MUSIC

Twoonky, the brothers duo from Brescia (Italy) formed by Michele and Simone Bornati, is back on Macadam Mambo for a second album. After their brillantissimo ‘Dezzo’ from 2019, which was well noticed by the underground scene, the new opus ‘Ottico’ won’t leave you static. This is the kind of masterpiece that the more you listen, the more you love. At the opposite of grandiloquent music that would have immediate effect, ‘Ottico’ is much more subtile, surfing on a cool wave of styles, a collage of vibes going from 70’s Kraut to 90’s Trip-Hop, where the analog sounds of guitars, synths, distorded voices, saxo, samples and electronics FX match so well, creating an ensemble in the unique mutant flow of the Twoonky’s that makes it so intemporal and so modern in the meanwile. It’s not about being curious, it’s about being open on crossing boundaries, like they are used to do with their unique place called Spettro in Brescia, where all the avant-garde of the electronic scene is coming to perform. ‘Ottico’ could be a kind of representation of the spirit of Spettro, and possibly one of the most interesting release of 2023. We don’t know why, but it’s true, Italians do it better ☺

Under the production moniker of Material Things, 12th Isle co-founder Stewart Brown unveils a part debut album part compendium of musical collaborations spanning from 2015-2020. Some recordings began as long, one-take improvisations (How's Life, Peckham) spliced together and revisited years later. Others were based upon chance opportunities to record with musicians operating a long way from the parameters of 12th Isle. Cult private-press loner folk guitarist Bob Theil, whose 1982 album So Far counts as one of the Scottish greats of the era, is at the heart of 'Westway'. Synth and guitar fragments recorded by the pair in Stewart's family home one summer form a low-key conclusion to the collection, whilst London based percussionist Pike Ogilvy brings an array of drum sounds and natural percussion to 'No Direction'. Regular 12th Isle affiliate Vague Imaginaires also features heavily, contributing synth work on Grenoble and his own extended digi bonus remix of 'How's Life'. As a collection, the 8 tracks show a studious, concise vision and combine influences from minimalism, concrete and avant-garde jazz and techno yet also embrace friendship, experimentation and curiosity whilst capturing 5 years of the artists own personal life. Some of the tracks have been circulating in various versions for a number of years now, with DJ support from Bake, Ivan Smagghe, Optimo, Lena Willikens, Huntley & Palmers, Orpheu The Wizard and, of course, 12th Isle.

Total Annihilation Beach is the latest collection from Caveman LSD, one of the handful of monikers of Special Guest DJ / uon / sometimes just shy. Their releases under this name have always had the character of sonic transmissions – crushed sine-waves hurtling out of a wormhole, remote pirate radio bandwidths, whale-song picked up on radar, and so on. Here, the signal seems to come from a place whose remoteness is not defined by distance, but adjacency: these are alternate reality bops. What does it sound like? Kind of solarpunk, but dirty; not at all an artifact from a hopeless culture. Percussion at the forefront; warm timbres and tones – never have I heard this producer play with tabla and tambourine loops as they do in “Lost Hours,” the opening track of the EP. The buildup holds tension and dynamics tight, with a vocoder-smoothed moan – sampled from the caveman’s own voice, on the low – alternating between two notes; when the beat decompresses for the first time two and a half minutes in, one hears the amorphous and cavernous pads we know so well from shy. “Bottle Service Angels” picks up with another acoustic drum loop, and a clap entering 18 seconds in swings the rest of the track into your hips – there’s even an alternate percussion interlude sandwiched in the middle. The drums are turned over by a distorted and delayed wave, almost like a cop siren, which finds an answer in the track’s final seconds: we hear them blaring, but distantly (the demo version of this track, from spring 2020, was called “ACAB Beat”). The B side begins with a textured, heaving slab of ambience: “The Sun Will Sink Into the Ocean.” It is perhaps the sun one sees setting over “Total Annihilation Beach” – a phrase that came to shy while tripping on LSD in San Francisco, which felt to them like a post-apocalyptic haven for the rich. Seems on point. There is a machinic repetition to the track, but also sweeping curtains of sound that move like mist. But what comes at nightfall? Not cops, not raiders nor bottle service angels – nothing, actually. Just a void into which one lobs praise. “H6 Remix” adapts a Mesopotamian hymn to the divine wife of a moon deity, dated to 1400 BCE; the strings of the sampled oud playing it out are rich and trail beautifully with reverb. Caveman LSD’s gesture of remixing such a song reads sincere – the reality we inhabit is likely just as brutal as the one to which these transmissions belong; however, in both, honor exists. Love follows.

