MUSIC

Melodies based on Lithuanian folk songs - A label collaboration with Granvat, Merope and THE Vilnius chamber choir Jauna Muzika .

In November 2022 world-renowned kora player Ballaké Sissoko and acclaimed guitarist Derek Gripper spend just three hours recording a wordless album together. The kora and guitar in the hands of masters - a session where New Ancient Strings meets One Night On Earth. “Musically we tested each other,” says Sissoko, explaining that the most magical aspect of their initial encounter was the spontaneity of the whole thing. “We have the mastery of our instruments, the technique and a good ear. Derek is very curious, that’s very important.” “He’s just such a good listener,” says Gripper about Sissoko. “It’s not what he plays, it’s how he plays it. He’s an amazing interpreter, the prime master of timbre.” “It’s a remarkable album,” says Lucy Duran, professor of Music at SOAS. “It’s the furthest away that Ballaké has gone from his own idiom and it’s brilliant – not world music, it’s in a totally different realm, entering new territory”

 

Netherlands-based artist Jonny Nash returns to Melody As Truth with his new solo album, ‘Once Was Ours Forever.’ Building on 2023’s ‘Point Of Entry,’ this collection of eleven compositions draws us further into Nash’s immersive, slowly expanding world, effortlessly connecting the dots somewhere between folk,

ambient jazz and dreampop.

While ‘Point Of Entry’ was characterised by it’s laid-back, daytime ambience, ‘Once Was Ours Forever’

arrives wrapped in shades of dusk and hazy light, unfolding like a slow-moving sunset. Built from layers of gentle fingerpicked guitar, textural brush strokes, floating melodies and reverb-soaked vocals, moments come and go, fleeting and ephemeral.

From the cosmic Americana of ‘Bright Belief’ to the lush, layered shoegaze textures of ‘The Way Things Looked’, Nash’s versatile guitar playing lies at the heart of this album, gently supported by a cast of

collaborators who each add their unique touches. Canadian ambient jazz saxophonist Joseph Shabason makes a return appearance, providing his delicate swells to ‘Angel.’ Saxophone is also provided by Shoei Ikeda (Maya Ongaku), cello by Tomo Katsurada (ex-Kikagaku Moyo) and Tokyo acid folk artist Satomimagae (RVNG) lends her haunting multilayered vocals to ‘Rain Song.’

As with much of Nash’s work, ‘Once Was Ours Forever’ deftly finds an equilibrium between softness and weight, offering the listener ample space to interpret and inhabit the music on their own terms. Through his uncanny ability to blend the pastoral and the profound, the idyllic and the insightful, ‘Once Was Ours Forever’ arrives as a tender and understated offering, infused with warmth and compassion.

The shifting dimensions of Masana Temples, fourth album from psychedelic explorers Kikagaku Moyo,are informed by various experiences the band had with traveling through life together, ranging from the months spent on tour to making a pilgrimage to Lisbon to record the album with jazz musician Bruno Pernadas. The band sought out Pernadas both out of admiration for his music and in an intentional move to work with a producer who came from a wildly different background. With Masana Temples, the band wanted to challenge their own concepts of what psychedelic music could be. Elements of both the attentive folk and wild-eyed rocking sides of the band are still intact throughout, but they’re sharper and more defined.

More than the literal interpretation of being on a journey, the album’s always changing sonic panorama reflects the spiritual connection of the band moving through this all together. Life for a traveling band is a series of constant metamorphoses, with languages, cultures, climates and vibes changing with each new town. The only constant for Kikagaku Moyo throughout their travels were the five band members always together moving through it all, but each of them taking everything in from very different perspectives. Inspecting the harmonies and disparities between these perspectives, the group reflects the emotional impact of their nomadic paths. The music is the product of time spent in motion and all of the bending mindsets that come with it.

Olvido Records is proud to present African Steel, a follow-up to 2019’s African country-western compilation Bulwayo Blue Yodel. Here we have a compendium of beautiful songs highlighting the early years of the slide guitar in southern, central and eastern Africa. Featuring traditional and popular regional styles adapting the acoustic lap-steel guitar, African Steel reveals intriguing influences from southern American country and blues, Argentinian and European tango, and back to the Hawaiian origins of the instrument, long before the shimmering electric slide guitar of Docteur Nico, and the pedal steel mastery of Demola Adepoju of King Sunny Ade's African Beats. Ranging from up-tempo dance numbers, to plaintive bottleneck-blues style ballads, to a Ugandan string-band cover of a Jimmie Rodgers classic, each song presented here is a unique glimpse into the early years of the slide guitar’s incorporation into various African musical cultures. These fourteen songs have been carefully restored from rare shellac and lacquer discs to honor and celebrate a previously under-represented chapter in global music history, and includes a booklet with contextual notes and translated lyrics.

