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Texas-born, Maui-based musician and producer Jesse Peterson aka Turn On The Sunlight's new LP via Music From Memory. "Originally formed in New York in the late 2000s, Turn On The Sunlight has evolved into a fluid, location-spanning practice rooted in collaboration, intuition and process. Now based on Maui, Peterson’s work draws together a wide network of musicians and environments, with recordings taking shape across Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, San Miguel de Allende and Haʻikū. Loosely situated within a framework of organic, ambient-leaning jazz, 'Iseo' unfolds as a series of open, exploratory pieces, with electronics sitting subtly beneath acoustic and environmental elements. Built from layered instrumentation including synthesizers, guitar, zither, flutes, voice and field recordings, Peterson moves between grounded, tactile detail and more expansive, immersive states. A sense of warmth and permeability runs throughout: organic percussion, environmental textures and drifting rhythmic elements lend the record a gently saturated humidity, reflecting Peterson’s base in Hawaii, where the presence of nature is felt as much as it is heard. Underlying the project is a way of working rooted in gathering, listening and tending. Instruments, ensemble sessions, field recordings and everyday environments are approached with attentiveness, shaped through collecting, refining and allowing things to settle. Relationships, landscape and lived experience shape the sound, giving 'Iseo' a tactile, almost hand-made quality. Rather than fixed arrangements, the album feels as if it has been organically and lovingly assembled through a process of listening and response, each element finding its place within a wider, evolving whole. This approach reaches a natural centre point in the 15-minute piece 'Medianoche En La Calle Aurora', which unfolds patiently, bending through shifting environments as motifs and textures emerge and dissolve with quiet continuity. Peterson’s role as both instigator and facilitator is central to the project. Bringing together a diverse group of collaborators including Carlos Niño, Mia Doi Todd, Laraaji, Ko Ishikawa, Luis Pérez Ixoneztli and Miles Spilsbury, he creates space for individual voices to emerge within a shared language. The result is a music defined by openness and generosity. 'Iseo' takes its title from Peterson’s son’s middle name, a word that can be understood to mean ‘one-world life’. The piece itself takes the form of a gentle lullaby, its melody loosely shaped around the syllables of his name and sung to Peterson’s son by Luis Pérez Ixoneztli, a close collaborator whose presence across the record reflects a long-standing relationship that extends beyond the music itself. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis."
Mu-inspired space cadets KiF Productions livicate their play of Japanese environmental ambient electronics, Hassellian 4th world, the KLF’s ‘Chill Out’, and Eno-esque harmonic perfumes, to the dearly departed Keith McIvor. "Passiflora (Passifloraceae) is a genus of around 550 species of flowering plants, native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. The Passion Flower is a plant of improbable beauty - its blooms almost too intricate to be real, its climbing habit a quiet kind of determination. It has been used for centuries as a remedy for anxiety and sleeplessness, something that slows us and the world around us down. Fresh from last year's triumphant debut by KiF; Still Out, Passiflora, the album, follows the plant from its very beginning. It opens in darkness - 'Secret of the Seed', dormant, waiting - before the first tentative stir of 'First Movement' and the long, instinctive reach of 'Seeking Light'. From there, the journey unfolds with the patience of something that has no choice but to grow: drinking, climbing, flowering. 'Song of the Vine' carries the plant's quiet insistence upward, while 'Florescence' and 'Pollination Dream' catch it at its most open - that brief, extraordinary moment of full bloom. Then the turn. 'Fruiting (Slight Return)' and finally 'Return to Earth' - the cycle completing itself, giving back what it always borrowed. Each track is a stage. The whole is a life cycle."