Ylia—aka Susana Hernández—had a remarkably productive 2020. In addition to releasing her debut album, Dulce Rendición, on Barcelona’s Paralaxe Editions, she penned compilation tracks for Lapsus Records, Hivern Discs, and Super Utu/Stars on Earth. But professional success can be deceiving: The following year was, personally speaking, terrible. Her grandfather died. Her father died. Her cat died. And she ended a relationship. “That’s a lot of things all at once, no?” she says. Her second album, Ame Agaru, is not necessarily a record of that year, but it is, she says, a response to those life events—a record of grief. The new album is clearly a continuation of the ambient investigations of Ylia’s debut, but it differs in key ways. Where Dulce Rendición was exploratory and faintly cosmic, Ame Agaru—a Japanese phrase meaning, roughly, “the rain lifts”— captures a melancholy sense of stillness. And where her debut was largely electronic, on the new album, Ylia has folded in a number of acoustic elements, even when they are not recognizable as such. Her partner, Alejandro Lévar, lends fingerpicked acoustic guitar to the glowing dronescapes of “Todos los Cuerpos”; multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Tete Leal adds flutes, clarinet, and soprano saxophone to “Ame Agari”—or “after the rain”—which opens the album with a moment of contemplative calm, the kind that follows an extended deluge. One track, the dub techno-influenced “Flowers in June,” grew out of Ylia’s live sets, but the rest are the fruit of improvisational sessions at home in Málaga, five minutes from the beach—jamming and then refining, searching for the ideal expression of a feeling as it was first captured. Searching for the spontaneity behind the stillness. In places, Ylia even incorporates piano, an instrument she has played since she was 10, yet has never included on one of her recordings before. For the most part on Ame Agaru, she seeks ways to fuse piano with synthesizers and electronic processes. But on the closing track, “El Único Adiós Posible,” she leaves us alone with the instrument in all its stark, unadorned beauty. It is a profoundly moving conclusion to an album defined by its economy of means and purity of expression: a cycle of life counted out in the passage of storm clouds and clearing skies.

ZZK Records Presents Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes. There’s no denying the power of the drum. It’s primal, it cuts across borders and most importantly, it makes you want to move. Ghetto Kumbé don’t just understand that—they celebrate it, and it’s why the tambor was at the heart of the Bogotá-based trio’s 2020 self-titled debut album. Rooted in mysticism and the Afro-Caribbean rhythms they’d grown up with all their lives, the critically acclaimed LP thrillingly updated the traditional Latin template, folding in elements of modern hip-hop, house and bass music while also delivering a transportive Afro-futurist vision. On Clubbing Remixes, that vision has been further amplified, as Ghetto Kumbé—who were already one of Colombia’s most prominent alternative acts—have now gone fully global; enlisting an all-star roster of artists from four different continents, they’ve put together a fresh version of their debut album that’s been specifically geared to the world’s diverse slate of dancefloors. As the title implies, the new LP is meant for the club, which is why Ghetto Kumbé have turned to Latin music heavyweights like Trooko—a multiple Grammy winner whose resume includes work with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Residente—and Monte (a.k.a. Bomba Estéreo founder Simón Mejía), along with top-shelf DJs like Nickodemus and Uproot Andy, two NYC artists who’ve spent decades championing Afro-Latin rhythms. True to the LP’s global spirit, the record also includes reworks from batida maestro DJ Firmeza, fellow Afro-Portuguese outfit Studio Bros and Parisian house groovers Les Enfants Sauvages, plus genre-blurring remixes from sonically adventurous Colombians Montoya (himself another ZZK artist) and Cero39. Even the artwork on Clubbing Remixes is a remix, as Ghetto Kumbé have tapped Uganda’s Denzel Muhumuza to transform the cover of their debut album into a new, explicitly Afro-futuristic illustration. Depicting a strong Black face and glowing neon fauna beneath a sparkling moonlit sky, the fantastical image speaks to both the ritual magic and Afro-indebted heritage of Ghetto Kumbé’s music, and thanks to Clubbing Remixes, the group’s passionate, drum-fueled sounds will soon be blasting out of sound systems around the globe. Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes will be released on all digital platforms on November 9th, 2022, with a double vinyl release to follow on March 31st, 2023.

“Unlike much of my work recently, it is not a ‘concept album’ and is without any collaborators. I just wanted to focus on my core sound really but without any of the genre tropes that may have been present the last time I made a solo album. I had hoped that the album could work on multiple levels. In that respect, it is intended as a psychedelic album as much as anything. You can listen to it in a more meditative way without getting distracted by the details. I suppose that is why the frequency spectrum is more similar to my earlier work, but there is a lot going on under the surface and it can be quite demanding if you are paying attention as there are odd time signatures and dissonant elements in there too. Light and shadow I guess. I am hoping that it may be the kind of album that people play at the end of an excessive night, like after a club being back home with some friends, sleep deprivation and whatever else kicking in together with the music helping to launch your mind into space! I am also hoping though that it will be interesting enough to stand up in the cold sober light of day as ‘just good engaging music’. It is quite foggy and scuzzy in feel and I am using a lot of filtering and reverb to get this. I think the vocal samples are an attempt to offset this, to bring a bit of light to the murkiness. I also wanted the vocal aspects to reflect influences or things I could closely identify with for the most part, so there are a few hints at British folk songs in amongst the music, albeit rather ghostly and not directly recognisable. But anyway, all this is much more a question of feel, rather than a signifier in this respect. I like the haunting, melancholic aspects of these songs I suppose. I am putting it out on my own label, Woe To The Septic Heart! I just felt it was time for that. It is a bad time for pressing records but conversely, Bandcamp has proved to be useful in showing you do not need to have the backing of an established label. I think I can do something independently and hope that it will still reach the public.” — Shackleton

The late 90’s was a busy time for Tokyo’s underground electronic scene for those in the know, but precious few releases ever matriculated outside its inner circles. The Shi-Ra-Nui label in particular hosted some of the most forward-thinking music of the era, including Jigen 1998 LP Blood's Finality / 狂雲求敗. Ostensibly drum and bass, Blood’s Finality dips into free jazz, Musique Concrète, and all out noise in its pursuit of artistic expression. Now widely available for the very first time on vinyl via ^ ^ (Double Circumflex), this historic piece of Japanese music history provides a key puzzle piece to a fertile time in experimental music.

