MUSIC

After previous sonic impressions of Unguja and Borneo, Gonçalo F. Cardoso continues his meditative travelogue on island life with Impressões de Várias Ilhas, released via Discrepant. This third chapter draws from time spent across three archipelagos in Macaronesia—Azores, Cape Verde and the Canary Islands—melding field recordings with synthesis to explore the hazy border between real experience and remembered sensation.

Cardoso’s diaristic approach captures the resonance of water caves, black beaches, lagoons, and small-town life, processed into impressionistic vignettes that feel both intimate and unreal. These aren’t grand postcard statements but subtle, atmospheric sketches—never lapsing into sonic tourism but instead conjuring fleeting, liminal states.

From the gentle waves and echoing tones of ‘Bufadeiros de São Vicente’—not far removed from Beaches & Canyons-era Black Dice—to the eerie ambience of ‘Noite em Rabo de Peixe’ and the musique concrète-leaning unease of ‘Rãs em Xoxo’, Cardoso moves between warmth, strangeness and nostalgia. The closing ‘Salinas de Pedra Lume’ becomes a quiet epic, full of cracked recordings and spectral tones—less a travel document than a haunted reflection on place, memory and disappearance.

This collection, featuring seven pieces from 2011 to 2015, celebrates Noah Creshevsky's 70th year with a fittingly life-affirming and masterful verve. An award-winning composer who has studied with Nadia Boulanger and Luciano Berio, he began composing electronic music in 1971, using the power of circuitry, tape and then digital technology to create a "hyperreal" musical world in which recordings of human performers, both vocalists and instrumentalists, are juxtaposed and recombined in compositions which span eras, cultures and genres. His use of expanded musical palettes arises from an aesthetic of inclusion, guided by an open spirit and an expansive musical sense. The combination of the emotional power of human performances with the precision of computers create real-beyond-real super-performances of surprising control and virtuosity, resulting in a hypothetical and yet very real music, full of drama, humor, and tenderness. This CD, Creshevsky's second release on EM, following the 2004 "Tape Music" compilation, gives ample evidence of both his mastery of digital technology and his profound, empathetic musical instincts. His ability to use the computer to highlight the gifts of human performers is displayed on every track, including a piece which focuses on Japanese vocalist Tomomi Adachi.

+ Standard jewel case. 8P booklet.
+ Liner notes in English and Japanese by composer, critic and independent scholar George Grella, Jr.

The second volume of Invisible Inc’s 10-year anniversary celebrations has landed, hot on the heels of the scorching first volume.

Where Volume 1 focussed on the dub-style, electronic and ambient side of the label’s output, the second volume leans towards the ‘psych’ side of the label.

As has been a consistent pattern with the label in its decade of existence is its ethos of releasing new and exclusive tracks as well as releasing on vinyl pre-existing tracks that only ever saw the light of day in the digital realm. This compilation is no different. Alongside exclusive new material from Anna vs June, E Ruscha V, Banda Magnética, Exotic Gardens, Kanot and a Coyote remix of Sordid Sound System we also have for the first time on vinyl two tracks by Hena and Futurum that went somewhat under the radar first time round and really deserved to be shared with the wider world.

Visionary electroacoustic explorations return as Black Truffle reissues Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, a major work fusing musique concrète and synthesis into emotionally charged sonic landscapes of rare intensity.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new edition of Kassel Jaeger's Fernweh, returning François J. Bonnet's electroacoustic project to the label five years after the acclaimed Meith (BT069). Originally released on Giuseppe Ielasi and Jennifer Veillerobe's impeccably curated Senufo Editions in 2012, Fernweh stands near the beginning of the gradual expansion of Bonnet's approach after the austere acoustic textures of Aerae and Algae (both released on Senufo), leading to the lush, layered environments of recent solo works on Shelter Press and the epic electronic expeditions undertaken in duo projects with Stephen O'Malley and Jim O'Rourke.

