MUSIC

It’s always summer somewhere, but especially so wherever Cheryl Glasgow’s carefree clubber “Glued To The Spot” plays. An absolute ear-worm from its first nylon strums, Glasgow’s Sade-adjacent, jazz vocalese sweeps into a warm-up tempo groove and never quite breaks a sweat. Issued on Ross Anderson’s short-lived, London-based Live label, “Glued To The Spot” swept through the club scene briefly in 1987, disembarking for warmer shores when the season changed.

In 1990 Ronald Lee Trent Jr. was the teenage creator of Altered States – a raw, futuristic techno-not-techno anthem, which in retrospect was something of a stylistic anomaly for the young artist. Across subsequent years, with time spent in Chicago, New York and Detroit, came the development of his signature sound, and renown as a world class purveyor of deep, soul infused house/garage. This story has already been told, and on casual inspection, the well-worn platitude ‘house music legend’ is an old shoe that still fits. However, in fact, he’s actually so much more, and has been for quite a while. A genuine musician, songwriter, and ‘producer’ in the proper, old-school sense, the artist today has more in common with Quincy Jones than he does your average journeyman DJ track-hack. 

To those in the know, these broader skills haven’t gone unnoticed, which is why on the highly collaborative, career-topping new LP ‘What Do The Stars Say To You’, it took little persuasion to recruit serious star power. Brazilian royalty Ivan Conti and Alex Malheriros from Azymuth, violin maestro Jean Luc Ponty, ambient hero Gigi Masin, hype band Khruangbin and more performed, whilst NY cornerstone François K provided mastering duties. At various points Ron himself played drums, percussion, keys, synths, piano, guitar and electronics.

Harking back to the 70s and 80s boom in adventurous, luxurious albums, WDTSSTY is a love letter to the longplayer, where rich musicality and a liquid smooth, silky flow make seemingly odd genre bedfellows acquiesce harmoniously. Each song its own high-fidelity odyssey, Trent incorporated a broad range of live instruments and electronics into a sophisticated, euphonic whole. Described by him as being “designed for harmonising with spirit, urban life and nature”, this is aural soul food, gently easing you into balmy nights, where everything is alright. 

Originally wanting to be an architect, Trent’s views his approach to collaboration and music in general as having the same principles. A firm believer in the nourishing qualities of sound, he sees direct parallels between the two disciplines, being as the purpose of good architecture is to improve quality of life. “With WARM, through sound design, I built frameworks for the musicians, who furnished and occupied these structures beautifully, which was a big compliment for me”, he comments. 

The conditions required for a good collab are more than simply structural though, as Trent expounds, “I’m a huge fan of everyone on the record, especially Jean Luc and Azymuth, who’re part of my DNA. Each track was made with that guest in mind – for example, when I started writing ‘Sphere’, I immediately thought ‘this IS Ponty’. I played the keys in his style, and did a guide violin solo using a synth, which he then re-did, amazingly. ‘Cool Water’ is based around Azymuth themes, so when I sent it to Ivan, he could immediately see himself in the piece; He got what I was going for straight away. For ‘Melt Into You’ I hit up Alex on Instagram, sent him the track, he liked it, and within 24 hours he’d sent back six different bass passes!” 

“Conversely, Admira began with a sketch sent by Gigi and became something combining Jon Hassell-esque chords and the feel of ‘Aquamarine’ by Carlos Santana, which links back to Masin’s recurrent nautical theme”, he adds. 

With community, history and the need for racial equality never far from Ron’s mind, ‘Flos Potentia’ translates from Spanish as flower power, but rather than promoting some hippy idyll, instead it refers to plants which drove the slave trade: tobacco, sugar and cotton. Joined by Khruangbin, together they propel Dinosaur L, Hi-Tension and afrobeat into an ethereal, clear-skyed stratosphere. 

Aside from these esteemed guests, other key influences cited by Trent include ‘Gigolos Get Lonely Too’ by Prince, ‘Beyond’ by Herb Alpert, David Mancuso, Jan Hammer, Tangerine Dream, The Cars, Trevor Horn, Alan Parsons Project and pre-Kraftwerk incarnation Organization. A multitude of others are audible too, including George Bension, Vangelis, Loose Ends, Maze, Flora Purim, Weather Report, Atmosphere, Grace Jones, James Mason and Brass Construction 

