MUSIC

The 2018 live performance captured on Carlos Niño & Miguel Atwood-Ferguson’s 'Chicago Waves' marked a beautiful turning point for International Anthem. The moment was recorded at our then-HQ in Chicago, Co-Prosperity, the day after Niño and Atwood-Ferguson performed as part of Makaya McCraven’s ensemble to celebrate the release of 'Universal Beings' and recreate their contributions to that album's “Los Angeles Side."

The two musicians were keen to use their time in Chicago to not only support Makaya's music but also create and present fresh sounds of their own to a receptive new community. In many ways this set of improvisational, exploratory conversation between Atwood-Ferguson’s violin/effects and Niño’s percussion/soundscapes cemented the growing interchange between International Anthem's bases in LA and the Windy City.

The 2020 release of this recording as 'Chicago Waves' magnified the unmistakable sound of togetherness audible in its grooves in a way that was uniquely cathartic given the difficulties, restrictions, and widespread social isolation of those times. But as that era fades further into the rearview mirror, 'Chicago Waves' maintains its power. It’s not a mystery—this is what togetherness sounds like.

The IA11 Edition LP features our IARC 2025 obi strip, plus a new 16-page 11x11" insert booklet with additional photos and extensive new liner notes by IARC co-founder Scott McNiece.

Irreversible Entanglements’s self-titled debut album was originally released in September 2017, and features the first music ever played together by the freshly assembled Philly/NY/DC-based quintet of poet Camae Ayewa (aka Moor Mother), bassist Luke Stewart, saxophonist Keir Neuringer, trumpeter Aquiles Navarro, and drummer Tcheser Holmes. The explosive collection of improvised free-jazz with spoken word accompaniment was born after the group's initial meeting at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event (organized by musicians/comrades Amirtha Kidambi and Peter Evans following the state-sponsored killing of Akai Gurley).

As the original press release puts it: “the spirit and subject the band channels and explores represent a return to a central tenet of the free jazz sound as it was founded—to be a vehicle for Black liberation. As creative and adventurous as any recording of contemporary avant-garde jazz but offering listeners no abstractions to hide behind, this is music that both honors and defies tradition, speaking to the present while insisting on the future.”

It’s that balance of honor and defiance that is so palpable in this early music of Irreversible Entanglements which, despite its system-shocking effect, sits squarely in the lineage of East Coast free jazz (often echoing the mid-1960s work of The New York Art Quartet and Amiri Baraka, among others). That line can be traced through all of the band’s recordings, including two other albums released by International Anthem (2020's Who Sent You? and 2021's Open The Gates), and their 2023 album Protect Your Light (released by Impulse! Records). Now ten years on from their first collective sound captured in the recording session for this self-titled debut, it’s clear that Irreversible Entanglements's intensity of spirit and purity of purpose influenced our label as much as it did its own community.

The IA11 Edition LP features our IARC 2025 obi strip, plus a new 8-page 11x11" insert booklet with unpublished session photos and new liner notes by Irreversible Entanglements bassist Luke Stewart.

Recommended for fans of modern classical music like Another Timbre and Elsewhere! Okkyung Lee is a Korean cellist and improviser who has collaborated with Christian Marclay, Steve Beresford, Phil Minton and many other big names. is out now on Shelter Press! It's from a rather unexpected label. A dreamy chamber music ensemble featuring Okkyung Lee (cello), Eivind Opsvik (bass), Maeve Gilchrist (harp) and Jacob Sacks (piano). The avalanche of sentimental melodies and gentle, melancholic touches, wrapped in a myriad of aspects from chamber to spiritual jazz and folk music, also evoke the beauty of the pull and the aesthetics of "pause" that are common to Japanese environmental music/ambient music by Satoshi Ashikawa and Hiroshi Yoshimura. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering.

Keith Jarrett, the solitary pianist who has revolutionized the possibilities and concepts of solo piano live performances and continues to release numerous masterpieces such as “The Köln Concert,” celebrated his 80th birthday on May 8. To commemorate this occasion, a live album from his final European solo tour has been released.

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”

 

Occasionally, you find music outside the commercial mainstream, outside of everything – the music of visionaries, eccentrics, inventors, loners, the keepers of secrets, the path-finders. Moondog, Daphne Oram, Harry Partch are from this mould. And so too is Lori Vambe. New on Strut, the first ever reissue of Vambe’s privately pressed original albums from 1982, Drumland Dreamland and Drumgita Solo. A self-taught drummer, inventor, and sonic experimentalist, Lori Vambe is a unique figure in British music. Creator of his own instrument, the drumgita (pronounced ‘drum-guitar’) or string-drum, Vambe intended to create a kind of music that had never been made in order to pursue access to the fourth dimension. Vambe was born in Harare, Zimbabwe and his father, Lawrence Vambe, was a noted Zimbabwean journalist and author. Moving to London in 1959, Vambe immersed himself in the Brixton squat movement of the early 1970s, teaching himself to drum and creating a short-lived performance group, The Healing Drums of Brixton (Vambe, the sculptor Alexander Sokolov and outsider musician Michael O’Shea). Vambe later had a dream-vision involving a feeling of ecstasy while playing an unknown instrument that extended from his own umbilical cord; the instrument would manifest itself as the drumgita. In 1982, he privately produced a pair of home recordings, the diptych set Drumgita Solo and Drumland Dreamland, releasing them on his own label Drumony. On these records, he rejected any commercial aesthetic and employed tape effects, temporal shifts, reversed sound and overdubbing to investigate space-time and access the fourth dimension. Combining layered drums with the rhythmic throb of the drumgita and, on Drumland Dreamland, an improvised piano performance by Brazilian concert pianist Rafael Dos Santos, the albums are both hypnotic and perturbing. Both albums were cut at Portland Studios by Chas Chandler and stand as a concealed monument of Black British experimental music. 500 copies of each record were originally pressed, and both were released together. The albums were never performed live. For this first ever reissue of Drumland Drumland and Drumgita Solo, Strut presents the two albums in their original artwork, housed in a deluxe slipcase including an additional 8-page 12”-sized booklet featuring unseen photos, liner notes and an interview with Lori Vambe by The Wire magazine writer Francis Gooding. Both albums are fully remastered by The Carvery.

