MUSIC

ニューエイジ〜アンビエント・リスナーにも！オリジナルは、名キーボーディスト = Philippe Besombesも参加した電子音楽グループ"Pôle "が運営していた仏の〈Pôle Records〉より75年に発表。元祖トイポップことフランス前衛ポップの大スター、Pascal Comeladeの別名義Fluenceの唯一作が、世界各地のアンダーグラウンドな音楽史を現代へと再提示する名門〈Superior Viaduct〉傘下の〈États-Unis〉より復刻リリース！仏南部の都市、モンペリエで74年から75年にかけてレコーディング。豊穣な実験精神と深遠なるプログレッシヴネスを湛え、時代性を超越した印象的な音世界へと昇華。フリップ&イーノ～リシャール・ピナス、ポポル・ヴーの幻影さえも付き纏うヴァナキュラー&コスミッシェなサウンド全開に、オブスキュアな電子音楽観を披露した傑作。ナンバリング入り限定750部。

Pitchfork gave it a "9.0" and called it "Best New Reissue"! Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain is the quintessential work of artist / filmmaker / composer Tony Conrad. Comprised of both film installation and minimalist score for amplified strings, Ten Years leaps across genre and medium to connect his revolutionary structural filmmaking with the experiments in long-duration sound that Conrad had begun in the 1960s as part of the Theatre of Eternal Music. "Ten Years began with image before sound," writes Andrew Lampert, "a row of quadruple projections arranged side-by-side, all the shuffling stripes cascading into each other. Over the next two hours the music throbbed and the projectors incrementally shifted inwards, their beams gradually uniting to form one pulsating, overlapping picture." For its 1972 premiere at New York's The Kitchen, Ten Years included Conrad on violin as well as Rhys Chatham and Laurie Spiegel performing on instruments of the composer's own making. Chatham played the Long String Drone – a 6-foot long strip of wood with bass strings, electric pickup, tuning keys, tape, rubber band and metal hardware – while Spiegel carried out an arrhythmic bass pulse throughout. Superior Viaduct is honored to present this previously unreleased recording of Ten Years Alive On The Infinite Plain's breathtaking premier performance. As Chatham recounts in the liner notes, "When I first listened to this recording after not hearing it for over 40 years, it transported me back to the early Kitchen and the heyday of early minimalism, played outside the Dream Syndicate."

Innercity Griots, the second album from Freestyle Fellowship, is perhaps *the* essential West Coast left-field rap album of the early ’90s. Released in 1993 on 4th & Broadway, it’s a towering, progressive hip-hop masterpiece that expanded rap’s boundaries through lyrical elevation and production innovation. Their talent was ahead of everybody else by light years. This is pure b-boy jazz. The original single vinyl LP is now hideously scarce, and of course the sound suffers from not being officially released as a double. This Be With re-issue fixes both problems, and for completeness also includes “Pure Thought” from the CD version of the album. This incredible display of imaginative hip-hop sounds better than ever. Freestyle Fellowship were some of the earliest technically dazzling rappers to come out of California. Mikah 9, P.E.A.C.E., Aceyalone and Self Jupiter - along with DJ Kiilu - forged their famed lyrical dexterity in the ultra-competitive crucible of the Good Life Cafe. Founded in Leimert Park, South Central LA in December 1989, this earthy health-food store and cafe was where the city’s finest microphone fiends would gather to showcase their freestyle skills at the Thursday night open-mic.

When Cyro Baptista moved to New York in 1980 from his home city of São Paulo, he brought with him an arsenal of percussion instruments, including the cuica (friction drum), surdo (the booming bass drum associated with samba), berimbau (single-string bow with resonating gourd), and cabasas galore, in the next few years deploying them most notably in numerous ensembles curated by John Zorn, who helped set up this studio session in 1982.
As you might expect from someone whose infectious grooves have graced the work of Herbie Hancock, Astrud Gilberto and Cassandra Wilson, Baptista expertly fires off cunning polyrhythms, even traces of thumping samba, with restless fluency. Bailey the wily old fox skirts and eschews the bait, which is quickly conjured away and newly fashioned. The guitarist homes in on the delicious squeaks of the cuica and the twanging drones of the berimbau with truly awesome tonal precision. You could sing along if you wanted, after a caipirinha or two. And he gets almost as many different sounds from his instrument as Baptista can from his kit – check out the stratospheric plings and string-length fret-sweeps of Tonto, which sound more like a prepared piano than an acoustic guitar.

Wonders abound, from the berimbau/bent-string exchanges that open Quanto Tempo to the delightful collision of howling cuica and spiky bebop on Polvo, and the spare, preposterous Webernian samba of Improvisation 3. These days, ‘improvisation’ often appears without its customary qualifier ‘free’. If there were ever a case to be made for its reinstatement, this album is the best supporting evidence. Freedom means you’re free to get into the groove, free not to, free to play with each other, free to play against each other. Sometimes frustrating, even scary, but more often than not in the hands of these two great masters it’s hilarious, exhilarating and utterly irresistible.

