MUSIC

Originally named „Merz“, this album should have been Merzbow's first vinyl release, but never came out on vinyl. So actually "Yantra Material Action" is „Material Action 1“, recorded in 1981 - with sticker and insert

The clear vinyl version is only available in the limited 99 copies boxset "artefAKTs from the Early Japanese Experimental Noise Music Scene"

London rapper, poet, and producer John Glacier releases his long-awaited debut album, Like A Ribbon, on . The album chronicles Glacier's life from a simple upbringing in Hackney, in the northeast corner of the capital's central London, to growing up at a phenomenal rate, with the lead single, “Found,” a floaty sound with a powerful message of overcoming daily struggles. Participating artists include Kwes Darko, the producer of the film, as well as Flume, Andrew Aged, Eartheater, Sampha, and others, all of whom complement John Glacier's unique musical style. John Glacier's sound, which combines contemporary yet dreamlike electronic tones with subtle beats, has the ability to draw out the listener's emotional depths and draw them in.

The long-awaited DJ Sprinkles reworkings of Will Long’s Acid Trax finally arrive on vinyl, beginning with this first instalment in a three-part EP series via Comatonse. Mastered by Terre Thaemlitz and cut by Rashad Becker, EP 1 features DJ Sprinkles’ ‘Acid Dog’ remix – a resoundingly trippy, sensual 11-minute journey of padded subs, shimmering percussion and richly layered 303 tones. One of the most immersive entries in the Sprinkles catalogue, it’s club music with both emotional depth and hypnotic power.

On the flip, Long’s original takes a more minimal approach, delivering a meditative groove that floats raw drum machine rhythms and restrained 303 sequences in wide-open space. Both tracks embrace the ascetic, introspective aesthetics that define this project.

Note: The correct tracks on this 12” are ‘Acid Trax N’ and ‘Acid Dog (DJ Sprinkles Remix)’ – centre labels are incorrect.

Artwork by Terre Thaemlitz.

CEM has gained international notoriety over the past years for bewitching club and festival audiences alike with his feverish, polymorphic and richly referential DJ sets. For his debut full-length album, FORMA, the Berlin-based Herrensauna founder momentarily departs the dancefl oor, instead contributing a refl ective and at times menacing compositional study on terror and temporal anachronism for our perplexing times. All six pieces were originally commissioned to accompany Portuguese artist Mauro Ventura’s performative installation of the same name, shown fi rst at the Volksbühne in 2022; the work engaged notions of labor and repetition through a multiplicity of gestural and corporeal interventions. Featured prominently on FORMA are the sound of bells—doorbells, meditative bowls, farm cowbells, Shinto bells—a motif CEM distills repeatedly onto the record to presage and work through both the violent specter of order and discipline, as well as the reparative qualities of harmony and retreat.

Opening the album with poignant synths, granulated bell hits, and double bass string drones is “The Calling”, which summons listeners into a rattling and twisting soundscape that dichotomously channels alertness and serenity at once. “Bells Corrupt”, in turn, transforms the comforting chime of bells into an alarming and insistent pattern as it evolves in pitch and form, recalling the anxious fi lm grammar of Italian giallo legends Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento or Czech animator Jan Švankmajer. “An Industrial Satire” is conceived as an homage to experimentalist Limpe Fuchs, known for her Dadaist use of self-made, metallic instruments and strings. The second part of the piece takes a staggering turn with the addition of ghaita—a Northern Moroccan double reed horn with a series of holes—sampled from the Master Musicians of Joujouka’s collaborative 1971 album with Brian Jones and layered alongside CEM’s own percussion work. The horn elements—linked to the ancient fertility rites of Pan—here culminate in a melodic embodiment of panic and celebration. “Statue Garden” is a minimalist organ drone piece interlaced with fi eld recordings accumulated through the musician’s recent travels across East Asia. Its dexterous balance of stillness and depth provides a contemplative interlude amidst the album’s vigour. The album closes on a provocative note with “The Sincerity Test” that features Berlin-based Lithuanian performance artist Gertrūda Gilytė, whose wry spoken-word intervention mirrors the kind of grotesque, deluded ‘positive affirmations’ that abounds on social media, suggesting a relatedness between narcissistic online speak and the rise of reactionary politics.

CEM is no stranger to the ever-threatening past and present of fascism, having been raised in Vienna within a Turkish-Kurdish immigrant household. FORMA thus emerges as a militant sonic offering and, through its razor-sharp interweaving of atmosphere and texture, conjures a fractured, albeit elegiac, space of possibility wherein time is out of joint and the circular motion of history with a capital H is dizzyingly thrown into disarray. As our world rushes forward into the past, casting dissonant spells might turn out to be our last rempart.

"A growing, single-minded confidence in his thing practically makes time stand still and places us right in the moment and momentum of the music. Crucially, whilst clearly referencing foundational styles, it’s a masterclass in innovation not imitation" - boomkat

Carrier presents Tender Spirits, the third turn on his eponymous series that explores his abstractions at its most sparse and cerebral.

Space maintains great purpose for Guy Brewer, having experimented with this previously for multiple drum-focused missives as Carrier. On his latest release, he treads deeper into the furthest regions of dub deconstruction, with Tender Spirits offering a serene path to the inbetween.

