MUSIC

2023 marks the tenth year of Music From Memory; a decade of groundbreaking archival releases, cross-generational collaborations and long-standing creative partnerships with our ever-expanding community of artists. To celebrate this milestone, earlier this year we asked our roster of artists to submit a piece of music for an anniversary compilation. As submissions gradually came in, we were blown away by what we received and slowly began to piece them together into what was to become “10”. Featuring work from artists who were present during the formation of the label, such as Gigi Masin, Joan Bibiloni and Michal Turtle, as well as artists like The Zenmenn, RAMZi and Dea, who have helped the label expand over subsequent years, “10” serves as a natural bookmark of where we are musically, whilst simultaneously reflecting on the label's rich musical past. In keeping with the Music From Memory ethos, the music of “10” spans both time and space, with submissions ranging from Vito Ricci's 'Da Hamptons' (1985) to Yu Su & J. Wilson's 'Mitti Atar' (2023). It crosses the globe, with a total of 10 countries represented across 17 tracks. The final result is an immersive musical compilation that flows perfectly from start to finish. Tragically, during the last few weeks of finalising MFM066, label co-owner Jamie Tiller passed away in a sudden accident. “10” was always intended to be a way to reflect on the journey of Music From Memory. The fact that it is now also one of the last releases that the team all worked on together adds a whole other level of reflection and makes it all the more special.

“Trash Can Lamb” is a new solo album from Akron, OH-based multi instrumentalist Keith Freund. For the better part of twenty years, Freund has been producing intimate, shape-shifting music on his own and as part of collaborative projects such as Trouble Books, Lemon Quartet, and Aqueduct Ensemble. Here, he concocts a heady, homespun broth of analog synthesis, bit-reduced sampling, piano, standup bass, saxophone, and location recordings, arriving at a loose and evocative set of songs. Throughout the album, we hear 8-bit experimental delays mangling airy acoustic materials, denaturalizing them into primitive loop structures while retaining their golden-hued, melodic cores. The sputters, hisses, and croaks of handmade electronics nuzzle up to wistful piano and saxophone ruminations; the pure pandemonium of chaotic triangle wave patching and filtered noise settles into the serenity of a backyard dusk full of spring peepers (or maybe they’re crickets…). It’s in the space between the ragtag and rough-hewn and the romantic and yearning that Freund situates these compositions; it’s a peek inside a workshop that sits atop the trees, branches scraping on the windows, bluejays who just won’t knock it off, a table fan spinning slower and slower, its cheap blades covered in dust.

For the first time, The Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble’s seminal album "Mr. Machine" is being re-issued on coloured vinyl. This is a record that put them alongside names as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, but with considerably more groove. More than anything, Daniel, Jan and Paul are keen that the Brandt Brauer Frick Ensemble are not written off as a curiosity: “Often people focus a lot on this whole "cross-over" aspect,” says Brauer. “We wish people would simply notice we have good chords, melodies etc. and take the music as it is. Because we make it the way we feel, and not for other, let's say purely conceptual reasons. Some only seem interested in how it’s made. Some reviewers perceive us as minimal techno, some as modern classical, some as nu jazz and so on. But we don’t divide the world into techno and non-techno.”

Mammal Hands fifth album ‘Gift from the Trees’ offers a fresh perspective on the unique trio’s singular music. The first to be recorded in a residential studio, the band enjoyed the opportunity to go late into the night searching for a deeper, more organic experience, closer to both their writing process but also their trance-like live performances. While some of the music was pre-composed and had even been performed live, the band also enjoyed the opportunity to improvise ideas in the studio. There was also a conscious decision to move away from the sound and ambiance of the recording studio, with the band opting to engineer the record with their go-to live engineer Benjamin Capp before mixing the sessions with Greg Freeman in Berlin. The idea was to try and capture more of the energy of the band’s captivating shows. The Welsh environment outside the studio doors seeped into the music presented on Gift from the Trees, with two recording sessions (one in winter and one in the spring) bringing different moods: one bleak and wintery, the other more hopeful and bright – an energy that permeates through tracks such as Kernel and Dimu.

