MUSIC
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Sweet And Nice is the vital debut album from Jamaica’s undisputed first lady of song Marcia Griffiths. It's reggae at its most soulful. Slinking through a tight ten tracks of R&B and pop-sourced material, it became an instant best seller. 45 years after its initial release the LP is available again on vinyl, now as a double LP, with an extra record collecting 14 rare tracks.
Everything’s been remastered of course, including the original LP, so Sweet And Nice now sounds even sweeter, and even nicer.
At long last, this legendary gem returns! A coveted treasure among Japanese jazz collectors, the album showcases bassist Hideto Kanai directing a 17‑member big band in a powerful and forward‑thinking exploration of orchestral jazz.
Side A
1. 夢は今日も / Dream Again Today
2. 造花の原野_1976 / Wilderness of False Flowers_1976
3. 白い目覚め / White Awakening
4. Guitar Solo 1（ボーナス・トラック *Vinyl Only）
Side B
1. カーニバル / Carnival
2. 氷の炎 / Flame of Ice
Side C
1. Guitar Solo 2（ボーナス・トラック *Vinyl Only）
2, 夜、暗殺者の夜 / The Night, Assassin’s Night
3. お前の眼に夜を見た / Saw the Night in Your Eyes
Side D
1. イビスキュスの花 或いは満ち足りた死 / Hibiscus Flower otherwise Dying Satisfied
2. Enter the Mirror
A key work from the golden era of Impulse! Records, Love in Us All is a 1974 masterpiece by spiritual jazz seeker Pharoah Sanders, now reissued on vinyl. As the title suggests, this album is a sonic journey of devotion and transcendence toward the “love within us all.” A powerful balance of mysticism and compassion, chaos and serenity—this is truly music shaped by love and the cosmos. An eternal resonance, more vital now than ever.
Collision Drive is Alan Vega’s second solo studio album, originally released in 1981. If his debut laid the groundwork for a raw, minimalist take on rockabilly and blues, Collision Drive expands the palette with a grittier, more layered, and unfiltered energy. Here Vega’s lyrics channel universal themes deeply rooted in his fascination with street life, science fiction, politics, comics, love and the mysteries of the universe. It’s a record that pulses with feeling and rebellion, displaying the full spectrum of human experience and Vega’s evolving vision.
Alan was always reinventing himself, creating and refining his mastery of variation while maintaining his own unparalleled and identifiable aesthetic. Sonically, this album is more dynamic than his first. Ditching drum machines for a live drummer, and enlisting a hard rock band to back him, Collision Drive offered a different view of Vega’s artistic vision. The aching punk rockabilly of “Magdalena 82” unfolds with a hypnotic blend of guitar slides and frenetic energy, while Vega’s cover of “Be Bop A Lula” transforms Gene Vincent’s classic into an aggressively charged, manic howl. Elsewhere, tracks like the hard-driving cosmic rock n roll “Raver” push into psychobilly territory. Vega was relentlessly innovative, continuously paving new ground.
Newly remastered by Josh Bonati from the original tapes, Collision Drive receives a reverent reissue from Sacred Bones Records.
Here we witness the full ascension into his own mythology: part rockabilly outlaw, part cosmic preacher, part outsider visionary. Broader in scope than his debut but just as uncompromising, Collision Drive is a bold and personal exploration of sound and identity. Raw, electrifying, and groundbreaking, it remains a cult cornerstone of outsider rock and a touchstone in the evolution of art-punk and experimental pop from one of New York’s most fearless icons.
Alan Vega’s self-titled debut solo album was released in 1980 during the same period Suicide released their second album, Suicide: Alan Vega and Martin Rev. While Suicide’s label ZE Records was interested in pushing the duo toward a synthetic disco sound inspired by Moroder’s production on Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” Vega felt a pull in a different direction. He wanted to dig deeper into the roots of his own sonic identity, fueled by rockabilly, early rock n roll, and his enduring love for Elvis Presley. Filling the gaps between recording with Suicide, and fleshing out the songs he was writing on his own, Vega started to create his first record and performing live to develop this sound.
