MUSIC

This is NEW MANUKE's first album. Shake your hips, shake the world, keep on movin', Maximum volume!

The most important compilation in the history of electronic music "Artificial Intelligence" will be reissued on vinyl for the first time in 30 years! ! Includes valuable early recordings from Aphex Twin, Autechre, Richie Hawtin, Alex Peterson, and more! !

Many cutting-edge artists such as Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, Boards of Canada, Flying Lotus, and Oneohtrix Point Never have been produced. A reissue of the legendary compilation "Artificial Intelligence" released 30 years ago by , a label that continues to make immeasurable achievements in history!
Released in 1992, this compilation features Aphex Twin's The Dice Man alias, Autecha and Richie Hawtin Up! (UP!), B12's Musicology, Alex Peterson (The Orb) and Jimmy Cauty (The KLF).
This work is the first work of the "Artificial Intelligence" series released from 1992 to 1994 by , and from the series, "Surfing On Sine Waves" under the name of Aphex Twin's Polygon Window, Black. Dog Productions' Bytes, B12's Electro-Soma, Richie Hawtin's F.U.S.E. Dimension Intrusion, Speedy J's Ginger, Outeka's Incunabula and Artificial Intelligence II were released. rice field.
The gatefold sleeves have been reimagined by The Designers Republic and cut in classic black wax by Beau Thomas of Ten Eight Seven Mastering.

＜Tracklist＞
01.The Dice Man - Polygon Window
02.Musicology - Telephone 529
03.Autechre - Crystal
04.I.A.O - The Clan
05.Speedy J - De-Orbit
06.Musicology - Premonition
07.UP! - Spiritual High
08.Autechre - The Egg
09.Dr Alex Paterson - Loving You Live

For this vinyl reissue, the album has been remastered from original analogue tapes, and includes a a 25x25cm, 24-page booklet with abundant notes and documents, as well as a CD (inserted in the LP sleeve) entitled "Before and After Bandits", containing previously-unreleased live and demo recordings

Black Editions present the first vinyl reissue of Keiji Haino's stunning debut album Watashi Dake?, originally released in 1981. This first ever edition released outside of Japan features the artist's originally intended metallic gold and silver jacket artwork. Over the last fifty years few musicians or performers have created as monumental and uncompromising a body of work as that of Keiji Haino. Through a vast number of recordings and performances, Haino has staked out a ground all his own, creating a language of unparalleled intensity that defies any simple classification. For all this, his 1981 debut album Watashi Dake? has remained enigmatic. Originally released in a small edition by the legendary Pinakotheca label, the album was heard by only a select few in Japan and far fewer overseas. Original vinyl copies became impossibly rare and highly sought after the world over. Watashi Dake? presents a haunting vision -- stark vocals, whispered and screamed, punctuate dark silences. Intricate and sharp guitar figures interweave, repeat, and stretch, trance-like, emerging from dark recesses. Written and composed on the spot -- Haino's vision is one of deep spiritual depths that distantly evokes 1920s blues and medieval music -- yet is unlike anything ever committed to record before or since. Produced in close cooperation with Keiji Haino and legendary photographer Gin Satoh. Coupled with starkly minimal packaging, featuring the now iconic cover photographs by Gin Satoh, the album is a startling and fully realized artistic statement. Housed in custom printed deluxe Stoughton tip-on jackets, including black on black inserts, extras, and hand-colored finishes; Remastered by Elysian Masters and cut by Bernie Grundman Mastering; Pressed to high quality vinyl at RTI; Includes 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 new ambient/new age masterpiece is born, a must-have for those who love Japanese 80's ambient music/ambient by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Satoshi Ashikawa, Gigi Masin, H.Takahashi, Mary Lattimore, etc.! Constellation Tatsu, a famous label from Oakland, California, has been pushing the new age revival from the underground cassette scene, along with Rotifer, Inner Islands, and Leaving Records. From Constellation Tatsu comes the debut album by Loris S. Sarid, a musician and sound designer from Rome, Italy, now based in Glasgow, Scotland. This is the arrival of an up-and-coming artist who has managed to keep Hiroshi Yoshimura, H.Takahashi and Joseph Shabason on his toes, and is even looking ahead to the future. This is a piece of "environmental music for plants," created as a musical tribute to a tomato farm, inspired by the small tomatoes I tended on the windowsill of my apartment this winter. This year, Leaving released Green-House's debut EP, "Six Songs for Invisible Gardens," which was based on the concept of "communication between plant life and the people who grow it. A work! It is described as "a tribute to the casual courage in simplicity, and the beauty and lightness of casual things".

