MUSIC

It’s five years in a blender. It’s every troublesome misunderstanding of a half-decade relationship distorted and stretched into an absurdist black comedy mini-series on wax. It’s the sound of every fight we ever had, playing simultaneously. It’s several consecutive voice notes that you did not listen to, and instead read the transcription. It’s fifteen songs from iconoclastic rapper Mike Eagle and innovative producer Kenny Segal. It’s the world’s first half-whimsical break-up album. It’s DOOMED! It’s also LA. Maybe not first and foremost, but Los Angeles runs deep in this record’s present, and its lineage. The story of any big city is also one of transplants. DJ Premier in New York, Tupac in California. If you build it, they will come. Mike and Kenny both arrived in LA as young, aspiring artists who were drawn to the scene around groundbreaking rap crew Project Blowed. They have been friends— and occasional collaborators—for almost twenty years. Despite that, DOOMED! is the first time the two have put together a full body of work. But everything happens in its time, and fate worked to bring them together at the exact moment that would allow the duo to create something extraordinary. Mike, fresh off a string of multi-producer records and processing the end of a tumultuous relationship, was in need of creative catharsis. Meanwhile, Kenny had locked in on his next challenge after a recent string of critically acclaimed collaborations not only with rappers like billy woods, and K-the-I???, but also jazz trio Human Error Club and bluesy indie rocker Benjamin Booker. “In recent years, Kenny made it very clear that he wasn’t trying to keep having one or two beats on my projects; he wanted to build something,” Open Mike Eagle explains. “I was able to convince him to let me use a couple beats for Neighborhood Gods Unlimited with the caveat that we would focus on our thing next. Then my relationship fell apart right when we started working, and it was like, ‘Perfect, I have a lot to say about this.’” Here are some more particularly interesting insights from the man himself: “If DOOMED! is prestige TV, then think of “Out To Lunch” as the pilot where we meet a man who’s not all there because his head is still in yesterday, and the following as a brief synopsis. There’s a song that starts at an argument about the color of a rental car. There’s a song about trying to write a pair of lovers’ initials in wet concrete and the. stick breaking. There’s a song that’s a prayer about finding the strength not to look at my ex’s social media. There’s a song about a character from Adventure Time who’s a piece of shit that I identify with. ach vision is a crashed airplane halfway on the border of dream and nightmare, bitter and sweet, sadness and freedom. Every one of Kenny’s beats is a chunk of ore from a different comet. I used each one as a canvas to paint my impression of a dead world.

Respekt! Sex Tags Mania, Karolin, Laton, Tage Tombola, Don Papa - The Genuin Of Moss Hip-Hop, Engvaal & The Rygge Family, Lene B., Kambo Super Sound & Family, The Endless Dynamic of Dynamo Dreesen, Brian Not Brian - Going Good And Axin' It Fo' Real - Salik Zia, SVN, Nupi & General Elektro, Bjørn Torske, L.A. Morillo, Fit Detroid, Skatebård, A-Bucci, Camila 575, Dåple-Pera, Benji, Atle, Vilunki 666, Queens Only - Madteo - Keeping It A Level Higher Than The Rest, Geir & Søssa, Rat Salad, Mor & Jerry, Eupraxia, Ringvold Gasta, Unit 6Q, DJ Gilb'R & Versatile Crew With I:Cube, Sähkö & The Keys Of House Life, Winklez, Peng! Ossia, Nell & The Dennis Bros., Roland Lifjell, Paleo & The Bhakti Crew, "70 CPS" Bailey, Bodhi Beats, Pyramide Phillips, Samir M'Kadmi, Thug Records, Audio-In Crew, King 909, Graff Et Grill, Paint House, 411, Nbm, Done, Pol, Sol, Yre, Culos, Kvam, Sau 2, Coats, Buba, 1999, Tmb, Crew - Skredderåsen, Moss! It's Not What You Play - But How You Play. Recorded and digitally edited at the 6th-EonMANIA-fract2 STD between 2012-2014. Original session for Side B recorded at Pyramide Studio, Frankfurt 2010. Vocals on Side C recorded at Inna Di Bu Studio, Moss 2013. Graffiti Can't Be Stopped

