MUSIC

RAW SPACE" is rooted in chaos and chance, sensuality and intensity - it's an album that's able to sound alarmingly freeform and tightly controlled simultaneously. Already established as a genre-disrupting DJ, and even dubbed "demon of the Nile" by Ugandan politicians after an exuberant performance at Nyege Nyege festival in September 2019, Kampala-based sonic hypnotist Authentically Plastic brings a digger's literacy, an activist's intent, and an artist's playfulness to their jagged debut album. As both a DJ and a producer, Authentically Plastic is drawn to the idea of chance as a creative tool - to push against the idea of the all-knowing genius, and approach artistry instead as a facilitator, unraveling parallel mismatched rhythmic events. Their musical process is to start with chaos, then attempt to mold those fleshy structures into polyrhythmic mutations, pulling influence from East Africa's innovative musical landscape and augmenting it with an exploratory sense of surrealism. On opening track 'Aesthetic Terrorism', rough-hewn industrial rhythms chug mechanically against course, dissonant synth blasts and acidic arpeggios. There's a faint sparkle of Detroit's chrome-plated Afro-futurism, but bathed in neon light, reflecting Africa's contemporary electronic revolution. Authentically Plastic's productions have a sense of thematic coherence, but their myriad influences are torched into cinders, leaving inverse impressions and ghost rhythms: the tuned overdriven clatter of 'Anti-Fun' echoes Ugandan kadodi modes, yet simultaneously mirrors the rugged out-zone grit of Container or Speaker Music; standout centerpiece 'Buul Okyelo' meanwhile is as rhythmically cross-eyed as Slikback or Nazar, but juxtaposes kinetic dancefloor thumps with chaotic microtonal ritual cycles. Writing "RAW SPACE", Authentically Plastic found themselves fascinated by sonic flatness. They realized that in Western art, there's an obsession with depth of field that carries into music, robbing it of intensity. The album is an example of the power that can be reclaimed when you let go of depth, letting sounds rub together carnally and spawn something fresh and unexpected

Big or profound sensations from small gestures which are carefully arranged. Using a mixture of sacred and profane, or classical and prosaic sound sources, knitted into intricate, fleet-footed compositions that virtually spring into the ear. Profondo Rosa is composer Ailin Grad’s first vinyl album following years embedded and loved in the Argentinian experimental music scene, with past treats on labels Krut, Sun Ark, Orange Milk Records and her own label Abyss, devoted to ‘connecting Latin Juke with the world’. There’s a playfulness at the heart of Profondo Rosa that’s immediately charming, with a sense of scale and spatialisation in the sounds being toyed with, exploring the strange pleasures and satisfaction in her approach to delightful and fresh feeling sound design. Aylu is known to be as likely to deploy the sound of a finger click, a fizzy drink being cracked open, or a fly buzzing past the ear, as she is drawn to sampling gorgeous strings or instrumentation. Her debut album for Mana constantly builds territories that tug at your heartstrings and then have you grinning five seconds later. This versatility and acceleration has often resulted in her music being compared to footwork, alongside collaboration with other producers experimenting in that sphere; in 2017 she and Foodman put together a dizzying hour of sounds for NTS. Her miniaturisation of rhythm and ringtone-like sample size could also bring to mind SND circa their warmer softer glitch Tenderlove phase, or perhaps the approach that Teenage Engineering take to designing tools for music making. Each are deriving pleasure from small and satisfying shapes, as well as advocating an object-oriented philosophy and minimalisation in their work that sidesteps a draining of colour. Sound is fun, and in Profondo Rosa it sounds like Aylu has that at the forefront of her mind. Her hyperreal sound and its link to the languages of electroacoustic or computer music are clear, but she outmanoeuvres many of the overly-academic and formless examples of those genres. Profondo Rosa’s skeletal assembly of objects becomes tunes in an elegant, almost understated way; tactile elements quickly combine and roll into deeper and persuasively emotional places. These compositions give off an air of being very free, very experimental, despite being meticulously artful and studied arrangements on precise and nimble coordinates.

