MUSIC

Under one of his most notable guises, Larry Heard presents a new album for 2018; his first full length album as Mr. Fingers in almost 25 years ! Famous as one of the most important heads in the dance music around the world, Larry has enjoyed a successful career as a producer, remixer, collaborator, vocalist and DJ spanning 35 years. Due for release on his own imprint Alleviated Records, 'Cerebral Hemispheres' features 14 new pieces of music that allows the listener to fully immerse themselves and dig deep into Larry's musical world.

Re-issue of essential Larry Heard album from the early 2000's... Love's Arrival!

An alternative sound born in the gap between digital dancehall and the UK underground’s experimental currents. Active in the mid-to-late 1980s and based in Britain, Reducer narrowly missed signing to On-U Sound and left little behind, yet reportedly had Downwards’ Regis enthralled at the time. A legendary post-punk/industrial reggae band, their long-lost recordings finally surface: a powerful three-track single on Bristol’s leftfield institution Bokeh Versions. Included is the 1986 discomix version of the era-defining riddim “Sleng Teng,” radically reimagined. Built around the Casio MT-40 preset that sparked the digital dancehall revolution, these tracks vividly evoke the atmosphere of sound system culture. Repetitive rhythms and low-end sway merge with a contemporary sensibility, preserving the original innovation while extending it into a more elongated, psychedelic form of ecstasy. An essential update to a monument of the digital revolution—indispensable for all devotees of reggae, dub, and dancehall alike.

London’s DJ Ojo expands his deep end club purview to a full album of purring downbeats, lilting rhythmelodies and technoid bassbin pressure with signature restraint and well-balanced weight for Blank Mind. It's really strong, tightly produced gear the far fringes of dub techno, somewhere between Monolake, Convextion, and the sort of thing Beneath and Kowton were up toback in the post-dubstep and post-UKF days of the late ‘00s...

One up to his label debut 12” of ’23, and a preceding EP for Significant Other’s Pain Management, the eight tracks of ‘Total Internal Reflection’ dwell in a vein of syncopated, offbeat UK bass music where deep house, dub techno, and electronic sound designer suss are reduced to barest essentials, as first shaped by the likes of Beneath and Kowton back in the post-dubstep and post-UKF days of the late ‘00s. It’s a sound that can sometimes take itself so seriously to the point of numbness, but is here inflected with just enough personality and sensuality in the tactile dub tech details and whirring, minimalist efficiency of the groove that buoys it to interest for connoisseurs of this sound.

A carefully plotted course emerges in the finely tempered escalation of tempo and opening of envelopes from a squashed, reticulated opener and nervier, skeletal 2-step parry of a title tune spangled with insectoid intricacy and adore dubbing, finding filigree variegation within a theme as the sloshing bleep swag of ‘Entropic’ nudges into mid-tempo swang shades from Paperclip Minimiser aces on ‘World of lens’, and echoes of Pole bounce around the sound sphere of ‘Axiomatic’, with a strong cap-tip to T++, but at depressed pace, on ‘Cruising’, and the sort of subs made for swimming in the club propel its most robust stepper ‘Isomorphic’.

The landmark work from Steven Hitchell—better known for his Deepchord and Echospace projects—returns under his Intrusion alias. Originally released in 2008 and later expanded into a two-disc CD edition in 2014, this long-awaited reissue brings the second disc to vinyl for the very first time via echospace [detroit]. Evocative deep dub techno visions such as “A Night To Remember” and “Under The Ocean” sit alongside iconic pieces like “Tswana Dub (Phase90 Restructure)”—also featured on Deadbeat’s classic mix Radio Rothko—while overlooked gems “Love In Lofi” and “Never Forget” finally get their due. The set also includes the live recording “Kingston’s Burning Dub [Live in NYC]”, balancing archival significance with immersive sonic force. Remastered by none other than Stefan Betke, aka Pole, who lends even greater depth to its already profound resonance.

DIN SYNC DUB is an exploration of communication through sound. Six tightly packed experimental dub tracks use bass-heavy vibrations to rattle both body and mind, pushing the limits of self-expression in the hope of fostering deeper human connection.

The drive for more efficient and precise communication tools—whether between man and machine or machine and machine—has been a foundational force in the evolution of technology. This duality, the way we interface with computers and the way we speak to one another, is at the heart of DIN SYNC DUB. For this album, N1_SOUND looks back to 1980, drawing inspiration from Roland’s Din Sync—a 40-year-old synchronization technology once used to link musical machines in perfect harmony.

