MUSIC

Uncle Reed In The Purple Mine is the debut record by a new duo, Amkarahoi. Uncle Reed In The Purple Mine conjures ghosts of 90s chill out tents, aqueous ambient, exploratory turn of the century IDM and echoes of jammy dub. Amkarahoi is named for a remote region of Eastern Siberia an intimidating car and boat journey from the nearest city - several songs are named after rivers - and the record was borne from a largely improvised show in Saint Petersburg, later overdubbed and mixed down in the studio. The combination of heady, melancholic synthscapes, unexpected samples and the loose, spontaneous nature of it’s genesis make for a unique, compelling proposition. Kirenga alternately swells and submerges ravey pads and shifting kicks, coming up midway for air before plunging again, and Cutima peppers the stereo field with foreboding stabs, collapsing drums and faintly nightmarish ambience before emerging from the darkness with gently plucked erhu. Handa’s simple four note piano loop and cuckoo vocal sample lament blooms into an engulfing E rush, before Mogoul threatens serotonin syndrome with it’s loved up lead and stuttering morning after nostalgia. Chininga ekes out a gentle groove over which is laid a hazy, head nodding shimmer, and on Djegda they finally submit and throw down a speedy breakbeat for some more classically vintage fire twirling shapes. Amkarahoi is Nikita Chepurnoi and Sergey Dmitriev. Chepurnoi has released records as Minereed on his own Echotourist imprint, and as part of The Patience and Copacabana on Hair Del. Dmitriev has made music as Purple Uncle for Echotourist, Hair Del and Nazlo. They’re currently based in Armenia (Dmitriev) and Europe (Chepurnoi). RIYL - Vladislav Delay, The Orb, GAS, Global Communication, Biosphere, Seefeel.

Originally conceived as a tour only exclusive, Bright Sparkling Light was recorded alongside, 2023's expansive beguiling long-player An Ever Changing View and draws on the same trademark blend of jazz, electronica, global and spiritual jazz influences. The original pressing sold-out on Matthew’s EU and UK tour last October and November and so many people got in touch with us here at Gondwana asking how they could get a copy that we decided to make a further 2000 copies available. The title track is a hypnotic meditation built on one of the lushest loops Halsall has ever created and featuring stellar work from Halsall and flautist Matt Cliffe. Newborough Forest is a brisk, uplifting composition celebrating one of Halsall’s favourite landscapes and the wonderous Tide and the Moon paints a sonic picture of late-night waters and deep mindfulness and features some of Matt Cliffe’s most beautiful tenor playing. Like An Ever Changing View, Bright Sparkling Light comes in a package as striking as the music, with handmade fonts designed by Ian Anderson and a beautifully realised embossed artwork that offers a perfect compliment to the LP. Strictly limited and featuring a download code, Bright Sparkling Light will not be re-pressed.

Brooklyn-based DJ and producer Ben Bondy follows releases on Good Morning Tapes, West Mineral, 3XL and Quiet Time Tapes with Por, the second release from his k2dj alias. It arrives on Montreal label NAFF with six tracks of pristine, crystalline electronica with the notable presence of processed vocals which create a sort of metallic, shimmering futuristic alien pop music.

Downtempo, Experimental, IDM … Knopha steps out on Mood Hut Records with ‘Kwong’. Ranging in tone from downtempo drum and bass to Herbert-like cut up house tunes, from esoteric pop to digital abstractions.

