MUSIC

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, Emile Mosseri, and Ghostly will be making a donation from today’s Bandcamp Friday sales of their collaborative album, I Could Be Your Dog/I Could Be Your Moon to support reproductive rights via Noise For Now. "His music filled me with the urge to connect with the world," Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith says of Emile Mosseri. She first heard his work while watching the 2019 film The Last Black Man In San Francisco; just minutes in, she paused it to look up who did the score and wrote to him immediately. "I love Emile's ability to create melodies that feel magically scenic and familiar like they are reminding you of the innocence of loving life.” Those talents saw recognition in 2020 with an Oscar nomination for Mosseri’s original score to the film Minari. He was already a fan of Smith’s and became increasingly intrigued by her impressionistic process as they started to talk. "The music feels so spiritual and alive and made from the earth," Mosseri says. "I think of her as the great conductor, summoning musical poetry from her orchestra of machines." I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon, their two-part collaborative album, introduces an uncanny fusion of their sonics. Constructed using synthesizer, piano, electronics, and voice, this soft-focus dream world is lush, evocative, and fleeting. It finds two composers tuning their respective styles inward as an ode to mutual inspiration, a celebration of the human spirit and its will to surrender to the currents of life. Early into their correspondence, Smith and Mosseri realized they were neighbors in Los Angeles and met up for a few hikes. Their conversations led to a musical exchange over email. The exercise became a sketch, the start of their first song together, "Log In Your Fire,” with Mosseri finding flourishes in Smith’s cathartic synth lines to intonate and harmonize alongside. Lyrically, it's a beautiful, open-ended sentiment. "Being a log in someone's fire, to me, means letting go, and surrendering to that feeling," says Mosseri. From there, the pair composed a series of musical foundations, trading files from afar, nurturing the eventual expansion as the remote days of 2020 set in. Smith likens the collaborative experience to the exciting uncertainty of starting a garden, "doing what I can to facilitate growth while enjoying the process of being surprised by what will actually grow." In the summer of 2021, the duo finished work on the sequel, I Could Be Your Moon, expanding their musical language as the first part reached its September release. Songs from these more recent exchanges find them even more synced, forging into percussive and harmonic experiments, leaning further into their “unused musical muscles,” as Smith and Mosseri put it. A unified vocal presence emerged. “As the friendship grew I think we both learned how to support each other more and musically that was communicated through singing together,” adds Smith. Now taken as a full album set, I Could Be Your Dog / I Could Be Your Moon moves fluidly from track to track, panning through textural vignettes. Two roughly 17-minute halves, the set evokes the bittersweet sense of something too bright or rare to last, a short-lived glimpse into a golden hour. "Moon In Your Eye" sends a choral refrain skyward; we stay behind, watching it haze away in the heavens. "Brush" bubbles with Smith's characteristic wonder and curiosity, expressed in a flutter of horn-like sounds, leading into the album's central expression, its titular track. Above pulsing harmonies, in his tender falsetto, Mosseri repeats variations of the mantra, "I don't want to feel / lost anymore /I can’t make you what I am." He says the idea they are reaching for is more abstract and universal, "It could mean I could be your friend / buddy, I could be someone / something else, I could transform, I could be your companion, etc. What I like about it is it could change based on what that means to you, or what the word dog means to you." The orchestral march of 'oohs and ahhs' on "Blink Twice” could register as both triumphant and tragic. "Moonweed," strays closer to the latter, with low and slow piano keys guiding the alien hums of a starlit goodbye. I Could Be Your Moon, the second installment and side B of the record, opens with the striking “Green To You.” Depicting a dream or a need for renewal — to be new in the eyes of another, all excitement of seeing and being seen as imagined, idealized versions of ourselves — the song unveils the duo’s newly fused voice. “I only want to be green to you,” they sing, as an organ phrase swirls underneath. There’s a wistful sense that bleeds into instrumental “Amber” and continues across “Standing In Your Light,” a piano ballad-turned-mini-symphony that traces over feelings of remorse (“I was distracted / overreacted… come to your senses”). “Shim Sham” starts woozily in anticipation before flipping on a drum break, becoming the collection’s energetic apex; their hums dance with the beat, wordless yet undoubtedly expressive. Once introduced, the percussion stays and syncopates for “Golden Cow,” another radiant duet that reads like a playful plea, or a reminder to their creative selves (“slow down / be careful now / you’ve done this one before”). The record ends inside “Radio Replacement,” a swan song in the lineage of somber album outros; lyrically they reflect on past loves and the passage of time, personifying the music (“I would really love to be / your favorite melody / for a while”). There is a dreamy, elemental intention to this music, which Smith and Mosseri say came naturally, as they both embraced intuitive interplay throughout their creative back-and-forth. The stylistic threads of each composer are recognizable yet become more ambiguous as the album progresses, sewn into a singular vision. "I'm so grateful that my musical ideas could dance with hers with some grace and harmony," says Mosseri. Smith adds that this experience helped her "remember that music can be a connecting layer of friendship, especially in a time when the usual ways were out of reach."