While connecting machines to produce precisely sequenced music is nothing new, it’s the tension between perfection and imperfection—the mistakes of both man and machine—that gives DIN SYNC DUB its voice, its emotional rawness.

The journey begins with “Horizontal Hang”, which crashes through the door with a relentless bassline and crystalline synths. “Such Love” introduces a throbbing, guitar-driven groove, while “Intuition Dub” channels the spirit of Jah Shaka, offering a rhythmic pulse that echoes dub’s deep roots. “Us All” provides a moment of introspection with its sparse, three-dimensional melodies, before “Joy” reintroduces chaos, creating a post-dubstep soundscape that dismantles everything in its path. The album closes with “Mauzy”, a hopeful yet fragmented conclusion, reflecting the ever-evolving nature of technology and connection.

By the mid-to-late 1980s, Din Sync was superseded by the more widely adopted MIDI, yet obsolescence is built into the nature of all technology. Just as our relationship with machines shifts and fades, so too does our understanding of how those changes shape us. Before we can grasp the impact, the world has already moved on.

DIN SYNC DUB, the first full-length LP from Spiritual World, pulses with energy, on the edge of malfunction—a manifestation of the tension between the digital and the organic, the past and the present. 

先鋭的英国のテクノ・プロデューサー、ShiftedこもGuy Brewerが"Carrier"名義で放つ最新作『FATHOM』が、Perko主宰の〈FELT〉よりリリース。ミニマルな構造の中にドラムンベースのリズムを再構築し、金属的な質感と抽象的なサウンドデザインが融合した全4曲を収録。幻覚的な抽象性を帯びたグリッチ・プログラミングと霧のようなアトモスフィアが特徴的な"FATHOM"や粘性のあるベースと点滅するパルスが印象に残る"The Cusp"、有機的なディテールが際立つ"Trooper"など、IDM、実験的テクノ、アブストラクト・エレクトロニカの愛好者にとって、現代的なリズムとサウンドの探求が詰まった一枚！

When we established Balmat in 2021, neither of us could have imagined that within two years, we’d be putting out an album by one of our musical heroes: Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq. The British producer has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs µ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment. Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them µ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s—coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N’ Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label—and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forward-looking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album’s title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early ’90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles. There’s no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more self-aware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like µ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas’ first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light. Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones (“Marmite”), horror-film themes (“Belt & Carpet”), jungle breaks (“Mesolithic Jungle”), and even house music (“Houzz 13”), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never—to our ears, anyway—feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. We hope you feel the same.

January 2nd, 2023. Aside from being the second of a new year, it was a pretty ordinary night at ETA in Los Angeles, where guitarist Jeff Parker - alongside his ETA IVtet with saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss, and drummer Jay Bellerose - had been holding down a regular Monday gig since 2016. At the time, nobody knew it was the first gig of the last year that ETA would be open for business.

Over seven years of holding down that residency, Parker’s ETA ensemble evolved from a band that played mostly standards into a group known for its transcendent, long-form (sometimes stretching out for 45 minutes or more) journeys into innovative, often uncharted territories of groove-oriented, painterly, polyrhythmic, minimalist and mantric improvised music.

With that musical growth, the crowds for Parker and his band at ETA grew across the years too. What started as a sparse gathering of weeknight drinkers, friends, family, and Chicago expats (coming to get a shot of nostalgia for the atmospheres Parker used to create at Rodan across the ‘00s and early ‘10s) grew into a Los Angeles nightlife staple with a packed house and a line down the block for every show.

By January 2023 interest in Parker’s music was stronger than ever, coming off successes with the December 2021 International Anthem/Nonesuch release of Forfolks – a collection of solo guitar works – and the October 2022 Eremite release of Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, a double LP chronicling the ETA IVtet’s distinct, expansive approach to improvisation across four side-length tracks recorded and mixed live by engineer Bryce Gonzales.

Mondays introduced the world to the ETA IVtet’s signature sound with a gathering of unnamed recordings from dates between 2019 and 2021. Parker’s new ETA IVtet offering stays true to that formula in some ways – as he returns to Gonzales’s archive of analog captures to gather four long recordings totalling around 80 minutes – while zooming in on a more particular moment in his journey. The Way Out of Easy provides us a macro-lens view of the ever-refining, infinite organic essence of the ensemble as they stretch out across a single night of soundmaking on January 2nd, 2023.