Sublime private-press piano improvisations channeled from another world by Willem Nyland. Remastered from the original tapes and reissued for the first time, with in-depth liner notes by Matt Marble of the American Museum of Paramusicology.

A Columbia-educated chemist by profession and a self-taught pianist by affinity, Willem Nyland (1890-1975) is known as a spiritual teacher in the tradition of Greek-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff.

In the mid/late 1960s, a split with Gurdjieff led Nyland to start his own group in upstate New York. There, after a Friday night lecture on “The Work” and a shot of brandy, Nyland would launch into remarkable piano improvisations on a specially tuned baby grand, sometimes playing for over an hour. Each improvisation was meticulously recorded and cataloged, a major part of Nyland’s teachings. 16 of these recordings were released as standalone LPs on Nyland’s own Gauge Hill Press, with artwork by Hungarian American decorative artist Ilonka Karasz, Nyland’s wife of over 50 years.

These records, with their cascading, deeply emotional playing and beautiful cover art, have become highly coveted by collectors and “paramusicologists.” Each contains depths of spiritual information and lyrical, almost visual instrumental storytelling. Nyland deftly and subtly shifts moods and tones throughout these truly inspired extended improvisations.

Piano Studies 337 is a particularly tempestuous performance that Nyland himself recommended to Ansel Adams as a good starting place for his music. So we’ve teamed up with Psychic Sounds and Nyland’s family to bring #337 to the world. Remastered from the original tapes and pressed to high-quality vinyl at Smashed Plastic in Chicago, the record includes extensive liner notes and faithful reproduction of the original artwork. Hopefully the first of more to come!!!!

Derek Bailey’s incredible debut solo showcase is given a necessary, expanded reissue as part of Honest Jon’s reissue series of important releases on Bailey and Evan Parker’s Incus Records. The original LP of finger-flaying improvisations and Bailey’s takes on works by Gavin Bryars and Misha Mengelberg is now augmented by an extra disc of farther improvs, including a solo show at York University in 1972. The late, great guitar pioneer’s Solo Guitar remains pivotal testament to his endeavours in dismantling modern instrumental music and freeing it to more curious routes of expression, much in key - so to speak - with the US free jazz and improvised music which it evolved from. Love it or not, this record remains a totem of late 20th centre musical exploration. “Recorded in 1971, Solo Guitar Volume 1 was Bailey’s first solo album. Its cover is an iconic montage of photos taken in the guitar shop where he worked. He and the photographer piled up the instruments whilst the proprietor was at lunch, with Bailey promptly sacked on his return. The LP was issued in two versions over the years — Incus 2 and 2R — with different groupings of free improvisations paired with Bailey’s performances of notated pieces by his friends Misha Mengelberg, Gavin Bryars and Willem Breuker. All this music is here, plus a superb solo performance at York University in 1972; a welcome shock at the end of an evening of notated music. It’s a striking demonstration of the way Bailey rewrote the language of the guitar with endless inventiveness, intelligence and wit.”

Nina Garcia has been actively moving the art of noise guitar into surprising and intriguing new spaces. She has been at it for some time now, a bit of a secret weapon all the while hiding in plain sight. As I listen to her music and ruminate upon seeing her perform it brings me to a realization which I have with very few musicians: the ego inherent in making art  can be transcended through a purity of direct action. At least that’s the feeling I have when experiencing Nina’s music which comes across as serious and radical and wholly engaged in the moment of its creative impulse. With Bye Bye Bird she delivers her most exalted and sublime collection of recordings for all adventurous hearts to hear. A fantastic album.

Thurston Moore, London 2024 </p><iframe style="border: 0; width: 350px; height: 406px;" src="https://bandcamp.com/EmbeddedPlayer/album=2191920208/size=large/bgcol=ffffff/linkcol=333333/artwork=none/transparent=true/" seamless><a href="https://ideologicorgan.bandcamp.com/album/bye-bye-bird">Bye Bye Bird by Nina Garcia</a></iframe>

'When the Distance is Blue' is Macie Stewart’s International Anthem debut. The Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist, composer, and improviser describes the collection as “a love letter to the moments we spend in-between”—a letter realized via an intentional return to piano, her first instrument and the origin of her creative expression. Here Stewart creates a striking and cinematic work through collages of prepared piano, field recordings, and string quartet compositions, one that gives shape to a transient universe all its own while tracing the line of her musical past, full circle.

Long-heralded in musician circles for her versatility, Stewart stands as a distinguished, go-to collaborator across genre and style, with a collaborative CV that reads like a dream year-end list—performing strings for Makaya McCraven or Japanese Breakfast; singing harmonies with Tweedy; arranging for Alabaster DePlume, Resavoir, Mannequin Pussy, or SZA; co-leading the jagged art-rock experimentation of Finom, her duo with songwriter Sima Cunningham. This varied-yet-distinct sound has led to a name recognition that goes beyond the devoted liner note enthusiast.

“Macie Stewart has had a hand in making some of the best
tracks of the past five years transcendent.” (Pitchfork)

'When the Distance is Blue' finds her gathering those threads and focusing those sensibilities into an 8-piece song cycle. The first sessions were recorded with IARC house engineer Dave Vettraino at Chicago’s Palisade Studios in early 2023. The piano was prepared with coins and contact mics, creating harmonically and texturally rich sounds to explore and improvise alongside.

Those improvisations eventually became nestled within a growing collection of Stewart’s field recordings. 2023 was a year marked with extensive touring, during which she collected dozens of aural snapshots from airports, stairwells, and crowded markets, effectively compiling an audio journal of her travels. Weaving their way throughout the record, those recordings form a collage of sound, movement, and memory.

“I wanted to recontextualize these recordings and evoke a nostalgia for something I wasn’t able to name,” says Stewart. That recontextualization was deepened by further performances and improvisations by Lia Kohl, Whitney Johnson (Matchesse), and Zach Moore, all recorded at Comfort Station in Chicago. It’s fitting for such a fervent collaborator that these collaborations began to bring the musical scope of 'When The Distance is Blue' into focus.

