MUSIC

Part 2 of the jungle series, it's another 4-tracker for fuzzy Akai hardware samplers, Technics turntable, analog monosynth bass and wide stretches of polysynths. Built with strictly old-school hardware with a loose groove, it's somewhere to get lost, down those night roads, and early mornings in the sky. Soak it up, and let's let time move a little faster.

Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (2) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (3) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (4) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (5) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (6) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (7) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (8) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (9) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (2) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (3) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (4) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (5) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (6) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (7) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (8) Mystica Tribe & Scopeotaku - MYSTICA TRIBE MEETS SCOPEOTAKU artwork (9) Buying Options CD (Compact Disc) Available Now SPS26126 CD | Release date: 8th October 2026 £14.99 LP (Black Vinyl) Available Now SPS26126 | Release date: 8th October 2026 £25.49 LP (Colour Vinyl) Available Now SPS26126 CV | Release date: 8th October 2026 £30.49 Blue vinyl with hand written insert. Mystica Tribe and Scopeotaku, having formed an international dub alliance, release "Mystica Tribe Meet Scopeotaku" via 13 / Silentes. "Taking their sounds into melodic experimental electronic dub territory. Previously, both have fused their own cultures and personalities into numerous dub releases. Now they are expanding their parameters by collaborating on a project that encompasses both their love for psychedelic and electronic audio combined with heavyweight dub reggae rhythms. Mystica Tribe is the musical alias of Tokyo, Japan based producer Taka Noda. Drawing on a wide range of influences from dub, soul, bass and rhythm & blues. Mystica Tribe has been developing a very distinctive sound that exists in a weird freaked out zone, between dub and techno. Noda is especially interested in deep psychedelic music and this is reflected in his productions. Which are equally suited for late night listening sessions or on bent broken dancefloors. Scopeotaku is the alter ego of Scott Prentice, a Glasgow, Scotland based artist. Scopeotaku has experimented with audio since purchasing a sampler and a four track cassette deck many many moons ago. His love for left-field dub and eccentric sounds have led him to create a variety of output, from industrial ambient, illbent electronics to mutant dub."

アルバムについて Minnets Långa Kedjor by Mats Erlandsson & Gus Loxbo is an intimately crafted musical topos moving through landscape of free improvised music, electroacoustic drone and doom metal according to an inherent dream logic. Their collaboration takes its starting point in a long friendship and a common frame of reference shaped by their upbringing environment in Bergslagen, with the specific moods that a shared past geographical location can give rise to. Through associations and memories - geographical, poetic and imaginary - immediate musical impulses shaped by an interplay that has developed over 25 years were captured instantly. These impulses formed the foundational material for a process of transformation where the music has been amplified, obscured and refined through extensive studio work carried out by Mats Erlandsson in the electroacoustic music tradition using editing and audio transformations through digital processing and analogue tape work. As a composer, musician and sound artist, Mats Erlandsson is part of the vibrantly reemerging field of drone music in Stockholm, Sweden, and is associated with practices characterized by the extensive use of sustained sound. Erlandsson presents his work both as a solo artist and in various collaborations utilizing synthesized and recorded analog and digital sound, contaminated field-recordings and extensive tape processing. Gus Loxbo has had a long career in improvised music primarily as a double bass player both solo and with groups such as Pombo and Silence Blossoms. His solo debut album Trådknaster was recorded by Mats Erlandsson and released in 2021 to much acclaim. The album contained nine solo compositions for double bass with no overdubs presenting the abstract sound of Loxbo’s extended performance techniques and a stark highly amplified light. Mats Erlandsson and Gus Loxbo have been playing music together since before either one of them had any notion of the existence of experimental music, and their musical relationship was fundamental in helping each other transform and extend their respective ideas about what could constitute a valid musical expression. The album Minnets Långa Kedjor is their first recorded work presented in public.

