MUSIC

Few artists have left behind a legacy as enigmatic and captivating as Shizuka Miura. Amidst the Tokyo underground, she was a spectral figure, creating ghostly, childlike dolls and writing haunting, other-worldly songs. She formed Shizuka in 1992 with Maki Miura, known for his staggering guitar work in legendary groups Fushitsusha and Les Rallizes Dénudés. Their music bloomed with a fragile, yet explosive mystical power; an atmospheric alchemy of psychedelic rock, folk and noise with Shizuka’s ethereal vocals invoking loneliness, yearning and dark providence. Since her passing in 2010, the group has steadily gathered a cult following. Black Editions presents their sole studio album, 1994’s Heavenly Persona, a monumental, transcendent work originally issued by P.S.F. Japan on CD in 1994; Now newly remastered and in its first ever vinyl edition on double LP with a laser etched fourth side. Presented in a deluxe tip-on tri-fold jacket with ink pigment foil stamping, gloss film laminate finish and printed inner sleeves and mounted booklet. It includes her extensive, heart wrenching final interview, translated for the first time to English alongside high-resolution archival images.

A quietly influential figure among electronic and experimental circles since the late 90s, Berlin based sound artist Hanno Leichtmann has been developing a sprawling and idiosyncratic vision both as a creator and curator. With a keen sense for charting new territories, Leichtmann's work spawns a multitude of languages that go from delicate ambient excursions to techno explorations or abstract sceneries on numerous sound installations, releases on such esteemed labels like Entr’acte, Karl Records, Arbitrary or The Tapeworm and collaborations with artists like Valerio Tricoli or Jan Jelinek. A reflection of his keen sense of discovery. Centered around the Villa Aurora Organ, an intriguing and mostly unknown instrument built in 1928/29 by the Artcraft Organ Company in Santa Monica, California, 'Outerlands' presents a deeply personal approach to the instrument's particular properties, very much in line with Discrepant's ethos. Consisting of a pipe organ, a wall mounted marimba and a two octave tubular bells/chimes ensemble, remotely controllable by MIDI, the Villa Aurora Organ's rich palette of sounds is translated into 12 short tracks capable of conveying the mesmerising spirits of minimalism, exotica and devotional music. Starting with the ecstatic sound of the pipe organ, 'Lucero' sets up the hypnotic mood for 'Outerland's excursions through moments of spiralling repetition - 'Tramonto' -, blissful contemplation - 'Sunset' or 'Notteargenta' - or underlying tension - ‘Coperto’. 'Espera' amps up the unease, with queasy organ tones lurking beneath marimba harmonic motifs that wouldn't sound out of of place on some survival horror movie, while 'Miramar' or 'Revello' bring an uncanny sense of familiarity through its repetitive melodies. Drifting seamlessly through a variety of moods that somehow feel connected - the outerlands are within you, if you allow yourself to let go.

'Science, Art And Ritual' is a story of ‘process'. Growing up in Harrow (a then quiet suburb of London) in the 70’s and 80’s from the age of about 10, Kingsuk Biswas aka Bedouin Ascent's ears opened up to sound as he scanned the airwaves. The undeniable righteousness of 80’s dub via David Rodigan’s Roots Rockers shows was the first prominent influence he received, and with punk roots —and his burgeoning record collection— became exposed to the breathless post punk experimentation that followed in the early 80’s sweeping up free jazz, noise, dub and much more. Throughout though, he maintained his fascination with Indian Classical music which was a mainstay in his parent’s house and spoke with the same infinite space as Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures', and King Tubby’s Studio dispatches. Through those teens he assembled and de-assembled, knocking about with fellow travellers —punk bands, garage, space rock, noise. Something was happening. On-U Sound, ECM, Factory Records kept him plugged in and sane. At that time Kingsuk's core studio setup revolved around his vintage Gretsch, Fender Jazz, Moog, TR-606 and rudimentary FX. He added congas, folk instruments, pipes, hand percussion, gongs, and jammed out shards of funk, noise, jazz fusion, electro and ambience into his hungry Tascam Portastudio. By 1987 these had morphed into what we’d now refer to broadly as techno, but the genre didn't exist beyond the reverberating walls of his bedsit, and he hadn’t yet plugged into the global conversation. 'Science, Art And Ritual' was released in 1994 by Rising High Records and was presented as Bedouin Ascent's debut album, although 'Music for Particles' (released in 1995, again on Rising High) was recorded even before —'SAR' sessions span from 1992-1993, whereas 'Music for Particles' were earlier from 1989-1992, with some older 4-track references from about 1986 too. Weaved in throughout the album are subconscious references to music that Kingsuk heard in the past that still remained within sight as companions. The opening track "Ancient Ocean III", referencing the extinct ocean Tethis, unapologetically channels Tackhead, Colourbox, Mantronix and Lee Perry. The style was also deliberately juxtaposed to the prevailing sound in techno at the time, which had locked onto a rigid form of symmetrical kicks and light snare drums. Elsewhere 80’s soul and funk are frozen and captured in fragile glass lattices. Electric pianos resound throughout, such as in "He Is She", probably a half-memory of 70’s MOR radio from childhood sleepy night drives. A duel between kick drums from three generations of Roland drum machines —TR-808, TR-707 and R-8— is a central theme in "Transition-R", all in conversation, calling and responding. These were not just machines to Bedouin Ascent, but part of an extended family, with heart and soul. Three decades after seeing the light, Lapsus is proud to present a special 30th anniversary reissue of this left-field techno gem in a repackaged and redesigned edition. All pressed on a deluxe 3LP marbled vinyl and including a limited lithographic insert print of the original album cover. All tracks have been restored and remastered directly from the original DAT tapes, and the album also features previously unreleased tracks such as "In the Clouds" and "Thru Water" —regularly performed live at that time and produced in the same period as the album sessions in 1993. 'Science, Art And Ritual’ may refer to esoteric traditions in Indian philosophy, but equally embodies the collision of the science, the art and the ritual that is at the core of being immersed in a deep musical journey.