“Art is awe, art is mystery expressed,” writes Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. “Art is somatic, even if it is experienced cerebrally. It is felt.” The central mysteries of Smith’s ninth studio album, Let’s Turn It Into Sound, have to do with perception, expression, and communication: How can we communicate when spoken language is inadequate? How do we understand what it is we’re feeling? How do we translate our experience of the world into something that someone else can understand? For Smith, a self-described “feeler,” the answers are inspired by compound words in non-English languages, translation, sculptural fashion, dance, butoh, wushu shaolin, and other forms of sensory and somatic experience. Just like fashion uses lines, shapes, colors, textures, and silhouettes to communicate on a sensual level separate from the conscious mind, Let’s Turn it Into Sound strives to use sound to communicate what words alone cannot. “The album is a puzzle,” Smith says. “[It] is a symbol of receiving a compound of a ton of feelings from going out into a situation, and the song titles are instructions to breaking apart the feelings and understanding them.” The energized “Is it Me or is it You?” comes from traversing the gaps between how you see yourself and how another might see you, through a filter of their own projections. The hushed sense of revelation that brackets “There is Something” refers to the feeling of walking into a room and being subconsciously aware of the dynamic present. All the while, Smith interprets these feelings through sound. This auditory interpretation process, driven by earnest curiosity, led Smith to record some thoughts and questions that popped up along the journey in Somatic Hearing—a booklet which accompanies the album. Over three frenzied months, recording alone in her home studio, Smith allowed herself to pursue new experiments to accompany her usual toolkit of modular, analogue, and rare synthesizers (including her signature Buchla), orchestral sounds, and the voice. She created a new vocal processing technique, and gave herself permission to pursue a pacing that felt intuitive, rather one that followed typical song structures. She walked around in the windiest season with a subwoofer backpack and an umbrella, listening to the low end of the album amidst 60mph gusts. She listened to herself, and, in doing so, to an inner community which suddenly opened to her. Underlying the album is a dynamic relationship between what Smith describes as six distinct voices, each a multifaceted storyteller. By acknowledging these characters, she was acknowledging her whole being: the woven plurality of self, the complex process of noticing and resolving inner conflicts, and the joy of finding harmony in flux. “I started to feel so embodied by all of these characters. This is all the felt, unsaid stuff [my inner community] wants to communicate but it doesn’t have the English language as its form of communication, and so [this album was a form of] giving space to let it talk and not judge it and just let it play.” By not adhering to expected song structures, each song feels even more like a conversation, with each character getting to express themselves in full. Smith has never fit neatly into the ambient genre conversation she’s most often associated with, and here she forges even further outside of it, traversing avant-garde pop, neoclassical, and the otherwise unclassifiable. The result is a playful, inquisitive, excitable work which appeals to us as social, sensitive animals, and invites listeners into a wholly idiosyncratic world that is both experimental, and, feels like the most human thing in the world. Proceeding through Let’s Turn it Into Sound is like peeking into a secret realm: one that delights both in the discovery of the magic hidden in the everyday, and the shimmer that lingers long after the portal itself shuts.

West Mineral return with a followup to Mister Water Wet’s 2019's subtropical ambient slow-burn debut ‘Bought the Farm’, expanding Iggy Romeu's horizons to contrast feverish Afro-Caribbean ambient jazz with jaunty illbient and atmospheric freakouts. Low-lit heat that’s highly recommended if yr into Nick León, Carlos Niño, Kelman Duran, Gonçalo F. Cardoso. Mister Water Wet continues to excavate the tropical soundscapes that simmer the producer's Kansas City home with his Puerto Rican roots, on a new album of extended vignettes and mood pieces that cross a late 90’s Mo Wax instrumentals vibe with present day feelings of displacement and ennui. LP opener ‘Bory’ tunes us into Water Wet’s weirdly fuzzed frequencies, where tremeloed strings and found sounds resemble what might have been a lost dean blunt x dean hurley sound design concept for Inland Empire, while ‘I Saw the Green Flash' opens a swirl of strings and traditional rhythms caught in a reflecting pool of canned classical orchestrals and 1950s theremin wails. 'Good Apple’, meanwhile, cranks up the mood with aged x looped piano paired with an undulating, bass-heavy shuffle that wouldn't sound out of place on a Kelman Duran x Martin Denny mixtape. 'When Kennybrook Burned to the Ground' leans into heady jazz vapours, spreading crackle over pitch-fucked horn samples, but it’s the producer's weird use of percussion that keeps us gripped: scattering his arrangements across the grid, mimicking an ensemble of players deployed in irregular formations. Romeu embraces trip-hop on 'Any Other Time', blending Afro-Caribbean percussion with a swung downtempo beat, while ‘Isthmus’ reminds us of the clatterbox plunder of Moonshake’s PJ Harvey hookup ‘Just a Working Girl’ - with all its asymmetric hooks. The extended closing track 'Losing Blood' takes a leaf out of Fennesz's glitched rulebook, stretching and folding disintegrating loops through an 11 minute descent into the elegiac aether.