A major work in the Kassel Jaeger oeuvre, stretching over two LP sides, Fernweh draws together synthesized and musique concrète materials into a drifting assemblage. Its title's meaning is close to the concept of 'Wanderlust', fitting for this music that moves freely and unexpectedly between what Bonnet calls 'climates'. Beginning with fizzing electronics whose rhythm of gradual approach suggests breaking waves, the clinical atmosphere is soon haunted by intangible traces of lived reality. Textures call up wind, water, insects, the crunch of feet on sand or the clinking of glasses, yet they can never be identified with any certainty. At times these concrete elements possess a vivid 'closeness'; at others, the sounds shade into a formless distance. Though the listener forms no clear picture from the concrete sounds, these elements aerate the music, lending it their space. Drawing from the rigorous formal language and conceptual apparatus of the French musique concrète tradition—with which Bonnet, as director of the INA GRM and researcher into its deepest archival recesses, is intimately familiar—the music of Kassel Jaeger is equally informed by how underground experimental music has rethought electroacoustic techniques, with Fernweh at times calling up the grit and grime of para-industrial eccentrics like Maurizio Bianchi or the Toniutti brothers, and at other moments suggesting the slow-moving grandeur of early Olivia Block.

Subtle features of dynamics and rhythm act as connective tissue between the numerous 'scenes', with wave-like envelopes, rapid pulsations, and short, tape-loop patterns all recurring throughout the piece, shared ambiguously between electronic and concrete sounds. Amid these shifting, often inharmonic textures, the electronic elements sometimes cohere into melodic shapes and chordal patterns, cutting through the fog in distorted arcs or underpinning the layered surface with slow-moving harmonies.

Like his friend and collaborator Jim O'Rourke, Bonnet displays a radical openness at odds with academic tradition, allowing unabashed emotion to coexist with rigorous experimentation. As Fernweh dies away with mysterious shudders, listeners are left at once moved and unsure of exactly what they just heard.

Spacious, vibrant free jazz ecosystems sprout from London duo Exotic Sin’s debut studio jams with Swiss drummer Sartorius, uncoiling along vectors akin an unbuckled TLF Trio or The Necks and Don Cherry’s quieter communal jams.

‘In Session’ pairs the the duo of Kenichi Iwasa (known for work with Beatrice Dillon and more recently Ziúr on The Tapeworm) & Naima Karlsson (daughter of Neneh Cherry, half-sister of popstar Mabel) with the prolific Swiss percussionist regarded for work with everyone from Herbert to Valentina Magaletti and for ECM. Those credits should coordinate heads to the fine-tuned sensitivities and digits at work here, who take all the time needed to unravel keys and woodwind on slowly shifting, asymmetric beds of wooden drums and tickled metal with an unhurried quality and sublime tension.

The six pieces shimmer mirage-like with loose structures emerging that suggest the listener act on pareidolia-type senses to fill in the gaps, make sense of it in the imagination’s playground. With preternatural effortlessness they limn breezily open space in the opening path, and draw in closer with the tactile strikes and pings of of path 2, reserving the right to switch up into glorious free jazz clatter and scree on the 3rd path, and seemingly enact an impossible physics of melting and puckered pulses in path 4, before introducing a fizzing line of range-finding electronics that just about holds together a parting piece of elegant collapse and diffusion.

In the wrong hands this stuff could have been a difficult mess, but cool, quizzical heads and hands prevail on this one with exemplary results.

    
Entering its 26th year of activity, the morphing, Los Angeles based experimental outfit, Sissy Spacek, joins Shelter Press with Entrance, among the project’s most captivating outings to date. Encountering the duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma joined in various configurations by an incredible cast of collaborators - Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky, and C Spencer Yeh - collectively transformed into a series a deeply intimate and delicate gestures of musique concrète, Entrance radically repositions the possibilities presented by group improvisation outside of time and place.

Founded at the end of the last millennium, the Los Angeles based project, Sissy Spacek, initially emerged from the knotted, fiery context 1990s American noise and grindcore, producing sheets of visceral sonority that quickly set the scene on its head. Going through numerous evolutions, before eventually settling as a duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma - joined by a rotating and often recurring cast collaborators - over the last 25 years the band has continuously entered states of evolution that have defied the expectations of its own context, seeding the sonic extremes noise with subtle and sophisticated approaches to free improvisation and musique concrète.

