MUSIC
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Come Back Down, the new album by Nashville experimental-pop duo Total Wife, was born from the edge of sleep. When composer and producer Luna Kupper would begin to fall asleep during late-night mixing sessions, the songs would follow her into the halfway place between dream and lucidity. Like Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, she’d wake with a new perspective on the puzzle she was piecing together. “I’m a psychological mixer — I’m trying to think of how someone’s experiencing the sound, versus getting stuck in trying to make all these different tones and using all this gear to make something sound a certain way,” Kupper says. And like a spiral from waking life into dream, the songs on Come Back Down are endlessly self-referential, building whole universes from a single point. Kupper sold all of her synths to make rent before she started working on the album, and so every inorganic sound is instead built from samples of the band’s own work. A guitar on one song may be reprocessed and used as a synth on the next, while everywhere on the album vocal samples are taken from a single unreleased cover of Elliott Smith’s “Between the Bars.” In tribute to this process, the album was almost named The Julia Set after the mathematical equation which feeds into itself again and again, creating beautiful fractal images. The intention was to create something complex but accessible; experimental, yet precise and without abstraction. In her lyrics, too, main vocalist and co-composer Ash Richter is as straightforward as she’s ever been. She drew on her experience of pandemic isolation to write about connection and disconnection, using her lyrics as a tool for the communication that was missing in everyday life. On the soaring, shoegazey track “peaches”, a storm that forced the cancellation of a recording session became a metaphor for emotional distance. “still asleep” chronicles Richter’s euphoria after Total Wife’s first tour, and watches it begin to curdle into paranoia. “Thank the full moon, my heart is overflowing,” she sings, before: “Is there such a thing as too happy?” The experience of isolation was prompting Richter to think back to her childhood, a time marked for her by solitude and natural play — climbing trees, making mud pies, getting lost in the woods. On tracks like “in my head” and “second spring”, she uses the imagery of nature to recall that time and forge a connection with her lonely inner child. “I feel connected with transcendentalist writing and magical realism — trying to convey things in a concrete way, but with that element of psychology and mystery,” she says. Richter and Kupper, friends from high school, formed Total Wife in 2016, relocating from Boston to Nashville in 2020. Both are visual artists as well as musicians, which they incorporate into their work with Total Wife via layered and purposeful visuals. A DIY streak underpins everything that they do — from handling their own artwork and music videos to recording their own music, releasing tapes through their label Ivy Eat Home, and hosting house shows in the basement they’ve christened Ryman 2. In Nashville they’ve settled into a weirdo scene living under the record industry’s floorboards, a hive of collaborative and creative energy that has made them excited to call the city home. They also assembled a live band for the first time shortly after moving to Nashville, consisting of Ryan Bigelow, Sean Booz and Billy Campbell — injecting their creative process with a jolt of spontaneity and aliveness that has fed back into Come Back Down.
A band that played so loud their entire fan base went deaf and never spoke of them again. Formed in 1993 in the go-nowhere exurb of San Jose, California, Super Static Fever played only a handful of gigs in their brief two year existence, punishing spectators with a tinnitus-inducing wah-wah wall of Marshall-stacked distortion. Their sound was a mix of Melvins-esque sludge, Swervedriver’s melodic crunch, and latter-day Black Flag’s penchant for volume, as heard from the stock stereo of a hot-boxed 1985 Ford Econoline. Unfinished tapes from two ear-bleeding sessions are all that survived the ensuing 25 years since their indifferent break-up, mixed by the exacting Steve Albini as the band’s one condition for reissue. The package reeks of the ’90s computer-crippled D.I.Y. aesthetic, with VHS blur and opaque white screened on chipboard. A record that just barely does, and probably should not, exist.
You Never End is the third album from Moin (Valentina Magaletti, Tom Halstead and Joe Andrews) out via AD 93 on the 25th October.
This record marks Moin’s shift into a new phase with vocal collaborations across the album from Olan Monk, james K, Coby Sey and Sophia Al-Maria.
The album’s collaborators all have voices that are alluring in their own right whilst hard to pin down: from james K’s ethereal, reverb drenched vocals, Coby Sey’s words that bounce and echo across London’s concrete streets and Olan Monk’s emotive songwriting, while artist Sophie Al-Maria’s voice and thoughts are known to stretch across her multidisciplinary practice as an artist, filmmaker and writer. The unique mystique of each collaborator is maintained throughout the record while simultaneously opening Moin up to new possibilities, in a gentle shifting alchemy.
