MUSIC

Narciso has been running parallel to most of his contemporaries, staying close to the main lane but researching in his own distinctive way. He takes pride in "being free from limitations and conventions. To me, music doesn't follow fixed rules; it is a field for experimentation, where any sound can be transformed into something pleasing to the ear". Depending on what one considers "pleasing", this is a pretty challenging set of tracks. The artist never loses the balance, though, mindful of a certain "dance" context in which this music thrives, but it is also that same context that is being constantly twisted and reshaped into other forms. Some of those provide fresh ground for others to follow; some are of such individuality that no one else dares disturbance; some quickly return to a safer way of communication.

"Diferenciado" does communicate, but like words can be changed to sound different and still mean the same, such are music and sound with Narciso. It's not about alienation of the listener nor alienation of the self from the surrounding areas. "I believe music is present in everything around us." And if anyone can say her/his/their music "reflects vision, experience and perception", you know the end result is not often surprising or even that different from previous examples. Well, we stand by "Diferenciado" in its obvious distinctiveness, and if all the blurb so far may read like a nervous justification it's just because of the excitement in helping put this out into the world.

As a founding element of RS Produções, where Nuno Beats, DJ Lima, DJ Nulo and Farucox are also found, Narciso has been contributing to a spiritual and creative atmosphere that permeates the environs of Lisbon where that golden, inspired air has to fight for space with many kinds of instability. The beauty and drama of opening tracks "Ziu Ziu" and "Cabelinho" (this one with mate Farucox) should be able to touch any sensitive soul that appreciates the quirkiness often attached to pure expression. As in "Pipipi" too, for example, where melody and rhythm gently and moodily lead you into a brief but sudden interruption feeling like a change into another state of being. Do not shy away. Narciso steps up as himself, not as representative of whatever or whoever.

Paris-born electronic music pioneer and 1970s GRM alumni Ariel Kalma joins with multinational New York trio Asa Tone (Kaazi, Melati ESP, Tristan Arp) for a series of intergenerational, electro-acoustic studio conversations, exploring elasticity within rhythm and winds… or as one early listener observed “space and time.”

Following a chance encounter at Ariel’s studio in the Australian rainforest during the pandemic, Melati & Kaazi began recording long live takes with Kalma, weaving in bioluminescent synth improvisations from Tristan Arp remotely. Revisited a few years later between the members of Asa Tone’s respective homes in New York & Indonesia, “○” is the document of a significant moment in the lives of all the album’s players; an ode to memory and connection in an era of crisis, illuminated via flickering fragments of steel flute, kantilan, modular synthesizer, xaphoon, tenor sax, EWI, field recordings of the surrounding rainforest, and the human voice.

Recorded, written and produced by Asa Tone & Ariel Kalma.
Ariel Kalma: Western Concert Flute, Xaphoon, Tenor Saxophone, Voice
Melati ESP: EWI, Kantilan, Voice
Kaazi: Hydrasynth, Opsix, Percussion
Tristan Arp: Modular Synthesizer, Moog Sub37, Percussion
Additional percussion on *3 by Miles Myjavec

Mixed by Tristan Arp, Kaazi and Ariel Kalma.
Mastered by Jose Arentes at GRAMA, Porto.
Art Direction & Layout : Melati ESP, Kaazi, Biscuit.
 

Nazar’s second album, Demilitarize follows his remarkable 2020 debut Guerrilla, which was released just as Covid started to lock down the world. That first album reprocessed kuduro music from Angola with rough textures, field recordings and media clips, re-telling Nazar's personal story of the civil war that exiled his family in Europe, while his father, a rebel General, fought a losing battle in the jungle back home.

After Guerrilla, and in the early throes of a new and important romance, Nazar was hit by Covid and with a weakened immune system, the latent tuberculosis he'd incubated while living in Angola, took over his body and left him seriously ill for a year. Reckoning with mortality and the flowering of new love are the two things that motivated this album, turning the ‘rough kuduro’ of Guerrilla inside out.

Like his debut, this is a deep sound world, but in contrast to its grit and realness, Demilitarize is genuinely dreamy. The arc of the album describes shedding the armour of trauma and surrendering to this new situation. A constant and unexpected aspect of Demilitarize is Nazar's gentle, submerged vocal. Insistent and mantra-like, it’s like a cross between Elisabeth Frazer, Arthur Russell and Frank Ocean, and the music is fragile and opaque in response.

Nazar says - 'With the album being introspective, I didn't seek to capture sounds from real places to enhance it’s universe like on Guerilla. I wanted to make it almost metaphysical like creating sci-fi, with classic cyberpunk anime ‘Ghost In The Shell’ being a core inspiration.' The rhythms of kuduro are still here, but move around his voice like fish around a swimmer. The precise sound design on Demilitarize illuminates from different angles. Chords spiral, ripple and shoot through the beats giving tracks the loosest of settings. Songs disassemble and vocals float off-centre.

Demilitarize insists you zoom in, listen closely, tune into Nazar's rare vibration. Let it overwhelm you, while paying close attention. 