Since his Beat Diary debut (a 12xLP box set comprising 365 beats recorded daily over the course of a year), Julian Sartorius has immersed himself in unique and ambitious projects - trekking the path not travelled to arrive at rhythmic life forms through found objects and prepared instruments. Equally as mighty are his two other escapades, the most recent being Locked Grooves - 112 beats cut as endless loops on vinyl spanning 56 dense 1.8 second compositions per side. Preceding that is his auditory hike into the mountains (Hidden Tracks: Basel - Genève), wading through and playing the landscapes around him like a lithophone. While Julian’s previous releases focus on innovative and conceptual approaches to realizing an album, his new venture on Marionette (titled Mux) is a culmination of all his efforts thus far to mimic a synthesizer and drum machine. This impossible feat challenges Julian to experiment and develop a musical language that bridges the gap between organic timbres and electronic music. When listening to Mux, one might simply forget that the seemingly electronic sounds are only constructed organically via hand movements. The common thread in all his works is that the drums are treated as resonant bodies - free to flow and form rhythm and harmony in spacetime. This is Julian’s second outing for the label, the first being (the long out of print) Sulla Pelle with Valentina Magaletti in 2019. Other collaborations include prolific artists such as Matthew Herbert, Sylvie Courvoisier, Gyda Valtysdottir, Dimlite, Shahzad Ismaily and Dan Carey (Speedy Wunderground).

Rainbow Disco Club and Rush Hour, a long-standing friendship that transcends continents! House, disco, new wave, Caribbean, rare groove, leftfield.. Antal compiles the second release on "Beyond Space And Time", loaded with personal choice cuts. Internationally recognised and much-loved festival from Japan, Rainbow Disco Club’s offshoot project "Beyond Space And Time" record label presents their sophomore release! Following the work by DJ Nobu, their second compilation has been compiled by none other than Antal. Also known as the festival's headliner and the man behind Amsterdam record shop/label Rush Hour, all 8 tracks are selected by Antal in a 2 x 12-inch format. From newcomers to '80s Japanese cult music, rare grooves to danceable house music, and rare Caribbean soul, this compilation is a portrait of music enthusiast Antal Heitlager’s enormous collection and 30-year DJ career, a work of art that can be enjoyed by all music fans! An afro electronics track recommended by South African collector DJ Okapi, who co-produced the masterpiece compilation "Pantsula!: Rise Of Electronic Dance Music In South Africa: 1988-90" released in 2017, which brought Kwaito back onto the map. A-1 Improvisation Organic Deep House track by New Zealand’s newcomer. A-2 A rare breezin' boogie by Larry Heard’s alias Trio Zero from 1989. Highly sought after by all collectors as a cult Balearic track. Previously unreleased version. B-1 From the 2015 album by L.A. funk maker DAM-FUNK on the prestigious Stones Throw label. LO-FI beats and synthetic breakdowns that are reminiscent of early Rush Hour works and ‘90s house. B-2 The debut single of Japanese idol unit, Shohjo-Tai. Haruomi Hosono also produced some of their tracks later on in their career. Japanese new wave disco from 1984. C-1 The soundtrack from the Japanese manga "Touring Express". RDC fans will recognize this track from the final hours of the festival. A nostalgic oriental disco from 1985. C-2 80s Silky Mellow Soul by Connecticut jazz vocalist Dianne Mower who also contributed to the re-press of the prestigious Numero Group. D-1 The original version is a masterpiece from 1983 by Zouk singer Jocelyn Mocka of French Guadeloupe. This edit still very much emphasizes an emotional mid-tempo Caribbean soul, nicely reconstructed by Rush Hour's Bonnefooi. D-2 A total of 8 tracks from all types of genres and generations, a true masterpiece and representation of Rainbow Disco Club’s vision “Beyond Space And Time”. Bringing you the love from Amsterdam to the world!