The first of two unearthings of the racket made by Derek Bailey and pals at his Company Week festivities in 1982. This is waaay out there improv experimentation which sees musicians like Julie Tippets, Motoharu Yoshizawa and George Lewis go into battle to see who can come up with the most ludicrous squeak. Faint hearted step aside, this is prime freeform improvisation with an all important humorous streak.

Epiphany  i-ˈpi-fə-nē  (1) a manifestation of the essential nature of something (usually sudden) (2) an intuitive grasp of reality through something (usually simple and striking) (3) an illuminating discovery or disclosure.
All three definitions apply perfectly to this span of music recorded at London’s ICA in July 1982. It’s a miracle of group interaction, wonderfully paced, moving steadily between moments of mounting intensity and tension. The passage about halfway through — when Derek Bailey’s harmonics ring out above a sheen of inside piano tremolos and shimmering electronics, topped off by Julie Tippetts’ soaring vocalese — is simply sublime. After which it’s fun to try and tell the two pianists apart. Are those runs Ursula Oppens, with her formidable technique honed from years performing some of the twentieth century’s most difficult notated new music, or are those Keith Tippett’s crunchy jazz zigzags? Are those intriguing twangs from one of Akio Suzuki’s invented instruments or could they be Fred Frith’s or Phil Wachsmann’s electronics? Bah, who cares?

There’s plenty of room for the more delicate instruments too, like Anne LeBaron’s harp picking its way gingerly through a pin-cushion of pings and scratches from Bailey and bassist Motoharu Yoshizawa. Of course, some performers are instantly recognisable: Tippetts, as lyrical and flighty on flute as when she sings, Phil Wachsmann, sinuous and sensitive on violin, and trombonist George Lewis, who, as John Zorn once put it, swings his motherfucking ass off.

So many magical moments abound, from the opening dawn chorus of Tippetts’ voice and Frith’s guitar swooping through a rainforest of exquisite piano cascades, to the Zen calm of the closing moments.

Epiphany, indeed.

Continuing the reissue campaign of legendary synthesizer artist Enno Velthuys, we are proud to offer the Different Places LP. The original tape from 1987 was the second tape Enno produced for EXART and it was his last work before he disappeared into obscurity. By this time, he became disillusioned by the cassette network and his mental condition sadly deteriorated. With Hessel Veldman, label owner of EXART, getting more interested in experimental music, they were both moving into different places and eventually lost contact. Enno was a perfectionist, always looking for better equipment. When listening to the original master tape of Different Places it turned out it had a real nice, clean sound. Definitely an improvement over some of his earlier material. While mastering these songs for vinyl in 2021 we tried to stay as close as possible to Enno’s original intentions. Different Places is probably his most coherent work and includes some magical chord progressions. Shades of Erik Satie and Hiroshi Yoshimura mixed with immersive, spacious, cosmic ambient. Melancholic but less claustrophobic when compared to predecessors Glimpse of Light or Landscapes in Thin Air.

Sweet Company is the second album by Jabu. Where their first LP, Sleep Heavy, was an unflinching exploration of grief, dark and disembodied, Sweet Company’s deep, sedative soul feels like more of a lovers’ outing: optimistic, becalmed, looking outwards as well as inwards, and longing for the kind of human connections where ego and self-consciousness might dissolve. It is perhaps also an exhortation to love and accept yourself, to recover a lost innocence and peace – that paradise which has always been lost. Released via their own do you have peace? label, Sweet Company is on the one hand a very intimate and private-sounding work - the sound of life played out in a room, a bubble, a home, a head. The rhythms of everyday domesticity: listening to the plants, cars in the street, voices through the wall…. going to work, not going to work, sleeping heavy or not sleeping at all. Wavering on the brink of a revelation, of something just beyond the material world, while you wait for the kettle to boil. The core Jabu trio of producer Amos Childs and vocalists Jasmine Butt and Alex Rendall is present and correct. Sweet Company has the exhilarating sweep and confidence of a collaboration between people who trust and understand each other implicitly, and, secure in that knowledge, are able to give the absolute best of themselves to us. As before, Jasmine’s voice is a textural, painterly instrument, layered and blurred into abstraction, resisting the limits of language; the songs she sings on are portals into vast internal landscapes where the normal rules of gravity are suspended, every sound is smothered in a cathedral-like resonance, and you're both fearful and hopeful that you might never find your way back out again. Alex takes a more narrative, confessional and no less engaging pop tack: as on the gauzy, decelerated 2-step of ‘Lately’, with his masochistic, self-mocking entreaties to “be cruel to me […] I like it when you make a fool of me”. Childs has a true hip-hop fiend's ear for a striking sample, and how to loop it to most hypnotic and rapturous effect, but here takes things to ever more powerfully uncanny and auteurish places, drawing inspiration from the voidal bliss-outs of shoegaze (AR Kane’s amniotic dream-pop epic 69 is one influence cited) and the space-time disturbances of dub, commanding both a raindrops-on-cobwebs delicacy and an immense, oceanic pressure. His productions seem to resist linear progression - instead they move by a kind of unstoppable diffusion, like weeds reclaiming an unkempt garden, or alien flora patterning the sea-floor and coral-caves of the subaquatic level of a computer game which may exist only in your, or his, imagination. Perhaps it's Daniela Dyson, the British-Afro-Colombian artist who contributes her vivid, energising poetic mysticism to two tracks, who best sums up Sweet Company's ambition and effect: “Me quiero perder en los momentos tan puros en su esencia que Las Horas mismas se detienen para ser testigo de nuestro amor” (I want to lose myself in the moments so pure in their essence / that The Hours themselves stop to bear witness to our love…). For a precious half an hour, we're invited to celebrate the smallness of our lives - and the limitless grandeur which that smallness contains. When it ends, we step back from the brink but things aren’t quite the same anymore: we’re haunted by what we briefly almost knew.

