MUSIC

Kim Gordon's third album, 'PLAY ME,' is distilled and immediate, expanding Gordon’s sonic palette to include more melodic beats and the motorik drive of krautrock. “We wanted the songs to be short,” Gordon says. “We wanted to do it really fast. It’s more focused, and maybe more confident."The follow-up to 2024’s Justin Raisen-produced, two-time Grammy-nominated 'The Collective' processes, in her inimitable way, the collateral damage of the billionaire class: the demolition of democracy, technocratic end-times fascism, the A.I.-fueled chill-vibes flattening of culture - where dark humor voices the absurdity of modern life.Despite its frequent outward gaze, 'PLAY ME' is an interior record, one in which a heightened emotionality pulses through physical jams, rejecting definitive statements in favor of an inquisitiveness that keeps Gordon searching, ever in process.“A lifelong radical still at the peak of her powers.” - New Yorker “A poet of modern life, offering abstract, spoken vocals that speak to both the banality and volatility of our world.” - New York Times

BJ4 is a pivotal album in the development of jazz-funk and early smooth jazz, marking a more confident and groove-oriented phase in Bob James’s career. Released in 1977, the album balances sophisticated jazz harmony with funk rhythms, helping to define the sound that would later become widely influential in jazz-fusion and crossover jazz. Compared to his earlier, more experimental or orchestral works, BJ4 places a stronger emphasis on electric keyboards, steady bass lines, and laid-back funk grooves. Overall, BJ4 represents Bob James’s transition from jazz pianist and arranger to a key architect of accessible, groove-based jazz, influencing generations of musicians in jazz, funk, and hip-hop sampling culture. This is the first vinyl edition of this album since 1987.

“Morning Picture”, the work of 1984, became the pioneer of the trend of ambient music that flourished in the mid-1980s.

This work, in which he knitted all the songs by himself and confined a beautiful melody, was released by Klaus Schulze’s “Innovative Communication”at that time, and Floating Points picked it with his own DJ MIX, both domestically and internationally. It is being evaluated.

In recent years, the long-awaited recurrence of the masterpiece, which is recognized as a masterpiece of high-purity modern new age-ambient, and also as a representative work of Japanese Balearic.

Recorded in the early 70's in her home on a reel to reel recording device, the songs on "Colour Green" are intimate portraits of life's sad and fragile beauty.

The soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch's 1986 film Down By Law is composed and performed by John Lurie, who also plays the pimp Jack in the movie. His world-weary avant-jazz pieces like "Please Come to My House," "What Do You Know About Music, You're Not a Lawyer," "Strangers in the Day," and "Fork in the Road" convey the film's seedy but humorous crime story.</p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/cL5J0kRwGQc?si=Lr_tt6C9OrxfJKu5" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Viva is the second album by the German band La Düsseldorf, realized in 1978 and it is considered its most successful release. Indeed, the album contains both the singles "Rheinita", which was their most successful single, and "Cha Cha 2000"; an expansive and utopian piece that mixes repetition, piano passages, chants, and electronic textures into a kind of dreamlike manifesto for a more ideal society. Probably the band’s most famous song. The album represents a combination of modern electronic textures, pop clarity, and krautrock experimentation which has secured Viva a lasting place in the history of German experimental rock. This vinyl reissue is the first after fifteen years.

Elis and Tom is a bossa nova album, released in 1974, recorded by Brazilian singer Elis Regina and singer-songwriter Antônio Carlos Jobim. Recorded over a 16-day period at MGM Studios in Los Angeles, California, the album was an old wish of Regina, who always wanted to record a full album of Jobim's songs with him. This finally came true in 1974, when Elis was celebrating her 10th anniversary as an artist of Philips Records. The label approved the project as a gift for her.

Outside of the international house underground, where his early ‘90s works for the Far East Recording label he co-founded with Shinichiro Yokota are rightly celebrated as bona-fide classics, Soichi Terada is best-known for his work composing music for video games. Yet until now, few of his productions for video games have been released outside of Japan, especially on vinyl. Apes In The Net, a six-track EP featuring music composed for the popular PlayStation 1 series Ape Escape, sets the record straight. It not only showcases Terada’s quality as a composer and producer, but also his versatility. Like much of Terada’s work on the Ape Escape series, the tracks featured don’t explore deep, New York and New Jersey influenced house sounds, but rather his lesser-celebrated love of jungle and drum & bass – a sound he fully explored on 1996 album Sumo Jungle. “The producer of the Ape Escape games heard that and got in touch,” Soichi remembers. “They asked me to make the soundtrack, and then work on the music for the sequels after that. I used to love making music with AKAI hardware samplers, synthesisers, and computers, so I played and recorded the tracks using almost the same methods as I did when I made house music. Using breakbeats and audio samples with a sampler was the most useful way to make the soundtracks.” The six tracks on show, which were originally recorded in the ‘90s but reconstructed and remastered for Japan-only CD and digital releases over a decade ago, mix elements of Terada’s familiar deep house style – think warming chords and pads, memorable melodies, and emotive musical motifs – with blistering D&B breakbeats, 16-bit synth sounds, electronic bleeps and undeniably weighty basslines. They’ve stood the test of time and arguably sound just as fresh now as they did at the turn of the millennium.