G of D welcomes back to the catalogue its co-founder Sabla, back to his spiritual home, with a collaborative ep alongside one of the most revered and transcendental artists out there, Donato Dozzy.

Crono is a collection of 4 tracks made in the span of 2019-2022, following each other in chronological order of creation.
In an era where information runs fast, and just one year ago feels like ages ago, the music inside this ep comfortably sits in a time bubble, absorbing old and new influences and melting them organically.

Dozzy’s signature enchanting synth sequences, created with iconic synthesizers Buchla and Ems Synthi, steadily flow in and out with digital sounds and editing by Sabla.
The core of this collaboration is the exploration of these steady flows, which is a peculiarity easily found in both artists’ works. The 4 Flusso flow like water, like thoughts, like energy, lifting up with no specific intention if not the simple act of moving forward.

Anthony Naples, a New York producer / DJ and co-founder of , who has left behind a number of different works on numerous labels such as and , which he is also involved in managing, is exactly "deep house". Under the curation of DJ Python, a cult hero who sent out the original sound of "meets reggaeton" under the name of "deep reggaeton" and swirled the world into a whirlpool of enthusiasm, the rainy day "Air Texture" The latest work in the series is here. An ambitious compilation album created by two of Brooklyn's leading producers and music selectors who are leading the current electronic music community! In addition to their own collaborative songs, Huerco S., Parris, Aurora Halal, Organ Tapes, Nick León, DJ Trystero, Beta Librae, Waon P, downstairs J, Meitei, etc. It is full of great songs by gorgeous people who crossed the dance music to Experimental and post club area!

Innervzm II, a companion to 2022’s Innervzm, is a sprawling, meditative collection from Los Angeles-based producer, drummer, and sound architect, Raays. The EP’s title derives from a conversation between Raays and Leaving labelmate Deantoni Parks regarding “archeology of self” as a creative methodology. Innervzm, as a concept, connotes the kind of soul work that necessarily precedes and renders outward action possible, meaningful, and effective. The Innervzm II EP blends musique concréte, field recordings, and improvisational synthesis, documenting Raays’ methodical, ritualistic, and materially grounded approach to composition. Each of the EP’s six tracks was seeded by a discrete instance of deep listening (of the Pauline Oliveros variety) in environments ranging from Raays’ own backyard of Ernest Debs Pond to the thundery night time forestscapes of Michoacán. If regarded sincerely as the ever-present music of this world, how might a listener interpret the spatial and melodic interplay of, say, birdsong and the distant hum of traffic? And how might that same listener respond, musically? Innervzm II provides one such example: a keen spirit, intermittently (generally for no more than ten minutes at a time) tuning into the sonic chaos, deciphering the elements (for it is only ever really seemingly chaos), then immediately distilling this experience into song. Aided by an hourglass (as much a talisman as an actual timekeeper), and abiding by a sort of “first thought / best thought” approach to completing a track in a single sitting, Innervzm II constitutes a snapshot of an artist in an especially fruitful and transitory period of exploration. As a self-described “optimistic futurist,” the tapestry Raays weaves is indeed soothing and consoling, deftly melding the organic and the analog. A persistent albeit oscillating flutter on “Beneath Your Surface” suggests the slow-motion beating of a hummingbird’s wings. The subtle warble hidden within the EP’s opener, “Equiinox” conjures the rainbow artifacts of a VHS sunrise. Though “textural message” is the title of track five, these pieces might very well all be considered textural messages, replete as they are in soil and static, dredged (lovingly) from some place just beyond the frame of knowing. Innervzm (dubbed “Full of vibrant life” by New Age luminary Laraaji) will be paired with Innervzm II for a joint physical cassette release in June, and Raays will soon join longtime experimental/ambient luminary, The Album Leaf, as an opener and drummer on a global tour. Which is all to say, Raays is diligently tending the garden, to our collective benefit.