EM Records again shines the spotlight on legendary Thai producer Surin Phaksiri in this second edition of his classic productions from the 1960s-80s. The first edition, released in 2019, focused on his innovative productions in the luk thung (*1) style. This 2022 release features his stellar, glowing molam (*2) gems from the 60s-80s, drawn mainly from his golden era in the late 70s and early 80s. Surin Phaksiri is a highly esteemed figure in Thai music, rooted deeply in his native region of Isan in northeast Thailand, a producer with a deep respect for the traditional artistry of his culture, yet always moving forward, looking outward, listening ahead. The molam style of Thai music showcases the voice; indeed, the genre’s name means “expert singer”, and Thailand is blessed with an abundance of experts, singers with amazing control, grace, vitality and finesse. This collection of 22 songs (18 only for digital download) features 15 singers, ranging from venerated legends to unjustly unheralded masters of the art. These songs were recorded and released after the era of the 7-inch single; with the advent of the cassette boom in Thai music, most producers adopted a quantity-over-quality conveyer belt production style, churning out soundalike material to fill the expanded length of cassette tape. Phaksiri resisted these tides and continued to work with a single-song mindset, tailoring each production’s instrumentation and arrangement to precisely fit each singer and song. This care and integrity can be clearly heard in this sweetly groovy collection. These gems, originally released on 7-inch vinyl, are all first-time official reissues, a project years in the making. Compiled by Soi48, who also provide liner notes. Cover art by Shinsuke Takagi (Soi48). 

Footnotes: 
1) Luk thung: A musical genre whose name means ʻcountry personʼs songʼ or ʻchildren of the fieldʼ . The name became established in the latter half of the 1960s and now has the status of a national genre of popular song unique to Thailand. The lyrics of luk thung songs deal mainly with the rural idyll, comparisons between the city and the countryside, life in the big city and current affairs. There are certain typical traits to the music, but no official musical form. 

2) Molam: "mo" is an expert and "lam" is a kind of performance art where the artist tells a story using tonal inflexions. In other words, the term molam refers to both the singer and art form. Molam pieces are not strictly speaking "songs". 

Futoshi Moriyama is an Osaka-based electronic music producer who began his musical career in the early 2000s improvised music hothouse of Osaka’s Shinsekai Bridge, an important venue for the “Kansai zero sedai” (Kansai Zero Generation), which sprang up in the wake of The Boredoms’ world-wide success. Kazuhisa Uchihashi was the axis of this Bridge scene; his workshops allowed a generation the freedom to develop their own voices. Moriyama’s early improvisational work often saw him using cheap samplers to surprising ends, but since then his work has moved in a more composed direction, while still investigating electronic sound. This particular release, which appeared initially in 2015 as a cassette on the Birdfriend label, run by Koshiro Hino (aka YPY), was a year in the making. All of the music was composed with software instruments, spurred by a desire to move beyond his previous work, and can be heard as a home-recorded orchestral music.

"Axacan" is the fourth album from Daniel Bachman for Three Lobed and his first album in three years. It was recorded in 2020 at various locations in Virginia. It will be pressed on two 140 gram 12" records in Virginia by Furnace and housed within a full color gatefold jacket bearing new photography by Bachman. As a part of the Three Lobed Recordings 20th Anniversary series it features an OBI strip bearing an essay about the LP by Aquarium Drunkard's Tyler Wilcox.

