MUSIC

This is the second album after the transfer of the company, which was released in 1995, and is a compilation of songs created between 1990 and 1994. The album is a work that encompasses the dichotomy and diversity of the Aphex Twin, with acid, noise, and broken beats that could be described as "drill'n'bass," while following the ambient, IDM, and hardcore techno of the early days. The album contains 12 tracks, including the single "Ventolin," which is a strong industrial downtempo explosion, and "Alberto Balsalm," a song that is often mentioned alongside "Xtal. 180g vinyl.

An inspired coming together of musical minds. To celebrate the 20th anniversary of In A Space Outta Sound, George Evelyn aka DJ E.A.S.E has handed over the tapes to dub maestro Adrian Sherwood to go on a heady version excursion with eight tracks from the original record, in the spirit of the reggae and sound system roots that informed the original album. The result is a fresh take on a much-loved classic, in the lineage of albums such as Massive Attack’s No Protection and Spoon’s Lucifer On The Moon. Features bold new re-works of iconic tracks such as “You Wish” (appearing here as “You Bliss”) and “Flip Ya Lid” (mutated into “Flippin Eck”). As well as his trademark mixing desk wizardry, Sherwood has also brought in some of the core On-U Sound players to add additional instrumentation and turn this collaboration into something which is much more than the sum of its parts.

‘Workaround’ is the lucidly playful and ambitious solo debut album by rhythm-obsessive musician and DJ, Beatrice Dillon for PAN. It combines her love of UK club music’s syncopated suss and Afro-Caribbean influences with a gamely experimental approach to modern composition and stylistic fusion, using inventive sampling and luminous mixing techniques adapted from modern pop to express fresh ideas about groove-driven music and perpetuate its form with timeless, future-proofed clarity.

Recorded over 2017-19 between studios in London, Berlin and New York, ‘Workaround’ renders a hypnotic series of polymetric permutations at a fixed 150bpm tempo. Mixing meticulous FM synthesis and harmonics with crisply edited acoustic samples from a wide range of guests including UK Bhangra pioneer Kuljit Bhamra (tabla); Pharoah Sanders Band’s Jonny Lam (pedal steel guitar); techno innovators Laurel Halo (synth/vocal) and Batu (samples); Senegalese Griot Kadialy Kouyaté (Kora), Hemlock’s Untold and new music specialist Lucy Railton (cello); amongst others, Dillon deftly absorbs their distinct instrumental colours and melody into 14
bright and spacious computerised frameworks that suggest immersive, nuanced options for dancers, DJs and domestic play.

‘Workaround’ evolves Dillon’s notions in a coolly unfolding manner that speaks directly to the album’s literary and visual inspirations, ranging from James P. Carse’s book ‘Finite And Infinite Games’ to the abstract drawings of Tomma Abts or Jorinde Voigt as well as painter Bridget Riley’s essays on grids and colour. Operating inside this rooted but mutable theoretical wireframe, Dillon’s ideas come to life as interrelated, efficient patterns in a self-sufficient system.

With a naturally fractal-not-fractional logic, Dillon’s rhythms unfold between unresolved 5/4 tresillo patterns, complex tabla strokes and spark-jumping tics in a fluid, tactile dance of dynamic contrasts between strong/light, sudden/restrained, and bound/free made in reference to the notational instructions of choreographer Rudolf Laban. Working in and around the beat and philosophy, the album’s freehand physics contract and expand between the lissom rolls of Bhamra’s tabla in the first, to a harmonious balance of hard drum angles and swooping FM synth cadence featuring additional synth and vocal from Laurel Halo in ‘Workaround Two’, while the extruded strings of Lucy Railton create a sublime tension at the album’s palatecleansing denouement, triggering a scintillating run of technoid pieces that riff on the kind of swung physics found in Artwork’s seminal ‘Basic G’, or Rian Treanor’s disruptive flux with a singularly tight yet loose motion and infectious joy.