"Nusa"is the result of a dialogue between the photographer Masao Yamamoto and the composer and musician Akira Uchida, initiated by IIKKI, between April 2025 and March 2026. "Nusa" is the last part of a trilogy started in 2020 with Masao Yamamoto and Akira Uchida. A project that began with light (“Sasanami”, 2020), moved through darkness (“Kurayami”, 2023), and returned to the ambivalence of the two (“Nusa”, 2026), which ultimately sustain and complement one another in all their variations and complementarities. Both in terms of tones and in the humanity that runs through us in these times of such stark contrast. For this last part of the trilogy, Masao Yamamoto and Akira Uchida travelled to the island of Hokkaido at the beginning of 2026 to supplement the project with photographs and audio recordings of the ice and the surrounding landscapes
"Nusa"is the result of a dialogue between the photographer Masao Yamamoto and the composer and musician Akira Uchida, initiated by IIKKI, between April 2025 and March 2026. "Nusa" is the last part of a trilogy started in 2020 with Masao Yamamoto and Akira Uchida. A project that began with light (“Sasanami”, 2020), moved through darkness (“Kurayami”, 2023), and returned to the ambivalence of the two (“Nusa”, 2026), which ultimately sustain and complement one another in all their variations and complementarities. Both in terms of tones and in the humanity that runs through us in these times of such stark contrast. For this last part of the trilogy, Masao Yamamoto and Akira Uchida travelled to the island of Hokkaido at the beginning of 2026 to supplement the project with photographs and audio recordings of the ice and the surrounding landscapes
ベルギー・リエージュを拠点に活動するfrançois vankaによる、東ベルギーの自然保護区や森との境界線、川の谷間を巡る散策の中で採集された音の断片を凝縮し、自然物から作り上げた自作楽器やフィールドレコーディングを用いて紡ぎ出された静謐な音響日記のようなデビュー作『quelques endroits』。セイヨウニワトコから削り出したチャイムやカタツムリの殻、フランス海岸の貝殻などを用いたハンドメイド楽器の素朴な不規則音と、霜のように繊細な音色、静かに漂うピアノとループが美しく交錯。風や水のせせらぎ、鳥たちの羽ばたきといった森のささやきに澄んだ響きが優しく溶け合い、作り手と聴き手の境目をやわらかく曖昧にしていくオーガニック・アンビエント空間を創出している。あらかじめ決められた構造を持たず、時間の流れから切り取られた自然の美しさと内省的な響きが調和した繊細な音像が静かに寄り添う好内容作！
Swedish-Finnish sound artist Marja Ahti returns to Black Truffle alongside Iceland-based American clarinetist John McCowen, whose innovative polyphonic technique provides the direction for 'Errands', imprinted by Ahti's processed field recordings and sinewaves. 'Errands' opens with the perfect dupe: a snippet of a recorder performance of Messiaen's 'O sacrum convivium!' that lasts just a few seconds before the sounds are morphed with elongated, buzzing resonances. The framing is crucial: although Ahti and McCowen are both aware of expectations within the confines of often stuffy electroacoustic music, they were keen to approach it in their own way, following a traditional philosophy while taking in very different elemental components. The two met in Stockholm in 2024 when they performed at Edition Festival and recorded the set in Reykjavik, where Ahti gathered many of the album's incidental recordings. And she didn't record the puffins or the crashing tides, she wandered around the streets, capturing the humdrum ambiance that makes the city so particular. McCowan is best known for his approach to the clarinet, a usually monophonic instrument that, via an extended technique, he's been able to transform radically. And it's those wavering multiphonic moans that anchor 'Errands', integrated seamlessly with Ahti's similarly treated sine waves. 'Errands' isn't a drone record though; the two sound artists concoct a surprisingly action-packed narrative on 'Chorales', punctuating their elongated tones with piano and bringing the recorders back in the final act. On 'Physical Display', the duo's restrained drones metamorphose into high-pitched, kettle-boiling squeals that foreshadow the next movement, when the space opens up to capture a host of familiar sounds before simmering down to almost nothing. At its most peaceful, the piece reveals its most intimate elements: rainfall, distant engines, stifled breaths, plucked strings.
Music aged in time, resonating from the surface to the core through layers and sediments of stones — the strata. Four morning recording sessions with a separation between them of between three and ten months — a chronozone that will rest for a time and on which the next one will be added, thus forming the total of the six pieces of the album — becoming six strata. A slow-moving album that develops landscapes of subtle but continuous evolution, where we find layers of diverse nature created from different procedures, bathed in the calm waters of wabisabi, where melancholy, immensity, insignificance, the potential of the unemerged, coexistence and simplicity converge at the same time.