London based Caribbean-Belgian composer, producer, and musician Nala Sinephro steps out on her own with a deeply personal debut album and her first release with Warp Records.

YHWH Nailgun, a New York-based four-piece band that, despite being virtually unknown, left a strong impression on Japanese audiences with their performance at Fuji Rock Festival 2025, has released *Magazine*, their debut album on the prestigious 4AD label.

YHWH Nailgun formed in 2020 around Zach Bolzon (vocals) and Sam Picard (drums). Sagiv Rosenstock (guitar) and Jack Tobias (keyboards) later joined, completing the current four-piece lineup.

Their music is often described using terms like noise, punk, free jazz, industrial, and experimental. However, they do not fully belong to any of these genres. Their sound features violently clashing rhythms, searing guitars, synthesizers that exude an eerie presence, and Zack Bolzon’s vocals, which sound like both a beast’s roar and a prayer. Rather than being a genre-spanning band, YHWH Nailgun has garnered attention as an entity that rejects any attempt to define music itself.

Their debut album, *45 Pounds*, released in 2025, earned high praise from media outlets worldwide for its overwhelming tension and destructive power. It established them as one of the most important new acts in the New York underground scene. Now, with their signing to 4AD—the label home to Cocteau Twins, the Pixies, Bon Iver, and Big Thief—their career is entering a new phase.

*Magazine* is an unusual work: though it contains 10 tracks, its total running time is a mere 11 minutes. However, this 11-minute duration is not merely an experimental idea. The album begins with a fade-in on the opening track, “Ghost of Love,” creating the sensation of having accidentally captured a fragment of sound that seems to be playing continuously somewhere. The band views this work not as a conventional album with a beginning and an end, but rather as a part of an endless musical world.

Their sound is even more refined than on their previous work. Sam Picard’s stripped-down drumming, Sagiv Rosenstock’s raw production, and Jack Tobias’s synthesizers, reminiscent of air raid sirens. And most striking of all is that Zach Bolzon’s vocals—previously hidden behind layers of reverb and delay—are now pushed to the forefront with unprecedented clarity.

The lyrics, filled with religious and symbolic imagery—blood, snakes, gods, and demons—exude a more vivid presence than ever before. The band name YHWH itself derives from the proper name for God in Hebrew, and this mystical worldview is explored even more deeply in *Magazine*.

YHWH Nailgun does not view their music as a reaction against or a counter to anything. Neither pandering to nor rejecting trends, they simply pursue the fleeting flashes of inspiration born of intuition and improvisation. What they are building is not a genre, but an autonomous world in and of itself. *Magazine* is a work that further sharpens this unique creative world and is sure to leave a lasting impression on many listeners.

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.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.

The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.

“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”

The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.

Where will the improvisation take place?

How will that space shape the sounds being made?

How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?

How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?

Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?

For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.

Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.

Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.

Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”

On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.

That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.

In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.

The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.

The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.

“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.

Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.

Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.

And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.

The opening of "Sixtyniner" is ethereal, a perfect example of BoC's unique sound. As with all their albums, Twoism reminds me of a specific time and place. Oh, how I loved getting home from work and zoning out to "Sixtyniner". "Basefree" is another track that always stood out, one of their faster tracks with a more drum and bass style. I've always enjoyed the one-minute section starting at 4:39. One of my most important ambient and electronic music groups, brimming with memories and meaning.

“Kataomoi” is the 1962 debut song by Okinawan folk singer Misako Oshiro, who passed away in 2021.

Written and composed by her mentor, Teihan China (father of Sadao China), this song became Oshiro’s signature piece. Oshiro, who remained an active singer until the very end, continued to cherish and perform this song, nurturing it over the years.

This album features her disciple, Kanako Horiuchi, carrying on the legacy by performing the song.

