MUSIC

Saltern’s latest offering marks the first-ever release of “lost minimalist” Terry Jennings’ visionary 1960 composition, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, as arranged in just intonation by legendary composer La Monte Young for renowned cellist Charles Curtis. Born in Los Angeles in 1940, Jennings was a close associate of Young, Terry Riley, and Dennis Johnson, and an early adopter of minimalist tendencies, creating slow, sustained music, influenced by jazz, modalism, and late romantic classical music. Jennings died tragically in his early forties, most of his work lost to a chaotic life; however, his forward-looking music quietly exerted a lasting influence on composers including Young and Harold Budd. Composed over sixty years ago, Piece for Cello and Saxophone, foreshadows a number of movements in postwar avant-garde music. Despite the title, there is no saxophone on this album. At over eighty minutes, La Monte Young’s justly tuned realization of Piece for Cello and Saxophone for cello alone unifies and extrapolates Terry Jennings’ dense harmonies, creating an extended field of complex sonorities in motion, all brought to life by the immaculate playing of Charles Curtis. The recording captures Curtis in a performance from 2016 reflecting more than twenty-five years of dedication to the piece.

Already sold out at the distributor. Einstürzende Neubauten, pioneers of German industrial music and unconventional in every way, defined their challenging and creative career by using junk metal, saws, tin drums, drills, hammers and many other unexpected instruments. A masterpiece from 1981! A legendary act that is not only one of the founding fathers of industrial music, but also one of the most highly influential in the sharp musical world where avant-garde music and rock intersect. A cathartic cascade of noise. A true masterpiece that remains a radical and extreme artistic statement even after the fall of the Berlin Wall. 12-page booklet included.

It was created for the "FORESTRO SUMMIT" event space held at Forest Limit in Hatagaya, Tokyo in January 011. The sound was selected from natural environmental soundscapes, sound effects, low frequency, electronic music, and experimental music. It is a 70-minute mix including silent time, which is connected to "SOMETHING IN THE AIR" in 2012, which I personally started to experiment with during this period. I tried to create a "sound prescription" worldview that is not ambient, experimental, new age, or healing, but rather a guide to the air and space, a "sound prescription" that you can listen to and feel with your free senses and imagination, while stimulating your perception to a good degree. It is a record of the first phase of the mind-drawing challenge to explore the space between music, song selection and mix arrangement. Ten years after the recording, we felt that the appeal of this mix could be better conveyed by listening to it on cassette tape. Compuma

Red/White two-color body cassette.
Limited edition of 200 copies.
All profits from this release will be donated to Ukrainian volunteer groups UAnimals and Save Pets Of Ukraine.

Artificial Dance founder Interstellar Funk releases Live At The Rest Is Noise - Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ. Limited to 150 cassettes, the recording documents Interstellar Funk’s performance at Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw concert hall in October 2021. The 45-minute set ebbs and pulses, leaving behind Interstellar Funk’s penchant for hard-wearing club sounds in favour of melody and texture. Some passages mirror elements from the studio album Into The Echo (Dekmantel, 2022), but the live setting allows Interstellar Funk to expand and explore richly detailed sonic spaces that highlight his skills as a composer-performer. Download card included.

Hajj’s Paris-based Dawn label delivers Modern Collapse’s debut album of dembow, drill and D&B tinted witch house-gothic. Leading down their unmarked path from Ronce’s frightening ‘Aquatics’ comp and the ‘From Dawn Till Dusk’ set that introduced us to Modern Collapse in 2021, ‘Usual Case Scenario’ serves to grasp the full scope of Gabriel De Sercey & Hugo Fabry’s slant on chthonic, contemporary club styles. To our ears they merge salient aspects of now-decade old witch house and ricocheting ballistics of ‘00s junglist breakcore with flourishes of ambient chamber classical and dembow that temper the emotions at the shadowy limen of club music’s sweatier peaks. The eight tracks are arranged with a underlying narrative thrust or arc that makes for an absorbing ride, bookending the session with particularly tender, cinematic parts of icy keys, vaporised vox and ambient subtlety, while the main body staggers between ruggedest UK-style dubstep (‘Gateway to Nihilism’), gothic chamber classical (‘Untold Subjects (Skit1))’, and scowling brukouts of dembow-rooted jungle/breakcore on ’Stolen Whispers in the Club’ and ‘Rush’.