Flora is an album that is listened to perpetually,
Passed on from one listener to another,
And the charm of the sound- and music-loving figure 
known as Hiroshi Yoshimura,
Just might come drifting through.
Like the scent of a small flower.
—Junichi Konuma

Announcing the worldwide reissue of Flora, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s underrated work originally recorded and completed in 1987 and first released on CD in 2006, three years after his passing in 2003.

Flora is chronologically and stylistically a follow-up to Hiroshi Yoshimura’s acclaimed 1986 works Green and Surround, wherein Yoshimura continues to play with the ambience of sound and the sound of ambience, underscoring his mastery in the field of environmental music. Listening to Flora is like taking a stroll in a park, absorbing the colors and textures of the natural environment—flowers, insects, the swaying of the leaves—as Yoshimura often did at his beloved Edo-era park near his home in Tokyo. As Junichi Konuma describes in his liner notes, Yoshimura’s music “only begins to emerge as it exists at the intersection of passive and active.” Yoshimura's approach to sound and melody invites the listener to hear the intricacies of the music with intent, while simultaneously allowing the aural textures to exist as part of the background of our everyday life.

This reissue marks the first time the album will be available on vinyl (2LP, 45 rpm) and cassette, and includes liner notes written by music scholar Junichi Konuma and remastered audio by Grammy-nominated engineer John Baldwin. Reissue design and layout was handled by Tiffanie Tran. 

On October 15th and 16th, 2020, drummer Daniel Villarreal was joined by guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Anna Butterss for two afternoons of recording in the backyard of Chicali Outpost in Los Angeles. For all three musicians, it was the first ensemble recording session they’d done in-person since the pandemic locked the world down just seven months prior. Some choice moments from these sessions made it onto Villarreal’s critically-acclaimed 2022 album Panamá 77, but most of the music remained unreleased. Lados B is a deep dive into the high-level spontaneous music made by Villarreal, Parker, and Butterss across those two days in 2020. Villarreal is heard leading the group through various rhythmic modes and structures for improvisation – flow as informed by the Latin funk of Fania Records as it is by the otherworldly humanity trance of Brain Records – while Parker and Butterss draw on their extensive experience playing free together (as heard on Parker's recently-released Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and the LA side of Makaya McCraven's 2018 LP Universal Beings) to build harmonic buoys for their spontaneous melodicism. The result is a beautifully vivid illustration of context, creativity, and collective composition from a particularly rich moment in history.

Jeff Parker, who is familiar with activities such as Tortoise and Chicago Underground Quartet, announces the latest work from the sanctuary of US contemporary jazz . It is an album composed of solo guitar works including interpretations of "Ugly Beauty" and "My Ideal" by Celonias Monk and 6 original songs, and it is a home in Altadena, California in June 2021. A gem of improvisational minimal ambient work recorded by Graeme Gibson in the studio over a two-day period!

On June 3rd Gondwana Records present ‘Next Time Could Be Your Last Time’ – the debut album by Forgiveness, AKA Jack Wyllie, JQ and Richard Pike. Described as “not really jazz, not really new age, not really ambient or electronica”, instead they welcome you into a synaesthesia-inducing technicolour fantasy, full of wondrous emotive beauty. This genesis began with the sharing of music, burgeoning friendships, and the mutually-inspirational benefit of the collective power of a group dynamic, with each spurring the next on to heighten their already expansive skills. Intertwining the acoustic, electric and digital, utilising instruments and tools from across the decades, their synthesized Shangri La is a place where craftsmanship meets musicianship, even including sections notated on sheet music. The mood whilst recording, however, was one of loose freedom and enjoyment, with parts displaying a light-hearted playfulness. A world where shiny electronics meet flute and sax motifs, subverting them into something new. Jack Wyllie is best known for his work with Portico Quartet, Paradise Cinema and Szun Waves as well as collaborations with artists such as Luke Abbott, Adrian Corker and Charles Hayward. Whilst JQ has released on Boxed and Lo Recordings, with his music also remixed by Loraine James, Sun Araw and Foodman. Richard Pike has had multiple records on Warp as a member of PVT, collaborated with Modeselektor and Ital Tek, recorded under his alter-ego Deep Learning, and founded the tape label Salmon Universe, all whilst composing scores for TV drama. Wide-ranging influences on the LP include 70s era ECM and Miles Davis, Spencer Clark/Star Searchers, Ansel Adams, Steve Reich, H Takahashi, Don Slepian, The Blue Nile, Talk Talk’s ‘Spirit Of Eden’, Michael Gordon’s ‘Rushes for 8 Bassoons’, Sir Simon Rattle’s documentary ‘Leaving Home’, Horoshi Yoshimura, Ulla Strauss and Disasterpeace, plus new developments in vaporwave and software experimental. Hitting the centre at the ven diagram of these interests, the record converges the trio’s individual sound worlds into something singular. Primarily purveying a sense of endorphin-flushed tranquillity, they build synthetic, bucolic, lysergic landscapes, which although imbued with processed plasticity also contain multi-stranded depths of textural field.