"may vast blessings of peace seek you. x many thanks to wildflower, santi, and villi" all music production and vocals - victoria m. 'what a joy' mastered by brandenburg mastering <3

Andy Stott’s radical 2011 bonecrusher returns on its first new pressing for almost a decade, still screwing the dance and heads like nothing else with its lo-sprung suspended takes on boogie dub and claggiest rhythmic thumpers.
The sludgy, slow-motion slug of ‘Passed Me By’ marked a pivotal point when Stott swam against the grain of prevailing currents of the post-dubstep era’s turn toward garage-techno and UKF- inspired percussive house. Working loosely adjacent to a then emergent witch-house sound, Andy screwed templates associated to Salem and Holy Other into a more muscular, thrumming style
of drug chug more in key with early Actress, arriving at his own distinctive sound that sent us reeling.
Between the intoxicating, syrupy gnarrr of ‘New Ground’ with its Proustian vocal motifs, and the head-wobbling Pennine weather system compressions of its titular curtain closer, it’s a stone cold classique; eliciting heads-down, wall-banging reactions in the side-chained thrum of ‘North To South’ and a lip-biting MDMA-buzz come up with the Thriller funk of ‘Intermittent’, while sore thumb ‘Dark Details’ gives shivering flashbacks to warehouse brukouts and ‘Execution’ curbs the high with a K-holing drag.
Delivering a narcotic, keeling dose of nostalgia that slings us back to late hours in the office
and blunted afters with the goodest kru, ‘Passed Me By’ was one of those records that made us reassess pretty much everything else around at the time, practically forcing us to play other stuff on the wrong speed if we wanted to DJ with it, or more simply letting it run and and slowly shift temporal perceptions and paradigms in the process. Ye ye we’re biased and all, but it’s the fucking GOAT.

Mark Fell & Gábor Lázár’s masterclass in shearing computer hyperfunk is one of its decade’s best; a peerless exploration of displaced dancefloor meter and warped chromatic tone, with mind and body-bending results. Finally re-issued in new artwork to sate demand. Still in a zone of its own, ‘The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making’ is the result of Mark Fell’s trip to Budapest in 2014, where he and his acolyte, Gábor Lázár practically unravelled the vernacular of contemporary computer and club musics and re-stitched them into brilliantly new & devious designs. Decimating elements familiar to 2-step, footwork, electro, flashcore and f*ck knows, they arrived at a mutual conclusion of sleekly turbulent minimalism in 10 jaw-dropping permutations that dance in the integers of rave music. In the process they effectively re-programmed limbic and motor systems in-the-moment with a wickedly diffractive sense of rhythmic anticipation and shockingly crisp sound for a pinnacle of modern experimental dance music. With benefit of hindsight, we can now hear this album as a watershed moment for both artists, and this style of production. Since its release, Mark has notably moved away from the sound to work with acoustic instrumentalists, while Gábor has firmly picked up the baton and run with it on the likes of 2018’s ‘Unfold’ album, and more recently ‘Boundary Object’ with Planet Mu. It’s not hard to hear it as a logical peak of Mark’s practice in this mode, solo and with SND, as much as a springboard for Gábor’s future work, while also catalysing a new wave of operators ranging from Rian Treanor to Kindohm, Kirk Barley’s Church Andrews, and Rhyw, who’ve all harnessed these sort of energies to their respective wills. No doubt the tunes still scare the shit out of DJs with their spasmodic flux, but brave cnuts will recognise the genius on show and let instinct kick in, finding proper club shockers in the slippery 2.1 step whorl of ‘Track 2’ and the scudding dancehall accelerationism of ‘Track 6’, while advanced adventurers will get theirs in the greased straightjacket laser-intensity of ‘Track 7’ or the devilish dexterities of its closing 12 minute zinger. It’s all just blindingly strong stuff for insatiable ravers and computer music neeks alike, properly future-proofed by its makers’ unyielding tenacity and visionary ingenuity.