To truly listen is not a passive gesture but a radical, embodied act of attention. Christina Vantzou’s The Reintegration of the Ear offers a slower presence: one rooted in care, intimacy, and reflection. An act beneath language. Through this reintegration, the ear becomes a quiet form of resistance.

Composed by the Greek-American composer between 2023 and 2025 after being commissioned by INA GRM as a multi-channel acousmatic work, The Reintegration of the Ear unfolds as a durational electroacoustic suite, meticulously arranged by Vantzou and performed with Irene Kurka (voice), John Also Bennett (flutes, synthesizers), Roman Hiele (double bass), and Oliver Coates (cello). Rather than a formal structure, the composition unfolds through intuition led by breath, resonance and subtle intelligence. What emerges is an acoustic ecology: an ongoing negotiation between perception and expression. An ethical act that reorients us toward the elemental.

Paired with "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness", a companion suite of domestic fragments and temporal drift, the album unfolds as a dialogue between the inward persistence of what is felt and the outward pull of what remains unresolved. A continuum that traces the porous boundaries between the intimate and the infinite. Through electronics, field recordings, and acoustic instrumentation, Vantzou maps atmospheres charged with psychic and temporal residue. "Observations, edits, a cure for restlessness" unfolds as a precisely sequenced constellation of sonic impressions gathered across nearly a decade, where the real and the imagined bleed into one another, like the mutable moods of places where time folds, drifts and reassembles itself.

Time here is embodied, a porous medium through which perception drifts and reforms, stretches, contracts, and suspends itself, blurring the boundary between presence and impermanence. Within this fluid temporality, intuition replaces structure; sound becomes a site of renewal rather than arrival. Each resonance carries the trace of what has passed and what is yet to unfold, an ever-shifting threshold where listening becomes a form of existence and time reveals itself as both instrument and witness.

The two side-long pieces are presented alongside digital renderings by the Belgian visual artist Eva L’Hoest, a longtime collaborator, extending this sensorial language into image. Her surreal images, containing fragments of Greek iconography - a sphinx in a coffee cup, votive ears, arrangements of laurel leaves - mirror Vantzou’s sonic landscapes in texture and tone. In Vantzou’s work, sound becomes a portal to states of perception where time bends and consciousness softens. The Reintegration of the Ear listens not only to the world but through it — a quiet, expansive meditation on presence, transformation and the invisible architectures of relation.

The Reintegration of the Ear will be released by Editions Basilic on February 20th, 2026 as an edition of 300 LPs with printed inner sleeves.

Text: Melis Özek

Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah is on vocal duties and assisted with ground-shaking grooves from On-U mainstays Doug Wimbish, Skip McDonald, and Jazzwad (amongst others). The resulting sound sculptures on this 2005 album are whipped into a dubwise frenzy by label head Adrian Sherwood. A great entry in the rich AHC back catalogue, and a fitting way to mark their return to the label.

New Age Steppers" is the first release from UK dub genius Adrian Sherwood's ON-U SOUND label. The project, which brought together 17 of the foremost artists of the time such as the Pop Group, Slits, and Creation Level, with Adrian at the center, created an unprecedented sound that went far beyond the categories of rock, punk, new wave, reggae, and dub. This is the first vinyl reissue in 40 years of a classic album that undoubtedly represented the 80's scene and is still appreciated for its innovation year after year!

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.

Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.

Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.

Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.

Track Listing:

31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM
23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta

La Monte Young was born in Bern, Idaho in 1935. He began his music studies in Los Angeles and later Berkeley, California before relocating to New York City in 1960, where he became a primary influence on Minimalism, the Fluxus movement and performance art through his legendary compositions of extended time durations and the development of just intonation and rational number based tuning systems. With wife and collaborator, artist Marian Zazeela, they would formulate the composite sound environments of the Dream House, which continues to this day.

Seeing reissue for the first time since its initial 1969 release, Young and Zazeela's first full-length album is often referred to as "The Black Record" due to Zazeela's stunning cover design, complete with the composer's liner notes in elegant hand-lettered script.