The compilation that started the renaissance. In 2002 Audika Records entered into an exclusive licensing agreement with the estate of Arthur Russell to compile and issue previously unreleased and out of print material from Arthur’s vast archive.This first album Calling Out Of Context, features 12 previously unreleased tracks of Buddhist Bubblegum Alt Disco Pop recorded during Arthur’s prime years 1985-90.

'Mita Koyama-cho' offers a fresh perspective on today’s ambient music scene, blending acoustic and electronic elements into a rich, evocative soundscape. Murakami, a multi-instrumentalist, weaves together acoustic and jazz guitar, saxophone, fretless bass, and an array of keyboards—including vintage synthesizers, Mellotron, and acoustic piano. The result is a fusion of jazz, new age, folk, Brazilian music, and even 1970s progressive rock.

With an intuitive sense of melody and arrangement, Murakami layers warm cassette textures, vintage amp tones, and intricate string and saxophone orchestrations. 'Mita Koyama-cho' is a deeply personal tribute to the musician’s family and the Tokyo neighborhood they once called home—demolished in 2024 due to corporate redevelopment.

Haruomi Hosono's 1975 masterpiece “TROPICAL DANDY” is being reissued in long-awaited analog format to celebrate its 50th anniversary.

Two years after his first solo album, “HOSONO HOUSE” (1973), this record of an era in which he steered a more free, exotic, and multinational sound, and his second solo album, full of tropical sensations and hybridity, is an important work that marks the moment Japanese pop music connected with the world music map.

This is a precious reissue of Haruomi Hosono's musical adventure, a turning point that led to the “Tropical Trilogy” and the formation of YMO, which can now be experienced once again.

Keith Freund’s music occupies a space where careful musicianship and homebrewed experimentation meet and shake hands. On “Window Left Open,” spacious melodies drift through dense fields of electronic activity: saxophone lines rise above buzzing circuitry, percussion flickers at the edges of the frame, and clustered glitch textures dart through the music like insects in tall summer grass. Every sound feels vividly animated, a charged part of the same mercurial ecosystem. Freund’s talent lies in balancing warmth and unpredictability with remarkable ease. Patient motifs recall the exploratory spirit of early folktronica, while bit-reduced textures, degraded loops, and idiosyncratic synthesis techniques continually reshape the terrain beneath them. Rather than treating acoustic and electronic elements as opposing forces, Freund allows them to intermingle until distinctions dissolve, creating compositions that reward close listening while retaining immediate warmth. This record finds Freund working with a fully formed vocabulary that is truly his own, transforming glitch, melody, improvisation, and atmosphere into songs that are both fundamentally curious and disarmingly engaging.

»Carpet Of Fallen Leaves« is an introduction to the folk-pop world of Eddie Marcon. It follows in the footsteps of other collections of Japanese artists on Morr Music, such as yumbo, Andersens, and the »Minna Miteru« compilations, »Carpet Of Fallen Leaves« draws together songs from Eddie Marcon’s twenty-two-year history, including fragile, yet rich in melody material, collected from a prodigious run of limited edition, self-released CD-Rs.

Eddie Marcon is the project of Eddie Corman and Jules Marcon, who met through their involvement in Japan’s underground music scene. Eddie was a member of noise-rock duo Coa, while both Eddie and Marcon were part of psych-rock collective LSD-March. Forming in 2001, Eddie Marcon’s sound is markedly different from these groups, though they do, at times, share a sense of psychedelic dislocation, through the gentle, limpid pace of their songs. But with Eddie Marcon, melody and gentleness is at the music’s core.

They’ve long marked out their own, unique territory within a worldwide community of psych-folk and folk-pop artists; sharing their music through a subterranean network of colleagues and friends, they count groups like The Pastels and The Notwist as their fans, and Eddie has collaborated with the likes of Shintaro Sakamoto, and Aki Tsuyuko (in Tondekebana, and with Marcon and Ippei Matsui in the quartet Wasurerogusa). Eddie Marcon have also recently worked with drummer Ikuro Takahashi, who’s played with groups such as Fushitsusha, Maher Shalal Hash Baz, and Nagisa Ni Te.

Across the songs on »Carpet Of Fallen Leaves«, Eddie Marcon’s songs are performed by Eddie on guitar, organ and vocals, and Marcon on bass; they’re variously joined by Takahashi, Yojiro Tatekawa (drums), Tomoko Kageyama (vibraphone), Yasuhisa Mizutani (flute), Madoka Asakura (vocals), and Ztom Motoyama (pedal steel). The arrangements are pared back to best serve the core of each song, and the playing is gorgeous – fluent but not showy; capable of great intricacy, but aware that simplicity is key to direct communication.

