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"Tranquilizer" by Oneohtrix Point Never is a limited-edition clear vinyl compilation exploring his early experimental and ambient works. The album showcases Daniel Lopatin’s signature blend of dreamy textures, fractured melodies, and sonic abstraction. A must-have for fans of avant-garde electronic music and OPN’s formative soundscapes.
Vel, recognized for her striking presence in the contemporary techno scene, initiates the Cuddle Protocol, her first ambient album and the third outing on her own label PURR. The nine-track record is a personal and intimate statement. With Cuddle Protocol, Vel explores the paradox of intimacy in a coded world. "I like the idea of a protocol for softness," she explains, "of codifying something that should be intimate and spontaneous." This tension runs through the album: fragile voices and soft layers unfold against serious, carefully structured arrangements, balancing tenderness with rigor. Ambient music has always been Vel's "first love." Before producing techno, she composed ambient exclusively, and this album marks a return to the form in its most sincere expression. "I know this music will follow me all my life. It's not a phase. It's how I express myself most truthfully." Cuddle Protocol is about slowing down, embracing sincerity, and reaching for deeper connection. "When I listen to ambient, I access another world. It's charged with emotion, it makes me drift and forget everything. That's the feeling I wanted to share." Mastering by Sixbitdeep. Artwork by Adone Giuntini.
First re-issue album from the Skintone Edition Volume 1 Box Set
Magic Thread is Susumu Yokota’s deeply soothing and delicate debut release on the Skintone label. With a spartan palette of sounds and textures, Yokota taps into a fundamentally human need to fuse and connect disparate fibres, magically forming work which glistens and pulsates with life.
Magic Thread originally came out in 1998 as a limited-edition CD release of 500 copies. Initially intended for the Japanese market, it came without any artwork in a standard transparent CD case adorned only by a sticker containing essential album information and a quote:
‘Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.’ – Yokota, 1998.
First re-issue album from the Skintone Edition Volume 1 Box Set
Magic Thread is Susumu Yokota’s deeply soothing and delicate debut release on the Skintone label. With a spartan palette of sounds and textures, Yokota taps into a fundamentally human need to fuse and connect disparate fibres, magically forming work which glistens and pulsates with life.
Magic Thread originally came out in 1998 as a limited-edition CD release of 500 copies. Initially intended for the Japanese market, it came without any artwork in a standard transparent CD case adorned only by a sticker containing essential album information and a quote:
‘Somewhere in the process of evolution, the spinning and weaving of thread became possible for humankind. How did this come to pass? It can only be that the thread is possessed of magical properties.’ – Yokota, 1998.
Yokohama multi-instrumentalist Tokio Ono eases into the Accidental Meetings' family with an array of Japanese folk tinged avant-dubs, drenched in beautiful texture.
The elusive artist has spent much of his life in his hometown with a view of the Yokohama waters, before settling into a new environment in Tokyo where Peel gradually took shape. The essence of a given situation emerges as you peel it away, these tracks were inspired by the accumulation of days and flashbacks of memories: layers to peel joyfully from our lives, while offering a slightly shifted and refreshing perspective on one’s surroundings. It's a dreamy journey from open to close, Ono's world engulfs you in a blissful dubbed out wormhole. Featuring a flip from the sound system royalty of Seekers International to top it off, Peel is a unique and exquisite piece of work.
Dave Huismans (ex_libris, A Made Up Sound) presents In Transit, a self-titled LP of arresting downtempo vignettes, with origins dating back to over a decade ago.
Renowned for some of this century’s most notorious rhythmic advances, the work of Dave Huismans (fka A Made Up Sound and 2562) continues to provide a blueprint for new generations of innovation-obsessives. After a long hiatus from releasing original material, he returned in 2025 with two beloved EP’s as ex_libris. Now he returns to FELT as In Transit, following up on his remix of Civilistjävel! from 2023.
Borrowing its name from the closing dialogue of a novel by Dutch author Hella S. Haasse, In Transit was written in just two weeks in the summer of 2013 on a Korg ESX sampler. Since then, he has patiently refined its constituent parts.
Over the course of 38 minutes across six tracks, In Transit maps out an absorbing vista. The music shimmers with a celestial quality, underpinned by rhythmic stamina and creeping intensity. Tangential to Huismans’ previous work, the beats here are decentred and further scattered, acting as buoys to the constantly evolving and intricate narratives of layered textures.