Across 8+ minutes, Light Candles, To Mark The Way moves towards the muted sublime; a gentle half time’d bliss that ebbs and floats across the enveloping mist. Slow Punctures gradually returns to dusk, eerily surveying the hollowed-out remains of its dub architecture with an off-kilter lurch. Carpathian echoes further in stark reduction, a weightless atonal zone anchored by the abstracted pressure suspended within.

Tender Spirits tracks Carrier at exciting new parallels, unfurling his most ascendant and capacious music to date.

Prolific Portuguese musician and visual artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha - of HHY & The Macumbas/The Kampala Unit - might be best known for his noisy, experimental excursions, but he's long been fascinated by the possibilities offered by the human voice. He's already composed a slew of choral pieces, such as 'Khōrus Anima', 'Del' and 'Plethora', and his last, 'Santa Viscera Tua', was an ambitious project for 150 voices. On 'Kembo', he builds on these experiences significantly, examining the commonality and shared spirituality of vocal music alongside the Kingdom Ulfame Choir, a seven-piece Uganda-based group of Congolese singers. The collaboration began at Nyege Nyege's Kampala studio, where Saldanha and the choir took the time to figure out their direction, singing together in an imagined language concocted from elements of Lingala, Swahili, Kikongo and French. Considering pre-linguistic communication, liturgical music and glossolalia (better known as speaking in tongues), their improvisations evolved into trances, with Saldanha's discreet electronic augmentations used only to accent the melodies and harmonies.

This process stands out immediately on opening track 'Boya Kotala' when the group trade poignant solos over Saldanha's aerated choral drones and ominous synthesized bass. The voices are suspended in time, cautiously referencing sacred music but disregarding the expected tropes, leaving hypnotic vapors that gust through the entire suite. 'Tokumisa Nzambe' is remarkably different, adding a brittle electro-acoustic pulse to the choir's tangled phrases that are ornamented with rhythmic chants and layered melodic outbursts. "Hallelujah," they repeat on 'Hosana', reaching back to familiar praise songs and building to a jubilant crescendo of voices. And later, on 'Nzambe Bolingo', the group's impassioned recitations are threaded through chopped, percussive vocalizations and exhalations. Taking a brief breather, Kingdom Molongi's words coalesce into a calming lullaby on the hushed 'Emanuel', and their appreciation of classic soul and gospel fizzes to the surface on 'Maloba ya Motema Nangai' with virtuosic wordless phrases that speak to the roots of the music, not its contemporary application.

'Kembo' is an album that investigates not just the mutability of language itself, but time, wondering how words and themes are reshaped as they tumble through history, picking up influences from various folk traditions, idiosyncratic pop forms and diverse quasi-religious expressions. Most of all though, Kingdom Molongi manage to highlight the enduring relationship between the voice and the spirit, and the transformative power of choral music.

Hailing from Tanzania's bustling cultural hub Dar Es Salaam - the biggest city in East Africa - young beatmaker DJ Travella is setting the breakneck pace for its musical evolution. He's been producing since he was just 10 years old and has already bent singeli into surprising new shapes, welding euphoric EDM breakdowns and earworm-y R&B riffs to the Tanzanian genre's frenetic rhythms. 'Twende' is a straight-to-the-point set of the producer's most requested secret weapons - four hyper-melodic floor fillers that were developed shortly after releasing his acclaimed debut album 'Mr Mixondo'. Featured on his popular Boiler Room performance, these tracks will be familiar to anyone who's managed to catch one of his sets.

Starting things out right with 'Trust', a wonky, festival-ready 170BPM ass shaker that shuffles a familiar singeli beat around wormy synths, Travella keeps things moving with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it 'Believe', a minute and a half of brassy pop fanfares and buzzing rhythms. On 'Mchakamchaka' he introduces quivering soukous guitar phrases into the mix, keeping up the momentum with crowd noise and pneumatic sound design vamps, and 'Vumbi Vumbi' slows things down, just a bit, splaying plasticky, acidic leads over blown-out syncopated beats. It's one for the feet, no doubt.

Recorded in Kampala, 'Mapambazuko' pairs Peruvian artist and researcher Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) with Congolese guitarist Titi Bakorta, who locate a balmy junction between their respective approaches. Bakorta's debut album 'Molende', released on Nyege Nyege Tapes in 2023, was an eccentric rumination on his years performing a unique fusion of Congolese soukous and folk sounds, and 'Mapambazuko' picks up where it left off, looping Bakorta's wiry guitar solos around Cárdenas' psychedelic Afro-Latin rhythms and fractured synths. Cárdenas' last run of albums have bounced her around the stylistic map: on the acclaimed 'Agua Dulce', she deconstructed traditional Peruvian rhythms with Laura Robles, while she traversed radically different territory on 2021's 'The life of Insects', imagining an abstract universe from the inside of a terrarium. All this experience - in pop music, electroacoustic experimentation and avant-garde minimalism - is applied to 'Mapambazuko' as she skews Bakorta's exuberant themes with subtle sound design elements and powerful, uncompromising drumwork.