Continuing their enigmatic re-configuring of the traditional band, Moin use a mix of conventional and unique production and compositional techniques. Subtly re-framing the current conversation about what band in 2024 needs to be, Moin walk the line between what's reassuringly familiar and what's unsettling and inquisitive. You Never End is a more sensitive record in sentiment, it re-contextualises grunge, shoegaze and indie rock with a weirdly comforting melancholy while still sounding direct and alive.
The vocal collaborations bring the most articulate moments and lucid emotion while still remaining uniquely within Moin's established world. Alongside this, the record fine tunes the elements of electronic production that have always been a feature of the band's unique sound in a deeply subtle way. Elements are simpler and more direct, offering robust functional support as well as textural and emotional resonance. Together they show the potential for both practices to intertwine.
Musically, first of all, 1991's second album, "loveless," was more advanced and unexpected than anything else released at the time. Kevin Shields and band thoroughly pursued a sound based on pure sensuality, resulting in a work that overwhelmed the listener's senses. 1990's representative work was hailed as a perfect masterpiece that pushed the possibilities of studio recording to the limit, and has been featured on The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" and It has been hailed as a milestone on par with The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds," Miles Davis' "In A Silent Way," and Stevie Wonder's "Innervisions.
Japanese obi included.
Mastered from 1/2" analog tape using Studer A80 VU-PRE and Neumann VMS 80
180g vinyl weight
Standard gatefold outer sleeve
Six 300 x 300 mm art prints enclosed
Includes DL code (24-bit | 16-bit | mp3)
Songs for Nothing was written upon Olan Monk’s return to the west coast of Ireland. The album is imbued with the influence of sean-nós singing, Irish language songs in the “old style” that often proclaim tales of love, loss and landscape; and also heavily indebted to the late Sinéad O’Connor’s confessional songwriting. Reconstructing these influences through their unique perspective has resulted in a fragmentary album veering between collaged pop, machinic rock and slow airs, “dedicated to Conamara and all who have called it home”. The western, Atlantic-facing edge of Ireland has a particular feeling and energy, one that permeates the release: the granite pulsates, the ocean and sky reflect intensities, seaweed rots on shingle shores, plants bloom, ancient trees come up for air from the drowned forest in Galway Bay, the sun splinters through the low clouds.
Seefeel is a pioneering, experimental electronic band. Formed in London in the early 1990s, they emerged as one of the most innovative bands bridging shoegaze and electronic music, known for their textured soundscapes, minimalist rhythms and ambient sensibilities. This new, expanded version of Pure, Impure brings together Seefeel’s three classic EPs; More Like Space, Plainsong, and Time to Find Me, and includes Aphex Twin mixes and a previously unreleased demo of “Moodswing”. Remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road Studios, this 11-track collection also features newly reimagined artwork.
Ostinato as Resistance: Rafael Anton Irisarri’s Landmark Work Reimagined
Marking the tenth anniversary of the American composer’s critically acclaimed album, this new edition arrives renewed, both sonically and visually.
First released in 2015 during a period of personal upheaval and creative reinvention, it endures as a testament to resilience, transformation, and the connection we hold with the places that shape us.
Written in the aftermath of a devastating theft, A Fragile Geography was born out of loss. Just days before a cross-country move to New York, Irisarri’s entire Seattle-based studio was wiped out. Instruments. Recordings. Archives. Gone without a trace. He arrived on the East Coast to an empty room and the daunting task of starting over.
“This album wasn’t just a record; it was a lifeline,” Irisarri reflects. “It became a way to process the emotional chaos that followed: uprooting, instability, and ultimately, the slow, intuitive rebuilding of a life.”
Composed and recorded in the rural woods of the Hudson Valley, the album took shape in seclusion, surrounded by nature, and through a process guided by improvisation. Embracing limitations, Irisarri wove textural layers of field recordings with half-remembered melodies from his Seattle years, piecing them together like fragments of memory. Tracks like “Displacement,” “Hiatus,” and “Persistence” juxtaposed haunting stillness with restless momentum, mapping an inner terrain of grief, catharsis, and rebirth.
Among its defining sounds is “Empire Systems,” a monumental centerpiece built around a simple four-chord progression, organ textures, and guitar drones. Gradually, the track expands into layers of immersive loops and thick, enveloping distortion that wash over the listener like a rolling wave. Often cited as the album’s most majestic passage, it captures Irisarri at his most sonically ambitious. With a harmonically saturated structure crafted from restraint and repetition, it remains one of his most recognizable compositions: an exercise in the art of maximal minimalism.