Songs like »Mayonaka No Ongaku« stretch their limbs languidly, the music shivering with beauty as guitar and cymbal drift across Eddie’s poised vocal delivery. »Tora To Lion« began as an improvisation, but it’s become a firm favourite of the group’s fans: as Eddie says, »it has become a very important song for us, to the extent that it can be said to be our representative song.«

Perhaps the most moving thing about »Carpet Of Fallen Leaves«, though, is the way it captures the subtle yet significant moments of everydayness that ask for our attention. »Shoujo«, a song for a beloved cat who passed away, possesses rare emotional resonance. »At the end of the song,« Eddie remembers, »I wanted to have her throat rumbling endlessly.« When the song was cut, a television voice appeared behind the purring, saying ›thank you‹. »For us, it felt like words from Poco-chan, and tears came to our eyes.« 

Liminal space – We all know it, a familiar friend. The haze we slip into on our way to sleep. That warmth on your eyelids you feel when you turn your face to the sun and drift out of time for a few minutes. Those moments of stillness that belong to you in the sacred minutes before the alarm goes off, before you are fully able to acknowledge the outside world that waits on you like some hungry panther, eyeing you from strange trees. Inhabiting this zone is a luxury, but the best sort of liminality lives in a very specific dream space, one we spend the rest of our lives chasing: The deep sleep that most children know. Somewhere between familiar household sounds and being carried to your own bed, there’s the quiet that only belongs to you and some dream self – someone that you haven’t met yet, but that you make future plans for and secret promises to. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, feels exactly like exploring this space and pushing forward, slipping out of time and waking up someplace new, a place that’s barely familiar enough to feel like home but somehow already wholly personal and meant for you alone. June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and student of sound all his own, built his own speakers and maintained no less than three sound systems across as many rooms. The bass from his solitary DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor, making itself at home like some wayward cat as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. On the edge of the Florida Everglades, two musics in one room, meshing into something indescribable. Lushness as past and premonition. The low end of where she comes from, and the high, gentle harmony of what she would eventually seek out, sharing the same humid air. She would find folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate, all the while nobody around her listening to it and her parents referring to it as “that sleepy music.” She did not mind being the only one; the solitude afforded her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words, before anything else. Harmony is the thing that reaches her, and now it is the thing she effortlessly reaches for. You will hear it all over this album, with chords opening up to greet you before you have any idea what she’s singing about. Yet and still, an elder also traveled a similar path: Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked hard to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. Mento is the genre at the root of all of it – we have the form to thank for ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything that came after, and he is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map. Even her name is part of it, though she will tell you she landed on it more by feel than reason. She records as June McDoom, born Alyssa, June being a nickname one of her grandmothers, Joan, went by, a name she thought was cool to carry and simply liked the sound of. An etheric channel that reverberates all the same. A dub all its own. For years, this was just the sound of her family, a comfort and constant companion that did not yet feel as if it also belonged to her. It took going out into the world, living, loving, learning and coming back home, to find that she had earnestly built a full life of her own – and that there was a sound to meet it. She put on an Alton Ellis record one day and realized the soundshe had been seeking had been there her whole life, a steady groove meant to hold anyone with ears and heart enough to listen. She set out to create and ended up making music that held space for all of the sounds and feelings that she loved. Not a reggae or dub record, not a folk record, but the harmony of one laid over the rhythm of the other. Sonic liminality, echoed out into the cosmos in some places. She and her longtime partner, Evan Wright, created the songs slowly, by hand. Songcraft for the pair meant stacking parts over time, chasing texture, exercising restraint in their explorations, keeping things minimal on purpose. Nearly every one began as just her voice and a guitar before the two of them fleshed it out, Evan playing most of the instruments while June layered in the vocal harmonies she so loves to arrange. They opened the record by cutting live drums with Victor Axelrod, the producer who records as Ticklah, down in his Sunset Park basement, then carried the songs home and built the rest themselves across long days in the studio they keep at home, tracking to tape and digital both, even hauling out to a friend’s house for the harp. Dub and Wall of Sound influencing the low end, with echoes of Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the washy, stellar guitars of Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand haunting the outer edges of what her sound would shapeshift into. Angelic heroics, and nothing less. It was not easy, by any stretch. A casual listener won’t know that she spent twelve hours a day mixing because she wanted perfection, or that she started the process over when, on a Christmas visit, her parents told her that they couldn’t hear enough of her vocals. “Without You,” the album’s lead single, carries the fingerprints of that patience: it began with live drums running straight through and slowly became something else entirely, the deeper she steeped it in Cocteau Twins, until a dub bassline and a shoegaze shimmer met in the middle, in the last place you would think to look for either one. That was the standard she wanted to meet and surpass – but you, listener, will only hear a record that could have gone overboard but didn’t. Generous in its way, it invites you in as an active participant on the path, leaving room for you instead of telling you how to feel. At the heart, the core of all of this, is June’s grandmother Aggie. She formed the center, both in family and in this recording – a guide for June in moments of stillness, in moments of uncertainty, and at the edges that she wants to keep close. Indeed, the song “Memory” was written with her in mind. That is the light making its way through the pinhole in this camera of the mind, the guide that helps June to focus, to see and to step forward confidently. People who love you showing the way, their energy still present and shining even when their form has moved on. There’s a harder, quieter undercurrent that moves through this album – one that June explores in “Outside the Window.” There are so many different iterations of a self, all belonging to so many different sets of people and realities. What obligation do you have to them, and can you meet all of the promises that you made to yourself in those sleepy, hazy moments when you pretended you weren’t a kid anymore? What is authenticity? Who defines that? Who do you owe it to? What do you owe yourself? These are questions that prowl around the corners of the overthinking artist’s mind when creating an album this intimate, this exacting, this personal. You’re learning how to be a person in public while keeping a degree of interiority all of your own, trying to make sure that you don’t let your life pass you by as you’re trying to meet your own standards. Future You is an ancestor that your current self gets to meet. As June layers these songs, she is figuring out who she is in real time. The album holds that answer, and offers it to you, the listener, as well. It knows that none of us are just one person, but a multitude of people we’ve had to let go of, kill off, commit to meeting at a future date and time. A continuum: There’s an entire lineage of selves that we all carry with us each day, and others that we will eventually meet. We are reaching back to those people and waving hello to them at the same time, along with the lineages of people who helped to shape us and get us here. A collection of people and things that don’t seem to go together, but we let them in anyway. Dark. Light. Equals. Opposites. All there in sound, in spirit, in daily action. We turn into the light when things feel dark. We get used to feeling around for it if we can’t see it. We let the warmth of it hit our faces and slowly open eyes to see.

Liminal space – We all know it, a familiar friend. The haze we slip into on our way to sleep. That warmth on your eyelids you feel when you turn your face to the sun and drift out of time for a few minutes. Those moments of stillness that belong to you in the sacred minutes before the alarm goes off, before you are fully able to acknowledge the outside world that waits on you like some hungry panther, eyeing you from strange trees. Inhabiting this zone is a luxury, but the best sort of liminality lives in a very specific dream space, one we spend the rest of our lives chasing: The deep sleep that most children know. Somewhere between familiar household sounds and being carried to your own bed, there’s the quiet that only belongs to you and some dream self – someone that you haven’t met yet, but that you make future plans for and secret promises to. June McDoom’s debut full-length, Follow the Light, feels exactly like exploring this space and pushing forward, slipping out of time and waking up someplace new, a place that’s barely familiar enough to feel like home but somehow already wholly personal and meant for you alone. June grew up in a Jamaican household in South Florida, an existence built of strong extended family, communal care, bass and harmonics. Her father, a carpenter and student of sound all his own, built his own speakers and maintained no less than three sound systems across as many rooms. The bass from his solitary DJ sets would sneak its way through her bedroom floor, making itself at home like some wayward cat as she listened to folk records, finding harmonies that were new and special to her. On the edge of the Florida Everglades, two musics in one room, meshing into something indescribable. Lushness as past and premonition. The low end of where she comes from, and the high, gentle harmony of what she would eventually seek out, sharing the same humid air. She would find folk music on her own, somewhere between the cast recording of The Sound of Music and Simon and Garfunkel’s contributions to The Graduate, all the while nobody around her listening to it and her parents referring to it as “that sleepy music.” She did not mind being the only one; the solitude afforded her the opportunity to fall in love with harmony first, before words, before anything else. Harmony is the thing that reaches her, and now it is the thing she effortlessly reaches for. You will hear it all over this album, with chords opening up to greet you before you have any idea what she’s singing about. Yet and still, an elder also traveled a similar path: Her grandfather, Colin Smith, was a distinguished mento man who played banjo and guitar, built his own rumba boxes and worked hard to keep Jamaica’s oldest form of rural acoustic folk music and storytelling alive. Mento is the genre at the root of all of it – we have the form to thank for ska, rock steady, reggae, dub and everything that came after, and he is the one who put a guitar in her hands. An inheritance, a gift and a map. Even her name is part of it, though she will tell you she landed on it more by feel than reason. She records as June McDoom, born Alyssa, June being a nickname one of her grandmothers, Joan, went by, a name she thought was cool to carry and simply liked the sound of. An etheric channel that reverberates all the same. A dub all its own. For years, this was just the sound of her family, a comfort and constant companion that did not yet feel as if it also belonged to her. It took going out into the world, living, loving, learning and coming back home, to find that she had earnestly built a full life of her own – and that there was a sound to meet it. She put on an Alton Ellis record one day and realized the soundshe had been seeking had been there her whole life, a steady groove meant to hold anyone with ears and heart enough to listen. She set out to create and ended up making music that held space for all of the sounds and feelings that she loved. Not a reggae or dub record, not a folk record, but the harmony of one laid over the rhythm of the other. Sonic liminality, echoed out into the cosmos in some places. She and her longtime partner, Evan Wright, created the songs slowly, by hand. Songcraft for the pair meant stacking parts over time, chasing texture, exercising restraint in their explorations, keeping things minimal on purpose. Nearly every one began as just her voice and a guitar before the two of them fleshed it out, Evan playing most of the instruments while June layered in the vocal harmonies she so loves to arrange. They opened the record by cutting live drums with Victor Axelrod, the producer who records as Ticklah, down in his Sunset Park basement, then carried the songs home and built the rest themselves across long days in the studio they keep at home, tracking to tape and digital both, even hauling out to a friend’s house for the harp. Dub and Wall of Sound influencing the low end, with echoes of Dionne Warwick, Minnie Riperton, Pentangle and the washy, stellar guitars of Cocteau Twins’ Victorialand haunting the outer edges of what her sound would shapeshift into. Angelic heroics, and nothing less. It was not easy, by any stretch. A casual listener won’t know that she spent twelve hours a day mixing because she wanted perfection, or that she started the process over when, on a Christmas visit, her parents told her that they couldn’t hear enough of her vocals. “Without You,” the album’s lead single, carries the fingerprints of that patience: it began with live drums running straight through and slowly became something else entirely, the deeper she steeped it in Cocteau Twins, until a dub bassline and a shoegaze shimmer met in the middle, in the last place you would think to look for either one. That was the standard she wanted to meet and surpass – but you, listener, will only hear a record that could have gone overboard but didn’t. Generous in its way, it invites you in as an active participant on the path, leaving room for you instead of telling you how to feel. At the heart, the core of all of this, is June’s grandmother Aggie. She formed the center, both in family and in this recording – a guide for June in moments of stillness, in moments of uncertainty, and at the edges that she wants to keep close. Indeed, the song “Memory” was written with her in mind. That is the light making its way through the pinhole in this camera of the mind, the guide that helps June to focus, to see and to step forward confidently. People who love you showing the way, their energy still present and shining even when their form has moved on. There’s a harder, quieter undercurrent that moves through this album – one that June explores in “Outside the Window.” There are so many different iterations of a self, all belonging to so many different sets of people and realities. What obligation do you have to them, and can you meet all of the promises that you made to yourself in those sleepy, hazy moments when you pretended you weren’t a kid anymore? What is authenticity? Who defines that? Who do you owe it to? What do you owe yourself? These are questions that prowl around the corners of the overthinking artist’s mind when creating an album this intimate, this exacting, this personal. You’re learning how to be a person in public while keeping a degree of interiority all of your own, trying to make sure that you don’t let your life pass you by as you’re trying to meet your own standards. Future You is an ancestor that your current self gets to meet. As June layers these songs, she is figuring out who she is in real time. The album holds that answer, and offers it to you, the listener, as well. It knows that none of us are just one person, but a multitude of people we’ve had to let go of, kill off, commit to meeting at a future date and time. A continuum: There’s an entire lineage of selves that we all carry with us each day, and others that we will eventually meet. We are reaching back to those people and waving hello to them at the same time, along with the lineages of people who helped to shape us and get us here. A collection of people and things that don’t seem to go together, but we let them in anyway. Dark. Light. Equals. Opposites. All there in sound, in spirit, in daily action. We turn into the light when things feel dark. We get used to feeling around for it if we can’t see it. We let the warmth of it hit our faces and slowly open eyes to see.

An album by a little-known guitar duo released in 1999. Their songs—composed solely of guitars and making heavy use of harmonics—are beautiful pieces that evoke an ambient-like tranquility; during their live performances at the time, they even collaborated with 8mm film projections. However, while the album received high praise from a select few, the overall response was very limited. At the time, the indie scene had not yet re-evaluated ambient sounds, and there were virtually no other groups performing such simple instrumental music live. I believe this made the music extremely difficult to categorize and left it in a precarious position. However, once Japanese ambient music began to be re-evaluated globally in the 2010s, this album was rediscovered, and the remaining stock of CDs sold out instantly. Amid calls for a reissue, we’d like to unleash this music anew with this first-ever vinyl release. KENKEN—now known as URBAN VOLCANO SOUNDS—also makes a guest appearance. Whether you want to take your time exploring this little-known hidden gem or use it as everyday background music, this acoustic guitar instrumental album creates beautiful moments that seep into the very air around you.

2026 repress; double LP version. "Marking the occasion of twenty years since the original release, and coinciding with Vashti Bunyan's 80th birthday, DiCristina is pleased to present Lookaftering (Expanded), a reissue of her legendary second album. This new expanded edition features the original studio album along with a second disc of demos, an alternate take, and a live performance. This edition also comes with a stunning 16-page lyric book featuring a collection of paintings by Vashti's daughter, Whyn Lewis -- paintings that they both say have closely, and coincidentally, reflected the lyrics of the album. Also included are sleeve notes from Vashti, producer Max Richter, and Devendra Banhart. Originally recorded between 2001 and 2005, the unreleased demos were created at Vashti's home, with Vashti accompanying herself on electric and acoustic guitar along with a host of experimental instrumentation including synths, accordion, piano, strings, pipe organ, harmonium and recorders. The demos offer a more stripped-back sound, with the live version of 'Lately,' recorded in 2006 at the Echo in LA, offering a pitch perfect performance by Vashti's North American touring band of Gareth Dickson, Jo Mango, Kevin Barker, Helena Espvall, and Kat Hernandez. Listening to the demos and final versions side by side while reading the sleeve notes, and taking in the beautiful new artwork is a wonderful experience."

"Recorded in Los Angeles over the course of a single day at a studio in the Eagle Rock neighborhood, Dois Desertos was produced by Mario Caldato Jr. and emerged without a predetermined plan or schedule. The project took shape during Portuguese musician João Pimenta Gomes' stay in Los Angeles with his family. During that time, through Rodrigo Amarante, João met Mario and Samantha Caldato, as well as musicians Abe Rounds (drums and percussion) and Gabe Noel (bass and cello). From those encounters, the album began to unfold organically. Working from simple scores—some containing little more than chord progressions—the sessions left plenty of room for improvisation. Every performance was captured live, in a single take, with no overdubs. The mixing process, also carried out live by Mario Caldato Jr., followed the same philosophy: effects and level adjustments were performed in real time and printed directly to the final two-track master. At the heart of the album's sound is the Cristal Baschet, a rare instrument played by rubbing glass rods with the hands, causing metal resonators to vibrate and produce an ethereal, resonant tone. João describes its sound as "a trace, almost like a shadow." Rather than taking the lead, the instrument serves as a textural foundation, while the bass and cello carry the melodic lines. Some of these melodies are original compositions, while others draw from traditional Portuguese fado, reimagined through an open and exploratory approach. The album has a dreamlike atmosphere, reflecting the perspective of someone experiencing Los Angeles from the outside—not in a rush to belong, but fully receptive to the city's unique energy. Two films helped shape this imaginary landscape: Model Shop (Jacques Demy, 1969), in which the French filmmaker uses Los Angeles as a pretext to simply observe and inhabit the city, and Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself. The result is Dois Desertos, an album that, in João's own words, "could never have been made anywhere else." With Dois Desertos, João Pimenta Gomes invites listeners into a deeply immersive experience, revealing a more exploratory side of his artistic practice while reinforcing Amor in Sound's commitment to releasing original works that engage with the many languages of contemporary music."

Kitto Records presents Gree, the debut album from Belfast artist ffolliott. Written and recorded over 5 years in a home studio, Gree came together slowly, through a near-daily writing process. ffolliott set out to make an album at the start of 2020, working through batches of songs each week until something began to take shape. “Life was to-ing and fro-ing around me at that time and the big long staircase of making an album felt like a comforting bottomless pit I could crawl into and escape.” Early on, the sessions were open-ended, producing what he describes as “wacky, bad ffolliott music”. The turning point came with the track 'cappy', which set the tone for the rest of the record. From there, the album began to draw from a very specific set of memories from his life – pulling in fragments of childhood, family dynamics, and moments spanning from the 90s through to the present day, shaped through a DIY approach to songwriting and sample-led production. The record moves between these timelines without settling into a single narrative. Some songs sit firmly in childhood memory, others jump forward to later years, and some hold more than one thread at once. Across it all, there’s a focus on what happens behind closed doors – the things that are heard through walls, left unsaid, or overheard. Running through the album is a reflection on witnessing someone deteriorate over time, and how experiences of addiction and excess within a family environment are first absorbed as a child, then re-examined later in life. “I generally found that the more I leaned into anything I didn’t like about my music, the more I would end up writing songs that meant a lot to me.” The warm and textured sound of Gree was shaped by both the equipment and the process used to make it. Vocals and guitars were recorded through a single microphone, drums were built from samples taken from ffolliott'S own vinyl collection and sequenced on an MPC, and much of the sound comes from ageing analogue gear – tape delays and instruments collected over time. The result is a record full of life and texture: hiss, crackle and instability left in place rather than cleaned up. The world of Gree is further developed through the extensive artwork archive of the artist's late father - a prolific self-taught artist and microbiologist whose work has never been shared publicly before. The front cover features an etching from The Dream Machine, a series of 32 black-and-white works created in the midsts of 1980s Northern Ireland, while the back cover brings together unfinished doodles, sketches and drawings recovered from his notebooks and diaries, some dating back to his childhood. “A big part of the ffolliott project has always been to get my dad’s artwork seen alongside my music. I’d always admired it – it felt like something that shouldn’t just live in the house.” Throughout the album, these personal elements sit alongside smaller details – including childhood cassette recordings of Jamie and his sister staging their own improvised radio shows, recorded on a boombox in the 90s. ffolliott takes its name from the artist's middle name, passed down through one side of his family and traditionally given to the first-born son. It remains deliberately uncapitalised, retaining a spelling rooted in older family history.

It began somewhere between sleep and memory. After first meeting in dreams, in Brussels and Berlin, on landscapes that felt strangely close to Vilnius, Marija Rasa aka emer and Ugnė Uma leisurely rewrote those visions into songs. What followed became a collection of moments suspended in idle summers, familiar faces, gentle motions, skin touched by golden sun. These songs wander through closeness and distance, tracing the delicate emotional shifts between us, who almost understand each other completely. ‘you and me’ lives in the space where magical realism meets everyday intimacy: honey-colored evenings, recurring thoughts, and the slow surrender to things unfolding on their own.

maya ongaku has always been searching for what exists just beyond the edge of perception. Since forming in the seaside towns surrounding Enoshima, the trio has followed a path guided less by intention than intuition, allowing songs, ideas, and experiences to emerge through a process they describe as 自然発生 (shizen hassei), spontaneous occurrence. Nothing Space Music is the deepest expression of that philosophy to date. Written in the aftermath of several years of international touring, the album emerged from a growing desire to reconnect with silence. As stages became larger and the world around them moved faster, the band found themselves drawn toward the quieter spaces beneath it all. What began as a reflection on stillness & silence eventually expanded into the idea of "Nothing Space". To realise the album, maya ongaku created an entirely new environment for themselves. Near a seaside shrine in their hometown, the trio transformed a large soundproof building into Nothing Space Studio, a space built specifically around the needs of this record. Nothing Space Music: a meditation on presence, perception, and the possibility of rediscovering the world through attentive listening.

Nigerian percussionist Gasper Lawal’s groundbreaking debut Ajomasé, originally self-released in 1980 on his own CAP label, finally sees an official reissue via the esteemed Strut imprint. Having honed his craft through collaborations with giants like Stephen Stills, Funkadelic, and Vangelis, Lawal crystallized his vision using hand-built instruments and meticulous multi-tracking to create a work of singular depth. Merging Afro-rhythmic intensity with experimental sensibilities, the album garnered international recognition after airplay from John Peel and others. A historic masterpiece where West African shamanism collides with Fourth World psychedelia, deep-rooted funk, spiritual resonance, and an avant-garde ethnomusicological spirit. Fully remastered from the original tapes.

The only break-up record you'll ever need to own. With its lofted harmonies, pick-pocket rhythms, and wailing-in-the-2AM-distance ambulance guitar solos, Ida's 1996 sophomore album leaked out of Brooklyn via detachable car stereo CD players and mixtapes from long-distance lovers. Originally issued on the stalwart Simple Machines label, this 30th anniversary deluxe Numero edition of I Know About You adds half a dozen extras, a wealth of photographic evidence - tissues not included.

Wendy Eisenberg has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser,and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk. On catalog highlights including 2020’s Auto and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler Viewfinder, they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy Eisenberg comprise their most certain vision yet.The songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts—where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory—and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half.”On Wendy Eisenberg, the artist creates their own paradigm with a tight-knit circle of longtime friends and collaborators—including bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Ryan Sawyer, and co-producer Mari Rubio (more eaze), who handled pedal steel, synth, and string arrangements—recording often at Eisenberg’s home and bringing a gorgeous ensemble texture to each note. “I was finally around people who accepted me,” Eisenberg says. “Many of the songs on this record were written in that new feeling. I wanted it to be incredibly comforting as it describes some massive changes in self-understanding and self-regard. It’s about relief.”

Wendy Eisenberg has spent the past decade as a fixture of independent music and an artist of inspired multiplicity. As a singer-songwriter, improviser,and virtuoso guitarist, the coordinates of their artistry are ever-shifting, from art-rock to jazz to blistering free improv and eloquent folk. On catalog highlights including 2020’s Auto and the 2024 free-jazz sprawler Viewfinder, they’ve made a signature of ambition. After spending the past five years experimenting in different bands, genres, and creative challenges, and following a period of self-confrontation that they liken to a personal exorcism, Eisenberg has arrived at a milestone. The poetic and formally daring folk songs of Wendy Eisenberg comprise their most certain vision yet.The songs began to take root in 2020 when Eisenberg moved from Western Massachusetts—where they’d lived for a few years after attending Boston’s New England Conservatory—and relocated to Brooklyn. Longing for the pastoral feel of their former home, Eisenberg gravitated towards the warm sounds of country and folk. “The songs are genuinely folk songs,” Eisenberg says of their record. “The production is less about seeing what the guitar might be capable of and more accepting the inherent strangeness of the languages it has spoken for the last century and a half.”On Wendy Eisenberg, the artist creates their own paradigm with a tight-knit circle of longtime friends and collaborators—including bassist Trevor Dunn, drummer Ryan Sawyer, and co-producer Mari Rubio (more eaze), who handled pedal steel, synth, and string arrangements—recording often at Eisenberg’s home and bringing a gorgeous ensemble texture to each note. “I was finally around people who accepted me,” Eisenberg says. “Many of the songs on this record were written in that new feeling. I wanted it to be incredibly comforting as it describes some massive changes in self-understanding and self-regard. It’s about relief.”

Dublin-born, thirty years an immigrant. That's the spine of henry o henry's debut, Apocrypha, not as a concept but as a condition. "Ireland is the DNA of the thing," he says, "the thing before every other thing." He's spent three decades in the United States working in the trades, absorbing the country's mythologies, imagining Whitman's American spirit, and building what he calls "an idiosyncratic American language" out of it all. He is, by his own account, "formally and informally not a musician." A childhood nylon-string guitar, a few chords learned, and not much else until 2019, when his brother handed him a $6 charity-shop guitar with a repaired headstock and low strings that distorted unpredictably. All but two of the songs on Apocrypha were written on it. It doesn't appear on the record. The songs came with a kind of finality. "I wrote them for myself," he says, "and was certain every song was the last one." It was filmmaker Rick Alverson, a longtime friend who produced the sessions, who convinced him they could stand together as something. They do. The musicians Eamon O'Leary and Ned Steves, father and son, play most of the album, recording together for the first time, without rehearsal. Their instinct is at once precise and open, parts that feel discovered rather than placed, deepening the harmonic language without disturbing the clarity of the songs. The sessions were engineered by Peter Townsend, the longtime Will Oldham collaborator who drummed on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness. Erik Hall mixed and contributed overdubs; Emilie Rex of Lean Year lends luminous harmonies to three songs; poet Callie Garnett appears on another. The arrangements grew in the room, the lyrics and melodies arriving intact, the music unfolding around them. Throughout, Alverson guided the tonal atmosphere and arrangements, shaping the space the songs inhabit as much as the performances themselves. The title does what o henry likes: it's slippery. Apocrypha suggests disputed texts, hidden books, stories that may or may not be true. "It suggests I might not be telling the truth," he says, "but also, some say, the Apocrypha were kept out of the Bible because they were too good." Across nine songs, with a sensibility that sits alongside John Cale, Nick Drake, and Leonard Cohen, o henry moves through time and place with a writer's quiet authority. "Spanish Girl" revisits his early-90s East Village years, an "operetta of agonies and enchantments." "Parade" is what it feels like when a place won't release you; "Driveway" is when the place is all that's left. Album standout "There" captures something harder to name: how powerful feelings drive you to the page, and how the thing you make can outlast the feelings that made it. "It feels like a triumph over something," he says, "even if you're a bit embarrassed by some of the sentiment." Apocrypha arrives as a debut but carries the patience of a life lived in full, shaped by Tarkovsky and Bolaño, by Frank O'Hara and a $6 guitar, by the specific weight of being somewhere for a long time without quite being from there.

Helado Negro returns with This Is How You Smile, an album that freely flickers between clarity and obscurity, past and present geographies, bright and unhurried seasons. Miami-born, New York-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange embraces a personal and universal exploration of aura – seen, felt, emitted – on his sixth album and second for RVNG Intl.