MUSIC

Not Waving explores grief, gratitude, and new beginnings on "The Place I've Been Missing" Renowned Italian musician Alessio Natalizia, AKA Not Waving, reaches new heights with his latest album, "The Place I've Been Missing." This deeply personal and introspective collection of songs delves into themes of grief, the fragility of existence, and the profound process of learning to bid farewell. "The Place I've Been Missing" is a poignant journey, written and recorded by Natalizia, with captivating guest appearances from long time collaborator and friend Marie Davidson alongside Ecstatic label mates Spivak, more eaze, and Romance. Unrestrained by conventional notions, Not Waving's sound defies easy categorisation. From enigmatic electronic soundscapes to dissonant symphonies, from syncopated beats to soothing melodic interludes, these 10 fragmented compositions are a testament to Natalizia's creative fearlessness. Over the span of 10 years, Not Waving's music has undergone a restless evolution, defying easy categorization. The soundscapes within "The Place I've Been Missing" traverse genres, featuring elements of crepuscular synth-pop, slowed-down strings, baroque guitars, shot through with layers of harmonic noise and hazy ambiance. "The Place I've Been Missing" is an audacious endeavor, straddling the fragile line between chaos and harmony, listeners are transported to an ethereal dimension, delving deep into realms of introspection.

New imprint Silver Triplet enters the world with a rocket of a collaborative album from two of electronic music’s most free-spirited mavericks. Combining the surrealist punk ethos of Scotch Rolex and the bass heavy psychedelia of Shackleton, Death by Tickling is ten tracks full of wild and unpredictable changes, incorporating odd time signatures, cosmic synth freak outs and dubbed out space vibrations. At times the album lulls the listener into a zoned out trance whilst at other times it startles with its ferocity, Death by Tickling has the whole range in its Helter Skelter approach. Produced in their studio in Berlin, both artists’ sonic signatures can be unmistakeably recognised on this album. Scotch Rolex is best known for his work with Kampala based artists MC Yallah and DUMA's Lord Spikeheart. With releases on Nyege Nyege’s Hakuna Kulala label, Rolex draws on dancehall, trap, Japanese traditional music, gabber, grindcore, Gqom, and Kuduro to unique and exciting effect. The same energy permeates this new release, but with a new elements of shamanism and deconstructed rhythms. Meanwhile, the founder of Skull Disco, Shackleton, has been carving out his own brand of esoteric ritual trance music for the best part of two decades on labels such as Honest Jon’s, Hot Flush and Perlon. This record sees him taking Rolex’s raw beats and devil may care trickery and exploding it through a dub effect rack into outer space. It is an hour of out-there music which will appeal to those who like it challenging and adventurous. At the same time, you could get the impression that there is even a savage humour or a cosmic joke underlying the whole endeavour, hence the title, Death by Tickling. To round off the package, the brilliant artwork is courtesy of Zeke Clough who can always be depended on to bring the unexpected.

ZZK Records Presents Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes. There’s no denying the power of the drum. It’s primal, it cuts across borders and most importantly, it makes you want to move. Ghetto Kumbé don’t just understand that—they celebrate it, and it’s why the tambor was at the heart of the Bogotá-based trio’s 2020 self-titled debut album. Rooted in mysticism and the Afro-Caribbean rhythms they’d grown up with all their lives, the critically acclaimed LP thrillingly updated the traditional Latin template, folding in elements of modern hip-hop, house and bass music while also delivering a transportive Afro-futurist vision. On Clubbing Remixes, that vision has been further amplified, as Ghetto Kumbé—who were already one of Colombia’s most prominent alternative acts—have now gone fully global; enlisting an all-star roster of artists from four different continents, they’ve put together a fresh version of their debut album that’s been specifically geared to the world’s diverse slate of dancefloors. As the title implies, the new LP is meant for the club, which is why Ghetto Kumbé have turned to Latin music heavyweights like Trooko—a multiple Grammy winner whose resume includes work with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Residente—and Monte (a.k.a. Bomba Estéreo founder Simón Mejía), along with top-shelf DJs like Nickodemus and Uproot Andy, two NYC artists who’ve spent decades championing Afro-Latin rhythms. True to the LP’s global spirit, the record also includes reworks from batida maestro DJ Firmeza, fellow Afro-Portuguese outfit Studio Bros and Parisian house groovers Les Enfants Sauvages, plus genre-blurring remixes from sonically adventurous Colombians Montoya (himself another ZZK artist) and Cero39. Even the artwork on Clubbing Remixes is a remix, as Ghetto Kumbé have tapped Uganda’s Denzel Muhumuza to transform the cover of their debut album into a new, explicitly Afro-futuristic illustration. Depicting a strong Black face and glowing neon fauna beneath a sparkling moonlit sky, the fantastical image speaks to both the ritual magic and Afro-indebted heritage of Ghetto Kumbé’s music, and thanks to Clubbing Remixes, the group’s passionate, drum-fueled sounds will soon be blasting out of sound systems around the globe. Ghetto Kumbé Clubbing Remixes will be released on all digital platforms on November 9th, 2022, with a double vinyl release to follow on March 31st, 2023.