Opener 'Bonne année' is a twitchy, effervescent party starter, with a frenetic rhythm from Cárdenas that gradually picks up grit, only enhancing the vivid soukous-inspired phrases from Bakorta. And on the title track, Bakorta's rubbery improvisations sound as if they're bouncing off Cárdenas' dissociated whirrs and squeals, while the duo's furious pulse holds their raw experimentation in check. Their worlds collide even more conspicuously on 'Una cumbia en Kinshasa', that identifies the similarities between psychedelic Peruvian cumbia and Congolese pop, and on 'Así baila el sintetizador' they ratchet up the tempo, smudging Bakorta's fictile riffs into Cárdenas' zesty oscillations. The acceleration only lets up on the album's gauzy finale 'Nitaangaza', where Bakorta plays dizzy psych-rock wails over Cárdenas' syrup-laced thuds and lopsided drones. And the album is filled out with three exclusive remixes. Kenyan sound artist KMRU strips the beat from 'Nitaangaza' and brings out its latent sensuality, adding light-headed pads and soft-hearted tones to re-contextualize the original track.

On her rework, Cárdenas augments 'Una cumbia en Kinshasa' with an even more belligerent rhythm, cutting further into Bakorta's glistening riffs and eventually guiding the track into chattering chaos. While Flora Yin-Wong marches towards the end credits with a sultry, percussive version of 'Así baila el sintetizador'. Slowing it down to a crawl and emphasizing the eerie, artificial landscape, Yin-Wong shines moonlight on Bakorta and Cárdenas' sun-baked grooves, providing the necessary wind-down as the party comes to an end.

The second volume of Nyege Nyege's career-spanning DJ Znobia retrospective, 'Inventor Vol. 2' continues the vital story of one of Africa's most influential artists - a producer, singer and DJ who's spent three decades inking his signature onto kuduro and tarraxinha. The label combed through Znobia's vast archives to assemble the four-volume set, picking out the most essential moments from over 700 tracks written between the late 1990s and the mid 2000s; these aren't just the expected dancefloor heaters either, but a sprawling anthology that shines a spotlight on Znobia's innovation and unhinged mastery.

On 'Inventor Vol. 2', Angola-born Sebastião Lopes' light-hearted sense of humor floats visibly to the surface. He samples the viral "Baby T-Pain" YouTube clip and flips it into a hypnotic wail on 'Choro do Corno', offsetting the melodic Auto-Tune layers with his idiosyncratic slowed-down kuduro thuds. Meanwhile, on the chaotic 'Beat Cursor', Znobia raids the Windows sound library, turning eerily familiar error chimes and message alert sirens into percussion that jerks and sways around urgent hand drum rolls and neck-snapping snares. But elsewhere, the magic that led vocal breakouts like 'Marimba' to cult status is thrust into the foreground.

Lopes' slippery, robotic voice curls through syrupy beats and FL Studio-powered electronic harp plucks on 'Sofre', mimics an early Talkbox on the electro-powered 'Dance Da Ma Ju' and shimmers into a soft, romantic coo on 'Monandengue'. Each track highlights the Angolan original's voracious appetite for experimentation, and expresses the parallels between Znobia's kuduro and tarraxinha innovations, and similar future-facing Afro-diasporic moves made in grime, early techno or Brazilian funk. Just check the wheezing synths, haunted flutes and hollow, driving percussion on 'Kuduro ou Hunderground', or the pizzicato blasts and garbled oscillations that shadow Os Bonitos' elastic rhymes on stand-out 'Wo Adji Wo'.

From humble beginnings, learning to mix with just a couple of semba LPs, DJ Znobia took his cues from local traditional sounds and used their groove to power a new musical movement. And with 'Inventor Vol. 2' we're provided with another piece of the puzzle, a sequence of visions that have provided the wider world with modernism, eccentricity and vision. We're still feeling the shockwaves, decades later.

Based in Kampala, Arsenal Mikebe are a groundbreaking Ugandan ensemble who playfully dance around the fringes of of acoustic and electronic music, infusing tempo-fluxed polyrhythms with dizzying chants and ghostly synthetic drones. The band is made up of percussionists Ssentongo Moses, Dratele Epiphany, Luyambi Vincent de Paul and was co-founded by Portugese sonic alchemist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, together they straddle a unique custom instrument dreamt up by Ugandan master sculptor Henry Segamwenge, better known simply as Sega. By reverse engineering Roland's iconic TR-808 beatbox, they devised a steel-cast "percussion machine" that allows Arsenal Mikebe to seamlessly integrate bass-heavy electronic sounds into their frenetic performances, and it's this device that lies at the core of their debut album.

'DRUM MACHINE' is a rhythmic masterclass that's impossible to slot into any particular niche or other. Moses, Vincent and Dratele's kinetic beats appear to bisect each other, slipping between time signatures as fluidly as they pierce the membrane between the organic and the digital. On opening track 'Okuleekaana', brushy high-end hits coalesce into quivering patterns that bounce off the trio's guttural chants before the track's shuttled into peak-time by an ear-splitting distorted kick. Harsh death metal-style growls echo and spiral into the distance, and Sega's percussion machine is nudged into overdrive, its smorgasbord of distinctive pulses lifted skyward by glassy, evocative synths and resonant twangs.

