MUSIC

'TTT grip Reckless Records don and record collecting heavyweight Toru Yoneyama on a mad cosmic noise mission sparked off with bony dancehall and mutant tekno-electro pulses – think Conrad Schnitzler meets Jeff Mills at Heinrich Mueller's lab afterhours, it's that wild.

The 92 minute 'Rescue at SW4' is among the best of TTT's already deadly run of '25 so far. Toru's eight trax take all the time needed – nearly up to 20′, and more often at least 10′ – to work out unpredictable permutations of spiny machine rhythm and rudely activated arp leads that seem to have a jazz-noise-tekno mind of their own.

An ideal case in point is the opening passage '052 T.HOLE', which spends the first 10 mins coaxing analog machines to sputter like a Schnitzler-meets-Dilloway jam, overeasy on the curdled chromatic distortion, before crystallising into a gnashing dancehall and Kongo tekno drum pattern whilst the synth wheezes psychoactive spumes. The transition is as effective and it is unexpected, and sets the tone for a class session of strangely sidewinding treats.

'BITT 35ER' stays in the longform lane with a more direct, if wobbly, traction from the offing, recalling some noisy Drexciyan probe and Mills' offbeat jazz-techno treks, whilst a pair of acrid palate cleansers set off a 2nd half encompassing pulsating, kosmiche dub techno noise in 'SPKXXX042', to Ra-esque wormholer '254222 BC' resolving in coiled acid tekno, and the stewed 303 gunk of '052 T.HOLE (048 bottoms)'.' (Boomkat, June 2025)

After the conceptual depth of "Parallel Traces of the Jewel Voice" (2021), dj sniff returns to Discrepant with a more direct and visceral document: Turntable Solos.

Composed from live recordings made during the latter half of 2024, Turntable Solos captures dj sniff’s improvised performances in their rawest form. At the core of his setup is Cut ’n’ Play, a software sampler he originally built in Max / MSP in 2007. Since then, he has continued developing custom tools and instruments that extend what Derek Bailey called the “instrumental impulse” — the tactile, responsive relationship between musician and machine that defines improvisation.

Following a summer 2024 tour of Japan with Gonçalo Cardoso, sniff was encouraged to document and release a selection of his live sets. Not long after, a performance at 20α (Alpha) in Hong Kong would become the emotional and conceptual anchor for the project. In the liner notes, sniff reflects on the eerie parallels between recent footage of protestors in Los Angeles — assaulted by police using so-called “less-lethal” weapons, and civilians being abducted into detention centers — and the 2019 Hong Kong protests. A place once filled with personal nostalgia began to feel like a grim foreshadowing of what might unfold in Western societies.

In this turbulent context, 20α stands out as a space of resistance and renewal — a beacon for a new generation of experimental musicians, growing in defiance of increasing censorship and surveillance. "Turntable Solos" is both a personal statement and a public act of sonic resilience.

Originally released in 1985 on Japan Records, "Trap" marks the second solo venture from pioneering Japanese musician Chiko Hige. Delving deep into the raw energy of the No-Wave movement, Hige crafts a powerful, hypnotic sonic journey brimming with hyper-kinetic grooves, jagged guitar textures, and contorted saxophone lines. "Trap" stands as a snapshot of controlled chaos—its blend of frenetic rhythms and edgy soundscapes continues to resonate with fresh relevance, captivating new listeners and longtime fans alike. "Trap" exemplifies Chiko Hige's mastery of the Japanese No-Wave scene, offering a singular mix of experimental punk, jazz-inflected improvisation, and post-punk brutality. The album's tracks feature propulsive drum work, energetic guitar riffs, and twisted, melodic saxophone interludes, all woven into a hypnotic soundscape that feels both organic and intentionally chaotic. Chiko Hige, well-known as the drummer for Friction, explores new artistic ground in this solo effort, further establishing his role as an innovator in Japan's underground music scene. Despite its release over four decades ago, "Trap" remains a strikingly modern listen, capturing the imagination of contemporary audiences with its unbridled energy and genre-defying arrangements. The album's experimental approach continues to influence cutting-edge musicians worldwide, making "Trap" a foundational touchstone for collectors and fans of post-punk, avant-garde, and No-Wave music. For those discovering Chiko Hige today, "Trap" offers a thrilling portal into the feverish creativity and unstoppable drive of 1980s Japanese underground music.

Faitiche presents Beispiel (German for example, also suggests playing together), a joint project by Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek. Muster is their first album. Free electronic music, the result of spontaneous improvisations. “Meaning” is a concept that is overused in connection with music. Muster does not call for the same kind of air quotes. With its title, German for patterns/exemplars, Beispiel’s album frees itself from the ballast of teleological semantics. There is no overarching theme, no preparation, no reading list, no reason for this music. Just two facts: Frank Bretschneider and Jan Jelinek have known each other a long time and appreciate each other’s work; and they share a love of modular synthesizers and of experimental set-ups designed to capture surprise. Bretschneider and Jelinek got together for their first joint session in 2016 and the years that followed brought more such meetings at Jelinek’s studio for open-ended musical dialog – at irregular intervals and with no clear objective. The improvisations were recorded in two stereo tracks: one track for Bretschneider’s audio, one for Jelinek’s. After each session, the recordings were processed separately, the options essentially limited to cutting and altering the frequency range. The nine pieces for Muster were selected from the resulting material. This approach reflects an ideal: music is when you play your first note without knowing what the third or fourth will sound like. When your 290th note still sees you leaving the beaten track, and when curiosity grows as the piece unfolds. Duping is part of Beispiel’s practice. Improvisation is about disagreement. It’s a matter of addressing the right issues. What’s happening here? What’s mine, what’s yours? Are “why” and “where next” legitimate questions? Muster is an exemplary work. Nine suggestions for what can be. Nine ideas for possibilities of listening. Arno Raffeiner

Merzbow is a Japanese noise legend who advocates and practices ahimsa and continues to experiment with alternative expressions that go beyond the boundaries of "noise". This is a rare cassette album released in 2010 by Gift Tapes, a prestigious American drone label that also produces works by Panabrite and Pulse Emitter.

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

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

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

An air of ancient ritualism cloaks Modern Love’s midnight meeting between UK producer MOBBS and French-Egyptian spellcaster Susu Laroche, carving out a channel between hexed trip hop and shoegaze that’s one part DJ Screw, one part MBV, operating within a long shadow of influence cast by Curve, Leila, Cocteau Twins, Nearly God.

Clasping chiral energies on their debut collab, MOBBS brings a history spanning shadowy production work for big name artists to the grimly stylised vein of performance art and musick explored by Susu Laroche, an Egyptian-French with strong binds to chthonic contemporary London. 

Their maiden sacrifice heightens the senses to blends of monotonic, sandalwood scented incantations and carpet-burned downbeats swept in slurred dub. Songs are subtly variegated in tone to spell out shifting plays of light evoking bedsit antechambers and warehouse innards lit by iPhone candle or extractor hood and emergency light bulbs on their last lumens. 

It's music that's as elaborately serrated and blemished as early MBV, but positioned in a vastly different cultural landscape, drawing from hip-hop, drone, psych and basement noise. The pair’s range of cultural obsessions maintains a precarious balance between shadowy histories and an asphyxiating present; all too often, when the past is projected it's thru a mollifying, nostalgic lens, so their critical, prudent hybrid sound is a vital, chilling corrective.

From the bell-ringing, chain-rattle jag of ‘Throne’ thru the sleepwalker drift of ‘Roam’, and concrete plangency of ‘Forest’, the marriage of MOBBS’ illusive textures with Laroche’s feel for analog image and film (as evinced in her art for the likes of Blackhaine and Mica Levi) imprints their sound in gauzy layers that leave fleeting impressions on the mind’s eye. At their heaviest, Laroche’s arcane declarations descend in impressive enactments, undressing the excesses of over-glossed trip hop to reveal and revel in the sound at its starkest, sexiest, for new waves of washed up souls.
 

First vinyl reissue of the landmark 1967 debut album by AMM, AMMMusic. Remastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Exact replica sleeve by Stephen O'Malley. "Coinciding with the 50th anniversary of its recording in 1966, this reissue makes one of the cornerstones of the experimental music tradition available again in its original form, replete with Keith Rowe's beautiful pop art cover and the terse aphorisms by the group that served as its original liner notes. A testament to the interaction between the experimental avant-garde and the countercultural underground, the album was originally released on Elektra, recorded by Jac Holzman (the label's founder, responsible for signing The Doors, Love, and The Stooges) and produced by DNA, a group that included Pink Floyd's first manager, Peter Jenner (the title of Pink Floyd's 'Flaming' is a tribute to AMM's 'Later During a Flaming Riviera Sunset'). Formed in 1965 by three players from the emerging British jazz avant-garde -- Keith Rowe and Lou Gare had played with the great progressive big band leader Mike Westbrook and Eddie Prévost played in a post-bop group with Gare -- AMM quickly evolved from a free jazz group into something decidedly more difficult to categorise. By the time these recordings were made, two more members had joined the group: another Westbrook associate, Lawrence Sheaff, and the radical composer Cornelius Cardew. Then at work on his masterpiece of graphic notation Treatise, Cardew brought with him extensive experience of the post-serialist and Cageian currents in contemporary composition. Using a combination of conventional instruments and unconventional methods of sound production (most famously Keith Rowe's prepared tabletop guitar, but also prepared piano and transistor radio), the group performed improvised pieces often running for over two hours and ranging from extended periods of silence to terrifying cacophonies. On AMMMusic, long tones sit next to abrasive thuds, the howl of uncontrolled feedback accompanies Cardew's purposeful piano chords, radios beam in snatches of orchestral music. AMM's clearest break with jazz-based improvisation concerned the idea of individuality. Initially through an engagement with eastern philosophy and mysticism and later though a politicized communitarianism, AMM sought to develop a collective sonic identity in which individual contributions could barely be discerned. In the performances captured on AMMMusic the use of numerous auxiliary instruments and devices, including radios played by three members of the group, contribute to the sensation that the music is composed as a single monolithic object with multiple facets, rather than as an interaction between five distinct voices." --Francis Plagne

Indonesian duo KUNTARI make music that's so distinctive, they had to devise their own genre: primal-core. On 'MUTU BETON', multi-instrumentalist Tesla Manaf and percussionist Rio Abror dialog with both history and their tropical surroundings in Bandung, West Java's mountainous capital. Using the cornet and hulusi, a free reed instrument made from a bottle gourd and bamboo pipes, Manaf echoes the bellows of local elephants, orangutans and rhinos, grazing Abror's ancestral Indonesian rhythms with potent overdriven riffs and evocative microtonal chimes. It's music that's profoundly atmospheric and simultaneously raw, recorded live to fully encapsulate the dynamic and deeply human interaction between the two seasoned players. There are elements of sludge metal, noise and post-hardcore, references to traditional folk music and jazz, and gestures towards sound art, 20th century minimalism and dark ambient, but what KUNTARI do is completely idiosyncratic - it's hardly surprising it needed a similarly unique categorization.

Manaf started KUNTARI as a solo project, debuting in 2020 with 'Black Shirt Attracts More Feather' and animating his nimble instrumental improvisations with bold electronic processes and booming synthetic drums. And by the time he recorded 2022's acclaimed 'Last Boy Picked', his approach had evolved significantly; prioritizing organic sounds, he played prepared cornet and piano, bringing in additional percussionists to help devise a ritualistic rhythm section. Abror was one of those performers, and ended up sticking around, playing on 2023's furious 'LARYNX/STRIDULA', the stylistic precursor for 'MUTU BETON'. At this stage, the duo have racked up a litany of accolades and collaborated with a spectrum of like-minded artists, from noise deity Keiji Haino to fellow Indonesian free-thinker Rully Shabara, who's best known for his work with Senyawa and avant-garde supergroup OSMIUM. 'MUTU BETON' plays like a lap of honor, showcasing their most kinetic and most feral recordings to date.

On 'Parai', a two-part composition made for Singapore-based artist Priyageetha Dia's multimedia installation LAMENT H.E.A.T, KUNTARI surround loose, rattling polyrhythms with blood-curdling, animalistic calls and industrial strength chugs from Manaf's prepared guitar. The artwork honors indentured laborers forced to extract rubber in Southeast Asia, and KUNTARI's response is an incisive critique of colonialism, celebrating the region's ancient rhythmic forms and sharpening their edges as they barrel into the future. Upsetting the logic of academic American minimalism, KUNTARI disrupt winding Reichian xylophone, glockenspiel and marimba repetitions on 'Kerak Terusi', wielding swinging ceremonial thuds from Manaf's Rebana, a cow skin drum that often accompanies Indonesian Islamic rituals.

They confront local sonorities even more directly on 'Miamch', a commission the duo made for Yogyakarta's Festival Kebudayaan, dueling on saron, a single-octave metallophone, and a Javanese gamelan set, and don't just follow the expected path. The familiarity is soon replaced with eccentricity as eerie resonances and reverberations sweep across the rhythmelodic patterns. Rough-edged technoid patterns are bent into new shapes on the abrasive 'Paniscus', and on 'Bessing', KUNTARI do their best to recreate the singular atmosphere of a local trance ritual, interrupting howling spirit voices and jangling chimes with blackened, grindcore-inspired riffs. KUNTARI surpass even their own high standards with 'MUTU BETON', folding history and geography in on itself and suggesting a trailblazing Indonesian cultural movement that's not restricted by highbrow Western conventions. It's not just automation and technology that drives progression, it's interaction and observation. And there's nothing more primal, or revolutionary, than that.

45 Pounds is the debut studio album from the exciting noise rock newcomers YHWH Nailgun. Spearheaded by the minute-and-a-half frontal lobe blast of lead single ‘Sickle Walk’, it finds Rich Smith and Zack Borzone laying down dizzying assaults on the senses that sound like math rock being electrocuted. For fans of Death Grips or Black Midi.

DJ K started producing music at 17, diving deep into FL Studio tutorials and honing his craft. Now at 24, he’s emerged as one of the most daring and inventive voices in contemporary Brazilian funk. Hailing from Diadema, on the outskirts of São Paulo, DJ K quickly rose to prominence with his creation of bruxaria—a dark, noisy, and psychedelic spin on baile funk that redefines the genre’s boundaries.

Two years after his groundbreaking debut, Pânico no Submundo, DJ K returns with Rádio Libertadora, an album that’s even more aggressive, visceral, and politically charged. In his own words, it’s “an album against the system”—a sonic rebellion confronting urban violence, social inequality, and police brutality, while embracing the explicit sexuality of putaria as an act of freedom and defiance.

The album's title nods to Brazil's legacy of resistance against military dictatorship. Its opening track boldly declares “Down with military dictatorship,” sampling a historic speech by communist guerrilla leader Carlos Marighella, originally broadcast during a clandestine radio takeover in 1969. Featuring MC Renatinho Falcão, the track is a sonic assault—metallic noise, thunderous basslines, and layers of distortion collide with insurgent lyrics that paint the favelas as battlegrounds in an undeclared social war.

Rádio Libertadora channels the militant spirit of 1990s Brazilian protest rap—drawing influence from legends like Racionais MCs, Ndee Naldinho, and Dexter—while immersing itself in a brutal, corrosive electronic landscape. Tracks like “Troca Tiro e Faz Dinheiro” and “Sobrevive Contra o Estado” weave gunshots, alarms, and sirens into frenetic rhythms, throwing listeners into a warlike cinematic experience. In “Mega Suicidio Automotivo,” beats refuse to settle, shifting unpredictably through apocalyptic, hyperconnected soundscapes that mirror the chaos of modern life.

On cuts like “Psy Vem Fazer Neném,” “Techno de Favelado,” and “Ali Perto da Imigrantes,” DJ K reimagines club music through the lens of bruxaria. Sharp techno hi-hats and bouncing house basslines clash with hallucinogenic tuin squeals, laser blasts, and harsh distorted whistles, blurring the lines between rave and riot. In DJ K's hands, baile funk is weaponized—becoming the soundtrack for a surreal dancefloor insurrection on the periphery of São Paulo.

With Rádio Libertadora, DJ K pushes the boundaries of funk, transforming it into a visceral weapon of protest and liberation. This is more than an album—it’s a manifesto set to the raw pulse of São Paulo's underground.

Katatonic Silentio makes her Fleur Sauvage debut with a live recording captured in the Hypnose Room at La Nature 2023—a raw, improvised performance split into four parts across two 12”s. Moving between abstract electronics, textured noise and cinematic ambient, the set balances low-end weight and grainy chaos with fleeting moments of stillness. Tension underpins the entire performance, occasionally boiling over into jagged peaks of intensity. Rather than simply documenting a performance, this release preserves a ritual: unstable, embodied, and elemental. As ever with Katatonic Silentio, the sound is not merely heard—it is lived in.

    
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. 

Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder. An evolution of her early 1980's Edinburgh-based punk band The Freeze, she launched the project upon moving to London, inspired by the crossroads of exploratory UK post-punk and early European industrial. Her work thrives on chance and transformation, collaging elements of noise, balladry, soundtrack, catharsis, and improvisation. After a series of celebrated albums for the Midnight Music label as well as collaborations with This Mortal Coil and Cocteau Twins, Cinder migrated to the United States, becoming involved with various underground techno collectives around the Midwest and West Coast. Subsequent relocations to Hong Kong and Japan further expanded Cindytalk's horizons, resulting in a fruitful partnership with Viennese experimental institution Editions Mego, for whom she released five full-lengths of swooning, granular atmosphere. 2021 finds her as engaged as ever, at the precipice of long-awaited back catalog reissues alongside multiple new works, guided by her lasting love of discovery and deviation: “new pathways always being uncovered.”

Across decades of activity Cinder’s body of work has forever followed its own elusive muse but nowhere is this restless spirit more apparent and ambitious than the 4th Cindytalk LP, Wappinschaw. Conceived as “a call to arms” inspired by Scotland and its struggle for independence, the title refers to an archaic Scottish battle inspection during which clan chieftains surveyed their group's weapons to ensure they were combat ready. A mindset of reflective preparation threads throughout the record, manifested in forms both naked and noisy, ancient and anguished.

Opening with an aching solo vocal rendition of the British folk standard “The First Time Ever (I Saw Your Face),” the album then surges into the Cindytalk classic, “A Song Of Changes,” sparkling and spiraling in strange waves of sorrow and joy. From there the mood fragments, tracing asymmetrical paths of feverish dirge, pensive spirituals, noir abstraction, spoken word (landmark Glaswegian writer Alasdair Gray guests on “Wheesht”), bagpipe drone, and apocalyptic post-punk. Given its aggressive eclecticism, it's not surprising that Cinder describes the creation of Wappinschaw as a “precarious” process, composed from “scraps” with abruptly shifting personnel – a situation only compounded by the impending dissolution of their label at the time, Midnight Music.

Despite, or perhaps because of, these factors, the collection stands as a testament to Cinder's belief that “so-called experimental can only remain so if you keep challenging yourself.” This is singular and challenging music, texturally jagged and emotionally conflicted, swimming through shivering darkness into fragile pockets of light. At the time of its recording, Cinder was attempting to leave London after many years in the city, dreaming of an ancestral return. But as much as “ideas of homecoming were percolating,” there remained unfinished business, old ghosts to exorcise, culminating in Wappinschaw's heady, harrowing voyage: “An invocation of spirits of resistance – as much a declaration of war as a declaration of love.”

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.

The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career.

Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS record is negated, inverted and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures.
Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music-denial. The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images.

While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.
The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.

AS Over and FT Over (Active noise canceling script) is the first dual single from the project, released in August, the hooky mantra late summer anthem caused a stir with provocatively minimal AI-generated visuals of cursed plastic debris cruising the streets of stock-video-opolis. The lyrics “riding waves of discontent / Wondering where the feeling went” set-up the turbulent hero’s journey for HOAX.

On AS Amygdala anxiety turns to blissful release. A bender leaves us marooned on ego-death island, as a saccharine more-emo-than-emo vox shuffles back to a lost corporeality with “Who’s body this, not mine? / Five more days and body still said no.”

The second single, AS DISCO drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.

On AS U, Animatronic Ed Sheeran’s fusion core is slowly fading at the year 100 million BCE.

AS Back staggers through the stages of grief or maybe it’s Dante’s inferno as we scavenge for breadcrumbs out of the Dark Forest. “Numb the senses / Time changes in my absence” FT HOAX snaps to life at the first instant. The triple-fried waveform debris cocoons the listener in deep resonation and ASMR-worthy velcro timbres. Time slows in this Near-Death-Experience as AS HOAX flashes before your ears. Memories of the record appear as faded imprints. All the anxieties, longing and elation is washed away now as you are pulled out of time, into a liminal space. Does it last for days, weeks or seconds? Who can say.
FT HOAX’s building drone passages rumble and pan back and forth pulling you in deeper. The earworms decompose your echolalia leaving your brain refreshed and ready for another spin. 

Black Editions present the first vinyl reissue of Keiji Haino's stunning debut album Watashi Dake?, originally released in 1981. This first ever edition released outside of Japan features the artist's originally intended metallic gold and silver jacket artwork. Over the last fifty years few musicians or performers have created as monumental and uncompromising a body of work as that of Keiji Haino. Through a vast number of recordings and performances, Haino has staked out a ground all his own, creating a language of unparalleled intensity that defies any simple classification. For all this, his 1981 debut album Watashi Dake? has remained enigmatic. Originally released in a small edition by the legendary Pinakotheca label, the album was heard by only a select few in Japan and far fewer overseas. Original vinyl copies became impossibly rare and highly sought after the world over. Watashi Dake? presents a haunting vision -- stark vocals, whispered and screamed, punctuate dark silences. Intricate and sharp guitar figures interweave, repeat, and stretch, trance-like, emerging from dark recesses. Written and composed on the spot -- Haino's vision is one of deep spiritual depths that distantly evokes 1920s blues and medieval music -- yet is unlike anything ever committed to record before or since. Produced in close cooperation with Keiji Haino and legendary photographer Gin Satoh. Coupled with starkly minimal packaging, featuring the now iconic cover photographs by Gin Satoh, the album is a startling and fully realized artistic statement. Housed in custom printed deluxe Stoughton tip-on jackets, including black on black inserts, extras, and hand-colored finishes; Remastered by Elysian Masters and cut by Bernie Grundman Mastering; Pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI; Includes download code.

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. 

Eager Buyers is an observation of longing, of memory, of attempted connection, of lost innocence, and irreconcilable dreams. It’s the sound of broken promises for a bright future, where rose-tinted glasses have lost their clarity, dirtied with disaffection over time. Spanish-born, Berlin-based artist JASSS, presents her third LP, Eager Buyers. It’s the inaugural release on her own new platform called AWOS, which also encompasses musical, AV and art collaborations, live events, and a radio show.

Across this sultry, smoky, cinematic epic, JASSS attempts to process mixed feelings amidst the modern malaise. Alluringly atmospheric and cerebral, but bold and direct, with high-spec sound design, JASSS spaces each element with expert definition. Searing swathes of noise nestle with crisp breakbeats, billowing bass, dark ambience, prepared piano, phosphorescent electronics and calibrated percussion.

“Whether you buy into the dream of capitalism or not, on a subconscious level, many people that lived through the 90s and 2000s had capitalist hope from the 80s and 90s drummed into them. It was a promise of something that never came true. We put our faith in a mirage, and now we’re left in an existential void, struggling with a very real

collapse.” - JASSS

A sort of anti-nostalgia, the record lives in a contemporary purgatory of oblique moods which hover in the psyche, somewhere between uncertainty, foreboding, and guarded anticipation. The raw metal of bass guitar strings plays a key part too, ranging from ornate melodic phrases, shoegazy drones, and attitude-riven hard twangs. Vocals come from JASSS herself, plus James K and Alias Error on the track “It’s A Hole”.

The heavy, hauntological atmospherics are in part due to the addition of field recordings – the discreet, but spiritually-loaded incidental sounds of a place which can capture its history, with the acoustics somehow retaining an emotional imprint of lives long gone. If pressed for descriptive reference points, ‘masterfully-produced-post-punk-post-rock- baroque-gothy-dubby-trip-hop’ might be a starting point, but that doesn’t do it justice. Equally spectral in their dream-like quality are the musical signposts, where genre elements are familiar, but somehow also unplaceable, untethered from context, and beautifully strange in their new composite. At points there’s an air of strangely dazed calm too – a kind of frazzled cool in the face of desolation, and even tender, lighter moments, which glint through the cracks.

Quickly following March’s The Fool - our label debut - Sa Pa reveals his new album Ambeesh on Short Span.

Coming five years after In A Landscape, and nearly a decade since his debut Fuubutsushi, Ambeesh is a collection of Sa Pa’s unreleased work.

Written between 2014-2019, the album has been conceptually curated as a follow up to his FORUM debut. Ambeesh possesses the unique language and liveliness of ambient, layered field recordings, and dub techno found in those earlier records, with those seamless skydives through pressure formations that were found on the Enter Sa Pa mix.

These pieces have been crackling under the surface of Sa Pa’s released work to date and there’s little else that compares. It’s a cache of some of his deepest and most texturally thrilling music.

Singular in its combination of atmosphere; Ambeesh presses on the body at the right volume, and moves in thrust and riposte with the listener’s circadian rhythms. Sa Pa continues to dissolve the border between club-informed experimentation and intimate headphone listening.

Ambeesh marks the artist’s return to his homeland Australia and an exciting new chapter.

Comprising a selection of songs masterfully recorded and produced by Greg Freeman right after the sessions that yielded 1993’s Admonishing The Bishops EP, The Funeral Pudding could be thought of as a sister release to that EP; indeed, the band originally considered combining tracks from both sessions into a single album. Had it been released, that record would’ve followed the pattern of the previous album in which the band’s pop and avant-garde leanings are yoked together cheek by jowl. Instead, Admonishing showcases the band at its most accessible while The Funeral Pudding flaunts their more expansive, abrasive and absurdist side without forfeiting the earlier EP’s miraculously high standards for songwriting and sonic clarity.

What makes The Funeral Pudding a unique feather in the Fellers’ cap is that most of the tracks are sung by bassist Anne Eickelberg and guitarist Hugh Swarts — a notable departure from the Davies/Hageman vocal dominance on most of the other albums. With Eickelberg’s soaring vocals leading the proceedings, tracks like “Waited Too Long” and “Heavy Head” are some of the most beloved in the band’s discography. And “23 Kings Crossing” is a whiplash-inducing psych/prog stunner that adds another metric ton to the burden of proof demonstrating that TFUL282 was creating some of the most thrilling, enduring and sonically autonomous music of its era

    
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. 

Big Black was started by Steve Albini in 1982 while he was attending Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Lungs, the first Big Black release was recorded by Steve on a borrowed 4-track. He played everything on the EP himself - except the sax bleating courtesy of pal John Bohnen and the drums courtesy of Roland. Soon after, Steve recruited Jeff Pezzati (Naked Raygun) on bass, and Santiago Durango (also Naked Raygun) joined them on guitar. In 1983, together with live drummer Pat Byrne, they recorded the Bulldozer EP. By 1984, the band had done some touring and recorded the Racer X EP and the start of the Il Duce 7". After that, Jeff returned to Naked Raygun and was replaced by Dave Riley. In 1985, Big Black recorded their first full-length, Atomizer, as well as finishing the Il Duce 7". Atomizer was released in 1986 along with the release of the Hammer Party compilation CD. In 1987, the Headache EP and Heartbeat 7" were released. That same year, the band recorded and released the 7" of The Model/He's A Whore as well as their second full-length album, Songs About Fucking. They toured extensively (for Big Black). And they broke up.

Hampus Lindwall is a musical artist active in many fields ranging from contemporary music to experimental and electronic sound / music. He has released many albums, as a soloist and in collaboration and is the titular organist in Saint-Esprit, Paris, since 2005.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor (GYBE) returns with its first single LP-length release since the group's earliest days in 1997-99. 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' clocks in at a succinct 40:23 and is arguably the most focused and best-sounding recording of the band's career. Following Godspeed's return from a long hiatus at the end of 2010 to begin playing live shows again, and with the hugely acclaimed 'Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!' release in 2012 marking their first new release in a decade, the group slowly and steadily put the new album together through late 2013 and 2014. This mighty slab of superlative sonics is shot through with all the band's inimitable signposts and touchstones: huge unison riffage, savage noise/drone, oscillating overtones, guitar vs. string counterpoint, inexorable crescendos and scorched-earth transitions. 'Asunder, Sweet And Other Distress' finds Godspeed in top form; a sterling celebration of the band's awesome dialectic, where composition, emotion and 'note-choice' is inextricable from an exacting focus on tone, timbre, resonance and the sheer materiality of sound.