In Transit marks a fascinating new addition to Huismans’ sprawling catalogue, a truly remarkable racket to be crafted with such humble means, finding a suitable context within FELT’s continued venture into parallel sounds.
Across a remarkable run of releases in barely half a decade, London’s Loraine James has established her identity through a blend of refined composition, gritty experimentation, and unpredictable, intricate electronic programming. While titles released under her given name on the esteemed label Hyperdub tend toward IDM-influenced, vocal-heavy collaborations, James reserves her alias, Whatever The Weather, for a more impressionistic, inward gaze. On Whatever The Weather II, rich worlds of layered textures flow seamlessly from hypnotic ambience, to mottled rhythms, to cut-up collages of diaristic field recordings. The result is a uniquely fractured beauty, born from a compelling union of organic and human elements, processed through a variety of digital and analogue methods.
James titled Whatever The Weather pieces based on an innate sense of their “emotional temperature” at the time of recording, but she notes that often, upon revisiting them, they will feel somewhere else entirely on the thermometer; such are the whims of the environment. Compared to the album’s predecessor and its Antarctic imagery, though, Whatever The Weather II is a warmer outing, as signaled by the desert clime of its cover photo which is once again shot by Collin Hughes, and the package designed by Justin Hunt Sloane. Also common to both albums is the mastering work of friend and collaborator Josh Eustis (aka Telefon Tel Aviv), who lends his keen ear to James’ complexities, to craft a strikingly three-dimensional sonic experience.
“1°C” opens the album with James speaking through thick static, idly pining, “Bit chilly, innit… Can’t wait for it to be summer,” as a bed of granular tones and scattered vocal samples emerges. This ineffable mood carries through “3°C”, where high-frequency oscillations flutter across the stereo field, a vigorous, minimal kick rattles through a broken speaker cone, and spacious synth harmonies burst and fade into mist. “20°C”, the longest entry in the collection, daydreams through a din of conversation and minor-key chords, before blossoming into a series of glitchy, staccato percussion patterns. “8°C” rides a sole, wandering keyboard line adorned with minimal counterpoint. In these moments, James effortlessly draws order from a diffusion of ideas, and an air of playful spontaneity creates the common thread.
In discussing this project, James notes that the first Whatever The Weather LP (Ghostly, 2022) was created concurrently with Reflection (Hyperdub, 2021), and that there was some degree of stylistic cross-pollination between her two musical frames of mind. At the time, she shared her feelings on genre with Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne, noting, “Yeah, I might look different from most people who make IDM, and I’m from a different time period, but I don’t really care about the term being negative or positive. I feel my music is IDM and I do my own spin on it, being inspired by other stuff and fusing it all together.” This go around, she dedicated several months of focused energy to the alias, and to the development of its distinctions: no collaborators, fewer beats, and a process based primarily on instinct and improvisation.
The album’s singular sound arises from James’ favoring of hardware over software, as her battery of synths is modulated, transformed, and reassembled through an array of pedals with few or no overdubs, effectively anchoring each arrangement to its precise moment of creation. The greatest effort in post-production was given to sequencing, on which the artist places the utmost importance; taken as a whole, the suite ebbs and flows with a fitting sense of seasonal flux and naturalistic grace.
The final act of Whatever The Weather II offers some of its most affecting moments, beginning with “9°C”, where the haunting echoes of children on a Tokyo playground break through intermittent bursts of static, steeped in a bath of off-kilter, bubbling tones. Here, James displays one of her many strengths: a fearless approach to sonic collage, elevated by ambitious experimentation and pacing that manages plenty of surprises. Never content to remain in the same sonic space for too long, “15°C” follows with soft pads and glistening countermelodies, abruptly joined by a jarring, cyclical rhythm that mimics a loose part inside a whirring machine. Like much of James’ work, it bears an internal logic that only makes sense in her hands.
Closing track, “12°C”, drifts from bustling human spaces into a concrete groove, weaving melody and texture into a truly unusual, soul-stirring fullness. In its final moments we hear, for the first time, a languid acoustic guitar and gentle, finger-tapped beat over her pitch-shifted voice, a callback that ends the album with wry ambiguity, and a hint of more to be found beyond the horizon. Whatever The Weather II is full of such passages, where formal composition appears like a film in negative, and conventions are upturned with wit, intelligence, and skill.