Crucially, the album sees Dillon focus on dub music’s pliable emptiness, rather than the moody dematerialisation of reverb and echo. The substance of her music is rematerialised in supple, concise emotional curves and soberly freed to enact its ideas in balletic plies, rugged parries and sweeping, capoeira-like floor action. Applying deeply canny insight drawn from her years of practice as sound designer, musician and hugely knowledgable/intuitive DJ, ‘Workaround’ can be heard as Dillon’s ingenious solution or key to unlocking to perceptions of stiffness, darkness or grid-locked rigidity in electronic music. And as such it speaks to an ideal of rhythm-based and experimental music ranging from the hypnotic senegalese mbalax of Mark Ernestus’ Ndagga Rhythm Force, through SND and, more currently, the hard drum torque of DJ Plead; to adroitly exert the sensation of weightlessness and freedom in the dance and personal headspace. 

Silly track titles that are mostly in-jokes with my little brother, a.k.a. DJ Denim. A cliché unfair record deal. A conspicuously missing title track. A pretentious looking poem in French about the stupidity of poets. A grid of pillows on the cover that the Japanese audience mistook for bags of heroin, resulting in myths about my being a heavy user. Super nineties Photoshop swirls. A graphic overlay of a UFO turning into an oyster shell that opens to reveal a mountain inside? Those are just a few of the embarrassing things I had to come to terms with when preparing this thirtieth anniversary restored and expanded edition of my first full-length album, Tranquilizer. Originally released in 1994 by the New York label Instinct Records, Tranquilizer is admittedly a bit of a shit-show. The album followed up on my 1993 self-released vinyl EP debut, Comatonse.000, featuring "Raw Through a Straw" on the A-side, and "Tranquilizer" on the B-side. I put out that EP mostly for the experience of pressing a record, with no expectation of people actually buying or listening to it. Lacking a distributor, I loaded up my backpack and lugged copies to all the local record shops, a few of which took some on consignment. As I later found out, most shops never pay for consignment sales, nor return unsold copies, so in the end I basically gave away most of them for free. Then, to my complete surprise, David Mancuso began regularly playing the A-side, transforming it into a Loft house classic. Equally surprising, the B-side caught the attention of ambient producers like Mixmaster Morris and Bill Laswell. Those random bits of buzz caught the attention of Tak Uchida, a US-based buyer for the Japanese vinyl distributor Cisco Music, which would remain the leading supporter of Comatonse Recordings vinyl releases until they went under in 2008. All of that was just enough hype to catch the attention of Instinct, which offered me a textbook fucked up two album record deal. Not wanting to be taken for a sucker, I came in for a contract negotiation meeting with my bona fide real McCoy idiot lawyer who didn't give me an ounce of good advice, the paperwork was signed, and Tranquilizer was underway to becoming a reality. Instinct's plan was simple: grab control of as many tracks as possible on the off chance I (or anyone else they signed) might be the next Moby, who was their cash cow. With typical music industry sleight of hand, the album's title track "Tranquilizer" was cut and released separately on a compilation, contractually requiring me to come up with additional tracks to fill the album. So that solves the mystery of the missing title track. The majority of tracks on this album were actually already done before signing with Instinct. I recorded them as a hobbyist between 1993 and 1994 using heavily edited Korg M1 and E-MU Vintage Keys synthesizers, and two Casio FZ-10M samplers. Despite the silly titles and hobbyist approach, there were social messages to be heard. Many of them stemmed from my longstanding interests in constructivism, industrial ambient records, disco, and queer subcultures. All of these put me at odds with the new age spiritualism and "zippy" techno-hippy raver hooey that dominated ambient music in the US. For example, the opening track "040468," which is the date of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, features a recording of the police radio during the chase and escape of his assailant James Earl Ray. Recorded at a time when King's "I Have a Dream" speech was still being dubbed over house anthems ad nauseam, it was an antithetical choice pointing away from dreams toward hideous reality. As one would expect, all of this was lost on music journalists who - assuming nothing could be more than a simplistic projection of the musician's ego - usually mistook the title for my birthday. "Fat Chair" is a critique of the colonialist fantasies latent in most ethno-ambient music of the time. Rather than taking the listener on a soothing armchair journey to a third world paradise, it focuses on a recording from the Nigerian-Biafran war during the late 1960s, in which a Western journalist's meddling gets a Biafran hostage killed. "A City on Springs" takes its title from a line in a constructivist manifesto calling for the prioritization of engineering over art. While I have never shared constructivism's optimistic faith in humanity's ability to achieve social equality, be it through communism or other means, it did inspire my career long criticism of the social and economic functions of art and music. And "Hovering Glows" features a monologue from a Hal Hartley film about scratched records as a metaphor for abusive family ties. I had planned on including a text on these themes in the original CD booklet to Tranquilizer, but Instinct quickly made it clear that wasn't going to happen. They feared it would alienate their audience. In response, I wrote the "anonymous" little poem against poetics above. Initially in English, I asked my friend/day-job-co-worker/Comatonse-Recordings-label-mate Erik Dahl to translate it into French so that the staff at Instinct would be less likely to understand it. In the end, they included it as a graphic element adding a bit of romantic flair. Still, it left me feeling dissatisfied. Two years later I managed to insert more meaningful imagery into the design of my second-and-last album for them, Soil, but I still was not allowed to include any text. In this thirtieth anniversary edition, disc one depicts the full-length album as I had initially intended it to be released, restored to include the title track, "Tranquilizer." Due to CD time constraints, this meant removing "Meditation of the Mountain Oyster." I also replaced the ending track "Fina•Departure" with its longer, original version. For the completists out there, the 1994 album versions of both tracks appear in their entirety on disc two. Additionally, the second disc includes a rare vinyl mix of "Hovering Glows," featured on Instinct's Untitled Ltd. Edition Ambient Double Vinyl Pack (US: Instinct Records, 1994, EX-291-1). Another rarity is "Get In and Drive," which found limited release through the compilations Muting the Noise (DE: Innervisions, 2008, IV CD02), and Comp x Comp (JP: Comatonse Recordings, 2019, CxC). "20min. Epoch," "Fina," "Fina•Departure (Original Long Version)," and "Hovering Glows (Little Guy Mix)" all get their first proper hi-fi physical release here, having been included as hidden MP3 bonus tracks in my Dead Stock Archive: Complete Collected Works (JP: Comatonse Recordings, 2009, C.018). Considering how few copies of the Archive exist, they are sure to be new to most peoples' ears. Last (and perhaps least?), "Pome" and "Day Off" are previously unreleased. Oh, in case you were wondering, Little Guy was the name of my cat. He loved sitting like a loaf in front of my speakers to feel the 808-style bass hits in "Hovering Glows." - Terre Thaemlitz, 2024