Baroque Sunburst is proud to present "Meliponica", the unique and unheard music of the interdisciplinary Brazilian artist João Machado, entirely created by electronically processing the recordings of stingless bees. Machado's work with field recordings of native bees form a sound library held in international collections such as the British Library and the Animal Sound Archive in Berlin, and his research into stingless bee communication has unfolded into experimental electronic music, finally finding its way on vinyl for the first time. Within its 40 minutes of never-stopping music, "Meliponica" reveals its unique sonic universe, flawlessly moving from complex percussive rhythms to melodies and soundscapes that seem to come as much from earth as from outer space. With an impressive ability to explore the potential of its original audio sources while pushing it to the limits, João Machado's idea of music never loses musicality and groove, even in its more intimate moments.
In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.
Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.
Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.
Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.
Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.
As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.
Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his time in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.
Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.
Alexander Holm presents Dial / Head Stroll, a pair of minimalist sound works built from repetition, movement and subtle shifts in perspective. Loops circle slowly in and out of focus, with fragments of sound appearing and disappearing like half-remembered scenes. Blurring the line between composition and sonic collage, Holm creates an abstract listening experience where small details gradually take on new meaning. Patient, playful and subtly uncanny, Dial / Head Stroll rewards close listening with each repeated pass.
A communication with the spirits. A sacred performance on a Papua New Guinean bamboo flute. Under the umbrella of Editions Mego, Ideologic Organ, one of the leading experimental labels run and curated by Stephen O'Malley (of Sunn O)))) fame, has released a new album on the same label. It was sampled on Bjork's latest and greatest album "Utopia", which makes it all the more controversial. This is a previously unreleased field recording of New Guinea made by Ragnar Johnson in 1979. This is a music heritage level recording!
This is a recording of musical heritage level! This is a rare field recording of a bamboo flute played by adult males in the Madang region of Papua New Guinea for ceremonial purposes, using long female and male bamboos. This is a solo performance of the bamboo flute with an all-too-rare sound, woven with mysterious breaths and occasional birdsong. The mysterious performance, like a dialogue with nature and spirits, seems to come from another world or dimension. These performers seem to be the last generation to have been taught this performance technique, and there is no doubt that this is a recording of great documentary value. The sound quality is perfect, no matter where or when it is played, and the production is flawless, with digitizing and mastering by Dave Hunt at Dave Hunt studio and cutting by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering. Notes by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer. Cover photo by Ragnar Johnson.
Martin Khanja (aka Lord Spike Heart) and Sam Karugu emerge from Nairobi's flourishing underground metal scene as former members of the bands Lust of a Dying Breed and Seeds of Datura. Together in 2019 they formed Duma (Darkness in Kikuyu) with Sam abandoning bass for production and guitars and Lord Spike Heart providing extreme vocals to the project.
Recorded at Nyege Nyege Studios in Kampala over three months in mid 2019 their self-titled debut album fuses the frenetic euphoria, unrelenting physicality and rebellious attitude of hardcore punk and trash metal with bone-crunching breakcore and raw, nihilist industrial noise through a claustrophobic vortex of visceral screams.
The savant mix of brutally adrenalized drums, caustic industrial trap, shredding grindcore inspired guitars and abrupt speed changes create a darkly atmospheric menace and is lethal on tracks like the opener "Angels and Abysses" , "Omni" or "Uganda with Sam".
The gruelling slow techno dirges and monolithic vocals on "Pembe 666" or "Sin Nature" add a pinch of dramatic inevitability bringing a new sense of theatricality and terrifying fate awaiting into the record's progression.
A sinister sonic aggression of feral intensity with disregard for styles, Duma promises to impact the burgeoning African metal scene moving it into totally new, boundary-challenging experimental territories.
*300 copies limited edition* Drawing from field recordings collected during a trip to Japan, boring tables saturates sonic vignettes in sentimental key, replaying familiar traces of lived experience into something more abstract. The seven tracks on mathematical model 0010, Luca Quartarone's debut album, trail through evolving tonal expanses that envelop the environment in a perpetually expanding haze of serenity. Though sonic fragments hail from the everyday, the compositions themselves inevitably glide towards something much larger—just like a passing instant can extend into an ongoing remembrance.
