MUSIC

Karen y Los Remedios’ new album Bestiaria expands the introspective world they established earlier, drawing on Mexican mythology, folk traditions, and feminine symbolism to shape a dense, narrative-driven form of electronic music.

Helado Negro returns with This Is How You Smile, an album that freely flickers between clarity and obscurity, past and present geographies, bright and unhurried seasons. Miami-born, New York-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange embraces a personal and universal exploration of aura – seen, felt, emitted – on his sixth album and second for RVNG Intl.

"Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba hails from three decades in the past, yet the simple profile of its abstract/ambient/cutup collage makes it a record that sits quite comfortably in our IDM-informed future. In 1988, Plux Quba was a primal dark horse in the world of pants-forward electronic music -- an obscurity issued with little explanation from the laid-back west coast of Europe: Portugal, of all places! -- though the casual listener could hardly know that from an examination of the LP jacket. The vanguard of electronics in late-80s Europe was being pushed by organizations like Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, HNAS -- and yet, when Christoph Heemann came across this recording, it struck his ears and the ears of fellow listeners like nothing before. Plux Quba was handed around between the principles of the early '90s A-Musik scene: Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert, Georg Odijk, plus interested fellow travelers like Jim O'Rourke, to the intense curiosity of all. To ears that were already saturated with all things kraut, the dark corners of prog and the frontline of experimental and improvised music, it proved elusive. Not simply in how it sounded and how that sound was achieved, but in where it was coming from -- like later Robert Ashley at times; certain stretches of melody recalled some of Eno's ambient pieces -- but mostly, it was a completely alien soundscape! And who was it? Was the band called Plux Quba? The record? The label? These sorts of mysteries are at the heart of records that require close listening and re-listening. As it was absorbed, it grew to be an influence on the Köln sound -- Mouse On Mars, Lithops, and Heemann's many and varied projects -- as well as O'Rourke, Fennesz and many others. Music and sound of this nature have for many years been made available by bands like Autechre, labels like Mille Plateaux -- but for the first ten years of its existence, Plux Quba was rarely heard. O'Rourke reissued it as the first record on his Moikai label in 1998, and it had a good run through around 2005 before the last of the print parts were filled. It's been almost a decade since Plux Quba was available, which is way too long considering that we live in an era where it is necessary to have an LP of this on hand for your contemporary listening distractions. And so, Drag City has stepped in to reissue the Moikai reissue of Nuno Canavarro's classic Plux Quba."

Japanese edition with Obi.

Another late night oooooze from short span, this time from NYC’s Eden Aurelius doing that sticky, hazed thing you’ll love if you’ve a feel for False Aralia, 3XL, Emer… "A beautifully poised collection for Short Span. A gorgeous showcase of her singular talent within a sparkling scene. Recorded in Brooklyn, NY, this is an innovative, and graceful body of music that feels truly contemporary. This album felt important for us to have out in time for summer. Emerging out of the heat, a feeling brought alive with the sun. Music that evolves throughout seasons and carries a spectrum of emotional range. Entre Nous is tight, but expansive. Its depth and complexity is languid but has gravitational pull. Like much of her work, this record feels so refreshing because its tracks are both sensory and illusory tones built in gossamer and transitory layers of satin. They have a remarkable sense of presence and pressure - floating rhythmically without sharp edges. There is guidance and gentle control that lead throughout the record. The B side opens with “Ion” featuring Pontiac Streator. The song is formed out of a textural haze. A glistening, iridescent light appears, broken through fabric, projecting a blurred image onto the surface nearby. A hypnotic and evocative collaboration. The shared connection between the two artists’ command of rhythm and ambient language. Mastered and cut by Mike Grinser at Manmade.

Ampoule's Pub returns with a fresh remaster of the classic 'Summer' and a brand new track titled 'The Fragile Root'

'Summer' was originally released 20 years ago on the Vertical Form label - a result of a multitude of completely live and improvised studio sessions, that gently swell and evolve over the tracks 16 minutes.

'Fragile Root' is a brand new track, think vintage idm - intricate rhythms and melodies crossed with massive dub chords.

Mastered by Dubplates & Mastering

Geogaddi is the second studio album by Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada, released on 18 February 2002 by Warp Records.

