MUSIC

Substrata was the third studio album by the Norwegian electronic artist Biosphere, released 25 years ago by All Saints Records in London. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it at number 38 on its list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Here are ten alternative versions picked from the Substrata recordings sessions that took place between 1995 and 1996. David Stubbs´review of the original album in Melody Maker ,July 12th 1997: Biosphere, aka Norwegian Geir Jenssen, is transmitting from a cold, polar outpost of the imagination. "Substrata" is the best ambient album I've heard in an ice age, an album of terrifying, desolate and all-enveloping beauty, the music of a man who's stared too long and too hard at the Northern lights, a music of distant rumbles, tremors underfoot, stray radio signals, yawning chasms and indistinct, grainy images in the half-light when the mind begins to play tricks. "Poa Alpina" reminds me of recent, frightening TV footage of vast chunks of iceberg cracking and falling away into the sea under the duress of global warming. As for "The Things I Tell You", imagine what Oasis would have sounded like had they been born Eskimos. "Sphere Of No Form" is shot through with a frantic peal like the Mayday song of the world's last whale and, best of all, "Kobresia" looms with a vast, mournful, symphonic motif, like the ghost of the Titanic. Chill out has never been this chilling.

On June 3rd Gondwana Records present ‘Next Time Could Be Your Last Time’ – the debut album by Forgiveness, AKA Jack Wyllie, JQ and Richard Pike. Described as “not really jazz, not really new age, not really ambient or electronica”, instead they welcome you into a synaesthesia-inducing technicolour fantasy, full of wondrous emotive beauty. This genesis began with the sharing of music, burgeoning friendships, and the mutually-inspirational benefit of the collective power of a group dynamic, with each spurring the next on to heighten their already expansive skills. Intertwining the acoustic, electric and digital, utilising instruments and tools from across the decades, their synthesized Shangri La is a place where craftsmanship meets musicianship, even including sections notated on sheet music. The mood whilst recording, however, was one of loose freedom and enjoyment, with parts displaying a light-hearted playfulness. A world where shiny electronics meet flute and sax motifs, subverting them into something new. Jack Wyllie is best known for his work with Portico Quartet, Paradise Cinema and Szun Waves as well as collaborations with artists such as Luke Abbott, Adrian Corker and Charles Hayward. Whilst JQ has released on Boxed and Lo Recordings, with his music also remixed by Loraine James, Sun Araw and Foodman. Richard Pike has had multiple records on Warp as a member of PVT, collaborated with Modeselektor and Ital Tek, recorded under his alter-ego Deep Learning, and founded the tape label Salmon Universe, all whilst composing scores for TV drama. Wide-ranging influences on the LP include 70s era ECM and Miles Davis, Spencer Clark/Star Searchers, Ansel Adams, Steve Reich, H Takahashi, Don Slepian, The Blue Nile, Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit Of Eden’, Michael Gordon’s ‘Rushes for 8 Bassoons’, Sir Simon Rattle’s documentary ‘Leaving Home’, Horoshi Yoshimura, Ulla Strauss and Disasterpeace, plus new developments in vaporwave and software experimental. Hitting the centre at the ven diagram of these interests, the record converges the trio’s individual sound worlds into something singular. Primarily purveying a sense of endorphin-flushed tranquillity, they build synthetic, bucolic, lysergic landscapes, which although imbued with processed plasticity also contain multi-stranded depths of textural field.

Substrata was the third studio album by the Norwegian electronic artist Biosphere, released 25 years ago by All Saints Records in London. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it at number 38 on its list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Here are ten alternative versions picked from the Substrata recordings sessions that took place between 1995 and 1996. David Stubbs´review of the original album in Melody Maker ,July 12th 1997: Biosphere, aka Norwegian Geir Jenssen, is transmitting from a cold, polar outpost of the imagination. "Substrata" is the best ambient album I've heard in an ice age, an album of terrifying, desolate and all-enveloping beauty, the music of a man who's stared too long and too hard at the Northern lights, a music of distant rumbles, tremors underfoot, stray radio signals, yawning chasms and indistinct, grainy images in the half-light when the mind begins to play tricks. "Poa Alpina" reminds me of recent, frightening TV footage of vast chunks of iceberg cracking and falling away into the sea under the duress of global warming. As for "The Things I Tell You", imagine what Oasis would have sounded like had they been born Eskimos. "Sphere Of No Form" is shot through with a frantic peal like the Mayday song of the world's last whale and, best of all, "Kobresia" looms with a vast, mournful, symphonic motif, like the ghost of the Titanic. Chill out has never been this chilling.