“Spring Becomes You, Spring Becomes New” begins with a series of unmetered and searching prepared piano repetitions before blooming into a rhythmically pulsing waltz of ennui à la Margaret Leng Tan’s approach to the material of Cage or Crumb. Electronically enhanced sustaining notes merge with droning violins in a dense teapot upper register, then are slowly paired away to reveal the inner layer of consonance and comfort, as the metallic rhythms of the prepared piano are co-opted by pizzicato plucked strings. When the sound of the piano re-enters it’s in its natural, unprepared state and in service of a simple melody—a slow-moving earworm, the final repetition, carrying the dynamic piece to its end. “This piece reminds me of a cross country train ride through different sceneries and landscapes,” says Stewart. It’s the feeling when you’re witnessing everything pass outside your window, knowing you may never set foot there.”

What’s more, this conceptual train ride is one that touches on many of the themes throughout the record—traveling through pieces like “Tsukiji”, which consists of field recordings taken during a walk through the crowded Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, or “Stairwell (Before and After)”, a serendipitous collage of piano improvisations overlaid with vocal improvisations recorded in a beautifully reverberant stairwell in Paris, France.

In the album’s final piece, “Disintegration,” Stewart’s through-composed quartet arrangement bends and contorts in a microtonal descent. Raw harmonics scrape and pull, whistling flute-like across desolate valleys, as strings spiral into an unknown beyond. From this stripped, warped place, we face the inevitability of transformation, and embrace the possibilities of change.

'When The Distance is Blue' is a companion piece for moving through life. A source of solace when we are unsure where we will land. The album draws its title from Rebecca Solnit’s book of essays, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost'. Stewart, too, contends with the longing for all that lies out of reach, and gives shape to that longing throughout this contemplative collection with a musical lexicon which lands somewhere between Alvin Curran’s 'Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden' and Claire Rousay’s 'A Softer Focus'. 

A long-awaited new album by none other than Rashad Becker — the living legend behind the scenes of contemporary experimental and electronic music. Known for his groundbreaking work at the iconic Dubplates & Mastering, closely tied to Basic Channel, Becker now returns with a new full-length released on his own label and studio, clunk. Alongside figures like Matt Colton, Stephan Mathieu, Amir Shoat, Helmut Erler, and Josh Bonati, Becker has certified countless landmark releases across the avant-garde spectrum. He has also released on Berlin’s cult label PAN, further cementing his legacy. On The Incident, swirling electronics and improvisational structuralism intertwine to form a surreal, otherworldly sonic landscape. A masterclass in sonic manipulation — Becker delivers yet another razor-sharp rupture in perception. A surrealist electroacoustic opus from a true artisan of the invisible.

Haswell laces up his n0!ze techno boots for a proper stomping and thistly set of modular bangers in his 6th outing with Diagonal, gnashing the heels of a ruder 10” for Skam, andan E-Mego issue of a UPIC session in duo with Florian Hecker.

‘Deep Time’ coughs up Russell’s typical mix of direct and obtusely playful tackle, serving dual purpose as his nervy response to the minute-by-minute fuckeries of geopolitics, and the inspiration of geologic revelations in his now-native Scotland. It all bristles with a livewire moxie that belies his decades in the game, bunkered in the fissures of art, music and technology, pulling and snapping threads that bind / divide body musics and radical experimental improvisational practices.

Eight severely rude bits deploy an arsenal of kit that warrants listing: “Used = Acid Rain Technology, ADDAC System, ALM/Busy Circuits, Apple, Audiofile Engineering, Beautiful Pieces of Outdated Technology, Cwejman, Epoch Modular, FANCYYYYY Synthesis, Future Sound Systems, MOTU, Neutrik, SnazzyFX, Super Synthesis, Tip-Top Audio, Waldorf …”

Cut to cut he navigates the gear with a personalised balance of upfront purpose and screwball mentality. Pronged by his extra musical cues he variously mirrors the turmoil of fiscal markets and crypto currency in the spiky waves of ‘International Globalisation’ and models ground-to-space warfare in ‘Satellite Killer’, whilst ‘Infinite Space’ scrambles proprioception in its warped space-time textures.

But most vital to the work is his fascination with, and perception of, scales of time, which guides the buckshot techn0!ze of ’Unconformity’, which takes its name from geologist James Hutton’s discovery of folds of rock that allow man to assert the age of Earth, and neatly contradict the in-the-moment fizz and crack of the set’s bangers, ‘Deep Time’ and bezzerker ‘Atropine.’

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhythms and intuitive melodic storytelling.

It’s worth mentioning that a leap forward for Gay is no small feat. The musical ground he has covered in the last decade, both as a bandleader and collaborator, is immense. His de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced the world to Gay by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another, letting the populace outside of Cook County in on an unintentionally best-kept-secret that Chicagoans had already been marveling at for quite some time. That secret has become even more open in the years since, with the full unveiling of those seven previously-unreleased albums, the release of his critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us, and the explosive free sonics of 2022’s Certain Reveries.

In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today. He makes active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks, and many more. He is also a long-time participant in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Suffice to say, his credentials are astonishing and the scope of his interests and abilities is seemingly limitless, with Yowzers representing the latest redrawing of that ever-expanding creative borderline.

Much of the music on Yowzers features his working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). But the unlisted feature here is Gay’s own ability to summon and unleash the unique strengths of his collaborators. The quartet material leans into a vocabulary that the group has developed over the course of several years together on the road; and the repertoire delivers an arresting cocktail of pulsing and free rhythms that somehow swing alongside a gathering of melodic phrases that sweep the outer-reaches of harmony with nostalgic echoes of family songs from the living room.

“Building a language, or taking a while to build a language—it’s like every other thing,” says Gay. “These stories are passed around through melody. You write a story and you share the story with individuals, and then you allow their individuality to embellish the story and take it on in another way. That person is a whole universe. It’s about trusting these people—trusting the people you leave something with, just like people trust their kids and their grandkids to carry a thing on. To not give it all away. To keep it in this tightly-knit body and to just keep it going.”

It’s not a new concept for Gay. One uniting factor in his deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving.

Information moves through Yowzers via the intuitive physicality of Gay’s creative polyrhythmic constructions as he covertly delivers familiar folk tunes and tales. “It’s the most natural thing,” says Gay. “That’s how the world is. There are overlapping rhythms all around us, and so it reminds you of the reality of the world when you hear them. It’s a loop and the loop is always changing.”