Japanese edition with Obi. The third part in Jon Hassell’s Pentimento trilogy captures the much-missed artist performing as part of a trio with Rick Cox and John von Seggern in London in 2015, in what would turn out to be his final ever concert. Carefully edited and mixed by Jeff Rona into something much more than a traditional ‘live album’; themes, motifs and riffs from his critically adored albums Listening To Pictures and Seeing Through Sound occur throughout these unique, semi-improvised mutations, making this a fitting final volume in the late career renaissance of the Pentimento series.

LP and CD edition contains a liner note essay by Jon Hassell that inspired the title, whilst the cover utilises Leh C’est Beau, a classic painting by Jon’s close friend Mati Klarwein, familiar to music fans through his striking 1970s album sleeves for the likes of Miles Davis and Santana.

‘Pentimento’ is defined as “the appearance in a painting of earlier images, forms, or strokes that have been changed and painted over”, a methodology that Jon applied in a musical sense throughout his career, refining and developing his approach over time. Alongside the release of Music Is Invisible, Ndeya have also put together a triple disc anthology of all three albums in the series.

In their third collaboration, the shared project between Merzbow and Pedro Vian shifts towards less confrontational and more introspective terrain. Bardo Thödol, released as an LP, draws on The Tibetan Book of the Dead not so much as an explicit narrative framework but as a conceptual resonance: a passage, a suspension between states. Where Inside Richard Serra Sculptures and The Wheel of Mani foregrounded a relatively defined dialectic between Vian’s environmental restraint and Masami Akita’s impulsive, textural excess, that friction here appears to dissolve in favour of a more homogeneous mass. Noise, far from its most abrasive edge, is reconfigured as a continuous field — dense yet permeable. Within this flow, melodic structures emerge without assertion, surfacing almost incidentally as by-products of the accumulation of frequencies itself. The result is less a reconciliation of languages than a blurring of their boundaries: a space in which intensity is internalised and the radical gesture folds into a more sustained, contemplative mode of listening.

Dance Party Album is an extremely early document of dance‑music history, created in 1984 by Z‑Factor, the project of Jesse Saunders and Vince Lawrence, capturing the atmosphere of Chicago house just before its emergence.

Ston Elaióna is John Also Bennett’s first album for Shelter Press since his 2019 solo debut Erg Herbe. The American born, Athens, Greece, based flautist, synthesist, and composer weaves a strikingly singular electroacoustic excursion for bass flute and Yamaha DX7ii, largely recorded in the golden haze of the early morning hours - bending time at the otherworldly juncture of consciousness and place. Translating from Greek as “in the olive grove”, Ston Elaióna is permeated with the ambiences of the ancient and present world, guided into form by a playfully rigorous approach to sound.

Initially emerging during the mid 2000s as part of Columbus, Ohio’s noise scene, before relocating to NYC around 2010, Bennett’s diverse activities picked up an increasing sense of pace over the following decade - performing and recording as a solo artist (JAB), with the trio Forma and with CV & JAB, his prolific duo with his partner Christina Vantzou, as well as playing in Jon Gibson’s ensemble among many other multifaceted collaborations. However, since 2020 the flautist and electroacoustic composer has existed in a semi nomadic state: drifting between Brooklyn, Brussels, extensive tours, and Greece, where he finally came to rest in Athens last year. Drawing upon a carefully honed attentiveness to the environments and experiences of everyday life, Ston Elaióna is a suite of nine pieces (with an additional track exclusive to physical formats), many of them composed and played live as the early morning sun touched the Parthenon, in full view from Bennett’s studio window in Athens. Bennett’s refinement and restraint, honed over his years adrift, led him to adopt a limited palette focused on his primary instrument, the bass flute, and a Yamaha DX7ii synthesizer tuned to just intonation scales. Alongside a handful of other keyboards, digital oscillators triggered by his flute, and occasional field recordings, this simple palette is reflected by the deeply emotive sense of minimalism that permeates the album’s two sides.