“The first series comprises six related movements, usually organised in pairs, electronic sounds with instrumental and more rarely, concrete sounds: Incidences/resonances brings into play controlled resonances akin to sounds of concrete origin in a process that helps to expand the variable electronic sound sources. Here, ‘incidents’ are opposed to one-off ‘accidents’ in the second movement: Accidents/Harmoniques (Accidents/Harmonics). In the second movement, very short events of instrumental origin change the harmonic tone of the continuum they interrupt or overlap. Moreover, the high notes are underplayed, which stimulates the attention given to other phenomena generally hidden by the melodic form applied to the instrumental play. Géologie sonore (Sound Geology) is similar to a flight over an area where different ‘sound’ layers come to the surface one after the other. When seen from high above, instrumental and electronic sounds seem to fuse ... Dynamique de la resonance (Dynamics of Resonance) is a microphonic exploration of a single sound resonating through different forms of percussion. L’Etude élastique (Elastic Study) places together various sounds produced by ‘touching’ elastic or instrumental skins (baloons, doumbeks) or vibrating strings and a number of instrumental gestures close to this ‘touch’, using electronic processes to generate white noise. Conjugaison du timbre (Conjugated Tone), the last movement in the series, uses the same substance to apply rhythmic forms onto a perpetually varying tone continuum. “The second series of movements draws its inspiration from concrete and electronic sources rather than instrumental ones. Incidences/battements (Incidences/Beatings) is a reminder of the first movement in the first series which then quickly moves into Natures éphémères (Ephemeral Natures): ephemeral play on instrumental and electronic sounds, singled out by their internal trajectory rather than by the material itself. Matières induites (Induced Matters): just as molecular effervescence triggers a changes of state, it seems that the different states of these sound materials can be generated by each other or through induction processes. In Ondes croisées (Crossed Waves), the pizz vibrations interfere with somehow ‘visible’ water drops on the surface of a similar material. Pleins et déliés (Downstrokes and Upstrokes) can be listened to as the energies absorbed in the motion of bouncing bodies, while hollow ‘bubbles’ and points bring together some people’s gravity and others’ downwards movements. The work finishes with Points contre champs (Reverse Angle Points). Here, the notion of perspective of the different sound threads weaving a kind of network, or field, traps the occasional iterative elements in the foreground and progressively absorbs them, giving more space for the angle - and the chanted sound - to grow.”(B.P.) 

Dreams In Splattered Lines fuses together Wolf Eyes' 25 years of DIY electronics with the avant-garde sensibilities of Fluxus and the granite of dreary Midwestern life. Continuing some of the ideas explored on the Difficult Messages record of collaborations, the result is a surreal dreamscape of disorienting sound collages, where hit songs are transformed into terrariums of sonic flora and decimated fauna. As if pulled from a fever dream, the surrealists of the 1960s converge with alien electronic blues musicians in an underworld of mystery. The air is thick with car wash radio white noise, crackling and fizzing like a toxic elixir, spoken word poetry transmissions as absurd and cryptic phrases. Each corroded aural environment is a microcosm of chaos, honed to razor-sharp precision. Swept away in a whirlwind of thirteen perplexing narratives, each one an unpredictable journey through subterranean worlds, a sonic trip of reality folded into itself.

Of all the things that can and should and will be said of Sam Wilkes’ & Jacob Mann’s Perform the Compositions of Sam Wilkes & Jacob Mann, let’s begin at the beginning and acknowledge that it is an aptly named record indeed. An ideal collaborative effort (which is to say, greater than the sum of its parts), here we have two longtime friends, two luminaries of the New Weird Los Angeles — the experimental, genre-encompassing underground—who have, at last, devoted a full-length record to their signature musical admixture. Since their meeting as USC music students (Wilkes studied bass, and Mann, jazz/piano), the two have, with a kind of ceaseless abandon, chased the music to the ends the earth — oftentimes quite literally; travel is a recurrent theme in Compositions’ track titles (Pre-board, Soft Landing, and Around the Horn), and the record’s second track, Jakarta, was sketched out in a hotel room in the city of the same name, where Wilkes and Mann were performing at a jazz festival in 2019. Having initially bonded over a mutual and abiding appreciation for the Soulquarians, the two have spent over a decade playing and traveling, together and separately, their styles coevolving all the while. Across its thirteen tracks, Compositions captures the relaxed creative flow of two consummate musicians. Most of the record’s sessions (“four-to-five-day summits” in an apartment studio, occasioned by “blasts of inspiration”) began with casual improvisation, and, indeed, roughly half of the final material was composed in this manner: Wilkes and Mann squaring off, a Yamaha DX7 facing a Roland Juno 106, alternating leads, two co-pilots with no set course. And though the songs are polished to a shine, there are artifacts of the intimacy of these sessions. Yes It Is concludes with a snippet of just-intelligible studio chatter: “…A flat minor, then A major.” A figuring-it-out-as-we-go moment that briefly renders explicit the warmth, friendship, and creative freedom that is the album’s heart. The duo has quipped that Compositions is Mann’s most “serious” project, while simultaneously being Wilkes’ most “light-hearted” — somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but there are certainly two distinct sensibilities at play across Compositions. Their aesthetics collide, coalesce, and diverge, often in a single song. Then the process starts anew. The album begins with the whimsical (exuberant, even!) glitched-out Cricket Club and ends on a note of quiet contentment with Wichita Wilkes, an Earth, Wind, and Fire x shoegaze fever dream. That Compositions coheres as well as it does is a testament to Wilkes’ and Mann’s shared vernacular. Both have expressed a tendency to communicate their musical ideas linguistically, posing questions like “what would the woodwinds be doing here?” Though only the two musicians are credited, the ensemble conjured by their combined imaginary feels infinite.