Mix Mup & Kassem Mosse mark a decade since their rudely offbeat debut with a 19-track, 1hr+ payload of woodcut drums and groggy samples tessellated in beatdown mode for fans of Theo Parrish, STL, Actress Back in 2012, MM/KM’s s/t maiden voyage was a staple round our ways, beloved for its odd bag of skewed grooves. After leaving us with only a 3-track EP ‘Have You Seen Them’ in the interim, the German duo return with ‘Ich sehe Vasen’, or ‘I See Vases’, making up for the big pause in duo production with a heavy satisfying session of loping, peg-legged rhythms, off-the-cuff keyboard lines and hiccuping ambient wobbles that feel right back at home amid the screwballs on TTT. The expanded run time of ‘Ich sehe Vasan’ allows for a far mazier and demonstration of their intuitive, lo-fi style, peppered with numerous beatless nuts and bolts that join the up the club workouts like a game of snakes and ladders on K. Roll the dice and expect to encounter the haziest, Theo Parrish-like Detroit house one minute, then trip down wormholes of lush ambient, or whirling percussive derives the next, popping out along the line at wheezing Actress-like grog, all primed for slinging on at the afters to regular calls of “what the fuck is playing, man?” until the sun goes down again.

"Combining steppy dance music, lush detail and a diaristic tone, Jack Chrysalis’ debut album dials between music that is destined to catch the ear of the club-goer and the heart of the dreamer, his signature propulsive mutations of organic techno and UK garage sounding strongly in tracks like Another Year and Coldharbour. Between these, Chrysalis threads in more introspective moments. Tracks formed by running a hand along piano keys in improvisation, or made in recollection of Koji Kondo’s clear bright musical palette for Zelda. They lend a sense of atmosphere and a deeper running mood to the album’s overworld, heightening endorphin hits from the garage swing and affording a little more bittersweetness to its textures and secrets. Whether in rush or retreat, each track on this album emerges with its own emotional resonance. There’s a sense of seasons turning, or a twilight quality that’s hard to fully pin down. “Owl music” became shorthand for Jack’s tunes, a way for Mana to capture a prescient, nocturnal flight within their environment."

What have we here? 16 pieces of hard-to-classify music, created during the period 1994-2008, a cornucopia of playful, intelligent, questing and eminently listenable electronic music from Osaka-born artist Hyu, who released two albums on Nobukazu Takemura’s Childisc label, in 1999 and 2002. Although a member of the turn-of-the-century generation of artists subsumed under the rather vague term “electronica”, his work stands apart in many ways, particularly in his unique exploration of microtonality, his ability to humanize music technology, and his distinctive trait of combining a light touch and sense of fun with conceptual rigor. This collection is an intriguing mix of previously unreleased tracks and re-edited versions of previously released pieces. There is a wide range of music here, many of the pieces truly unique: wiggy and wiggly robo-pop, fractured funk, swinging sample assemblages of subtle sensory overload, dynamo-drones, overtone explorations. All of it distinctive, much of it prescient, all of it rising above the strictures of genre. Hyu’s music is appealing and fun, but driven by a desire to not only create music, but to create ways of creating music. This desire, this quest, is clearly audible in all of these tracks, and in the overall excellence of his music. Available on CD or 2LP with DL. The 2LP features a bonus cover of “Kaze wo atsumete” by Happy End. A notable feature is the entertaining and enlightening notes, written by Hyu himself.

What have we here? 16 pieces of hard-to-classify music, created during the period 1994-2008, a cornucopia of playful, intelligent, questing and eminently listenable electronic music from Osaka-born artist Hyu, who released two albums on Nobukazu Takemura’s Childisc label, in 1999 and 2002. Although a member of the turn-of-the-century generation of artists subsumed under the rather vague term “electronica”, his work stands apart in many ways, particularly in his unique exploration of microtonality, his ability to humanize music technology, and his distinctive trait of combining a light touch and sense of fun with conceptual rigor. This collection is an intriguing mix of previously unreleased tracks and re-edited versions of previously released pieces. There is a wide range of music here, many of the pieces truly unique: wiggy and wiggly robo-pop, fractured funk, swinging sample assemblages of subtle sensory overload, dynamo-drones, overtone explorations. All of it distinctive, much of it prescient, all of it rising above the strictures of genre. Hyu’s music is appealing and fun, but driven by a desire to not only create music, but to create ways of creating music. This desire, this quest, is clearly audible in all of these tracks, and in the overall excellence of his music. Available on CD or 2LP with DL. The 2LP features a bonus cover of “Kaze wo atsumete” by Happy End. A notable feature is the entertaining and enlightening notes, written by Hyu himself.

Ulla returns with ‘Foam’, a surprise new album unlocking variants of ambient pop and looped jazz/dub styles coiled inside a glitched matrix that reminds us of Huerco S’ ‘Plonk’ as well as Ekkehard Ehlers fractal treatments and those incredible, smudged and disneyfied edits of Celine Dion released earlier this year by elusive outfit Romance. It’s an absorbing, quietly significant album for 3XL, on its most substantial release to date. Responsible for one of contemporary ambient’s finest breadcrumb trails in recent years, Ulla leads on from an acclaimed run of albums toward a more filigree style on ‘Foam’. Deploying fragmented morsels resembling glass-cast confectionary with a burbling vernacular, these ephemeral new works dissolve into a supine, shoe-gauzy and jazzed bliss that’s best compared with Jan Jelinek’s efforts in this dream-staged arena, the subs x piano minimalism of Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto’s revered collabs, as well as the memory-frothed echo of claire rousay and Co La’s fractal baubles. Aye, it’s a sound close to our hearts and one weft with a certain sort of magic that sparkles on the nerves and imagination with delicacy. Intending it to “feel like a keychain”, the album follows a logic that’s almost algorithmic with its haphazard mutations, but which ultimately displays a more human pulse on pieces like ‘foam angel’, weaving forlorn brass around jazz samples and Ulla’s disjointed voice murmuring unintelligibly like some cyborg liz frazer speaking into the sublime. Effusive solo keys and strings cascade like petals on ‘song’, where familiar leitmotifs become wind-dispersed like seeds. We’re snagged on the bittersweet tang of ‘popping out’, and the unexpected dance between marina’s jazz guitar lilt and the aerosoul thizz on ‘sad face’, while the tongue-tip sensitivities of ‘blush’, and ‘for your love’ sound like Rihanna produced by a Systemisch-era Oval. As tangled and complex as it is filled with improbable ohrwurms, ‘Foam’ is unlike anything we’ve heard from Ulla before, and it just might be the weirdest ambient/pop dislocation of the year so far.

Boundary caught our ears when he was just a 19-year-old, a true genius, he's been making music since he was 13 with a maturity and depth well beyond his years. We're absolutely gassed to get him onto the label with a transcendent LP that hits you right in the feels. Hailing from the Dominican Republic, Boundary leans heavily on all the good stuff from early Detroit techno, UK & Japanese ambient, and leftfield techno, stitching things together with immaculate drum programming, wandering basslines, and ethereal pads. Sometimes brilliantly raw and gritty, at other times delicate and refined, this is an LP that ranges from deep, glassy ambient through to 140 bpm (and beyond!) pumpers. It's classy techno from start to finish, think Aphex Twin meets PLO Man with an early Detroit twist. Limited cassette run and digi, don't miss out!

Ship to Shore PhonoCo., in conjunction with Sony Music Entertainment, is proud to present Hirokazu Tanaka & Keiichi Suzuki’s original soundtrack to the 1994 Super Famicom classic MOTHER 2: ギーグの逆襲 (MOTHER 2: Gyiyg Strikes Back!). MOTHER 2, released as EarthBound in the West, is revered as one of the most offbeat and memorable RPGs. Citing influence from artists such as Brian Wilson, Frank Zappa and John Lennon, Suzuki and Tanaka created a diverse soundscape quite unlike anything that came before it. Remastered specifically for vinyl and released outside of Japan for the first time ever, MOTHER 2 is a must have for video game music and soundtrack fans.

The Black Dog's highly regarded album, Radio Scarecrow, is now remastered and re-issued on Dust Science, 15 years after its original release on Soma Records. Two years of constant development culminated in a masterpiece that flows delightfully and hits hard. Marking a true progression from the band's previous album, Silenced, the trio are keen to note: "The beats are faster and the bass is much heavier - so much so, that it was making us ill, working with the low frequencies for hours on end. We could only do 3 hours at a time on some parts." Tracks like Floods v3.9 and Beep are a testament to this. With throbbing basslines strong enough to make an impact on the Richter scale, these tracks are best played out on big sound systems. Radio Scarecrow unfolds gracefully, barely skipping a beat between tracks. The act have created an album that demands to be listened to in its entirety. With elements blending between tracks (the same kick drum being used to very different means in Short Wave Lies and Siiiipher for example) and with constant references to conspiracy theories and the supernatural, The Black Dog present more than a collection of tracks. Influenced heavily by their interest in Magick, Numbers Stations and Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP), the act have hidden examples of these within their work. "These transmissions and recordings (and people's interpretations of them) had a strong influence on many of the final concepts and compositions, to the point where we've been embedding coded messages and curses deep inside the tracks". "These transmissions and recordings (and people's interpretations of them) had a strong influence on many of the final concepts and compositions, to the point where we've been embedding coded messages and curses deep inside the tracks".

Picnic is collabolation unit of ju ca & mdo. Nostalgic ambient electronica masterpiece!!

ゆっくりと映る影。音楽ディグをテーマに据えた漫画『ディグインザディガー』の作画を手掛けることでも知られるイラストレーター、漫画家、音楽家の駒澤零氏が主宰する東京の音楽レーベル〈KAOMOZI〉のカセット作品群をストック！音楽制作以外にも絵画やファッションショーモデルとしても活動しているエレクトロニック・ミュージック作家の山下憶良 (Okura Yamashita)が23年4月に発表したミニ・アルバム『液晶』のカセット版が登場！『液晶(ディスプレイ』をテーマにしたプライヴェートな内容の一作で、愛らしくも実験的なエレクトロ/アンビエント・ポップを全7曲収録。平沢進ファンにも推薦！

音楽ディグをテーマに据えた漫画『ディグインザディガー』の作画を手掛けることでも知られるイラストレーター、漫画家、音楽家の駒澤零氏が主宰する東京の音楽レーベル〈KAOMOZI〉が、今年9月にリリースしていたコンピレーション・アルバム『kaomozi compilations vol​.​2』の限定カセット盤を特別にストックさせて戴きました！レーベル・ショーケース的なラインナップとなった本作は、1周年記念となる作品であり、佐々木虚像、鮭とばSKTB、零進法、ナナビット、H B、帰国子女といった近年のhyperpop以降の若手音楽シーンで活躍する作家たちによる豪華トラック群を全14曲収録。マスタリングはNaofumi Uedaが担当。版元完売。

There isn’t much to go on other than the soundscapes when it comes to Civilistjävel! What is rumoured to be a figment of the pre-internet era tapping into a similar consciousness as Biosphere, Chain Reaction or early Fax +49-69/450464 is ultimately left up to second guessing. For the average listener crossing paths with the project, a steady run of small-run, minimally packaged LPs has cemented Civilistjävel! as a leading force in the dub techno/glacial drone scene of present. However niche that may sound, this collection of tracks for Perko’s new FELT imprint navigates the same territories as the previous outings but with the folkloric tag “Iron Night” to help guide our ears. A Swedish expression for long nights of frost that damage plants and crops, the spectral and foreboding atmosphere of the opening cut already hints at the direction of the album. Combining dense ambient synth layers with hard to place industrial motifs (sometimes in rhythm, sometimes chaotically arranged) are what Civilistjävel! does best, indeed Järnnätter unfolds as a piece of work you can really spend time with. At points it feels as if the machines in some old factory complex have spluttered back to life through some unknown force and have begun to sing to one another. Other times the atmosphere is akin to a hydrophone placed deep into an ice-covered lake and the synthetic pulses of ‘A2’ are the only vaguely human touch. However, the sparse melodic flourishes across the record stem from an interest in psalms and early Swedish folk music, the juxtaposition of machine-led intuition and personable studiousness adding a hidden depth to the album.

