MUSIC

Join the Kyle Shepherd Trio on “A Dance More Sweetly Played” as they explore, collaborate and improvise on the ‘songs we like to play’. The album’s title is a dedication to the celebrated South African artist William Kentridge, with whom Shepherd collaborated on a joint-work “Waiting for Sybil” that has toured world-wide. In addition to ten Shepherd originals, perhaps most unexpected is the inclusion of an exquisite reading of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ and a deconstructed take of Journey’s ‘Don’t Stop Believing’, a favourite rock anthem that Shepherd describes as a ‘guilty pleasure’. ‘The inclusion of the Massive Attack and Journey tunes – that’s something out of character to me,’ observes Shepherd. The selection rests well within the grand jazz tradition of repurposing popular songs as vehicles for improvisation, thought, and pleasure. ‘It just came down to playing some tunes that we like and we can flow with, so that we can be inspired and express ourselves in a very natural organic way,’ he says. ‘We walked away from the from the studio feeling like – you know, we actually really enjoyed playing this record!’ ‘With this record, I felt less attached to any sort of predetermined concepts except that we would play some music that I wrote that we like – a selection of things that we like to play. It felt like a bit of a tonic – every musician gets a chance to breathe through the music, and the music just flows and moves as organically as we could make it.’ To hear one of South Africa’s foremost pianists play with intention, freedom and enjoyment, in the tradition and beyond it, is above all a gift to the listener, and Matsuli Music is proud to be able to share the Trio’s first album in a decade, A Dance More Sweetly Played. "… it’s in his linking of international influences with his own local traditions that his strength lies." Peter Bacon, The Jazz Breakfast

The second LP compendium of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s early solo piano works, recorded throughout the 1960s – finally available again. Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear!

These original compositions, performed by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru herself on solo piano, were originally self-released in Germany in small editions as fundraisers for orphanages, support organizations for widows of war victims, and other philanthropic causes. We are humbled and proud to present this album in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation, and to assist in continuing her life-long mission of using music as a vessel to care for those who have been abandoned by society, or harmed by strife.

Black vinyl LP comes in black inner-sleeves and heavy cardstock jacket with color printing and gold-foil stamping, and song notes by the composer herself. Restored and remastered by Timothy Stollenwerk.

Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our current times, it could be interpreted as human frailty in the face of nature’s unyielding dominion. Conversely, it could represent the persistence of human spirit and resourcefulness in the midst of catastrophe and upheaval. The album opens with 'Beginner’s Mind' – a semi-improvised motif develops into an impressionistic refrain. This is followed by "Twilight Flowers" and "Waltz On Treated Wire" – intimate, monochrome piano portraits. Later tracks such as "Lost Albion" and "Signs Of Life" build on skeletal piano motifs with subtle electronic washes, textures and field sounds. The album ends with the elegiac "On Terminus Hill" where a stately piano refrain explores a series of sparse harmonic variations evoking a sense of closure.

“How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes to Leo Svirsky’s River Without Banks. Dedicated to his first piano teacher Irena Orlov, River Without Banks is a mesmerizing, emotional collection of pieces that are simultaneously complex and fluid. The title River Without Banks comes from a chapter of musicologist Genrikh “Henry” Orlov’s profound work Tree of Music. In said chapter, Orlov traces the history of sacred music from the Western and Eastern tradition and how the forms (of the chant, raga etc.) sought to eliminate the division between the physical and the spiritual--the bank and the river.

Arranged for two pianos with accompaniment from strings, trumpet, and electronics, this is Svirsky’s first piece to approach the history of the piano and the possibilities of the recording studio, and his deepest dive yet into exploring the instability of listening and its transformation of musical semantics and affect. Like Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Svirsky overlays romantic musical gestures to create a lush unfamiliarity. No sooner than each track begins the next moment unfurls beneath it, cascading time and blurring perception of past and present.

Akin to a multidimensional Rzewski thematic interpretation, Svirsky’s music defies genre-classification or classical ideology while its virtuosity clearly stems from somewhere from within disciplined traditions. Continuously revisiting, revising, and renewing its emotional core, River Without Banks is less an album of songs than songs of a singular, unlocatable album. Performed by the composer with assistance from Britton Powell, Max Eilbacher, Leila Bordreuil, Tim Byrnes, and recorded by Al Carlson.

