MUSIC

Shintaro Sakamoto's new album ‘Yoo-hoo’, his first release in about three and a half years, reflects his overseas live experiences over the past few years while showcasing a diverse sound incorporating blues, mood songs, 60s soul, surf instrumentals, funk, and more. Furthermore, the lyrics, captured through his unique perspective, are truly one-of-a-kind. The new album, containing ten tracks including the October digital single “To Grandpa” and the November digital single “Is There a Place for You?”, is now complete.

Like the previous work, this album was recorded primarily with members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA on bass & backing vocals, and Toru Nishinai on saxophone & flute. Guest player Mami Kakudo participates on marimba for two tracks. Recording engineer/mastering: Soichiro Nakamura. Artwork: Shintaro Sakamoto.

roduced and engineered by Jah Wobble at home in his bedroom (hence the title), the album was originally released in spring 1983, showing a different side in the bass player evolution. His proper 2nd album after a major label stint with Virgin - for his debut - and the stratospheric collaborations with Holger Czukay & The Edge. A mystical hybrid of dub fusion, ethereal wave and global beat, still ahead of his time.

Los Angeles–based artist Sam Wilkes is known for his genre-defying solo work and collaborations in the experimental and jazz community. His debut release for Psychic Hotline, “I Know I’m Not Wrong” b/w “Learning to Fly,” is part of the label’s ongoing Singles Series. Stepping away from his bass guitar, Wilkes explores new territory on a borrowed Fender Stratocaster, lent to him by longtime friend Brian Robert Jones (Paramore, Vampire Weekend). On the very night he brought the guitar home, Wilkes recorded a live, loop-based version of Tom Petty’s “Learning to Fly” in a single take, later layering in bass and background vocals. A process more about exploring an instrument than making a record. A few weeks later on his last night with the Strat, Wilkes recorded what would become the A-Side: his reimagining of Fleetwood Mac’s “I Know I’m Not Wrong.” “I just wanted to document what was happening without any other intention. Half of my time on bass is spent trying to make it sound not like a bass, so actually getting to play a different instrument felt incredibly liberating,” says Wilkes. Both arrangements are intuitive and spontaneous. Captured without pretense, the result is a pair of understated songs, perfect for a summer drive.

