. Producer and composer Church Andrews (aka Kirk Barley) and drummer Matt Davies return to explore the outer limits of rhythm on a six-track suite that is at once angular and fluid, natural and systematic. Drawn to the restrictions of working solely with one synth and live drums, the pair found creativity in limitation, developing a compositional dialogue between the sonic timbres of Kirk’s productions and Matt’s percussive practice. Evoking the primitive yet complex form of the plant from which it takes its name, Yucca features tracks that are built around rhythmic ratios of the Fibonacci sequence. Mirroring spiral patterns exhibited in nature, each track evolves like a cellular structure of its own, from the livewire syntax of ‘Chirp’ and the deconstructed ebb and flow of ‘Ferns’, to the mini-album’s title track, where crisp grooves flit between modulated electronics like fireflies. “I’ve always been inspired by music that is complex without sounding complex,” Matt explains. He maintains a sense of bounce amid the intricate phrasing and cites drummers Roy Haynes and his grandson Marcus Gilmore as inspirations, alongside sabar drummers from Senegal and Mridangam drumming of South India. With a shared background in hip-hop and the swung beats of J Dilla and Flying Lotus, Kirk Barley and Matt Davies were also inspired by the minimalism of Terry Riley and the sparse palette of dub techno. Written and recorded in Lewisham in the spring and summer of 2023, Yucca follows the release of Axis in 2022, with the duo having also performed at festivals such as Rewire and Waking Life, and recorded live sessions for FACT magazine and Worldwide FM. The third release on Yorkshire-based Odda Recordings, following Kirk Barley’s Marionette and Flaer’s Preludes, Yucca confirms the label’s reputation for championing music on the unstable ground between the organic and the synthetic.

Shuttle358 Optimal.LP is the much-anticipated debut release from californian dan abrams, and the first release in a series of artists featured on 12k's .aiff compilation. Dan Abrams' music is a self-replicating ecosystem that grows and unfolds with the movement of sonic particles and binary rhythm. Optimal.LP plays on the juxtaposition of ambient drones and delicate melodies with layers of digital static, lo-fi rumblings, and distressed microscopic sounds. this contrast in elements makes "optimal.lp" a very engaging and sophisticated body of work; tense, jarring, and oddly soothing.

Light, textural daydream house from Edmonton’s Dylan Khotin-Foote, whose debut 1080p release under the Khotin title lands in the middle of close, bedroom zones and more club-friendly grooves. Since his initial moves towards house and techno genre experiments two years ago, Khotin has refined his unique slant on gentle acid and blurred yet effervescent hybrid house, with a stack of hardware: Roland TR-505, 606, 707, SH-101, Juno 106, Korg MS-10, Yamaha DX7, and various casio keyboards. Khotin’s lightly dusted grooves are inflected with a bedroom pop sensibility as much as reverence for heavy techno greats, scattering samples over breezy house rhythms. Loose themes of flight and brightness coast in and out of each side (mixed live); loose house drifters like “Flight Theme” and title track “Hello World” float on gentle bongos and hi-hats and brightly hued melodies (that are consistently focal and catchy across the record) while darker techno heavy hitters like “Why Don’t We Talk” and “Infinity Jam” bring a distinct take on cosmic hardware vibes.

For the first time, The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble’s seminal album "Mr. Machine" is being re-issued on coloured vinyl. This is a record that put them alongside names as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but with considerably more groove. More than anything, Daniel, Jan and Paul are keen that the Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble are not written off as a curiosity: “Often people focus a lot on this whole "cross-over" aspect,” says Brauer. “We wish people would simply notice we have good chords, melodies etc. and take the music as it is. Because we make it the way we feel, and not for other, let's say purely conceptual reasons. Some only seem interested in how it’s made. Some reviewers perceive us as minimal techno, some as modern classical, some as nu jazz and so on. But we don’t divide the world into techno and non-techno.”

Hania Rani announces her new album, Ghosts, bringing her songwriting and beautiful vocals to the fore and featuring special guests Patrick Watson, Ólafur Arnalds and Duncan Bellamy (Portico Quartet). Ghosts is the sound of an ever-evolving artist and, just as the album’s title suggests she passes repeatedly and gracefully between musical worlds: as composer, singer, songwriter, and producer. This album builds on Rani’s earlier successes Esja and Home with an expanded yet still minimal setup of piano, keyboards, synths (most importantly her Prophet) and features more of her mysterious, bewitching voice. Its spirit is warm, beckoning one into an ambitious double album that unfolds at an exquisite pace, informed by her revelatory, exploratory live performances. Ghosts is also an album of collaborations as Rani is joined by Patrick Watson, who breathes unearthly life into the ethereal ‘Dancing with Ghosts’. ‘Whispering House’is written and recorded with her friend, Ólafur Arnalds and casts a peaceful, ineluctable spell; and Portico Quartet’s Duncan Bellamy contributes vital loops to ‘Don’t Break My Heart’ and ‘Thin Line’. Rani’s lyrics are partially inspired by a two-month residency in a small studio in Switzerland’s mountains, where Rani was working on the soundtrack On Giacometti for a documentary about the renowned Swiss artist. “Where I stayed was once an old sanatorium in an area which used to be very popular, but now there are huge abandoned hotels where the locals say ghosts live. I mean, it's kind of a local belief system – these ghosts even have names! – but once you're deep into nature or some abandoned place, your imagination starts working on a different level.” “The edge of life and death,” Rani summarises, “and what actually happens in between: this was what really interested me. Even singing the word ‘death’ was quite a shock. It’s such a weird word to say out loud, and people are afraid of it, which I found extremely interesting. Most of the songs probably still talk about love and things like that, but Ghosts is more me thinking about having to face some kind of end.”