First volume of solo piano compositions by Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, finally back in print. Born to an aristocratic family in Addis Ababa in December of 1923, Emahoy spent much of her youth and young adulthood studying classical music in Europe. She returned to Ethiopia in the 40s, where the war interrupted her musical studies. In 1948 during a church service in Ethiopia, she found her faith and began years of religious training. Throughout her physical and spiritual journeys, Emahoy continued to compose for the piano. She first released this album in Germany 1963 as small private press record. The tracks reflect her own travels, seamlessly moving between Western classical and traditional Ethiopian modes, evoking Erik Satie, the orthodox liturgy, and meditative Christian music all at once. Her work is like no one else in the world, lyrical, hypnotic, full of spiritual warmth and a direct connection to the divine. Emahoy is now 98 years old and still lives in Jerusalem. She continues to play, and the funds from her work go to the righteous causes to which she has dedicated her life. We are incredibly proud to present this music on vinyl again, mastered by Timothy Stollenwerk and presented in collaboration with the EMAHOY TSEGE MARIAM MUSIC PUBLISHER and Foundation. This black vinyl LP version includes a new reproduction of the original artwork, with the composer’s own notes, translated from the original German.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."

For more than three decades, Go Hirano has developed a quietly enthralling sound world on the peripheries of the Japanese underground. Emerging in the 1990s, Hirano released three albums with the revered PSF Records label and established himself as an artist with a unique sense of melody and atmosphere that was both entrancing and intimate. His work, largely recorded at home and in the field, de-emphasized technical perfection in favor of an unvarnished immediacy that imbued the quiet moments of daily life with a dreamlike splendor.

On The Habit, Hirano brings together recordings that span decades of his playing the piano and other instruments on a daily basis. The core of the album was recorded in 2020 at Pianola Records in Tokyo, while other pieces draw from recordings dating as far back as the late 1980s. Through this span of years, a coherent vision emerges, marked by patient, subtle engagement with repetition, space, and resonance. Hirano works with a restrained palette—piano, pianica, wind chime, percussion, and synthesizer—to develop simple melodic figures that gradually shift in harmony and texture. Spacious piano chords expand through soft synthesizer tones. Near-imperceptible rhythmic frameworks intertwine with tranquil phrases that drift and merge with the sounds of the world around them.

This synthesis of music and the environment in which it is created is critical to Hirano's approach. Rather than isolating the music from its surroundings, he embraces the atmosphere of the moment, the room in which each piece is played, capturing the subtle sounds and artifacts of the artist’s daily experience and the surrounding natural world. For Hirano, these “imperfections” are pathways to vibrant, living expression.

While he may share affinities with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Hiroshi Yoshimura, and even Brian Eno, Hirano's dedication to “initial, unadorned expression” and processing the environment through his own particular filter sets him apart. The Habit reveals a meditative, melodic language unfolding over the decades and within the many spaces of a life in music marked by a unique warmth and beauty.

Akira Kosemura’s Polaroid Piano is a record that is very close to my heart. In fact, it is Akira’s work that was one of the drivers for Someone Good, one of the Room40 sibling labels, to be founded. Polaroid Piano marks the beginning of what would later become known as felt piano music, an approach to the piano which was picked up by numerous artists across subsequent years. It captures an essential and intimate rendering of the piano at close proximity, but it does more than that, it allows the piano to breathe within the places around it. Structurally, the record is a collection of piano-led vignettes. Each piece is a microcosm of lived in music, which is porous, and opens themselves outward, inviting a sense of time and ’the present’ to seep into the music. They feel instantly intimate and evocative, melodies imprinted with the world around them. In some of the recordings a siren calls out from beyond the immediate acoustic space of the studio, whilst in others birds seep in and the rustling of Akira’s clothing folds into the music itself. When we first discussed the recording, Akira had invited me to offer some sounds that might act as a leaping off point for the compositions. I collected a series of field recordings which were offered as simple and suggestive prompts, and as a means of imagining ‘other’ environments which might be simultaneously in orbit of the places Akira was recording in. Some of those field recordings are captured in the record, like a memory being recounted at a distance of time. Polaroid Piano is a unique record for many reasons. One is it manages to manifest an acoustic transcription of that ‘momentary' quality of its photographic namesake. The pieces are auditory snapshots and reflect a certain quality of harmonic light and timbral exposure that is unquestionably tethered to the aesthetics of the polaroid format. It is a record that celebrates the body of the instrument as a sound source and invites us to be proximate to the resonation, and the living qualities of sound, that make music so utterly profound, and gratifying.