“Senzatempo” became a lockdown record. In 2019, a year after our last concert as a trio with Christian Fennesz, the release of his “Agora” and our first publication for Touch – “Elusive Balance” – we met in Milan. We talked about ongoing projects, the evolution of our musical language and, as is often the case when we are all three together, the more frenetic and superficial aspects of contemporary society, the difficulty of letting ideas and projects mature and how music could still play a constructive role in that context. We left each other with the intention of talking at a distance about a new project, to be developed calmly, without any hurry. In the months that followed, after e-mails in which we continued to discuss the project, we decided to work on the perception of time and to focus our attention on those periods of life in which time tends to dilate, to lose its boundaries, dedicating ourselves to the project without the fear of resting on indefinite moments of stasis – trying to take the time of creation as an ally, making the most significant ideas 'sprout', distilling emotions and crystallising them slowly. Catapulted into the first wave of the pandemic, we began to work at a distance, We exchanged different types of sound materials, sometimes raw sometimes more structured and with Christian we tried to give musical form to a surreal calm, at the same time as magmatic, uncertain emotional states. In this phase of collective confusion and almost total isolation, the first drafts of 'Senzatempo' and 'Movements I' were born. In both tracks, we tried to structure chordal waves and melodies inlaid with counterpoints with broad architectures and sinuous movements, in a sort of 'rubato', with the idea of creating an orchestral breath to the entire album. ‘Senzatempo’ is characterised by a dream melody with a dense and continuous dialogue between a sharp guitar and percussive sounds floating on an abstract and flexible pulse. ‘Movements I’, later transformed into a two-part suite, is airy and meditative; an initial acoustic shock leads to a melody resting on relaxed chords and enveloping sounds studded with noise, glitches and fragments of field recordings. After this initial work, we wanted to organise a studio session, but pandemic restrictions forced us to postpone and leave the music to mature further. The following summer, thanks to a residency project for young artists centred on the Senzatempo project and conducted by Christian and ourselves in central Italy, the opportunity arose for the first time to play the material produced thus far, and to experiment and focus on new musical ideas. In November 2021, after a concert we did in Turin, we finally devoted ourselves to the drafting of the album in a studio session lasting some days. The final versions of the first two tracks were created, with the addition of a second part to ‘Movements I’, and ‘Floating Times’ and ‘Motionless Image of Eternity’ came into being. In ‘Floating Time’, clouds of micro-sounds envelop an iridescent, sinuous melody in a sonic space delimited by sculpted percussive sounds. Lost memories seem to resurface. The end of the track takes up the beginning in a kind of ‘rondo’. ‘Motionless’ is counterpointed by telluric percussive sounds in a complex and detailed atmosphere. It seems as if nothing is moving in this sea of sound on which the guitar floats, when in fact everything is in motion in a simmer of textures and melodies that embroider counter-songs to the main refrain. The music of 'Senzatempo' moves in balance between composition and improvisation. It is a symphonic work for an imaginary orchestra in which melodies, counterpoints, dynamics and sonorities define a structural breadth reminiscent of classical music.

Black Truffle announce the release of Le Piano Englouti (The Sunken Piano), the first collaboration between Brunhild Ferrari and Jim O’Rourke, offering up two side-long realisations of Ferrari’s tape compositions recorded in concert at Tokyo’s SuperDeluxe in 2014, revised and mixed by O’Rourke in 2019. The title piece weaves an immersive web of electronics, pre-recorded piano, and field-recorded sounds, including the raging Aegean sea, the tranquil atmospherics of a Japanese island, and the roar of a pachinko parlour. Far from a slice of audio vérité, these geographically distant sites intermingle in an unreal space where they often become indistinguishable. Shadowed by electronics and reverberant snatches of piano, the field recordings rise up and recede like ocean waves, creating a constantly shifting texture that is nonetheless warmly inviting. Chirping birds are confused with their electronic doubles; snatches of footsteps and voices are engulfed by ambience of unclear origin. Increasingly present throughout the piece, the piano rises up one last time before being swallowed up for good by the pachinko parlour. Tranquilles Impatiences (Quiet Impatiences) takes as its source material the electronic sounds produced by Luc Ferrari for his 1977 Exercises d’Improvisation, seven tapes intended to be heard alongside instrumental improvisation. Brunhild Ferrari’s piece layers Luc Ferrari’s sounds into a dense new work that emphasises the insistently pulsing rhythms of the source material. In this realisation with O’Rourke, the piece becomes a monumental sound-object, a slowly shifting mass of skittering electronic tones, shimmering reverb, and growling bass from which field-recorded events occasionally arise. At times, the placement of these fragments of real life in a pulsing, insistent musical landscape calls up Luc Ferrari’s classic Petit Symphonie; at other points, the swarming electronics bring to mind O’Rourke's Steamroom work or even the vast expanses of Roland Kayn.

