MUSIC

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

Jan Jelinek and Copehagen-based composer Mads Emil Nielsen trade remixes on this one, with Jelinek stretching 'Framework 10' into a ghosted early electronic hallucination, and Nielsen matching Jelinek's 'Zwischen' collage with modular blips and drones.

Originally released in 2019 on the CRXSSINGS fundraiser compilation, these two tracks were too good to let languish in digital-only obscurity. Now pressed to 7" and packaged with Nielsen's graphic score, it's a great reminder how impressive this pair of reworks actually were. Jelinek's version of 'Framework 10' bumps Nielsen's two minute original up to seven minutes, fatting its austere modular belches with kinked sine moans, saturated brassy punctuations and sub-aquatic exotica FX. And Nielsen's take on Jelinek's brief Marcel Duchamp collage - if you remember, Jelinek stitched the silences between speech in interviews into short negative space extractions - adds drama to the original, supplementing the pregnant pauses with white noise bursts and modular squiggles.

Despite their Michigan roots, but with their hearts anchored in the golden age of 1970s German Krautrock, Fling ii celebrate the sound of that sensational season of experimentation. In the chords of the band dwell the typical motorik style of Neu, the percussive obsessions of Can, as much as the pulsing, hypnotic electronic textures of Cluster and Kraftwerk. The absolute protagonist of this adventure back in time is the legendary Boss Super Phaser PH-2, the dual-circuit modulation pedal that shines through the entire development of all the tracks; it's the main demiurge of deep resonances, of impulsive intergalactic excursions, of dust and mists in perpetual motion. The sound is as dreamy and cosmic as ever, revealing such instrumental rigour in which the strongly emotional blend of the original sources of inspiration finds a perfect balance between rhythm and dynamics.

Originally from Sicily but living in Basel, electronic composer Marco Papiro confirms his eccentric and multifaceted personality. The sound articulation of his analog synthesizers flows into in an artificial hyperrealism of great thematic and expressive variation. The tracks unfold between ascending cosmic moments, more ecstatic meditative tones, symphonic planetary floods, exotic afrodelic and psycho-andean drifts. Papiro synthesises and converts echoes of acoustic wind instruments (oboe, recorders, bamboo flute), while the percussion lives on its own pulsating reality. The influence of certain folk traditions, as well as contemporary music, also suggests the more acoustic flavor of an ethereal minimalism (for voice and psaltery), making his music a continuous open sea of visions. Cover painting by Anton Bruhin printed on two different colored papers. Co-released with Les Giants.

Mika Vainio started making a new Ø album in 2014. He almost finalized the record before his too early passing in 2017. The album Sysivalo is the 9th out of 8 full scale albums, released under the Ø alias by Vainio. Ø was his longest running project from 1993 to 2017. Sysivalo was recorded during 2014-2017 and is 60 min long album with 20 tracks, produced by Vainio. He described the record as a distinct Ø album that was going to include several shorter tracks, etudes. The title, Sysivalo, is invented by Vainio by combining the Finnish words sysi (dark or sinister) and valo (light).

Like life itself, the album carries a quiet darkness - honest and full of hidden light. The many of the tracks are beatless subtle soundtracks of eclipsed emotions. Like an incapacitated creature waiting for something to happen.

The closing track Loputon (Endless) is maybe the most beautiful tracks Vainio has ever written, Vainio's last word.

Mika Vainio started making a new Ø album in 2014. He almost finalized the record before his too early passing in 2017. The album Sysivalo is the 9th out of 8 full scale albums, released under the Ø alias by Vainio. Ø was his longest running project from 1993 to 2017. Sysivalo was recorded during 2014-2017 and is 60 min long album with 20 tracks, produced by Vainio. He described the record as a distinct Ø album that was going to include several shorter tracks, etudes. The title, Sysivalo, is invented by Vainio by combining the Finnish words sysi (dark or sinister) and valo (light). Like life itself, the album carries a quiet darkness - honest and full of hidden light. The many of the tracks are beatless subtle soundtracks of eclipsed emotions. Like an incapacitated creature waiting for something to happen. The closing track Loputon (Endless) is maybe the most beautiful tracks Vainio has ever written, Vainio's last word.

A lifelong admirer of DAF, Fixmer has been playing El Que in his DJ sets for years, considering it one of the band’s most enduring and powerful pieces. His connection to the track and to DAF’s groundbreaking legacy is the core inspiration behind these two new remixes, created with both reverence and bold creative vision.

