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Parisian label Latency presents "Without References / Cindy van Acker (Variations)", a new release by goat (JP) and legendary producer Ricardo Villalobos. For this project, Villalobos reinterprets two tracks – "Orin" and "Factory" – originally composed by goat (JP) for choreographer and performance artist Cindy van Acker’s dance piece "Without References". The release follows Latency’s recent publication of Villalobos’ variation on percussionist Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s "Swamp" (Latency, 2025), continuing the label’s exploration of reinterpretation and rhythmic dialogue. goat (JP), led by Osaka-based composer Koshiro Hino (YPY, Kakuhan, Boredoms, Mark Fell), is widely regarded as a leading force in contemporary minimalist composition. In “Without References/Cindy Van Acker”, goat (JP) transforms non-tonal rhythmic patterns into intricate, hypnotic structures with remarkable depth. In this new version, the group’s simultaneously tribal and futuristic sound is reshaped by Villalobos’ distinctive production style, which draws from both minimalist techno and Latin American rhythmic traditions. Ricardo Villalobos is a pioneering figure in minimal techno, known for his hypnotic and deeply rhythmic approach to electronic music. Born in Chile and raised in Germany after his family fled Pinochet’s regime, Villalobos developed an early fascination with percussion, beginning to play congas and bongos at the age of eleven. This tactile engagement with rhythm continues to inform his production work today. Influenced by both Latin American folk traditions and the emerging house and techno scenes of late-1980s Europe, he began DJing and producing in the early 1990s and quickly gained cult status within global club culture. Cindy van Acker’s dance piece "Without References" features scenography by visionary choreographer Romeo Castellucci. The stage environment evokes a space that shifts between a waiting room, a train station hall, and a mid-century installation. Eleven dancers interpret Van Acker’s precise yet fluid movements, interacting with goat (JP)’s percussive, stripped-down compositions to create a visceral and immersive performance. The artwork features photographs by Magali Dougados from a staging of "Without References" at the Maison de la Culture de Seine-Saint-Denis.
Yuri Suzuki, the sound artist and designer known for creating works that explore the realms of sound through exquisitely designed pieces, has become completely captivated by that silver box. Toting that infamous box and relentlessly diving deep into the swamp of Acid House, he drops a new album after nearly six years in LP format. On this record, Suzuki's finely honed squelchy old-school 303 sound, tightly mastered by the sound alchemist Rashad Becker, unfolds with precision and points toward another possible tomorrow. Each track is a sketch, carrying you through a timeless landscape of rhythm and texture and reaffirming Suzuki's unique command over sound and space.
Recorded at Nippon-Columbia Daiichi Studio, on Oct 8-10, 1975.
Trombone: Hiroshi Suzuki.
Keyboards: Hiromasa Suzuki.
Bass: Kunimitsu Inaba.
Drums: Akira Ishikawa.
Saxophone: Takeru Muraoka.
This is a solo percussion work recorded in 1980 and released in 1981 by Masahiko Togashi, one of Japan’s foremost percussionists and drummers. After the accident that left him partially paralyzed, Togashi developed his own techniques and performance methods, using drums, bells, gongs, and a wide range of percussion instruments to capture the unique sound world he envisioned. This album documents that deeply personal sonic exploration.
A drummer who shone brightly in the Japanese jazz scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hideo Shiraki recorded this album in Berlin in 1965.
The moment when the energy of Japanese jazz shines brightest: Terumasa Hino’s May Dance returns nearly 50 years after its creation as the sixth release in the Spin This Now! series.
I hope that everyone who listens to this album will be able to feel a little happiness.
The above sentence was written by Nujabes himself as an introduction to the album "modal soul" on tribe at the time of its release. He did not dare to mention the contents of the songs on the album, but rather expressed his own wishes in his comments on the album, hoping that people would actually listen to the album and empathize with the songs.
Nujabes has been expressing various thoughts and feelings through the world of sound, and their second album is finally released on 2LP.
