MUSIC

Tucked in the heart of Koreatown lies The Libra Hotel—the titular architecture of Nick Malkin’s new album and site of his musical and psychogeographic exploration. Unlike most musical “site-specific” studies, Malkin remains wholly ambivalent to the documentarian approach, instead sharpening an auteur-like focus on the site as a conceptual and highly expressive backdrop. The Libra is musically explored as a space that houses a noir fragmentation of identity—the exhausted trope of a complicated protagonist walking through rain-soaked street corners and fumy neon lights—where an inner monologue is rendered in both miniature and at a cosmic scale. Casting aside stifling tropes around field recording, ambient, and improvised music, Malkin’s work finds its own unique fidelity and emotional core through the assembly and reassembly of memory. Nearly every sound on the album—from frayed saxophones, lambent pianos, and dissected jazz drum kits—are multiplied, shattered, and reconstituted into shapes that adorn The Libra in a motion-blurred fog. The narrative of the Hotel suddenly appears as if out of the mist, with intersecting characters interacting within its walls by happenstance. Adminst the languid set pieces, wraith-like sonic grains gravitate around wide subbass beams that give structural form to The Libra, a narrative tension like when a scene is shot from hundreds of different perspectives: an image both luminous and veiled. Much like Sinatra’s own spatial residency immortalized on “Live at The Sands,” “At The Libra Hotel” showcases an exuberant view of entertainment, hospitality, and a form of masculinity, one that can quickly detourn into darkness. Knowing this, Malkin extracts a melancholic core out of The Libra locale. The flickering shadows of American decadence are shown in their ephemeral honesty, lines that trace how even in everyday life virtue is tested, sanity is tested, even reality is tested within the confines of desire, within the night. The album is draped in fleeting textures, carefully arranged with a trance-like microtonality, the faint inflections and articulations of a jazz band cascading into dissipated stillness. Voicemails about changed locations and covert eavesdropping on guests' whispered conversations provide an atmosphere of missed connection and voyeurism—a purloined letter of desire receding into a vanishing point. Like the music itself, The Hotel, a chapel perilous at the intersection of desolation row, the center of it all, yet simultaneously at the edge of town, becomes a structure between libidinous virtuality and actuality—our inevitable half-light. Ultimately, the pensive atmosphere of “At The Libra Hotel,” powerfully asserts a plea for the kinds of intimacy only possible in transient spaces. Here, memory cascades into a force that feels like something supernatural, perhaps even religious, yet always subject to the infidelity of our imagination. Here, the album opens into its primary psychodrama, the transient nature of subjectivity itself and how this becomes fractured in the tumult between our commitments and desires. Within this nocturnal space, to quote Louise Bourgeois, "you pile up associations the way you pile up bricks. Memory itself is a form of architecture.