It's extreme music, in a sense, but Arsenal Mikebe command startling dynamics, veering off course whenever possible. 'Omuzimu' is the perfect example, a labyrinth of itchy rhythms and anxious pauses that only slowly converges into a discernible beat, with its jerky bumps and muted crashes underpinned by eerie, almost inaudible B-movie whines and stifled shouts. And on the lengthy 'Boiller Omukka', the trio sing soulfully and wordlessly over feverish hollow thuds and cowbell knocks, referencing traditional Ugandan song forms while simultaneously excavating the bones of techno. It all builds up to the rubbery, intense 'Bell Ghost', that carves energetic vocal snippets into an undulating rhythmic concertina and fractalizes the atmosphere with swirling, psychedelic flutes and haunted intonations.

Since the release of 2021's 'Bubbling Inside' - a collection of Dutch wunderkind Guillermo Schuurman's most vital early productions, plus a few recent additions - the DJ and producer has been touring incessantly, introducing the wider world to his feet-forward, hybrid style. Rooted in the Netherlands' Afro-diasporic bubbling sound, it's an effervescent cocktail of dancehall, electro, EDM and R&B that fizzed to the surface back in the late 1980s, dominating Den Haag's vibrant club scene in the '90s and '00s. Spurred on by his uncle DJ Chippie, who helped co-found the genre, De Schuurman revitalized the movement in the late '00s, and has been instrumental in bringing bubbling back to the main stage, puzzling out its intersections with trap, techno and beyond.

'Bubbling Forever' is another unforgettable arsenal of acidic laser synths, Antillean tambu percussion and swirling vocal snippets, all anchored to an all-important dancehall swing - the backbone of the sound since its earliest days in Den Haag. Like its predecessor, the collection is a wide-reaching set of vintage cuts and twitchy new productions, kicking off with the curled 'Raw', an immaculate introduction to De Schuurman's world: cybernetic electronic swooshes, backed by rattling percussion and the kind of kicks that don't cut, they bounce. And although it's relatively hotfooted, De Schuurman's music is blessed with unexpected lightness, coaxing movement sensually rather than demanding it. On 'Stylez Two' for example, fiery screams and breakneck beats are disencumbered by steel drum chimes and cheery whistles, splitting the mood between the sweatbox and the carnival.

But De Schuurman's greatest talent is his ability to absorb ideas from all across the musical map. 'Scratchin' fuses urgent turntablist scrapes with nostalgic 8-bit bleeps, and on 'Bubbling Meets Kaseko', he teams up with DJ Electro to blend big-room air horns and wobbly synths with traditional Surinamese melodies and percussion. He even brings bubbling OG DJ Chuckie along on 'Gangster Sht 2', flipping rap samples and stuttering ATL trap percussion into a whirlwind peak-time banger. And there even a few moments when De Schuurman takes a breather and turns down the tempo a little: he pulls back on 'Fucked Up Industrie', layering tangy lead zaps over a hiccuping Caribbean step, and leads the album out horizontally with 'Fashion Week', curving plasticky flutes around piercing woodblock cracks.

Bubbling might be approaching its fourth decade, but with producers like De Schuurman constantly breathing new life into the formula, it's not about to disappear any time soon. 'Bubbling Forever' is some of the most viscous, energetic and original dancefloor material you're likely to hear this year. Play loud!

Growing up in Uganda, multi-disciplinary artist Ian Nnyanzi (aka Masaka Masaka) always knew he wanted to make music, he just needed enough time and breathing room to figure out what exactly his contribution had to be. He cut his teeth fashioning rudimentary hip-hop beats at a friend's studio on Makindye, a hill that overlooks Kampala's balmy Murchison Bay, and quickly realized that he wanted more. "Out here, everyone seems okay to listen to the same thing," he explains, and Nnyanzi wasn't interested in following the crowd. During regular commutes across the city, his mind was being cracked open by sounds from Dean Blunt, Slauson Malone, Arca, Jpegmafia and Vegyn; he knew he needed to show Kampala something similarly distinct.

'Barely Making Much' is a sprawling, ambitious album that's as sculptural as it is explorative, reaching through genre membranes and refusing to stay still for a second. Masaka Masaka wrote it over a fragmented two year period at Nyege Nyege's Kampala studio, and tapped into a jumble of interconnected sounds, from jungle and experimental hip-hop to techno and smoked-out, dubwise ambient music. He was particularly absorbed by the loose, open-minded production style he heard from Manchester's Sockethead, who makes an appearance on 'Before I go', a frayed tapestry of stuttering snares and floury breaks that billows into jazzy euphoria.

On 'cut right through', Masaka Masaka bends fictile piano hits through a lattice of Afro-Brazilian-style vocal chops, trap hi-hat rolls and serrated, synthesized bass thumps. Airy and energetic, the track makes an unexpected left turn when the hats transform into insectoid rasps that cushion a woody hand drum patter. Elsewhere, Nnyanzi isn't afraid to go straight for the jugular: on 'elv9t' he sets atmospheric, back room pads against booming, soundsystem-ready Southern rap subs, and on the kinetic 'let me out', he remolds hard techno in his image, knocking the 4/4 kick off grid to perplex seasoned dancers, and hammering the nail in further with swirling, psychedelic synth fuzz.

Even when Masaka Masaka's working in a more contemplative mode - like on the hypnotic title track and the fragile cinematic finale 'it's okay to dance alone' - he maintains the momentum, swirling otherworldly vocal loops and erratic percussion into pools of melted ambience. 'Barely Making Much' is a charming, hyperactive debut that wears its influences on its sleeve, playing like a lysergic, literate mixtape packed with layers and subtle gestures. Cool-headed and mysterious, it exposes the twilit side of the Kampala underground.