Following releases for The Tapeworm and 12th Isle, Christos Chondropoulos lands on The Death Of Rave with this incredible album of "Athenian Primitive” riffs on ancient Greek music and proto-techno prisms, highly recommended if yr into Paul DeMarinis, Rashad Becker, Jonathan Bepler’s soundtracks for Matthew Barney, Black Sabbath or Aphex Twin. Continuing Christos’ singular fascination with, and reappraisal of, Ancient Greek modes, ’Relics’ further excavates the deeptime topography of Greek music prior to the ban of “oriental” or 1/4 tone microtonal modes nearly 100 years ago. Clandestine, euphoric, hyperreal and otherworldly; it takes shape as faintly familiar forms of new age folk, avant-techno and metal musicks, but with an alien appeal that treats the past almost like another planet, never mind a foreign land. Christos studiously raids the past for lost treasure, navigating his tuned instincts as an improvising percussionist, and lover of non-Western composition, to create a uniquely absorbing soundworld that resembles an AI’s dreams after ingesting encyclopaedia entries on thousands of years of Greece prior to 1936. In the process, the album acutely questions his and our relationship to the past, and what has become lost in translation with reliance on prelaid templates and the “wisdom” of elders. Bursting to life with the iridescent arps and new age AI chorale of ‘First Love Fereter’, and concluding with bone-clacking raverie of ‘Jungle X’, the album offers a stunning advance of the themes and aesthetics in Christos previous records, from the self-released free jazz of ‘Fingerpainting’ (2013) to 2021’s 12th Isle released ‘Athenian Primitivism.’ Thanks to meticulous detailing, ‘Relics’ allows a finer play of textured light and almost tangible - yet entirely generated - voices into his music: most strikingly on the sublime songcraft of ‘Regret’ and ‘I Dream Of You’, while the likes of ‘Asham’ are bathed in deeply uncanny atmosphere, and his percussive proprioceptions are most heightened in the delirious battery of ‘War Horns’ and ‘Sacrifice’, with ‘Cyber Crust’ calling up demonic, cthonic pagan spirits resembling Black Sabbath undergoing regression therapy.

Andy Stott’s ultra-classic bout of screwed, knackered House is a shapeshifting, hardy perennial whose crushing traction and atmospheric grip has only deepened in the decade (+1) since it was first issued, as part of a now notorious one-two in 2011 beside ‘Passed Me By’. Out of print for almost a decade, it’s now finally available again in a new edition that’s still sounding unlike pretty much anything else we’ve heard in the intervening years. ’We Stay Together’ was a proper watershed moment for Andy Stott in the nascent phase of an inspirational stylistic arc. While he’d spent the previous six years constructing everything from warehouse-shuddering deep house and dub techno to bare-boned dubstep, the arrival of a new decade paid witness to Stott turning inward, collapsing what he’d learnt from late night sessions with the Modern Love crew into a radical new sound that was arguably without precedent in its field. The simple move of screwing the tempo to circa 100BPM would, in turn, open out his sound, prising room between the rhythms which he coloured with a palette of particularly bruised, processed outside-the-box textures gleaned from an array of guitar pedals and endlessly churned samples. There were, of course, parallels in DJ Screw’s codeine-infused treatments of classic rap and soul, and their influence on the contemporaneous “witch house” style, but few, if any, were doing it within a techno and club music context that hewed so close to the darker, gristlier underbelly and animus of Manchester’s warehouse heritage. This style of viscous, cranky chug proved fertile ground that would be explored in-depth over the next decade - you can hear traces of it on everything from Overmono’s sludge to Low’s acclaimed 'Double Negative’ - and trust when we say it’s the source of it all. But, still, nothing twats quite as smart or heavy as ‘We Stay Together’. From an opening that uncannily echoes the rinsed-out empty warehouse scenes in the closing stages of ‘Fioriucci Made Me Hardcore’, the serotonin-depleted ’Submission’ triggers a side-chained momentum that helplessly drags users thru the gnarly mire of ‘Posers’ to the zombied lurch of ‘Bad Wires’ and its title tune’s ket-legged strut. He pushes the aesthetics to asphyxiating degrees on ‘Cherry Eye’, but not without a glimmer of hope in its underwater choral motifs that always buoys his best bits from utter doom, before ‘Cracked’ stresses the metallic tang of his textures with a bloodlust and vital, systolic throb whose effect has only been galvanised with age. With the benefit of hindsight, ‘We Stay Together’ surely ranks among the best of its strange, pivotal decade. There’s really nothing else quite like it.

Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth exists first as a curator's fancy – in this case from Oslo's Ultima Festival for contemporary music in 2014. The idea was to give revered Norwegian experimental electronic musician Helge Sten, aka Deathprod, access to seminal avant-garde composer Harry Partch's self-designed, custom-made, specialized, invented instruments – an orchestra tuned to just intonation, using up to 43 intervals instead of the standard 12 for the most commonly used Western equal temperament. An artist with a 30+ year career and an uncompromising reputation that reflects the emotional specificity of his uneasy, yet compelling sound, maintained throughout his expansive discography, Sten was an intriguing choice for such a project. Although he attended art school, training in electronic music and sound art, he had little experience with acoustic instruments and can neither read nor write music notation. Yet he's been engaged with Partch's music, and outsider art more generally, since he was a teenager. His resulting piece/composition for the project was originally intended only for performance by Cologne-based Ensemble Musikfabrik, for a series of concerts in five European cities between 2015 and 2018. It's Musikfabrik that undertook the painstaking, expensive process of building an entire set of the composer’s creations – the second only to the originals built by Partch himself. They are the professional musicians and virtuosic instrumentalists that had to re-train and re-educate on these unknown and experimental sound sculptures in non-standard tunings. And they house this large, gorgeous physical instrumentarium and deal with the enormous logistics of working with it, sometimes shipping the fragile pieces to other locales via semi-trucks or ships. Because of such monumental efforts, Musikfabrik are notoriously guarded with recordings of the instruments. And rightly so. They're the only ones allowed to perform on them, too. But Sow Your Gold isn't Musikfabrik playing. Instead, Sten spent days and nights alone with the instrumentarium in Cologne. He played the instruments himself while recording, layering the recordings and editing without effects to compose an 'audio score' for Musikfabrik to work from in order for the ensemble to perform the piece. (Partch also regularly worked this way, although he would transcribe afterwards. Likewise, Sten worked with a professional arranger to create a detailed score, too.) So, that makes Sow Your Gold an even less likely rarity – partly why its release comes seven years after its creation. If you ask Sten about the album's title, he’ll point you to the text he borrowed it from – Michael Maier's Atalanta Fugiens by H.M.E. De Jong, a 1969 study of a 1617 book of alchemical emblems – and notable passages dealing with alchemy, chemistry, and agriculture, all transformative processes. And while that may sound complicated, his takeaway is simple: "You have to break something down to create something new," – a lesson he felt related strongly to his own musical process, especially in this project. So, while Sow Your Gold in the White Foliated Earth is a piece written for specific, oddly tuned, extremely rare and unusual instruments, and for a certain ensemble – namely, some of the finest contemporary musicians in Europe – Sten grew fond of the audio score, recognizing it as coming directly from the creative process in its purest, most natural form. And so from a foliated earth, where obscure tradition, treasured scarcity, immense effort, and patient certainty layer and criss-cross, comes rugged gold, polished to shining by one outsider for another.

We are putting 3 past albums by Detroit dub techno artist Deepchord onto Bandcamp. Here we have 'Auratones' - a foray into deep, organic, cinematic dance music. Shimmering, watery, brain hemisphere synchronization tones caress and melt stress away. Dance floor friendly tracks that work equally well in one’s private listening space. Synesthetic sounds trigger sensory experiences in cognitive pathways other than hearing…smells of perfumes, thoughts of colours, and altered perception of time and space. Psychoacoustic, cerebral, electronic listening music for those wanting a different experience than the current harsher, darker dance trends are offering. Recorded during April - June 2016 in Barcelona Spain, then further mixed / processed / assembled in Port Huron Michigan early 2017.

NAFF013 ∞ the Pearl ∞ Sensational x Planteaterz The Pearl is a collaboration between Planteaterz and the mercurial NYC rap-mystic, Sensational. The EP features four songs recorded in the winter of 2021 with Sensational on the mic and eaterz on production, and is accompanied by instrumentals and killer remixes by Maara, J. Albert, and Lowjack. The Pearl is a sound, a world, and definitely a vibe. We’re pleased to share the fruits of this collaboration with you here.

Oddball Fantasies is more than pleased to welcome Cheb Runner for its second release. His Moroccan roots remain omnipresent in this perfectly balanced blend between traditional Raï elements & the irresistible sound of the 80s underground. When old meets new, those who resist to dance, shall be few!

