MUSIC

Suishou no Fune, the solitary psychedelic band whose works have graced Important Records, Holy Mountain, and Japan’s avant-garde stronghold P.S.F. Records. True to their name—taken from a classic song by The Doors—they have long spun visionary and transcendent sound worlds. Now in stock: their 2024 double-cassette box set. Released on Love Share Dopamine (L.S.D.), a sub-label of Beijing’s rising UFO CREAtions, carrying forward the devotion to P.S.F. alongside imprints such as Black Editions, An’archives, and Eschogras Records. Recorded live at the sacred venue Kuroneko Sabō in Asagaya in April 2024, the performance moves from pitch-black P.S.F.–to–Ftarri-like free improvisation and silence, through the smoke-shrouded, decadent psychedelia in the lineage of Les Rallizes Dénudés, to drifting slow-psych like ripples across water, and even slow psychedelic shoegaze recalling Hallelujahs and Nagisa ni te. A definitive document of dense, multifaceted visions. Hand-numbered edition of 100 copies.

Following years of memorable turns in collab with Dean Blunt and on her own solo recordings, ‘Blurrr’ is likely the moment Joanne Robertson ooozes into much wider acclaim and recognition - a stunning album of sparse heartbreakers recorded in the company of Oliver Coates and landing at an irresistibly fragile spot somewhere between classic Grouper, Cat Power and Arthur Russell’s ‘World of Echo’. A real delicate, special album - one of the year’s finest.

In pursuit of last year’s ‘Backstage Raver’ duo with longtime spar Dean Blunt, Manchester born, Blackpool-rooted, Glasgow-based Joanne Robertson casts her strongest spell yet on ‘Blurrr’, cementing her status as a master of timeless songcraft. On nine new songs, every strum and murmured lyric exposes a patient beauty and rare intimacy that transcends the sum of its parts. It includes a trio of co-productions with Oliver Coates - noted collaborator with everyone from Malibu and Mica Levi to Laurel Halo - lending an extra frisson of flesh-tingling substance to accentuate the sensuality of Robertson’s voice.

In solo mode, she has us by a thread on the album’s longest piece ‘Friendly’ where we're treated to harmonies and hooks that pull from Nick Drake through Sarah Records and the blissed Americana of Hope Sandoval, lilting into a filigree coda somehow comparable to Vini Reilly’s sun-kissed, balearic glissandi. Her blissed coos on ‘Peaceful’ set our arm hairs on end, and the languorous opener 'Ghost' is like Robertson's answer to Grouper's timeless 'Heavy Water’, while ‘Why Me’ feels like the Nirvana Unplugged x Cat Power hookup of our dreams; there's nothing heavy handed or overdone - just bare expressions - like a blast of cool air on a humid afternoon.

Coates elevates three of the album's most striking tracks. His emotive string flourishes are remarkably subtle, there's a trace of the cinematic wonder that elevated his work with Laurel Halo on 'Raw Silk Uncut Wood' and with Malibu on the now classic 'One Life', but Coates is careful not to overpower Robertson's songs, enhancing her harmonies without ever obscuring their faultlines. On 'Gown' we’re reminded of Arthur Russell's timeless 'World of Echo', and that connection deepens further on 'Doubt', where Coates' fluttering low-end reverberates below Robertson's cool-headed voice. The killer for us, though, is 'Always Were', a glittering masterpiece that sounds like Robertson’s voice has been recorded to a half-broken mic, then dubbed to worn tape, magnifying its emotional resonance as it cracks alongside Coates' heaving strings, snowballing into a dense mass of harmony and echo.

" dean blunt & Elias Rønnenfelt - lucre LP. Single-sided, 180g vinyl "

Highly recommended for fans of Dean Blunt and hypnagogic pop. Emerging in the late 2010s as Belgium’s counterpart to Music From Memory with its focus on obscure archival excavations, and now known for releasing cult records from contemporary artists, STROOM.TV presents the full LP debut of the enigmatic act Felicity J Lord. A collision of obscure playfulness and fragile poetics, the album unfolds as a collection of nearly 30 fragmentary tracks, each lasting only a minute or two—like peering into a diary or sketchbook. Synths, piano, cut-up voices, and intimate domestic sounds appear and dissolve, sometimes evoking lo-fi pop sensibilities, sometimes drifting into experimental collage. Rather than striking with force, it’s the accumulation of hazy, fleeting fragments that lingers—resonating quietly in the listener’s memory. A rare and remarkable work.

Domenique Dumont’s fourth album, Deux Paradis, arrives like the three that came before it – with an air of mystery and wonder. This is dance music for inner worlds – rituals, revelations and reveries.

