MUSIC

O'Rourke does Ishibashi! This Imitiation is her western bow, plus also a progressive sci-fi pop album featuring the best playing on any albums released in Japan in 2012. New music, no matter in what year you hear it!

Gastr Del Sol emerged from the remains of Bastro in 1992 with the brooding, mostly drumless album, ‘The Serpentine Similar’. This represented an unlikely evolution from the fury of Bastro, but evolution was only getting started - and ‘unlikely’ was one of the ongoing principles in Gastr Del Sol’s approach. Before the sessions for the second album, Bundy Brown left the group and David Grubbs asked Jim O’Rourke to come play. 1994’s ‘Crookt, Crackt Or Fly’ tangled the clean lines of the original band in the writing, playing and editing of the music. This was all very fascinating, but it wasn’t until the five songs of ‘Mirror Repair’ that the compelling space of Gastr Del Sol could be fully perceived. ‘Mirror Repair’ was rife with guitar interplay, but Gastr coloured the palette with piano, drums and a sudden and rattling variety of woodwinds, all evoking the obsessive pull of a deep-seeded conviction, an insistent image that one cannot forget in a dense atmosphere with riffs patterning over each other and fading into landscape. The quieting of Gastr Del Sol had been dialling down since the start; here the silences were as essential a part of the sound as the sound was. In a fast five song mini album, length and depth were impossibly extended as part of the many moods of Gastr Del Sol. Albert Oehlen’s cover art provided a perfect counterpart to the sounds within, providing also a shout out to The Red Krayola, where David and Albert met during their mutual involvement with Mayo Thompson. The best in this vein was yet to come - but with ‘Mirror Repair’, Gastr had made something definitive. Now, the bold sounds of nearly twenty years ago are back in the groove, freshly cut for 21st ears to hear. You need ‘Mirror Repair’.

"Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba hails from three decades in the past, yet the simple profile of its abstract/ambient/cutup collage makes it a record that sits quite comfortably in our IDM-informed future. In 1988, Plux Quba was a primal dark horse in the world of pants-forward electronic music -- an obscurity issued with little explanation from the laid-back west coast of Europe: Portugal, of all places! -- though the casual listener could hardly know that from an examination of the LP jacket. The vanguard of electronics in late-80s Europe was being pushed by organizations like Nurse With Wound, The Hafler Trio, HNAS -- and yet, when Christoph Heemann came across this recording, it struck his ears and the ears of fellow listeners like nothing before. Plux Quba was handed around between the principles of the early '90s A-Musik scene: Jan St. Werner, C-Schulz, Frank Dommert, Georg Odijk, plus interested fellow travelers like Jim O'Rourke, to the intense curiosity of all. To ears that were already saturated with all things kraut, the dark corners of prog and the frontline of experimental and improvised music, it proved elusive. Not simply in how it sounded and how that sound was achieved, but in where it was coming from -- like later Robert Ashley at times; certain stretches of melody recalled some of Eno's ambient pieces -- but mostly, it was a completely alien soundscape! And who was it? Was the band called Plux Quba? The record? The label? These sorts of mysteries are at the heart of records that require close listening and re-listening. As it was absorbed, it grew to be an influence on the Köln sound -- Mouse On Mars, Lithops, and Heemann's many and varied projects -- as well as O'Rourke, Fennesz and many others. Music and sound of this nature have for many years been made available by bands like Autechre, labels like Mille Plateaux -- but for the first ten years of its existence, Plux Quba was rarely heard. O'Rourke reissued it as the first record on his Moikai label in 1998, and it had a good run through around 2005 before the last of the print parts were filled. It's been almost a decade since Plux Quba was available, which is way too long considering that we live in an era where it is necessary to have an LP of this on hand for your contemporary listening distractions. And so, Drag City has stepped in to reissue the Moikai reissue of Nuno Canavarro's classic Plux Quba."