Anenon returns with a highly anticipated new album ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’, bearing his most personal, expressive, and arresting works to date. Anenon is the ongoing solo studio and live project of Brian Allen Simon, whom since 2010 has released multiple albums and EPs to critical acclaim, including the highly revered ‘Tongue’ (2018) and ‘Petrol’ (2016). "I feel a kinetic and messy honesty that doesn't exist in any of the other music I've ever made. There is also a sense of being settled, of calm. There is no faking it here.” ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’ is direct, efficient, and unwavering in its immediacy. Anenon departs from the electronics of previous works, and embarks on a reductive, almost entirely acoustic approach consisting of piano, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, and field recordings. All of the music was improvised with everything recorded as either a first or second take with no edits. Any layering happened fast and in the moment, and yet the sonic architecture of the whole feels both planned and refined. The opener ‘Untitled Skies’ acts as prologue with flourishing solo tenor saxophone and sustained piano lines, before dampened footsteps and bird calls from field recordings echo — a scene is set. The album's undeniably emotive and nocturnal title track follows with sharp poignancy, inspired directly from an ongoing deep connection and dialogue to his LA surroundings. “I would take evening walks in my neighborhood, and I felt in awe of what I deemed an autumnal milky quality of light at dusk. This light felt like a seemingly unending flash, and was something that I wanted to evoke in the playing and meshing of instruments.” Simon shifts focus on ‘Maine Piano’, a beguiling solo piano piece ahead of ‘Night Painting I’, which features further breathy saxophone and bass clarinet counterpoints, embellished with immersive field recordings. Brian also confronts the subject of personal loss and anguish with a deep sincerity as a solemn through-line pervades the album's 11 tracks. Notes are eloquently delivered with grace and the message is one of hope with a palpable human quality. Non-diegetic field recordings were taken in Maine (USA), London (UK), and the Auvergne (FR), and reveal evocative and personal interactions as heard in the album's centre points. ‘As it is When it Appears’ glows with the ambience of French voices resounding an evening's interplay before a spaciously muted piano overtakes. The rained in ‘Champeix’ captivates with a seductive and wild romanticism, played out by its connective saxophone and piano layers, each gliding up and down their respective scales. Swirling bass clarinet lines vigorously pour out of ‘Night Painting II’, and ‘Endings (Solo)’ hits with a virtuosic, yet tender tenor saxophone take. The album closer ‘Sightless Eyes (N16)’ brings everything full circle — after an intro of 5 AM NE London birds singing, piano, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet coalesce in expressive tactilities; a sonic image of an intuitively robust and in the room harmony. The production of ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’ began in the autumn of 2022, and was recorded at home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, informed in part by an acoustic collaboration with the artist Susan Cianciolo during the vernissage of her 2022 Paris exhibition, RUN 14: FIELD of existence, as well as solo performances mostly at casual non-venues such as wine bars and inns around Europe that same year. It was the combination of these experiences that led Brian to pursue this immediate approach of improvised acoustic instrumentation. Moons Melt Milk Light is a hyper-personal statement contained in a visceral beauty, a compact record of threadbare honesty and musical prowess seldom found in the musical art form. It is a search for light out of dark, for the tangible and tactile, and yet like most art of staying power, the results remain ephemeral and elusive, a beauty just out of reach. “Loss has been a constant (in my life), and I wanted to express a deep acceptance of this, but also a pervasive feeling that these kinds of sadnesses are what beauty is derived from, that it doesn't come from perfection. I find the idea of perfect beauty completely banal. Tension matters.”

Enter Demi-Monde: A “half world” of botanical sounds and surreal impressions assembled as four tracks for Munjebel’s first release on Mesma Records. Oscillating between Ambient, Fourth world and Environmental Music, Demi-Monde is a peaceful yet captivating promenade into organic and percussive synth scapes — melancholic, escapist and contemplative. Munjebel is the joint project of Royer (Lobster Theremin, Closer) and Aurèle (Demi-Monde, Rinse, Cracki).

Un Día is a hypnotic record, restless, alive with melodies that surface imperceptibly before burrowing into your brain, never to leave. It’s a record informed by an ever shifting and polymorphous sense of groove, rhythms writhing over and inside each other, played out on wood and cymbal and bombo legüero, and woven from electronic glitches. “I noticed rhythm on my previous records was tacit, there but concealed,” explains Molina. “For this record, I aimed to make what was obvious to me obvious to others, to bring it to the front, like a hidden layer in Photoshop.”

This approach informs more than just Un Día’s rhythms. These songs are bright and playful; for all their seeming complexity, the melodies and harmonies of tracks like ‘¿Quien? (Suite)’ lock into place instantly, the gentle and trancelike conversation between coos and sighs and handclaps and murmurs building to nagging, chiming hooks and refrains. And while she has experimented with Ambient and Electronic music – and while those experiments still indelibly colour her approach – Un Dia is a warmly human record, Molina’s voice played to the foreground, gliding dreamily through the tangle tentative rhythm on the blissful eddy of ‘No Llama’, sighing urgently along with the spectral guitars and keyboards of ‘Los Hongos De Marosa’.