“Unlike much of my work recently, it is not a ‘concept album’ and is without any collaborators. I just wanted to focus on my core sound really but without any of the genre tropes that may have been present the last time I made a solo album. I had hoped that the album could work on multiple levels. In that respect, it is intended as a psychedelic album as much as anything. You can listen to it in a more meditative way without getting distracted by the details. I suppose that is why the frequency spectrum is more similar to my earlier work, but there is a lot going on under the surface and it can be quite demanding if you are paying attention as there are odd time signatures and dissonant elements in there too. Light and shadow I guess. I am hoping that it may be the kind of album that people play at the end of an excessive night, like after a club being back home with some friends, sleep deprivation and whatever else kicking in together with the music helping to launch your mind into space! I am also hoping though that it will be interesting enough to stand up in the cold sober light of day as ‘just good engaging music’. It is quite foggy and scuzzy in feel and I am using a lot of filtering and reverb to get this. I think the vocal samples are an attempt to offset this, to bring a bit of light to the murkiness. I also wanted the vocal aspects to reflect influences or things I could closely identify with for the most part, so there are a few hints at British folk songs in amongst the music, albeit rather ghostly and not directly recognisable. But anyway, all this is much more a question of feel, rather than a signifier in this respect. I like the haunting, melancholic aspects of these songs I suppose. I am putting it out on my own label, Woe To The Septic Heart! I just felt it was time for that. It is a bad time for pressing records but conversely, Bandcamp has proved to be useful in showing you do not need to have the backing of an established label. I think I can do something independently and hope that it will still reach the public.” — Shackleton

Across 8 concise vignettes, Chantal Michelle alchemizes acoustic instrumentation with a spectrum of layered feedback and field sounds, depicting fractured beauty amongst a precarious reality. Michelle’s work is characterized by intoxicating juxtaposition and enriched with an array of source material to construct immersive narrative. Much of the work here was recorded during her time in New York City, perhaps a pre-requisite to the heightened tension at play. Opening with lucid choral vocals, a mysteriously seductive anaesthesia disseminates before evaporating into surging feedback, vocals dissolving as quickly as they appeared. It’s this oscillation between states that permeates throughout the work. Whether it’s the esoteric rumbling of acoustic drones, or the radiant fusion of distorted chords amongst the warming sounds of tropical atmospheres, moments of serenity are conjured up in a space so bliss that their endings incite an immediate nostalgia. Fleeting melodies are pierced by shattering cries of feedback; gossamer tones engulfed in saturated noise. Amongst the instrumentation, buzzing field sounds tremor with hyperreal peculiarity and hallucinations shape noise into sounds of the familiar; the rumbling of an overheard aeroplane or the whirring of distant grasshoppers. Similarly, recurring motifs elicit a false sense of security in their subliminal familiarity, soon exposed as echoes, a reverberation of what was left behind. At the approaching climax, the blissful onset anaesthesia has worn off, interrupted by a powerful chorus of deep, gothic synthesis that fuels post-apocalyptic fever dreams, an unnerving and mesmerising symphony. The unresolved tension leaves us in a state of delirium, questioning if the tranquillity we experienced was ever really there. Michelle was immersed in Fleur Jaeggy’s 'The Water Statues' whilst recording, and its imprint is woven into the sonic fabric of 'Broken to Echoes'; a sublime liminal dream-state, pervaded by haunting visions. It’s a view of the world captured from inside the enclosure of a cell membrane. Through translucent mesh, we see the billowing tension of our surroundings, protected only by the most delicate walls.

‘Health’, by Frankfurt-based artist and musician Man Rei, aka Kristin Reiman, opens wistfully amongst lush, echoing drones, their vocal intimations stretched out in boundless, iridescent cycles. It’s amongst these reverb-drenched murmurs of 90s shoegaze that a vast space makes way for their confessional ruminations on the disarray of life and its messiness. Man Rei’s work is woven with intricate narrative, take ‘Cusp’ (2020), where expressions of fatigue and lethargy meld into an absorbing idle dream state. In ‘Health’, they confront the impermanence of their existence, their words ‘I am not endless’ cutting straight to the core in a potent shot of bittersweet sorrow. The sheer weightlessness of the A side elicits a blissful reverie, disguising the underlying narrative of discontent and uncertainty. As meandering piano rings out in ‘Just another let it die’, Side B veils into shadow; a paranoid self-reflection with unnerving synths brooding in suspense. At the height of this tension, the deep, rumbling bassline of ‘Endless-no’ summons a fever dream of devastating heartbreak. Man Rei’s unique ability to modulate tension conjures immersive shifts, and the whispered solace of ‘Still, by’ provides respite from the heartache. The same duality resonates in their diaristic verse, replete with both dry wit and sensitive observations on the melancholic human experience. Within these songs is a voice that illuminates the overlooked, a pervasive synthesis of idiosyncrasy and beauty, all imbued with the irresistible and tender spirit of Man Rei. As the closing words of ‘Without fear’ reverberate, there’s a feeling akin to acceptance, Reiman’s perception of loneliness intertwined with hope.

Bassist and composer Milo Fitzpatrick (Portico Quartet) launches new collaborative project with saxophonist Jordan Smart (Mammal Hands) Vega Trails is a new project from double-bassist and composer Milo Fitzpatrick, a founder member of Portico Quartet, who has also performed with the likes of Nick Mulvey and Jono McCleary and features saxophonist Jordan Smart (Mammal Hands, Sunda Arc) in a richly powerful duo bringing together two powerfully charismatic musicians. The project which takes its name from Carl Sagan's science fiction novel 'Contact' (a book about signals of new life detected from the Vega system) and was born out of a desire to bring the elements of bass and melody to the foreground in their rawest form and Fitzpatrick explains that he deliberately chose the stripped back approach. “There is so much in just one musician’s sound; the emotional, the intellectual, the vulnerability and power of their character. But often these delicate nuances can be submerged in the quest for a group sound. In Vega Trails I wanted to grant the musicians space to breathe and be heard and for the listener to witness the intimacy and depth of a conversation between two voices, bass and melody. I was also interested in how the limitations would guide both the composition and performance and to push us both to places close to the limits of what we could play, and it is in this place where I believe the character of a musician blossoms and comes forward”. Tremors in the Static was composed during Lockdown as Fitzpatrick immersed himself in music that had space and sparseness such as Swedish fiddle music and Indian Classical music. Jan Johansson’s legendary ‘Jazz på Svenska’ (jazz versions of Swedish folk songs) was another influence, as was a collection of ancient lullabies by Spanish soprano singer Montserrat Figueras. Through exploring the harmonic and textural possibilities on the bass, Fitzpatrick would cycle riffs and motifs whilst singing melodies, and he began to create the music debuted here. However, it was only after listening to Charlie Haden’s album of duets, ‘Closeness’, that the project would come into focus as a duo, and Fitzpatrick immediately knew that the second musician had to be Jordan Smart. “I saw Jordan play at two Gondwana Records events – in Berlin and Tokyo. Both times I was mesmerised by the intensity and conviction of his playing. His commitment to the cause of transcending himself and the listener made a lasting impression on me. When I began writing this record, I knew I needed a strong player who had equal conviction in their playing as me, but also someone who understood the importance of melody” It was an inspired idea as Smart brought an openness and positivity which allowed the music to be both experimental and bold. Smart’s ability to play tenor and soprano saxophone with equal command, as well as bass clarinet and Ney flute, allowed them to open up the pallet of sound and pull the melodies into varying emotional landscapes. The final piece of the puzzle was the performance space. Fitzpatrick knew that he wanted the two players to react off of a third element. The music was written for an ambient space which interacted with the notes: decaying and disintegrating them into silence. They found the perfect space in a church in Fitzpatrick’s local neighbourhood of Stamford Hill. “The recording space is the canvas on which the sound interacts and flows, it is the frame in which notes can live, breathe and die and is as important as the other elements. A resonant recording space, like a church, allows this stripped back sound to resonate, echo and linger, enough to create images and landscapes in which stories can play out”. This then is Vega Trails, a project that brings together two open-mined and communicative musicians for the first time, to tell beautiful winding stories together and to create something soulful and new. Something bigger than both of them and something that leaves us all richer for hearing it. Enjoy!