Following two solo albums defined by outward facing temperaments - 2022’s Out there in the middle of nowhere (Poole Music), which used a lap steel guitar and generative oscillators to evoke the surreal landscapes of the South Dakota badlands, and the largely synthetic atmospheres of the 2024 anthology Music For Save Rooms 1 & 2 (Editions Basilic) - the shift in Bennett’s worldly circumstances offered an intuitive return to the calm, inward states of creative exploration that have historically defined JAB’s sound. In parallel, context provided clear sources of inspiration for many of the album’s themes, as well as sources for some of its sounds. The aura of Greece, from the ancient to the present, from its stones and olive groves to its traffic, figures heavily across Στον Ελαιώνα (Ston Elaióna)’s two sides.

The album’s title track and opener “Ston Elaiona” is but one key to opening the album’s multilayered worlds: swells of intertwining of bass flute, oscillators, and DX7ii channel feelings of playful contentment felt by Bennett when “in the olive grove” or in his apartment, reflecting quiet moments spent among the ancient hills of the noisy city that he now calls home. Drawing upon chance encounters within daily life, the flowing synthesizer tones of “Gecko Pads” dance in motions that seem to mimic the movements of a house gecko that appeared on a wall of Bennett’s studio - a quick dash, and then stillness - while “Hailstorm” expands this vision of domestic intimacy, playing the rise and fall of bass flute melodies against the captured sounds of an intense storm outside: a potent sonic metaphor for his intra and extra worlds. As the sharpness and depth of Ston Elaióna comes into focus, playfully threaded amongst its seductive tonal interplay, we encounter Bennett moving across dimensions of time, topical experience, and layers of cultural conjunction. Like “Hailstorm”, “Easter Daydream” incorporates field recording, but here his flute tones are joined by urban ambience and subtle punctuations of melody and rhythm, captured from a day long bell procession at the small church across the street from his apartment during Orthodox Holy Week, seeding the composition with a deep sense of immediacy and place that draw consciousness well beyond the limits of sound.

Moving the narrative possibilities further out into the landscape, “A Handful of Olives” utilizes Bennett’s technique of triggering long synthesizer tones with another instrument - in this case, fluctuating modular synth drones underscoring the glacial melodies of his bass flute. Immersive and meditative, the piece’s title nods to the resilience of a character from a Nikos Kazantzakis novel, who begins a long journey across the countryside with nothing but some wine, a piece of cheese, and a handful of olives. “First Lament” is the oldest work on Ston Elaióna, having been performed live by Bennett, in evolving states, for the past three or four years. A strongly affecting exercise in deep listening, meditation, and sometimes emotional catharsis, like “A Handful of Olives” it utilizes his technique of triggering long synthesizer tones with the flute, extending and overlapping resonances to create tone clusters that hang in the air with an otherworldly effect, echoing Bennett’s heartfelt yet restrained melodies of lament.

Tapping a sense of dualism endemic to Greece, where the ancient world continues to occupy the present day, both “Sacred House” and “Oracle” refer to the building that housed the Oracle of Ancient Dodoni in Epirus, where people have continued to seek guidance or assistance from the gods for thousands of years, in modern times by hanging small notes on the tree within its grounds. Unaccompanied pieces composed and played on Bennett’s just intoned synths, each positions haunting, slow paced melodies - imbued with metaphysical and spiritual weight - as bridges that span the millennia and diverse states of the conscious and unconscious mind. With “Seikilos Epitaph”, Bennett takes his immersion into the subcutaneous depths of Ancient Greece one step further. The piece is a version of the oldest known surviving complete musical composition, found notated in Greek on a stone pillar / stele on the site of an ancient village. Played on his DX7ii, and subtly permeated with field recordings of environmental sounds, his brilliant rendering builds bridges between the present and the distant time Bennett calls forth: another key, equal to the title track, to unlocking the album’s lingering depths.

John Also Bennett’s Ston Elaióna forms an elegantly rigorous world of electroacoustic sonority, bridging the expanse of time with the immediacies of environment and happening in the here and now: a profound sonic mediation on the countless dimensions unlocked by life in Greece.