The engineer Gonzales is well known for the high-end audio gear he builds as Highland Dynamics, and even designed a custom mixer to be able to record the ETA IVtet, specifically, while only taking up a single space at the bar. In his liner notes for The Way Out of Easy, he colors his process and approach: “There are many different ways to make recordings and they all have their place. But for this band, the most important thing to consider is: not doing anything to get in the way of what they are saying to each other.” He refers to the simple schematic he used for capturing these performances – “basically only 4 level controls for one microphone per player” – which allows us an incredibly pure, honest, transparent and transporting experience of the music as it unfolds and is created in real time.

The set begins with an extended take on Parker’s composition “Freakadelic” – a tune he originally recorded for his 2012 Delmark release Bright Light in Winter. The B-side piece “Late Autumn” finds Parker swaying in alliterative, arpeggiating cycles, using just a few plucked notes as he lays the compositional foundation. At first it almost sounds like an echo of the humble tunes he wrote alone with his guitar on Forfolks, but in this space his ensemble joins him to help build a beautifully multi-textured, gently-shifting four-dimensional construction out of a simple idea. On “Easy Way Out,” Butterss’s bobbing bass line leads, paddling the ensemble into a placid expanse of tender psychedelia while Bellerose dusts off the drums like an archaeologist unearthing ancient artifacts.

It had become customary for the IVtet to end their shows every week with a standard or a tune – a practice that Parker embraced for wanting to give the audience something warm and familiar to take home after a long night of taking them out on creative limbs. Some of Parker’s more common calls were “This Guy’s In Love With You” by Burt Bacharach, “1974 Blues” by Eddie Harris, or “Peace” by Horace Silver. In this set, the IVtet closes not with a familiar song, but a familiar sound in the form of a dub/reggae groove (given the name “Chrome Dome” by Parker in post), developing spontaneously out of lyrical ad libs by Johnson on solo saxophone.

In early December of 2023, ETA co-owner Ryan Julio was forced to make a sudden announcement that the venue would permanently shutter at the end of the year. On December 23rd, Parker and the band played at ETA for the last time.

On July 22nd, 2024, the ETA IVtet gathered to perform together for the first time since then, playing for a sold-out crowd of several hundred listeners – a smiling Ryan Julio among them – at Zebulon in Los Angeles. Gonzales was there, recording with his compact analog setup just behind the band on stage. The space may be gone but its spirit lives and the music moves forward into new vessels.

Different Rooms is a collection of songs and musical motifs we composed, edited, and collaged in the weeks between late 2024 and early 2025. Most of the recorded material was performed during that editing process, except for live performances taken from improvisations we recorded with Jeff Parker and Josh Johnson some time in 2023.

In our typical process, much of our material is collaged and combines moments of live improvisation, field recordings, and in-studio experimentation. This record, however, marks an evolution in our approach to studio production.

Our studios are side-by-side. When we were writing this album, you might have found us tracking viola stacks in one studio while, in the other, we were writing through-composed themes and rearranging the material. Granular synthesis and tape manipulation are key tools we use to create variation and movement in a composition. This process often yields surprising results, capturing the emotion but expressing it in unexpected ways. It feels essential that we embrace a bit of chance.

In contrast to our first album, Recordings from the Åland Islands, we wanted this music to feel very present. Where Recordings was intended to transport you to another place, Different Rooms is meant to meet you where you are. It’s a decidedly urban album. The field recordings were captured on train platforms, in city streets, in rooms at home, and intentionally paint a quotidian sonic image, blurring the line between what you hear in your own environment and what is on the record.

The song cycle is set in palindromic sequence, figuratively, with certain pieces (reflected) by a reprised or recurring motif that is often reimagined with new instrumentation.

The sonic and temporal abstraction between what is performed in real-time versus what is recorded, manipulated, and collaged reinforces our intent to collect the works under the title Different Rooms, which literally expresses the way the material was recorded in different rooms while reminding us that our shared experience of present time is also one that is asynchronous, historied, and complex.

Alabaster DePlume often asks a simple question: what do people need? In his work, at his shows, in his collaborations, the Mancunian singer-saxophonist and poet-philosopher poses this to the people around him. What are people looking for? In recent years, the same reply kept coming up: healing, healing, people need healing. But why, and what does it mean to heal, especially in a world where the very idea is often commodified and sold as a luxury? If people were coming to his music for something so mysterious, he ought to figure it out. Maybe he ought to try some healing himself.

“For a long time, I've always tried to give responsibility for my value to someone else,” DePlume told me on a recent phone call. It seemed he’d become so caught up in the work of forging connections, and thinking about the effects of his work on others, that he’d lost a sense of himself. “I was working on that,” he explained.

This experiment in healing included slowing down, reading, reflecting, and even taking up the practice of jiu-jitsu. DePlume wrote poetry, too, including the book 'Looking for my value: prologue to a blade', seventy pages of verse rooted in its title’s great search, in finding strength of self within a community, alongside meditations on the paradox of the blade. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in the introduction. “Healing is the forming of a whole, and a whole is singular, more itself, as in more one, as in more alone.” A blade could be used to attack, to shave, to sever, but it could also be used to cut oneself loose—in the process of getting free.

“What's the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep,” he told me. “And so what's the opposite of looking for my value? It is knowing my value. It simply is there. My dignity is there. I don't need anyone else to know my dignity, or me, to know it. I know it first. I can't seek it from another. I stand for it.”

Selections from the poetry book ultimately became the lyrics across half of the tracks on 'A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole', DePlume’s latest full-length work for the reliably great International Anthem label: eleven songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism. In sum, it documents his learning of the fact that dignity and self-determination are prerequisites for becoming whole, which is to say, for healing. If a blade were broken it would not serve its purpose; it must be unbroken, it must be whole, to be of use.

In the Alabaster DePlume songbook, the celestial ease of his instrumental tracks can sometimes feel like a trojan horse for a voice that is disarmingly honest about the heaviness of existence. Opener “Oh My Actual Days” is true to form in that sense, with DePlume’s tenor sax and Macie Stewart’s ghostly strings playing together like a slow march towards an inner reckoning, one that’s beautiful because it is true. The punchy and contemplative “Thank You My Pain” makes a rhythmic refrain from his titular lyric, inspired by the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, who urged the importance of listening to one’s own pain. “Hello my little pain, I know you are here,” Nhất Hạnh would say. “I am home to take care of you. I do not want to cover you up with consumption anymore.” While writing A Blade, DePlume “watched loads of him on YouTube.”

Then there’s the gorgeous swell of “Invincibility,” an ode to self-respect that feels a bit like a choir of angels led by a trickster, a group contemplating: how do we live with the forces that seek to destroy us? The whole song feels like a heavy exhale, or like the feeling of reaching the surface after a long while underwater. “If I meet with my feelings, they cannot destroy me,” he told me. “When I allow myself to embody them, physically, then I live through that feeling and I meet with it and I make peace with it and I find that my feeling is me, and I welcome it. It is a sense that I cannot be destroyed by my feeling. I am invincible.”

“Form a V” is the closest DePlume comes to a monologue, and also his song most indebted to his jiu-jitsu practice. “I’ve only been doing it for the past two or three years,” he told me. “But now I don’t know how you get by without it.” The song takes inspiration from a tradition where a whole dojo will stand in the shape of a V, facing just one lone individual, who is then attacked quickly and repeatedly by each of the others. “The title is a challenge to the world,” DePlume explained. “Go on, form a v—I am ready.”

Across the first half of the record, when the sax comes in short phrases, it feels like a highlighter over lines in DePlume’s poetry book. Other times, it plays out like an extension of his voice. “Playing the saxophone feels like singing,” he said. A transfixing run of instrumentals on the second half of the record includes “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity,” an anthem for self-possession. “Believing in yourself feels ridiculous,” he says. “It's ridiculous, but that's what it takes. That's what's required. To stand for yourself is absurd. Let us do the absurd that is standing for ourselves. There is this prayer going on in the background—you can't quite tell what the words are, but it's basically, I'm praying for my sovereign dignity but I don't need to pray for it. It's not going to be given to me. I already have it.”

Where DePlume’s previous material was drawn from collective sessions, improvisation, and editing, A Blade was tightly composed, arranged and produced by DePlume himself. From there, he brought his compositions to a cast of players and co-arrangers, including Macie Stewart (strings), Donna Thompson (backing vocals), and Momoko Gill (strings and backing vocals), for sessions at the collective arts space Total Refreshment Centre, where he has long been involved.