"GLOW WORLD is Rod Modell's new project resulting from his collaboration with Taka Noda. The duo delivers what could be an example of perfect elegance and musical refinement, but the resulting sounds are once again dirtied, ruined and ravaged by a noise capable of deafening us, sounds that come from afar, that seem to fade away but suddenly illuminate the world around us, which lands on us and which no longer belongs to us, leaving us lost in an infinite melancholy. GLOW WORLD is a work characterized by buoyant ambient sounds from which delicate rhythmic textures emerge, and never speeding up they run along the routes of an electronic music that surely knows how to be as minimal and suffused as it is distressing. Touches of piano, slow pulsations of bass lines and constantly disturbed sounds that nevertheless almost lull the listener into listening to this timeless music, perfect for letting go, observing time inexorably slipping out of our hands forever. Sounds that are timeless, it was said. Rod Modell and Taka Noda are visionaries, and GLOW WORLD is a rare gem. Simply another masterpiece."

*per customer 1 copy. The dreamlike encounter between Dean Blunt's experimental refraction and Joanne Robertson's dreamy vocals is a dream come true. A dreamlike encounter between Dean Blunt's refractive experimentalism and Robertson's dreamy vocals, this dream-pop/shoegaze album is a graceful, introspective soundscape that blends lo-fi, experimental, and ambient music in a genre-defying style.

Clear vinyl. Edition of 500 The Danish-Chilean composer Molina (b.1992), explore the transformation between organic and synthetic musical landscapes. She weaves her own tapestry of dreamy guitar surfaces, soaring flutes and atmospheric vocals.

A Colourful Storm presents Tangerine, a collection of songs by Reiko and Tori Kudo. Recorded at Village Hototoguiss, Japan, during autumn, winter and spring 2011 and 2012, the makeup of Tangerine is the culmination of over thirty years of experimentation, improvisation and intimacy between Reiko Kudo and Tori Kudo. Beginning their collaborative musical activities in the late 1970s and documenting their movements as Noise, it would be an earlier Les Rallizes Dénudés gig that would prove influential in shaping the duo’s lifelong impulse for collaboration and free play - it was, after all, where they first met. Over the course of a decade, they became associated with Hideo Ikeezumi’s seminal PSF (Psychedelic Speed Freaks) scene, Tori playing with the likes of Ché-SHIZU and Fushitsusha and self-releasing cassettes before forming the first incarnation of Maher Shalal Hash Baz. Maher Shalal Hash Baz, Tori’s storied musical ensemble of an ever-rotating cast of contributors, would perhaps find difficulty with Tori if called his own. First surfacing in 1985 on a Shinichi Satoh-released cassette compilation, the group would spend the next thirty years playing live and recording, their sound finding solace with labels as far-reaching as Geographic and K. Tori would welcome local amateur and professional musicians, neighbourhood children, friends and passersby on stage, while in the studio, the likes of Ikuro Takahashi (LSD March) and Takashi Ueno (Tenniscoats) have joined him and Reiko on seminal sides such as Return Visit To Rock Mass and Blues Du Jour. A deeply human, deeply romantic recording, Tangerine shines as a touchstone of contemporary Japanese folk minimalism and is significantly the last recorded appearance of Reiko and Tori Kudo as a duo. Reiko's voice, plaintive yet playful, quietly commands centre stage and resonates perfectly with Tori's crystalline instrumentation: bass guitar, euphonium, violin and piano evoking echoes of Enka blues. Glacial soliloquies ’The Deep Valley of Shadow’ and ‘When Seeing the Setting Sun Alone’ bare isolation and restlessness before evolving into profoundly welcoming works. A dedication to playwright and former collaborator Jacob Wren, ‘The Swallow II’ struts confidently while ‘Homeless’, delicately adorned and desirous, addresses themes of universal vulnerability: “Will you give me bread when I’m hungry? / Please stay by me like my mother”. A beautiful accompaniment to the intoxicating swirl of ’We May Be’, recorded live by John Chantler at a Cafe Oto concert in 2009. Originally released on CD by Hyotan in 2013, Tangerine is presented for the first time on vinyl by A Colourful Storm with an exclusive alternate digital version of ‘Homeless’. It stands as the final documented interplay of this enchanting, invigorating duo.