Lena Willikens X Elena Colombi live at Lux Fragil, Lisbon 2026 Cover art + design by Alicia Carrera Mastered by Lottie Lou Poulet at Wysyng Arts Centre Manufactured at Tapeline, UK Limited edition cassette tape NO repress 💚 Once they're gone they're gone...

アルバムについて In a continuation of his devotional celebration of the dance, Shed arrives on Dekmantel with Rave Echoes — a supple, mesmerising album of angular techno caught between the heat of peak time and the time-blurred hours after the club. Few artists have nailed the intersection of the intellectual, emotional and physical in techno as evocatively as René Pawlowitz. For more than 20 years and across scores of aliases the Frankfurt/Oder-born, Berlin-based trailblazer has pushed a distinctive strain of machine music in thrall to the functional demands of motion without ever sacrificing subtlety, space, intrigue and expression. While his vast catalogue of work touches on many different moods and energies, on his Dekmantel debut Rave Echoes he shrouds eight forthright workouts in a blanket of misty melancholia to evoke the enchanting afterglow of the party. "It's not nostalgic," Pawlowitz explains. "It's about that feeling that remains for a day, a week or even years after celebrating a rave. I still have that feeling for about 30 years now. This record tries to describe it." The vaporous pads that soar over 'Password (Techno Mix)' certainly come charged with a bittersweet sentiment. Meanwhile the rhythmic locomotion comes on like the rumble of the first train back after leaving the club. The insistent bell loop up top rings out like the hook of the last track that rang out over the soundsystem. It's a sensation familiar to anyone who has spent their last drop of energy at the altar of dance, where exhaustion meets with satisfaction and disorientation as you recalibrate back into the real world. This approach — dreamlike atmospherics and rugged propulsion — takes on many guises across Rave Echoes. It's submerged and restrained on 'Loot 25', speckled with sharply sliced breaks on 'Everybody' and scattered across a sparse, steppy soundscape on 'Rave Predator'. Emotive, swooning strings collide with tough, squashed breakstep drums on 'Double Scoop' and 'Taking You Home' thrusts with urgency even as Pawlowitz softens the spiky transients to make space for pure rave romanticism. There is even space for 'Rave Echoes' itself — the last groove before your eyes finally close, as the beat slows to a weighty trip hop roll and the ambience blooms out into a dense blanket across the frequency range. Bursting with the nuanced production, rugged UK-school soundsystem pressure and Berlin-school techno momentum that makes him such a celebrated producer, on Rave Echoes Shed offers a perfect impression of those wild, indescribable sensory overloads that leave their mark on anyone devoted to the dancefloor.