We Jazz Reworks is an idea that repurposes some of the label’s output 10 albums at a time. That is, we invite producers whose music we love on board, and one by one, they tackle 10 albums worth of source material, of which they are free to use as much or as little as they choose. The series evolves chronologically, so this volume being number two, the source material is pulled from We Jazz LPs numbers 11 through 20. The artist has complete freedom. Volume 2 in the series happens with Carl Stone, a legendary figure in creative music. His career spans decades of unlimited musical innovation. Stone’s recent output on Unseen Worlds, the label who has also been instrumental in issuing some of his remarkable earlier work, ranks among the most original art of our time and renders notions such as ”genre” virtually meaningless. Here, We Jazz originals by Terkel Nørgaard, OK:KO, Jonah Parzen-Johnson and more are met here with a fresh sense of discovery, spun around and delivered ready for the turntable once again. Carl Stone says: ”It was wonderful that We Jazz gave me carte blanche to work with any materials from the set of ten releases in its catalog. This freedom to work with everything could have been a mixed blessing though, as it could be a challenge to try to deal with so much musical information. In the end I did what I almost always do: Let my intuition be my guide and to seize upon any musical items that seemed to fit into an overall approach.” ”To make a new piece I usually start with an extended period of what really is just playing, the way a child plays with toys. Experimentation without necessary expectation, leading to (hopefully) discovery of things of musical interest, then figuring out a way to craft and shape these into a structured piece of music. Each track uses a different approach, which I found along the way during this play period.” This conceptual approach becomes complete with the design, in which album graphics are treated in a similar fashion, reworking what’s there. This time around, the artwork is reinvented by Tuomo Parikka, a great friend of the We Jazz collective and a regular cover collage contributor for the We Jazz Magazine. credits released October 21, 2022 We Jazz Records presents the second volume of their reworks albums dealing with source material from the Helsinki-based label's catalog. This time around, it's Carl Stone's turn to tackle the source albums at hand and filter the label's output through his musical lens. We Jazz Reworks is an idea that repurposes some of the label's output 10 albums at a time. That is, the label invites producers whose music they love on board, and one by one, they tackle 10 albums worth of source material, of which they are free to use as much or as little as they choose. The series evolves chronologically, so this volume being number two, the source material is pulled from We Jazz LPs numbers 11 through 20. The artist has complete freedom. Volume 2 in the series happens with Carl Stone, a legendary figure in creative music. His career spans decades of unlimited musical innovation. Stone's recent output on Unseen Worlds, the label who has also been instrumental in issuing some of his remarkable earlier work, ranks among the most original art of our time and renders notions such as "genre" virtually meaningless. Here, We Jazz originals by Terkel Nørgaard, OK:KO, Jonah Parzen-Johnson and more are met here with a fresh sense of discovery, spun around and delivered ready for the turntable once again. "It was wonderful that We Jazz gave me carte blanche to work with any materials from the set of ten releases in its catalog. This freedom to work with everything could have been a mixed blessing though, as it could be a challenge to try to deal with so much musical information. In the end I did what I almost always do: Let my intuition be my guide and to seize upon any musical items that seemed to fit into an overall approach." "To make a new piece I usually start with an extended period of what really is just playing, the way a child plays with toys. Experimentation without necessary expectation, leading to (hopefully) discovery of things of musical interest, then figuring out a way to craft and shape these into a structured piece of music. Each track uses a different approach, which I found along the way during this play period." - Carl Stone This conceptual approach becomes complete with the design, in which album graphics are treated in a similar fashion, reworking what's there. This time around, the artwork is reinvented by Tuomo Parikka, a regular cover collage contributor for the We Jazz Magazine. !

Hotel Paral.lel, released in 1997, marks the full length debut release from Austrian Christian Fennesz, originally released by MEGO, following the twitching drone as found on the 1995 EP Instrument, also included in this deluxe 2LP reissue. Once launched, Hotel Paral.lel was to instigate a sublime exploration of a wide variety of forms, from formal abstraction to shimmering drone around to ground zero glitch pop. Recorded just before mobile computing devices became omnipresent it was an investigation into the sonic possibilities residing in guitar based digital music. Sz launches the career with a constantly buzzing sound that resembles a fax machine encountering a G3 laptop for the first time, realising the game is up. Nebenraum is the first foray into the style for which one would attribute to Fennesz. A glacial drone unexpectedly morphs into a gorgeous melody and microscopic groove. Adding pulse and melody was hearsay in the radical end of experimental music up until this point and with this single gesture, everything changed, for everyone. Blok M nails this trajectory home with a straight up 4/4 beat. Such rhythm also features on Fa with a euphoric mix of a thudding beat, sharp splinters of noise and a devastating exploding melody. Repetition plays heavily through this album as the hyper metronomic beat on traxdata lays a bed for all manner of buzzing electronics. On the closing “Aus” we see a glimpse of what was to come in the future works of Fennesz, an experiment in popping, bubbling pulse pop. A far more darker and experimental work than Fennesz’ subsequent work. This is an exquisite radical field of freeform noise, sliced techno beats and subtle ambient texture all coming together to create a timeless work. There’s little out there in the world of music, still to this day, that sounds remotely like Hotel Paral.lel. With a radical reinvention of music Hotel Paral.lel is an essential addition to collectors of pioneering music in the late 20th Century and sounds as enthralling today as it did to the shocked ears occupying 1997. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu. Vinyl cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle. Artwork by Tina Frank.

Substrata was the third studio album by the Norwegian electronic artist Biosphere, released 25 years ago by All Saints Records in London. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it at number 38 on its list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Here are ten alternative versions picked from the Substrata recordings sessions that took place between 1995 and 1996. David Stubbs´review of the original album in Melody Maker ,July 12th 1997: Biosphere, aka Norwegian Geir Jenssen, is transmitting from a cold, polar outpost of the imagination. "Substrata" is the best ambient album I've heard in an ice age, an album of terrifying, desolate and all-enveloping beauty, the music of a man who's stared too long and too hard at the Northern lights, a music of distant rumbles, tremors underfoot, stray radio signals, yawning chasms and indistinct, grainy images in the half-light when the mind begins to play tricks. "Poa Alpina" reminds me of recent, frightening TV footage of vast chunks of iceberg cracking and falling away into the sea under the duress of global warming. As for "The Things I Tell You", imagine what Oasis would have sounded like had they been born Eskimos. "Sphere Of No Form" is shot through with a frantic peal like the Mayday song of the world's last whale and, best of all, "Kobresia" looms with a vast, mournful, symphonic motif, like the ghost of the Titanic. Chill out has never been this chilling.