AOTN proudly present a new solo outing from long time friend & contributor to Athens of the North, Other Lands aka Gavin L.Sutherland. Channelling his considerable improvisational skills to evoke notions of island life, his concept was to create something that could work equally well in the wilds of the Western Isles as in the sunnier spots of the world that we all yearned to escape to at that time. The more he played with this idea of groups of islands, of archipelagos the world over, the more it also became about people themselves experiencing isolation as individuals, while still feeling a sense of togetherness with others in the same boat. Working a little at home but mainly here at Athens of the North studios, he would come in each day over the course of a few weeks and just hit record, playing at times almost without mind. Sometimes the mood would call for keys, strings, or drums through delays for days and days. Often, the music would happen by chance as much as by design. One rule he tried to adhere to was to not overthink things, capturing moments honestly with minimal editing or digital processing. What we’ve ended up with is a beautiful, spontaneous, timeless and honest meditation on what it is to be at once both alone and part of a larger whole.

AOTN proudly present a new solo outing from long time friend & contributor to Athens of the North, Other Lands aka Gavin L.Sutherland. Channelling his considerable improvisational skills to evoke notions of island life, his concept was to create something that could work equally well in the wilds of the Western Isles as in the sunnier spots of the world that we all yearned to escape to at that time. The more he played with this idea of groups of islands, of archipelagos the world over, the more it also became about people themselves experiencing isolation as individuals, while still feeling a sense of togetherness with others in the same boat. Working a little at home but mainly here at Athens of the North studios, he would come in each day over the course of a few weeks and just hit record, playing at times almost without mind. Sometimes the mood would call for keys, strings, or drums through delays for days and days. Often, the music would happen by chance as much as by design. One rule he tried to adhere to was to not overthink things, capturing moments honestly with minimal editing or digital processing. What we’ve ended up with is a beautiful, spontaneous, timeless and honest meditation on what it is to be at once both alone and part of a larger whole.

As the sun sets on a quaint East Nashville house, a young man bares a piece of his soul. Facing the camera, sporting a silky suit jacket/shirt/slacks/fingerless gloves ensemble that announces "singer" before he's even opened his mouth, Lee Tracy Johnson settles onto his stage, the front yard. He sways to the dirge-like drum machine pulse of a synth-soaked slow jam, extends his arms as if gaining his balance, and croons in affecting, fragile earnest, "I need your love… oh baby…" Dogs in the yard next door begin barking. A mysterious cardboard robot figure, beamed in from galaxies unknown and affixed to a tree, is less vocal. Lee doesn't acknowledge either's presence. He's busy feeling it, arms and hands gesticulating. His voice rises in falsetto over the now-quiet dogs, over the ambient noise from the street that seeps into the handheld camcorder's microphone, over the recording of his own voice played back from a boombox off-camera. After six minutes the single, continuous shot ends. In this intimate creative universe there are no re-takes. There are many more music videos to shoot, and as Lee later puts it, "The first time you do it is actually the best. Because you can never get that again. You expressing yourself from within." "I Need Your Love" dates from a lost heyday. From some time in the '80s or early '90s, when Lee Tracy (as he was known in performance) and his music partner/producer/manager Isaac Manning committed hours upon hours of their sonic and visual ideas to tape. Embracing drum machines and synthesizers – electronics that made their personal futurism palpable – they recorded exclusively at home, live in a room into a simple cassette deck. Soul, funk, electro and new wave informed their songs, yet Lee and Isaac eschewed the confinement of conventional categories and genres, preferring to let experimentation guide them. "Anytime somebody put out a new record they had the same instruments or the same sound," explains Isaac. "So I basically wanted to find something that's really gonna stand out away from all of the rest of 'em." Their ethos meant that every idea they came up with was at least worth trying: echoed out half-rapped exhortations over frantic techno-style beats, gospel synth soul, modal electro-funk, oddball pop reinterpretations, emo AOR balladry, nods to Prince and the Fat Boys, or arrangements that might collapse mid-song into a mess of arcade game-ish blips before rallying to reach the finish line. All of it conjoined by consistent tape hiss, and most vitally, Lee's chameleonic voice, which managed to wildly shape shift and still evoke something sincere – whether toggling between falsetto and tenor exalting Jesus's return, or punctuating a melismatic romantic adlib with a succinct, "We all know how it feels to be alone." "People think we went to a studio," says Isaac derisively. "We never went to no studio. We didn't have the money to go to no studio! We did this stuff at home. I shot videos in my front yard with whatever we could to get things together." Sometimes Isaac would just put on an instrumental record, be it "Planet Rock" or "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (from Evita), press "record," and let Lee improvise over it, yielding peculiar love songs, would-be patriotic anthems, or Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe tributes. Technical limitations and a lack of professional polish never dissuaded them. They believed they were onto something. "That struggle," Isaac says, "made that sound sound good to me." In the parlance of modern music criticism Lee and Isaac's dizzying DIY efforts would inevitably be described as "outsider." But "outsider" carries the burden of untold additional layers of meaning if you're Black and from the South, creating on a budget, and trying to get someone, anyone within the country music capital of the world to take your vision seriously. "What category should we put it in?" Isaac asks rhetorically. "I don't know. All I know is feeling. I ain't gonna name it nothing. It's music. If it grabs your soul and touch your heart that's what it basically is supposed to do."

