MUSIC

We invite you to enter the strange and enchanting world of Nino Gvilia, where nothing is quite what it seems. These two ep's (presented on one disc in March 2024) draw you deep into her dreamlike sound-world of hushed late night atmospherics and surreal songwriting. Born in Poti, near Lake Paliastomi in Georgia, Nino Gvilia is a singer-songwriter whose lyrics offer up meditations on what it is to be human in the 21st Century, and aim to carry us beyond into ecology and the politics of the non-human world. Her songs are influenced by folk and minimalism and make use of magnetic tapes, field recordings, vocal samples of contemporary thinkers and philosophers, and an array of strange instruments and vintage textures, drawing for us an intense dreamlike atmosphere. On these two EPs, Nino Gvilia collaborates with Zevi Bordovach (synth / keyboards) and Pietro Caramelli (electric guitar / vocals), with Giulia Pecora and Clarissa Marino adding violin and cello. Now I should tell you that Nino Gvilia does not exist. She is a purely fictional character invented in order to help us reflect on the place of the songwriter in times of global crisis.

During the 1990s Shizuka self-released a series of four cassettes, barely heard by anyone outside of their inner circle. Culling together live recordings and home demos, these served as companions to the scant amount of proper Shizuka releases at the time (including the recently reissued Heavenly Persona). Concentric Circles is proud to present the third and most anomalous cassette from Shizuka, simply titled III, on vinyl for the first time in an edition of 500 copies. Formed by guitarist and singer Shizuka Miura, alongside husband Maki Miura, who’d previously played with both Les Rallizes Dénudés and Fushitsusha, the group known as Shizuka started in the early 90s with Jun Kosugi (also of Fushitsusha) on drums, and a revolving cast of bass players, including J.J. Junko, whose sole recorded appearance with the band is here on III. Devoid of any of their trademark noise and bombast, III feel distinct from their studio and live albums of the era, largely due to its fragility; haunted and spare, the songs revolve around Shizuka Miura’s gentle, unforced sighs, and Maki’s flickering, flinty guitar. The first side of the album features four songs – “For You,” “Lunatic Pearl,” “The Night When The Door Opens” and “To The Sky” – which will be well-known to Shizuka fans from previous recordings, but the drastically understated renditions here are particularly moving for their quietude and intimacy. The second half of III consists of a side-long duo session, just Shizuka and Maki Miura together at home, circling around the simplest two-chord motif for twenty minutes, Shizuka singing the most heavenly melody, strung through the sky of this lengthy improvisation. It’s an astonishingly beautiful performance, one that stills time through its becalmed repetition, pointing towards the endless forever. In this respect, it feels like an ultimate extension of Opal’s early recordings, Big Star’s 3rd or even Galaxie 500’s quietest moments. III lifts the darkness away, allowing for a softer, more gentle Shizuka to shine through, bringing with it a side to the band that most never knew existed. A lovely discovery if there ever was one.