On June 3rd Gondwana Records present ‘Next Time Could Be Your Last Time’ – the debut album by Forgiveness, AKA Jack Wyllie, JQ and Richard Pike. Described as “not really jazz, not really new age, not really ambient or electronica”, instead they welcome you into a synaesthesia-inducing technicolour fantasy, full of wondrous emotive beauty. This genesis began with the sharing of music, burgeoning friendships, and the mutually-inspirational benefit of the collective power of a group dynamic, with each spurring the next on to heighten their already expansive skills. Intertwining the acoustic, electric and digital, utilising instruments and tools from across the decades, their synthesized Shangri La is a place where craftsmanship meets musicianship, even including sections notated on sheet music. The mood whilst recording, however, was one of loose freedom and enjoyment, with parts displaying a light-hearted playfulness. A world where shiny electronics meet flute and sax motifs, subverting them into something new. Jack Wyllie is best known for his work with Portico Quartet, Paradise Cinema and Szun Waves as well as collaborations with artists such as Luke Abbott, Adrian Corker and Charles Hayward. Whilst JQ has released on Boxed and Lo Recordings, with his music also remixed by Loraine James, Sun Araw and Foodman. Richard Pike has had multiple records on Warp as a member of PVT, collaborated with Modeselektor and Ital Tek, recorded under his alter-ego Deep Learning, and founded the tape label Salmon Universe, all whilst composing scores for TV drama. Wide-ranging influences on the LP include 70s era ECM and Miles Davis, Spencer Clark/Star Searchers, Ansel Adams, Steve Reich, H Takahashi, Don Slepian, The Blue Nile, Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit Of Eden’, Michael Gordon’s ‘Rushes for 8 Bassoons’, Sir Simon Rattle’s documentary ‘Leaving Home’, Horoshi Yoshimura, Ulla Strauss and Disasterpeace, plus new developments in vaporwave and software experimental. Hitting the centre at the ven diagram of these interests, the record converges the trio’s individual sound worlds into something singular. Primarily purveying a sense of endorphin-flushed tranquillity, they build synthetic, bucolic, lysergic landscapes, which although imbued with processed plasticity also contain multi-stranded depths of textural field.

Substrata was the third studio album by the Norwegian electronic artist Biosphere, released 25 years ago by All Saints Records in London. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it at number 38 on its list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Here are ten alternative versions picked from the Substrata recordings sessions that took place between 1995 and 1996. David Stubbs´review of the original album in Melody Maker ,July 12th 1997: Biosphere, aka Norwegian Geir Jenssen, is transmitting from a cold, polar outpost of the imagination. "Substrata" is the best ambient album I've heard in an ice age, an album of terrifying, desolate and all-enveloping beauty, the music of a man who's stared too long and too hard at the Northern lights, a music of distant rumbles, tremors underfoot, stray radio signals, yawning chasms and indistinct, grainy images in the half-light when the mind begins to play tricks. "Poa Alpina" reminds me of recent, frightening TV footage of vast chunks of iceberg cracking and falling away into the sea under the duress of global warming. As for "The Things I Tell You", imagine what Oasis would have sounded like had they been born Eskimos. "Sphere Of No Form" is shot through with a frantic peal like the Mayday song of the world's last whale and, best of all, "Kobresia" looms with a vast, mournful, symphonic motif, like the ghost of the Titanic. Chill out has never been this chilling.

As the sun sets on a quaint East Nashville house, a young man bares a piece of his soul. Facing the camera, sporting a silky suit jacket/shirt/slacks/fingerless gloves ensemble that announces "singer" before he's even opened his mouth, Lee Tracy Johnson settles onto his stage, the front yard. He sways to the dirge-like drum machine pulse of a synth-soaked slow jam, extends his arms as if gaining his balance, and croons in affecting, fragile earnest, "I need your love… oh baby…" Dogs in the yard next door begin barking. A mysterious cardboard robot figure, beamed in from galaxies unknown and affixed to a tree, is less vocal. Lee doesn't acknowledge either's presence. He's busy feeling it, arms and hands gesticulating. His voice rises in falsetto over the now-quiet dogs, over the ambient noise from the street that seeps into the handheld camcorder's microphone, over the recording of his own voice played back from a boombox off-camera. After six minutes the single, continuous shot ends. In this intimate creative universe there are no re-takes. There are many more music videos to shoot, and as Lee later puts it, "The first time you do it is actually the best. Because you can never get that again. You expressing yourself from within." "I Need Your Love" dates from a lost heyday. From some time in the '80s or early '90s, when Lee Tracy (as he was known in performance) and his music partner/producer/manager Isaac Manning committed hours upon hours of their sonic and visual ideas to tape. Embracing drum machines and synthesizers – electronics that made their personal futurism palpable – they recorded exclusively at home, live in a room into a simple cassette deck. Soul, funk, electro and new wave informed their songs, yet Lee and Isaac eschewed the confinement of conventional categories and genres, preferring to let experimentation guide them. "Anytime somebody put out a new record they had the same instruments or the same sound," explains Isaac. "So I basically wanted to find something that's really gonna stand out away from all of the rest of 'em." Their ethos meant that every idea they came up with was at least worth trying: echoed out half-rapped exhortations over frantic techno-style beats, gospel synth soul, modal electro-funk, oddball pop reinterpretations, emo AOR balladry, nods to Prince and the Fat Boys, or arrangements that might collapse mid-song into a mess of arcade game-ish blips before rallying to reach the finish line. All of it conjoined by consistent tape hiss, and most vitally, Lee's chameleonic voice, which managed to wildly shape shift and still evoke something sincere – whether toggling between falsetto and tenor exalting Jesus's return, or punctuating a melismatic romantic adlib with a succinct, "We all know how it feels to be alone." "People think we went to a studio," says Isaac derisively. "We never went to no studio. We didn't have the money to go to no studio! We did this stuff at home. I shot videos in my front yard with whatever we could to get things together." Sometimes Isaac would just put on an instrumental record, be it "Planet Rock" or "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" (from Evita), press "record," and let Lee improvise over it, yielding peculiar love songs, would-be patriotic anthems, or Elvis Presley or Marilyn Monroe tributes. Technical limitations and a lack of professional polish never dissuaded them. They believed they were onto something. "That struggle," Isaac says, "made that sound sound good to me." In the parlance of modern music criticism Lee and Isaac's dizzying DIY efforts would inevitably be described as "outsider." But "outsider" carries the burden of untold additional layers of meaning if you're Black and from the South, creating on a budget, and trying to get someone, anyone within the country music capital of the world to take your vision seriously. "What category should we put it in?" Isaac asks rhetorically. "I don't know. All I know is feeling. I ain't gonna name it nothing. It's music. If it grabs your soul and touch your heart that's what it basically is supposed to do."

Black Sea was the follow-up album to Venice (Touch, 2004), and was originally released in 2008; Stylus Magazine's Nick Southall wrote: "Fennesz does with sound what Stan Brakhage did with film, altering its very fabric and texture, employing disorder and error as forms of communication and expression. He forces you to learn a different method of perception and interpretation, to look beneath the chaos that seems to govern the movements of life and find the patterns beneath." Fennesz's career has come a long way since Instrument, his debut for Mego in 1995, and his first solo album Hotel Paral.lel which followed in 1998. Endless Summer (Mego, 2001) brought him to a much wider audience and Venice underlined his mastery of melody and dissonance. His songs usually embody the skillful application and manipulation of dense sonic textures with a genuine feel for the live, and real-time. Black Sea features guitars that rarely sound like guitars; the instrument is transformed into an orchestra. Fennesz lists the elements used to make the compositions: "Acoustic and electric guitars, synthesizers, electronics, computers and live-improvising software lloopp." On "Glide," Fennesz duets with New Zealand's Rosy Parlane, whose work is also released on Touch. Fennesz also teams up with eMego artist Anthony Pateras whose prepared piano features on "The Colour of Three." Fennesz pushes his work into a more classical domain, preferring the slow reveal to Venice's and Endless Summer's more song- based structures. Jon Wozencroft's artwork makes visible this carefully hidden world resting beneath the surface of "the first impression." A series of shots, taken in quick succession as the tide recedes, reveals a world of specific activity only visible at a particular time and place, histories appearing and disappearing.

SONG 08

A selection of private press 45s featuring Nate Young, John Olson, Alex Moskos, Gretchen Gonzales, Aaron Dilloway & Raven Chacon. These collaborations between the core Wolf Eyes crew and friends was originally self-released as a series of super-limited 7” hand painted box sets, but now the core ‘hits’ have been compiled by Disciples for wider consumption. 

Wolf Eyes' history with collaboration goes back almost 26 years. From the first Wolf Eyes w/Spykes concert that led to Olson joining the band to Smegma, Braxton, Richard Pinhas, Merzbow, Marshall Allen, and many more. Wolf Eyes has continued expanding musical ideas through collaboration and Difficult Messages is the first compilation of this practice. 

Many of the bands on 'Difficult Messages' exist inside an assemblage of a mail art tradition. Most of the music was made remotely and this allowed for deeper exploration into styles that might have been too uncomfortable to attempt face to face. Short Hands finds Nate Young, and Alex Moskos exchanging bass and guitar fragments with Olson’s reeds and tones overtop sculpted into odd rock songs. Wolf Raven touches on harsh electronics and pushes forward into postmodern ideas of composition. Time Designers is a duo of Alex Moskos and Nate Young using hacked drum machines and a 'design' approach to organizing sound. U Eye finds Olson and Young alongside longtime collaborators Gretchen Gonzales and Aaron Dilloway for a scrape and tape session recorded by Warren Defever. Stare Case is Olson and Young in a non-Wolf duo. Perhaps the only 'rules following' project these two have EVER had. The collection of audio tracks could be looked at as an exquisite corpse: a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled. With this method over thirty tracks and four hundred paintings were created.