MUSIC

It is often said that we find it hard to stare at the light, however, the universe never lights out. This first premise from As Above, So Below is the base point for the setting of what follows. A group of rabble-rousing guerillères from the commune decide to go bowling. They had entered the forest, followed its winding paths, and emerged blind after staring at the universe for too long. No longer able to find their way by observing the stars, they now have to climb on the houses and feel the vernacular roofing to find out in which direction they’re heading. They get to the bowling alley all amped up. The punters insist on lighting their cigarettes - they’re not interested in matches but rather in the cardboard cover that attaches them. The only striking going on is the sound of the skittles getting scattered, syncopating with saturated basslines, mixed vocal techniques, heavy fx, and feeding into an arsenal of bells and percussions. They start stomping on the alleys as if this was a housewarming party and they had to break in a newly laid wood floor. Moving in circles, they eventually fall through it and end up in a room where the light has been swallowed. A band including none of its original members is performing, they can only hear a warm yet throbbing hum. They soon realise the massive rolling sub is getting louder and louder and adjusting its pitch. The dust their feet was lifting is slowly sweeping around the floor and gathering in patches and lines, drawing out the Chladni figures they had seen in their dreams, experiencing the same thoughts at the same moment, they inscribe them on a loquat leaf.

Last spotted on production duties for Yungwesbster’s ‘II’ as well as turns for Nostalgians and Dj Loser’s Magdalena’s Apathy.. Seattle-based Jaqueline Lawson aka Matryoshka shows serious emotional range on her debut album, channeling Burial, Shinichi Atobe, Space Afrika, Malibu and Surf Gang, seemingly all at once…. Matryoshka has already built a reputation as a producer for DJ Loser's Magdalena's Apathy imprint as well as work for the Nostalgians, an under-the-radar ambient rap collective featuring Yungwebster, Mdb, tnotsobad, Nopaprr and ogpra1. Her musical roots - dubstep, trance and hard dance - tell some of the story here, but she transmogrifies those influences into haunted, Basinski-esque memories like the gaseous traces and decelerated remnants of the club. On album opener 'Lifelover’, Burial's hazed interludes spring to mind, or perhaps the 4am cityscapes of Space Afrika's now mythical 'Somewhere Decent to Live’. Background ambiance simmers below Lawson's pensive FM pads, but once she establishes the mood, things take an unexpected turn with a pitch-bent bassline that might have been lifted straight from a 6LACK loosie, and a rhythmic pulse that traces the thin red line of Shinichi Atobe. If it's dub techno, it's a strand that hasn't been codified quite yet. 'Surface Tension' uses deep, Maybach Music-coded bass womps to twist through her skittering slow rhythms and sadcore pads. But it’s Matryoshka’s harmonic instinct that stands out; if you heard the airy 'otr' or 'fantasize' from Yungwebster's 'II' you'll know exactly what we mean, and she takes it even further here, weaving cinematic, languid harmonies that bridge the gap between Steve Roach and Future. Check 'Where the Dancers are Spinning' with its levitational, almost orchestral sweeps that Lawson counterbalances with thudding subs, or the brief title track, an Akira Yamaoka-style save room loop that dissipates into a dreamy, dissociated fog, for further proof. Then there's the second side's centrepiece 'Parted by the Sea', where a ratcheting Chain Reaction-style rhythm builds to a tense crescendo only to get splintered unrecognisably in the second half, its broken pieces pillowed by Lawson's billowing time-stretched chords.

Key importers/translators of Japanese Kankyō Ongaku to the Western world, Visible Cloaks present a fine new bouquet of digital flowers pruned in-the-mix with help from Lifted’s Joe Williams and arranged with input by Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima, and Satsuki Shibano. Ryan Carlile & Spencer Doran’s Visible Cloaks have been instrumental in bridging the rarified world of ’80s Japanese environmental ambient and its modern offshoots since their self-titled debut of 2015. Their ‘Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo’ mixtape and original productions inspired by that particular time and space - circa the emergence and application of game-changing musical technology - have been indispensable for discerning diggers and ears. Their first album since 2019, ‘Paradessence’ now marks the duo’s return to a sound they helped bring to wider interest, displaying cross-border/generational binds between experimental scenes in Japan, US, and EU across an intricately crafted and romantic spirited album defined by its technical sorcery and sense of adventure. Benefitting from the energy of their collaborators and time out to sharpen and reassess their sound, ‘Paradessence’ feels like the most fully realised iteration of Visible Cloaks’ illusive world building. 14 succinct pieces open out a fantasy playground where prior spars Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano chime into the pitch bent, shatterproof contours of ’Shapes’ and again with Félicia Atkinson’s french vox in ‘Thinking’, before Satie-esque piano phrases are refracted into hyaline hyperprisms glistening with Joe Williams touch on ‘Zinna’. The shearing shape of ‘Balloon’ impresses in its hyperreal tactility, and the synthetic wind-swept strings of ‘Swirl’ brings us teasingly close to oneiric dimensions also touched on in ‘Telescoping’, suffused with ultrasonic insect sounds that lend a frisson of waking dream detail for the susceptible.