AGON is the directorial debut of Giulio Bertelli. It follows a triptych of female athletes as they prepare and then compete in LUDOJ 2024, a fictional Olympic Games, in their personal disciplines - judo, fencing, and rifle shooting. Informed by the historical figures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Nadezhda Durova, these women are portrayed against the political, social, technological and physical contexts that dominate the highest level of sports competition and performance. AGON explores a contemporary account of the contradictions of these sports, which began as peacetime practices for war, as their disciplines are institutionally sanitised, recast as wholesome global entertainment, and ultimately dematerialised altogether in new digital arenas. The events at LUDOJ are conducted not in sports arenas but on soundstages, with no live audience. These spartan spaces are populated only by athletes, sports officials, and film crew, capturing every audio-visual layer of information. Within this environment, every mat crash, sword clash and gunshot is experienced in exacting detail. Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley. “I saw a material parallel between the sportsperson and the musician. That you have these tools which you carry through life, which hold complex histories of use. These techniques and traditions are studied, and combined with contemporary technologies to unlock new potentials. As Alex Sokolov is to her gun, Jean-Luc Guionnet is to his saxophone. From this model sprung many ideas, which lay the foundation for the score: applying the gestural language of the fencing epee to Ute’s bow; the ‘tuned air’ of both the rifle and the saxophone; taking the judo concept of barycentre and applying that to a form of rhythmic gravity with Seijiro. It was a rich seam” – Tom Wheatley “Where realism and fiction are blurred in the world of AGON, Tom accomplished the same for the score, obfuscating the boundary between the acoustic landscape of the film and the music, respecting the theoretical framework of the film itself.” – Giulio Bertelli AGON premiered at Venice Film Festival 2025, was awarded the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Independent Production, and the FIPRESCI Award (International Federation of Film Critics). It is a MUBI/Match Factory production.

'The Will of Tongues' is the new studio album by Sarah Davachi, and it is certainly her most ambitious to date, spanning over two hours of music across three LPs. The album features five new solo compositions for historical pipe organs (recorded across the USA, Canada, and the Netherlands), a suite of three choral pieces, a collection of “interludes” for various microtonal ensembles (strings, brass, woodwinds), and a longform chamber piece for string trio, organ, and tape. The latter two pieces were commissions from the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in Troy, New York, while the choral work was commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dundalk, Ireland.

In addition to Davachi performing on organ throughout, 'The Will of Tongues' also features an incredible group of musicians and ensembles from across the USA and Europe, including Whitney Johnson (viola), Eyvind Kang (viola), Lucy Railton (cello), Diapason (an experimental/microtonal brass ensemble based in Los Angeles, consisting of Nev Wendell, Nicholas Ginsburg, Mattie Barbier, and Mason Moy), Phaedrus (a Renaissance flute consort based in Switzerland, consisting of Liane Sadler, Charlotte Schneider, Mara Winter, and Luis Martinez Pueyo), and Chamber Choir Ireland (conducted by Nils Schweckendiek).

'The Will of Tongues' engages the numerous compositional concepts and methods that have preoccupied Davachi over the past decade especially – including iteration, tuning theory, textural and timbral variation, extended duration, vertical harmony, intervallic affect, and canonic structure, all rooted in the minimalist tradition from which she operates – but with a more pointed and intentional touch than in previous forms. Across its thirteen tracks, ideas hocket from one ensemble or instrument to the next, slowly shifting in balance over the course of what is unmistakably a demanding length.

As a combined body of work, however, the music on this album seeks to articulate a deep reverence for the act of listening, and for the awareness that such listening can serve as a kind of imaginative negative space; one that critically promotes confrontation and creation rather than escape. This collection of music is not easy listening, and it’s not meant to be – when long durations and a reduction of materials are at play, the ear and the mind are forced to truly face the reality of sound itself and the significant mental spaces that it continually gives rise to, which can carry deep wells of meaning if the listener is willing to journey there. 'The Will of Tongues' is thus a celebration of iterative listening and of extreme engagement, of intimate aural experience and its vast psychic horizons.

Nothing expresses us beyond death, and I sometimes cried out: “that is how the will of tongues is made!”

Experiments In Psychoacoustics, Timbre & Minimalism: 2011-2021

Late Music and Disciples are pleased to present the first and second volumes in an archival series of selected electronic and acoustic works by Sarah Davachi, all previously unreleased in the vinyl format. Featuring (way) back catalogue material from various CDs, cassettes, and EPs; singles and original film scores; as well as miscellaneous live and studio recordings.

“Something for everyone”

On June 29th, 2023, Jeremiah Chiu walked into the Vintage Synthesizer Museum (VSM) in Highland Park, Los Angeles, with no plan more specific than “let’s fire this stuff up and see what happens.” Exploring the VSM’s vast collection of classic, rare and staple synthesizers, he would sequence, trigger, and layer the machines together with help from VSM founder/curator Lance Hill. Hill recalls: "Jeremiah arrived before the engineer showed up. We talked for maybe 5 minutes before he started programming a sound and sequence into the Gleeman Pentaphonic. By the time the engineer showed up, Jeremiah had built several other parts around the Gleeman that weren't synced by any control method but sounded like they were just calling and responding to each other. They plugged the Tascam 388 into the patch bay, and hit record. Jeremiah played with it, and that was it. First piece written and recorded in under an hour. It felt natural, fun and free. And that's pretty much how the rest of the session went. Constant ecstatic motion. It was the funnest non-HipHop session I've ever worked on." The resulting album – In Electric Time - was recorded in just two days, and edited to completion in the two days following. It was captured fully analog by engineer Ben Lumsdaine, who ​​contributes performances on a few tracks himself. Cooper Crain (of Bitchin Bajas) makes an appearance as well; but ultimately the collection is an intuitive expression of organic electronic music conceptualized and created in-context by Chiu alone, as he calls on a lifetime of work in sound synthesis to paint a fulgent, refreshingly undercut sequence of cinematic sketches and in-process themes. In some ways, In Electric Time reflects the directness of Raymond Scott’s electronic studio recordings — with sharp cuts and room chatter — and, in others, it conjures the in-the-moment magic of Harmonia. About the work, Chiu says: “The approach to the improvisations was to embrace the mixer setups at VSM — where a section of synthesizers are all routed to a single mixer/patchbay — and to start at one end of the studio and work our way around the six different sections. I began with the synths I was most familiar with — or had spent years researching — and was fairly certain I could reign in quickly. When working with vintage gear, there's always a sweet spot where the instrument sings in a unique way. This may be the idiosyncrasies of its filter and how it resonates, the action of the keys, the ability to trigger and use control voltage to sequence, or the unique onboard features. I love finding the moments where a melody or rhythm appears in an unexpected way — at times feeling more like archaeology than sculpture. I was quite improvisatory with the editing as well, often pulling bits from distinctly different sections in dialogue with each other, in order to maintain the raw, spontaneous feeling. I loved hearing moments in the recordings when Ben started or stopped tape, so a take that was running long and beyond its moment would hit directly against a fresh idea.”

"Tranquilizer" by Oneohtrix Point Never is a limited-edition clear vinyl compilation exploring his early experimental and ambient works. The album showcases Daniel Lopatin’s signature blend of dreamy textures, fractured melodies, and sonic abstraction. A must-have for fans of avant-garde electronic music and OPN’s formative soundscapes.

Influenced by the minimal music of the 60s and 70s, baroque music, and experimentation in studio environments, Canadian artist Sarah Davachi creates music using a variety of sounds including analog synthesizers, piano, electronic organ, pipe/reed organ, vocals, tape samplers, and orchestral music. Sarah Davachi, a Canadian artist who creates music with a variety of sounds, including piano, electronic organ, pipe/lead organ, vocals, tape sampler, and orchestral music, has released her latest album "Two Sisters" on her Late Music label. The album features a chamber ensemble and a pipe organ solo. A variety of instruments are used, including carillon (a keyboard instrument composed of very large cast-iron bells), chorus, string quartet, bass woodwinds, trombone quartet, and sine tones and electronic drones. The pipe organ is a 1742 Italian tracker organ, now located in the deserts of the American Southwest, and contains the sounds of a very rare pipe organ.

An album etched not only in the history of Japanese rock but also in the history of rock worldwide!A miraculous sound that never ages!Due to popular demand, re-released on clear vinyl!

●Why did the world's avant-garde musicians want to create "sound" with Conny Plank back then? The album "Phew" (released in 1981) was produced at the legendary Conny's Studio, which spawned masterpieces by Kraftwerk, Neu!, DAF, Eno, and others, with former Aunt Sally member Phew joining them.

●Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebezeit, former members of the German rock band Can, who had a great influence on techno and post-rock, participated.

●Conny Plank's outstanding engineering and Holger Czukay's ingenious editing created a groundbreaking sound world that still resonates uniquely and never fades even today.

For years, Takuro Okada has carried a quiet question: how can a Japanese musician honor the music of African Americans without simply borrowing it? That search shapes his new album Konoma, a work guided by the idea of “Afro Mingei.” The Tokyo guitarist, producer, and bandleader has lived inside this tension since childhood, drawn to blues, jazz, and funk records that nourished him, yet hesitant in the face of the histories they hold. The concept of Afro Mingei, which Okada first encountered in an exhibition by artist Theaster Gates, gave him a way forward. Gates connected Black aesthetics with Japanese folk craft, both rooted in resistance — “Black is Beautiful” defying racism, the Mingei movement preserving everyday beauty against industrial erasure. That kinship became the compass for Konoma, a record attuned to echoes across cultures and time.

Konoma holds six originals and two covers, all shaped by this dialogue. The elegantly unhurried “Portrait of Yanagi” drifts like a standard half-remembered from another era, while the brief but potent “Galaxy” gestures toward Sun Ra’s late 1970s electric organ experiments, the fractured propulsion of Flying Lotus’s early beat tapes, and the shadowy atmospheres of trip-hop. Okada’s choice of covers sharpens the conversation: Jan Garbarek’s “Nefertite” shimmers with the cool austerity of 1970s ECM, reframing Europe’s own search for identity inside jazz, while Hiromasa Suzuki’s “Love” channels the electric vibrancy of 1970s Japanese fusion, when musicians fused psychedelia, funk, and folk into a distinctly local dialect. Together, they anchor Konoma in a lineage of artists who bent borrowed forms toward something new.

Okada’s life has been shaped by such crossings. He grew up in Fussa, where the Yokota U.S. Air Force base loomed large, learning guitar in rowdy clubs for American servicemen while teaching himself recording at home. That hybrid education led to collaborations with Haruomi Hosono, Nels Cline, Sam Gendel, James Blackshaw, and Carlos Niño, and to a body of work spanning film soundtracks, collaborative projects, and exploratory solo albums. Earlier this year, Temporal Drift released The Near End, The Dark Night, The County Line, which features selections from Okada’s expansive archive of recorded material, cementing his reputation as one of Japan’s most adventurous contemporary musicians. With Konoma, co-released by ISC Hi-Fi Selects and Temporal Drift, Okada delivers his most personal and expansive statement yet: a meditation on connection, influence, and the beauty that survives across cultures.

- Words by Randall Roberts

opo’s 666ridims (2020 - 2026), compiled by J.TRIPP, brings together tracks from his 666ridims netlabel, reflecting on the singular sound worlds of some of his solo work. Like a discovery made by neutrino sensors, opo’s tracks research the transformation of rhythm, swing, and structure, aiming for a new grid. Sketchy and raw, processing emotions and experiences, regaling stories, and asking questions, opo relates in trance verse. All tracks here breathe his focus on improvisation, experimentation, and collaboration. Some of the beats featured on 666ridims (2020 - 2026) are outlines for freestyles and songwriting ideas, a practice formed during a long-distance music conversation with illustrator, printmaker, painter, designer, and maker Billy Bigwood. Other tracks are more club-oriented, like speculative genres programmed in odd meters. Japanese Barcelona-based DJ Hanakito contributes to one track, using samples and chops sourced from her vinyl imports. Through Afroelectronic experimentation and diasporic narratives, opo encodes his soul's past and future through his music. Encoded, activated, returned. Initiate only when you receive permission from all your mental fragments. Keep transmissions in mind and dislodge and follow the command cluster's trail. Strongly influenced by sci-fi, ancestral afro musics, jazz, performance art, and food, as musical lines and shards of meaning cascade, 666ridims (2020 - 2026) is a minimalist dive into strange meters, polyrhythm, and the transcendence of ideas. Fast, slow. Exhilarating. We don’t discover physical laws; we just collaborate on them.

Alexander Holm presents Dial / Head Stroll, a pair of minimalist sound works built from repetition, movement and subtle shifts in perspective. Loops circle slowly in and out of focus, with fragments of sound appearing and disappearing like half-remembered scenes. Blurring the line between composition and sonic collage, Holm creates an abstract listening experience where small details gradually take on new meaning. Patient, playful and subtly uncanny, Dial / Head Stroll rewards close listening with each repeated pass.

Forgotten electronic treasures by composer Ton de Leeuw rediscovered: first release in the Dutch Oscillation Series Dutch Oscillation Series (DOS) proudly announces the release of a box set featuring the complete electronic works of Ton de Leeuw (1926–1996). This publication marks the first instalment in a new series that brings the history of Dutch electronic music to life for a broad audience. The official presentation will take place on Saturday, 12 September, during the Gaudeamus Festival for contemporary music in Utrecht. Unique discoveries from the archive. For far too long, twentieth-century Dutch electronic music has remained hidden away in dim archives, only occasionally accessible under optimal conditions. Many compositions have not been heard for decades, perhaps after being presented to an audience only once. For this project, the original tapes were carefully traced in basements and archives, including the mysterious work Chronos, which was rediscovered in the collection of the Netherlands Music Institute (NMI). Even close collaborators of De Leeuw were unaware of the existence of Chronos. Another highlight of this release is the radiophonic oratorio Job (1956), which was awarded the Prix Italia radio prize by broadcaster Rai. The recordings were digitised by experts at the Institute of Sonology and the Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision). The music was then meticulously restored and mastered in the studio of Jos Smolders (EARLabs), in accordance with modern standards, while strictly adhering to the composer’s original artistic intentions. The edition includes eight works composed between 1956 and 1982. The collection is released as a deluxe LP and CD box set and is also available via streaming and as high-resolution downloads. For an optimal listening experience, originally four-channel works such as Elektronische Studie (Electronic Study) and Antiphonie (Antiphony) are available as special Dolby Atmos downloads, allowing listeners to experience at home the unique spatial sound world envisioned by Ton de Leeuw. About Ton de LeeuwTon de Leeuw was one of the most influential Dutch composers of the twentieth century. A thinker with a distinctly cosmopolitan outlook, he immersed himself deeply in musical cultures from India, Japan, and Indonesia, among others. His work consistently sought to bridge Eastern and Western musical traditions and concepts. In addition, De Leeuw enjoyed a distinguished academic career. He served for many years as senior lecturer and director at the Amsterdam Conservatory and was affiliated as a senior research fellow with the University of Amsterdam. His book Muziek van de twintigste eeuw (Music of the Twentieth Century) remains a standard reference work.

“Great Doubt” is the third full length LP by Danish composer Astrid Sonne. Throughout her acclaimed discography, Astrid Sonne has been carefully crafting different moods through electronic and acoustic instrumental endeavours. On “Great Doubt” this skill is refined, now with the distinct addition of the composer's own vocal in front. The tone of each track is unmistakably Sonne’s, structured around contrasts through an impeccable sense of timing. Lyrics on the album are sparse, merely highlighting different scenes or emotional states of being, leaving the music to fill in the blanks. Yet they also form a pattern of ambiguity, consolidated through the album title, searching for answers through looking at how and what you are asking, questions for the world, questions of love. The viola, a trusted companion since Astrid Sonne’s youth, appears effortlessly throughout the album, fully integrated into the sonic universe; through a pizzicato driven arrangement in the poignant track “Almost” or along with booms and claps in mutated cinematic stabs during “Give my all”, paraphrasing Mariah Carey's 1997 ballad. Yet the string section also gives way to explorations of woodwinds, counterbalancing the bowed movements with digital brass and airy flutes. Finally, beats and detuned piano are fresh additions to the soundscape, cementing how Sonne’s practice is always evolving into new territories.

Somewhere between revelation and delusion, Euphoria Bound maps a familiar trajectory: the irresistible pull towards dissolution, the gradual erasure of memory, the self rendered irretrievable. It moves between states of consciousness where such distinctions of enlightenment or self-deception are erased.

Across ten tracks, the album constructs a spectrum of sound that is both ambitious and uncompromising.

The approach here is more direct than recent releases, with textures that accumulate and disintegrate with renewed urgency.

Having sold his instruments to fund a nomadic 1970s lifestyle, eccentric Irish experimentalist Michael O’Shea was forced to create his own handmade answer to the sitars and zelochords he’d become accustomed to playing on his travels around the globe. 

Using an old door, 17 strings, chopsticks and combining them with phasers, echo units and amplification, the new device was to become his signature sound, mixing Irish folk influences with Asian and North African sounds in a mesmerising and soulful new way that brought him to the attention of the leading improvisers of his day - Alice Coltrane, Ravi Shankar, Don Cherry and more. 

A logical follow up to AllChival’s recent reissue of Stano's debut LP, Michael O’Shea’s self titled LP was originally released on Wire's Dome Imprint in 1982. 

The background to the album is as interesting and inspiring as the artist who created it - born in Northern Ireland but raised in the Republic, O’Shea was keen to travel and escape the troubles of his home. 

Wandering throughout Europe and the Middle East, O’Shea found himself living and working as a relief aid in Bangladesh in the mid Seventies where he learned to play sitar while recovering from a bout of hepatitis. A later period spent busking in France accompanied on zelochord by Algerian musician Kris Hosylan Harp led to O’Shea’s idea of combining both instruments as a homebuilt instrument - Mo Chara [Irish for "My Friend"]. 

He later described the process on the back of the LP himself saying: "Having sold my sitar in Germany and being desperate for money to travel to Turkey, I conceived of the idea of combining both sitar and zelochord. The first Mo Cara was born, taken from the middle of a door, which was rescued from a skip in Munchen" 

A combination of dulcimer, zelochord and sitar, O Shea would play it with a pair of chopsticks, striking the strings softly using Irish folk rhythms mixed with the rich, nostalgic sounds of of the many Asian artists he’d encountered on his travels. 

It was a pan cultural sound standing at an unusual crossroads of folk, traditional, rock, progressive, jazz, electronic and post-punk worlds without hesitation. 

Perfecting the instrument on the streets, there were further spells spent busking in the underground stations and cafes of London's West End and Covent Garden during the heady days of the 1970s when they were full of eccentric street entertainers, jazz improvisers and musical pioneers. 

His work with Rick Wakeman never saw the light of day but O’Shea’s contact with the world of post-punk London ensured his name would live on. 

Introduced to Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis via cartoonist Tom Johnston, O’Shea eventually acquiesced to an open invite to record at their studio. Turning up unannounced in the first half of 1981 the LP was recorded in a day in the legendary Blackwing Studios and released on Dome the year after. 

The first side features the fifteen minute masterpiece "No Journeys End" with the B side featuring more input from Wire in processing the Mo Chara sound. 

Lewis himself said years later of the forgotten masterpiece: “I always said it was the best job we ever did.” 

After an aborted LP with The The's Matt Johnson the following year, O’Shea quietly disappeared from the formal recording world . His brief but unique contribution to the music world came to a sad end in 1991 when O’Shea was struck by a post van and died a few days later in hospital in London. 

This repress on All City’s AllChival imprint has been remastered and reissued with the approval of both Dome and his surviving siblings. 

2024 Repress. Essential stuff from Finnish legend, Mika Vaino ( Ø, Pan Sonic ++ + +).
One for the headphone amp / hi fi sound system crew.

Minimal & reduced nordic techno and electronics - Mika Vaino's second album from 1996 - only released on vinyl for the first time in 2019.

Written and produced by Mika Vainio in Turku in 1993
Muutaja is written and produced by Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen

A pivotal 2006 work from the late Mika Vainio—renowned as one half of Pan Sonic and a towering figure in experimental and electronic sound—returns on Sähkö under his solo alias Ø. Born from the underground of Helsinki, Finland’s experimental stronghold, Aste documents a coldly precise yet exploratory approach to electronic sound that left a decisive mark on the minimal techno scene. Metallic austerity and mysterious silence coexist here, as sharpened structural beauty and ruthless reduction of sound deliver an overwhelming tension that still resonates today. A definitive statement from the outermost edge of electronic music.

Originally released in June 2009, The Ecstatic stands as a defining artistic statement from Mos Def (now known as yasiin bey) — a richly textured return to form that reaffirmed his status as one of hip-hop’s most adventurous and intellectually engaged voices. Arriving a decade after his celebrated debut Black on Both Sides, the album was widely regarded as his strongest work in years, earning near-universal praise for its lyrical breadth, eclectic production, and thematic ambition.Musically, The Ecstatic weaves a global sonic tapestry shaped by an array of forward-thinking producers including Madlib, J Dilla, Oh No, Preservation, Mr. Flash, Chad Hugo (of The Neptunes), and Georgia Anne Muldrow. The resulting soundscape is both rooted in hip-hop tradition and unbound by genre, integrating elements of jazz, soul, Middle-Eastern inflection, and experimental sample work. Tracks like “Supermagic” and “Twilite Speedball” establish a vibrant, restless energy that mirrors the album’s expansive creative scope.Lyrically, yasiin bey traverses personal, political, and philosophical terrain with characteristic incisiveness, confronting social inequality, Western imperialism, and questions of cultural identity with poetic urgency. Embracing risk and complexity rather than nostalgia, The Ecstatic remains a mature, deeply felt body of work whose ambition, depth, and enduring resonance have solidified its place as a standout entry in Mos Def’s catalog and in modern hip-hop history.

There is a certain solace to be found in minimal music—a contemplative joy that emerges through sustained repetition and subtle variation. Solo Three, the slyly absorbing new album from Michigan-based composer and multi-instrumentalist Erik Hall, embodies that hypnotic charge while boldly reimagining a distinct selection of contemporary classical works.

Hall’s affinity for minimalism began decades ago, when as a jazz-studies drummer at the University of Michigan he first encountered Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians. The piece altered his trajectory completely. Years later, amid a creative lull, he revisited that formative work by attempting a solo reconstruction. Working alone in his home studio, Hall painstakingly recreated Reich’s intricate, interlocking architecture—supplanting the piece’s orchestral palette with his own keyboards, guitars, and synths—and performing every part himself without loops, programming, or sequencers.

That recording, released on Western Vinyl in 2020, arrived during the fraught early months of lockdown and resonated deeply with listeners. Pitchfork praised it for making “a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit,” and it won the 2021 Libera Award for Best Classical Record. Even Reich himself wrote to congratulate Hall, saying he had “reinvented the piece.”

Heartened, Hall next turned to Simeon ten Holt’s Canto Ostinato, a sprawling work of Dutch minimalism built on repetition and euphoric harmony. His 2023 interpretation was hailed by Bandcamp Daily as “mesmerizing as patterns emerge, coalesce, and retreat,” and the New York Times highlighted Hall in a feature on ten Holt’s growing influence. The project led to a years-long collaboration with New York’s Metropolis Ensemble and Sandbox Percussion, confirming Hall’s place as an inventive new voice bridging classical and contemporary practice.

With Solo Three, Hall brings this trilogy to a sweeping close. Instead of focusing on a single composition, he weaves together multiple works by several visionary composers: Glenn Branca, Charlemagne Palestine, Laurie Spiegel, and a return to Steve Reich. The result is a rich, varied homage to American minimalism—at once reverent and exploratory. Branca’s “The Temple of Venus Pt. 1” unfolds in oscillating organ and prepared piano; Palestine’s “Strumming Music” becomes a meditative blur of felted piano and guitar; Spiegel’s “A Folk Study” is recast with acoustic warmth in lieu of electronics; and Reich’s “Music for a Large Ensemble” closes the album with a 16-minute, kaleidoscopic rush of overlapping melodies and jubilant rhythmic patterns.

True to his method, Hall performs and records every part himself, layering instruments one by one like sonic bricks. The approach is deeply human and quietly defiant in an age of faceless automation. “It’s just so much more compelling to actually play every note,” Hall says. “Those micro-differences between takes create a sort of living, breathing magic.”

That living, breathing magic fills every corner of Solo Three. It’s both a reverent ode to the composers who shaped Hall’s musical identity and a vivid reminder that minimalism’s hypnotic beauty—its patience, precision, and quiet emotional power—still speaks urgently to the present moment.

- Zach Schonfeld

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

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

With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.