Two raw minimal cuts from '94 that will piece up any self respecting dance floor; Mika Vainio, Ilpo Väisänen & Sami Salo at the controls - an ESSENTIAL 12" from Sähkö Recordings, TIP!

“The idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”- Fred Moten

When we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it.

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition.

Radical Frame arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on ‘Live By You’ (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston).

Today, we get ‘Overchord’ - the centre of the album paired with its precursor ‘Live By You’. It arrives alongside a video by Anna van der Velde, featuring Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making, contained but not constrained.

Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.

“The idea of the black avant-garde exists, as it were, oxymoronically – as if black, on the one hand, and avant-garde, on the other hand, each depends for its coherence on the exclusion of the other. Now this is probably an overstatement of the case. Yet it’s all but justified by a vast interdisciplinary text representative not only of a problematically positivist conclusion that the avant-garde has been exclusively Euro-American, but of a deeper, perhaps unconscious, formulation of the avant-garde as necessarily not black. Part of what I’m after now is this: an assertion that the avant-garde is a black thing.”- Fred Moten

When we go searching for a Black avant-garde, we have to be prepared to look in unexpected places. The route to a Black avant-garde involves walking down – what some might consider – peculiar highways. Where they see strangeness, a road leading them nowhere, we see nothing but beauty. The paths Darren Cunningham went down, the highways he took to make Actress, are a chapter in the story of the Black avant-garde. Cunningham the footballer. Cunningham the Wulfrunian. Cunningham the ex-footballer. Cunningham the DJ. Cunningham the Londoner. Cunningham the producer. Cunningham the painter. Cunningham the writer. Cunningham the composer. This is where the Black avant-garde in Britain is made. This is where you have to go to find it.

Across an expansive discography of more than ten LPs, Actress has created his own arcane language of hermetic references and inter-dimensional electronic composition.

Radical Frame arrives 18 years since debut album Hazyville, and it feels like an apotheosis. The image realised. We get the full gamut of Actress signatures. Short bursts of broken down music. Tiny sketches of zoomed-in sound. Refracted dance floor heat. And we get more. We get appearances from CASISDEAD on ‘Live By You’ (another image, another mask) and Rainy Miller (another artist from the provinces, Preston).

Today, we get ‘Overchord’ - the centre of the album paired with its precursor ‘Live By You’. It arrives alongside a video by Anna van der Velde, featuring Cunningham trapped in a luxury prison of his own making, contained but not constrained.

Perhaps Radical Frame is a container for everything that Cunningham has built so far. A frame he is handing over to the next in line. The next artist to make their own way in the Black British avant-garde.

Kakuhan, a unit of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, has released a self-released CD, which has been sold exclusively at live venues, on "Nakid," a hot label run by Koshiro Hino, who is also well known for his activities with goat and YPY and for running "birdFriend," and has released such powerful artists as Keith Fullerton Whitman and Mark Fell & Will Guthrie. The CD is a self-released CD by Kakuhan, a unit consisting of Hino and Hiroki Nakagawa, which has been sold exclusively at live venues and has won critical acclaim!

The CD includes a live performance by KAKUHAN, a unit consisting of YPY, Hino Koshiro, and cellist Nakagawa Hiroki, at the "Feldman meets freq 2022" event held at Kyushu University in February 2022.
KAKUHAN's first album "Metalzone", released at the end of 2022, was voted the 5th best release of 2022 by Boomkat and the 5th best album of the year by Music Magazine in the best electronic music category. The CD contains a total of six songs, including the previous night's "Prototype," a song from the same album, and includes a song that can only be heard on this CD.
As the unit name suggests, the various elements of both artists' activities-"electronic music/strings," "contemporary/club music," "traditional/contemporary," "physical/metaphysical," "composition/improvisation"-are literally "stirred" in the performance. It is highly recommended to listen to it together with "Metalzone"!