Our fourth release comes in the form of a collection of rich, pulsating ambient/dub techno from Pan•American - the solo project of post-rock trio Ladbradford's front man Mark Nelson. Drawn to the incredible depth and texture of these tracks, we hope to shine a light on Mark's more exploratory electronic work, reminiscent of Jan Jelenik, Fennesz and Vladislav Delay. Through the Pan•American moniker, Mark has been able to embrace the possibilities of sampling and other musical technologies in order to exercise his interests in more remote genres like dub and techno. This collection comprises Mark's dreamiest, most sumptuous and blissed-out tracks taken from 3 obscure releases on labels traversing Zedelgem, Lon don and Portland - (K-RAA-K)³, Veritcal Form and BSI Records. Across these imprints, their output spans IDM, electronica, lo-fi, experimental dub and beyond and have been a music al home to the likes of Pub, Muslimguaze, and King Jammy and more. Mark's work sits at a confluence of these broad influences, shedding the sound of his post rock past for a more rhythmic, computer-based approach, which culminated in 2002's The River Made No Sound. As ever, the music is an emotional outpouring, progressing slowly through phases between stillness and movement, darkness and light. With a string of recent releases on Longform Editions and his long-term home Kranky, Mark continues to write and perform worldwide at festivals and prestigious venues such as London's Cafe Oto and Public Records in Brooklyn, NYC. The increasingly personal and reflect ive nature of his music has seen him come full circle to a more organic sound, as exempli fied by his latest LP, The Patience Fader.

ASA Arturo Lanz Saverio Evangelista AtomTM are the last three futurists on earth. »Radial« is the result of a vivid creative merge between Esplendor Geométrico and AtomTM. A transparent diamond formed by a heavy implosion. Its underlying massive mechanics are covered by a crystal surface made to cut reality in half. Just one letter short of “radical”, this album is no less than exactly that - an orgy of powerful, blunt repetition and hyperbolic simplicity, a profound evocation of nothingness and its surroundings. The 13 tracks (which comprise the digital full-length version) of »Radial« are the exact expansion of sonic ideas those three artists have explored during the last couple of decades. Unexpectedly so, this makes this production an outstandingly atemporal one - some would even classify it as meta-contemporary. A selection of 10 tracks of the digital full-length album will be released on CD through raster on September 01, whereas an accompanying vinyl release is scheduled for the end of 2023.

MD Pallavi & Andi Otto first crossed paths on a theatre stage in India ten years ago. They started collaborating instantly and in 2016 MD Pallavi's mesmerizing vocals for the downtempo raga Bangalore Whispers warmed hearts and ears. Their musical relationship flourished with artistic residencies in Bangalore and Hamburg, their respective hometowns, and a concert tour in Japan. The album presents an interwoven pop-aesthetic vision of the two artists with their contrasting musical backgrounds. It ranges from organically woven folktronica to cut-up disco tracks and acoustic ballads. MD Pallavi is a singer, actress, filmmaker and performer from Bangalore, South-India, where she trained in Hindustani music and poetry since childhood. On Songs for Broken Ships, poems in her native tongue Kannada*, one of India's many languages, are performed over Andi’s alluring production, translating the stories into musical narratives. The poems address topics that are as timeless as the music itself. Social equality is touched upon in Bayalu (written by Bontadevi in the 12th century). Artistic struggles - communicated on An Unwritten Word (Gangadhar Chittala, 1865) - are almost prophetic and the surreal, dreamlike scenario of Clockshop (KS Narasimhaswamy,1958) brings you further inside the sonic journey. Andi Otto is a composer, cellist and DJ based in Hamburg, Germany, He is known for his idiosyncratic and unconventional dance music productions on labels such as Multi Culti, Shika Shika and Pingipung (which he co-runs and curates). For this collaborative experience his dubbed out basslines gently interlock with the 7/4 and 5/4 beats to create a backbone for the instrumentation and expressive vocal timbres of MD Pallavi. His sound design combines graceful acoustic recordings, juxtaposed against modern drum machines, computer generated noise and vintage synthesizers.

