MUSIC

Having studied under Takehisa Kosugi in 1975 and participated in the legendary improvisation group East Bionic Symphonia, Tomonao Koshikawa—now also a member of Marginal Consort and an artist who performs experimental music, jazz, rock, Indian classical music, and even Kanze‑school Noh chanting—presents his second solo work, following his ato.archives debut Footprint

The archive is not neutral. In 2019, Andrea Centazzo discovered unlabeled tape reels in his mother's attic in Udine - boxes assumed lost seven years earlier. What emerged from these deteriorating reels, transferred by engineer Sergio Tomasini during COVID lockdowns, was unexpected: unreleased recordings from the original Elektriktus sessions of 1973-76, alongside other archival materials including previously unknown collaborations with Steve Lacy and Evan Parker from the same period.Centazzo's solution was conceptually elegant: add contemporary digital electronics to the original analog Elektriktus recordings, creating temporal palimpsest in which the seventy-something composer engages in dialogue with his younger self. Crucially, his fundamental approach hasn't changed. "Making a 10-minute loop meant playing and overdubbing for 10 minutes!" This rejection of computer automation, this insistence on the hand-played and physically executed, links 2025 to 1975 through continuous methodology.Vol. 2 operates in complex register: contemporary electronics don't "update" the original recordings but exist in conversation with them. By overlaying 2025 digital work onto 1975 analog recordings, Centazzo creates proof that affinities between cosmic drift and percussive grounding were present in the original conception, waiting to be heard.The reborn Ictus label presents both volumes as complementary documents: Vol. 1 preserving the original artifact in its analog integrity, Vol. 2 revealing latent possibilities through temporal superimposition. Together, they map territory that standard histories have overlooked - the Italian synthesis of kosmische consciousness and Mediterranean sensibility.This temporal doubling produces music that is neither nostalgic recreation nor radical revision but something more complex - a conversation between past and present, between the composer who created these sounds in the mid-1970s and the artist who now understands their full implications. The phantom that PDU Records once denied a proper name finally speaks, twice, across fifty years.

In the summer of 1976, a peculiar album appeared in Italian record shops bearing no artist name - only the cryptic moniker Elektriktus. The music posed a question that wouldn't be answered for decades: who had created this hybrid of jazz sensibility and kosmische synthesis? The answer was hiding in plain sight. Andrea Centazzo - recognized figure in European free improvisation who had shared stages with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey - had been leading a double life between touring with Giorgio Gaslini's quartet, conducting experiments with Minimoog, Davolisint, and the GEM Rodeo 49 synthesizer.

PDU Records - owned by pop icon Mina and Italy's primary distributor for German avant-garde labels including Brain, Kosmische Musik, and Pilz, making PDU the Italian gateway to Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Cosmic Jokers, and the broader kosmische scene, often releasing these albums in prestigious Quadraphonic editions - recognized the value of what Centazzo had created but worried his jazz identity would confuse the cosmic electronics market. The solution: create Elektriktus as pseudonym, fusing "electronic" with "Ictus," the name Centazzo would give to his own label and percussion series.

Where German kosmische musik tended toward the infinite and abstract - Conrad Schnitzler's austere minimalism, Tangerine Dream's sequencer-driven expanses - Centazzo's electronic music retained tactile, physical quality. Franco Feruglio's upright bass walks and breathes, remembering northern Italian folk traditions. Centazzo's percussion maintains the rhythmic intelligence of jazz improvisation even when filtered through electronics. Electronic Mind Waves presents a heady dive into mystical electronics at the intersection of kosmische consciousness and jazz improvisation. Each of the eight tracks unfolds as its own sonic meditation, incorporating otherworldly themes through wild synth lines played against meandering bass patterns and Centazzo's driving yet nuanced percussion - pushing the listener into cosmic spaces while maintaining the tactile, almost physical quality that distinguishes Italian cosmic music from its German counterparts.

