MUSIC
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Welsh musician Aisha Vaughan presents The Gate. It is upon us to renew the deep-cut, heavy-weighted melancholy of Celtic New Age for 2024. New Age music from the Celtic/British Isles crossed over into the mainstream in the late 80s - notably with Enya (and her band Clannad), the perhaps now lesser-known instrumental Celtic harp music of Patrick Ball, and the slew of now mostly forgotten various artist compilations that saturated the New Age CD and cassette music market in the early 90s.
The Gate earnestly gives reverence to the landscape that she calls home (as cinematically portrayed consistently in Vaughan’s self-shot videos via her social media). Now living in converted barn in mid-Wales, Vaughan writes and records her music to red kites and eagles hunting in the mountains outside her windows. The notably welcomed layers of ASMR sound design and computer music production supplement the main instrument here - her voice - woven within campfire crackle, wind chime, cricket, bird, harp, flute, synthesizer pad & sfx, and new moon wolf howl to channel celestial guides conjured from her remote homeland.
Using composition as catharsis stemming from a traumatic upbringing where music was banned in her childhood household, and the inherent occult history that surrounds the art form, Vaughan does not shy away from precisely stewarding this particular - often still-overlooked - musical tradition through her generation’s ambient lens.
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いざ、第4の扉へ。自国のソウル、ゴスペル、ファンクにとどまらず、ニューエイジ・ミュージック始祖ヤソスや日本からは原マスミまで、世界各地のオブスキュアなサウンドを掘り起こしてきた米国の大名門であり、コンピに定評のある〈Numero〉から新物件！ニューエイジ・ミュージック始祖の1人IasosやLaraaji、Joanna Brouk、Don Slepian、Master Wilburn Burchetteといったレジェンドが残した傑作曲を一挙特集した、「Private Issue New Age (PINA)」の世界への、新たな入門盤的コンピレーション・アルバム『Bliss Out For Days』が登場！シアトルの〈Light in the Attic〉が手掛けた自主盤ニューエイジ・コンピ金字塔『I Am The Center』と是非セットで聴きたい内容！静かに漂う弦楽器や、くすんだ録音の、しかし美しいピアノがアンビエンスの宇宙として広がる、極上の逸品！オールドスタイルなチップオンジャケット仕様。32ページのブックレットが付属。
When electronic pioneers, Coldcut, dropped their groundbreaking Journeys by DJ mixtape in 1995, one of its standout moments came towards the very end of the mix. Amidst the era’s finest beat-makers and electronic visionaries, the DJ duo teased a hypnotic, looping double bass line, followed by haunting sax, thunderous drums, and guitar, before seamlessly blending into the Radiophonic Workshop's Doctor Who Theme. That earworm bass line? It’s the signature sound of Red Snapper’s Hot Flush, forever etched in the listener’s brain.
Fast forward 30 years, and Red Snapper is reissuing their Reeled & Skinned compilation on Warp. The collection includes Hot Flush in both its original form and the remix by Andrew Weatherall’s Sabres of Paradise. It brings together the trio's self-released early EPs from ’94 and ’95, a time when they quickly gained a reputation on the London live scene, captivating jazz, hip-hop, and dance heads alike.
Now, Reeled & Skinned is available on vinyl again for the first time in decades, remastered and featuring an additional track, Area 51, recorded during the same period.
An eclectic compilation album celebrating twenty ‘tips of the tongue’ from David Keenan, released to coincide with a book of his collected music writing.
As well as being the title of a book. Volcanic Tongue was a record shop that existed in Glasgow from 2005 to 2015, run by David Keenan and Heather Leigh, it championed contemporary DIY music from around the world, often released in tiny runs on homemade CD-Rs, and also sought to shine a light on forgotten artists from the past, who had often released their music as a ‘private press’ LP. The shop was also known for it’s weekly mailing list, with Keenan enthusiastically rapping about new arrivals, especially the record of the week, given the sobriquet ‘tip of the tongue’. This collection has been put together from releases that were a ‘tip of the tongue’, containing music that runs the gamut from outsider synth to psych-folk to damaged rock’n’roll, with tracks recorded between 1968 and 2013, a celebration of a vibrant and eclectic underground avant-garde.