Born Gus Fairbairn, DePlume is a man of many past lives. He played “rock band type music” as a teenager, and started playing improvised music around 2008. He is compelled by how improvising allows him to “put faith in others.” He taught himself the saxophone around the time that he became employed as a support worker assisting men with mental disabilities; he once called playing music with them “one of the best breakthroughs for me as an artist.” His debut as Alabaster DePlume came in May 2012, while he was still living in Manchester. He moved to London in 2015 and took up residency at Total Refreshment Centre, where he was encouraged to put on a monthly concert, leading to the series Peach, releasing a namesake album that year, too. His music, from the start, has been imbued with his politics and values; he was maybe arrested once during a protest with the environmental group Extinction Rebellion. His proper international breakthrough came in 2020 with 'To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1', after nearly a decade of steadily releasing records.

On a phone call in the fall of 2024, we barely speak about any of this though. For at least an hour, we mostly just speak about his recent trip to Palestine, and how could we not? DePlume had traveled to Bethlehem in the spring for a conference hosted by a local Lutheran pastor, before meeting up with musicians from a community arts space, the Wonder Cabinet, and the independent radio station, Radio Alhara. “Palestine is a place where people make records,” he says. “I want to normalize the dignity of that. It's not like, oh, I'm going to make a thing about Palestine. I am just there, and I'm making a thing.”

At the end of 2024, DePlume prefaced A Blade with a collection of recent works: the poetry book and a three-track EP partially recorded in Bethlehem, and in collaboration with Palestinian musicians. There’s “Honeycomb” and “Cremisan,” both recorded during his “Sounds of Places” residency at Wonder Cabinet; “Cremisan” documents the conclusion of a daylong performance presented by Wonder Cabinet and Radio alHara, June 1, 2024, described as “a cry from the Cremisan Valley (Bethlehem, Palestine) to Rafah (Gaza).” The EP’s final recording, “Gifts of Olive,” references the soul-wrenching poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023.

To suggest that dignity is a human right we are all entitled to is to say: by nature of being alive, every human life has worth. Contemplating the very concept of human dignity also raises the daily indignities that are so normalized in a world of suffering. The lack of access to clean water, air, housing, healthcare. Without the basic necessities of life, we cannot know dignity. And how can people know dignity if they are living under a constant state of military attack, if they are living as the target of a genocide?

“The album was written before the genocide started, but I had Palestine on my mind all the time,” DePlume explains. “This question of dignity, sovereignty, and the work of healing. It has a relevance in what's being perpetrated there by the Israeli state, and taking responsibility for my place in that. I pay my taxes here in the United Kingdom—I am contributing to, as a white Englishman, the country that brought the Balfour Declaration, that brought the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that supports and enables the colonization and the settler-colonial project in Palestine. It is my issue, and I have a position where I can speak about it.”

“Dignity” has roots in the Latin dignitatem: worthiness. And instilling the plain truth of every human life’s worth has been a recurring commitment in DePlume’s work. “They can’t use us on one another if we don’t forget we’re precious,” he sang in 2022, summing the emotional core of his 2022 album 'GOLD', concerns of shared humanity that play out into the new works as well.

“We make stories in our lives,” DePlume says. “Oh, I need my story. Oh, something bad happened, and I need to heal upon that. Then I will be healed and all will be good, happily ever after. But no, it is work that needs doing all the time. We all are wounded in our many different ways. And there are degrees of healed, or wounded. Basically, we are either doing one thing or we're doing the other. How do I know I am not destroying myself? I only know that when I am working on healing.” 

Limited of deep dub influenced music from 12' from Greville.

Romeo’s Fall is an original score for voice by artist and composer EXLRUTH, a new work traversing romance and romanticism in a post-industrial North East England. Performed by countertenor Nik Rawlings with accompanying double bass from Caius Williams.

Informed by congregation, community and euphoria, exploring the meeting points of contemporary dance music cultures, traditional hymnal form, and the sonic appropriation and influence of regional industry, influenced by the legacy of the New Monkey. Addressing alternative trajectories of communion; on dancefloors (Makina) versus the nuclear act of togetherness within an industrial Northern landscape (classical/hymnal form).

This book features images taken from recently developed family super8, taken in and around Sunderland - 1960's onwards.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.

The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.

“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”

The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.

Where will the improvisation take place?

How will that space shape the sounds being made?

How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?

How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?

Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?

For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.

Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.

Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.

Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”

On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.

That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.

