MUSIC

The Glitch hype was a rather short one. But it brought together different scenes; minimal techno, sound art and electronic minimalism. Then it hit a dead end and dissolved. In the centre of Glitch we found labels like Mille Plateaux (who released the formative ”Clicks + Cuts”) and raster-noton who especially with their static series formed a sound. The first release (2000) was by a young Andreas Tilliander who under his new moniker MOKIRA released the ”CLIPHOP” album. He had done synth and techno for years and then got his hands on an early COH CD on raster-noton in some Stockholm record shop and decided to send a demo to Carsten Nicolai and crew. They luckily decided to release it. I got my copy in the Wave record shop in Paris, as I knew Tilliander’s earlier techno and synth stuff. But this blew my mind. Sharp, funky (yes), static and it sounded like pure electricity. It still sounds great, and rather alien to me. I am proud to reissue this on iDEAL, and to dive even deeper into "CLIPHOP" - check out Johan Jacobsson Franzén's book on the album.

Joachim Nordwall, Gothenburg 29.10.2025.

Japanese bamboo flute maestro and goat (JP) cohort Rai Tateishi makes an impressive debut statement with his holistic attempts to transcend the limits of ancient instruments to reveal gently delirious insights comparable with Jon Hassell, Phew, Bendik Giske, FUJI|||||||||||TA.

‘Presence’ is a triumph of improvised, elemental musicality that distills aspects of myriad folk traditions in pursuit of the artist’s own truth. For 40 minutes of singularly weird, locked-in performance, Rai Tateishi diverges his formative training in the shinobue (a bamboo flute) to applications for its elder sibling, the shakuhachi, and its distant relatives in the khene mouth organ of Northeastern Thailand and Laos, and even the Irish flute, with remarkable results returned from each.

Piece to piece, Tateishi adapts a spectra of unusual and extended instrumental experiments to articulate uniquely animist sound arrangements, with judicious use of a ring modulator and delay effects only subtly altering his sound in real-time, gelling the harmonics and smoothing off its contours. Some 15 years of studies and accreted knowledge of histories, timelines, and spirits are deftly tattered in the air and rebound in precisely complex ribbons that become all the more impressive by virtue of its in-the-moment recording.

Presented with no overdubs, the six works were recorded by label head and KAKUHAN/goat lynchpin Koshiro Hino across three days of adventurous improvisation capturing the breadth of Tateishi’s vision in a mix of succinct flights of fancy and one durational wonder where he really cuts loose. An opening piece of rapid percussive fingering and rasping sets the tone for increasingly intricate explorations of the shinobue, and bluesy cadence of a reedy Thai khene - antecedent of the shō - whipped into headier harmonic overtones, whilst his 5th piece for Irish flute best recalls Ka Baird or Michael O’Shea’s lysergic impishness, and a 13 minute closing piece most boldly fucks with folk and jazz traditions, in-depth and with the genre short-circuiting audacity of Rahsaan Roland Kirk.

Landing in the wake of prism-shaking works by Will Guthrie & Mark Fell, goat (jp) and Kakuhan; Tateishi’s ‘Presence’ more than lives up to NAKID’s impressive levels, unflinchingly operating by its wits with a verve and dare-to-differ moxie that gets at it from the first hit to the last, harnessing the kind of skill and ingenuity that’s distinctive but still strikingly minimal and overwhelmingly physical. It's a remarkable achievement.

With Rhythm Immortal, Carrier — the project of Guy Brewer (formerly of Commix and Shifted) — makes a remarkable full-length debut that expands his intricate rhythmic world into deeper, slower, and more textural terrain.

Since first surfacing with 12”s for FELT and his own label, Carrier has become a touchstone for those drawn to the intersection of precision, space, and pulse. Brewer’s debut album distils the essence of drum & bass, dub techno and electro-acoustic minimalism into eight finely carved movements where every percussive fragment feels alive.

Appearing alongside guest collaborators Voice Actor and Memotone, Brewer navigates between noirish ambience and tightly coiled rhythmic design — from the hovering tension of ‘Offshore’ to the hypnotic sway of ‘A Point Most Crucial’. Tracks such as ‘Outer Shell’ and ‘Wave After Wave’ balance heady abstraction with physical propulsion, creating a sound equally suited to introspection or motion.