Written, produced, recorded between 2018 & 2022 in France and the United Kingdom. Special thanks to the palace builders, the ones who supported me and generously helped crafting this record ; Florian, Oliver, Madelen, Paul, Joshua, Melek, Igor, Jackmichaelking user on freesound . com, Ulysse, Antoine, Derek, Charles, Ailton, Kristina & Josh. And extra thanks to my loved ones, you know who you are ♡

Lucy Duncombe embroiders her signature vocal synthesis on a remarkable cover of Bonnie Beecher’s one-off, cult ballad ‘Come Wander With Me’, a pearlescent gem exemplary of Modern Love’s guess-again, gotta-get-‘em-all 7” shellings - RIYL Maria Chavez, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Laurie Anderson, Nozomu Matsumoto, Niecy Blues. Highly regarded for a pair of innovative releases with 12th Isle, Lucy Duncombe is an experimental singer and artist who uses technology to deftly abstract songcraft in ways that uniquely pique the imagination. With ’Sunset, She Exclaims’ Lucy diversifies Modern Love’s 7” series via a trio of works that embody influences ranging from doo wop to avant garde and pure pop forms, in a style of melismatic sound poetry weft with Jacquardian intricacy. It’s a truly precious, beguiling and evocative record that will reward repeat plays for eons to come, much in the manner of contemporary classics such as Kara-Lis Coverdale’s ‘Grafts’, or Laurie Anderson’s ‘O Superman’. The star of this short story is no doubt ‘Sunset, She Exclaims’, where Lucy reframes Jeff Alexander and Anthony Wilson's haunting ballad, ‘Come Wander With Me’, used as a titular device in The Twilight Zone’s swansong episode, 1964, and which has since notably featured on Vincent Gallo’s ‘Brown Bunny’(2003). In Duncombe’s larynx and motherboard, the song is dissected and reworked as a glossolalic froth of hiccuped melody blooming into crepuscular harmony. Its effect is practically hormonal; affective as indole in, as she puts it, "reducing the stench of the real”, whilst distilling the saccharine sadness of the original to a synaesthetic, dream-nudging whiff of nostalgia. Once you prize yourself away from that A-side, Lucy’s B-side only lures deeper into blurred hyper-pop fantasy. The precedents of Maria Chavez’s experimental sound poetry and Niecy Blues’ raw soul hover around ‘Ghosting’ and ‘Ghosted’, teasing the parameters of avant-pop into plasmic refrains, foregrounding the usually unwanted parts of vocal performance - glitching digital artefacts and errant detritus - in a way that makes the mind’s eye saccade, tracing the half-heard glowworms nestled in its bush of ghosts. Fine-tuned ears will surely recognise the sort of brilliance on show here, and will no doubt revel in its gauzy glaze, which prizes oneiric ambiguity, ephemerality, the supernatural, over anything more corporeal.

The entire album is permeated with ethereal, lo-fi sounds, creating a superb ambient/drone masterpiece that is melancholic and introspective, yet filled with sweet, meditative charm!

Holy Springs are a shoegaze band from London who, after a mini album tape release Indoor Tapes, go for the big one with E.A.T. The three-piece create typically submerged dream-pop with nods to My Bloody Valentine and The Brian Jonestown Massacre alongside instrumental interludes which show their love of electronic music. Very promising.

