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Electronic lullabies and folk songs from Ethiopia! A landmark recording from Ethiopia’s vibrant cassette era of the 1980s, Resonance of Time features pioneering composer Wesenyeleh Mebreku reimagining Ethiopian folk melodies through the humble circuitry of an early Casiotone keyboard. Historically, the works featured on Resonance of Time (የጊዜ ቃና Yegizie Kana) stand as quiet documents of Ethiopian musical memory. Many of the original songs included in this release emerged during important moments in Ethiopian history when music carried the collective emotion of the nation - love, loss, resistance, dignity, and hope. By arranging these pieces from Ethiopia’s musical heritage instrumentally, Wesenyeleh Mebreku aimed to preserve their essence while protecting them from being confined to a single era or performance style. In doing so, his preservation of Ethiopia’s musical heritage became a contribution to his country’s musical legacy itself, as Resonance of Time serves as an important musical milestone of this composer’s innovative recordings and musical developments in the prolific era of Ethiopia’s 1980s cassette tape culture. On Resonance of Time, Wesenyeleh made use of the first Casio electronic keyboard - the Casiotone CT-201 - to arrange and perform Ethiopian folk songs in his own unique style. Implementing the soulful, lo-fi character of the keyboard, Wesenyeleh’s interpretations of these works take on a life of their own. Charming analog tones interpret swirling sounds of organ and piano in kignit modality to the beat of a nostalgic rhythm machine while twinkling synthesizer sounds carry the melodies drifting out of time. The recordings reflect a watershed moment in Ethiopian musical history - when traditional melodies started being interpreted on electronic keyboards, and the advent of cassette tape recording allowed for music to be transmitted more accessibly than centuries-old oral traditions. During this time, Ethiopian musical modes were syncretized with new technology and budding musical experimentation, and Wesenyeleh’s interpretations on Resonance of Time are a landmark recording of this era, following in the tradition of reflecting upon and re-interpreting historical Ethiopian music for a new generation. Featured on the release are timeless Amharic folk songs and lullabies, Tigrinya love songs, Gurage and Oromifa popular songs, and even works closely associated with performers from Ethiopia’s 1970s popular music era such as “Tiz Alegne Yetintu” (ትዝ አለኝ የጥንቱ) which was famously performed by Tilahun Gessesse. Each piece, thoughtfully chosen by Wesenyeleh, is beautifully transformed into instrumental music of his own style - allowing these worlds of song to echo into the future while they are synthesized with the electronic innovations of the 1980s and Wesenyeleh’s own musical history. Wesenyeleh says this about his musical approach - ”Instrumental music, for me, is a space of reflection. Without words, the listener is invited to remember, imagine, and feel freely. In Resonance of Time, I hear my own musical philosophy: respect for Ethiopian kignit, careful dialogue with Western harmony, and a deep trust in melody as a storyteller.” Each piece performed on Resonance of Time speaks to a time when Ethiopian music was shaped by oral transmission through live performance and communal listening. In today’s fast-moving musical environment, revisiting these works is an act of cultural responsibility. These works remind us that melody once traveled slowly, settling deeply in the listener’s heart. The instrumental format allows these works to cross linguistic and generational boundaries, making them accessible to audiences who may not know the original lyrics but can still feel their spirit. Resonance of Time also reflects a broader historical dialogue: the meeting of tradition and adaptation. Ethiopian music has always evolved while holding onto its core identity. These arrangements affirm that evolution does not mean abandonment. Instead, it can be a form of safeguarding - ensuring that the musical wisdom of the past continues to resonate in the present and inspire the future. In this sense, the album is both personal and collective. It carries Wesenyeleh Mebreku’s own musical fingerprint, shaped by decades of practice, but it ultimately belongs to a wider cultural continuum. It is the artist’s contribution to keeping time audible so that memory, history, and sound may continue to speak to one another.
Maruyama follows Vapor Curve with grainy film, a hardware-only mini album created without the use of computer-based recording software. Built from synthesizers, samplers and delay units alone, it finds beauty in restraint, combining minimal harmonies with glowing ambient passages, shimmering arpeggios and the warm, grainy character of vintage samplers. Inspired by the faded texture of old film stock, grainy film expands on its predecessor with a deeper, more abstract and dub-inflected sound. Maruyama describes it as "music for a cigar" – understated electronic music that quietly transforms the atmosphere rather than demanding attention. Nostalgic melodies and lingering echoes capture a sense of impermanence, making this a meditative and deeply absorbing listen.
Techno, Mondo, Lo-Fi - they anticipated the entire universe of these genres in 1978.
Recorded on a 4-channel tape recorder before their debut and released as a CD in 1996 to great acclaim, the legendary sound collection "1978" is finally being released as an LP for the first time after 30 years. It includes three previously unreleased tracks, including "Confusion," which had a different version on a fan club-exclusive flexi-disc.
A year before releasing their debut album from Toshiba EMI, Hikashu was already creating their own fascinating music. In a house off a narrow alley leading to the train tracks from the intersection at 6-chome, Toyotamakita, Tokyo, with the shutters closed and blankets hung, they reverberated sounds to intense rhythm machines. —Koichi Makigami
Kyoto-based lo-fi home-recording funk duo Khan Brown and OHHKI return with a strictly limited 7-inch single cut from Ryokan, their self-released mini-album originally issued on cassette in 2025. Following a release on the renowned US label PPU, the pair deliver another dose of their distinctive DIY funk sound, now pressed on an exclusive 7-inch format.
A key contributor to Wah Wah Wino’s KWALK, Sli Town Crier steps out solo with Auditions. Drawn from an extensive archive of recordings and assembled by Morgan Buckley, it’s a restless collision of raw chops, battered rhythms and heavily mangled beats. Unpredictable and rough around the edges, Auditions pulls its source material apart and stitches it back together into something gloriously unruly.
NPLGNN's BABYLON INNA 'A CAPA MI is a five-track assault of fractured rhythms, damaged bassweight and post-industrial tension. Emerging from the momentum of his lathe-cut series, the record pushes deeper into a landscape of urgency, disorder and decay, where relentless percussion and corroded low-end collide. Drawing comparisons with DJ Scud, Conrad Pack, DJ Gonz and The Bug, these tracks thrive on pressure rather than resolution, turning ruin into a source of raw energy.
Iris is back! This time with a brand-new long-player under the name Irisplus with many featured guests. Lazy, stumbling slacker songs with multilingual vocals, expanding the melodic, riff-driven sound of previous Iris releases like “Surrender”. Watch out for the full-band live version! Flute by Falyakon: Music/Ghost Vox by TRii: Fog, Spoof, EG Land Extra guitar/percussion by TRii: Deeds Vox by Falyakon: يا ليل ,قرش و عتيق Vox by Employee: Fernando, Crossings Vox by Mo Chan: 今日も明日も All songs written, produced, mixed and recorded by Iris. Mastered by The Bastard and Maximilian Schweizer. Graphics by Non-CN. Pressed by Disk Media Service.
Sooj — a collaborative project between members of Duster and Dirty Art Club. Picking up where their 2024 two-sider Anhedonia II b/w Ecstasy Cowgirl left off, Crusher sees Duster’s slowcore drift dissolve into Dirty Art Club’s sample-heavy, collage-minded production. The result is neither band, nor side project, but something more elusive — a third space built from tape hiss, chopped memory, and late-night signal bleed. Across its runtime, the album avoids the gravitational pull of nostalgia. Instead, it hovers in a liminal present — part collaboration, part escape route.
Reverend Baron’s singular troubadour soul may best understand the capacity music has to span the distance between points on a map and pages in a calendar. Daniel, the acoustic instrumental follow-up to 2022’s Karma Chief label debut, From Anywhere…, expands the world beyond LA’s concrete canyons and overpasses to the bustling, churning sea of life that is Mexico City, to the sparse, rolling landscape of Red Cloud, Nebraska. In each locale, the constant companion was a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar — with a well-traveled history of its own. “It was my father’s guitar,” recalls Danny Garcia, the man behind the Reverend. “I found out a few years ago that it was my grandfather’s as well.” Ever-present since his childhood, the Mexican acoustic has taken on increased meaning for Garcia with each passing year. Hours upon hours spent playing, traveling, and breathing meaning into its fretboard have made it both a tool and talisman. “There’s the obvious bloodline and family and link…that link through history,” confides Garcia. “It’s kinda the only family heirloom I have.” Over the last while, all this playing (or “noodling” as Danny puts it) had Reverend Baron chasing a sound — one which belies the guitar’s origins. It’s a sound he would hear from time to time, and when it came to record Daniel, it would be his true magnetic north (or south as it were). Spinning through Daniel, and you will hear echoes of Antonio Bribiesca and Luiz Bonfa's guitar tones. Dig deeper and you’ll see the bones of Townes Van Zandt and Nick Drake guitar textures as well. While not claiming their virtuosity in his playing, the soul and vulnerability that have become calling cards for the first two Reverend Baron albums complement these influences. There is a warmth in Daniel that takes center stage in these acoustic meditations. From brief, fluid moments like “El Monte” and “How Glad” to the high-lonesome “Muchacho,” the songs drift like cumulus clouds over a deep blue skyway. Their graceful float is in stark contrast to the album’s origins. The studio Garcia was using for his intended second release on Karma Chief was a victim of the LA wildfires in January of 2025. “[The fires] halted work on my record,” says Garcia. “So I ended up leaving and went to Mexico City for a few months, and so worked quite a bit [on Daniel] there.” With his striped-down set up -- featuring his guitar, a few microphones, and a laptop -- the time in Mexico City set the tone for the project. “I just came into this space because it seemed like I could just do it…it seemed like it was time, and I didn’t have to force anything.” After leaving CDMX, Reverend Baron spent a few weeks in Red Cloud. While all the traveling and miles energize Garcia, this small midwestern village’s peaceful and unassuming nature was the ideal spot to focus and create. “LA is home and has its own cultural juice, which I love…Nebraska is very quiet. No one disturbs you, and I can just work and concentrate for weeks [there].” Daniel’s 11 tracks criss-cross the laylines of border music and folk, but categorizing them along a fault line or genre tag misses the point. These acoustic numbers move with a deliberate ease, never overstaying their welcome. The songs respond to time and distance with equal parts reflection and transparency; both mirror and window to the soul. Daniel is Reverend Baron’s conversation with his bloodline, influences, and the stops along the way. By the album’s closer, “Velasco,” Daniel’s conversation becomes your invitation to search for a path along that great sonic continuum housed within a song.
Reverend Baron’s singular troubadour soul may best understand the capacity music has to span the distance between points on a map and pages in a calendar. Daniel, the acoustic instrumental follow-up to 2022’s Karma Chief label debut, From Anywhere…, expands the world beyond LA’s concrete canyons and overpasses to the bustling, churning sea of life that is Mexico City, to the sparse, rolling landscape of Red Cloud, Nebraska. In each locale, the constant companion was a nylon-stringed acoustic guitar — with a well-traveled history of its own. “It was my father’s guitar,” recalls Danny Garcia, the man behind the Reverend. “I found out a few years ago that it was my grandfather’s as well.” Ever-present since his childhood, the Mexican acoustic has taken on increased meaning for Garcia with each passing year. Hours upon hours spent playing, traveling, and breathing meaning into its fretboard have made it both a tool and talisman. “There’s the obvious bloodline and family and link…that link through history,” confides Garcia. “It’s kinda the only family heirloom I have.” Over the last while, all this playing (or “noodling” as Danny puts it) had Reverend Baron chasing a sound — one which belies the guitar’s origins. It’s a sound he would hear from time to time, and when it came to record Daniel, it would be his true magnetic north (or south as it were). Spinning through Daniel, and you will hear echoes of Antonio Bribiesca and Luiz Bonfa's guitar tones. Dig deeper and you’ll see the bones of Townes Van Zandt and Nick Drake guitar textures as well. While not claiming their virtuosity in his playing, the soul and vulnerability that have become calling cards for the first two Reverend Baron albums complement these influences. There is a warmth in Daniel that takes center stage in these acoustic meditations. From brief, fluid moments like “El Monte” and “How Glad” to the high-lonesome “Muchacho,” the songs drift like cumulus clouds over a deep blue skyway. Their graceful float is in stark contrast to the album’s origins. The studio Garcia was using for his intended second release on Karma Chief was a victim of the LA wildfires in January of 2025. “[The fires] halted work on my record,” says Garcia. “So I ended up leaving and went to Mexico City for a few months, and so worked quite a bit [on Daniel] there.” With his striped-down set up -- featuring his guitar, a few microphones, and a laptop -- the time in Mexico City set the tone for the project. “I just came into this space because it seemed like I could just do it…it seemed like it was time, and I didn’t have to force anything.” After leaving CDMX, Reverend Baron spent a few weeks in Red Cloud. While all the traveling and miles energize Garcia, this small midwestern village’s peaceful and unassuming nature was the ideal spot to focus and create. “LA is home and has its own cultural juice, which I love…Nebraska is very quiet. No one disturbs you, and I can just work and concentrate for weeks [there].” Daniel’s 11 tracks criss-cross the laylines of border music and folk, but categorizing them along a fault line or genre tag misses the point. These acoustic numbers move with a deliberate ease, never overstaying their welcome. The songs respond to time and distance with equal parts reflection and transparency; both mirror and window to the soul. Daniel is Reverend Baron’s conversation with his bloodline, influences, and the stops along the way. By the album’s closer, “Velasco,” Daniel’s conversation becomes your invitation to search for a path along that great sonic continuum housed within a song.
Greg Mendez has always been an economical songwriter – he wields restraint and simplicity as tools, the core of his songs sharpened into simple, cutting truths. On Beauty Land, his new album and debut LP for Dead Oceans, we’re guided by a wry but forgiving narrator, an underdog who has learned to balance cynicism and faith. These songs are self-effacing without self-pity, carefully constructed altars of imperfection channeled through pop melodies, shimmering but urgent guitars, and a voice that reaches for choir boy innocence. The bulk of Beauty Land was recorded directly to tape, almost entirely alone in Mendez’s makeshift home studio in Philadelphia – a small room with no natural light. It’s his first full length since his unexpected self-titled breakthrough in 2023, which was a slow burn success following 15 years of writing and recording music in relative obscurity between Philly and New York. Beauty Land picks up where we left off three years ago – plumbing the depths of grief, love, and addiction – but its intense, quiet clarity shows Mendez at his songwriting best. Parts of Beauty Land feel like a lucid dream, dented characters carve their way through a world that’s cartoonish and warped – the broken-clock march of “I Wanna Feel Pretty,” the chiming toy piano on “Gentle Love.” “Mary / Dreaming” begins as a sparse, finger-picked lament before cutting abruptly to a deflated, Beach-Boys-but-make-it-fucked-up resolution that brings both melancholy and joy; a sense that all things can be true at once. None of the 14 tracks here break three minutes, but they tell stories that span lifetimes. Death floats through the record, whether it appears as a memory or a threat. Everything feels precarious. There’s a fragility to how these songs are built: the way the funeral organ hits alongside the morphine on “Looking Out Your Window,” the devastating simplicity of “Frog,” with its slowed-down keyboard and bare refrain: “Please forgive me for my faults.” Beauty Land feels, at times, impossibly lonely. Which makes it really count when it doesn’t – like when Mendez sings in harmony with his wife and bandmate, Veronica near the end of “So Mean” and it feels like a cherished reunion, a fleeting moment of redemption, a temporary parting of the seas.
Smouldering and aching in all the right places, Dawuna's latest mixtape is a muted hypnagogic R&B tour de force, pieced together while recovering from a traumatic head injury and conveying all the fragile, dizzy and ineffable beauty imaginable. Trust, it’s next-level gear tipped FFO D’Angelo, Prince, Niecy Blues, Soulquarians, Rodney Jerkins. ‘African Family Laptop Musick’ is Ian Mugerwa’s 4th dispatch as Dawuna since 2020’s still unfathomable ‘Glass Lit Dream’, an album that we called "the debut of the century thus far" and which has still, somehow, evaded any kind of meaningful crossover despite triggering total joy and bewilderment every single time we play it to the uninitiated. Since that album, and shortly after a relocation to Baltimore, Mugerwa was involved in a car accident that triggered a period of hospitalisation and amnesia. 'African Family Laptop Music' emerges from that difficult period; recorded and pieced together while still in recovery. He doesn't remember much about the project at this point, just small flashes, but it's easily the most personal, touching material he's shared to date. Mugerwa calls the compositions simple, but it’s the kind of simple many have spent a lifetime trying to engineer. On opener 'I am a woman too', daring lo-fi sound design lends texture to multi-tracked vocal harmonies and a beat rapped on a table with knuckles and finger clicks, before tuning in to a chat between elders on ‘Obulesi’, that he laments in the bloozy ache of the incredible ‘Family Trauma Drama’. Lashed to a celestial vocal performance, he fleshes out the arrangement with downsampled waltzing hats and a single snare hit with synths that sound like they've been lifted from a mid-'80s Sierra adventure game, before being filtered out to a low hum. There's a quiet virtuosity on show; it's lo-fi, with all the aesthetic hallmarks of some of the very best outsider gear, but Mugerwa builds on the foundations of 'Glass Lit Dream' and 'Naya' to provide an unmistakably Black ideation of hauntology. Approaching the very concept of memory from a unique vantage point, he muddles dreams and impressions, sorting through the canon (think 'Songs in the Key of Life', 'Sign O' the Times', 'Baduizm', 'Brown Sugar' and 'Full Moon' just for starters) as it vanishes from view. What makes the record hit even harder is that Mugerwa collages the more “proper” songs with skits and interludes that help map the narrative, taping conversations with his family and abstracting them with disorientating glitches, synths and FX. ‘Pressure’ pushes deep on a bittersweet bruise with lyrics about “the pain on your brain making fun of you”, set to the heaviest smudge of bass and organ recalling Angel Bat Dawid’s ‘The Oracle’, whilst the latter stages reveal precious gems in the harpsichord sway of ‘Bipolar Memory’,thru the lip-biting downswang and helium-voiced Camille vibes of ‘Grabba Boy Problem’ and a poignant sign-off addressed to his father - not sure if that’s his dad or him upstairs - in a delicate prayer ‘Undo This Damage,’ which once over, is bound to make you rake back over all Dawuna’s gear to date. "This is the last lil offering from a personal side of myself before I give y'all something big," he assures cryptically. "Enjoy." Incredible, really.
Limited new edition with revised artwork on the sleeve and labels.Originally released in 2022, this is an epic collage and mixed LP of all original material, compiled and stitched together over three years by Morgan Buckley.KWALK features Roger Doyle, Mr & Ms KWalker, Sli Town Crier, Olmo, Davy Kehoe, Morgan Buckley, plus some surprise guests.
The home-recorded album everything pointed to - now on vinyl and CD for the first time. After several delays, we finally received the long-awaited production date from the pressing plant - and are happy to share this long-overdue announcement. Following the 2022 reissue of Scott Seskind’s 1985 debut, there was never a question - we wanted to go further. Ebalunga!!! exists to restore forgotten gems, and Scott’s music has been warming our hearts for years. So, to our own joy - and in response to all your emails, questions (and demands!) we’re thrilled to announce that his second album Chance (1991) will be released for the first time on vinyl and CD in September 2025. Thank you for keeping us on our toes: you helped make this real. A rare cassette that should have become a classic: Originally released only as a self-distributed cassette, Chance never got the attention it deserved but over the decades, it became a cult favorite among collectors and lo-fi folk devotees. Recorded in the early ’90s, the album feels like a quiet diary stitched together from fragments of late evenings, memory, hope, and doubt. A home recording - just the way we love it: “I recorded the songs on the same cassette recorder as my first album… I mistakenly put it out on cassette only. It wasn’t more than 1,000 copies. I only have one left.” - Scott Seskind (Psychedelic Baby!, 2023) Chance was recorded on the same 4-track Portastudio cassette machine Scott used for his debut. These are songs born between duties and silence, family life. There are no frills here: just voice, guitar, subtle strokes of cello, female backing vocals, mandolin, and percussion. Total intimacy. Total warmth. Songs of hope, grief, and memory: The lyrics explore friendship, loss, longing, and love with no pretension and no mask. Chance feels like a personal conversation, not a performance. And among its tracklist is perhaps Scott’s most widely known song: “I Remember”, which in recent years has reached a new generation of listeners after being featured on the acclaimed compilation "Skygirl"(Efficient Space) a release that introduced countless people to its fragile beauty. Bonus track and closing chapter: This edition also includes, for the first time, the bonus track “Last Song” a home recording made “many years ago” in the Colorado foothills. A bright and serene farewell, it brings the album to a gentle, natural close like the final page of an abandoned diary.
Ebalunga!!! is thrilled to announce the first official reissue of the self-released, self-produced, and self-titled 1985 LP Scott Seskind. The album is a lo-fi singer-songwriter jewel. Don't miss it. "Authentic and personal, at times it reminds this writer of luminaries such as Jackson C. Frank, PF Sloan, Skip Spence, and Phil Orchs while never feeling derivative. The songs are melodic and haunting, fueled by existential woes, political angst, and good ol' fashioned love. Scott's rich voice has an unpretentious gravitas, his simple-yet-effective guitar playing ranging from delicate fingerpicking to angry bashing. Created at home on a Tascam 4-Track Portastudio, the recording features few frills and is all the better for it. Unlike most mid-80s records it sounds like it could have come from any time since the late '60s onwards. As a testament to its greatness, and despite the late recording date, it even gets a nod on Patrick Lundborg's "Acid Archives" compilation website, Lysergiawhere it's described thus: "Late phase downer-loner folk and singer-songwriter trip, mostly acoustic, some tracks with a small band." - Andrew Ure for Ugly Things. Read a long story about the album in the upcoming Shindig! issue: www.silverbackpublishing.rocks/product/shindig-136-pre-order-on-sale-2nd-february-2023/ The reissue is available on vinyl with a lyric insert. Mastering(as always) by Jessica Thompson. Feedbacks and reviews: "Almost totally unheralded singer-songwriter Scott Seskind gets the reissue treatment, and I couldn't be happier. About a year ago I pulled Seskind's sole vinyl release out of the used bin of a Boulder record store, and with its almost Wallace Berman-esque cover art, could immediately suspect it was something special. The first listen didn't dispel that notion one bit; here was an impressively captivating and moving collection of four-tracked bedroom folk of the highest order, with an out-of-time vibe that didn't really snyc with its 1984 recording date. Definitely on the loner-ish end of the folk spectrum, with some aspects of the album harkening back to Skip Spence's iconic Oar, while other moments revealed the urgency of the '80s lo-fi revolution. But most importantly, the songs were just really, really great and managed to remain haunting long past their leaving. Here, I thought, is an album that needs to be heard by more people, NOW. I asked around amongst some record collecting friends and discovered it was pretty highly rated by a small circle of people in the know, and that it had even managed to garner a mention in the Acid Archives despite its late recording date, and most excitingly that there was talk that the digital reissue label Yoga had managed to track Seskind down and secure the rights to his LP. (...) So here we have it, the best songs from Seskind's eponymous LP. (...) I really hope this release continues to garner the listeners that it deserves." - Michael Klausman "The one that struck us the most this year was the almost totally unheralded work of singer-songwriter Scott Seskind, who recorded an impressively captivating and moving collection of four-tracked bedroom folk of the highest order, with an out-of-time vibe that doesn't really sync with its original 1984 release date. Definitely on the loner-ish end of the folk spectrum, with songs that are really, really great and which manage to remain haunting long past their leaving. Truly an album that deserves to be heard by more people immediately. " - Other Music
Sooj — a collaborative project between members of Duster and Dirty Art Club. Picking up where their 2024 two-sider Anhedonia II b/w Ecstasy Cowgirl left off, Crusher sees Duster’s slowcore drift dissolve into Dirty Art Club’s sample-heavy, collage-minded production. The result is neither band, nor side project, but something more elusive — a third space built from tape hiss, chopped memory, and late-night signal bleed. Across its runtime, the album avoids the gravitational pull of nostalgia. Instead, it hovers in a liminal present — part collaboration, part escape route.
Connecters Vol. 1: Original Recordings, 1992–1999 marks the first public release by Larrison, the recording alias of Midwestern visual artist and musician Larrison Seidle. Composing, programming, and recording entirely on a Casio CZ-5000 during the halcyon days of early '90s homespun exploration and experimentation, Larrison inhabited a dreamworld of his invention, soundtracked by space age pop vignettes speckling with hypnotic, ebullient layered synthesizer melodies. Unfolding across 26 tracks, all newly restored and mastered from the original sources, Connecters Vol. 1 reinvents itself, song by song, transcending time and defying the fated obscurity of this brilliant, discreet music made three decades ago.
Ignatz, the long-running project of Belgian musician Bram Devens, has spent two decades refining a distinctive approach to songcraft—built on repetition, subtle shifts, and an ear for the uncanny. Across a steady stream of releases on labels including (K-RAA-K)³, Ultra Eczema and Fonal, his work remains instantly recognisable while continually evolving. I Don’t Know marks a striking departure. Following earlier recordings centred on guitar, Devens turns to piano, uncovering a new, more skeletal language. The instrument first entered his orbit in the mid-2010s, when he inherited a family piano and began exploring its possibilities as a self-taught player. Recorded at home in Landen, these pieces feel sparse and unsettled, carrying a raw intimacy that sets them apart from his previous work. The result is a haunted, deeply personal album that reframes Ignatz’s sound without losing its core identity.
This compilation charts the unlikely link between Cologne’s DIY scene and the Ukrainian underground at the turn of the 1990s. Visual artist and producer Guido Erfen and sound engineer Michael Springer were central figures in SHM1, a Cologne collective who ran concerts and a studio space inside the vast, disused Rhenania grain silo. From this base, they built an independent network for recording and distributing music beyond the mainstream. In 1990, Erfen received a cassette from Ukraine featuring bands from Kharkiv and Kyiv, alongside an essay by Sergey Myasoyedow, co-founder of Kharkiv’s Novaya Scena rock club. The music—shaped by punk, avant-garde experiment, folk motifs and abrasive grooves—opened a window onto a scene largely unheard in the West. Further tapes followed, and Erfen travelled to Ukraine, eventually persuading Alfred Hilsberg to release the Novaya Scena compilation on What’s So Funny About, documenting 14 bands recorded between 1986 and 1992. In the wake of that release, musicians including Svitlana Nianio and Yewgeny “Yenia” Taran travelled to Cologne. From 1994 onwards, informal sessions at Springer’s Phantom Studio and the SHM space at Rhenania forged a new chapter in this exchange. Those recordings form the basis of this collection, capturing four distinct incarnations of the Ukraine–Cologne connection.
Strung-out yet precise. Introverted but with something to say. Industrial Relations is a further unraveling of the stories untold left lingering around the Piedmont capital. Cloistered away behind one of Turin’s many crumbling doorways, a basic studio set-up alongside a scattering of found photos and a type-writer forms the backbone of this bureau. Noticeably more barbed than its predecessor Chamber Music, drums are frayed and left to splutter. Grungy guitar chords come in at angles, occasionally spiralling into delay-drenched depths before coming back up for air. The ghosts of 90’s post rock are often summoned and keep close company. Drowsy drum-loops and turntable mischief is a strong nod to the bedsit charms to Crescent (specifically Electronic Sound Construction to these ears at least), whilst Hood’s fuzzy greyscale warmth forms a backdrop for the songier moments. For all its uncanny abstraction though, Industrial Relations is punctuated by moments of unexpected sensitivity and space. Burial is little more than soft nylon strings, a demure vocal and the passing of traffic. Egg Monster unravels to expose a tender character, only just about covered with vinyl crackle whilst Musica Di Guarigione demonstrates a genuine sensitivity and ear for melody. It’s music outside but of it’s time, equally of the past and the present, offering a further insight into the inner-workings of this unique Italian dilettante.
Emerging from Italy’s contemporary underground scene, La Festa Delle Rane is the project of Naples-based musician Lucia Sole, whose new cassette release is a collaboration with UK label All Night Flight. Her music gently captures fleeting everyday moments, evoking dreamlike nostalgia through a childlike lens. With a simple setup of melodica, acoustic guitar, and flute, combined with percussion and brass, the sound balances intimate stillness and kaleidoscopic improvisation. Lo-fi recordings preserve the delicate textures of her innocent vocals, whispering glockenspiel, and distorted organ—tracing the breath and presence of space itself.