The title of the album is inspired by a piece of land art by Hiroshi Sugimoto, which Luca encountered during a visit to the Enoura Observatory at the Odawara Art Foundation. The work features a metallic plane that embodies the geometry of a hyperbolic surface with constant negative curvature, continuously converging toward a 5mm gauge without ever meeting. Much like the geometry of this piece suggests a mathematical infinity, the album's sonic cartography evokes the feeling of intimate gestures within infinite expanses.
etting aside the dread-soaked UK atmosphere of his Karkossyn moniker, Tavis Hitchcock introduces Grandma Love. In stark contrast to his previous work, Grandma Love welcomes listeners home for a warm, hearty stew just before the streetlights come on. Drawing from childhood nostalgia, Cornish summers, and family day trips, Hitchcock pulls the plug on a reservoir of mood and atmosphere that sits somewhere between post-club sofa lounging and early morning coffee mug steam. Following his appearance on Northfield Records' Gilbert Road EP with the track "A2," this self-titled debut album dawns the opening chapter in the Grandma Love story. Filled with field recordings, delicate percussion, washed-out pads, and fragments of home-video VHS recordings, the album opens a time capsule of lost memories, coastal daydreams, and a longing for a time washed far away with the tide.
etting aside the dread-soaked UK atmosphere of his Karkossyn moniker, Tavis Hitchcock introduces Grandma Love. In stark contrast to his previous work, Grandma Love welcomes listeners home for a warm, hearty stew just before the streetlights come on. Drawing from childhood nostalgia, Cornish summers, and family day trips, Hitchcock pulls the plug on a reservoir of mood and atmosphere that sits somewhere between post-club sofa lounging and early morning coffee mug steam. Following his appearance on Northfield Records' Gilbert Road EP with the track "A2," this self-titled debut album dawns the opening chapter in the Grandma Love story. Filled with field recordings, delicate percussion, washed-out pads, and fragments of home-video VHS recordings, the album opens a time capsule of lost memories, coastal daydreams, and a longing for a time washed far away with the tide.
Brussels-based producer, composer, and field recordist Le Motel has developed a distinct body of work rooted in environmental sound, collage, and immersive electronic composition. Across releases, collaborations, and audiovisual projects, his music blends ambient textures, rhythmic experimentation, field recordings, and downtempo electronics into transportive listening experiences. Le Motel is also the founder of the Brussels label Maloca Records and has become known for projects that incorporate recordings gathered through travel and collaboration. His acclaimed release Odd Numbers / Số Lẻ drew from recordings made in Vietnam and explored the intersection of ambient composition, documentary sound, and experimental electronic music. Pozo de Agua continues Le Motel’s exploration of atmosphere, texture, and place through a fluid palette of ambient electronics, organic detail, and layered sonic environments. Most of the tracks were created outdoors or in transit, primarily on trains, emerging from what Le Motel describes as “a very natural and emotional process” of translating feelings, memories, and passing thoughts into sound. The album treats environmental sounds — ripples, water drops, movement, and air — with the same importance as traditional instruments, allowing elements to drift in and out like ocean waves while forming subtle polyrhythms and overlapping textures. Working at the intersection of ambient, experimental electronic music, balearic downtempo, and new age-inspired sound design, Le Motel creates music that feels both intimate and expansive. His approach combines processed acoustic elements, environmental recordings, and soft electronic structures into compositions that reward deep listening while maintaining an understated emotional pull. For listeners drawn to exploratory ambient music, environmental sound collage, and contemporary downtempo electronics, Pozo de Agua presents another entry in Le Motel’s evolving sonic world.