After a limited self-release in 2022, Extravision, the deeply therapeutic musico-psychonautic offering from experimental guitarist Guy Blakeslee has received the Leaving Records “all genre” re-release treatment, with the understanding that more listeners should hear with this vulnerable and graceful document. The record is, in a word, a balm. Like a window flung open on a sweltering day, Extravision occasions the sudden awareness of space, of calm, of context, of possibility. The record also catalogs a musician’s search for meaning and healing in the wake of catastrophe. Since its initial run, Blakeslee has been bracingly open about Extravision’s genesis. On March 13th, 2020, while walking across the street, Blakeslee was struck by a car. Upon regaining consciousness the following day, the hospitalized Blakeslee found both the outer world and his inner world suddenly transformed. As lockdowns took effect, it was immediately clear that the brain injuries Blakeslee sustained had not only affected his vision but altered his very consciousness and would inevitably affect his music-making. From Los Angeles, to Virginia, to Baltimore, he pursued physical and spiritual recovery with music as his primary medicine. Sitting for hours at the piano, the man for whom guitar had always been the primary instrument now intuited the riddles and patterns laid out neatly before him in black and white. Armed with beginner’s mind and a cassette 4-track, Blakeslee began to experiment with wordless, impressionistic songcraft. Extravision is the transcendent result, an hour-plus compendium of humble and fiery dalliances with the musical and psychical unknown—a record from a lifelong musician rediscovering the joys and vexations of learning. Throughout Extravision, the guitar exists as both specter and reference. A majority of the album’s tracks notably do not feature any discernible guitar—the songs functioning as emotive, drone-based exercises in texture and duration. And yet, one never doubts the extent to which Blakeslee’s practice has been (and continues to be) informed by a uniquely American folk guitar idiom. We are, with Blakeslee as our guide, gladly charting the vast and newest horizons of so-called “American Primitive” music, now often referred to as “Cosmic American.” And when Blakeslee’s interdimensional guitar does eventually emerge — see the album’s fittingly final title track, “Extravision”— the sweetness, not untinged by loss, is palpable. Blakeslee has stated that his goal, with Extravision, is to induce in the listener a trance-like state, to inaugurate the conditions under which time might function “differently.” To be sure, the drones and gentle recurrent phrases that comprise much of Extravision are a welcome antidote to the now commonly felt acceleration of time. But it is the experience that Blakeslee is transmitting with and through and beyond these musical gestures—the experience of non-linear time, of total time-loss, of starting again, of retracing one’s steps and rerouting one’s journey—that challenges and rewards us.

Ana Roxanne is an intersex Southeast Asian musician based in Los Angeles. Born & raised in the Bay Area to immigrant parents, Ana's love for music and singing began through her mother's cd collection of 80's/90's R&B divas. Raised in the catholic church, she became a devout choir nerd and found any opportunity to sing, whether for religious mass, the jazz ensemble of her catholic high school, or karaoke at family gatherings. Her commitment to singing led her to a brief stint at a vocational jazz program in the cornfields of the midwest; in a remote town of 7,000 people, she began a formal study of jazz and classical music. During these years she would tour with various ensembles to beautiful old cathedrals in nearby cities and became enamored with the sacredness of choral music, as well as the enveloping sound of harmony. A near death experience, too, served as a connection between music and spirituality, and music as a healing art after facing tragedy. 

In 2013, Ana was also fortunate enough to spend a few months in Uttarkhand, India where she met an incredible voice teacher who introduced her to classical Hindustani singing. Living and studying with this teacher deeply impacted her outlook on the voice as art. It was there that she began to see the singer - the Diva - as a symbol of divinity; that the unique power of one's voice comes from the vulnerability of using the body as an instrument. Be it romance, love, or worship of a deity - in order to access such depths of emotional expression, one must be willing to be intensely vulnerable, lay one's heart in the open air, expose what is kept hidden. This brief study was the catalyst that led her to finish her music study at the experimental Mills College in Oakland, CA, where she began to combine all of these influences into her current self-titled project. This album ~~~ was created during her last years residing in the Bay Area, a tribute to the great musicians who inspired her and the landscape where she spent her formative years. 

In addition to the worship of R&B and pop divas, Ana's current practice explores themes of gender & identity. In October of 2018, she decided to come out publicly as intersex, and is dedicated to being a voice for her community and speaking out about social justice for intersex youth.

Mark Templeton is a Canadian media artist and the founder of Graphical, an audiovisual label dedicated to publishing his own musical and image based experiments. Mark’s audio compositions are constructed from reel-to-reel tape loops and sampled cassettes that are contrasted with contemporary sound techniques. In his published photobooks, he incorporates his own 35mm pictures and found images, focusing on intangible fantasies and realities. During his audiovisual performances, he utilizes digital instruments while projecting his own photographs, VHS footage, Super 8 film, and other sampled video. 

Mark Templeton’s reinterpretation of outdated media as musical instruments makes him a compelling artist for the Faitiche label roster. For his debut on Faitiche, he browsed his old hard drives and invited Andrew Pekler to listen through and co-produce a selection of Mark’s unreleased works. The compositions act as a series of snapshots: a look back at a decade of archived sounds, re-envisioned and re-imaged for Faitiche.

 The album contains nine tracks that follow an AB song structure. Each piece begins with verse A, transitions into verse B, and then ends. This simple formula creates a dichotomy that is also present in Mark’s diptych photographs, featured in the artwork. Throughout the album, both juxtaposition and inherent connections are simultaneously at play. One way or another, Two Verses provides a beginner’s guide to Mark Templeton's highly idiosyncratic catalog.

The Moon and the Melodies is a singular record within the Cocteau Twins’ catalog—unusually ethereal, even by their standards, and largely instrumental, guided by the free-form improvisations of Harold Budd, an ambient pioneer who had drifted into their orbit as if by divine intervention.  Building on the atmospheric bliss of Victorialand, released earlier the same year, it signaled a possible future for the trio, yet it was a path the Cocteau Twins would never take again.  Now, 28 years after it was first released, it has been reissued for the first time—remastered, from the original tapes, by Robin Guthrie himself.