The long-awaited CD version of the album includes two newly remastered bonus tracks that were only included on the cassette tape version! Japan’s KAKUHAN deliver a futureshock jolt on their incred debut album ‘Metal Zone’ - deploying drum machine syncopations around bowed cello and angular electronics that sound like the square root of Photek’s ‘Ni Ten Ichi Ryu’, Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’, Beatrice Dillon’s ‘Workaround’ and Mica Levi’s ‘Under The Skin’ - or something like T++ and Errorsmith dissecting Laurie Anderson’s ‘Home Of The Brave’, her electric violin panned and bounced relentlessly around the stereo field. It really is that good - basically all the things we love, in multiples. While "Metal Zone" might be their debut, KAKUHAN are hardly newcomers. Koshiri Hino is a member of goat (jp), releasing a run of records under the YPY moniker, and heading up the NAKID label, while Yuki Nakagawa is a well known cellist and sound artist who has worked with Eli Keszler and Joe Talia among many others. Together, they make a sound that’s considerably more than the sum of its parts - as obsessively tweaked, cybernetic and jerky as Mark Fell, frothing with the same gritted, algorithmic intensity as Autechre's total-darkness sets, stripped to the bone and carved with ritualistic symbolism. The album’s most startling and unexpected moments come when KAKUHAN follow their 'nuum inclinations, snatching grimey bursts and staccato South London shakes and matching them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place. It's not a collision we expected, but it's one that's completely melted us - welding obsessive rhythmic futurism onto bloodcurdling horror orchestration - the most appropriate soundtrack we can imagine for the contemporary era. By the album's final track, we're presented with South Asian microtonal blasts that suddenly make sense of the rest of the album; Nakagawa erupts into Arthur Russell-style clouded psychedelia, while wavering flutes guide bio-mechanical ritual musick formations. It’s the perfect closer for the album’s series of taut, viscous, and relentless gelling of meter and tone in sinuous tangles, weaving across East/West perceptions in spirals toward a distinctive conception of rhythmic euphoria with a sense of precision, dexterity and purpose that nods to classical court or chamber music as much as contemporary experimental digressions. Easily one of the most startling and deadly debuts we’ve heard in 2022; the louder we’ve played it, the more it’s realigned our perception of where experimental and club modes converge - meditative, jerky, flailing genius from the outerzone. Basically - an AOTY level Tip.
From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).
Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.
Originally released in 2005, Out To Lunch by Otomo Yoshihide’s New Jazz Orchestra (ONJO) is a bold, track-by-track homage that reimagines Eric Dolphy’s legendary 1964 album of the same name. Bringing together the early members of ONJO, this record serves as the most vivid manifestation of Otomo’s "New Jazz" concept at the time—placing a jazz orchestra, free improvisation, and electronic textures on the exact same stage.
Japanese vibraphonist and marimba player Masayoshi Fujita returns with Migratory, his masterful new solo album, where his sonic explorations into the unknown continue.
In 2020, after 13 years of living in Berlin, Fujita returned to his native Japan with his wife and their three children, fulfilling his life-long dream of living and composing music in the midst of nature. The family found their new home in the mountain hills along the coast of Kami-cho, Hyōgo, three hours west of Kyoto.
Once settled in, Fujita spent his time turning an old kindergarten into his own music studio, Kebi Bird Studio, which became the birthplace of Migratory. On his new album, the composer and producer masterfully reimagines and mesmerises with his trademark sounds of vibraphone, and resumes his experimentation with the marimba and synthesisers that he first incorporated on his 2021 album, Bird Ambience, which followed the release of his acclaimed vibraphone triptych: Stories (2012), Apologues (2015) and Book of Life (2018).
On Fujita’s ever-evolving list of collaborators, Migratory introduces vocals from Moor Mother on ‘Our Mother’s Lights’ and Hatis Noit on ‘Higurashi’, as well as shō and saxophone to its soundscapes.
Whilst at a music residency in Stockholm in 2021, Fujita met Swedish shō player Mattias Hållsten. Although it was a brief encounter, the two musicians stayed in touch. During a visit to Japan, Hållsten stopped by the studio and played on three of the tracks, including the alluring album closer ‘Yodaka’, exceeding Fujita’s own expectations.