Klara Lewis' Opening is a deceptive recording with veiled melodies and clandestine bangers. "Klara Lewis’ distinctive talent for disfiguring sound into forms that remain recognisably song-like reaches a new peak here. Lewis, creator of worlds, treats music as a mirror that reflects a perspective misaligned with the real image. Her music moves in unusual and often startling ways. Acoustic instruments such as ukulele and piano are subjected to processes of deconstruction and reconstruction, their original forms continually reshaped. The tracks within Opening offer an array of disorientating tactics; damaged field recordings are suddenly sliced into ominous rhythmical patterns whilst deceptively simple tactics provide foreboding dread. Often alien on entry, the progression of a piece can land in a surprising tenderness, or the other way around. The momentum grows as a physical state but also one which is questioning, desiring, encapsulating a feeling, to explore a further way of expression and ultimately connecting: A new closeness, a new perspective. Opening is an album in which the protagonist’s manipulation of sonic matter seems to extend beyond the music itself, resulting in a corresponding manipulation of the active listener. Sounds shift, dissolve, and re-emerge in altered forms, creating an experience that feels both intimate and disorienting. Lewis maintains a delicate balance between abstraction and emotional immediacy, drawing the listener into a world where familiar musical gestures are constantly reconfigured in surprising ways. The works on Opening are refracted through an exploratory and transformative lens, suggesting an artist continuing to redefine the possibilities of musical language as a space where the instantaneous and the eternal come together."
Still somehow operating in the shadows despite a pair of exceptional albums under his belt, plus a standout appearance on Space Afrika’s acclaimed ‘Honest Labour’ album, Nigerian born Londoner LA Timpa returns with this super deep, confounding third album featuring screwed, unfathomable dreampop variants that worm from layered flutes to oddly tuned trip hop, referencing everything from Mica Levi to Klein to early Yves Tumor and, most obviously, A.R Kane - ultimately sounding like nothing else. LA Timpa snagged our attention with his exceptional debut ‘Equal Amounts Afraid’ for O___o?, and an acclaimed follow-up for Rabit’s Halcyon Veil, which eventually led to a guest spot on Space Afrika’s cult lightning rod ‘Honest Labour’ and a remix for Tricky. After letting the dust settle, he returns with a new collection of songs mired in rawly sublime melancholy, turning existential reflections into a richly evocative sort of chamber pop akin to Arthur Russell jamming with A.R. Kane. It drifts heavy-lidded between fully formed songs obfuscated by a dense fug to properly bezzonked lo-fi improv that follows his nose for detuned strings smudged and activated with field recordings. It’s all done in the loosest, most hypnagogic style, characterising how the spirits of ‘80s no wave NYC and even ‘90s Kiwi indie rock have sluiced into the truly singular milieu of South London in the 2020s. Sung in a fragile yet shatterproof falsetto to backdrops of smeared loops and lines of coruscating guitar and keys, ‘Pity By One All Good Treasure’ conveys itself by seduction and suggestion rather than any heavy handed or literal techniques. Whether by design or implication, its rhythmelodic make-up recalls how West African music surfaces in the lilt of Lifetones, or even how Jim Reeves’ country music unexpectedly percolates thru Nigerian styles, all obviously at a remove of decades, but nonetheless short-circuiting expectations and putative timelines in the process. The record wails into view with 'Wide', a properly bewildering opening of tangled flutes that sounds like Debit’s pre-historic wind instrument investigations as if treated by Alvin Lucier, before taking flight on a screwy trajectory that seems to reference a great deal of music we love; from labelmate Dawuna to Coby Sey’s pop inversions to Dean Blunt’s enigmatic world-building, from Tricky’s low-lit pre-millennial tension to Mica Levi’s unsteady phased strings - it all sounds immaculately produced and entirely unresolved. In fact, the glossolalic unintelligibility of the songs becomes a virtue it its own right, initially limning and drawing us into psychoacoustic parameters and occupying an elusive mid-distance throughout the album, form the slippery lilt of ‘It Smiles Without my Lie’ to the Blood Orange-esque nod of ‘City Hell Cast In Fire’, the haunted blooziness of ‘Treatment’ and eyes-in-backa-head grog to ‘Brave (forsake)’, and a properly wooze-inducing enigma on the nine minute denouement ‘Ruthless’ - a crumbling epic that centres negative space, splicing field recordings with instrumental strums. When a song does eventually appear from those embers, it's like a queered response to Grouper's enduring 'Heavy Water’ as though perceived through layer upon layer of gauzy saturation. It all makes for a supremely unusual and engrossing listen, and provides further proof, if needed, that LA Timpa is an elemental force all of their own, a vital part of South London’s eminently watchable new musical ecology.
