MUSIC

Ephemera is the debut album by Fergus Jones, the artist formerly known as Perko, an Edinburgh-born, Copenhagen-based producer, DJ and founder of the FELT record label. The nine-track release is out now. Ephemera was developed with collaborative energy as the creative priority, produced by Jones alongside an extensive list of like-minded musicians, lyricists and vocalists including Huerco S, James K, Koreless, Birthmark, ELDON and Withdrawn of Bristol’s Cold Light crew, Laila Sakini and Lia T. The album embodies Jones’ inner journey as he ranges further than ever sonically and emotionally, emphasising instinct, intensity, tactility and rapture. “Heima” was written and produced with Huerco S and James K between Iceland, Copenhagen and the United States’ East Coast. Developed during and named after the same Icelandic artist residency that birthed Perko & Huerco S’ debut co-production “Prang,” “Heima” is a shimmering piece of fortified trip-pop featuring vocals from James K, appearing here following solo releases for AD 93 and collaborations with Yves Tumor. “Tight Knit” aligns Jones’ graceful production with the raw and restless emotions thundering from the performances of Birthmark, ELDON and Withdrawn of Cold Light, the shadowy Bristolian collective channelling the city’s deep sonic history into an equally rich future. The album makes a distinctive impact that reverberates and glows long after its runtime. Analogue audio sculpting, adaptive processes and imaginative approaches to creating sound are at the forefront – whether resulting from an endless exchange of iterative stems with Huerco S, or hydrophone recordings with Koreless. Evocative vocal performances and songwriting combine with weighty sound design, gliding easily between the organic and synthetic to reflect and expand the thin spaces of transcendence in each. “This album was made over the last five years in various studio and outdoor locations around the world, reflecting my ongoing emphasis on natural collaboration as a creative ideal. It’s my most personal record yet, written with experimentation and an open attitude as guiding lights.” – Fergus Jones Ephemera follows three prior releases on Numbers under the Perko alias – 2018’s NV Auto, 2020’s The City Rings, and 2023’s Prang, which was included on Resident Advisor’s Best Tracks of 2023. Jones has contributed DJ mixes to the long-running FACT and Truants series, is a frequent guest on radio stations such as NTS and Rinse, and has toured globally.

“Rocky Top Ballads” is the debut album of Copenhagen singer/songwriter and producer Fine. Woven around Fine's voice, with guitars, drums, samples, and synthesisers, the album visits both country and folk moods but with an underlying electronic world counter weighing. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Fine.

boycalledcrow is the alias of Chester-based sound artist Carl M Knott (Wonderful Beasts, Spacelab). Knott, a former folk musician, uses his myriad acoustic influences to create unique, strange and beautiful compositions. We're excited to be able to bring you the latest wonderful album from Chester's boycalledcrow, after some superb releases for labels such as Mortality Tables, Waxing Crescent Records and Subexotic Records. Knott's music doesn't sit easily in any pre-existing genres, being at once strange and experimental, yet melodic and somehow comforting. His music is intimate and evocative, deeply personal, and manages to be both bucolic and yet totally 21st century, like Kraftwerk's robots dreaming of sheep. The songs and sounds on “eyetrees” are inspired by a rich family life and the wonderful times spent with his wife and kids, both at home and out in nature. Knott said of the album and its inspirations: “We enjoy spending time in the woods with our young children, creating stories about the "eye tree”. This tree, with thousands of eyes, watches over us and cares for us like family. We make fox medicine and cherish these blissful moments. The music reflects these times, seen through the colors of an old, fuzzy reel—orange, red, and yellow with blurred edges, like an old photo scorched by the sun. I feel a deep spiritual connection to the countryside; the hands of Arcadia cradle me when I feel sad. Some of the album was created during times of sadness when I felt death was close and the lines between worlds were blurred. This feeling—that anything can happen and that life is delicate and can be taken away in a flash—permeates the music. The song titles are stories and memories of my family, filled with hazy pinks, yellows, reds, and oranges. Wonky acoustic guitar, broken electronics, and a warm, otherworldly space."