A shining star in Mika Vainio’s dense microcosm returns to vinyl - and for our money it’s the most transcendent record in his revered catalogue, unfurling through an hour of disarmingly melodic romance and astral projection that never fails to bring a tear to our eye. First presented on CD in 2005 under Vainio’s Ø alias, ‘Kantamoinen’ became something of a sleeper gem, cultishly adored for its concerted embrace of extended melody and narrative tone within an ambient context, which made it stand out from his preceding decade of ascetic noise brutalism and minimal techno. Our first encounter, back at our Pelicanneck shop, left us utterly smitten with its soundtrack-like qualities, eventually prompting us to issue it on vinyl for the first time via our Editions label in 2016. Sadly, Mika passed the following year, which only made the material more precious as a lone, curious artefact in his deeply influential body of work. It now returns in this new edition, ready to flip preconceptions with a new generation of listeners through its exquisite carousel of tear-jerking soundscpaes where the artist’s most intimate, distinctive spirits endure. Dedicated to Mika’s grandma, Laina Vainio (1913-1991), and adorned with a cover image of her garden in Artjärvi, Finland, the 16-part 2LP is the closest you’ll get to a type of nostalgia in Mika’s catalogue. Whilst recorded 1999-2004 at an early crest of his game-changing work with Pan Sonic, the album clearly manifests a quieter space for Mika to emote far more nuanced feels, from the wide-eyed vastness of ‘Galaxy’ to a breathtaking ‘Sound Picture’, transitioning from Hans-Ulrich Obrist’s snippet of Oskar Sala into icy bliss, and the rosy warmth of a ‘Summerland’ clearly dedicated to his nan’s garden. The rest is better defined as ephemeral snapshots adding up to a broader picture, like a mind’s eye filling gaps in the memory from illusive vapours and sensations, generating all-time gems in the steepled choral synth voice of ‘In Wind’, or a sense of magic realism in the swaying organ of ‘Antenna-ant’, with the blooz folk wheeze of closer ‘To Home’ that could feasibly score the most haunting moments of a Bela Tarr flick.

Brazil’s premiere guess-again specialists Lugar Alto have been threatening to unleash this one for a while and here it finally is; compiled by the goat GG Albuquerque and mixed by label enigma Akira Umeda, “My Life is a Movie and In It I Am the Villain” is a compendium of signature DJ drops and idents used in soundsystems from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo going back to the 1980's and right up to the present day - a genuinely synapse-popping madness that maps the constant evolution of the most vibrant and forward-facing soundsystem cultures of our time... If you've spent any time with Brazilian funk, you'll know the sonorous intros - always larger-than-life, tongue-in-cheek, fluoro-flavoured - almost as important as the songs themselves. You don't have to understand Portuguese to get the message, either; the cacophony of pitch-wonked vocal stims, familiar samples, pop culture references and cheapo effects is borderless in its appeal, a core component of contemporary funk that's just as important as the syncopated tamborzão beat itself. We've copped tracks that are entirely reliant on the "carimbos" (literally "stamps") and "vinhetas" (intros) so we were hoping someone would put together something like this. And Lugar Alto - the Brazilian imprint responsible for releasing those essential DJ Ramon Successo LPs and that shocking Djalma Corrêa anthology - have taken the most impressive approach imaginable, tasking fount of all knowledge and journalist GG Albuquerque (last seen putting together that sick MÉDIO GRAVE tape for Nyege Nyege Tapes) with compiling something from a genuine street's-eye perspective. The mix tells a non-linear, multi-dimensional story of Brazilian sound system culture, using DJ drops, stage calls, adverts, cheeky samples and explosive intros made between the 1980s and 2025. It takes us from the point where local sounds collided with funk, freestyle, electro and Miami bass in the wake of 'Planet Rock’ to the moment the scene eventually evolved into the splintered landscape of bruxaria, ritmado, brega and other sounds that we can interface with today via TikTok and Insta. It's a dense, fittingly psychedelic and suitably impertinent mosaic of references, in-jokes and mind-tickling sonics that's seemingly without beginning or end, a time-fluxing braindump of laugh tracks and aborted rhythmic snaps that's best compared to being airlifted into a Rio street party after being shot with medical-grade ketamine. Within a matter of seconds we get John Williams' 'Star Wars' intro followed by a Portuguese Darth Vader voice and a barrage of buzzing "tuin" effects - and it just gets madder and more frenetic from there. A sort of heatsick parallel narrative to decades of British pirate radio culture, 'Minha Vida...' Is an incredible artefact of a movement that defies easy categorisation, a multi-coloured collage of sounds, humour and idiosyncratic energy that's driven the sound since the very beginning. You can take the boom-cha-cha boom-cha-cha beat, but you can't even begin to mimic the sheer gusto.