Pow wow singer and Bon Iver collaborator Joe Rainey directs his astonishing voice thru industrial grit, widescreen orchestrals and chaotic DIY synth noise on "Niineta", his debut for Justin Vernon's 37d03d label. Completely singular music. Rainey was brought up in Minneapolis, with a heritage that links to the Red Lake Ojibwe - an indigenous tribe that has a sovereign state in northern Minnesota. And while he didn't grow up there, he long felt the pull of a culture that at various times has been blotted out by the USA. Rainey has been involved in pow wow singing since he was just five years old, and has performed in bands as well as building up an immense archive of field recordings. 'Niineta' is his debut album, but he's been performing for years - in 2016, he even brought Justin Vernon to tears during a festival show in Wisconsin. It was enough for Vernon to invite Rainey to contribute to his last album, and sign him to the 37d03d he runs with The National's Aaron and Bryce Dessner. The record is an example of how pow wow traditions can be synthesized into different forms without losing their musical core; Rainey's range and vocal style roots the album in tradition, but his production and willingness to experiment fires "Niineta" into the future. With help from Fog's Andrew Broder, Rainey has put together a distorted, abstract backdrop that happily ducks from jagged beatscapes into luscious orchestral cinematics without any unintentional jerkiness. The music is consistent with Rainey's pow wow tradition, but acknowledges decades of music that too often has sat distant. 'b.e. son' loops vocal phrases across each other over blown-out percussion and sweeping strings, and 'easy on the cide' foregrounds a beat that sounds rougher than gravel, Autotuning Rainey's lead vocal and contorting it evocatively. On 'no chants', a frazzled TR-808 kick booms beneath tape saturated pulses, creating a soundscape that's not a million miles from Kanye West's game-changing "Yeezus" - but this isn't homage, Rainey uses the distortion to hint at darker elements, a disturbance in his culture that's violent, deafening and charged with emotion. The album's lengthy finale 'phil's offering' is also its most impressive, building slowly over looped crackle that gives a rhythmic click to Rainey's unforgettable vocal performance - eventually the track disappears into an industrial blur as processed field recordings reveal Rainey's heritage. Trust us, this ain't like anything you've heard before.

By the end of their career Unwound were whispering their disgruntled musings over sinewy guitar lines into a bucket of lo-fi, but they initially skewered a far more hardcore sound, screaming and yelping their baby nihilism over crashing instruments and repeated noise bulletins. Fake Train proves it and Numero Group have reissued this piece of pissy brilliance for proof. If you didn't know by now: there are classics at either end of this band's discography.

As the rift between academic jazz, new age, and pop narrowed in the 1980s, DI.Y. practitioners of metronome driven riffs found new growth in a burgeoning managerial middle class, a commercial audience held captive in dentist offices and waiting rooms across America. Session players took to midi-banks stocked with every instrument imaginable and delivered on a road rage-induced demand to stay cool, relaxed, and focused all at once. The extra-wide cuts packaged here will be mint for years to come. Go ahead, break the seal on a fresh pack of Nuleafs. There’s only one sensation this smooth.
About the Cabinet of Curiosities:

For Numero, taking time to explore the more esoteric possibilities of our creative practice provides a deeper understanding of the resulting piece of work. This curatorial exercise, usually relegated to mix tapes and oddball DJ nights, has allowed us to see the connections between our most far reaching corners.

After years of whittling away at the art of compilation, this part of the practice came to the foreground, and an alternate view began to emerge. The outlines of a context beyond time and place, individual and scene. Threads sewn through the fabric of music history that tell a story primarily concerned with intentionality, psychic connections, and vibe.

To tell these stories an equally symbolic medium is required.

In order to create an object that can emote the value of the like minded yet distant relationships therein we looked to the world of commercial production running parallel to these musical subcultures. The treasure chest of artifacts made during the 20th century’s post-industrial free-for-all may be the only conceptually appropriate talisman for this music, the ability to bring the studio home was after all made by the same mechanism that brought on the consumer gold rush.

The consumer experience embodied by the secondary market, dog eared, footnoted, taken apart and tinkered with. The cabinet is a simulacrum of the lost and found. Our commercially nostalgic spirit-animal, redressed to be a more accurate representation of our emotional experiences with these objects. Less concerned with function than with the memories we associate with them.