The work of JJJJJerome Ellis lives comfortably in the gaps between silence and possibility. The Black disabled Grenadian-Jamaican-American artist creates atmospheric soundscapes with saxophone, organ, hammered dulcimer, electronics, and their voice. Improvisation is at the core of their artistry – often chipping away at large slabs of recordings to reveal the piece like a marble sculptor. It’s an expansive and interdisciplinary practice that allows JJJJJerome to adapt to any medium or form, including recorded music, live theatrical and performance art, scoring, spoken word and storytelling, and multimedia/visual works that incorporate sound. Living as a person who stutters, using their mouth to express themselves proved difficult growing up. The practice of spelling their performance moniker “JJJJJerome” stems from the realization that the word they stutter most frequently is their own name. Despite a brief placement in speech therapy as a child – Everything clicked when they picked up the saxophone in seventh grade. “I still stutter on the saxophone, but it’s different.” As an artist, their creative ethos now revolves around the exploration of stuttering through music, expounding upon the ability of each to shape time. They honor the stutter through art. Their career began when they started to improvise along with John Coltrane and Billie Holiday CDs on the horn. But as someone drawn to navigating limitations, JJJJJerome has since blossomed into an adept multi-instrumentalist, each instrument being a watershed in paving new avenues of potential sound worlds. Their voice is additionally guided by a reverence for the earth and ancestors – both human and otherwise. With maternal familial ties to the church, and memorable stories of their grandmother performing as a pianist and organist, JJJJJerome’s recent affinity for keyboards holds a meaningful weight. Forthcoming sophomore record Vesper Sparrow (Shelter Press) is born out of this connection to Black religious tradition and inheritance. It is a continuation of the artist’s ongoing study of the intersections between music and sound, stuttering, and Blackness, through the lens of time. The album is comprised of two complete thoughts, and hinges on a recorded stutter. JJJJJerome splits the four-part composition “Evensong” by fading out the stutter in part two, and sandwiches tracks three and four (“Vesper Sparrow” and “Black-Throated Sparrow”) in-between. “The stutter becomes a structuring moment,” they explain, regarding the opportunity to fill the time opened up. Suspension, then, becomes integral to JJJJJerome’s musical language. Both stuttering and granular synthesis can suspend moments in time, and “invite multiple ways of inhabiting, traversing, and connecting with others in those moments.” The artist also pulls in elements of pop production – electronic textures and distortions inspired in part by indie-rock; and spoken word, sampling, and audio manipulation drawn from Caribbean and Black American musics. JJJJJerome’s artistry has been recognized on a wide scale. Their debut record The Clearing (NNA Tapes, 2021) and accompanying book (published by Wendy’s Subway) was awarded the 2022 Anna Rabinowitz Prize for its “restless interrogation of linear time,” as described by esteemed writer Claudia Rankine. Their work has been presented by large cultural institutions, both internationally at the 2023 Venice Biennale and adventurous Rewire Festival; and at home in the US by the Whitney Museum, The Shed, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, and National Sawdust. JJJJJerome has additionally been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship (2015), Creative Capital Grant (2022), and several MacDowell residencies (2019, 2022). Recently, they have been commissioned by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Ars Nova. A Virginia native, JJJJJerome currently lives in a monastery on traditional Nansemond and Chesepioc territory, aka Norfolk, VA. They live with their wife, poet-ecologist Luísa Black Ellis. earned a B.A. in music theory and ethnomusicology from Columbia University, and went on to lecture in Sound Design at Yale University. With childhood friend James Harrison Monaco, they create vast sonic-storytelling productions as James & JJJJJerome. It’s JJJJJerome’s dream to build a sonic bath house.

Karate’s first five years, boxed in classic Numero fashion and annotated by frontman Geoff Farina. Collaging DC posthardcore, De Stijl, and Django Reinhardt, this five LP set includes their self-titled debut, In Place of Real Insight, The Bed Is In The Ocean, period 7”s, and previously unissued 1993 demo. 41 late millennium accounts of 2AM bike rides, punk house floors, skinny dipping, regrettable tattoos, and Interstate 95 commuting, all remastered from the original tapes and housed in sturdy tip-on sleeves for the discerning Karate enthusiast. Don’t drown.

The latest by iconic slowburn Australian duo HTRK is an elegant nine song suite of windswept emotion and heartbreak noir, crafted in skeletal arrangements of guitar, voice, metronomes, and FX. Inspired by a recent infatuation with “eerie and gothic country music,” Rhinestones moves from whispered lament to acoustic eulogy to downtempo vignettes, tracing muted embers of loss and lust through haunted city streets. Taking cues from the economy and brevity of western folk but skewed through a narcotic, nocturnal lens, the album maps enigmatic badlands of strung out beauty and lengthening shadows.

Nigel Yang cites friendship as a central muse, “particularly the forging of it, and its potential for new feelings of telepathy and trust.” Jonnine Standish’s wounded, alluring vocals echo similar mysteries of connection and unknown crossroads, poetic but direct, dream diaries faded with age and rain. The rhinestones of the title evoke the glittering plastic of cowboy glamor, yet “made precious somehow;” Standish cites as an example a baby blue star brooch from Texas, gifted to her “from a stoned friend on New Year’s Eve 10 years ago in Brighton – cheap keepsakes can be more valuable than diamonds.”

Even for a group as enduringly versatile as HTRK, Rhinestones is a revelation, condensing their lyrical alchemy to its simmering, magnetic essence. “Sunlight Feels Like Bee Stings,” “Reverse Déjà vu,” and “Gilbert and George” in particular are masterpieces of drama, delivery, and distillation, dried flowers clouded by smoke, the candle’s flame flickering but unforgotten: “Some things are not like the others / Some friends are not like the others / did I ever say / did I ever say / did I ever say thank you?” 