Another foggy day in Yorkshire. A steel grey sky. Raindrops tracing one another down the windowpane. Kirk Barley sits in his studio and assembles compositions from scraps of found sound and live instrumentation. Melodies swell, withdraw and repeat like waves. Time slows. Accelerates. Slows again. The light bends, tweaked at the edges. Twisted by rhythms that never quite resolve.

Written, recorded and produced by Barley in Yorkshire in early 2024, Lux picks up where 2023 LP Marionette leaves off, conjuring a mystical, reflective space between formal minimalism and sonic imaginaries of northern landscapes.

And yet, where Marionette relied at times on more recognisable field recordings, Lux leans into Barley’s skill as an instrumentalist and sound designer, working from a palette of short samples and utilising a variety of alternate tuning systems to build, layer and coax his compositions into being. Most evident on tracks ‘Vita’, ‘Sprite’ and ‘Descendent’, these tunings create an otherworldly harmonic language that is easier to perceive than describe.

Rivet’s new album for Editions Mego is an uplifting and joyous affair coming in the wake of tragedy and disenchantment. It is yet another rebirth from an artist willing to take a step back and reprise the current situation he is in. Mika Hallbäck has a long credible history in the Swedish underground. First recognised for his industrial techno works under the Grovskopa moniker he worked privately on more experimental works that eventually came out as On Feather and Wire, an album released on Editions Mego in 2020. After much acclaim for this bold new direction that blended electronic abstraction, pop and industrial forms into a heavy synthetic trip two tragedies struck. One was the passing of label boss Peter Rehberg and then the passing of his dog Lilo, who was as close as a companion one could have. These events led to the release of the more unsettling follow up L+P-2 (Lilo and Pita minus two) on Midnight Shift Records in 2023. Peck Glamour sees Rivet return to the reawakened Editions Mego with an album of optimism inspired by reconciliation with loss and further explorations of new mental/sonic realms.

Hallbäck defines his approach as not being married to any particular machine, instrument, process or genre. However he holds a particular affinity to sampling, of which, he says, provides the dirt and grit amongst what would otherwise be pristine, generic machine music. The contemporary crate digging method of scouring obscure download music bogs for unique sounds was his preferred research practice.

Peck Glamour is an album full of tracks brimming with the excitement of exploration. It's the results of a mind informed by punk, industrial, techno, dancefloor, disappointment, trauma and rebirth. Here the synthetic and authentic is viewed simply as the same means of human rationale and expression.

The opening, ‘Catch Up to Light’, sets the scene with ecstatic and odd fluorescent vocals sliding amongst crystalline likembe whilst synths swirl amongst the external festivities. ‘Orbiting Empty Cocoon’ is somewhat a homage to the alien sound worlds of The Orb, one which takes the listener deeper into a mind melting array of teased potential as visual elements are executed in a mask of audio wizardry and euphoric staccato rhythms, the later being a nod to Singeli music. ‘Patitur Butcher’ is more dance frontal utilising the Ghatam drum and a YouTube rip of a Chinese language lesson. ‘Plastic Bag Putain’ was made during the beginning of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and should be clear of its intent. ‘All that Heaven Allows’ is a marimba cover of an imaginary Love Parade anthem. 'Kyrie Geire’ potentially briefly fills the void left by the demise of Coil. The entire trip of Peck Glamour is sewn up with ‘We left before we came’ whereby extraneous recordings of double bass player Gregory Vartian-Foss (tuning/strumming/moving the bass) are superimposed with local field recordings to create a gorgeous bed of sounds acting as an exciting exit music to this sharp collection of cinematic ear excursions.

Kompakt is proud to announce, finally, a reissue of the first, self-titled GAS album. Originally released on electronica imprint Mille Plateaux back in 1996, it’s been unavailable in its original form ever since – the version of GAS included in 2008’s Nah Und Fern box featured several different tracks. Here, however, GAS is restored in all its glory, the debut full-length from Wolfgang Voigt’s most enigmatic, quixotic project. There had, of course, been signs of what was to come. Back in 1995, Voigt essayed the first GAS release, a slender, yet remarkable four-track EP, Modern. Its centre label featured a reduced symbol – an overhead or lamp light, switched on, its glow radiating outwards in four bold black lines – a perfect representation of the tight, stylised ambient electronic pop contained on that 12”. A few curious compilation tracks were floating around, too, for Mille Plateaux’s Modulation & Transformation and Electric Ladyland series. If you were attentive enough, you could tell something was up. But nothing quite prepared us for the languorous, effervescing loops and regular-like-clockwork beats that Voigt folded together on GAS. Its six long tracks, all untitled, neither begin nor end but hazily fade into earshot, vibrate majestically in your cochlea for fifteen-or-so minutes – some a bit shorter, some longer – and then meander away, reading the mise-en-scène for the next example of Voigt’s drift and dream logic to unfold. The material is referential in the most distant way, and you can sense only the most evanescent of ghostly presences, haunting these six compositions. GAS feels, also, like a more pliable hint at what’s to come, as the GAS concept really solidified on its successor, 1997’s Zauberberg, and reach its apotheosis on Königsforst and Pop. Those three albums share a very similar palette – blurred, hazy samples, often of classical music, stacked and cross-thatched across a muted 4/4 thud. GAS, then, is an outlier of sorts: it’s more expansive in its remit, lighter in its mood, perhaps more fleet of foot. This, of course, is part of its charm. In clearing space for Voigt, by preparing the terrain, GAS sits both at the edge of the forest, and at the verge of an expansive, wide-eyed future; one where GAS would become truly eternal.