Previewed at Berlin Atonal 2025, Rhythm Immortal confirms Carrier as a singular voice in modern electronic music — a producer devoted to rhythm as both structure and spirit.

RIYL: Photek, Rhythm & Sound, Torsten Pröfrock, Burial.

Viva is the second album by the German band La Düsseldorf, realized in 1978 and it is considered its most successful release. Indeed, the album contains both the singles "Rheinita", which was their most successful single, and "Cha Cha 2000"; an expansive and utopian piece that mixes repetition, piano passages, chants, and electronic textures into a kind of dreamlike manifesto for a more ideal society. Probably the band’s most famous song. The album represents a combination of modern electronic textures, pop clarity, and krautrock experimentation which has secured Viva a lasting place in the history of German experimental rock. This vinyl reissue is the first after fifteen years.

Ricky V runs wild on Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s Persian tombak hand drum actions, expanding a 4 min kernel of inspiration into 24 minutes of mesmerising polyrhythmic traction. From an original 'Swamp' piece that practically recalls Ricardo’s style of slinky minimal techno sorcery to begin with, the Chilean-German maverick derives a more driving tract of rough hewn rhythmic grit bound to hypnotise dancefloors for the duration. Accentuating the undulating bass and dialling up the volume whilst retaining the frictional grind of the original, Villalobos gets right inside the groove with typically obsessive tekkerz, plucking out additional string motifs and tempering the flow with signature, taut but sinuous, loosey goosey flex that cross-pollinates cultures and gets right under the skin of the thing. Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (b. 1979, Iran) is a virtuoso percussionist known for his groundbreaking work with the tombak and daf, traditional Persian drums that he has radically redefined through new playing techniques and extended vocabulary. Mortazavi began playing the tombak at the age of six. By nine, he had already outpaced his teacher and won Iran’s national tombak competition — a distinction he would earn six more times. By his early twenties, he was widely regarded as one of the foremost players of the instruments. Since then, his music has continued to evolve, embracing new forms and vocabularies beyond tradition. Ricardo Villalobos (b. 1970, Chile) is a pioneering figure in minimal techno, celebrated for his hypnotic approach to rhythm. Raised in Germany after his family fled Pinochet’s regime, Villalobos was drawn early to percussion — he began playing congas and bongos at eleven, developing a tactile relationship to rhythm that would later inform his distinctive production style. Immersed in both Latin American folk traditions and the emerging house and techno scenes of late-80s Europe, he began DJing and producing in the early 1990s, quickly achieving cult status within global club culture. Swamp originally appears on the album Nexus, released in 2025 via Latency.

Sought after two-tracker, Ricardo Villalobos releasing under his moniker “Richard Wolfsdorf” in his early years, remastered, new cut

What Burns Never Returns is the third album by American math rock band Don Caballero. What Burns Never Returns was released on Touch and Go Records in 1998 and was a reunion of sorts for the band—it was their first album after a two-year hiatus and marked the return of the original line-up. The album is notable for guitarist Ian Williams' first significant experimentation with pedals and other electronic effects. This style would be prevalent in both Williams' and the band's subsequent work. It is the final studio album to feature guitarist Mike Banfield and bassist Pat Morris, both of whom were in the original line-up of Don Caballero.

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.

Rave At Your Fictional Borders is not beyond borders. The band simply denies any notion thereof. Driven by a sense of community, it defines human existence as one bio-organism with planet Earth. Now comprising members Dave De Rose, Marius Mathiszik, and Salim Akki, this incarnation of Rave At Your Fictional Borders first released the 'Entanglement' and 'Utopia' tracks in March 2025. Analogue Nomadism is the project's first album release. Recorded in Morocco and then co-produced and mixed by Dan Nicholls, it is an album of dizzying, trance-inducing scope. Rave music stripped of all external signifiers. Repetition, noise, krautrock, avant-garde sensibilities. This is a search for a groove that both connects and interlocks. The soul of improvisation and exploration runs through all seven pieces on Analogue Nomadism. Genres are referenced and transcended. The open-ended is perpetually embraced. It is neither night nor day, but there is a half-light all the time. What used to be disconcerting is now not alien anymore. The sky boasts a faint light. Certain shapes are laid out, but get changed through communal ritual. Analogue Nomadism is the music of a feeling of community. It builds and breaks down. It is accepting of the psychedelic standards of the groove. Transportative and vertiginous. Endless.

