MUSIC

The songs on Touch, the first new Tortoise music in nine years, are dramas without words. They’re elaborately appointed and carefully mixed to enhance a familiar feeling — a distinctly cinematic uneasiness. Close your eyes and you might see cars swerving around unlit rural roads, or cityscapes at night with bells clanging in the distance, or some abandoned warehouse where spies chase each other between towering stacks of boxes.

The making of Touch is an entirely different kind of film — a heartwarming story of musicians adapting to life circumstances.

Tortoise operates as a collective; the five multi-instrumentalists make records by committee, seeking input on creative decisions large and small. All ideas are considered, and for most of the band’s influential three-decade run, the process has been straightforward: Each musician brings in songs or sketches, and as the group absorbs them, the players exchange ideas about the structure, instrumentation, different grooves or (more frequently, because they’re Tortoise) odd metric divisions that might stretch the initial conception of the song.

These discussions have always happened in real time, face to face. Until Touch. As guitarist and keyboardist Jeff Parker explains, over the last decade, the members of Tortoise scattered geographically, making the pre-production rehearsal sessions if not impossible, at least more complicated.

“It’s the first record we’ve done where everything wasn’t based in Chicago,” says Parker. “Two of us are in Chicago. Two of us are here in Los Angeles and John [McEntire] is in Portland, OR. We recorded in several different places. But the strange thing is, in a way it’s kind of the most cohesive session that we’ve done.”

McEntire, who plays drums, percussion, and keyboards and serves as mixing engineer, had little doubt that the actual recording would be fine. His apprehension was about those more open-ended development sessions leading up to the recording, which, he says, have been known to yield moments of peak Tortoise inspiration. “We don't work remotely, unfortunately. We kind of all have to be in the room together. For me the trial-and-error stage is very important. I didn’t want to lose that.”

The percussionist and multi-instrumentalist John Herndon explains one reason why: The path to a “final” version of a Tortoise tune is not a straight line. “It becomes writing and arranging and editing and orchestrating and sort of getting things into a sonic space that feels good, all at the same time.”

There was consensus about that; each of the musicians has a story about songs being transformed by the collaborative dynamic. Percussionist and keyboardist Dan Bitney recalls a session when they were working on one of his tunes. He wasn’t happy with it and promised to come up with a countermelody. “Right away somebody just asked “Does it need a melody? Like, why does this need a melody? And I’m like, “Yeah!” That’s the kind of thinking that can open your eyes.”

In the initial planning for the new record, the band arrived at what seemed like a reasonable geographic compromise: They’d set up shop at studios in three different areas — Los Angeles, Portland, and Chicago. They scheduled sessions with sometimes months in between, so that everyone could sit with the material and refine it further. The plan: To shift some of the wild idea-chasing of those development sessions from group work to individual work, building on Tortoise’s deep and iconoclastic lexicon of sounds — and on the trust between musicians that’s accrued over decades of music-making.

“It’s like, humans adapt,” Herndon says flatly. In order to keep making music as a group, he explains, everyone needed to be flexible then and remain so now. “If you’re used to doing something one way, and then it flips, well, you have to adapt to another way of working. I think that that's what we all were aspiring to do with this, endeavoring to kick in our adaptation skills.”

Still, it wasn’t smooth sailing. “I’m going to be honest, I think that we had some doubts” after the first set of sessions, McEntire recalls. Noting that four years elapsed from the beginning of Touch to its completion, he adds that “it took a long, long time for the music to coalesce. There was some ‘what are we doing?’ questioning going on along the way.”

Douglas McCombs, who plays guitar, bass, and the deep-voiced bass VI guitar that adds a noir luster to “Night Gang” and other Touch songs, believes that questioning would have happened regardless of the geographical challenges. “In the best circumstance, there’s a flow when we’re working on a tune. Everyone’s sparking ideas and inspired. It’s not work.” He adds, “In the worst moments, when we just absolutely don’t know what to do with something, it’s torturous.”