Yowzers is ripe with the fine mash of that loop’s changes and diffusions, recalling the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. More amalgam than pendulum swing; a fresh thought made up of old ideas, like some imaginary Sacred Heart Ensemble led by Elvin Jones and Rashid Ali. It’s all there, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied. For a man who has inhabited and traveled these continents so extensively, it’s safe to call this work true Americana, despite what that word might mean to the average white person in the United States.

“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live.” Translating that language to a studio situation is a tough task, even for a seasoned crew. “You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in a room there can be a disconnect.” Striving to document the magic of those live moments, to great end, Gay chose to track the quartet pieces (“the glorification of small victories,” “there, inside the morning glory,” “I am (bells),” and “cumulus”) for Yowzers live, in real time, seated with his bandmates in a small circle at Palisade Studios in Chicago.

The spectrum of the album is widened by a batch of music created via Gay’s highly successful approach to composing in-studio, augmented with contributions from his bandmates, instrumentalist Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu. This straying from the quartet material throughout the course of the record acts as an expansion of detail rather than an interruption of continuity.

All together, the pacing and flow of Yowzers is proof-positive of Gay’s practiced grasp on how the album format can traverse such a breadth of atmospheres. The titular album opener “yowzers” is a simple, soulful, three-chord piano and vocal repetition nestled in the hypnotically swelling effect of the Woods/Parker/Nwaogwugwu choir. The undecorated lyrics leave ample room for a listener to comprehend references to the binding existential crises of our times. It’s a Blues that everyone in the world should feel in their bones:

Ain’t gon snow no more x4

Rain gon pour and pour x4

Fire don’t stop no more x4

“for Breezy”, a could-be New Orleans dirge, straddles the deep sigh of a heavy sadness and the sweet lift of a fond look back, echoing the most contemplative moments of Duke Ellington’s small group arrangements. Gay’s clustered synth chording sets the scene while Frye’s breathy flute and Moretti’s delicate brushwork are positioned front-and-center along with a synthetic static—the nagging question of darkness even as beauty blooms. Gay’s flugelhorn enters at the 1:35 mark, maneuvering slowly around Frye and locking the vibe into place. It’s a gorgeous and fitting tribute to an old comrade.

“John, John Henry” begins with doomy oscillations and click-clack electronic rhythm loops hovering atop a contextually disjointed swing beat from Moretti. Enter Gay and his choir, digging into a take on the dusty-yet-timeless tale of man versus machine, an update we didn’t know we needed and an entrance we didn’t know we wanted. The way the group’s vocal rhythms hit here is a classic example of the Gay conundrum: an idea that reads as challenging on paper but sounds simple to the ear and feels intuitive to the body. With spectacles underfoot and charts out the window, the listener sings along, unencumbered by know-how. It’s all in service of Gay’s ongoing exploration and expansion of folklore in his work—arguably the one concept that bridges the gap between all of the disparate elements of his oeuvre.

This bottomless bag of tricks never induces fatigue, instead allowing for breaths and bites as needed—the quick-vibe banana peel windup of “rollerskates”; the endlessly psychedelic metallic rhythm chant of the album’s centerpiece “I am (bells)”; and the triumphant free-folk shouts of “the glorification of small victories,” which is a drastic and collaborative quartet rework of a composition originally recorded for Gay’s album Grapes that serves as further evidence of his steady crew’s interpretive powers.

How, though, does Gay end a collection that covers so much ground? The sweetest sendoff is often the one that sounds like a beginning. The album closer “leave some for you”—a balladeer’s kiss as the sun comes up—pairs a deeply disintegrated series of rhythmic loops with a diddley bow shuffle, ushered by the sturdy-yet-understated swing of Moretti’s kit. Gay’s sweetly intoned low-register lilt is front and center with an affirmation delivered as an earworm. The simple melody carries it home:

You look brand new today

Not cause you need it

Just cause you want it

New

2025 restock. Space Elements Vol. II is the fourth release in Rafael Toral's ongoing project, the Space Program. Following the first Elements release, this volume features a new set of collaborators: Evan Parker (soprano sax), Manuel Mota (guitar), Afonso Simões (drums), Stefano Tedesco (vibraphone), João Paulo Feliciano (Rhodes piano), and Ruben Costa (digital synthesizer), as well as returning guests Sei Miguel (trumpet), César Burago (percussion), Fala Mariam (trombone), and Rute Praça (cello). Space Elements Vol. II displays a melodic quality that, along with a refined management of silence, marks a new area and consolidates the Space Program's complex network. Its spaciousness is explained in Toral's liner notes: "While finding ways to make decisions on sound emission, it became evident to me that such sounds should have a reason to exist, they should be essential and necessary." Dan Warburton's writing in The Wire about Space fits Space Elements Vol. II perfectly: "The melodic logic that drives certain instruments within Space also recalls birdsong, with dense, convoluted runs of twittering melody ending in single piping notes, as spontaneous as Messiaen's birdsong transcriptions were painstaking and meticulous." Toral's music is a jazz-inspired re-evaluation of live electronics: "Despite working in a sound world that is cosmetically closer to R2D2's vocabulary than Louis Armstrong's or John Coltrane's, Toral has claimed a kinship to jazz because it models instant music making within a disciplined framework." (Bill Meyer, Dusted); "Toral is looking for nothing less than a totally fresh language to work in" (The Wire). Space Elements Vol. II was mastered direct to metal from 24-bit files and pressed on clear 200 gram virgin-vinyl. With design by Helder Luis at NOTYPE, the LP features a collage by João Paulo Feliciano. Presented in a limited edition of 500. CD version available on Staubgold.