As with his visual art, Vega layered sound in a minimalist, dynamic and intentional way. The result was a fiercely singular album built from raw materials and deeply rooted in Vega’s artistic vision. Tracks like the classic anthem “Jukebox Babe” with its jiving rhythm and minimalist swagger, captured that approach completely and went on to become a hit in France. “Kung Foo Cowboy” takes on a southern twist, strongly leaning into the blues, while the golden pop shine of “Ice Drummer” rings in melodic yet plaintive vocals, marching drums and a tasteful harmonica solo. “Bye Bye Bayou” is a haunted slice of mutant rockabilly that fuses 50s rock with Vega’s eccentric performance style and was later reimagined in the 2009 cover by LCD Soundsystem, introducing Vega’s solo work to a new generation. Similarly, The Flaming Lips’s 1994 cover of “Ice Drummer” paid homage to Vega’s outsider spirit.
Now remastered by Josh Bonati from the original tapes and available on streaming services for the first time, Alan Vega has been faithfully reissued by Sacred Bones Records, preserving the raw intensity of Vega’s original recordings while making them newly accessible to listeners around the world.
Alan Vega is more than a solo debut, it’s a declaration of artistic independence and freedom from one of New York’s most influential and uncompromising artists. Stripped of Suicide’s intense electronics yet retaining Vega’s outsider energy and edge, the album translates early rock 'n roll through an art-punk filter that stands the test of time as a cult masterpiece in its own right.
During his time with the Yosuke Yamashita Trio, he poured his heart and soul into every single note. In the early 1970s, he wove flashes of inspiration and impulse into his melodies, blowing with powerful intensity. And now, on this album, Seiichi Nakamura undergoes yet another transformation. As he himself says, “It’s the feeling of sharing a space together and soaring freely like a bird. That’s the ideal,” the overlapping sounds and pauses richly expand the space, through which Nakamura’s saxophone dashes with exuberance. The expansive and exhilarating “Wolf’s Theme,” inspired by author Kazumasa Hirai’s “Wolf Guy” series, “Harappa,” where a nostalgic melody shines against a laid-back groove; “Body & Soul” and “I Can’t Get Started,” which weave together standards with care and elegance; and “Viva Giappone,” with its delightful sense of dynamism and openness—here, Nakamura’s ideal is magnificently realized. Featuring Toshiyuki Daitoku, Aki Takase, and Ryojiro Furusawa.
One of the most important works in hip-hop history, Nas's legendary 1994 debut album, Illmatic. Nas, hailing from Queensbridge, New York, crafted lyrics at the age of 20 that blend the harsh realities of the streets with poetic imagination, achieving an astonishing level of perfection. The album features a lineup of producers including DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Large Professor, and Q-Tip, with beats rooted in jazz and soul samples, blending hard-hitting rhythms with lyrical depth. In just 10 tracks and under 40 minutes, the album condenses the aesthetics and realism of East Coast hip-hop. It is a masterpiece that maximizes the potential of rap as an art form and serves as definitive proof of hip-hop's establishment as an art form.
RYUICHI SAKAMOTO'S ULTRA RARE FIRST ALBUM UNDER HIS NAME - RECORDED WITH RENOWNED PERCUSSIONIST TOSHI TSUCHITORI FOR ALM RECORDS - REISSUED FOR THE FIRST TIME ON VINYL WITH AUDIO REMASTERED BY HEBA KADRY AND LINER NOTES BY ANDY BETA
Wewantsounds is delighted to announce the first vinyl reissue of Disappointment–Hateruma, the 1976 ALM Records release by percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The album is notable as Sakamoto’s first recording issued under his own name and represents one of the few occasions he explored fully improvised music during the 1970s. It provides a vital document for understanding Sakamoto’s early development as a composer and performer, capturing a period when he was experimenting with ambient soundscapes and textured improvisation. This edition features original artwork, audio remastered by Heba Kadry and new liner notes by Andy Beta.
Ryuichi Sakamoto is widely recognized as one of the most important artists of his generation. At the time of Disappointment–Hateruma, he was still a student at the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music and active in Shinjuku’s experimental music circles. He was busy contributing to Transonic Magazine, performing with the multimedia group Gakushudan, and working with musicians pushing the boundaries of jazz, free improvisation, and contemporary composition.
on his side, revered Japanese percussionist Toshi Tsuchitori, who had recently returned from New York, brought influences from Milford Graves’ approach to drumming, including African rhythms, ritualized performance, and a holistic approach that combined music, movement, and philosophy. Sakamoto and Tsuchitori had previously played together in Gakushudan, but neither considered those early encounters definitive. As Andy Beta notes in the liner notes, Sakamoto was “trying to break the traditional form of music, to break open the narrow genres of contemporary music,” and this recording captures one of the rare moments when his exploratory piano work met Tsuchitori’s distinct rhythmic language in a studio setting.
