MUSIC

A Day of the Sun is a spiritual jazz masterpiece full of poetry by two geniuses of the Japanese musical scene. Masahiko Togashi and Isao Suzuki, pivotal figures in jazz with a unique talent and sensitivity that transcends conventional jazz forms and styles. In addition to being skilled performers they demonstrate extraordinary compositional talent that transcends their sensibilities and wisdom of more conventional jazz. They are together a wonderful combination of techniques, but without the eyes and ears of these two artists, the mutual understanding, friendship and cooperation that only certain artists are able to recreate together, would never have given rise to this music. The album is based on Togashi's drums/percussion and Suzuki's bass, with occasional changes to cello and piano/synths, and is skillfully performed by just the two of them, creating a unique worldview; a performance that far exceeds expectations. The mystical melodies of the East, earthy percussion, and the sensibilities of the two intertwine to create a unique groove, resulting in a universal masterpiece that will never fade away and connects with today's sound makers and DJs. Top sound quality from original master tapes. Includes 4-sided insert with a very interesting interview at the time with the two musicians regarding the record.

Legendary German post-rock band formed in 1971 by undisputed noise pioneer Uwe Nettelbeck, Faust garnered an immediate following due to its artistically extreme experimentations with music cut ups and other mixed sources hinging on cacophony and distortion. Don't miss their 1971 cult classic debut, now reissued with its original clear printed sleeve on 180 gram clear vinyl.

Masahiro Sugaya began his career in the 1980s, working alongside the environmental music scene of that era while also making a significant impact in stage music through his involvement with Pappa TARAHUMARA.

Over the past 20 years, Sugaya has shifted from traditional composition using instrumental music to creating works for 8-channel multi-speaker systems, incorporating environmental sounds and field recordings. His latest album continues this evolution, featuring collages of environmental sounds within individual tracks. The album is structured to balance past and new works, creating a collage-like representation of Sugaya’s diverse creative output.

"しるしまみれ / Overflowing Signs" offers an experience that navigates freely between Sugaya’s environmental music approach and his practices in field recording and musique concrète, presenting a sequence of sounds that defies easy categorization or symbolism. Additionally, this album marks Sugaya’s first stereo full album release in nearly 20 years.

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.

Finally…Terre Thaemlitz saves the most sought-after cuts of her debut LP ‘Tranquilizer’ for the third and final of its 30th anniversary, first-time vinyl editions, including that stunning Memphis rap x proto-dubstep dedication to MLK - 100% essential ’90s ambient bass, oneiric concrète and breaks driven deep house for the heads. Frankly unmissable if even just for the album’s opening killer ’040468’ - named for the day MLK departed - which sounds better than ever on its sumptuous vinyl cut, ‘Tranquilizer EP3’ is the one the stans have been eagerly awaiting. It brings to a close a necessary reissue series for a prized totem of‘90s ambient music, conceived in the wake of the KLF’s inspirational ‘Chill Out’ album, after Terre had laid deep roots in NYC’s queer deep house club scene, and began to seed one of the most distinctive catalogues in contemporary electronic music. Semi-autobiographical and coloured with an inherently political take on ambient music, the album can be heard to reference their background in the US Midwest via the track titles and aesthetic inference of wide open spaces at night, as in ‘2am on a Silo’, and on thru their formative journey of self-discovery in downtown NYC, where they took up residency at a queer bar playing earliest deep house to sex workers during the years of devastation from the AIDS pandemic. While that would be expounded more explicitly in their later albums as DJ Sprinkles, on ‘Tranquilizer’ it’s implied by a deep sense of melancholy and longing. ‘Tranquilliser EP3’ pretty much distills and triangulates the album’s most salient points in a discrete story unto itself. Her politics are writ in a titular nod to the day Martin Luther King died on ’040468’, which we’ve long marvelled at as a remarkable prototype for both booming Memphis rap instrumentals, and the mid ’00s halfstep dubstep sound, due to its sweeping subs that go all the way down, and then some, under a blanket of starlight twinkles and bluest pads. An absolute all timer - trust. The nocturnal is also evoked in the wheezing electro-acoustic rawness and plangent beauty of ‘2am on a Silo’, like the soundtrack to a memory of a dream, and perfectly characteristic of a sound sensitivity that became Terre’s calling card, whilst ‘Raw Through a Straw’ offers the most tangible bridge between her deep house background and the emergent ambient house sound in its mingling of gorgeous organ ruminations rolling out into Dennis Coffey’s ‘Scorpio’ break, a cornerstone of hip hop deployed in deadliest deep house style. Finally we can rest easy knowing this one’s on wax.