Forthcoming 7" from Tokyo's TAMTAM.. Including a favorite of Kuro's, "花を一輪 - Hana Wo Ichirin" which was featured on Dublab Japan's -resilience- A Charity Compilation in Aid of the 2025 LA Wildfires. Also available at Dublab.jp digitally. Flip for the Magic Hour DUB version.
Released in 1998 as Massive Attack’s third studio album, this work is regarded as their masterpiece. Unlike the soulful and jazzy atmosphere of their previous albums Blue Lines and Protection, it deepened the trip-hop sound while strongly incorporating influences from post-punk and industrial, resulting in a cold and heavy sonic landscape. Issued by Virgin Records as a 180-gram double LP edition.
Two tracks of dub-infused electronica, edited from recordings of my live modular jam sessions (which you can watch on my YouTube channel).
You can buy the 7" here on Bandcamp, but please support your local record store where possible :) You can find a list of shops selling the record here: linktr.ee/yassokiiba
If you buy from a store and would also like the WAV files, just message me here and I'll send you a free download code.
The Oganesson Remixes EP follows the March 2025 release of the “Oganesson” digital single, which was the first new music released by Tortoise since 2016. The EP includes the original version of “Oganesson” alongside five new remixes of the track created by collaborators and friends of the band, including poet and activist Saul Williams, prolific mastering engineer Heba Kadry, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, indie music icons Broken Social Scene, and International Anthem labelmate Makaya McCraven. The Oganesson Remixes EP comes ahead of a new album by Tortoise, which will be released this fall via International Anthem and Nonesuch Records.
The songs on Touch, the first new Tortoise music in nine years, are dramas without words. They’re elaborately appointed and carefully mixed to enhance a familiar feeling — a distinctly cinematic uneasiness. Close your eyes and you might see cars swerving around unlit rural roads, or cityscapes at night with bells clanging in the distance, or some abandoned warehouse where spies chase each other between towering stacks of boxes.
The making of Touch is an entirely different kind of film — a heartwarming story of musicians adapting to life circumstances.
Tortoise operates as a collective; the five multi-instrumentalists make records by committee, seeking input on creative decisions large and small. All ideas are considered, and for most of the band’s influential three-decade run, the process has been straightforward: Each musician brings in songs or sketches, and as the group absorbs them, the players exchange ideas about the structure, instrumentation, different grooves or (more frequently, because they’re Tortoise) odd metric divisions that might stretch the initial conception of the song.
These discussions have always happened in real time, face to face. Until Touch. As guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Parker explains, over the last decade, the members of Tortoise scattered geographically, making the pre-production rehearsal sessions if not impossible, at least more complicated.
“It’s the first record we’ve done where everything wasn’t based in Chicago,” says Parker. “Two of us are in Chicago. Two of us are here in Los Angeles and John [McEntire] is in Portland, OR. We recorded in several different places. But the strange thing is, in a way it’s kind of the most cohesive session that we’ve done.”
McEntire, who plays drums, percussion, and keyboards and serves as mixing engineer, had little doubt that the actual recording would be fine. His apprehension was about those more open-ended development sessions leading up to the recording, which, he says, have been known to yield moments of peak Tortoise inspiration. “We don't work remotely, unfortunately. We kind of all have to be in the room together. For me the trial-and-error stage is very important. I didn’t want to lose that.”
The percussionist and multi-instrumentalist John Herndon explains one reason why: The path to a “final” version of a Tortoise tune is not a straight line. “It becomes writing and arranging and editing and orchestrating and sort of getting things into a sonic space that feels good, all at the same time.”
There was consensus about that; each of the musicians has a story about songs being transformed by the collaborative dynamic. Percussionist and keyboardist Dan Bitney recalls a session when they were working on one of his tunes. He wasn’t happy with it and promised to come up with a countermelody. “Right away somebody just asked “Does it need a melody? Like, why does this need a melody? And I’m like, “Yeah!” That’s the kind of thinking that can open your eyes.”
