MUSIC

Japan’s KAKUHAN deliver a futureshock jolt on their incred debut album ‘Metal Zone’ - deploying drum machine syncopations around bowed cello and angular electronics that sound like the square root of Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’, Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, Beatrice Dillon’s ‘Workaround’ and Mica Levi’s ‘Under The Skin’ - or something like T++ and Errorsmith dissecting Laurie Anderson’s ‘Home Of The Brave’, her electric violin panned and bounced relentlessly around the stereo field. It really is that good - basically all the things we love, in multiples. While "Metal Zone" might be their debut, KAKUHAN are hardly newcomers. Koshiri Hino is a member of goat (jp), releasing a run of records under the YPY moniker, and heading up the NAKID label, while Yuki Nakagawa is a well known cellist and sound artist who has worked with Eli Keszler and Joe Talia among many others. Together, they make a sound that’s considerably more than the sum of its parts - as obsessively tweaked, cybernetic and jerky as Mark Fell, frothing with the same gritted, algorithmic intensity as Autechre's total-darkness sets, stripped to the bone and carved with ritualistic symbolism. The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KAKUHAN follow their 'nuum inclinations, snatching grimey bursts and staccato South London shakes and matching them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place. It's not a collision we expected, but it's one that's completely melted us - welding obsessive rhythmic futurism onto bloodcurdling horror orchestration - the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era. By the album's final track, we're presented with South Asian microtonal blasts that suddenly make sense of the rest of the album; Nakagawa erupts into Arthur Russell-style clouded psychedelia, while wavering flutes guide bio-mechanical ritual musick formations. It’s the perfect closer for the album’s series of taut, viscous, and relentless gelling of meter and tone in sinuous tangles, weaving across East/West perceptions in spirals toward a distinctive conception of rhythmic euphoria with a sense of precision, dexterity and purpose that nods to classical court or chamber music as much as contemporary experimental digressions. Easily one of the most startling and deadly debuts we’ve heard in 2022; the louder we’ve played it, the more it’s realigned our perception of where experimental and club modes converge - meditative, jerky, flailing genius from the outerzone. Basically - an AOTY level Tip.

From the cutting-edge label Principe, which continues to innovate the dance music "Kuduro" originating from Angola in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, comes a huge compilation of 37 unreleased tracks by its crew and related artists! A prayer of rhythm that connects the memory and future of Afro-diaspora. Sharp and flexible beats, irregularly swaying polyrhythms, vocal material and sound effects that cut through the void. While resonating with house and UK funky, the sound pursues the "groove of the black city" to the fullest, transforming from the back alleys at night into a street festival. It is the forefront of modern post-club music and a spiritual archive for the future.

Originally released in 1974 on Shandar, Dream House 78'17" is the second full-length album by La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. This first-time US edition reproduces the original gatefold sleeve with beautiful calligraphy by Zazeela and liner notes by Young and French musicologist Daniel Caux. Side one was recorded at a private concert (on the date and time indicated by the title) and features Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone with Jon Hassell on trumpet and Garrett List on trombone. This work is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). The piece evolves with the oscillator changing pitch and dictating an ornate pattern over the course of the performance. Side two is an example of one of the sets of frequencies sustained in the Dream House, the composite sound environments conceived by Young and Zazeela. The composer suggests listening while seated – to experience how the sound interacts with the room and other perceptions of its arrangement – as well as while walking. As Young states, "The frequency ratios are monitored continuously as lissajous patterns on the oscilloscopes and, in spite of the great stability of the oscillators, the phase relationships of the sine waves gradually drift which causes their amplitudes to add and subtract algebraically. Not only does the sound become a bit louder and softer, but at very loud levels, one actually begins to have a sensation that parts of the body are somehow locked in sync with the sine waves and slowly drifting with them in space and time."

Goja means “chaotic” or “nonsensical” in various Japanese regional dialects.