OK this is a full madness; visually impaired pensioners Anne Goss (75), Kathleen Allott (74) and Mick Gladwin (65) aka Rotherham Sight & Sound play the music of persistent prism disruptor Rian Treanor with a knockout set of mutant dancehall and mercurial electro-styled zingers, a huge tip if you’re into Autechre, SND, Kakuhan, Iueke, Shubharun Sengupta. Rian Treanor keeps knocking new doors of possibility with his new label Electronic Music Club and its initial focus on Rotherham Sight & Sound, participants of a community-based initiative in their shared post-industrial home town Rotherham. Utilising software synths designed by Rian and his dad Mark Fell, the trio twist out vortices of shearing, asymmetric anarchitecture, rudely resembling the sort of hyper-contemporary styles alluded to in Rian’s solo works, but inflected with cranky timing and an intuitive freedom that bears extraordinary results, especially when considering the fact the trio had no prior musical ability, and only encountered electronic music a few years ago. After a couple of years of practice and performance, ‘Action Potential’ now firms up their quicksilver sound for club and home buzzes with seven actions that warp and morph from the needling jolts and hoof of ‘Pass The Go’, to shuddering detonations in ‘Dial’, each with a properly electrifying force carrying a genuine futureshock. Working within Rian’s systems-based framework, Anne, Kathleen, and Mick deploy a tactile feel for the machines, finely honed over the course of many sessions at the Rotherham Sight & Sound facility, that uses their visual impairments to synaesthetic advantage. Between the wickedly metallic ragga swivel of ‘Hold’, the diffractive chain reactions of ‘When It Ends’, and more tempered, sloshing sensuality of ‘30 Seconds’, the trio follow their noses down wormholes that manifest an ideal of accessibility and expressionism within electronic music contexts that Rian and Mark have long worked towards, with Anne, Kathleen and Mick’s relative lack of cultural conditioning in this paradigm prompting them to act on pure instinct. Seriously, this has to be one of the most unexpectedly brilliant and boundary shattering sides of the year, not to be missed by any self-respecting follower of the future or hyper present.

Man Rei’s music traces plaintive states, haunted by hazy memories and heavy musings held in suspension. With its resonant loops, dazed iterations and eternal returns, ‘Thread’ weaves a gorgeously blurred portrait of restlessness, desire and longing. The album grew around loungey ballad 'Call', first heard on last year’s ‘The Blue Hour’ compilation and serving as this collection’s tender heart. The gauzy vocals and low-lit instrumentation of ‘Call’ diffuse across ‘Thread’, which roams under a fog of low-hanging guitars, misty piano, muted synth lines and half-heard field recordings. Man Rei sings from the shadows, sharing a poignant, raw-edged poetry that drifts in and out of ambiguity. As their lyrics stitch the literal to the ephemeral, we’re moved into a trance; considering all that’s been left unsaid; leaden with weightless feelings that slip beyond recognition. - 𝘕𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘢 𝘗𝘢𝘯𝘻𝘦𝘳

Carmen's new 3 track EP gives a sense of where she might be heading next on her musical journey. On Nutrition, the submerged influence of dub seen in a lot of her earlier work has risen more prominently to the surface. Carmen describes the tracks as "some dub studies born out of my continued fascination with the form. I’m in a period where I just keep going back to experimenting with beats and rhythms". Nutrition is set for release on 25 October 2024 through Smalltown Supersound.

'Music for a Bellowing Room' is a collaborative durational work by musician Sarah Davachi and filmmaker Dicky Bahto, both based in Los Angeles.

With a performance/running time of three hours, 'Music for a Bellowing Room' is an exercise in resolution, inviting the audience to shift their concentration and perception through gradual changes in sound and image. This piece was originally commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and received its premiere performance in September 2023.

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!

Hoshina Anniversary is from Hachioji, westside of Tokyo. His new LP of fluid, experimental dance music extends outward from his initial influences of jazz fusion, electronica, and Japanese heritage.

nown for his innovative fusion of ambient sounds, Brendon Moeller once again pushes the boundaries of the genre with swirling, organic forms and immersive textures grounded in the dark, moody tones of deep techno and dub. What results are the sounds of melodic, fluttering synths set to low, steady beats, all of which seem to playfully dance through some kind of cosmic aural nebula.

Kieran Hebden is arguably at the height of his career so far, making Three his most highly anticipated Four Tet album yet. Since the 2020 triple drop of Sixteen Oceans, Parallel, and 871, Hebden has been pretty much ubiquitous in the scene, from all dayers with Skrillex and Fred again.. to revered collaborations with Madvillain, Burial, Thom Yorke, and William Tyler. And as multifaceted as the cover design by Jason Evans and Matthew Cooper would imply, Three capitalises on a busy decade in progress with an amalgamation of all things we love from Four Tet: ambient sonics meeting crisp club beats, glorious MIDI instruments paired with noise and intricate texture, celebrations of his eclectic influences from hip hop, folk, electronic and abstract sound art that coalesce ever so sweetly into a concise tracklist bursting with life. There’s always a sense of brightness and joy to the feasts of electronic articulations that Hebden prepares, where gauzy psychedelic guitars open a hypnagogic portal to boom bap inflected grooves and mosaics of choral synths. The cerebral, enigmatic moments of scribbling glass plucks amplified into distorted ethereal waves are offset by rejuvenating pools of ambience, lax downtempo beats with reverb throws like skipping stones, and rosy hued melodies swaying and slingshotting across the scales. For the ravers, there’s the battery acid soaked electro rhythm of ‘Daydream Repeat’, evidence of the dance muscles Hebden’s been flexing with his KH singles as a roiling throttle is overtaken by idyllic glittering harps, flipping the track from sweat-drenched heater to luscious euphoric aftermath. For the romantics, there’s the frothing drums and subtle snatches of vocals commanding space all over the album, capturing a full, heartfelt sense of depth that hums, buzzes, and vibrates in the awestriking closer ‘Three Drums’. Whether you’ve just become acquainted with Four Tet or you’ve known him for a lifetime, Three is a stunning work from an inimitable talent.

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.