A twisted web of diverse musical references and puzzling ambiguities, NET GALA's debut full-length is either a noise album that's aimed squarely at the dancefloor or a future-proofed club transmission that's been muddled and obscured by incomprehensible distortions - maybe it's both. The title has been on the South Korean producer's mind since 2020, a tongue-in-cheek reference not just to the Korean-English (Konglish) pronunciation of Galápagos and NET GALA's queer identity, but to "Galápagos Syndrome", a term to describe isolated, localized developments within global businesses. In NET GALA's hands, it's an apt metaphor for both their idiosyncratic, hybrid sound and their similarly distinctive dissection of queerness away from the stifling structures of the global north. And across 11 frenetic, eccentric tracks, they reconfigure loose genre signifiers and queer cultural references, figuring out what these motifs might mean within a new framework. There are few entrenched definitions in South Korea, which gives NET GALA with a relatively blank canvas to paint an enigmatic sonic landscape that provides more questions than answers.

'Galapaggot' develops a sound NET GALA has been diligently refining over the last few years. They cut their teeth as a member of the local LGBTQ collective Shade Seoul, playing regularly at the notorious Cakeshop venue, and after releasing their dazzling first EP '[re:FLEX*ion]' on NBDKNW in 2019, spent time researching Shinpageuk, an early 20th century melodramatic theatrical style, to heighten the drama of 2021's SVBKVLT-released '신파 SHINPA'. This time around, they take an even broader view, surveying how far they're able to push dance music before it shatters into pieces. Samples are shoehorned into unseemly places, and snares and hats - the primary signifiers of many club sub-genres - have been eliminated, or swapped with alternate sounds. The result is an album that pulses with a familiar energy, but sounds completely unconventional. Nods to footwork, ballroom, grindcore and hard trance are obscured with jagged sonic contortions and hyperactive rhythmic quirks, ripped up and assembled into dazzling new shapes.

Punk/grindcore artist Supermotel K steps in to scream '90s and '00s Korean gay slang on 'The Dog', vocalizing sensually over NET GALA's galloping, blown-out kicks and trance-inducing synth cycles, and on 'Rac Cap Cu', NET GALA taps Vietnamese collective Rắn Cạp Đuôi to help elevate their epic club collage of grainy, militaristic rolls and celestial chimes, forming the track around a guitar riff from drummer Zach Sch. And NET GALA puts their own mark on ballroom with the pneumatic 'KATRINAKATRINAKATRINA' and 'Ha Dance'-approximating 'Cistem Boom', using the genre's rhythmic pulse and singular momentum as a springboard to jack up their quirky sound designs and and harsh distortions. On opening track 'Joappa' and its follow-up 'Paran', NET GALA injects fierceness and drama into footwork with frenetic tuned percussion and cynical eagle calls, and they push the volume to 11 on 'Warp This Pussy (For Kitty)', a cacophonous, jerky dancefloor weapon that's led by a playful vocal call.

Disturbing politics with humor and mischievous defiance in the face of misunderstanding, NET GALA makes a powerful statement with 'Galapaggot'. It's a bold album that ignores comfortable aesthetic stereotypes in favor of proposing a cunning new direction for Korean electronic music. And although it might be sometimes jarring, it turns frustration and uncertainty into a rallying call for the world's most nebulous fringes.

Six shimmering new tracks on the downtempo spectrum from the Khotin Industries Northern HQ. Peace to all listeners.

Paris-born electronic music pioneer and 1970s GRM alumni Ariel Kalma joins with multinational New York trio Asa Tone (Kaazi, Melati ESP, Tristan Arp) for a series of intergenerational, electro-acoustic studio conversations, exploring elasticity within rhythm and winds… or as one early listener observed “space and time.”

Following a chance encounter at Ariel’s studio in the Australian rainforest during the pandemic, Melati & Kaazi began recording long live takes with Kalma, weaving in bioluminescent synth improvisations from Tristan Arp remotely. Revisited a few years later between the members of Asa Tone’s respective homes in New York & Indonesia, “○” is the document of a significant moment in the lives of all the album’s players; an ode to memory and connection in an era of crisis, illuminated via flickering fragments of steel flute, kantilan, modular synthesizer, xaphoon, tenor sax, EWI, field recordings of the surrounding rainforest, and the human voice.

Recorded, written and produced by Asa Tone & Ariel Kalma.
Ariel Kalma: Western Concert Flute, Xaphoon, Tenor Saxophone, Voice
Melati ESP: EWI, Kantilan, Voice
Kaazi: Hydrasynth, Opsix, Percussion
Tristan Arp: Modular Synthesizer, Moog Sub37, Percussion
Additional percussion on *3 by Miles Myjavec

Mixed by Tristan Arp, Kaazi and Ariel Kalma.
Mastered by Jose Arentes at GRAMA, Porto.
Art Direction & Layout : Melati ESP, Kaazi, Biscuit.
 

Nazar’s second album, Demilitarize follows his remarkable 2020 debut Guerrilla, which was released just as Covid started to lock down the world. That first album reprocessed kuduro music from Angola with rough textures, field recordings and media clips, re-telling Nazar's personal story of the civil war that exiled his family in Europe, while his father, a rebel General, fought a losing battle in the jungle back home.