Black Sea was the follow-up album to Venice (Touch, 2004), and was originally released in 2008; Stylus Magazine's Nick Southall wrote: "Fennesz does with sound what Stan Brakhage did with film, altering its very fabric and texture, employing disorder and error as forms of communication and expression. He forces you to learn a different method of perception and interpretation, to look beneath the chaos that seems to govern the movements of life and find the patterns beneath." Fennesz's career has come a long way since Instrument, his debut for Mego in 1995, and his first solo album Hotel Paral.lel which followed in 1998. Endless Summer (Mego, 2001) brought him to a much wider audience and Venice underlined his mastery of melody and dissonance. His songs usually embody the skillful application and manipulation of dense sonic textures with a genuine feel for the live, and real-time. Black Sea features guitars that rarely sound like guitars; the instrument is transformed into an orchestra. Fennesz lists the elements used to make the compositions: "Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, electronics, computers and live-improvising software lloopp." On "Glide," Fennesz duets with New Zealand's Rosy Parlane, whose work is also released on Touch. Fennesz also teams up with eMego artist Anthony Pateras whose prepared piano features on "The Colour of Three." Fennesz pushes his work into a more classical domain, preferring the slow reveal to Venice's and Endless Summer's more song- based structures. Jon Wozencroft's artwork makes visible this carefully hidden world resting beneath the surface of "the first impression." A series of shots, taken in quick succession as the tide recedes, reveals a world of specific activity only visible at a particular time and place, histories appearing and disappearing.

“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. 
 

A selection of private press 45s featuring Nate Young, John Olson, Alex Moskos, Gretchen Gonzales, Aaron Dilloway & Raven Chacon. These collaborations between the core Wolf Eyes crew and friends was originally self-released as a series of super-limited 7” hand painted box sets, but now the core ‘hits’ have been compiled by Disciples for wider consumption. 

Wolf Eyes' history with collaboration goes back almost 26 years. From the first Wolf Eyes w/Spykes concert that led to Olson joining the band to Smegma, Braxton, Richard Pinhas, Merzbow, Marshall Allen, and many more. Wolf Eyes has continued expanding musical ideas through collaboration and Difficult Messages is the first compilation of this practice. 

Many of the bands on 'Difficult Messages' exist inside an assemblage of a mail art tradition. Most of the music was made remotely and this allowed for deeper exploration into styles that might have been too uncomfortable to attempt face to face. Short Hands finds Nate Young, and Alex Moskos exchanging bass and guitar fragments with Olson’s reeds and tones overtop sculpted into odd rock songs. Wolf Raven touches on harsh electronics and pushes forward into postmodern ideas of composition. Time Designers is a duo of Alex Moskos and Nate Young using hacked drum machines and a 'design' approach to organizing sound. U Eye finds Olson and Young alongside longtime collaborators Gretchen Gonzales and Aaron Dilloway for a scrape and tape session recorded by Warren Defever. Stare Case is Olson and Young in a non-Wolf duo. Perhaps the only 'rules following' project these two have EVER had. The collection of audio tracks could be looked at as an exquisite corpse: a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. With this method over thirty tracks and four hundred paintings were created. 

"Minimalism meets rave pentatonics"
★★★★ – The Guardian - Experimental Contemporary Album of the Month

"A fiercely focused electro-acoustic masterclass, full of life-affirming zeal." ★★★★ – MOJO

"Akusmi crafts an often-jubilant, forward-thinking sound from a vocabulary of past futures" – The Quietus

"Delightful pointillist songs from this London artist where sound appears in short tonal bursts to create musical constellations." – New and Notable, Bandcamp

Akusmi is the new project moniker of French-born, London based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Pascal Bideau, who signs to the new Tonal Union imprint for the release of his album ‘Fleeting Future.’ With its hallucinatory, genre-defying blend of minimalism, cosmic jazz and Fourth World influences, and in its quest for optimism in the face of unknown and limitless possibility. ‘Fleeting Future’ stands apart as an inventive and inspirational debut.

The creation of the album’s richly colourful and multi-layered sound world was originally inspired by Bideau’s journey to Indonesia, where he immersed himself in traditional Gamelan and gong music. Many of the themes, motifs and melodies on ‘Fleeting Future’ seed from the ‘Slendro’ scale, one of the essential tuning systems used in Gamelan. However it is not musical scales, but scales as in the size or extent of things that most fascinates Bideau, specifically he explains; “the compelling way things dramatically change when you shift from any given scale to another.”

The album connects directly to nature and the wider world in its evocation of perceptive shifts and transitions from microscopic to macro scale, as evidenced by the opening title track ‘Fleeting Future’, on which a simple dotted saxophone line morphs and billows into synths, brass and strings, indicating the musical voyage that lies ahead. Like the start of a journey or adventure it is full of anticipation, its arborescent growth conveying the optimism of the unknown and of limitless possibility. The album centrepiece ‘Neo Tokyo’ is a vibrating, ebullient mass of colliding elements which feels like zooming in to the electron level, as it teeters on the edge of chaos. The title is a reference to Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, a dizzying work of art set in a sprawling futuristic metropolis.

‘Yurikamome’, meanwhile, is an imaginary soundtrack inspired by Bideau’s yearning to visit Japan which he fuels by watching Youtube videos of drives and rides through Japanese landscapes and cities. “It’s amazing” he adds, “that we have the ability to access almost anywhere in the world and see what it’s like, that people document it and upload it. It’s never going to be any replacement for the real thing, but with places that really touch you, it works.” The track is named after a Japanese monorail train line which rides from Shinbashi to Toyosu, a last journey that feels like a new beginning.


‘Fleeting Future’ was composed and recorded by Bideau between 2017 and 2019 in his North London studio and features additional contributions recorded in Berlin by Florian Juncker (trombone), Ruth Velten (saxophone) and regular collaborator Daniel Brandt of Brandt Brauer Frick (drums / electronic percussion). Having been living through uncertain times, one thing that keeps spiralling into the unknown is the future, about which Bideau leaves us with a final thought:

“The future is fascinating: It is constantly readjusting to new events. I feel we left a linear approach to the future to enter an arborescent one where all the data and information we have about what could happen is exponentially ever-growing. Following a branch might allow you to glimpse into what it may become, but the evolution of the whole picture might very well render the prediction totally obsolete, and even meaningless. In that sense, there is not one future but innumerable ones all cancelling each other. That’s what makes it fleeting.”

‘Fleeting Future’ will be the first release on the new London/Berlin based Tonal Union imprint, founded by Art director and curator Adam Heron.

Akusmi — ‘Fleeting Future’ is released on Tonal Union Records on June 24th 

Second outing from Jaeger and O’Rourke following the release Wakes on Cerulean on Editions Mego in 2017. Covering a vast terrain with delicacy and poise this new release unveils a spectral showcase for all manner of deep abstraction. The first side positions itself somewhere between stoned komische synth and more nuanced electroacoustic tactics, all weighted by a melancholic undertow. The second side builds on the tension of the former as an undulating drone teases all variety of matter to rise and fall amongst the foreign space it inhabits. The effect creates an enormous sense of deep space before subsiding into a smaller more anxious flickering world. All manner of machines fold into play; digital machines, industrial and analogue machines. The seemingly random yet ordered nature of events is reminiscent of the behaviour of the natural world providing this machine driven release a convincing organic feel. Whether invoking mirrors, distant galaxies or a pond of frogs it is a delightful challenge to focus and locate what is nature and what is nurture. To play this loud is to immerse oneself in a fascinating journey which carries the listener through an array of dizzying emotional states.

Both a marketing firm and metaphysical mission, Valley of the Sun synthesized style and spirituality to produce an extensive catalog that at once defines and defies new age music. Founder Dick Sutphen worked with tireless devotion to spread a message he believed could change the world for the better. This 18-track overview of VOTS’ fertile 1977-1990 period includes music from Upper Astral, Robert Slap & Steve Powell, David Naegele, David Storrs, Steven Cooper, and Gloria Thomas, a 24-page booklet with extensive liner notes, J-card scans, and a hint of Sedona sand. Subliminal hypnosis likely.

The diminutive Peter Barclay was that guy in early ’90s Oakland, the eccentric with the most style, the most talent, the local magician. This self-taught musical wizard recorded at home and produced two barely-released albums, 1990’s dreamlike Acceptance and 1992’s synth pop What Kind Of World, winning over the few who heard them. But fame outside his small circle was not to be, and Barclay was lost in the late-’90s crest of the AIDS epidemic. Rediscovered for a new generation, this is queer music at its finest… Welcome to the world of Peter Barclay.

100% GALCHER was by all accounts a game-changer when it landed in 2013 as an hour of original music from a relatively unknown producer ushered in by the beloved mix series Blowing Up The Workshop. Galcher Lustwerk's signature sound — a smoky stream-of-consciousness baritone shadow-boxing with beats, informed by funk, rap, rhythm, and blues — felt like an epiphany, impossibly hypnotic and complete. Resident Advisor writes, "100% GALCHER laid out a louche, lysergic and resolutely black take on deep house." Pitchfork remembers the music's immediate impact: "It's the sort of gem you felt inclined to pass around” — and by year-end list time, word-of-mouth intensified. It was Resident Advisor and Juno's mix of the year, and earned a top-ten placement in FACT Magazine's albums list, as well as Philip Sherburne's personal rundown for Spin." Since then, select songs from 100% GALCHER have seen small-run pressings, while the album has lived primarily on SoundCloud and YouTube as a low-key cult legend. The gateway into Lustwerk's now well-established catalog, known for its reliability as a late-night listen and its prophetic vision for the near future of underground dance music. RA would later name it a mix of the decade, citing its influence and imagination: “Original in every sense — unknown, unheard and unbelievably good.” In late 2022, marking ten years since he first recorded the material, Lustwerk returns to Ghostly International to release 100% GALCHER as a remastered limited-edition double LP. Lustwerk is a product of the Midwest. Growing up in Cleveland, he'd tape over his parents’ cassettes and spend hours at his family computer recording loops and designing artwork for the jewel cases of burned CDs. In high school, he turned to Ableton Live and absorbed every ​​electronic music magazine he could find at the local Borders Books store. In excerpts from the 100% GALCHER liner notes, Lustwerk looks back: "My dad drove me to this shop on the westside Bent Crayon, where I would get anything the blogs told you to get + whatever the clerk recommended. CDs stayed in their packaging, there was always an overflow of vinyl stacked on the floor. I was too shy to listen to anything before buying." As a college student at RISD, he played in noise bands, plugged into Providence's DIY scene via Myspace, and started DJing weeknights at bars downtown. There he connected with Young Male and DJ Richard, who would go on to found White Material Records and offer their third release to Galcher Lustwerk, an alias realized via CAPTCHA test, a perfect artifact of its internet age. By 2012, Lustwerk had drifted to New York City and settled into a graphic design job, quickly growing disenfranchised by office culture. "Some days I felt like a token, other days I felt invisible." At night, he and his friends were carving out their own space, throwing parties in small basements, office buildings, and off-beat karaoke bars in Manhattan, influenced by series such as Mr. Sunday Night in Gowanus and The Bunker at Public Assembly. The lifestyle started to bleed into Lustwerk's musical vision. He remembers the night it clicked in Providence, partying and listening to tunes with Morgan Louis and Alvin Aronson. He went back to New York and pieced together his bedroom setup: a Dave Smith Tempest drum machine, a Waldorf Blofeld synthesizer, and a TEAC cassette recorder. The first sessions were loose. “I wanted to feel like you were tripping, maybe having a bit of heatstroke, or dehydration. Your body feels detached, your jaw clenched. People become furniture. Light becomes the main character, surfaces show their age in real-time. Wabi-sabi shit.” Early snippets went straight to SoundCloud, where Lustwerk tested the crowd. "I was able to generate moods quickly now, a pad crying like a dozen detuned french horns. Frequency dithering towards red. An 808 comes to the forefront." Comments and messages offered instant feedback. One DM proved to be the greenlight: from Matthew Kent, an invitation to his burgeoning mix series Blowing Up The Workshop. "In his straightforwardness + my willingness at the time to take the opportunity for what it's worth, I decided to go for broke and finish a lil mix, sort of like a rap mixtape you'd find off Datpiff.com." 100% GALCHER traveled fast and far. A phenomenon he could only enjoy for a short period before discovering that nearly all the masters of the tracks got wiped by water damage to his computer. "The only copies were now on the 192kbs mp3 mix I sent Matt." Until now, after Lustwerk revived the lost tracks and handed them to Josh Bonati for remastering. "The original mix was never mastered so I hope older fans can find something new here." Hearing the enhanced set for the first time delineated by tracklist reveals this was a proper album all along. Sly synth interludes (all titled "Stem") clear the air for raspy house anthems like “Fifty” and "Parlay," the set's original breakout. Themes present across Lustwerk's catalog first materialize in this iconic run — the link between the meditative state of Midwest driving and the solitary comedowns of nightlife. Lustwerk, the narrator, is an elusive character, a secret agent of the club, embodied by the hooks: "One minute I'm on / next minute I'm gone," he reminds us on cult-favorite "Put On." These narcotic, one-line refrains stick with you; look no further than the original YouTube upload of "Kaint" to know that fans can’t let these phrases go. While recorded alone, 100% GALCHER was a collective moment. A decade later, Lustwerk sees the legacy as shared: "Making music can be an alienating experience, especially for DJs who travel a lot, it's all super isolating. It's easy to express loneliness in the music itself, but when it comes down to getting things done, putting music out, you def should go on that journey w other people, friends, or maybe just a group of people online, build things with your friends then they can build to help you." 100% GALCHER was by all accounts a game-changer when it landed in 2013 as an hour of original music from a relatively unknown producer ushered in by the beloved mix series Blowing Up The Workshop. Galcher Lustwerk's signature sound — a smoky stream-of-consciousness baritone shadow-boxing with beats, informed by funk, rap, rhythm, and blues — felt like an epiphany, impossibly hypnotic and complete. Resident Advisor writes, "100% GALCHER laid out a louche, lysergic and resolutely black take on deep house." Pitchfork remembers the music's immediate impact: "It's the sort of gem you felt inclined to pass around” — and by year-end list time, word-of-mouth intensified. It was Resident Advisor and Juno's mix of the year, and earned a top-ten placement in FACT Magazine's albums list, as well as Philip Sherburne's personal rundown for Spin." Since then, select songs from 100% GALCHER have seen small-run pressings, while the album has lived primarily on SoundCloud and YouTube as a low-key cult legend. The gateway into Lustwerk's now well-established catalog, known for its reliability as a late-night listen and its prophetic vision for the near future of underground dance music. RA would later name it a mix of the decade, citing its influence and imagination: “Original in every sense — unknown, unheard and unbelievably good.” In late 2022, marking ten years since he first recorded the material, Lustwerk returns to Ghostly International to release 100% GALCHER as a remastered limited-edition double LP. Lustwerk is a product of the Midwest. Growing up in Cleveland, he'd tape over his parents’ cassettes and spend hours at his family computer recording loops and designing artwork for the jewel cases of burned CDs. In high school, he turned to Ableton Live and absorbed every ​​electronic music magazine he could find at the local Borders Books store. In excerpts from the 100% GALCHER liner notes, Lustwerk looks back: "My dad drove me to this shop on the westside Bent Crayon, where I would get anything the blogs told you to get + whatever the clerk recommended. CDs stayed in their packaging, there was always an overflow of vinyl stacked on the floor. I was too shy to listen to anything before buying." As a college student at RISD, he played in noise bands, plugged into Providence's DIY scene via Myspace, and started DJing weeknights at bars downtown. There he connected with Young Male and DJ Richard, who would go on to found White Material Records and offer their third release to Galcher Lustwerk, an alias realized via CAPTCHA test, a perfect artifact of its internet age. By 2012, Lustwerk had drifted to New York City and settled into a graphic design job, quickly growing disenfranchised by office culture. "Some days I felt like a token, other days I felt invisible." At night, he and his friends were carving out their own space, throwing parties in small basements, office buildings, and off-beat karaoke bars in Manhattan, influenced by series such as Mr. Sunday Night in Gowanus and The Bunker at Public Assembly. The lifestyle started to bleed into Lustwerk's musical vision. He remembers the night it clicked in Providence, partying and listening to tunes with Morgan Louis and Alvin Aronson. He went back to New York and pieced together his bedroom setup: a Dave Smith Tempest drum machine, a Waldorf Blofeld synthesizer, and a TEAC cassette recorder. The first sessions were loose. “I wanted to feel like you were tripping, maybe having a bit of heatstroke, or dehydration. Your body feels detached, your jaw clenched. People become furniture. Light becomes the main character, surfaces show their age in real-time. Wabi-sabi shit.” Early snippets went straight to SoundCloud, where Lustwerk tested the crowd. "I was able to generate moods quickly now, a pad crying like a dozen detuned french horns. Frequency dithering towards red. An 808 comes to the forefront." Comments and messages offered instant feedback. One DM proved to be the greenlight: from Matthew Kent, an invitation to his burgeoning mix series Blowing Up The Workshop. "In his straightforwardness + my willingness at the time to take the opportunity for what it's worth, I decided to go for broke and finish a lil mix, sort of like a rap mixtape you'd find off Datpiff.com." 100% GALCHER traveled fast and far. A phenomenon he could only enjoy for a short period before discovering that nearly all the masters of the tracks got wiped by water damage to his computer. "The only copies were now on the 192kbs mp3 mix I sent Matt." Until now, after Lustwerk revived the lost tracks and handed them to Josh Bonati for remastering. "The original mix was never mastered so I hope older fans can find something new here." Hearing the enhanced set for the first time delineated by tracklist reveals this was a proper album all along. Sly synth interludes (all titled "Stem") clear the air for raspy house anthems like “Fifty” and "Parlay," the set's original breakout. Themes present across Lustwerk's catalog first materialize in this iconic run — the link between the meditative state of Midwest driving and the solitary comedowns of nightlife. Lustwerk, the narrator, is an elusive character, a secret agent of the club, embodied by the hooks: "One minute I'm on / next minute I'm gone," he reminds us on cult-favorite "Put On." These narcotic, one-line refrains stick with you; look no further than the original YouTube upload of "Kaint" to know that fans can’t let these phrases go. While recorded alone, 100% GALCHER was a collective moment. A decade later, Lustwerk sees the legacy as shared: "Making music can be an alienating experience, especially for DJs who travel a lot, it's all super isolating. It's easy to express loneliness in the music itself, but when it comes down to getting things done, putting music out, you def should go on that journey w other people, friends, or maybe just a group of people online, build things with your friends then they can build to help you."

Kumachan Seal: solo project of Japanese vocalist/keyboardist/songwriter Sairi Ojima, who has been playing in numerous indie bands, including Neco Nemuru, since her teens. She began her solo career in 2013, and released her first cassette in 2017. This EM Records release is her first CD/LP album, with all compositions by Ojima, who co-produced the album. Each of the eleven songs reveals beguiling layers of detailed and surprising sounds, with Ojima’s DIY sonic core embroidered by vibrant and colorful beats and guitar from EM artist Le Makeup and the quintessential ambient-pop synths and keyboards of fellow EM-er Takao. Le Makeup mixed ten of the eleven songs, with Takao mixing “China Sandwich”. The heart of Ojima’s musical identity is her clear, aqueous voice; apart from one instrumental, all the tracks here feature that mellifluous voice, but in an interesting twist, only half the songs have lyrics, with the remainder employing her wordless voice as melodic and textural elements. Although Kumachan Seal can be heard as a sort of bedroom pop filtered through ambient music and the new-age revival, listeners will note that the final two songs, “Atsumono” and “Tiny Cell”, are respectively a slightly skewed four-on-the-floor track and a lightly skanking Doo-wop-flavored confection, slightly reminiscent of the UK’s Brenda Ray. 
This album, full of Ojima’s calm and cool observation of the world, is available on CD, LP and DL, and includes an English lyric sheet. 

A unique dialogue between the electronic textures of Saint Abdullah with the live drums of Jason Nazary (Anteloper).

Saint Abdullah consists of Tehran-born brothers Mohammad and Mehdi Mehrabani-Yeganeh, who have been exploring a diverse palette of sounds over their releases to date, including collaborations with Eomac on Nicolas Jaar’s Other People label, and Model Home on Purple Tape Pedigree, as well as their own duo album on Important Records.

Jason Nazary is a drummer and composer from Atlanta and based in Brooklyn. Fascinated by the intersection of acoustic and electronic music, Jason has been a force in New York's creative music scene for over a decade. As well as his own solo work he also co-leads a number of ensembles, among them the dystopian electro noise duo Clebs with singer Emilie Weibel, and until recently Anteloper (International Anthem), an improvising modular beat shredding duo with the much-missed Jaimie Branch.

Yeah the pace with this lot is relentless and the vibes are loose as fuck, this time finding Michael J Blood & Sockethead in duo mode, feeding screwed street soul and emotional jams into the blunted, early-hours. This is actually their debut merger, following trio actions with Rat Heart on a couple of ace ‘True’ volumes in recent years. On ‘Eating Late’ MJB pulls Sockethead away from his wildest inclinations and into a deliriously stoned dimension, where gloopy synths and restless subs tumble in and out of time, ample levels of smudged, nostalgic romance included. Plotted for slow-release thru the night, the album starts with bleary-eyed immersion therapy ‘aaa(a)’ on a sort a tip between classic Move D/Reagenz and some Frictional slow jam, before nimbly proceeding into R&G sampler ‘Try to Keep’ and the delicately jazzy deep house ‘Blown Out’. The tart darkwave of ‘Breathe Properly’ and Sockethead’s peal on ‘Heat Of U’ are perhaps best enjoyed like Wambsgans eating a songbird, napkin over the noggin, while echoes of Gescom’s fractal Disengage flex on ‘Recto-Verso’ and ‘Swamptrix’ give up one of the most satisfying sessions in either artist’s run over the last few years. Collect them all eh?

Tenderly propelling and full of haunting melodies: Studio Mule re-issues Sakura Tsuruta’s so far digital only, self-released debut album “c / o” from november 2022. An evocative first long player by Tokyo based artist, who was trained in classical piano during childhood, played with brass instruments, studied music production, and is today active as a composer, live performer, and versatile dj. With “c / o” she expressed her personal history in a fluid, around 43-minute long light flooded, yet dark-ish musical vision. eight profoundly composed tracks, melding complex rhythms with emotional airs, tripping arpeggios, and ghostly sounds, slightly influenced by some of her fa-vorite artist like björk, holly herndon, or kaitlyn aurelia smith. “c / o is a love letter for the experiences, people, and memories i had in the last two years that i spent producing this album. i also like that the letter “c” looks like an incomplete circle, whereas the letter “o” is a full circle.

Sacramento, CA duo Blank Gloss’s third album, Cornered, is an exquisite statement of pop ambient starkness, an album that oscillates between lush beauty and spare melancholy. It follows from their 2021 debut for Kompakt, Melt, an album that saw Morgan Fox (piano, synths) and Patrick Hills (guitar) aligned, loosely, with the cosmic pastorale of the ‘ambient Americana’ movement. Cornered feels like a significant step forward, though – by peeling back the layers of their music, they’ve revealed both its restful core and its solemn gravitas. It is unendingly lovely, but with something disquieting at its centre. Cornered was recorded quickly, over two days in December 2020. There’s nothing rushed or haphazard about the album, though; everything has its place, with each sonic element contributing profoundly to these nine miniature dioramas. It signals change, quietly but perceptibly, through the way the duo sculpts their material, building out of loose improvisations that morphed into songs. While there was no plan in mind when Blank Gloss settled into the studio, Fox recalls that “right away we realised that things were sounding and feeling a bit different than any of the sessions we had previously.” That difference can be heard in the increased amount of space Blank Gloss gift to their sound sources. Some of the most moving moments on Cornered come when Fox and Hills strip everything back – see, for example, “Crossing”, which sets pensive piano across a shyly humming drone and quiet arcs of guitar, recalling the driftworks of Roger Eno. Curiously, the album’s distinctive shape and mood develops, at least in part, from a change in instrumentation, with Hills using a MIDI pick-up on his guitar. “This resulted in making things happen a lot quicker,” Fox says. “It also helped create what I think is a bit more sombre, dark feeling to some of the songs.” Elsewhere, on songs like “Salt”, the piano tussles with flecks of guitar, single tones sent out to mingle with the stars, like Morricone at 16 RPM, while Cornered’s centrepiece, the eleven-minute “No Appetite”, lets long arcs of electronic texture breathe and sigh, tangling together in a cat’s cradle of bliss. Throughout, it feels as though the music is blossoming as you hear it, like watching time-lapse footage of flora in bloom. But perhaps the most seductive thing about Cornered is the sense you get, listening, that the music was something unexpected, a visitation. “It almost felt like we weren’t dictating where the music went and how it sounded,” Fox agrees. “We were just there in a room together in December and these sounds were happening, and we were lucky enough to be recording the process.”

Time bends for Imaginary Softwoods, the solo guise of producer, songwriter, and synthesist John Elliott. Though he’s working on new recordings daily, Elliott’s process for the construction of his albums moves at a much different interval, stretching out over months of considerate listening, revision, and waiting patiently for the right combinations and clashes of elemental forces to materialise on their own. The Notional Pastures of Imaginary Softwoods continues Elliott’s practice of zeroing in on what he wants to say with an album over the course of countless sessions that span multiple years, this time paying even more attention to locating the emotional through-line that connects the various pieces. The eleven-piece album vibrates at a low, unbroken cycle through all of its articulations. The bubbling neon dots of “North of Roswell,” double vision stumble of “Mr. Big Volume,” underwater music box trickle of “Portable Void,” and clear headed Arctic daybreak drones of “Diagram of the Universe” are all linked by a gentle, fluid hum. The brief moments of anxiety and long stretches of calm both feed back into the same center of gravity, becoming conjoined reflections of one another as they cycle through. After bending to find this specific universal frequency, time evaporates altogether, and longer zones like the glimmering “Almond Branch” become indistinguishable from Elliott’s signature miniatures, some of which stick around for less than a minute. The Notional Pastures of Imaginary Softwoods is a document of the universe as we comprehend it, designed to vanish as soon as it is felt.

Síntomas de techno : Ondas electrónicas subterráneas desde Perú (1985​-​1991) Symptoms of techno: Underground electronic waves from Peru (1985-1991) This compilation presents for the first time various underground techno groups and projects that emerged in Lima in the mid-1980s. Projects such as Disidentes, Paisaje Electrónico, T de Cobre, Meine Katze Und Ich, El Sueño de Alí, Cuerpos del Deseo, Círculo Interior, Ensamble and Reacción were responsible for introducing styles such as techno-pop, EBM, industrial and minimal synth in Peru. Coinciding with the explosion of punk in Lima and the appearance of the so-called Rock Subterráneo [underground rock], these techno groups shared the same DIY spirit, performing in many punk concerts and even creating their own fanzines, and, above all, opening a space for other types of sonic experiences. Meine Katze Und Ich, El Sueño de Alí and Paisaje Electrónico were also the parallel projects of the members of Narcosis, the iconic punk band, one of the founders of Rock Subterráneo. Disidentes and T de Cobre brought extreme sounds to local electronics: viscerality, mechanical rhythms and the use of Casiotones or synthesizers, which resulted in an atypical sound that, in turn, portrayed a critical time in Peru, and which has made them an unavoidable reference for any historical account of techno and industrial music in Latin America. The title of this compilation is inspired by the name of a concert held in Lima in 1991, considered to be the first techno concert to have taken place in Peru. Even though not all intervening groups were doing techno at that time, they did share the fact that they all used keyboards. Four of them, however (Cuerpos del Deseo, Ensamble, Círculo Interior and Reacción), were in fact affiliated to an electronic sound (techno-pop, EBM). The concert was a sign of the diversification of musical styles in Lima's alternative scene, and in particular of the emergence of a micro scene, for which the concert Síntomas de techno [Symptoms of Techno] represented an important step towards the development of a local culture of electronic music during the 90s. Many of the recordings included here are extracted from demos with limited circulation, practically impossible to find. Other tracks are unpublished pieces which come from the private archives of the artists themselves. The compilation has been made by Luis Alvarado and is part of the Essential Sounds Collection, with which Buh Records is making available a vast archive of avant-garde Peruvian music. This compilation is published in vinyl format in a limited edition of 300 copies, with extensive information and visual documentation. Mastered by Alberto Cendra. Art by René Sánchez. Cover photography by Rogelio Martell. This project was awarded with funding from the Economic Stimuli program of the Peruvian Ministry of Culture.

Let yourself go with the overwhelming musical output of Argentina’s very own Melopea Discos, in a selection of songs that explore fusion with an air of mystery and a side of exquisite sensitivity across 11 carefully curated leftfield synth pop, experimental folk and ambient tracks. “Viento Sur” has been compiled by Argentine DJs and collectors Bárbara Salazar and Alejandro Cohen (dublab) based in Buenos Aires and Los Angeles respectively. Most of the songs are reissued here for the first time and many of them were previously unavailable on vinyl. Includes a 4-page insert with liner notes and photos. Remastered sound.

unification of techno and dub reggae. An outstanding universal masterpiece of sound dub/minimal techno released in 1995 as M-Series by German Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel, repressed in 2023.

unification of techno and dub reggae. An outstanding universal masterpiece of sound dub/minimal techno released in 1995 as M-Series by German Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel, repressed in 2023.