Side one was recorded in 1969 (on the date and time indicated by the title) at the gallery of Heiner Friedrich in Munich, where Young and Zazeela premiered their Dream House sound and light installation. Featuring Young and Zazeela's voices against a sine wave drone, the recording is a section of the longer composition Map of 49's Dream the Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery (begun in 1966 as a sub-section of the even larger work The Tortoise, His Dreams and Journeys, which was begun in 1964 with Young's group The Theatre of Eternal Music). According to Young, the raga-like melodic phrases of his voice were heavily influenced by his future teacher, the Hindustani singer Pandit Pran Nath.

Side two, recorded in Young and Zazeela's NYC studio in 1964, is a section of the longer composition Studies in the Bowed Disc. This composition is an extended, highly abstract noise piece for bowed gong (gifted by sculptor Robert Morris). The liner notes explain that the live performance can be heard at 33 and 1/3 RPM, but may also be played at any slower speed down to 8 and 1/3 RPM for turntables with this capacity.

Track Listing:

31 VII 69 10:26 - 10:49 PM
23 VIII 64 2:50:45 - 3:11 AM The Volga Delta

Since 2010, Adam Keith's solo project Cube has been supplying a steady run of records and cassettes that capture songwriterly fixations and frustrations in a dextrous style of wounded electronics. Though Cube has been the centrepiece of his activity for some years, he's all the while remained active in collaborations, playing in bands such as SPF and Mansion to name just a few. Rounding off a decade of dialogues and agitations, Alter now presents Keith's third LP under the moniker of Cube, 'Drug of Choice' Based in New York, though managing a functional transience that takes in California too, Keith's latest iteration as Cube launches a panoramic set of sonic touchstones into a gristly and hypnotic orbit. Seismic drum machine parts partition an album that layers industrial-tipped takes on digi-dub with roaming guitar lines, piano vignettes, and breakbeat theatrics. For all the abrasiveness and rhythmic allusions that Keith employs, his use of voices alongside lush manipulations of errant samples and atmospheres tempers the commotion, delivering something that feels as much focused on artful constructions of private experiences as it does the cathartic qualities of noise.

1990's Recurring, the fourth and final studio album by Spacemen 3, is often considered the introduction of two brilliant solo projects (Spectrum and Spiritualized) rather than the work of a functioning band. While Spacemen 3's departing statement surely reveals a deep divide within the S3 camp – each side of the LP was written by Sonic Boom and Jason Pierce separately and, unlike previous releases, the two do not play on each other's songs – Recurring maintains a cohesive, dreamy feel with its chief sonic officers backed by fellow travelers Will Carruthers, Mark Refoy and Jon Mattock. Opening saga "Big City (Everybody I Know Can Be Found Here)" marries ambient haze with narcotized indie rock, while "I Love You" manages to arrange a beautiful flute alongside a defiantly throbbing bass track. "Hypnotized," a reimagined fuzz-pop hymn, would become the group's first entry in the UK Singles Charts. Recurring lays bare the essence of Spacemen 3's persistent sound, rooted in both aural expansion and phenomenal songwriting. Includes download card and new insert with liner notes by Marc Masters.

Spacemen 3 began assembling their third album, 1988's Playing With Fire, at perhaps the freest, most confident point in their career. Recording began with the band road-tested and rugged, even amidst the functional volatility that famously motivated their course. The sessions' first offering came in the form of "Revolution," a single of heroic Stooges-devotion and the most commercially successful release the group had to date. High expectations for the album were soon exceeded, as Playing With Fire would become Spacemen 3's crowning studio achievement and cement their rightful place on the vanguard of otherworldly rock 'n' roll.An exquisite mix of stuttering tremolo guitars and wistful melodies, Playing With Fire sheds any trappings of revisionism and furnishes a nuanced grade of psychedelia. Epic entries like "Suicide" (named after the notorious NYC band) and the mesmeric "How Does It Feel?" catch Spacemen 3 at their celestial apex, the very point where their collective writing, performance and production would crest and wondrously splinter.Includes download card and new insert with liner notes by Marc Masters.