The album was never actually meant to happen; no one can even recall exactly how it came about in the first place. As both Guthrie and Simon Raymonde remember it, the independent television station Channel 4 approached 4AD about a film project pairing musicians from different genres.  In interviews in the 1980s, however, Budd, who passed away in 2020, believed that his music publisher had linked him with the Cocteaus after the group had expressed interest in covering one of his songs.  In any case, the film never happened. “But we’d spoken to Harold, and we were all quite excited about it—in a very sort of downbeat Cocteau Twins way, where we were rarely excited about anything,” Raymonde recalls.  “We’re like, well, let’s carry on and do it anyway—you’ve already booked your flight, let’s just hang out in the studio and see what happens.”

“There was a lot of hilarity,” Guthrie says.  “It was strange to have an older man in our life, because Liz and I saw everybody around us—the contemporary bands, the people running record labels, the journalists—as grownups.  We were literally kids.  I thought, ‘Oh Christ, he’s going to be some pompous, you know, into his classical music,’ and he wasn’t.  He was just a big man-child. We clicked in that respect.”

The Cocteau Twins had recently built their own recording studio in North Acton, in West London.  It was the first time they’d had their own space, and they relished their newfound freedom.  “We were in this lovely little bubble of making our own music,” Raymonde says.  Budd fit right into their bubble world; all four musicians got on immediately.  Over pints at the pub, they talked about everything but music, and in the studio, Raymonde and Budd both say that very little, if anything, was discussed, save perhaps for questions of tempo or key.

“Harold would sit down at the piano and start playing something, and then maybe I’d pick up a bass and start playing along with him,” Raymonde says.  “They were very much noodles rather than songs.  That was the way we tended to work anyway.  Work out what kind of mood are we feeling, get a drum beat going, just a two-bar pattern; Guthrie would plug his guitar in, I would plug my bass in, and then we’d just jam for a few minutes and go, ‘Yeah, that was cool, let’s carry on doing that thing or that thing,’ really casually, and then all of a sudden we’d have a song.  I know that sounds ludicrous, but that is how we did it, and with Harold it was exactly the same.”

Budd played a Yamaha CP-70 electric grand, and the group came armed with a growing arsenal of gear, like the Yamaha Rev7 multi-effects processor and Lexicon PCM60, perhaps an Ensoniq Mirage.  Guthrie used an EBow on his guitars, along with a Gizmo, an electromechanical device invented by Godley and Creme.  Guthrie remembers endless experiments in search of new sounds: “Lots of messing around, tuning the guitar strings all the same, getting droney sorts of things—really big, loud, sort of Metallica-like feedback sounds, but then put in the mix so quietly you can hardly hear them the first time you listen.  All these psychoacoustic sort of tricks that I liked.  It’s all in there, you know.  Just being fearless—if it didn’t work out, it was never going to be a record anyway.”

The musicians’ contrasting approaches ended up shaping the album’s somewhat curious format—four instrumentals in Budd’s meandering style, more tone poems than actual songs, and four more structured pieces with verses, choruses, drum machine, and, of course, Elizabeth Fraser’s inimitable singing, as bold and inspired as anywhere in the band’s catalog.  There was no conscious decision to have Fraser only sing on four songs.  “That’s just what came out of the sessions,” Guthrie says.  “It was a lightweight atmosphere making it, because we didn’t actually feel that we were making a record at the time.  We were trying out some stuff in the studio, and it just evolved into what it did.  Which is, essentially, a recorded version of some people trying out some stuff in the studio.”

The sessions were over in two weeks, maybe three.  “And that was already getting a bit long,” Guthrie says, “because some of our earlier records had taken just a couple of days.”  They fleshed out the material, he adds, with one more song that the trio wrote in Budd’s absence, after they realized they didn’t have quite enough material for a full album.  (“Was I that drunk?” Budd asked, upon hearing the final version of the album, which included a song he had no recollection of making.)  As much as it may pain fans to hear it, there is no more extant material from the sessions—no outtakes, no rough drafts, no alternate versions. “For the 13 years I was in the band, we have no spare tracks at all,” Raymonde says.  “If after an hour or two a track wasn’t coming together, we’d just get rid of it.  If it wasn’t good now, our attitude was, it’ll never be any good.  So we’d think, tomorrow’s another day—let’s go to the cinema and come back tomorrow, and see how it goes.  Let’s go bowling.”

The other curious thing about the album—the fact that it was credited to all four players under their individual names—followed the same intuitive logic as everything else that went into the record.  “It’s because it wasn’t a Cocteau Twins album,” Guthrie says.  Raymonde concurs: “It was simple.  All four of us have gone into the studio and done something, but it isn’t a Cocteau Twins album.”  But perhaps the passage of time has changed matters.  These days, on streaming services, you’ll find the album filed chronologically alongside the rest of the band’s work.  “What’s interesting,” Guthrie adds, “is that I got the tape boxes from the studio, and guess what it says on it?  ‘Cocteau Twins plus Harold Budd.’”  Perhaps, he seems to suggest, the group got hung up on a detail that never really mattered.  In any case, Raymonde says, “The more credit that Harold gets for the work he did, the more people that find his music because it’s in the Cocteau environment, the better.”