Prescient jazz-techno mutator Jamie Hodge (Conjoint, Studio Pankow) ushers a long overdue solo debut album, of sorts, with Demdike Stare’s DDS label; an archival harvest spanning his earliest experiments circa his Plus 8 debut thru to ’00s anomalies - hybrid ambient techno jazz and incredibly inventive forerunners of dubbed electronica - bookended by two Demdike Stare edits. Essential listening if yr into anything on the axis from Move D to Detroit Escalator Company, Jan Jelinek or Tortoise. Jamie Hodge grew up in Chicago in a jazz-loving family, first forming a band when he was a teenager, using drum machines and keyboards to rattle thru covers of Joy Division and Ministry tracks. His sound progressed into dubbier spaces when he befriended Ted Gray, a local record store clerk, and into off-kilter jazz when he ran into Bundy K. Brown and David Grubbs, who let Hodge watch rehearsals of the first Gastr del Sol recordings. But the transformational moment came when a friend (pictured on the "Diagonals" cover no less) played Hodge the 1991-released "From Our Minds To Yours Vol. 1", the first compilation on Richie Hawtin and John Acquaviva's Plus 8 label. From here, Hodge took his growing obsession with dance music to early Chicago raves, and began to explore European techno and UK hardcore. Eventually he met Hawtin in person after convincing his mom to cut through Canada on the way back from visiting East Coast colleges, and released his Plus 8 debut by the time he'd moved into a college dorm in 1993, using the Born Under A Rhyming Planet moniker for the first time. Hodge was also immersed in Chicago’s famous experimental jazz scene of the ‘90s - later on establishing the short-lived but excellent Aestuarium label that brought the work of Philip Cohran And The Artistic Heritage Ensemble to wider attention. Hodge would release two more 12"s for Plus 8, heading to Germany to connect with David Moufang (Move D) and forming Conjoint, later Studio Pankow. The material presented on "Diagonals" takes us right back to Hodge's vintage era, when he was using a mutating spread of equipment - Korg MS-20, Atari ST, Nord Micro Modular, ARP Axxe, Yamaha TG77 and TX816, and Alesis HR-16B - to assemble tracks that reached through his wide range of musical interests. According to Hodge, more Plus 8 releases were planned but never materialised, so this long overdue set fills in the gaps between records like 2000's classic Conjoint plate "Earprints" and Studio Pankow's still-underrated 2005 slow-burner "Linienbusse”. ‘Diagonals’ sputters to life with a Demdike Stare edit of a track Hodge recorded in Brooklyn while he was on summer break from college and working at a local record distributor. Inspired by music he'd seen at that year's New Music Seminar, he used an Atari ST and Yamaha TG77, a glassy FM module, to conduct a mood that hovers between '80s new age DIY tapes and gaseous dub techno. ‘Handley' digs into the tranquil electrified jazz modalities over a swung drum machine rhythm, squeezing robotic soul from a modest arsenal of gear, lashing the hypermelodic post-Detroit sensitivity of The Black Dog/Plaid to Chicago-axis experiments from Tortoise and Gastr del Sol. The shorter interludes are just as engrossing: Hodge experiments FM spray on 'Trampoline' and dusty Jan Jelinek-esque electroid funk on 'Menthol', ducking further into jazz on 'Hot Nachos...', augmenting his electronics with fretless electric bass. Cherry-picked by DDS, the selection best portrays the mix of soulful depth and atmospheric effervescence that defined that elusive era in electronic music; spanning a late night spectrum of styles from dusty electro-acoustic ambient prisms to supple deep house pearls, with a special strain of gently frayed computer jazz touching on the outer limits of Detroit techno. It's exceptional material that reminds us of a time when electronic music was frothing over with hope, futurism and revolutionary spirit, so whether you're into the post-Artificial Intelligence era or the Jazz-looped investigations of Jan Jelinek and crew, "Diagonals" feels like stepping into a particularly good dream.

By the end of their career Unwound were whispering their disgruntled musings over sinewy guitar lines into a bucket of lo-fi, but they initially skewered a far more hardcore sound, screaming and yelping their baby nihilism over crashing instruments and repeated noise bulletins. Fake Train proves it and Numero Group have reissued this piece of pissy brilliance for proof. If you didn't know by now: there are classics at either end of this band's discography.

The last chapter of Lou Ragland’s Cleveland career was perhaps the most monumental. By its completion, Understand Each Other—more often referred to as The ConVeyor, with that uppercase V intentional but unexplained—featured generations of Cleveland luminaries, and representation from most scenes, both sexes, and several ethnicities. The album’s credits read like the guest list for a Lou Ragland episode of This Is Your Life. Kathy Grant was brought in to arrange the massive Cleveland Orchestra, inviting her father Frank in as first chair cello. A pre-O’Jays Dunn Pearson handled keys, and Richard Shann, the man who Pearson would replace in the O’Jays, got an arranger’s credit as well. The horn section was rounded out by Mother Brain Tree trombonist Ulysses Young, Bell Telefunk trumpeter Watson Vaughn, and future Dazz Band trumpeter Pierre Demudd. Lou’s live-in girlfriend Elaine Hines and her First Light singing mate Joyce Jenkins, both on break from stints with Terry Knight’s Grand Funk Railroad project, contributed backing vocals. One-time Co-Co co-owner Leonard Jackson brought his Temps knock-off the True Movement in as a male counter to First Light. In the middle of his stumbling career on the Miystic Insight label, Sonny Lovall adds another voice. Hot Chocolateers past and Seven Miles Highers present Tony Roberson, Herbert Pruitt, R. C. Johnson, Tom Tichar, James Johnson III, Joe Jenkins, and Pam Hamilton are all accounted for. Understand Each Other opens with the socially conscious title track, gutting out a second place finish to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On?" in both its mission and its mix. Like Gaye's own conceptual title track, there is not a dull moment in Ragland’s, as strings, horns, percussion, and vocal motifs rise and fall organically through the monumental piece. Lou testifies throughout, matching the complicated terrain of the dynamic opener. Two songs later, “Since You Said You’d Be Mine” gets its 30-second intro back and looks all the stronger for it. On Side B, Ragland revisits Love For Dollars And Cents’ “Into The Next World”—issued on Co-Co in 1972—stretching the song out toward the five-minute mark but truncating its title. The album closes with an instrumental “Understand Each Other,” reminding the listener to flip the record over and begin again. The album’s jacket must be the most curious element of the package. The cover drawing, from the pen of Remus Peterson, depicts Lou Ragland as peacemaker, standing between a sabre-toothed tiger and a dove, asking them literally to “Understand Each Other.” On the reverse, that message is taken to the spiritual extreme. Sometime in 1977, Lou had taken on Lateef Mahmud as his spiritual guru in a brief flirtation with Islam (the Arabic on the sleeve translates to “God Is The Greatest”). Mahmud somehow snagged a producer credit, but he was also called on to pen an album preface. His notes conceive of music as a cosmic language, with this very LP itself compiled as a tribute to the “ghetto masters—those who master the ghetto and have become among those who help shape the destiny of this land.” Lou Ragland is deemed The Conveyor: “…the conveyor of harmony thru the ethers manifested in words, songs, and deeds to bring into focus the universal, educational, and inspirational plane of consciousness.” So Mahmud wasn’t all that far off, it turns out.

Dang-Khoa Chau aka Đ.K. gives up a self-released treat, sidewinding into psychedelic realms of radiant gamelan and slow, humid bangers, highly recommended if yr into ’Forest of Evil' period Demdike, early Shackleton, DJ Python. A pivotal presence in the Parisian scene thanks to his rounds for Antinote, L.I.E.S., Second Circle, and most recently 12th isle & Good Morning Tapes; Đ.K now takes matters into his own hands to issue some golden material, drawing on his South East Asian heritage and sultry, stylized nEuropean club music for a properly hypnotic seven track trip. In deep pursuit of atavistic urges, and modelled with electronic futurism, his ‘Gate Of Enlightenment’ calls up a spectra of spirits that invoke altered states; vocal swirls meet purposeful gamelan in ‘Enlightenment Process’, aligning for the deftly weight trample of ‘Middle Path’ with its mystic horns, and a slippery sort of dancehall swivel in ‘Sacred Creatures.’ ‘His ‘Day of Mourning’ makes room for contemplation with sound sensitive instincts heightened to unnerving degrees, while ‘Metal Frames’ yokes back to the ‘floor with something like an industrialised echo of the Ghost In The Shell OST, while the closing couplet see his percussive proprioceptions at their most devilish and immersive.

French photographer, musician, and lifeguard Romeo Poirier is also known for his cult favorite "Plage Arrière," a meditative deep sea ambient cassette released on Kit Records. A long-awaited repress of this popular work, originally released in 2020! Is this truly a miraculous fusion of Andrew Pekler and Biosphere? Mastered at Schwebung by Stephan Mathieu. If you like Jelinek or Boards Of Canada, you will love this. Limited edition clear vinyl.

Limited edition transparent blue vinyl in 3mm colour printed sleeve with printed inner , full sleevenotes, fold-out 24” x 12” Pay It All Back concert poster and download card.

'As always, the Pay It All Back series is intended to promote our upcoming releases and productions. It also offers soundtracks from artists we would like to promote, including unreleased songs and versions that will only be included on this one. Sadly, we lost many greats in the music world last year, including Lee Scratch Perry, George Oban, and John Sharp. Lee laughed at death. For him, death was just a part of life, a new beginning... I have faith in Lee. I am very proud to release this album. This album is a gift to all the On-U Sound crew and to all the irreplaceable friends I will never see again. Adrian Sherwood

Connecting Wasulu hunter music, griot praises, Senufo pastoral dances, Fula and Mandingo repertoire alongside Western psychedelia, blues and afro-beat, Zani Diabaté’s Super Djata Band de Bamako was among Mali’s top orchestras by the late 1970’s well into the mid-1980’s. Tracked live inside Radio Mali’s raw but inspiring studio in January 1982, En Super Forme was briefly available via Côte d'Ivoire’s Musique Mondiale imprint. The album centers around Diabaté and his electric guitar’s pyrotechnics, a relentless shredder that stands shoulder to shoulder with Mali’s fingerstyle gods Ali Farka Touré and Rail Band's legendary Djelimady Tounkara.

Gassing the tempo and playing it loose & tracky as f*ck, Rat Heart’s 5th solo album in the space of 18 months twists his grimy kaleidoscope to spy a more manic, ruffcut batch of warehouse scrappers and basement brukkouts injected with levels of scuzz and blunted vocals. It’s an instant classic shot at the rise of cosplaying posh DJs, alongside thee rudest steppers and spannered grime. Aye, you’re in for a treat - Massive RIYL Michael J. Blood, H-Fusion, Demdike Stare, Actress, Laswell, Hints of this sound are strewn across Tom Boogizm’s gush of Rat Heart releases, but never quite so intently and single-minded as on ‘Ratty Rids The Clubs From The Evil Curse Of The Private School DJ’s’. Under that canny titular nod to Scientist’s classic album, he makes absolutely no bones about his antipathy toward the way dance music - traditionally a working class past-time - has been cuckooed and blanched by the British middle/upper class in the past decade (obvious correlations with 12 years of Tory dickheads?). To be fair, the politics aren’t overbearing - he’s not trying to be Wigan’s Chumbawumba - but they’re inherent to what makes him tick, and patently result in a brilliantly dare-to-differ sound. Taking a big lick of the salty chip, he comes off like MES meets H-Fusion in ‘A Poem 4 The Modern Day DJ Private School Online Activist’, before cycling thru some of his strongest uptempo shit, keeping toes off the ground between the ghettotech percs of ‘Stressss’, his outstanding rimshot stepper ‘Teeth Like a Burnt Fence M8’, and lip-bitingly tight hi-hat thizz on ‘Leigh via Hag Fold’, plus the Sockethead-adjacent ace ‘Yeye’ and a Devil mix style mutation ‘No Tick 4 Lads in V-Neck Shirts (Brave Lil Piggy Mix)’. There’s something else happening on this one too; a very specific je ne sais quoi that’s giving us momentary flashbacks to Laswell, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s ‘Gray’, even John Cale’s super distinctive production style on 'Squirrel And G-Man Twenty Four Hour Party People Plastic Face Carnt Smile (White Out)’ - bits like the claggy ambient of ‘$hatterdance’ and hot-boxed grogginess of ‘Wot Happens if U Just Eat Crisp’ - all designed to ideally temper the flex.

Japanese Balearic Masterpiece ('93) is re-pressed on Clear Blue Vinyl! HIROSHI II HIROSHI" is a unit of Hiroshi Fujiwara and Hiroshi Kawanabe (Tokyo No.1 SOUL SET). This is their chill-out~Balearic classic (EP), which was distributed as a picture disc with a vinyl jacket at the time, and is now a popular and expensive item on the second-hand market. The EP features "H2O," the first track that takes you to a fictional resort with its gentle guitar strumming, and "Beauty & Beast + Bagle (Dub)," an exquisite summer resort dubwise track with melting sounds and the melancholy of the sun in the west. The album also includes six evergreen songs that pioneered the Café Del Mar craze that later spread throughout Japan. The artwork is a faithful reproduction of the CD-era design by Hiroshi Nagai.