Super sweet sleepover core from the turn of the millennium. When not at the mall or elementary school, Jessica, Ayden, Janet, and Mary created a suburban Spice World all their own, singing, dancing, and making videos in anticipation of a global pop takeover. Summer 2000 expands their home-burned Y2K CD-R Stardust, encapsulating girl group R&B, trip hop, Eurofunk, and pool party heartbreak into a revealing portrait of millennial girlhood. Party til 2, sleep til 1, come on baby let's have some fun.

Backwoodz Studioz is excited to announce the release of Crayola Circles, a collaboration between rapper Fatboi Sharif and producer Child Actor. While both artists have long standing connections to Backwoodz, this album marks their first collaboration of any kind and breaks new artistic ground for all parties. Sharif’s previous album, Decay, released on Backwoodz in 2023, was a haunting experimental rap masterpiece, an acid trip in a mental hospital. On Crayola Circles Sharif trades menacing psychedelia for a simmering stew of blacklight expressionism, his verses slipping effortlessly through the swells and tides of Child Actor’s masterful production. No matter how uneasy the waves grow, Sharif is at ease, a truth teller whispering anti-riddles in your ear.This album feels like a new chamber for Child Actor, as well. The producer has been on an impressive run since dropping CINE- a collaboration with rapper Cavalier- on Backwoodz in late 2024. Child Actor has shown up in the liner notes of everyone from Navy Blue (The Sword & The Soaring) to Earl Sweatshirt (Live, Laugh, Love) to ELUCID (Revelator) to Open Mike Eagle (Neighborhood Gods Unlimited), to Ghais Guevara (A Quest to Self-Mythologize), amongst others. On Crayola Circles Child Actor’s production is dynamic, shifting and sliding into new phases and movements in an instant. The beats are full and knotty, leaning into jazz and folk, while remaining tethered to the tender minimalism that is his signature. It’s a difficult balance for any producer, and here it is executed perfectly, placing us in a world of wood and brass, cowhide and undersea piano. On any other record, this soundscape would steal the show — and it very nearly does — but Sharif’s command never wavers, ever in control; a lucid dreamer in an induced coma.There are no guests, no skits, and no interludes. There might not even be songs, instead Crayola Circles seems akin to a great river; singular, traversing forest and jungle, mountain and valley, running from mouth to endless sea.

Two turntables and a microphone. There is a truth in the clarity of that simple coda, a truth that also belies the breadth of what is possible within its confines. Sometimes you gotta get reminded. I Guess U Had To Be There, the new album from NYC rapper ELUCID and veteran producer Sebb Bash, is one of those ones. So fresh it sounds like it was made tomorrow, but bet money you could put this on in '89 and get heads bopping.

There are moments in music when masters of their craft cross paths at the height of their respective powers - records like Madvillainy, Liquid Swords, Dr. Octagonecologyst, and Hell Hath No Fury - where the result is more than the sum of its parts. ELUCID and Sebb Bash find themselves in this heady, seemingly effortless ephemera on I Guess U Had To Be There. Everything is both familiar and groundbreaking. The beats shift and flip under ELUCID's feet but he tightropes it all, delivery nimble as a mountain goat, producer and rapper moving in perfect synchronization. Some shining stars make memorable appearances: billy woods, Breezly Brewin, Estee Nack, Shabaka Hutchings. But this is a two-man show, and the duo keep the spotlight where it belongs. I Guess U Had To Be There is a captivating, convention-defying listen and a high-water mark for two of the best artists in the genre.

Coming in October. A groundbreaking compilation album showcasing Japanese techno-pop for a new era—『TECHNO KAYŌ VOL. 1 - JAPANESE TECHNO POP 1981–1989』—compiled by none other than Dubby, one of Japan’s most renowned record diggers and the mastermind behind the influential record shop ONDAS (a key force in the post-obscure revival alongside Organic Music and Revelation Time), and Antal, head of Rush Hour. From the neo-classical/mutant funk gem “Last Battle” by Kazuo Ōtani (of SHOGUN fame), originally featured on the obscure film soundtrack Koiko no Mainichi, to the balearic house anthem “MicroWave” by Kyōko Koizumi—culled from the now-revered cult LP KOIZUMI IN THE HOUSE—this album masterfully weaves post-balearic and obscure city pop perspectives. A curated deep dive into the rich and underrated legacy of Japanese techno-pop, brought vividly to life in the context of 2025.

"Take me, I’m yours" is the first collaboration album between Alan Abrahams and Jan Jelinek. Released through the latter’s faitiche, it builds upon multi-layered vocal sketches by the former. The Paris-based artist, primarily known for his work as Portable and Bodycode, supplied Jelinek with multi-layered song sketches that the German artist subjected to a rigorous process of manipulation, excavating the ambiguities of the original material and transforming its rhythms into subtle pulses. "Take me, I’m yours" is neither a typical Abrahams record nor a classic Jelinek album—it is something third, mediating between the physicality of the voice and the abstraction of electronic sound design. The two had crossed paths before really getting to know each other after Abrahams invited Jelinek to play at one of his Süd Electronic parties. The idea of a collaboration emerged slowly. “It started as an experiment, and over the past few years grew from a few tracks into this album,” says Abrahams. He describes recording the basic material as a “tantalizing” process, not knowing how Jelinek would transform his material, some of which was based on wordless chanting, while other tracks were working with lyrical content. However, their mutual trust allowed Jelinek to remove the harmonies, radically reduce the rhythms, and concentrate on Abrahams’ voice. Jelinek heard something “fragile” in this voice, “moments of doubt and dark premonitions.” He points to Forever as an example. “Alan’s original song reminded me of classic vocal house, but his voice seemed to almost break,” he says. “This contradiction made the piece even bigger, because we hear a singer in the moment of an awakening.” He further accentuated such tensions through arrhythmic synth modulations and time-stretching algorithms, while also adding concrete sounds from a variety of sources. With its dedication to both transforming and amplifying the emotional qualities hidden within Abrahams’ pieces, "Take me, I’m yours" functions as a dialogue between those two singular artists.

For our 17th expedition, we once again put our trust in expert bass navigators, Inner Echo. After an exceptional outing on PSI011, the Bristolian duo have been further honing their craft via an LP on Moonshine, and the launch of their own imprint, EchoPlex Recordings. They return to the Challenger Deep with a brace of dub-drenched, bass heavy excursions. Limited press, no digital.

Even in these most turbulent of times, dub musician and fatigued onlooker Elijah Minnelli remains an inexplicable stalwart on the lower rungs of the Breadminster County Council.

His latest record ‘Clams As A Main Meal’ continues his astute siphoning of council funds, this time with help from the Breadminster Board of Abstinence. As a further mark of respect, the original head of the Board, Dr. K'houldoux, graces the cover art in his infamous ‘Looming Moon of Desire’ guise.*

As fine a backdrop as any for Minneli’s off-brand dub experiments, and ‘Clams…’ is the truest representation of his varied wheelhouse yet…

We find vocal appearances from dub goliath Dennis Bovell and Welsh-language singer Carwyn Ellis. A pair of tracks which build on 2024’s acclaimed ‘Perpetual Musket’, a collection of folk songs reworked alongside reggae vocalists, released by FatCat Records. It garnered glowing reviews, with nods from The Guardian and The Quietus concluding with prominent appearances on their respective yearly round-up lists.

Elsewhere, the album finds Minnelli in a more experimental mode, all wheezing contraptions and cockeyed bass, creaking with the weight of creation, a satisfying tactility laid seam-side up.

As well as ‘Perpetual Musket’, the new album follows years of sold out 7" singles, handmade and self-released. Online, the tracks have amassed global streams numbering in the millions. His tracks have found play across an eclectic range of radio mixes and dance floors, most notably the likes of Andrew Weatherall, Batu, Optimo and Zakia Sewell (BBC6Music).

It is perhaps worth mentioning that this everbuilding interest in his work is at great odds with the growing suspicions amongst his fellow townsfolk, who see his Breadminster County Council Music Initiative as nothing more than an empty cash-grab.

*For further reading on the Breadminster Board of Abstinence, please see below.

Further Reading on the Breadminster Board of Abstinence

In the late 70s, Breadminster was awash with the last vestiges of the hippy era. Though the flared silhouette of the lower leg remained, the utopian ideals that had once flowed merrily around the youth's shaded ankles had begun to wane. LSD and free love had led to a sharp spike in population and a generation of children raised by air-headed psychonauts unprepared for the bleary-eyed strictures of parenthood.

Aware of the crisis, the County Council entrusted Dr. Paulinque K'houldoux to spearhead a pushback, and it was his pro-abstinence movement - a mixture of education initiatives and radical renutrition campaigns - that came to impact Breadminster's census deep into the new millennium.

Being a pseudo-archipelago Breadminster has fundamentally limited resources, however deep-seated ties to distant coastal villages meant that oysters were a regular part of the local diet. K'houldoux pinpointed this as a factor in the town's overpopulation, and believed that simply replacing these with clams (a “lesser mollusk”) would help lower the erotic urges of the people. It was his “anti-aphrodesia” movement that first championed the idea of “Clams As A Main Meal,” and the slogan “Consider Abstinence” carried the message yet further.

The Breadminster Board of Abstinence soon became involved in all cultural happenings in the area, with K'houldoux MCing at prominent festivals and performances, sometimes dressed as the “Looming Moon of Desire” - an idea of his relating to the tide, seafood, menstrual cycles, and his privately held celestial predilections.

It was in 1981 that it was revealed Dr. K'houldoux had never fully qualified as a doctor and was seeking exile in Breadminster due to a series of botched bracelet heists in which he had previously been involved. K'houldoux was subsequently extradited to Basingstoke, where he served 3 of a 12-year sentence, owing to the lunar-oriented prisoner health campaigns he helped implement.

It has been a strange twist of bureaucratic fate that the Breadminster Board of Abstinence has never stopped receiving public funding, despite its lack of clear utility. And while its roots are tied to a rose-tinted past, the Board continues to sponsor cultural events and projects to this day.

An extract from: Eugeniq Schooner's article in Sydney Parishioner: “Clams, Breadminster and Countercultural Abstinence Trends” (2008)

Shangaan electro, amapiano & gqom fiends take note: Limpopo’s Serokolo 7 breaks thru with a thrilling introduction to Mapanta; a local, traditional sound he’s revived and modernised, somehow resembling amapiano’s taut log drum rhythms and tense atmospheres, but sped to 180BPM, spliced with toasters and FX bombast glittering with modernist melodic sheen. In other words: 100% zingers! Repped by Björk during her DJ set at this year's Venice Biennale, Serokolo 7's debut is an idiosyncratic, adrenaline-filled reboot of South Africa's lesser-known mapanta sound, stirring its 180BPM rhythms with traces of footwork, gqom and hard techno. South Africa’s scene has perfused every nook of the global club movement for years at this point; whether it's the low 'n slow sound of Durban's gqom, Pretoria's kwaito-rooted Bacardi house or world-dominating log drum-laced amapiano, but head north to the country's border with Botswana, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, and you'll hear something completely different. In Ga Sekhukhune, a village in the Limpopo province, the Bapedi ethnic group have retained their own unique cultural form, mapanta, a "living communal practice" that has been maintained through weddings and youth gatherings over decades. Although its popularity waned after its peak in the 1980s, producer, DJ and sound-system operator Serokolo 7 has been instrumental in modernising the formula, sharing FL Studio tips and tricks and sound packs in the village to keep the music alive. 'Maramfa Musik Pro' is Serokolo 7's first widely-available set and is a great primer to his contemporary strain of mapanta, and although he augments the traditional rhythms with ideas he's skimmed from other interrelated rhythmic forms, the core elements still remain intact. The unique vocals, for example, are considered invocations, delivered in Sepedi, one of South Africa's 12 official languages. And they can't be cleaved from their ceremonial function, speaking directly to mapanta's importance as a community celebration, calling out to family lines and totems. The rhythms themselves, while similar in some ways to the brittle, high-speed work of Nozinja (who hailed from nearby Giyani), sound as if they've been marinated in their own juices, trance-inducing but simultaneously disrupted by Serokolo's unforgettable oddball production choices, whether it's field recordings, screwed voices or delirious sub-heavy basslines. The album opens with 'Naba Ba Papedi', a bleak uptempo ritual that plays like an unwieldy fusion of gqom (that omnipresent synth drone), footwork (those unmissable rushing snares) and Shangaan Electro, with layered vocal chants and callouts filling in the gaps. Serokolo is a restless producer who's out on his own, something that only becomes fully evident as the set develops with the pneumatic 'Roskae', a fusion of vocal micro-edits and pressurised subs, or the electrifying 'Chunku Manabeng', that excites the core pulse with brain twisting polyrhythms and the occasional log drum smack for good measure. On ’Bonkoko Bagana' Serokolo lightens things up with chiming melodic hooks and a feathery manyalo-style beat. Unsurprisingly, it's this track that Björk made the focal point of her recent Venice appearance - a key cut from yet another truly eye-opening treasure from Nyege.