Printed inner sleeves with original notes on each artist by David Keenan, housed in a sleeve designed by Julian House.
The Smile have today announced two new remixes of tracks from their critically acclaimed third album CUTOUTS, from James Holden and Robert Stillman.
The remixes will also be released as a limited edition AA side 12-inch on 28th March. Stanley Donwood’s sleeve design pays tribute to XL Recordings’ signature housebag series
New age for the suburban city, spun from a poor planting in the suburbs or from an apartment room along the national highway. "Suiyu" is the first album by Hajime Orikawa, a musician living in Chiba.
From side A, which is composed of home recordings and environmental sounds in a room at home, and contains a lo-fi yet theological resonance, to the title track "Suiyu" which exceeds 15 minutes and where various instruments such as autoharp, electronic piano, Moog synthesizer, organ, and tenor saxophone beautifully blend with a free-spirited singing voice like a wild rabbit running through the fields, the melancholy of the suburban city floats gently.
The cassette version includes a DL code for “Ikkojiteki,” a collection of outtracks, along with a DL code for "Suiyu".
Picking up where "Máquina de Vénus" (Blacksea Não Maya) left off, this is now near 100% DJ Kolt at the controls. Slow, grinding power tools working their way across the complex web of ideas the producer lays down. Truly a next level thing, taking elements from recognized styles such as tarraxo, EDM, even trap, bending their accepted signifiers to suit his own creative mind instead of the crowd pleasing monster that constantly haunts Dance Music. Here we find a wonderful, twisted approach to the dancefloor, one heavy on brain activity, fantastically moody, showcasing music that we long ago quit trying to define.
"Despertar" (again) changes the game, adding secret doors and pathways previously unheard and unthought of. This right here is the mark of a unique producer. You'll have a hard time trying to compare Kolt with any other artist on Príncipe, much less on the outside world. A keen sense of groove filters through all tracks, the dance is never forgotten but you know there are certain demands - you can't just expect a straight line to "a good night out", there's an effort required, you'll have to reach out as well so you can let loose and connect with the universal Master Plan.
The album is all made up of liquid transitions as much as rock-hard foundations, perfectly capable of being explicit when honouring the roots but so committed to a new stance that one may feel thrown off balance by the sheer genius of the compositions. High art with a deep low end.
Kind Regards is the second duo release from guitarist Oren Ambarchi and drummer Eric Thielemans, out via AD 93 on the 21st February 2025.
The record captures an expansive performance in Poitiers, France in November 2023. First working together in an unpredictable trio with minimalist legend and eccentric extraordinaire Charlemagne Palestine, Ambarchi and Thielemans quickly established a remarkable musical chemistry that led to an ongoing series of duo concerts, including the performance documented on their LP Double Consciousness (Matière Mémorie, 2023).
Kind Regards finds the duo refining their shared language while continuing to take risks, allowing the music’s gravitational pull to lead them from meditative calm to unexpectedly expressive passages of melodic invention and rhythmic drive. Recorded in sparkling fidelity and carefully mixed by Ambarchi’s longtime collaborator Joe Talia, the LP contains a single unbroken performance, stretching out for over 45 minutes. Guitar and drums weave together into a symbiotic whole that nevertheless affords us ample opportunity to marvel at the highly personal approaches these two musicians have developed to their chosen instruments through decades of diverse collaboration and prolific performance.
The set begins with Thielemans’ hypnotic tom patterns, around which Ambarchi’s wavering, shimmering guitar tones—achieved with the help of the rotating speaker of a Leslie cabinet—flurry and swirl. Thielemans’ drums play subtle tricks with time and perception, adding and dropping beats within repeated patterns to create an effect at once rhythmically insistent and liquified. Growing at first into a rapidly pulsing texture of brushed drums and flickering harmonics, the music builds momentum into an irregular groove over which Ambarchi’s guitar is transformed into haunting, monumental electric organ chords, strikingly recalling the Wurlitzer work of Alice Coltrane, before settling into a section of gentle portamento melody embedded into the tactile clicks and clangs of Thielemans’ percussion.
When Thielemans adopts a more traditional jazz approach to the kit in some of the set’s second half, the results are stunning, demonstrating a feel for shifting accents and sensibility to the touch of the stick on the drum or cymbal that recalls greats like Jack De Johnette or Billy Hart (one of Thielemans’ mentors). And when Ambarchi turns up the heat, he does so in an unexpected and delightful way, letting loose a swarm of jittering delayed tones straight out of Henry Kaiser’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life, with a more active use of the guitar’s fretboard than his usual approach to the instrument allows. As the performance draws to a close after a climactic episode of distorted harmonic groans and crashing cymbals that manages to be at once thunderous and carefully attuned to detail, it is clearer than ever that, for these two serial collaborators, this is a very special pairing.
Kind Regards shows us the kind of magic that can happen when two masters who have dedicated decades to reimagining their instruments simply begin to play, following the music wherever it goes.
Alabaster DePlume often asks a simple question: what do people need? In his work, at his shows, in his collaborations, the Mancunian singer-saxophonist and poet-philosopher poses this to the people around him. What are people looking for? In recent years, the same reply kept coming up: healing, healing, people need healing. But why, and what does it mean to heal, especially in a world where the very idea is often commodified and sold as a luxury? If people were coming to his music for something so mysterious, he ought to figure it out. Maybe he ought to try some healing himself.
“For a long time, I've always tried to give responsibility for my value to someone else,” DePlume told me on a recent phone call. It seemed he’d become so caught up in the work of forging connections, and thinking about the effects of his work on others, that he’d lost a sense of himself. “I was working on that,” he explained.
This experiment in healing included slowing down, reading, reflecting, and even taking up the practice of jiu-jitsu. DePlume wrote poetry, too, including the book 'Looking for my value: prologue to a blade', seventy pages of verse rooted in its title’s great search, in finding strength of self within a community, alongside meditations on the paradox of the blade. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in the introduction. “Healing is the forming of a whole, and a whole is singular, more itself, as in more one, as in more alone.” A blade could be used to attack, to shave, to sever, but it could also be used to cut oneself loose—in the process of getting free.
“What's the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep,” he told me. “And so what's the opposite of looking for my value? It is knowing my value. It simply is there. My dignity is there. I don't need anyone else to know my dignity, or me, to know it. I know it first. I can't seek it from another. I stand for it.”
Selections from the poetry book ultimately became the lyrics across half of the tracks on 'A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole', DePlume’s latest full-length work for the reliably great International Anthem label: eleven songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism. In sum, it documents his learning of the fact that dignity and self-determination are prerequisites for becoming whole, which is to say, for healing. If a blade were broken it would not serve its purpose; it must be unbroken, it must be whole, to be of use.
In the Alabaster DePlume songbook, the celestial ease of his instrumental tracks can sometimes feel like a trojan horse for a voice that is disarmingly honest about the heaviness of existence. Opener “Oh My Actual Days” is true to form in that sense, with DePlume’s tenor sax and Macie Stewart’s ghostly strings playing together like a slow march towards an inner reckoning, one that’s beautiful because it is true. The punchy and contemplative “Thank You My Pain” makes a rhythmic refrain from his titular lyric, inspired by the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, who urged the importance of listening to one’s own pain. “Hello my little pain, I know you are here,” Nhất Hạnh would say. “I am home to take care of you. I do not want to cover you up with consumption anymore.” While writing A Blade, DePlume “watched loads of him on YouTube.”
Then there’s the gorgeous swell of “Invincibility,” an ode to self-respect that feels a bit like a choir of angels led by a trickster, a group contemplating: how do we live with the forces that seek to destroy us? The whole song feels like a heavy exhale, or like the feeling of reaching the surface after a long while underwater. “If I meet with my feelings, they cannot destroy me,” he told me. “When I allow myself to embody them, physically, then I live through that feeling and I meet with it and I make peace with it and I find that my feeling is me, and I welcome it. It is a sense that I cannot be destroyed by my feeling. I am invincible.”
“Form a V” is the closest DePlume comes to a monologue, and also his song most indebted to his jiu-jitsu practice. “I’ve only been doing it for the past two or three years,” he told me. “But now I don’t know how you get by without it.” The song takes inspiration from a tradition where a whole dojo will stand in the shape of a V, facing just one lone individual, who is then attacked quickly and repeatedly by each of the others. “The title is a challenge to the world,” DePlume explained. “Go on, form a v—I am ready.”
Across the first half of the record, when the sax comes in short phrases, it feels like a highlighter over lines in DePlume’s poetry book. Other times, it plays out like an extension of his voice. “Playing the saxophone feels like singing,” he said. A transfixing run of instrumentals on the second half of the record includes “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity,” an anthem for self-possession. “Believing in yourself feels ridiculous,” he says. “It's ridiculous, but that's what it takes. That's what's required. To stand for yourself is absurd. Let us do the absurd that is standing for ourselves. There is this prayer going on in the background—you can't quite tell what the words are, but it's basically, I'm praying for my sovereign dignity but I don't need to pray for it. It's not going to be given to me. I already have it.”
Where DePlume’s previous material was drawn from collective sessions, improvisation, and editing, A Blade was tightly composed, arranged and produced by DePlume himself. From there, he brought his compositions to a cast of players and co-arrangers, including Macie Stewart (strings), Donna Thompson (backing vocals), and Momoko Gill (strings and backing vocals), for sessions at the collective arts space Total Refreshment Centre, where he has long been involved.
Born Gus Fairbairn, DePlume is a man of many past lives. He played “rock band type music” as a teenager, and started playing improvised music around 2008. He is compelled by how improvising allows him to “put faith in others.” He taught himself the saxophone around the time that he became employed as a support worker assisting men with mental disabilities; he once called playing music with them “one of the best breakthroughs for me as an artist.” His debut as Alabaster DePlume came in May 2012, while he was still living in Manchester. He moved to London in 2015 and took up residency at Total Refreshment Centre, where he was encouraged to put on a monthly concert, leading to the series Peach, releasing a namesake album that year, too. His music, from the start, has been imbued with his politics and values; he was maybe arrested once during a protest with the environmental group Extinction Rebellion. His proper international breakthrough came in 2020 with 'To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1', after nearly a decade of steadily releasing records.
On a phone call in the fall of 2024, we barely speak about any of this though. For at least an hour, we mostly just speak about his recent trip to Palestine, and how could we not? DePlume had traveled to Bethlehem in the spring for a conference hosted by a local Lutheran pastor, before meeting up with musicians from a community arts space, the Wonder Cabinet, and the independent radio station, Radio Alhara. “Palestine is a place where people make records,” he says. “I want to normalize the dignity of that. It's not like, oh, I'm going to make a thing about Palestine. I am just there, and I'm making a thing.”
At the end of 2024, DePlume prefaced A Blade with a collection of recent works: the poetry book and a three-track EP partially recorded in Bethlehem, and in collaboration with Palestinian musicians. There’s “Honeycomb” and “Cremisan,” both recorded during his “Sounds of Places” residency at Wonder Cabinet; “Cremisan” documents the conclusion of a daylong performance presented by Wonder Cabinet and Radio alHara, June 1, 2024, described as “a cry from the Cremisan Valley (Bethlehem, Palestine) to Rafah (Gaza).” The EP’s final recording, “Gifts of Olive,” references the soul-wrenching poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023.
To suggest that dignity is a human right we are all entitled to is to say: by nature of being alive, every human life has worth. Contemplating the very concept of human dignity also raises the daily indignities that are so normalized in a world of suffering. The lack of access to clean water, air, housing, healthcare. Without the basic necessities of life, we cannot know dignity. And how can people know dignity if they are living under a constant state of military attack, if they are living as the target of a genocide?
“The album was written before the genocide started, but I had Palestine on my mind all the time,” DePlume explains. “This question of dignity, sovereignty, and the work of healing. It has a relevance in what's being perpetrated there by the Israeli state, and taking responsibility for my place in that. I pay my taxes here in the United Kingdom—I am contributing to, as a white Englishman, the country that brought the Balfour Declaration, that brought the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that supports and enables the colonization and the settler-colonial project in Palestine. It is my issue, and I have a position where I can speak about it.”
“Dignity” has roots in the Latin dignitatem: worthiness. And instilling the plain truth of every human life’s worth has been a recurring commitment in DePlume’s work. “They can’t use us on one another if we don’t forget we’re precious,” he sang in 2022, summing the emotional core of his 2022 album 'GOLD', concerns of shared humanity that play out into the new works as well.
“We make stories in our lives,” DePlume says. “Oh, I need my story. Oh, something bad happened, and I need to heal upon that. Then I will be healed and all will be good, happily ever after. But no, it is work that needs doing all the time. We all are wounded in our many different ways. And there are degrees of healed, or wounded. Basically, we are either doing one thing or we're doing the other. How do I know I am not destroying myself? I only know that when I am working on healing.”
After crafting an all-timer with 2008's 'Hazyville', Actress set his sights on the unknown with a futureshock debut for Honest Jon's.
Wheras it's predecessor was composed over a staggered period of many years, Splazsh was fashioned in a fraction of that time, lending a tangible symmetry between shapeshifting tracks that defined and propelled the era. Of the 14 tracks, we'd previously encountered the first two, with the unstable space float of 'Hubble' appearing on a shady Thriller 12" and his remix of Various Production's 'Lost' reminding us that there are some deep cuts in the Cunningham discography.
From here in it's all about that longing, sealing the airlock and initiating pressure sequence with 'Futureproofing', before laying down 'Always Human' - can u even remember a time you didnt know this one? Showing resistance towards any categorisation, 'Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)' swerves down a side street into a footwurkin' face-off by sliding to a mutilated mix of Jon E Cash and Chez Damier played underwater. Next we hit the erogenous interzone of 'Maze' and that incapacitatingly lush bassline designed to lock into your central nervous system and send shockwaves of piloerection to every fucking corner of your soul.
After that, we're cynically dumped into the Ferraro-esque Prince tribute 'Purple Splazsh', and on into the Detroit ghetto stalk of 'Let's Fly'. The dissonant robo-crunk of 'The Kettle Men' and closing entry 'Casanova' confirm that if anything, Actress only suffers from a surfeit of ideas. Proof, if it were needed, that there is a sprawling future beyond the stasis of so much contemporary electronic music.
Spangled 2-step swivel, hyperkinetic techno and restless ambient by Doc Sleep & Delta Rain Dance’s Beats Unlimited duo out of Berlin
Beats Unlimited put forth their 2nd effort on Hypno Discs, run by Glenn Astro aka Delta Rain Dance, urging bodies in motion from the air-filleting swing and parry of ‘Virta Chords’ with its butterfly-winged 2-step and fluttering jazz notes, to the fast-FWD hyper footwork rush of a ’Speed Dub’ recalling Sasu Ripatti’s Dance Classics experiments, and finally easing off into the the sound bathing, eye-fluttering ambient of ‘Transition Env’.
A controversial work, an innovative work that shifted to electronica sound rather than approaching Aphex Twin and Autechre. Includes "Everything in its Right Place", "Idiotech" and others.
One of the very best ever Tribal Ambient Dub albums, originally released on the famous Australian Extreme label.
Brilliantly new mastered, sounds way better than the original recordings.
Includes bonus songs from other Extreme releases.
For fans of early WARP, Muslimgauze, Future Sound Of London, The Orb, Rapoon and alike.
Clear vinyl is only available in the boxset, the regular vinyl edition is black vinyl.
Laminated cover, printed also on the inside, with OBI.
AKT22 Paul Schütze – The Anihilating Angel LP -> out in January 2025
AKT21 Paul Schütze – Deus Ex Machina 2LP -> out in February 2025
The boxset contains all 3 albums at once!
People believe that the magic of Muslimgauze works best with looong tracks. Think the same? Then "Al-Zulfiquar Shaheed" is exactly for you! 75 minutes of mellow eastern-style hypnotism. Consisting of only five parts, the album shows Bryn's ability to create lengthy and detailed compositions filled with Arabic percussion, droning keyboards, vocal samples and ethereal atmospheres.
A strong rhythmic, yet melodic album, that should be in the collection of every Muslimgauze fan. Definitely one of Bryn's best ever albums
"Citadel" is the fourth album release on EXTREME by this enigmatic Manchester-based group. For over 10 years, Muslimgauze have defined their style as a Western re-contextualisation of traditional Middle Eastern music enhanced by technology to form a post-modern mix of music, politics and culture. Muslimgauze construct the music through ethnic instruments that are a frame for dark and sometimes foreboding aural tapestries that capture the essence and mood of the music of the Middle East and the plight of the Palestinian people.
"Citadel" is an album of exotic Arabic textures where traditional instruments intermesh with technology, found sounds and voices meld with drones and synthesizers. The album uses both eastern and western rhythmic patterns embedded in layers of shifting soundscapes. The title track "Citadel" with incessant tablas piercing through swirling cymbals and a haunting melody. "Dharam Hinduja", where staccato percussion moves to fill the space between pulsing inverted samples, and "Opel" with drones building only to be overpowered by machine-gun rhythms. "Masawi Wife & Child" has a subdued rhythmic undercurrent while "Infidel" stands out with its strident percussion fusing with a myriad of sounds. "Shouf Balek" incorporates traditional strings that interplay with rhythm and voice, and "Beit Nuba" with mesmerizing chants weaving between a persistent drum beat. It all draws to a close with "Ferdowsi" where percussive improvisations rise and fall through a minimal soundscape.
Muslimgauze produce a raga music for the technological post-cyber age. Shifting cultures out of ancient history into the current day, transcending those traditional forms. "Citadel" has a voice of what is now and perhaps what is to come. In these troubled political times, peace through people being unified in harmony whilst maintaining their own strength and cultural identity is a vision to strive towards.
– from the original Extreme press-release
The original tracks were perfectly remastered for this first time ever vinyl release and the new masters received high praise from the Extreme Music owner Roger Richards.
New sleeve designs were created by Oleg Galay, who is famous for his artworks for many Muslimgauze reissues.
All 4 album covers are made from extra heavy cardboard with deluxe spot UV finish and inside print.
Japan exclusive Purple vinyl, Limited 400 copies. Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date.
The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain.
Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album.
Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating."
His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says.
Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider".
Japanese Edition with Obi. Repetition and motorik beats borrowed from Krautrock. A unique work with a noisy and experimental soundscape.
Japanese Edition with Obi. A beloved masterpiece of its time. Produced by John McEntire (Tortoise) and Andy Toma (Mouse on Mars), this is a must-hear album with a diversity unrivaled in its time.
Japanese Edition with Obi. Re-mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane. Includes bonus tracks originally included on Instant 0 In The Universe and a tour single. Including the bonus material this reissue contains everything Stereolab recorded during the sessions for Margerine Eclipse.