From the outset, “Reprisal” received praise from BBC’s Mary Anne Hobbs, who championed the track on her radio show. Her support played a key role in introducing Irisarri’s work to wider audiences and solidifying his place within the lineage of electronic, drone, and experimental sound artists. A slow-burning elegy, the piece emerges from a haze of distortion and sub-bass, with dense, unrelenting drones carrying a sense of mounting tension. Just as it seems to collapse under its own weight, flickers of guitar emerge like distant light through fog. It’s a meditation on dissonance, resolve, and the elusive possibility of release.
The closing track, “Secretly Wishing for Rain,” is steeped in saudade: a longing for Seattle’s dour grey skies, lush green landscapes, and desaturated sunsets. Through it, Irisarri mourns a vanished chapter of life bound to the city, a time documented in scattered mementos and cherished collections, now permanently gone. A reflection on what could never be recovered: an era lost to time. Julia Kent’s looped cello motifs added a melancholic warmth to the track, marking the first collaboration between the two artists and sparking a musical dialogue that would keep growing in the years that followed.
More than a career highlight, A Fragile Geography has laid the foundation for Black Knoll studio, which Irisarri rebuilt from the ground up. The studio has since grown into a creative hub for countless projects, with Irisarri engineering records for iconic music figures like Terry Riley, Ryuichi Sakamoto, William Basinski, MONO, Devendra Banhart, Grouper, Emeralds, Steve Hauschildt, Julianna Barwick, and many others. Carried by its lasting influence, the album has quietly captured the ear of a younger generation, its sound and emotional arc finding new listeners in unexpected corners.
The album’s new visual language was reimagined in collaboration with Mexico City–based designer Daniel Castrejón. Irisarri captured ghostly images at Gaztelugatxeko Doniene, a historic coastal site in Bermeo, Euskal Herria. Castrejón then treated the photographs with distressed textures and spectral overlays. The final artwork channels the rugged, elemental forces that shaped both the music and Irisarri’s aesthetic, renewing his ties to ancestral ground inspired by the Basque homeland of his bloodline.
Mastered by Stephan Mathieu with exceptional attention to detail, this anniversary edition uncovers every nuance in the sound design, enhancing clarity and presence. With each listen, new elements emerge, inviting discovery and reconnection.
“I don’t experience this album as a document of grief anymore,” says Irisarri. “I hear adaptation and I'm reminded that when everything falls apart, something meaningful, maybe even beautiful, can emerge.”
lovesliescrushing's Bloweyelashwish is an ambient masterpiece, originally recorded in 1992 with a 12-string guitar, 4-track recorder, looping pedal, and boundless reverb. Scott Cortez’s project, alongside the haunting vocals of Melissa Arpin Duimstra, transformed bedroom daydreams into a serene, moonlit journey on a timeless sea. This expanded and remastered double album features five additional tracks, each distortion-laden and hypnotic, alongside lyrics and a replica postcard to guide listeners deeper into its world. Blindness, not eyewash, is the intended experience.
lovesliescrushing's Bloweyelashwish is an ambient masterpiece, originally recorded in 1992 with a 12-string guitar, 4-track recorder, looping pedal, and boundless reverb. Scott Cortez’s project, alongside the haunting vocals of Melissa Arpin Duimstra, transformed bedroom daydreams into a serene, moonlit journey on a timeless sea. This expanded and remastered double album features five additional tracks, each distortion-laden and hypnotic, alongside lyrics and a replica postcard to guide listeners deeper into its world. Blindness, not eyewash, is the intended experience.
An air of ancient ritualism cloaks Modern Love’s midnight meeting between UK producer MOBBS and French-Egyptian spellcaster Susu Laroche, carving out a channel between hexed trip hop and shoegaze that’s one part DJ Screw, one part MBV, operating within a long shadow of influence cast by Curve, Leila, Cocteau Twins, Nearly God.
Clasping chiral energies on their debut collab, MOBBS brings a history spanning shadowy production work for big name artists to the grimly stylised vein of performance art and musick explored by Susu Laroche, an Egyptian-French with strong binds to chthonic contemporary London.
Their maiden sacrifice heightens the senses to blends of monotonic, sandalwood scented incantations and carpet-burned downbeats swept in slurred dub. Songs are subtly variegated in tone to spell out shifting plays of light evoking bedsit antechambers and warehouse innards lit by iPhone candle or extractor hood and emergency light bulbs on their last lumens.
It's music that's as elaborately serrated and blemished as early MBV, but positioned in a vastly different cultural landscape, drawing from hip-hop, drone, psych and basement noise. The pair’s range of cultural obsessions maintains a precarious balance between shadowy histories and an asphyxiating present; all too often, when the past is projected it's thru a mollifying, nostalgic lens, so their critical, prudent hybrid sound is a vital, chilling corrective.
From the bell-ringing, chain-rattle jag of ‘Throne’ thru the sleepwalker drift of ‘Roam’, and concrete plangency of ‘Forest’, the marriage of MOBBS’ illusive textures with Laroche’s feel for analog image and film (as evinced in her art for the likes of Blackhaine and Mica Levi) imprints their sound in gauzy layers that leave fleeting impressions on the mind’s eye. At their heaviest, Laroche’s arcane declarations descend in impressive enactments, undressing the excesses of over-glossed trip hop to reveal and revel in the sound at its starkest, sexiest, for new waves of washed up souls.
2025 has been a big year for Drop Nineteens. They finally officially released their long lost pre-curser to 1992’s Delaware, the demo collection 1991. These releases comprise the band’s early run and as Pitchfork noted in their review of both albums earlier this year, “established Drop Nineteens’ reputation as leading lights of U.S. shoegaze.”
The band follows up the release of the 1991 LP with their first ever 7”, White Dress b/w White Dress (demo). The 7” features the band’s cover of the Lana Del Ray classic in two versions. It comes on the anniversary of the band’s digital release of “White Dress.”
This is an edition of 500 black 7”s and 200 white 7"s and is sure to be a collectable item for fans of shoegaze and Drop Nineteens alike.
co:clear is overjoyed to welcome Jonnnah to its fold, with a new long-form 12” edition. Featuring Pavel Milyakov (aka Buttechno) right off the bat, ‘Me, With You’ is an album that grips its listener tight with gleaming electronica, off-kilter trip-hop and swampy bass.
With past offerings to Soleil Rouge and Second End Records – a label which he heads – there's a thread that laces all of Jonnnah’s work. Although never sticking to a definable bracket, the Lyon-dweller effortlessly floats through various tempers, peddling impeccable electronics as equally suited to colossal sound systems, as they are to solitary early morning walks in headphones. It's ambient for the foreground that surprises with flurries of two-step and amen breaks – present-day sonics that doff their cap to what’s come before.
He also participated in the legendary psychedelic bands “Hallelujahs” and “Idiot O'Clock” with Shinji Shibayama and others, which were praised to the highest degree by the late Hideo Iketsuzumi, owner of Modern Music, who presided over “P.S.F. Records,” one of the most prestigious psychedelic underground bands in Japan. Naoiki Toushi is one of the residents of Kyoto's “Drugstore,” a rock cafe renowned as a sacred place for underground music, and is also a founding member of the famous band Hijokaidan. Paradise” is the first solo album of Toushi's career, released on the Shibayama-led ‘Org Records’ label, and the first time it has been reissued in analog format.
Originally released in 1993, Quique (pronounced “keek”) was the first album by UK band Seefeel. A landmark album, it’s unique blend of shoegaze fuzz, abstract electronic sounds and sparse minimalism made it a must have for any collector of ambient techno. Released by too pure, the album was reissued in expanded form as Quique Redux on cd in 2007. About it, Pitchfork wrote that “Quique showed how the oceanic end of shoegaze could be found in a purely electronic world” and called the album “timeless”.
"Quique was very much a product of its time in terms of who we were as people, the social world we inhabited and the technology available to us. I think the album was very much restricted by the relatively primitive technology we were using by today's standards, but that very restriction is I think partly what gives it its flavour."– MARK CLIFFORD
We are excited to make Quique and Quique Redux available again, newly remastered by Geoff Pesche at Abbey Road.
QUIQUE REDUX will be available on vinyl for the first time via a limited edition 4XLP set through the Beggars Arkive webstore and bandcamp only. The release is housed in a slipcase with new artwork. The cd version is not limited and will be available everywhere. Quique Redux is comprised of Quique plus 9 bonus tracks of alternate versions and material that wasn’t included on the original album.
QUIQUE will be available everywhere on double LP, remastered.