The album, originally released in 1976 on producer Yukio Kojima’s influential ALM Records imprint, is structured across four tracks, with the first, "綾 (Aya)," filling the entirety of Side 1, while Side 2 contains three shorter pieces, each exploring different combinations of instruments and sound sources. The recordings employ a wide array of textures, from prepared piano, bells, marimba, and gongs to EMS synthesizer and voice. Together, the tracks create hypnotic, ethereal soundscapes and rich sonic textures that highlight the interplay between Sakamoto’s experimental piano work and Tsuchitori’s percussive expertise.
Remastered by renowned sound engineer Heba Kadry, this new edition highlights the detail, range, and clarity of the original album, making the ultra-rare Disappointment-Hateruma available worldwide for the first time. It stands as a key early document of Sakamoto’s work and situates the recordings within the broader context of his formative years and Tokyo’s mid-1970s cutting-edge music scene.
Edition of 250. Deluxe edition + insert. For eighteen months, between 1984 and 1985, Patrick Lysaght played flute, strings, and percussion inside the Rainforest Birdhouse at the Rio Grande Zoo in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His audience and collaborators: 150 birds of 42 species.
The result is one of the earliest and most radical documents of interspecies improvisation. Predating the current wave of sound ecology by decades, For The Birds sits comfortably alongside the biophonic research of Bernie Krause, the ornithological field recordings of Jean C. Roché, the Deep Listening practice of Pauline Oliveros, and the interspecies experiments of Jim Nollman. A missing link unearthed.
Lysaght didn't record the birds. He played with them. On Downstream, the talking drum establishes a backdrop while the birds take the lead. On Mourning Music, a threnody for his father, the birds seemed to be respectfully listening. On Light Sensitive, delicate percussion triggers avian response. Complex clouds of point notes build to rich density, following what the original notes call "the excitement of chance and the probability of experience."
Originally released in 1985 on Frank Records, Santa Fe. Now reissued with mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi
** Edition of 250 copies, remastered from the original master tapes ** Real Time is an extraordinary example of interaction between musicians coming from different worlds of new music. I had the chance to perform with those two great musicians on other occasions: in duo with Alvin Curran and in duo, trio and sextet with Evan Parker. Alvin came from the American school, full of minimalist references, melodic structures and open to all kinds of contamination. Evan had left jazz to accomplish his own instrumental language, aiming at total improvisation. The idea of getting them to put together a trio that would perform several concerts and recording was one of the most exciting moments of my career. Our three languages found a common ground of expression where different musical backgrounds came together and created a unique blend for that period of time. (Andrea Centazzo)
Andrea Centazzo percussion, percussion synthesizer
Alvin Curran synthesizer, piano, trumpet
Evan Parker soprano & tenor saxophones
Recorded live in concert Rome, Italy December 13, 1977
Engineer: Nicola Bernardini
Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio
** Edition of 250 copies, remastered from the original master tapes ** Recorded live in concert. Rome, Italy December 12-13, 1977 by Nicola Bernardini and at Teatro Comunale, Pistoia, Italy December 14, 1977 by Carla Lugli. "It was a magic evening. Not only did the trio burst with a creative energy that was homogeneous and interactive, but the acoustics, usually inadequate, of the half-empty sports pavilion with a capacity of 10,000 people, gave the music an ethereal transparency and crystalline purity that the recording captured and the CD newly presents in all its singular beauty."(Andrea Centazzo)
Andrea Centazzo percussion, percussion synthesizer
Alvin Curran synthesizer, piano, trumpet
Evan Parker soprano & tenor saxophones
Recorded live in concert at Teatro Comunale, Pistoia, Italy December 14, 1977 by Carla Lugli
Remastered from the original tapes by Matt Bordin at Outside Inside Studio
The archive is not neutral. In 2019, Andrea Centazzo discovered unlabeled tape reels in his mother's attic in Udine - boxes assumed lost seven years earlier. What emerged from these deteriorating reels, transferred by engineer Sergio Tomasini during COVID lockdowns, was unexpected: unreleased recordings from the original Elektriktus sessions of 1973-76, alongside other archival materials including previously unknown collaborations with Steve Lacy and Evan Parker from the same period.Centazzo's solution was conceptually elegant: add contemporary digital electronics to the original analog Elektriktus recordings, creating temporal palimpsest in which the seventy-something composer engages in dialogue with his younger self. Crucially, his fundamental approach hasn't changed. "Making a 10-minute loop meant playing and overdubbing for 10 minutes!" This rejection of computer automation, this insistence on the hand-played and physically executed, links 2025 to 1975 through continuous methodology.Vol. 2 operates in complex register: contemporary electronics don't "update" the original recordings but exist in conversation with them. By overlaying 2025 digital work onto 1975 analog recordings, Centazzo creates proof that affinities between cosmic drift and percussive grounding were present in the original conception, waiting to be heard.The reborn Ictus label presents both volumes as complementary documents: Vol. 1 preserving the original artifact in its analog integrity, Vol. 2 revealing latent possibilities through temporal superimposition. Together, they map territory that standard histories have overlooked - the Italian synthesis of kosmische consciousness and Mediterranean sensibility.This temporal doubling produces music that is neither nostalgic recreation nor radical revision but something more complex - a conversation between past and present, between the composer who created these sounds in the mid-1970s and the artist who now understands their full implications. The phantom that PDU Records once denied a proper name finally speaks, twice, across fifty years.