In the initial planning for the new record, the band arrived at what seemed like a reasonable geographic compromise: They’d set up shop at studios in three different areas — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. They scheduled sessions with sometimes months in between, so that everyone could sit with the material and refine it further. The plan: To shift some of the wild idea-chasing of those development sessions from group work to individual work, building on Tortoise’s deep and iconoclastic lexicon of sounds — and on the trust between musicians that’s accrued over decades of music-making.
“It’s like, humans adapt,” Herndon says flatly. In order to keep making music as a group, he explains, everyone needed to be flexible then and remain so now. “If you’re used to doing something one way, and then it flips, well, you have to adapt to another way of working. I think that that's what we all were aspiring to do with this, endeavoring to kick in our adaptation skills.”
Still, it wasn’t smooth sailing. “I’m going to be honest, I think that we had some doubts” after the first set of sessions, McEntire recalls. Noting that four years elapsed from the beginning of Touch to its completion, he adds that “it took a long, long time for the music to coalesce. There was some ‘what are we doing?’ questioning going on along the way.”
Douglas McCombs, who plays guitar, bass, and the deep-voiced bass VI guitar that adds a noir luster to “Night Gang” and other Touch songs, believes that questioning would have happened regardless of the geographical challenges. “In the best circumstance, there’s a flow when we’re working on a tune. Everyone’s sparking ideas and inspired. It’s not work.” He adds, “In the worst moments, when we just absolutely don’t know what to do with something, it’s torturous.”
Herdon points to the early versions of “Vexations,” which became the new album’s opening track, as one such slow-torture situation. “We were confounded as to figuring out an arrangement, and things were just stuck,” he recalls. During one of the long lulls between the studio sessions, Herndon says, he got an idea for the tune. “I asked John if I could have the stems [the individual track files] for the song, and then I kind of did a reworking in the garage. Re-did the drums completely and made a breakdown section in the middle. I sent it and was like, ‘I don't know if this is anything, but here.’ And those guys seemed really excited about it.”
Herndon quickly adds that every Tortoise record has benefitted from similar experimentation. In fact, it’s the key thing, a defining characteristic: “Sometimes doing an edit will leave a space open for something else, and we’re all into that idea of, ‘What happens next?’ It’s this attitude of ‘Let’s make some music together and see what happens.’ We're all comfortable with the not knowing, with letting an idea go through many permutations.”
Along with that is the knowledge that this open-ended exploring can be time-consuming. And might possibly end in futility. McCombs says that though the band’s approach changed with Touch, the players still needed the mindset they’d used in those brainstorming rehearsals. “When I get frustrated or when we seem like we're stalling out a little bit, I just have to remember that patience is one of the things that makes this band work.”
Asked to recall a moment that required patience, McCombs doesn’t hesitate. “It seems to happen a lot with the drummers,” McCombs says. “Somebody will be like, ‘Hey John [McEntire] why don’t you play this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘I don’t wanna play it cause I hear Herndon here.’ It’s like McEntire hears Herdon and Herndon hears Bitney… That happens a lot, and then they’ll come to a consensus. Sometimes half the song will be one drummer and half the song will be another drummer. That’s kind of the way it works.”
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It must be said: When things click into place, Tortoise is a rare force. Whether cranking out a foursquare rock backbeat or chopping time into polyrhythmic shards that defy counting (and logic), the band challenges accepted notions of what rock music can be, what moods it can evoke — that’s part of the reason the band is revered so widely, among musicians working in many genres.
Tortoise’s indescribable sonic arrays have grown more intense — and more influential — over time. Early works — the 1993 debut and the 1996 Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which opens with a twenty-one-minute suite — contrast the thick harmonic schemes of Krautrock with the similarly impenetrable densities of musique concrete, adding jarring spears of electric guitar as spice accents. The commercial breakthroughs that followed, TNT (1998) and Standards (2001) found Tortoise further expanding its toolkit: Rather than orient each piece around declarative single-line melodies, the musicians let the vast, lush, inviting scenes become a hypnotic wordless narrative, built from overlapping layers and interlocking rhythms.
Each step in the discography underscores a truth about Tortoise: The questions about arrangement and orchestration are foundational, defining the scope of the canvas and the density of the band’s exactingly precise soundscapes. There can, as McCombs notes, be multiple drummers on a track, and their beats can be supported by acoustic percussion or random electronic blippage. Likewise, on any given track, there can be multiple mallet parts, sometimes sustaining gorgeous washes of color, at other times pounding out intricate Steve Reich-style interlocked grids of harmony. There can be multiple guitars, each with its own earthshaking effects profile. (Parker laughs when he says “I’m kind of like the straight man with the guitar sounds.”) There can be multiple synthesizers — darting squiggles of lead lines crashing into asymmetrical arpeggios, or bliss-toned drones hovering in the upper-middle register like a cloud in a landscape painting.