Recorded between the iconic Abbey Road and Polish Radio studios, Hania Rani’s original music for Joachim Trier’s Cannes and Golden Globe winning, Oscar and Bafta nominated ‘Sentimental Value’ is a deeply intuitive collaboration, composed before a single frame was edited. Intriguingly Hania worked on the score for Sentimental Value without an edit in hand; instead, she was given a carefully written script and the freedom of her own substantial imagination. The story told in the film oscillates around three characters and the motionless presence of the house, yet the relationships between all these personalities are not fixed, but in progress. Those subtle qualities were at the center of her attention and became the core topic of numerous discussions with Joachim about the music, the film, and the philosophy behind Sentimental Value. In September 2024, Hania went to Oslo and spent a couple of days in the main film location (the family home in Oslo) with her sound engineer, Agata Dankowska. The film crew was away in France to shoot another scene for the project, so they were allowed to freely explore the space - both visually and sonically. They made field recordings in the building, capturing the sounds of objects and furniture found in the apartment, and they also managed to record a couple of piano pieces. The house plays a significant role in the story, silently witnessing the tangled trajectories of its residents.

Graze the Bell is a collection of soul-stirring, mesmerizing solo piano pieces, and the most distilled offering of David Moore’s artistry to date. Known for his atmospheric compositions with Bing & Ruth, as well as his collaborations with guitarist Steve Gunn and Cowboy Sadness, this marks Moore’s first widely shared solo piano album. Using the piano to meditatively inquire into the human condition, Graze the Bell is a sanctuary of sound, and an invitation for listeners to meet him in the present moment.

Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions.  Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery.  Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape

The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album.  ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’  is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.

A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is a collection of nine solo piano works that explore resistance, resonance, and space with a distinctive spectral sensitivity. These pieces are nocturnes, written deep in conservation in Winter, in a small rural studio in Valens, Canada. A Series of Actions in a Sphere of Forever is the follow-up to From Where You Came that was released in May and earned a RA Recommend and The Guardian’s Experimental Album of the Month calling it a "quiet ecstasy from a composer without boundaries".

In the Fall of 2022, Phil Cook found himself living alone in a small home at the edge of field and forest in North Carolina’s Piedmont. For most of Cook’s life he lived near the hearts of the towns he had called home, near the groan of traffic and hubbub of coffee shops. Such close quarters helped make the gregarious Cook a prolific collaborator, from co-founding Megafaun to working with The Blind Boys of Alabama, Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger, and endless others. But Cook’s closest neighbor now was a trailhead, so he went and listened, enraptured first by the stillness and then by the manifold birds. He began leaving his windowsill slightly cracked each night, so that the dawn chorus greeted him. Cook began recording these tangled bird songs, and he slowly joined them. With the sun finally high, Cook would listen to the day’s recordings and improvise in real time on the instrument that remains the first and most steadfast love of his musical life, the piano. When Cook left that cabin after a year, he moved into a home of his own in Durham, with plenty of space for his two boys to play and for something he’d never actually owned—a proper piano. Over the next several months, Cook spent untold hours drilling down on these pieces. During lessons with the Southern gospel great Chuckey Robinson, the pianist had challenged Cook to sustain fewer notes, to stop clouding and crowding his melodies by using the instrument’s pedals as crutches. His music suddenly had more clarity, with the sounds and the feelings they ferried given more room to function. Cook dug into the danger and delight, into the idea that we twist our bodies into knots trying to understand what is best for our hearts. In April 2024 Cook returned to Wisconsin’s Chippewa Valley where he was raised. His lifelong friend and bandmate, Justin Vernon, had just finished an overhaul of April Base, the studio compound where Cook has worked on more than a dozen records during the last 15 years. Cook asked Vernon to produce Appalachia Borealis as simply as possible—merely to listen and offer feedback in two extended afternoon sessions, to talk about the right takes and make sure that they’d captured the heart. It, of course, got more complicated, as they experimented with the process. Vernon would add or subtract the bird songs to Cook’s headphones, seeing how they impacted his playing. Or they would route his notes through a massive reverb chamber, Cook responding in gossamer improvisations. Appalachia Borealis is a deeply poignant and personal set of 11 piano meditations, built with the emotional range of a full and open existence. Inspired by those windowsill improvisations, it reflects not only the turmoil and sadness of a fraught time for Cook but also the hope, light, and joy of looking for the other side. You can sometimes still hear the birds whose tune and time helped to inspire so many of these songs. Even when they’re not within earshot, their essence remains.