The 2015 edition of Winnipeg’s send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle is pleased to announce the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters? For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch’s phrase, ‘establish silence’. Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don’t often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Alongside metallic, wooden and skin percussion of all kinds, sounded and struck in every conceivable way, we also hear bamboo flute, viola, and Fuchs’ distinctive free-form vocalisations. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. On opener ‘Dessogia I’, the shimmering almost-gilssandi tones of Fuchs’ enormous set of microtonally tuned metal tubes ripples across Fell’s rubbery pulse, which moves up the frequency spectrum as Fuchs becomes more animated and switches to horn. At some points, as on the metallic chiming tones that open ‘Fauch I’, only the unexpected dynamic behaviour of Fell’s sounds distinguish them from Fuchs’ acoustic instruments. At others, like on ‘Queetch III’, the waves of sliding tones and noise textures are bracingly synthetic, joined by piercing squeaks and scrapes from Fuchs’ metal objects. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.

No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like William Tyler. After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, this adopted son of Nashville emerged at the dawn of the last decade with a string of inquisitive albums that paired the measure of his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for post-modern experimentation, field recordings and static drifts folded beneath exquisite melodies. Tyler dug Chet Atkins and Gavin Bryars, electroacoustic abstraction and endless boogie. His productive little enclave of instrumental music has increasingly followed such catholic tastes, not only ushering new sounds and textures into the form but also critical new voices and perspectives.And on the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear (and, for what it’s worth, all of his records) stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices.Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions (as heard on last year’s staggering “Darkness, Darkness” single, with more to come), Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked longtime friend and producer Jake Davis to help stitch them together and perhaps clean up those imperfections. (Eventually, back in Los Angeles, Alex Somers stepped in to provide the finishing touches.) Davis and Tyler opted to go the other way: embrace the hiss and wobble and, in the end, unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.From the start, Tyler’s music has pulled from the past, drawing old notions and conventions into the revealing light of now. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, Miss., to clean out his late grandfather’s downtown office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, back to Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.Time Indefinite begins with a sampled shard from that antique, as harsh as Merzbow processing the sound of a washing machine. It is a lurid, worrying signal flare: I am here, and things are hard, but I am trying. The piece unfurls like a haunted house still inhabited by real, living people, trying to make do when the world around them seems to be saying don’t. Not 10 minutes later, at the start of “Concern,” Tyler slips into a melody as gorgeous as anything he’s ever found, strings and steel rising like the sun beneath his simple folk waltz. It is a hand on a shoulder, a radiant bit of music that answers: I am here, and things are hard, but we are trying.This seesaw of struggle and survival defines these nine songs and 50 minutes, a map of anguish and belief and the trails that link them. “Electric Lake” is an ecstatic drone that summons La Monte Young to this century, but there is pain beneath its glow. “Howling” is an absolute wonder, its gentle guitar lope and choir of echoing horns and keys recalling the glory days of Windham Hill. But the background actually does howl, latent worry simply waiting to roar back to life. It doesn’t during the supple “Anima Hotel,” but you know it won’t be long now, because it never is—on this album as in real life. “This is a mental illness record,” Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as he is on tape. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” He doesn’t, however, need to tell you that; you can feel it, probably even recognize it from your own experience.Too, Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical references and influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes and legends of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee. In the mid-’80s, he began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. (The record is a nod to this idea, of time’s relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it.) It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler, like McElwee, wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united at least in having them. Time Indefinite is the soundtrack that Tyler’s create.“Held,” the ninth and final track, seems to sigh through a grin as it begins, a welcome reprieve from the plangent drone of its predecessor. It is the benediction at the close of all these goddamned chaotic blues. For what it’s worth, that is Tyler in a nutshell, someone will who smile sheepishly and offer a perfectly silly joke even as he tells you the hardest things about himself. But by the end, that grin blooms into a full smile, Tyler beaming through an acoustic waltz that is a perfect bit of unadulterated beauty. Yes, the machines and strings still whirr in the background, a true-to-life reminder of omnipresent menace. Not right now, Tyler seems to be saying. Instead, the message is clear: I am here, and things are hard and wonderful, and I am still here.

Cult Japanese outsider composer K. Yoshimatsu’s key 1980’s works are collected and reissued for the first time on new career retrospective Fossil Cocoon, binding ambient, abstract punk, music concréte and purist songwriting into a single unified artform. Over a furiously prolific period from 1980 to 1985, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu composed, recorded and released some forty albums in the span of a few years. These records primarily appeared under his own name, some required aliases, and others saw him compose, arrange, and produce for friends and peers in his creative circle. All of them, however, surfaced on Japan’s cult and inimitably fertile DD. Records, an astonishingly exhaustive catalogue once described as “the most amazing DIY effort ever undertaken to document an alternative music scene”. Led by close Yoshimatsu associate T. [Tadashi] Kamada, DD. Records released exactly 222 cassettes of brazenly, addictively weird Japanese outsider music over a period of five years, each with typewritten liner notes and enigmatically constructed Xerox artwork of found materials. The cassettes remain the stuff of collectors’ dreams, fetching astronomic prices on the rare occasions they surface in record stores or private sales. However, a keen archivist, Koshiro Yoshimatsu’s master recordings remained in his possession (a not unreasonable outcome given that his work was all self-recorded in his home) and meticulously filed, ready for rediscovery. Conversely, label boss Tadashi Kamada is no longer in the public eye, and not even known to have any personal online presence. He is, writes one observer, “unlikely even aware of his cult following”. Only extensive retroactive cataloguing (ardently fuelled by the cratedigging detective work of German collector Jörg Optiz) can offer any remaining memorial to his extraordinary achievements with DD. Records. Koshiro Yoshimatsu was born in 1960 in Yamaguchi City in the Chugoku region of southern Japan. In 1978, then a student of Yamaguchi University and already deeply engaged in the local arts scene, Yoshimatsu was introduced to the Japanese communications magazine PUMP by his classmate and future bandmate F. [Fumie] Yasumura. In the classified ads he chanced upon the creative work and curatorial interests of the aforementioned Tadashi Kamada, at the time a medical student in a nearby town. From their correspondence bloomed an intensely symbiotic new friendship, initially trading homespun cassettes by mail and eventually co-forming a cassette-sharing postal society named The Recycle Circle. The Recycle Circle also included the idiosyncratic saxophonist T. [Takafumi] Isotani, a member of the university’s Light Music Club, with whom Yoshimatsu (now singing, and playing guitar, bass guitar, and synthesisers, as well as programming drum machines) went on to form the unique experimental band Juma. With fluctuating line-ups, Juma managed to compose, record, and release six albums (all via DD. Records) in a single year - 1981 - before disbanding. Yoshimatsu then graduated from Yamaguchi University and relocated to Hiroshima to pursue his passion for filmmaking, all the while continuing to release his own solo music on Kamada’s now-burgeoning label. Yoshimatsu’s first solo record was the mysteriously titled pʌls, released in 1981 while still a member of Juma, and receiving the distinction of being the third entry to DD. Records’ cassette catalogue numbers. It was not until the seventeenth that we see Yoshimatsu credited again as a solo artist, this time with the strange and delicate collage album Mirror Inside. Over the breadth of Yoshimatsu’s work - solo, ensemble, and in composition for labelmates - we see a remarkable generosity of musical talent. Some records (such as those produced for Fumie Yasamura, represented here in “Violet” and “Escape”) are formed of hazy, gliding 4-track pop songs coursing with hallucinogenic electricity. Others, such as 1982’s Poplar (and its namesake track on this collection), combine bucolic nylon-string guitar rambles, vibrantly coloured with sequenced MIDI arpeggiation and the dulcet bloops of early computer programming. Deeper still, “Pastel Nostalgia”, from the 1983 album of the same name, marries childlike piano with a wailing siren tone and dripping tap percussion. It is significantly creepier, more acerbic and disembodying than the ambient or New Age music of the era, despite a similarity in raw materials. Elsewhere, Yoshimatsu floats between ambient, rock guitar, new wave, industrial, musique concréte, abstract punk, vocal music, instrumental music and pure songwriting, all bound into a single, unified experience by his distinctive compositional voice. Compiling Fossil Cocoon was a task. Not only to pare down Yoshimatsu’s substantial catalogue into a neat collection, but also to compress these enormous abilities into single moments. Koshiro himself was an invaluable lighthouse throughout the curation process, guiding us through the depths and annals of his recording career, now forty years hence, shining light onto forgotten music rescued from home-recorded tapes. The result may be an expressly varied album, but it is held magically together by Yoshimatsu’s profoundly singular creative alchemy. Koshiro continues to reside in Hiroshima, and continues to work in film. James Vella Phantom Limb February 2024, Brighton, UK