Scottish experimental/electronic musician Drew McDowall’s lifelong interest in an elegiac solo bagpipe style called pibroch (ceòl mòr in Gaelic) has been an inspiration for much of his previous work (including Coil’s legendary Time Machines). This form, often traditionally used for laments and for tributes to the dead, fuses modal drones with flickering dissonance and plaintive melody evoking an ancient, solemn mood. His latest work, A Thread, Silvered and Trembling, both incorporates and transforms these elements via exploratory electronic processing, weaving an electro-acoustic tapestry of strings, shudders, voids, and voices, alternately disembodied and displaced. Co-produced with engineer Randall Dunn at Circular Ruin Studios in Brooklyn, the collection’s four pieces capture McDowall at his most elevated and elusive, in thrall to "the ineffable – that which refuses to be spoken." McDowall’s palette here is unusually eclectic, sourced from a dynamic orchestral ensemble arranged by Brent Arnold and comprised of cello, viola, violin, harp (Marilu Donovan of LEYA), and french horn. Ebbing between shrouded electronics and enigmatic, sometimes spectralist orchestration, the album moves with a seething, simmering energy, surging into elegant, uneasy crescendos. The first two pieces are inspired by a liberatory hijacking and inversion of a grim biblical story (and by a cryptic and strange UK simple syrup branding). Opener "Out of Strength Comes Sweetness" shivers with short echo and resonant pads, before shifting into the album’s centerpiece: the 14-minute saga "And Lions Will Sing with Joy." A murmuring electrical storm of keening strings and disorienting drones gradually grows darker and denser, until suddenly there’s a crack in the clouds, revealing mutated choral voices and sparkling harp. McDowall describes the track as "an incantation to help usher in a break, and a new beginning." The record’s latter half evokes a deep untamed animism shot through with spiraling radiance. "In Wound and Water" sways with harp, plucked strings and eerie cello undertows while lush layers of disorientated electronics hang in the dusk. There is no resolution, only a faint gradient of fragile dissipation, leading into the album’s harrowing and climactic closer, "A Dream of a Cartographic Membrane Dissolves." Processed voices (credited on the liner notes to "The Ghosts Who Refuse to Rest") contort, whisper, and gather as the rest of the ensemble sharpens, poising to strike. Then it does – grand, tragic stabs of strings and horns lashing the sky, storming heaven by force. The fallout is poetic and inevitable, raining embers into a dark sea. But the journey and catharsis of A Thread linger long after it goes silent. Like so much of McDowall’s multifaceted catalog, this is music of immanence and alchemy, attuned equally to the sacred and the profane, to the tile and the mosaic.

"Kevin, a new collaboration between Ben Bondy and Mister Water Wet, presents what feels like a time-machine hidden in the back of your closet. ‘Laundry’ pleasantly haunts listeners with phantom purrs, harmonies, hums and horns. This project is a hand reaching through the void and out of your speakers responding to moments of isolation and pining with resounding gratitude. It makes space for warmth in slow-healing wounds; the gift of reset that is born from the call and response between friends." -Yves B. Golden

Following up on reissues of the 2000 compilation »Multila« and 2001’s »Anima,« Sasu Ripatti has thoroughly revisited the classic »Whistleblower« for its first ever vinyl issue on the German Keplar label. Ripatti created entirely new mixes of previously unheard-of alternative versions of the tracks that first appeared on CD through his own Huume imprint in early 2007. He thus shines a new, different light on a record that was as much an expression of reaching a turning point in his life as it also showcased a new, more direct and perhaps more abrasive side of his Vladislav Delay project. »Whistleblower« was marked by the insertion of more noise and disruptive elements into Ripatti’s slowly moving take on intricate electronic music that heavily leaned on dub techniques. Fittingly for an album written at the threshold between one life and the other, »Whisteblower« seems at once melancholic and forward-looking in both tone and style. »Whisteblower« was the follow-up record to 2005’s »The Four Quarters« and produced in the German capital. »I had quite a hard time in Berlin towards the end and I'm sure the track titles and the music reflect some of that uneasiness,« Ripatti says 15 years later. Changes in his personal life had a profound impact on him when making the record. The fifth track, »Lumi,« was dedicated to his daughter who was born shortly after the album was finished. »I had to reconsider what my life had been,« he recalls this watershed moment in his biography. Having already previously embraced a sober lifestyle—hinted at with the last piece’s title, »Recovery IDea«—Ripatti started questioning his life choices more thoroughly. This is also expressed in »He Lived Deeply,« a track inspired by Miles Davis’s love for Duke Ellington whose title can be read as an implicit question that Ripatti nowadays paraphrases thusly: »Had I been living fully, or fully not living?« The seven tracks also marked a musical turning point in Ripatti’s work as a producer, not only because it was the last one for which he primarily used analogue and vintage equipment. They are also more straightforward on a music level, more demanding and at times more concerned with subtle rhythms than with the thick textures that were so integral to his earlier work. »Whisteblower« represented the first step in a process of focusing less on sonic abstraction and more on direct (self-)expression. While Ripatti admits that he found working on the album difficult back then, he also points out that he was surprised to hear how »gentle and peaceful« it sounded when he started revisiting the original files he used as a basis for these newly mixed versions. »It probably proves how much more comfortable I had become with sound.«

Being somewhere, while being somewhere else
A place I look for in other places
A moment on repeat
I made this music as a way to hug myself