Space Elements Vol. II is the fourth release in Rafael Toral's ongoing project, the Space Program. Following the first Elements release, this volume features a new set of collaborators: Evan Parker (soprano sax), Manuel Mota (guitar), Afonso Simões (drums), Stefano Tedesco (vibraphone), João Paulo Feliciano (Rhodes piano), and Ruben Costa (digital synthesizer), as well as returning guests Sei Miguel (trumpet), César Burago (percussion), Fala Mariam (trombone), and Rute Praça (cello). Space Elements Vol. II displays a melodic quality that, along with a refined management of silence, marks a new area and consolidates the Space Program's complex network. Its spaciousness is explained in Toral's liner notes: "While finding ways to make decisions on sound emission, it became evident to me that such sounds should have a reason to exist, they should be essential and necessary." Dan Warburton's writing in The Wire about Space fits Space Elements Vol. II perfectly: "The melodic logic that drives certain instruments within Space also recalls birdsong, with dense, convoluted runs of twittering melody ending in single piping notes, as spontaneous as Messiaen's birdsong transcriptions were painstaking and meticulous." Toral's music is a jazz-inspired re-evaluation of live electronics: "Despite working in a sound world that is cosmetically closer to R2D2's vocabulary than Louis Armstrong's or John Coltrane's, Toral has claimed a kinship to jazz because it models instant music making within a disciplined framework." (Bill Meyer, Dusted); "Toral is looking for nothing less than a totally fresh language to work in" (The Wire). Space Elements Vol. II was mastered direct to metal from 24-bit files and pressed on clear 200 gram virgin-vinyl. With design by Helder Luis at NOTYPE, the LP features a collage by João Paulo Feliciano. Presented in a limited edition of 500. CD version available on Staubgold.

This is the third volume of the Space Program's Space Elements series. In this series, each volume features guests and is focused on a compositional function. The Space Program is a long-term project launched in 2004, for performing music with a post-free jazz mind-set but using strange sounds from electronic instruments. Playing physically, the body is involved in making decisions. The Space Program is about articulating silence and sound, structuring musical flow on experimental instruments with a simple and clear sonic identity.

All these instruments are different but have a few things in common. The first is that they don't have a conventional interface, which means that for all of them i have to find out what they do and develop technique to play them. The second is that none of them respond accurately to performing action. So there's always a live tension between an accurate decision and its somewhat unpredictable outcome. I meant to play music technically free from any school and teachings, but beyond that i also wanted the music somehow to escape my own self, playing instruments with a sort of life of their own, never allowing complete control and making any repetition virtually impossible. Space Elements Vol. III by Rafael Toral

At the end of 1970, having worked on his free jazz “made in France” and, with his Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra, sung the blues with all the regional accents of the country, François Tusques made his contribution to the traditional music of a region he knows well: Brittany. With the electric bass of Tanguy Le Doré and the bombards and bagpipes of Jean-Louis Le Vallegant, Gaby Kerdoncuff and Philippe Lestrat, the Intercommunal becomes a kind of Brotherhood Of Breizh. But if the swell and the sway remind us of Chris McGregor, the repetitions and dissonances soon rock the boat. Bracing, the wind in Brittany!

If the jazz of François Tusques is “free”, his spirit is even more so: having recorded Free Jazz with other like-minded Frenchmen (Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and Charles Saudrais), the pianist had covered a lot of ground, with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz) or even solo (Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2), so as not to repeat himself…

In 1971 he founded the Inter Communal Free Dance Music Orchestra which, as the notes the this album stated, “is an interpretation of a music which sythesizes the different communities living and working in France.” In 1976, on the first album (L’Inter Communal) we can already hear Tusques playing without borders in the company of Carlos Andreu (vocals), Michel Marre (trumpet and saxophone), Jo Maka (saxophone) and Ramadolf (trombone). It is a meeting between jazz and music from Catalonia, Occitanie and Africa. So far so good, but what about Brittany, that, Tusques knows “by heart”?

Having lived for a long time in Nantes, he would expand his ‘brittanitude’ on the canal linking the aforementioned city to Brest by playing with, for example the Diaouled-Ar-Menez. With these “devils from the mountain” who, under the baton of Yann Goasdoué, worked throughout the 1970s on the renewal of music from Brittany, Tusques met, notably, Tanguy Ledoré and invited him one day, with trois bombards and some bagpipes (Jean-Louis Le Vallegant, Gaby Kerdoncuff and Philippe Lestrat), to join the ranks of the Intercommunal. And so they set of towards a new music from Brittany, as the title states; Vers une Musique bretonne nouvelle!

With percussion from Samuel Ateba and Kilikus, the association launches the ‘bombardier’: the repetitions and dissonance of the different members all serve a common cause however: the dance, which is always the reason for the party. This sets a whole universe spinning, which can bring to mind Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath (“La rencontre”) when not taking on board waltz, swing, blues and gavotta or even revealing mysteries like those of Gurdjieff (“Les racines de la montagne” or “Le cheval” sung by Andreu). Only one thing to say to this Brotherhood Of Breizh: Mersi!

At the end of 1970, having worked on his free jazz “made in France” and, with his Intercommunal Free Dance Music Orchestra, sung the blues with all the regional accents of the country, François Tusques made his contribution to the traditional music of a region he knows well: Brittany. With the electric bass of Tanguy Le Doré and the bombards and bagpipes of Jean-Louis Le Vallegant, Gaby Kerdoncuff and Philippe Lestrat, the Intercommunal becomes a kind of Brotherhood Of Breizh. But if the swell and the sway remind us of Chris McGregor, the repetitions and dissonances soon rock the boat. Bracing, the wind in Brittany!

If the jazz of François Tusques is “free”, his spirit is even more so: having recorded Free Jazz with other like-minded Frenchmen (Michel Portal, François Jeanneau, Bernard Vitet, Beb Guérin and Charles Saudrais), the pianist had covered a lot of ground, with Barney Wilen (Le Nouveau Jazz) or even solo (Piano Dazibao and Dazibao N°2), so as not to repeat himself…

In 1971 he founded the Inter Communal Free Dance Music Orchestra which, as the notes the this album stated, “is an interpretation of a music which sythesizes the different communities living and working in France.” In 1976, on the first album (L’Inter Communal) we can already hear Tusques playing without borders in the company of Carlos Andreu (vocals), Michel Marre (trumpet and saxophone), Jo Maka (saxophone) and Ramadolf (trombone). It is a meeting between jazz and music from Catalonia, Occitanie and Africa. So far so good, but what about Brittany, that, Tusques knows “by heart”?

Having lived for a long time in Nantes, he would expand his ‘brittanitude’ on the canal linking the aforementioned city to Brest by playing with, for example the Diaouled-Ar-Menez. With these “devils from the mountain” who, under the baton of Yann Goasdoué, worked throughout the 1970s on the renewal of music from Brittany, Tusques met, notably, Tanguy Ledoré and invited him one day, with trois bombards and some bagpipes (Jean-Louis Le Vallegant, Gaby Kerdoncuff and Philippe Lestrat), to join the ranks of the Intercommunal. And so they set of towards a new music from Brittany, as the title states; Vers une Musique bretonne nouvelle!