Substrata was the third studio album by the Norwegian electronic artist Biosphere, released 25 years ago by All Saints Records in London. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it at number 38 on its list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Here are ten alternative versions picked from the Substrata recordings sessions that took place between 1995 and 1996. David Stubbs´review of the original album in Melody Maker ,July 12th 1997: Biosphere, aka Norwegian Geir Jenssen, is transmitting from a cold, polar outpost of the imagination. "Substrata" is the best ambient album I've heard in an ice age, an album of terrifying, desolate and all-enveloping beauty, the music of a man who's stared too long and too hard at the Northern lights, a music of distant rumbles, tremors underfoot, stray radio signals, yawning chasms and indistinct, grainy images in the half-light when the mind begins to play tricks. "Poa Alpina" reminds me of recent, frightening TV footage of vast chunks of iceberg cracking and falling away into the sea under the duress of global warming. As for "The Things I Tell You", imagine what Oasis would have sounded like had they been born Eskimos. "Sphere Of No Form" is shot through with a frantic peal like the Mayday song of the world's last whale and, best of all, "Kobresia" looms with a vast, mournful, symphonic motif, like the ghost of the Titanic. Chill out has never been this chilling.

Substrata was the third studio album by the Norwegian electronic artist Biosphere, released 25 years ago by All Saints Records in London. In 2016, Pitchfork ranked it at number 38 on its list of the 50 Best Ambient Albums of All Time. Here are ten alternative versions picked from the Substrata recordings sessions that took place between 1995 and 1996. David Stubbs´review of the original album in Melody Maker ,July 12th 1997: Biosphere, aka Norwegian Geir Jenssen, is transmitting from a cold, polar outpost of the imagination. "Substrata" is the best ambient album I've heard in an ice age, an album of terrifying, desolate and all-enveloping beauty, the music of a man who's stared too long and too hard at the Northern lights, a music of distant rumbles, tremors underfoot, stray radio signals, yawning chasms and indistinct, grainy images in the half-light when the mind begins to play tricks. "Poa Alpina" reminds me of recent, frightening TV footage of vast chunks of iceberg cracking and falling away into the sea under the duress of global warming. As for "The Things I Tell You", imagine what Oasis would have sounded like had they been born Eskimos. "Sphere Of No Form" is shot through with a frantic peal like the Mayday song of the world's last whale and, best of all, "Kobresia" looms with a vast, mournful, symphonic motif, like the ghost of the Titanic. Chill out has never been this chilling.

AOTN proudly present a new solo outing from long time friend & contributor to Athens of the North, Other Lands aka Gavin L.Sutherland. Channelling his considerable improvisational skills to evoke notions of island life, his concept was to create something that could work equally well in the wilds of the Western Isles as in the sunnier spots of the world that we all yearned to escape to at that time. The more he played with this idea of groups of islands, of archipelagos the world over, the more it also became about people themselves experiencing isolation as individuals, while still feeling a sense of togetherness with others in the same boat. Working a little at home but mainly here at Athens of the North studios, he would come in each day over the course of a few weeks and just hit record, playing at times almost without mind. Sometimes the mood would call for keys, strings, or drums through delays for days and days. Often, the music would happen by chance as much as by design. One rule he tried to adhere to was to not overthink things, capturing moments honestly with minimal editing or digital processing. What we’ve ended up with is a beautiful, spontaneous, timeless and honest meditation on what it is to be at once both alone and part of a larger whole.

AOTN proudly present a new solo outing from long time friend & contributor to Athens of the North, Other Lands aka Gavin L.Sutherland. Channelling his considerable improvisational skills to evoke notions of island life, his concept was to create something that could work equally well in the wilds of the Western Isles as in the sunnier spots of the world that we all yearned to escape to at that time. The more he played with this idea of groups of islands, of archipelagos the world over, the more it also became about people themselves experiencing isolation as individuals, while still feeling a sense of togetherness with others in the same boat. Working a little at home but mainly here at Athens of the North studios, he would come in each day over the course of a few weeks and just hit record, playing at times almost without mind. Sometimes the mood would call for keys, strings, or drums through delays for days and days. Often, the music would happen by chance as much as by design. One rule he tried to adhere to was to not overthink things, capturing moments honestly with minimal editing or digital processing. What we’ve ended up with is a beautiful, spontaneous, timeless and honest meditation on what it is to be at once both alone and part of a larger whole.

The third part of Ideologic Organ Music’s trilogy of field recordings of sacred flute music from Papua New Guinea, recorded by Ragnar Johnson and Jessica Mayer in the 1970s. A book titled “A Papua New Guinea Journey” consisting of RagnarJohnson’s account of the circumstances behind the recordings will be published simultaneously with this music release.

“The recording of a male initiation ceremony with sacred flutes, bullroarers and ‘crying baby’ leaves was only possible after fifteen months residence during anthropological research. From the same Ommura villages in the Eastern Highlands there are bamboo jews harps, yam fertility flutes and singing. Nama (‘bird’) sacred flutes were recorded in a Gahuku Gama village in the town of Goroka. There are Mo-mo bamboo resonating tubes and singing from the Finisterre Range of Madang. From the Ramu Coast region of Madang there are: Waudang flutes, garamut slit gongs and singing from Manam Island, Maner flutes from Awar village and Siam and Guna flutes and garamuts from Nubia Sissimungum Village. These previously unreleased recordings were made in 1976 and 1979.”
–Ragnar Johnson, London 2021

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Ragnar Johnson's liner notes for the release

This music comes from the Eastern Highlands and Madang provinces of Papua New Guinea. The recordings of the Ommura Iyavati male initiation ceremony, the different bamboo jews harps, yam fertility flutes and singing were the result of fifteen months residence for anthropological research 1975- 1976 and a one month return in 1979. The Iyavati male initiation ceremony with its spirit cries of bamboo transverse blown and water flutes, bullroarers and ‘crying baby’ leaves was recorded at night outside the men’s house with the sounds of instruction and singing from inside the men’s house audible in the background. Nama ‘bird’ transverse blown paired bamboo flutes were recorded in a Gahuku Gama village inside the town of Goroka in the Eastern Highlands. The Mo-mo resonating tubes and singing were recorded at Damaindeh Bau on the Markham Valley edge of the Finisterre Range. The other Madang recordings of long paired bamboo flutes and garamut wooden slit gongs come from the Ramu coast region. There are Waudang flutes, garamuts and singing from Manam Island, Maner flutes from Awar and Siam and Guna flutes and garamuts from Nubia Sissimungum.

The Ommura lived in the Yonura villages of Samura, Sonura and Moussouri which were next to the Obura Patrol Post and in the neigbouring villages of Kurunumbaira and Asara. The1975 Government Census listed a population of 1,140 inhabitants of whom 437 lived in Yonura. The Ommura, the collective name for the inhabitants of these villages, spoke a dialect classified as Southern Tairora. The Obura Patrol Post, established in 1965, was 32 miles from the town of Kainantu in the Dogara Census Division of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The altitude was 4,000 to 5,300 feet on the valley floors and up to 8,000 feet on the mountain ridges. The arrival of steel tools, traded along the Markham Valley, into what was previously a stone age technology, preceded the establishment of the patrol post by about fifteen years. The first government patrol to reach the Ommura area was in the early 1950s and the area was regularly patrolled by the 1960s. Inter-village warfare was endemic.

The Ommura were slash and burn cultivators growing sweet potatoes, yams, taro, bananas, sugar cane, various beans, pit-pit, maize, squashes and greens. Arabica coffee was introduced as a cash crop in the early 1970s and young men were sent as plantation labourers to New Ireland.

Every Ommura patri-lineage (okyera) had a mountain demarcating a traditional area of lineage residence and a mythical lineage ancestor (uri). Ommura social life revolved around the staging of various kinds of ceremonies. There were fertility ceremonies to promote the growth of yams, sweet potatoes and pigs. Major events in individuals lives were marked by the enactment of the life cycle ceremonies of birth, male or female initiation, marriage and death. All Ommura ceremonies involved payment of some kind varying in amount from large payments between lineage groups for life cycle ceremonies consisting of traditional valuables, earth oven cooked pig meat and food, and money to small payments of food.

The Ommura practised three types of curing ceremony; Ua-ha in which the illness was chased away by armed men, Vu-ha in which the afflicted were fed a mixture of pork and medicinal herbs and their illnesses were transferred into a device made of sugar cane and washed away by flowing water and Asochia where diviners chewed hallucinogenic tree bark (Galbulimima Belgraveana) to see the cause of the illness and then treat it.

The Ommura performed the following male and female initiations: Nihi Rara the piercing of the nasal septum for male and female children; Kam Karura performed in the women’s house for girls, Ummara and Iyavati performed in the men’s house for boys and the male and female pre-marriage ceremonies performed respectively in the men’s house and woman’s house.
These initiations were enacted to discipline youth into their respective male and female roles with bleeding the nose and beatings with taroah stinging nettles to promote heath. Male and female initiates were instructed to practice the same food taboos and were educated by means of gender specific secret stories and songs. Burlesque mimes of the opposite sex occurred in both and at the end the initiates were decorated in new clothes, ornaments and paint. A feast of pig meat and vegetables had to be given by the father at the end of an initiation ceremony together with a payment to the eldest mother’s brother for his participation.

Nose bleeding was performed to remove the dangerous accumulation of blood that became lodged inside the bridge of the nose at conception in the womb. To strengthen the penis young males had the urethra of the penis bled sometime between the final stage of male initiation and marriage. During the Iyavati initiation the male initiates were beaten with taroah stinging nettles, secret taroah songs were sung and exaggerated mimes of aggressive male sexual behaviour involving the use of taroah were enacted with much chanting of the male ’Wo-Wo’ war cry. Initiates were told what acts and foods were forbidden to them and given instructions regarding permissible sexual relations and their duties to assist their relatives and future wife. Iyavati initiates wore a pair of pigs tusks points upwards through a hole in the nasal septum.