Deeply resonant spiritual music transmitted via piano, organ, and harmonium by beloved composer and Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.

Church of Kidane Mehret collects all the musical work from Emahoy’s 1972 private press album of the same name, alongside two additional unreleased piano recordings, exploring Emahoy’s take on “Ethiopian Church Music.”

Recording herself in churches throughout Jerusalem, Emahoy engages directly with the Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. For the first time, we hear Emahoy on harmonium and massive, droning pipe organ, alongside some of her most moving piano work.

“Ave Maria” is one of our favorite pieces Emahoy ever recorded, her chiming piano reverberating against ancient stone walls. Her familiar melodic lines take on new resonance when played through the harmonium on “Spring Ode - Meskerem.” Two towering organ performances comprise the B Side, combining Emahoy’s classical European training with her lifelong study of Ethiopian religious music.

Nowhere is Emahoy’s unique combination of influences more apparent than on “Essay on Mahlet,” a meditative slow burner in which Emahoy interprets the free verse of the Orthodox liturgy note for note on the piano. This revelatory piece, alongside the dramatic piano composition “The Storm,” comes from another self-released album, 1963’s Der Sang Des Meeres. Only 50 copies were ever produced (and no cover). One of the only known copies was saved from the trash and shared with Mississippi by a fellow nun at Emahoy’s monastery when we visited for Emahoy’s funeral in March of 2023.

We are proud to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation to bring you these rare spiritual recordings in what would have been the artist’s 102nd year.

Available in black and clear vinyl editions. Old-school tip-on jacket with metallic silver foil stamping along with a 12-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes from scholar and pianist Thomas Feng.

Found Keys is the debut album by American artist Ruth Maine. Although Ruth has been playing and composing music for over two decades, this is the first time she decided to record some of her varied compositions and share them with the public. But in times when it is the norm to clamour for attention, she prefers to go the opposite way. Ruth likes to let her music speak for itself and stay in the shadows.

The 16 short piano pieces heard on this album, each about two to three minutes long, were recorded remotely and purely surrounded by nature. Once a composition was found and Ruth considered it mature, she only recorded it once, embracing the beauty of doing something for the first time with all its little imperfections. Found Keys sounds anything but imperfect though. These compositions feel timeless, intimate and comforting, as if they have been around for a long time, like an old friend. Gently played keys slowly evolve into minimal pieces through repetitive melodies. There’s stillness as much as there’s brightness, sadness as much as joy; welcome to a beautiful journey through Ruth’s world of wonder.

In many ways, Found Keys is a deeply personal record that takes Sonic Pieces back to its roots. And it leaves a feeling of nostalgia while reviving memories of the past.

A solo album released in 2017. It is an ambitious work that breaks new ground after more than a year of recuperation from illness, and several concerts have been held overseas, mainly featuring material from this album. While the previous album "out of noise" was an organic acoustic work, this album makes extensive use of analog synthesizers, including vintage ones. Since one of the original production ideas was the soundtrack to a fictional Tarkovsky film, each song strongly evokes the listener's own image of the film. In fact, after the album's release, Shiro Takatani, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Zakkubalan, and others made a film of the album and its songs, which was also presented as an installation. The album includes "andata," a new signature song that has been performed at every concert in recent years. Also, "fullmoon" and "Life, Life" featured readings by Paul Bowles and David Sylvian, respectively, from the film "Sheltering Sky".

Deeply resonant spiritual music transmitted via piano, organ, and harmonium by beloved composer and Ethiopian Orthodox nun Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru.

Church of Kidane Mehret collects all the musical work from Emahoy’s 1972 private press album of the same name, alongside two additional unreleased piano recordings, exploring Emahoy’s take on “Ethiopian Church Music.”

Recording herself in churches throughout Jerusalem, Emahoy engages directly with the Ethiopian Orthodox musical liturgy. For the first time, we hear Emahoy on harmonium and massive, droning pipe organ, alongside some of her most moving piano work.

“Ave Maria” is one of our favorite pieces Emahoy ever recorded, her chiming piano reverberating against ancient stone walls. Her familiar melodic lines take on new resonance when played through the harmonium on “Spring Ode - Meskerem.” Two towering organ performances comprise the B Side, combining Emahoy’s classical European training with her lifelong study of Ethiopian religious music.