Musique Hydromantique is the second solo album by Tomoko Sauvage archiving many years of her performance-based practice on the waterbowls -- the natural synthesizer of her invention, composed with porcelain bowls filled with water and amplified via hydrophones (underwater microphones). While her first album Ombrophilia (2009) was studio-recorded/composed work, Musique Hydromantique is about experimentation and improvisation with the environment -- acoustics affected by the architecture, temperature, humidity, and the human presence. For more than ten years, Sauvage has been investigating the sound and visual properties of water in different states, as well as those of ceramics, combined with electronics. Water drops, waves, and bubbles are some of the elements she has been playing with to generate the fluid timbre. Since around 2010, hydrophonic feedback has been an obsession -- an acoustic phenomenon that requires fine tuning depending on the amount of water, a subtle volume control, and interaction with the acoustic space. "Calligraphy" was recorded in a genuine echo chamber, with about ten second reverbs, situated in a former textile factory. Like an endless exercise to draw perfect curves and forms floating in the air, the subaquatic feedback frequencies are pitch-bended with the mass of water sculpted by a hand changing its quantity. "Fortune Biscuit" is about the singing bubbles emitted from the pieces of "biscuit" (porous terra-cotta). Depending on the texture of the surface, each biscuit makes different sound. "Clepsydra" (meaning "water clock") features Sauvage's classical technique, a random percussion with dripping water. Sauvage tunes the waterbowls by adding and removing water, making flowing glissando, to find the balance point in ever-changing tonalities. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. However, slowness dominates throughout the album as a result of favoring the full resonance of the instrument. Hydromancy is a method of divination by means of water. Unpredictable bubbles and water ripples become oracles. Evaporation and acoustic space constantly play a chance operation. All the tracks were live-recorded without electronic effects or editing. Recorded during night or very early in the morning, and the whole album is to be listened to during that period of a day. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. CD version comes in a digipak; Edition of 1000.

When Billy Eckstine's band dissolved in the mid-1940s, adventurous drummer Art Blakey spent two years in Africa, where he briefly converted to Islam; back in New York, he gigged with Miles and Monk, before fronting his own Jazz Messengers. 1957's Orgy In Rhythm drew on the sounds of North Africa and the Middle East, Blakey's unfettered drumming accompanied by Latin percussionists such as Potato Valdez and Evilio Quintero, with Herbie Mann on flute. The musical arrangement is stunning, at times melodic or primordially rhythmic, but never short of pure brilliance. Overall, an excellent and astounding release!

Ship to Shore PhonoCo., in conjunction with Sony Music Entertainment, is proud to present Hirokazu Tanaka & Keiichi Suzuki’s original soundtrack to the 1994 Super Famicom classic MOTHER 2: ギーグの逆襲 (MOTHER 2: Gyiyg Strikes Back!). MOTHER 2, released as EarthBound in the West, is revered as one of the most offbeat and memorable RPGs. Citing influence from artists such as Brian Wilson, Frank Zappa and John Lennon, Suzuki and Tanaka created a diverse soundscape quite unlike anything that came before it. Remastered specifically for vinyl and released outside of Japan for the first time ever, MOTHER 2 is a must have for video game music and soundtrack fans.

Vinyl version. Edition of 1,000 copies. Includes hand-numbered certificate, 10 LPs in faithful replicas of the original covers and polylined inner sleeves, an 80-page LP-sized book in English, all housed in a custom lavish linen box. Over the last few years, the Italian imprint, Dialogo, has showed a remarkable dedication to the history of experimental music via reissues of seminal artefacts from the Cramps catalog, and important albums by Piero Umiliani, Ennio Morricone, Bruno Nicolai, Enrico Rava, and others. This initiative now takes on a towering scale with the first ever box set gathering the entire ten album collection of Brian Eno's Obscure Records, originally issued between 1975 and 1978. A truly groundbreaking body of recordings - many of which have remained out of print and difficult to find for decades - it contains some of the most important, influential, and enduring music to emerge during the second half of the 20th Century, which collectively reconfigured the terms of minimalism and laid the groundwork for the emerging movement of ambient music over its short, three-year run. This historic collection marks the first time such a seminal series has received a complete repress and is certainly one of the year's most interesting, essential, and widely anticipated releases, stunningly produced with the complete involvement of all the artists or their estates. Includes texts / contributions by Gavin Bryars, Bradford Bailey, David Toop, Max Eastley, Richard Bernas, Tom Recchion, Carlo Boccadoro, Walter Rovere and Bruno Stucchi, and rare photos, including several by Roberto Masotti. When viewed collectively, the Obscure catalog reveals a remarkable, and previously unexplored counterpoint – bridging the United Kingdom and the American West Coast – to the dominant threads of minimal and experimental music, centered in New York that had long dominated the public consciousness. LP1 Gavin Bryars - The Sinking of the Titanic LP2 Christopher Hobbs, John Adams, Gavin Bryars - Ensemble Pieces LP3 Brian Eno - Discreet Music LP4 David Toop, Max Eastley - New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments LP5 Jan Steele, John Cage - Voices and Instruments LP6 Michael Nyman - Decay Music LP7 The Penguin Café Orchestra - Music From the Penguin Café LP8 John White, Gavin Bryars - Machine Music LP9 Tom Phillips, Gavin Bryars, Fred Orton - Irma LP10 Harold Budd - The Pavilion of Dreams