A massive personal favorite of Demdike Stare's, Shinichi Atobe's 2001 Ship-Scope 12" was the Chain Reaction label's penultimate release, and, with the benefit of hindsight, also one of its most sublime offerings. This necessary 2015 reissue arrives in the wake of Atobe's much-loved archival salvage, Butterfly Effect (DDS 010CD), which caused quite a ripple upon its release in 2014. Notable for its unusually sweeter, dreamier ambient tone, especially when compared with the rest of Chain Reaction catalog, this is a must-have for followers of the romantic streak in Ross 154, Convextion, and classic Chain Reaction.

Tthe main alias of René Pawlowitz (aka EQD, Hoover1, STP and many more) capping off a fruitful year on his own The Final Experiment imprint with a new 2xLP entitled The 030 Files. A heads-down trip through a handful of deep and dark techno techniques, Shed nonetheless keeps you engaged throughout with his clever sound design and chilly detours into downtempo and more headphone-oriented affairs. Early album highlight ‘Shot Rhythm’ forego the atypical jackhammer kicks for some hip-swinging drum breaks, and the simmering, skeletal ‘Let Yourself Go’ provides a nice respite, as well.

Ampoule's Pub returns with a fresh remaster of the classic 'Summer' and a brand new track titled 'The Fragile Root'

'Summer' was originally released 20 years ago on the Vertical Form label - a result of a multitude of completely live and improvised studio sessions, that gently swell and evolve over the tracks 16 minutes.

'Fragile Root' is a brand new track, think vintage idm - intricate rhythms and melodies crossed with massive dub chords.

Mastered by Dubplates & Mastering

The next installment of MFM's popular multi-artist compilation Virtual Dreams: 'Virtual Dreams - Ambient Explorations In The House And Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999'. As with Part One, released in 2020, 'Virtual Dreams II' shines a light on house and techno-adjacent music that helped redefine the definition of ambient music during the 1990s.

The focus of Part One heavily fell on music from techno and house producers in Europe, eagerly exploring new soundtracks for chill-out rooms and re-imagining the potential future of club culture from new perspectives. For Part Two, we narrow the lens to focus on a unique time and place, namely Japan between 1993-1999. Despite missing out on the 'Acid House Fever', club culture was beginning to take shape in Japan during the early '90s. In contrast to the rest of the world, where ambient techno / IDM emerged as a by-product or response to the scene, 'listening techno', as it is known in Japan, was a central pillar of the culture right from the start.

'Virtual Dreams II' aims to shine a light on this unique moment in time where the thread of ambient music weaved its way through the music of an emerging club culture. This period saw the birth of many great Japanese techno labels such as Sublime Records, Transonic Records, Syzygy Records, Frogman Records, and Form@ Records, following in the late '90s. 'Virtual Dreams II' features ambient, chill-out, and intelligent techno from these leading labels alongside other lesser-known but equally influential imprints, as well as ambient deviations from Japanese house producers. Much of the music featured has only ever been released on CD.

'Virtual Dreams II' is compiled by Eiji Taniguchi and Jamie Tiller, who have worked closely together on previous Music From Memory releases such as 'Heisei No Oto' and 'Dream Dolphin - Gaia'. It is also the final project Jamie Tiller worked on before his tragic passing in 2023. Jamie had been researching, planning, and compiling this version of Virtual Dreams even before the first chapter was released, believing that there were many great tracks in Japan that fit the concept of the series. Knowing how much love and energy he put into compiling it gives it an extra special place in our hearts.

Compiled by Jamie Tiller and Eiji Taniguchi with artwork by Kenta Senekt, design by Steele Bonus and liner notes by Itaru W. Mita,

Following two 12-inch singles released via the self-run label Plastic & Sounds, which launched unexpectedly this past July, the culmination of their work to date—the album Silent Way, comprising ten tracks—will be released on 27th March as a coloured vinyl 2LP (gatefold sleeve/33RPM/limited press) and digitally.Mastering and record cutting by Rashad Becker in Berlin. The artwork centres on photographer Yusuke Yamatani's work, with Satoshi Suzuki—who handles all P&S releases—constructing the overall aesthetic.Last October, they appeared on Resident Advisor's popular series “RA Podcast”, with audio from their world premiere live performance in April 2023 released. They held the “Plastic & Sounds” label launch party at Shibuya WWW. In January 2026, they performed a live set of their acclaimed album “Haet” at the venue's New Year's party.This release comes amidst growing international acclaim, with their previous album ‘Discipline’ featured in Pitchfork's ‘The 30 Best Electronic Albums of 2025’, and one of their signature tracks, ‘Butterfly Effect’, selected for RA (Resident Advisor)'s ‘The Best Electronic Tracks of 2000-25’.