Pity by One All Good Treasure LA Timpa
Adrian Rew's properly hypnotic cult classic 'Slot Machine Music' has finally been reissued and it sounds even more terrifying and prescient than it did back in 2013 at the height of the basement noise era. One of the best environmental recording records bar none - don't sleep. Back in 2009, PAN released its fourth album, 'Kenrimono', a set of recordings made by Greek sound artist Ilios at Japanese pachinko halls. The sheer density of it was as shocking and as intense as anything the noise genre had to offer, packed out with whirring, crunching and chiming resonances that took you to the smokey epicenter of the Japanese gambling world. And when 'Slot Machine Music' arrived a few short years later we assumed the sound would be similar; we were wrong. Initially dropped via Rew's own Ergot Records on CDr before the great Aaron Dilloway stepped in to handle the vinyl edition on his own Hanson imprint, the album seemingly grew from the Midwestern noise petri dish - but it wasn't an exercise in aesthetic posturing, using the racket of the modern American casino to mimic the intensity of a Wolf Eyes set. Instead, Rew was drawn to the experience itself, that's been meticulously designed by malign forces to guide behavior: those trapped inside the casino's four walls are seduced into spending more, losing more and returning to do it all over again. Rew didn't know much about the environment when he visited Cleveland's Horseshoe Casino for the first time in 2013 armed with an Olympus LS-11 recorder and a camera. And over four months, he developed a peculiar relationship with the culture, surreptitiously taping the soundscapes at various Midwestern locations - in Michigan, Indiana, Ohio and Illinois - while attempting not to lose too much cash in the process. And it's a warts-n-all set, with dialog snippets and outdoor ambiance giving us more than simply the dense mass of chimes and stings and themes that you'd hear on the casino floor itself. What Rew is able to do is create a snapshot of a time and place, capturing the sheer desolation of the casino experience and using it to drive a narrative that Robert Altman would be proud of. The first thing you notice is that each machine's sounds are in tune with the next; "game designers," explains Rew, "tune their machines to the key of C in order to optimize harmonic cohesion." So although Rew's recordings are full-bodied, they're never too chaotic or discordant. Indeed, if you check in for the entire record - 2013's iconic 'Slot Machine Music' and its 2014 sequel 'Slot Machine Music Vol. 2' - you'll be lulled into the same false sense of security that entrances casino regulars. It's almost like ambient music, packed out with tiny sonic details that some well-paid sound engineer-cum-neurologist worked for years to figure out. Guided meditation music? New age crypto-psychedelia? It's all here, packaged in neon-lit one-armed-bandits aimed to target the dopamine centers of aging boomers with money to burn. And the best thing about the recordings is that Rew keeps some of the chatter intact, so we can hear him tangling with casino security, or haggling with his slot machine neighbors over change. We can hear the cheers and claps as paltry sums are won while vast fortunes are lost. The best moment for us comes when Rew wanders outside Grand Victoria Casino in Elgin, Illinois at the dead of night, the crickets singing as the machines echo from behind grand double doors. A freight train rushes past and blots out any other sound, distorting the recording. It's a good reminder that although you might be able to hide from reality inside the casino, the Midwest will inevitably confront you with its rusted truth