The Scandal of Time' bookends a prolific period of experimentation for Sam Shackleton and follows a raft of collaborations (with Wacław Zimpel, Heather Leigh and Scotch Rolex this year alone) with what amounts to his first new solo album since 2021’s ‘Departing Like Rivers’. It might also be his most advanced, forward-facing work in years. Shackleton's been edging away from the dancefloor for about a decade now, exploring alternative tuning systems, modern classical sounds and non-Western rhythms. 'The Scandal of Time' works not just as a précis but a daring leap forward, mixing ghosted, traditional; German folk songs with heart-piercing basslines, xenharmonic percussion and open-ended drones, on what promises to be his last solo release for a while. The eerie, hauntological world Shackleton has created here is a testament to his years of work on experimental bass music's fringes. He's managed to shepherd us through so many disparate musical styles that have here been finally sutured into a single, startling vessel.

Howling blasts of blackened metallurgy by Hamburg miscreants Scheich In China, chasing a killer mixtape for V I S with 13 blistered instrumentals sure to tickle the fancy of Bathory, Wold and Death Metal fiends. One of two hellish new Scheich in China albums, the malefic form of ‘Arschgesichter des Todes’ looms like a soundtrack to petrifying night terrors with a devil-baiting parade of ungodly pleasures. The harder hearing among you may be familiar with Philipp Meiers and Alsen Rau’s work in this guise from a number of LPs issued on local Hamburg labels since 2014, and should also recognise this one as closest to source, mostly ditching the drone and technoid elements in favour of pure death metal throttle and blizzard dynamics. Riddled with dread and venom, the album shells a cavalcade of enslaved drum machine and wiry guitars (ir)resplendent in typically lo-fi recording virtues and hungry to gnaw the nerves of any poor soul in earshot. Of course it’s an outright buzz if you like this stuff, shy of the sort of vocal theatrics that can put some heads off, but with steely, uncompromising focus on the textures, energy and an end-of-earth primordial thrust that makes Death Metal, proper, such a uniquely extreme proposition. At its longest, ’Nosebleeding Diarrhea Pus Mucus’ sums up the sound literally and viscerally, while the rest of it tends to more succinct assaults on the senses, spanning the heck-raising charge of ‘The Virgin Witch’ thru the inferno-in-the-next-room of ‘Deine Gebeine’, tape sodden squall of ‘Satan Needs no Forks’ and martial mini-epic ‘Postatomicwat Hookers’, with their sick sense of humour epitomised in the title and grindcore flay of ‘The eBook of Dead’.

Compilation, previously unreleased work from Finis Africae together with the reissue of their first album "Prima Travesía". A deep trip of the roots of organic ambient with the seminal Spanish band. "Pulso de la Madera" comes as the definitive official reissue of the first album by the legendary band, along with previously unreleased remastered material, on a double LP with extensive liner notes and previously unseen pictures of the band. Essential to revisit the work of a band that inspired fourth world and organic ambient as we know it today; these tunes sound immersive and still contemporary. On their short but influential career, Finis Africae proposed an informal and decentralized model of creativity that was decades ahead of current practices linked to technological advances; they explored unknown worlds and imagined landscapes of the “fourth world” apart from their present; they neither affirmed nor denied any of the labels they were to assign to them (“New Age”, “ethnic music”, “world music”, etc.); they recreated, used, and nourished foreign cultures without fear. And most importantly - they shaped a sound “finis”. Your own space. Where there were no rules. A dimension in which the collective was submerged in long sessions of improvisation; where they could be goblins and magical entities; a place where they could imagine scales and structures unreal; where they could play any instrument in the known world; where they could tour the Mediterranean, Africa, and the Middle East in a blink of an eye; where they could be themselves without caring about anything that happened outside. The unreleased tracks come as a careful selection of a deep-dive over hundred tracks and demos, compiled by Urba and Glossy Mario. The license comes from Juan Alberto Arteche's family. Double LP and digital release scheduled for June 21st.

In 1979 Suns of Arqa creator and mentor Michael Wadada set about recording the ground breaking Suns of Arqa album 'Revenge of the Mozabites' with his friend Adrian Sherwood. Together they formed the ‘4D Rhythm’ label – the world was not ready! Wadada retreated to the Pennine mountain range in Lancashire, Adrian Sherwood went on to create the formidable ‘On-U Sound’ label. Three years went by before a a very curious Peter Gabriel came across a rare copy of that first Suns of Arqa album; he was putting together the very first World of Music and Dance festival (WOMAD), and asked Suns of Arqa to come and perform. Revenge of the Mozabites is where it all started, this truly eclectic album of world-dub-east-west fusion from Suns of Arqa, ignited what would ultimately become the new World Beat Dub Dance genre which has influenced & inspired so many artists today.

Timeless atmospheres, hypnotic sonorities, minimal arrangements. And a composer gifted with a never ending passion for music, experimenter in his genetic code, innovator by vocation, at ease with various instruments in order to forge avant-garde themes. Piero Umiliani was already forward in building completely new sounds in the late Seventies. “Tra Scienza E Fantascienza” finds his alter ego Moggi experimenting with alternative grooves, electronic music, jazz tunes and soundtrack motifs. One of the most interesting music libraries in the Italian composer's discography, reissued with a new remastering by Musica Per Immagini, is in full harmony with its title. Science fiction has opened up our eyes to a variety of scenarios, possible or impossible, sometimes with a happy ending, sometimes apocalyptic, at times familiarly near, more often disarmingly far away, and always capable of inspiring our imagination. For the histrionic artist it took, perhaps, less of a cosmic leap to create this masterpiece. Centred on the cover, a strange creature with only one eye, its hands on a beaker containing a mysterious red liquid. To its right, a symbolic circle is imprinted on a sandy surface, and three bizarre constructions, similar to the volumetric flasks found in a laboratory, of differing heights and shapes. There is a strange blue planet in the distance. (Notes and images of a dystopian future according to Piero Umiliani)

Here is the second album of original japanese freak Magical Power Mako, originally released in 1975. A truly iconic acid folk manifesto, interspersed with intense moments of pure psych rock. A sonic journey into imaginary lands !

2023.8.13 Recorded at Recording Studio, Acoustic Research Center, Ohashi Campus, Kyushu University.

Nicole Lachartre: “Mundus” 3LP box – Metaphon 012 - 2023 Hardboard linen LP box with silkscreened titles, 12 page booklet with track info and text by Vincent de Roguin and Mark Harwood, notes by Lachartre and a rare portrait photo from 1969. Edition of 200 copies Available through the La Scie Dorée webshop First ever release of French composer, musicologist and writer Nicole Lachartre (1934-1991). This 3LP set comprises most of her electronic music and musique concrète compositions recorded in the 60’s and 70’s, all previously unreleased. Lachartre had a classical formation, studied with a.o. Darius Milhaud, Iannis Xenakis and Michel Philippot. Her broad formation and interest as well as her profound commitment and singular vision created a solitary voice even within the field of electronic music and musique concrète, strangely enough unheard till this day. Her first tape composition from 1968 was recorded in Pierre Henry’s Apsome studio and most of her other electronic and electro-acoustic compositions included in this box set were recorded at the IPEM in Ghent.

Originally released in 2016 as a tour-only cassette, 'Origo' is the first recorded evidence of Timo Van Luijk (Elodie) and Bart De Paepe's Ilta Hämärä project, a heady, hallucinogenic psych-drone jammer that's been bumped up with an extra cut from the same era. Ilta Hämärä is the outlet for Van Luijk and De Paepe's smokiest, dankest material - sessions that thrum at their own pace, tickling the pineal in the process. If you can remember Brooklyn's Religious Knives, or Kiwi skronkers Pumice, you'll have a good idea of where Ilta Hämärä are headed. The opening side's 'Ilma' pits organs against blunted drums and swirling pads, before we lurch into the atmospheric 'Vesi', a soupy zoner that's carried by lysergic axe tweaks and gurgling synths. On the second side, the mood continues with the grim, green-hued 'Vesi', but it's the previously unheard 'Eetreni' that has us most captivated. While it was recorded around the same time, it's markedly different gear, a long-form, mostly beatless Alice in Wonderland thriller that sounds as if it was pruned from a long-lost Czech or Hungarian new wave movie. Flutes and dulled oscillations wind around each other in the first stretch, but when the drums begin to surface they attack like a death rattle from another reality, spplintering out into serrated, saw wave noise and ritualistic crashes...