Grace & Raffaella is the first collaborative release by ML and Vittoria Totale. Over nine tracks, the album strikes a deceptively minimalist tone, taking in a ton of musical as well as literary references. An elegy on a journey back to the present, with all the hushed intensity of an informed fever dream, Grace & Raffaella has a magic-realist feel. Its vocal parts serve as loopy self-fulfilling prophecies. Cut off from the sun, the gorge grows darker. Using an electroacoustic sense of spacing, as well as abstracted current-day club influences, with scraps of background noise fading in and out, this album's use and treatment of a snippet-like narrative is its core aesthetic. A digital gleam drenches the spoken bits into instances of subtle surrealism. Like a kitchen sink drama stripped of all deadweight. We are on the edge of relinquishing all control here. Rip up your diary and let go of the language of the old ones. Grace & Raffaella is a seductive slice of modern hyper-pop that defines its own intentions over and over again.

Another pair of Ricardo Villalobos mixes of Building Instrument (Mari Kvien Brunvoll’s Band) via Villalobos' own Sei Es Drum imprint."If it is nice, collaborate twice. Once again a track from the Building Instrument gets the Ricardo Villalobos treatment.It's all about the frequencies."

Written and produced by Mika Vainio in Turku in 1993
Muutaja is written and produced by Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen

THE FIRST-EVER VINYL RELEASE OF BRION GYSIN’S CULT RECORDINGS, PRODUCED IN THE 1980S AND EARLY 1990S BY RAMUNTCHO MATTA. A HYPNOTIC, GROOVE-DRIVEN BLEND OF FUNKY AFROBEAT, AMBIENT AND MINIMALISM, DREAMACHINE CHANNELS THE VISIONARY EFFECTS OF GYSIN’S ICONIC LIGHT ART DEVICE. A HUGELY INFLUENTIAL FIGURE, GYSIN WILL BE THE SUBJECT OF A MAJOR PARIS MUSEUM OF MODERN ART EXHIBITION OPENING SPRING 2026. ​ ​Wewantsounds is delighted to release for the 1st time on vinyl Brion Gysin’s cult recordings, produced by Ramuntcho Matta in the 80s and early 90s. The release features the hypnotic 32-minute journey "Dreamachine," which transforms the effects of Gysin’s legendary light art device into a hypnotic audio experience infused with minimalist and Afrobeat elements, alongside the track "The Door," featuring the visionary saxophonist Steve Lacy. A towering figure in avant-garde art, literature, and sound, Gysin influenced generations of creators, from William Burroughs to David Bowie and Laurie Anderson. Newly remastered and accompanied by liner notes by Gysin scholar Jason Weiss, this LP edition coincides with a major exhibition dedicated to Gysin at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, opening Spring 2026, underscoring his lasting impact on contemporary culture. ​ Wewantsounds continues its exploration of the archives of French producer and musician Ramuntcho Matta with the first-ever vinyl release of these cult recordings by Brion Gysin, one of the most radical and influential figures of 20th-century counterculture. A pioneering artist whose work spanned literature, sound, performance, and visual art, Gysin remains inseparable from the Beat movement and his long-time friend William Burroughs. Born in England and raised in Edmonton, Canada, he lived in Paris in the ‘30s, New York in the ‘40s, Tangier in the ‘50s—where Paul Bowles introduced him to the Master Musicians of Jajouka—and returned to Paris by the end of that decade, becoming a central figure among writers and artists experimenting with new forms of expression. His cut-up technique, permutation poetry, and cross-disciplinary approach influenced generations of creators including David Bowie, Laurie Anderson, Genesis P. Orridge, and Burroughs himself. ​ Produced by Ramuntcho Matta in the 1980s and early 1990s, the recordings on Dreamachine reflect Brion Gysin’s fascination with altered perception. Matta had returned to Paris after a late-1970s stay in New York following the death of his brother, Gordon Matta-Clark, and had already produced Gysin’s album Junk and the single Kick featuring Don Cherry. At the center is the title track "Dreamachine" a hypnotic 32-minute piece built on minimalist repetition, echoing the stroboscopic effects of Gysin’s iconic light sculpture. Slowly evolving grooves create a trance-like state, drawing on Afrobeat in the lineage of Fela Kuti and the laid-back, cyclical guitar patterns of King Sunny Adé’s juju music. As Jason Weiss notes, “the strands of Gysin’s narrative phase in and out of focus, suggesting that experience and memory can always be revisited through new connecting threads.” Conceived as a sonic extension of the eponymous visual device, invented by Gysin with Ian Sommerville, Dreamachine reshapes the listener’s sense of time and perception. The record also includes The Door, a striking collaboration featuring the legendary saxophonist Steve Lacy, adding further depth to the avant-garde jazz elements of Gysin’s world. ​ This vinyl features remastered audio and an insert with a striking photo of Gysin and Burroughs in front of the Dreamachine, shot by French photographer François Lagarde, alongside liner notes by Weiss situating the recordings in historical and artistic context. Issued alongside a major exhibition dedicated to Gysin at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, opening Spring 2026, this release is both a vital archival document and a timely reappraisal of an artist whose influence continues to resonate across contemporary music and art.