On the “El Que (Terence Fixmer Leather Remix)”, Fixmer remains close to the original’s raw, muscular pulse while injecting a sharp, modern club sensibility. The remix builds on DAF’s unmistakable rhythmics but adds a contemporary momentum that feels like a natural extension of the band’s DNA. “It was like imagining what I would do if I were a member of DAF today,” Fixmer says.

The second version, “El Que (Terence Fixmer Drive Remix)”, ventures deeper into Fixmer’s own territory: darker, hypnotic, and peak-time focused. Tension and release are crafted with surgical precision, taking the original’s spirit into a harder-edged, suspense-driven sound world. It’s a version built for late-night floors without ever losing the soul of El Que.

Fixmer explains:

“I’ve been playing DAF’s El Que in many of my DJ sets for years. It’s a track I deeply loved from the first listen. I’m super proud to have remixed DAF — one of my cult bands and a major influence on my sound and electronic universe.

For the "Leather Remix", I wanted to stay close to the original while bringing modernity and club momentum. For the "Drive Remix", I pushed the track toward darker, peak-time and hypnotic techno, keeping the soul of the original intact.

I wanted to make versions that make you think: ‘I know this track… but wait — what is this version? I want it!’ When I tested them, that’s exactly what happened.”

DAF remains one of the most influential bands in electronic music history. These new remixes by Terence Fixmer reinforce the timeless power of El Que while offering two striking, club-ready perspectives for a new generation of listeners.

Music From Memory is excited to introduce ‘Total Blue’, the Los Angeles-based trio of Nicky Benedek, Alex Talan, and Anthony Calonico. Despite collaborating for over a decade, ‘Total Blue’ represents a new chapter in their artistic journey together as a trio. Embracing chance, inviting the unknown, and guided by a spirit of sheer play and exploration, ‘Total Blue’ was driven by a desire to ‘touch the beyond’ in pursuit of an elusive vibe the three had been chasing for years. Alex, Nick, and Anthony envision ‘Total Blue’ as the all-encompassing full picture, a place where the real and the imaginary begin to blur; a destination reached not through escapism but by expanding one's perspective; a widened scope of vision where personality both shines and disintegrates. Across the album, their mission statement is expertly achieved with subtlety and delicate human touch; painting with a lush palette of digital synths, Akai EVI wind synthesizer, fretless bass, and guitar, the trio masterfully balance texture and color, evoking wide expansive vistas that stretch from Los Angeles right out to the furthest reaches of sky and sea. This is ‘Total Blue’ - a place of time and timelessness where echoes of history and tradition merge with rootless inhuman sonics. MFM071 will be released as 1xLP on vinyl and in digital format on July 19th 2024. Art and design by Michael Willis.

Released in 2016, this album was created primarily using the legendary vintage 1980s Cheetah MS800 synthesizer, showcasing Aphex Twin's signature experimental spirit. Layering retro textures, it weaves thick basslines and uniquely distorted electronics into undulating currents that gradually pull listeners deeper. Its inorganic yet oddly humorous, strangely addictive texture is Aphex Twin's signature sonic magic. A singular classic born from the fusion of vintage gear devotion and futuristic soundscapes.

xavisphone's debut for Modern Love hits with unrelenting energy; a hyper-kinetic, red-lining funk that joins dots between DJ Anderson do Paraiso’s darkside minimalism, Equiknoxx’s riddmic pressure and DJ Ramon Sucesso’s walloping delirium.

Born to Dominican and Brazilian parents, xavi grew up bouncing from place to place, picking up inspiration wherever he landed. His first love was baile funk, but he was raised on classic hip-hop, eventually notching up production and songwriting credits for Vince Staples, Demi Lovato and Ariana Grande. But the major label life wasn't giving; sick of the industry, he headed back to São Paulo to soak up the atmosphere and connect with artists on the ground. Before long, he started uploading quickfire bangers to SoundCloud - at this point there are over 350 of them on his feed - an "evolutionary playlist" in his own words, bursting with ideas.

'balança e paixão' is his debut release, proper, a 12-cut snapshot of chaotic, trailblazing, turbulent genius - bending thrashed rhythms into relentless vocal chops from a laundry list of young brazillian MCs. Built on ear-zizzing "tuin" hits and razor's edge cuts, he creates hypnotic ripples that wedge themselves between São Paulo's weirdo fringe (artists like JLZ and Iguana) and the percussive, MC-heavy sound of funk ritmado, one of the contemporary scene's most vital and recognisable strains. Crucially, you can hear a Photek-like approach to space in his productions too, filling the gaps with metallic clangs to lend his rhythms their own unique dimension.