Despite all its quirks, The Moon and the Melodies has attracted a passionate fan base over the years.  Its most atmospheric tracks routinely turn up in ambient DJ sets. 'Sea, Swallow Me' is one of the Cocteau Twins’ most streamed songs on Spotify, second only to Heaven or Las Vegas’ 'Cherry-coloured Funk'; it has also found new life on TikTok, where it serves as the soundtrack to innumerable expressions of hard-to-express melancholy.  For such a low-key affair, the album casts a long shadow—but Raymonde believes the record’s uniqueness stems directly from its humble, unpremeditated origins.  “It’s always about making something that’s pleasurable,” he says, “capturing a moment in time between friends that are enjoying making music together.  Really, that’s the essence of it—the music was just a reflection of how nice a time we were having in the studio.”

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal.

While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (The Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after.

Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

A glorious debut that undeniably set a high watermark, Luz Bel is finally available again, faithfully remastered by Mikey Young and featuring bilingual liner notes from John Gómez, the authoritative ear behind Outro Tempo.

Dawn Richard and Spencer Zahn share a common collaborative ethos, a genuine sense of musical curiosity, and a cosmopolitan eagerness to escape the conventions of genre. That shared vision first brought them together on 2022’s Pigments—icy and warm, stripped-down and grand, familiar and otherworldly—and now it has reunited them for Quiet in a World Full of Noise By turns intimate, soul-baring, spectral, and startling, Quiet in a World Full of Noise blends atmospheric and orchestral soundscapes with mellifluous soul, jazz, and journalistic vocalizing—driving it all home with stark, confessional lyricism. The new album finds Richard at her most raw and exposed. Quiet expands the definitions of what constitutes progressive, avant-garde R&B by rewriting them altogether.

It was the lonely, overwhelming early days of the pandemic. Topu Lyo was living in Georgia, feeling distant from his home in New York City, and Salenta De Badisdenne was in Wisconsin helping an elderly relative. When Topu sent Salenta the files of Moon Set, Moon Rise, the project of wistful, contemplative cello and piano music they had recorded over the previous two years, she put off listening for a few weeks because of the stress of her daily life. When she finally played the music, she was blown away by what they had created together. The 17 songs on this album are patient, exploratory, and dynamic. The keys tiptoe through space at some moments, and pirouette ecstatically at others. The cello provides a sonic backbone that glows like amber. With song titles like “Woman Reading a Letter” and “Light Coming On The Plains,” the album evokes vignettes of home, falling asleep with someone you love, learning to soothe yourself. Topu and Salenta had met in 2018 at a mutual friend’s house in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn and decided to jam together. Their connection was instant: though they weren’t recording with the intention of releasing the music they were making, the very first session they played together made its way onto the album. They continued to meet up and improvise every week until the start of 2020. The two established rituals while recording: Topu would bring dark chocolate to their sessions that they would eat while talking about their days, herbalizing, and eventually playing. Topu and Salenta made very few edits to the live recordings. The album we hear is a document of their shared bond and their time together. If you listen closely, you can even hear the two artists breathing on the recording. “This music was liberating because both Topu and I were just allowed to be,” Salenta says. “There was no right or wrong way, we were creating this atmosphere together. We were right there with the listener learning about and experiencing it.” “What I love about Salenta as a human and a musician is how honest she is,” adds Topu. “You hear when we’re playing, suddenly she’ll start laughing. There’s such a human aspect to it that makes me so happy when I listen to the music.” Both artists, as well as their community of friends and fellow musicians, see the music as healing. Topu and Salenta hope that listeners feel the peacefulness and liberation they experienced while creating these songs. — Vrinda Jagota

Dark Entries summons Philadelphia synthesizer scribes The Ghostwriters to rouse their ambient masterwork Remote Dreaming. The late Buchla maestro Charles Cohen and multi-instrumentalist Jeff Cain joined up in 1971 to craft electroacoustic chaos as Anomali, later renaming themselves The Ghostwriters. Their collaborations with choreographers and visual media artists led to their singular style, straddling improvisation and composition, the oneiric and the immediate. Following their debut album, Objects in Mirrors, they were approached by ambient outlet Mu-Pysch. Remote Dreaming would take shape in various studios over nine months. Jeff Cain's instruments on this project included electric and acoustic pianos, the Juno 106 synthesizer, and a Mirage sampler, while Charles Cohen used his signature Buchla 200 Series Electronic Musical Instrument. A stark departure from the tightly wound first LP, Remote Dreaming shows the duo unfurling with soothing pianos and psychoacoustic textures, its somnambulant drones just skirting the edges of the uncanny. Although ignored in its time, Remote Dreaming is now heralded as a landmark in 80s experimental ambient music. It is here released for the first time on vinyl, spread across a double LP with five additional tracks, four of which were previously unreleased. Remote Dreaming has been freshly remastered and includes an insert with photos and liner notes. Proceeds will be donated to SOSA (Safe from Online Sex Abuse), a nonprofit that combats online child sex abuse and trafficking.