Space Afrika follow last year's heartbreaking x perception-bending mixtape "hybtwibt?" with an anxious patchwork of drill bass, reflective musique concrete and after-hours surrealism >> singular deep headspace exploration to file alongside Mark Leckey, Perila, Burial or Klein. Assembled to accompany a short film from Manchester-born visual artist, poet and filmmaker Tibyan Mahawah Sanoh, Joshua Inyang and Joshua Tarelle’s newest is a cinematic audit of identity and ancestry. In the film, Sanoh works hard to visually illustrate an honest and vulnerable picture of her soul. Inyang and Tarelle respond by doing the same with sound, collaging disparate elements together in a way that should be familiar to anyone who heard "hybtwibt?" or their jawdropping RA mix from earlier this year. Warped field recordings, overdriven rhythmic pressure, syrupy pads and disorienting vocals are cut and pasted over each other, generating a living, breathing study of the duo's Northern working class Black British reality. Unlike the duo's acclaimed "Somewhere Decent To Live" full-length, elements mutate and transform: mushy noise bends into street sounds, haunted vocals into echoing drill melancholia and muffled howls into shattered digital remnants. The main event is the full 10-minute soundtrack, that's layered with Sanoh's disorienting and deeply personal poetry and echoes Mark Leckey's recent "In This Lingering Twilight Sparkle". Then the EP is bumped up with three sketches from the same sessions, two of which never made it to the final mixdown. 'Version 3' is a particular highlight, pasting heartbreaking piano and blowtorched vocal loops over winding drill bass > sounds like Burial remixing Unknown T into pure syrup.

Noise titan Anthony Di Franco (Ramleh, JFK) returns to his perennially influential and long dormant AX project for the first time since 1997's 'Astronomy', pitching into pure, beat-less feedback/amp-worship on a crushing and expansive new album of manacled, atonal guitar + synth + FX slowly edged into oblivion. Big boned, highly recommended listening FFO Kevin Drumm, Stephen O’Malley, Kevin Richard Martin, Mika Vainio, E.A.R. Di Franco was just 21 when he started the AX project in 1993. He'd been a member of Matthew Bower's influential noise rock band Skullflower since he was 16 and was their full-time bassist by that point, playing on classic sides like 'IIIrd Gatekeeper' and 'Obsidian Shaking Codex' before being tapped by Gary Mundy to join Ramleh. The idea for AX was to create music without drums that was just as heavy as the extreme noise and sludgy rock that surrounded Di Franco at the time. And so, using a cheap 4-track, an arsenal of guitars and a few synths and effects to strip out the rhythm and focus solely on the weight of the sound, the project produced three albums - 'AX II', 'Nova Feedback' and 'Astronomy' - records that have remained cult touchstones for dedicated drone fanatics ever since. One year since the mighty, psyched-out return of Ramleh with ‘Hyper Vigilance’, Di Franco appears clearly gassed on a new energy in ‘Vulcanalia’, wherein he revives the alias with the benefit of lessons learned since that last album three decades ago. For the duration, he touches scorched grass in his most elemental guise, sustaining combustible harmonic overtones and biting-point distortion thickened with re-thought production techniques, from mic placements to amp sorcery and FX, factored by obsessive, extramusical cues from Roman mythology and religion. The results live up to his intention - to plunge users in the midst of the lushest tempest - in order to overwhelm himself and us. Nothing exceeds quite like excess, and this one delivers in glacial spades. Numbed drones grow in shivering intensity to a vision-blurring electromagnetic stormfield on ‘Elagebal’, culminating in a keeling, blackened wave that never breaks, whereas ‘Jupiter Best and Greatest’ allows for more harmonic colour in the sustained density of his synths and axe, rising and dashing souls on distant noumenal, isolationist shores. ‘Aedes Saturnus’ evokes a necessary lull in the storm, dialling everything down to a sort of still water depth and dread that builds from below, boiling waters that turn to caustic treacle one the 12 minute titular closing, set to immure the senses in a style of doom wrangling that hears the influence of his Ramleh and Skullflower works which also fed into E.A.R., SoMa, and Kevin Richard Martin, returning home to roost.