“Art is awe, art is mystery expressed,” writes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. “Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt.” The central mysteries of Smith’s ninth studio album, Let’s Turn It Into Sound, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we’re feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand? For Smith, a self-described “feeler,” the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let’s Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot. “The album is a puzzle,” Smith says. “[It] is a symbol of receiving a compound of a ton of feelings from going out into a situation, and the song titles are instructions to breaking apart the feelings and understanding them.” The energized “Is it Me or is it You?” comes from traversing the gaps between how you see yourself and how another might see you, through a filter of their own projections. The hushed sense of revelation that brackets “There is Something” refers to the feeling of walking into a room and being subconsciously aware of the dynamic present. All the while, Smith interprets these feelings through sound. This auditory interpretation process, driven by earnest curiosity, led Smith to record some thoughts and questions that popped up along the journey in Somatic Hearing—a booklet which accompanies the album. Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her. Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller. By acknowledging these characters, she was acknowledging her whole being: the woven plurality of self, the complex process of noticing and resolving inner conflicts, and the joy of finding harmony in flux. “I started to feel so embodied by all of these characters. This is all the felt, unsaid stuff [my inner community] wants to communicate but it doesn’t have the English language as its form of communication, and so [this album was a form of] giving space to let it talk and not judge it and just let it play.” By not adhering to expected song structures, each song feels even more like a conversation, with each character getting to express themselves in full. Smith has never fit neatly into the ambient genre conversation she’s most often associated with, and here she forges even further outside of it, traversing avant-garde pop, neoclassical, and the otherwise unclassifiable. The result is a playful, inquisitive, excitable work which appeals to us as social, sensitive animals, and invites listeners into a wholly idiosyncratic world that is both experimental, and, feels like the most human thing in the world. Proceeding through Let’s Turn it Into Sound is like peeking into a secret realm: one that delights both in the discovery of the magic hidden in the everyday, and the shimmer that lingers long after the portal itself shuts.

Multi-media mystic Andro Gogibedashvili aka Saphileaum’s latest slate expands his “spherical ambient” lexicon into increasingly celestial terrain, inspired by visions of galactical oases, sparkling starscapes, and elemental serenity. Ganbana takes its title from a Georgian word for ‘cleansed by water,’ which aptly characterizes the album’s six liquid-tribal compositions. Rolling oceans of hand percussion flow below soothing swells of electronics, streaked with ocarina, insects, and sitar. Snippets of mantric voice occasionally cut through the devotional trance but otherwise Saphileaum’s world is one of solitude and ascent, attuned to a time and space outside our own, where “a second is a century, and a century a second, as the waterfall of cosmic nectar is poured over your being.”

Human Pitch is proud to welcome Seoul-based duo Salamanda to the label for the release of their third LP ashbalkum - a portal into unseen worlds, enchanting stasis, & laughter in the face of our evolving realities. Across an effervescent 39 minute runtime, ashbalkum provides a spellbinding view into how we interact with the world around us - one where one’s own being, language, & nature itself are all rendered infinitely mutable.

Written during the surrealist landscape of summer 2021 somewhere between a sweet dream & a beautiful nightmare, ashbalkum accesses a playful tranquility that mirrors our tumultuous present - distantly intimate, static & constantly changing, moving while standing still, all the while narrowly evading the pressures of our pre-apocalyptic world looming just overhead. Through their collaborative energy steeped in joy, friendship, & experimentation, Salamanda transports us towards even further surreality - taking their sound to wholly new frontiers  while aiming to just have fun creating together & living presently.

ashbalkum’s namesake stems from symbolic & phonetic reinterpretation - specifically, a Korean phrase for the realization that what you’ve been experiencing as “reality” is actually a dream. The transmutation of this humorous existentialism into new meaning forms the core of ashbalkum - blissfully maneuvering through life, basking in irreverent states of lucidity, & attuning all frequencies to fellow dreamers within the dream.

Do dreams always reflect what we think? Is what we feel within dreams real?

Ultimately, Salamanda don’t seek to answer these questions, so much as revel in the delightful liminality of it all.

“Weaves impressions of ancient stories with modern sounds… Every detail and twist passed down through the generations [with] a deep spiritual resonance” Pitchfork “Like experiencing the glacial lassitude of a one-hour raga compressed into four-minute movements....A self-assured and challenging collection” The Guardian Hailing from Baltimore, Punjabi-American sitar player, songwriter and ambient musician Ami Dang unites the disparate worlds of Indian classical music and dreamy synth-infused song composition on beguiling new album The Living World’s Demands. Envisioned as a lament to the challenges to which humanity has subjected the world and itself, Ami Dang’s newest album builds on the floating, blissful ambience of 2019’s Parted Plains and the vocal-led, pop structures of 2020 collaborative release Galdre Visions (a bona fide ambient supergroup also featuring Green-House and Nailah Hunter). The Living World’s Demands is an immensely evocative and expressive collection, just as complex, nuanced and precious as the living world in its title. Within are themes of trauma, survival, resistance, desperation and righteous vitriol, responding to greed, fear and injustice, yet the music is often euphoric, disarming and breathtakingly beautiful. Lilting sitar lines sparkle about an unpredictably broad spectrum of synthesis; Indian classical percussion rattles and snakes through its drum programming. And atop, Ami’s astonishing singing voice - with lyrics of English and Punjabi - deftly weaves her two worlds together with silken threads of both contemporary and traditional textures. Amrita “Ami” Kaur Dang has studied North Indian classical music (voice and sitar) in both New Delhi and Maryland, and she also holds a degree in music technology & composition from Oberlin College Conservatory of Music. Following in the footsteps of artists like Ravi Shankar and Philip Glass, she seeks to advance the sound of contemporary experimental, pop, and electronic music with the sounds of South Asia—through vocals and sitar, ragas, and sampling. She has collaborated with Animal Collective, William Cashion (of Future Islands), James Acaster, Thor Harris—to name a few. She has performed onstage with Beach House, black midi, Grimes, Lower Dens, Florist and more. The Living World’s Demands is a co-release between Phantom Limb and LA’s Leaving Records.

AE-30 is both a film and audio album of the 2021 Sam Gendel x Roland AE-30 / Aerophone / Pro Digital Wind Instrument documentary. In August, musician Sam Gendel and filmmaker Marcella Cytrynowicz traveled to Iceland and filmed Gendel performing the instrument in unique locations outdoors around the country - most locations remote and accessed only via their friend Viktor, a search-and-rescue volunteer for Iceland who expertly navigates the country's challenging terrain in his modified Toyota Land Cruiser. The full documentary film and audio companion album will be released December 8th 2021 via Leaving Records.

All Genre artist & beatmaker in anonymity Droopy Eye debuts the full-length album Embruja. After nearly a decade of exchanging genre-fluid demos and audio email attachments with Leaving Records founderperson Matthewdavid, Embruja surfaces as the perfect anomaly with playfully aligned experimental sonic & philosophical influences that include Terence McKenna x Underground UK Dance Music Culture, and The LA Beat Scene.

Eagerly awaited yet patiently bubbling under the surface, UwU dust bath emerges with its primal offering, a deeply generous and authentic sonic array from low-key prolifics Purelink. Despite the Chicago trio’s humbly mysterious presence, the transcendental music speaks resoundingly. UwU 001 is rooted in the group’s most sincere and early jams; exuding an innocent magic almost impossible to recreate, tranquil effervescence of the highest nature; three otherworldly originals harmoniously colluding with an intercontinental all-star cast of remixers. xphresh (special guest DJ & Ben Bondy), Low Flung & Nice Girl each respectfully contributing to the synonymous mutual (& virtual) affiliation, kindredship and vision entrenched in the UwU ethos. An immersive sense of bliss exudes from even the initial vibrations of the A side. Soaked in textural pleasure, Butterfly Jam feels suspended; gloriously hovering with organic ebb and flow. Preparing to bloom, the harmonic design starts to flourish, thriving together with rhythmic and dynamic nuances to form a mesmerizing spherical habitat. Fantasize the interior of a bubble with Fine Pink Mist, effortlessly floating and entirely balanced; rich, assured subs anchor the glistening percussive texture and pads, providing a soft bed for experiments in melody and tone; hypnotic movement propelling throughout. The concluding original Dozen Sunbeams evokes a dance of flickering light, dynamically subtle motion maturing in each voice. Everything has a perfect place; an evolving trademark of Purelink’s delicate, yet deliberate, chillout ecstasy. Each track is thoughtfully paired with a complimenting remix on the B side, preserving and echoing the ethereal essence while adding a personally inspired touch, nurturing fresh existence and perspective. Arguably the most unforeseen plot twist comes via xphresh (Special Guest DJ & Ben Bondy), causing Rih✫nna’s notoriously iconic vocals to drip like honey, seeping into the fuzzed post-dancehall daydream; a sunkissed celebration. Low Flung carries the brightly burning torch, contributing a deep-haze rendition which exhibits elevated harmonics and pulsing drum delays, tripped out extraterrestrial heaven. Lastly, Nice Girl’s semi locked groove percussion heavy mix plants our feet firmly back on earth; infectiously spirited and euphoric like the original, the luminous stabs glow alongside a bulked out beat and vocal whispers - witness the transformation to full dancefloor status. In case you aren’t fully satisfied, the Good Girl No Infringement Dub comes as a digital treat, stripped back sublime and mesmerized. UwU dust bath is inaugurating its anticipated catalog with pure, unadulterated aural alchemy. The synergy throughout this entire release reveals an unspoken affinity and divine love language between the label and artists that can translate to how we feel and absorb music, its sound and a subconscious sense of intimacy and connection.