HOME RECORDINGS (2018-2021) “Who is Yara Asmar and how does she make music so strangely beautiful? The 25-year-old instrumentalist-puppeteer lives in Beirut with her cat, Mushroom, and presumably that’s the feline’s shadow next to the artist’s on the album’s back cover. The warm light of that photograph and the quiet beach scene of an abandoned lifeguard’s station and an empty net tells you all you need to know. Home Recordings 2018-2021 is an assured debut album that builds an eerie tension out of dreamlike layers of isolation” Spectrum Culture "Tiny worlds expand and contract in the palm of Yara Asmar’s hand. These recordings are remarkable in their ability to command attention in the gentlest terms. There are stories to find on this album and new worlds to discover." Foxy Digitalis SYNTH WALTZES & ACCORDION LAMENTS “Melancholic drifts sound through the overcast skies of synth waltzes and accordion laments, infusing ageless melodies with a sense of falling backward through time. History is stitched through gilded aural silhouettes and elegiac drones. Asmar’s music is visceral. While electronics beckon beyond the sunrise stretched through a metallic shimmer, synth waltzes and accordion laments sticks with us while we remain lost in the hazy doldrums, always crawling forward tethered to our past lives. Highest recommendation.” The Capsule Garden “ …these tracks are a cushion against reality. Asmar creates music that unfurls in evanescent bliss, an invitation to a safe space both isolated and welcoming.” The Quietus “…a set that transmutes the instrument’s droning tones into a sweep of introspective, breath-catching moments of beauty“ Pitchfork, 30 Best Jazz & Experimental Albums of 2024

In the Summer of 2023, we recorded our first studio album onboard a Lightship in the docklands of East London. Sculpted through long form improvisations, this music reflects our personal transformations as well as the rapidly evolving world in which we live. With its gradually unveiling intricacies and soundscapes rich in colour and depth, we sincerely hope this album can provide some moments of calm and joy. "Some of the most exciting jazz currently lighting up the London scene, right here. Moody, gliding, ranging improvisations, fronted by the closely-knit harmonies and melodies of woodwind duo Idris Rahman and Tamar Osbourne, and under-pinned by the propulsive, layered rhythms of Yusuf Ahmed’s drums and Jihad Darwish’s sitar and bass. Very warmly recommended." - Honest Jons Records

The concept for and palette of Crystal Dorval aka White Poppy’s ‘Paradise Gardens’ trilogy first germinated in 2016 as a notion of “paradise music” combining new age, bedroom shoegaze, and bossa nova into “transcendental Tropicalia.” As she filled tapes of recordings exploring the idea, many of the songs gradually gravitated towards the hermetic dream pop her project is best known for, becoming the albums Paradise Gardens (2020) and Sound Of Blue (2023). Dorval describes these collections as a sort of “emotional purging or shadow work,” before arriving at “the state of inner paradise:” Ataraxia. As the third, final, and most purist realization of the original ‘Paradise Gardens’ vision, Ataraxia delivers. Nine instrumentals of nimble guitar, elevated bass, clean rhythm, and clear light, gliding like swans on a shimmering pond. There’s a sense throughout of playful tranquility, of serenades at sunset, of kisses of blissful Muzak wafting along a boardwalk. But behind the music is a patience, grace, and levity born of Dorval’s personal journey with spiritual healing that paralleled the trilogy. A process of transmuting pain into beauty, day by day, melody by melody, cleaving the darkness from the soul and re-entering one’s rightful home in the Garden.

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

Listening to Fashion Club’s self-produced second album A Love You Cannot Shake feels like being caught in the crossfire of a profound beam of light. You can’t help but feel both enlivened and exposed as its aberrant synth lines, artful strings and disfigured guitars swell into larger-than-life crescendos, which evoke a divine yet probing spotlight. You can bask in the glow of a towering light with self-assured poise, but there’s also something inherently uncomfortable about an imposing light source—revealing yourself to onlookers (and oneself) comes with varying levels of anxiety and self-doubt. This is the tension at the heart of A Love You Cannot Shake, a record of lush radiance and otherworldly scope, with each track functioning as its own twinkling, transportive realm. Pascal Stevenson, the Los Angeles-based musician behind Fashion Club, likens the experience of hearing A Love You Cannot Shake to staring into the sun, and though the record wasn’t written with religion in mind, its heavenly sonics and emotional sagacity also make it feel like a prophetic encounter. The album was shaped by Stevenson’s gender transition and sobriety journey and parses her fluid emotions surrounding these events and other personal trials and tribulations. But as much as it's a dialogue between Stevenson’s current and former selves, it’s also an invitation for listeners to join her in the work of discarding bitterness and recentering hope, especially when such efforts feel futile. Musically, A Love You Cannot Shake is an unshackling of expectations, as Stevenson’s previous stint as bassist in the L.A. post-punk outfit Moaning and her first record as Fashion Club, 2022’s Scrutiny, didn’t necessarily reflect the full range of her taste, which includes ambient, pop, classical and dance music, or embody her sensitive tenderness and femininity. “By the time Scrutiny came out, I had transitioned, and I was making different music and caring about different things,” Stevenson says. “I felt less held back by ‘Oh I’m this kind of person, I have to make this kind of music,’ and I reached a point where I was like, ‘Let me just try to write a bunch of songs on acoustic guitar and piano, where I think the songs are good and have a solid core and then start producing them and see what happens if I don’t put any limitations in place.’” Though A Love You Cannot Shake is the first album that explicitly addresses her transness, it’s not so much a “coming out” record or a confessional, straightforward tell-all as it is a tastefully abstract distillation of her personal experiences and identities into stirring vignettes that anyone can relate to. Whether it’s the search for self-worth in a society that only values humanity in its relation to capital (“Confusion”), the uncomfortably circular nature of self-growth (“Forget”) or the self-destructive urge to make up for “lost time” (“Ghost”), this LP is rooted in the universal truth that self-actualization is always worth pursuing. Tracks often begin from a place of discomfort and shame, but by the end, they tend to arrive at a more patient, hopeful frame of mind, as Stevenson cherishes the authenticity of a more amorphous emotionality. A Love You Cannot Shake also thrives on a fluid sonic palette. The throttling balladry of “Faith” falls somewhere between gentle pop, glitchy industrial and epic classical music. “Ghost” has a bubbly garage-y techno thrust, and “One Day” soars with its electronic take on anthemic heartland rock. The album’s magnetic immersiveness hinges on its strange dynamic shifts, jagged production and ambitious song structures with parts that don’t repeat—choices influenced by her love of left-field electro-pop and her classical music background. Stevenson was inspired by the movements and storytelling of classical music, and she even picked up the upright bass again for this record, despite not touching the instrument for years. While Stevenson handled most of the instrumentals on Scrutiny, this LP is much more collaborative, featuring an array of contributors who lent strings, piano, pedal steel and more. Plus, this album boasts country harmonies from Perfume Genius (“Forget”), high-pitched coos from Jay Som (“Ghost”) and gauzy whispers from Julie Byrne (“Rotten Mind”). Stevenson’s vocal evolution is also on display with this record, embracing a softer delivery that’s more reflective of her personality and identity. With this album, Stevenson masterfully executes a daring vision and chronicles how far she’s come in several facets. Sonically, she says, “It feels like the album I’ve wanted to make for the past 10 years, but didn’t have the musical vocabulary to or was scared to,” and personally, she says, “I am, for once in my life, finally feeling something I’ve been reaching for forever, and I want to live in that feeling for the rest of my life.” A Love You Cannot Shake vehemently encourages a walk towards the edge and into the sultry glow—after all, it’s cold out here in the cynical abyss of our minds.

On this LP you hear two kanteles built by the Master Luthier Rauno Nieminen. One of them is a copy of a historical instrument built by the folk poet Ontrei Malinen in 1833. It is carved from single piece of pine, and it has five bronze strings. The other one is carved from a single piece of spruce. Its lowest seven strings are bronze, and highest three strings are English iron. On most tracks the two kanteles are played simultaneously. For me, playing these instruments is searching for meaningful ways to interact with wooden objects from another time. By choosing a set of 5 to 15 frequencies and plucking them, I'm able to think, feel, and imagine more than I could without the instruments. the patterns that emerge from the vibrating strings give temporal shapes to thoughts. The music on this album is improvised. It was recorded at home after dark and outdoors in daylight during 2020-2022. No overdubs or edits were made afterwards. On the last track the kantele is accompanied by detritus gathered from the forest floor. Tuokioita translates to moments. This music is about coloring time. Dedicated to Mia, who also came up with the album title. - Olli Aarni

“I could not be alive alone,” a longtime family friend said to Merce with a smile. “None of us could be alive alone.” Within the quiet, cascading corners of Pittsburgh lies a community – nothing short of one large family – that spans zip codes, histories, occupations, and generations, always tumbling into itself, propped up by steadfast pillars of conviction toward spiritual and emotional mutual aid. The kind of earnest community scaffolding that gets bandied about, wielded as conjecture, particularly in an age of increasing fracture through digital sublimation, is alive and quite well within the universe surrounding Merce Lemon. When asked how the city has inspired her creative practice, she responds with a characteristic joke wrapped in an earthen warmth – “There are big hills, three rivers, and more bridges than anywhere in the whole world.” Growing up in a family of art and music in a city with a small, but vigorously supportive scene, Merce has been going to shows here her whole life, even playing them with the “grown up” friends of her parents – as recently as a few years ago, her band was comprised of her own father and his peers in the Pittsburgh music community. Merce took a step back in 2020, after releasing her last album 'Moonth', to reassess during an era of anxiety and lockdown – even the reliably nourishing exercise of sharing and playing music felt precarious. “I was grappling with what kind of relationship I wanted with music in my life. It was just something I’d always done, and I didn't want to lose the magic of that – but I was just having less fun.” In this time of restless non-direction, she turned her gaze inwardly, down to the roots – figuratively and literally. “I got dirty and slept outside most of the summer. I learned a lot about plants and farming, just writing for myself, and in that time I just slowly accumulated songs.” A never-ending creative hunger, supported by the community framework she’d always been able to depend on, had been newly fertilized by the wide-eyed inspiration that came from plunging her hands into both the earth’s soil and her own. Rooting around for an answer, finding and turning in her palms what had been buried there all along – from this rediscovery, imbued with the vitality of earth’s green magic, 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' sprouted forth. The album emerges, enveloped in propulsive guitars and saccharine-sweet songs of blackbirds and blueberries, from the dead-calm center of a pastoral frenzy in a manner that one could argue as erratic, reckless — a grave misconception, as Merce is just as aware of where she’s being pulled from as she is curious about where to go next. Her sound is built upon a reverence and gratitude for the natural world, how paying respect to it charts a more confident path through the choppy waters of the heart. On the soft and confessional “Rain,” she maps memory onto the stillness of the landscape around her, panning for clarity in an endlessly blue sky: “I can see your relentlessness / in the muddy puddles where retting is / shattering the splintered stalks / where golden braids pour into drops." In her music, romantic and familial love rips into and out of itself, barely registering as disparate feelings in the flurry of reckoning. Lead single “Backyard Lover” is an honest and incisive exploration of this confused, raw intimacy. In it, a warm memory gently meanders alongside warbling steel and guitars, tinged with a classic outlaw haze, before it suddenly erupts with the frustration of a broken promise, making way for a cathartic sonic fury – “what dying felt like / a wooden spoon tossed in the fire / cause nothings good enough / you fucking liar.“ The song’s climax deftly uncovers the formidable heartbeat hidden underneath the floorboards of her creative expulsion: loss. “So many of my songs are touched by and explore death, specifically in relation to the loss I experienced of my best friend when I was fifteen years old” says Merce. “That loss has forever changed me and who I am in my relationships to lovers, friends, family." In reconciling the quiet conflict of a desire for closeness and a solitude cultivated by distrust, there is a fierceness, a persistence in her vulnerability, matched in droves by the wildness of her band. These songs range, often within the structure of a single track, from ballads to blown out electric riffs combating feedback, harmonies concealed behind wailing guitars, both dependent on each other as they careen towards new meaning. They build slowly, synthesizing a naturalist’s penchant for romance and nihilism to create the warring, triumphantly escalating nature of Merce’s lyrics and her band’s heavy entropy. For Merce, the only certainty is the endlessly shifting nature of a river, roaring straight past a dogwood, never missing the opportunity to watch a petal fluttering to the ground in the rear view. They are songs of belonging just as much as they are songs of longing – ”Say I was a lonely gust of wind / could I redirect them,” she muses in “Crow”, one of the more hopeful tracks on the record. Its structure is simple, gentle acoustics pushed forward by an ever-present and fluid percussion that guides the song as naturally as Merce hopes to guide the “murderous flock,” forgoing the voyeur in all of our hearts and comfortably settling in the supportive role of a shepherd – “I’d make a city of this ghost town / even let the crows come / rest their necks / and nest their young.” There is an oaken strength in 'Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild' that makes it easy to love – once wild, still free, honest and familiar. Its genesis is timeless, its restlessness eternal – it is one cohesive yet unanswered question built around, and dependent upon, the life-giving force of nature that came before Merce. The album’s closing track also inspires its title – a lonely ballad of forlorn projection into an unknown future, forever protected by the comforting green of Pittsburgh’s hills, rivers, bridges, and homes: “Old man howling / laughing his teeth out / with the dogs down the hill. And a tree fell / I smell the wood / and the bark is coming off in sheets / I write my words down on it. And honestly / the thoughts of a husband / weighing on me.”

It was the lonely, overwhelming early days of the pandemic. Topu Lyo was living in Georgia, feeling distant from his home in New York City, and Salenta De Badisdenne was in Wisconsin helping an elderly relative. When Topu sent Salenta the files of Moon Set, Moon Rise, the project of wistful, contemplative cello and piano music they had recorded over the previous two years, she put off listening for a few weeks because of the stress of her daily life. When she finally played the music, she was blown away by what they had created together. The 17 songs on this album are patient, exploratory, and dynamic. The keys tiptoe through space at some moments, and pirouette ecstatically at others. The cello provides a sonic backbone that glows like amber. With song titles like “Woman Reading a Letter” and “Light Coming On The Plains,” the album evokes vignettes of home, falling asleep with someone you love, learning to soothe yourself. Topu and Salenta had met in 2018 at a mutual friend’s house in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn and decided to jam together. Their connection was instant: though they weren’t recording with the intention of releasing the music they were making, the very first session they played together made its way onto the album. They continued to meet up and improvise every week until the start of 2020. The two established rituals while recording: Topu would bring dark chocolate to their sessions that they would eat while talking about their days, herbalizing, and eventually playing. Topu and Salenta made very few edits to the live recordings. The album we hear is a document of their shared bond and their time together. If you listen closely, you can even hear the two artists breathing on the recording. “This music was liberating because both Topu and I were just allowed to be,” Salenta says. “There was no right or wrong way, we were creating this atmosphere together. We were right there with the listener learning about and experiencing it.” “What I love about Salenta as a human and a musician is how honest she is,” adds Topu. “You hear when we’re playing, suddenly she’ll start laughing. There’s such a human aspect to it that makes me so happy when I listen to the music.” Both artists, as well as their community of friends and fellow musicians, see the music as healing. Topu and Salenta hope that listeners feel the peacefulness and liberation they experienced while creating these songs. — Vrinda Jagota

Very pleased and grateful to announce this ‘Home Comfort’ reissue by Mark Glynne and Bart Zwier, originally self-released in 1980. Maybe a bit of an unexpected title to appear in the LSD catalog but my love for this album goes back to my late teenage years and has had an addictive effect since, like a spleen infused magnet. With this album Glynne and Zwier, based in the Netherlands and connected to the Ultra scene, drew an insular blend of intimate post-punk and chamber (bedroom) songs with surreal scenic reflections. Probably its naked singularity defying categorization has left it so unnoticed, even 43 years after the making. It also features a reciting Marlène Dumas still quite unknown at the time. With biggest gratitude to Mark Glynne who instantly felt confident with my proposal to reissue this silent witness of lasting beauty. My long time Japanese friend You Ishihara (White Heaven, The Stars) who bought the LP when it came out in 1980 still considers it as one of his all-time favourites. This is what he writes about ‘Home Comfort’:“Resignation and fear in a desolate mental landscape. This album, which exists like a shelter for those who have quietly escaped through the backdoor of the world, vividly reflects the inner depths of the devastated Amsterdam of the early 80’s. A beautiful and sad, unmistakable masterpiece.”

Very pleased and grateful to announce this ‘Home Comfort’ reissue by Mark Glynne and Bart Zwier, originally self-released in 1980. Maybe a bit of an unexpected title to appear in the LSD catalog but my love for this album goes back to my late teenage years and has had an addictive effect since, like a spleen infused magnet. With this album Glynne and Zwier, based in the Netherlands and connected to the Ultra scene, drew an insular blend of intimate post-punk and chamber (bedroom) songs with surreal scenic reflections. Probably its naked singularity defying categorization has left it so unnoticed, even 43 years after the making. It also features a reciting Marlène Dumas still quite unknown at the time. With biggest gratitude to Mark Glynne who instantly felt confident with my proposal to reissue this silent witness of lasting beauty. My long time Japanese friend You Ishihara (White Heaven, The Stars) who bought the LP when it came out in 1980 still considers it as one of his all-time favourites. This is what he writes about ‘Home Comfort’:“Resignation and fear in a desolate mental landscape. This album, which exists like a shelter for those who have quietly escaped through the backdoor of the world, vividly reflects the inner depths of the devastated Amsterdam of the early 80’s. A beautiful and sad, unmistakable masterpiece.”

The debut album from New York-based vocalist, composer, and producer Charlotte Jacobs plays out like a half-remembered Greek epic of avant-pop proportions, piecing together earthy woodwinds, old-school synths, and shifting rhythmic patterns that enhance her myth-inspired spoken word and bilingual vocals, delivered in Dutch and English. Arranged and co-produced by Jacobs, a t l a s, her debut solo full-length—and first for the Grammy-winning label New Amsterdam Records (Arooj Aftab, Bryce Dessner, Julia Holter et al)—preserves the fluidity and vocal centricity of her 2021 EP The Shape of Wandering, once again using text as a means of grounding her musical ideas to give her storyteller’s heart a home. Spanning both Dutch and English, the LP also incorporates spoken language for the first time, creating vocal dynamics that add depth and dimension. Jacobs played a large proportion of the instruments on a t l a s while also working with a talented cast of musicians, including harpist Rebecca El Saleh, drummer Raf Vertessen, flautist/saxophonist Charlotte Greve, and violinist Hannah Epperson, who lend the record a contemporary classical flair. Engineer and producer Zubin Hensler also helped to steer the production.

Gondwana Records are proud to announce Morning Sun / Arrival, a limited two track 12” release from the sublimely beautiful and immersive LA instrumental project Phi-Psonics Phi-Psonics is a meditative, deeply soulful jazz group from Los Angeles, led by bassist Seth Ford-Young and featuring Sylvain Carton on woodwinds, Mitchell Yoshida on electric piano, and Josh Collazo on drums. Their beautiful music draws on jazz and classical influences together with Ford-Young’s own musical experiences, relationships, and his introduction to spirituality, yoga and philosophy at a young age. Along the way they create something uniquely their own, sharing beautiful landscapes for your spirit to roam freely within. Morning Sun / Arrival was recorded from the same sessions that formed Phi-Psonics second album Octava - it’s an emotional, introspective, and unusual approach to meditative jazz that offers us a beautiful space for uplifting contemplation and wields a quiet power to create a spiritually inspiring world of timeless, warm melodies and instrumental exploration for the deep listener and thoughtful voyager. Pressed on high quality black BioVinyl at Optimal in Germany for maximum sound quality.

“Do you dream too?” Tomemitsu’s Martin Roark asks on his sophomore album with Friends of Friends Music out September 20, 2024. The question is also what stemmed from the album title, ‘Dream 2’, a shorthand written in the lyrics. ‘Dream 2’ is quite possibly Tomemitsu’s dreamiest LP, if not his most diverse. It is brimming with both new territory and nods to his past. This record reveals a more buoyant side to accompany his traditionally spaced out productions. Since his 2013 release of ‘m_o_d_e_s’, Tomemitsu has combined calm with chaos to create chilled out nuggets of pop containing an ear for ambience in odes to offbeat artists from genres of all sorts. “Creators like Thelonoius Monk, Joao Gilberto, Daniel Johnston, Brian Eno, Bill Withers, Arthur Russell… they were all immediately inspiring to me. I think I’ve come to appreciate the ‘solo project’ness of tomemitsu without realizing how much i was nodding along to the loneliness of my favorite artists.” says Roark. For ‘Dream 2’, Tomemitsu also added a slew of analog and digital gear, processors and synthesizers, to his private Laveta Loca studio elevating the aural output from his hyper lo-fi origins.

On the 6th of October 2023, the release date of her third solo album ‘Ghosts’, Hania Rani organised a special album release concert with a string ensemble in a very unique location - Witold Lutosławski's Concert Studio at the Polish Radio in Warsaw. “Over the years, the spaces of Polish Radio became an important part of my life - both privately and professionally. I visited it for the first time as a student of Chopin University of Music and came back to make my first recordings in late 2018, just before the release of the debut album ‘Esja’. Since then I have been a regular guest.” The building is located in the Mokotów district in Warsaw and has served generations of musicians and sound engineers for decades. For Hania it is a home from home; a beloved recording studio but something more important and resonant too. Nostalgia does more than just present a memorable concert; it celebrates a space and an idea as through the mediums of photography and recorded sound. Hania creates something profound and enlightening. “Some months after this special concert in Studio S1 I came back to the chambers of Polish Radio. This time not as a musician, but as an observer. It was one of the coldest Mondays of January and Warsaw was adorned with fresh, plush snow. The building seemed completely empty, so I was able to navigate freely with my camera from space to space without interruption. I relished each object and each room waiting patiently to be consumed by a film roll. The obscure lighting was putting things in a subtle movement, the strong white beams were making them still again” Through Nostalgia, Hania presents the studios in her own perspective, as somewhere unique and unknown. A place of work, but something more. A place of ghosts and hidden meanings, of inspiration and mystery; The deluxe LP comes with a 16-page booklet featuring Hania’s unique analogue photos, along with her thoughts on the recording process, studios, and the compositions themselves. The CD includes these photos in a beautifully glued-in 12-page booklet.

It’s not difficult to find beauty in the sounds of nature – ocean waves, birdsong, rainfall – but it's easy to overlook the charm and wonder of everyday anthropogenic sounds. Equal parts reverent and playful, Normal Sounds is built around field recordings of human-made, non-musical sounds: fridge drones, grocery store beeps, car horns. Lia Kohl alternately hallows and mimics them, offering them to the listener in a new light. Using a textural cloud of cello and synthesizers, with a few notable contributions from wind players Ka Baird and Patrick Shiroishi, Kohl brings out beauty in the world’s inane noise. This interest in the mundane is not new to Kohl. Normal Sounds follows a series of pieces – The Ceiling Reposes, Untitled Radio, Variations on a Topography – which use field recordings of AM/FM radio as centerpieces. Her work hones in on unnoticed or under-documented sounds: the things we tend to tune out or hear passively. Many of the field recordings on Normal Sounds are functional, indicating danger (tornado siren, car alarms), fun (ice cream truck) or change (“the seatbelt sign is on”, “please take your receipt”). Others are simply byproducts of machine function: the drone of a fridge or airplane. While they’re sometimes intended to be heard, they’re not intended to be listened to. For Kohl, her treatment of these sounds acts as a practice of attention, or in her words “a practice of trying to be more alive.” Often this practice takes the form of mimicry: harmonizing the already-present frequencies of a tennis court light with cello harmonics, or cheekily pairing car horns with Shiroishi’s saxophone. Sometimes, she augments the soundscape more dramatically, pulling it in a new direction with melodic cello or arpeggiated synths. It’s occasionally unclear whether a sound comes from her or the world around her. She nestles each field recording into a bed of her own sounds, inviting us to listen to the world through her ears.

“My favorite singer in the place was Karen Dalton. She had a voice like Billie Holiday’s and played the guitar like Jimmy Reed.” – Bob Dylan Karen Dalton's 1969 Capitol debut is finally back in print! Light in the Attic is thrilled to present a brand new edition of this heart-wrenching & bluesy introduction to the intoxicating world of Dalton and her deep well of musical secrets. World-weary and filled with the blues, Dalton’s unsurpassed interpretive depth and emotional range were like no other. Recorded for Capitol in 1969, It’s So Hard To Tell Who's Going To Love You The Best spans generations of classic American songwriting–covering classics by Lead Belly, Fred Neil, and Tim Hardin. While no longer with us in the physical, Karen’s growing musical presence is stronger than ever and worthy of re-examination by both the converted and the uninitiated alike. This new re-release serves as the definitive, all-analog version of Dalton’s stunning debut, featuring remastered audio from the original Capitol masters, the original 1969 artwork in an expanded gatefold jacket, unseen photos by album photographer Joel Brodsky, and an essay interviewing Karen’s friends and music collaborators, from album producer and bassist Harvey Brooks to musician Peter Stampfel of the Holy Modal Rounders.

"When I was little, I could open the window and go right up to the roof. I didn't have a balcony, so I would lie on the roof and watch the night sky." A dream to be releasing the first vinyl edition of Yahho no Potori, a treasured recording by one of our most cherished contemporary Japanese folk outfits, Eddie Marcon. Comprised of the core duo of Eddie Corman and Jules Marcon, Eddie Marcon was formed in Himeji in 2001, following Corman's involvement in noise-rock duo Coa and Shinsuke Michishita's fabled psychedelic outfit, LSD March. Marking a stylistic shift into delicate, acoustic territories, the duo would release dozens of albums and singles, mostly self-released through their Pong-Kong imprint, that have seen little distribution outside of Japan. An'archives helped us source some of their recent 7" singles, while Preservation, who compiled their earliest works in 2005, remains the only other label outside of Japan to have released their work exclusively. Recorded over a particularly humid summer and autumn, Yahho no Potori sees Eddie Marcon drifting from the delicate psychedelia of their debut EP (2002) into traditional song-based structures, first hinted at in their preceding and debut album, Aoi Ashioto (2005). A document of tenderness, wistfulness and joy, Marcon's deft yet effortless guitar strum sets a stylish backdrop for Corman's voice to ascend. Desirous yet self-assured, Corman breathes life into an intimate space adorned by the elegant instrumentation of Yashuhisa Mizatani, Yoriro Tatekawa, Ran Mizutani and Saya Ueno, whose ingenuous collaborative instinct has been gifted to listeners through collectives such as Tenniscoats, Maher Shalal Hash Baz and Spirit Fest. Here, she also lends her engineering prowess, having produced the entire album. Devotees of ambitious yet beautifully understated songwriting will find much to adore in the songs of Eddie Marcon, and followers of Reiko and Tori Kudo, Nagisa Ni Te, Ai Aso, and those curious about the wider contemporary Japanese underground, will not be surprised by the inclusion of the album's devastating climax, 'Toratolion', in Morr Music's Minna Miteru compilation in 2020. An intense and heartbreaking piece where Corman's voice takes centre stage, it remains a favourite amongst listeners and a centrepiece of Eddie Marcon's live performances. Released on vinyl on June 14 with remastered audio, faithful artwork and Japanese lyric sheet, A Colourful Storm is proud to give new life to a shimmering, underappreciated gem.

Cassette version of the 2022 album "Hymnes Apophatiques" by the french artist Delphine Dora, previously released on CD by Morctapes. During the summer of 2021, Delphine Dora was invited for a residency at the church of St Saphorin (Switzerland), on the occasion of the Jolie Vue Festival. Having the opportunity to fully explore the organ the days before the festival, Delphine improvised a long, long series of tracks, of which you’ll find a small selection on ‘hymnes apophatiques’. She’s definitely full of respect for the organ, at some moments diving deep in the sound traditionally associated with this rich instrument – the one you’ll recognize from the hours spent in church as a kid. However, at many moments throughout the album the sound is more playful than we’re used to. It’s a fearless approach. The fact that she dares to intervene with her voice quite often really makes her recordings stand out from those of many other artists who have been experimenting with a church organ lately: she definitely has a high regards for the tradition of the organ, but refuses to bow. She’s in charge, not the instrument itself. This way, Delphine manages to bend the sound completely her way. It’s an enthralling listen, that not only takes you along all the possibilities of the instrument, but also through Delphine’s entire musical path. And that’s quite a journey. Review on Fluid Audio by James Catchpole : "Hymes Apophatique is the latest album from French musician Delphine Dora, recorded last year during a residency at the church of St Saphorin, Switzerland. Delphine recorded her improvised music on the church organ, an instrument she fully respects and recognises, and this level of respect comes through in her music. Although traditionally confined to the dusty recesses of a church, the organ is so much more than an instrument of devotion. Delphine isn’t afraid to open the doors and push the sound of the organ out and into the modern world. No hesitation is found in her music, and in her wish to spread its wings. With so many pedals and tonalities, the organ can be an intimidating instrument, not something to necessarily master but to temporarily hold the reins and somehow snake-charm its tones. Delphine manages to remain in control at all times while still respecting its background and rich history. Somehow, the organ exhales with the unfathomable weight of history. One of the most interesting elements of Hymes Apophatique is the introduction of her voice, which accompanies the instrument, partaking in a slow, entangled dance, but never blotting it out or overshadowing it. Trenches of deep reverence, respect, and awe are maintained. Other sections are incredibly melodic, sometimes sounding like an echo from a fantastical forest and at other times carrying medieval undertones. All the while, though, the organ is airy and well ventilated. Its reverent nature is not lost – not even a drop – as it steps forward into the glowing sun of a new dawn." Review on Terrascope by Simon Lewis : Recorded in the summer of 2021 at the Church of St Saphorin (Switzerland), this album is a collection of pieces for voice and Church Organ, that were improvised and recorded during a residency by the artist Delphine Dora. Familiar to anyone who attended church as a child, the sound of the organ is warm and comforting, easily evoking memories, the smell of wooden pews, old books, a quiet chatter and the echo of footsteps, whilst the addition of Delphine's voice adds a slightly stranger feel to the music, taking it into Canterbury sounding music, reminding me of early albums by Kevin Ayers especially on “Ritournelle Scolastisque #2” which has a lovely melody that would sit happily on “Joy of a Toy”. Another charming aspect of the album is the way the pieces just end as the pause button is pressed, each track a raw nugget of sound, the experience as it happened. Over 17 tracks, the music retains a similar pace and feel giving it a wonderful flow, allowing the listener time to just sit and contemplate the simple beauty of the music. Maybe I should be highlighting some individual songs at this point but it is the album as a whole that is its strength, seemingly more than the sum of its components although “. L'immuable sous-jacent “ has a fragile beauty running through it, whilst the six minute “Opus Divinum” is a distillation of the whole album,a gnetly breathing piece that could be the beginning of an early seventies Tangerine Dream track, especially as it contains distant voices picked up by the recording process, I was just waiting for a sequencer to kick in. I have played this album several times now and it gets better every time, the rawness of the recording and Delphines' untrained voice adding a human element to the music that really appeals to me, give it a listen. (Simon Lewis)

‘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.

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.

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey.