MUSIC

Phi-Psonics is a meditative, deeply soulful, immersive instrumental group from Los Angeles, led by bassist Seth Ford-Young and featuring Sylvain Carton on woodwinds, Mitchell Yoshida on electric piano, and Josh Collazo on drums. Their beautiful music draws on jazz and classical influences together with Ford-Young’s own musical experiences, relationships, and his introduction to spirituality, yoga and philosophy at a young age. Along the way they create something uniquely their own, sharing beautiful landscapes for your spirit to roam freely within. Octava is their second album and like their debut The Cradle, it’s emotional, introspective, and unusual approach to meditative jazz offers us a beautiful space for uplifting contemplation and wields a quiet power to create a spiritually inspiring world of timeless, warm melodies and instrumental exploration for the deep listener and thoughtful voyager. Seth explains: “This album is about change and evolution to a higher version of ourselves. Understanding this journey through the idea of ascending a musical scale and arriving at a new, higher octave is natural especially for a musician. We move, struggle, and work through the various steps or tones and arrive at the octave a new version of ourselves, still the same person, but vibrating at a higher frequency.”

After crafting an all-timer with 2008's 'Hazyville', Actress set his sights on the unknown with a futureshock debut for Honest Jon's.

Wheras it's predecessor was composed over a staggered period of many years, Splazsh was fashioned in a fraction of that time, lending a tangible symmetry between shapeshifting tracks that defined and propelled the era. Of the 14 tracks, we'd previously encountered the first two, with the unstable space float of 'Hubble' appearing on a shady Thriller 12" and his remix of Various Production's 'Lost' reminding us that there are some deep cuts in the Cunningham discography.

From here in it's all about that longing, sealing the airlock and initiating pressure sequence with 'Futureproofing', before laying down 'Always Human' - can u even remember a time you didnt know this one? Showing resistance towards any categorisation, 'Get Ohn (Fairlight Mix)' swerves down a side street into a footwurkin' face-off by sliding to a mutilated mix of Jon E Cash and Chez Damier played underwater. Next we hit the erogenous interzone of 'Maze' and that incapacitatingly lush bassline designed to lock into your central nervous system and send shockwaves of piloerection to every fucking corner of your soul.

After that, we're cynically dumped into the Ferraro-esque Prince tribute 'Purple Splazsh', and on into the Detroit ghetto stalk of 'Let's Fly'. The dissonant robo-crunk of 'The Kettle Men' and closing entry 'Casanova' confirm that if anything, Actress only suffers from a surfeit of ideas. Proof, if it were needed, that there is a sprawling future beyond the stasis of so much contemporary electronic music.

Moritz von Oswald, who has laid the groundwork for a deep interaction between genuine Jamaican dub and Detroit-style classic techno through his collaborations with Mark Ernestus, dub techno legend =Basic Channel and Rhythm And Sound, is creating ambient techno. Moritz Von Oswald Trio, a legendary trio teamed up with Max Loderbauer of Sun Electric, the pioneer of , and Vladislav Delay, a master of avant-garde electronic music from Northern Europe and Finland. Stock up on the 4th album "Fetch" released in 2012 from London's prestigious !

"Combining steppy dance music, lush detail and a diaristic tone, Jack Chrysalis’ debut album dials between music that is destined to catch the ear of the club-goer and the heart of the dreamer, his signature propulsive mutations of organic techno and UK garage sounding strongly in tracks like Another Year and Coldharbour. Between these, Chrysalis threads in more introspective moments. Tracks formed by running a hand along piano keys in improvisation, or made in recollection of Koji Kondo’s clear bright musical palette for Zelda. They lend a sense of atmosphere and a deeper running mood to the album’s overworld, heightening endorphin hits from the garage swing and affording a little more bittersweetness to its textures and secrets. Whether in rush or retreat, each track on this album emerges with its own emotional resonance. There’s a sense of seasons turning, or a twilight quality that’s hard to fully pin down. “Owl music” became shorthand for Jack’s tunes, a way for Mana to capture a prescient, nocturnal flight within their environment."

Spangled 2-step swivel, hyperkinetic techno and restless ambient by Doc Sleep & Delta Rain Dance’s Beats Unlimited duo out of Berlin

Beats Unlimited put forth their 2nd effort on Hypno Discs, run by Glenn Astro aka Delta Rain Dance, urging bodies in motion from the air-filleting swing and parry of ‘Virta Chords’ with its butterfly-winged 2-step and fluttering jazz notes, to the fast-FWD hyper footwork rush of a ’Speed Dub’ recalling Sasu Ripatti’s Dance Classics experiments, and finally easing off into the the sound bathing, eye-fluttering ambient of ‘Transition Env’.

‘The surrealist, psychedelic brain-burps of notorious all-caps-tweeting wind-up-merchant Louis Johnstone aka Wanda Group. Twenty-six congealed morsels of spur-of-the-moment sound-art executed with genuine economy of means, namely… a phone. An impulsive, scatter-brained trip into the inner circles of regional weirdness, secreting a creeping unease which really gets under your skin. Fragments of aural rubble haphazardly cohere into galvanising spacial tones and textures, punctured by Johnstone’s garbled Essex rantings. The long-distance stare of warbled tape loops is abruptly fractured by a drunken sing-along in a care home for the elderly. As hallucinogenic takes on the utterly mundane, there’s an obvious kinship with Lambkin’s nocturnal, straight-to-dictaphone sound-pieces. Dan Johannsen’s splintered classical collages on that PIG tape and the suburban soliloquies of Regional Bears alumnus Russell Walker also feel closely aligned.’ (All Night Flight) With an A4 riso insert.

When Festival de Frue’s organizers asked Sam Wilkes to put together an ensemble for their 2022 festival, they initially asked for the band he created for his 2021 album “One Theme & Subsequent Improvisation.” With keyboardist Chris Fishman (Pat Metheny, Louis Cole) the only member of that group who was available, Wilkes asked that the organizers select one of two groups as an alternative: a Trio featuring drummer Craig Weinrib (Henry Threadgill, Amen Dunes) and guitarist Dylan Day (Jenny Lewis, Jackson Browne)—with whom Wilkes recently released a trio album—or a Quartet featuring Weinrib, Fishman, and keyboardist and guitarist Thom Gill (KNOWER, Joseph Shabason). “I couldn’t make the decision on which band I should bring, I felt very confused about it,” he says. Through a strange series of miscommunications—or simply a bit of serendipity—both Wilkes and the Frue organizers thought the other had suggested combining the ensembles into a Quintet including members of both groups. An idea that neither side voiced somehow became the obvious choice. The combined Quintet represents what Wilkes calls “two disparate worlds in my community,” that of the “virtuosic, fast-paced grid” of music played with Fishman and Gill, “and this other thing with Dylan that’s coming from different elements of traditional American music.” Luckily, Weinrib fits seamlessly into both worlds. While all members of the group played on Wilkes’ 2023 album Driving, they’d never all played together. They had one five-hour rehearsal in Tokyo, but, Wilkes says, “It was impossible for me to predict how this music was going to sound.” His strategy, after showing them the arrangements of several of his own compositions and a few covers, was to “allow everyone to blossom fully” with the hope that “what I’ll get is everyone’s personality being expressed unfettered.” iiyo iiyo iiyo is Sam Wilkes’ fifth album as bandleader and arranger, and the atmosphere is so rich it spills out of the speakers. The album, a document of the Quintet’s meeting, was recorded live at Festival de Frue in Kakegawa and at WWWX in Tokyo, where they played headlining sets for hundreds of people. Not that you’d know it from the intimate interplay between the players or the small-room feel of the recording. In opener “Descending,” which made its debut on Wilkes’ 2018 self-titled album, the mood is so cozy you’d swear the sound of kids at play in the back of the hall had been sampled in—another perfect bit of serendipity. For Wilkes, setting the right tone for a performance or a recording is paramount, and it’s inseparable from how he understands his role as a bassist. “My entryway into understanding my thing, what I care about the most in music, was through accompaniment; focusing on time, feel, tone, form, and most importantly, listening.” he says. “There are things that are ineffable about that, which is the energy. But there are also conscious and subconscious decisions, where I’m arranging and orchestrating to create the ultimate environment for, say, Dylan to play his melody over, or Thom to play his. Those are choices as much as reactions, combining in equal parts in-depth preparation and total improvisation” The title iiyo iiyo iiyo is a Japanese expression used in response to an outpouring of gratitude, a cheeky way of brushing the accolades off of oneself. Accordingly, the record is full of charming, homespun personality. In a gorgeous version of the standard “I Wanna Be Loved,” Day plays the melody in a way that moves between washed-out ambient gauze and a traditionally beautiful run of lines that echoes the Dinah Washington original. While the band circulates the mantric melody in “Descending,” Fishman dots around it on his Moog One, opening a new seam in a song that’s quickly become a Wilkes standard. Weinrib’s patient, impressionistic brush strokes seem to swirl beneath the melody, while Gill fogs the room with thick, reverb-heavy accompaniment from his keys. And where is Wilkes in all this? He’s guiding his friends, helping them decorate a room that he himself built, drawing them deeper into the song’s wistful, hopeful, grounded atmosphere. His polyphonic voicings—a signature of his playing—sets out the song’s boundaries and acts as both its musical and emotional anchor. It’s the approach Wilkes takes across the album, using his phrasing as both the music’s gravitational center and its heart, and he does it to perfection in the opening minute or so of “Girl.” The song originally appeared on Sam Wilkes “Sings” (2014–2016)” in what he calls a “psychotically different arrangement.” On stage in Kakegawa, he slows the song to a crawl and isolates its central chords. He plays them gently, patiently; he voices the chords with the clarity of a person who’s just cried out all of their confusion. As Wilkes says, his role as a bassist means that he’s the foundation of these songs, and foundations by their very nature tend to be obscured. Here, for one lovely moment, he strips everything back to the studs, revealing the lush architecture that holds this miraculous music together.