These eight synth-fueled tracks sound close to what kraut/cosmische heads were doing at the time - think Conrad Schnitzler, Deuter, or Cosmic Jokers, and also other European experimentalists like Richard Pinhas' Heldon, Spacecraft, Didier Bocquet, Seesselberg, F.G. Experimental Laboratory, Roberto Cacciapaglia, or Hydrus. Elektriktus represents the most adventurous experimental sounds under kosmische influence to emerge from Italy. What made Electronic Mind Waves significant wasn't imitation of German models, but transformation of them through Mediterranean sensibility and freeform jazz ethos.

The album's 1976 appearance came at a pivotal moment. Rock Progressivo Italiano - the movement that had produced the political complexity of Area, the folk-inflected experimentation of Stormy Six, the symphonic ambitions of Le Orme - was entering terminal crisis. Elektriktus arrived into this collapse: anonymous, difficult to market, structurally uncommercial. Poor distribution ensured its swift disappearance. But as often happens with prematurely buried artifacts, the album acquired an afterlife in collector circles, becoming whispered legend - a forgotten electronic gem that not only reflected the Italian craze for space synth, but looked north to the genius of electronic Krautrockers while maintaining distinctly Mediterranean character.

Strongly recommended to fans of minimal electronic music, kosmische sounds and ambient soundscapes.

A new ambient/new age masterpiece is born, a must-have for those who love Japanese 80's ambient music/ambient by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Gigi Masin, H.Takahashi, Mary Lattimore, etc.! Constellation Tatsu, a famous label from Oakland, California, has been pushing the new age revival from the underground cassette scene, along with Rotifer, Inner Islands, and Leaving Records. From Constellation Tatsu comes the debut album by Loris S. Sarid, a musician and sound designer from Rome, Italy, now based in Glasgow, Scotland. This is the arrival of an up-and-coming artist who has managed to keep Hiroshi Yoshimura, H.Takahashi and Joseph Shabason on his toes, and is even looking ahead to the future. This is a piece of "environmental music for plants," created as a musical tribute to a tomato farm, inspired by the small tomatoes I tended on the windowsill of my apartment this winter. This year, Leaving released Green-House's debut EP, "Six Songs for Invisible Gardens," which was based on the concept of "communication between plant life and the people who grow it. A work! It is described as "a tribute to the casual courage in simplicity, and the beauty and lightness of casual things".

This is just sublime: Stroom & Hessel Veldman illuminate 13 unreleased gems by a sacred figure of ‘80s DIY Dutch tape music, nestling deeply precious, noctilucent synth works for lovers of BoC, Eno & Harmonia, Vangelis, Tangerine Dream & Klaus Schulze, Dominique Lawalrée...

Trust the Lowlands standard bearers at Stroom to pluck this quietly breathtaking bouquet from behind the ear of DIY synth and ambient music history. Adding to prized reissues of Enno Velthuys’ work over the past decade - from albums to songs secreted on comps for LSD and Light in the Attic - ‘Music From the Other Side of the Fence’ helps fill gaps in the patchy knowledge of his cultish catalogue 1975-1990. While the label are being typically, poetically playful with background info, a crudely educated guess can assign pieces to recordings that made up his four cassettes issued 1982-1987, but it’s better taken as a lovingly sequenced overview of his harmonious short stories, each riddled with an exquisite atmospheric magick that tiles up to an adorable portrait of the troubled artist.

If memory serves, it was a pair of LSD comps that first anonymously seeded Velthuys’ ohrwurms ‘Blue Heron’ & ‘The Day After’ to our lugs, at least, and it wasn’t until a reissue of their motherships ‘Landscapes in Thin Air’ (1985) & ‘Different Places’ (1987) that things began to fall in place. A slightly broader picture now emerges via this new raft of signature, woozy arabesques and powdered ambient pads threaded with a feel for extended melody that ties it all off with a ribbon bow. A solitary, melancholic presence guides from the frosted carillon of ’Something Special’ thru the reedy romance of ‘Uplands (Unplugged Alt Version 2)’, sashaying to types of aerial waltz in ‘Underneath a Dark Sky’ and slowed, Vangelisian brass fanfare with ‘Moonlight Serenade’ that surely shiver nostalgic timbers with an evocative, tongue-tip timbre that tickles places others don’t reach.

100% no brainer for hopeless ambient synth romantics and introverts.

This seminal, eponymous post-punk album by Japanese group Aunt Sally, fronted by experimental singer Phew, was first released by the iconic Vanity Records label in 1979. Over the past forty-plus years, Phew has forged a singular path through a wide range of styles - from free improvisation to pop - and has collaborated with the likes of Ryuichi Sakamoto, members of Can, DAF, Einstürzende Neubauten, The Raincoats and more. But Aunt Sally is where she got her start and, despite the members’ young ages (still in college at the time), Phew and the band delivered a mature, timeless take on minimalistic punk. Remastered from the original analog tapes, this fully authorized reissue.

"Ikue Mori, PHEW and YoshimiO are three legends of the Japanese Avant Garde music scene: Ikue was an original member of DNA and is a vital member of the NYC Downtown Scene, Phew founded Aunt Sally in 1978 and has performed in countless folk/rock solo projects and collaborations and YoshimiO is a core member of the Boredoms, Saicobab and OOIOO. Here they come together for their first ever trio project. Recorded at Club U.F.O. in Tokyo, the music was edited and mixed during the shelter-in-place months of early 2020. Surprising and powerful, this is a fabulous and essential meeting of three new music superstars!"

I.P.Y is a dense and striking collaboration that brings together three legends of the Japanese avant‑garde — each with a distinct voice and an unrelenting experimental spirit.

PPU's first long-play LP highlights some of the early beginnings of one of our favorite producers, UKU KUUT. Written and recorded at UKU's home studio in Los Angeles and Stockholm between 1982 & 1989. Some tracks co-written with Maryn E. Coote, famous jazz vocalist who had her beginnings in 1960s Soviet Union. "That's my MOM" recalls UKU, "I remember when I was little, sitting under the mixing board at her sessions". Growing up in studios, UKU's love of music production began early, and over the years he has amassed a vast collection of domestic and soviet electronic gear. In true PPU style this LP is a mix of UKU KUUT's raw cassette demos, forgotten masters and unreleased magic.

12th Isle ready the first of many new releases after a break over the first half of 2025. Radx is a new collaborative endeavour between label artists X.Y.R. and Vlad Dobrovolski (½ of S A D) exploring a shared appreciation of vintage 80s & 90s synthesisers, ambient-adjacent furniture music and, er, dragons. Referencing the electronica of artists such as Kim Cascone/Hydrosphere as well as the sci-fi literature of Michael Swanwick where dragons act as living machines, the pair combine various synthesis models, pedals and samplers for an album that sits somewhere firmly between each of their solo works. From the cathedralic ascension of ‘Heavenly Shepherd of Silence’ to the back-room bean bag swirls of ‘Ovgo’s Etheric Mind’ and dense, jungle-like humidity of ‘Liminal Space’, the more ambient-leaning end of the catalogue is built upon further.

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

A new ambient/new age masterpiece is born, a must-have for those who love Japanese 80's ambient music/ambient by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Gigi Masin, H.Takahashi, Mary Lattimore, etc.! Constellation Tatsu, a famous label from Oakland, California, has been pushing the new age revival from the underground cassette scene, along with Rotifer, Inner Islands, and Leaving Records. From Constellation Tatsu comes the debut album by Loris S. Sarid, a musician and sound designer from Rome, Italy, now based in Glasgow, Scotland. This is the arrival of an up-and-coming artist who has managed to keep Hiroshi Yoshimura, H.Takahashi and Joseph Shabason on his toes, and is even looking ahead to the future. This is a piece of "environmental music for plants," created as a musical tribute to a tomato farm, inspired by the small tomatoes I tended on the windowsill of my apartment this winter. This year, Leaving released Green-House's debut EP, "Six Songs for Invisible Gardens," which was based on the concept of "communication between plant life and the people who grow it. A work! It is described as "a tribute to the casual courage in simplicity, and the beauty and lightness of casual things".

Caterina Barbieri is set to release a sister album of her 2019's acclaimed “Ectatic Computation”. “Myuthafoo“ will be out on June 2. Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent the best part of a decade breaking apart the rigid structures of electronic music, using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop landscapes. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the Important Records-released "Patterns of Consciousness", a confident fusion of analogue synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it with "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label in 2019, wide acclaim ensued, with critics praising its potent fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synth experimentation. Pitchfork has described her music as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreamachine for the ears". Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini. "Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.

The Expanding Universe is the 1980 debut album by composer and computer music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. The original album is reissued here as a massively expanded 3LP or 2CD set, containing all four original album tracks plus an additional 15 tracks from the same period, nearly all previously unreleased and many making their first appearance on vinyl in this brand new 2018 edition. Since this album's first reissue in 2012, it has gone on to be widely established as a classic of electronic, ambient, and 20th century classical music. Some of the well-loved works included in this set are "Patchwork", the "Appalachian Grove" series, "East River Dawn" and "Kepler's Harmony of the Worlds", which was included on the Golden Record launched on board the Voyager spacecraft. The pieces comprising The Expanding Universe combine slowly evolving textures with the emotional richness of intricate counterpoint, harmony, and complex rhythms (John Fahey and J. S. Bach are both cited as major influences in the original cover's notes), all built of electronic sounds using the GROOVE system at Bell Laboratories during the 1970s. The 3LP vinyl edition was cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering, Berlin.

Echoes, Spaces, Lines collects Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, and Spectre, the first three albums by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. Exploring all corners of the multiverse through transpersonal form and freedom, Strom’s first three albums share a singular sensibility, different streams flowing from the same oracular font. Echoes, Spaces, Lines establishes Strom’s rightful place in the canon of great synthesists. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, newly remastered, and adding Oceans of Tears, a fully realized but previously unreleased album exclusive to this box set, these are the first official reissues and the definitive encapsulation of Pauline Anna Strom’s prolific and visionary early work. This four LP box set includes a 12-page booklet containing liner notes, an unearthed interview with Strom, and unseen ephemera.

Echoes, Spaces, Lines collects Trans-Millenia Consort, Plot Zero, and Spectre, the first three albums by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. Exploring all corners of the multiverse through transpersonal form and freedom, Strom’s first three albums share a singular sensibility, different streams flowing from the same oracular font. Echoes, Spaces, Lines establishes Strom’s rightful place in the canon of great synthesists. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, newly remastered, and adding Oceans of Tears, a fully realized but previously unreleased album exclusive to this box set, these are the first official reissues and the definitive encapsulation of Pauline Anna Strom’s prolific and visionary early work. This four LP box set includes a 12-page booklet containing liner notes, an unearthed interview with Strom, and unseen ephemera.

Plot Zero is the second album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1983, Strom envisioned the album as a “mind trip without chemicals,” utilizing boundless imagination to cover a canvas with brilliant synthesized shapes and tones. The pieces on Plot Zero flow freely and infinitely, evoking a transportative momentum with Strom’s distinctive synthesizers soaring across infinite horizons into vast, colorful nebulas. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Trans-Millenia Consort is the near mythical debut album by the late West Coast composer, healer, and medium Pauline Anna Strom. First released in 1982, the album is a bold and beautiful evocation of a life that exists between and beyond time. Evoking ancient rituals and primordial futures, the music of Trans-Millenia Consort glows with a strange iridescence; its pulsing embryonic waveforms flutter and drift, tones fall like raindrops of the long-ago, and melodies shimmer and dance across the ages like fireflies of a lost world. Restored and mixed from the original reels by Marta Salogni, and newly remastered, this is the album’s first ever official reissue, and the definitive edition of a visionary statement.

Bamanya is responsible for building Africa's first DIY modular synthesizer, a huge wall of home-made modules and FX units that he dubbed, fittingly, The Afrorack. His reason for embarking on this difficult project was simple: as he began to investigate the world of modular synthesizers, he realized it would be difficult to acquire the technology in Uganda. Not only were there relatively few retailers across the whole of Africa, but the modules were often prohibitively expensive. After quick search online, Bamanya realized he could easily download circuit diagrams and buy the required parts locally, so he taught himself electronics and constructed a CV-controlled system that's been evolving ever since. "The Afrorack" is Bamanya's debut album and displays the producer's untethered creativity and restless energy. He's all too aware that these modules were developed with European and American musical styles in mind, so developed his own musical methodology and language to coax the system into suiting his needs. His starting points are often abstractions of acid and techno, but Bamanya curves East African rhythms and different scales into these familiar structures, splintering them into fractal shards. "I believe Africa is at that point where people are getting new tools which were not available to them, and then experimenting with them in a different context, because Africa has its own traditional music," he told Pan African Music back in 2019. This attitude is most evident on 'African Drum Machine', where Bamanya uses a Euclidean rhythm sequencer to divide his CV signals into complex algorithmic patterns that mimic the polyrhythmic structures that exist in many East African musical forms. If you're not listening closely it might sound like 4/4 techno, but focus your attention and you'll hear different layers of drums and jagged oscillators bouncing between each other creating hypnotic new rhythms. Bamanya takes a similar approach on 'Why Serious', fuzzing dubby basslines and plasticky percussive sounds into a frenetic hybrid of abstract electronics and fwd-thinking East African club sounds. At times, Bamanya's meditative, bass-heavy compositions echo the psychedelic sounds of Shackleton or Adrian Sherwood's African Head Charge, particularly on tracks like 'Inspired' and 'Last Modular'. With lysergic tonal shifts and precision-engineered drums, both tracks sound defiantly metallic, but sculpted by a producer who's always completely in control as he introduces risky eccentricities like feline groans and videogame blips. And on less beat-heavy tracks like 'Osc' and 'Rev', Bamanya makes a conscious nod to the history of modular music, approaching the kosmische universe of Popol Vuh, Klaus Schulze and Emeralds, augmenting it with East Africa's idiosyncratic rhythmic intensity. "The Afrorack" is the beginning of a conversation that's been long overdue.

Double-LP version. The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas". Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet -- a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D'Avila's foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti's posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit. Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they've always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri's great passion and obsession and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through "Terminal Clock". As the album closes on "The Landscape Listens" -- a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)".

Diva of the diode’ Suzanne Ciani pairs up with Jonathan Fitoussi on ‘Golden Apples Of The Sun’, a whirring homage to W.B. Yeats and celebration of the timeless beauty of Buchla, Moog and EMS synthesisers. Recorded largely in Bolinas, California overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the waveforms of the modular synths share the hypnotic ebb and flow of the water, coaxing the listener into a buoyant trance. The term ‘Golden Apples Of The Sun’ is taken from Yeats’ poem ‘The Song Of Wandering Aengus’, which Ciani recites in full on the title track, turning his dreamlike imagery into almost extraterrestrial yearning

His name may not be instantly familiar, but Hideki Matsutake has had a huge influence over Electronic music. Starting his career as the assistant of Japanese Electronic Music master Isao Tomita in the early 70s, he went on to work with Ryuichi Sakamoto before joining Yellow Magic Orchestra as the group's keyboard programmer and unofficial fourth member. In 1981 he started his own Logic System project recording "Venus" that year in Los Angeles with Don Grusin, Nathan East and Michael Boddicker, brilliantly mixing Synth Funk, Ambient and Boogie with a touch of Smooth Jazz predating Vaporwave by 30 years. Wewantsounds is delighted to reissue this visionary album, which comes remastered from the original tapes and features Pater Sato stunning artwork.