This new work is packed with freely rambling music that leaps over the boundaries of orthodox musical instruments, homemade ones, and random objects. Listen out for taiko, drums, bits of wood, and a piano, marimba, accordion, rhythm machine, effector, wooden washtub, pot, impact screwdriver, power tool charger, and more…

Features 8 tracks. Download code available.

Fred Frith is simultaneously a singular musical figure and a collection of musical lifetimes. He‘s the composer who wrote fragile avant-garde music in the tradition of John Cage and Earle Brown, the innovator who created new concepts of underground rock with his colleagues in the band Henry Cow, and the improviser who developed his very own language on the guitar. The many facets of Frith‘s musical oeuvre shimmer in vibrant and unique colors, but stand as one rainbow monolith of musical creation, never disintegrating into esoteric eclecticism. Always musically curious and unbiased, he develops his ideas in the moment, demonstrating in real time how his creative process, while free of old hat conventions and tricks, creates an immediate yet unrandom and committed music. At the core is his unique guitar playing, which is on full display across these two records. His debut, "Guitar Solos" (1974), opened up a space beyond rock and improvised music, and now, 50 years later comes "Fifty" (2024), a new solo guitar album that sounds completely different and yet familiar, that adds to his monolith of musical creation with another new vibrant color.

Dettinger’s Intershop and Oasis have long been held, by many fans of ambient and electronic music, to be some of the finest albums in their field. Produced by the mysterious Olaf Dettinger, about whom not much is publicly known, they were some of the earliest full-lengths released by the then-nascent Kompakt, and in many ways, they both articulated and defined the sound that would come to be known as Pop Ambient, while also existing, somehow, to the leftfield of any clearly recognisable genre. Beautiful, sui generis works, it is a rare pleasure to see them being reissued on vinyl for a new generation of listeners to embrace. Originally released on CD only in 1999, Intershop was Kompakt’s first artist full-length. The music here simmers and broods, with opulent banks of tone marking out territory for rhythms that seem to be built from the clacking detritus of technology – hisses, thunks, knocks. Bass is deployed carefully, each drop a dubbed-out depth charge; drones spin and spiral, warping and weaving between the beats. Oasis, released in 2000, refined the palette that Dettinger had explored on its predecessor. A blurred crusade of ambient texturology, its unassuming patterns, and subtle, incremental dynamics, admit to real beauty, and a kind of abstract sensuality that you don’t often experience with music that is, perhaps, similarly tooled, but not as poetic. Through seemingly simple gestures – whether lushly expansive repetitions, hyper-acute tremolo tones, or ear-tickling rhythms – it builds complex emotional resonance. It’s no surprise to discover Oasis is held in high esteem by artists like Panda Bear of Animal Collective, who once said of Dettinger, “For us, he was the dude.” There is, of course, other music to know Dettinger by, too – his three excellent EPs for Kompakt, Blond (1998), Puma and Totentanz (1999), the latter of which, Michael Mayer once argued, “invented dubstep.” There is also a small, yet graceful run of compilation contributions, many of which can be found on Kompakt’s Total and Pop Ambient series. All this music has plenty to recommend it, sharing a clarity of purpose, and a rare, human warmth and depth. But Intershop and Oasis are the releases that distil Dettinger’s singular vision, and allow him, should he wish, to claim his place as a modern master of ambient and electronic music.

OKTEMBER is the second EP release under Wolfgang Voigt’s mythical GAS project (it follows "Modern“ on Profan, 1995). The 2 compositions were originally released in 1999 on Mille Plateaux, and then reissued partially in 2016 on GAS “BOX”. OKTEMBER is finally released on Voigt's own label KOMPAKT, pressed on 180 gram vinyl in its original artwork.

This reissue features “Tal ‘90“ (instead of the original A side) – a predecessor to the GAS project originally recorded in 1990 under the alias TAL, it was released as a part of the Pop Ambient 2002 collection. With its sampled strings, horns and guitars, "Tal 90” soundtracks a more uplifting side to what is typically accustomed to being the sound of GAS. The title track “Oktember” is a dense, hypnotic affair that conjures a unique vision of dub techno that few have been able to replicate.

A monumental soundtrack to uncertain times.

Visionary electroacoustic explorations return as Black Truffle reissues Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, a major work fusing musique concrète and synthesis into emotionally charged sonic landscapes of rare intensity.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet's electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe's impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet's approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O'Malley and Jim O'Rourke.

A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title's meaning is close to the concept of 'Wanderlust', fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls 'climates'. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid 'closeness'; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the INA GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block.

Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous 'scenes', with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies.

Like his friend and collaborator Jim O'Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.

Octogenarian experimental legend Annea Lockwood returns to Black Truffle with more paradigm-shifting new material, playing Belfast's "peace lines" with sticks, stones and leaves to soundtrack 'History of the Present' and examining Vanessa Tomlinson's relationship with the bass drum on 'Skin Resonance'.

There's nobody else doing it quite like Lockwood, that's for certain. At 85-years-old, the New Zealand-born composer is still producing vital, radical experimental art; Black Truffle might have started their relationship with Lockwood by reminding all of us how genius her 1970 tape piece 'Tiger Balm' is, but 2022's 'Becoming Air / Into the Vanishing Point' brought us right up to the present day, spotlighting her recent collaborations with Nate Wooley and Yarn/Wire. This latest double-header goes even further into her contemporary canon; opening side 'On Fractured Ground' is extracted from Maria Fusco and Margaret Salmon's 2023-released feminist opera-film 'History of the Present', an experimental work set in Northern Ireland that amplifies working-class women's voices. Lockwood, working alongside Dr. Georgios Varoutsos and Professor Pedro Rebelo, two academics who developed a binaural "soundwalk" along Belfast's Peace Wall, approaches the Troubles with refreshing clarity. Taking a radical perspective in terms of representation, she imagines the walls, built around Northern Ireland since the late '60s to divide Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods, as resonant instruments, playing them with her hands and found objects to emphasize the disruption of these barriers, not the space itself.

Lockwood, Rebelo and Varoutsos spent time tracking around Belfast and recording in-situ, but not making field recordings as such. It sets our mind back to Brötzmann and Bennink's iconic 'Schwarzwaldfahrt' album, in fact, where they decamped to Germany's Black Forest and recorded their natural free improvisations in the open air. Here, the trio take a similar approach to their landscape, representing the awkward topography of the region with sonorous, gong-like clangs, Limpe Fuchs-esque rolling resonances and extended micro-percussive asides.

On the flip, Lockwood teams up with Aussie composer/percussionist Tomlinson to represent a relationship between musician and instrument that's surprisingly difficult to put into words. The piece materialised after the duo discussed the concept of "sonic attraction", and is made from supple, unusual drum improvisations - the kind of rubbery, mutant resonances that are eccentric enough to fully command your attention - and poetic, confessional reflections from Tomlinson herself. "What do I absorb? What do I reflect?" she asks. "I start to think about my skin as an ear, so maybe the bass drum skin is an ear as well." Lockwood focuses her own ear on Tomlinson's ability to transmogrify the instrument's aesthetics, stripping away all conventional understanding of the bass drum and letting its component parts sing, rattle and hum.

Super Tip! Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have orbited each other's work for over a decade, their individual explorations of sustained tones and harmonic space suggesting an inevitable collaboration. When they finally entered McDowall's Brooklyn studio together, what emerged on Magnetism transcends mere musical compatibility. Malone has spent recent years extending the legacy of Éliane Radigue, redefining what electronic minimalism can accomplish through pipe organ and synthesizer. Her compositions stretch single chords into cathedral-sized architectures of sound, tracing harmonic territories that Radigue first mapped in her pioneering electronic works. McDowall brings a different lineage: as a veteran of Coil, he approaches synthesis with the patience of an alchemist, crafting electronic textures that breathe with unsettling life. Magnetism resolves this apparent contradiction through sonic diplomacy. Malone's melodic sensibilities—those long, searching lines that seem to trace the curvature of space itself—find new expression through McDowall's textural arsenal. Where Malone typically builds with mathematical precision inherited from the Radigue tradition, McDowall introduces the controlled chaos he perfected with Coil: digital distortion that pulses like organic matter, synthesis algorithms that decay at the speed of memory. The album's foundation reveals their shared fascination with the spaces between notes. Karplus-Strong synthesis becomes their primary tool, combined with just intonation tuning systems that allow Magnetism to inhabit frequencies conventional instruments cannot reach. But technique serves expression here, not the reverse. Across four extended movements, repetition becomes meditation, saturation a means of transcendence. There's something ritualistic about how these pieces unfold, their harmonic cycles suggesting ancient ceremonies filtered through electronic consciousness. This is music that operates on geological time while pulsing with digital immediacy. The collaboration marks significant evolution for both artists. Malone embraces the productive friction of working with another creative mind, while McDowall discovers in her melodic clarity a redemptive light reminiscent of Coil's more transcendent moments. Together, they've created something that feels both ancient and urgently contemporary—proof that experimental music's most profound statements emerge when distinct artistic visions recognize themselves in each other.

0on Zero-on, a label run by the percussion group "Kodo 鼓童" which has its roots on Sado Island, has released a cassette recording of a solo performance by percussionist Yuta Sumiyoshi, a member of the "Kodo" group. 

KENTATAKU YUTATAKU’s 3rd album “Zero On” is the eponymous first release on Kodo’s new label 0on.
Featuring four improvisational tracks, ranging from large ensemble works without musical instruments to vast sound collages, KENTATAKU YUTATAKU’s latest work is packed full of heart, soul, and fresh new sound.
Limited release of 200 cassettes + download code. 

Psychic 9-5 Club marks the beginning of a new chapter for HTRK. It's an album that looks back on a time of sadness and struggle, and within that struggle they find hope and humour and love. It's Jonnine Standish and Nigel Yang's first album recorded entirely as a duo—former band member Sean Stewart died halfway through the recording of their last LP, 2011's Work (Work, work).

Though the record is instantly recognisable as HTRK—Standish's vocal delivery remains central to the band's sound, while the productions are typically lean and dubby—they've found ample room for exploration within this framework. Gone are the reverb-soaked guitar explorations of 2009's Marry Me Tonight and the fuzzy growls that ran through Work (Work Work). They've been replaced with something tender, velvety and polished. This is HTRK, but the flesh has been stripped from their sound, throwing the focus on naked arrangements and minimalist sound design.

The album was recorded at Blazer Sound Studios in New Mexico with Excepter's Nathan Corbin, who had previously directed the video clip for Work (Work Work) cut "Bendin." Inviting a third party into their world was no easy decision, but in Corbin they found a kindred spirit. The LP was then refined and reworked in Australia at the turn of 2013, before the finishing touches were applied in New York during the summer. Psychic 9-5 Club was then mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering in Berlin.

Of all the themes that run through Psychic 9-5 Club, love is the most central. The word is laced throughout the album in lyrics and titles—love as a distraction, loving yourself, loving others. Standish's lyrics explore the complexities of sexuality and the body's reaction to personal loss, though there's room for wry humour—a constant through much of the best experimental Australian music of the past few decades.

Standish explores her vocal range fully—her husky spoken-word drawl remains, but we also hear her laugh and sing. Equally, Yang's exploratory production techniques—particularly his well-documented love of dub—are given room to shine. They dip headlong into some of the things that make humans tick—love, loss and desire—with the kind of integrity that has marked the band out from day one. Psychic 9-5 Club is truly an album for the body and for the soul.

Emily A. Sprague’s Cloud Time is an improvised ambient document of her long-awaited debut tour of Japan, recorded in autumn 2024. Compiled from over eight hours of live material captured in venues across the country, the album reflects a dialogue between performer, place, and moment, presented with no additional mixing and only minimal edits. Originally conceived as a journey rather than a traditional concert tour, Sprague approached each performance as an open exchange with her surroundings, redesigning her live setup to allow for real-time responsiveness and spontaneity. The result is a series of distinct, site-specific sound pieces shaped by intuition and environmental influence. Rather than follow a chronological order, the seven long-form tracks are sequenced to convey a narrative flow that mirrors the emotional arc of a full live set. Tracks like ‘Nagoya’, ‘Tokyo 1’, and the ten-minute ‘Matsumoto’ gently pulse with layered synthesis, embodying an ambient mode rooted in the ethos of kankyō ongaku and deep listening traditions. Cloud Time invites listeners into a reflective space where sound becomes a means of connection, stillness, and surrender—an offering from Sprague’s deeply personal and healing encounter with time, place, and presence.

Heith is the alias of Milan-based artist and musician Daniele Guerrini who crafts a mesmerising and ritualistic subterranean soundscape, a resonant and eclectic collage of distinct sonic elements: from celestial percussion intertwined with jarring, mechanical oscillations to haunting vocals atop murky dubbed-out beats.Exploring the textures of consciousness through research into the ritual animism, he kept an omnivorous and universalist approach to cultural and sonic influence. This is central to X, wheel, Heith’s debut album and first release on PAN. It’s a deep dive into his creative and spiritual practice, one where art and life are inextricable. The Liars Tell..., on the other hand, feels like a kind of respite, a moment of meditation and pause from the fatigue of dimension-hopping. As if the traveller dismounted their carriage and, standing puzzled on a crossroad, listened to the echoes of distant places. Occupying a liminal space and letting thousand of contradictory tales form the lyrics to one unfathomable song.

Uganda's famous Nyege Nyege Tapes festival, and in 2020 at the legendary nightclub Berghain in Berlin with avant-garde acts Gabber Modus Operandi and Harsya Wahono from Jakarta. The self-titled debut album of Nakibembe Embaire Group, who appeared on the album, is now available. Nakibembe is a small village in Uganda's Busoga Kingdom (one of four existing constitutional monarchies). Since ancient times, locals have set aside communal spaces for musical performances and social events. In its center was a deep hole, crossed by a groove to amplify a gigantic xylophone "enver" consisting of 15-25 wooden keys. While log xylophones are common in East Africa, the music played by the Basoga, an ethnic Bantu tribe in the east, is extremely special and unique, with its own tuning, dance, and auxiliary instruments. They are said to be the last group where up to eight players can play simultaneously around the enver, layering hypnotic polyrhythms while the ensemble members play vocals, shakers and drums. Its trance-like sound, fused with meandering polyrhythms and dazzling vocals, makes the past, present, and future seem to align.

BJ Nilsen returns with True than Nature, a collection that elevates everyday and environmental sounds through subtle electronic manipulation. Focused on the intrinsic properties of sound itself, the album draws attention to often-ignored sonic phenomena—industrial hums, echoes, labour, and material textures—transforming them into abstract, shifting soundscapes.

By withholding details about source locations and techniques, Nilsen encourages listeners to engage without preconceived anchors, allowing meaning to emerge through deep listening. Titles are left deliberately open-ended, offering symbolic cues rather than fixed narratives. The result is a contemplative, perception-altering experience that blurs the line between the known world and imagined sonic possibility.

Based in Amsterdam, BJ Nilsen has worked since the early 1990s across music, theatre, film, and sound design. His long-standing interest in field recording, environmental acoustics, and the psychological dimensions of sound has led him to explore both natural and industrial terrains, including recent studies of Arctic mining regions and urban soundscapes.

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.

Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14
bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.

‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.

With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.

Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace. 

Bon Iver, Bon Iver is Justin Vernon returning to former haunts with a new spirit. The reprises are there – solitude, quietude, hope and desperation compressed – but always a rhythm arises, a pulse vivified by gratitude and grace notes. The winter, the legend, has faded to just that, and this is the new momentary present. The icicles have dropped, rising up again as grass.

The latest by iconic slowburn Australian duo HTRK is an elegant nine song suite of windswept emotion and heartbreak noir, crafted in skeletal arrangements of guitar, voice, metronomes, and FX. Inspired by a recent infatuation with “eerie and gothic country music,” Rhinestones moves from whispered lament to acoustic eulogy to downtempo vignettes, tracing muted embers of loss and lust through haunted city streets. Taking cues from the economy and brevity of western folk but skewed through a narcotic, nocturnal lens, the album maps enigmatic badlands of strung out beauty and lengthening shadows.

Nigel Yang cites friendship as a central muse, “particularly the forging of it, and its potential for new feelings of telepathy and trust.” Jonnine Standish’s wounded, alluring vocals echo similar mysteries of connection and unknown crossroads, poetic but direct, dream diaries faded with age and rain. The rhinestones of the title evoke the glittering plastic of cowboy glamor, yet “made precious somehow;” Standish cites as an example a baby blue star brooch from Texas, gifted to her “from a stoned friend on New Year’s Eve 10 years ago in Brighton – cheap keepsakes can be more valuable than diamonds.”

Even for a group as enduringly versatile as HTRK, Rhinestones is a revelation, condensing their lyrical alchemy to its simmering, magnetic essence. “Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings,” “Reverse Déjà vu,” and “Gilbert and George” in particular are masterpieces of drama, delivery, and distillation, dried flowers clouded by smoke, the candle’s flame flickering but unforgotten: “Some things are not like the others / Some friends are not like the others / did I ever say / did I ever say / did I ever say thank you?” 

Instrumental four-piece Yuuf return with a new EP ‘Mt. Sava’, out on Ninja Tune imprint Technicolour. The release follows their earlier 2025 EP ‘Alma’s Cove’, a six-track journey through natural soundscapes and quiet introspection.

Described by the band as the “spiritual sister to ‘Alma’s Cove’”, ‘Mt. Sava’ shifts the setting from lush coastal tranquility to the awe-inspiring scale of mountainous desert terrain - one that “lets the listener both explore the serenity of a night sky filled with stars far removed from human life and the brutality and fierceness of life in the desert” the band comment. “The name Mt. Sava comes from the place where we shot a Live Session of the full EP. It’s a breath-taking and canyon-like gorge that is often referred to as St. Sava Canyon”.

First vinyl reissue in 18 years, since 2008.

PULSE DEMON probably is the most iconic, most representative and best known album in the JAPANOISE scene and MERZBOW discography.
This is the edge of music and sound, here you enter a new dimension made of POWERFULL NOISE.
Recorded in 1995 and first released in 1996 on the US label REPLAPSE, this album was re-released several times in both, CD and Vinyl formats.
This is first time in which album was completely re-mastered by Masami Akita for CD re-release with the addition of an exclusive bonus track taken from the original PULSE DEMON recoding session (the original DAT) and never used up to now.
Album comes in a six panel digifile presenting the lavish original and very psychedelic holographic-waves-art-work.

PLAY VERY LOUD AND MERCILESS!

Mesmerising album of Yokota’s earliest sonic explorations that demonstrates his unique vision and sublime transcendence of boundaries.

‘Image 1983-1998’ is a collection of short miniatures, composed in two different time periods. Tracks 1-5 were recorded with guitar and organ between 1983-4 and tracks 6-12 were composed through 97-98, being inspired by the earlier material.

A musical scrapbook, or sonic design board. The sleeve notes give an insight into Yokota’s belief in a close connection between music, memory and his active imagination: ‘Encountering Acid House made me visualise music – I could clearly see the sounds sparkling… this experience led me to create electronic music.’

Mesmerising album of Yokota’s earliest sonic explorations that demonstrates his unique vision and sublime transcendence of boundaries.

‘Image 1983-1998’ is a collection of short miniatures, composed in two different time periods. Tracks 1-5 were recorded with guitar and organ between 1983-4 and tracks 6-12 were composed through 97-98, being inspired by the earlier material.

A musical scrapbook, or sonic design board. The sleeve notes give an insight into Yokota’s belief in a close connection between music, memory and his active imagination: ‘Encountering Acid House made me visualise music – I could clearly see the sounds sparkling… this experience led me to create electronic music.’