Another collaborator, American poet Moor Mother asked Fujita to contribute vibraphone to her upcoming album, and in return lent her powerful voice to the Migratory’s centrepiece, Our Mother’s Lights — “it carries a kind of African and Asian vibe, a perfect match for the energy of the piece,” he adds.
As with Bird Ambience, Fujita continues to be inspired by our feathered friends. The album’s title, Migratory, originates from an image that came to him of migratory birds, travelling somewhere between Africa, Southeast Asia and Japan, imagining them hearing the music from the land underneath, and how their point of view of the world from above blurs the boundaries of music and land.
Expanding on this, Fujita says: “these ideas and images were inspired by my experiences of living abroad and returning to my homeland, as well as by the artists featured on this album who also somehow travelled or lived in other countries across the boundaries, and being influenced by the music of other lands but at the same time somehow led to their roots."
Masayoshi’s parents too made a life abroad in Thailand for over 15 years. After returning to Japan, Fujita’s mother passed away in the beginning of 2023. So he invited his father to come for a visit, to spend time with him and his grandchildren. A lifelong musician in his own right, the two of them soon found themselves holed up in Kebi Bird Studio. Fujita senior had brought his saxophone, which he played on top of the then unfinished recordings, resulting in three breathtaking pieces. The slow jazz-tinged ‘Blue Rock Thrush’ stands out, with the saxophone and marimba blending harmoniously reaching new artistic heights.
Nature has always been a source of inspiration for Fujita, and on Migratory it takes centre stage. You can hear it on the album’s peaceful and considered field recordings, but most importantly, Masayoshi highlights – “nature is there as the image to be evoked by the listener from the music.” On the record’s sleeve notes, written by renowned novelist and travel writer Pico Iyer, we learn about the Japan that he hears as he sits down and listens to the music. It educates and encapsulates us, in the same way Fujita’s imaginary birds vividly depict the essence of musical migration.
In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.
Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.
Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.
Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.
Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.
As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.
Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his time in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.
Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.
In the final month of 2024, Meitei arrived in Beppu, a city long steeped in vapor, myth, and mineral memory. Invited to create onsen ambient music commemorating Beppu’s 100th anniversary, he immersed himself in the city’s geothermal psychogeography, where sound rises from the ground and time clings to mist.
Known for his Lost Japan (Shitsu-nihon) works, which channel forgotten eras into flickering auditory relics, Meitei took residence in the warehouse of Yamada Bessou, a century-old inn perched by the bay. Over two weeks, he listened intently to steam, to stone, to the atmosphere itself. The resulting work, Sen’nyū, traces the inner spirit of onsen culture. Like water finding its path, the music emerged with quiet inevitability, shaped by Meitei’s synesthetic sensibility and deep attunement to place.
Equipped with a microphone, he wandered Beppu’s sacred sites: Takegawara Onsen, Bouzu Jigoku, Hebin-yu, and the private baths of Yamada Bessou. There, he captured the breath of the springs, bubbling mud, hissing vents, wind against bamboo, and the murmurs of daily visitors. These field recordings became the sonic bedrock of Sen’nyū, an act of deep listening that attempts to render even the rising mist and shifting heat into sound.
Unfolding as a single, continuous piece, Sen’nyū drifts like fog through sulfur and stone. It traverses the veiled madness of Bouzu Jigoku, the spectral resonance of Yamada Bessou’s inner bath, and the hushed voices of Takegawara Onsen. It is a gesture of quiet reverence, for water’s patience, the land’s memory, and the hands that have bathed here for generations.
Where Meitei’s earlier works conveyed his personal impression of a fading Japan, Sen’nyū is grounded in tactile presence, music not imagined but encountered. Here, his practice moves closer to the spirit of kankyō ongaku, environmental music born from place, shaped by it, and inseparable from it.
As part of the project, Meitei conceived a two-day public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, culminating in a live performance. Bathers soaked in mineral-rich waters while submerged in sound, an embodied ritual of place, body, and listening.
Sen’nyū marks Meitei’s first full-length work centered entirely on onsen and opens a new chapter of his Lost Japan project under the expanded title 失日本百景 (One Hundred Lost Views of Japan), a series exploring extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life. The album will be accompanied by Meitei’s first photo book, a visual document of his time in Beppu. A new layer is added to the world he has, until now, built only through sound.