Emeralds — musicians John Elliott, Steve Hauschildt, and Mark McGuire — emerged from the rust-pocked, post-millennial Midwest drone/noise scene seemingly unable or uninterested in keeping up with themselves. Their proliferation of material was intimidating; mountains of improvised, home-recorded music were released on limited-edition tapes, CD-Rs, and split LPs. There is and was a sense that the Ohio trio was after something beyond physical mediums. By 2008, their sprawling live sets were a known can't-miss at any underground experimental event. Tiny Mix Tapes reviewed that year's appearance at No Fun Fest: "No one's sawtooths, sines, and other various waveforms were so beautifully sculpted and beamed out into the Plejades as Emeralds'." These basement dwellers were shaping meditative, psychedelic, arpeggiated electronic music in the veins of German kosmische forebears like Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, and Klaus Schulze. Made primarily with synthesizers and guitar, Emeralds' music possessed the same astral psyche with a home-crafted punk edge, a distant descendant of that pioneering era, and a bridge to someplace new, someplace scorched. Released on Aaron Dilloway's (Wolf Eyes, etc.) Hanson imprint, Solar Bridge was the first Emeralds album to receive any kind of proper distribution and represents the first attempt to archivally preserve their fluid craft. Giving the album top honors in their 2008 Rewind issue, The Wire wrote: “John Elliott and Steve Hauschildt’s billowing synth drones, together with Mark McGuire’s sedately plangent guitar melodies, are uncannily good at carving out a space for the imagination to crawl into and wander about.” The first of an inimitable five-LP run before their disbanding in 2013, Solar Bridge is a moment of glistening primacy that boots up a catalog and legacy that the heads still grapple with. Emeralds begin to make sense of it in the fall of 2022 with a remastered Solar Bridge LP release on Ghostly International. The Midwest leaves an indelible mark on Emeralds' sound; their debut characteristically vibrates as if from a ghost mall or some other relic of the rust belt. Side A, "Magic," finds the three young musicians summoning by way of analog synthesis and processed guitar motifs. Though it could be loosely called "drone," this miasmic wall of melody ripples through dynamics; pulses ebb and flow in and out in a way where every edge disappears. Like any good magic trick, there is something invisible at play here. On Side B, "The Quaking Mess," oxidized squeals and shuddering mechanical whines commingle with square and saw wave pads and flickering guitar details to create a post-industrial parking lot tableau. Eventually, the ground swells up, and a massive firmament trembles below the wobbling synths and rickety electronics. There is a power at the heart of Emeralds’ sound that displays a kind of egalitarian psychedelia, a working-class kosmische, a proletariat trip zone. Everyone is welcome to watch the world fold in on itself as they are pulled into the portal. "Photosphere," a previously unreleased recording included as a digital exclusive, affords a look at a more serene stretch from the same session. A demure guitar loop wafts above slowly shifting tectonic synthesizer drones; the tremendous restraint the trio shows here hints at part of the unique place they would carve out for themselves, both together and respectively, in the annals of American DIY experimental music. Elliott, McGuire, and Hauschildt are known now for being tuned into a mutual vocabulary as Emeralds. They are players that exercise a kind of profound listening. Slowness, as a kind of punk ethos. As the static sputters into the right channel around the twelve-minute mark, the scene becomes self-aware, and we are released into the ether. Emeralds materialized as a fully formed entity radiating cosmic potential. Their discography evolved and incorporated different qualities and vocabularies, but hearing where it started will always feel different. The density, the patience, and the sheer refinement presented on Solar Bridge legibly demonstrates how and why Emeralds has become a legendary part of the contemporary electronic music canon.

Caterina Barbieri is set to release a sister album of her 2019's acclaimed “Ectatic Computation”. “Myuthafoo“ will be out on June 2. Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent the best part of a decade breaking apart the rigid structures of electronic music, using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop landscapes. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the Important Records-released "Patterns of Consciousness", a confident fusion of analogue synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it with "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label in 2019, wide acclaim ensued, with critics praising its potent fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synth experimentation. Pitchfork has described her music as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreamachine for the ears". Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini. "Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.