With percussion from Samuel Ateba and Kilikus, the association launches the ‘bombardier’: the repetitions and dissonance of the different members all serve a common cause however: the dance, which is always the reason for the party. This sets a whole universe spinning, which can bring to mind Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood Of Breath (“La rencontre”) when not taking on board waltz, swing, blues and gavotta or even revealing mysteries like those of Gurdjieff (“Les racines de la montagne” or “Le cheval” sung by Andreu). Only one thing to say to this Brotherhood Of Breizh: Mersi!

Sept duos pour guitar acoustique et piano préparé is the second duo recording from Stephen O’Malley and Anthony Pateras. Their first together, Rêve Noir (2018), took an electro-acoustic scalpel to a 2011 duo concert for electric guitar and piano, using Revox and digital treatments to twist and smear gig documentation into ghostly echoes and fractured drones. Here, in contrast, the music is entirely acoustic and presented as it was performed, without overdubs. Both players’ choices of instruments are notable: this is O’Malley’s most extensive recording on steel string acoustic guitar (playing an instrument whose previous owners include Marissa Nadler and Glenn Jones) and Pateras return to the prepared piano, which he has rarely employed in recent years, after spending much of the first decade of the 21st century exploring its possibilities. Recorded during O’Malley’s residency at La Becque on Lake Geneva in the summer of 2021, from the first moments of the opening ‘déjà revé’ the music immediately establishes the distinctive landscape of chiming tones and hovering clouds of resonance explored throughout its one-hour running time. Pateras’ preparations create tolling bell-like tones alive with complex overtones, alongside which O’Malley’s open strings and natural harmonics add a sparkling clarity. While Pateras’ music often uses a densely chromatic harmonic language, these duos are remarkable for their modal simplicity. However, the interaction between the pure intervals of O’Malley’s just-intoned strings and the unstable harmonies created by the piano preparations suspends the music in an oneiric state of hazy ambiguity. Without obvious reference to tempo or meter, the music floats in what the composer Ernstalbrecht Stiebler has called a ‘bottomless sound space’, the temporal placement of events determined by bodily rhythms and the performers’ own listening to (and enjoyment of) the sounds being made. Heard one way, this music can seem striking in its consistency, almost environmental. Attending more carefully, the listener hears the pitch sets and tunings changing throughout the album’s length. Each piece has its own character, subtly distinguished from the others through mood, pacing, and timbre. On ‘déjà voulu’, for instance, O’Malley makes prominent use of slide, the woozy, bending pitches weaving through a series of lush arpeggiated chords from the piano. ‘Déjà senti’, on the other hand, is particularly spare, the gestures spaced out to the extent that they often float in isolation against the background of fading resonance. Much of ‘déjà su’ is built around a slowly pulsing single prepared piano tone, creating an almost ominous tension, whereas the sparkling guitar harmonics and arpeggios of the closing ‘déjà raconté’ have a gently triumphal air. While the music’s calm, rippling surface is immediately entrancing, these seven duos – in the tradition of the best improvised music – also reward close listening, which reveals sonic details and focuses the listener’s attention on how the music unfolds spontaneously from decision to decision, from gesture to gesture. Recorded during a period when O’Malley and Pateras were grieving the loss of recently departed friends and collaborators, these seven duos possess a reflective, at times almost mournful quality. More importantly, though, they are imbued with other qualities that can arise from personal loss: a clarity that allows one to clear away the inessential, to begin again, to renew one’s faith in friendship and music. — Out now on a limited 2xLPs with an etching on fourth side housed in printed heavyweight inner and outer sleeves. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu, Artwork by María Jesús Valenzuela Vittini, Design by Bartolomé Sanson.

This reissue of the “Collection” is limited to just 299 hand-numbered copies, making it a truly special release for fans and collectors alike. Encased in a beautifully crafted wooden box, this deluxe edition features ten LPs, each adorned with original collages by Masami Akita, printed in black silkscreen on Cordenons Astropack ivory cardboard sleeves. Accompanying the vinyl is a 12-inch booklet, also printed on the same high-quality cardboard as the cover, containing 32 pages filled with previously unpublished photographs, as well as artwork and collages by Masami Akita from 1981-83. This booklet includes exclusive notes by Lasse Marhaug, Thurston Moore and Masami Akita along with a unique interview of Jim O’Rourke with Masami Akita.

The 2015 edition of Winnipeg’s send + receive festival, focussed on rhythm, turned out to be a generative meeting of minds. There, Mark Fell encountered the music of Will Guthrie, a meeting that was eventually to result in the frenetic acoustic drumkit and digital synthesis pairing heard on Infoldings and Diffractions (2020). At the same festival, Limpe Fuchs first heard and appreciated the music of Mark Fell, planting the seed of a collaboration that came to fruition when Fell (along with his son Rian Treanor) visited Fuchs at her home in Peterskirchen, Germany in September 2022. Black Truffle is pleased to announce the release of the results of this extensive session in the audacious form of a triple LP, housing over two hours of music across its six sides. The collaboration might appear unlikely: what common ground could exist between Fuchs, classically trained pianist, legend of improvised music, instrument builder and sound sculptor active since the 1960s, whose group Anima Sound connected the dots between free jazz, krautrock and ritual, and Fell, proponent of radical computer music, known for his bracingly austere productions that twist remnants of club music into algorithmic stutters? For all their seeming disparity in technology, approach and background, the music on Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch makes it immediately evident the pair share a great deal in their essentially percussive approach and ability to, in Fuch’s phrase, ‘establish silence’. Recording at her home studio, Fuchs had the use of her entire array of instruments, found, invented, and traditional, and treats the listener to some that don’t often make their way to concerts, including extensive passages performed (with Gundis Stalleicher) on pieces of wooden parquetry. Alongside metallic, wooden and skin percussion of all kinds, sounded and struck in every conceivable way, we also hear bamboo flute, viola, and Fuchs’ distinctive free-form vocalisations. Fell also stretched himself, with his contributions ranging from characteristically fizzing pitched percussive pops to swarms of sliding tones and abstract digital noise. Showing both remarkable restraint and improvisational freedom, much of the music consists of duets between a single percussion instrument and a distinctive mode of digital sound, often lingering in one timbral-rhythmic space for minutes at a time. Improvisational forward momentum coexists with a free-floating, wandering quality. On opener ‘Dessogia I’, the shimmering almost-gilssandi tones of Fuchs’ enormous set of microtonally tuned metal tubes ripples across Fell’s rubbery pulse, which moves up the frequency spectrum as Fuchs becomes more animated and switches to horn. At some points, as on the metallic chiming tones that open ‘Fauch I’, only the unexpected dynamic behaviour of Fell’s sounds distinguish them from Fuchs’ acoustic instruments. At others, like on ‘Queetch III’, the waves of sliding tones and noise textures are bracingly synthetic, joined by piercing squeaks and scrapes from Fuchs’ metal objects. Epic in scope, immersing the listener in an entirely distinctive world of sounds, and thrillingly bold in its melding of the most ancient musical procedures with cutting edge technologies, Dessogia/Queetch/Fauch is an unexpected major statement from two of the great mavericks of contemporary music.

Pink Floyd Live at the Old Refectory 1969 captures the band in a transitional phase, blending their early psychedelic roots with the progressive sounds that defined their future. This rare performance showcases experimental improvisations and tracks that reflect their evolving musical identity.

Kind Regards is the second duo release from guitarist Oren Ambarchi and drummer Eric Thielemans, out via AD 93 on the 21st February 2025.

The record captures an expansive performance in Poitiers, France in November 2023. First working together in an unpredictable trio with minimalist legend and eccentric extraordinaire Charlemagne Palestine, Ambarchi and Thielemans quickly established a remarkable musical chemistry that led to an ongoing series of duo concerts, including the performance documented on their LP Double Consciousness (Matière Mémorie, 2023).

Kind Regards finds the duo refining their shared language while continuing to take risks, allowing the music’s gravitational pull to lead them from meditative calm to unexpectedly expressive passages of melodic invention and rhythmic drive. Recorded in sparkling fidelity and carefully mixed by Ambarchi’s longtime collaborator Joe Talia, the LP contains a single unbroken performance, stretching out for over 45 minutes. Guitar and drums weave together into a symbiotic whole that nevertheless affords us ample opportunity to marvel at the highly personal approaches these two musicians have developed to their chosen instruments through decades of diverse collaboration and prolific performance.

The set begins with Thielemans’ hypnotic tom patterns, around which Ambarchi’s wavering, shimmering guitar tones—achieved with the help of the rotating speaker of a Leslie cabinet—flurry and swirl. Thielemans’ drums play subtle tricks with time and perception, adding and dropping beats within repeated patterns to create an effect at once rhythmically insistent and liquified. Growing at first into a rapidly pulsing texture of brushed drums and flickering harmonics, the music builds momentum into an irregular groove over which Ambarchi’s guitar is transformed into haunting, monumental electric organ chords, strikingly recalling the Wurlitzer work of Alice Coltrane, before settling into a section of gentle portamento melody embedded into the tactile clicks and clangs of Thielemans’ percussion.
When Thielemans adopts a more traditional jazz approach to the kit in some of the set’s second half, the results are stunning, demonstrating a feel for shifting accents and sensibility to the touch of the stick on the drum or cymbal that recalls greats like Jack De Johnette or Billy Hart (one of Thielemans’ mentors). And when Ambarchi turns up the heat, he does so in an unexpected and delightful way, letting loose a swarm of jittering delayed tones straight out of Henry Kaiser’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life, with a more active use of the guitar’s fretboard than his usual approach to the instrument allows. As the performance draws to a close after a climactic episode of distorted harmonic groans and crashing cymbals that manages to be at once thunderous and carefully attuned to detail, it is clearer than ever that, for these two serial collaborators, this is a very special pairing.

Kind Regards shows us the kind of magic that can happen when two masters who have dedicated decades to reimagining their instruments simply begin to play, following the music wherever it goes. 

Alabaster DePlume often asks a simple question: what do people need? In his work, at his shows, in his collaborations, the Mancunian singer-saxophonist and poet-philosopher poses this to the people around him. What are people looking for? In recent years, the same reply kept coming up: healing, healing, people need healing. But why, and what does it mean to heal, especially in a world where the very idea is often commodified and sold as a luxury? If people were coming to his music for something so mysterious, he ought to figure it out. Maybe he ought to try some healing himself.

“For a long time, I've always tried to give responsibility for my value to someone else,” DePlume told me on a recent phone call. It seemed he’d become so caught up in the work of forging connections, and thinking about the effects of his work on others, that he’d lost a sense of himself. “I was working on that,” he explained.

This experiment in healing included slowing down, reading, reflecting, and even taking up the practice of jiu-jitsu. DePlume wrote poetry, too, including the book 'Looking for my value: prologue to a blade', seventy pages of verse rooted in its title’s great search, in finding strength of self within a community, alongside meditations on the paradox of the blade. “The blade, that divides, is whole,” he writes in the introduction. “Healing is the forming of a whole, and a whole is singular, more itself, as in more one, as in more alone.” A blade could be used to attack, to shave, to sever, but it could also be used to cut oneself loose—in the process of getting free.

“What's the opposite of sleep? It’s trying to sleep,” he told me. “And so what's the opposite of looking for my value? It is knowing my value. It simply is there. My dignity is there. I don't need anyone else to know my dignity, or me, to know it. I know it first. I can't seek it from another. I stand for it.”

Selections from the poetry book ultimately became the lyrics across half of the tracks on 'A Blade Because A Blade Is Whole', DePlume’s latest full-length work for the reliably great International Anthem label: eleven songs of agency and survival and presence; of confronting life’s pains rather than trying to avoid them; of banishing escapism. In sum, it documents his learning of the fact that dignity and self-determination are prerequisites for becoming whole, which is to say, for healing. If a blade were broken it would not serve its purpose; it must be unbroken, it must be whole, to be of use.

In the Alabaster DePlume songbook, the celestial ease of his instrumental tracks can sometimes feel like a trojan horse for a voice that is disarmingly honest about the heaviness of existence. Opener “Oh My Actual Days” is true to form in that sense, with DePlume’s tenor sax and Macie Stewart’s ghostly strings playing together like a slow march towards an inner reckoning, one that’s beautiful because it is true. The punchy and contemplative “Thank You My Pain” makes a rhythmic refrain from his titular lyric, inspired by the Vietnamese monk and peace activist Thích Nhất Hạnh, who urged the importance of listening to one’s own pain. “Hello my little pain, I know you are here,” Nhất Hạnh would say. “I am home to take care of you. I do not want to cover you up with consumption anymore.” While writing A Blade, DePlume “watched loads of him on YouTube.”

Then there’s the gorgeous swell of “Invincibility,” an ode to self-respect that feels a bit like a choir of angels led by a trickster, a group contemplating: how do we live with the forces that seek to destroy us? The whole song feels like a heavy exhale, or like the feeling of reaching the surface after a long while underwater. “If I meet with my feelings, they cannot destroy me,” he told me. “When I allow myself to embody them, physically, then I live through that feeling and I meet with it and I make peace with it and I find that my feeling is me, and I welcome it. It is a sense that I cannot be destroyed by my feeling. I am invincible.”

“Form a V” is the closest DePlume comes to a monologue, and also his song most indebted to his jiu-jitsu practice. “I’ve only been doing it for the past two or three years,” he told me. “But now I don’t know how you get by without it.” The song takes inspiration from a tradition where a whole dojo will stand in the shape of a V, facing just one lone individual, who is then attacked quickly and repeatedly by each of the others. “The title is a challenge to the world,” DePlume explained. “Go on, form a v—I am ready.”

Across the first half of the record, when the sax comes in short phrases, it feels like a highlighter over lines in DePlume’s poetry book. Other times, it plays out like an extension of his voice. “Playing the saxophone feels like singing,” he said. A transfixing run of instrumentals on the second half of the record includes “Prayer for My Sovereign Dignity,” an anthem for self-possession. “Believing in yourself feels ridiculous,” he says. “It's ridiculous, but that's what it takes. That's what's required. To stand for yourself is absurd. Let us do the absurd that is standing for ourselves. There is this prayer going on in the background—you can't quite tell what the words are, but it's basically, I'm praying for my sovereign dignity but I don't need to pray for it. It's not going to be given to me. I already have it.”

Where DePlume’s previous material was drawn from collective sessions, improvisation, and editing, A Blade was tightly composed, arranged and produced by DePlume himself. From there, he brought his compositions to a cast of players and co-arrangers, including Macie Stewart (strings), Donna Thompson (backing vocals), and Momoko Gill (strings and backing vocals), for sessions at the collective arts space Total Refreshment Centre, where he has long been involved.

Born Gus Fairbairn, DePlume is a man of many past lives. He played “rock band type music” as a teenager, and started playing improvised music around 2008. He is compelled by how improvising allows him to “put faith in others.” He taught himself the saxophone around the time that he became employed as a support worker assisting men with mental disabilities; he once called playing music with them “one of the best breakthroughs for me as an artist.” His debut as Alabaster DePlume came in May 2012, while he was still living in Manchester. He moved to London in 2015 and took up residency at Total Refreshment Centre, where he was encouraged to put on a monthly concert, leading to the series Peach, releasing a namesake album that year, too. His music, from the start, has been imbued with his politics and values; he was maybe arrested once during a protest with the environmental group Extinction Rebellion. His proper international breakthrough came in 2020 with 'To Cy & Lee: Instrumentals Vol. 1', after nearly a decade of steadily releasing records.

On a phone call in the fall of 2024, we barely speak about any of this though. For at least an hour, we mostly just speak about his recent trip to Palestine, and how could we not? DePlume had traveled to Bethlehem in the spring for a conference hosted by a local Lutheran pastor, before meeting up with musicians from a community arts space, the Wonder Cabinet, and the independent radio station, Radio Alhara. “Palestine is a place where people make records,” he says. “I want to normalize the dignity of that. It's not like, oh, I'm going to make a thing about Palestine. I am just there, and I'm making a thing.”

At the end of 2024, DePlume prefaced A Blade with a collection of recent works: the poetry book and a three-track EP partially recorded in Bethlehem, and in collaboration with Palestinian musicians. There’s “Honeycomb” and “Cremisan,” both recorded during his “Sounds of Places” residency at Wonder Cabinet; “Cremisan” documents the conclusion of a daylong performance presented by Wonder Cabinet and Radio alHara, June 1, 2024, described as “a cry from the Cremisan Valley (Bethlehem, Palestine) to Rafah (Gaza).” The EP’s final recording, “Gifts of Olive,” references the soul-wrenching poem “If I Must Die” by Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at the Islamic University in Gaza, who was killed by an Israeli airstrike in 2023.

To suggest that dignity is a human right we are all entitled to is to say: by nature of being alive, every human life has worth. Contemplating the very concept of human dignity also raises the daily indignities that are so normalized in a world of suffering. The lack of access to clean water, air, housing, healthcare. Without the basic necessities of life, we cannot know dignity. And how can people know dignity if they are living under a constant state of military attack, if they are living as the target of a genocide?

“The album was written before the genocide started, but I had Palestine on my mind all the time,” DePlume explains. “This question of dignity, sovereignty, and the work of healing. It has a relevance in what's being perpetrated there by the Israeli state, and taking responsibility for my place in that. I pay my taxes here in the United Kingdom—I am contributing to, as a white Englishman, the country that brought the Balfour Declaration, that brought the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that supports and enables the colonization and the settler-colonial project in Palestine. It is my issue, and I have a position where I can speak about it.”

“Dignity” has roots in the Latin dignitatem: worthiness. And instilling the plain truth of every human life’s worth has been a recurring commitment in DePlume’s work. “They can’t use us on one another if we don’t forget we’re precious,” he sang in 2022, summing the emotional core of his 2022 album 'GOLD', concerns of shared humanity that play out into the new works as well.

“We make stories in our lives,” DePlume says. “Oh, I need my story. Oh, something bad happened, and I need to heal upon that. Then I will be healed and all will be good, happily ever after. But no, it is work that needs doing all the time. We all are wounded in our many different ways. And there are degrees of healed, or wounded. Basically, we are either doing one thing or we're doing the other. How do I know I am not destroying myself? I only know that when I am working on healing.”