A cozy collection of botanical background sounds from Lullatone – an arrangement of atmospheric ambience that blossoms into a bouquet of meditative melodies.

What is the obsession with electronic musicians and houseplants? Is it because they are a captive crowd to watch composers create? Because photosynthesis kind of sounds like synthesizer? Because roots and vines like cables on a modular synth rig? Or is it just because ever since Erik Satie coined the term “Furniture Music” every person with a penchant for soundtracking can’t help but look for things in their immediate surroundings to turn into a muse?

From seedlings to sprouts, these melodies mature more like the life cycle of flowers than typical long-lasting houseplants. Living in Japan, Lullatone quickly learned that half of what makes a flower beautiful is knowing it won’t be around for long. Every spring, phrases about fleeting beauty flood conversations as cherry blossoms saturate the sky. Even the flitting run time of some of the songs evokes the haiku-ish poetry of plucked petals falling away too soon.

Imagined also as a tribute to an avant-garde(ning) local flower shop in Nagoya, Japan called Tumbleweed, which hosts a special event called “Flower Listening” multiple times a year, this album plays a bit like a mixtape but with tracks made all by one person. Shawn, the songwriter / producer behind Lullatone often played at the event and found himself making more and more new songs to especially fit the space. But as time went by, he listened to them other places and noticed the impressionistic tone of the tracks translated to lots of other areas as well.

Whether you want to call it botanica / petalcore / pollinated pastoral / j-ambient / folktronica / floraltronica / compositional collage / environmental / kankyō ongaku / “ambient for angiosperms” or just plain instrumental, we hope these soft & serene synth sounds soundtrack anywhere you (and maybe some flowery friends) find yourself growing.

A cozy collection of botanical background sounds from Lullatone – an arrangement of atmospheric ambience that blossoms into a bouquet of meditative melodies.

What is the obsession with electronic musicians and houseplants? Is it because they are a captive crowd to watch composers create? Because photosynthesis kind of sounds like synthesizer? Because roots and vines like cables on a modular synth rig? Or is it just because ever since Erik Satie coined the term “Furniture Music” every person with a penchant for soundtracking can’t help but look for things in their immediate surroundings to turn into a muse?

From seedlings to sprouts, these melodies mature more like the life cycle of flowers than typical long-lasting houseplants. Living in Japan, Lullatone quickly learned that half of what makes a flower beautiful is knowing it won’t be around for long. Every spring, phrases about fleeting beauty flood conversations as cherry blossoms saturate the sky. Even the flitting run time of some of the songs evokes the haiku-ish poetry of plucked petals falling away too soon.

Imagined also as a tribute to an avant-garde(ning) local flower shop in Nagoya, Japan called Tumbleweed, which hosts a special event called “Flower Listening” multiple times a year, this album plays a bit like a mixtape but with tracks made all by one person. Shawn, the songwriter / producer behind Lullatone often played at the event and found himself making more and more new songs to especially fit the space. But as time went by, he listened to them other places and noticed the impressionistic tone of the tracks translated to lots of other areas as well.

Whether you want to call it botanica / petalcore / pollinated pastoral / j-ambient / folktronica / floraltronica / compositional collage / environmental / kankyō ongaku / “ambient for angiosperms” or just plain instrumental, we hope these soft & serene synth sounds soundtrack anywhere you (and maybe some flowery friends) find yourself growing.

" dean blunt & Elias Rønnenfelt - lucre LP. Single-sided, 180g vinyl "

Expanded edition of Sufjan Stevens 2015 LP, celebrating its 10 year anniversary.

"A decade after its release, Carrie & Lowell continues to resonate as one of Sufjan Stevens’ most personal and beloved albums—“a fall-down gorgeous and emotionally devastating masterpiece” (The Guardian). To mark the anniversary, Asthmatic Kitty Records presents Carrie & Lowell –10th Anniversary Edition, featuring seven never-before-released demos that offer a rare window into the album’s creation. With updated cover art, a beautifully designed 40-page booklet and new essay reflecting on the album by Sufjan, this special edition celebrates and expands the legacy of one of his most cherished works. Arriving on May 30, 2025, this anniversary edition is a must-listen for fans and newcomers alike, inviting listeners to experience the music’s evolution and reflect on the raw emotional landscapes that influenced its creation."

At Our Best! were one of the greatest and most influential bands to emerge in the early 1980s as part of a new wave of independent acts. DJ John Peel championed them, playing their singles repeatedly and inviting them to record a session for his programme. Wry vocalist Judy Evans and brutal yet melodic guitarist James Alan who’d met at art college in Leeds fronted Girls At Our Best!, the proto-Indie band that formed from the ashes of Alan’s 1977 punk band SOS! Pleasure, the sole album, reached number two in the Indie Chart. It was an album so different from the rest of the post-punk indie pack that you can still play it now and completely baffle new listeners. As John Peel said about Roxy Music, it just doesn’t seem to relate to anything else.

Originally released on Tiger Style in 2003, Two Conversations stands as The Appleseed Cast’s crowning achievement. Arriving during the second-wave emo backlash, the Lawrence, Kansas band sidestepped genre clichés in favour of widescreen indie rock shot through with atmosphere and emotional depth.

Dreamy keys and synths drift over intricate steel-string guitars, carrying lyrics that explore love, loss, and the spaces in between. It’s an album that favours reflection over angst, unfolding with a cinematic sense of space and texture.

Hailed by Pitchfork as sounding “trapped on Polyvinyl Records circa 1996,” Two Conversations remains a landmark — a soul-baring, beautifully constructed record that has only grown in stature with time.

Culled from half a decade of home four-tracking, Remote Echoes is a hissy, crumbly, and ungrounded expression of Clay Parton and Canaan Amber's ongoing Duster project. A mix of cassette only demos released under the banners Christmas Dust and On The Dodge, this 14 track album also includes a bevy of previously unissued stragglers. Duster's unique blend of fuzzy guitars, bargain synths, muffled percussion, and hushed vocals anticipated chillwave, mumblecore, and corecore, elegantly illustrating the holy trinity of slacker vices: cigarettes, coffee, and the weed supreme.。

Highly recommended for fans of Dean Blunt and hypnagogic pop. Emerging in the late 2010s as Belgium’s counterpart to Music From Memory with its focus on obscure archival excavations, and now known for releasing cult records from contemporary artists, STROOM.TV presents the full LP debut of the enigmatic act Felicity J Lord. A collision of obscure playfulness and fragile poetics, the album unfolds as a collection of nearly 30 fragmentary tracks, each lasting only a minute or two—like peering into a diary or sketchbook. Synths, piano, cut-up voices, and intimate domestic sounds appear and dissolve, sometimes evoking lo-fi pop sensibilities, sometimes drifting into experimental collage. Rather than striking with force, it’s the accumulation of hazy, fleeting fragments that lingers—resonating quietly in the listener’s memory. A rare and remarkable work.

A longtime favorite at our shop, El Michels Affair—New York-based instrumental funk/soul band renowned for their unique “cinematic soul” sound and a flagship act of the esteemed Big Crown Records—returns with a brand new album, featuring none other than Shintaro Sakamoto as a guest! Rooted in funk and soul yet infused with a breezy, urban summer feel, this exquisite release blossoms into a light and airy indie pop-soul masterpiece. A refreshing soundscape full of timeless musical elegance, perfect for strolling through sun-drenched city streets.

Driving is Sam Wilkes’ Indie Rock record. Out October 6th, 2023, it is the first release on Wilkes Records, an imprint borne of the artist’s emergent need to self-release. The songs presented here exist comfortably within the ever-expanding Wilkesian cosmos, characterized as they are by virtuosity, torqued experimentalism, and collaboration with a range of talented musicians. But Driving’s influences, its sincerity, and its allegiance to a certain pop sensibility reflects a departure for an artist who has primarily staked his claim within the experimental jazz idiom. Take the first track, “Folk Home,” which inaugurates the album’s fecundity—a bright, green, humid, summer feel. A swirling, freakout coda of reversed vocals gives way, in no short order, to a caterwaul of flute work that conjures Van Morrison’s (in)famous Astral Weeks sessions. Standing beside Morrison, the usual suspects are all present, if somewhat abstractedly. Dylan, The Dead, Joni, the Fab Four. Wilkes has developed a reputation as an experimental jazz luminary, but his deep affinity for the pop/rock/folk idiom of the latter twentieth century rings clear throughout Driving. More so than any Wilkes release to date, Driving is a collection guided by and dedicated to the man’s attention to songcraft. Written and recorded during a period of rain-damage induced renter’s itinerance (and the attendant desire to produce a kind of therapeutic, self-soothing, home-feeling music), Driving loosely charts the trajectory/experience of “a protagonist,” both Wilkes and not, “who has figured out how to live an enlightened and fulfilled life, but is unable to do so because he thinks about it too much.” This friction is surely relatable — a symptom of our compulsively self-aware present. But Wilkes avoids the obvious pitfalls of public hand-wringing. Rather, Driving’s nine tracks evince a genuine, and mature searching-ness, both sonically and lyrically. The ending refrain of “Own” serves like something close to a thesis— “Letting go // isn’t a concept // it’s an action.” In an attempt to beat back ego, hyper-cogitation, language itself, Wilkes arrives at an axiom that feels so true and familiar, you’d swear you’d heard it one hundred times before. Driving’s final third is, fittingly, its most emotive and cathartic. Tracks seven and eight, “Again, Again” and “And Again,” form a diptych, joined most obviously by the jangling, recursive grooves of guitarist Daryl Johns. Wilkes is said to have encouraged Johns to go “full Lindsey [Buckingham]” (clearly a welcome and resonant prompt), but one also catches stray Knopfler vibes, some intermittent Fripp, and (perhaps more-so in tone than technique) the spirit of DIY prophet and jangling man himself, Martin Newell (the Cleaners from Venus). Wilkes has stated that he finds joy in creating musical environments suitable to the contribution and flourishing of his favorite musicians. Throughout Driving, and in these two tracks especially, he has more than succeeded. The record closes with the titular track: a story-song that, according to Wilkes, poured out of him (melody, composition, and lyrics) in a single sitting. The tale is told plainly, bravely, starkly; a mistake was made, regrets have been had, and all is wrapped up in the recollection of a deeply felt adolescent heartsickness—a time when the narrator was first afire with music and automotive freedom. The song captures the moment when meaning inexplicably falls into place, when a long-nagging memory suddenly assumes narrative form, and the subsequent sense of lightness and unburdening. It is fitting that Driving, a record conceived as a form of self-therapy, should culminate with a sense of humble revelation. That Wilkes is plainly eager to share the vulnerable fruits of this labor constitutes Driving’s joyful offering.

Though Dean Blunt and Danish singer-songwriter Fine Glindvad Jensen are credited, the overall identity of the project remains a mystery. This self-titled debut album by the unit The Crying Nudes has been released on the label World Music Group. Comprising nine songs and clocking in at a compact 15 minutes, the album feels like a collection of short sketches, centered on fragmented acoustic guitar phrases, ambient sounds that make use of empty space, and ethereal vocals enveloped in reverb. With a musical style that prioritizes atmosphere and texture over melody and harmony, and an intentional anonymity that keeps the artists' identities ambiguous, this album exudes a minimalist aesthetic and a captivating mystique.

Drag City reissues Land of Plenty, the recorded debut from Chicago guitar duo Bill MacKay and Ryley Walker. Captured live during a January 2015 residency at the Whistler, these performances showcase two kindred spirits in full creative flight, blending their influences into a seamless, intuitive exchange. Meeting only a year before the recording, MacKay and Walker found common ground in artists as varied as Albert King, Laura Nyro, Nick Drake, Bert Jansch, Ali Akbar Khan and Jimi Hendrix. Across six-strings, twelve-strings and requinto, they weave a dialogue that draws from blues, folk, jazz and global traditions, folding them effortlessly into each other in real time. The set brims with interplay, each player listening and responding with precision and imagination. The stereo mix keeps their guitars distinct while capturing the shared headspace where improvisation and composition meet. Live recording adds an extra charge, amplifying the richness and detail in their sound. Originally released on Whistler in 2015, Land of Plenty stands as one of the most dynamic and engaging acoustic guitar records of its era — a document of two musicians discovering just how far their combined energies could take them.

Eric Broucek was the ur-engineer of the most fertile era of DFA Studios, from about 2003 to 2008 (no one knows anything precisely about that time, as it’s all lost in the fog of chaos). His hand was on all of the remixes, LPs, dance 12s. He was there in that over-designed gear dungeon almost every day, recording, mixing, struggling to not roll his eyes at Tim and me. And somewhere in that fog, he quietly dropped limited runs of three 12-inch delayed reaction bombs on his own label Stickydisc Recordings—two under the name Babytalk, and one as Watussi with another DFA regular, Morgan Wiley.

Back in the day, Eric did not want his music released on DFA. He wanted to forge his own identity, which he did, sending out music that wandered from the DFA path with its uniquely wonky, upended and understated power. His music is so unlike everything else of that era, so profoundly singular, that it still sounds completely out of time.

A few years back, I started DJing the tracks again, and saw how the world was still surprised by what Eric had made, and the idea of this compilation was born.

So, in the end, Eric, we totally got to release your records anyway. We heart you, man.

-James Murphy

2025 has been a big year for Drop Nineteens. They finally officially released their long lost pre-curser to 1992’s Delaware, the demo collection 1991. These releases comprise the band’s early run and as Pitchfork noted in their review of both albums earlier this year, “established Drop Nineteens’ reputation as leading lights of U.S. shoegaze.”

The band follows up the release of the 1991 LP with their first ever 7”, White Dress b/w White Dress (demo). The 7” features the band’s cover of the Lana Del Ray classic in two versions. It comes on the anniversary of the band’s digital release of “White Dress.”

This is an edition of 500 black 7”s and 200 white 7"s and is sure to be a collectable item for fans of shoegaze and Drop Nineteens alike.

昨年の初のフルレングス『Bewilderment』が大変秀逸な内容だった、Carole King、William Onyeaborなど、幅広いソングライターの影響を受けているというジャズ・ヴォーカリスト、ピアニストのPale Jayによる最新アルバム『Low End Love Songs』が当店お馴染み〈Colemine〉傘下の〈Karma Chief Records〉からアナログ・リリース。前作から早一年、たった4週間で作り上げたという、カタルシスと喜びに満ちたアルバム！ラテンからの豊穣な影響が浸透し、ソウル・ミュージックのルーツに新しいリズムとテクスチャーのレイヤーを追加したような、複雑で豊かな構成のインディ・ソウル作品に仕上げられています。

Am I ever gonna be the one? Do I ever wanna be with someone? Am I ever gonna be the one? Will I ever end up being someone?

The latest album from Horse Vision, the experimental indie rock unit based in Stockholm and crafting music across Europe, now arrives on vinyl. Positioned at the intersection of pop/indie sensibilities and dreamy electronic ambient, the record quietly dwells on themes of “everyday fluctuations and the slippage of memory and emotion.” Its intimate, introspective sound—shaped by post-rock and emo influences—feels attuned to the stillness before dawn or the moments when city lights continue to flicker. A graceful work where rich imagery emerges through resonance and ambiguity, filling the quiet spaces within the listener.

Born in Bangkok but rooted in Vancouver’s underground scene, the little-known legend Hussain Bokhari presents his debut album, proudly released on local ambient-dance institution Mood Hut. A deft blend of bedroom pop, lo-fi textures, and Balearic-infused guitar and synth work, the record shimmers with understated intimacy. The pillowy sonics of “Pull Me Up” and the Thai-language vocals of “Bangkok Boy” evoke a nostalgia that traverses both time and place. A superb soundscape for quiet hours, drifting between self, city, and memory.