Adroit jazz guitar, prog rock fantasia, and Japanese environmental music all rest comfortably behind Leo Takami's Next Door. The follow up to the acclaimed Felis Catus & Silence, Next Door finds Takami ruminating on passages — of time, seasons, consciousness. Through music, Leo contemplates daily events and finds beauty in ordinary moments. He also seems to be questioning the value of being stuck in the world, allowing his mind to wander towards something beyond it. His music is earnest, deeply personal and introspective, and is sort of akin to Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker or Kenji Miyazawa’s Night on the Galactic Railroad. On “As If Listening” Takami takes inspiration from a Van Gogh art show organized chronologically, articulating the sense of “enlightened resignation” that is intrinsic in the act of creativity. “Beyond” is a dream of otherworldly nostalgia, a watercolor of past lives. His music is a hazy cinema of memory, the soundtrack to a cherished memory that may have never really happened, but still radiates in the mind like the sun on an unusually warm winter day.

Human Remains follows Creatures of the Deep and Black Sarabande as the final installment of a trilogy of piano based recordings by Robert Haigh for Unseen Worlds. The trilogy marks the end of the late era of solo albums by Haigh before he steps away from music production. The title, Human Remains, was initially based on a painting of the same name by Haigh that is suggestive of an ancient structure resolute in the wake of overwhelming forces. As a metaphor for our current times, it could be interpreted as human frailty in the face of nature’s unyielding dominion. Conversely, it could represent the persistence of human spirit and resourcefulness in the midst of catastrophe and upheaval. The album opens with 'Beginner’s Mind' – a semi-improvised motif develops into an impressionistic refrain. This is followed by "Twilight Flowers" and "Waltz On Treated Wire" – intimate, monochrome piano portraits. Later tracks such as "Lost Albion" and "Signs Of Life" build on skeletal piano motifs with subtle electronic washes, textures and field sounds. The album ends with the elegiac "On Terminus Hill" where a stately piano refrain explores a series of sparse harmonic variations evoking a sense of closure.

Release date Feb. 9th. Kali Malone's anticipated new album "All Life Long" is a collection of music for pipe organ, choir, and brass quintet composed by Kali Malone, 2020 - 2023. Choral music performed by Macadam Ensemble and conducted by Etienne Ferschaud at Chapelle Notre-Dame-de-L'Immaculée-Conception in Nantes. Brass quintet music performed by Anima Brass at The Bunker Studio in New York City. Organ music performed by Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley on the historical meantone tempered pipe organs at Église Saint-François in Lausanne, Orgelpark in Amsterdam, and Malmö Konstmuseum in Sweden. Kali Malone composes with a rare clarity of vision. Her music is patient and focused, built on a foundation of evolving harmonic cycles that draw out latent emotional resonances. Time is a crucial factor: letting go of expectations of duration and breadth offers a chance to find a space of reflection and contemplation. In her hands, experimental reinterpretations of centuries-old polyphonic compositional methods become portals to new ways of perceiving sound, structure, and introspection. Though awe-inspiring in scope, the most remarkable thing about Malone’s music is the intimacy stirred by the close listening it encourages. Malone’s new album All Life Long, created between 2020 - 2023, presents her first compositions for organ since 2019’s breakthrough album The Sacrificial Code alongside interrelated pieces for voice and brass performed by Macadam Ensemble and Anima Brass. Over the course of twelve pieces, harmonic themes and patterns recur, presented in altered forms and for varied instrumentation. They emerge and reemerge like echoes of their former selves, making the familiar uncanny. Propelled by lungs and breath rather than bellows and oscillators, Malone’s compositions for choir and brass take on expressive qualities that complicate the austerity that has defined her work, introducing lyricism and the beauty of human fallibility into music that has been driven by mechanical processes. At the same time, the works for organ, performed by Malone with additional accompaniment by Stephen O’Malley on four different organs dating from the 15th to 17th centuries, underscore the mighty, spectral power that those rigorous operations can achieve. All Life Long simmers in an ever-shifting tension between repetition and variation. The pieces for brass, organ, and voice are alternated asymmetrically, providing nearly continuous timbral fluctuation across its 78-minute runtime even as thematic material reiterates. Each composition’s internal framework of fractal pattern permutations has the paradoxical effect of creating anticipated keystone moments of dramatic reverie and lulling the listener into believing in an illusory endlessness. On an even more granular level, the historical meantone tuning systems of each organ used, and the variable intonation of brass and voice, provide further points of emotional excavation within the harmony. The titular composition “All Life Long” appears twice on the album, first as an extended canon for organ and again in the final quarter, compactly arranged for voice. In the latter, Malone pairs the music with “The Crying Water” by Arthur Symons, a poem steeped in language of mourning and eternity. For organ, “All Life Long” moves with a patient stateliness, the drama concentrated in moments when shifting tonalities generate and release dissonance and ecstasy. For voice, each word is saturated with feeling, the singers swooping gracefully downward to capture the melancholy of the narrator’s relationship to the timeless tears of the sea. “Passage Through The Spheres,” the album’s opening piece, contains lyrics in Italian pulled from Giorgio Agamben’s essay In Praise of Profanation. In it, Agamben defines profanation as, in part, the act of bringing back to communal, secular use that which has been segregated to the realm of the sacred, a process Malone enacts each time she performs on church organs. This is not music of praise, or of spiritual revelation, but it is an artistic enactment of translating the indescribable. It carries the gravity of liturgical chant, and its fixation on the infinite, but draws its weight from the earthly realm of human experience. A music that draws the listener into the present moment where they can discover themselves within the interwoven musical patterns that can come to resemble the passage of days, weeks, years, a lifetime.

Becoming Peter Ivers tells the story of the late Peter Ivers, a virtuosic songwriter and musician whose antics bridged not just 60s counterculture and New Wave music but also film, theater, and music television. Written and recorded in Los Angeles in the mid-to-late-1970s, Becoming Peter Ivers raises the curtain on this mischievous master of ceremonies, who, harmonica in hand, rarely missed a chance to light up an audience. Since his untimely death in 1983, Ivers¡Ç short but storied life has been the subject of much research and remembrance. Becoming Peter Ivers is the most expansive effort yet to collect his archival recordings. ¡ÈDemos are often better than records,¡É Ivers wrote. ¡ÈMore energy, more soul, more guts.¡É The statement anticipates the appearance of Becoming Peter Ivers, which was assembled from a trove of demo cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes that Ivers recorded variously at his home in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, and Hollywood studios for a pair of major label albums in 1974 and 1976. While the two commercially released albums feature the resources of session musicians and state-of-the-art studio detail, Becoming Peter Ivers highlights the private moments of Ivers¡Ç musical energy, frequently pared down to piano, drum machine, harmonica, and Peter¡Çs ageless voice. Though technically not Ivers¡Ç debut album (in 1969 Epic Records released Knight Of The Blue Communion, Peter¡Çs psychedelic jazz odyssey of sorts), Terminal Love was the A&R brainchild of music legend Van Dyke Parks. Already a masterful harmonica player (respectively mentored by blues legend Little Walter and jazz bassist Buell Neidlinger while he was a student at Harvard in the late 60s), Ivers wove his harp melodies through the sensuously colored but unconventionally arranged pop compositions of Terminal Love and its self-titled follow up, which, like the New York Dolls at the same time, explored the libidinous, ironic, and artful possibilities of the rock template. A studious artist, Ivers recorded hundreds of writing and rehearsal sessions onto reel-toreel and cassette tapes, but notes were either scarcely kept or have since been lost. RVNG Intl. collaborated with Ivers¡Ç longtime friend and supporter Steven Martin, as well as his lifelong companion Lucy Fisher, to tell an intimate story of Peter¡Çs creative journey through this untold music. The collection includes tracks that recurred in Ivers¡Ç ouvre over the years; ¡ÈAlpha Centauri,¡É ¡ÈEighteen And Dreaming,¡É ¡ÈMiraculous Weekend.¡É And, of course, ¡ÈIn Heaven¡É – the song co-written with David Lynch and commissioned by the filmmaker to be featured in a now-iconic scene of Eraserhead. An accomplished Yogi by the late 70s, Ivers was as spiritual as he was playful. Accentuated by his cherubic face and compact height, Ivers¡Ç vitality and curiosity became a part of his poetic sensibility, a quality that also characterizes his singing voice. Fisher remembers Ivers calling his days holed up in the studio as ¡Èsnowy days,¡É as if he had been cut from school and let free to roam on his own. ¡ÈNo one knows what Peter Ivers does on a snowy day,¡É he would say. In 1980, Ivers became involved with the Los Angeles-area public access show New Wave Theatre, serving as its host and paternal misfit. Ivers would introduce a new generation of groups like Fear, Dead Kennedys, and Suburban Lawns while playing a kind-of ¡Èstraight¡É man, deliberately baiting the punks with square questions and frocked fashion. His signature question to guests was delivered deadpan: ¡ÈWhat is the meaning of life?¡É Ivers died, tragically, the victim of a violent homicide in 1983 that remains unsolved. A shock to his community, his death all but fazed the LAPD, who treated the investigation with less than minimum care. A labor of love that took RVNG Intl. over five years to complete, Becoming Peter Ivers re-frames Peter¡Çs music as the centerpiece of his captivating story, concentrating on the work he made during his numerous retreats into art, or, as he put it, during his snowy days.