Sen’nyū continues Meitei’s devotion to Japan as subject, while opening new terrain: both ritual and remembrance, an immersion into the mineral soul of Beppu.
'Mita Koyama-cho' offers a fresh perspective on today’s ambient music scene, blending acoustic and electronic elements into a rich, evocative soundscape. Murakami, a multi-instrumentalist, weaves together acoustic and jazz guitar, saxophone, fretless bass, and an array of keyboards—including vintage synthesizers, Mellotron, and acoustic piano. The result is a fusion of jazz, new age, folk, Brazilian music, and even 1970s progressive rock.
With an intuitive sense of melody and arrangement, Murakami layers warm cassette textures, vintage amp tones, and intricate string and saxophone orchestrations. 'Mita Koyama-cho' is a deeply personal tribute to the musician’s family and the Tokyo neighborhood they once called home—demolished in 2024 due to corporate redevelopment.
"Remnants" is an album marked by the ambiguity of presence and absence. The pieces, recorded using minimal equipment in what Suzuki describes as a ritual-like atmosphere, began as a way of processing the loss of her father in 2019. But beyond this, they also come to speak to the ways in which loss changes our relationship with someone, and our experiences of the world. Indeed, the experience of loss is not marked merely by a single event, but is instead a process that unfolds over time. Despite the other's absence, a particular location, the smell of a certain brand of tobacco, a look on a friend's face - traces such as these are enough to bring about a renewed presence. It is through these subtle traces and remnants, encountered over time, that we come to understand loss as not only the acceptance of absence, but the recognition of a continued presence. As Suzuki says, "this is not a solo album." Its creation was instead shaped by an ongoing dialogue, the continued elaboration of a complex and ambivalent relationship. At once melancholic, warm, and embracing, it is this ambiguity, these subtle traces, that Suzuki’s compositions speak to. These are not merely the sounds of mourning, but instead have been shaped by the evolving dialectic of presence and absence into something far more subtle and haunting. (Zefan Sramek, 2026)
Pon is Tujiko Noriko’s sixth album for Editions Mego and a further extension of her already significant body of work as both a solo and collaborative artist. Dedicated to her cat who she adopted as an infant and passed away due an accident having been born deaf, Pon is imbued with abstraction, tenderness and a deep emotional resonance. Noriko’s palette of electronics, romantic melodies and surprising sonic details are all fully present here, and like her last full length, 2023’s Crépuscule this is an epic work, released as a 2LP by Editions Mego alongside a Japanese CD release. The unmistakable hue of Japan hovers throughout this emotional rich landscape. Subtle field recordings and fragile, abstract motifs drift through the album, all cloaked in a warmth and humanity that only Noriko seems able to conjure. Pon moves effortlessly between the childlike and the obscure. There are moments of deceptive simplicity where unexpected elements suddenly surface — strange voices emerge on Boku Wa Obaka, Knife of Yonder is a standout: a startling ten-minute unfolding that begins with a warm, almost Eno-esque drift before launching into a soaring mid-section and finally landing somewhere unexpectedly blues-adjacent. Kikoeru Pon is brimming with childlike wonder — a heartfelt ballad that dissolves into domestic field recordings, including sounds of the feline for whom both the album and track are named. A quietly devastating ending that brings the personal nature of the record into sharp focus. There is a deep sense of the human in the way Noriko embraces technology. This is far from cold abstraction; rather, Ponfeels like a colourful photo album, documenting Noriko’s inner world and instincts with remarkable intimacy. Hovering in liminal states between pop, ambient and abstraction, this is a deeply affective and moving release that reveals new surprises with each listen. The emotional range of Noriko’s latest offering inspires hope in a world in disarray. It is both gentle and epic and one which we feel embodies the work of an artist fully at the height of her powers.