Once again Studio Mule dives deep into the music history of Japan, unearthing the multi-colored album “A-Key” by Eiki Nonaka, released as CD only on the short living japanese label Sun & Moon Records in 1995. An album, that uniquely unifies global ethnic music styles, the playfulness of Jazz, innovative electronic soundscapes, and the winding per-sonality of spiritual music. It’s the only solo album of a musician, that is triggering the advanced electrified japanese music culture since the early 1980ees. Eiki Nonaka was part of electronic New Age quartet interiors, releasing the two minimalistic, synth-pop leaning albums “Interior” and “design” in 1982 and 1987. likewise, he was a member of Haruomi Hosono’s band friends of earth, playing, voicing, and tuning the drum machine, guitar, synthesizers, and mi-crophone on their second landmark experimental Pop Electronic album “Sex, Energy and Star”, released Hosono’s outstanding non-standard label in 1986. His one and only solo album “A-Key” features the essence of all his musical journeys until 1995, bringing, as he puts it on his blog http://www.viewz.jp, “all my musical career up to that point designed in sounds that were ringing in my head at that time. It's extremely introspective, but the various mental landscapes of that time are still vibrating fresh and acoustically new.”

Brunhild Ferrari's Stürmische Ruhe, her first duo with Christoph Heemann. "A legendary figure in underground music, Heemann has quietly produced a unique body of work since his beginnings with the absurdist cutups of H.N.A.S. in the mid-1980, including collaborations with Merzbow, Organum and Nurse With Wound, the eerie psychedelia of Mirror (with Andrew Chalk), In Camera (with Timo van Lujik) and Plastic Palace People (with Jim O’Rourke), and the precise cinema pour l’oreille constructions of his solo works. Created together in Ferrari’s Parisian studio (once shared with Luc) between 2011 and 2014, Stürmische Ruhe is a single half-hour piece that folds rain and storm recordings into a intricately woven fabric of haunted electronics, unexpected edits and disorienting processing."

This is the long-awaited debut album from the mysterious producer Pretty Sneaky, who has been releasing singles on her own label under the same name as "Mana," which has been distributing high-profile releases from Luc Ferrari and Nicolas Jaar under the distribution by Honest Jons. This is a double-pack from an up-and-coming producer who is rumored to be an alias of SHED, who has been releasing only stamped label albums with no information at all, and is also known for his work on Ostgut Ton and Delsin. This is a good release that showcases his lustrous dub techno/ambient sound amidst the tropical scent of birdsong and nature sounds collected from the jungle. Mastered and cut by Duplates & Mastering. Mastered and cut by Duplates & Mastering. Artwork by Matthew Kent, the label's owner.

Shadowy London duo Two Shell continue mischievously subverting and twisting the norms of UK bass on their third EP ‘Icons’. Although the overall feel of these five tracks is one of stability - accelerated vocal samples, synths pinging around all over the place, post-Joy Orbison bass heavy techno - the results are uniformly pulse-raising and intense. For fans of Bicep or Jamie xx.