In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.

The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.

The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.

“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.

Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.

Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.

And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.

エレクトロニック・ミュージックの先駆者として、テクノの生みの親として、結成から54年が経過した今なお愛され続ける伝説的なドイツのグループであるKraftwerk。カスタムメイドの電子楽器を製作し、最先端の機器を使用して独自のサウンドを生み出し、アルバム『アウトバーン』などで世界的に高い評価を得た彼らが1970年から1981年にかけて放送していた音源を一挙収録したCD5枚組ボックス！

“Things fade into obscurity when a populace has no interest” - Meitei / 冥丁

Meitei considers himself an old soul, often preoccupied with the customs and rituals of the past. Recently Meitei lost his beloved 99-year-old grandmother, a woman who he considered to be one of the last remaining people to have experience and understanding of traditional Japanese ambience. His music and art is driven by a desire to cast light on an era and aesthetic that he believes is drifting out of the collective Japanese consciousness with each passing generation, what he calls "the lost Japanese mood". He chose to dedicate Komachi to his late Grandmother.

“I want to revive the soul of Japan that still sleeps in the darkness” - Meitei / 冥丁

Haunting and delicate, distant and timeless, Komachi is awash with white noise, complex field recordings and the hypnotic sounds of flowing water. Though confidently contemporary, like a bucolic J-Dilla, Komachi’s lineage can be traced back to the floating worlds of Ukiyo-e and Gagaku via the prism of 80s Japanese ambient pioneers, and 90s pastoral sample-based artists such as Susumu Yokota and Nobukazu Takemura.

Composed as individual sonic dioramas, each of the twelve tracks have been crafted to not only evoke feelings of nostalgia but to also explore the dichotomy of ancient and new in modern Japanese society. This pervasive narrative runs throughout, calling to mind the work of authors Yasunari Kawabata and Natsume Soseki, as well as the films of Yasujirō Ozu and Hayao Miyazaki, artists similarly fascinated by the reflective tranquillity that permeated traditional Japanese domestic life.

The limited vinyl release, produced in collaboration with label and distributor Séance Centre, includes a super limited special edition complete with beautiful twelve-page booklet featuring a number of prints in the Ukiyo-e style, a traditional style of woodblock print that dates back to 17th century Japan. The images were chosen by Meitei to showcase the old style Japanese sentiments that form a core inspiration to his musical output. 
 

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s.

In 1992, the museum mounted a John Cage Memorial exhibition, and this release showcases Hirose’s work on the overall exhibition design and the creation of the sounds that were played in the museum during the exhibition, through a re-edit and reissue of the sound materials.

The sound materials that Hirose created for the exhibition environment were only ever distributed on CDr to members of the curatorial team so this is their first formal release. Hirose’s work for the exhibition was radical in its use of musique concrète and collages of noise and everyday sounds, and in his homage to Cage’s methods, these pieces represent a distinct departure from his normal approach at the time.

The A4 booklet includes texts about the exhibition by members of the team, Hirose’s own description of the pieces, and photographs of the exhibition. (Text in Japanese and English).

The Kiyosato Museum of Contemporary Art was located in Kiyosato, Yamanashi prefecture from 1990 to 2014. It was a private art museum with a permanent exhibit based on a collection of unrivalled scale. The museum also collected and mounted exhibitions on the work of radical contemporary composers, including John Cage. The museum’s primary informant on music was sound designer Yutaka Hirose, one of the pioneers of Japan’s environmental music (kankyō ongaku) movement in the 1980s.

In 1992, the museum mounted a John Cage Memorial exhibition, and this release showcases Hirose’s work on the overall exhibition design and the creation of the sounds that were played in the museum during the exhibition, through a re-edit and reissue of the sound materials.

The sound materials that Hirose created for the exhibition environment were only ever distributed on CDr to members of the curatorial team so this is their first formal release. Hirose’s work for the exhibition was radical in its use of musique concrète and collages of noise and everyday sounds, and in his homage to Cage’s methods, these pieces represent a distinct departure from his normal approach at the time.

The A4 booklet includes texts about the exhibition by members of the team, Hirose’s own description of the pieces, and photographs of the exhibition. (Text in Japanese and English).

Following the success of last years Babe Roots EP, Echocord revisits the package with reworks from Forest Drive West, Mike Schommer, Felix K, DB1 and Babe Roots themself.