コンゴ・ルンバ、アメリカのR&B、フランスのイェイェ、キューバのソンとセヌフォとマンディンゴの地域の伝統音楽を溶け合わせることで、60年代と70年代の西アフリカ音楽のグラウンド・ゼロとなったOrchestre Volta Jazz。〈Pitchfork〉や〈The New Yorker〉でも賞賛された彼らの貴重楽曲の数々が編集盤として登場。本作は、〈Disques France-Afrique〉と〈Sonafric〉レーベルからリリースされていた9曲のオリジナル楽曲をコンパイルしたものとなっています。騒々しくもあり、煮えたぎるようでもある、アフロ・サイケデリック・ミュージックの珠玉の傑作選！

On their first official collaboration, Japanese noise pioneer Masami Akita aka Merzbow and Australian sound sculptor Lawrence English present a harrowing, surrealist portrait of nocturnal industrial activity, spawned by field recordings made in a sprawling factory complex seven hours north of English’s home in Brisbane. He characterizes the area as “uneasy and unsettling,” awash in the sickly glow of smelters and refinement machinery, somehow not of this world – a liminal quality vividly captured in Andrei Tarkovsky’s sprawling purgatorial opus, Stalker, to which the title alludes. Akita, too, described early drafts of Eternal Stalker as feeling “like the soundtrack to a dystopian science fiction opera.” A mood of mechanical dread and ruined futures permeates each of the album’s seven potent compositions. Opener “The Long Dream” sets the stage with steady rain on sheet metal, punctured by thunder and metallic echoes, reverberating to the rafters in a collapsing warehouse. Quickly the tempest rises. “A Gate Of Light” and “Magnetic Traps” both convulse in churning furies of electric demolition and rattling chains, roaring and relentless. “The Visit” and “Black Thicket” operate more at a distance, surveying the topography of steam, rust, and liquid metal from above, their flickers of violence like gunfire swallowed by blankets of darkness. This is noise at its most elemental and unknowable: brooding, bristling, and opaque, stalking forbidden peripheries of chaos and creation. Discussing Akita’s music, English refers to its “intense substrata that is purely psychedelic; it consumes and confounds.” The seasick swells of friction and fracture subsume the listener, forcing an auditory surrender: “this saturation of the senses can be a euphoria.” Proof comes halfway through “The Golden Sphere,” when the howling mayhem subtly recedes, revealing an eerie siren drone hovering in the void, like the resonance of a dead star galaxies away. Slowly a seething, venomous wall of volume returns, shredding the signal until its frequencies fray, whipping away into the eye of the storm. The combined effect merges obliteration and liberation, rapture and ravagement; it’s the sound of dissolution as resolution, uprooted and unmoored, finally freed from form.

Jake Muir’s by-now classic debut for sferic is a thing of spectral wonder; a luxurious set of gently phased and looped edits and field recordings based around gutted Beach Boys samples cast adrift in a sea of atmospheric shimmers. Followers of work by Jan Jelinek, Pinkcourtesyphone, Andrew Pekler or even Rhythm & Sound should be all over this one - a highly immersive exercise in blissed worlbuilding.

sferic cruise the best coast with Jake Muir, an artist and field recordist hailing from Los Angeles, California, who has quietly become one of the more interesting operators in this crowded field. His conceptual approach to sampling follows a lineage of artists at the very top of the game - from Fennesz’s re-imagined cover-versioning on his pioneering ‘Plays’ (also using the Beach Boys as source material), to DJ Olive’s quietly radical Illbient movements in the mid 90’s, to Jan Jelinek’s loop-finding heyday a decade or so later. Muir isn't so much interested in making sounds for mindless zoning-out, but instead evaluates the very essence of sound itself, in a way that feels like a microscopic view of the very fibre of popular music.

On ‘Lady’s Mantle’ Muir combines these elements with aqueous field recordings made everywhere from Iceland to the beaches of California with results that limn a wide but smudged sense of space and place. With fading harmonic auroras and glinting, half-heard surf rock melodies, the album is rendered in an abstract impressionist manner that suggests a fine tracing of in-between-spaces, perhaps describing the metropolitan sprawl giving way to vast mountain ranges and oceanic scales.

In effect the album recalls the intoxicated airs of Pinkcourtesyphone (a.k.a L.A. resident Richard Chartier) and Andrew Pekler’s sensorial soundscapes and even the plangent production techniques of Phil Spector and the subby sublime of Rhythm & Sound. For all its implied sense of space, there’s a paradoxically close intimacy to 'Lady’s Mantle’ which feels like you’re the passenger in Muir’s ride, and he patently knows the scenic route...