ZULI's widest-reaching and most ambitious album to date, 'Lambda' is a conspicuous left turn for the Berlin-based Egyptian producer. Draped in gauzy, granulated textures and woven with enigmatic vocal flourishes from collaborators MICHAELBRAILEY, Coby Sey and Abdullah Miniawy, it's a vivid, soul-searching set of polychromatic reflections that sets fire to the boundaries between ambient, trip-hop, industrial music, chamber pop and symphonic noise. In some aspects, 'Lambda' reveals ZULI's softer side; gone are the earth-shaking chopped rhythms and stop-start outbursts of corroded static that characterized his last full length, 'Digla Dive - Live'. But peer beneath the brain burrowing vocal melodies, mangled instrumental loops, anxious poems and subtle, harmonic synth washes and a new kind of intensity lurks in the shadows. Since his early releases on Lee Gamble's UIQ label and his 2018 breakout 'Trigger Finger', ZULI has notched up major global acclaim for his futuristic, kinetic musical diversions. He cut his teeth supplying beats to local rappers back home in Cairo, soon shifting his attention to the city's burgeoning dance underground, promoting events, DJing prolifically and tirelessly supporting the scene's most experimental fringe. In 2019, ZULI teamed up with Rama to curate the irsh series of video transmissions, evolving the project into a label shortly afterwards. And now situated in Berlin, the duo have extended the concept to encompass an ongoing sequence of genre-averse club nights. All this experience and constant creative motion is etched into the foundations of 'Lambda'. It's an album that plays liberally with euphoria, but feels constantly precarious, intrepidly peering out from its tense internal world. Lead single '10000 (Papercut pt. 1)' is one of the album's most unexpected cuts, featuring a soaring falsetto vocal from Hamburg-based British composer and performer MICHAELBRAILEY. "What do I have to show for it?" he asks suggestively, while ZULI replies with seismic bass rumbles and celestial, harp-like chimes. Building towards a crippling, dense crescendo, the track is among the weightiest ZULI's ever produced, replacing his signature beats with industrial metal drones and razor-sharp electronics. Brailey also shows up on the symphonic 'Syzygy', singing sweetly until he stretches his voice into mutant echoes, augmenting the chorals with powdery, granulated hisses and surreal piano phrases. On 'Plateau' meanwhile, ZULI works alongside virtuosic multi-instrumentalist and singer Abdullah Miniawy, who calls to the heavens as digitally pulverized strings quiver in the background. And cult British artist Coby Sey adds his unmistakable tones to 'Ast', mouthing tense, thoughtful words over mangled music box jingles and ecstatic pads. When he's not straddled by his collaborators through, ZULI is free to make some of his most personal gestures. He fashions a phantasmic, pitch-fluxed robotic croon on 'Trachea', curving it around half-speed hip-hop clacks and cinematic drones, then driving it into walls of impermeable noise on 'The Horn'. And the album's most revealing moment comes with the short 'Fahsil Qusseer', when ZULI recites a poem written by his father. Stretching his voice and a tape-saturated break like elastic, ZULI mimics the emotional push-and-pull of the protagonist, who overcomes their anxiety to escape into the outside world, only to retreat immediately back to the safety of solitude. The track puts the whole of 'Lambda' into sharp focus - through the walls of noise and exuberant, intoxicating waves of ambience, ZULI finds solace in limbo between the manic extremes.

This album, which includes the two latest tracks under the name Basic Rhythm, which has maintained a strong dedication to UK Bass, is a masterpiece in which the aesthetics of an underground pirate radio DJ OG are incorporated into an atmospheric and ravy Jungle/DnB sound. In recent years, he has continued to develop a fairly consistent musical style based on influences from Jungle, DnB, Grime, Rave, etc., as well as industrial sound design, and those who like him will be hooked.

They say you should never meet your heroes, but for Mike, meeting the legendary Adrian Sherwood has been a transformative experience, leading to creative collaborations that have benefited both of them. Nearly 30 years after first being mesmerized by OnU Sound’s releases, a cheeky bit of radio ripping serendipitously led to Mike helping Pats Dokter, the label’s official archivist, with his work restoring master tapes, and eventually to him creating visual content for Adrian’s live shows. A while after this collaboration began, Adrian offered to remix some of Mike’s music, either Misled Convoy or Pitch Black, and it’s four cuts by the latter that grace this heavyweight platter. From the dreamy dub of Transient Transmission to the rolling rhythms of A Doubtful Sound, our originals have been re-arranged and dubbed to $%># in Adrian’s signature style, with fluid melodies, pounding basslines and vocal samples awash in a wall of effects. Trumpets by David “Ital Horns” Fullwood bookend the release, haunting in the first track and celebratory in the last, while Doug Wimbish (Living Colour/Tackhead) added an extra bassline to the heaving version of 1000 Mile Drift, which now features the voice of the iconic Lee “Scratch” Perry. Reflecting on the collaboration, Mike says, “the whole experience has been slightly unreal, from working on Adrian’s videos to being in the OnU studio and watching him dub-mixing the tracks I’ve made, something I could never have imagined happening!” Mike isn’t the only OnU fan in Pitch Black, as a pivotal moment for Paddy was “watching Adrian mixing Tack>head at the Powerstation in 1995 and seeing the cause-and-effect of what he was doing and hearing the unbelievable sounds coming out of the speakers. It was the first time I’d ever seen somebody dub mix like that.” The cover of Echoes of the Night is based upon an original artwork by our long-time collaborator (and fellow OnU aficianado) Hamish Macaulay, while the vinyl has been pressed using a 100% recycled compound known as eco-mix, making each record totally unique as the colours change across the pressing run (most appear to be green-ish).

 

 

After Prince Istari finished the Dub Encounter with Erik Satie, he immediately set to work on expelling the evil curse of artificial intelligence. While the encounter with Satie was guided by the original compositions, this album delves deeper into dub science. The opening track is "Curse Of Machine Learning," a grinding cumbia dub track that sucks you into the curse of machine learning. It's followed by "Artificial Neural Network," arguably the album's most nerve-wracking track, with wild snare rolls colliding with offbeat echoed riddim sections. "Large Language Models" offers a more relaxed, arabesque one-drop riddim with speech synthesis vocals. "Fake Image" closes the first side with a full trombone solo contributed by Eugene Rosebud. Side B starts with the one-drop killer tune "Haunted By Delusion," featuring an organ solo by Prince Istari. Drum and bass in your face. "Evil Forces," on the other hand, is a fusion of jazz and dub; after the brass section breakdown, it rolls into a crazy synth solo. Then next „I Want Your Data" pulls your data into the AI's guts with a vibraphone. This is maybe the ambitious tune on the record speaking of chord progressions. The final track sees Eugene Rosebud return with a double trombone solo in "Transhuman Feedback Rock" assisted by a saz cooling the blues pattern with a hookline. Here we have beautifull springreverb and harmonizer dub effects on the snare twirrling around the trombone solos. All tunes composed, arranged, conducted and engineered by Prince Istari and played by his house band The Virtualistics. Trombone Solos by Eugene Rosebud. Packaged in a nice cover drawn by Markus Schäfer and frequency shift and cut by LXC.

On "SHAME", producer 2K88 (Przemysław Jankowiak, fka 1988) invokes the era and spirit of PL SOUND, a local genre inspired by British soundsystem music but infused with the social, urban, and sonic themes that developed during Poland’s post-communist transformation. "SHAME" is a progressive, bass-fueled transmission built from scraps of hip-hop’s past; it’s a cinematic vision of Y2K Polish rap that’s in constant flux, where every detail is just as important as the whole structure. Sampling the Polish canon of beats from the low-rent districts of the nineties, 2K88 plunders tracks already based on samples and channels the experiences of the generations that grew up with those sounds, struggling and celebrating with them. And just as he did with his previous projects Etamski and 1988, 2K88 draws out, processes, and ages his elements in an echo chamber, asking questions and formulating answers. Jankowiak works on the fringes of genre: traces of ambient, dub, rap and jungle flicker into low-lit urban rhythms, chunky nightclub basslines and paranoid production touches. This is in keeping with his new, futuristic handle, 2K88. Not for a second does he succumb to today’s omnipresent nostalgia, instead putting reconstruction before deconstruction — he finds whole worlds in his scraps, and in the long-gone turn-of-the-millennium period, whose liminal qualities feel like a precursor to the unease of the present moment. The end-of-the-20th-century paranoia has only intensified in the past 30 years, and paranoia, as Philo Gant once said in the 1995 sci-fi film "Strange Days", is “just reality on a finer scale”. By that logic, 2K88 offers a picture of the grittiest reality blown up to truly awe-inspiring proportions. ______________________________________________________________ 2K88— fka 1988, aka Przemysław Jankowiak — is a music producer, graphic designer, and audio director raised in the Poland of the 1990s and on the pioneering rap records of that time. The rawness, chunkiness, and paranoia he took from this period have always been an integral part of his music. They were there when he made his first homemade beats and stayed with him when, in the following years, he distanced himself from hip-hop, going deeper into the world of sampling experiments and the post-genre avant-garde. Later, he and Robert Piernikowski created the universe of the duo Syny - an irreal spectral/ontological phenomenon built out of memories, dreams, and bass, rap, dub, and smoke. Since the end of Syny, Jankowiak has let loose his beatmaker impulses on a collaborative record with Warsaw’s legendary MC Włodi, created the album Ruleta [Roulette] with over 30 featured guests, and struck up a dialogue with the electronic soundsystem work that’s fascinated him for years on the Ring the Alarm EP. He’s also created chart-topping avant-pop with Brodka and a mimetic soundtrack to “Splinter”, but it is SHAME that is the album we might call his sonic résumé.

Re-release of Blue Chemise's debut LP, which originally appeared in 2017 as a limited private release of 105 copies. We are proud to make this much sought-after record available again on both physical and digital, with remastered sound by Christophe Albertijn and updated artwork, all true to the original intentions of, and in close collaboration with, the artist. ‘Influence On Dusk’ forms an idiosyncratic cycle of fourteen mysterious, sometimes uncanny electroacoustic compositions, a personal and subdued eruption of 'melancholy of the healthy kind’, suddenly here and suddenly gone… This is the second release on B.A.A.D.M. by the Australian artist Mark Gomes, following his equally atmospheric but more romantic 'Flower Studies' from 2021.

A limited edition 2024 repress of 'Descending Moonshine Dervishes' by Terry Riley. Originally recorded live in Berlin in 1975 and released by Kuckuck in 1982, Beacon Sound reissued the album in 2016 to widespread acclaim.

Blake Lee has always been fascinated by the unknown, and space, in its isolating, mysterious vastness, embodies this theme immaculately. The open void, captured so memorably by Stanley Kubrick in '2001: A Space Odyssey', is Blake's far-reaching canvas on 'No Sound In Space', a cinematic meditation on the cosmos that's painted in nuanced, emotionally sincere colors. The Los Angeles-based composer has been contemplating his full-length debut since 2021, using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush rather than find himself snared in its traditional aesthetic constraints. Transforming its characteristics with effects and subtle processes, he layers sustained tones and intimate improvisations, creating richly visual polychromatic utopias teeming with unknown life. Since 2011, Blake has been most known for being the guitarist and a music director for Lana Del Rey, notching up three songwriting credits on her acclaimed ‘Ultraviolence’ full length. He sees his solo work as a form of escapism, a place where he can experiment and find comfort and catharsis outside of expectations and formal structure. The album was written instinctively, and Blake made sure he didn't force anything, letting go and getting out of his own way, listening intently as sounds and textures materialized organically. "I didn't want to ruin it by being a perfectionist," he laughs. And his collaboration with Kenyan sound artist KMRU, who runs the OFNOT label and contributes to two of the tracks on the album, occurred similarly organically. Blake was moved to reach out to KMRU when he caught a performance of 'Natur' at Los Angeles' Zebulon in 2022, leading to a prolonged back-and-forth. They didn't meet in person until earlier this year, by which time they'd become firm friends, continuously sharing music and conversation. KMRU had lent a valuable ear to Blake, who sent early playlists of 'NSIS' that, over the months, slowly evolved into the finished album. It's the first release on OFNOT that's not by KMRU himself; the label emerged last year with the release of KMRU's own 'Dissolution Grip', and Blake's debut immediately expands its sonic universe. Alongside the playlists, Blake also provided KMRU with the tracks' raw stems, which he began to edit and expand in his Berlin studio. 'Miura' and 'Waiting' are the result of this process, two sublime abstractions that augment Blake's dreamlike, euphoric tones with KMRU's pebbly distortions and booming low-end rumbles. And this same playful sense of freeness seeps into Blake's other compositions. On the misty 'In A Cloud', he surrounds cascading string tones with soft-focus pads that swell until they're like crashing waves, and on the two 'Echoplexx' pieces, he uses delay and reverb to smudge his sounds until they're viscous residue, the harmonies obscured by whooshes of white noise and distant chimes. The mood is quieted somewhat on 'Moving Air', as Blake's swirling tones form half-heard lullabies, coalescing into a dense, melancholy crescendo, and he fills out the sound with reverberant airport recordings on 'Pan AM', letting pitchy My Bloody Valentine-esque drones warble beneath the transitory chatter. Each track melts into the next, forming a billowing, cryptic narrative that leaves more questions than answers. Blake is constantly searching, and fills his unoccupied space with warmth, perception and sensitivity.

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.