London’s DB1 leads the package with his take on ‘Work Hard’, a mostly beatless interpretation fuelled by oscillating white noise, winding dub chords and snippets of the original’s dub reggae vocals. Hidden Hawai’s Felix K then ups the energy levels with a high-octane take on ‘Sufferation Time’, driven by upfront, shuffled and distorted drums and unfaltering, tension building dub swells.

The hotly tipped Forest Drive West steps up next to remix ‘Jah Nuh Dead’, a typically classy reimagining from the Livity Sound artist, stipping things back to ethereal pads, off-kilter percussion and sporadic echoes of the original composition. Former Deepchord member Mike Schommer’s take on ‘Bless Me’ follows, the pioneer of contemporary dub techno delivers a cinematic rework employing sweeping voices, glitched out electronics and resonant swells alongside the bouncy dub reggae groove of the original.

Lastly Babe Roots revisit one of their own compositions, ‘Sufferation Time’, delivering a more refined feel this time round with more impetus on drums and dark, hypnotic synths to contrast the original’s more vocal focused feel.

The inimitable Richard Youngs returns to Black Truffle with this third full-length for the label, Hidden. Like CXXI and Modern Sorrow, Hidden unfolds across two side-long pieces at once eminently listenable and possessed of the ‘bloody-minded’ dedication to ‘having an idea and sticking with it’ that Youngs himself has identified as one of the key qualities of his work.

At the core of both pieces are rapid, randomised arpeggios generated with a Moog Grandmother, hypnotic patterns that wouldn’t be out of place on a Berlin School classic. Alongside these arpeggios, across the seventeen minutes of the first side-long piece Youngs builds an airy structure of shakers, synthetic handclaps and a brief, repeated sample, impossible to identify but sounding like a glitched foghorn. Over the top we hear his unmistakable voice, repeating single syllables—Ha, Ho—with a slow delay, something like a lonely one-man-band take on Anthony Moore’s Pieces from the Cloudland Ballroom or a more musical elaboration of the hypnotically overlapping delayed phonemes of Anton Bruhin’s Rotomotor. Like much of Youngs' work, the arrangement of sounds is sparse, each layer punctuated by spaces that allow others to shine through, in a way that seems to have more to do with dub or early hip-hop than high-brow models of musical reductionism.

On the flipside, the arpeggios return, now accompanied by ringing, filtered guitar chords and long flute tones. The use of a similar ground layer across the two pieces with strikingly different overdubs calls up Youngs' first solo record, the classic Advent, reminding us of how consistent ‘theme and variations’ is as an approach in his enormous body of work. Joined by handclaps and a chiming sound, the piece almost feels like it is about to achieve dance-floor lift-off at times, only for the percussion to disappear and leave the listener once again floating among the guitar and flute, now joined by occasional cut-off vocal snippets, like a radio turned quickly on and off. The suspension of these disparate elements over the steady foundation of the Moog arpeggios might remind some listeners of the free-form studio explorations of Moebius & Plank and Holger Czukay or even give a nod to Youngs’ formative encounter with Cabaret Voltaire.

Like some of Youngs’ much-loved work with Simon Wickham-Smith, Hidden approaches relatively familiar sounds and instruments from skewed angles, delighting in loose structures of interaction that border on gleeful incoherence while remaining outwardly beautiful. Coming up to almost four decades of persistent activity, like little else in contemporary music Youngs’ work beams with the simple joys of exploration and experiment.



Recorded in concert at the University of Sheffield in March 2025, Reality Is Not A Theory is the first collaboration between Mark Fell and Pat Thomas. Major figures in British experimental music since the 1990s, Fell and Thomas have developed their rigorous practices from radically different backgrounds and perspectives: where Fell’s singular take on synthetic abstraction emerged from Sheffield’s electronic underground, Thomas is a virtuoso improvising pianist steeped in jazz and modernist art music who has simultaneously worked with sampler-based electronics for decades. As the record’s wonderfully academic subtitle explains, we are presented here with two sides of ‘algorithmic and improvised music for computer and piano’, exemplifying both players’ insatiable search for new (and sometimes uncomfortable) playing situations.