DJ Plead’s genre-defining album of slow and humid dance music, recorded almost entirely on a Yamaha ‘Oriental’ keyboard in the spring of 2020, finally lands back in print on this new vinyl edition made for anyone who missed it first time round, remastered by Rashad Becker. Giving us full classic/futureshock from the moment we first heard it, it’s one of those albums that’s stitched itself to the very fabric of our being over the last couple of years, becoming a sort of reference against which we’ve measured all weapons made for the sweatiest end of the night. If you’ve ever heard it out, you’ll know what we’re saying - it’s just supremely provocative, unhurried body music. Recorded at his home in Sydney during the height of that first lockdown with a wild creative energy only amplified by strict aesthetic control - almost all of the album was recorded on the one keyboard featured on the cover artwork - it’s ironic that at a time when we basically got several years worth of reflective home listening albums recorded in isolation, Plead made one of the definitive club albums of the 2020’s, even if it’s for the kinda club that keeps it on full slink. Equally influenced by vintage dancehall riddims and the inspirational glow of CS + Kreme's psycho-ambient heartmelters, Plead here dissolves his much-loved hard drum style, dropping the tempo and conserving energy levels across a suite of smutty, tense works, matching his waviest microtonal vamps with the signature, rhythmelodic lilt of his drums in a properly hypnotic style. A hazy introductory piece of autotuned vocals and subs seduces from the front, with feelings spilling out into delirious dancehall pressure with drums on some mad Mahraganat x Timbaland tip, closing on a mesmerising beatless highlight. Perfect music, made for slow dancing.

‘Desire’ is the sophomore full-length album by TLF Trio. On ‘Desire’, the group presents their signature, contemporised chamber music through their main instruments: piano, cello and electric guitar; now enhanced by a pervasive use of sampling and a distinct use of silence as musical material.

The album is an aesthetic voyage in a musical landscape of minimalism, classical music, free improvisation, left-field-electronica, and references to pop and house music. It blends into a sound that is experimental and unpredictable – yet at the same time strangely familiar and self-explanatory.

The album’s ten pieces balance an open-ended improvisational intimacy with a tight compositional intention. Each track's repetitiveness operates as a trickling plateau of layered sentiments of times and spaces through the sampling of different acoustic rooms, the playing in specific styles and the curated selection of sounds and instrumentations; a collage of memories and associations patched together to create new meanings.

Moritz von Oswald, who has created a foundation for deep interaction between authentic Jamaican dub and Detroit-style classic techno through his collaborations with Mark Ernestus, dub techno legend =Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, is creating ambient techno. Moritz Von Oswald Trio, a legendary trio teamed up with Max Loderbauer of Sun Electric, the pioneer of , and Vladislav Delay, a master of avant-garde electronic music from Scandinavia and Finland. Stock up on the first album "Vertical Ascent" released in 2009 from London's prestigious !

2026 repress. With Dub Techno firmly back on the menu in clubs the world over, Deadbeat, at long last, resissues what is perhaps his greatest collaborative work with Paul St Hilaire aka Tikiman. A true genre masterclass, as the name suggests, the album infinitely showcases two titans of the form at their very best, and 10 years on, remains a stone-cold classic. Re-cut by their old friend Stefan Betke aka Pole at Scape Mastering who first cut it to wax so many years ago, this 10-year anniversary edition is a crucial showcase of two masters at work.

Third volume in Dave Huismans' stellar ex_libris series, further exploring the outer edges of deep house and leftfield music across three cuts in a total runtime of 25 minutes. The A-side offers up a rough-around-the-edges, spirited 4/4 beatdown epic, while the B1 & B2 venture into equally vivid world-building and fluttering wildlife curiosity. Limited edition - once again housed in lovingly hand-stamped, full-color sleeves. Design by Bernie van Vlijmen. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at D&M.

Gendel on C-Melody Saxofone and Wilkes on Fender P-Bass arrangements of selected material and original compositions a document of specific variations in instrumentation, sound, and repertoire, with a focus on melody, execution of arrangement, and total freedom The Doober follows the release of Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar (2018) and Music for Saxofone & Bass Guitar More Songs (2021).

Devon Russell pays homage to Curtis Mayfield on these ten remakes recorded in the early '80s. A favorite among Jamaicans, Mayfield's songs translate well via Russell's crusty falsetto. The title track, a speedier, bouncier "We the People Who Are Darker Than Blue," one of Mayfield's most introspective songs, stands out, as does the frenzied, up-tempo, positive "Move on Up," which utilizes the engaging horn arrangement and ultra soulful bassline that made the original irresistible. But the title track is just too short -- Mayfield's mantle piece off his first solo album was a marathon-length fist pumper. Russell does justice to both "Never Too Much Love" and "The Makings of You." Curtis Mayfield and old-school reggae fans will find these interpretations pleasing. ~ Andrew Hamilton

Key importers/translators of Japanese Kankyō Ongaku to the Western world, Visible Cloaks present a fine new bouquet of digital flowers pruned in-the-mix with help from Lifted’s Joe Williams and arranged with input by Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima, and Satsuki Shibano. Ryan Carlile & Spencer Doran’s Visible Cloaks have been instrumental in bridging the rarified world of ’80s Japanese environmental ambient and its modern offshoots since their self-titled debut of 2015. Their ‘Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo’ mixtape and original productions inspired by that particular time and space - circa the emergence and application of game-changing musical technology - have been indispensable for discerning diggers and ears. Their first album since 2019, ‘Paradessence’ now marks the duo’s return to a sound they helped bring to wider interest, displaying cross-border/generational binds between experimental scenes in Japan, US, and EU across an intricately crafted and romantic spirited album defined by its technical sorcery and sense of adventure. Benefitting from the energy of their collaborators and time out to sharpen and reassess their sound, ‘Paradessence’ feels like the most fully realised iteration of Visible Cloaks’ illusive world building. 14 succinct pieces open out a fantasy playground where prior spars Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano chime into the pitch bent, shatterproof contours of ’Shapes’ and again with Félicia Atkinson’s french vox in ‘Thinking’, before Satie-esque piano phrases are refracted into hyaline hyperprisms glistening with Joe Williams touch on ‘Zinna’. The shearing shape of ‘Balloon’ impresses in its hyperreal tactility, and the synthetic wind-swept strings of ‘Swirl’ brings us teasingly close to oneiric dimensions also touched on in ‘Telescoping’, suffused with ultrasonic insect sounds that lend a frisson of waking dream detail for the susceptible.

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.

With All Shall Go, Damos Room (the trio of Luke Miles, Nicholas Elson & Huw Oleskar (a.k.a Elijah Minnelli)) delivers a work of deliberate unravelling — a record that resists spectacle in favour of pressure, proximity and slow erosion. For Long Gone Are The Old Traditions, this release marks a natural extension of the label's commitment to sound as atmosphere and atmosphere as doctrine: music that does not decorate space but alters it. Across these pieces, dub is reduced to its elemental properties — weight, echo, absence — while sheets of corroded texture and distant, disembodied vocals drift through a landscape that feels both devotional and terminal. Rhythm appears only as rupture, a disturbance in the grain. What persists is tension — patient, unblinking, almost liturgical in its austerity. In Damos Room's hands, sound becomes residue and invocation simultaneously, a procession of shadows that gathers momentum not through volume but through inevitability. All Shall Go stands as a document of attrition and quiet extremity, aligned precisely with the label's ongoing exploration of the haunted and the unmoored.

A historic meeting point between Ethio-jazz and ambient jazz. Born out of Bristol’s Bloom collective, the eight-piece Afro-jazz band Tezeta sees their 2016 debut album Seventh Place finally issued on vinyl via KLANG TONE RECORDS. Exotic Fender Rhodes lines recalling Hailu Mergia, the psychedelic shimmer of vibraphone and marimba, fiercely jazzy saxophone, and the driving force of contemporary Afrobeat converge into a sound that is both refined and full of fire. The 6/8 rhythms radiate the spirit of Ethio-jazz, while the group’s modern sense of crossover resonates with European ensembles such as Debre Damo Dining Orchestra and Langendorf United. A meditative Afro-jazz gem, and one to recommend also to fans of ambient jazz.

Drummer-composer and multi-instrumentalist Valentina Magaletti’s explorative percussions join Afro-Portuguese artist Nídia’s singular beat-making for an exciting new collaboration in dance music. From the first beat, listeners are drawn into a world where rhythm reigns supreme and movement is inevitable. The album explores a diverse yet universal musical language through syncopated drum patterns, pulsating marimba lines, and melodic interludes.

The percussive new age soundtracks of '80s and early '90s Japanese TV, anime and manga built alternative worlds and pushed boundaries in the process.

When Japanese composer Yas-Kaz left Tokyo for Bali in the mid 1970s he had little idea of how influential his trip would become. In studying the storied art of gamelan, the jazz and avant-garde percussionist opened a door to a world of sound and rhythm left behind by the West. The music he and his contemporaries made would become known as new age. It also happened to soundtrack the golden era of anime.

Awash with money and with the prerogative to entertain the burgeoning middle classes, anime in the 1980s experienced a creative and commercial boom. Not constricted by generic expectations, production houses such as the now renowned Studio Ghibli were able to experiment liberally with both form and content. And with it came the space for composers to be similarly adventurous.

TV, Anime & Manga New Age Soundtracks 1984-1993 charts this moment across eight tracks spanning classics of the genre and previously unknown rarities. The collection brings together music that found kinship in electronic and acoustic instrumentation, often combining spiritual or environmental themes with percussive, varied and highly refined syncopations of non-Western musical traditions.

Among them is ‘Kaneda’ by Geinoh Yamashirogumi, the shape-shifting group of self-styled musicians, anthropologists and computer scientists that masterminded the soundtrack to game-changing dystopian anime Akira - and with whom the sound, tuning and breakneck speed of Balinese gamelan has become indelibly entwined.

Reflecting the desires of the era to reach beyond Japan’s borders, many of the soundtracks featured were commissioned for narratives set in distant lands or alternative worlds. There’s violinist and composer Norihiro Tsuru’s ‘Farsighted Person’, written for The Heroic Legend of Arslān, set in ancient Persia; Yas-Kaz’s own ‘Hei (Theme of Shikioni)’, for period sci-fi manga & anime series Peacock King - Spirit Warrior; and two tracks - Tassili N’Ajjer and Fiesta Del Fuego - from Yoichiro Yoshikawa’s soundtrack to NHK’s proto-Planet Earth series The Miracle Planet.

Such was the variety and quality of the music produced, if there is a guiding principle to the tracks collected here it is a sense of escapism and adventure that came with the confluence of modern electronic instruments and a fascination with percussive traditions.

Elsewhere, pioneering children’s TV composer Chumei Watanabe’s ‘Fushigi Song’ (performed by a vocal group Korogi ‘72) offers a trippy and infectious groove with sonic similarities to Don Cherry’s ‘Brown Rice’; little-known jazz-funk library group Columbia Orchestra showcase the best of Tokyo’s session musicians on ‘Hearts Beats - Theme for Andrew Glasgow’; before lawyer-turned-composer Kan Ogasawara closes out the compilation with a dramatic flourish on ‘Gishin Anki’.

Following on from Time Capsule’s acclaimed deep-dive into the world of manga & anime synth-pop in 2022, this vinyl only collection is set to broaden and diversify an understanding of how soundtracks shaped the sound of new age music in Japan for a generation.