A classic Harold Budd album originally released in 1988. Partly recorded at the Cocteau Twins studio with production help from Robin Guthrie and Brian Eno, 'The White Arcades' effortless blend of glistening synths, limpid piano notes, foggy textures and space result in a beautiful contemplative whole.

“Although its aura is ethereal and unworldly, Budd's music is actually an exemplary form of humanly useful music. When the mundane urgencies of life, or the nonsense of our political culture, get you frazzled, which is pretty much every day these days, you can put on this music and imbibe its stillness and grace. His records are exactly the kind of music you'd play for calm and solace during a bereavement — or at a service sending someone to their final resting place. Harold Budd sounds like heaven on earth.” Simon Reynolds

"On the short-lived moment when Warner Bros. was distributing Opal records, this Harold Budd album probably reached more people than his previous work combined. One can hope so, at least. This album shows Budd at his most stylistically pure: nine pieces that rarely shift from their piano and synth instrumentation, all treated with much echo and coloration. Budd is after beauty, not menace, but with the mystery that follows it. From the pulse of "Coyote" to the grand thunder and rolling clouds of "Balthus Bemused By Color," this is a solid album, one for thinking, studying, or whatever one does when the ambient comes." - All Music

For their second album 'The Foel Tower', Quade holed up in an old stone barn in the cradle of a Welsh mountain valley.

The valley was a stark and windswept backdrop with little daylight, as the band would huddle around crackling fires each evening. “There was very much a feeling of being on the complete fringes of society,” the band says. “The last vestiges of settlement before the unrelenting barren moors that loomed over us.”

It was an environment that would shape the band – a Bristol four piece made up of Barney Matthews, Leo Fini, Matt Griffiths and Tom Connolly – and the record they have made. It’s an album that is as dreamy as it is melancholic, and as quiet and tender as it is forceful and potent – gliding across genres like winds blowing over those wide-spanning Welsh hills – to arrive at something the band half-jokingly, yet somewhat accurately, describe as “doomer sad boy, ambient-dub, folk, experimental post-rock.”