As well as releasing post-classical music as Goldmund stretching back nearly two decades, American composer Keith Kenniff also uses the alias Helios to create ambient electronica. ‘Espera’ is Kenniff’s twelfth such album, and introduces a more panoramic and dynamic iteration of Helios, the woozy, hazy compositions taking on the structures and grandeur of post-rock in places.

Bastian Epple makes an eagerly anticipated return to marionette under his elusive MinaeMinae guise that imagines rich sonic architectures for the journeying spirit to voyage to. Räumlichkeit is Epple’s debut album and third release to date following Gestrüpp from 2020, venturing further into melodic electronic nostalgia and percussive beat oriented soundscapes. Spanning fifteen vignettes that trapeze through uncharted winding trails and familiar spaces, the album’s recordings evoke a scenic state of mind. The tracks simulate a room or nested rooms where the breathtaking views of nature and contrasting brutalist structures are explored with an equal sense of curiosity and wonder. Taking the listener down unpredictable paths that are rooted within the music itself, Epple is as much present in the creation as the listening experience which gives the recordings an immediacy and a live element of unfolding before your ears, unfamiliar each time. This novel viewpoint is very much at the core of Räumlichkeit, poetically contemplating the concept of spatiality and how that, in turn, influences the receiving of those fleeting moments. Apart from the world building qualities of the recordings, it's the speed of travel that also impacts the perception of the journey, and Epple tends to manipulate time at a fully immersive rate that grips the mind and body.

Having crested the west coast modular-ambient wave in just a few releases- including 2018's Sharing Waves on the influential LA experimental imprint Leaving Records- Sean Hellfritsch has swapped the mossy analog synth improvisations of his prior output for refined melodic arrangements dressed in sprightly dawn-of-digital textures. Big Earth Energy plumbs the depths of Hellfritsch's multimedia mind and naturalist heart, spinning an impressionistic narrative world off of cultural touchstones like the PC game MYST, and the work of Studio Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi. Inspired by the aforementioned, and guided by Hellfritsch's experience as an animator and filmmaker, Big Earth Energy is the soundtrack to a hypothetical video game with a pointedly ecological premise, and a twist of psychedelic charm. In Hellfritsch's imagined virtual journey, the player assumes the perspective of a treefrog sixty-five-million years ago, hopping epochs with each new level, forming a comprehensive picture of the massive hanges the planet has gone through over the eons. The ultimate goal of the game is not to amass resources, defeat enemies, or gain power, but to fully witness the unfolding of one of the biggest systems of energy imaginable- or as the album's creator puts it- "to explore the incomprehensibly vast energetic expression and mystery that is Earth." Big Earth Energy is steeped in exploratory RPG intrigue, possibility, and contemplation, lovingly overlaid with Miyazaki-an sentiments and aesthetics. The through-composed, organic, meandering synthesis heard on previous Cool Maritime albums has been fully replaced by meticulous polygonal arrangements that recall the computerized sheen of late 80s work by composers like Hiroshi Yoshimura, and Yoichiro Yoshikawa- using true-to-period gear no less. Even given it's referentiality, Big Earth Energy comes off as forward-facing where so much reminiscent music remains fixed to a bygone moment in pop culture. Hellfritsch has created a musical world where the endless verdancy of the biosphere finds it's parallel in the golden age of early 1990s video games, and late 80s Japanese environmental music, all while pointing to a hopeful planetary and artistic future that vindicates the motives of all of these muses.

Hotel Paral.lel, released in 1997, marks the full length debut release from Austrian Christian Fennesz, originally released by MEGO, following the twitching drone as found on the 1995 EP Instrument, also included in this deluxe 2LP reissue. Once launched, Hotel Paral.lel was to instigate a sublime exploration of a wide variety of forms, from formal abstraction to shimmering drone around to ground zero glitch pop. Recorded just before mobile computing devices became omnipresent it was an investigation into the sonic possibilities residing in guitar based digital music. Sz launches the career with a constantly buzzing sound that resembles a fax machine encountering a G3 laptop for the first time, realising the game is up. Nebenraum is the first foray into the style for which one would attribute to Fennesz. A glacial drone unexpectedly morphs into a gorgeous melody and microscopic groove. Adding pulse and melody was hearsay in the radical end of experimental music up until this point and with this single gesture, everything changed, for everyone. Blok M nails this trajectory home with a straight up 4/4 beat. Such rhythm also features on Fa with a euphoric mix of a thudding beat, sharp splinters of noise and a devastating exploding melody. Repetition plays heavily through this album as the hyper metronomic beat on traxdata lays a bed for all manner of buzzing electronics. On the closing “Aus” we see a glimpse of what was to come in the future works of Fennesz, an experiment in popping, bubbling pulse pop. A far more darker and experimental work than Fennesz’ subsequent work. This is an exquisite radical field of freeform noise, sliced techno beats and subtle ambient texture all coming together to create a timeless work. There’s little out there in the world of music, still to this day, that sounds remotely like Hotel Paral.lel. With a radical reinvention of music Hotel Paral.lel is an essential addition to collectors of pioneering music in the late 20th Century and sounds as enthralling today as it did to the shocked ears occupying 1997. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu. Vinyl cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle. Artwork by Tina Frank.

Arovane's acclaimed 2004 album »Lilies« has been out of print on vinyl for nearly 2 decades now. It finally gets a well-deserved reissue through the Berlin based Keplar label. The new version has been remastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering and comes with a brand new cover artwork. *2023 remaster* "Lilies" was a follow-up to "Tides" in every sense, exploring a trip to Japan and drawing on shimmering textures and the sort of melodies that you might need some time to recover from. There's a hugely evocative sense to these tracks, emotionally driven, free of complexity or conceit, piano melodies providing the central focus for a twilight cascade of light that seems perfect for the Tokyo skyline - just as the sun sets. It's an album that radiates warmth and vulnerability, fusing the technological might at the heart of each track (and at the heart of the city) with an age-old understanding that certain echoes of sound, small melodic changes and cushioned lullabies can imprint sounds on your mind like childhood memories - remembered forever. Like a dreamlike score, or maybe even an alternate soundtrack to "Lost in Translation" - the sort of music that intertwines with images and stays in your mind indefinately. After coming back from Tokyo and completing the production of "Lilies", Uwe Zahn disassembled his studio in the big flat in an old building in Berlin's Prenzlauerberg district and stored it away in boxes. He needed a break from making music. "Lilies" was the last album prior to a nine-year hiatus for Arovane, ending in 2013 with the release of "Ve Palor".

With Narration, Toki Fuko returns to Affin after a long break. The EP contains 4 stylistically diverse tracks (some of them overlong), which are captivating in their perfection and document the musical versatility of the musician, who skilfully moves between dubby, hypnotic, in-depth techno here.An extremely worthy successor and a grandiose further development of the Astatine EP from 2020. Keplar continue their Arovane reissue program with this long overdue edition of Uwe Zahn's iconic EP collection 'Icol Diston' that features some of his finest productions, all releases by cult legendary label Din (the Hardwax one, not Ian Boddy's label). From the shockingly contemporary rework of Torsten T++ Pröfrock's 'Außen vor' to the itchy industrial grind of 'icol vern', it holds up. After Zahn changed track completely with 'Tides' in 2000, Pröfrock's DIN label assembled the then Berlin-based producer's early 12"s - "i.o.", "icol diston" and "AMX" - into "Icol Diston", closing the book on the first iteration of his sound. Zahn had written the music during a time of unprecedented musical freedom in Berlin, and felt the city's energy seep into ideas he was exploring in his rapidly growing studio. "There was an overwhelming dynamic of liberation reverberating through the city—through the clubs, the arts, the people," he says. During long tram rides, he would dream out the rhythmic sequences he'd reassemble later using a handful of synths, sequences and samplers, recording live in stereo straight to DAT. So invariably, this is some of the most intricate beat oriented material Zahn has ever produced, drawing on the blueprint of Autechre's seminal "Tri Repetae" and fashioned in the shadow of Hardwax and the mighty Dubplates & Mastering, welding dub bass and tekno stabs to skittering IDM repeaters and cycling hats. With the benefit of hindsight, it all makes complete sense. His first release, "i.o." was an attempt for Zahn to map out a process he'd explore further on the following year's "Atol Scrap". These are still some of the producer's most iconic recordings, and show how well developed his sound was even at the very beginning. Gravelly beats immediately push to the front of the title track, steadily overwhelmed by winding, melancholy synth patterns that would become an Arovane staple in the coming years. 'parf' and 'torn' follow largely the same path (the latter being a particular highlight), but it's when Zahn switches things up on 'andar' that the depth of his sound begins to show. Using a rumbling kick and barely-present glitches to provide an almost hip-hop jolt, he concentrates his focus on undulating, dubby atmospherics that allow his signature melodies to poke only half-way through the fog. The EP's follow-up "icol diston" meanwhile is some of the most upfront music Zahn has produced to date, immediately showing his rhythmic advances on the glassy 'yua:e', a self-assured collision of pulsing, stepped kicks, polyrhythmic crunches and euphoric analog washes. Zahn even responds to the rave echoes that surrounded him in Berlin with 'nacrath', contorting 'ardkore stabs into chirpy, hopeful lead sequences that dance through sine pulses, harp-like synth plucks and halfstep bumps. But hands-down our favorite moments come from Zahn's final DIN 12", where he remixed two tracks from Pröfrock himself: Dynamo's 'außen vor' and Various Artists' 'no.8'. The former is legendary around these parts, showing Zahn's skill working in plushest technoid mode as he skips around a squashed deep house template, letting pads slowly affect the flow with distant longing, and the latter is a remodel of Pröfrock's most crushing recording. Zahn takes his friend's smoked-out synth squelches and adds a low, slow beat that comes across like a weightless answer to Timbaland's Missy/Tweet run, dominating the soundsystem with subdued, syncopated force. Both tracks still sound like little else out there, and they haven't aged a day. Massive recommendation, obviously.

The first Huerco S. album in 6 years, glyding into new territory with a pool of glassy synths, padded subs and cascading arpeggios, pretty much unlike anything Brian Leeds has made under any alias. "His sound palette has broadened to absorb and refine trap’s un-smeared geometrics and drill’s taught rhythms amongst the gaseous bodies and soul-piercing ambience that has garnered such acclaim; Where those previous veins were rooted in the pre-Columbian civilizations of his native Kansas, Plonk reflects the mournful sodium glow of cities at night, street corners that light up with painful moments of clarity you wish would disappear."

With A Hammer is the debut studio album by New York singer-songwriter Yaeji.

“With A Hammer” was composed across a two-year period in New York, Seoul, and London, begun shortly after the release of “What We Drew” and during the lockdowns of the Coronavirus pandemic. It is a diaristic ode to self-exploration; the feeling of confronting one’s own emotions, and the transformation that is possible when we’re brave enough to do so. In this case, Yaeji examines her relationship to anger. It is a departure from her previous work, blending elements of trip-hop and rock with her familiar house-influenced style, and dealing with darker, more self-reflective lyrical themes, both in English and Korean. Yaeji also utilizes live instrumentation for the first time on this album—weaving in a patchwork ensemble of live musicians, and incorporating her own guitar playing. “With A Hammer” features electronic producers and close collaborators K Wata and Enayet, and guest vocals from London’s Loraine James and Baltimore’s Nourished by Time.