After Guerrilla, and in the early throes of a new and important romance, Nazar was hit by Covid and with a weakened immune system, the latent tuberculosis he'd incubated while living in Angola, took over his body and left him seriously ill for a year. Reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love are the two things that motivated this album, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of Guerrilla inside out.

Like his debut, this is a deep sound world, but in contrast to its grit and realness, Demilitarize is genuinely dreamy. The arc of the album describes shedding the armour of trauma and surrendering to this new situation. A constant and unexpected aspect of Demilitarize is Nazar's gentle, submerged vocal. Insistent and mantra-like, it’s like a cross between Elisabeth Frazer, Arthur Russell and Frank Ocean, and the music is fragile and opaque in response.

Nazar says - 'With the album being introspective, I didn't seek to capture sounds from real places to enhance it’s universe like on Guerilla. I wanted to make it almost metaphysical like creating sci-fi, with classic cyberpunk anime ‘Ghost In The Shell’ being a core inspiration.' The rhythms of kuduro are still here, but move around his voice like fish around a swimmer. The precise sound design on Demilitarize illuminates from different angles. Chords spiral, ripple and shoot through the beats giving tracks the loosest of settings. Songs disassemble and vocals float off-centre.

Demilitarize insists you zoom in, listen closely, tune into Nazar's rare vibration. Let it overwhelm you, while paying close attention. 

Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet & electronics) and Lester St. Louis (cello & electronics) work together as HxH (H by H). Their skills have seen them move smoothly across various situations, constantly carving out new terrain and working in new configurations of musicians at a rapid pace. While worth reading, their biographies capture only a part of their complex rhizome.

HxH started about three years ago. The project is a direct response to all their activity with others and more importantly all their future leaning sonic desires. Their debut album STARK PHENOMENA is both their first studio recording and their first physical release. The album is appropriately set to be released by KMRU on his growing label OFNOT. It’s an ideal introduction to their sound world and their approach.

HxH describe their music as “electroacoustic,” but until recently the presence of Black musicians in this field has been greatly overlooked and largely ignored, making this phrase only partially appropriate. What HxH do really is to always be unpredictable. Every gig is a new soundscape. Sometimes you might hear echoes of Autechre or Robert Hood but then the sound-field will open up into a new terrain all their own. Chris and Lester bring together techniques from across the sound spectrum of electronic music and also draw on their deep backgrounds in Jazz, Improvisation, Classical and Noise scenes to create a sound that is true to them. After all, these two have worked with the likes of Bennie Maupin and the music of Black Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. Their rhizome is deep.

One of the ways that their unique approach manifests is in their merging of both acoustic instruments and electronic instruments in real time. This is something few have managed to do – but their spontaneous leanings work in both complex and accessible ways because of their deep understanding of landscape crafting. You can hear this clearly on the track “Pyrex Vision.” Their approach makes it tempting to compare their music to Sun Ra jamming with Laurel Halo – a comparison that would be only partly accurate.

Chris and Lester note that the sounds on STARK PHENOMENA are “imbued with such hopeful, gracious care; one that is far flung from obsessive carefulness or fuck the world carelessness, but more a caring embrace without the fuzziness of nostalgia.”

They note that when they began working together, they would “always come back to speaking on our concepts of an architecture of the expanse,” noting that their live sets often take on the joyfully noisy task of “dreaming big.” For HxH it was essential that STARK PHENOMENA have a quality that is “almost sculptural.” They consider the album “an object to be viewed from all sides.” This kind of thinking has resulted in them directly engaging with numerous sculptors and artists including Torkwase Dyson. Shape wise HxH’s sound fields work in a parallel to Dyson’s black architectural works.

They also note that the opening cut “BEACH” (the opening and longest track from the album) was “written weeks after our first gig in a studio session donated to us by our dear friend jaimie branch.” And that Pyrex Vision “was continually being edited months after sending our ‘final mixes’ to KMRU.” Their sound sources and samples come from studio sessions, live gigs, durational installations, 3am improvised downloads and more.

KMRU notes: "I think there is an in-between layer on this record. I was first caught by the Pyrex Vision track which organically flows between monologue, subtle field recording, and instrumentation. It's such a beautiful track, evoking deep emotion through simplicity. STARK PHENOMENA effortlessly glides in between imaginative mosaics of sounds—free yet complex— unlocking memories within its layers "

Another foggy day in Yorkshire. A steel grey sky. Raindrops tracing one another down the windowpane. Kirk Barley sits in his studio and assembles compositions from scraps of found sound and live instrumentation. Melodies swell, withdraw and repeat like waves. Time slows. Accelerates. Slows again. The light bends, tweaked at the edges. Twisted by rhythms that never quite resolve.

Written, recorded and produced by Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes.

And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognisable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley’s skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilising a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks ‘Vita’, ‘Sprite’ and ‘Descendent’, these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe.

Rivet’s new album for Editions Mego is an uplifting and joyous affair coming in the wake of tragedy and disenchantment. It is yet another rebirth from an artist willing to take a step back and reprise the current situation he is in. Mika Hallbäck has a long credible history in the Swedish underground. First recognised for his industrial techno works under the Grovskopa moniker he worked privately on more experimental works that eventually came out as On Feather and Wire, an album released on Editions Mego in 2020. After much acclaim for this bold new direction that blended electronic abstraction, pop and industrial forms into a heavy synthetic trip two tragedies struck. One was the passing of label boss Peter Rehberg and then the passing of his dog Lilo, who was as close as a companion one could have. These events led to the release of the more unsettling follow up L+P-2 (Lilo and Pita minus two) on Midnight Shift Records in 2023. Peck Glamour sees Rivet return to the reawakened Editions Mego with an album of optimism inspired by reconciliation with loss and further explorations of new mental/sonic realms.

Hallbäck defines his approach as not being married to any particular machine, instrument, process or genre. However he holds a particular affinity to sampling, of which, he says, provides the dirt and grit amongst what would otherwise be pristine, generic machine music. The contemporary crate digging method of scouring obscure download music bogs for unique sounds was his preferred research practice.

Peck Glamour is an album full of tracks brimming with the excitement of exploration. It's the results of a mind informed by punk, industrial, techno, dancefloor, disappointment, trauma and rebirth. Here the synthetic and authentic is viewed simply as the same means of human rationale and expression.

The opening, ‘Catch Up to Light’, sets the scene with ecstatic and odd fluorescent vocals sliding amongst crystalline likembe whilst synths swirl amongst the external festivities. ‘Orbiting Empty Cocoon’ is somewhat a homage to the alien sound worlds of The Orb, one which takes the listener deeper into a mind melting array of teased potential as visual elements are executed in a mask of audio wizardry and euphoric staccato rhythms, the later being a nod to Singeli music. ‘Patitur Butcher’ is more dance frontal utilising the Ghatam drum and a YouTube rip of a Chinese language lesson. ‘Plastic Bag Putain’ was made during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and should be clear of its intent. ‘All that Heaven Allows’ is a marimba cover of an imaginary Love Parade anthem. 'Kyrie Geire’ potentially briefly fills the void left by the demise of Coil. The entire trip of Peck Glamour is sewn up with ‘We left before we came’ whereby extraneous recordings of double bass player Gregory Vartian-Foss (tuning/strumming/moving the bass) are superimposed with local field recordings to create a gorgeous bed of sounds acting as an exciting exit music to this sharp collection of cinematic ear excursions.

Twenty-four years on from its original release, Monolake's seminal Gravity receives its first vinyl pressing courtesy of Field Records. Occupying its own space at the intersection of dub techno, minimal and electronica, it's an ageless album of staggering vision and technological prowess which has matured into an all-time pillar of electronic music. This edition, remastered by the album's key architect Robert Henke, follows on from the recent reissue of Monolake's first album, Hongkong.

Arriving just after the turn of the millennium, Gravity marked a turning point for Monolake. With co-founder Gerhard Behles moving on to other ventures, Henke produced most of the album solo and journeyed deeper into spatial exploration and the dub-informed principles that underpinned their project from the start. Minimalism and negative space run through the whole record, from the keen slithers of percussion pinging through lattices of delay to the hypnotising pulse of subliminal basslines anchoring the tracks. Gravity is a record which hangs on techno's linearity as a form of meditation, but the crystalline clarity of the mix allows every micro-fluctuation in rhythm and sound to cut through.

Compared to a lot of overly sterile digital music released in the early 2000s, Gravity endures thanks to the warmth and texture Henke elicited from his processes — even when leaning into none-more-digital effects like bit reduction. He described the ninth-floor view over Berlin from his studio at night as a key influence on the sound of the record, but the space Gravity shapes out feels thrillingly implacable. Unbound by the standard conventions of time and space, Gravity stands proud as a true original and finally gets the ceremonious vinyl pressing it so richly deserves.

Mamman Sani Abdoulaye, a legendary name amongst Niger’s avant garde, presents a singularly unique recording of minimalist organ music from the Sahara. Dreamy and hypnotic, the sound is unlike anything coming out of West Africa before or since, closer in effect to early electronic experiments of Kraftwerk.Mamman composes in technique that can only be called minimal, relying on the simplicity and space. It is a remarkable manipulation of sound that uses the silence to invoke the emptiness, a metaphoric desert soundscape. Unsurprisingly, his source material is folkloric Nigerien music, and many of the compositions on this record are reproductions of ancient songs brought into the modern age. Interpreting this rich and varied history of Niger’s dance and song for the first time in contemporary music, Mamman electrifies the nomadic drum of the Tuaerg, the polyphonic ballads of the Woddaabe, and the pastoral hymns of the Sahelian herders. Accompanying this repertoire are a few compositions, such as Salamatu, the deeply personal love letter to an unrequited romance.Recorded in 1981 at the National Radio in Niger, shortly after Mamman discovered an old Italian organ, the album was a spontaneous production, recorded in two takes. It was released on cassette but was a commercial failure, and only a handful were sold. The recordings, however, were a success, and became the themes to the National radio for the subsequent 30 years, securing Mamman’s place in the foundation of Nigerien music.Rediscovered in a cassette archive in Niger and digitized on a portable recorder, La Musique Électronique du Niger was reissued in 2013 on limited vinyl. Now restored and remastered from the original tape material by Jessica Thompson, this new edition is available on vinyl, cd, and a color Newbury Comics edition.

Cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu’s key 1980’s works are collected and reissued for the first time on new career retrospective Fossil Cocoon, binding ambient, abstract punk, music concréte and purist songwriting into a single unified artform. Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums in the span of a few years. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as “the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”. Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. [Tadashi] Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of brazenly, addictively weird Japanese outsider music over a period of five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching astronomic prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery. Conversely, label boss Tadashi Kamada is no longer in the public eye, and not even known to have any personal online presence. He is, writes one observer, “unlikely even aware of his cult following”. Only extensive retroactive cataloguing (ardently fuelled by the cratedigging detective work of German collector Jörg Optiz) can offer any remaining memorial to his extraordinary achievements with DD. Records. Koshiro Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student of Yamaguchi University and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, Yoshimatsu was introduced to the Japanese communications magazine PUMP by his classmate and future bandmate F. [Fumie] Yasumura. In the classified ads he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of the aforementioned Tadashi Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town. From their correspondence bloomed an intensely symbiotic new friendship, initially trading homespun cassettes by mail and eventually co-forming a cassette-sharing postal society named The Recycle Circle. The Recycle Circle also included the idiosyncratic saxophonist T. [Takafumi] Isotani, a member of the university’s Light Music Club, with whom Yoshimatsu (now singing, and playing guitar, bass guitar, and synthesisers, as well as programming drum machines) went on to form the unique experimental band Juma. With fluctuating line-ups, Juma managed to compose, record, and release six albums (all via DD. Records) in a single year - 1981 - before disbanding. Yoshimatsu then graduated from Yamaguchi University and relocated to Hiroshima to pursue his passion for filmmaking, all the while continuing to release his own solo music on Kamada’s now-burgeoning label. Yoshimatsu’s first solo record was the mysteriously titled pʌls, released in 1981 while still a member of Juma, and receiving the distinction of being the third entry to DD. Records’ cassette catalogue numbers. It was not until the seventeenth that we see Yoshimatsu credited again as a solo artist, this time with the strange and delicate collage album Mirror Inside. Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work - solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates - we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records (such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura, represented here in “Violet” and “Escape”) are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar (and its namesake track on this collection), combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming. Deeper still, “Pastel Nostalgia”, from the 1983 album of the same name, marries childlike piano with a wailing siren tone and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials. Elsewhere, Yoshimatsu floats between ambient, rock guitar, new wave, industrial, musique concréte, abstract punk, vocal music, instrumental music and pure songwriting, all bound into a single, unified experience by his distinctive compositional voice. Compiling Fossil Cocoon was a task. Not only to pare down Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue into a neat collection, but also to compress these enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, guiding us through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied album, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy. Koshiro continues to reside in Hiroshima, and continues to work in film. James Vella Phantom Limb February 2024, Brighton, UK

Respekt! Sex Tags Mania, Karolin, Laton, Tage Tombola, Don Papa - The Genuin Of Moss Hip-Hop, Engvaal & The Rygge Family, Lene B., Kambo Super Sound & Family, The Endless Dynamic of Dynamo Dreesen, Brian Not Brian - Going Good And Axin' It Fo' Real - Salik Zia, SVN, Nupi & General Elektro, Bjørn Torske, L.A. Morillo, Fit Detroid, Skatebård, A-Bucci, Camila 575, Dåple-Pera, Benji, Atle, Vilunki 666, Queens Only - Madteo - Keeping It A Level Higher Than The Rest, Geir & Søssa, Rat Salad, Mor & Jerry, Eupraxia, Ringvold Gasta, Unit 6Q, DJ Gilb'R & Versatile Crew With I:Cube, Sähkö & The Keys Of House Life, Winklez, Peng! Ossia, Nell & The Dennis Bros., Roland Lifjell, Paleo & The Bhakti Crew, "70 CPS" Bailey, Bodhi Beats, Pyramide Phillips, Samir M'Kadmi, Thug Records, Audio-In Crew, King 909, Graff Et Grill, Paint House, 411, Nbm, Done, Pol, Sol, Yre, Culos, Kvam, Sau 2, Coats, Buba, 1999, Tmb, Crew - Skredderåsen, Moss! It's Not What You Play - But How You Play. Recorded and digitally edited at the 6th-EonMANIA-fract2 STD between 2012-2014. Original session for Side B recorded at Pyramide Studio, Frankfurt 2010. Vocals on Side C recorded at Inna Di Bu Studio, Moss 2013. Graffiti Can't Be Stopped

Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force lick another deadly shot of tumbling, tucked-up senegalese mbalax, making their 1st outing of ’16 and a 3rd 12” together in this line-up since 2015.

We’re all over the sloshing Walo Walo Version something rotten. It’s an utter joy to reprogramme yourself to its tangled syncopation, picking out and anticipating particular patterns with uncertain limbs, revelling in its wickedly stumbling, uniquely resolved meter. If, like us you’re nuts for drums, that lone, hingeing clap will leave you equally rapt, and then there’s a locked groove…

Flip side is also amazing: Ndiguel Groove resets the rhythm to a loping, shoe-laces-tied sort of house bustle sprinkled with lissom guitar and suspended in Mark’s mixing trickery, before turning up a denser original mix of Walo Walo Rhythm riding that Prophet 5 bassline and talking drums ‘aaaard.