In the summer of 1976, a peculiar album appeared in Italian record shops bearing no artist name - only the cryptic moniker Elektriktus. The music posed a question that wouldn't be answered for decades: who had created this hybrid of jazz sensibility and kosmische synthesis? The answer was hiding in plain sight. Andrea Centazzo - recognized figure in European free improvisation who had shared stages with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey - had been leading a double life between touring with Giorgio Gaslini's quartet, conducting experiments with Minimoog, Davolisint, and the GEM Rodeo 49 synthesizer.
PDU Records - owned by pop icon Mina and Italy's primary distributor for German avant-garde labels including Brain, Kosmische Musik, and Pilz, making PDU the Italian gateway to Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Cosmic Jokers, and the broader kosmische scene, often releasing these albums in prestigious Quadraphonic editions - recognized the value of what Centazzo had created but worried his jazz identity would confuse the cosmic electronics market. The solution: create Elektriktus as pseudonym, fusing "electronic" with "Ictus," the name Centazzo would give to his own label and percussion series.
Where German kosmische musik tended toward the infinite and abstract - Conrad Schnitzler's austere minimalism, Tangerine Dream's sequencer-driven expanses - Centazzo's electronic music retained tactile, physical quality. Franco Feruglio's upright bass walks and breathes, remembering northern Italian folk traditions. Centazzo's percussion maintains the rhythmic intelligence of jazz improvisation even when filtered through electronics. Electronic Mind Waves presents a heady dive into mystical electronics at the intersection of kosmische consciousness and jazz improvisation. Each of the eight tracks unfolds as its own sonic meditation, incorporating otherworldly themes through wild synth lines played against meandering bass patterns and Centazzo's driving yet nuanced percussion - pushing the listener into cosmic spaces while maintaining the tactile, almost physical quality that distinguishes Italian cosmic music from its German counterparts.
These eight synth-fueled tracks sound close to what kraut/cosmische heads were doing at the time - think Conrad Schnitzler, Deuter, or Cosmic Jokers, and also other European experimentalists like Richard Pinhas' Heldon, Spacecraft, Didier Bocquet, Seesselberg, F.G. Experimental Laboratory, Roberto Cacciapaglia, or Hydrus. Elektriktus represents the most adventurous experimental sounds under kosmische influence to emerge from Italy. What made Electronic Mind Waves significant wasn't imitation of German models, but transformation of them through Mediterranean sensibility and freeform jazz ethos.
The album's 1976 appearance came at a pivotal moment. Rock Progressivo Italiano - the movement that had produced the political complexity of Area, the folk-inflected experimentation of Stormy Six, the symphonic ambitions of Le Orme - was entering terminal crisis. Elektriktus arrived into this collapse: anonymous, difficult to market, structurally uncommercial. Poor distribution ensured its swift disappearance. But as often happens with prematurely buried artifacts, the album acquired an afterlife in collector circles, becoming whispered legend - a forgotten electronic gem that not only reflected the Italian craze for space synth, but looked north to the genius of electronic Krautrockers while maintaining distinctly Mediterranean character.
Strongly recommended to fans of minimal electronic music, kosmische sounds and ambient soundscapes.