Herdon points to the early versions of “Vexations,” which became the new album’s opening track, as one such slow-torture situation. “We were confounded as to figuring out an arrangement, and things were just stuck,” he recalls. During one of the long lulls between the studio sessions, Herndon says, he got an idea for the tune. “I asked John if I could have the stems [the individual track files] for the song, and then I kind of did a reworking in the garage. Re-did the drums completely and made a breakdown section in the middle. I sent it and was like, ‘I don't know if this is anything, but here.’ And those guys seemed really excited about it.”

Herndon quickly adds that every Tortoise record has benefitted from similar experimentation. In fact, it’s the key thing, a defining characteristic: “Sometimes doing an edit will leave a space open for something else, and we’re all into that idea of, ‘What happens next?’ It’s this attitude of ‘Let’s make some music together and see what happens.’ We're all comfortable with the not knowing, with letting an idea go through many permutations.”

Along with that is the knowledge that this open-ended exploring can be time-consuming. And might possibly end in futility. McCombs says that though the band’s approach changed with Touch, the players still needed the mindset they’d used in those brainstorming rehearsals. “When I get frustrated or when we seem like we're stalling out a little bit, I just have to remember that patience is one of the things that makes this band work.”

Asked to recall a moment that required patience, McCombs doesn’t hesitate. “It seems to happen a lot with the drummers,” McCombs says. “Somebody will be like, ‘Hey John [McEntire] why don’t you play this?’ And he’ll be like, ‘I don’t wanna play it cause I hear Herndon here.’ It’s like McEntire hears Herdon and Herndon hears Bitney… That happens a lot, and then they’ll come to a consensus. Sometimes half the song will be one drummer and half the song will be another drummer. That’s kind of the way it works.”

**

It must be said: When things click into place, Tortoise is a rare force. Whether cranking out a foursquare rock backbeat or chopping time into polyrhythmic shards that defy counting (and logic), the band challenges accepted notions of what rock music can be, what moods it can evoke — that’s part of the reason the band is revered so widely, among musicians working in many genres.

Tortoise’s indescribable sonic arrays have grown more intense — and more influential — over time. Early works — the 1993 debut and the 1996 Millions Now Living Will Never Die, which opens with a twenty-one-minute suite — contrast the thick harmonic schemes of Krautrock with the similarly impenetrable densities of musique concrete, adding jarring spears of electric guitar as spice accents. The commercial breakthroughs that followed, TNT (1998) and Standards (2001) found Tortoise further expanding its toolkit: Rather than orient each piece around declarative single-line melodies, the musicians let the vast, lush, inviting scenes become a hypnotic wordless narrative, built from overlapping layers and interlocking rhythms.

Each step in the discography underscores a truth about Tortoise: The questions about arrangement and orchestration are foundational, defining the scope of the canvas and the density of the band’s exactingly precise soundscapes. There can, as McCombs notes, be multiple drummers on a track, and their beats can be supported by acoustic percussion or random electronic blippage. Likewise, on any given track, there can be multiple mallet parts, sometimes sustaining gorgeous washes of color, at other times pounding out intricate Steve Reich-style interlocked grids of harmony. There can be multiple guitars, each with its own earthshaking effects profile. (Parker laughs when he says “I’m kind of like the straight man with the guitar sounds.”) There can be multiple synthesizers — darting squiggles of lead lines crashing into asymmetrical arpeggios, or bliss-toned drones hovering in the upper-middle register like a cloud in a landscape painting.

And there can be noise, all kinds of it: While the working method of Touch meant Tortoise sacrificed some spontaneous sparks, it encouraged the musicians to explore the thickening textural possibilities of different flavors of noise (white, pink, etc). The band recently issued a set of remixes for the single “Oganesson.” The more austere, stripped-down interpretations offer telling insights about the deployment of noise as well as the track-by-track assembly process, the ways Tortoise uses open space, textural layers, and dissonances to create drama.

McEntire believes those little devices are essential to the sound. “Because we don't have a singer, we have to have a different vocabulary for creating interest. So we use all the little things, like dynamics, texture, orchestration.”

Given the intricacy of the music, McEntire explains, every little sound starts as a decision in the recording studio, and then, subsequently, becomes a logistical decision for live performance — after all, the many parts have to be executed by the five players.

Rare and seriously sought after instrumental album of Gay Feet rocksteady hits from 1968.

Eleven elegant instrumental tracks, and one female vocal, showcasing the tenor sax artistry of master musician Roland Alphonso, ably assisted by Aubrey Adams on organ and the inestimable Lynn Taitt on guitar, interpreting a selection of Mrs Pottinger’s most memorable hits of the era.

When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.

That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.

The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.

“Live at Sound City” is an instrumental collaboration between bassist Pino Palladino, guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/producer Blake Mills, and LA-based saxophonist Sam Gendel. Recorded in one day at the legendary Sound City Studios in Van Nuys, the EP presents new versions of compositions from Palladino & Mills’ Grammy-nominated 2021 album “Notes with Attachments” in an intimate chamber trio setting. Across four tracks, the accomplished trio explores common musical vocabularies, then goes about the work of defamiliarizing them in search of something new, blending the sounds of West African and Cuban music, jazz, R&B, English folk, pop, and beyond. Pino Palladino is a Grammy Award winning songwriter, producer and bassist who helped create the rhythm-section sound of D’Angelo’s Voodoo and Black Messiah, and over a four-decade career has worked with artists including Keith Richards, Erykah Badu, Eric Clapton, Nine Inch Nails, Questlove, John Mayer, Paul Simon, Jeff Beck, Herbie Hancock and Adele. Blake Mills is a two-time Grammy Awards Producer of the Year nominee. He has released four solo albums and produced and recorded with artists such as Alabama Shakes, Fiona Apple, Bob Dylan, John Legend, Perfume Genius, Jim James, Moses Sumney, Laura Marling, Phoebe Bridgers, Cass McCombs, The Killers, Sara Bareilles, Weyes Blood and Randy Newman. His most recent album Mutable Set, released last year, was praised by Pitchfork as “a hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream,” and earned their Best New Music title. Sam Gendel is a musician living in Los Angeles, CA. He is most known for his work with the saxophone, though he is proficient on multiple instruments. His work is diverse and includes collaborations with a wide range of artists including Ry Cooder, Laurie Anderson, Mach-Hommy, Sam Amidon, Perfume Genius, Moses Sumney, Knower, Vampire Weekend, and inc. no world.

When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.

That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.

The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.

When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.

That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.

The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.

One of the most expansive instrumental Hip Hop series to date, MF DOOM’s lauded Special Herbs collection assembles a mountainous collection of his beats, ranging from series exclusives to slightly reworked favorites he produced for himself and others. Released under the alias Metal Fingers, Special Herbs succeeds at capturing DOOM’s highly influential sound which continually breaks and reinterprets the rules of the game in favor of The Super-Villain. The world is a treasure trove of sounds, and the Metal-Fingered DOOM accepts no limits; ’70s Soul/Funk classic, ’80s R&B hits, rap nostalgia, and even soundbites from children’s records & TV all find their place in the ingredients needed to perfect his recipes.

Rumah Sakit were a four-piece rock band based in San Francisco, CA. The group began to take shape in 1998 after guitarist John Baez, bassist Kenseth Thibideau and drummer, Jeff Shannon, all moved from Redlands to San Francisco. Fully formed once guitarist Mitch Cheney quickly joined, the band settled on the name Rumah Sakit – a literal Indonesian translation of “sick room” (aka hospital) – and a sound that fused the frenetic energy of Red-era King Crimson with a meditative melodicism that starkly contrasted the vast majority of so-called “math-rock” bands of the era. Soon thereafter, Rumah Sakit entered the studio for the first time to record what would become their eponymous debut album.Rumah Sakit was recorded in 1999 at The Music Annex – a hallowed megaplex that counts diverse icons such as Erik Satie, The Tubes, Michael Hedges, Montrose, and American Music Club amongst its many historical clients – in two somewhat clandestine overnight sessions with good friends and studio interns, Jay & Ian Pellicci. The album was made with a “no tricks” philosophy that would come to define the band’s approach to performing and documenting their music. Recorded entirely live with no overdubs in very few takes, the band embraced the art of using the natural presence of the room and strategic gear placement to capture the purest and most accurate representation of those songs in those moments. In an era that was quickly being transformed by the burgeoning popularity of ProTools and meticulously manicured, maximalist mixes, the world inside of Rumah Sakit was a refreshing respite.A year later, in the fall of 2000, Rumah Sakit flew renowned Chicago recording engineer and Shellac bassist, Bob Weston, out to San Francisco to spend two brief days recording an EP at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone Recording. This EP would be released as part of Temporary Residence’s subscription-based CD series, Travels In Constants (alongside Mogwai, Low, Explosions In The Sky, Eluvium, and MONO). Aside from the original pressing of 1,000 CDs reserved for subscribers, the studio recordings on Travels In Constants were never available again on any format or platform.Reuniting with Bob Weston to meticulously remaster the original master tapes, Rumah Sakit 25 collects the band’s debut album and their long out-of-print Travels In Constants EP into one exceptional package. Featuring new cover art from old friends and collaborators, Jeremiah Maddock and Marty Anderson, the expansive gatefold 2xLP includes full-color printed inner sleeves featuring hundreds of previously unpublished photos documenting this inspired early era in the band’s history, as well as a massive full-size 24-page art book of previously unpublished artwork by Maddock. It’s an exquisite opus that masterfully captures a special band at a special time.

One of the most expansive instrumental Hip Hop series to date, MF DOOM’s lauded Special Herbs collection assembles a mountainous collection of his beats, ranging from series exclusives to slightly reworked favorites he produced for himself and others. Released under the alias Metal Fingers, Special Herbs succeeds at capturing DOOM’s highly influential sound which continually breaks and reinterprets the rules of the game in favor of The Super-Villain. The world is a treasure trove of sounds, and the Metal-Fingered DOOM accepts no limits; ’70s Soul/Funk classic, ’80s R&B hits, rap nostalgia, and even soundbites from children’s records & TV all find their place in the ingredients needed to perfect his recipes.

When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.

That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.

The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.

When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.

That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.

The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.

When DOOM reemerged on the scene in the 90s, he firmly marked his return, capturing the theory of knowing the rules if only to better break them.

That sentiment was captured not only in his unique writing method, but also in his production style that birthed the moniker Metal Fingers. He seamlessly blended creative ingenuity with the all-too-obvious, and a unique ability to sample things oft-considered off limits, yet still create magic.

The 10 volume Special Herbs instrumental series captures a key moment in time of Metal Fingers DOOM as producer, assembling, and sometimes slightly reworking, select beats from albums such as MM..Food, Operation: Doomsday, & King Geedorah, as well as a collection of exclusive beats.