'Persistent Repetition Of Phrases' success comes from the attention it pays to the function of 'the loop', not only as a narrative ordering system in modern music, but as a means by which the brain itself recalls and interprets information; it's as old as recorded sound itself, but in this context the repetition of small shards of auditory information becomes an elegy to fading memory and the worn-out synapses of old age. The track titles offer signposts through Kirby's labyrinth of faulty remembrances, pointing their way towards the peculiarities dictating the manner by which the mind stores and attempts to recover information.

Jana IRMERT « Portals » Produced entirely from sounds recorded in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil and Colombia, Portals evokes the hidden world of sounds that lie beyond our perception. Whether concealed in ultra-sonic frequency registers or in the depths of the aquatic medium, these sounds bear witness to an unsuspected and teeming animal activity. Insects, frogs, bats and freshwater dolphins move about, hiding from our eyes and ears. Revealing this palette of sounds, in particular through transposition, and placing it back in the realm of the audible, Jana Irmert invites and guides us on a fascinating exploration of an unsuspected, speculative and non-human world of sound, which she exposes and recomposes in a way that is both respectful and personal, accompanying this teeming and fascinating sound material in a musical gesture of great clarity. Portals is an attempt to access the evocative power of an Amazonian forest on the brink of catastrophe, through a decentring of the listening experience delicately composed by Jana Irmert.7038634357 « Rope » With uncommon mastery and precision, Rope unfolds in a suspended time that seems nonetheless ominous. As its title suggests, Rope explores the formal figure of the rope, as an interweaving of synthetic and natural fibres that hold and amalgamate, held together by the forces of tension and friction. The rope itself, as Neo Gibson explains, is knotted at regular intervals along its entire length, so that you can hang on to it. Rope unfolds slowly, evolving from the threshold of the perceptible towards denser, more ballasted electronic textures, but always on the brink of an upheaval to come. Then a melodic motif appears, seeming to carry within it an impossible consolation. In this respect, Rope balances strikingly between formal elegance, sonic gravity and an emotional charge that is almost uncontainable.

2025 edition. Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code is the 2019 breakthrough album of the acclaimed composer’s pipe organ pieces. Her temporally informed studies of harmonics and intonation breathed life into a suite of compositions which leaves the heart moved and mind still. This 2025 edition was mastered by Rashad Becker and features a new track Sacrificial Code III.

Pitchfork praised the album for its "time-stretching properties" and "clean minimalism". Resident Advisor described the album as an "exercise in concentration, restraint, and focus". Tiny Mix Tapes emphasized the "intensity and intimacy" of the album, pointing out how Malone's close miking technique brings out every textural detail of the organ, creating a highly focused and immersive listening experience.

48k/32bit master by Rashad Becker

The music on Horse Lords’ Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! feels both impossibly detailed and eminently human. The album’s twelve pieces are layered and interwoven, tonally and rhythmically complex––moiré-like patterns of interaction and tessellation that play out for both mind and body, full of sonic warrens with an inescapable groove. An electrifying leap forward for the band’s shared language, Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! aims to liberate the listener into a spiritual, ecstatic, and utopic dimension of sound.

Underneath his mysterious metal mask, MF DOOM hides the cachet underground legends are made of. After his first group KMD’s sophomore album Black Bastards was shelved by Elektra in 1994, and his blood brother Subroc — one half of the sibling rap duo — passed away, surviving frontman Zev Love X slowly mutated into the supervillain MC known as MF DOOM, and the rap world is better for it.The 1999 release of Operation: Doomsday marked MF DOOM’s official debut, reintroducing a mysterious figure who would soon become one of underground rap’s greatest voices. Within its 19 tracks, Operation: Doomsday reveals the confluence of DOOM’s tragic past, personal interests and daring creativity. His clever rhymes and remarkable schemes stood out against the landscape, and every sound he touched — from cartoon theme songs, to ‘80s soul, to rap classics and more — got reinterpreted into something brand new and surreal.Decades later, MF DOOM is still celebrated for all facets of his work and influence. In the face of tragedy, DOOM re-infiltrated the rap game on his own terms, and crafted an instant cult classic. Operation: Doomsday stands as a testament to the power of betting on yourself against all odds.