At the latest with the release of the albums "Zauberberg" and "Königsforst", in the mid-1990s, one associates GAS, Wolfgang Voigt's very own artistic cross-linking of the spirit of Romanticism and the forest as an artistic fantasy projection surface, with intoxicatingly blurred boundaries of post-ambient infatuation and the impenetrable thicket of abstract atonality. The distant, iconic straight bass drum marching through highly condensed, abstract sounds taken from classical music by the sampler or modulated accordingly, and the enraptured gaze through pop art glasses into the hypnotic thicket of an imaginary forest, manifested over the years this unique connection of audio and visual, which to understand fully, then as now, would be neither possible nor desirable.

Quite the opposite. The album GAS - DER LANGE MARSCH once again invites us to follow the deep sounding bass drum, to give in to its irresistible pull into a psychedelic world of 1000 promises. In the process, the journey leads us past stations of memories sounding from afar, from "Zauberberg" to "Königsforst" and "Pop", from "Oktember" to "Narkopop" and "Rausch", back and forth, now and forever.

Way. Destination. Loop. Forest loop.

OKTEMBER is the second EP release under Wolfgang Voigt’s mythical GAS project (it follows "Modern“ on Profan, 1995). The 2 compositions were originally released in 1999 on Mille Plateaux, and then reissued partially in 2016 on GAS “BOX”. OKTEMBER is finally released on Voigt's own label KOMPAKT, pressed on 180 gram vinyl in its original artwork.

This reissue features “Tal ‘90“ (instead of the original A side) – a predecessor to the GAS project originally recorded in 1990 under the alias TAL, it was released as a part of the Pop Ambient 2002 collection. With its sampled strings, horns and guitars, "Tal 90” soundtracks a more uplifting side to what is typically accustomed to being the sound of GAS. The title track “Oktember” is a dense, hypnotic affair that conjures a unique vision of dub techno that few have been able to replicate.

A monumental soundtrack to uncertain times.

A milestone in the history of ambient music! GAS, a very popular ambient project by Wolfgang Voigt of the famous KOMPAKT, released their masterpiece album "POP" on Mille Plateaux in 2000. From the depths of the ocean to the heavens... GAS's mystical ambient sounds move powerfully in a microcosmic soundscape with deep reverberations, a milestone album that fully demonstrates a solitary view of nature.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a tenth anniversary reissue of Oren Ambarchi’s Quixotism, originally released on Editions Mego in 2014. Recorded with a multitude of collaborators in Europe, Japan, Australia and the USA, Quixotism presents the fruit of two years of work in the form of a single, LP-length piece in five parts. Quixotism takes the driving rhythmic aspect of works such as Sagittarian Domain to new levels, with the entirety of this long-form work built on a foundation of pulsing double-time electronic percussion provided by Thomas Brinkmann. Beginning as almost subliminal propulsion behind cavernous orchestral textures and John Tilbury’s delicate piano interjections, the percussive elements (elaborated on by Ambarchi and Matt Chamberlain) slowly inch into the foreground of the piece before suddenly breaking out into a polyrhythmic shuffle around the halfway mark, and joined by master Japanese tabla player U-zhaan for the piece’s final, beautiful passages. The pulse acts as thread leading the listener through a heterogeneous variety of acoustic spaces, from the concert hall in which the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra were recorded to the intimacy of crys cole’s contact-mic textures. Ambarchi’s guitar itself ranges over this wide variety of acoustic spaces, from airless, clipped tones to swirling, reverberated fog. Within the complex web Ambarchi spins over the piece’s steadily pulsing foundation, elements approach and recede in a non-linear fashion, even as the piece plots an overall course from the grey, almost Nono-esque reverberated space of its opening section to the crisp foreground presence of Jim O’Rourke’s synth and Evyind Kang’s strings in its final moments. Formally indebted to the side-long workouts of classic Cologne techno, the long-form works of composers such as Éliane Radigue and the organic push and pull of improvised performance, Quixotism is constantly in motion, yet its transitions happen slowly and steadily, often nearly imperceptible, the diverse elements which make up the piece succeeding one another with the logic of a dream. At the time of its first release, Quixotism was clearly a summation of Ambarchi’s work in the years leading up to it. Now, listening back a decade later, it also seems like an arrow pointing to the future, suggesting paths that would be explored further in works to come: the pulsating guitar layers of Hubris, the album-length collaboration with Jim O’Rourke and U-zhaan on Hence, Shebang’s joyous layering and percussive drive. Now sounding better than ever in a new remaster by Joe Talia, the time is ripe to rediscover its quixotic charms.