KILN return with an opulent new display of hue and swing on Lemon Borealis, a sumptuous gallery of dazzling motifs that display a finely hewn concoction of visual tones and vital pulse.

Across its 12 cuts, this collection utilizes a fresh process of condensing immersive sprawl into compact, punchy and colorful sound. Using aspects of live performance, beatmaking and waveform sculpting, the troika of Kevin Hayes, Kirk Marrison and Clark Rehberg III create evocative and invigorating dioramas, continuing to surprise and enchant listeners after over thirty years into their collaboration.

Deep in waves of Hi-meets-Lo Fi, KILN delivers a panchromatic daymark arranged to biochemically align and stimulate your personal syntax, forging a tapestry of sonic reveries ranging from the aquarium-on-fire radiance of DrnkGrlfrnd, a garden groove of field-recorded percussion in Maplefunk Diptych, to the sizzling guit-noise whiteout of Deacon Rayhand.

Their eighth album, and first for A Strangely Isolated Place, on Lemon Borealis, KILN expands upon the long-explored themes of mosaic texture, subtle melancholy, eroded consonance, and vivid cadence to reveal yet another aperture to their unique magnetic universe.

Lemon Borealis will be available on 12” Transparent Yellow/Ochre Smoke vinyl and digital on July 18th. Lacquer cut by Andreas Lupo Lubich, and featuring artwork by KILN.

To celebrate 20 years of this incredible album by Masami Akita, we are doing a limited edition gatefold vinyl pressing on baby pink colored vinyl limited to 300 copies worldwide.

‘Of the Earth’ was entirely written, produced, performed and mixed by Shabaka. It’s a deeply personal album which establishes Shabaka as a new form of instrumentalist/producer and shows the musical range that connects his dance based work from groups Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming to the intricate textural sound world of his recent solo works (‘Perceive its Beauty, Acknowledge Its Grace’, ‘Afrikan Culture’) .Beats and loops made on portable devices whilst on the road lay a foundation for choral flute melodies to soar within. Sequences of electronic rhythms outline a story of diasporic progression and words contextualise the record’s lyrical framework. Shabaka raps on the album - “I’ve never rapped before but was actually inspired by André 3000’s courage in exploring new dimensions with fearlessness and sincerity; I decided to find my voice on this album”.A self imposed saxophone hiatus ended mid 2025 with a performance for South African drum maestro Louis Moholo’s memorial concert. This album marks Shabaka’s first recording made after a year and a half not playing the saxophone and a reckoning as to what his time on flutes primarily has shown him to be the future for his relationship with the instrument.Shabaka says of an initial inspiration for the album - “D’angelo’s Brown Sugar was the first CD I bought and it sparked a lasting curiosity about the emotional possibilities allowed by the self produced and performed album. This record is my celebration of freedom in creative self expression. Before the pandemic I could only play the clarinet and saxophone and knew nothing about music production (or how to play the flute), so this has been a journey of learning and a reflection on the music that’s been created as a result.”

A eulogy to a band and a millennium, the year 2000's collaborative Macha Loved Bedhead has been remastered from the original analog tapes and finally makes its way to the mother format. Recorded long distance by Wichita Falls-born brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane and Josh and Mischo McKay, this five-song, 34-minute EP combines gamelan, slowcore, and a cover of Cher's "Believe" pecked out on a touch tone phone into a seamless meditation on life at the end of the American century.

Groggy, engrossing new work from Ulla under their newly minted U.e. tag, riffing to the sublime on a set of (mostly) acoustic reveries that tap into the kind of smokey vapours favoured by the likes of Vincent Gallo, Voice Actor, Jonnine. Oh aye, it’s a special one.

A new year, label, album and handle for Ulla, a multifaceted artist who has draped our pages with wonder, under numerous aliases and collabs, for almost a decade. On ‘Hometown Girl’ they distill transience and flux into a quiet set of chamber works subtly resembling the room recorded nuance of their ‘Jazz Plates’ side with Perila - here taken a step further into more elusive, low-lit dimensions.

In a mode that’s wistful and melancholic, listening to the album’s dozen discrete pieces feels like leafing thru a journal of hand-written notes, reflecting on the feelings that come with separation from loved ones and displacement from familiarity. Ulla performed and recorded all of the instruments themselves, lending a tangible tactility to layered arrangements of woodwind, keys, strings, drums and voice, lightly speckled with electronics and perfused with open window field recordings. 

They locate a crackling frisson of personality in the voice notes and day-dreaminess of their mottled inscapes, gauzily demarcating lines between past and present selves. In that aesthetic and approach we can also hear similarities to Jonnine’s blue-skied ‘Southside Girl’ or crys cole’s poetic sensuality, often leaning into the domestic surreal.

A frayed, opening salutation ‘Good Morning’ signals a delirious half hour in Ulla’s company, variously swaying to the downstroked jazz swing of a ‘Lavender (NF)’ spritzed with clarinet, whilst ‘Froggy Explorer’ stirs the air like Jan Jelinek on a barely-there tip. The Basinski-esque fritz of degraded loops really snags the imagination along with a twinkling nightlight ‘Ball’, as the album opens out into its most fully resolved songs with a closing couplet of disarming wonders ‘Drawing of Me’, and a blurry ‘Mute’ that feels like Ulla 〜almost〜 reveals too much before retreating back into the shadows.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

From the 1950s, Masaaki Takano (1927-2007) worked as a freelance "sound planner," mainly creating sound effects for stage productions. In the mid-1980s he began performances called "Sound Play" where he would perform on his own self-created sound instruments and his collection of ethnic instruments. Growing out of his work with sound effects, he became obsessed with the recording of natural sounds from the 1970s onwards, and this album "Shizukutachi" is a record of a high-quality recording of water droplets that he created in the studio using his own self-created suikinchiku system. This reissue recreates the original LP, using special paper to create beautiful packaging and duplicating the original, ultra-transparent vinyl. The reissue includes newly penned, detailed liner notes by Tomotaro Kaneko (owner of the Japanese Art Sound Archive).

Remastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

The LP jacket is made from two layers of chipboard cardboard and washi-like "shindanshi" paper that reproduces the feel of the original. The LP also comes with two postcards and a 20-page A4 booklet (Text in Japanese and English),a download code.

A four-piece band based in Tokyo.
Initially playing reggae/dub music, the band gradually developed into an innovative fusion of diverse musical influences, such as jazz, soul, psyche pop, new age, and exotica.
The sound is based on groove and euphoria, with nostalgic melodies.
They have performed at iconic events in Japan such as Fuji Rock Festival, and also have been looking overseas since they performed in Canada(Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver) in 2019.
The new EP "Ramble In The Rainbow"(2024) is their first international release on the US label Peoples Potential Unlimited.
The work shows their musical maturity, drawing inspiration from Sun Ra, Lee "Scratch" Perry, and Yasuaki Shimizu.

kwes. returns to Warp after 8 years with his second album ‘Kinds’ - an expansive, intuitive composition set inspired by memory, colour and his kids, who also helped create the album artwork.

Recorded at Nippon-Columbia Daiichi Studio, on Oct 8-10, 1975.
Trombone: Hiroshi Suzuki.
Keyboards: Hiromasa Suzuki.
Bass: Kunimitsu Inaba.
Drums: Akira Ishikawa.
Saxophone: Takeru Muraoka.

The first album by Koshimiharu, a musician with a diverse background including classical, chanson, jazz, and ballet, on the Alpha/YEN label (original: 1983). The analog reissue LP, which was released on “RECORD STORE DAY” in 2021 and sold out immediately, is now available to the general public by popular demand from fans in Japan and abroad. All but one of the songs were written by Haru Koshimi. The song “L'amour Toujours” was co-written with Belgian techno-pop group Telex, who also participated in the performance, and it caught the attention of IDIOT Record, which released it simultaneously in the Netherlands. The basic specifications for this release are the same as the 2021 reissue, with the original version pre-mastered by Haruomi Hosono and cut by master engineer Toru Kotetsu, but it will be pressed on colored vinyl (transparent pink). The album artwork differs from the original version, using the cover photo from the 1992 CD release. Interview with Koshimiharu 2021 published (with English translation).

This solo debut album was self-produced and released in 1984, following the hiatus of Guernica. Including the title track on the theme of female menstruation and "Mushi no Onna (Pupa Woman)," a baroque song (Pachelbel's Canon) with lyrics written by herself, this album fully expressed her one-of-a-kind worldview and catapulted her to the status of queen of the 80's subculture. Even today, it remains a classic in the history of Japanese women's rock music.