And there can be noise, all kinds of it: While the working method of Touch meant Tortoise sacrificed some spontaneous sparks, it encouraged the musicians to explore the thickening textural possibilities of different flavors of noise (white, pink, etc). The band recently issued a set of remixes for the single “Oganesson.” The more austere, stripped-down interpretations offer telling insights about the deployment of noise as well as the track-by-track assembly process, the ways Tortoise uses open space, textural layers, and dissonances to create drama.
McEntire believes those little devices are essential to the sound. “Because we don't have a singer, we have to have a different vocabulary for creating interest. So we use all the little things, like dynamics, texture, orchestration.”
Given the intricacy of the music, McEntire explains, every little sound starts as a decision in the recording studio, and then, subsequently, becomes a logistical decision for live performance — after all, the many parts have to be executed by the five players.
Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 is the culmination of Chapter Music’s ongoing reissue series for Jeremy Dower.
"Reclusive Melbourne electronic figure Jeremy Dower announces a quarter century-spanning compilation of previously unreleased music, split into halves to showcase his unpronounceable 90s ambient techno project Tetrphnm, as well as the wistful faux-jazz recordings made subsequently under his own name.
Inspired at first by austere German techno such as Monolake and Mouse on Mars, Jeremy’s sound world grew to take in influences as various as The Sea and Cake, Joao Gilberto, Jaki Liebezeit and Alain Goraguer. But Jeremy worked through these touchstones all alone on the other side of the world, improvising systems of “subtractive composition” via cheap 90s sound cards, 12 bit samplers and banked noise gates. His music evolved in a parallel but separate world to genres later called IDM or Microhouse, but really it sounds like nothing but Jeremy Dower – magically inventive, touching and personal. Efficient Space comped a Tetrphnm track on their much-loved 2018 compilation of 90s Australian electronica 3AM Spares. But Personal Computer Music, 1997-2022 is your first chance to explore Jeremy Dower’s compelling musical history with the depth it deserves."
'28’ is the work of two Japanese artists both now resident in France and both aged 28 - hence the title. This album is the result of over 3 years worth of collaboration between the pair, coming together to form a beautiful marriage of sweet female vocals, alongside pristine, lusciously textured and layered electronics, and some clever yet funky beat programming. ‘28’ has the feeling of a classic electronica album. The sonic precision, clarity, and detailing of each element has been lovingly worked on; everything fits and flows together as the album unfolds with an organic, slowly unfurling logic. Often built up in overlapping layers, Noriko’s voice is beautifully recorded and placed within the mix. Although largely sung in Japanese, her vocals add a warmth and solidity to the album – like a series of breathy vapour trails or lullaby coos and hums, which are occasionally chopped into and stuttered via computer, yet never jarringly so. Added alongside the gentle loops and textures of the music, the album is consequently held between a kind of swaying, fluid drift where the various layers gently slide across one another, and the sudden elastic snap of the beat.
Aoki and Tujiko’s collaboration began in 2002 when they were both booked the same event for The Cartier Foundation in Paris, got talking and began working together on the track ‘Fly’ for the first time. As they worked, it quickly dawned that they both really liked what they were doing and so decided to extend the project to an album-length collaboration. Yet following that show, the pair found little time to work together because Aoki was at the time living in Osaka whilst Tujiko was in Paris. As a way around this problem, they began sending their audio files to each other as CDRs, working separately on ideas and then slowly building their tracks bit by bit. Consequently, it took a long time to finish this album, although the process sped up when Aoki also moved to Paris just under a year ago.
Whilst this album marks the first time the pair have worked together on a recording, AOKI has previously released four albums on the Japanese-based Progressive Form label and one on Cirque. Somewhat better known to European audiences, Noriko has released albums on Mego, Sub Rosa, Tomlab, all of which have received glowing and considerable coverage.
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y e a r s o l d m a n f r o m b u c h a r e s t o n l y u s e d s o m e p i a n o , s t r i n g a n d w i n d i n s t r u m e n t e l e m e n t s a n d a n a l o g u e e l e c t r o n i c s t o a r r a n g e a g r a c e f u l l y d e e p o c e a n o f s o u n d . a l l s l o w g r o o v i n g t r a c k s s p r e a d t h e a t m o s p h e r e o f l i v e i m p r o v i s e d s e s s i o n s t h a t a r e e d i t e d , t w e a k e d a n d m i x e d t o p e r f e c t i o n . i n - t h e - m o m e n t m o o d s o f s t r a n g e a n d u n u s u a l a n a l o g u e s y n t h s o u n d s g r o o v e i n a f l u i d q u a l i t y w i t h s u b l i m i n a l b a s s s h a p e s , l a t i n a t e p e r c u s s i o n s , j a z z r h y t h m s a n d a c o u s t i c m e l o d i e s . t o g e t h e r t h e y c r e a t e a g a s e o u s k i n e t i c a t m o s p h e r e f u l l o f t a n g i b l e r h y t h m p a t t e r n s , d e l i c a t e c h o r d s a n d g h o s t l y m o d u l a r s y n t h p a d s a l l m i x e d s u b t l e t o c r e a t e s p a c e f o r t h e t o n e s b e t w e e n t h e t o n e s . y o u c a n c a l l i t a h y p n o t i c a f t e r h o u r a l b u m f o r a f t e r h o u r s t h a t a r e d e d i c a t e d t o a d e e p l i s t e n i n g e x p e r i e n c e . y o u c a n t a g h i s a r r a n g e m e n t s a s b r i l l i a n t l y t e x t u r e d a n d m u s i c a l l y s u p e r - c h a r g e d a m b i e n t , w h i c h g o e s b e y o n d t h e u s u a l d e f i n i t i o n o f t h e g e n r e . a l l n i n e s u s p e n s e f u l c o m p o s i t i o n s s e d u c e w i t h a d e e p m e l o d i c s e n s i b i l i t y , h a r m o n i c a d v e n t u r e s a n d a n o v e r a l l r h y t h m i c a m b i a n c e o f f r e s h n e s s a n d l a i d b a c k e n t h u s i a s m . t o g e t h e r t h e y r e p r e s e n t a c h a l l e n g i n g a u d i t o r y e x p e r i e n c e t h a t w i l l r e s o n a t e i n y o u r m i n d l o n g a f t e r t h e m u s i c h a s f i n i s h e d.
Mike Majkowski makes his debut on Hands in the Dark Records with Invisible, a selection of six moody and mysterious pieces produced between 2019 and 2025.
The prolific Australian double bassist and music maker has been involved in a diverse array of contemporary and experimental music since the early 2000s. This time, the Berlin-based artist is venturing deeper into downtempo, meditative and hypnotic minimal electronic realms.
While time and space are constraints, they also define our identities, creating inexplicable bonds with others flowing through shared moments and shared places. The state of being invisible obliterates these confines, allowing one to return to their pure essence. In this setting, Majkowski’s compositions display a discreet and profoundly emotional language characterised by vulnerability, darkness and confusion, while also embodying hope, soothing and resilience. A dim light, transcending love, space, memory and time.
Dutch composer Casimir Geelhoed presents an LP of music at the "intersection of overstimulation, introspection and fragility" via B.A.A.D.M.
"With Processing Music, Dutch composer and electronic musician Casimir Geelhoed offers a compelling meditation on sound transformation as a metaphor for psychological and emotional processing. Operating at the intersection of overstimulation, introspection and fragility, the album unfolds as a deeply immersive and personal exploration — one that invites the listener to inhabit a space of their own projection, memory and reflection.
Rather than imposing a fixed compositional structure, Processing Music follows a bottom-up approach, allowing form to emerge organically from the interaction of sonic materials. Digital signal processing is not used here as a mere technical tool, but as a poetic device: transformation as narrative, delay as memory, distortion as tension. Through slowly eroding loops, gently collapsing textures and shifting layers of timbre and space, Geelhoed crafts a delicate sound world that is charged with friction.
What may at first seem abstract gradually reveals an emotional core. The album evokes the suspended time of a largo, the layering of memory like an excavation, the psychological tension of perceived spatial expansion. These are not literal themes, but associative keys to a music that operates in a distinctly human sonic language.
Emerging from a series of live performances, Processing Music retains a performative sensibility: the music breathes, transforms, and invites attention to nuance. It slowly unfolds a landscape shaped by the subtle interplay between structure and dissolution.
Casimir Geelhoed has presented performances and installations at festivals such as CTM, Sonic Acts, Rewire, Fiber, SPATIAL, and Aural Spaces. He studied computer science, composition, music technology, and sonology in Amsterdam, The Hague, and Utrecht."
With Michaela Melián's LP music for a while, a-Musik is releasing the first album by the visual artist, co-founder of F.S.K., and solo musician since Monaco, which appeared on Monika Enterprise in 2013. While her last releases, Electric Ladyland (2016), Music from a Frontier Town (2018), and Tania (2022) were created as part of exhibitions and sound installations, music for a while is Melián's fourth autonomous LP, characterized on the one hand by her unmistakable dreamlike sound along the interfaces between dark chamber music, solemn ambient techno, and cinematic sound art.
As with her previous albums, there is also a wonderful avant-pop cover version—this time of the track “My Other Voice” (1979) by the Sparks. On the other hand, music for while, whose cover is adorned with Melián's photographs of the clouds above her new home of Marseille, spreads a comparatively ominous mood – one that is nevertheless appropriate given the circumstances in 2025 – thanks in part to the sedate, almost ticking drum sounds of co-producer Felix Raethel. Once again, the multi-instrumentalist, supported by Ruth May on violin and Elen Harutyunyan on viola, weaves her recordings of various string instruments — cello, guitar, bass, and zither — into fascinating, lurching, looping, and almost hypnotic soundscapes, but atonal synthesizer sounds in tracks such as “traverse benjamin” and “märchenwald” open up the music to electroacoustic and experimental music. The concluding cover version of Irving Berlin's “they say it's wonderful” (1946) rounds off one of this year's most impressive releases in an incomparably groovy and melancholic way.
New York based artist James K returns with Friend.
"Friend: The rupture is filled with sounds and a translation is made from blazing starlight to harmony and weather. Laid down in our silken dreams, the tripped out flows in the dubbed footpath, and with our hands wet, we root down. Her voice fades and gathers from this place, where we hold the water of our bodies against the speaker of time, and let the ripples give us pleasure and vision. Spin slowly around the open air room, dripping with the undertone of two hearts, to hear the warming of her sun come across our deep cold space.
She flies out from the vapor whirlpool feeling the celestial breakdown rise and slip, making room all around for singing out, signaling the days to come and go in peace. And still we find that heaven and earth don’t ever mean enough, even when they speak the same. It’s in these distilled moments we construct a reality, learning to listen quietly for the voices and call out in return. A kiss, a friend, a hand in hand, continuing until things disappear. In the metronome of the cat’s tail, erasing and mending, we find reasons for love and for life.
Riffs of glory and bitter-sweet chorals, trilling and resonant, source from the sub-zeit; it's a deeper sense of emotion that we travel through this space with. And with the blissful sequencing in reverse, we recognize the sonic vistas to come through us. It’s all smiling and sliding in the backwards, floating in the drift of cricket circuitry, when you say to me “is it real?” She leaves us where sounds flicker into taste and touch, where shadows sparkle into color, where star-kissed clouds come down like doorways."
Like an ambient house comet, Local Artist Ian Wyatt’s Slow Riffs return to Mood Hut 13 years since their debut LP with a bevy of weightless, subtly pendulous levitations.
The projected dream sequence of ’Simulacra’ connotes an out of body experience with a poetic grasp of ambient, deep house and their roots in jazz, fourth world and new age urges. With subtle holographic dub diffusions the record achieves a pleasant sense of treading air/water and being gently buffeted by cosmic breezes. Take the title tune for example, whose rippling congas and bleary sax motifs feels like passages of earliest Terre Thaemlitz meets Jon Hassell, while elsewhere they touch a subtly ruggeder vein like Rezzett’s ambient jungle thizzers in its depth charged subs and aerial interplay of drums and pads, giving way to Romance-like sensations with the tousled choral pads of ‘Cosmic Joke’, while ‘Mutual Dreaming’ harks back to early vaporwave templates of 0PN via James Ferraro.