Divine Comedy stands as a magnum opus crafted by two of the foremost composers of their era, boasting a musical ambition akin to Dante’s poem and its visual interpretation by Sandro Botticelli or Gustave Doré. For a long time, this triptych was presented as a two-sided work in which Bernard Parmegiani’s Hell and François Bayle’s Purgatory responded to and extended each other, guided by Michel Hermon’s voice through the listener’s imagination. Because Paradise, a mixed piece co-composed and performed live, had never been released on record before. Indeed, fifty years after its premiere, Paradise is unveiled to our ears, thereby rounding off the very first complete edition of the Divine Comedy.

Since debuting his Khotin project in 2014, Edmonton’s Dylan Khotin-Foote has fine-tuned an impressionistic, dream-like style of music that straddles multiple sonic worlds. His output often sways from gentle synthesized atmospherics to hypnotic, dance-minded frameworks. His self-released 2018 LP, Beautiful You, offered a study on melody and memory; the album’s nostalgia-nudging use of passing environments, voices, and abstractions captivated a cult following, a rare 4.5 review in Resident Advisor and the attention of Ghostly International, who pressed the cassette on vinyl for wider circulation in 2019. Now, Khotin reveals his first collection of new material since the signing. The album is a fluid continuation of his blissful and melancholic songcraft, extended humbly and warmly, Finds You Well.

As tongue-in-cheek as the title may appear, the phrase has haunted the producer for some time. Most often seen at the start of correspondence, the words “I hope this email finds you well” can land with varying levels of sincerity, depending on context and mood. Khotin-Foote started to read the line more ominously during the onset of the pandemic. So, this set of music winks at both possibilities, mixing a platitude’s opaque optimism with lurking uncertainty.

Finds You Well can be heard in near-symmetrical halves: its 10 tracks represent the selections from a bounty of demos that, with less modesty, could have filled two records, one active and the other ambient. The resulting set isn’t an even split but it’s close. The A-side centers on the album’s steadiest sequence of beat-centric material. “Ivory Tower” is inextricably tied to benchmarks set by late ‘90s downtempo forerunners, spilling lucious and narcotic synth modulations across a sprinkler’s spray of breakbeats. Khotin’s sprightly melodic noodling brings that touchstone sound into vogue, bubbling up in free-form spurts. The sequence continues through the propulsive “Heavyball,” into “Groove 32,” which begins with a funky bit-clipped drum and bongo boogie. A tight bass-line plugs into place, building a grid for square-wave pads, shimmering melodic textures, and stuttering vocal samples to percolate in.

Khotin’s tone stabilizes on the B-side, balancing decidedly bucolic terrain with suspiciously eerie melancholy. Voices wander in the sprawling frequency sweeps. Organic textures sizzle and sputter in the clouds. “WEM Lagoon Jump” references local West Edmonton folklore, the time a kid jumped from a shopping mall's second-floor balcony into the main pavilion’s fountain. After the splash, we land in the record’s most satisfying stasis, “Your Favorite Building.” A brittle clave and muffled kick hover in a wobbly mist of organ chords; the building is gorgeous, but seen at night, and empty, and from this angle, those shadows seem to crop up more of those subdued tremors, those nostalgic creeps, those droll musings. From behind a wall of melody, a kid peeks their head and softly sings, “you must love the world because it’s wonderful,” the vocal snippet comes courtesy of Khotin-Foote’s sister, Amaris.

For much of Find You Well’s second half, Khotin dabbles in a dusty and slightly detuned piano sound, revealing an artist unafraid to change shapes but maintain course. This set of chimeric visions sidesteps the subdued bombast that fills the A-side; instead, it suggests a counterpoint emphasizing the uncanny overlap between well wishes and empty promises. 