After two years since second effort Eurybia, Francesca Heart returns to Leaving Records with a new seven-tracks album detailing the progress in her personal musical lore. Bird Bath expands on the musician’s childlike cosmic approach, crafting new tales where feelings and symbols of unearthly love and possibility, inner protection and desire become the album’s pillars. An iteration of the artist’s interest in mediterranean mythology and the evolution of sacred icons, Bird Bath begins with the figure of the angel as depicted by early renaissance Italian painter Beato Angelico, visible at Monastero of San Marco in Florence. In that period, the not-yet-achieved perfect perspective in painting would give an abstract feeling to the image, leaving room for imaginative contemplation and therefore aiding the monks in meditating for long periods of time. As the album unfolds, the listener is playfully transported through a puzzle of whispering grottos, mossy architectures and theatrical fountains that follow the idea of the Genius Loci, the generative essence of places, and the guardians that may inhabit them. It therefore calls for a devotional relationship to nature. Bird Bath is a playful, adventurous, and whimsical journey towards embracing a delicate vulnerability. Through Francesca’s imaginative musicality, the sacred unites with the mundane, the digital and even the kitsch to generate a healing field where her compositions can come to life. In Rose Petal Place fantasy-tales meet video game sounds with a repetitive, samba-like rhythm that could recall a secret spring party. Caryatids evokes marine ambiences and insular melodies and was inspired by the island of Ponza. Angelsummit.net is a tender sound tapestry enriched by sampling which invites the listener to collect shiny floating gems along the way. Continuing in the spirit of Eurybia, Bird Bath uses fantasy as a musico-devotional choreography where Francesca’s intuitive and impressionistic approach to composition, reefs of midi arpeggios, constellations of samples and foamy ambiences become instruments to build and connect the virtual, spiritual and earthly channels of the artist’s labyrinthine and spellbinding world.

This Trio is very Californian, even though Surya is based on the East Coast . . .We swim together in the Pacific Ocean, Vibing, bonding, talking, listening, riding the Waves . . .as often as we can. - Carlos Niño Together these three adventurously creative Musical Artists have played in Portland, Oregon, Manhattan and Brooklyn, New York, London, England, Amsterdam and Zaandam, NL, Köln, Germany, San Diego and Ojai, California, and many times throughout Los Angeles County, since February 2022. They first came together in July 2021 at the Glendale, California Home Recording Studio of Jesse Peterson and Mia Doi Todd. Nate was invited by Carlos to meet Surya and to possibly play. No specific plans were set other than to explore with Surya. (Multi-Reedsman Randal Fisher was also there.) That Session turned out to be Day 1 of what became Surya's debut album Everyone's Children released by Spiritmuse Records on November 4, 2022. Suyra and Nate were both featured extensively on the Carlos Niño & Friends album (I'm just) Chillin', on Fire released by International Anthem on September 15, 2023, though not together on any of the same pieces. The first in-depth representation of the Trio was in collaboration with André 3000 on his album New Blue Sun released by Epic Records on November 17, 2023, where they are featured as co-writers and co-creators of 5 of the 8 album pieces. Niño also Produced that album in collaboration with André. Nate enthusiastically took it upon himself to be the Trio's Archivist and would get to Mixing and playlisting the group's recordings as soon as he received them from Live and Studio recordists. He took the lead on Producing and Mixing this album, Subtle Movements. His unique perspectives, thoughts, feelings and intense heart energy went into telling the story of how these pieces, recorded in different settings, with a wide range of gear, by an array of characters, all flow together. "It is a blessed opportunity and Cosmic Gift to be at the keyboards with Nate and Carlos," Surya gleams. "In appearance, I play a few keyboards at a time: a MIDI controller that I use in tandem with music studio software, my absolute FAVORITE analog sensibility synth Roland SH-201 (although it is digital), and typically another 88key board (the Roland SV-1). If there is a piano available, I will also use that with us for a total of 4 keyboards at my station, (that my cousin Georgia Anne Muldrow has forever deemed “Praise Console no.3”), Surya enthuses. "My instruments and sound are the last thing I consider about this Trio. For me, it is about us as human beings first; as members of our respective families and soul tribes before anything else. I think whatever sound that comes forth is a result of that inner connected soul conversation. That, at least in my view, is the Sound." "I play guitar, guitar synthesizer, and midi-guitar sampler," writes Nate Mercereau of his Instruments on Subtle Movements. "In addition to my main GR300 guitar synthesizer sound, I am sampling the band live as we perform and using the sound . . .It takes many different shapes, but I am often playing something like the sound of Carlos's percussion from 30 seconds earlier in a new key and tempo, or as a chord — or a quick slice of a pad from Surya’s keyboard pitched down into sub frequencies, anything can happen," Nate details. "I live-sample and expand, magnify, permutate, repeat, live-remix, live-edit, and reframe moments of our sound within our sound while it's happening. Worlds Within Worlds and Worlds Upon Worlds, Currents Within Currents. I also use previously recorded and created samples from my library in this context, allowing my guitar to be anything." Nate also offers: "I consider what I do in this trio to be a part of and extension of the greater sound of this group, which is often oceanic (which represents everything to me), waves, it's full communication. Love and support in sonic form. Going beyond together in all ways." Carlos Niño plays everything that you hear in the Aerophone, Drum, Percussion and Plant realms . . . He was the group's "Connector" and its first advocate. Depending on who received and accepted the opportunity to present the Trio their names have appeared in different orders. Hear, on Subtle Movements the order is Alphabetical by last name: Botofasina, Mercereau, Niño