The Cabinet of Curiosities is Numero’s tribute to the origin of the DIY museum, with our curatorial focus as always on the heroically home-made, the expanding fan universe, the suburban studio sublime.

Recordings of The pale faced family on the hill took place over a week in January 2020 in a small church hall on the outskirts of London. A small number of electronic music producers decided to form a collective and make heavy ambient music for raw pleasure in the agreement that their identity be withheld. They invited Oliver Coates as a live musician to contribute cello drone which they would then add to, process, subtract from and mix with weather recordings and esoteric ways of generating sounds, including old sample packs and whatever else they had to hand. The results were mixed down to tape live without further editing or arrangement. Wishing to work under a cloak of anonymity, the process freed the producers from their other lives and released output, allowing them to enter a new group alias, to induce heady states of sound and to become a group without hierarchies.

»Tides« marked a radical change in direction for Arovane. After Uwe Zahn had made a name for himself with cutting-edge IDM rhythms and slick ambient textures on a slew of releases, his sophomore album saw the prolific producer opt for a sample-based approach that resulted in a more organic sound and laid-back downbeat grooves. Having reissued Arovane’s seminal »Atol-Scrap« as a double LP in 2021, the Berlin-based Keplar label now makes »Tides« available on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 2000 through the legendary City Centre Offices. The new version has been remastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering and comes with a brand new cover artwork. It shines a new light on a release for which Zahn quite literally ventured into previously unknown territory — »Tides« is an album that emits a timeless, quiet calm and nonetheless stays constantly in motion. »The idea for the album came to me after a vacation in France«, says Zahn. Inspired by the landscape, especially the coastline and the sea, he made field recordings throughout his trip that were also used on the record, giving it its sensual feel. The foundation of the album however, the loose yet gripping grooves at the heart of every track, result from Zahn working extensively with samples. »I wanted to make use of drum sounds and small excerpts from old jazz vinyl records«, he explains. He maintained the unique sound signatures and rhythmic flutter of the source material while building intricate beats with them. Most of the material was culled from the record collection of Christian Kleine, whose spontaneous guitar improvisations over the first musical sketches were recorded and edited by Zahn and can be heard on four tracks. Also employing the occasional cembalo or spinet sound, he worked with a hardware sequencer and a delay to integrate the different, discrete elements into nine tracks that feel both dense and light at once. What’s astonishing still 22 years later is how spacious »Tides« sounds. This is due to the fact that Zahn not only paid close attention to the sonic idiosyncrasies of his source material, but also to what happened in between those sounds. »Mark Hollis’s solo album was a huge inspiration at that time«, says Zahn. »What I find fascinating about it until this day is how silence and the subtle hiss of the mixing boards were being used on that record.« Silence was also an important stylistic element on »Tides« and adds greatly to the overall atmosphere of an album that with the appropriately named »Theme« immediately sets the mood with intricate spinet melodies: Zahn opens a door for his listeners and invites them to follow him to see a specific part of the world through his very own lens. As a whole, the album mirrors Zahn’s trip that took him along the steep cliffs on a foggy day (»Seaside«), to an abandoned house in which he found old maps (»A Secret«), along the coastline during a long car ride (»Deauville«), to a sleepy village and the slowly moving sea (»Tides«) and finally back home to his native Germany where he started reflecting upon his experiences, ultimately deciding to translate them into music (»Epilogue«). »Whenever I listen to this album now, the images and memories it evokes are incredibly vivid and vibrant«, he says. It’s not hard to see — or rather hear — why. »Tides« may have been a deeply personal project, but it effortlessly evokes universal feelings by (re-)building an entire world in the course of only a few pieces of music.

Building on the promise of nearly 10 years testing limits within club music, Batu presents his debut album Opal. Experimentation is a well-established facet of Omar McCutcheon’s identity within the leftfield techno zeitgeist, but more than ever on Opal he seizes the opportunity to incorporate ideas beyond dancefloor impetus into his animated, forward-leaning sound. Through the course of 11 tracks, rhythmic forms are mutated and manipulated, sonic matter bends across the frequency range and narrative structures coalesce and dissolve according to Batu’s own internal logic. Unpredictability lies at the heart of all this music, bound together by a consistent modernist glint. It’s a sound intrinsically connected to the superlative string of club 12”s, EPs and collaborations Batu has spun behind him thus far, even as it moves into unfamiliar terrain, guided by abstract inspiration from coastal landscapes and the mineral matter all life on Earth is built on. On Opal the visceral production isn’t necessarily geared towards shock tactics. Instead, emotional depths are explored through melodic and textural forms which take on an elemental quality. It’s a space which can accommodate the explicit heart and soul of the human voice, as recent collaborator serpentwithfeet demonstrates weaving a mesmerising vocal through ‘Solace’, but it can also take in broad sweeps of interpretive landscape. There’s also room for small fragments of instrumentation, recorded by Memotone, processed by Batu and subtly threaded throughout the album. Balancing micro and macro in specific sounds as much as moods, Batu’s finely-sculpted work calls to mind the immensity of passing time cast in cliff faces, and the intimate personal growth we experience in our own lifetimes. Mimicking the iridescent stone it takes its name from, Opal refracts Batu’s distinctive artistic imprint, giving us a deeper, more revealing impression of the artist as he explores ideas bigger – and indeed smaller.

Previously unissued music by Alvin Curran. Collecting works recorded between 2018-2021 and a side-long epic dating back to the early 80s, as the title suggests, »Drumming Up Trouble« focuses on a hitherto almost unknown aspect of Curran’s encyclopaedic and omnivorous musical world: his experiments with sampled and synthesised percussion. As Curran’s wonderful, wildly sweeping liner notes make clear, his fascination with drumming belongs to the radical investigation of music’s fundamental elements that has marked his output since the beginnings of MEV, who aimed (as he says in a recent interview) to return 'in some collective way to a non-existent start time in the history of human music'. Whatever kind of music our proto-human ancestors played, he writes, 'drums were front and centre in the mix. Drums rule!' In a paradox typical of Curran’s approach, »Drumming Up Trouble« interrogates this most ancient dimension of music with contemporary technology. On the first side, we hear recent pieces performed using the sampling software and full-size MIDI keyboard setup Curran has refined since the 1980s. Two of them are wild real-time improvisations, primarily utilising an enormous bank of hip-hop samples. Building from polyrhythmic layers of drum machine fragments to wild cacophonies of clashing vocal samples, scratching, and frantic pitch shifting, these energetic and at times hilarious pieces occupy a space somewhere between John Oswald’s Plunderphonics, Pat Thomas and Matt Wand in the Tony Oxley Quartet, and the propulsive Kudoro/Grime fusion of Lisbon’s Príncipe label. They are improvisations are accompanied by two austere, minimal compositions realised in collaboration with Angelo Maria Farro: »End Zone« for orchestral bass drum and high oscillator, and »Rollings«, where a snare roll is gradually stretched and filtered by digital means into ‘floating electronic gossamer’. The incredible breadth of Curran’s output makes it pretty unlikely that a listener familiar with his work would be surprised to find it branching out in a new direction. But no degree of familiarity with his work can really prepare for side B’s epic and bizarre »Field it More«. It’s perhaps best to let the maestro describe this unhinged and infectious offering in his own words: ‘It features an 8 bar funky minimal riff à la James Brown, played on synth and an-out-of-tune piano, synced to a pre-paid patch on the Roland drum machine. Over this is laid a heavily processed track of the voices of dancer Yoshiko Chuma and movie-maker Jacob Burckhardt discussing an upcoming performance of theirs at the Venice film festival, capped by a track of my playing an increasingly out of control blues over the top of all of the above’. Only Pekka Airaksinen’s Buddhas of the Golden Light comes to mind as a reference point that might even vaguely compare to this wild home-brew of drum-machine funk, mad improvisation and squelching electronics, which eventually dissolved into a massive, layered cluster. Ancient and modern, synthetic and human, hysterical and rigorous, Drumming up Trouble is 100% Curran.

Swooping, sub-heavy sci-fi from Riz Maslen. Leda Maar is a new moniker for the established artist who’s released a crop of downtempo and electronic music as Neotropic and Small Fish With Spine, as well as collaborated with the likes of Future Sound of London, filmmaker Andrew Kötting, and featured in PSP-era Grand Theft Auto soundtracks. Mana’s long lasting love of Riz’s 1996 Laundrophonic EP, released under her Neotropic name, spurred this new release. That 12” was a deep and dark web of rhythm and ghostly urban found sound that one Discogs reviewer aptly named “coin-slot Dubstep”. With elements mostly sourced from tape recordings made in and of her local laundromat, it still stands out as a remarkably contemporary feeling work; more like a post-Fisher, post-hauntology observation of urban life from the last decade, taking the ambient temperature and undercurrent pressures of the 90s. Asking if she had anything in continuity with this slice of her discography, and describing our interest in her take on “space and bass”, Maslen returned to us with Stairway 13. Heavy-lidded and ethereal in long form, Stairway 13's balance of bass weight, mechanical metre, and darkly tinted new age feels like a cinematic re-approach to some of the textures, moods, and themes of Laundrophonic. Originally composed for an installation, Stairway 13 folds in her decades’ experience in sound design and theatre, along with shards and elements abstracted from her more recent folk-like music, zoning into a deep, retreated, altogether dreamlike and expansive atmosphere. The scale and soundscape is reminiscent of Geinoh Yamashirogumi and their Ecophony album series, resonating to similar frequencies and exploring themes of chaos and rebirth in feature-length form. Stairway 13’s four parts spread and swoop as single extended sides across this double LP. Carried by waves of sub bass and heavenly chorus, and later punctuated with autonomic clicks of machinery, whirrs, and pulses -sometimes reminiscent of FSOL’s weirder and more clipped staccato sampling in sections of their cyberpunk ISDN-the work forms a gothic, otherworldly ambience. A subtle space opera.

Runhild Gammelsæter and Lasse Marhaug are two Norwegian musicians/sound artists. Both started in the early 1990s music underground and have worked in many constellations with a wide range of collaborators. Despite knowing each other for a long time, Gammelsæter and Marhaug’s first collaborative work was the “Quantum Entanglement” LP in 2014. The album ignited a collective spark that both wanted to pursue further. Still, other commitments got in the way, and the project lay dormant until Stephen O’Malley, and Greg Anderson invited them to open for Sunn O))) for a special gig in the St. James Church of Culture in Oslo in the autumn of 2019. The two gathered for a long series of rehearsals, and after the successful performance, it was clear that it was time to start working on new compositions and recordings. That process initiated in late 2019 and continued to early 2021, encompassing before and after the world went through the lockdown. The result of this long development to be heard accumulated upon their new album “Higgs Boson” on Ideologic Organ Music. Throughout the profound process of creating “Higgs Boson”, Gammelsæter and Marhaug drew inspiration from various subjects and artists. For Marhaug, it was concepts informed by the structuralist experimental cinema of Japanese directors Takashi Ito and Toshio Matsumoto, futurist worlds of French comic book artists Philippe Druillet and Jean Moebius Giraud, landscape photography of Fay Godwin, Kåre Kivijärvi, and Tamiko Nishimura, amongst others. It became a metaphysical juxtaposition involving Gammelsaeter’s research and lyrical ideas based on several seemingly unrelated principles. A process of association inspired by “the Glass Bead Game” by Herman Hesse. The discovery of the Higgs Boson as a confirmation of the physical universe. The work of Ernst Schrödinger on the uncertainty principle. The four forces of physics. The Force. Helplessness under armed forces - as the war sailors in World War II. The influence of magic as expressed in tarot. Gammelsæter experiments with a boundary involving the thresholds amongst various states of focus and legibility by forensic experimentation with techniques such as exclusive expression of consonants, syllabic repetition, retrograde text vocalisations and multi-lingual layering. Her vocal inspirational sources include Sidsel Endresen, Diamanda Galas, Natacha Atlas, the choral works of Rachmaninov, and the bands Carcass and Grave. Two worlds coming together, making the music special. Mixing hard facts with science fiction helps create a kaleidoscopic cross point between the complex realities of the past and a possible future. “Quantum Entanglement” featured two long-form pieces centred around a prepared piano and layered voice, while “Higgs Boson” developed a much more elaborate and ambitious compositional work. Across eight parts, the two artists brought a broad palette of instrumentation and sound. Electronic and acoustic, objects and field recordings, and pipe organ define the structures of which the centre is Gammelsæter’s magnificent voice. She has become known for her legendary voice, with her vast and unique range of inflective techniques and affective colour through her 30 years creating music. In the mix, Lasse approached the instrumental elements like landscapes, then Runhild’s vocals as characters that inhabit those worlds. Often, Gammelsæter multiple characters fused with the landscape. Make them occupy space, sometimes blend into it, sometimes dominate it. Constructing and setting visual guidelines helps set focus and open possibilities. As an album, “Higgs Boson” is direct and focused, drawing on song structures. Within these tracks are vast strata of sound, an immersive multi-dimensional depth of music. Creating a feeling of depth while working with a flat two-channel stereo format - and how dimensions of texture and distortion can help develop the illusion of a space. The album structure is a story-like arc, a malleable subjective path, set as the album traverses oblique and suggestive areas, opening the concepts for the listener to unpack as they like. – exclusive consultation with Gammelsæter & Marhaug, edited by Stephen O’Malley, June 2022

12H is a two hours long summa of the very best material produced for the eponymous sound installation, specifically designed by Donato for the Music Bridge - Armando Trovajoli in Rome under the curation of MAXXI Director Bartolomeo Pietromarchi. The original piece translated in music the architecture of the bridge and its surrounding life, layering samples and field recordings in the language Donato knows best: the repetition, rhythm and harmony of different building blocks. The work was originally reproduced by 24 speakers spread along the bridge colonnade, escorting the visitor through different musical places in their crossing. It now takes its final stereo form in this continuous mix version: a dense, enthralling flow akin to Tiber’s murky waters. The original installation was set up by sound engineer Giuseppe Tillieci / Neel, a frequent collaborator of Dozzy in the “Voices from the Lake” project, with Funktion One support.

« Similar to a whale skeleton beached on Tiber’s banks, the Music Bridge connects two parts of the city that had been ignoring one another for centuries. On one side the slopes of Mount Mario dominate the CONI (Italian National Olympic Committee) sports fields where many masterpieces of Italian modernist architecture were built: Moretti’s Fencing Academy, the Youth Hostel, the Olympic Pool and later on the Tennis Stadium and the Stadio Olimpico. On the other side there is Quartiere Flaminio, with its theatre, contemporary art museum MAXXI and Renzo Piano auditorium. Donato Dozzy has converged sport and music in his sound installation for the Music Bridge, recounting the story of the two universes connected there. The work, originally presented in a 12 hours format, was a day-long journey through environmental sounds and Donato’s own melodies. In the new-found synthesis we present today we experience once again time and Tiber flowing together, from the crack of dawn until nightfall artificial lights. »
(Pietromarchi Bartolomeo, Director of MAXXI)

Few DJs and producers are as widely and universally acclaimed in techno circles as Italian Donato Dozzy. He has a rare ability to work his way into peoples’ minds in both contemporary and classical settings, conjuring real mood and atmosphere. Never one to pay heed to the zeitgeist, he prefers to deal in hypnotic soundscapes that really take you on a trip.

Enigmatic as he is, and laidback as he seems, as an artist he is constantly unveiling new work. Displaying a large variation in terms of sound and method across many new releases each year — some of which come on his co-owned label Spazio Disponibile — he also puts out installations for public spaces and museums, uses obscure musical instruments, collaborates with likeminded producers, classical singers or visual artists. Donato seems to continuously challenge himself on a creative level: whatever method he uses, though, he is always likely to permeate your cerebral cortex and rewire it in fascinating and compelling new ways. 

Dang-Khoa Chau aka Đ.K. gives up a self-released treat, sidewinding into psychedelic realms of radiant gamelan and slow, humid bangers, highly recommended if yr into ’Forest of Evil' period Demdike, early Shackleton, DJ Python. A pivotal presence in the Parisian scene thanks to his rounds for Antinote, L.I.E.S., Second Circle, and most recently 12th isle & Good Morning Tapes; Đ.K now takes matters into his own hands to issue some golden material, drawing on his South East Asian heritage and sultry, stylized nEuropean club music for a properly hypnotic seven track trip. In deep pursuit of atavistic urges, and modelled with electronic futurism, his ‘Gate Of Enlightenment’ calls up a spectra of spirits that invoke altered states; vocal swirls meet purposeful gamelan in ‘Enlightenment Process’, aligning for the deftly weight trample of ‘Middle Path’ with its mystic horns, and a slippery sort of dancehall swivel in ‘Sacred Creatures.’ ‘His ‘Day of Mourning’ makes room for contemplation with sound sensitive instincts heightened to unnerving degrees, while ‘Metal Frames’ yokes back to the ‘floor with something like an industrialised echo of the Ghost In The Shell OST, while the closing couplet see his percussive proprioceptions at their most devilish and immersive.

Marasma Vussa is the BrainChild of Antonio Feola a long standing figure on the london music scene, Antonio has been running the Fish Factory Studio in Willesden North London for over two decades now. Throughout the year he has had a major role in helping many of the current lead players of the London scene have a place to record and define their sound. Antonio's project Masmara has existed for over 30 years and here has found its place on record. Recorded on tape over time with some of the most sought after players in London and edited during the lockdown period, Vussa is an album of mind-bending deep, cosmic mediative jazz experiments. Boasting catchy melodies and heavy, heavy jazz breaks! - Fascinating gentle post-jazz from Vussa that’s not about propulsion and force, but rather the profound impact of stillness. - Bandcamp MARSAMA VUSSA LP is distributed by honestjons

Black Truffle is thrilled to continue its program of archival releases from Arnold Dreyblatt with a recently unearthed concert recording from Dreyblatt and Paul Panhuysen’s "Duo Geloso". While isolated examples of Dreyblatt’s collaboration with the legendary Dutch multi-media artist appeared on the CD reissue of Propellers in Love and Black Truffle’s wide-ranging archival Second Selection, this is the first release to document the variety and playfulness of the concerts that Duo Geloso performed throughout Europe in 1987-88. Both working across sonic and visual forms, fascinated by numerical relationship and the infinite complexity of string harmonics, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen had a natural affinity for each other’s work, strengthened through Dreyblatt’s many visits to Het Apollohuis, the important experimental art space Panhuysen helped to found in Eindhoven. However, as René van Peer suggests in the liner notes enclosed within this release, Dreyblatt and Panhuysen took very different approaches to these shared interests; the wonderful energy of these Duo Geloso performances results from the meeting of Dreyblatt’s more austere, compositional process with Panhuysen’s spontaneity. Recorded at a concert at Het Apollohuis in December 1987 (a series of beautiful photographs of which adorn the LP’s packaging), each of the six pieces presented here is distinctive in terms of instrumentation and performance approach. Using electric guitar and bass tuned by Dreyblatt and played using E-Bow and Panhuysen’s motorised plectrums, the opening ‘Razorburg’ moves slowly through a long series of held notes with a madly insistent tremolo that crosses Dick Dale with a mechanised take on the layered guitars of Günter Schickert. The same pair of instruments returns on ‘Duo for Guitars’, where the mechanised attacks dissolve into a harmonic wash, reminiscent of the machine guitar work of fellow Het Apollohuis alumni Remko Scha. On ‘Love Call’, the guitars and bass are accompanied by Panhuysen’s distant warbled vocals, familiar to Maciunas Ensemble listeners. On the remarkable ‘Synsonic Batterie’, Panhuysen begins proceedings with a solo barrage of electronic percussion on the Synsonics Drum Machine (a simple drum synthesiser produced by the toy manufacturer Mattell), joined eventually by Dreyblatt performing his signature percussive natural harmonics on pedal steel guitar. When Panhuysen adds his bird whistle to the mix, the performance becomes the perfect exemplar of the Duo Geloso’s unique mix of studious close listening and subtle absurdity. Presented in a gatefold sleeve with archival photos and illuminating liner notes from René van Peer.

Written, recorded & performed by Muslimgauze, this album was withdrawn by Bryn Jones, and replaced by the ‘Betrayal’ album in 1993. This is the album in its original form, as intended by Jones. The material was recovered from a cassette copy of the album as the original DAT was reused. ​ "Shekel Of Israeli Occupation' was never meant to be released. This is the only release of the album in its original form, as intended by Bryn. The material was recovered from a cassette copy of the album as the original DAT was overwritten with new material. Remixes of the tracks "Khan Younis", "Jerusalem Knife" and "Yasser Arafat's Radio" appeared on the album 'Hamas Arc'. The tracks "Caste" and "Amritsar" appeared on the album 'Satyajit Eye'. A version of "Drugsherpa" appeared on the mini album 'Drugsherpa'. Versions of the tracks "Khan Younis", "Drugsherpa", "Amritsar" & "Jerusalem Knife" appeared on the extended 'Drugsherpa' album."

olina project emerged at a time when CDJs became standard in clubs and artists from many disciplines began exploring their possibilities. In Lolina’s records and performances, they are used as a live sampling tool allowing her to move between composition and improvisation. On “Fast Fashion”, discarded vocal takes and phone recordings made while watching videos online or walking down the street are re-sampled across long-form collages. “Mark Ronson’s TED Talk Intro (Using Computer Remix)”, restyles a lecture about sampling and constructed of samples into a track that can’t be contained by any of its elements. Relaxed beats break down into stuttering, jokes turn into abstract situations, and meaning is altered through repetition. With transitions between different parts defining the listening experience, “Fast Fashion” reveals a process by which one thing can be changed into another. “Fast Fashion” is Lolina’s fifth album and first working with Deathbomb Arc. Digital to be released on Oct 27th with vinyl to follow in early 2022 ~ both on pre-sale now. Lolina previously released music as Inga Copeland and was a member of the band Hype Williams between 2009 — 2013.

The prolific shapeshifting artist known as Emma DJ is back on L.I.E.S. following his "FUSION" split lp from last year. His new nine track "Melon Siesto" lp is a deep dive into the warped world that is Emma DJ and his musical perversions. Mechanized soundblasts, tortured voices rising from the rubble, slowbeat mind destruction, and fast paced teeth grinding dance not dance make this album what it is. And what is it? Think about armor piercing bullets shot from close range with maximum blood splatter across your xxxl white tee while a tricked out Honda Accord side swipes your falling and now lifeless corpse and you're getting the idea. Limited to 250 copies worldwide.

Gassing the tempo and playing it loose & tracky as f*ck, Rat Heart’s 5th solo album in the space of 18 months twists his grimy kaleidoscope to spy a more manic, ruffcut batch of warehouse scrappers and basement brukkouts injected with levels of scuzz and blunted vocals. It’s an instant classic shot at the rise of cosplaying posh DJs, alongside thee rudest steppers and spannered grime. Aye, you’re in for a treat - Massive RIYL Michael J. Blood, H-Fusion, Demdike Stare, Actress, Laswell, Hints of this sound are strewn across Tom Boogizm’s gush of Rat Heart releases, but never quite so intently and single-minded as on ‘Ratty Rids The Clubs From The Evil Curse Of The Private School DJ’s’. Under that canny titular nod to Scientist’s classic album, he makes absolutely no bones about his antipathy toward the way dance music - traditionally a working class past-time - has been cuckooed and blanched by the British middle/upper class in the past decade (obvious correlations with 12 years of Tory dickheads?). To be fair, the politics aren’t overbearing - he’s not trying to be Wigan’s Chumbawumba - but they’re inherent to what makes him tick, and patently result in a brilliantly dare-to-differ sound. Taking a big lick of the salty chip, he comes off like MES meets H-Fusion in ‘A Poem 4 The Modern Day DJ Private School Online Activist’, before cycling thru some of his strongest uptempo shit, keeping toes off the ground between the ghettotech percs of ‘Stressss’, his outstanding rimshot stepper ‘Teeth Like a Burnt Fence M8’, and lip-bitingly tight hi-hat thizz on ‘Leigh via Hag Fold’, plus the Sockethead-adjacent ace ‘Yeye’ and a Devil mix style mutation ‘No Tick 4 Lads in V-Neck Shirts (Brave Lil Piggy Mix)’. There’s something else happening on this one too; a very specific je ne sais quoi that’s giving us momentary flashbacks to Laswell, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Gray’, even John Cale’s super distinctive production style on 'Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)’ - bits like the claggy ambient of ‘$hatterdance’ and hot-boxed grogginess of ‘Wot Happens if U Just Eat Crisp’ - all designed to ideally temper the flex.

Spiro World (or One Must First Become Aware Of The Body) is the definitive Time Wharp full-length coming of age collection. Unhinged to any particular music scene, Spiro’s (in reference to prescription drug spironolactone) unabashed yet vulnerable all genre album story by its Brooklyn-based artist Kaye Loggins describes somatically profound personal experiences of derealization, the endocrinological mixolydian heaven & pharma hell on earth, and love letters to New York. Imagining and creating futures can be frightening, joyous, difficult, effortless, inevitable.