Black Truffle is thrilled to announce Spilla, the second album from Nantes-based Ensemble Nist-Nah, 48 minutes of music for Gamelan, drum kits, wood and metal percussion instruments, and plucked strings that will surely count as one of the most electrifying records you hear this year. Founded by the Australian drummer/percussionist Will Guthrie in 2019, continuing the explorations begun in solo form on Nist-Nah (Black Truffle, 2020), the ensemble (eight or nine core members with occasional guests) has been consistently active in the half-decade since: composing, rehearsing, recording and touring Europe (with a mass of equipment in tow) to great acclaim. Spilla tracks the continuing evolution of the project since the recording of their first album, Elders (Black Truffle, 2022). The two sides of this record document two different iterations of the group, and the members' compositional input has increased: each side contains one piece by a member other than Guthrie. It has become clearer than ever that Ensemble Nist-Nah is not an attempt at a European Gamelan ensemble but rather a hybrid percussion ensemble that uses instruments from a Javanese Gamelan alongside other percussion to perform original music informed by a variety of South East Asian music but also by everything from free jazz to contemporary hip-hop: while Nist-Nah and Elders both featured traditional Javanese pieces, on Spilla the only tune not generated by a member of the group is by Guthrie’s long-time musical hero and occasional collaborator Roscoe Mitchell.The two short pieces that open the record could almost be the two sides of a wild 7” selected to show off what the Ensemble can do. On opener ‘Gerak Maju’, intricately skittering open-snare patterns bounce over clanging metal, chiming bell-like tones and deep gong hits, adapting the rhythm-register connections heard in traditional Gamelan musics—where the lowest pitched sounds are heard least frequently—to a cut-up breakbeat straight off Feed Me Weird Things. ‘Strollabout’ then moves into an entirely different realm of meditative repeating patterns, performed entirely on Chinese, Javanese and Vietnamese gongs. The remaining seven pieces, ranging from three to twelve minutes, offer up a wealth of different percussive, compositional and arrangement possibilities. On ‘Ghostly Klang’, two drumkits mirror each other’s moves, bouncing hats and snares across the stereo field in a way that recalls On the Corner and the jittering hi hat patterns of trap, while slow moving melodies on the tuned instruments add a sense of majesty contrasted by scurrying details in resonant wood. The epic closing track presents a take on Roscoe Mitchell’s ‘Uncle’, performed by the Art Ensemble of Chicago on their classic Urban Bushmen live album. Where the Art Ensemble used Mitchell’s dirge-like melody as a jumping off point for virtuosic improvisational flights, Ensemble Nist-Nah rethink the piece as a near-static dialogue between the monumental, slow-moving sequence of unison tuned percussion notes and a textural cloud that grows in richness and intensity from whispering cymbal rolls into a mass of gong overtones and bowed metal.Beautifully recorded and mixed, Spilla arrives in a sleeve decorated with core member Charles Dubois’ drawings of cymbals and gongs. Against the backdrop of a wider musical landscape dominated by over-produced electronic slop and bland harmonic wallpaper, Ensemble Nist-Nah stands out as a reminder, vital and unpretentious, of the joys and possibilities of human beings playing instruments together.

‘Halos of Perception’ releases on November 3, 2023 with a hyperreal film in collaboration with Chinese-Malaysian Australian video artist Tristan Jalleh. Drawing from Lerkenfeldt's field work and electroacoustic practices, piano, cello and tape loop arrangements light up lost chambers and underground histories in a patchwork of reflective musique concrète, instrumental composition and surreal cinema. The artist's sophomore LP on Shelter Press spotlights underground networks opening questions of reality, virtuality and perception through oral traditions, experimental AV composition and diary-like vignettes.

The second LP compendium of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s early solo piano works, recorded throughout the 1960s – finally available again. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear!

These original compositions, performed by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru herself on solo piano, were originally self-released in Germany in small editions as fundraisers for orphanages, support organizations for widows of war victims, and other philanthropic causes. We are humbled and proud to present this album in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation, and to assist in continuing her life-long mission of using music as a vessel to care for those who have been abandoned by society, or harmed by strife.

Black vinyl LP comes in black inner-sleeves and heavy cardstock jacket with color printing and gold-foil stamping, and song notes by the composer herself. Restored and remastered by Timothy Stollenwerk.

The duo’s third album of instrumental guitar recordings pushes their sinuous compositions into labyrinthine new shapes, interlocking and interlocutory, supported by a cast of stellar collaborators. Interwoven among the dazzling original pieces is a fascinating array of covers, ranging from traditional Breton dance tunes to a deconstruction of Neneh Cherry’s “Buffalo Stance.

All the music in the world is at your fingertips, and it’s up to you to set the vibe… So, what should we listen to? If you’re having trouble deciding, turn on the radio. It’s the perfect place to discover something new, or jam along to a tried-and-true station that’ll never let you down.Tune In is due out 11/1/2024 via Chiefdom Records. The second of three installments in the Terrestrial Radio series, it’s a carefully curated collection of instrumental fusion, designed to serve as the perfect radio mix for fans of jazz, hip hop, funk, soul, reggae and beyond. It’s the latest release from Cincinnati based executive producer Doctor Bionic (Jason Grimez). As a DJ, producer, and former member of 90s rap group MOOD, Grimez’ musical career revolves around hip hop. He’s always preferred to sample songs from the late 60s and early 70s because of the authentic tone. “Growing up collecting and sampling records was an education, whether we realized it or not,” he explained. Grimez records and produces music using analog gear to emulate the instrumentals that he’s always loved as he works with some of the best musicians in the Cincinnati area to bring his ideas to life. Among others, Jonathan Luck Spaulding and Josh “Mojo” Cole made several appearances on guitar throughout the record. Every Doctor Bionic release is accompanied by a unique, thought-provoking album cover. For Tune In, Grimez worked with Refael Idan Suissa, a painter and digital artist based in Israel.Next time you’re looking for some new instrumental tunes to set the tone, you can count on the growing catalog from Doctor Bionic.

Madvillainy without the raps is still a classic, with Madlib taking his place on the cover.

Svaneborg Kardyb are Nikolaj Svaneborg - Wurlitzer, Juno, piano and Jonas Kardyb - drums, percussion a multi award winning duo from Denmark, where they won two "grammys" at the Danish Music Awards Jazz 2019: New artist of the year and Composer of the year. 
Drawing on Danish folk music and Scandinavian jazz influences, including Nils Frahm, Esbjörn Svennson and Jan Johansson's landmark recording Jazz På Svenska, their music is an exquisite and joyful melding of beautiful melodies, delicate minimalism, catchy grooves, subtle electronica vibes, Nordic atmospheres and organic interplay, all underwritten by the sheer joy of playing together. "We started in the earliest of mornings over the blackest of coffee, sometimes even without talking, just music. Immediately we felt a connection between our personal style of playing and the compositions emerged like out of nowhere. The vibe from these early sessions is still the backbone of our little band". Svaneborg Kardyb hail from Aalborg, in Jutland, in the north of Denmark where they first met in 2013 and discussed the possibility of creating a duo over late night talks. Six years went by as they both explored other projects before they eventually realised the idea of making music together. Like their new label mates, Vega Trails, Svaneborg Kardyb are a duo, a format that gives them a lot of space to occupy - or leave blank. "We enjoy the simplicity and focus it gives to the interplay. We come from very different musical backgrounds; Nikolaj from Scandinavian jazz, and Jonas from Roots, blues and folk, so the music is a sum of our personal contributions and doesn't thrive to be anything else than that. It's quite unique for us to have this shared musical tongue and friendship". Their music is intentionally simple at first glance, but evolves and unfolds through listening over time, with plenty of room for exploration, reflection and improvisation. Their aim is to create music that is as honest and intimate as possible "with melodies and rhythms so strong that we are left as only the messengers". And their fast-developing music chemistry allowed them to give little thought to what their musical influences were. Giving their music a captivating charm. "We explored whatever sounds and musical structures our duality gave birth to and through long jam-sessions we found small seeds of ideas that turned into tunes. Danish traditional songs, community singing and hymns are a big inspiration too. Both the tonal language, the lyrical melodies and the way generations can gather around the music, is something that is close to our hearts". Over Tage (over roofs) is their third album, following Knob (2019) and Haven (2020) and marks their debut for Gondwana Records a label noted for working with artists such as Mammal Hands, Portico Quartet and GoGo Penguin whose music, like that of Svaneborg Kardyb delights in exploring the fertile spaces between genres. For the duo it is their most serious and thoughtful record to date. "It may be our strongest and most honest record so far. Doubts and uncertainty were kind of the foundation for the sounds of the album but there is also hope and lots of uplifting moments and we're very pleased with how it came out." And it is that mixture of elevation and thoughtfulness, honesty and intimacy that makes the music of Svaneborg Kardyb so special and Over Tage such a joy to listen to. The world awaits.

990x has been blurring the line between rap and ambient for almost a decade, breaking up his subby, saturated 808 kicks and itchy percussive trills with effervescent pads, levitational loops and the kind of ghostly contrails you'd expect to hear on a Grouper record. He's never sounded quite as liminal as he does on 'Ruins', though, an album produced in recovery as he contemplated the healing process, shifting between one state and the next. As part of the recently formed label clique The Citadel, along with Sauron and IJI, he hones in on decentralised, defocussed sounds linked across continents by the internet’s rhizomatic networks, repping a certain slant on the sound that originated with Lil B and diffused via soundcloud to become a key node in the contemporary definition of what Brian Eno termed a “scenius”; a collective intelligence that transcends the sum of its parts. Throughout ‘Ruins’, 990x deploys all the hallmarks of the aesthetic - glyding 808 bass and sibilant trills, vaporous pads, and noctilucent melodies - with a melancholic grip all his own. According to classic cloud rap convention, the 8-part, 40 minute suite evinces a liminal, weightless state of mind with immersive structures that appear to float, buoyed by subs that plunge all the way down, whilst his ambient soul wraps the head in high tog puff stuffed with hopes and dreams. Shimmering echoes of Lil B and Clams Casino’s early works perfuse ‘Forest of Silence’ in his use of guzheng-like string motifs diffused to the rafters on diaphanous subs, and Yungwebster’s screwed diagonals come to mind in the vertiginous bliss-out ‘Fallen’. A tempered ecstasy thieves thru the saturated cinematic panorama ‘June Lovers’ and gives way to the ruder ballast of ‘Crates’ while the fractal hi-hats on ‘Sonar’ ultimately get subsumed by saturated waves of bass and screwed ambient dub on the album’s longest cut, the subtly optimistic 8 minute parting shot ‘Wisdom’, deploying a horizontal dembow rhythm that can't help but remind us of Kelman Duran's epochal '1804 Kids'.

Squanderers are the glowingly new—2024 vintage—trio of guitarists Wendy Eisenberg and David Grubbs alongside multi-instrumentalist and legendary producer Kramer. The group sprung into action as the duo of Kramer and Grubbs with the single “Congress of Poodles” b/w “Lendrick Muir Bible Study Weekend,” part of Kramer’s 2023 Shimmy-Disc box set Rings of Saturn. Squanderers now enter the arena of live performance with the addition of bona-fide guitar slayer Eisenberg, a dream of a foil to Grubbs’s grubbslike guitarisms, setting the scene for Kramer to follow his musical divining rod. Divining urges not dirges. In Grubbs’s book-length poem, The Voice in the Headphones, “Squanderer” is the nickname that most deeply troubles of the book’s unnamed protagonist: “Hang your head, Squanderer. You’ll never darken the doorway of Studio A.” Will this trio of inveterate Squanderers redeem themselves?

Karate Boogaloo are proud to present Hold Your Horses, a mesmerizing new long-playing disc of original instrumental tunes from Melbourne, Australia’s most dedicated. Sitting at the core of Melbourne’s burgeoning movement of cinematic instrumental soul, Karate Boogaloo’s roots go deep into the fabric of the DIY soul idiom. A mainstay of the Melbourne underground over the last decade, their now sought-after series of LPs delving into hip-hop sample culture and its relationship to funk music, The ‘KB’s Mixtapes’, are evidence of their long-standing contribution to the development of the Melbourne cinematic soul sound. Henry Jenkins, Hudson Whitlock, Callum Riley, and Darvid Thor have been playing music together since their playground days. Meeting as high school preteens, these four friends explored the teachings of the great small combo instrumental bands à la Booker T & The MG’s and The Meters. With these lessons in one hand and their characteristic sense of goofy humor in the other, the ensuing 15+ years saw Karate Boogaloo develop the kind of shared musical language that can only be built through countless hours spent together existing as friends and musical allies. Karate Boogaloo’s singular bond shines brightly on Hold Your Horses, the second album of original Karate Boogaloo compositions. Following on from the cult classic Carn The Boogers (College Of Knowledge Records, 2020), Hold Your Horses is a document of KB’s distinct interpretation of instrumental funk. A bona-fide journey from start to finish, each tune melds seamlessly into the next, deftly creating a world built on moments of cinematic tension, whimsical melodies and eerie discordance and underpinned by undeniable super heavy funk. Hold Your Horses respectfully builds on a legacy of soul music whilst remaining unimpeachably unique and authentic. Recorded and mixed by bassist Henry Jenkins, the mind responsible for the sound of the entire College Of Knowledge catalogue (Surprise Chef, The Pro-Teens, Let Your Hair Down, Karate Boogaloo), Hold Your Horses employs a methodology for writing and recording music that mirrors KB’s long relationship together. “It’s always instrumental, and it’s always recorded live. We have a strict no overdubs policy,” Jenkins explains. All of the songs were written collaboratively in the studio, with no pre-prepared material being brought in by any member. It's a process specifically designed to maximize the strengths of the band and their relationship to one another; KB’s MO is enabled by their innate understanding of one another as people and musicians. Stylistically, links can be drawn to the deep funk of the late 60s and early 70s, certain examples of European film music and new wave of instrumental soul. The restrained instrumental palette is limited to drums, guitar, bass and organ, establishing a distinct and consistent tone throughout, yet the use of dynamics, space and finite execution in the playing carves the experience, keeping the listener glued to their headphones from start to finish. The artwork, created by Melbourne-based visual artist Drez, is a stunning visual representation of the 12-track medley. To add to the experience, the LP cover creates an interactive optical art experience as the inner sleeve is removed from the jacket.

Man from Wareika was the first album recording for Rico Rodriguez led by his own artistic imagination, not to mention the only roots reggae album to be released on Blue Note Records in the USA. After 15 years Rodriguez returned for the first time to Jamaica. He had left the country in 1961 when he was already heavily involved in creating the then new ska sound. In 1976 he added something new to reggae music. The nine self-composed tracks on the album offer intense Jamaican rhythms with seriously horn lines more linked to the jazz heritage. The trombonist album was released on Island Records in 1976 for the UK market and soon labeled as a revolutionary step forward.

Most of this recording was made during a single early evening in Southern California, outdoors, with the San Bernardino Mountains in view. Sam Wilkes played bass guitar, Craig Weinrib played trap drums, and Dylan Day played electric guitar. Eight months after that dusk recording session, the trio reconvened to capture a few more pieces. Wilkes wanted to hear Dylan play a Jobim melody (How Insensitive), Dylan wanted to hear Craig play a funeral march (When I Can Read My Titles Clear), and Craig wanted to play nice and gentle. The resulting record, a document of an initial and seemingly fated musical encounter, conveys the ease and the intensity of the trio’s chemistry. Their shared sonic affinities, while essential to the record’s sound, feel secondary to the integrity, confidence, and mutual regard that suffuse each note and every beat. Atop standards, folk songs, and hymns, Wilkes, Weinrib, and Day unfurl a series of cascading improvisations. Joyful and precise music. Sam Wilkes is from Westport, Connecticut and lives in Los Angeles, California. Craig Weinrib is from New York and lives in New York. Dylan Day is from Fletcher, Vermont and lives in Los Angeles, California.