Nowhere is Emahoy’s unique combination of influences more apparent than on “Essay on Mahlet,” a meditative slow burner in which Emahoy interprets the free verse of the Orthodox liturgy note for note on the piano. This revelatory piece, alongside the dramatic piano composition “The Storm,” comes from another self-released album, 1963’s Der Sang Des Meeres. Only 50 copies were ever produced (and no cover). One of the only known copies was saved from the trash and shared with Mississippi by a fellow nun at Emahoy’s monastery when we visited for Emahoy’s funeral in March of 2023.

We are proud to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Foundation to bring you these rare spiritual recordings in what would have been the artist’s 102nd year.

Available in black and clear vinyl editions. Old-school tip-on jacket with metallic silver foil stamping along with a 12-page booklet featuring extensive liner notes from scholar and pianist Thomas Feng.

From beloved composer Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru, a revelatory new album of piano pieces, unreleased or virtually inaccessible until now!

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru is a true original – an Ethiopian nun whose recordings have funded orphanages back home since the early ’60s. Her compositions and unique playing style live somewhere between Erik Satie, Debussy, liturgical music of the Coptic Ethiopian Church, and Ethiopian traditional music. It is some of the most moving piano music you will ever hear.

This is the first archival release of the great composer’s recordings since the Éthiopiques series reintroduced her music to the world in 2006. Drawn from original master tapes and a nearly impossible-to-find vinyl release, Jerusalem unveils profound new facets of Emahoy Gebru’s performance and compositions.

The record picks up where the last two Mississippi releases left off, with tracks from her 1972 album Hymn of Jerusalem, of which only a handful of copies are known to exist. These include “Home of Beethoven,” “Aurora,” and a true masterpiece that stands amongst her greatest compositions, the moving “Jerusalem.” “Quand La Mer Furieuse” is the first release featuring Emahoy’s singing voice, forshadowing a vocal album planned for fall 2023. The B-Side brings us the artist’s home recordings - tracks like “Farewell Eve,” “Woigaye Don’t Cry Anymore,” and “Famine Disaster 1974” mark a bridge from liturgical work to dark and intense classical material, a new mode.

This album is released in celebration of Emahoy Gebru’s 99th birthday on December 12, 2022. Mississippi is honored to work with the Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Publisher to continue to introduce this visionary composer to the world.

Newly remastered recordings pressed on 160gm black vinyl, heavy jacket with reproduction of 1972 artwork, song notes by the artist. 

Ignatz, the long-running project of Belgian musician Bram Devens, has spent two decades refining a distinctive approach to songcraft—built on repetition, subtle shifts, and an ear for the uncanny. Across a steady stream of releases on labels including (K-RAA-K)³, Ultra Eczema and Fonal, his work remains instantly recognisable while continually evolving. I Don’t Know marks a striking departure. Following earlier recordings centred on guitar, Devens turns to piano, uncovering a new, more skeletal language. The instrument first entered his orbit in the mid-2010s, when he inherited a family piano and began exploring its possibilities as a self-taught player. Recorded at home in Landen, these pieces feel sparse and unsettled, carrying a raw intimacy that sets them apart from his previous work. The result is a haunted, deeply personal album that reframes Ignatz’s sound without losing its core identity.

Gondwana Records is pleased to announce ‘Interlude’, the second album from Estonian-born, London-based composer and pianist Hanakiv. Showcasing an expanded sound, the compositions trace a journey of overcoming the past, unfolding into a seductively unconventional style imbued with hope and a therapeutic quality. Existing in a liminal space between genres, Interlude , the second album from composer, pianist and now singer Hanakiv is as mysterious as it’s seductively unconventional, with piano, often prepared, only one of its elements, both analogue and electronic. First inspired by “those crystallised moments where time almost stands still, pain hasn’t yet fully set in, and happiness is still just a glimpse,” it provides, all the same, “a sense of hope that standing still is part of living.” Interlude’s range is further intimated by its contributors, including Portico Quartet’s Milo Fitzpatrick, who, as well as playing double bass throughout, co-wrote the refreshed long-term live favourite, ‘Intro’, and the eloquent closer, Stillness’. Also present are saxophonist Pille-Rite Rei, cellist Joanna Gutowska, violinist Gabriel Green, and PIKE on drums, helping capture the instances Hanakiv calls “in-betweens”. Unpredictable, unfathomable, candid and carefree, Interlude embodies flaws embraced as well as senses regained. This record is a product of creative and personal revelation, earned only when one’s true self.