All music performed and written by Ulla E. Straus

2024 Repress. Tokyo's Ai Aso is a Japanese psychedelic pop singer-songwriter whose work has a whisper-thin acid-folk quality to it. She started performing as a solo singer around 2000. Her solo work, infrequent collaborations with White Heaven members You Ishihara and Michio Kurihara, Yurayura Teikoku, and Boris bring a level of fragility and hypnotism to the stage, recalling lost memories, small flavors of Coil, and serial playing on the verge of evaporation. As for her recent activities, she has performed on bills together with Sunn O))), Boris, Masaki Batoh (Ghost), Touri Kudoh, Kim Doo Soo, Mark Fry, Simon Finn, etc. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.

In the chaos of our every day, it can be difficult to find time for pause. Knee-jerk reactions have become the norm, while the instantaneous fog clouding our culture urges us to move along, to step away from the present moment. Mexico City-based songwriter and instrumentalist Estrella del Sol wanted to craft a space where there is finally room to breathe, and time to arrange the patchwork of our reality. On new album Figura de Cristal, she encourages fragility, and celebrates the delicacy of our ever-evolving selves. Estrella del Sol is known for her work in shoegaze band Mint Field, hailed for their tender exploration of sentimentality and grief. While Mint Field propel their themes with oozing, amplified guitars and commanding vocals, del Sol’s solo work blossoms in a quieter, more electronic space. “I wanted to experiment more with my vocals and mainly synth sounds, always trying to find a different sound,” she explains. The result is a patient and nurturing collection of songs that remind us of the importance in taking our time. Her first solo album, Un espacio de lo imaginario, released in 2020 and recorded in the first two months of the pandemic, introduced del Sol’s ethereal side. Expansive vocal dynamics dance carefully through gentle melodic structures, showcasing the intimacy of del Sol’s solo arrangements. Figura de Cristal builds upon this intimacy, adding a blanket of subdued yet glittering drones, haunting electric guitars and celestial vocal textures. It was written, recorded and produced entirely by Estrella del Sol at her home in Mexico City, with cello contributions by experimental composer and personal friend Mabe Fratti and mixed by Mint Field bassist Sebastian Neyra. The album includes field recordings of Estrella del Sol’s surroundings, namely her neighborhood in Mexico City. By including these miniature portraits of her reality, Figura de Cristal acts as a kaleidoscopic interrogation into what it means to be alive, and how others figure into the images we create for ourselves. By using the recordings, del Sol says “the album could feel familiar to my reality at that particular moment.” Enmeshing them into the album’s ambient arrangements, Figura de Cristal threads together the familiar and the fantastical. It’s a reminder of the coexistence of multiple realities. When making the LP, Estrella del Sol wanted to create a soundtrack that could replicate the calming notion of a sunset-stroked evening, or the pink tones of a quiet morning. The title track, “Figura de Cristal,” replicates the grace of these moments, teaching us to lend ourselves that same grace and gentleness, even during the most difficult days. “This album became a reminder to me that I have to take care of myself and that If I don't, I can break like a crystal figure,” she explains. “I have to learn to empathize with myself and the people surrounding me. That everyone's perspective of reality is different and there's no true answer.” Figura de Cristal is an album about curiosity, and the merit in embracing our vulnerabilities. There is not one single reality, or experience, but instead an infinite range of truths. Through improvisational techniques and dynamically droney sonic textures, Estrella del Sol asserts the joy in following your instincts, rather than following the rules. Figura de Cristal rids itself of rigid structure or certain form, bending to a liminal space that declares joy in the unknown, and an exhale in the unfamiliar.。

Lerkenfeldt explores the hallucinatory nature of refraction alongside electroacoustic experiments in the storm water network on ‘Halos Of Perception’ (Shelter Press, 2023). Arrangement of new textures and web-like structure reveal another side to her immersive practice. With friends and guest artists eight works are remixed and represented as a suite for the drains ahead of her first European tour in 2024 on limited edition cassette.