Deux Paradis is a ten-track song cycle that leads the listener through the rhythm of a day, the bloom and fade of a relationship, or even the stages of a life. It begins with a song about waking up – the candy-striped dub of “Enchantia” – and traces the sun’s arc with the pixelated reggae of “La Vie Va” and the sensuous rush of “Amants Ennemis”. As night falls, the songs take on a twilight quality in the shimmering pop of “The Order of Invisible Things” and the seductive pulse of “Visages Visages” (a subtle nod to the Desireless classic). There’s also the baroque swoon of “Deux Paradis” and the soft exotica of “Visiteur de la Nuit”. Bolder and richer than before, it’s vintage Domenique Dumont – timeless and romantic, yet laced with an unplaceable sense of longing, like in an Éric Rohmer film.

After the instrumental film score People On Sunday (Leaf, 2020) composed solo by Arturs Liepins – singer Anete Stuce returns to Domenique Dumont, bringing her inimitable joie de vivre. Deux Paradis

completes a trilogy of releases alongside Comme Ça (2015) and Miniatures De Auto Rhythm (2018) on the Antinote label.

Deux Paradis took shape between 2022 and the end of 2024 in studios in Riga and Paris, and on the Estonian island of Hiiumaa.

Vanligt Folk unleashes their most daring work yet with Dischorealism, a wild mix of crabby 2-step rhythms, echoing yowls, and noisy club shapes. Following their 2017 release Palle Bondo, the Swedish trio continue to blur the lines between noise, club, and outsider pop, crafting a sound unlike any other.

This time, they focus on tight, groove-driven beats, while maintaining their signature weirdness with gravelly dub-noise textures, twisted hooks, and unsettling, possessed vocals. Exploring themes of friendship, sex, violence, and drug abuse, Dischorealism takes an impressionistic approach, leaving ideas open to interpretation and creating an eerie atmosphere that works on both the dancefloor and in more intimate settings.

With over a dozen tracks in 42 minutes, the album pulls from a range of influences—from fellow Scandinavians SHXCXCHCXSH to the dissonant, lo-fi worlds of V/Vm and Börft—but remains unmistakably Vanligt Folk. Highlights include the blunted 2-step of ‘DISKDASKO’, the acid-tinged ‘ÜNG GÜD’, and the peculiar odd-pop textures of ‘TJUF’. It’s an album that keeps you guessing, always on the edge of something strange.

Zither Suite is the fifth OPE album. It was recorded in my apartment in Kortedala, just outside of Gothenburg. No neighbours were harmed in the recording process. The title track opens with a bitter sweet bass melody that I first recorded some 10 years ago, but it's been fermenting ever since and finally reached maturity. The zither that gave name to the record (and the first track) was a find from the local charity shop. While it's not featured on every track of the album it's a crucial part of the feel of the album as a whole. It's the rug that ties the room together.

The tracks on this album are all original compositions with the exception of Jämtland which is based on an old Swedish folk melody, reported to have been played by musicians in Jämtland as early as the late 1700s. The county of Jämtland is forever claiming a tounge in cheek sort of independence from the Swedish governing body (in spirit rather than in actual policies) and Jämtlandssången is it's unofficial national anthem.

-Gustav Horneij

After following Luke Blair's work for approaching two decades from his 2007 debut as Lukid on Actress' Werk Discs, we're humbled to present a new album on Death Is Not The End. Following relatively hot on the heels of 2023's Tilt (his first in 11 years, not counting his work with Jackson Bailey under the Rezzett guise) Underloop brings Blair's innate knack for building loops and sound structures further to the surface, while allowing his ear for emotional expression to be dialled up a notch.

Those fortunate enough to be familiar with Lukid's work as a DJ will be aware of how distinct his ability is to seamlessly disappear into loop-based abstraction and back again seemingly without blinking, and often Underloop feels much like a collection of the sludgey interludes and foggy sketches that underpin his sets. Blending apparently ramshackle melodies and textures and pulling them together into an undeniable whole, Blair's tendency for pairing the simple and the indescribable with an understated vigour is fully on show here.

Active between 1987 and 1997 out of Leeds, UK, cult unit Drug Free America was led by Brian Moss of Vicious Pink alongside the late Steve Dixon and Hayley Windsor. Their sound evolved from early industrial/techno roots into darker, post-punk-leaning experiments. Now arriving via Noir Age, this archival release draws from their 1995 CD Narcotica, including the sprawling title cut “Baby Doll and the Dolphin Burger.” Here, cyberdelic electronics collide with shadowed vocals across tracks that stand as strange, singular constructions. Capturing both the dreams and menace of the city, these recordings channel the heat of the UK underground into the present. Limited to 200 copies.

International Anthem is proud to present 'Step on Step', a double LP collection of home recordings marking the de-facto eponymous debut album by enigmatic producer, arranger, and composer Charles Stepney (1931-1976). The music that makes up Step on Step was created by Stepney alone, in the basement of his home on the Southside of Chicago, sometime in the late 1960s and early 1970s, before his untimely death in 1976. A Chicago born and bred arranger, producer, multi-instrumentalist and songwriter, Stepney is known for his work with Earth, Wind & Fire, Deniece Williams, and Ramsey Lewis, and as a staff producer for Chess Records in the 1960s, where he was an essential creative force behind seminal recordings by Rotary Connection, Minnie Riperton, Marlena Shaw, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, Terry Callier, The Dells, The Emotions, and many more. In the decades since his passing, the presence of his name in liner notes and on vinyl labels has become a seal of quality for record collectors, music historians, and aficionados, while his sound has been used by countless samplers in the hip-hop world including Kanye West, A Tribe Called Quest, The Fugees, MF Doom, and Madlib. But in comparison to the post-mortem renown of his sound, or the music he created and the artists he supported while he was alive, Stepney is a greatly underappreciated figure… a genius relegated to the shadows. One of the signature elements of his “baroque soul” sound is the epic, expansive, orchestral expression of his horn and string arrangements (in many cases brought to life by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), as heard on Minnie Riperton’s “Les Fleurs,” or Marlena Shaw’s “California Soul,” or Terry Callier’s “What Color Is Love.” Hence making it even more special that his de-facto debut LP Step on Step, which sees its first wide release nearly five decades after his death, is a collection of stripped-down 4-track tape recordings featuring Stepney, alone, performing all instruments with minimal means. It is, as said by Chicago culture historian (and author of Step on Step liner notes) Ayana Contreras, “the uncut funk,” an unprecedented depiction of an imbued composer imagining and conceiving music (some of which would eventually become massive studio productions) in its primal state. Step on Step features 23 tracks, most of which are original compositions by Stepney that were never again recorded by him or any other artist. It also features prototypical, seedling-style demos of Stepney compositions for Earth, Wind & Fire, including “That’s The Way of The World,” “Imagination,” and “On Your Face,” as well as the original version of “Black Gold,” which would eventually be recorded by Rotary Connection (as “I Am The Black Gold of The Sun,” with lyrics by Richard Rudolph). And in addition to the wordless croons of Stepney original and early single “Daddy’s Diddies,” Stepney’s actual voice is heard on a couple occasions across the album, testing microphones and inputs on his tape machine. All of the otherwise unrecorded, previously unnamed original compositions contained on Step on Step were given their titles by Stepney’s daughters Eibur, Charlene, and Chanté Stepney, whose voices are also heard throughout the album, telling stories and sharing memories about their father. The Stepney Sisters, who produced this album over many years, have long been engaged in efforts to celebrate their father’s legacy and bring his work into brighter light. They’ve cherished the tape reels left behind by their father in the basement of their home, transferring the audio on multiple occasions, and originally compiling the recordings for an ultra-limited CD on their own DIY label (The Charles Stepney Masters) in the early 2010s. “We always talk about how we were trying to develop this and would go to different people and they would go ‘what is this raw stuff…’ It was just the first level of something that became something really great,” says Chanté. “To get this type of intimate look into an artist’s process is really unknown and unheard of… so I just really appreciate the opportunity to give this. I am very happy for my Dad that we’re able to share this with the world in this way, with this amount of respect.” This new double LP collection on International Anthem presents “a genuine, beautiful, deeply emotional and personal effort by three women to reconnect with their father and validate their own memories of his passion and brilliance,” says label co-founder Scott McNiece. And it’s a long-overdue fulfillment of Stepney’s unsatiated plan to release a solo album – which he once vowed to his daughters that he would do, and that he would name it: “Step on Step.”

“Although it’s not a UFO case, there are those who insist on interpreting it as such, creating narratives and situations that don’t correspond to reality.”

– Claudeir Covo, ufologist, during the 1st Brazilian Forum on Exobiologism and Holism, 1998.

Sensational Conversations is a phantasmatic dialogue between two people who have never met — a freewheeling exploration across different languages, geographies, and states of mind. An artifact that could be interpreted as an alien signal, but in fact, it is just the sound of two people trying to stay in motion.

Bruno Tonisi’s debut album began as a gesture of contact: reaching out to one of his longtime heroes, legendary New York rapper and producer Sensational. What followed wasn’t a conventional collaboration, but something far more peculiar — an exchange that feels like a coded message, picked up on a staticky radio frequency, halfway between two broken worlds.

The album deconstructs hip hop until it becomes something else entirely: at times, an abstract sound collage in a similar vein as GRM's; at others, a dirty, low-slung loop that could’ve emerged from some long-lost NYC basement tape. No matter how far it ventures into atmospheric or unearthly territory, there’s always a kind of tension anchoring it — a pulse, a streetwise roughness, a refusal to drift too far from lived experience.

With intense spectral processing, distorted beats, fractured voices and half-lit conversations, the album creates a terrain that constantly shifts underfoot. At first, it’s disorienting. But as you acclimatize yourself to its logic — its unstable rhythms, its errant signals, its sudden emotional clarity — the landscape begins to feel strangely navigable.

And through all of this, one thing remains clear: hustling creates connections. Beneath the abstractions and distortions one finds a shared drive — a low-key urgency in both Bruno and Sensational, each of whom find ways to keep on moving, keep on creating, keep on reaching out. Sensational Conversations may sound like science fiction, but its engine is deeply real.

What we’re hearing isn't necessarily what it seems — and it is precisely therein that some form of truth may lie.

Manchester’s Sferic label (Space Afrika, Jake Muir, Bianca Scout, Roméo Poirier++) return with a fire debut from ungoogleable Greco-Canadian anomaly Anastasia Patellis, aka Any, featuring additional instrumentation and co-production from Klein/Lolina cohort LA Timpa. It's a set of "squat pop" experiments that thread nocturnal soundscaping and pop hooks through hallucinated outlines written on harp and broken synth, highly recommended if you’re into Astrid Sonne, Tirzah, Nala Sinephro.

Greco-Canadian artist Any was bedding down in a Cretan squat when the album's title, μέγα ελεός in Greek, boomed from loudspeakers next to a bonfire, courtesy of a midnight Orthodox church sermon. Moving to the sunny, ancient island had provided her with an escape from big city burnout, but she ended staying far longer than expected - years rather than months. It’s this prolonged sense of suspension that provides the album with its wandering spirit, using harp as an emotional core.

Listening to Breton music made on the Celtic harp from artists like Kristen Noguès and Alan Stivell, Any sketched out song outlines that were then tweaked by Lagos-born, Toronto-raised journeyman LA Timpa, who flew out to Crete last summer to put his idiosyncratic stamp on the record. Like the dusty songs on Astrid Sonne's 'Great Doubt, ‘MEGA MERCY' sounds as if its drum line was duped on dictaphone from an old beat tape, then spliced with field recordings and vocals.

Half sung, half spoken, she murmurs around the beat, not exactly over it, adding circuitous, boss-tuned harp twangs when necessary. It's music that's spartan rather than lo-fi; a sort of bare-bones reaction to electroacoustic experimentation and outsider folk. It makes perfect sense that an artist as thematically on-point as LA Timpa is involved - Any's instrumental vamps are roughly pasted around pinprick boom-bap snaps and crunchy foley denouements, eventually cooled into contemplative Nala Sinephro-esque meditations.

Sections bring to mind Tirzah's most psychedelic early excursions, with dry asides set against a slurping, off-axis beatbox loop and distant, barely-audible synths. The record is tied up on 'WEATHER LIKE TIDE', an instrumental callback to the opener, book-ending the album with a melancholy, humid kinda ambient folk, purposefully melting the timeline.

The result of an 18-month residency in Rio de Janeiro, 'Só Ouço' distills classic Brazilian pop (think Gilberto Gil, Tom Zé and João Gilberto) into a sunbleached contemporary art-pop statement.

Genre-agnostic German-Spanish artist Wolfgang Pérez might not be Brazilian, but he's spent enough time in the country to at least come to terms with its rich musical history. He moved to Rio in 2022 on a university exchange to study composition, and extended his semester into three, learning the ropes under Brazilian masters Josimar Carneiro, Marcello Gonçalves and Almir Cortes. 'Só Ouço' emerged from jam sessions and shows around Rio with a cast of young players and it's surprisingly on-point material. Pérez was no doubt awed by his surroundings, and his collaborators help manage the tone precisely.

Harry the Nightgown return with Ugh, their second album and most ambitious work to date — a fizzing fusion of hyperpop, experimental electronics and avant-pop songwriting. Now a trio, the group features original members Spencer Hartling (aka tp Dutchkiss, founder of Wiggle World studio) and Sami Perez (Cherry Glazerr, Jerry Paper, The She’s), joined by DIY harmony obsessive Luke Macdonald, also a touring member of Cherry Glazerr.

Five years on from their self-titled debut, the band embrace imperfection with open arms, crafting an eleven-song record packed with warped hooks, dense production, and flashes of emotional vulnerability. Released on Leaving Records, Ugh takes cues from artists like Björk, fka twigs, Oneohtrix Point Never, Tirzah and Vegyn, but filters them through Harry the Nightgown’s own playful, fractured lens.

Noisy, surreal and uncompromisingly idiosyncratic, The Shadow Ring's 1997-released 'Hold Onto I.D.' is a perennially misunderstood rust spot in their discography, marked by Graham Lambkin's choked free-form poetry and Tim Goss's eerie Radiophonic oscillations.

Squeezed between '96's 'Wax-Work Echoes', founder members Lambkin and Darren Harris's first album with keyboard player Goss, and '99's dark, concept-driven double album 'Lighthouse', it's easy to understand why 'Hold Onto I.D.' is one of The Shadow Ring's most overlooked full-lengths. Listening now, it falls perfectly into place; if they were playing fast and loose with the possibilities on 'Wax-Work...' and exploring new territory with 'Lighthouse', this is the point where Lambkin, Harris and Goss were able to take stock, augmenting the Bolan-goes-Jandek crankiness of 'City Lights' and its snotty follow-up 'Put the Music in its Coffin' with frazzled, hot-wired electronics and isolationist, paranoiac reflections. "You've got to learn the difference between sweat and dew," Harris deadpans on opener 'Watch the Water'. "You've got black lakes forming on your floor, and the dusty brown rug from decades or so ago becomes hot spot for shrimp and nautical foe."

Lambkin's muculent tales of small-town boredom ink a rough outline of Folkestone, the somnolent coastal town where the band lived, contrasting literal decay with asphyxiating cultural emptiness. On previous records, The Shadow Ring had sounded as if they were delivering their own discrete reading of British rock, but the music falls away from the figurative even further here. The gunky, detuned riffs are there just to prop up the stern, psycho-satirical lyrics (guitars would disappear completely by 'Lighthouse'), and any rhythms have become little more than side-room ambient clatter. It's Goss's piercing, terror-stricken monosynth keens that take pride of place, forming an uncomfortable bed of anxious electronics that buzzes beneath the entire record. Lambkin and Harris break and bend their acoustic instruments as if they're speaking to the synth sounds from a similar vantage points, like forgotten remnants of British folk history.

A disheveled piano is tapped at furtively on 'Wash What You Eat', and dissonant chords crack awkwardly from a cheap acoustic guitar; Goss's swirling, pitchy warbles sound as if they've been pulled from a Quatermass re-run and copy-pasted with cheap cassette. And it's the fact that we're served this inner vision of humdrum British surrealism - a no-hope fantasized hi-culture/lo-culture melt fueled by tapes, fanzines and overdue library books - that makes it so enduringly good. Lambkin, Harris and Goss weren't pretentiously trying to affix their images onto concepts earmarked for the elite, they were working in their own damp, festering cinematic universe and presenting it warts 'n all. It's fucking timeless.

Originally conceived as a compilation of outtakes and live recordings from The Shadow Ring’s 1995 stateside tour, Wax-Work Echoes takes its name from the first line of “Put the Music in Its Coffin,” the title track of the group’s breakthrough release. Lambkin abandons the bits-and-bobs approach, advancing the Shadow Ring concept with entirely original material that builds on the unit’s self-mythologizing lyrics, celebrates the clicking of horse hooves, ponders on the sociability of rats and mice, and warns of the dangers of poultry. The first Shadow Ring album to officially include Tim Goss in the main lineup, Wax-Work Echoes reveals the group in its final and lasting form, awash in the outer bounds of atmospheric exploration, with Lambkin’s familiar wry and morbid lyricism and the stripped-down angularity of amateurishly detuned guitars fully intact. While Klaus Canterbury and Tony Clark seem all but forgotten, and the shrugged off S. Fritz is listed on the liner notes as performing only “when required,” Lambkin did solicit contributions from outside the inner circle. A bit of “Mambo Twist,” lifted from a tape of unreleased Vitamin B12 material sent to Lambkin by Alasdair Willis, found its way into “V.E.R.M.I.N.,” while an extended epistle contribution from Richard Youngs (and, technically, Brian Lavelle) would be employed in the second half of “Catching Sight/Of Passing Things.”

Released on CD in 1996 for Bruce Russell’s newly minted Corpus Hermeticum, Wax-Work Echoes was recorded concurrently with intense rehearsal periods, in anticipation of the forthcoming “Rose Watson Tour,” and was supported by a celebratory fanzine media blitz. The album seemingly absorbs the frenetic excess of the band’s transatlantic travels; Wax-Work Echoes channels the trio’s wilder instincts into an unresolved catharsis, not yet free of frustration or restlessness. Out of print for almost three decades and available here for the first time ever on long-playing disc, Wax-Work Echoes is a classic from the outer eddies of The Shadow Ring’s sound, a must-have for any aficionado’s collection: “A window slides, glass slips from frame / And canvas carcass breathes again.”

Throughout their legendary, decade-long run, The Shadow Ring were an enigmatic force on the international musical sub-underground. Before their disbandment in 2002, this shambolic rock outfit, formed by a group of rowdy teenagers in southeast England, left behind a mighty run of eight LPs, a handful of 7"s, and a spate of raucous live shows and cryptic zine appearances on both sides of the Atlantic, all which have bolstered their enduring word-of-mouth mystique. Beginning in 2023 with the first-ever vinyl pressing of the self-released pre–Shadow Ring tape The Cat & Bells Club (1992), Blank Forms Editions has been conducting a systematic retrospective of the storied group. Wax-Work Echoes and Hold Onto I.D. are the latest releases in a multiyear reissue effort that includes several LPs, a comprehensive CD box set, and a nearly five-hundred-page book.

〈Captured Tracks〉The biggest seller! Along with masterpieces such as "Salad Days", this is definitely an introductory board for this person! Mac Demarco is a current indie pop cult icon from Canada, known for his activities in Makeout Videotape, sampling Sekito Oshigeo's "The Word II", and the popular split single "Honey Moon" with Mr. Hosono. The 10th anniversary edition of the masterpiece "Rock And Roll Night Club" released in 2012 has been released as an analogue. A masterpiece of psychedelic and addictive indie pop that makes you feel like you're listening to Deerhunter's "Microcastle" cassette demo!

Special Guest DJ — also known as Shy — has spent the better part of a decade quietly reshaping the experimental electronic underground. Operating from Berlin under aliases like Caveman LSD and uon, their work weaves between dubwise ambient, smeared club textures, and lo-fi dream states.

On Our Fantasy Complex, they channel that tangled web into a 40-minute suite of fogged-out mood music: sensual, angry, dreamlike. There are trace elements of shoegaze, dub techno and quasi-speed D&B, but it’s more hex than genre exercise — a lucid tangle of textures shaped by peers like Ben Bondy, mu tate, and Arad Acid add an extra dimension.

This isn’t ambient in the blissed-out sense, but a darker, dirtier kind of psychedelia — music that melts the line between introspection and club detritus. From the looming bass pressure of ‘How Long Can I Burn?’ to the dissociative haze of ‘Yoro (pt I & II)’, and finally the crystalline closer ‘Dream’, it’s a record that lingers like smoke.

Yes! Tommy Guerrero’s much-loved 4th LP – the smooth West Coast classic From The Soil To The Soul - gets its first ever vinyl release. As the follow up to his revered Soul Food Taqueria, this album was originally released by Quannum Records in 2006 but only on CD. Working with Tommy directly, the LP has been fully remastered, cut on to heavyweight wax, and comes with artwork freshly reworked by the man himself.

From The Soil To The Soul represents a continuation of Tommy’s blissful guitar-soul whilst demonstrating increasingly complex chops and a slightly darker side to his distinctive sound. His spare, effortless funk is blended here with elements of Americana, heavy psych, lo-fi fuzz and intoxicating Latin rhythms. Combined with his typically breezy, laid-back San Franciscan style, it’s a vibe from start to finish.

Recorded primarily in his home studio, Tommy wrote, arranged and played nearly all the instruments, including bass, guitar, keyboards, percussion and kalimba. Renowned street artist Barry McGee, aka Twist, designed the cover art which Tommy has now recast in a deep, deep red for the vinyl version.

As ever with Tommy, the highlights are many and memorable. From twinkling, sun-drenched opener “Hello Again” to the penultimate, punk-rocking track “Let Me In Let Me Out” (featuring the melodic yet fearsome rapping of Lyrics Born), the variety across the LP is relentless, but satisfying, and without once losing focus.

We’re treated to the gorgeous hip-hop blues of “The Under Dog”, Meters-style Hammond B-3 jams like “War No More” and “No Guns More Glory” and Balearic bangers like Bing Ji Ling’s star-turn on the sleazy “Don’t Fake It.”

Curumin’s soulful guest vocal elevates the already-great Brazilian lounge feels of “Salve” to hitherto unscaled heights and the heavy, driving basslines - funky and warm on “Badder Than Bullets”, sombre and intense in “Tomorrow’s Goodbye” and “Molotov Telegram” – never fail to move both body and soul.

But our favourite track is the beautiful breezy pop of “Just Ain’t Me”. A bittersweet, skipping ballad which boasts an incredibly rare instance of Tommy singing. “What you want from me, I can never give” he repeats throughout, lending the already-melancholic atmosphere greater poignancy. It would’ve been number 1 across the planet in a parallel universe.

Primitive Maxi Trial is a time-warped excavation from the archives of Emiliano Pennisi, the Palermo-based producer and underground fixture behind the Paradigma collective (DerFreitag, Algoritmo). Surfacing on the Heat Crimes imprint, this archival transmission feels less like a retrospective and more like a haunted artifact – a fragment of the pre-digital underground rendered in dusty, lo-fi hues.

Drawn from material produced between the late ’90s and mid-2000s, Primitive Maxi Trial occupies a blurred zone where early DAW fetishism meets pirate aesthetics and a scavenger’s ear for pop-cultural residue. Think cracked VSTs (Albino, SubBoomBass), MPC 1000 grit, and CD-ROM sample libraries ripped from Future Music and Computer Music cover discs—long-lost sonic ephemera unearthed like forgotten VHS tapes in the backroom of a failing electronics shop.

There’s an unmistakable hauntological hue here—not in the usual Ghost Box pastiche sense, but something rawer, more regionally specific. These tracks were forged under the looming shadow of the Mafia Maxi Trial, in a city fraught with paranoia, informal spaces, and cultural fragmentation. That tension bleeds into the music: compressed textures, iron-lung atmospheres, and bleakly humorous juxtapositions that wouldn’t feel out of place soundtracking a Mark Leckey installation.

But this isn’t mere nostalgia. Pennisi’s compositions slip between IDM’s jittery melancholy, no-fi techno, ambient detritus, and grotesque rave misfires with an almost outsider art sensibility. Surreal cuts appear like tape-warped memories of nights out you’re not sure really happened. In the best moments, Primitive Maxi Trial feels like music made not for release but for ritual—claustrophobic yet oddly liberating, deeply personal yet disarmingly tongue-in-cheek.

Graham Jonson is drawn to the comforts of melody and noise. How the two conspire in tension, tonally and atonally, stirring up memory and mood. This quality animates the technicolor world of quickly, quickly, the psych-pop project that emanates from Kenton Sound, his basement studio in Portland, Oregon. “Everywhere your eye lands, there’s another curio to marvel over,” noted Pitchfork’s Philip Sherburne when he visited Jonson’s recording space for a Rising feature just after the release of his “strikingly original” 2021 debut LP, The Long and Short of It. Since then, Jonson formed a live band, released his Easy Listening EP in 2023, got into production projects (for Moses Sumney, Kid LAROI, and SahBabii), and navigated the up-and-downs of a young musician, the sustainability of tours and relationships. While shaped by personal bouts and fallouts, his highly-anticipated full-length follow-up finds Jonson making music that’s universal, open-ended, and rewarding, like great songwriters can do. He set out to make a folk album but couldn’t help coloring it in with noise; a confluence of lush instrumentation and unexpected sounds. Ambitious yet intimate, hi-fi yet homespun, the idiosyncratic songs on I Heard That Noise curve around the contours of everyday life with warmth, wit, and dissonance.

When asked to unpack the inputs of I Heard That Noise, Jonson cites the unpredictable vocal melodies and sound design of Phil Elverum (The Microphones, Mount Eerie), the raw emotion of Dijon, and the timeless cadence of Nick Drake. While drums were the focus of Easy Listening, he challenged himself to think outside of the beat with new material: “to see how much I could do with a song, specifically with production, without having a beat to it… there are moments with drums but it was more about the space in between.” Songs utilize visceral delay and distortion; sometimes, they melt out of frame before the peak or take sharp turns with sudden chord changes or sweeping jolts he likens to “jump scares” in film. “Experimenting with the idea of being comfortable, and then some crazy shit flies at you, takes you out of it for a second, and then maybe brings you back in.” What makes these non-linear choices effective is that Jonson remains a natural pop architect, knowing where to push and pull, add and subtract; and essentially, how to draw in and hold one’s attention.

Themes reach from recent experiences — a breakup followed by “periods of either being miserable or, like, living…trying to better myself” — to childhood memories. There’s a recurring low-frequency hum in his neighborhood; he and his friends have come to know it as the “Kenton Sound” (which gives his studio its name), and they’ve narrowed it down to some industrial testing site nearby. Every time it vibrates, he thinks of that time he heard “that noise” while skateboarding outside his mom’s house. Similar, but louder, scarier, a sky siren of sorts. “I remember all the dogs started barking in the neighborhood at the same time...a really weird, bizarre phenomenon.” The thought pattern, scattered with a cathartic headspace, led him to record the title track, where an abrasive intro dissipates into a sweet piano ballad about remembering and surrendering.

Jonson has a knack for interludes and outros, and he’s in full stride here; the opener’s ambient wobbles snap into the stomp of “Enything,” which at one point swelled with so much information he needed to get a new computer. Above bright and jagged guitar lines, harmonized with backing vocals from friend and past tourmate Julia Logue, Jonson playfully rattles through everything he’d do (“for you”). He’s quick to admit he often dreads the process of writing lyrics, yet the loose wordplay of “Enything” is proof his subconscious runs clever.

On “Take It From Me,” subtle sonic flourishes surround acoustic strums and tender keys as Jonson recalls the resignation of a night when a relationship’s end was imminent (“a great storm is coming over the hill.”). He explains, “I've always found peace in knowing that other people, even if I don't know their exact experience, may have the same feeling that I do.” The mantra-like reprise of “Take It from Me” carries that notion, a soft reassurance before the song washes away.

Kenton Sound’s ceiling can attest to the truth of “I Punched Through A Wall.” Jonson says in reality, the act emerged from a silly intrusive thought. The image (“The silhouette of myself”) lent a figurative scene to wrap real angst around. “I feel love like a cannon ball / I like being ripped apart,” he sings over one of the record’s sweetest, most pop-forward arrangements. As the chorus takes its final pass, a gentle piano phrase gets clipped by an outburst of power chords and feedback, repeating the lines twice as loud.

“Raven” crosses fable-like fiction with the sad story of a friend who lost his way; and just when the track’s innocent country twang settles in, he pulls the rug out with near-metal levels of heavy. The juxtaposition gets to the heart of I Heard That Noise. By excavating the extremes of his sound, Jonson not only brings the best out of himself but introduces myriad ways to engage with his music, which grows ever more inviting and boundless. 
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Mac DeMarco, the cult-favourite singer-songwriter known for sampling on Sekito Shigeo's ‘The Word II’ and collaborating with Haruomi Hosono, released his third studio masterpiece in three years in 2017 on indie giant Captured Tracks. The demo of his third studio album This Old Dog, released in 2017 on indie giant Captured Tracks, is now available on cassette. It's an accessible lo-fi indie-pop album with psychedelia.

The genesis of "Nosthaigia" is as fascinating as the music itself. Onra spent several years living in Thailand, immersing himself in the vibrant culture and scouring local record shops for rare gems. The result is a collection of Thai songs from various genres, all sourced on 7 inches. These short instrumentals serve as time capsules, transporting listeners to a bygone era filled with nostalgia and longing. Produced entirely on the MPC1000 in 2017 and revisited in 2020, "Nosthaigia" is a testament to the power of serendipity and artistic evolution. What began as a casual exploration of unfamiliar musical territory blossomed into a deeply personal and meaningful project for Onra. Amidst a series of unfortunate life events, he found solace and inspiration in the beats he had crafted years prior. Each track on "Nosthaigia" is a reflection of his journey, a sonic expression of longing and introspection. Onra describes the process of creating the album as a cathartic release, a way of letting go of old memories and embracing the present. Despite the somber undertones, there is a quiet beauty to "Nosthaigia" that is impossible to ignore. Onra's vintage production skills breathe life into each track, infusing them with warmth and depth. From the haunting melodies of "Until The End" to the hypnotic rhythms of "Close Your Eyes And Remember" every moment feels poignant. Onra's decision to "remove all the bangers" from the album speaks volumes about his artistic integrity and dedication to authenticity. "Nosthaigia" is not about flashy beats or catchy hooks; it's about raw emotion and genuine expression. It's a reminder that music has the power to heal, to uplift, and to connect us to something greater than ourselves. In the end, "Nosthaigia" is more than just an album; it's a testament to the human experience. It's a reminder that even in our darkest moments, there is beauty to be found, if only we're willing to listen.

A new age lightness of being guides NNF alum Baptiste Martin to gently optimistic ambient, H-pop and glitching electronica styled results on a debut for Stroom, inseparable from its back story, regaled by the label below:

""I was admitted to Son Llàtzer Hospital in Mallorca on October 1, 2024, following a psychotic shock”.

This could well have been the opening sentence of a confessional novel but it’s not. It’s the first line of an email, which landed in my mailbox seemingly out of nowhere. The words were written by Baptiste Martin, the composer behind Les Halles.

In his letter, sent as a pdf document, Baptiste offered his friends a concise but striking report on his whereabouts from the past months. In brief, Baptiste was lost, found, lost and found again, yet seemingly forever confined to the walls of his cerebral interior. The letter describes a loss of grip and self-control, like a baby water turtle trying to hoist his way out of the fish tank by scratching the glass walls, without any result.

Baptiste is a musician and not a writer. His opening line is thus followed by an album, not a novel. This is the album. Yet, ‘Original Spirit’ doesn’t tell the story of his psychotic shock as a linear nonfiction, it offers a vague resolution to all the mischief in life: the hope for the existence of an original spirit, untainted despite all that might happen during the course of a life.

The album provokes images of what I would perceive as indeed an original spirit of oneself: an abstract nothingness breezing through landscapes of colours, searching for places beyond the boundaries of what we call freedom in the material world. A stream of sound, nostalgic to a time that never existed, a mystical loophole that we know isn’t there yet still crave for. In short: the sound of an uncannily serene feeling beyond hope."