Recorded between the iconic Abbey Road and Polish Radio studios, Hania Rani’s original music for Joachim Trier’s Cannes and Golden Globe winning, Oscar and Bafta nominated ‘Sentimental Value’ is a deeply intuitive collaboration, composed before a single frame was edited. Intriguingly Hania worked on the score for Sentimental Value without an edit in hand; instead, she was given a carefully written script and the freedom of her own substantial imagination. The story told in the film oscillates around three characters and the motionless presence of the house, yet the relationships between all these personalities are not fixed, but in progress. Those subtle qualities were at the center of her attention and became the core topic of numerous discussions with Joachim about the music, the film, and the philosophy behind Sentimental Value. In September 2024, Hania went to Oslo and spent a couple of days in the main film location (the family home in Oslo) with her sound engineer, Agata Dankowska. The film crew was away in France to shoot another scene for the project, so they were allowed to freely explore the space - both visually and sonically. They made field recordings in the building, capturing the sounds of objects and furniture found in the apartment, and they also managed to record a couple of piano pieces. The house plays a significant role in the story, silently witnessing the tangled trajectories of its residents.

“How to begin? No beginning... never ending reverberation,” Antoine Beuger writes in the accompanying notes to Leo Svirsky’s River Without Banks. Dedicated to his first piano teacher Irena Orlov, River Without Banks is a mesmerizing, emotional collection of pieces that are simultaneously complex and fluid. The title River Without Banks comes from a chapter of musicologist Genrikh “Henry” Orlov’s profound work Tree of Music. In said chapter, Orlov traces the history of sacred music from the Western and Eastern tradition and how the forms (of the chant, raga etc.) sought to eliminate the division between the physical and the spiritual--the bank and the river.

Arranged for two pianos with accompaniment from strings, trumpet, and electronics, this is Svirsky’s first piece to approach the history of the piano and the possibilities of the recording studio, and his deepest dive yet into exploring the instability of listening and its transformation of musical semantics and affect. Like Wolfgang Voigt’s Gas project, Svirsky overlays romantic musical gestures to create a lush unfamiliarity. No sooner than each track begins the next moment unfurls beneath it, cascading time and blurring perception of past and present.

Akin to a multidimensional Rzewski thematic interpretation, Svirsky’s music defies genre-classification or classical ideology while its virtuosity clearly stems from somewhere from within disciplined traditions. Continuously revisiting, revising, and renewing its emotional core, River Without Banks is less an album of songs than songs of a singular, unlocatable album. Performed by the composer with assistance from Britton Powell, Max Eilbacher, Leila Bordreuil, Tim Byrnes, and recorded by Al Carlson.

A new album of piano driven ambient music from British composer Robert Haigh. Following in the path of his albums for the Japanese Siren label, Creatures of the Deep is an underground vantage of a meeting between the musical worlds of Harold Budd and Erik Satie. With a storied musical career that has ranged widely in style ― from his industrial-avant-garde works on Nurse With Wound’s United Diaries label as SEMA to his legendary ambient drum and bass records as Omni Trio on Moving Shadow ― Robert Haigh's work occupies a space between music and mystery. With Creatures of the Deep, Haigh is at the peak of his powers. Among noir, minimal, neo-classical landscapes are robust scatterings of bright reflection and a musical expression that is subtle and elusive yet uniquely Haigh’s in its voice and masterful execution. The closer we examine, the more is revealed, and the less is defined.

Minecraft - Volume Alpha is the work of German composer and musician Daniel Rosenfeld. Using C418 as his moniker, Rosenfeld crafted the sweeping soundtrack and vibrant sound design which helped breathe life into Minecraft's voxel-based universe. Fans and critics were universally enamored with his beatless, nuanced electronic pieces upon release. Popular gaming site Kotaku named it among The Best Game Music of 2011, calling the music "remarkably soothing," and The Guardian has compared Rosenfeld's delicate piano and sparse ambient motifs to legendary artists Erik Satie and Brian Eno. In an interview feature with C418, Polygon distilled Volume Alpha to its essence: "It's not bound by the retro aesthetic of Minecraft's graphics. It transcends them. The album is an attempt to uplift the combined game/music experience into the sublime."