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.

FJLP-05 continues with Forest Jams recent trend of Japanese re-issues from the 90’s. This one is E.S. Island’s “Southwind from Hachijo” a deep ambient exploration that is more tribal and spiritual than prior E.S. Island releases. This was recorded on Hachijo Island featuring several traditional instruments with the bulk of the music being played by Eisuke Takahashi (R.I.P.) and Nene Sanae. Limited copies.

Recorded in a live setting and played with instruments conserved in the collections of the MEG Museum, Cutting Branches For A Temporary Shelter is Midori Takada’s very own rendition of "Nhemamusasa", a traditional work emblematic of the musical repertoire for mbira of the Shona of Zimbabwe, well known worldwide, thanks notably to its version by Paul F. Berliner included on the famed 1973 album The Soul of Mbira.

The choice of this title by Midori Takada evokes the links between traditional African and contemporary music which are the foundation of this work, and it also translates the resolutely multicultural vision of the artist.

Midori Takada explains: "African music is remarkable for its polyrhythms. Not only are there simultaneously several rhythmic motifs, sometimes as many as ten, but furthermore it may be that the part played by each musician has its own starting point and its own pace, all combining to form a cycle. All the cycles progress at the same time according to a single metrical structure which functions as a reference point, but which is not played by any one person from beginning to end. The structure emerges out of the multi-level parts, all different. With the Shona, the musical system is based on the polymelody: one performs simultaneously several melodic lines which are superimposed, each having its own rhythmic organization. It is truly captivating. In Western classical music, one four-beat rhythm induces some precise temporal framework and regular reference points, which come on the strong beats 1 and 3. But in the logic of the Shona musical system, and in other African music, the melody can begin in the very middle of the cycle and be continued up to some other place in an autonomous manner, as if it had its own personality. It’s very rich."

The album comes with in-depth liner notes that include an interview with Midori Takada, a point of view by Zimbabwean scholar, musician and activist Forward Mazuruse, and background information on the project by Isabel Garcia Gomez and Madeleine Leclair from MEG Museum.

The sleeve features an artwork by celebrated Zimbabwean painter Portia Zvavahera.

Part of the budget for the album was donated to Forward Mazuruse’s Music For Development Foundation whose aim is to identify, nurture, and record young but underprivileged musicians in Zimbabwe.

This is a new intersection of field ambient and improvised sound. ARBORE, a collaborative project by French-born, Berlin-based sound artists Diane Barbé and Laure Boer, will be released by Somewhere Press, an underground sound venue in Glasgow! Rough field recordings and improvised noise/sound sculptures interweave the spiritual and the animal. The faint footsteps deep in the forest, the noise of creaking metal, and the rippling breathing can all be considered sensory reorganization devices that awaken non-human senses.