Khotin by Vancouver producer Dylan Khotin-Foote is a reissue of the cassette release that sold out instantly at bandcamp in 2018! The profound ambient sound is a chill-out refinement of the unfathomable depth of the previous work, which is both immersive and sleepy, and has been beautifully incorporated into the lo-fi feel of the artwork while maintaining the vibrancy of the spiritual & naturalistic sound world. This is a masterpiece of beauty that cannot be described in words, with a profound sound world that creates a dreamy fantasy land on a windowsill in broad daylight, only to sink into the border between Hades and reality. A masterpiece of unspeakable beauty. Highly recommended for all music lovers from new age to ambient and Balearic.

An Obscure Sound Documentary from Sado Island — A Compilation Capturing the Present Through 10 Artists Living Within Its Environment

Sado Island, located in the Sea of Japan, is a place where ancient traditions continue to thrive amidst rich natural landscapes. Noh stages still remain across local villages, and practices such as Noh theater and Ondeko drumming are woven into the daily lives of its residents. Surrounded by sea and mountains, the island offers a unique cultural and environmental context for contemporary creativity to emerge. This compilation album, produced in 2025, serves as a sonic documentary capturing the music and people of Sado as they exist today. While rooted in the island’s deep cultural heritage, the album also presents a fresh wave of expression and imagination, offering new perspectives shaped by place, tradition, and personal vision. The album features ten creative units, each contributing original works that reflect the atmosphere and rhythms of life on the island. Included are solo pieces by Yuta Sumiyoshi and Masayasu Maeda, both key members of Kodo—the internationally acclaimed taiko performing arts ensemble known for transcending tradition through innovation. Sadrum brings a raw, organic groove through the use of handmade bamboo drums, crafted from moso bamboo that grows naturally on Sado. Composer Nozomu Sato presents his project Plantar, which showcases a wide-ranging musical language from pop to the avant-garde. Gilles Stassart, a chef and artist who runs the Sado-based restaurant La Pagode, explores the fusion of gastronomy and art in his contribution. Charles Munka, a comtemporary artist recognized for turning scribbled notes from around the world into abstract artworks, offers an ambient mix inspired by the spirit of Noh. Contemporary artist Morito Yoshida, a central figure in the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, contributes a piece reflecting his pioneering vision across art and community. Kota Aoki, known for his experimental paintings and sound works, adds a composition grounded in a personal and deeply aesthetic approach. Miyuki Fukunishi, active in music since the 1990s, explores new possibilities in composition through laptop-based production techniques. The album also features The Fugu Plan?, a collaborative unit led by ukulele player Yuka and bassist Shanir Ezra Blumenkranz, whose work is widely recognized through his association with John Zorn’s Tzadik label. Their piece brings a cross-cultural resonance that connects Sado to a broader global soundscape. Beyond the music, the project is also deeply rooted in the island. The album cover features NAMI (“wave”), a photograph by Syoin Kajii—a Sado-based photographer and Buddhist monk—capturing the living rhythm of the sea. The liner notes are written by Noi Sawaragi, an influential art critic and advisor to the Sado Island Galaxy Art Festival, adding critical depth to the project’s cultural context. A work that captures the very essence of Sado’s present—every element of the album has been created by individuals uniquely connected to the island.

KMRU is the moniker of Joseph Kamaru, a sound artist, and producer based in Nairobi. One of the leading exponents of the burgeoning experimental music scene in Nairobi and beyond he was listed by Resident Advisor as one of ’15 East African Artists You Need To Hear’ in 2018 and is a regular performer at the fabled Nyegenyege Festival having also presented live performances at CTM festival and Gamma Festival. Peel is KMRU’s first release for Editions Mego. exquisite mix of field recordings and electronics unravelling at a repetitive and leisurely pace to expose a rich tapestry of sound that has been revered for it’s ability to cross borders with the sheer undertow of emotional content. The subtle calming atmosphere within Peel belies the compositional prowess as layers of delicate sounds wrap around each other creating a hybrid new form ambient musics both captivating through it’s textural depth and kaleidoscopic patterns. The track titles lend themselves to the themes and mood set within: Why are you here, Well, Solace, Klang, Insubstantial and the title track. This is a deep heartfelt journey with a new strong voice being expressed through the means of organically presented electronic ambient sounds, one which reveals further layers on repeat listens.