A sonic journey through rhythm and abstraction by the cult Japanese post-rock ensemble goat (jp). Originally composed as the score for Cindy Van Acker’s eponymous dance piece ‘Without References,’ this release expands the group’s radical approach to rhythm and structure into the realm of contemporary performance. Hailing from Osaka and led by Koshiro Hino (YPY, Kakuhan, Boredoms, Mark Fell), goat (jp) has redefined minimalism by prioritizing pure percussive interplay over melody—using guitar, bass, drums, and percussion. Their intricate rhythmic architectures blur the line between mechanical precision and organic fluidity, using harmonics outside standard tonality, muted bass tones, and interlocking drum patterns. The result is a relentless, hypnotic sound—one that pulses like an urban ritual, at once tribal and futuristic. goat (jp) elevates rhythmic composition to an extreme, creating performances that immerse audiences in a trance-like state. Their sonic explorations push the boundaries of instrumental music, making their live shows both physically intense and meticulously controlled. Recognised as one of Japan’s most compelling avant-garde acts, goat (jp) transforms rhythm into pure architecture—an evolving structure of sound that unfolds with unwavering precision and power. goat (jp) recently supported Ryoji Ikeda for a series of major shows in Japan as part of the ‘Ultratronics Japan Tour,’ further reinforcing their prominent role in the contemporary experimental music scene. Recently, goat (jp) has performed at Liquidroom (Tokyo), Rewire Festival (The Hague), Institute of Contemporary Arts (London), Gnration (Braga), Centro de Artes Visuais (Coimbra), Galeria Zè Dos Bois (Lisbon), and Creative Center (Osaka). About Cindy Van Acker’s ‘Without References’ : A choreographic exploration of form, duration, and memory, Cindy Van Acker’s ‘Without References’ features scenography by visionary director Romeo Castellucci. The performance creates a space that oscillates between a waiting room, a train station hall, and a mid-century installation. Eleven dancers interpret Van Acker’s stark yet fluid physical language, interacting with goat (jp)’s percussive and purified compositions to create a visceral, immersive experience.
In the mid-90s, Ken Ishii rose to prominence, with a futuristic sound rooted in Detroit’s machine soul yet unmistakably his own. Hailing from Sapporo, Ishii quickly became synonymous with futuristic, cutting-edge productions, and ‘Jelly Tones’ – originally released on R&S Records in 1995 - was the breakthrough release that propelled the Japanese producer to global notoriety.
'28’ is the work of two Japanese artists both now resident in France and both aged 28 - hence the title. This album is the result of over 3 years worth of collaboration between the pair, coming together to form a beautiful marriage of sweet female vocals, alongside pristine, lusciously textured and layered electronics, and some clever yet funky beat programming. ‘28’ has the feeling of a classic electronica album. The sonic precision, clarity, and detailing of each element has been lovingly worked on; everything fits and flows together as the album unfolds with an organic, slowly unfurling logic. Often built up in overlapping layers, Noriko’s voice is beautifully recorded and placed within the mix. Although largely sung in Japanese, her vocals add a warmth and solidity to the album – like a series of breathy vapour trails or lullaby coos and hums, which are occasionally chopped into and stuttered via computer, yet never jarringly so. Added alongside the gentle loops and textures of the music, the album is consequently held between a kind of swaying, fluid drift where the various layers gently slide across one another, and the sudden elastic snap of the beat.
Aoki and Tujiko’s collaboration began in 2002 when they were both booked the same event for The Cartier Foundation in Paris, got talking and began working together on the track ‘Fly’ for the first time. As they worked, it quickly dawned that they both really liked what they were doing and so decided to extend the project to an album-length collaboration. Yet following that show, the pair found little time to work together because Aoki was at the time living in Osaka whilst Tujiko was in Paris. As a way around this problem, they began sending their audio files to each other as CDRs, working separately on ideas and then slowly building their tracks bit by bit. Consequently, it took a long time to finish this album, although the process sped up when Aoki also moved to Paris just under a year ago.
Whilst this album marks the first time the pair have worked together on a recording, AOKI has previously released four albums on the Japanese-based Progressive Form label and one on Cirque. Somewhat better known to European audiences, Noriko has released albums on Mego, Sub Rosa, Tomlab, all of which have received glowing and considerable coverage.