When you’re running a label, a demo occasionally comes across your desk that makes you reconsider everything you thought your label was all about. For Balmat, such was the case with this stunning album from Stephen Vitiello, Brendan Canty, and Hahn Rowe. It sounds like nothing we’ve released so far—and that very otherness opened up a whole new world of possibilities for us. Fans of ambient, experimental electronic music, and sound art will be familiar with Vitiello, a New York native, long based in Virginia, who has collaborated with a cross-generational list of greats: Taylor Deupree, Steve Roden, Lawrence English, Tetsu Inoue, Nam June Paik, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Pauline Oliveros, and many more. On labels like 12k, Room40, and Sub Rosa, he has explored a wide range of minimalism, microsound, lowercase, ambient, improv, and other styles. But this album is something different. It may begin in ambient-adjacent territory, but it quickly veers off, and it just keeps zigzagging, taking on elements of krautrock, post-punk, dub, and the groove-heavy interplay of groups like Natural Information Society and 75 Dollar Bill. This stylistic turn is thanks in large part to Vitiello’s choice of collaborators. “We’re coming from three different schools,” Vitiello says: “sound art, art rock, and punk rock.” Active since the early 1980s, Rowe—a violinist, guitarist, and producer/engineer—has played with, or manned the boards for, a frankly jaw-dropping list of musicians: Herbie Hancock, Gil Scott-Heron, the Last Poets, Roy Ayers, John Zorn, Glenn Branca, Swans, Live Skull, Brian Eno, David Byrne, Anohni, R.E.M., Yoko Ono, and many more. But he might be most closely associated with Hugo Largo, a one-of-a-kind New York quartet—two basses, vocals, and Rowe’s violin—that in the late 1980s helped lay the groundwork for what would eventually become known as post-rock. Canty, of course, is the legendary drummer of Fugazi, the visionary DC post-hardcore group, as well as Rites of Spring before them, and, currently, the Messthetics, a Dischord-signed instrumental trio with guitarist Anthony Pirog and Fugazi bassist Joe Lally. Vitiello’s trio first collaborated on First, a 17-minute piece released on the Longform Editions label in 2023. Second picks up where the freeform drift of First left off, channeling the trio’s exploratory energies into more intentionally structured tracks and—in a real first for Balmat—some almost shockingly muscular grooves. “Sometimes my projects are more conceptually driven,” Vitiello says, “but I think this was more musically geared. I just wanted to open up the references and bring in an incredible drummer, bring in some melodies, and I’m sort of the center.” But his collaborators, he stresses, are “vastly creative in making anything I might suggest better.” Like its predecessor, Second took shape in phases, shifting between improvisation and collage. Vitiello laid down the skeleton of the music at home, sketching out initial ideas on Rhodes keyboard and acoustic and electric guitar; he then fed the parts through samplers and his modular system, recording 10- or 20-minute jams. Once he had edited them into more structured forms, he hit the studio with Canty, who added not just drums but also bass and piano; finally, Vitiello took the results of those sessions to Rowe, who played violin, viola, electric bass, and 12-string acoustic and bowed electric guitar, and assisted in some of the final structuring and mixdown. A few more surprises along the way: Reanimator’s Don Godwin, the studio engineer where Vitiello recorded with Canty, contributed what he calls “resonant dustpan”; and none other than Animal Collective’s Geologist, who just happened to be in the studio that day, sits in on hurdy gurdy on “Mrphgtrs1,” the album’s gorgeous, stunningly atmospheric drone closer. “I love these chance encounters,” Vitiello says. “Somebody I admire, a group I admire—that was an unexpected gift.” An unexpected gift is a great way of describing Second as a whole: three veteran musicians venturing outside their usual zones and finding a new collaborative language together. The results can’t be neatly slotted into any given genre; they belong not to any given category, but to the spirit of conversation itself.

On The Sport of Love, seasoned collaborators Asma Maroof, Patrick Belaga and Tapiwa Svosve consider the language, competition and contradiction of modern romance: its yearning, incomprehensible vastness and the inevitable darkness and fleeting fragility. For the trio, love is the emotion that propels all of us whether we acknowledge it or not, and its expression can be realized in many forms.

In the late-1990s, after a successful career as an MTV-era music video director, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson moved with Jhonn Balance - his partner in life and in Coil - from London to the rural Weston-super-Mare, creating an environment for all things "musick, musick, musick!" with a revolving door of new members, including Thighpaulsandra. This eruption in activity saw Coil's discography nearly double, and during this fruitful period, Thighpaulsandra asked the simple question: why doesn't Coil play live? After a 16-year wait, thanks to the rapid technological advancement in the form of MacBooks, DAWs, VSTs and plugins, Coil were able bring their music to the stage as always envisioned. In live performance, they could embrace the risks and freedoms of real time sonic manipulation, as noted by Sleazy: "Reshape the show minute by minute... the direction is very spontaneous, not so much in the way of like jazz improvisation but in a kind stream of consciousness… Thighpaulsandra brought us his wisdom, and he was able to convince us we could do it." From 1999 to 2003, Coil was "like a snake shedding its skin," transforming every six months into something "completely different." Their evolution was documented in real time through the recent advent of lower-cost CD-R manufacture, on limited edition albums including 'Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil' and 'Queens of the Circulating Library.' In preparing for 2004’s "Even an Evil Fatigue" live series, Coil began work on their next period-defining masterpiece, 'Black Antlers.' 'Black Antlers' showcases late-period Coil at their purest: stripped down, tighter, and leaner. The music became more rhythmic, with a greater emphasis on beats: "the songs we did tend to be more... not rock in any sense of a word, but you know, more conventional in terms of structure, but now what we're doing is sort of within an 'electronic' genre." The sound of 'Black Antlers' is of an intoxicating energy, combining Thighpaulsandra's advanced synthesis, Balance's poetic lyricism and Christopherson's flirtations with jazz and Ableton-aided PowerBook maximalism. Rounding out the trio were renowned hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton on a "specifically commissioned" electric variant, to merge into the band’s "strange and other-worldly music"; Royal Academy of Music trained percussionist Tom Edwards (who also appeared with Thighpaulsandra in Spiritualized’s live band); and European and Near East winds specialist Mike York on pipes, bombarde, duduk and balalaika. Initially released as an "album-in-progress" in June 2004, a post on the Threshold House website noted, "Please remember that September will see Coil recording the album "Black Antlers (Proper)"." Jhonn Balance passed away that November; Christopherson would reunite with 'Love's Secret Domain' collaborator Danny Hyde to complete 'Black Antlers' by May 2006. Revitalized energy marked 'Black Antlers''s recording, paired with the group's signature wordplay and humor (the name came from a series of imagined adult film titles). At their "Evil Fatigue" tour opener in Paris, Jhonn Balance presented the revised "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" as, "an updated version of one of our older-never 'hits.'" The song, about the energy generated by "two teenagers, or old age pensioners" rapidly pulses, with Edwards's marimbas electronically modified and arpeggiated by Christopherson. Album opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is hypnotic and hallucinatory, recalling Coil's 90s period, with a potentially uneasy air, filled with repetition, distorted vocals, and Thighpaulsandra's modulated drone. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part One - Saturnalia)" reveals the potentials of the 2004 lineup, as it writhes and glides through an imagined conversation with the legendary composer, building into overdrive. On the complementary piece, Christopherson & Hyde's "Sex With Sun Ra (Part Two - Sigillaricia)", the song evolves into a throbbing ouroboros of glitches and free flowing energy, with York's pipe samples reverberating almost filmically. One highlight is "The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris", an expansion of the song's first release (as "Wraiths And Strays (From Montreal)", available as a downloadable bonus track). "Of Paris" takes Thighpaulsandra synthesized warmth and Christopherson's PowerBook manipulations & stylizations from the original, adding samples taken from multi-track recordings of the full live band - including Balance's vocals from the Paris show - fully realizing Christopherson's desire of "taking the (electronic) genre to a place that people would find unexpected, and more challenging." Adding to the unexpected, and building upon their own uncompromising legacy, Coil delicately cover the traditional African American lullaby (and "friend's song") "All The Pretty Little Horses", with Balance's vocals soothing the listener in an almost hushed whisper. For Christopherson, following Jhonn's death, the relevance and power of Coil's creative output changed. He had one goal in mind: "to maintain the availability of the archive for future generations." In original form, 'Black Antlers' represented the possibilities of a new era for the group, built from the momentum of live performance, new sounds and ideas. For the final version, 'Black Antlers' reunited Coil members from over the decades, collaborating across the boundaries of fixed time. There would be no more new Coil, only the completion of unfinished projects, bringing them to a standard which Balance would "have loved and approved of." Dais Records would like to thank Thighpaulsandra and Danny Hyde for their collaboration on this reissue. The Dais reissue presents Coil's 2006 version 'Black Antlers' with 2004's "Wraiths And Strays (From Montreal)" available as a downloadable bonus track.

In the late-1990s, after a successful career as an MTV-era music video director, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson moved with Jhonn Balance - his partner in life and in Coil - from London to the rural Weston-super-Mare, creating an environment for all things "musick, musick, musick!" with a revolving door of new members, including Thighpaulsandra. This eruption in activity saw Coil's discography nearly double, and during this fruitful period, Thighpaulsandra asked the simple question: why doesn't Coil play live? After a 16-year wait, thanks to the rapid technological advancement in the form of MacBooks, DAWs, VSTs and plugins, Coil were able bring their music to the stage as always envisioned. In live performance, they could embrace the risks and freedoms of real time sonic manipulation, as noted by Sleazy: "Reshape the show minute by minute... the direction is very spontaneous, not so much in the way of like jazz improvisation but in a kind stream of consciousness… Thighpaulsandra brought us his wisdom, and he was able to convince us we could do it." From 1999 to 2003, Coil was "like a snake shedding its skin," transforming every six months into something "completely different." Their evolution was documented in real time through the recent advent of lower-cost CD-R manufacture, on limited edition albums including 'Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil' and 'Queens of the Circulating Library.' In preparing for 2004’s "Even an Evil Fatigue" live series, Coil began work on their next period-defining masterpiece, 'Black Antlers.' 'Black Antlers' showcases late-period Coil at their purest: stripped down, tighter, and leaner. The music became more rhythmic, with a greater emphasis on beats: "the songs we did tend to be more... not rock in any sense of a word, but you know, more conventional in terms of structure, but now what we're doing is sort of within an 'electronic' genre." The sound of 'Black Antlers' is of an intoxicating energy, combining Thighpaulsandra's advanced synthesis, Balance's poetic lyricism and Christopherson's flirtations with jazz and Ableton-aided PowerBook maximalism. Rounding out the trio were renowned hurdy-gurdy player Cliff Stapleton on a "specifically commissioned" electric variant, to merge into the band’s "strange and other-worldly music"; Royal Academy of Music trained percussionist Tom Edwards (who also appeared with Thighpaulsandra in Spiritualized’s live band); and European and Near East winds specialist Mike York on pipes, bombarde, duduk and balalaika. Initially released as an "album-in-progress" in June 2004, a post on the Threshold House website noted, "Please remember that September will see Coil recording the album "Black Antlers (Proper)"." Jhonn Balance passed away that November; Christopherson would reunite with 'Love's Secret Domain' collaborator Danny Hyde to complete 'Black Antlers' by May 2006. Revitalized energy marked 'Black Antlers''s recording, paired with the group's signature wordplay and humor (the name came from a series of imagined adult film titles). At their "Evil Fatigue" tour opener in Paris, Jhonn Balance presented the revised "Teenage Lightning (10th Birthday Version)" as, "an updated version of one of our older-never 'hits.'" The song, about the energy generated by "two teenagers, or old age pensioners" rapidly pulses, with Edwards's marimbas electronically modified and arpeggiated by Christopherson. Album opener "The Gimp (Sometimes)" is hypnotic and hallucinatory, recalling Coil's 90s period, with a potentially uneasy air, filled with repetition, distorted vocals, and Thighpaulsandra's modulated drone. "Sex With Sun Ra (Part One - Saturnalia)" reveals the potentials of the 2004 lineup, as it writhes and glides through an imagined conversation with the legendary composer, building into overdrive. On the complementary piece, Christopherson & Hyde's "Sex With Sun Ra (Part Two - Sigillaricia)", the song evolves into a throbbing ouroboros of glitches and free flowing energy, with York's pipe samples reverberating almost filmically. One highlight is "The Wraiths And Strays Of Paris", an expansion of the song's first release (as "Wraiths And Strays (From Montreal)", available as a downloadable bonus track). "Of Paris" takes Thighpaulsandra synthesized warmth and Christopherson's PowerBook manipulations & stylizations from the original, adding samples taken from multi-track recordings of the full live band - including Balance's vocals from the Paris show - fully realizing Christopherson's desire of "taking the (electronic) genre to a place that people would find unexpected, and more challenging." Adding to the unexpected, and building upon their own uncompromising legacy, Coil delicately cover the traditional African American lullaby (and "friend's song") "All The Pretty Little Horses", with Balance's vocals soothing the listener in an almost hushed whisper. For Christopherson, following Jhonn's death, the relevance and power of Coil's creative output changed. He had one goal in mind: "to maintain the availability of the archive for future generations." In original form, 'Black Antlers' represented the possibilities of a new era for the group, built from the momentum of live performance, new sounds and ideas. For the final version, 'Black Antlers' reunited Coil members from over the decades, collaborating across the boundaries of fixed time. There would be no more new Coil, only the completion of unfinished projects, bringing them to a standard which Balance would "have loved and approved of." Dais Records would like to thank Thighpaulsandra and Danny Hyde for their collaboration on this reissue. The Dais reissue presents Coil's 2006 version 'Black Antlers' with 2004's "Wraiths And Strays (From Montreal)" available as a downloadable bonus track.

Limited Japanese edition with Obi.“Some of it sounds so pure and clear and I am picturing him huddled around all that gear, simply magical. In my memory he didn’t play ‘for’ the audience but was rather trying to perfect these various permutations of sound within himself…and a few of us just happened to be present.” – Tom Lee

"Open Vocal Phrases, Where Songs Come in And Out" offers an intimate unedited Arthur Russell solo live performance recorded at Phill Niblock’s Experimental Intermedia Foundation in Downtown NYC on 12/20/85.

Phill curated and produced with Arthur two concerts at EI that would become an integral part of the foundation for the World of Echo album. Arthur titled this performance “Open Vocal Phrases, Where Songs Come in and Out”. This extraordinary performance was recorded by Steve Cellum and overseen by Phill and Arthur. Arthur would later edit sections from this performance merging it with studio material recorded at Battery Sound to finalize the World of Echo album released in 1986. Side four of the vinyl includes two instrumental tracks from "Sketches For World Of Echo", "Changing Forest" and "Sunlit Water"

Edward Artemiev's re-recording of his scores to Andrei Tarkovsky's classic films Зеркало (Mirror) (1975) and Сталкер (Stalker) (1979), reissued on 180-gram vinyl. When Artemiev recorded these scores in Moscow in 1989 and '90, there were no legitimately available releases of the original soundtracks. Artemiev chose to fill that void himself with these recordings, released on Torso Kino in the Netherlands as part of a 1990 double-LP set also containing re-recordings of Artemiev's score to Солярис (Solaris) (1972). This set is now long out of print, and Mirumir is pleased to present the collection on two separate LP releases, remastered, with new artwork, and officially licensed by the artist himself.

Carrying on a string of stunning archival releases from major figures of Indian classical tradition (including releases from members of the Dagar family and Amelia Cuni), Black Truffle is pleased to announce an unheard recording from tabla master Kamalesh Maitra (1924-2005). For over fifty years, Maitra devoted himself to the rare tabla tarang, a set of between ten and sixteen hand drums tuned to the notes of the raga to be performed. While the tabla tarang has its origins in the late 19th century, Maitra was the first to recognise its potential as a solo concert instrument, using the set of tuned drums to perform full-length raags. Seated behind a semi-circular array of drums, Maitra produced stunning waves of melodic improvisation enlivened with the rhythmic invention of a master percussionist. Across his career, Maitra performed in ensembles led by Ravi Shankar, collaborated with George Harrison, and led his own East-West fusion group, the Ragatala Ensemble. However, it is in the solo setting that his remarkable artistry and the otherworldly timbral qualities of the tabla tarang are most strikingly on display. Recorded during the same 1985 Berlin sessions that produced Maitra’s self-released solo LP Tabla Tarang: Ragas on Drums, on Raag Kirwani on Tabla Tarang we are treated to Maitra stretching out for over forty minutes on the late night Raag Kirwani, accompanied by Laura Patchen on tabla and Mila Morgenstern and Marina Kitsos on tanpura. The performance begins with the traditional free-floating exposition section, where Maitra’s spacious melodic improvisation at times almost resembles a plucked string instrument (like the sarod, which Maitra also played). For the listener unaccustomed to the tabla tarang, the sound of these microtonally inflected melodic patterns played on drums has a magic quality. As Maitra begins to imply the rhythmic cycles more strongly, Patchen joins on tabla, beginning half an hour of rhythmic-melodic exploration, where virtuosity sits side by side with delicacy and meditative attention. Accompanied by beautiful archival images and extensive liner notes from Laura Patchen, for many listeners Raag Kirwani on Tabla Tarang will be the perfect introduction to the magical world of Kamalesh Maitra, released to coincide with the hundredth anniversary of the master musician’s birth.

With But remember what you have had, Stephen O’Malley continues and expands his musical approach by transposing it to multiphonic electroacoustic writing and acousmatic listening. Drawing not only on his extensive experience as a composer and live instrumentalist, but also on the countless studio production and mixing sessions he has taken part in the course of his many projects (in solo, with SUNN O))) or KTL, to name but a few), Stephen O’Malley’s work on this new piece is ambitious, engaging in an inspired research that delves into the deep intricacies between polyphony, intonation and timbrality, enhanced by melodic motifs. To do this, O’Malley summons up his own very personal sound universe, constellated with amplified textures, instrumental sustained tones and raw energy, in order to diffract them into wavefronts, waves and blows that weave a complex, rich and fascinating matter. But remember what you have had stands out as an important work in Stephen O’Malley’s repertoire: it brings together the multiplicity of his musical approach in an exemplary way, while laying the foundations and promises for the future of an already extraordinary journey.

Trances, Jules Reidy’s follow-up to the celebrated World in World (2022), takes place in between states, tracing a kind of restless movement in search of—or is it away from?—a center. The twelve tracks shift between fragment and epic, returning to familiar phrases between forays outward into uncertain expanses. Through its exploration of the cyclical movements of grief and emotional turbulence, Trances produces a sonic world as raw, absorbing, and surprising as anything Reidy has created to date. Trances’ primary instrument is a custom hexaphonic electric guitar tuned in Just Intonation. Reidy’s combination of fingerpicked phrases, open strums, and corrugated processing push on the grammar of guitar-driven experimentalism, locating expressive heft in open-ended harmonics and the odd angles formed by overlapping elements. Chords are slowed and stretched as if to examine their resonance, then overtaken by subterranean motion. The effect is that of oceanic depth, but the rippling that passes between the compositions’ sedimentary layers often takes on a metallic edge. The addition of synthesizers, sampled 12-string guitar, field recordings, and half-submerged autotuned voice further denaturalize the compositions. Reidy’s vocal interjections—their particular linguistic content rendered inaccessible—are based on counting and self-observational techniques for bringing oneself back into the present; at times Reidy’s picking also assumes a mantra-like quality, though ultimately the flow of the composition subsumes both. There is a heavy sense of the strange throughout these songs, which bleed at their edges into a continuous, questioning whole. That Reidy’s compositions here have a tendency to engulf the listener, like a wave or a squall, can be variously comforting and disorienting. Either way, we are fortunate to follow Reidy on such a journey.

"Drag City presents the first official reissue of Dorothy Carter's 1976 album debut, her folk-music exegesis, Troubadour. In her lifetime, Dorothy, a self-made traveling musician and folklorist, brought forth masterful evocations on hammered dulcimer and psaltery from a myriad of times and places. Her music was played, produced and sold outside of that era's mainstream music distribution. Troubadour reissue producer Eric Demby can look back to a childhood spent off the grid: the early '70s in rural Maine, and later on, in Boston -- wherever his freewheeling father brought the family, at one point or another, there too was Dorothy, as she lived and breathed, playing her hammered dulcimer. The early '70s found everyone living up on the farm up in rural Maine; it was here that Rutman, Constance, Dorothy and some others formed Central Maine Power Company, a troupe of almost feral improvisers playing on a combination of self-made and found instruments, with live video feedback to boot. In 1976, Dorothy had been playing music for decades, but had yet to record any of it. That year, she went to Cambridge's Studio B with Rutman and friend Steve Baer at the console. Constance and Sally Hilmer accompanied her. The performances captured there were released later that year as Troubadour. In addition to hammered dulcimer and psaltery, Dorothy played the flute and sang. She chose songs from all over: Appalachian folk tunes, old and ancient psalms and hymns, Scottish, Irish, French and Israeli melodies, with a few of her own songs for good measure. They all flow together effortlessly under Dorothy and friends' hands in a syncretic space that we can identify today as a garden of world musics -- a highly energized, alternately meditative and proselytic recital whose vitality has only burgeoned in the decades since it appeared. As it should be: the music of Dorothy Carter is akin to a portal, linking her with the eternal. This edition of Troubadour reproduces the original album package, adding an insert adorned with additional photos of Dorothy and her collection of instruments, as well as notes from Eric Demby exploring the era -- his childhood -- from a vantage point of some 50 years. This reissue is a long-held family dream come true, and it is dedicated in loving memory to Bob Rutman, Constance Demby, David Demby and Dorothy Carter."

Ever unpredictable, Drumm this time takes the fellow time-traveller through what sounds like an electronic field recording, a journey through an electronic soundscape of luminescent textures that invites immersive listening.

〈Mille Plateaux〉や〈iDEAL Recordings〉にも作品を残すスウェーデンの電子音楽の名手Andreas Tilliander（TM404）と、ジャズ・トランペッターGoran Kajfešによるコラボレーション作品『In Cmin』が〈Kontra Musik〉からアナログ・リリース！TB-303のベースラインやアナログ／デジタルシンセによる音響彫刻と、Kajfešのトランペットやフルートが交錯し、月面や神話的な風景を想起させる音世界を構築。Terry Rileyの『In C』へのオマージュとして、Cマイナーでの即興演奏を展開しながら、ジャズとアンビエントの境界を越えた新たな地平を切り開いていく一枚です。

Originally released on tape in 2019, 'Big Room' helped establish Philly's Ulla Straus as one of the key figures in the post-"bblisss" wave of nu-ambient practitioners. Interchangeably glacial, gaseous and liquid, it's a rare downtempo tome that never shies away from sensuality and raw, messy emotionality. Gorgeous material: essential listening for anyone into Jake Muir, Perila, Shuttle358, Oval, Pendant or Space Afrika. 'Big Room' is a technically advanced record that never dangles its prowess in your face. Ulla's sound sculpting is remarkable, but the key to 'Big Room' is not her processing skill, it's her open-hearted emotional honesty. And if contemporary ambient and experimental music has been pocked by the Instagrammable nostalgia drip and hacky tacked-on PR narratives, 'Big Room' succeeds because it offers us a clear, demarcated alternative. Ulla doesn't need to shoehorn in a grandstanding press release or video footage of an elaborate modular setup to get our attention, the music does all the heavy lifting, drawing us in with clouded bathhouse textures and soft-focus dub rhythms, chiseled digital hiccups and levitational synthesizer loops. From the opening tones of 'Nana', with its sloshing pads and subtle glitches, to the dislocated wind chimes and blurry electronics of 'House', there's a resounding faded texture to Ulla's music that helps set a picture perfect mood. 'Big Room' is an album to lose yerself in - Ulla's able to dial in an aesthetic that goes beyond the surface level, piercing not just the production elements but the writing itself. Using relatively few elements, she's able to bridge the gaps between dub techno ('Net'), Mille Plateaux-esque processed glitch ('Past'), glowing Eno-influenced ambient ('Billow') and breathtaking arpeggio-led kosmische sounds ('Sister'), linking each track with her diaristic subtlety and careful choice of processes. In a forest of withered ambient mediocrity, 'Big Room' is a lonely, pristine evergreen - we just can't recommend it enough.

Artwork by Nicola Tirabasso and Alison Fielding
Thanks to Jack Colleran, Henry Earnest, Finn Carraher Mc Donald, Margie Jean Lewis, Róisin Berkley, Luka Seifert, Diego Herrera, and Olan Monk
Recorded in Conamara and Dublin between 2021 and 2023.

Roberto Musci, born in Milan in 1956, studied guitar, music and electronic instruments. From 1974 to 1985 he traveled the world studying African, Indian, Arab and Oriental music recording ethnic music “in the field,” studying and collecting ethnic musical instruments from all parts of the world. His self-produced debut album, “The Loa of Music,” is a seminal work of staggering originality and extraordinary beauty in which field recordings, musique concrète, electronics, synthesis and instrumentation are interwoven, drawing on the countless musics from all over the World that he recorded. The subsequent “Water messages on desert sand,” composed with Giovanni Venosta, was nominated for a Grammy in the UK in 1987. In the 1980s 'and 90s' he broadcast ethnic and electronic-experimental music from Rai and Radio Popolare radio stations. He has also composed and played music for videos, commercials, dance, poetry, theater, composed soundtracks and accompanied silent films live. From 1980 to the present, he has played with many Italian and European musicians: Giovanni Venosta, Claudio Gabbiani, Walter Prati, Giorgio Magnanensi, Massimo Cavallaro, Massimo Mariani, Moni Ovadia, Roberto Zorzi, Chris Cutler, Jon Rose David Moss, Steve Piccolo, Elliott Sharp, Keith Tippett and the Third Ear Band. The theme of travel, ethnicities and mysticism are a pivotal point in this new album of his as well, demonstrating once again how music needs absolutely no sharp lines of demarcation. The music is one. It goes from the search for deep meanings in a time spent in a Hindu monastery (Ashram) listening to mantras and studying Buddhist philosophy to space explorations and human settlements on the Moon or Mars wondering how man will live and what he will bring to the new worlds imagining that Sufism, an Islamic mystical religion, will accompany him in the discovery of new worlds. An inspired Roberto Musci is increasingly aware of his hypnotic and visionary language.

A mega-rare album is reissued. This is a tremendous property from the famous "Outernational Sounds", which has been conducting ambitious excavation releases across spiritual jazz, jazz funk, and Indo jazz, including rare works related to Nimbus. This is a reissue of a legendary independent album released in 1979 by Betty Lou Landreth, a female jazz singer from Oklahoma who also performed at clubs and worked as a backup singer in studios. This is the only album that features talented session players such as The Funk Brothers, a Motown session group, and Marcus Belgrave of Detroit's Tribe Collective. This is a cult album of jazz vocals with a fierce blend of unfathomable mysteriousness and excessive energy that engulfs all kinds of audiences into another dimension.

Full HD re-creation/restoration of the legendary soundtrack for 1994 Exploration / Action-Adventure / Sci-Fi / Alien video game Super Metroid by Louisiana-based composer and producer Jammin' Sam Miller. Jammin' Sam Miller explains: "Composed by Kenji Yamamoto. Recreated by me. This was made possible by locating the original instrument samples from workstation keyboards and drum machines before they were put into the game and rebuilding the soundtrack from the ground up, applying some modern mixing techniques along the way to lift the veil of 16bit compression and create an updated listening experience." *For fans of Video Games, SNES, Samus Aran, Atmospheric Sounds, Zebes Music*

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

“Upopo Sanke“ means “Let's sing a song" in the Ainu language. Umeko Ando (1932-2004) was one of the best-known artists of the Ainu, an indigenous, long-suppressed community in northern Japan. She sings their traditional songs together with Oki Kano on the Tonkori harp, who also recorded the album. The two are supported by members of the female vocal group Marewrew as well as Ainu percussionists, a string player and a male singer who provides rhythmic shouts and also throat singing. The call-and-response structure of many of the songs is performed with a mantric quality in a vocal style that is perhaps best described as elastic and breathing. There seems to be a gentle smile in every note and syllable. This music softly hits the heart. Upopo Sanke was recorded on a farm in Tokachi in the summer of 2003. We hear dogs barking, a distant thunderstorm and voices imitating animals. The liner notes that accompany the 2LP release gather the anecdotal memories of Umeko Ando and Oki Kano about the stories of the 14 songs. Oki Kano is a musical ambassador of the Ainu culture who tours worldwide with his Oki Dub Ainu Band and also gives solo concerts, always playing the Tonkori, the five-stringed Ainu harp. The Ainu have suffered from the oppression of their culture and language by Japan, especially since the 18th and 19th centuries. Only recently, in 2008, were the Ainu officially recognized again as an indigenous people culturally independent of Japan. As a result of the marginalization, there are now only a few hundred native speakers of the Ainu language left, making it a particularly worthy object of preservation. "Upopo Sanke" was mixed again in part by Oki Kano, before being mastered and cut to vinyl by Kassian Troyer. The 2LP plays on 45rpm and it sounds fantastic. This album was the second album by Umeko Ando, the follow-up to „Ihunke" and also re-released in 2018 by Pingipung together with Oki Kano.