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Pick a small spot (a point) in front of you (a small knot of wood, a dog down the way). And tightly focus on this spot. And now slowly unfocus your gaze. Widen your gaze. Pan out without moving your eyes. Take it all in.
A smeared and pixelated surface, swelling of contour and light. (Monet’s seepages of light, Altman’s overlapping nomadic dialogue.) Once you have unfocused with little to no center of attention, slowly close your eyes. And please feel very free to notice the light. All of the light that your eyes knocked back as you dilated your focal point. This exercise can be repeated a few times. Unfocusing does not always come easily. And it is probably best to not put too much effort into it. Best to not employ too much pressure.
And we will not put too much pressure on this exercise to help us explain away the humidly, saturatedly psychedelic canopy of moan-‘n-twang and slackelastic-groove of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza’s Sasquatch Landslide.
Mitch Hedberg has a great joke about the Sasquatch: “I think Bigfoot is blurry. That’s the problem. It’s not the photographer’s fault. Bigfoot is blurry! And that’s extra scary to me, because there’s a large out-of-focus monster roaming the countryside.”
Sasquatch Landslide. A landslide of hazy configurations. Blurriness, far from a lack of detail, is an embroidering of detail, a horizontal expansion of surface and swarms of light. The name “Sasquatch” derives from the Salish word se'sxac, which means “wild men.” And Sasquatch Landslide is wild. Everything is unravelling. Offset. Décalage. A whole host of slippery tempos and pulses as the organs, guitars and saxophones loiter and lope over a skipping hop of beats, and everything emerges always mid-stream. It is all middle with no halfway point, no dead center, no bullseye. Everything twangs, moans, sweeps, slips, swings, skitters, slides, and grooves out of nowhere. And the almost-human voice with no mother-tongue.
There is something ecstatic (an elatedly miniscule frenzy) going on here but it is pushed beyond the ecstatic: a joyous-grotesque rolling right past trance to dance. Psychedelias appear out of the infra-spaces in between the apparitions and overlapping ‘regimes’ and registers—pushed and squeezed far beyond the recognizable. And these spaces groove joyously hard like some kind of illusive House music, houses completely submerged in molasses. BigFoot-work? (Oh my!) There is not a place to throw your anchor here in the furrowing humidity. That does, and it does, sound like some kind of landslide.
A psychedelic encounter is a brush with the marvel of otherness. The point from which we speak of other, becomes other itself, in an ever-storm of other-production that shreds ideas of knowing and understanding what we think is going on. Time unhinged from the clock. Space unhinged from the frame. An unpinpointing hallucination, a hot get-down, an untethered throw-down of oscillations, fiercely, joyously, exuberantly incomprehensible. Listening to Sasquatch Landslide, a wildly unhinged reverie.
Eric Chenaux and Mariette Cousty
Condat-sur-Ganaveix, February 2025
Interstitial Spaces is Martin Brandlmayr’s debut release on Faitiche. In this award-winning radio collage, the well-known drummer and composer (Radian, Polwechsel) explores the quiet moments in music and film recordings.
The last notes of a piece of music fade out in the space. The pianist and the violinist remain frozen in place, holding their breath. The sound engineer sits silently at the desk. Once he has switched off his tape machine, the dull drone of a ship’s horn is heard in the distance. Otherwise, not a sound. Or was there something else hidden in the white noise?
Interstitial Spaces is based on short excerpts from music recordings, films, TV adverts and field recordings. Brandlmayr takes these quiet scenes, intervals in which nothing seems to happen, and brings them into the foreground, subjecting them to a microscopic spotlight. Moments in which one hears only the space itself, or the subtle presence of someone in the space: faint breathing, footsteps and the soft creak of a chair. We also hear preparations for an orchestra rehearsal: the musicians are all busy tuning their instruments, talking to each other, the concert has not yet begun.
This leads to a shift in perception: incidental details hidden in the hubbub of voices or in the silence suddenly take on a leading role. In the empty spaces, we discover various shades of noise, sharpening our awareness of sonic peculiarities. In a gentle rhythm, Brandlmayr’s radio collage offers a sequence of strange, not immediately identifiable sounds that are woven in the second part into a dense structure. At the end, the carefully captured sounds are released back into the empty space. Interstitial Spaces is a bold spectacle that celebrates the eventful uneventfulness.