Thrilled to announce the reissue of Nikolaus Utermöhlen’s ‘Karlsbad’ album, originally released in 1989. Utermöhlen was a founding member of Die Tödliche Doris and this is his sole solo release. A collection of 23 witty oddball compositions for clarinet, accordion, percussion, recorder, violin, guitar, organ. It definitely has a Doris dose but even more so it shines for its totally singular mélange of tribal dada chamber folk, dilettante dissonant poetry, hard to compare with anything else. A slice of flamboyant wellness. The recordings of this album were made for the ‘Georgette Meunier’ film by Tania Stöcklin and Cyrille Rey-Coquais. Issued from the original master tapes and includes the 8 page booklet with engravings from the Karlsbad spa era.

During the mid-‘70s, Switzerland had embraced punk within its cities, informing the subsequent post-punk era of the 1980s as music splintered into freeform musical strands across the whole of the country. It was to become one of the most innovative periods in Switzerland’s modern day music history. “It was like a wild laboratory for all forms of new and strange sounds, rackets and compositional experiments,” explains writer Lurker Grand, “accompanied and inspired by cutting- edge developments in electronic musical instruments. A broad, innovative scene developed and the four different language and cultural regions of Switzerland were no longer perceived to be an obstacle. There was a curiosity for the foreign and the strange. Conflicts for freedom and free spaces took place and this was reflected in the music.” It was unfiltered creativity and this free, non-commercial approach is a common denominator for the songs on this compilation. Many artists operated in their own universe; hardly any of the acts on this album actually met each other at the time. Only Liliput from Zürich achieved notable fame, building on the success of their previous incarnation as Kleenex.

WAAN represents the musical marriage of seasoned saxophonist Bart Wirtz and keyboard wiz Emiel van Rijthoven. "Echo Echo", the album"s title reflects the relationship between WAAN"s two members. They are the echo of each other"s echo - a symbiotic and never ending musical relationship and far more complex than just being a dance music influenced jazz album.

Hania Rani announces her new album, Ghosts, bringing her songwriting and beautiful vocals to the fore and featuring special guests Patrick Watson, Ólafur Arnalds and Duncan Bellamy (Portico Quartet). Ghosts is the sound of an ever-evolving artist and, just as the album’s title suggests she passes repeatedly and gracefully between musical worlds: as composer, singer, songwriter, and producer. This album builds on Rani’s earlier successes Esja and Home with an expanded yet still minimal setup of piano, keyboards, synths (most importantly her Prophet) and features more of her mysterious, bewitching voice. Its spirit is warm, beckoning one into an ambitious double album that unfolds at an exquisite pace, informed by her revelatory, exploratory live performances. Ghosts is also an album of collaborations as Rani is joined by Patrick Watson, who breathes unearthly life into the ethereal ‘Dancing with Ghosts’. ‘Whispering House’is written and recorded with her friend, Ólafur Arnalds and casts a peaceful, ineluctable spell; and Portico Quartet’s Duncan Bellamy contributes vital loops to ‘Don’t Break My Heart’ and ‘Thin Line’. Rani’s lyrics are partially inspired by a two-month residency in a small studio in Switzerland’s mountains, where Rani was working on the soundtrack On Giacometti for a documentary about the renowned Swiss artist. “Where I stayed was once an old sanatorium in an area which used to be very popular, but now there are huge abandoned hotels where the locals say ghosts live. I mean, it's kind of a local belief system – these ghosts even have names! – but once you're deep into nature or some abandoned place, your imagination starts working on a different level.” “The edge of life and death,” Rani summarises, “and what actually happens in between: this was what really interested me. Even singing the word ‘death’ was quite a shock. It’s such a weird word to say out loud, and people are afraid of it, which I found extremely interesting. Most of the songs probably still talk about love and things like that, but Ghosts is more me thinking about having to face some kind of end.”