Marriage was centred around the bride price which was given to the wife’s father by the husband, his paternal kin, mother’s brother and relatives. During the marriage ceremony, grooms were warned about the disastrous consequences of contact with female menstrual pollution and brides were warned not to poison a husband in this way.
Peace was made between enemy villages by an exchange of cooked pigs in a ceremony called Obu. A death compensation ‘head’ payment
in traditional valuables or a woman in marriage was the only act that eliminated the need for a payback killing in retribution for a death in war. Inter-village trade was carried out between two individuals rather than groups from different villages, frequently with partners from the lower altitude Bush Markham villages. 

"A New Guinea Journey" is Dr. Ragnar Johnson's 289 page manuscript concerning his ethnomusicology research in Papua New Guinea during the 1970s. Ideologic Organ has released three double LP/double CD titles of recordings from these extensive, immersive and assimilated research trips. This is the definitive writing on the topic.

Amid massive global paradigm shifts Dave Hartley (aka Nightlands) became a father twice over and left his native Philadelphia for Asheville, where the pace of daily life is slower and it's easier to maintain a zoomed-out perspective on modern life. From the newfound refuge of a studio he built using the bones of a barn attached to his hundred-something-year-old house in the mountains, Hartley has tailored a collection of well-crafted pop rock, pointedly titled Moonshine. Guided by some of the harmonic sensibilities that have helped make The War on Drugs a force in modern music, Moonshine combines immaculate-yet-dense vocal stacks and billowy clouds of effected keyboards with classic songcraft, revealing previously unseen acreage in the unfurling dreamscape that is Nightlands. The surrealistic album art by Austin-based illustrator Jaime Zuverza depicts an archway opening to the stars over the surface of an idyllic sea flanked by both moon and sun. Similarly, Moonshine reveals portals within portals leading to ever deeper places in Hartley's vocal-centered labyrinth. Hartley lays out the narrative of Moonshine on its masterfully sparse opener, "Looking Up." "Take your family to the mountains," he sings, "Hide them safely; pray for mercy, and easy fictions..." Throughout the album, there are plenty of buoyant high moods where the pitter-patter of drum machine and humming digital organ hints at Hartley's low-key tropicalia streak, but lyrics such as these anchor the dreaminess in real-world sorrow and resignation. Nowhere are these sentiments more apparent than on the title track, a nearly acapella recitation of "America the Beautiful" that poignantly hovers over a mirage of soft keyboards before dovetailing into Hartley's own words about the hypocrisy of the American dream. "This was never intended to be an overtly political record" he admits. "I have so many friends who are able to process the frustration of current events gracefully or with wisdom or in a nuanced way, but I often find myself just consumed with anger about it all. I decided to just let that come out, and it manifested itself lyrically." Moonshine's wide-eyed, utopian instrumental backdrops provide sharp contrast to Hartley's lyrics, which sting even harder within the sweetness. "With You" follows with full-on pop romanticism, as a rolling synth bass line and a decelerated drum machine ground the breezy arrangement. The track departs after an accumulation of warbling keyboard textures give way to "Blue Wave," an angelic instrumental vignette that deepens the mood while allowing the listener to reflect on Moonshine's earlier chapters. The slowly anthemic "No Kiss for the Lonely" takes poetic aim at xenophobia beneath a canopy of chiming bells, kalimba-like textures, glassy vocoded passages, and a massive chorus derived almost entirely from Hartley's own voice, exemplifying the nucleus of his creative process. "I spend ninety percent of my studio time building these vocal stacks with sort of endless vocal layering and lots of speeding up and slowing down of the track, overdubbing at different speeds and with different microphones," Hartley details, "and I really perfected that, I think, on this record." In terms of instrumentation, Hartley pared things down as much as possible, choosing to allocate all of Moonshine's density to his vocal harmonies, the layers of which number in the hundreds on some songs. "People sometimes ask me what's in my vocal effects chain, gear wise" he muses, "but honestly it's just a matter of having put in thousands of hours obsessing over the blend of these stacks, honing the craft." Even in light of the album's vocal emphasis, Hartley's history as a bassist brilliantly beams through Moonshine, giving effortless and sprightly movement to songs like "Down Here," which also features an extended section of saxophone lent by his Western Vinyl labelmate, Joseph Shabason. In addition to Shabason, the album hosts a short list of remote collaborators including four of Hartley's bandmates from The War on Drugs, Robbie Bennet, Anthony Lamarca, Eliza Hardy Jones, and Charlie Hall, as well as exotica virtuoso Frank Locrasto (Cass McCombs, Fruit Bats), and producer Adam McDaniel (Avey Tare, Angel Olsen). Hartley was forced to keep the guest list small out of the necessity of pandemic isolation, coupled with his move to a smaller city, all of which challenged him to do most of the album's heavy lifting right down to the mixing duties, resulting in the most independent effort of his career. By that measure, Moonshine is also the clearest image yet of Dave Hartley as a person and creator.

Lucrecia Dalt channels sensory echoes of growing up in Colombia on her new album ¡Ay!, where the sound and syncopation of tropical music encounter adventurous impulse, lush instrumentation, and metaphysical sci-fi meditations in an exclamation of liminal delight. In sound and spirit, ¡Ay! is a heliacal exploration of native place and environmental tuning, where Dalt reverses the spell of temporal containment. Through the spiraling tendencies of time and topography, Lucrecia has arrived where she began. CD edition includes lyrics and an essay by Miguel Prado in Spanish and English.