During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? The result is aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with friends decorating this space alongside him.The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities’ first half begins with the junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame “Tem” and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and shakers on “Can Tangle.” There is a hard-won joy to these numbers, as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead end but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became a kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores across Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener “Nu Male Uno” to the uncanny amorphousness of closer “Felt Like Floating.” All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm, like the loping strut at the center of “Midpoint” and the head-nodding pulse that winds through “Persurverance,” winkingly misspelled to suit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are springboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New Age references—shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring flutes—that circle through “Midpoint” or the dub-indebted delays and gamelan hymns that bubble up through “Persurverance.” This is deeply multivalent music, each number’s propulsive core counterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness and joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here, tangling toward infinity.In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund reached out to friends—Califone’s Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds.Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album’s insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, this is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.

Assembling a 'Kwaidan'-style anthology from chewed scraps of noir, horror and dystopian sci-fi movies, billy woods chronicles Black American angst on 'GOLLIWOG', running circles around his peers and arriving on the AOTY for fans of Ka, EARL, Aesop Rock, Westside Gunn or Cannibal Ox. Featuring production from El-P, The Alchemist, DJ Haram, Saint Abdullah, Shabaka Hutchings and others.

The English language is violence, I hotwired it woods coolly quips on 'Jumpscare', tossing out run-on cadences to juggle polyrhythms between beatless double-bass and vaudeville Pan Sonic-esque electrical interferences. Within a track, he fully establishes the concept for 'GOLLIWOG', an album that surveys the full spectrum of horror, splicing together creaking floorboards, ticking clocks, industrial clanks, Herrmann-esque stabs and detuned pianos, maniacal screams and blood-curdling laughs to accompany knotty tales of corporeal terror. It's horrorcore in a sense, cobbling together its scenery with the same congealed raw materials as Necro or Prince Paul, but woods uses the schlocky formula to lighten his death blows, landing some of the deepest lyrical lacerations of his lengthy career so far; 'Dead Body Disposal' it ain't. "Daddy longlegs stride your home like Cecil Rhodes," he nicks, equating the fear of (harmless) spiders with the terror of a real-life boogeyman - the coloniser of Zimbabwe (where woods' father was born), no less. And the track ends with a seemingly throwaway vocal sample: "a horrid sight, the blackest gnome." A description of the titular character from American author Florence Kate Upton's 19th century children's book 'The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg', it's actually a clue to unpicking the album's title. What's fear, exactly, ponders woods, and what's merely ideology? And how does all of this become entertainment, let alone throwaway cutesy fodder for kids?

American horror as a genre has long broadcast the innermost fears of a nation who wears its ideology so boldly that it almost vanishes. Way back in the early 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft's racism manifested in stories of an ancient evil lurking beneath the New World's disturbed earth; later on, in the wake of the contraceptive pill and the subsequent free love movement, promiscuity was met with death and mutilation in an endless slew of slasher movies; and during peak neoliberalism, a taste for "torture porn" offset the stasis of safe liberal suburbia. woods accepts the history of horror, and proposes a true Black American Gothic archetype; just like Jordan Peele's 'Get Out' bolted together familiar tropes to signal how psychologically traumatic the Black experience can be within manicured white confines, woods bundles various cultural spikes to fabricate a more dangerous lyrical weapon. On 'BLK ZMBY', the ubiquitous zombie myth - a Haitian folkloric invention that was famously repurposed by George Romero in the '60s as a critique of American capitalism - is used as packaging for a barrage of knowledge that wraps references to Fela, Dune and Usual Suspects in thorny post-colonial theory. In Romero's 'Night of the Living Dead', the Black lead character spends 90 minutes fighting off zombies only to be shot in cold blood by beer chugging rednecks; now, woods' Black zombies have taken over the asylum, ignoring accountability and poisoning the water supply while the third world's corpse is sucked dry. "Zombies go home to platters of prawn and escargot," woods says, not letting Biggie off the hook. "New mothers struggle while the zombies suckle like baby goats."

DJ Haram handles the production on 'All These Worlds are Yours', dilating Shabaka Hutchings' transcendent improvisations with damaged '50s b-movie oscillations, rasping amp distortions and microtonal drones. "Today, I watched a man die in a hole from the comfort of my own home," woods recounts, accepting the day-to-day wartime horror-tainment we're fed on social media, 'Human Centipede'-style. "Trench fire, silent weapons, body horror, private booth," replies E L U C I D, woods' longtime Armand Hammer cohort. And woods coaxes out some of El-P's best production work in years on 'Corinthians', linking snippets of Lu Xun's 'Diary of a Madman' - that equates the Confucian ethical system with cannibalism - with the breakdown of late-stage Abrahamic morals that'll be closer to home for Anglophone listeners. "Best believe them crackers won't make it to Mars," he quips, double-underlining a verse that muddles St. Paul with Steven King, and Noah with the military industrial complex. By itemizing his own fears in a sequence of 'Cat's Eye'-style vignettes, woods launches hooks into the contemporary façade of terror-as-amusement, a fairground haunted house that's populated with very real demons. It's shockingly effective - the Pulitzer-ready rap album woods has been promising for aeons, and one of the very best things we've heard this year so far.

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

“Eero : Eesu” is a spiritual and experimental sound‑art work by Adey Omotade, a Lagos‑born artist whose experiences across Paris, Johannesburg, Berlin, Côte d’Ivoire, and other places inform his unique fusion of Yoruba traditions with contemporary sonic practices.

“Perfect Answer,” the latest release from US underground innovator Evanora Unlimited, is a singular pop record where destruction and lyricism coexist. Featuring striking guest appearances from Maria M, RockangelZ, She Diamond, and Taraneh, each track takes on its own distinct personality, giving the album a depth and dimensionality that grows with every listen.

Following The Pocket of Fever, Ambient Sans presents the second part of Masahiro Sugaya’s visionary collaborations with avant-garde performance group Pappa TARAHUMARA, founded by Hiroshi Koike in 1982. The company fused dance, theatre, music and visual art into abstract stage environments, with Sugaya’s music serving as their emotional and conceptual core.

Music From Alejo was his first full score for the troupe—a refined work where repetition and silence mingle with luminous synthesizers and drifting melodic fragments. More structured than The Pocket of Fever, it balances modern composition with subtle inflections of Japanese tradition, evoking a sense of movement suspended between dream and reality.

Reissued for the first time on vinyl, the album includes a printed insert with an exclusive interview and photographs from Sugaya’s home in Japan. A vital rediscovery for admirers of Hiroshi Yoshimura, Midori Takada and Brian Eno, it captures a quietly radical moment in Tokyo’s 1980s experimental scene.

Tastemaker and cult figure among some, noise vendor among others… lurking somewhere in the shadows between London and Paris, the man known as Sheet Noise emerges out of the blue with his debut LP, Shostakovich's 5th Played Backwards in a Concrete Silo.

A direct shock to the system: equally beautiful and evil, abrasive yet uncomfortably calming. The feeling that something is about to happen at any minute—impending love or hatred blaring from the speakers at breakneck speeds. Heavy-duty, reactor-melted junglism; twisted samples buried under layers of dust and static; familiar voices in unfamiliar places.

This eight-track album is as intense as it can get. Don’t call it ambient. Don’t call it jungle. Don’t call it noise. Just strap yourself into the electric chair and get ready for the end.

Iconic PULSE DEMON design printed on the front

Bowed MERZBOW script on the back

Front & Back Silver Prints on Black T-Shirt

Limited edition of 100

T-Shirt brand: GILDAN

*300 copies limited edition* A sporangium (from Ancient Greek sporá 'seed' and angeîon 'vessel') is an enclosure in which spores are formed. It can be composed of a single cell or can be multicellular. Virtually all plants, fungi, and many other groups form sporangia at some point in their life cycle. Sporangia can produce spores by mitosis, but in land plants and many fungi, sporangia produce genetically distinct haploid spores by meiosis.

Sporangium is brand new "merzsoniks"! Equipments used by Masami: handmade instruments / contact microphones / various fuzz / distortion / glitch pedals / synthesizer... And many other soft & hard-ware to be discovered...

*199 copies limited edition* Aka Meme by Merzbow was first released on Music-Cassette in 1983 on Masami'a own label ZSF Produkt and on V2 Uitgave (a Sub-label of V2 Organisation). Tape was later re-released in other two editions but is long time sold-out and impossible to find. Finally OEC is going to re-release that special tape once more. This is Industrial-Noise from the very first era made by the master of Japanoise. Recordings are mixing many different sounds that range from: ritual-sounds / vocals / found-sounds / treated-guitar / many different rythms / noise.... and a wired and wide range of other bubbling & rumbling sounds! A total merzexperience!

Moritz von Oswald, who has created a foundation for deep interaction between authentic Jamaican dub and Detroit-style classic techno through his collaborations with Mark Ernestus, dub techno legend =Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, is creating ambient techno. Moritz Von Oswald Trio, a legendary trio teamed up with Max Loderbauer of Sun Electric, the pioneer of , and Vladislav Delay, a master of avant-garde electronic music from Scandinavia and Finland. Stock up on the first album "Vertical Ascent" released in 2009 from London's prestigious !

Ash Ra Tempel is the eponymous debut studio album by the Krautrock band Ash Ra Tempel. It features guitarist Manuel Göttsching with drummer Klaus Schulze and bassist Hartmut Enke. Engineered by Conny Plank it was recorded in March 1971 and released in June 1971 on Ohr Records. This 50Th Anniversary Album will be Released in Memoriam of all the Musical Contributors to this Release and on Manuel Göttsching´s MG.ART label. It´s the fourth and headlining edition in this series and was finalised, carefully overseen by Manuel Göttsching himself in the late Autumn of 2022. Much has been written about the record and band. Having finished a first musical chapter with their Steeple Chase Bluesband and still at very young age of only 17 and 18 years old Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke met Klaus Schulze. Together they started to write and and compose what, to many, became one the holy grails of Psychedelic Rock and early Electronic Music - the German variant which was later also named "Krautrock": Ash Ra Tempel´s self-titled first album "Ash Ra Tempel". "The trio of Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching and Hartmut Enke decided to abandon conventional composition and song writing, in favour of free-form improvising and developing a new musical language. As such, they became notorious for jams that could exceed 30 minutes." Says Discogs. "Some of these recordings can be found on Manuel Göttsching´s "The Private Tapes" releases", which will be re-released on MG.ART as well, following this edition. "Krautrocksampler" author Julian Cope mentioned it to be "… one of the greatest rock 'n' roll LPs ever made." (Julian Cope Presents Head Heritage | Unsung | Reviews | Ash Ra Tempel - Ash Ra Tempel". 15 March 2000.) AllMusic called the album "both astonishingly prescient and just flat out good, a logical extension of the space-jam-freakout ethos into rarified realms." Here we would like the Band to be heard, for what can easily be said as the first time in 50+ years, with the exception of some early Journalists for whom the young Manuel Göttsching wrote a statement of intent (the original text can be found inside this edition) as following: "Our musical concept is based on a combination of blues rock and delicate collages of electronic sound. These two elements should remain inseparable. And in their complex unity, the different musical philosophies of each musician find a common sweet spot. Our music is a permanently impulsive experience left to develop as it will, starting from a common fixed point of departure. This is where the difficulty of the music begins: No standardized formulation of our music can and should be possible. Only the constant reaction within the band can determine the musical result. And this requires constant listening with full concentration on the part of the creators. The idea of a particular musician will be - if flexible enough - absorbed by the others, transposed to their own instrument, and reflected back into the music as an individual contribution. This reciprocity within the band is then transferred over to the audience. And this process means that their reaction is not only a contribution to the end result; it actually makes them jointly responsible for the creation of the final musical product. … On our album, the track "Amboss" represents the first layer. Conventional instruments communicate familiar music which is in part expanded through electronic means. In the second track of the album - "Traummaschine" - the actual basic sound approach is dissolved into an electronic Nirvana which no longer allows the concrete identification of actual instruments. Innocent, virgin listening, free from any and every association, can finally begin - and the music can be absorbed and processed free from the limitations of categorization. That is the purpose of our music: To convey freedom without any predetermined criteria or traditions. Thank you for your attention." (Taken from the original A-R-T Bio 1970) Hartmut Enke, Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze aka. Ash Ra Tempel travelled to Hamburg in March 1971 to record their debut, with assistance of another Icon, legendary engineer Conny Plank. The rest is history.