Originally released in 2008 on Ezekiel Honig’s own Anticipate Recordings, Surfaces of a Broken Marching Band finds the artist refining a compositional language rooted in the methodologies of musique concrete, ambient, and beat research. Working from a palette of environmental recordings, instrumental fragments, and soft electronic treatments, Honig pushes the source material into an array of sympathetic forms ranging from pillow-soft, lowercase ambient to diffuse downtempo and minimal house. For its reissue on Keplar, the album has been remastered by Kassian Troyer (D&M), bringing a new clarity to its intricate, low-lit architectures. Throughout the record, serving almost as audiographic guideposts, are faint but insistent gestures toward propulsion, an abiding and recurrent 4/4 pulse that guides the music laterally and instantiates a slow negotiation between its various elements. This music invites close listening precisely by not revealing itself all at once, allowing small collisions of timbre and subtle shifts in emphasis to carry the weight. The traces of lived environments that remain embedded in the mix - distant crowds, sounds of transit, the indistinct acoustics of interiors in flux - expand the frame without breaking its intimacy, creating a potent dislocation between the nearness of the sound and the scale of its sources. Rather than foregrounding any single voice, this is music that distributes attention equally across its materials, allowing background details to assert their presence as much as melody or rhythm. Honig presents listeners with an astute practice that’s concerned less with building from the ground up than with uncovering what happens when disparate textures and structures are brought into close contact with one another. (Alex Cobb, 2026)
Limited new edition with revised artwork on the sleeve and labels.Originally released in 2022, this is an epic collage and mixed LP of all original material, compiled and stitched together over three years by Morgan Buckley.KWALK features Roger Doyle, Mr & Ms KWalker, Sli Town Crier, Olmo, Davy Kehoe, Morgan Buckley, plus some surprise guests.
Texas-born, Maui-based musician and producer Jesse Peterson aka Turn On The Sunlight's new LP via Music From Memory. "Originally formed in New York in the late 2000s, Turn On The Sunlight has evolved into a fluid, location-spanning practice rooted in collaboration, intuition and process. Now based on Maui, Peterson’s work draws together a wide network of musicians and environments, with recordings taking shape across Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, San Miguel de Allende and Haʻikū. Loosely situated within a framework of organic, ambient-leaning jazz, 'Iseo' unfolds as a series of open, exploratory pieces, with electronics sitting subtly beneath acoustic and environmental elements. Built from layered instrumentation including synthesizers, guitar, zither, flutes, voice and field recordings, Peterson moves between grounded, tactile detail and more expansive, immersive states. A sense of warmth and permeability runs throughout: organic percussion, environmental textures and drifting rhythmic elements lend the record a gently saturated humidity, reflecting Peterson’s base in Hawaii, where the presence of nature is felt as much as it is heard. Underlying the project is a way of working rooted in gathering, listening and tending. Instruments, ensemble sessions, field recordings and everyday environments are approached with attentiveness, shaped through collecting, refining and allowing things to settle. Relationships, landscape and lived experience shape the sound, giving 'Iseo' a tactile, almost hand-made quality. Rather than fixed arrangements, the album feels as if it has been organically and lovingly assembled through a process of listening and response, each element finding its place within a wider, evolving whole. This approach reaches a natural centre point in the 15-minute piece 'Medianoche En La Calle Aurora', which unfolds patiently, bending through shifting environments as motifs and textures emerge and dissolve with quiet continuity. Peterson’s role as both instigator and facilitator is central to the project. Bringing together a diverse group of collaborators including Carlos Niño, Mia Doi Todd, Laraaji, Ko Ishikawa, Luis Pérez Ixoneztli and Miles Spilsbury, he creates space for individual voices to emerge within a shared language. The result is a music defined by openness and generosity. 'Iseo' takes its title from Peterson’s son’s middle name, a word that can be understood to mean ‘one-world life’. The piece itself takes the form of a gentle lullaby, its melody loosely shaped around the syllables of his name and sung to Peterson’s son by Luis Pérez Ixoneztli, a close collaborator whose presence across the record reflects a long-standing relationship that extends beyond the music itself. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis."
A work of genuinely monumental proportions. Jean-Claude Eloy's Gaku-No-Michi - subtitled "Tao of Music" or "Ways of Music" - stands among the towering achievements of 20th Century electroacoustic practice. Produced at the electronic music studio of NHK Radio in Tokyo between 1977 and 1978, its four hours of concrete and electronic sound unfold as what the composer called "a film without images" - an immense, spiraling architecture of sonic transformation that remains, nearly five decades on, as radical and absorbing as the day it was conceived. Born in Paris in 1938, Eloy belonged to the great second wave of post-war European composers. He studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, winning First Prizes in Piano, Chamber Music, Counterpoint, and Ondes Martenot, and worked on composition with Darius Milhaud. Summer courses at Darmstadt brought encounters with Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen; he then entered Boulez's master class at the Music Academy in Basel. Yet Eloy was never content to remain within the European serialist orbit. A professorship at the University of California, Berkeley during the late 1960s opened his ears to Eastern aesthetics - to the vast, unhurried perception of time in Asian musical traditions. From that point forward, his trajectory diverged sharply from his contemporaries, carrying him toward India, Japan, and a singular practice in which the boundaries between Occident and Orient dissolved into sound itself. After the 135-minute electronic meditation of Shânti (1972-74), realized in Cologne, Eloy traveled to Tokyo. There, working inside the NHK Denshi Ongaku Studio, he produced Gaku-No-Michi - a composition of staggering ambition, structured in four linked parts. The first, "Tokyo", draws on the raw acoustic fabric of the city - subway announcements, factory hum, political speeches broadcast from loudspeakers in public squares - and subjects it to a slow, spiraling metamorphosis, pulling the concrete toward the abstract. "Fushiki-e", the longest section at nearly 80 minutes, reverses the trajectory: electronically generated material absorbs fragments of Gagaku court music, Nô theater, and Shômyô Buddhist chant, drifting toward a sustained "sound of immobilization" - an immense organ point of contemplative stillness. "Banbutsu no Ryûdô" works an endlessly metamorphosing weft of daily and extraordinary sound, where a nationalistic speech dissolves into the buzzing of insects, where the hollow strike of a bamboo Shishi Odoshi against stone emerges only after long electronic transformation. "Kaiso", the final movement, condenses reminiscences of all that preceded, built around the annual commemorative ceremony of Hiroshima, leading through gravity and lament toward an infinitely sustained tone of peace. What distinguishes Gaku-No-Michi from so much electroacoustic work of its era is the sheer physical presence of its sound world. Eloy does not merely manipulate material - he inhabits it. The timbral palette is extraordinarily rich: electronically fabricated Tibetan bells more haunting than their acoustic counterparts, iridescent spirals that diffract into divergent lines before converging into vast harmonic masses, crackling meteorite trails, low-pitched resonances swept by winds both violent and majestic. The experience of duration is central to the work's design. Four hours is not a provocation but a necessity - the time required for the listener's perception to shift, for ordinary awareness of passing minutes to give way to something closer to immersion, to what Eloy described as a "psychophysical acoustic" encounter with sound. This 4CD set on Hors Territories represents the first complete publication of the work in its digitalized and revised version, dedicated to the memory of Wataru Uenami. Packaged in a 10-panel digipak with a 16-page booklet in French and English, it is an essential document - not only for admirers of Eloy, but for anyone drawn to the outer reaches of what composed sound can achieve. A bridge between worlds, between concrete and abstract, between the noise of the living city and the stillness at the heart of contemplation. CD 1: “Pachinko” introduces “Tokyo” in a deliberately stiff, regular, almost mechanical and untranscended way while the big spiral of long successive waves, which further develops through Tokyo, becomes more and more varied in its material ending in the surpassing and searched-for transubstantiation taking place throughout the fi nal part. CD 2: The second disc, “Fushiki-e”, takes us (through varied, complex, contrasted and sometimes violent sound episodes) towards the four “stages of contemplation” including the last one, “Mokuso”, which represents the ultimate stage of the contemplative. It is the longest part of the whole piece, lasting almost 80 minutes. CD 3: “Banbutsu no Ryûdô” is a boundless continuous “weft” travelling so to say through all sorts of daily or exceptional « sound scenes » continually metamorphosing, going from political speeches to a Shishi Odoshi, transformed for a long time well before its pure, direct appearance. CD 4: “Kaiso “ is a moment of gravity innervated and built around the annual commemorative ceremony of Hiroshima, which however leads us beyond the evoked drama to a place of surpassing with peace through the « Han » sound, extending the work to infinity…”