It’s hard to tell on first listen, but the L.A.-based Gendel made every sound on his new album using his alto saxophone. “Pass If Music” is hardly a solo jazz album, though. Rather, the musician harnesses his horn in service of ambient tones and experimental works that reside outside genre distinctions. “East L.A. Haze Dream” floats like an amorphous cloud of vapor as Gendel layers gently blown notes with the occasional brief sax run. “Trudge” is a darkened mantra featuring lower-register hums and a minimal rhythm that marches with determination. In notes, the artist writes that it and the other eight pieces were inspired by the motion picture “The Labyrinth & the Long Road,” [directed by Daniel Oh] for which Gendel contributed the score, and that makes sense. It’s an atmospheric work that evokes its own brand of drama.” –Randall Roberts for the Los Angeles Times

Dewa Alit, Bali’s master of contemporary Gamelan composition, returns to Black Truffle with Chasing the Phantom, presenting two recent works played by the composer’s Gamelan Salukat, a large ensemble that performs on instruments specially built to his designs, using a unique tuning system that combines notes from two traditional Balinese Gamelan scales. Alit explains that the ensemble’s name suggests “a place to fuse creative ideas to generate new, innovative works” and both compositions demonstrate the composer’s ability to wring stunning new possibilities from variations on the traditional Gamelan ensemble. While using familiar elements of Balinese Gamelan music, such as unison scalar melodies and stop-start dynamics, Alit’s music is overflowing with harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral inventions, the latter often facilitated by unorthodox playing techniques. “Ngejuk Memedi”, an English translation of which gives the LP its title, results from Alit’s reflection on the complex relationship between tradition and modernity in Balinese culture, particularly in the way that belief in the phantoms or spirits known as ‘memedi’ are shared through social media using digital technologies. Embodying this uncanny co-existence, the opening passages of the piece are at once immediately recognisable in their use of the metallophones of the Gamelan ensemble and strikingly reminiscent of electronics in their timbre and movement. At points, what we hear seems to have been fragmented with digital tools, or even to originate in some incessantly glitching DX7. Short melodic figures loop irregularly, with the ensemble splintering into polyrhythmic shards before unexpectedly recombining for intricate unison passages. After several minutes of this manically tinkling metallic sound world, the metallophones are joined by drums for a meditative passage of lower dynamics, as the uniformly high pitch range explored in the opening sections gradually opens up to include resonant low gong hits. Recovering some of the manic energy of the opening, but now enhanced with the full range of percussion, the piece weaves through a series of tempo changes to a stunning passage of rapid-fire melodies and ringing chords that sweep across the metallophones, their unorthodox tuning creating complex clouds of wavering harmonies. “Likad”, written during Covid-19 lockdowns, channels anxiety and uncertainty into musical form, resulting in a piece that, even by Alit’s standards, is stunning in its complexity and the virtuosity it demands of Gamelan Salukat. Its opening section is perhaps most remarkable for its mastery of texture, with rapid transitions between dry, muted strikes and metallic shimmers calling to mind the use of filters in electronic music. At points, the complex irregular repetitions of short melodic patterns, where the music seems to get stuck or be suddenly interrupted by a skip, recall the mad sampler works of Alvin Curran or the skittering surface of prime period Oval more than anything familiar from acoustic percussion music. Moving through a dizzying series of twists and turns, the piece ends with a majestic sequence of chords possessing an almost hieratic power. A major statement from a radical contemporary composer, one cannot help but agree with Alit when he sees Chasing the Phantom as an answer to the “question of the future of Gamelan music”.

First ever reissue of an influential and much sought-after norsk drone masterpiece originally self-released in 1996 in an edition of just 108 copies, tipped by all the people you ought to be taking tips from, most notably Jim O'Rourke and Oren Ambarchi. Deeper than deep, it's a durational masterwork that connects ley lines between Ramleh, Stephen O'Malley, My Bloody Valentine, Deathprod, When and Antena, taking unexpected turns and sounding better than ever on this new edition, mastered by Lasse Marhaug and finally available for wider public consumption. Selected by Jim O’Rourke for his Tone Glow list of 25 albums that “never got their due”, Org was founded in the early 90’s by Espen Jensen and Kjetil D Brandsdal who would later go on to variously record as Elektrodiesel, Noxagt and Ultralyd in the swirl of the highly active Norwegian underground. “Org" was the only album the pair recorded as a duo, pressed in a meagre edition of just over 100 copies which disappeared almost as soon as they were made, lodged in the memory of the select few who have managed to hear it in the years since. Made up of three long tracks, the near 20-minute ‘001’ opens the album with an extended organ zone-out matched with scraping factory machinery saturated into a dense cloud of harmonic fuzz. There's something transcendental about the sound that intersects with microtonal Alice Coltrane (particularly the unfairly maligned organ-only edition of "Turiya Sings"), as well as Pauline Oliveros and Ramleh. It’s music that pulls you in subconsciously; before you know it, you're fixating on the uncomfortable grind of metal on metal, buried mechanical rhythms and liturgical organ vamps that wind between industrial cacophony and sacred ritual music. For its last few seconds, we go into a full death metal tearout that fades out before it takes full flight, a glorious wtf. ‘002’ connects between minimalist drone styles and shoegaze, distorting fuzzed organ into pliable, dreamlike warbles that end up sounding like Kevin Shields' ‘Loveless’-era glides, or even Sunn O))) at their most devotional. Never losing the numbing overdriven mettle, its a piece that sounds spiritually entwined with Matthew Bower's Skullflower - a minimalist re-reading of high-contrast guitar music that takes all the psychoacoustic power and none of the annoying posturing. For ‘003’, subaqueous organ is joined by synth and drum machine, sounding like the inspirational spark for Religious Knives' screwed 'n chopped cosmic psychedelia. The choice of sounds links it to Antena's foundational electro samba recordings too, but the overwhelming drone - a constant on all three compositions - connects the music to minimalist spirituals that have simmered beneath the DIY/avant garde for decades. ‘Org’ sits heavy on the nerves with overproof levels of mulched amp worship and ungodly, palms-down organ chords and wheezing, bezonked lines of melodic thought. 25 years out of sight and marinading in the archives, with the benefit of hindsight we can better understand the role these sounds played in the development of music in the contemporary sphere. It’s an important piece of the puzzle, one that makes valuable connections that, over time, have looked progressively more faint.