To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.

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.

Delphine Dora, the prolific French composer and multi-instrumentalist, graces Marionette with a suite of keyboard instrumentals that evoke futurism and the transcendental. Based in France and actively releasing music since the 00’s, Delphine’s remarkable solo and collaborative projects loosely connect the dots scattered across modern classical, folk, ambient, and poetic writing - always seeking new ambitions in terms of her sound. Leaving behind the chaos of city life for the quiet solitude of a small village in the French countryside, Delphine finds herself fully immersed in the present moment and committed to her multi-disciplinary creative practices, savoring the experiences of deep listening in nature and her environment. Drawing from an academic background in Outsider Art and Art Brut, Dora yearns to express intimate inner dialogues, revealing the beauty of vulnerability through transportive musical passages to the mystical and sublime. L’inéluctable pulsation du temps was composed in 2018, at a time when Delphine’s life was becoming increasingly busy, marked by relentless touring and concerts unfolding in rapid succession across different places. Written in parallel with L’Inattingible, her most ambitious album, it stands as its instrumental counterpart. The recordings reflect a period of exploration and assimilation of the Nord Electro, an instrument that opened up vast sonic possibilities, particularly for the development of rich polyphonies inspired by repetitive music. The track titles draw inspiration from an essay by Hartmut Rosa on the notions of acceleration and alienation - a reflection that resonates strongly with the pre-covid era right before the quarantine. The album reveals Delphine’s most colorful and rhythmic side, an aural mille-feuille, in total contrast with her previous melancholic vocal works. On L’inéluctable pulsation du temps, Dora sustains atmospheric drone miniatures that form the foundation for flowing, cyclical arpeggios, spiraling into a liminal dream space where the repetitive phrasing of melodies rewards introspective listening. The compositions move through (dis)enchanted landscapes, taking unexpected turns into more haunted terrain, their contours further blurred by Dora’s intuitive articulation and sense of refinement. By mirroring both the acceleration of time and the experience of alienation, Delphine conjures up timeless sonic meditations, rendering the inevitable pulsation of time as something at once mesmerizing and unsettling.

Khadim is a stunning reconfiguration of the Ndagga Rhythm Force sound. The instrumentation is radically pared down. The guitar is gone; the concatenation of sabars; the drum-kit. Each of the four tracks hones in on just one or two drummers; otherwise the sole recorded element is the singing; everything else is programmed. Synths are dialogically locked into the drumming. Tellingly, Ernestus has reached for his beloved Prophet-5, a signature go-to since Basic Channel days, thirty years ago. Texturally, the sound is more dubwise; prickling with effects. There is a new spaciousness, announced at the start by the ambient sounds of Dakar street-life. At the microphone, Mbene Diatta Seck revels in this new openness: mbalax diva, she feelingly turns each of the four songs into a discrete dramatic episode, using different sets of rhetorical techniques. The music throughout is taut, grooving, complex, like before; but more volatile, intuitive and reaching, with turbulent emotional and spiritual expressivity.

Not that Khadim represents any kind of break. Its transformativeness is rooted in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours the Rhythm Force has played together. Nearly a decade has passed since Yermande, the unit’s previous album. Every year throughout that period — barring lockdowns — the group has toured extensively, in Europe, the US, and Japan. With improvisation at the core of its music-making, each performance has been evolutionary, as it turns out heading towards Khadim. “I didn’t want to simply continue with the same formula, says Ernestus. “I preferred to wait for a new approach. Playing live so many times, I wanted to capture some of the energy and freedom of those performances.” Though several members of the touring ensemble sit out this recording — sabar drummers, kit-drummer, synth-player — their presence abides in the structure and swing of the music here.

Lamp Fall is a homage to Cheikh Ibra Fall, founder of the Baye Fall spiritual community. The mosque in the city of Touba is known as Lamp Fall, because the main tower resembles a lantern. Soy duggu Touba, moom guey séen / When you enter Touba, he is the one who greets you. After a swift, incantatory start Mbene sings with reflective seriousness. Her voice swirls with reverb, over a tight, funky, propulsive interplay between synth and drums, threaded with one- two jabs of bass. Cheikh Ibra Fall mi may way, mo diayndiou ré, la mu jëndé ko taalibe… Cheikh Ibra Fall amo morome, aboridial / Cheikh Ibra Fall shows the way forward, he gives us strength, he gathers his disciples… Overflowing with grace, Cheikh Ibra Fall has no equal.

Interwoven with Wolof proverbs, Dieuw Bakhul is a recriminatory song about treachery, lies, and back-biting. Over moody, roiling synths and ominous, lean bass, Mbene throws out fluttering scraps of vocal, as if re-running old conversations in her head. The music shadows her despair to the verge of breakdown, at one moment seemingly so lost in thought and memories, that it threatens to disintegrate. Bayilene di wor seen xarit ak seen an da ndo… Dieuw bakhul, dieuw ñaw na / Stop judging your friends and companions… A lie is no good, a lie is ugly.

Khadim is a show-stopper; currently the centrepiece of Ndagga Rhythm Force live performances. The song is dedicated to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, aka Khadim, founder of the Mouride Sufi order. Serigne Bamba mi may wayeu / Serigne Bamba is the one who makes me sing. The verses name-check revered members of his family and brotherhood, like Sokhna Diarra, Mame Thierno, and Serigne Bara. Though Islam has been practised in Senegal for a millennium, it wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century that it began to thoroughly permeate ordinary Senegalese society, hand-in-hand with anti-colonialism. The verses here recall Bamba’s banishment by the French to Gabon, and later to Mauritania, in those foundational times. During exile, his captors once introduced a lion to his cell: gaïnde gua waf, dieba lu ci Cheikhoul Khadim / the lion doesn’t budge, it gives itself over to Cheikh Khadim. Deep, surging bass, steady kick-drum, and simple, reverbed chords on the off-beat lend the feel and impetus of steppers reggae. A reed plays snatches of a traditional Baye Fall melody; the dazzling polyrhythmic drumming is by Serigne Mamoune Seck. Mbene compellingly blends percussive vocalese, narrative suspense, exultant praise, introspection, and grievance.

Nimzat is a devotional tribute to Cheikh Sadbou, a contemporary of Bamba, buried in a mausoleum in Nizmat, in southern Mauritania. Way nala, kagne nala… souma danana fata dale / I call upon you and wonder about you… If I am overwhelmed, come to my aid. The town holds special significance for Khadr Sufism. An annual pilgrimage there is conducted to this day. The rhythm is buoyantly funky; the mood is sombre, reined-in, foreboding. Punctuated by peals of thunder, Mbene sings with restrained, intense reverence; huskily confidential, steadfast. Nanu dem ba Nimzat, dé ba sali khina / Let us go to Nimzat, to seal our devotion.

Junko Tange's second and final album is a minimalistic, phantasmagoric masterpiece of distant, dreamlike voices woven through pulsating, dubbed-out drum machines, synths and static, originally issued by Osaka's Vanity Records in 1981. Did this unassuming dental student (who vanished from the music world following this release) inadvertently invent dub techno? You be the judge. Label head Yuzuru Agi said this was his favorite Vanity release, and it's not hard to see why. Remastered by Stephan Mathieu from brand new transfers of the miraculously well preserved original analog tapes, this fully authorized 2LP (@45rpm) is the definitive edition of this landmark electronic work. Packaged in a deluxe, gatefold Stoughton tip-on jacket.

Gondwana Records is pleased to announce ‘Interlude’, the second album from Estonian-born, London-based composer and pianist Hanakiv. Showcasing an expanded sound, the compositions trace a journey of overcoming the past, unfolding into a seductively unconventional style imbued with hope and a therapeutic quality. Existing in a liminal space between genres, Interlude , the second album from composer, pianist and now singer Hanakiv is as mysterious as it’s seductively unconventional, with piano, often prepared, only one of its elements, both analogue and electronic. First inspired by “those crystallised moments where time almost stands still, pain hasn’t yet fully set in, and happiness is still just a glimpse,” it provides, all the same, “a sense of hope that standing still is part of living.” Interlude’s range is further intimated by its contributors, including Portico Quartet’s Milo Fitzpatrick, who, as well as playing double bass throughout, co-wrote the refreshed long-term live favourite, ‘Intro’, and the eloquent closer, Stillness’. Also present are saxophonist Pille-Rite Rei, cellist Joanna Gutowska, violinist Gabriel Green, and PIKE on drums, helping capture the instances Hanakiv calls “in-betweens”. Unpredictable, unfathomable, candid and carefree, Interlude embodies flaws embraced as well as senses regained. This record is a product of creative and personal revelation, earned only when one’s true self.

Award-winning composer and producer Sarathy Korwar to release new album celebrating the melodic power of the drum ensemble Sarathy Korwar, genre-breaking drummer, producer and composer, announces the release of his seventh album, There Is Beauty, There Already, out on Otherland on 7th November 2025. Celebrating the melodic power of the drum ensemble, the album follows his 2022 Indofuturist manifesto KALAK with a deeply immersive longform suite of percussion-led compositions. Playing as a 40-minute suite of hypnotic and transcendent drum improvisations, the album beats through a repetitive, circular structure that brings to mind Indian folk music, jazz drum ensembles like Max Roach’s M’Boom and the contemporary classical minimalism of Terry Riley and Steve Reich. From the undulating bass tones of the tabla to the tonal varieties of South Indian clay pot ghatam, the snare drum snap of the drum kit, and shades of electronic texture through the Buchla Easel, Korwar’s ensemble bubbles and flows through a stream of steady rhythm, forever in motion like the ceaseless energy of a river.

“The album is me finding my voice as a composer again and going back to the thing I know best, which is the drums,” Korwar says. “It’s me falling back in love with percussion and expressing just how melodic and emotive it can be. Unlike my other albums that have often engaged with weighty themes like migration, identity and futurism, this is a raw act of placing myself front and centre – letting the drums speak instead.”

Written and recorded over four days at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios, Korwar is joined by drummers Photay, Magnus Mehta, and Joost Hendrickx. Setting up an array of drums in the live room – from drum kit to tabla, marimba, balafon, udu and ghatam – Korwar gave himself and his instrumentalists free reign to flow through and play whatever complimented their ever-developing music, while triggered attachments to synthesisers and the Buchla Easel added unexpected elements of electronic texture. "By day three, we realised that we kept coming back to this single, repeated 40-minute pattern, which was locking us in and making us hypnotised by its rhythm," Korwar says. "I decided to do multiple takes of that idea to build a structure – and that’s what you ultimately hear on the record." A riposte to our flitting attention spans, the album is designed to be played from start to finish as a singular, longform suite of music, evoking a constant sense of motion and intent. Drawing on the idea of repetition to the point of going beyond monotony and into the unknown – like a word repeated so many times it loses meaning – the record becomes a remarkable exploration of rhythm as trance and transformation. Exploding onto the international jazz scene with his 2016 Ninja Tune debut Day to Day, Korwar has released four albums exploring everything from the folk music of the Indian Sidi community to hip-hop, electronics, contemporary jazz and Indian classical music. He won the 2020 AIM Award for Best Independent Album and MOJO’s Jazz Album of the Year for 2019’s spoken word-influenced More Arriving, as well as being nominated at the Jazz FM and Worldwide Awards and in 2023 won the Songlines Award for Best Album (Asia/Pacific) with KALAK.

As a musician and producer, meanwhile, he has collaborated with Shabaka Hutchings and producer Hieroglyphic Being on 2017’s A.R.E. Project, as well as releasing a collaborative album with Auntie Flo in 2022, and forming jazz supergroup FLOCK with Bex Burch, Tamar Osborn, Danalogue and Al MacSween. He is also currently a member of sitarist Anoushka Shankar’s band and produced and co-wrote her 2025 album, Chapter III: Return to Light. Almost a decade on from his debut, There Is Beauty, There Already sees Korwar producing some of his most personal and vulnerable work to date. From the album cover – a grid of self-portraits taken at his local Co-Op checkout over the past five years, “a ritual story of my life in images” – to an accompanying, self-written poem reflecting on beauty, the record marks a new direction. It also signals the launch of Korwar’s own label, Otherland. “It’s a home for my own future music and music from others that doesn’t tick many boxes – that doesn’t have a motherland or fatherland of its own," he says. "It’s about embracing this music as it is, finding the beauty in it and recognising it, just as the album title says." The album will launch with an exclusive show at The ICA on 15 November 2025 as part of the London Jazz Festival, where Korwar will expand his ensemble to a dozen drummers, guiding live improvisations through the record’s percussive textures from start to finish. There Is Beauty, There Already is released on Otherland on 7th November 2025, distributed worldwide by !K7.

Following two 12-inch singles released via the self-run label Plastic & Sounds, which launched unexpectedly this past July, the culmination of their work to date—the album Silent Way, comprising ten tracks—will be released on 27th March as a coloured vinyl 2LP (gatefold sleeve/33RPM/limited press) and digitally.Mastering and record cutting by Rashad Becker in Berlin. The artwork centres on photographer Yusuke Yamatani's work, with Satoshi Suzuki—who handles all P&S releases—constructing the overall aesthetic.Last October, they appeared on Resident Advisor's popular series “RA Podcast”, with audio from their world premiere live performance in April 2023 released. They held the “Plastic & Sounds” label launch party at Shibuya WWW. In January 2026, they performed a live set of their acclaimed album “Haet” at the venue's New Year's party.This release comes amidst growing international acclaim, with their previous album ‘Discipline’ featured in Pitchfork's ‘The 30 Best Electronic Albums of 2025’, and one of their signature tracks, ‘Butterfly Effect’, selected for RA (Resident Advisor)'s ‘The Best Electronic Tracks of 2000-25’.

Welcome to the world of Edward Blankman, a retired dentist who wrote elegant, minimalist jazz in obscurity circa 1970.

At least that’s the story. In truth, Edward Blankman’s Cape Cod Cottage is the 2021 concept album from Echo Park composer Brendan Eder.

A tender, wistful follow up to 2020’s To Mix With Time, the Cape Cod Cottage sound evokes the spirit of Erik Satie, Miles Davis with Gil Evans, and Stevie Wonder, balanced with the accessibility of 1960s lounge-exotica.

Eder created Blankman’s story to channel his own grief, with bittersweet tenderness. Read the liner notes (or watch the mini-doc), and you’ll be transported to the quiet shores of Cape Cod, where a lonely retiree mourns his late wife, Natalie, with walks in nature and evenings at his Wurlitzer.

The story is brought to life with a meticulously crafted package sporting classic liner notes, faux 1970s photographs documenting Edward with the musicians (taken during the actual session), a make-believe jazz label, and a commissioned oil painting of Edward’s cottage.

Eder brought together a dream line up with a ton of chemistry for the project; drummer Christian Euman (Jacob Collier), saxophonist Josh Johnson (Jeff Parker, Leon Bridges), and bassist Alex Boneham (Billy Childs), who all studied together at the Hancock Institute of Jazz. Rounding out the group is flutist Sarah Robinson, a recurring player in Eder’s ensemble, and Edward Blankman (Brendan) on the Wurlitzer.

The cast was booked for a single date with coveted engineer Michael Harris (Kamasi Washington, Angel Olsen) at famed Electro-Vox Recording Studios. To create realism for Edward’s story, the charts were purposefully withheld from the musicians until they arrived at the studio. The result is an authentic and natural performance delivered by players at the top of their game, captured on lauded vintage equipment including the legendary Neve-8028 console.

Cape Cod Cottage will be released on September 10th including a gatefold vinyl.

Released in 1982 on Trumpett, the Colonial Vipers cassette offered an extensive snapshot of the Dutch home-taping scene at its creative peak. One of the earliest compilations of its kind, it brought together a diverse array of underground artists, nearly all contributing exclusive tracks. For this reissue, 13 of these rare pieces have been carefully selected, highlighting the experimental energy that defined the era. Naturally, it features core Trumpett artists Ende Shneafliet, capturing the spirit of the early ‘80s experimentation with their otherworldly minimal synth composition and Doxa Sinistra, blending cold wave and electronics in ways that remain strikingly fresh today. Also present are acts such as Van Kaye & Ignit, Nice Circles and The Actor, whose minimal and infectious tracks epitomize the DIY synth ethos of the period. Additional contributors like Genetic Factor, Det Wiehl, De Fabriek and Muziekkamer offer textured, atmospheric pieces that blur the line between the avant-garde and concrete industrial sound works. For the first time ever on vinyl, this revised edition preserves the energy, eerie atmospheres and mechanical beats that made the original cassette a hidden gem of the European underground. Carefully mastered to ensure every nuance of these pioneering tracks is fully realized, it is a must-have for minimal wave enthusiasts and anyone fascinated by the innovative sounds of the early Dutch post-punk scene.

Collected Works and War of the Martian Ghosts is the definitive recorded collection of living Chicago DIY legend, Dr. Charles Joseph Smith. Born on Chicago's southside in 1970, Smith is a lifelong resident of the Beverly neighborhood who went on to earn 3 degrees in piano (Bachelor's, Master's, and Doctorate) and perform as a concert pianist in 5 countries (USA, Italy, Germany, France and Hungary). The album also marks the first archival release from Chicago’s Sooper Records.

All of the music here is being made widely available for the first time. This 90-minute collection is compiled from 30 years of Charles’ self-released original music spanning concert piano, electroacoustic experimentation, electronic beats, free improvisation, and two instrumental sketches of his evolving sci-fi opera, War of the Martian Ghosts (a 2023 electronic realization, and a 2018 piano realization). This double Vinyl / Triple CD Collector’s Edition comes with an extensive Insert Booklet containing 9000 words including poetry, interviews, quotes, 30 archival photographs, and extensive liner notes on the life and work of Charles Joseph Smith written by Sooper co-founder Glenn Curran (edited by Sadie Dupuis). This is a piece of Chicago music history.

Dr. Charles Joseph Smith’s remarkable story begins with a mute child’s gift for music, and the purposeful way he nurtured this talent to become both life practice and raison d'être. Charles recounts this artistic journey in his autobiography, The 88 Keys that Opened Doors, a self-published book that chronicles a life in which music was (and still is) the primary key to overcoming immense challenges posed by Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD).

His career as a musician starts in the church, reaches into the international concert piano circuit, and eventually settles to bear strange fruit in Chicago’s experimental underground. Along the way, Charles Joseph Smith’s compositional voice absorbed and metabolized popular music spanning pop to jazz, the gospel of the church, the canon of the classical conservatory, modern dance scores, and the rule-shattering experimentalism of his city’s DIY subculture, where he has been a mainstay for over 30 years. Since the mid-1990s, Charles has been performing, dancing, and selling his self-published musical and written works in person, often at the local shows he frequents. He is known around Chicago as a living symbol of the power of music, and of the beloved spirit of community at the heart of DIY. This is the definitive collection of his original recordings—though it would be impossible to ever encompass the galaxies of music, poetry, and prose penned by the prolific Dr. Charles Joseph Smith.