The flipside takes it slower, deeper. On 'sei q tu gosta' (I know you like it), DJ Leal Original and MC Vuk Vuk's voices are transformed into ghosted sibilances next to xavi's sonar pings and woodblock hits with an almost avant-dancehall slant, like some choice Equiknoxx dub, while on 'cuidado bandida' (be careful bandit), he deploys bone-rattling trills that bite down on atmospherics that wouldn't be out of place on Akira Yamaoka's 'Silent Hill' OST.

LINE is proud to announce the new solo release by Mark Fell, Ten Types of Elsewhere. Topology is a branch of mathematics concerning possible spaces and spatial objects – curves, surfaces, knots, manifolds, phase spaces, symmetrical groups, etc. The work explores a link between objects and alterity through spatial and temporal deformations, twistings, rotatings, reflections and stretchings. Here spaces and objects are not self-evident and singular, but multiple, irregular, anomalous.

The work began as a documentation of recent installations some in public spaces, some gallery works, some large works, some small etc. Inspired by the problems brought up by this activity, instead of using recordings to document these, ten processes came about each of which relates to the spaces and works in a different way – a recording, or system used to run the work, a pattern, a method or technique, a way of working, a name, or a reference point outside the work. This is Mark Fell’s first solo full length release in the United States and is a exciting new departure for LINE.

This year sees Rainy Miller take a holiday from his Fixed Abode home to team up with The White Hotel’s off-shoot label HEAD II with his most ambitious project to date DESQUAMATION (Fire, Burn. Nobody). The project came at a difficult time for Miller who was both struggling to find much inspiration and interest in music along with working through complex emotional pain from his upbringing (“I felt entirely lost and uncertain with the position I’d found myself in, as a creative, in competition with myself…”)

Miller utilises these struggles and worries and turns them on themselves as a medium for a deeper connection with his process and ultimately with the music (“…Desquamation came in a way in which I think I will always find necessary. The shedding of a skin that will continue to grow back. The symbiosis within me of creativity, amassed with struggle or pain. Music and art to me are a means to expel inner trauma and issue”)

The end result is a full bloodied, emotionally visceral piece of work segueing and stretching across a sound world of contorted pop and laconic drill that will cement Miller’s position at the cutting edge of contemporary electronic music; pushing the culture to always move forwards.

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.
The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.

Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

-Andy Beta 

The cultured dub and tech label Sushitech marks its 20th anniversary by branching out with a new imprint, Wood White Sessions, which has been designed as an outlet for more intimate, home-focused listening sounds that don't stray too far from the parent label's original ethos. Dedicated to albums from long-time collaborators and core artists, the new venture expands the Sushitech sound with a softer, more reflective edge, and seasoned dub craftsman Another Channel is up first. Across eight cuts rich in texture and atmosphere, he hooks up with Prince Morella, Masis, and Yassin Omidi to immerse you in the most shady and pristine dub.

Bitchin Bajas return with Inland See, a fluid and meditative follow-up to 2022’s Bajascillators. Written largely on the road and recorded live at Electrical Audio, the album captures the trio in a heightened state of cohesion—playing together in real time with no added reverb, preserving the raw spatial dynamics of the room. Across four expansive tracks, Inland See drifts with a translucent clarity, guided by the band’s trademark time-warping minimalism and gentle sense of propulsion. Each piece stands apart but flows into the next, forming a seamless whole that feels both grounded and elevated—like floating on saltwater or rising with helium. The album deepens the group’s physicality while holding space for stillness and transformation. What emerges is a sense of discovery, of something quietly breaking through. Bitchin Bajas continue to refine their elemental sound, radiating ease, precision and an ever-present sense of wonder.

BJ Nilsen returns with True than Nature, a collection that elevates everyday and environmental sounds through subtle electronic manipulation. Focused on the intrinsic properties of sound itself, the album draws attention to often-ignored sonic phenomena—industrial hums, echoes, labour, and material textures—transforming them into abstract, shifting soundscapes.

By withholding details about source locations and techniques, Nilsen encourages listeners to engage without preconceived anchors, allowing meaning to emerge through deep listening. Titles are left deliberately open-ended, offering symbolic cues rather than fixed narratives. The result is a contemplative, perception-altering experience that blurs the line between the known world and imagined sonic possibility.

Based in Amsterdam, BJ Nilsen has worked since the early 1990s across music, theatre, film, and sound design. His long-standing interest in field recording, environmental acoustics, and the psychological dimensions of sound has led him to explore both natural and industrial terrains, including recent studies of Arctic mining regions and urban soundscapes.

Heith's music has always been infused with sacred mystery, striking a delicate balance between lived experience and imagination. On Escape Lounge, his second full-length release for PAN, Heith draws inspiration from contemporary digital spirituality and interpretations of experience that are crossing over from cultural niches into the mainstream – including internet-based conspiracy theories and psychological operations. The album presents a sonic diary recorded across Milan, Berlin, London, and Stockholm, crafting a post-informational folklore while exploring new territories in personal songwriting. The title Escape Lounge, inspired by airport waiting areas, serves as a metaphorical waiting room of the mind. Its hidden passages can lead either to peril and loss or to enlightenment and kaleidoscopic mental landscapes. This liminal space echoes the mysterious realms of Twin Peaks or the viral "Backrooms" phenomenon. Within it, contributing musicians – including frequent collaborators Leonardo Rubboli, Aase Nielsen, and 33 drummer Alexander Iezzi – move like ethereal presences, creating intangible soundscapes that leave traces of post-hypnotic melancholia. Notably, the vocal contributions from Price and James K enhance the otherworldly atmosphere, their multifaceted timbres adding layers of intentional ambiguity. Throughout the album, Heith masterfully blends acoustic instruments, human voices, and digital technology along an uncharted path that references the experimental pop of 90s trip-hop, 2000s indie-folk songwriting, and lush Mediterranean psychedelia. The sounds are meticulously crafted, combining synthesizers with guitar-based compositions in a computational songwriting approach that creates a collage across eras and landscapes. Each track unveils new dimensions of this delicate hallucinogenic narrative, delivering an immersive listening experience. As reality continuously shifts, Escape Lounge emerges as both sanctuary and confinement – a space of momentary connections and endless potential. In 2025, Heith will debut a new live show and audiovisual collaboration titled 'The Talk' with James K and Günseli Yalcinkaya, commissioned and premiering at Sonar Festival, Terraforma, Nuit Sonores, and Reworks.

Jessica EKOMANE « Manifolds » Entirely computer-generated, Manifolds is a work that explores the multiple possibilities of polyphonic writing, extending it to the “multiphonic” universe where sources and timbres diffract themselves in the listening space. The different voices of the composition no longer follow the traditional parallel trajectories of musical dialogue, but find themselves propelled as if into a particle accelerator, a “collider” freed from all formal rhetoric to reach a state of liberation of energies that is truly confounding. It is then that, in the multi-layered universe of sonic electrons, as if against its own will, a “chant” of overwhelming humanity is revealed. Laurel HALO « Octavia » (2022) Octavia, a piece for piano and electronics, explores the relationship between melodic motifs and textures in a singular way, intermittent moments of melody, harmony and sound materials connecting and disconnecting, to indicate a series of nets or webs, swaying in and out of one another. These sonic nets gently float, spin and merge, and the effect is one of gently floating over an abyss. The work is inspired by the “spiderweb city” of the same name in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities: “Below there is nothing for hundreds of feet: a few clouds glide past; further down you can glimpse the chasm’s bed….Suspended over the abyss, the life of Octavia’s inhabitants is less uncertain than in other cities. They know the net will last only so long.” — François J. Bonnet, 2023

Recorded in Osaka almost exactly a year ago (11th Nov, 2024), II = II is the first and likely only collaborative album between CS + Kreme and KAKUHAN, a stunning flex of asymmetric and atmospheric world-building, mastered by Rashad Becker for added shine, and highly recommended if you’re anywhere on the line from Autechre to Beatrice Dillon, Mark Fell to HTRK.

Playing to the quartet’s respective strengths, II = II finds balance between KAKUHAN’s percussive tekkerz and CS + Kreme’s emotional heft, with Conrad Standish providing drum programming and bass, Sam Karmel on electronics, Koshiro Hino on sampler, and Yuki Nakagawa on Cello. The sound they make together is beautiful but full of swagger - as if SND’s MAX MSP-ed and Razor-ed electronics were blunted at the edges, very gradually melted to vapour. It’s music that’s hyper-specific, in a vein that will be familiar to anyone who copped KAKUHAN’s astonishing debut album ‘Metal Zone’ in 2022, and yet somehow super loose with it, unravelling through four long tracks that each progress and expand the same essential register.

Shot from the hip but with ample tricks in the pocket, enhanced by that distinctive room-recorded je ne sais quoi and Noh-style percussive theatrics, it’s the most human sounding electroacoustic music imaginable; tough, rolling, complex, full of space and resonance - and if it really is to be the last word from CS+Kreme (they recently announced the band was no more) - what a way to go out.

Alpenglühen starts 2026 with two close friends working together in the 11th one.

Atàvic is the collaborative project between Estrato Aurora and Absis, merging two distinct yet complementary approaches to electronic music. The project is rooted in texture, atmosphere, and subtle narrative, allowing sound to evolve organically and without excess.

They together bring a refined sense of space and detail, working with ambient layers, restrained rhythms, and melodic fragments that unfold slowly. Here is a 4 track release with a more tactile and material approach, focusing on timbre, resonance, and sonic density, blurring the line between abstraction and structure.

The alignment between Atàvic and the label lies in a shared appreciation for subtlety, patience, and sonic storytelling, where each release is conceived as a complete and meaningful statement.

With this reference, Atàvic contributes a work that resonates with alpenglühen’s aesthetic ethos while reinforcing the collaborative project’s own identity: music that invites close listening and reveals its nuances slowly.

If you’re looking for a peak-time, dancefloor-driven banger to keep you moving until sunrise, this is not that record.

But if you’re after a mind-blowing experience that challenges and expands your listening (and dancings), this one’s for you. Don’t overthink it.

Legowelt & Takafumi Noda aka Mystica Tribe with their third Noda & Wolfers album, this one is for the real dub headz!

AI-31 sees the debut release from a new collaboration between Samuel van Dijk (Netherlands) and Rasmus Hedlund (Finland). Both key proponents to the scene in Northern Europe, they come together with mutual understanding and a common vision to sound. Dialog acts as a conversational exchange that sees the interplay of dynamic frequencies, evocative imagery and contemporary sonic art. Spread across four sides, the album as a whole exists as a kind of metaphysical process, eternally growing and contracting — change is the only constant, marked by a continuous progression of sound and space.

Don’t Trust Mirrors caps off one of the most transformative periods of Kelly Moran’s musical life. In 2019, her career was defined by extensive touring and festival dates — waking up early to play her sets, and staying late to dance to techno. The experience of staying out and absorbing this environment generated a new connection between herself & the music she was making, inspiring her to work on a more rhythmic followup to her 2018 Warp Records debut Ultraviolet.

But an unexpected and personal shift in her life, along with a halted tour during the pandemic, changed the course of the project. Her self-perception altered — both physically and emotionally — as well as her path, presenting a new creative process. This led to 2024’s Moves in the Field, which The New York Times called “a softhearted but steel-skinned set of 10 piano pieces that are as rapturous as a waterfall or as delicate as vapor.”

Setting itself apart from her last release, Don’t Trust Mirrors is a pivotal return to a project that was put on hold and to self-actualization, showcasing the experience of observing yourself through distortion, reflection, and the slow work of piecing yourself back together again. The album features Warp Records labelmate Bibio, and comprises 10 tracks of magnificent textural refractions — reflecting light, hard edges, and the full spectrum of embracing true embodiment.

The announcement is accompanied by the release of new single “Echo in the Field,” which opens the album, and comes with a mesmerizing, kinetic video directed by Katharine Antoun.

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Part of a series of three new archival releases from Ndeya that showcase Jon Hassell and group in the late 1980s exploring a radical tangent on his Fourth World sensibility.

The Living City captures the Jon Hassell Group in September 1989 performing as part of an audio-visual installation inside the World
Financial Center Winter Garden in New York City, with Brian Eno mixing the band live. Eno had designed an audio-visual installation in the 10-story glass-vaulted pavilion, inspired by the hunting, ceremony, animals, and weather sounds of the Ba-Ya-Ka pygmy tribe from Cameroon gathered by Louis Sarno.

Jon Hassell and his then band, the musicians who had recently recorded the City: Works Of Fiction album, played in the Winter Garden Atrium over the course of three nights, with Eno mixing the band live with the installation sounds.

The audio presented here is an edited selection from the performance on the second night, available on vinyl for the first time, cut across four sides by Stefan Betke aka Pole. Gatefold vinyl edition includes download card and extensive sleevenotes.

“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.