The Voices of Creation are a community-based choir led by vocalist, songwriter, arranger, producer and mainstay of the Los Angeles scene Jimetta Rose. Made up of a multigenerational group of mainly non-professional singers backed by some of the city’s finest musicians, their music marries hip strains of gospel with layers of jazz, soul and funk. While aspects of their music might recall Kamasi Washington, The Staple Singers or Sly Stone, Jimetta’s unique vision has resulted in new spiritually-charged forms of music whose whole-hearted embrace of love, joy and peace act as sonic healing balms for the soul. For Jimetta - whose resume includes collaborations with Miguel Atwood Ferguson, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Sa-Ra Creative Partners, Angel Bat Dawid, Shafiq Husayn, MED and Blu - the very act of creation was part of a healing process: “I was very low at the time and I wrote most of the songs going through hardship. But I found comfort in the songs and a way to adjust my mindset to where things got better. So I thought ‘if this music works for me, maybe it will work for other people’ I believe that every person has their own voice and their own note and that we can use our voices to heal ourselves. That’s the intention behind creating the project.” After putting out a call on social media for people interested in joining her choir she was met with a sea of replies. Members were chosen in less-than conventional fashion: “I recruited people based on their interest in healing themselves and others, not necessarily on their musical experience or being seasoned performers” she says. Among those accepted into the ever-evolving collective, which was begun initially as a community choir, were the likes of Sly Stone’s daughter Novena Carmel, better known as a radio DJ for KCRW’s flagship breakfast show. Jimetta’s upbringing in the Pentecostal church, where she was a youth choir director, fed into her otherwise intuitive teachings of her songs and arrangements to the inexperienced members with help from the group’s seasoned organ player/co-musical director Jack Maeby. Produced by Mario Caldato Jr. (Beastie Boys, Seu Jorge) and his wife Samantha Caldato the results show the incredible sense of togetherness and communal spirit that the group had built up over time in the rehearsal sessions. The six tracks of their debut album, a mixture of originals and rearranged covers, are performed in a wide-eyed mix of styles that reflect Jimetta’s vision for borderless music: “It’s new black classical music,” she explains. “It’s all the hodgepodge of being an African American but also with creativity and vision for the future. It has a taste of what is to come and what we can do. What we have gone through and who we are now.” The group’s propensity for warm and buoyant sonics finds representation on album opener Let The Sunshine In, a sparkling rework of the Sons and Daughters of Lite’s deep jazz classic. Their version finds the group’s dynamic group harmonies offset with Allakoi Peete’s nimble afro-percussive touches and plenty of soul-drenched keys courtesy of pianist Quran Shaheed and organ player Jack Maeby. A similarly uplifting take on Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s choral jazz classic Spirits Up Above follows, with Maeby’s groove-laden organ lines inspiring some gorgeous group harmonies as well as prime solo turns from the likes of Kellye Hawkins, Zavier Wise, Tamara Blue, and Khalila Gardner. Another Sons and Daughters of Lite cover follows as Jimetta leads the choir in the groove-drenched ode to self-affirmation Operation Feed Yourself. Written as a series of mantras for everyday living, the Jimetta-penned composition How Good It Is harnesses the full transformative power of music to generate a stirring and joyful ode to positivity - it’s chanted declarations bringing out some of the group’s most deeply-felt and affecting vocal performances over some superlative piano and organ accompaniment with a surprise feature vocal from Novena Carmel. Jimetta’s talent for re-imagining songs in her own light is highlighted in Answer The Call, her vivid re-telling of Funkadelic’s Cosmic Slop: “When I listened to the original song, the Mom in the story was really going through it. I thought of how I could turn this into a song that can encompass the glorification of all mothers and I thought of the Egyptian cosmic goddess Nut. To that mother we’re all the seeds planted in the garden. Answering the call in your life is literally that. Finding out exactly what you’re here for through your heart.” The album finishes with the standout original gospel number Ain’t Life Grand. Over swaying organs and clapped percussion Jimetta’s lyrical mantras serve to emphasise the good feelings that come to those with a grateful heart. Good feeling is an apt descriptor for the mood of the album as a whole. Its shining positivity provides a welcome ray of light in an increasingly dark world. “It’s a shortcut if you will to the better feelings” Jimetta says. “The hope that we need to keep pressing forward. We are saturated and inundated with images of chaos and destruction, death and hatred. There’s so much we can witness. So, I want to make sure that there is a representation sonically of the other parts that are still there to witness so that we can continue to build those things. So that the systems we support actually reflect what we want to experience. So it’s like: “Don’t give up and Let The Sunshine Into You” and then find out what your purpose is and answer the call.”

Quiet Voices is a collaborative musical and sound art project, mixing ambient & electronic music, cinematic atmospheres & spoken word, founded by Jean-Yves Leloup, featuring musical pieces he composed with Hélène Vogelsinger, Villeneuve & Morando, Wild Anima, François-Eudes Chanfrault and Maxence Cyrin. Most of the composers involved in this project are all working in the field of cinema, composing music using electronic and acoustic instruments. All these musicians are also working in the field of modern classical, ambient and electronic music. Through the use of spoken voices (some of them coming from films), the Quiet Voices project can be heard as a tribute to the power and emotion of cinema. Each track can be heard as a short film, or a scene, fostering the listener's imagination. All the pieces from the record are dealing with the themes of time, memory, death or loss, and often dealing with the idea of an imaginary intermediate dimension between life and death. Jean-Yves Leloup is a Paris-based french sound artist/DJ, curator and music writer. He is the curator of various music exhibitions (Electro at Paris Philharmonie, London Design Museum and Düsseldorf Kunst Palast) and the author of various books such as " Digital Magma ", " Global Techno ", " Techno 100 ", " Music Non-Stop " and t " Ambient Music : avant-garde, new age, chill-out & cinema " (2021). He teaches sound in cinema at Paris Esra cinema School, and has released four albums with the RadioMentale duo.

The LP, mostly inspired by Ursula L Guins Earthsea, follows the narrative of a shadow/gebbeth stalking oneself and trying to overpower the phases of one submitting to & resisting it. Susu's voice demonstrates the gebbeth, using her voice as an instrument, representing it in various proximities but also at times it represents the soul in various states responding to the gebbeth. The backing and verse then operate as a call and response between the gebbeth and the soul. Many lyrics are inspired and formed from a Persian book of poetry and the cut-up technique style within it. Her trademark dark & harrowing sound is prominent throughout, taking influence from dabke rhythms.

Artists really do move about don't they? Sage Redman (aka Klein Zage) has zig-zagged from Seattle to London then back to upstate New York. This reinvention of living quarters is reflected in her music which is an ever changing dollop of left-field dream -pop which is particularly heavy on the synths. Lyrically it discusses the mundane - routines and realities that we deal with day to day. Where a dog comes into it I have yet to work out. Forget what you know about Klein Zage. Her mundanely poetic spoken-word meets outsider-house has reached it’s final form – and it’s almost nothing to do with dance music at all. Existing in the intersections of alt-pop, trip-hop and shoegaze, the Seattle born, NY based artist has created an evocative collection of songs that balance existential longing with pop sensibility to create a deeply reflective album that elevates the everyday into the celestial. Each track revels in a sort of serene, catatonic beauty – quietly psychedelic and decidedly cinematic –the album evokes a certain kind of contemplative disassociation. This feeling is echoed on the cover, where we witness Klein Zage frozen, deep in thought - statuesque – pondering life and her environment in a state akin to an out of body experience: This is the precise feeling listening to the album imparts No stranger to South East London, having previously been based there in the past for a few years, Klein Zage – real name Sage Redman - lands on Rhythm Section INTL with “ Feed the Dog” – part observational realism, part cry for help, part love letter to London. Klein Zage established herself with previous releases on her own label, Orphan, which she runs with long term collaborator Joey G ii. Her previous work fuses electronic sounds with spoken social commentaries about themes of the city, femininity, and the hospitality industry. The keen eye and the sharp wit prevails, but the final product feels like a total reinvention for Klein Zage in terms of sound and delivery. Written between Seattle, a remote Washington fjord called Hood Canal, and London, her music covers a lot of ground – sonically speaking. The compositions – whilst clearly evoking dream pop, are fortified with flashes of deconstructed club acoustics that add a contemporary weight to the production. ‘Feed The Dog’ may sound like a transformation of the former Klein Zage sound, but infact this is the music she’s always been making. Her career-long ambitions have come to fruition with these songs, and now seems like a perfect time for people to hear them. In her own words, Sage says the album “is about the mundane, the routines that tether you to reality, caring for a living breathing being that needs you. Defending the ones you love”. These themes, apart from being a literal ode to her dog Steves, provide a metaphor for a defining moment in Klein’s career as a musician and lyricist. The intro, ‘Sand’, opens with the sounds of water, taken from field recordings of the Hood Canal fjord. Sonic atmospheres build up with haunting yet hopeful harmonies and long sustained electronic brass and string notes. We are left with the comforting sounds of high tide in the song’s closing moments, signifying the coming and going of care and attention, attachment and release. Zage repeats the incantation, “I’ve convinced myself that this is it”. Hope confronts despair in the album opener. Is this a turning point or breaking point? The ambiguity persists through the album with lines like “ I am trying to feel”, “ Do I still exist”... This is existentialism at it’s most raw and vulnerable, but the door is always left open… On ‘Bored With You’, Sage flips the conventional love song on its head, hitting back against the sensational depictions of love. She’s happy to just sit in “augmented silence”, free of unattainable expectations. This song uncovers a crucial truth about romance over the top of swirling synths and lofi drum sounds. We are made aware of the things that exist physically in front of us, rather than an unreal dream of expectation. The title track is an intricate anthem of life’s mundane joys and comforts and the emotional exchanges of care-giving, full of left field dreaminess and glittering colours. Distant, shoegazey guitar chords, provided by Joey G ii, swell back and forth with eerie electric piano notes. Sage says herself, the project is also about the “tendency to take a back seat in my life - metaphorically feeding the dog while forgetting to feed myself”. As the project closes we are met with a heartfelt ode to the borough of Lewisham, South East London. A place that is close to Sage and her friends as she sings a lullaby to the ones she’s left behind over metitative synth plucks. This emotional reach back in time hints at some unfinished business from Klein Zage in London, with ‘Feed The Dog’ providing a full-circle moment. Much like Sage’s metamorphic role as an artist, the overall sound of this record waltzes seamlessly between low tempo pop, filled with rich instrumentation and chorus-soaked guitars, to moving grungy anthems bursting with 80s-inspired energy. Her lyrics provide a poetic remedy to the challenges of everyday life by championing the things we might miss if we are not looking.

INFO is pleased to announce Voices Fill My Head, Kristin Oppenheim’s second double LP release on the label documenting her early sound works from the 1990s. Recorded between 1993 and 1999 in her Brooklyn studio, Voices Fill My Head features eight pieces composed solely of the artist’s voice. For listeners who were fond of Night Run, Oppenheim’s first release on the label, this record reveals yet another important chapter in Oppenheim’s oeuvre.

Since the early 1990s, Oppenheim has produced vocal compositions for gallery and museum settings, making compositions not as music, but as repetitious sound installations designed to drift back and forth across wide stereo fields. Oppenheim’s installations saturate space, touching on fragmented memories that blur the lines between reality and abstraction.

Kristin Oppenheim is an American artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She is best known for installation art based in performance, film, and sound. She is represented by greengrassi in London and 303 Gallery in New York.

9ms is the duo of Simon Popp and Florian König. On their wide ranging debut album ‚Pleats‘ the tech-savvy drummers offer grooves from the dubbier realms of World Music and Krautrock - some meditative and light, some thick as wall and steady as a clock. The album was recorded live in a large wooden hall in the Bavarian Alps with only three microphones. Using various infrared and magnetic field sensors, Popp and König were able to translate their movements into control voltage, which they then used to trigger and tweak synthesizers and a myriad of effects. A way for two humans to become one with their mystic machinery.