Quade is a band but it’s also a very close-knit group that have been friends since childhood who use this musical vehicle for interpersonal explorations and connections. “We’ve individually experienced a lot of difficulty over the last several years and Quade has represented a space to shelter from these,” the band says. “This means we often communicate extensively with each other about the issues affecting us individually and collectively. These conversations and concerns are central to The Foel Tower.”

In many ways, the making of this record – or any Quade record – goes way deeper than the simple writing, construction and recording of music. It is a profoundly deep and meaningful experience. “A key theme of the album relates to why we connect with specific places in the way that we do,” the group says. “We often remove ourselves to isolated valleys, sheltered from some of the painful personal struggles that we have experienced as a band. These become spaces in which we collectively purge ourselves of some of these difficulties hoping to make Quade a physical and emotional place of solace. This album celebrates these places that we’ve been able to retreat to and recuperate.”

It is a deep, dense record that is stuffed with musical, cinematic and literary influences – from Ursula La Guin and Cormac MacCarthy through to RS Thomas and Yeats – but despite the heavy, introspective and anxious nature of some of the material, it is also a record that is remarkably deft, agile and considered.

Made with producer Jack Ogborne and mixer Larry ‘Bruce’ McCarthy, there is a pleasing duality to the final sound of the record. One that feels fragile and intimate but also powerful and forceful, as introspective as it is expansive, and a record that is as detailed and textured as it is wide open and spacious.

The album title also pays homage to the place that shaped it so greatly. Within this remote Welsh valley stands the Foel Tower, a stone structure filled with valves and cylinders that can raise and lower the level of the reservoir to draw off water. Which it can then send as far as 70 miles to Birmingham. However, in the late 1800s this land was occupied by local farmers and families in the hundreds until the British Government acquired the land, cleared the valleys, and promptly displaced them in order to begin serving the vastly expanding industrial English city. The band dug into the history and politics of this and wove it into the themes they were already thinking about, using what the Foel Tower stands for as something of a contemporary metaphor. “This tension was something that we wanted to explore without the haughty judgement of our more metropolitan lifestyles,” they say. “And to explore how this specifically relates to ourselves: how can we envisage a genuinely ecological future for ourselves – one that is accessible, affordable and in harmony with endangered rural practices.”

What makes The Foel Tower such an incredible record is that it feels born of a time, place and situation that only existed in that very moment. It’s a snapshot of those 10 days spent in rural Wales and all the feelings and anxieties the band were experiencing at that specific time, magically caught on tape. “The album very much feels tied to this valley for us and the conversations and experiences we shared there,” they say. “It brings up a great deal of poignancy for us, an emblem of some fleeting respite from the strains we all have to experience. But there’s also deep sadness knowing how transient these moments are – in fact, there’s just a great deal of sadness in this album. But it’s also a record that while personal, resigned, and emotionally burdened, is ultimately hopeful.” 

What an amazing pair of compositions, beautifully balanced music that transports me to a deep zone where time stands still.

— Jonny Nash (Musician / The founder for Melody As Truth)

"KANNON" achieves a profound listening experience by deliberately avoiding the diverse techniques of the shakuhachi and instead focusing on simple, sustained tones. This approach allows one to concentrate on the inner richness of a single note’s resonance and its delicate nuances, creating a sense of release into the infinite expanses within its deep layers. The moment a sound emerges, passes through, and fades away is truly beautiful.
"RAVEN" showcases the shakuhachi’s expansive yet delicate tonal expressions with remarkable beauty. I was astonished by its level of perfection, making it hard to believe it was recorded live. The piece harmonizes with the steady pulse of the mukkuri, evoking a sense of music that connects to a spectral dimension. I particularly love the latter half, where the high-register tones of the shakuhachi intertwine with the breath-infused mukkuri, resonating with deep overtones. I was utterly captivated by the gentle unfolding of this piece.

— Ko Ishikawa (Shō player / Ancient Kayō performer)

This is captivated by an auditory landscape of deep listening—an immersive soundscape of the mind. Could this not be one of the most uniquely innovative expressions in the current realm of traditional Japanese instruments?

— Kaoru Inoue (DJ / Musician)

Although I often say, "Genres of music don’t really matter," I was truly surprised when I listened to it and thought, "Is this really a shakuhachi?" It made me realize how trapped I had been by my existing preconceived notions. It's like a "eureka moment" for my ears! The deep resonance that is incredibly pleasing to the ear, along with the sonic development that feels like it’s breathing in unison with the natural environment, gradually led me to feel as if I had wandered into a bamboo forest, losing track of where I was—a meditative labyrinth-like experience. It reaffirmed for me the truth that sound tells the whole story. The balance of the sound is also exquisite and remarkable. Such improvisational performance reminds us of the forgotten awe that in the natural world, nothing is ever the same—while each individual expresses their uniqueness, they also form part of the overall harmony.

— Nami Hōtatsu (Vocalist / Synthesizer player / Composer)

I'll be terribly honest: those two tracks are the deepest and most intense I've heard from a long time, a vibrant sound that takes hold of your attention and takes you far, but without moving a step, as if it sounded inside, touching hidden and alive chords. Beauty, like a long breath, a story that the sea gives us, fast clouds that announce spring, wind that smells of flowers and meadows and a thousand leaves of dancing trees.... Gorgeous music that speaks to the heart.

— Gigi Masin (Musician)

I was surprised by the abstract tone, which is not unlike that of old instruments. The dense soundscape shows a love of musical culture.

— Jun Morita (Electronic instrumentalist / DJ)

Released in 2000 by the UK rock band, Radiohead, Radiohead's 4th album has been described as "the last masterpiece of the 20th century in music history."
A controversial work, an innovative work that shifted to electronica sound rather than approaching Aphex Twin and Autechre. Includes "Everything in its Right Place", "Idiotech" and others.

One of the very best ever Tribal Ambient Dub albums, originally released on the famous Australian Extreme label.

Brilliantly new mastered, sounds way better than the original recordings.
Includes bonus songs from other Extreme releases.

For fans of early WARP, Muslimgauze, Future Sound Of London, The Orb, Rapoon and alike.

Clear vinyl is only available in the boxset, the regular vinyl edition is black vinyl.
Laminated cover, printed also on the inside, with OBI.

AKT22 Paul Schütze – The Anihilating Angel LP -> out in January 2025
AKT21 Paul Schütze – Deus Ex Machina 2LP -> out in February 2025
The boxset contains all 3 albums at once!

People believe that the magic of Muslimgauze works best with looong tracks. Think the same? Then "Al-Zulfiquar Shaheed" is exactly for you! 75 minutes of mellow eastern-style hypnotism. Consisting of only five parts, the album shows Bryn's ability to create lengthy and detailed compositions filled with Arabic percussion, droning keyboards, vocal samples and ethereal atmospheres.
A strong rhythmic, yet melodic album, that should be in the collection of every Muslimgauze fan. Definitely one of Bryn's best ever albums

The culmination of Glenn Gould's interpretation of Bach.
Limited Edition] Analog / 90th anniversary of Glenn Gould's birth and 40th anniversary of his death Special Edition / Japan Original Edition
The debut album "Goldberg Variations" was released in January 1956 and made the young Glenn Gould's name famous all over the world. The last album released before his death, "Goldberg Variations," was released in September 1982, about a month before Gould's death. This work frames Gould's life like a closing circle, and is indispensable in considering his unique music. When we think of Gould, we think of Goldberg, and vice versa.
The fourth in a special series of six analog reissues of four different performances of that important work is a re-recording that was recorded over a period of ten days in April and May of 1981. The performance time is over 51 minutes, 13 minutes longer than the 1955 version, and the tempo continuity of each variation has been redefined, making this the ultimate performance in which every note has been thoroughly examined. 2000 DSD remastering is scheduled for cutting at Sony Music Nogizaka Studio in Japan. The gatefold jacket of the first U.S. release, IM 37779, is reproduced.

"Citadel" is the fourth album release on EXTREME by this enigmatic Manchester-based group. For over 10 years, Muslimgauze have defined their style as a Western re-contextualisation of traditional Middle Eastern music enhanced by technology to form a post-modern mix of music, politics and culture. Muslimgauze construct the music through ethnic instruments that are a frame for dark and sometimes foreboding aural tapestries that capture the essence and mood of the music of the Middle East and the plight of the Palestinian people.

"Citadel" is an album of exotic Arabic textures where traditional instruments intermesh with technology, found sounds and voices meld with drones and synthesizers. The album uses both eastern and western rhythmic patterns embedded in layers of shifting soundscapes. The title track "Citadel" with incessant tablas piercing through swirling cymbals and a haunting melody. "Dharam Hinduja", where staccato percussion moves to fill the space between pulsing inverted samples, and "Opel" with drones building only to be overpowered by machine-gun rhythms. "Masawi Wife & Child" has a subdued rhythmic undercurrent while "Infidel" stands out with its strident percussion fusing with a myriad of sounds. "Shouf Balek" incorporates traditional strings that interplay with rhythm and voice, and "Beit Nuba" with mesmerizing chants weaving between a persistent drum beat. It all draws to a close with "Ferdowsi" where percussive improvisations rise and fall through a minimal soundscape.

Muslimgauze produce a raga music for the technological post-cyber age. Shifting cultures out of ancient history into the current day, transcending those traditional forms. "Citadel" has a voice of what is now and perhaps what is to come. In these troubled political times, peace through people being unified in harmony whilst maintaining their own strength and cultural identity is a vision to strive towards.

– from the original Extreme press-release

The original tracks were perfectly remastered for this first time ever vinyl release and the new masters received high praise from the Extreme Music owner Roger Richards.
New sleeve designs were created by Oleg Galay, who is famous for his artworks for many Muslimgauze reissues.
All 4 album covers are made from extra heavy cardboard with deluxe spot UV finish and inside print.

The unreleased 1984 follow-up to the groundbreaking albums Kakashi and Mariah's Utakata No Hibi, Kiren is Yasuaki Shimizu's work for experimental dance music. Employing cutting edge production to create lush new wave soundscapes, it bridges the gap between his early 80s recordings and his later work with the Saxophonettes, filling a key lost chapter in his discography. Full liner notes in English and Japanese by Chee Shimizu.

CV & JAB is a duo consisting of John Also Bennett (JAB), a Brooklyn-based sound designer who is also a member of RVNG, and Christina Vantzou, a composer based in Brussels, Belgium. & JAB", a duo from Kranky, consisting of JAB (aka Bennett) and Christina Vantzou, a composer based in Brussels, Belgium, released a popular album on their own label "Editions Basilic" in 2020, which has been reissued on vinyl! The artwork for this album was created by Zin Taylor, a Canadian artist living in Paris who is known for his elaborate installations that incorporate elements of performance and sculpture. Their previous work was an attempt at a musical interpretation of a 90-meter-long panoramic mural created by the same artist. The beauty of the work is similar to that of Japanese environmental music by Hiroshi Yoshimura, Yutaka Hirose, and Satoshi Ashikawa, but this is a more melancholic and introspective view of the world. This is a great masterpiece of modern classical ambient, with enigmatic piano investigations spreading endlessly, interweaving naturalistic field recording materials and electronics in a dotted pattern. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut in analog by Dubplates & Mastering. Limited edition 357 copies.

Tuareg rock from Niger's singer-songwriter Mdou Moctar. Tales of anguished love and broken hearts, plus some well known classics. Famous for his autotuned studio sessions popular on West African cellphones, here Mdou performs live. Recorded on location in Niger, electrifying, distorted and blown out guitar balances with sweet melodies of Saharan folk. 

Japan exclusive Purple vinyl, Limited 400 copies. Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Crush will be released on 18 October on Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement he has shared new track 'Last Bloom' along with accompanying video by Hamill Industries and announced details of a new live show with dates including London's Printworks, his biggest headline live show to date.

The best musical mavericks never sit still for long. They mutate and morph into new shapes, refusing to be boxed in. Floating Points has so many guises that it’s not easy to pin him down. There’s the composer whose 2015 debut album Elaenia was met with rave reviews – including being named Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Music’ and Resident Advisor’s ‘Album of the Year’ – and took him from dancefloors to festival stages worldwide. The curator whose record labels have brought soulful new sounds into the club, and, on his esteemed imprint Melodies International, reinstated old ones. The classicist, the disco guy that makes machine music, the digger always searching for untapped gems to re-release. And then there’s the DJ whose liberal approach to genre saw him once drop a 20-minute instrumental by spiritual saxophonist Pharoah Sanders in Berghain.

Fresh from the release earlier this year of his compilation of lambent, analogous ambient and atmospheric music for the esteemed Late Night Tales compilation series, Floating Points’ first album in four years, Crush, twists whatever you think you know about him on its head again. A tempestuous blast of electronic experimentalism whose title alludes to the pressure-cooker of the current environment we find ourselves in. As a result, Shepherd has made some of his heaviest, most propulsive tracks yet, nodding to the UK bass scene he emerged from in the late 2000s, such as the dystopian low-end bounce of previously shared striking lead single ‘LesAlpx’ (Pitchfork’s ‘Best New Track’), but there are also some of his most expressive songs on Crush: his signature melancholia is there in the album’s sublime mellower moments or in the Buchla synthesizer, whose eerie modulation haunts the album.

Whereas Elaenia was a five-year process, Crush was made during an intense five-week period, inspired by the invigorating improvisation of his shows supporting The xx in 2017. He had just finished touring with his own live ensemble, culminating in a Coachella appearance, when he suddenly became a one-man band, just him and his trusty Buchla opening up for half an hour every night. He thought what he’d come out with would "be really melodic and slow- building" to suit the mood of the headliners, but what he ended up playing was "some of the most obtuse and aggressive music I've ever made, in front of 20,000 people every night," he says. "It was liberating."

His new album feels similarly instantaneous – and vital. It’s the sound of the many sides of Floating Points finally fusing together. It draws from the "explosive" moments during his sets, the moments that usually occur when he throws together unexpected genres, for the very simple reason that he gets excited about wanting to "hear this record, really loud, now!" and then puts the needle on. It’s "just like what happens when you’re at home playing music with your friends and it's going all over the place," he says.

Today's newly announced live solo shows capture that energy too, so that the audience can see that what they’re watching isn’t just someone pressing play. Once again Shepherd has teamed up with Hamill Industries, the duo who brought their ground-breaking reactive laser technologies to his previous tours. Their vision is to create a constant dialogue between the music and the visuals. This time their visuals will zoom in on the natural world, where landscapes are responsive to the music and flowers or rainbow swirls of bubbles might move and morph to the kick of the bass drum. What you see on the screen behind Shepherd might "look like a cosmos of colour going on," says Shepherd, "but it’s actually a tiny bubble with a macro lens on it being moved by frequencies by my Buchla," which was also the process by which the LP artwork was made." It means, he adds, "putting a lot of Fairy Liquid on our tour rider". 

Japanese Edition with Obi. Repetition and motorik beats borrowed from Krautrock. A unique work with a noisy and experimental soundscape.

Japanese Edition with Obi. A beloved masterpiece of its time. Produced by John McEntire (Tortoise) and Andy Toma (Mouse on Mars), this is a must-hear album with a diversity unrivaled in its time.

Japanese Edition with Obi. Re-mastered from the original 1/2" tapes by Bo Kondren at Calyx Mastering and overseen by Tim Gane. Includes bonus tracks originally included on Instant 0 In The Universe and a tour single. Including the bonus material this reissue contains everything Stereolab recorded during the sessions for Margerine Eclipse.

Japanese Edition with Obi. The album is one of the most influential albums of the post-rock, electronica, and “acoustic school” that followed.

Japanese Edition with Obi. A band that has risen to become a representative of the scene proves its further evolution
A milestone of 90's alternative music.