Bélver Yin's soul mining odysseys have been unjustly overlooked for three decades. An anomaly in the Spanish alt-pop scene, their forlorn instrumentals and ethereal romanticism would have struck a chord in the British league of Felt, The Chameleons, Cocteau Twins and Dif Juz, leaving their 1991 debut Luz Bel deserving of reappraisal. While coining their band name from a Jesús Ferrero novel and quoting Laozi philosophy on album sleeves, Bélver Yin create illuminating textures that unlock a wordless language of memory and adolescent emotion. Formed in Salamanca by self-taught musicians Pedro Ortega Sánchez and José María Martín, the guitar-bass duo spent two years crafting their divine interplay with interim drummers before submitting a demo to Noisex Music, their only attempt at label courting. The phone rang mere days later with owner and producer Bernar Marks (Dust Sessions) offering to cut an album and the band ventured to Valencia with cloud-touching optimism soon after. Championed by local press, the release fell short of expectation, fueling the mythology of a vanished band known only to the initiated. Varying lineups would, however, continue to work in the shadows under Pedro's direction, recording two spatially arranged follow-ups at their own pace in 1996 and 2005.

Selkie Reflections was originally conceived by Alliyah Enyo as a 2-hour composition of tape loops, made for an installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop in 2022. In album format, Selkie Reflections materializes as a split-side release; a dialogue between Alliyah Enyo and Florian T M Zeisig, under his new alias Angel R. On the A-side, Enyo re-works the material into a seamless blend of layered vocal calls, dub-mixing at Green Door studio to stimulate the spontaneous spirit of the original takes. Her motifs ooze around one another in overlapping cycles, conjoining the distant cries of the solitary selkie into an evolving ballad of fragmented song. Zeisig assimilates the archival recordings, shattering them apart to piece them back together. His compositions are traced with the angelic echoes of Enyo’s vocals, yet his intricate processing taps into the arcane sides of the selkie. As vocals twist, warp and distort, disturbed reflections emerge, contending the sublime radiance of the choral drones. In his reinterpretations, infinitesimal moments are stretched out infinitely, like calls from the gods, eerie and cosmic; the cries of the selkie immortalised.

After many years drifting in and out of each-other’s orbit, ‘Jazz Plates’ finds Ulla and Perila making music in the same room for the first time, exhaling a double album’s worth of gorgeously evocative mood music, gently crackling with a dream-textured haze for the ages. It's remarkably intimate material, linking the duo's own hypnagogic portrait of jazz, in all its hushed permutations. ‘Jazz Plates’ catches the mutual spirits measuredly channelling their shared love of Alice Coltrane and Pharoah Sanders, making use of voice, clarinet, guitar, piano, vocals and various non-musical objets - logs, leaves, an aquarium - until they hit their emotional core. Previously separated by an ocean, their first recording sessions in person find an intoxicating play of slow and atmospheric sounds porous to the shifting weather outside, with one plate subtly guided by the sun, and another by heavy rain. Unhurried, etheric, and wistful, the album’s 13 parts wash over the senses with a soothingly meditative resonance that emerges from their “mutual dialogue of our instruments and souls”, as Perila puts it. Distant voices swirl around the duo's dampened instrumentation on opener 'lasting like a grass leaf', as themes duck and dive over plangent ambience. It isn't a capital A Ambient record, by any means, but Perila and Ulla's approach is impressionistic rather than figurative. They form ghostly half-songs around hollow trace rhythms on 'a josh outside the window', coating the breathy romance of modern jazz in a layer of dust, and let the clarinet do most of the work on 'placing in shell parcels' as it slow dances around a reverberant vocal. More than anything, ‘Jazz Plates’ seems to highlight the sensuality of collaboration; you can almost hear the duo trading glances and allowing the mood to dictate the momentum. When they switch things up on the second disc, they pull their ideas more tightly together without losing any of the intimacy. Muffled electric guitar prangs punctuate woody rhythms on 'messages from a floor', as if the two are trying to rethink the logic of free jazz, and on the heart piercing 'cheese homework', blues-y guitar phrases are sunk under a powerful, loping bassline.