(Limited quantity / Japanese Obi included / Booklet included) Richard D. James, aka Aphex Twin. At a young age, he earned the title of “Techno Mozart” and is widely recognized as the pinnacle of electronic music and the flagship artist of WARP RECORDS. This legendary album, released under the name Polygon Window and which changed the history of electronic music, is finally being reissued on LP with Obi.

After more than 10 years of silence since his debut in 2001 on Chain Reaction subsidiary of Basic Channel, he has been consistently releasing music since 2014 on DDS label in Manchester, UK, attracting not only the club audience of dub techno / minimal but also the enthudieatic music fans around the world. Electronic musician Shinichi Atobe has established his own private label Plastic & Sounds.

The first release on Plastic & Sounds includes two tracks: ‘Whispers into the Void’, which gradually and ascetically develops from minimal synths and rhythms with the introduction of a flowing piano refrain, and the floor use ‘Fleeting_637’, which develops immersive minimal dub techno at around 125 BPM. Mastering / record cutting was done by Rashad Becker in Berlin, who has worked on many of Shinichi Atobe's productions.

Making a bold change of direction as he toasts 45 years working in electronic music, Steve Rachmad dials up the symphonic dimension of his musical practice for Light and Time — a widescreen trip to techno's outer reaches. As one of the true originators of Dutch dance music, Rachmad brings a wealth of experience to his first album for Dekmantel even as he adopts new production methods to create his most ambient body of work to date. A strong melodic sensibility runs through all of Rachmad's work. His 1995 album The Secret Life Of Machines under his Sterac alias remains a landmark of lush, emotionally charged, deep-diving techno, while classic workouts like 'Helix' and 'Gnosis' (as Parallel 9) foregrounded powerful synth lines. Up until the upheaval of COVID, Rachmad's studio practice had been squarely focused on synths and drum machines, but when (along with the rest of the world) he was stuck at home reevaluating his situation, he found himself exploring the world of film scoring. Experimenting with Native Instruments' sampling software Kontakt, Rachmad taught himself how to arrange and layer orchestral instrumentation. Having rarely used sampling in his music before, the distinct fluctuations of recorded orchestral players opened up a new dimension that has become the foundation of Light and Time, the first of many albums Rachmad has ready to go in a more downtempo, home-listening vein. Throughout Light and Time, harmonious passages take centre stage as Rachmad audibly stretches out. At times the orchestral samples arrive in a pure, organic form, while elsewhere they merge and mutate into synthesised elements. His techno legacy manifests throughout, in abstract form. In lieu of strident beats, we're offered fractal, scratchy rhythms guiding uniquely shaped noise and natural sounding percussion with a human lilt. These fluctuations are no accident — they're a result of Rachmad playing much more of the album by hand after years in thrall to the precise machine pulse of arpeggios and sequences. The album never feels restricted by one dogmatic approach. At times, Rachmad's embrace of moody soundtrack composition fills the whole picture, as on haunting string piece 'The Field Of Reality'. Elsewhere he dips into low-slung electro soul for 'Invisible Warriors Of Light' while 'Cosmic Memories' revels in alien synthesis with a dramatic bite. 'Encrypted Instructions' tweaks and processes string samples through angular prisms to close the album out with an experimental flourish. Rachmad's long and winding history in electronic music naturally folds into these new modes of expression, and the end result is a sumptuous, many-sided album that showcases the hidden depths of a techno legend's musicality.

2024 Repress. Essential stuff from Finnish legend, Mika Vaino ( Ø, Pan Sonic ++ + +).
One for the headphone amp / hi fi sound system crew.

Minimal & reduced nordic techno and electronics - Mika Vaino's second album from 1996 - only released on vinyl for the first time in 2019.

Written and produced by Mika Vainio in Turku in 1993
Muutaja is written and produced by Mika Vainio and Ilpo Väisänen