Wind, the natural movement of air - is invisible but perceived through mediums: swaying branches, whistling pipes, blowing hair, clashing wind chimes. Filled with these daily associations with the wind it’s easy to overlook the beauty of the wind itself: an ethereal turbulence of air molecules with their own dynamics, wildly shifting direction and momentum. Celia Hollander’s album 2nd Draft, out November 10th on Leaving Records, is a tribute to the motion of making music: the invisible, forceful current that runs through humanity. In the way wind finds expression in the mediums of leaves, hair or dust, music is an unseeable current with its own energy that finds expression through resonant bodies, vibrating strings, trained fingers, colliding objects and more. 2nd Draft was recorded while Hollander was a composer in residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE in 2022. While working on multiple projects, she decided to improvise on their upright practice piano for an hour everyday. Writers refer to this type of practice as a “free write:” letting words from the unconscious torrentially fill a duration. Hollander compares these sessions to a sitting meditation: at best the hour soars by, and at worst it can feel like a tedious way to spend time. Once back in Los Angeles, she sifted through the recordings, chose excerpts and digitally marinated and simmered morsels of audio until achieving a desired texture, viscosity and aroma. Hollander considers all released music to be drafts: building from a previous piece and working towards something unknowable in the future. 2nd Draft is literally so: a sequel to DRAFT, the 2017 tape on Leaving Records under her bygone moniker $3.33. Both feature improvised piano, an exception to a more digital-composition based process heard in the rest of her discography. Like a draft of wind - a sudden gust, invisible but felt, something from the outside broken through to the inside - these piano free writes are meant to stir the external and the internal, ruffle the energy of a room, provide a refreshing breeze and surprise with spontaneity.

Delight, Arushi Jain’s follow-up to 2021’s seminal Under the Lilac Sky, out March 29 2024 on Leaving, carries, at its core, the simple proposition that delight is accessible and that the practice of cultivating it is a necessary endeavor. Weaving together emotions, imagery, and a sense of yearning for beauty, Jain aims to instill belief in the ever-present nature of delight, asserting the need to actively seek it when not readily found. The enhanced perception of this elusive emotion, Jain asserts, comes through extended observation of the present - the longer we look, the more we see - an idea that serves as a guide in her quest for delight. The introduction of cello, classical guitar, marimba, flute, and saxophone plus rich Indian classical vocals, all layered with modular synthesis, expands her sonic vocabulary to a lush textural landscape and signals new areas of creative focus. Jain, for the uninitiated, is a multi-hyphenate artist/musician (composer, vocalist, engineer, modular synthesist) . As has been widely noted, Arushi Jain deploys the sounds and aesthetics of contemporary experimental electronic music to channel, celebrate, iterate upon, and interrogate traditional Indian idioms. Under the Lilac Sky, her first LP (also released on Leaving), constituted an offering of sorts: a six-song suite intended to accompany the listener as they watched the sun’s setting. But while Jain’s last record was concerned with time, space, and our outer environment, Delight is reflective, occasionally approaching the autobiographical—simultaneously a record of an artist’s inward journey, and an invitation/roadmap for the listener to embark on their own search for delight. Each of Delight's nine tracks were inspired by Raga Bageshri (a raga being a melodic framework particular to Indian classical music). Bageshri is said to convey the feeling of waiting to reunite with one’s beloved. It possesses an innate longing, colored by potent fantasies of reunion. “Bageshri embodies the realization that you have unknowingly fallen deeply in love. It triggers within me immense devotion, juxtaposed with a poignant acknowledgement of suffering; for love as immense is often challenging to reciprocate”, Jain writes. “We come into this world alone, and we leave alone. Despite this knowledge, the human capacity for love is without reservation, which I find generous.” She sings of connection to a past and future self, and the creative practice (see the meditation on intimacy, “Our Touching Tongues”), but her longing feels more expansive. The beloved Jain invokes throughout Delight is not a lover, as Bageshri calls for, but delight itself. Stirred by Raag Bageshri during a creative fallow, Jain decamped to Long Island, where she composed and recorded the core of her new album. She assembled a makeshift studio in an empty house on the seaside, a house suffused with light and art and surrounded by wildlife. This ambience has clearly seeped into the album, drenched as it is in the warm sun as it is in the cold October rain. In her self imposed isolation, Jain experimented with vocal compositions, building songs out of short sung phrases. Jain ended her solitary writing by entering a previously unexplored territory of collaboration, working with acoustic instrumentalists to incorporate classical guitar, cello, marimba, flute, and saxophone into her sonic vocabulary. The result is a collection of songs that are often slower and sparer than those featured on Under the Lilac Sky, yet audibly richer, embracing the transcendental potential of repetition and the nuance of sampling live instruments on her synthesizer. Phrases, lyrics, and notes recur, but the feelings they evoke are consistently novel; Delight is diverse and fluid. Each song documents, by Jain’s own account, a tussle with the void, a journey into the unknown. She has opened an unmarked door and returned with small things that bring delight, precious and unexpected; we catch their glimmer in each recording. Indeed, Delight serves as an abject reminder that, through attention, openness, and practice, we are all capable of tapping into this necessary human sensation.

XKatedral Anthology II is the second installment in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers affiliated with XKatedral working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces written from 2018 to 2020 by composers Kali Malone, Jessica Ekomane, Mats Erlandsson, Theodor Kentros, Wilma Hultén and Maria W Horn. This collection of pieces focuses on the use of synthetic sound and algorithmic composition languages as tools for precise work within the realm of spectral exploration. In addition to this, the electronic instrumentation in many of the pieces is augmented by acoustic instruments.

"What the f**k this is unREAL! I love Liquid DnB and this is classsssss!" - DJ Mag (Chris Blackhall) "Amazing job, the vibes from the music to the artwork was just *chefs kiss*...Liquidy drum and bass paired with a late 90s/early 00s video game aura… perfect breaks for late-night drives." - Pad Chennington "There aren't too many artists that sound this authentic...it just sounds like he knows this music like the back of his hand...it's a complete banger from start to finish" - Future Sounds FM (My Pet Flamingo) "We've been lucky enough to have the Level Select album for a while now in the SEGA Powered office, and it's a cracking one to put on for those late-night deadline evenings!" - SEGA Powered Magazine Pizza Hotline’s Level Select is one of my records of the year. It came out right at the start of 2022, and crystallises a cultural moment...Level Select is the most successful album by a single artist at capturing this kind of DJ/compilation-style flow and sense of journey. It is deep and heady, while melodic and fun at the same time. - Thom Hosken (Future Sounds FM) WRWTFWW Records is extremely excited to announce the first ever vinyl release for Pizza Hotline’s brilliant 2022 full-length Level Select, originally only released on cassette and digital. The liquid drum & bass meets Y2K era video gaming aesthetics monster is now available in a limited edition transparent vinyl double LP with a glorious 45rpm cut, p Entirely written and composed by UK producer Pizza Hotline (apart from "GLACIER ZONE", a collaboration between Pizza Hotline and DJ Total 90), the stellar 8-song album was initially released as a limited cassette in January 2022 and quickly gained cult status - making a full-on vinyl release quite the necessity. It’s here now with the the previously unreleased track "POLYGON DREAMSCAPE" (which sounds as magical as its title) and 45rpm cut for louder, bigger, deeper bass rumbling. Spellbinding, atmospheric, and beautifully melodic, Level Select is a large scope dreamy adventure of liquid DnB filled with ambient escapades, ethereal jungle, high vibe breaks, and a heavy loving dose of late 90s / early 2000s video game influences. Hypnotic late night hype and pensive chill moods mesh with ease in a cinematic soundscape that re-contextualizes and gives a new life to a beloved music genre - LTJ Bukem, Peshay, the Wipeout OST or Soichi Terada's Ape Escape come to mind, and sounds and soundtracks from the Sony Playstation, the Nintendo 64, and the Sega Saturn resonate from the speakers. It’s all fresh with a subtle nostalgia and so much heart. An instant classic. Spellbinding, atmospheric, and beautifully melodic, Level Select is a large scope dreamy adventure of liquid DnB filled with ambient escapades, ethereal jungle, high vibe breaks, and a heavy loving dose of late 90s / early 2000s video game influences. Hypnotic late night hype and pensive chill moods mesh with ease in a cinematic soundscape that re-contextualizes and gives a new life to a beloved music genre - LTJ Bukem, Peshay, the Wipeout OST or Soichi Terada's Ape Escape come to mind, and sounds and soundtracks from the Sony Playstation, the Nintendo 64, and the Sega Saturn resonate from the speakers. It’s all fresh with a subtle nostalgia and so much heart. An instant classic. Press start. Points of interests For fans of liquid DNB, Video games, ambient, late night vibes, computers and clubs, Soichi Terada's Ape Escape, LTJ Bukem, Peshay, Wipeout OST, good music, good music on video games, playing video games all night and possibly all week. Limited edition vinyl of Pizza Hotline’s 2022 cult hit album redefining liquid drum & bass with a Y2K video game twist.

Carmen Villain returns with the 'Planetarium' EP, the follow-up to her 2013 debut, Sleeper. In the span of the last few solitudinous years, the US-born, half-Norwegian and half-Mexican has honed and nurtured her songwriting and production craft, while still drawing from the gossamer atmospheres of 'Sleeper.' She weaved the hyper-personal songs in peaceful seclusion, creating starry tapestries of field recordings, piano, guitars, programmed drums and synths.

Limited to 1000 copies! The first collaboration between Amelia Meath (Sylvan Esso, Mountain Man) and guitarist / producer Blake Mills, who have long respected each other. When the scent or lighting hits the face, it unfolds quietly and strangely, evoking the outline of the memory floating outside the frame. Mills' characteristic fretless baritone guitar and sparse decoration form the basis of the song, and the gap between the instrument and Meath's delicate voice comfortably leads to the night scene. On the B side, the performance of the same song by the genius Sam Gendel is recorded with an original interpretation. The wonderful performance that distorts the existing melody and coexists with mystery and eerieness invites you to sleep deeper at night.

Ethereal dream gloom from a voice so unique they had to create an entirely new genre to contain all four octaves. Mixing classical music with synthesizer and acoustic guitar, Happy Rhodes' "ecto pop" never quite broke outside upstate New York, but that didn't stop gothic-americana queen Marissa Nadler from reinterpreting "Where Do I Go" in 2018. Both the original and cover have been paired here, housed in an elegant black and silver sleeve, with embossed braille lettering for the visually impaired.

A subjective mixtape by Dj Salinger. Mixed, recorded and assembled by Dj Salinger in a state of deep melancholy. Mastering by Franz Kirmann.

Franz Kirmann is a French music producer living in London. He has made albums for various labels including Denovali, Bytes, Mercury KX. He also writes music for film and TV and is a lecturer in music production at Point Blank Music school.
 

Emboldened by the success of the recent reissue of It's Cosy Inside, Mark and Clive had a listen to hundreds of previously unreleased tracks recorded in the 70s and 80s to assemble their first new record in two decades, When The Past Arrives, out in March from Drag City / Yoga Records.

With comparisons to Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Animal Collective, Cluster, and Brian Eno, WOO's profile in the world of atemporal music has been growing for years. For the lucky few who know, like Fela, or Neu!, WOO has their own instantly recognizable vibrantly pulsing sound, a quiet sound of comfort and contentment.

If we got something good happening it would continue into the early hours. I remember one morning waking up still sitting at my keyboard, the phone as my pillow. The woman below us would thump the ceiling with a broom handle when she got sick of the noise, so that influenced a lot of what we could do and how we would work: drums became triangles, clarinets were played real breathy, guitars were plucked, not strummed. Even hitting the keyboard keys were not to be struck too hard. This new album is mainly a result of these late night recordings. Soft melodic compositions created on either piano or guitar, then multi tracked with improvisations and harmonic patterns. -- Clive

When The Past Arrives is a collection of deceptively airy jams, addictive, crystalline. Uncut called It's Cosy Inside "the epitome of domestic bliss," and Pitchfork observed the album "stakes itself on the premise that the most cosmic and revelatory experiences you'll ever have will all happen between your house and the backyard." As if to answer, the Ives brothers selected a vocal track to complete the album, which asks,

"How far out, will you go today
up the garden path?" 

London based composer, multi-instrumentalist and producer Akusmi announces »Lines«, an exhilarating new collection of works born from the desire to take where the acclaimed debut album »Fleeting Future« left off - in search of new forms. Formed with a sense of urgency and a reductive approach »Lines« is almost entirely comprised of alto saxophone, clarinet and piano with embellishments of ambience and minimal percussive elements. Recorded in full at his home studio in London, Pascal Bideau speaks about the process: »I wanted to go a bit more a bit more horizontal and ambient, work with layers of lines, might they be dotted or straight, and leave them to unfold and see where they would take me.« Akusmi uniquely finds the spaces in between experimental jazz, crossover classical and ambient music.

Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast. Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Langage is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Langage is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments. Image Langage is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity. — Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Ghastly and hallucinatory – Last Liasse is a sign of the times, alternative pop record by Helen Island. Within this debut album, the artist captures the saccharine gaze of digital escapism through characteristic filtered high notes, cut-up genres, and processed vocals. Providing a comprehensive overview of Helen Island’s self-distributed initiatives, with the ethos of the Parisian Simple Music Experience collective, the twelve tracks set a solid musical score that resonates with the age to come.

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.

Originally released as a hand-numbered CD on New Year’s Eve of 2004, Last Light captures Tor Lundvall’s hushed songcraft at its most ghostly and grayscale, stripped bare like branches bracing for winter. Initially conceived as “a piano album with sparse electronics” (with the working title November), Lundvall’s palette steadily expanded, incorporating synthesizer, samples, bass, metronomes, and his signature spectral vocals. A journal entry from the spring of 2002 proved formative to his evolving vision: “I remember watching the blueish-grey light shimmering outside and hearing distant sounds echoing far away, eventually sinking into silence and stillness.” The album’s 12 tracks are steeped in this sense of autumnal transience, of bearing witness to what fades. The music moves in whispered swells, between dirge, drift, and devotional. Synths chime like slow-tolling bells; percussion shuffles and shivers, icy and isolated; bass traces a low-lidded plod – it’s a mode both austere and seductive, lulling the listener into its landscapes of deepening dusk. Lyrically, Lundvall’s language skews observational and depressive (“through lace curtains / grey light falls / dark clouds gather / in my soul”), with each song like a gauzy glimpse into a different tableau framing winter’s descent: rust-colored leaves, frozen ponds, cold crescent moons. Lundvall has long considered Last Light a “personal favorite” in his discography, and it’s easy to hear why. In texture, finesse, and pacing, it vividly evokes the rare mood of fragile, frosty pastoral noir depicted in his iconic oil paintings. His is an art of the half-seen and half-remembered, of fleeting figures, shapes and shadows, and gathering darkness. Of all that disappears, and the ghosts that never leave: “So I wait / as the years / slowly drain the magic and the light / and the girl / I never loved / haunts me through the dark roads of my life.” Originally released as a limited CD edition of 955 hand-numbered copies on Strange Fortune in 2004 (SF2). Reissued by Dais Records as part of the 5-CD box set "Structures and Solitude" in 2013 (DAIS052). ARTIST STATEMENT: I outlined my earliest ideas for this album in October 2001. My original plan was to record a piano album with sparse electronics. The working title was "November" with the catalogue number EAE006 (later re-assigned to "Insect Wings Volume 1"). I originally wanted the CD artwork to feature details from my Autumn paintings, so trees and rusty leaves would cover the entire package. The inspiration came six months later, from a journal entry I wrote in April 2002 entitled "Lying in Bed - A Strange Evening". I remember watching the blueish-grey light shimmering outside and hearing distant sounds echoing far away, eventually sinking into silence and stillness. "Last Light" is a personal favorite and I feel it's one of my strongest releases. The music differs from my previous works in that the vocals are more up front and the compositions are sparser and more austere. There's a lot going on beneath the surface, however. Several tracks are based on specific locations near my home while others describe the changing light in my bedroom at various times during the day. The title was taken from one of my paintings which, curiously enough, does not appear on the sleeve. Tor Lundvall January 19th, 2005 (Amended March 2018)

Japanese obscure dream pop gem! Two elevator bangers to get through the gloomy holiday season by Japanese artist, Sonoko, probably made somewhere in the 90's. Merry ye ye