The performance begins with Fell’s electronics close to the timbres of acoustic percussion, attacks that suggest wood, metal or glass threaded along a rapid pulse while Thomas focuses on the lowest registers of the piano, deadening the strings. As Fell’s electronics start to ring out and occupy more harmonic space, Thomas turns to wide, repeated clusters, which slowly expand into patterns of chords. Like in his recent solo recordings and his trio work with Joel Grip and Anton Gerbal, Thomas’ playing combines extreme dissonance with a deep lyrical sense. Fell’s work gradually shifts its focus toward drum sounds, drawing on the microtemporal processes that have characterized his practice in recent decades. Heard together with Thomas’ probing piano, the computer sounds call up unexpected associations with the klangfarben antics of improv drummers like Paul Lovens or Tony Oxley. Throughout its second half, the music grows increasingly frenetic, as Thomas sounds out rapid, irregularly repeated figures and beautifully sour chords in the upper register, while Fell’s percussion develops into angular pan-pipe-like feedback and waves of glissandi.

With great confidence and patience, Fell and Thomas often let their individual contributions remain rhythmically distinct and unsynchronised, allowing unexpected correspondence and coincidence to guide the music’s development. Recorded in a hall named after Sheffield steel manufacturer and Master Cutler Mark Firth, the location might suggest a model for understanding how Fell and Thomas interact here: two workers in the same workshop, each immersed in their own part of the production process. Arriving in a striking sleeve designed by Mark Fell, with liner notes by Francis Plagne, Reality Is Not A Theory is an invigorating document of the meeting of two mavericks of contemporary music.

2025 repress, gatefold sleeve, gold pantone print, incl. hot foil stamping. Edition of 500 ** After more than two decades, one of experimental noise music's most uncompromising statements returns to vinyl. Mego presents the long-awaited reissue of Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma, first released on CD in 2002 on the original Mego label. This 2LP edition marks the return of a landmark album that has remained a ferocious document of Drumm at his most inventive and unrelenting. The history of Sheer Hellish Miasma is one of resilience to the twists of underground trends that have come and gone since its initial release. Where lesser works have faded into obscurity or been absorbed by the zeitgeist, Drumm's vision has only grown more singular and essential with time. This is not music that seeks to comfort or accommodate - it is an artifact of eternal power that demands confrontation on its own uncompromising terms. Using guitar, tape manipulation, microphones, pedals, analog synthesizers, and subtle computer processing, Sheer Hellish Miasma constructs an overwhelming sonic architecture. This is an album that exists at the intersection of brutal physicality and meticulous composition - a careful orchestration of storming feedback, fractured textures, and unrelenting energy that reveals Drumm's mastery of extreme electronic sound. The album offers a singular vision positioned at the outermost edges of sound art, where conventional musical structures dissolve into pure sonic phenomenon. Each element - from the carefully manipulated guitar feedback to the processed analog textures - contributes to a cohesive statement that transcends the sum of its abrasive parts. For seasoned noise veterans, Sheer Hellish Miasma offers a bracing soundscape filled with exquisitely abrasive textures and hidden details that reward deep, repeated listening. In an increasingly homogenized world of abstract electronic noise, Drumm's work maintains a distinct voice that refuses easy categorization or imitation. For the uninitiated, Drumm's journey through the noisy underworld represents something more challenging - a confrontation with sound pushed to its absolute limits. This is music likely to inspire fear, or in the most optimistic case, a fearful admiration for the composer's uncompromising vision. Sheer Hellish Miasma stands as an abstract noise classic precisely because it refuses the comfortable compromises that allow underground music to be easily absorbed by mainstream culture. This 2LP reissue presents the work in its full, unmediated power - an artifact that has lost none of its capacity to challenge, disturb, and ultimately transform the listener's relationship to sound itself. In an era of endless digital reproduction, the return of Sheer Hellish Miasma to vinyl represents more than mere nostalgia. This is music that demands physical presence, that requires the listener to commit to its durational extremes, and that rewards those willing to submit to its particular form of sonic discipline.

In my mailbox: "Good day info, the conquer solidity static status gigolo. 2 caves dungeons song. pitch fungus vim, 14 triplets listlessness. celluloid advisor applying. season globe Italy, switch-off amphitheatre 42 updraught. The popularity buddha languish fifth mockery. holder condensate minima. the tutorial verifized (and rinse). 14 appetence concept’s. dullness captived cockerel. With good wishes, Dr. Fatimaiy Oakley" Social Engineering brings together thirteen text fragments from so-called phishing emails. Using speech synthesis, they are spoken, sung, and/or transformed into abstract textures. The result is a 36-minute language and sound collage devoted to the dark forces of phishing