In the late 1980s, Klaus Wiese (Popol Vuh) deepened his connection with Tibetan culture. The result is a series of works solely dedicated to the universal purity of the Singing Bowls. Uranus, perhaps the most rigorous of these, is an intense meditation on the trans-personal sphere of the VI chackra. The music becomes like a single harmonic chant, the reflection of a constant flow of divine light, which transforms the psyche and dilates the secret passages of the heart. In the galaxy of pure sound, the accumulated overtones offer the intrepid listener the access to a prismatic, fluoriscence-rich consciousness. The ego thus becomes the sonorous composer of itself, of the vital circle flooded with beneficial acoustic vibrations. In this sense, Uranus, originally published on tape (Aquamarin Verlag/1988), also marks a parallel with the same research by Henry Wolff & Nancy Hennings or Nada Himalaya's Deuter. CD edition co-released with Aquamarin Verlag.
In the late 1980s, Klaus Wiese (Popol Vuh) deepened his connection with Tibetan culture. The result is a series of works solely dedicated to the universal purity of the Singing Bowls. Uranus, perhaps the most rigorous of these, is an intense meditation on the trans-personal sphere of the VI chackra. The music becomes like a single harmonic chant, the reflection of a constant flow of divine light, which transforms the psyche and dilates the secret passages of the heart. In the galaxy of pure sound, the accumulated overtones offer the intrepid listener the access to a prismatic, fluoriscence-rich consciousness. The ego thus becomes the sonorous composer of itself, of the vital circle flooded with beneficial acoustic vibrations. In this sense, Uranus, originally published on tape (Aquamarin Verlag/1988), also marks a parallel with the same research by Henry Wolff & Nancy Hennings or Nada Himalaya's Deuter. CD edition co-released with Aquamarin Verlag.
fully remastered from the original tapes** A mysterious sound aurora on the magical paths of the infinite universe of percussion, originally released in 1985 and then almost completley lost. Moon On The Water were a trio of percussionists based in Italy - David Searcy and Jonathan Scully, both American tympani players in the Scala Philarmonic Orchestra, with the legendary Italian jazz drummer Tiziano Tononi, who worked with everyone from Roberto Musci, to Muhal Richard Abrams, Pierre Favre (who later joined the group), Andrew Cyrille, Barre Phillips, and Steve Lacy. Drawing on a diversity of experience, joined collectively by a unified love of rhythm and sound, they assembled a percussion record of the highest order - an unclassifiable work which should be legendary, and leaves you confounded that it’s not.
Within the history of efforts dedicated to percussion, Moon On The Water’s debut stands apart. A singular work, made remarkable by the diversity and range of its sonorities and structures. The scope of its ambition is startling. Utilizing the full intellect, experience, and talent of its creators, it employs field recording against a stunning array of instrumentation - seemingly everything from which rhythm and resonant tone could be drawn. The result renders a remarkable effect. From the delicate pulse of nature, deep resonances and carefully placed tone, intricate structures and tempos as slow as they go, across its movements the album rewrites how composition for percussion should be understood, before giving way to consuming and ecstatic rhythms which reference the Brazilian tradition of Batucada, various trance and ritual traditions of Africa, and drum solos from Free Jazz and Rock. This is as good as percussion records get. A lost marvel - accessible while distinctly avant-garde. The throbbing pulse of creative joy, distilled onto two sides of wax.
Ecstatic elements of Japan ambient minimalism dialogue with contemporary music solutions (Varèse, Ligeti), in the stream of a harmonious fusion of ancient and modern. It’s a propitiatory ceremony of supernatural things that open portals of blissfulness, tribal and shamanic darkness, timeless jungles. Between amazon fires and African safaris, we float in the Asian rivers of meditation, lost in water games, echoes of caves and rocks in the night, synergies of frogs, birds, snakes, marimbas, chimes, gongs, and tubular woods.
The album also includes one of the sickest percussion jam we’ve heard from 1980’s Italy: the mystically-named In the Land of the Boo - Bam. Exploring a wide range of percussions, from mallet instruments to drums, the band tightly builds a hypnotic jam with a strong Mediterranean feeling, maybe partly provided by the «Tullio de Piscopo-esque» drumming pattern. As the song goes by, the vibe gets more and more shamanic, often changing directions before climaxing in an epic final. True uplifting trance music!
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.
2024 Repress. Essential stuff from Finnish legend, Mika Vaino ( Ø, Pan Sonic ++ + +).
One for the headphone amp / hi fi sound system crew.
Minimal & reduced nordic techno and electronics - Mika Vaino's second album from 1996 - only released on vinyl for the first time in 2019.
Under The Pipal Tree is the debut album by now-legendary Japanese experimental rock band, MONO. Released in 2001 on avant-garde icon John Zorn's Tzadik label, Under The Pipal Tree showcased a young Japanese quartet whose wide range of influences – most notably Sonic Youth, Mogwai, The Velvet Underground, and Neil Young's Crazy Horse – were on ferocious and ambitious display. Though MONO would eventually become known for their expert marriage of metal and classical genres, Under The Pipal Tree highlights the band's psychedelic roots. Long stretches of hypnotic, melodic washes give way to scorching guitar freakouts that evaporate into haunting silence. It's remarkable not just for its earnest exploration, but for its startling execution. Fifteen years and eight albums later, Under The Pipal Tree stands as one of the great debut albums by a seminal underground band. Finally released on vinyl for the first time ever, Under The Pipal Tree has been remastered for vinyl by longtime friend and tour mate, Bob Weston at Chicago Mastering Service. The double album is packaged in all new artwork, and is pressed onto audiophile-quality 100% virgin vinyl. This stunning album has never looked, sounded, or felt better.
Originally compiled & released in 2015 by Leaving Records & Laraaji, we proudly present (again), with humble gratitude, three re-issues of seminal works by new age musician, composer, and laughter meditation workshop leader Laraaji - recorded between 1978 and 1983. Although some excerpts of the material have been featured on various compilations, this was the first time in over 30 years that one can experience the uninterrupted duration of these cosmic etudes in their complete form. The added length creates an immersive environment of fresh, exploratory, experimental and healing sounds in which to dwell– these are the proper, entire experiences as intended by their creator.
1978’s Lotus Collage was recorded live in a Park Slope, Brooklyn living room during Laraaji’s busker years. The sounds consist of freestyle electric open tuned zither/harp, Ecstatic Rhythmic hammer percussion, and free flow open hand ethereal moods. This recording crucially predates Laraaji’s now mythological “discovery” by Brian Eno, and is significant as one of Laraaji’s first electric zither recordings. This early recording captures a youthful Laraaji at the outset of his musical journey, still ripe for discovery, exploration, and transcendence. 1981’s Unicorns in Paradise was performed on electric keyboard Casiotone MT-70, and once again features Laraaji’s iconic zither in a flowing atmospheric improvisation. Laraaji describes its sonic environs as “an ideal habitat in another dimension of timelessness.” Many years later, this description holds true as its vibrant sounds inspire sensual reflections of the excited imagination. The final re-issue consists of two parts. Its first side, “Trance Celestial,” is a glowing, amorphous survey of muted and malleable electric sounds. Its uncharacteristically dark atmospheres nevertheless still paint a surreal atmosphere for self-reflection. Much beauty and inner-wisdom can be found in the depths of its inward trajectory. In contrast, the title track is a guided meditation full of light and optimism. Its spoken word segments and patient arrangements illustrate a constructive framework for enjoying the whole of Laraaji’s extensive catalog.
Originally, these releases were hand-made and dubbed to cassette by Laraaji himself. Of the process, he says “I felt like I was distributing artwork. As a matter of fact, for some of the cassettes I actually did some extra handwork on the label, doing a screen print or magic marker to add some color. So there was a sense of how to be an industry homemade artist direct-to-consumer feeling in the early years. People would ask for cassette tapes of an issue that I had not mass produced. So, now and then I’ll run into somebody who has a cassette tape… I’ll look at it and say, ‘Oh Wow, hand-made label, J-card and HEART.'”
Available on both cassette and digital, these re-issues offer Laraaji’s early music in both its original form and a form that did not exist at the time of its recording. Regarding this parallel, Laraaji reflects, “Having the music move in dimensions I didn’t predict… It feels like an extended blessing.”
![90 Day Men - (It (Is) It) Critical Band + [Y2K 25th Anniversary Edition] (Coke Bottle Wave Translucent 2LP)](http://meditations.jp/cdn/shop/files/212032-90-day-men-it-is-it-critical-band_{width}x.jpg?v=1759992897)
90 Day Men emerged from Chicago’s underground at the turn of the millennium with a sharp, shape-shifting take on post-rock. Their Southern Records debut blended no wave tension with hypnotic repetition, carving out eight tracks that balance wiry rhythms and atmospheric drift.
This 25th anniversary edition expands the original release with a previously unheard album recorded at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio. Engineered by Greg Norman and newly mastered by Heba Kadry, it sheds fresh light on the band’s restless creativity during their most exploratory phase.
A vital document of a scene in flux, (It (Is) It) Critical Band now stands taller than ever.