A 14 minute solo piano piece from Terre Thaemlitz alongside an incredible 15 minute Dead End House mix from DJ Sprinkles on the second in this two-part vinyl series, proper head-melters the pair of them...  Presenting vinyl versions of the bonus reworks to his 43 minute Deproduction album track Admit It’s Killing You (And Leave), the A-side includes Terre’s haunting 14 minute Piano Solo, where he drops the unsettling backdrop of samples to leave the keys suspended in reflective space, reverberating in plangent overtones which take on a starker effect if you care to play it at 33rpm.   The B-side is Sprinkles’ uncanny, brilliant Dead End house mix, a more percussive adjunct to the House Arrest mix off EP1, framing traces of the original vocal and keys in a sumptuous, rolling and swinging deep house workout full of rustling congas and lustrous low end that marks up among her most affective, especially in its closing minutes.

Watch-Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) (Piano Solo) (Vinyl Edit)
Watch-Admit It's Killing You (And Leave) (Sprinkles' Dead End)

The return of Terre Thaemlitz / DJ Sprinkles with a first solo vinyl release in over five years, features an exclusive 17 minute vinyl edit of 'Names Have Been Changed’ from the Deproduction album and DJ Sprinkles’ incredible House Arrest mix - which totally destroys us each and every time...

Asking pertinent questions about the hypocritical nature of relations between LGBT agendas and Western Humanist notions of the nuclear family, Terre’s Deproduction sensitively yet unflinchingly broaches topics usually considered taboo by a mainstream who are all too happy to pick and choose parts of radical, fringe culture to fetishise, while swerving the bigger questions proposed by those niches.

In the vinyl edit of Names Have Been Changed, exclusive to this LP, Terre contracts the original, 43 minute blend of strings and unsettling scenes of domestic violence into a 17 minute version, beautifully suspended in the cut at 45rpm in order to best represent the work’s unique democracy of frequency - from the muffled row heard next door, to its hyperrealistic avian chirrups and modestly spare, foregrounded strings. 

On DJ Sprinkles' extended House Arrest mix on the B-Side, Terre’s ideas feel even more radical when juxtaposed with a sublime deep house production, placing them in context of what was and still can be a radical artform when done with insight and consideration. The result is one of this decade’s most sublime yet unsettling house tracks, bar none.

sample-Names Have Been Changed (Sound/Reading for Incest Porn) (Vinyl Edit)
sample-Names Have Been Changed (Sprinkles' House Arrest)

'Imerro' is a collection of song odes to both heat and desire, closely felt. Its title literally presented itself to Diab from a random page contained in a poem by Ezra Pound found in the book ‘The Imagist Poem’. Searching for its meaning, Diab discovered that Imerro is “a Greek word for ‘desire for, I desire you’, yet nothing could substantiate its truth. “It made sense, almost like it had chosen me. An obscure word for Desire, one that might not even exist, or is so ancient that nobody really remembers it meaning anything. It's just a sound, like an album.” Imerro finds Caton at his most expressive and free-spirited. Inviting the music to find him, almost by osmosis, foregoing any preconceptions of playing any instrument he is unfamiliar with or regrets not learning during adolescence. This is music for wide screens: the result is an undeniably evocative, moving and mysterious voyage. Imerro was recorded in late July and August of 2021 at Risque Disque Studio in Cedar, BC, during the summer’s unprecedented second “heat dome”, which saw temperatures soaring to over 40 degrees. Recorded with regular collaborator and engineer Jonathan Paul Stewart, the pair journeyed by boat to the studio to a place with minimal distraction with a plan of “simple ecstatic improvisation.” Diab explains: “I wanted to place myself in a space for creation with little thematic pretence, with the belief that music ‘shows its face’ as you move along. I would pick up an instrument, whether I had experience playing it or not, and make a sound. If it wanted to be played, it would play.” ‘Ourselves At Least’, the rhythmic album opener gracefully leaps and bounds with a human-like metronome at its core, capturing a rush of elatedness felt by Diab over the course of its late night creation. ‘Lunar Barge’ bursts into life with tone-bending bow strikes that glide across Diab’s guitar towards a climatic peak before the track drops into an electronic/acoustic trance. Inspired in part by the rhythmical works of Huun-Huur-Tu and the animated cello play remindful of Arthur Russell. “Lunar Barge is a track for a dry, hot night in the forest (which it quite literally was.). I roamed around the floors of the studio picking up any instrument standing out in the moment, and tried to see if it had anything to say.” ‘The Excuse of Fiction’ sees Diab return to free-flowing guitar play, the chosen instrument of his youth. He loops layers to form an ethereal backbone before plucking further melodies from the air on top. The result is a cinematic guitar-laden expanse brimming with optimism and nostalgia. The title references a quote by Zizek: “We need the excuse of a fiction to stage what we really are.” Themes of remembrance, yearning and desire pervade the album's 9-tracks with a palpable presence as we reach ‘Quatsino Sound’, named after an inlet on Northern Vancouver Island where Diab grew up. It features hoopoe birdcalls which were sampled from a found cassette tape of African sounds before being randomized until it became rhythmic, then embellished with synth lines, bass drops, and bowed layovers. The album centres around the nocturnal ‘Crypsis’ with Diab sleepily playing notes on a switched-off Wurlitzer before dampened piano chords, bow scrapes, and noisy glitches reverberate. ‘Erratum’ erupts with untamed force from a war cry of screaming saxophone layers reminiscent of Colin Stetson. Its visceral thirst and energy seem to be a response to the heat of the night and Diab’s urge to play the instrument he loved but had yet learnt. ‘Tiny Umbrellas’, an improvised pass of banjo, bowed guitar and ethereal modular synths breathes a contemplative pause before ‘Surge Savard’ chimes in. This whirlwind closer started life as a longform jam under the influence of psychedelics; its modular synth, air organ, guitar and sax lines were initially improvised with final touches made at Watch Yer Head studio.

Duval Timothy's latest album Help, his most ambitious work to date, sees him collaborate with co-producer Rodaidh McDonald (King Krule, The XX) and Marta Salogni (Bjork), with collaborations from Lil Silva, Melanie Faye, Vegyn, Desta Haile, Mr Mitch, Dave Okumo, and Twin Shadow amongst others. Recorded in London and Los Angeles, it reveals the artists' experience traversing the meshes of the music industry, mental health, YouTube self-help videos, and the healing he discovered through friendship and collaboration. Duval Timothy is a multidisciplinary artist, whose practise is centred around colour and involves the use of music, photography, textiles, painting, sculpture, design, cooking and video. In between delivering a celebrated cookbook for Penguin Books, and an interactive installation at Tate Modern Turbine Hall, Duval makes music, which is sampled by the likes of Solange and Loyle Carner.

Delphine Dora is a prolific composer, improviser and musician who has released on a plethora of labels including Recital, Morc, Sloow Tapes, Feeding Tube, Okraïna and more, and ‘Le Grand Passage’ is her Modern Love debut, a stunning set of songs for piano and voice, recorded in one take without overdubs or edits. We don’t think theres much, if anything, quite like it, but if you’ve been snagged by transcendent, advanced and amateur music by Andrew Chalk, Virginia Astley, Dominique Lawalrée, or Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, we think this one might just be for you. In an act of pure expression, Delphine Dora recorded the 8 songs of ‘The Great Passage’ in a single take, succumbing to a whirlwind of inspiration that transported her beyond the material world. Baroque paradigms bleed into fragile, introspective mantras, expressed through a made up language of existential yearning and channeled through piano and voice. It’s music that caresses the sublime, made without any premeditation. Delphine was nearing the end of a three-day prepared piano residency when an technician stepped in to tune her grand piano for her final performance. He removed the objects from the strings and fixed the pitch, leaving Dora with a freshly tuned instrument. Mesmerised by its new sound, she proceeded to switch on her recorder and pour out her soul, channeling, in her own words, "something greater than myself". The result is some of the most unusual but elevated material the prolific composer, improviser and multi-instrumentalist has ever recorded, rooted in a deep understanding of European musical history but willing to push at its boundaries, questioning the earthly logic of life and death, asceticism and impiety. Glistening imperfections lash 'The Great Passage' to the physical world, but Dora - seemingly possessed as she quivers in a fictional dialect - lets her fantasies intensify her spirit, lifting the music towards the heavens. It's not sacred music, per se, but it is unashamedly mystical. On the luxurious, languid opening, Dora dissolves eerily familiar romantic piano motifs into an attentive ceremony, singing with charged emotion. Her words aren't really decipherable, but their resonance vibrates beyond language; it's striking to hear how confident she is in vulnerability. She lets the piano wrap into her voice, connecting us directly to a unique mode of emotional expression by urging us - the listener - to project our own meaning onto her abstracted words. Dora refers to the act of improvisation itself as a way to indicate "the fragility of being”, and as her words blur in and out of focus, dipping from a hoarse croak to a choking wail, she places herself at the very edge of musical formality, questioning strictures put in place to suffocate self-expression. Her music has often been labeled "outsider", but here she sounds intimate and interconnected, more self-consciously candid than anything traditional might have allowed. She conjures affecting, plainspoken poetry, like a bedside diary written in a hypnagogic, delirious state: a stream-of-unconsciousness, channelling the beyond. The album title connects to a book dedicated to French philosopher and activist Simone Weil, who famously pored over global religions to ascertain spiritual truths. To Weil, meditation was a passage to access mystical experience, or a bridge between humanity and divinity. In Dora's hands, this idea is a corridor between herself and the listener, a liminal place where she's able to address feelings without making anything explicit. The title, of course, also refers to life, its impermanence, finitude, and fragility, presenting the complex, multi-dimensionality of being through one of the most undiluted, unbridled set of songs imaginable.

"In the core of the album’s creation, lies my fascination with unveiling the piano overtones by harnessing the properties of complex systems, which emerge when competing oscillations of strings interact with room acoustics, microphone placements, the piano's pedals, and its soundboard. Through long forms, incremental gestures, and nuanced timbral artifacts, the album aims to distort the perception of time and invite an introspective experience of multiple and expanded temporalities." - Zoe Efstathiou. "Following collaborations with Egil Kalman and Oda Dyrnes, Greek pianist Zoe Efstathiou investigates chaotic overtone systems on this pecuilar solo piano excursion, teasing inscrutable, hypnotic drones that sound utterly alien. RIYL Akira Rabelais, John Also Bennett, Kassel Jaeger." - Boomkat. Bio: Zoe Efstathiou, pianist and electro-acoustic composer, originally from Greece, has lived in Sweden since 2015. Her interest shifts between the intricate relationships of the overtones of acoustic instruments, electro-acoustic textures, and the sonic potential of light installations. Her music interpolates the momentary with the ever-evolving, exploring ideas related to time, expectation and memory. Physical copies of the ltd LP is available from Boomkat, A Musik, Discreet Music, etc!

"Stunning recordings from Norwegian pianist Anja Lauvdal, who follows-up last year’s Laurel Halo-produced ‘From a Story Now Lost’ with an album of improvisations made on a Wurlitzer electric piano, featuring the great Lasse Marhaug on mastering duties. Pastoral, personal, heartbreaking gear that’s required listening if you’re into Harold Budd, Loren Connors, Dominique Lawalrée, Robert Wyatt, Vincent Gallo." - Boomkat

"Night Rhythms proudly presents a first-time vinyl edition of Toshimi Mikami’s elusive gem of 90’s ambient “気舞 - Quimai” (“Chi Dance”). Released on CD in 1996 and again in 2008, this double LP version marks the first time the album will be readily available outside of Japan. Mikami states: “I made this album mainly as background music for Qi Gong, Tai Chi, yoga, etc., but I also want people to use it for various other kinds of relaxation.” The music reflects the practice of these deliberate, meditative disciplines with spacious motifs carried along by a steady rhythmic current. In his liner notes for the original CD edition, which are reprinted here, Mikami’s one-time bandmate Harumi Hosono writes of the evolution of the ambient/“organic” strain in 20th century music that “eyes, ears, and hearts opened like never before may now extend beyond notions to the specks of the natural world.” Ambient music isn’t music stripped of meaning, but rather its meaning finds form in our connection to the most basic elements of our environment, as distinguished from what Hosono calls the “endlessly exhausted economic principles” of modern pop music.

“Quimai” exists at the intersection of ambient, new age, and classic minimalism, with a gentle synthetic palette of global instrumentation layered and braided into fully orchestrated compositions. Relaxing though it may be, it’s a very focused sort of relaxation that encourages active listening rather than the blissful “tuning out” that some ambient music can inspire. Opening track “十六夜の月 Izayoi No Tsuki” immediately calls to mind Steve Reich’s work with its insistent 6/4 pulse and prominent woodwinds and percussion. “玉響 Ai Ai” continues on a similar footing, with shards of sunlight glinting off an otherwise untroubled and tireless stream. The enchanting marimba ostinato of “玉響 Tamayura” has a subaquatic quality, as if the listener is now witnessing the events on the water’s surface from below. Mikami follows it with “早乙女 Saotome,” a carefree piece that sheds the vestiges of tension present in the preceding tracks and features a playfully cascading gamelan figure. All underlying rhythmic churn falls away with album-closer “天の小道 Ama No Komichi,” an airy piece that maintains a structure similar to its sibling works while coming closest to the new age tradition, breathing freely without ever standing still. One can imagine Mikami or other practitioners enacting the final movements of their daily exercise — body tired but limber, mind reset.

This gatefold double LP edition is mastered from the original source by Travis Nordahl with lacquers cut at Palomino Records (USA). Track 3 “玉響 Tamayura” has been slightly abridged to fit the constraints of the format. Artistic elements of both CD editions have been combined by Joe Bastardo with additional nature photography courtesy of Night Rhythms Recordings owner Greg Holly. Liner notes by Toshimi Mikami and Harumi Hosono." 

What Is Not Strange? is the first full-length solo album by Los Angeles-based composer Tashi Wada, comprising his most far-reaching and impassioned music to date. Written and recorded over a period that encompassed the death of his father and the birth of his daughter, the album sees Wada reflecting inward to explore broad narratives—being alive, mortality, finding one’s place in the world—through new modes of ecstatic, song-based expression. While the denser forms, stark contrasts, and overt surreality may carry a different weight than Wada’s earlier work, which elicited perceptual effects with minimal means, the heart of What Is Not Strange? is still in experimentation and unforeseen outcomes.

With Lucifer, Kompakt presents an album of rare beauty from two masters of modern music. A family affair, it’s a collaboration between the Italian father-and-son duo of Luciano Michelini and Lorenzo Dada, whose combined histories bring to Lucifer a depth of experience alongside clarity of vision and a finely tuned, neatly developed combined compositional voice. A lovely, beguiling suite of music that combines the electronic and the acoustic, the urban and the pastoral, its gorgeous night-eye vision and tender melancholy sits neatly within the Kompakt universe, while offering the curious listener some rich new perspectives. There is already plenty to know both artists by. Lorenzo Dada creates across multiple fields – a techno producer and DJ who has already worked with the likes of Jay Haze, Fete, Leo Benassi, and Der, he’s released a small clutch of stylish, smartly designed EPs, and a solo album, Second Life (2018). His complementary background in classical music and composition informs his ensemble project, Tears Of Blue (who appear on Lucifer), where Dada paints with neo-classical tones for a quartet of violin, viola, cello and grand piano, supplemented by electronics for live performance. Luciano Michelini’s history is yet richer. He may be best known, to many, for his piece “Frolic”, the theme to Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm series; it was also sampled by Snoop Dogg for 2022’s “Crip Ya Enthusiasm”. But there’s much more to Michelini’s story. A successful soundtrack composer, Michelini both studied and taught at the Conservatoro di Santa Cecilia, and worked for RCA from the sixties to the eighties; his soundtracks from this period are gorgeous examples of the form, particularly his work for Il Decamerone Nero (1972), L’Isola Degli Uomini Pesce (1979), and the devastatingly gorgeous Dimensione Donna (1977). In the eighties, Michelini and his wife Anna Gutling founded the Electronic Music Division studio and academy in Rome, which is where the majority of Lucifer was recorded. Dada reflects on the experience: “We never worked together before, so it was all new for both of us,” with Michelini adding, “I truly love this experience with my son. He’s a talented pianist and composer. I am not very familiar with electronic music nowadays, but we did it fluently.” There’s certainly a familial energy at play through Lucifer, and you can hear how Dada and Michelini, through exploration and experiment, find a shared language, balancing Dada’s tendency toward minimalism, and Michelini’s composerly voice. Lucifer flows as a suite that interweaves electronic music with acoustic instruments: the lonely sigh of saxophone; Michelini’s lush, verdant piano; the weeping strings of Tears Of Blue (recorded at the studio of Michelini’s friend, the late Maestro, Ennio Morricone). These multiple voices are located within the electronic sighs and swarms from Dada’s kit; there are moments of propulsion, and passages of lambent drift, where the album revels in its tonal sweetness. If it flows so effortlessly, that’s because Lucifer was designed that way, as a suite or a sonata of sorts. And the title? Dada reflects, “Lucifer was an angel who decided not to be one anymore. The miracle of life is that we can decide what we want to be, even if we are born as angels or vice versa.” This feels somehow apposite: there’s certainly something of the transformative, and the transportive, in Lucifer, a unique family collaboration of rare poetry and sensitivity, where two generations meet in the modern crucible that is the electronic music studio.

Dear reader & listener, After being out of print for several years, Duval Timothy’s phenomenal ‘Brown Loop’ has finally been reissued. Recorded in New York in the winter months of 2016, this brand new edition features a slightly adjusted track listing. The release date is 2nd of October 2020, which happens to be the multidisciplinary artist’s birthday. Duval has asked me to write a few words about his record. I often find myself listening to Duval’s music when travelling. On an aeroplane for example, where the comforting piano pieces are set starkly against the sound of the world passing by, the constant engine humming, air conditioning running. Or when I’m walking through a city I’ve not been to before, the music blending into the continuous noise of cars and motorbikes, anchoring me when I find myself in unknown surroundings. Grounding me, one note at a time, in contrast to a city that does the exact opposite. Duval’s compositions bring a sense of comfort where there is detachment. It’s the soundtrack for an immigrant (such as myself), alienated from wherever he came, but someone who also doesn’t fully belong to the place he set off to. I heard Duval describe the music of Brown Loop as ascending a mountain, and after you reached the top you come down to the other end. Through rhythmic repetitive patterns, the music builds. Within the pieces, melodies stray away from the theme, into unknown territories, but always find their way back to a comfortable home. Most elaborately this happens on my favourite piece, Hairs. The patterns and melodies on pieces such as Through The Night and (recently added to the vinyl version) G are stripped down to their very essence. It is not just jazz, it’s pure hip hop, as the hooks are reminiscent of the shards of melancholy legends like Dilla, Pete Rock and Havoc used in their best work. In terms of repetition, the music is also very techno. And like in all good techno, the patterns (perhaps contrary to popular belief) ooze humanity and emotion. But most of all Duval’s Brown Loop is a very personal record. it takes courage to expose your inner self like that in the most minimal of compositions. But once you find the right notes, the right pattern, music is the most beautiful thing in the world. Martyn Deykers

Lerkenfeldt explores the hallucinatory nature of refraction alongside electroacoustic experiments in the storm water network on ‘Halos Of Perception’ (Shelter Press, 2023). Arrangement of new textures and web-like structure reveal another side to her immersive practice. With friends and guest artists eight works are remixed and represented as a suite for the drains ahead of her first European tour in 2024 on limited edition cassette.

Wind, the natural movement of air - is invisible but perceived through mediums: swaying branches, whistling pipes, blowing hair, clashing wind chimes. Filled with these daily associations with the wind it’s easy to overlook the beauty of the wind itself: an ethereal turbulence of air molecules with their own dynamics, wildly shifting direction and momentum. Celia Hollander’s album 2nd Draft, out November 10th on Leaving Records, is a tribute to the motion of making music: the invisible, forceful current that runs through humanity. In the way wind finds expression in the mediums of leaves, hair or dust, music is an unseeable current with its own energy that finds expression through resonant bodies, vibrating strings, trained fingers, colliding objects and more. 2nd Draft was recorded while Hollander was a composer in residence at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, NE in 2022. While working on multiple projects, she decided to improvise on their upright practice piano for an hour everyday. Writers refer to this type of practice as a “free write:” letting words from the unconscious torrentially fill a duration. Hollander compares these sessions to a sitting meditation: at best the hour soars by, and at worst it can feel like a tedious way to spend time. Once back in Los Angeles, she sifted through the recordings, chose excerpts and digitally marinated and simmered morsels of audio until achieving a desired texture, viscosity and aroma. Hollander considers all released music to be drafts: building from a previous piece and working towards something unknowable in the future. 2nd Draft is literally so: a sequel to DRAFT, the 2017 tape on Leaving Records under her bygone moniker $3.33. Both feature improvised piano, an exception to a more digital-composition based process heard in the rest of her discography. Like a draft of wind - a sudden gust, invisible but felt, something from the outside broken through to the inside - these piano free writes are meant to stir the external and the internal, ruffle the energy of a room, provide a refreshing breeze and surprise with spontaneity.

For Anyone That Knows You, an album of mostly piano solos by Josiah Steinbrick, was recorded not for smoothness or posterity but to emphasize the piano as object, the person playing it, and the moment it sounds. On three of the pieces, the saxophone of Sam Gendel hovers over the piano like a faint change in the light, adding resonance and gentle reinforcement rather than counterpoint. Three others are delicate renditions: “Green Glass” interprets an untitled recording by Quechuan folk musicians Leandro Apaza Romas and Benjamin Clara Quispe; “Elyne Road” abbreviates one of Malian kora master Toumani Diabaté’s most tender compositions; and “Lullaby” is an arrangement of a traditional Creole song, originally recorded in 1954 by the Haitian-American guitarist Frantz Casseus.

Matti Bye is a Swedish composer and pianist with an illustrious catalogue spanning two decades, with numerous soundtracks and releases on Kning Disk, Rotor Records, Tona Serenad and Time Released Sound. He has previously appeared on Northen Electronics via compilations, but Between Darkness and White Snow is his first album for the label. The creation involved playing a 1926 Steinway Grand Piano through his EMS Synthi A. It was recorded onto tape with a vintage Swiss Nagra IV S tape machine giving it a wonderful warm analogue fidelity. We get four shadowy, soul-stirring, brittle ambient pieces traversing light and dark which are a pleasure to get lost inside during the small hours.

A timeless minimal ambient masterpiece that was released only in CDR in 2003.

Opening the window, I look at the light, it connects me to something more vast. Felicia Atkinson’s music always puts the listener somewhere in particular. There are two categories of place that are important to Image Language: the house and the landscape. Inside and outside, different ways of orienting a body towards the world. They are in dialogue, insofar as in the places Atkinson made this record—Leman Lake, during a residency at La Becque in Switzerland, and at her home on the wild coast of Normandy—the landscape is what is waiting for you when you leave the house, and vice-versa. Each threatens—or is it offers, kindly, even promises?—to dissolve the other. Recognizing the normalization of home studios these days, she revisited twentieth-century women artists who variously chose, and were chosen by, their homes as a place to work: the desert retreats of Agnes Martin and Georgia O’Keefe, the life and death of Sylvia Plath. Building a record is like building a house: a structure in which one can encounter oneself, each room a song with its own function in the project of everyday life. At times listening to Image Langage is immediate, something like visiting a house by the sea, sharing the same ground, being invited to witness Atkinson’s acts of seeing, hearing, and reading in a sonic double of the places they occurred. In an aching moment of clarity in “The Lake is Speaking,” a pair of voices emerge out of the primordial murk of piano and organ, accompanying the listener to the edge of a reflective pool that makes a mirror of the cosmos. “I open my feet to fresh dirt, and the wet grass. I hold your hand. You hold his hand. In the distance without any distance. The comets, the stars.” At other times, listening to Image Language is more like being in a theater, the composition a tangle of flickering forms and media that illuminate as best they can the darkness from which we experience it. On “Pieces of Sylvia,” a noirish orchestra drones and clatters beneath and around a montage of vocal images, stretching the listener across time, space, subjectivities. Atkinson says that Image Language is like the fake title of a fake Godard film. There is indeed something cinematic about Atkinson’s work—not cinematic in the sense that it sounds like the score for someone else’s film, but cinematic in the sense that it produces its own images and language and narratives, a kind of deliberate, dimensional world-building in sound. Image Langage is built from instruments recorded as if field recordings, sound-images of instruments conjured from a keyboard, instruments Atkinson treats like characters, what she calls “a fantasy of an orchestra that doesn’t exist.” And then, speaking of Godard, there are the monologues, operating as both experimental-cinematic device and a literary style of narration. Voice can be a writerly anchor or a wisp of a textural presence. Atkinson’s capacious and slippery speech plunges into and out of the compositional depths, shifting shapes, channeling the voices of any number of beings, subjectivities, or elements of her surroundings—not unlike her midi keyboard, able to speak as a vast array of instruments. Image Langage is an environmental record, in the vastest sense of the world. It is about getting lost in places imagined and real; it registers, too, the dizzying feeling of moving between such sites. It puts forth a concept of self that is hopelessly entangled with the rest of the world, born of both the ache of distance and the warmth of proximity. — Thea Ballard, 02.2022

Piotr Kurek’s new album “Smartwoods” is a sprawling root system of tiny melodic phrases that loop and curl around subtly evolving instrumental thickets. The Warsaw-based producer and composer takes his cues from early music, baroque music and experimental jazz, entangling his influences with filigree traces of contemporary computer music and fueling it with sonic vapors from the near future. Made up of seven distinct segments, the album blurs its acoustic and electronic elements into an illusory hedge of abstract sound. Harp, saxophone, clarinet, double bass, voices and guitar twist into computerized processes and synthesizer chirps, creating an uncanny dreamworld where the real isn’t always what it seems. Each player is entwined with the other to create a living, breathing whole. Like Kurek’s painterly 2021 album “World Speaks”, “Smartwoods” is also inspired by visual art - particularly the whimsical work of Algerian-French graphic designer Jean Sariano. The album cover features artwork by Polish painter Tomasz Kowalski, whose shapeshifting creatures and miniature stories aptly reflect the music’s wild fantasy. The first manifestation of “Smartwoods” – a live show at Unsound in Kraków in 2022 – featured animations by Italian artist Francesco Marrello, who put together a visual treatment for the single “Harps”.

Anenon returns with a highly anticipated new album ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’, bearing his most personal, expressive, and arresting works to date. Anenon is the ongoing solo studio and live project of Brian Allen Simon, whom since 2010 has released multiple albums and EPs to critical acclaim, including the highly revered ‘Tongue’ (2018) and ‘Petrol’ (2016). "I feel a kinetic and messy honesty that doesn't exist in any of the other music I've ever made. There is also a sense of being settled, of calm. There is no faking it here.” ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’ is direct, efficient, and unwavering in its immediacy. Anenon departs from the electronics of previous works, and embarks on a reductive, almost entirely acoustic approach consisting of piano, tenor saxophone, bass clarinet, and field recordings. All of the music was improvised with everything recorded as either a first or second take with no edits. Any layering happened fast and in the moment, and yet the sonic architecture of the whole feels both planned and refined. The opener ‘Untitled Skies’ acts as prologue with flourishing solo tenor saxophone and sustained piano lines, before dampened footsteps and bird calls from field recordings echo — a scene is set. The album's undeniably emotive and nocturnal title track follows with sharp poignancy, inspired directly from an ongoing deep connection and dialogue to his LA surroundings. “I would take evening walks in my neighborhood, and I felt in awe of what I deemed an autumnal milky quality of light at dusk. This light felt like a seemingly unending flash, and was something that I wanted to evoke in the playing and meshing of instruments.” Simon shifts focus on ‘Maine Piano’, a beguiling solo piano piece ahead of ‘Night Painting I’, which features further breathy saxophone and bass clarinet counterpoints, embellished with immersive field recordings. Brian also confronts the subject of personal loss and anguish with a deep sincerity as a solemn through-line pervades the album's 11 tracks. Notes are eloquently delivered with grace and the message is one of hope with a palpable human quality. Non-diegetic field recordings were taken in Maine (USA), London (UK), and the Auvergne (FR), and reveal evocative and personal interactions as heard in the album's centre points. ‘As it is When it Appears’ glows with the ambience of French voices resounding an evening's interplay before a spaciously muted piano overtakes. The rained in ‘Champeix’ captivates with a seductive and wild romanticism, played out by its connective saxophone and piano layers, each gliding up and down their respective scales. Swirling bass clarinet lines vigorously pour out of ‘Night Painting II’, and ‘Endings (Solo)’ hits with a virtuosic, yet tender tenor saxophone take. The album closer ‘Sightless Eyes (N16)’ brings everything full circle — after an intro of 5 AM NE London birds singing, piano, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet coalesce in expressive tactilities; a sonic image of an intuitively robust and in the room harmony. The production of ‘Moons Melt Milk Light’ began in the autumn of 2022, and was recorded at home in Silver Lake, Los Angeles, informed in part by an acoustic collaboration with the artist Susan Cianciolo during the vernissage of her 2022 Paris exhibition, RUN 14: FIELD of existence, as well as solo performances mostly at casual non-venues such as wine bars and inns around Europe that same year. It was the combination of these experiences that led Brian to pursue this immediate approach of improvised acoustic instrumentation. Moons Melt Milk Light is a hyper-personal statement contained in a visceral beauty, a compact record of threadbare honesty and musical prowess seldom found in the musical art form. It is a search for light out of dark, for the tangible and tactile, and yet like most art of staying power, the results remain ephemeral and elusive, a beauty just out of reach. “Loss has been a constant (in my life), and I wanted to express a deep acceptance of this, but also a pervasive feeling that these kinds of sadnesses are what beauty is derived from, that it doesn't come from perfection. I find the idea of perfect beauty completely banal. Tension matters.”

Koki Nakano’s new album, Oceanic Feeling, is a celebration of ambiguity. The album’s title is borrowed from an expression coined by the French writer and musician Romain Rolland in 1927. In a letter written to Sigmund Freud, Rolland described the oceanic feeling as “the sensation of eternity, a feeling of being one with the external world as a whole”. While this concept of oneness permeates Nakano’s whole album, the music also deals with his inability to fully live in this so-called "oceanic feeling", capturing thus the composer’s longing, frustration and ultimately search for harmony within his own limitations.