Aquainted through their shared love of music technology, and now a friendship, this is the second-time pairing between two well-known musicians from the ambient and electronic scene since some decades: the German artist Arovane and the American artist Taylor Deupree. After their first release together in November 2022, "Skal_Ghost" on 12K, this new release explore once more an organic journey built around loops and layers or processed and re-processed sounds giving this particular color to a new must-have album.

Aquainted through their shared love of music technology, and now a friendship, this is the second-time pairing between two well-known musicians from the ambient and electronic scene since some decades: the German artist Arovane and the American artist Taylor Deupree. After their first release together in November 2022, "Skal_Ghost" on 12K, this new release explore once more an organic journey built around loops and layers or processed and re-processed sounds giving this particular color to a new must-have album.

Named for Bach's Inventions - played on piano growing up - Inventio carries a Baroque sensibility: trilling polyphonic textures and lush vocal harmonies rising above it all. Sonic touchstones include Björk, Elizabeth Fraser, and the kulning-style singing of Lena Willemark. Made across three years in Sweden, the album was built without Murex knowing it would become one. Collaborators including Pelle Westlin, Isak Hedtjärn, and Elvira Anderfjärd gave the work what Murex calls "extra arms." All music videos are directed by Murex herself.

On revelations of divine love, jason calhoun’s fifth release for Dear Life Records, Calhoun has assembled an especially potent album of work that whirrs, hums, and glows. Unlike his recent output centered around extended, hypnotic compositions, the fourteen tracks here immediately request your attention and curiosity. Their concision only underscores one of his greatest strengths: the ability to capture an evaporating, fleeting moment, and hold it close. The title is a nod to British Anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose collected writing of the same title is the earliest of any woman written in English. Here it serves as a unifying theme for Calhoun's particular palette of restless textures and tentative melodies. This is personal music, to be sure, but it also feels tactile, almost taffy-like in its presentation—and with such a potent combination, it is hard to resist a smile while listening. Like when the insistent pulse grounding 'last one' suddenly changes color as yawning tones reveal themselves, or how 'eye dilation' tiptoes into the room with each note sounding like a carefully chosen step. Though never precious or fussy, the album remains resolutely intimate. Calhoun puts it plainly: “Julian of Norwich says “‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’. These days, I’ve been having my doubts that this is true. As no solution to the issue at hand, I look for the revelations of divine love in my life, and I find them--in my partner asleep on the floor in our studio, my survival of a social interaction with a stranger, being bad at chess. Don't ask me what they mean-I'm still figuring that out myself. Maybe we can figure it out together.” It is from this place of doubt, searching, and openness that the album finds its footing. When asked about the origin of the album's cover art, Calhoun explained, "I see this spot all the time on my commute home from work". A true statement of how the mundane and meaningful are interwoven, from someone who celebrates that union better than most. Unlike Julian of Norwich, Calhoun is no hermetic mystic himself-but in his daily life he works at an oncology center, doing routine but necessary work to provide treatment for those in need of it. While he might resist any analogizing, it is sincerely easy to say that Calhoun's body of work, which is only fortified by revelations of divine love, also offers care and company.

"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.

Making a bold change of direction as he toasts 45 years working in electronic music, Steve Rachmad dials up the symphonic dimension of his musical practice for Light and Time — a widescreen trip to techno's outer reaches. As one of the true originators of Dutch dance music, Rachmad brings a wealth of experience to his first album for Dekmantel even as he adopts new production methods to create his most ambient body of work to date. A strong melodic sensibility runs through all of Rachmad's work. His 1995 album The Secret Life Of Machines under his Sterac alias remains a landmark of lush, emotionally charged, deep-diving techno, while classic workouts like 'Helix' and 'Gnosis' (as Parallel 9) foregrounded powerful synth lines. Up until the upheaval of COVID, Rachmad's studio practice had been squarely focused on synths and drum machines, but when (along with the rest of the world) he was stuck at home reevaluating his situation, he found himself exploring the world of film scoring. Experimenting with Native Instruments' sampling software Kontakt, Rachmad taught himself how to arrange and layer orchestral instrumentation. Having rarely used sampling in his music before, the distinct fluctuations of recorded orchestral players opened up a new dimension that has become the foundation of Light and Time, the first of many albums Rachmad has ready to go in a more downtempo, home-listening vein. Throughout Light and Time, harmonious passages take centre stage as Rachmad audibly stretches out. At times the orchestral samples arrive in a pure, organic form, while elsewhere they merge and mutate into synthesised elements. His techno legacy manifests throughout, in abstract form. In lieu of strident beats, we're offered fractal, scratchy rhythms guiding uniquely shaped noise and natural sounding percussion with a human lilt. These fluctuations are no accident — they're a result of Rachmad playing much more of the album by hand after years in thrall to the precise machine pulse of arpeggios and sequences. The album never feels restricted by one dogmatic approach. At times, Rachmad's embrace of moody soundtrack composition fills the whole picture, as on haunting string piece 'The Field Of Reality'. Elsewhere he dips into low-slung electro soul for 'Invisible Warriors Of Light' while 'Cosmic Memories' revels in alien synthesis with a dramatic bite. 'Encrypted Instructions' tweaks and processes string samples through angular prisms to close the album out with an experimental flourish. Rachmad's long and winding history in electronic music naturally folds into these new modes of expression, and the end result is a sumptuous, many-sided album that showcases the hidden depths of a techno legend's musicality.

Following his critically acclaimed collections Electronic Music from the Seventies and Eighties and Electronic Music from the Eighties and Nineties, Carl Stone pairs Baroo (March 2019) with a double-LP album of recent works, including the final section of "Fujiken", his epic journey through southeast Asian field recordings and street cassette culture. On all six tracks, composed between 2013 and 2019, Stone’s pan-global playground of looping synths and Asian pop culture remains as fertile as ever, digitally shattered into unimagined patterns and gestures, either through the MAX programming language or (in the case of "Kikanbou") by generating live loops within an Elektron Octatrack sampler.The title track is the first recorded release from Stone’s ongoing collaboration with the Japanese vocalist Akaihirume. Elsewhere new influences come from rock (the slow drum break of "Bia Bia"), disco (the Nile Rodgers-esque guitar riff "Kikanbou") and hip hop (the frenetic percussion loop of "Han Yan"). Their diversity only adds to Stone’s borderless musical vision, a world where rhythm becomes atmosphere, song becomes beat, and pop becomes art.

"I have always been searching for a way to articulate the intangible area between the recognizable and the unfathomable, a feeling perhaps informed by some long-abandoned experiments with psychedelics. This has been a continued pursuit starting with my tape experiments in the 1970’s until the present, with technological evolution driving new ways of expression. With the exception of Xé May, which is performed on an Elektron Octatrack, these pieces were constructed for live performance using a laptop computer running programs I have built in the MAX programming language. Okajouki and Xé May were composed in 2011, all the rest are from 2018. The pieces use a technique of time slicing that I first started doing back in the 90's, notably with my piece Mom’s, wherein sound files are metaphorically shattered in time like glass and then reorganized into mosaic patterns. The technique used to require laborious preparation outside of real-time before the files could be brought onstage. Now not only can it be done spontaneously while performing, but also with a degree of flexibility that I find quite liberating. They are a lot of fun to play and hopefully to listen." - Carl Stone

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.

Loraine James has processed the last two years of turbulence through her art. The North London producer started a monthly show on NTS radio, shared several projects on Bandcamp, and recorded two Hyperdub releases, the Nothing EP and Reflection, the proper LP follow-up to her 2019 breakthrough, For You and I (which landed James, then a teaching assistant by day, the top spot on year-end lists by Quietus and DJ Mag). She also returned to a distinct creative terrain uncharted since her teenage years. In contrast to her club music sensibilities, this mode embraces keyboard improvisations and vocal experimentation, foregoing percussive structure in favor of shaping atmosphere and tone. From this divergent headspace emerged new coordinates and climates, a new outlet: Whatever The Weather. A longtime fan of ambient-adjacent Ghostly International artists such as Telefon Tel Aviv (who she’d ask to master the album), HTRK (whose singer Jonnine Standish features on Nothing), and Lusine (whom she remixed at the start of 2021), James saw the label as the ideal home for this eponymous album of airy, transportive tracks as they began to formulate. The titling on Whatever The Weather works in degrees; simple parameters allowing James to focus on the nuances as a mood-builder. Her suspended universe fluctuates; freezing, thawing, swaying and blooming from track to track. James describes her jam-based approach for the sessions as “free-flowing, stopping when I felt like I was done,” allowing her subconscious to lead. The improvisations have an intrinsic fluidity to them, akin to sudden weather events passing over a single environment — the location feels fixed while the conditions vary. The album opens at “25°C,” a sunshower of soft hums and keys. As the longest piece, it serves to establish stability, the inflection point where any move above or below this temperate breeze breaks the bliss. Given James’ proclivity for organized chaos in her production, this scene is fleeting, naturally. From that utopia, we plummet to the most melancholic read on the meter, “0°C,” its isolated synth line traversing a hailstorm of steely beats and static. Next, the dial jumps for the propulsive standout “17°C.” Like a timelapse of springtime in the city, the single accelerates across a frenzy of frames; car horns, screeching brakes, and crosswalk chatter fill the pauses between rapid jolts of multi-shaped percussion. For portions of the work, James leans neo-classical, rendering pensive vignettes of cascading piano keys and warm delay. “2°C (Intermittent Rain)” ends the A-Side on a short and stormy loop; a resulting sense of reset permeates the B-Side’s opener, “10°C.” The producer mingles intuitively on echoed organ, locking into and abandoning atypical rhythms that suggest her jazz-oriented interests. “4°C” and “30°C” display the range of James’ vocal experiments. The former chops and pitches her voice to a rhythmic, otherworldly effect, the latter reveals James at her most straightforward (she cites Deftones’ Chino Moreno and American Football’s Mike Kinsella as inspirations), singing tenderly and unobstructed for nearly the duration before beats collide in the climax. Whatever The Weather closes at “36°C,” while a sweltering heat by any standards the track eases along comfortably on a chorus of synth waves, acting as an apt bookend for this evocative, sky-tracing collection that started in a similar state. Cyclical, seasonal, and unpredictable, true to its namesake.

2026 repress; clear with red color vinyl. "Standards, the fourth full-length recording from Chicago's Tortoise, boldly announces their return following 1998's TNT. Tortoise spent the bulk of 1998 and a portion of 1999 touring the world. Following tours of the U.S., Europe, South America, Japan, Brazil, and Australia, Tortoise members worked on other projects that occupied them until the spring of 2000 when they began to record Standards. In 1999 members of the band toured the US as the backing band for legendary Brazilian composer/singer Tom Zé's. Musically, Standards is their most concise statement of purpose thus far. The tunes are direct and immediate, yet they maintain the exploratory edge that has always characterized the group's output. The fusion of instrumental sounds (electric, acoustic, and synthesized) is subtle and subversive. Similarly, the group's fluency within the studio environment gives the finished work a quality that alternates between artifice and reality. Whilst TNT was constructed in the studio using segments recorded, improvised or altered electronically, the 'Standards' sessions began after a period of rehearsal and composition. The contrast, simply stated, is that the studio was used extensively as a compositional tool for TNT, whereas with Standards it was used predominantly as tool to realize and enhance the existing new compositions. The studio does not impose itself on the recording to the same degree listeners witnessed on TNT, and the resulting record is in many ways reminiscent of their unadorned self-titled debut. Sounds, notes and rhythms are manipulated but in general, processing is spare. Tortoise's highly lyrical melodies, rich and varied tonal palette and high level of musicianship were recorded in a studio designed by McEntire. The resulting record is the clearest demonstration of the band's many skills and strengths."

The EP "Trans Canada Highway", released in 2006 by the Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada on Warp. Against a backdrop of the nostalgia and sense of memory characteristic of Boards of Canada, synthesizers that evoke the warmth of analog equipment, hazily processed samples, and gently swaying beats layer together to create a soundscape that blurs the line between reality and memory. It is one of the defining works of Warp in the 2000s and an EP that leaves a particularly beautiful afterglow within their discography.

Boards of Canada's masterpiece single. released in 2000.

A classic. Boards of Canada's 1998 masterpiece, their first album.

Keith Freund’s music occupies a space where careful musicianship and homebrewed experimentation meet and shake hands. On “Window Left Open,” spacious melodies drift through dense fields of electronic activity: saxophone lines rise above buzzing circuitry, percussion flickers at the edges of the frame, and clustered glitch textures dart through the music like insects in tall summer grass. Every sound feels vividly animated, a charged part of the same mercurial ecosystem. Freund’s talent lies in balancing warmth and unpredictability with remarkable ease. Patient motifs recall the exploratory spirit of early folktronica, while bit-reduced textures, degraded loops, and idiosyncratic synthesis techniques continually reshape the terrain beneath them. Rather than treating acoustic and electronic elements as opposing forces, Freund allows them to intermingle until distinctions dissolve, creating compositions that reward close listening while retaining immediate warmth. This record finds Freund working with a fully formed vocabulary that is truly his own, transforming glitch, melody, improvisation, and atmosphere into songs that are both fundamentally curious and disarmingly engaging.

Fresh from an appearance on Space Afrika’s 'Honest Labour’ album, collaborations with Klein and Lol K and a placement in the Dazed 100 list, LA Timpa finally offers his head-turning 'Equal Amounts Afraid' album on vinyl following a short CD run just before the pandemic hit in early 2020. Served up on promising yung London label O___o, and made with additional mixing from Solange collaborator Kwes and mastering from sometime Dean Blunt engineer Amir Shoat, ‘Equal Amounts Afraid’ is a beautiful smudge of pop experimentation riddled with timeless musical soul. Following from his 2016 debut ‘Animal’, and guest production for Cold Specks’ trip hop sound, LA Timpa’s gently reserved and melancholic productions push an intimate pop vocabulary into spectral, dreamlike dimensions. Introspective and avant like Klein’s psyched chop-ups, as sensuous as Blood Orange, but with a taste for expressively harmonised pop refrains that clearly recall Yves Tumor via Richard Youngs, the album unfolds with its own logic, deploying eyelid-tugging levels of hypnagogic charm that practically demand to be heard in sequestered, lowlit situations. Seducing us to his singular temporality and hazy atmosphere with the vaporous falsetto and ambient soundfield of sirens and groggy bass in ‘Around’, a cut-up interlude leads into fragmented music box melody and intimate plainsong on ‘Fertile’, while ‘Core’ almost echoes the 4AD dream-pop of A.R. Kane, and ‘Give’ beautifully dematerialises indie-pop into ambient gauze. ‘Backyard Exotic’ surfaces his strangest side in a maze of mushied songcraft, ushering a trippier 2nd half where the songs really start to fray between ‘Caretaker’, the smokers’ hymnal vignette ‘Towel Under The Door’, before channelling Thom Yorke in the melting Mbira melody of ‘Rattle Snake’, and spooling out into proper ambient soul with the spine-tracing lines of ‘Tried Ice’ and the smudged magic of ‘Memory Phone’ where he truly divines a strength in his vulnerability in a way that should resonate with the most sensitive souls.

Twenty years ago, Jan Jelinek’s debut album Personal Rock was released by Source Records. Under the pseudonym Gramm, it brings together eight tracks that have not been available on vinyl since their original release. Faitiche is very glad to announce the re-release of the album: Personal Rock will appear as a double LP featuring the original cover artwork. What people wrote about Personal Rock two decades ago: “Situated somewhere between Jelinek’s much loved Loop-Finding Jazz Records, Farben, Move D’s Conjoint project and Atom Heart’s most immersive work for Rather Interesting, it’s a late night album full of subtle production tricks and melodic House structures that belong to the pre-millennial IDM heyday, but which transcend its overly-masculine templates.” (Boomkat) “Though many producers have pushed forward the clicks-and-cuts style of experimental ambience developed by German experimentalists Oval (among others), few have been able to match their knack for making abstract cuts into pieces of undeniable beauty. Jan Jelinek’s first LP as Gramm is one of the precious few, and it’s obvious from the opener.” (AllMusic) “Organized in organic structures and minimal movements, the tracks get into utopian states and super-desirable moods, offering superior contentedness and dependable taste of the kind seldom sustained for a whole album. (...) Subway-Escalator-Soul.” (Spex)