Japan’s cult, half-forgotten goldmine DD. Records opened and closed within a few frantic years. In that short time, they released exactly 222 cassettes (and a handful of vinyl records) of the strangest, boldest, most arresting and addictively subversive music within their social and creative circles. Each of their cassette releases came with abstract, xerographic artwork, often created by the musician themselves, while the label’s recorded output encompassed avant-punk, Cubist ambient music, sound collage, pop concréte, jazz-prog, early computer music, and anything else their roster cared to throw at them. Housed in sleeves of found imagery taken from classical and Medieval literature, contemporary and historic photography, science textbooks, magazines, homemade erotica, and endless more, these records reveal not only the strength of the community the label had fostered, but also the insular self-reference and in-jokes that kept the music from outsiders for decades. Two facets of DD. Records shine through even this unique story: firstly, they were friends. Founder T. [Tadashi] Kamada formed the label alone, but it wasn’t long before he was joined by like-minded allies T. [Teruo] Nakamura, K. [Koshiro] Yoshimatsu, K. [Keiichi] Usami, and T. [Takafumi] Isotani, among a few others. All were contributors to Kamada’s tape-trading network The Recycle Circle, formed at the University of Yamanashi, most of its members at the time around 20 years old. Their bond was a love of exploratory sounds and a hunger for deeper excavations into the tunnels and caves of experimental music. “An independent, private circle where members who owned expensive records or rare imported vinyl with limited distribution could send a cassette tape and a return postage stamp to dub the record back to each other for free,” Usami explains, in interview with Jon Dale for Bandcamp Daily. Secondly, the aforementioned cassettes remained almost entirely unavailable to the world outside Japan, with only a single US retailer engaged to carry the releases. Forty plus years hence, many of the records have been lost to time, but occasionally surface when (so writes an online observer) “a private collector has a medical bill to cover.” A German archivist, Jorg Öpitz, is primarily (and almost exclusively) responsible for the entire English-language directory of the label’s output, cataloguing online surviving and lost cassettes with completist dedication. Largely autodidactic, and almost always hermetic, this company of hobbyist and amateur (and in many cases, totally untrained) musicians rarely performed live. Many of them collaborated remotely, sending home-recorded tapes and collaged artwork in the post. “[We were] isolated from the rest of the [Japanese] indie movement,” Usami remembers. Strangely, and sadly for many, Tadashi Kamada has completely retired from public view. According to one-time collaborators, it is likely he is unaware of the cult following his label has garnered over the decades. Some sources point to a successful career in consumer electronics, a family, and a contented indifference to his early experiments in record label curation. But no-one seems certain about these details, none of which has harmed the image of a label that revels in mythmaking. An artefact left behind was Disk Musik. Though compilations were not unknown to DD. Records, vinyl was rare. Only a handful of Kamada titles - presumably self-funded - were released on vinyl, right at the start of the label’s life, and it is not until 1985 and Disk Musik that the format reemerges. It appears to be their final release: a parting gift to neatly bookend five feverish years of new music, rubber stamping their creative identity. In the twenty-first century, the second hand market for original copies is limited to scarce private sales at seriously hefty prices. There are endless and curious gems within. Opening with the fried psych-folk, dreamy vocals, and toybox percussion of trio サーカディアンリズム [Circadian Rhythm], Disk Musik’s stall is set out as much to bewilder as it is to beguile. Following, comes musician and painter Kumio Kurachi’s project Kum, with its homespun, acoustic glam-stomp always on the verge of falling to pieces, but revealing genuine songwriting chops and earworming melodic detail beneath the knowingly applied layers of hauntology, noise, and humour. Later, Tomomichi Nishiyama sends intergalactic plates spinning into black holes of solarstorm feedback with 10T track “Israel”, while T. Isotani’s “½ Orange” provides a welcome return to earth, an edenic utopia of plantasic blossoms and blooms. Across an extended duration (over fifty minutes on a single disc!), Disk Musik is relentless in its invention, wildly varied in its expression, and entrancing in its telling of a story truly unique in the world of independent and alternative music. Where else could Tadashi Tsukimoto’s rambling outsider folksong marry Yip/Jump primitivism to the scorched Casiotone ambience of “In and Out” by Takahiro Kuramoto’s Mask? While extensive efforts were made to contact every musician featured on Disk Musik, some are no longer within reach of known DD. Records associates. Keiichi Usami, Kumio Kurachi, and Teruo Nakamura all gladly approved the reissue of this compilation in the absence of their peers, and were vitally helpful throughout the curation process, offering insights into the history and significance of each artist and track featured here. We could not have done it without them. Usami-san, Kumio-san, Teruo-san: thank you. “Everyone has the right to make and enjoy music,” Tadashi Kamada once wrote. This spirit of inclusivity and equality underpins DD. Records and its gleefully weird catalogue, and we are grateful for it.

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

Recorded circa 1995/96, mostly in John Fahey’s room at a Salem, Oregon boardinghouse, the performances on Proofs and Refutations prefigure the ornery turn of the page that marked Fahey’s final years, drawing another enigmatic rabbit from his seemingly bottomless musical hat, making confoundingly delightful demands upon your listening (and thinking) ears.