Fiercely positioning its efforts within the outer reaches of contemporary experimental music, while resisting the constraints of a singular sound or proximity, Wiese regards Sissy Spacek as being primarily centred around the practice of musique concrète and the pursuit of extremes. From its earliest releases - collage treatments of material gathered from the band’s full throttle practice sessions - the project’s conceptual framework has continuously evolved within a deeply engaged process of experimentation, not only reworking tactical approaches, but also definitions and perception regarding the location and action of their work. In recent years, this has led to an increasingly varied and diverse output. Percolating within, is a thread marked by a striking sense of delicacy and intimacy, driving forward while doubling as an unexpected challenge, in real time, to perceptions connected to the band’s past. Entrance is the most recent of these.

Embarking upon the four compositions that comprise the finalized four sides of Entrance, Wiese and Mumma enlisted longstanding collaborators, Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, and C Spencer Yeh, as well as new initiate, Ralf Wehowsky (of the seminal German electronic noise collective P16.D4), requesting a contribution of sounds from each, determined by a general set guidelines that dictated certain qualities the given sonorities, while allowing for the expression of each player’s distinct creative voice. The sets of resulting recordings were then chopped, harvested, manipulated, and reassembled as the four tape compositions that make up the album - Web Of Unfolding Appearance, Figure Of Reflected Light, Trancher And The Inheritors, True Dimension (From The Opaque - Spike) - each blurring the lines of authorship and clear creative proximity in remarkable ways.

Where historical gestures of musique concrète tend to draw upon non-instrumental sound sources - regarding its sonorous material as raw elements, unburdened by inherent meaning or association, to be transformed and imbued with musicality - Sissy Spacek turns this position on its head. Entrance comprises works of musique concrète that not only draw upon instrumental sound sources, with all their possible meanings or associations, but also individual characters and personalities of their players, crediting each resulting piece to its respective configuration of contributors.

As such, Entrance is an effort of sound collage defined by a rare sense of intimacy and humanity: four pieces that often take on the resemblance of group improvisation, but have, in fact, been assembled outside of time and place. Bent under the ever-present hand of Wiese’s tape treatments and manipulation, each of the album’s four compositions unfurl startling states of sonic abstraction and percolating texture, marked by a striking sense of hard-shifting structure, that culminate as tense, driven manifestations of ambient music: scrapes, squeals, rattles feedback, rolling drums, bouncing tones, whispers, bent electronics, electric artefacts, and seemingly everything else under the sun, configured into immersive, sublime mediations in sound from the most improbable events. 

A Colourful Storm proudly presents remastered first-time vinyl and digital editions of Lone Capture Library’s modern-day DIY environmental masterpiece, All Natures Most Mundane Materials.

“Environmental”, you say? Well, this certainly wasn’t recorded for dinner party ambience nor was it commissioned by Harrods. But it does document a haphazard wander through the English countryside, feeling the air and the earth, detaching oneself from confinement while attempting to make sense of it all.

Its protagonist is Rory Salter, London's restless improvisor extraordinaire, who has contributed to dozens of solo and collaborative releases in an ecosystem centred around his Infant Tree private press, as well as recordings for Bison, Alter and MAL. Under his Malvern Brume alias, he is responsible for some of the most enchanting sides of contemporary concrète that has graced our ears, each record a dérive, revealing beauty and curiosity within London’s urban banality. And while we’d argue that Lone Capture Library applies this approach but instead seeks the peculiar within the pastoral, there, too, lies a certain hermetic recklessness, with its unique disruptive details and discarded sonic bric-a-brac permeating the air.

“I'd walked from Swindon to Avebury and back, which is about a 21-mile round trip. I'd been a muppet and did the whole thing down the A4361, which is not a road suitable for walking on - there was a lot of jumping into the hedges to avoid lorries. Turned out, there was a really nice walk across the fields I could have done instead. But maybe that sums it up quite well. Instinctive and very impulsive. The day following, I was at home and recorded it in single takes, improvised and straight to the tape. There was a good deal of significance for me in walking to the stones, passing the Hackpen Horse, being in the landscape and dealing with some brain rot after being stuck in a house, anxious and depressed. There was a sense of freedom and detachment. It was all about the materials of the earth and the body and fucking the brain off for a bit - just wanting to move between places. I dunno, it's all very cliché.”

A certain post-peak revelry and shaky fidelity of memory triggers and recall underlies Sebastian Carghini’s subtly trippy debut bow for topo2, the label run by erstwhile Dekmantel programmer Bert de Rooij and home to upsammy and Windu.

With a compelling poetic quality Carghini seduces us deep into hypnagogic states of mind with the mercurial ephemerality of his ‘Ramble’ album, an idealised iteration of the peculiar, subtle sound he’s developed over the past decade for the likes of Second Sleep, enmossed/Psychic Liberation, and Total Stasis. 

Leading on in the steps of upsammy’s gently febrile ‘Strange Meridians’, and the featured flows of ‘Juxtapose’ by Wind, the 11-part suite chases a frayed thread of memory looping logic thru processes that appear to uncoil and re-stitch the strands into forms of smudged dub tech and decayed electronica shades away from Actress’s iridescent greyscale, the Peak Oil x False Aralia dubtech soul axis, or even the sounds Andy Stott’s machines make when he’s not listening. 

    
Entering its 26th year of activity, the morphing, Los Angeles based experimental outfit, Sissy Spacek, joins Shelter Press with Entrance, among the project’s most captivating outings to date. Encountering the duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma joined in various configurations by an incredible cast of collaborators - Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, Ralf Wehowsky, and C Spencer Yeh - collectively transformed into a series a deeply intimate and delicate gestures of musique concrète, Entrance radically repositions the possibilities presented by group improvisation outside of time and place.

Founded at the end of the last millennium, the Los Angeles based project, Sissy Spacek, initially emerged from the knotted, fiery context 1990s American noise and grindcore, producing sheets of visceral sonority that quickly set the scene on its head. Going through numerous evolutions, before eventually settling as a duo of John Wiese and Charlie Mumma - joined by a rotating and often recurring cast collaborators - over the last 25 years the band has continuously entered states of evolution that have defied the expectations of its own context, seeding the sonic extremes noise with subtle and sophisticated approaches to free improvisation and musique concrète.

Fiercely positioning its efforts within the outer reaches of contemporary experimental music, while resisting the constraints of a singular sound or proximity, Wiese regards Sissy Spacek as being primarily centred around the practice of musique concrète and the pursuit of extremes. From its earliest releases - collage treatments of material gathered from the band’s full throttle practice sessions - the project’s conceptual framework has continuously evolved within a deeply engaged process of experimentation, not only reworking tactical approaches, but also definitions and perception regarding the location and action of their work. In recent years, this has led to an increasingly varied and diverse output. Percolating within, is a thread marked by a striking sense of delicacy and intimacy, driving forward while doubling as an unexpected challenge, in real time, to perceptions connected to the band’s past. Entrance is the most recent of these.

Embarking upon the four compositions that comprise the finalized four sides of Entrance, Wiese and Mumma enlisted longstanding collaborators, Tim Barnes, Marco Fusinato, Aaron Hemphill, Brad Laner, Katsura Mouri, and C Spencer Yeh, as well as new initiate, Ralf Wehowsky (of the seminal German electronic noise collective P16.D4), requesting a contribution of sounds from each, determined by a general set guidelines that dictated certain qualities the given sonorities, while allowing for the expression of each player’s distinct creative voice. The sets of resulting recordings were then chopped, harvested, manipulated, and reassembled as the four tape compositions that make up the album - Web Of Unfolding Appearance, Figure Of Reflected Light, Trancher And The Inheritors, True Dimension (From The Opaque - Spike) - each blurring the lines of authorship and clear creative proximity in remarkable ways.

Where historical gestures of musique concrète tend to draw upon non-instrumental sound sources - regarding its sonorous material as raw elements, unburdened by inherent meaning or association, to be transformed and imbued with musicality - Sissy Spacek turns this position on its head. Entrance comprises works of musique concrète that not only draw upon instrumental sound sources, with all their possible meanings or associations, but also individual characters and personalities of their players, crediting each resulting piece to its respective configuration of contributors.

As such, Entrance is an effort of sound collage defined by a rare sense of intimacy and humanity: four pieces that often take on the resemblance of group improvisation, but have, in fact, been assembled outside of time and place. Bent under the ever-present hand of Wiese’s tape treatments and manipulation, each of the album’s four compositions unfurl startling states of sonic abstraction and percolating texture, marked by a striking sense of hard-shifting structure, that culminate as tense, driven manifestations of ambient music: scrapes, squeals, rattles feedback, rolling drums, bouncing tones, whispers, bent electronics, electric artefacts, and seemingly everything else under the sun, configured into immersive, sublime mediations in sound from the most improbable events. 

The 5-CD set ‘The Way of Raku’ is a grand experiment that shatters conventional musical concepts. Electronic music and soundscapes merge, inviting the listener's consciousness into an infinite universe. With this work, composer Eloa pursues the ‘path of sound’ and opens up new horizons of aural experience. In this work, the composer Eloa combined Western musical traditions with Eastern thought to create a unique musical world.

The Way of Music is not just a musical work, but a meditative experience that takes the listener's consciousness into the abyss. It encourages the flow of time, the expansion of space and a dialogue with the self.

‘The Way of Raku’ eschews any visual elements and appeals solely to the sense of hearing. The listener is immersed in a flood of sound, weaving his or her own story.

This album, crafted entirely within a subharmonic framework and meticulously processed through tape manipulation, stands as Concepción Huerta’s sharpest work to date—undoubtedly her most abrasive, intense, and exhilarating. Her signature remains intact: a practice deeply rooted in drone, musique concrète, and hauntingly visceral textures—a kind of soundtrack that evokes powerful, image-driven narratives.

Conceptually, Huerta’s sonic vision evokes an image of open veins, not human veins, but those of the earth itself, the open veins of Latin America. These nervures are, in truth, rivers of lava; fury transmuted into fire coursing beneath the land until it erupts. The album is, in a way, a reflection on dispossession, resource extraction, and colonization. But beyond being a historical commentary—one that some might relegate to a forgotten past—it is also a reminder of the present, of how these practices persist in contemporary, postmodern guises.

It serves as both a tribute to the literary work of Eduardo Galeano, one of the most influential voices of Latin American leftist thought, and a howl from the Lacandon jungle in Mexico, resonating with the Zapatista struggle, the resistance of the Guaraní people in Paraguay and Argentina, and the voices of Indigenous communities across Latin America.

In the 16th century, a book titled Visión de los vencidos (The Broken Spears) was published in Mexico, compiling Nahuatl texts that presented the unofficial history, the account of the defeated. Concepción Huerta’s album El Sol de los Muertos (The Sun of the Dead) is not a call to action nor a reactionary manifesto, but an invitation to reflection, a historical reexamination. It urges us not to accept the official narrative at face value and serves as a warning, to remain vigilant and, within our capacities, resist the resurgence of fascism and colonialism in all its modern forms.



Originally named „Merz“, this album should have been Merzbow's first vinyl release, but never came out on vinyl. So actually "Yantra Material Action" is „Material Action 1“, recorded in 1981 - with sticker and insert

The clear vinyl version is only available in the limited 99 copies boxset "artefAKTs from the Early Japanese Experimental Noise Music Scene"

Holidays Records is on fire! Hot on the heels of their recent incredible vinyl releases of the Italian sound artist and musician Ezio Piermattei’s “Gran trotto” and the duo Acchiappashpirt’s “Ninulla”, they return with one of their most important and captivating releases to date: Hartmut Geerken’s “Requiem for the Snake of Maidan”, a mind-blowing body of archival recordings from the 1970s, made on a stony ridge in the Hindukush mountains of Afghanistan, encountering the artist locked in a sprawling performance on a self-made “percussion environment”. An absolutely visionary revelation from this sinfully under-recognised collaborator of Sun Ra, John Tchicai, Michael Ranta, The Art Ensemble of Chicago, and numerous others, few experimental percussion records soar like this.