Heavy, heavy, heavyyyyy rhythmic madness from Shackleton, Scotch Rolex and Omutaba, invoking new rhythmic traditions on an enchanted debut album for Nyege Nyege Tapes, twisting galvanic rhythms from HHY & The Kampala Unit's Omutaba into sozzled, psychedelic peregrinations. Dubby, kinetic and viciously mind-bending, it's peak gear if you're into anything from African Head Charge to Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force.
Leading on from Shackleton and Scotch Rolex’s maiden merger, ‘Death by Tickling’ in 2023, the duo pull in the dextrous limbs of Omutaba - known from his work with STILL, Metal Preyers and HHY & The Kampala Unit - for a dervishing session of dubbed-out and tumbling polyrhythms and psychoactive vibes as Three Hands of Doom. Shackleton’s hand on the tiller is patently apparent but, as with his recent works with Heather Leigh and Wacław Zimpel, he proves a mutable collaborator and porous to the shared spirits of fellow electronic music journeymen Scotch Rolex and Uganda’s Omutaba in four swingeing sections defined by their joint ability to diffract the flow between rolling and irregular grooves.
‘Ring Dirt’ opens the session with a limber display of monotone strings and suspenseful synth work that calls to mind Can sent economy class to the equator for ritual teachings. Enlightened, they proceed thru the lush, whorling metric calculations of ‘Insect Vibration’, layering shivering incantations and worm-charming subs with a frisson of field recordings. At this point fully attuned to each other, Omutaba’s Ugandan drumming is felt most powerfully meshed into the 10 minute matrix of rug-pulling and thunderous detonations to ‘Burnt Earth’, before they all buckle into the outright dread of a standout eponymous title tune that appears to follow rhythms from the Congo thru West Africa, to Haiti, via Japan and Berlin, and back to Uganda.
Both Shackleton and Ishihara have been on blistering form in the last couple of years, and 'Three Hands of Doom' feels like both a continuation and an extension of last year's 'Death By Tickling', weaponizing Omutaba's exhilarating playing into something that feels much, much more than the sum of its parts.
Khadim is a stunning reconfiguration of the Ndagga Rhythm Force sound. The instrumentation is radically pared down. The guitar is gone; the concatenation of sabars; the drum-kit. Each of the four tracks hones in on just one or two drummers; otherwise the sole recorded element is the singing; everything else is programmed. Synths are dialogically locked into the drumming. Tellingly, Ernestus has reached for his beloved Prophet-5, a signature go-to since Basic Channel days, thirty years ago. Texturally, the sound is more dubwise; prickling with effects. There is a new spaciousness, announced at the start by the ambient sounds of Dakar street-life. At the microphone, Mbene Diatta Seck revels in this new openness: mbalax diva, she feelingly turns each of the four songs into a discrete dramatic episode, using different sets of rhetorical techniques. The music throughout is taut, grooving, complex, like before; but more volatile, intuitive and reaching, with turbulent emotional and spiritual expressivity.
Not that Khadim represents any kind of break. Its transformativeness is rooted in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours the Rhythm Force has played together. Nearly a decade has passed since Yermande, the unit’s previous album. Every year throughout that period — barring lockdowns — the group has toured extensively, in Europe, the US, and Japan. With improvisation at the core of its music-making, each performance has been evolutionary, as it turns out heading towards Khadim. “I didn’t want to simply continue with the same formula, says Ernestus. “I preferred to wait for a new approach. Playing live so many times, I wanted to capture some of the energy and freedom of those performances.” Though several members of the touring ensemble sit out this recording — sabar drummers, kit-drummer, synth-player — their presence abides in the structure and swing of the music here.
Lamp Fall is a homage to Cheikh Ibra Fall, founder of the Baye Fall spiritual community. The mosque in the city of Touba is known as Lamp Fall, because the main tower resembles a lantern. Soy duggu Touba, moom guey séen / When you enter Touba, he is the one who greets you. After a swift, incantatory start Mbene sings with reflective seriousness. Her voice swirls with reverb, over a tight, funky, propulsive interplay between synth and drums, threaded with one- two jabs of bass. Cheikh Ibra Fall mi may way, mo diayndiou ré, la mu jëndé ko taalibe… Cheikh Ibra Fall amo morome, aboridial / Cheikh Ibra Fall shows the way forward, he gives us strength, he gathers his disciples… Overflowing with grace, Cheikh Ibra Fall has no equal.