Shutting Down Here is a special work. Symbolically, it covers a period of thirty years, between two visits by Jim O'Rourke to the GRM, the first, as a young man fascinated by the institution and his repertoire, the second, as an accomplished musician, influential and imbued with an aura of mystery. Shutting Down Here is a piece shaped like an universe, a heterogeneous world in which collides the multiple musical facets of Jim O'Rourke: instrumental writing, field recordings, electronic textures and cybernetic becomings, dynamic spaces, harmonic spaces, silent spans . This variety of approach, strangely, does not in any way weaken the coherence of the whole and this is the talent of Jim O'Rourke, a talent, properly speaking, of composition, where all the sound elements compete and participate to stakes that exceed them and of a common destiny, that is to say of an apparition.

Forma by Lucy Railton, is a work that burrows deep inside. It disorientates and teases, without malice. Its beauty lies in gentle projections, which, though subtle, leave deep impressions, like the wings of a nocturnal moth reflecting dark light. Its path, too, is unpredictable, but such disorientation is not a reflection of chaos. Instead, a mysterious intention appears through an imperious unfolding - its logic escapes us, but nevertheless captivates us. It is the story of a becoming of forms, as well as of their fading away and their appearance as a disappearance . Metabolist Meter (Foster, Cottin, Caetani and a Fly), by Max Eilbacher is a teeming piece, a matrix where textures and structures merge together, where the polyrhythmic instances become timbre, where the formal abstraction of the harmonic volutes coagulates around a vibrating form that is actualized in the dramatic reality of a dying fly. And this formal mastery is not disembodied in Max Eilbacher’s work and the kaleidoscopic forms of the sound spectra that he has deployed know how to resonate in the sensations and experiences of each one. These works, each with their own agenda, evolve with grace and inspiration in their exploration of vast sound worlds, and it is with great pride that we present them in the new collection. Released in association with Editions Mego. Coordination GRM: François Bonnet, Jules Négrier 
Executive Production: Peter Rehberg

William Basinski's epochal four-album box of slowly decomposing memories gets its long-overdue deluxe reissue, with liner notes from Laurie Anderson and a fresh mastering job from Josh Bonati.

Undoubtedly one of the greatest "ambient" albums of our era, 'The Disintegration Loops' is an enduring aesthetic touchstone. It didn't exist in a vacuum when it appeared in the early '00s, as the dust settled after 9/11, but Basinski's prescient meditation on decay in the wake of tragedy felt like a musical mark in the sand - a body of work that changed the way we think about repetition and tape saturation. The story goes that the composer, who'd been recording loop-based, minimalist experiments since the '70s, inspired by Brian Eno's 'Discreet Music' and Steve Reich's 'It's Gonna Rain', was going through his archive of reel-to-reel tapes when he realized the ferrite was flaking away from the plastic. Not willing to give up on the material, he recorded the output, letting the tape head destroy his pieces irreparably and adding reverb to the output.

Now, this would have been good enough without the additional context, but Basinski finished 'Disintegration Loops' on the morning of September 11, 2001, and played the first piece to his friends as they sat on the roof of his apartment block, watching agape as events unfolded. He used the footage he shot at the time for the covers of each disc, and the suite's solemn, thoughtful decline served as the unofficial soundtrack of our collective grief, an unfussy reminder of tragedy that plays out its haunted remnants of the past until they die, quite literally. There's been plenty of music that's aped Basinski's method since, and we don't doubt there'll be plenty more, but there's nothing quite like the original, and this latest remaster is the definitive version.

Violostries (1963/64), 16'39

Premiered and recorded in April 1965 at the Royan Festival - France, by Devy Erlih (violin) & Bernard Parmegiani (sound projection).

Violostries represents the intersection of several musical research directions, presented as two simultaneous dialogues - composer/performer and instrument/orchestra.

After a short introduction tutti very spatialized:

1. Pulsion/Miroirs: multiplied by itself, the violin is projected into the four corners of the sound space.

2. Jeu de cellules: concertante piece for violin and audio medium, the latter being made up of very tightly woven microsounds.

3. Végétal: slow and invisible development following a continuous time, resulting from an internal and permanent processing of the matter.

Capture éphémère (1967, 1988 version), 11'48

This work was composed in four tracks in 1967 for quadraphonic diffusion.

Remixed in stereo in 1988.

Premiered at the Studio 105 of the Maison de la Radio, Paris, May 1967.

Sounds - noises that circulate as time unfolds - continue to exist despite our recording them.

Breaths, fluttering wings: ephemeral microsonic sounds streaking space, sound scratches, landslides, bounces, vertigo of solid objects falling into an abyssal void, multiple snapshots forever frozen in their fall. As many symbols leave inside us the permanent trace of their ephemeral brushing against our ear.

Some day, a desert, a sound, then never again....

Somewhere, in my head and body something still resonates... resonance, what could be more ephemeral.

La Roue Ferris (1971), 10'45

Premiered at the Festival des chantiers navals, Menton, on August 26, 1971.

Sound projection: Bernard Parmegiani.

La Roue Ferris (Ferris wheel) spins, merging with its own resonance, stubbornly perpetuating its variations. It only sketches a regularly evolving movement around a constant axis. Each of its towers generates thick sonic layers that penetrate each other, producing a very fluid interweaving. The crackling of the origin eventually metamorphoses into sonic threads whose lightness recalls high-altitude clouds, cirrus clouds, haunted by the cries of swifts twirling in the warm air. The wondrous arises and dies off, leaving us with an illusion of duration.

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.

Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14
bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.

‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.

With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.

Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace. 

In the midst of the UK house rave-olution of the early-’90s, London’s V4 Visions imprint documented the confluence of street soul, deep house, swingbeat, and jungle sounds emanating from the clubs and pirate radio signals. Over the course of half a decade, V4’s unparalleled 12” output referenced every significant Black British music scene; from lovers rock to jazz-funk, sound system reggae to hip hop, new jack swing to garage, from artists Ashaye, Julie Stapleton, Maureen Mason, Rohan Delano, The Wades, and Endangered Species. This 18-track double LP is the first critical overview of the label, with extensive notes by Simon Reynolds, era-defining photographs, and fresh remasters, all housed in a glorious foil-stamped gatefold tip-on sleeve. Is this a dream?

An overview of Laraaji’s earliest works, Glimpses of Infinity gathers selections from his 1978 debut Celestial Vibration and six additional studio sessions from the era. Full of discovery and wonderment, Glimpses of Infinity is a miraculous chronicle of new age’s most fabled artist. A condensed version of the 2023's sold out 4xLP Boxset.

Since debuting his Khotin project in 2014, Edmonton’s Dylan Khotin-Foote has fine-tuned an impressionistic, dream-like style of music that straddles multiple sonic worlds. His output often sways from gentle synthesized atmospherics to hypnotic, dance-minded frameworks. His self-released 2018 LP, Beautiful You, offered a study on melody and memory; the album’s nostalgia-nudging use of passing environments, voices, and abstractions captivated a cult following, a rare 4.5 review in Resident Advisor and the attention of Ghostly International, who pressed the cassette on vinyl for wider circulation in 2019. Now, Khotin reveals his first collection of new material since the signing. The album is a fluid continuation of his blissful and melancholic songcraft, extended humbly and warmly, Finds You Well.

As tongue-in-cheek as the title may appear, the phrase has haunted the producer for some time. Most often seen at the start of correspondence, the words “I hope this email finds you well” can land with varying levels of sincerity, depending on context and mood. Khotin-Foote started to read the line more ominously during the onset of the pandemic. So, this set of music winks at both possibilities, mixing a platitude’s opaque optimism with lurking uncertainty.