The first-ever official vinyl edition, completely remastered by Josh Bonati. The turn of the millennium ushered in an apex visionary phase for English esoteric duo Coil. Relocating from the city to the coastal quiet of Weston-super-Mare freed them to follow even more fringe obsessions, fully untethered from peer influence. During a single six-month stretch in 2000 they released the devious underworld sequel to Music To Play In The Dark, arcane drone summit Queens Of The Circulating Library, and a malevolent hour-long synthesizer exorcism prophetically titled Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil. This latter work remains one of the group’s most miasmic and mind-expanding creations, on par with Time Machines – a sustained divination of shuddering, psychoactive noise, rippling with the motion sickness of an all-seeing eye. Thighpaulsandra characterizes the album as “an exercise in brutality,” born from a thorny patch of his Serge modular unit that Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson found entrancing. Processing this sliver of electronics into a ravaged labyrinth was a trial and error process, aided by Christopherson’s visual sense of sound, stretching and manipulating it for maximum spatial disorientating. Frequencies nauseously crawl across the stereo field, burrowing into the ear like a sinister brainwashing experiment. An outlier / centerpiece is the 13-minute alien tribalist sea shanty, “I Am The Green Child,” guided by John Balance’s sung-spoken free verse concerning vengeance, oblivion, and insanity, culminating in the memorable refrain, “We're swimming in a sea of occidental vomit.” But the rest of the record seethes in unhinged instrumental chaos, divided into 18 micro-movements of a composition called “Tunnel Of Goats.” Intended to scramble the functionality of a CD player’s shuffle mode, the piece throbs, thrashes, and flatlines in compressed frenzies of twisted synthesis, at the threshold of some bottomless purgatory, forbidding and unknown.

In your face new 8 track LP of vicious beat driven warehouse electronics from the L.I.E.S. boss. Straight and to the point, "Extinctionist" stands very much in line and continues further in the sonically unapologetic L.I.E.S. Records tradition of the last 15 years. This is music made with the artist, not the public in mind. No concessions made. End times music.

This is the second collaboration on Offen by the French post-industrial experimental artist Thierry Mérigout of Geins't Naït, composer and multi-instrumentalist Laurent Petitgand, and the UK composer and sound designer Robin Rimbaud AKA Scanner, whose prolific catalogue includes scores for dance works by the London Royal Ballet and Merce Cunningham, and who has performed and installed his music in venues ranging from the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow to the Pompidou Centre in Paris and a hospital morgue in Garches.
Vitio is a repository of memory: Coastal plateaus and city streets evoked and cracked open by glowering basslines and jumbled rhythms made for ragged walking. Thierry and Laurent have been collaborating together since 1987, the year after Thierry co-founded Geins’t Naït while at the Architecture School of Nancy. Their work together is dense and textural, influenced by Situationists and Surrealists; the raw loops of Geins’t Naït meeting the musicality of Petitgand, a soundtrack composer for film, dance and theatre who has worked closely with director Wim Wenders. Thierry and Laurent first collaborated with Scanner on OFFEN015, a set of otherworldly collaged slow-mo soundscapes. Here, on tracks like Vitio and Austral, threads of sampled dialogue interweave with melodic fragments or repeating piano lines, like the sun breaking through above a tangle of golden wrack and rockweed. On Acid and 63, divine industrial shoegaze sweeps across the windscreen like water washed from trees. Elsewhere, on SIO, submerged clicks surface amid foghorn-like electrostatic charges, an introspective aeromancy. On J’Appartiens, stabs of samples dart back and forth over the ominous time keeping of a sparse beat and pulsing bass. On Sunday and NNSS, we, the invisible listeners, rise to the surface, where there is rain. Both the sounds of NNSS and the rainfall were installed in the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, as captured in a lovely video made by Thierry’s daughter. Beneath the rain, in a building designed by SANAA architects, paving stones can be seen. Beneath the stones - we can only guess - a cloud.

Kutmah pays dues to departed astro-dub and beats pioneer Ras G in a mazy album primed for playing and smoking loud.

Lest we forget, Ras G (1979-2019) was like the cosmic offspring of Sun Ra x Madlib x King Tubby, and his run of works as Ras G & the Afrikan Space Program for the likes of Brainfeeder and others between the ‘00s and up till his passing were massive touchstones for the whole West Coast US beats scene and far beyond.

Kutmah tends to his departed peer’s legacy on ‘Sacred Conversations’ in a transdimensional dialogue across 26 tracks that ape G’s style and sense of moon boot gravity, replete with heavy use of the recognisable “oh Ras!” ident and samples of the artist in convo with DJ Sacred. In beat tape style they’re all rugged morsels that add up to an undulating session of squashed offbeats rendered with haziest, psychoactive dubbing and astro-soulful vibes to the rafters.

Kutmah pays dues to departed astro-dub and beats pioneer Ras G in a mazy album primed for playing and smoking loud.

Lest we forget, Ras G (1979-2019) was like the cosmic offspring of Sun Ra x Madlib x King Tubby, and his run of works as Ras G & the Afrikan Space Program for the likes of Brainfeeder and others between the ‘00s and up till his passing were massive touchstones for the whole West Coast US beats scene and far beyond.

Kutmah tends to his departed peer’s legacy on ‘Sacred Conversations’ in a transdimensional dialogue across 26 tracks that ape G’s style and sense of moon boot gravity, replete with heavy use of the recognisable “oh Ras!” ident and samples of the artist in convo with DJ Sacred. In beat tape style they’re all rugged morsels that add up to an undulating session of squashed offbeats rendered with haziest, psychoactive dubbing and astro-soulful vibes to the rafters.

Through a delicious haze of delayed guitars, Pierre Bujeau’s Megabasse lures into deeply hypnagogic states of mind in the mode of his ace tapes for All Night Flight, adding to marvels of Melbourne’s Efficient Space.

In one satisfyingly extended piece and a pair of shorter parts Megabasse’s ‘Flamenca’ plucks out a slow motion petal-fall cascade of notes that linger on the senses like perfume and slot beautifully well into meridian of sounds found on Efficient Space’s prized folk and zoner country compilations ‘Sky Girl’ and ‘Ghost Riders’. The side-long ‘L’Último Sacrifacio’ yields a mesmerising 23’ ribbon of lissom rhythmelody enchanted by its own beauty and lodged somewhere in the outer realms of kosmiche and country folk music with Rafael Toral, Jules Reidy and Jim O’Rourke, for example, whilst ‘Marcia, Baila, Suogna’ comes down to earth gently with 9’ of chamber-posed minimalism elegant in its waltzing figure that sashays to a gorgeous, hushed vignette ’Suogna Piazzata’.

Jack Rollo is clearly really feeling it, as he expounds: “Pierre Bujeau is an expert at creating temporary escape zones - musical structures to evade the everyday. Sometimes he works collectively as part of the mysterious French groups Omertà and Tanz Mein Herz. But it’s when he’s on his own, performing as Megabasse, that he offers the most complete break from reality.

His kit is simple: a few bottles of cheap lager, twin Fender amps, and his double-necked guitar. An instrument like this normally signals maximum rockist excess - think Jimmy Page, Geddy Lee, or that dude from the Eagles. In Pierre’s hands, it becomes more like a zither or a dulcimer, producing soft chiming patterns that build against themselves until the sound of the room, passed back and forth between his two amps, starts to blur everything, and we are away in another world. Wait, though - let down your yoga bun and don’t light the palo santo yet. The new space he creates has nothing to do with smug wellness. It’s a rough, do-it-yourself psychedelia, scuffed but hopeful. Not a perfect blank space to be your best self in, but instead a communal dreaming, an uncanny place where all are welcome.

Until now, without catching him live, the Megabasse experience has been difficult to find: CD-Rs, short-run tapes, and one blink-and-you-missed-it LP. Thankfully, this record on Efficient Space, a reissue of some pieces that were previously only available on a small cassette edition, will put that right. Here are two long, intricate pieces, and something new - a shorter track that hints at a move toward beautiful, burnt-out guitar soli.

Unless you are very lucky, wise, or rich, life imposes its structures on you. Maybe a record of shimmering, tranced guitar is all you need to get out from underneath?”

Official reissue supervised by the artist Sourced from the original masters A rare and sought-after item among collectors and enthusiasts of early Japanese electronic music Never released on vinyl before Club is a stunning and timeless collection of avant-garde electronica, proto-techno, mecha-ambient, and ear-pleasing experimentations from the master behind Music for Spiral and producer of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s Pier & Loft, Motohiko Hamase’s #Notes of Forestry, and Satsuki Shibano's iconic Rendez-Vous Experience the roots of Japanese electronica

Initially released in 2006, ‘Revep’ is the third collaboration album between Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto and the third installment of V.I.R.U.S.’s five albums series. Remastered in 2021 in collaboration with Calyx Studio, the album’s recordings are accompanied by three new compositions titled ‘City Radieuse’, ‘Veru 1’, and ‘Veru 2’. ‘City Radieuse’ was composed for the 2012 short cinematic essay titled ‘Cité Radieuse’ and part of Carsten Nicolai’s ‘future past perfect’ series. The video shot at le Corbusier’s Unité D’Habitation in Nantes (called ‘cité radieuse’) takes the viewer through the modular system and design applied to the residential buildings. The film’s narrative unfolds through a sequence of images tracking the apartments’ indoor space and details, and points to the different benchmarks of standardized production as they correlate to their environment and its inhabitants. The album’s original recordings resulted from musical exchanges that began with ‘Vrioon’ and revolved around a collaborative arrangement of Sakamoto’s classic ‘Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence,’ the theme music to the 1983 movie starring David Bowie, Takeshi Kitano, and Ryuichi Sakamoto himself. In ‘Revep,’ the piano takes the lead while the padded bass and pitched electronic frequencies mark sudden change. Deeply evocative and effortlessly colliding worlds of analog beauty and digital mastery, this album is considered another indispensable record from the duo’s ongoing collaboration. ALBUM ART DESIGNED BY CARSTEN NICOLAI MASTERING BY BO @ CALYX TRACKLIST:

Paradigm-shifting percussionist Valentina Magaletti stops time on 'La Tempesta Colorata', a long-form set that rolls thru tempos and time signatures with gymnastic flexibility, offering another spectacular entry to A Colourful Storm’s gravity-defying recent run of releases. Magaletti is a regular and constant presence on these pages as a member of Moin, Vanishing Twin, Tomaga and CZN, as well as thru endless collabs with everyone from Floating Points to Nicolas Jaar, Jandek to Helm. For our money, though, she's at her most arresting when operating in solo mode. "La Tempesta Colorata" was recorded at Cafe Oto in October 2021 and follows her astonishing 2020 solo set "A Queer Anthology of Drums” with a virtuoso performance that never drags for a moment, fluctuating from ASMR scraping to angular post-punk rhythmic pulsewerk. With a full drum set, a handful of additional small instruments and a delay pedal, Magaletti somehow captures a full spectrum of sound, employing only minor additional elements to flesh out her sound. From the dewdrop swagger of the opening minutes, thru rolling tom-led seismic activity - complete with customary screams - and into echoing industrial dub-improv experimentation, she's able to assemble her rhythms with metronomic accuracy, but with enough space in the gaps to enhance inherent human qualities - a far cry from fully electronic studio productions. It’s a spellbinding display of polymetric complexities where no two seconds repeat themselves, persistently pulling patterns apart and restitching them in diffractive slow-fast-slow temporalities that arc from showers of cascading hi-hats, to pugilistic breaks, to an unexpected trough of Twin Peaks-y drones around the mid-section, only to climb out of it via icicles of melodic chimes and into more humid areas of her imagination, ultimately shoring up in pitch black Amazonian zones. If you're into anyone from Autechre to Eli Keszler, Milton Graves to Han Bennink, this one's a mindmelt.

All copies are HAND-MADE, silk-screened by C. Julien (Marga studio). Produced by Mambo Chick for Symbole Records. Symbole presents the first ever release of Patrick Jean-Marie's  'Atika – LIVE !' Made from the original master tape, recorded in mono during a TV Live Show on RFO in GUADELOUPE, 1982. A real miracle these moment were captured and this fragile magnetic tape have survived ! The no ‘music studio’ conditions and spontaneous mood with lots of improvised sequences gives a unique feeling of the vibrant & silent dialogues between musicians, crossing dimensions. The Jean-Marie’s brothers as their top! All tracks composed & arranged by Patrick Jean-Marie (Except ’De Bougies’ composed by Daniel Jean-Marie

Presenting our second look at the music of Roger Doyle and Operating Theatre, a little known proto synth-pop act and experimental theatre group that he led, what you have here is a remastered and repackaged collection of two very different sides of this project. In reverse chronological order the second disc contains music from the United Dairies release of 1979 – ‘Rapid Eye Movements’. Experimental tape work heavily influenced by the French school of music concretists and recorded at various points during the 70s in Finland, Holland and Ireland, although it is most certainly a Roger Doyle solo record the label ran by Nurses With Wounds John Fothergill decided to release it under the group name for reasons now lost to the fog of time. After this a volte-face towards a more accessible sound, coming via his friendship with future Hollywood actress Olwen Fouéré and her connection to the theatre. It also featured the vocals of a young Spanish immigrant Elena López- bucking the 80’s trend by moving to, rather than, from Dublin. With Fouéré adding the theatrical element to the group (an almost essential part of any early 80s synth act) alongside pulsing synths, brass, a vocoder and the electro acoustic production talents of Doyle himself, it was the first time a Fairlight sampler was used in an Irish studio setting and gives a prescient but alternative take on the new wave sound that came to dominate the charts soon after. Doyle’s work on the newly released Fairlight sampler had brought him to the attention of U2’s Bono who had seen a feature about his sampling experimentations and reached out to him for piano lessons. This led to a deal on the bands embryonic Mother records for what Doyle calls his first “popular song” - Queen of No Heart - which alongside “Spring is Coming” made up the backbone of the EP which was released some years later (1986) on the Mother Records label. Established by U2 in 1984 and initially intended to launch Irish bands, many of the acts – including this one – were subsequently unhappy about the label’s haphazard approach to releases and lack of promotion. The record was released as a die cut 7 inch with the two main tracks and a 12 inch EP with additional tracks – ‘Part of My Make-Up’ / ‘Atlantean’ / ‘Satanasa’. The Mother experience was for Doyle and the rest of the group a frustrating one with no promotional plan and no tour. After that Operating Theatre as a quasi pop project ‘just kind of fizzled out’ says Doyle. Doyle, the musical maverick at the heart of the act, continues to produce to this day and has released 30 albums. A frequent collaborator we round out the record with a remix from another Irish outsider - Morgan Buckley of the Wino Boys.

- This is a solo performance by SG, recorded May 19, 2019, in the Waiting Hall of Union Station in Los Angeles.

- Instruments used include alto saxophone with an early version of his poly-sax effect, along with a Suzuki Waraku III synthesizer.

- In "Cosmic Love", at 04:27, you can hear the train announcer reading the preface to the book When Will Jesus Bring The Pork Chops? by George Carlin: "I'm an outsider by choice, but not truly. It's the unpleasantness of the system that keeps me out. I'd rather be in, in a good system. That's where my discontent comes from: being forced to choose to stay outside. My advice: Just keep movin' straight ahead. Every now and then you find yourself in a different place."

- Moments before going on stage SG asked if the train announcer would read this at any point during his set over the intercom system, and somehow they agreed. No one knew when they would read it, so it is easy to miss.

- "Miss U Sonny" is dedicated to the memory of Sonny Abegaze.