(Boomkat) 

Today sees Belgian-Caribbean provocateur Charlotte Adigéry and her long-term musical partner, Bolis Pupul announce their debut album Topical Dancer, due for release on March 4 2022 via Soulwax’s iconic label DEEWEE. Cultural appropriation. Misogyny and racism. Social media vanity. Post-colonialism and political correctness. These are not talking points that you’d ordinarily hear on the dancefloor but Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul are ripping up the rulebook with their debut album Topical Dancer. The Ghent-based duo, who broke out with their 2019 Zandoli EP, are rare storytellers in electronic music: they take the temperature of the time and funnel them into their playful synth concoctions – never didactic and always with a knowing wink. Their debut studio record – which cements them as a duo under both their names for the first time and is co-written and co-produced by Soulwax – is both a triumph of kaleidoscopic electro-pop and “a snapshot of how we think about pop culture in the 2020s.” It captures Charlotte and Bolis’s essence as musical collaborators and the conversations they’ve had over the past two years on tour, as well as their perspectives as Belgians with an immigrant background, Charlotte with Guadeloupean and French-Martinique ancestry and Bolis being of Chinese descent. Beyond the album’s thematic heft, Topical Dancer reflects Charlotte and Bolis’s idiosyncratic sound: it’s thoughtful but it bangs. Their take on familiar genres is always off-kilter; songs sound undone or a little wonky; but these are nocturnal heaters to make the club throb. “We like to fuck things up a bit,” laughs Bolis. “We cringe when we feel like we're making something that already exists, so we're always looking for things to combine to make it sound not like a pop song, not like an R&B song, not a techno song. We’re always putting different worlds together. Charlotte and I get bored when things get too predictable.” Topical Dancer is fizzing with ideas – there’s certainly no filler among its 13 tracks. But above all, perhaps, it has a restlessness, a desire not to be boxed in and to escape others’ narrow perceptions of who they are. It’s summarised by the refrain of their new single, ‘Blenda’: “Don’t sound like what I look like / Don’t look like what I sound like.” “One thing that always comes up,” says Bolis, “is that people perceive me as the producer, and Charlotte as just a singer. Or that being a Black artist means you should be making ‘urban’ music. Those kinds of boxes don’t feel good to us.” ‘Blenda’ in particular references how “I am a product of colonialism,” says Charlotte, “and I feel guilty for taking up space in a white country.” The song was inspired in part by Reni Eddo-Lodge’s book Why I’m Not Longer Talking To White People About Race. “It talks about the colonial past and post-colonial present in the UK,” Charlotte continues, “but that isn’t merely a British or American problem, Belgium is part of that as well.” She says that her home country is likewise “oblivious to a big part of its history” which “results in general ignorance and a lack of understanding and empathy towards Belgian inhabitants of immigrant descent.” On Topical Dancer, it’s less about finger pointing or being dogmatic about all the things they speak about. It’s about emancipation through humour. “I don’t want to feel this heaviness on me,” says Charlotte. “These aren’t my crosses to bear. Topical Dancer is my way of freeing myself of these issues. And of having fun.”

Salutations signals a series of meetings, greetings, group assemblies and exercises along the invisible plane created through correspondence. This is the inaugural compilation of new music from RVNG, inspired in part by a collaboration with Adult Swim. The question of how similar we are arises in the simple form of contact, and how we choose to embrace the potential of that moment and one another. Through correspondence, we connect, communicate, and form community. At first, correspondents with one another, and through the processes of collaboration and transmission, we correspond to parallel and intersecting collective cores. This eternal network, perhaps informed (consciously or subconsciously) by some celestial or spiritual force, becomes a portal to practice social responsibility and an access point to a wider, inclusive universe of information. In turn, the network becomes a human phenomenon, as well as a potent demonstration of art and collectivism. As the world heals, and evolves through future changes, having this network in place provides a vessel to and grow / glow beyond our corporeal state.

With a sound that was swampy, primal and modern-urban all at once—as much in the tradition of rock n’ roll and punk rock as it was a rejection of those things, the Scientists’ formula was as universal as it was specific to their own experience. The themes of getting wasted, driving around in hotted-up cars, being trapped in crap jobs, and paranoia were their subject matter. Machine throb bass and drums with jagged car-wreck guitars were their modus operandi. Fitting into no place or time they spurned all but the most rudimentary and elemental of rock structures to create a sound all their own. Quadruple CD includes their complete studio recordings, live recordings, and a previously unissued set from Adelaide UniBar, plus dozens of previously unpublished photographs, discography, and fold out Perth Punk family tree. Double LP version boils the box down to 22 essentials, plus unpublished photographs, discography, and fold out Perth Punk family tree.

Samba Esquema Novo is the 1963 debut album by Brazilian artist Jorge Ben. It includes the original recording of the international hit “Mas Que Nada”. It was listed by Rolling Stone Brazil as one of the 100 best Brazilian albums in history. While many of the performers during the heyday of Tropicalia and the rise of MPB (música popular brasileira) opted for a more radical stance in their challenge to Brazil’s political and cultural authorities, artists like Jorge Ben took a more understated approach. Rather than use overly theatrical performance to shock the audience or write songs loaded with political content, Ben became known as one of the country’s great musical alchemists, a furiously eclectic songwriter who combined elements of indigenous Brazilian music with a groove from the west coast of Africa. Never a controversial figure in the manner of the tropicalistas like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, Ben became one of the most respected and resilient figures in Brazilian pop. Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1940, Ben took up bossa nova guitar playing after hearing João Gilberto but found the style too complex to execute. This led to his developing his own approach to the bossa nova that focused on playing the guitar as one would a bass — his early recordings are in fact bass-less. His first big hit as a singer/songwriter came at the age of 23 with “Mas, Que Nada.” The song’s subtle bossa nova groove proved so seductive that it was quickly covered by a number of Brazilian artists, most successfully by Sergio Mendes. During the military dictatorship’s cultural crackdown in the late ‘60s Ben, whose music wasn’t scrutinized as rigorously as that of tropicalistas like Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso, was able to perform without too much trouble into the early ‘70s. Still, he felt the long arm of Brazilian censorship when a 1971 performance was stopped in midsong because censors felt as though Ben’s backup singers were dancing too suggestively. Benjor It was from the late ‘60s to mid-’70s that Ben established himself as a songwriting force within Brazil. Over the next ten to 15 years he expanded his reach, with varying success, to Europe and America (he’s more popular in Europe than America). In 1989 he released the album Benjor, simultaneously announcing that he was changing his last name to Benjor. During that same time period Ben realized his dream of working with prominent African musicians when he collaborated with Nigeria’s King Sunny Ade, and also was represented on an anthology of Brazilian music compiled by former Talking Head David Byrne. Although not as politically radical as many of his contemporaries, Ben proved that in certain contexts and under unusually repressive restraint, music takes on a radical political dimension. – Allmusic.com

Following a 1997 compilation album on Carl Craig's Planet E label, Moodyman's virtually first album, released in 1998 on the prestigious UK label Peacefrog, is being reissued on limited edition clear vinyl.

The third folk song series supervised by the Tayo Mountains, this time in Gunma! The definitive version of the heavyweight Bon Odori "Kizaki Ondo", in which abnormal boost bass and distorted Kodama swirl, is released in the original version of the local preservation society and the old and new doubles of the current TRAP version. This will overturn your view of folk songs! ??

"Yagibushi" is the first folk song to be recorded in Japan and is popular as one of the largest dunks in the folk song world. .. This song is just crazy. The killer of killer that makes any folk music dance tune hazy in front of the dangerous force! Did you make a mistake in adjusting the EQ in the studio? A massive low beat with distorted bass and strange reverberation that makes you doubt your ears. And the lyrics in the form of a persuasion (Note 2) that tells the story of Meshimori onna (Note 1) who lives at night in Hanamachi. It's neither a Chicago-born ghetto base nor an Atlanta-born trap. It is a Japanese folk song that was brought up in the life of Kita-Kantou.

This time, with the cooperation of the Kizaki Ondo Preservation Society, we remastered and recorded the locally recorded versions of 1980 and 1965 that trapped the hustle and bustle of the night of Bon Odori. As a new attempt, Clark Naito's new recording Kizaki Ondo was also recorded there. MC / track maker Clark Naito, who raps garage punk on sampled tracks and is also active in the Gorge area, has a sense of connecting Bo Diddley and bass music with the term "3 minutes R & R". The collaboration between Minyo Mountains and Clark Naito created a modern version of Kizaki Ondo with contemporary trap beats and sweet synths. This is an extension of the act of "putting folk songs on a turntable and making a roaring sound" at the Soi48 party, and is a proposal for "a new way to enjoy folk songs." Please enjoy it simply as cool music.

Limited edition colored vinyl! Recorded live in New York in 1978 and 1979. The album is a compilation of Sun Ra's live performances in New York in 1978 and 1979, ranging from glamorous big band performances to sweet and free-form performances. Includes the classic song "Space is The Place". The back cover of the album is also interesting, showing a psychedelic live performance, including a member of the Arkestra wearing a pyramid hat. Eddie Gale plays trumpet on this album.

Limited colored vinyl.This 1966 LP by Astatke (billed to Mulatu Astatke & His Ethiopian Quintet) isn't shaded by nearly as much African/Ethiopian influence as his later work, which was recorded between the late '60s and mid-'70s. As the title might lead you to believe, it is indeed more in the Latin soul-jazz bag than the later material, sometimes leaning toward the R&B-informed boogaloo sound of the mid-'60s. On his own compositions and arrangements (which comprise about half the LP), sometimes more exotic and African colors bubble closer to the surface, as on the eerie vibe parts he lays on 'Mascaram Setaba.'" -- Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide.