MUSIC

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-James Murphy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty

Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025

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

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

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

Soft piano notes kiss trippy electronic tones: “Kossaiko”, the only collaborative record that japanese piano player Saiko Tsukamoto and globally known electronic producer Kuniyuki Takahashi ever produced, is an unmissable profound soft classic music burner.

Together they composed and produced an eight-chapter strong deeply absorbing narrative, whose enthralling story arc dives profound into authentic drama zones, that sound like they jumped right out of a Claude Sautet movie.

Originally released in 2007 as cd only, the perfectly put together longplayer now enters the world for the first time in a vinyl edition that is tragically hip. deeply starry-eyed composi-tions full of minimalistic piano melodies that creep, twist, and dance around unobtrusive electronic notes who never call the tune, but always elevate the spectacle into higher elec-tronic spheres.

In the center of each between five- and nine-minutes long composition is the piano play of Saiko, gently hitting the keys, giving space to each note to vibrate in an endless “Pauline Oli-Veros” way, drifting until the very last sound vanish. around them, Kuniyuki plays his charming electronic tricks, opening the space for tones that sometimes pulsate, sometimes flow the ambient way.

Furthermore, occasionally a guitar notes pop up or accordion melodies cover the sorcery with a severely romantic veil.

Modern classical music, that has no fear of electronic meltdowns, that embraces digital tones while staying organic in its very inner circle.

A wise man once said: when words leave off, music begins. Those who fall for the eight poems of Saikoss will lose their speech and in return get pleased all agitations of their soul.

A new set of drifting electronics and meditative new age sounds from Khotin under his Area 3 project.

Khotin by Vancouver producer Dylan Khotin-Foote is a reissue of the cassette release that sold out instantly at bandcamp in 2018! The profound ambient sound is a chill-out refinement of the unfathomable depth of the previous work, which is both immersive and sleepy, and has been beautifully incorporated into the lo-fi feel of the artwork while maintaining the vibrancy of the spiritual & naturalistic sound world. This is a masterpiece of beauty that cannot be described in words, with a profound sound world that creates a dreamy fantasy land on a windowsill in broad daylight, only to sink into the border between Hades and reality. A masterpiece of unspeakable beauty. Highly recommended for all music lovers from new age to ambient and Balearic.

You can't just soak it in and sleep to it, you'll melt. From "Mood Hut" to "1080p" to "Summer Cool", Khotin, a popular Vancouver producer by the name of Dylan Khotin-Foote, has taken over the charm of the cool house coming out of Canada. The cassette, which sold out in 2017 on Bandcamp, has been reissued with 2LP! It's a lone ambient sound with a sweet layer of synthesizers drifting with dreamy ambience, a gentle beat with a hint of sanctuary, and immersive concrete sounds floating in the air. This is the culmination of the lo-fi house movement. A mysterious sound with an unfathomable depth. If you like ambient, deep house, new age, or Balearic music, this is a must have!

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome – the bonkers sound collage / 2000 skratch odyssey from the musical genius that is Kid Koala – gets the 25th Anniversary reissue treatment from Ninja Tune. A true musical visionary, Eric San aka Kid Koala combined a sensei-like approach to his craft with wild humour, giving his art an utterly inimitable quality. A dedicated turntablist (“turntablism”: the art of using turntables as a musical instrument to create original sounds, mixes, and rhythms), San recorded Carpal Tunnel Syndrome entirely on turntables, hand-cutting vinyl records onto an eight-track recorder. The result is an eccentric, joyful romp through his uniquely warped and brilliant mind.

Lindsay Olsen aka Salami Rose Joe Louis is a genre traveller multi-instrumentalist female producer and a signee to Flying Lotus's Brainfeeder label. She returns with her most personal album to date on April 25th, 2025.

Delightfully raw and heartfelt, ‘Lorings’ is a collection of songs that find SRJL displaying her vulnerability through a playful and sonically explorative lens. “I was hoping to bypass the distillation process of overthinking outside perception,” she says. “Each song feels like a significant section of my personality has been carved out and put on a platter for public consumption, which is a devastating thought [haha].”

This record she made almost entirely autonomously on her trusty Roland MV8800 workstation. For a couple of songs, SRJL invited a handful of exceptionally talented friends to collaborate: guitarist/producer Flanafi (with whom Olsen partnered for the collaborative album ‘Sarah’ in 2024); Omari Jazz (Black Decelerant); Luke Titus and Sergio Machado Plim.

Lead single “Inside” was born of a tumultuous chapter in Olsen’s life – one that she hopes never to repeat. Floating atop gently revolving Polybrute arpeggios, it’s a sombre but incredibly beautiful and powerful song. “My hope, by putting this song first on the record – and making it the first single – is that some of the songs that follow have more levity and hope, leaving this heaviness behind,” she surmises.

Elsewhere on ‘Lorings’, Olsen addresses themes of imposter syndrome, falling in love, heartbreak, the idea of family and parenthood, superficiality, her frustrations with the music industry (“I dunno the way… For I cannot play… The game”). She does revisit more familiar tropes too as exemplified by “Motorway (feat. Flanafi)”. “I feel like the world is being confronted with an enormous lack of humanity at the moment and it feels impossible to comprehend how people can be so cruel,” she declares. 

This is the second album after the transfer of the company, which was released in 1995, and is a compilation of songs created between 1990 and 1994. The album is a work that encompasses the dichotomy and diversity of the Aphex Twin, with acid, noise, and broken beats that could be described as "drill'n'bass," while following the ambient, IDM, and hardcore techno of the early days. The album contains 12 tracks, including the single "Ventolin," which is a strong industrial downtempo explosion, and "Alberto Balsalm," a song that is often mentioned alongside "Xtal. 180g vinyl.

Detroit dub techno and ambient dub legend Rod Modell returns with a reissue of his 2014 Deepchord masterpiece on Soma Quality Recordings. Across two weighty yet spectral cuts, the release embodies his lineage to Basic Channel while expanding into a uniquely immersive emotional space. Rarely has Modell so explicitly foregrounded spectral vocal textures, marking this as a work that broadens his expressive scope. A true masterstroke—poised between meditation and the club, equally attuned to the shadows of the midnight city and the depths of inner emotion.

大人気ユニット、Salamandaの片翼！韓国・ソウルを拠点に活動するプロデューサー／DJ、Yetsubyによる最新アルバム『4EVA』が、UK新興レーベル〈Pink Oyster〉の第1弾として登場。ブレイクビーツ、フットワーク、ジャングル、IDM、アンビエント、クラブ・ミュージックを自在に横断しながら、デジタル／アナログ／アコースティックの音響を緻密に編み上げた全10曲。遊び心溢れるサウンド・デザインと、内省的かつ親密なムードが共存する、Yetsubyのソロ作品として極めて完成度の高い一枚です。限定300部。

DJ K started producing music at 17, diving deep into FL Studio tutorials and honing his craft. Now at 24, he’s emerged as one of the most daring and inventive voices in contemporary Brazilian funk. Hailing from Diadema, on the outskirts of São Paulo, DJ K quickly rose to prominence with his creation of bruxaria—a dark, noisy, and psychedelic spin on baile funk that redefines the genre’s boundaries.

Two years after his groundbreaking debut, Pânico no Submundo, DJ K returns with Rádio Libertadora, an album that’s even more aggressive, visceral, and politically charged. In his own words, it’s “an album against the system”—a sonic rebellion confronting urban violence, social inequality, and police brutality, while embracing the explicit sexuality of putaria as an act of freedom and defiance.

The album's title nods to Brazil's legacy of resistance against military dictatorship. Its opening track boldly declares “Down with military dictatorship,” sampling a historic speech by communist guerrilla leader Carlos Marighella, originally broadcast during a clandestine radio takeover in 1969. Featuring MC Renatinho Falcão, the track is a sonic assault—metallic noise, thunderous basslines, and layers of distortion collide with insurgent lyrics that paint the favelas as battlegrounds in an undeclared social war.

Rádio Libertadora channels the militant spirit of 1990s Brazilian protest rap—drawing influence from legends like Racionais MCs, Ndee Naldinho, and Dexter—while immersing itself in a brutal, corrosive electronic landscape. Tracks like “Troca Tiro e Faz Dinheiro” and “Sobrevive Contra o Estado” weave gunshots, alarms, and sirens into frenetic rhythms, throwing listeners into a warlike cinematic experience. In “Mega Suicidio Automotivo,” beats refuse to settle, shifting unpredictably through apocalyptic, hyperconnected soundscapes that mirror the chaos of modern life.

On cuts like “Psy Vem Fazer Neném,” “Techno de Favelado,” and “Ali Perto da Imigrantes,” DJ K reimagines club music through the lens of bruxaria. Sharp techno hi-hats and bouncing house basslines clash with hallucinogenic tuin squeals, laser blasts, and harsh distorted whistles, blurring the lines between rave and riot. In DJ K's hands, baile funk is weaponized—becoming the soundtrack for a surreal dancefloor insurrection on the periphery of São Paulo.

With Rádio Libertadora, DJ K pushes the boundaries of funk, transforming it into a visceral weapon of protest and liberation. This is more than an album—it’s a manifesto set to the raw pulse of São Paulo's underground.

A multidisciplinary artist and curator, Violaine Morgan Le Fur (aka Violence Gratuite) has spent the last few years sharpening her creative perspective, developing documentaries, producing exhibitions, and directing music videos and short films. 'Baleine à Boss' isn't just her debut album, but her first venture into music production; Le Fur had only begun to experiment with music software a few weeks before dubbing the record, a fact that makes this unique set only more bewildering. Singing and vocalizing candidly and producing each track alone, she sounds profoundly polished, invoking a beguiling haze of chanson, rap, no wave and experimental electronics that hovers around the margins of pop and the avant-garde.

Le Fur grew up in Paris's sprawling suburbs, and was provided with a diverse coterie of influences by her Breton mother and Cameroonian father. She's channeled her ancestry into her work before, splicing material from her mother's film archives with her own footage recorded in Bamiléké land to develop the autobiographical documentary 'À L'ouest' back in 2017. As Violence Gratuite, Le Fur thinks more cryptically, considering the vast forests of western Cameroon, lands ravaged by generations of bloodthirsty men and looping pulsing techno rhythms with fractured trap and the ghosts of French pop.

Her voice stands out proudly on opener 'Iséo', layered into a charming mantra over a brittle, grime-y beat assembled from stuttering samples and 8-bit blips. Acrobatic yet somehow casual, Le Fur splits her delivery, singing in French over undulating chants and spectral coos. And she switches up the flow on 'Olive', rapping in an icy cool deadpan while spiky synths bubble around jerky, Neptunes-like stabs. Then, on the nocturnal 'Smooth Operation', Le Fur guides us towards a moonlit ritual, crying sweetly into the darkness as hand drums and dreamy plucks chatter in the background.

On the title track, Le Fur strips the rhythm down to a moody, skeletal rumble, using rubbery drums and trapped chorals to mire herself in negative space. Speaking in a low rasp, she brings to mind Tricky's eeriest early material, or the wonkiest output of French no wave hybridist Lizzy Mercier Descloux. But the record switches gears relentlessly, lurching towards the Caribbean on 'Ragga Nieztches' and into spannered dembow on the hypnotic closing track 'Bad à Bras le Corps'. 'Baleine à Boss' is an unpredictable, labyrinthine suite that refuses to stay static, a variety show that's as comfortable in the club as it is at a fest noz.

On her moonlit second solo album, Hungarian Transylvanian vocalist, composer and performer Réka Csiszér composes an uncanny and chilling soundtrack that muddles the physical and spiritual realms, balancing crumbling realities with confident self-actualization. 'Danse des Larmes' is based on sketches commissioned for a theater production, and Csiszér widens the original concept of "Eastern European melancholy" by painting dreamlike memories from her childhood - of alienation, unconscious trauma and distress - into a hypnotic sequence of soundscapes that hum with tension, mystery and transcendence. She pulls from industrial music, dark ambient, Eastern European folk music and vintage horror soundtracks, smudging sludgy drones, dense electro-acoustic textures and her own breathtaking choral vocals until the roots vanish almost completely, leaving only ghostly traces behind.

The album follows Csiszér's acclaimed VÍZ debut 'Veils', a bold seven part audiovisual "body horror soundtrack" that spiraled out from her long-held interests in theater, cinema and opera. Those elements are still present on 'Danse des Larmes', but by examining her past, Csiszér is able to reach into the future, amalgamating gothic horror and speculative science-fiction. This is never more evident than on the album's eerie opening track 'Eden X', that juxtaposes wheezing synthesizer textures with soul-stirring choral echoes that liquefy into Csiszér's oily ambience. As the track washes to a close, Csiszér suspends her sounds in the silence, letting the obscured harmonies and rusted noise peer beyond the veil, setting the scene perfectly for the vastly different title track. Here, the influence of folk music bubbles to the surface, with distorted, eerily familiar vocal rotations that crack over woody environmental sounds. "I dreamt a dream tonight, that dreamers often lie," a processed voice speaks into the phantasmal forest. "In lovers arms they fade and die, I talk of dreams, I talk of lies, I dream of you, I dream of I."

Csiszér's voice is clearer still on the giallo-influenced 'Hyperálom', calling confidently across hymnal rhythms and woozy analog throbs, and on 'Angel's Throat', it's thrust into a parallel universe, reverberating wordlessly before Csiszér dexterously sculpts it into terrifying ferric shrieks and gaseous vapors. Elsewhere, she pays tribute to iconic Hungarian composer Mihály Víg on 'Vali 2.0', offering her own interpretation of 'Kész az egész', a piece featured in Béla Tarr’s 1987 film 'Kárhozat'. In Csiszér's hands, Víg's sardonic original is lifted into the clouds, obscured by celestial pads that drape around Csiszér's sensual, Julee Cruise-like vocals. It's a cunning way for Csiszér to trigger a memory and immediately obfuscate it, leaving a sense compelling disorientation in its wake. And that sense of terror and awe swirls throughout the album, questioning the horror of childhood trauma and the confusing echoes of the past and replacing it with something beautiful, and something new.