Interwoven with Wolof proverbs, Dieuw Bakhul is a recriminatory song about treachery, lies, and back-biting. Over moody, roiling synths and ominous, lean bass, Mbene throws out fluttering scraps of vocal, as if re-running old conversations in her head. The music shadows her despair to the verge of breakdown, at one moment seemingly so lost in thought and memories, that it threatens to disintegrate. Bayilene di wor seen xarit ak seen an da ndo… Dieuw bakhul, dieuw ñaw na / Stop judging your friends and companions… A lie is no good, a lie is ugly.
Khadim is a show-stopper; currently the centrepiece of Ndagga Rhythm Force live performances. The song is dedicated to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, aka Khadim, founder of the Mouride Sufi order. Serigne Bamba mi may wayeu / Serigne Bamba is the one who makes me sing. The verses name-check revered members of his family and brotherhood, like Sokhna Diarra, Mame Thierno, and Serigne Bara. Though Islam has been practised in Senegal for a millennium, it wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century that it began to thoroughly permeate ordinary Senegalese society, hand-in-hand with anti-colonialism. The verses here recall Bamba’s banishment by the French to Gabon, and later to Mauritania, in those foundational times. During exile, his captors once introduced a lion to his cell: gaïnde gua waf, dieba lu ci Cheikhoul Khadim / the lion doesn’t budge, it gives itself over to Cheikh Khadim. Deep, surging bass, steady kick-drum, and simple, reverbed chords on the off-beat lend the feel and impetus of steppers reggae. A reed plays snatches of a traditional Baye Fall melody; the dazzling polyrhythmic drumming is by Serigne Mamoune Seck. Mbene compellingly blends percussive vocalese, narrative suspense, exultant praise, introspection, and grievance.
Nimzat is a devotional tribute to Cheikh Sadbou, a contemporary of Bamba, buried in a mausoleum in Nizmat, in southern Mauritania. Way nala, kagne nala… souma danana fata dale / I call upon you and wonder about you… If I am overwhelmed, come to my aid. The town holds special significance for Khadr Sufism. An annual pilgrimage there is conducted to this day. The rhythm is buoyantly funky; the mood is sombre, reined-in, foreboding. Punctuated by peals of thunder, Mbene sings with restrained, intense reverence; huskily confidential, steadfast. Nanu dem ba Nimzat, dé ba sali khina / Let us go to Nimzat, to seal our devotion.
Khadim is a stunning reconfiguration of the Ndagga Rhythm Force sound. The instrumentation is radically pared down. The guitar is gone; the concatenation of sabars; the drum-kit. Each of the four tracks hones in on just one or two drummers; otherwise the sole recorded element is the singing; everything else is programmed. Synths are dialogically locked into the drumming. Tellingly, Ernestus has reached for his beloved Prophet-5, a signature go-to since Basic Channel days, thirty years ago. Texturally, the sound is more dubwise; prickling with effects. There is a new spaciousness, announced at the start by the ambient sounds of Dakar street-life. At the microphone, Mbene Diatta Seck revels in this new openness: mbalax diva, she feelingly turns each of the four songs into a discrete dramatic episode, using different sets of rhetorical techniques. The music throughout is taut, grooving, complex, like before; but more volatile, intuitive and reaching, with turbulent emotional and spiritual expressivity.
Not that Khadim represents any kind of break. Its transformativeness is rooted in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours the Rhythm Force has played together. Nearly a decade has passed since Yermande, the unit’s previous album. Every year throughout that period — barring lockdowns — the group has toured extensively, in Europe, the US, and Japan. With improvisation at the core of its music-making, each performance has been evolutionary, as it turns out heading towards Khadim. “I didn’t want to simply continue with the same formula, says Ernestus. “I preferred to wait for a new approach. Playing live so many times, I wanted to capture some of the energy and freedom of those performances.” Though several members of the touring ensemble sit out this recording — sabar drummers, kit-drummer, synth-player — their presence abides in the structure and swing of the music here.
Lamp Fall is a homage to Cheikh Ibra Fall, founder of the Baye Fall spiritual community. The mosque in the city of Touba is known as Lamp Fall, because the main tower resembles a lantern. Soy duggu Touba, moom guey séen / When you enter Touba, he is the one who greets you. After a swift, incantatory start Mbene sings with reflective seriousness. Her voice swirls with reverb, over a tight, funky, propulsive interplay between synth and drums, threaded with one- two jabs of bass. Cheikh Ibra Fall mi may way, mo diayndiou ré, la mu jëndé ko taalibe… Cheikh Ibra Fall amo morome, aboridial / Cheikh Ibra Fall shows the way forward, he gives us strength, he gathers his disciples… Overflowing with grace, Cheikh Ibra Fall has no equal.
Interwoven with Wolof proverbs, Dieuw Bakhul is a recriminatory song about treachery, lies, and back-biting. Over moody, roiling synths and ominous, lean bass, Mbene throws out fluttering scraps of vocal, as if re-running old conversations in her head. The music shadows her despair to the verge of breakdown, at one moment seemingly so lost in thought and memories, that it threatens to disintegrate. Bayilene di wor seen xarit ak seen an da ndo… Dieuw bakhul, dieuw ñaw na / Stop judging your friends and companions… A lie is no good, a lie is ugly.
Khadim is a show-stopper; currently the centrepiece of Ndagga Rhythm Force live performances. The song is dedicated to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, aka Khadim, founder of the Mouride Sufi order. Serigne Bamba mi may wayeu / Serigne Bamba is the one who makes me sing. The verses name-check revered members of his family and brotherhood, like Sokhna Diarra, Mame Thierno, and Serigne Bara. Though Islam has been practised in Senegal for a millennium, it wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century that it began to thoroughly permeate ordinary Senegalese society, hand-in-hand with anti-colonialism. The verses here recall Bamba’s banishment by the French to Gabon, and later to Mauritania, in those foundational times. During exile, his captors once introduced a lion to his cell: gaïnde gua waf, dieba lu ci Cheikhoul Khadim / the lion doesn’t budge, it gives itself over to Cheikh Khadim. Deep, surging bass, steady kick-drum, and simple, reverbed chords on the off-beat lend the feel and impetus of steppers reggae. A reed plays snatches of a traditional Baye Fall melody; the dazzling polyrhythmic drumming is by Serigne Mamoune Seck. Mbene compellingly blends percussive vocalese, narrative suspense, exultant praise, introspection, and grievance.
Nimzat is a devotional tribute to Cheikh Sadbou, a contemporary of Bamba, buried in a mausoleum in Nizmat, in southern Mauritania. Way nala, kagne nala… souma danana fata dale / I call upon you and wonder about you… If I am overwhelmed, come to my aid. The town holds special significance for Khadr Sufism. An annual pilgrimage there is conducted to this day. The rhythm is buoyantly funky; the mood is sombre, reined-in, foreboding. Punctuated by peals of thunder, Mbene sings with restrained, intense reverence; huskily confidential, steadfast. Nanu dem ba Nimzat, dé ba sali khina / Let us go to Nimzat, to seal our devotion.
An Obscure Sound Documentary from Sado Island — A Compilation Capturing the Present Through 10 Artists Living Within Its Environment
Sado Island, located in the Sea of Japan, is a place where ancient traditions continue to thrive amidst rich natural landscapes. Noh stages still remain across local villages, and practices such as Noh theater and Ondeko drumming are woven into the daily lives of its residents. Surrounded by sea and mountains, the island offers a unique cultural and environmental context for contemporary creativity to emerge. This compilation album, produced in 2025, serves as a sonic documentary capturing the music and people of Sado as they exist today. While rooted in the island’s deep cultural heritage, the album also presents a fresh wave of expression and imagination, offering new perspectives shaped by place, tradition, and personal vision. The album features ten creative units, each contributing original works that reflect the atmosphere and rhythms of life on the island. Included are solo pieces by Yuta Sumiyoshi and Masayasu Maeda, both key members of Kodo—the internationally acclaimed taiko performing arts ensemble known for transcending tradition through innovation. Sadrum brings a raw, organic groove through the use of handmade bamboo drums, crafted from moso bamboo that grows naturally on Sado. Composer Nozomu Sato presents his project Plantar, which showcases a wide-ranging musical language from pop to the avant-garde. Gilles Stassart, a chef and artist who runs the Sado-based restaurant La Pagode, explores the fusion of gastronomy and art in his contribution. Charles Munka, a comtemporary artist recognized for turning scribbled notes from around the world into abstract artworks, offers an ambient mix inspired by the spirit of Noh. Contemporary artist Morito Yoshida, a central figure in the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, contributes a piece reflecting his pioneering vision across art and community. Kota Aoki, known for his experimental paintings and sound works, adds a composition grounded in a personal and deeply aesthetic approach. Miyuki Fukunishi, active in music since the 1990s, explores new possibilities in composition through laptop-based production techniques. The album also features The Fugu Plan?, a collaborative unit led by ukulele player Yuka and bassist Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, whose work is widely recognized through his association with John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Their piece brings a cross-cultural resonance that connects Sado to a broader global soundscape. Beyond the music, the project is also deeply rooted in the island. The album cover features NAMI (“wave”), a photograph by Syoin Kajii—a Sado-based photographer and Buddhist monk—capturing the living rhythm of the sea. The liner notes are written by Noi Sawaragi, an influential art critic and advisor to the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, adding critical depth to the project’s cultural context. A work that captures the very essence of Sado’s present—every element of the album has been created by individuals uniquely connected to the island.
During the last half-decade Joe Westerlund became engrossed in studying the clave, the metric pattern that first defined so much Afro-Cuban and Latin music and then drifted into almost every corner of jazz and rock. What did it mean for an idea to be so flexible, for it to fit so many forms while retaining its own essence? The result is aleap into the unknown for Westerlund: Curiosities from the Shift, a 12-track playground of endlessly interwoven beats and melodies, where Westerlund’s clave enthusiasm collides with his textural experimentalism, where his rhythmic symphony of one shakes hands with friends decorating this space alongside him. The three-piece suite that holds Curiosities’ first half begins with the junkyard percussion and delightful bass splashes that frame “Tem” and ends with the surrealistic boom-bap of thumb pianos and shakers on “Can Tangle.” There is a hard-won joy to these numbers, as if Westerlund is delighting in real time in spotting a potential dead end but finding his own way forward, anyway. Those songs became a kind of working roadmap for the terrain that Westerlund explores across Curiosities, from the call-and-response glory of opener “Nu Male Uno” to the uncanny amorphousness of closer “Felt Like Floating.” All of these songs are defined by an identifiable rhythm, like the loping strut at the center of “Midpoint” and the head-nodding pulse that winds through “Persurverance,” winkingly misspelled to suit his North Carolina-via-Wisconsin pronunciation. But those are springboards for other textures, moods, and notions, like the New Age references—shimmering metallophones, chattering birds, retiring flutes—that circle through “Midpoint” or the dub-indebted delays and gamelan hymns that bubble up through “Persurverance.” This is deeply multivalent music, each number’s propulsive core counterbalanced by a series of surprising choices. Bittersweetness and joy, grief and liberation, sighs and smiles: It all exists here, tangling toward infinity. In the months after the initial sessions were done, Westerlund reached out to friends—Califone’s Tim Rutilli, saxophonist Sam Gendel, trumpeter Trever Hagen, and violinists Libby Rodenbough and Chris Jusell among them. These were his most thoroughly composed and precisely built works ever, but he wanted to hear what happened when his pals responded in real time. They delivered grace, depth, and feeling, with their parts pulling back curtains on hidden recesses of rhythmic worlds. Westerlund readily admits he is surprised by the album’s insistence on groove and meter rather than drifting abstraction. Having lived and worked so long with bands, he assumed he was done functioning within basic meter. These 12 songs fuse so many of Westerlund’s loves into pieces that are endlessly fascinating, using familiar elements to render his adventures into the unknown. Playful but tender, wistful but wondrous, driven by beats but not bound by them, this is Westerlund’s definitive statement so far, the solo drummer record that opens wide to reveal a musical and emotional landscape richer than perhaps even he imagined he might find.
fully remastered from the original tapes** A mysterious sound aurora on the magical paths of the infinite universe of percussion, originally released in 1985 and then almost completley lost. Moon On The Water were a trio of percussionists based in Italy - David Searcy and Jonathan Scully, both American tympani players in the Scala Philarmonic Orchestra, with the legendary Italian jazz drummer Tiziano Tononi, who worked with everyone from Roberto Musci, to Muhal Richard Abrams, Pierre Favre (who later joined the group), Andrew Cyrille, Barre Phillips, and Steve Lacy. Drawing on a diversity of experience, joined collectively by a unified love of rhythm and sound, they assembled a percussion record of the highest order - an unclassifiable work which should be legendary, and leaves you confounded that it’s not.
Within the history of efforts dedicated to percussion, Moon On The Water’s debut stands apart. A singular work, made remarkable by the diversity and range of its sonorities and structures. The scope of its ambition is startling. Utilizing the full intellect, experience, and talent of its creators, it employs field recording against a stunning array of instrumentation - seemingly everything from which rhythm and resonant tone could be drawn. The result renders a remarkable effect. From the delicate pulse of nature, deep resonances and carefully placed tone, intricate structures and tempos as slow as they go, across its movements the album rewrites how composition for percussion should be understood, before giving way to consuming and ecstatic rhythms which reference the Brazilian tradition of Batucada, various trance and ritual traditions of Africa, and drum solos from Free Jazz and Rock. This is as good as percussion records get. A lost marvel - accessible while distinctly avant-garde. The throbbing pulse of creative joy, distilled onto two sides of wax.
Ecstatic elements of Japan ambient minimalism dialogue with contemporary music solutions (Varèse, Ligeti), in the stream of a harmonious fusion of ancient and modern. It’s a propitiatory ceremony of supernatural things that open portals of blissfulness, tribal and shamanic darkness, timeless jungles. Between amazon fires and African safaris, we float in the Asian rivers of meditation, lost in water games, echoes of caves and rocks in the night, synergies of frogs, birds, snakes, marimbas, chimes, gongs, and tubular woods.
The album also includes one of the sickest percussion jam we’ve heard from 1980’s Italy: the mystically-named In the Land of the Boo - Bam. Exploring a wide range of percussions, from mallet instruments to drums, the band tightly builds a hypnotic jam with a strong Mediterranean feeling, maybe partly provided by the «Tullio de Piscopo-esque» drumming pattern. As the song goes by, the vibe gets more and more shamanic, often changing directions before climaxing in an epic final. True uplifting trance music!
Makaya McCraven, a leading drummer, composer, and producer in contemporary jazz.
Having gained prominence through his works released by International Anthem, as well as reimagined versions of Gil Scott-Heron and Blue Note recordings, this leading drummer, composer, and producer in contemporary jazz has released a compilation of four EPs titled ‘Off the Record’ through XL Recordings, International Anthem, and Nonesuch. The album features recordings of pure improvisation captured during live performances, with the space and presence of the audience reflected in the sound. It is composed of four EPs—‘Techno Logic,’ 'The People’s Mixtape,‘ 'Hidden Out!,’ and ‘PopUp Shop’—that are independent yet organically interconnected.
This work follows his 2022 masterpiece ‘In These Times,’ which the GRAMMY Awards described as “the most ambitious work in Makavely's career.” It revisits the essence of “organic beat music” that Makaya established in his 2015 debut album ‘In the Moment,’ and further developed in ‘Highly Rare’ (2017), 'Where We Come From' (2018), and ‘Universal Beings’ (2018). Makaya reconstructs his live recordings into his unique sound world through editing, overdubbing, and post-production at his home studio in Chicago. The compilation of these four EPs, ‘Off the Record,’ is not merely a collection of tracks but a documentary work celebrating the creative and collaborative moments of music that could only have been born from being present in that space.
Goja means “chaotic” or “nonsensical” in various Japanese regional dialects.
This new work is packed with freely rambling music that leaps over the boundaries of orthodox musical instruments, homemade ones, and random objects. Listen out for taiko, drums, bits of wood, and a piano, marimba, accordion, rhythm machine, effector, wooden washtub, pot, impact screwdriver, power tool charger, and more…
Features 8 tracks. Download code available.
0on Zero-on, a label run by the percussion group "Kodo 鼓童" which has its roots on Sado Island, has released a cassette recording of a solo performance by percussionist Yuta Sumiyoshi, a member of the "Kodo" group.
KENTATAKU YUTATAKU’s 3rd album “Zero On” is the eponymous first release on Kodo’s new label 0on.
Featuring four improvisational tracks, ranging from large ensemble works without musical instruments to vast sound collages, KENTATAKU YUTATAKU’s latest work is packed full of heart, soul, and fresh new sound.
Limited release of 200 cassettes + download code.
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Kenta Taku Yu Tataku 2nd Album
Physical release on cassette tape along with digital release. The cassette is limited to 100!
Imagine from the sound.
Create sound.
The "sound" that overflows from Kenta Nakagome and Yuta Sumiyoshi, who chose the media "cassette" in an era where they can listen to anything with various streaming services, is particular about their own sound and the sound that only two people can make "NAYUTA". It became a work called.
Please prepare a cassette deck and fully enjoy the difference in texture and sound quality peculiar to analog that can never be reproduced digitally.
Also pay attention to the cassette design that you want to collect and the bonus stickers that come with it!
Al Wootton’s Trule hosts a truly outstanding session of needlepoint techno steppers dub by Đ.K. - absolutely required listening for fans of Muslimgauze, Shackleton, Raime and Carrier.
Long admired for a percussive sleight of hand and hypnotic atmospheric levity to his music, Parisian producer Dang-Khoa Chau made a decisive switch from downbeat pressure to up-stepping momentum on his ‘Signals from the Stars’ 12” for Midgar in ’24. He now sustains that effortless feel for steppers chronics into ‘Realm of Symbols’, coaxing a signature palette of S.E. Asian-accented drums and spectral electronics into sub-propelled, spring-heeled rhythms holding among the deadliest in his contemporary field.
Seriously we’re shocked at the levels of his shadowboxing tekkerz here, from the sort of tip-toed, Tyson-esque peek-a-boo pivots and humid Ballardian atmosphere to ‘High Rise’, thru the kind of scaly, reticulated intricacies we’d expect from Photek, Raime or Carrier in ’Stepping Stone’, to the laser-etched spatial sound design harnessing his mercurial flow in the title piece, and pendulous swivel of his industrial-strength conga-clonks synced to coiled subbass torque on ‘Rough Dub’.
No doubt it’s some of the sickest, deep-end ‘floor tackle we’ve heard in a hot minute. No brainer!
The first ever reissue of Juju’s powerful 1973 album for Strata-East, ‘A Message From Mozambique’.
The roots of Juju started in San Francisco after Plunky had met his musical mentor, Zulu musician Ndikho Xaba, helping to form his band Ndikho and The Natives. Three members of The Natives (Plunky, bassist Ken Shabala and vibes / flute player Lon Moshe) then joined Marvin X’s theatrical production The Resurrection Of The Dead, joining local musicians Al-Hammel Rasul (keyboards), Babatunde Lea (percussion) and Jalango Ngoma (timbales).
When the production ended, the six musicians formed Juju. “We had high-energy rehearsals that lasted for hours and, as a band, we became powerful and began gigging around the Bay Area,” remembers Plunky. Although oriented towards Black Nationalism, the band fed off the Bay Area’s culturally diverse communities as Plunky shaped an inclusive worldview based on collective political, social and artistic activities. During this time, the Soledad Brothers case and Angela Davis were prominent and the band supported Professor Davis and the cause.
Juju’s music matched the fire of their activism. “As a band, we blew, pounded and stroked our instruments like there was no tomorrow, like our life’s work was wrapped up in each session. We approached our performances like religious rites and the music mesmerised, informed and awakened people.” The band’s first album, A Message From Mozambique, was intentionally political. While the anti-war movement focused on Vietnam, Juju looked towards wars being waged in South Africa, Angola and Mozambique over issues of white supremacy and control of natural resources. A second album, ‘Chapter Two: Nia’ would follow before the birth of Oneness Of Juju during the mid-‘70s.
This definitive reissue is fully remastered by The Carvery from the original tapes and features original artwork and a new interview with Juju bandleader James “Plunky” Branch.
Angus MacLise, the first drummer for the Velvet Underground, was a poet, composer, and a member of The Theatre of Eternal Music alongside La Monte Young.
The "Tapes" 3CD Box is the first-ever reissue of a 3-cassette compilation that Pleasure Editions originally released in 2015, limited to only 100 copies. The 3CD box set comes with a miniature poster and track lists, and each CD has a paper sleeve that reproduces the original cassette card artwork. This comprehensive 3CD box set is over three hours in length and includes session recordings with Tony Conrad and William Breeze (of Coil, Current 93, and Psychic TV), mystical recordings from the filming of Ira Cohen's "The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda" (1968), shortwave experiments, and sounds of Tibetan Buddhist monks recorded by MacLise.
The "Tapes" compilation features excerpts from the archives of the Angus MacLise Papers, which are held at Columbia University Library. The archives contain over 100 hours of reel-to-reel tape recordings of live improvised music, theatrical performances, and sound experiments created by MacLise and his associates during the 1960s and 1970s. MacLise produced the original recordings in his own unique style, characterized by rough and peculiar editing.
The release is curated and sequenced by Will Cameron and Mark Iosifescu.
Jim O'Rourke completed a new sound restoration and mastering of the recordings in 2023.
The 3CD box comes with a miniature poster, a sheet of track list, and each CD comes with a paper sleeve which reproduces the original cassette sleeve artwork.