Finds You Well can be heard in near-symmetrical halves: its 10 tracks represent the selections from a bounty of demos that, with less modesty, could have filled two records, one active and the other ambient. The resulting set isn’t an even split but it’s close. The A-side centers on the album’s steadiest sequence of beat-centric material. “Ivory Tower” is inextricably tied to benchmarks set by late ‘90s downtempo forerunners, spilling lucious and narcotic synth modulations across a sprinkler’s spray of breakbeats. Khotin’s sprightly melodic noodling brings that touchstone sound into vogue, bubbling up in free-form spurts. The sequence continues through the propulsive “Heavyball,” into “Groove 32,” which begins with a funky bit-clipped drum and bongo boogie. A tight bass-line plugs into place, building a grid for square-wave pads, shimmering melodic textures, and stuttering vocal samples to percolate in.

Khotin’s tone stabilizes on the B-side, balancing decidedly bucolic terrain with suspiciously eerie melancholy. Voices wander in the sprawling frequency sweeps. Organic textures sizzle and sputter in the clouds. “WEM Lagoon Jump” references local West Edmonton folklore, the time a kid jumped from a shopping mall's second-floor balcony into the main pavilion’s fountain. After the splash, we land in the record’s most satisfying stasis, “Your Favorite Building.” A brittle clave and muffled kick hover in a wobbly mist of organ chords; the building is gorgeous, but seen at night, and empty, and from this angle, those shadows seem to crop up more of those subdued tremors, those nostalgic creeps, those droll musings. From behind a wall of melody, a kid peeks their head and softly sings, “you must love the world because it’s wonderful,” the vocal snippet comes courtesy of Khotin-Foote’s sister, Amaris.

For much of Find You Well’s second half, Khotin dabbles in a dusty and slightly detuned piano sound, revealing an artist unafraid to change shapes but maintain course. This set of chimeric visions sidesteps the subdued bombast that fills the A-side; instead, it suggests a counterpoint emphasizing the uncanny overlap between well wishes and empty promises. 

ドイツのミュージシャン/作曲家のDaniel Rosenfeldが変名C418にて製作した傑作！物理世界とピクセル化された世界の両方で響くサウンドを描き上げた『マインクラフト』のオリジナルサウンドトラック盤『Minecraft Volume Beta』が〈Ghostly International〉からアナログ・リプレス。前作『Alpha』には未収録の楽曲だけでなく、ゲーム内では使用されたなかった楽曲も収録したC418自身のオリジナル・アルバム的一枚！牧歌的で穏やかなサウンドスケープに仕立てられた前作と比してよりダークで内省的な側面もクローズアップされた魅惑のアンビエント/エレクトロニック・ミュージックが収められています。

This is the first album by Teno Afrika, a hot project led by Lutendo Raduvha, a 21-year-old young musician who is one of the most important figures in the latest "Amapiano" movement born in South Africa, where homegrown jazz, boogie, Afro-house, kwaito, etc. are rapidly being revived. This is the first album from Teno Afrika, a project led by Lutendo Raduvha, a 21-year-old young musician who is a key figure in the latest Amapiano movement emerging in South Africa. Born in the townships of Gauteng, South Africa, Teno Afrika has rapidly gained momentum over the past five years, evolving into a nationwide mainstream genre of "amapiano," a new genre influenced by kwaito. Having spent most of his life moving back and forth between Johannesburg and various townships in the suburbs of Pretoria, Gauteng, he has incorporated the influences of these areas into this exciting new collection of Afro-dance tracks.

First time on CD for this classic Merzbow duo album from 1983...
......Material Action is a favorite among early Merzbow free-music, junk-noise workouts. Psychedelic improvised instrumental energy abounds on this essential early recording that is PURE MERZ.

Masami Akita plays tapes, percussion, electro-acoustic noise, organ
Kiyoshi Mizutani overdubs tapes, synthesizer, violin, machine noise