In mulling over their career, it’s staggering to realize that Sonic Youth not only delivered a healthy slab of releases as a unit but also have a myriad of shelved material still waiting for broader ears. While the group’s current Bandcamp abode lays out a generous amount of it, a bunch more has yet to surface. And it’s a massive mountain to chip away at in the sense of the group output alone; individual members’ projects are a whole other game, needless to say. "In/Out/In" ably delivers a new slab of mostly-unheard Sonic righteousness, with a scope on the post 2000-era band in especially zoned/exploratory regions. The 80’s and 90’s continually saw Sonic Youth reminding everyone that their jams ran free alongside song craft and visible development album to album; there were Peel excursions, dipping toes into soundtrack work starting with 1986’s "Made In USA", and of course great impromptu expansive takes of tried and true previous material onstage. The millennial establishment of home turf studio spaces in NYC then NJ greatly egged on forays into improvisation and composition on their own clock as evidenced in "Goodbye 20th Century" and the plethora of SYR releases that trickled out side by side between major release albums. At this juncture they had already created a cultural template for a whole new breed of rock heads who, in turn, entered a feedback loop to SY itself, which cultivated more of its own new moves informed by the very fandom they had for their acolytes all the while pushing the band outward to uncharted fields. Jim O’Rourke’s residency had already influenced the band’s material in part into denser, longer, meditative paths. Mark Ibold’s entry for their swan song "The Eternal" also allowed for more of this exploration with Kim Gordon having more room to commit to third guitar. However "The Eternal" also took more cues from Ibold’s bottom-end swing and perhaps dialed back the expansiveness of the "NYC Ghosts and Flowers" and "Sonic Nurse" era a notch in a cool way, making it one of the best group efforts for me, anyway. Perhaps this fueled some of these tracks here, in an already comfortable zone with a new lineup and new drive to take sideroads to even more outer realms. "In/Out/In" reveals their last decade to be still heavy on the roll-tape and bug-out Sonic Youth. Not all recorded in one session but rather spread out over 2000-2010, the sequencing here is especially well thought out. Opening with the 2008 “Basement Contender” we get a super-unfiltered glimpse of the band at Kim and Thurston’s Northampton house creating a gentle springboard of Venusian choogle, with phased Lee lappings at cascading Thurston figures forming a simmering soundtrack. “Machine” offers another instrumental track from "The Eternal" sessions and is a steamy exercise in stop-start rhythmic grunt amidst a jungle of chiming and upward spiraling chord progressions. We’ve also got the extended score offering “Social Static” from the Chris Habib/Spencer Tunick film of the same name, draping white sheets of noise over your head then descending into a gauzy maw of car-alarm guitars and ambient-yet-disruptive turbulence that eventually subsides into a smoky coda. Two more tracks round out the set both culled from a Three Lobed box set of various artists from 2011 called "Not the Spaces You Know, But Between Them": “In & Out” quietly resembles Can in a cave with dripping stalactites of Kim’s wordless tone rumble and was recorded at a soundcheck in Pomona California and their home Hoboken turf in 2010. “Out & In” from 2000 was done in their late downtown NYC studio and serves to close out this LP’s last 12 minutes as a reminder of what they got up to with O’Rourke there. More gentle time shift chord framework erupts into molten fury three minutes in, before mutating into the sonic equivalent of a slowly collapsing star. Casting an audio net over the entire instrumental/outtake oeuvre of Sonic Youth’s long history isn’t something easily committed to a single release without a doubt. Hearing these tracks in comparison to, say, 1986’s "Made In USA" material shows the massive leaps they took over the years. Whereas ’86 showed them freshly discovering their go-with-the-flow instrumental abilities for a soundtrack, their last decade showed them complementing the ambience with assured twists and turns that only came to be through their inimitable and rooted telepathy. That, plus the freedom to compose in more comfortable environs other than dank Ludlow Street rental spaces (hard to believe "Daydream Nation" was created in a claustrophobic practice basement) most assuredly was a component in their continued paths of discovery. Shifting on the drop of a dime from quiet/deep forays into full on noised-out Autobahn stomps with Steve Shelley at the wheel, they painted detailed and varied brush strokes and continually created organic sounds that undoubtedly carried the signature sound of the band, while ringing loud with their continual drive to free themselves from just that. Enjoy this capsule. -Brian Turner, 2021-

A 22-year-old genius jazz pianist who also works with Kamasi Washington, Thundercat and Carlos Niño, including his grandfather legendary soul jazz drummer Donald Dean, Sun Ra, Alice Coltrane, Herbie Hancock and more. A young Jamael Dean who needs attention to be influenced by. The long-awaited official debut work is fully released from the prestigious ! Currently, he leads the music group The Afronauts and participates in the legendary black jazz "Pan Afrikan People's Arkestra". It is a two-part album consisting of 10 hip-hop songs produced under the name of his own nickname "Jasik" using jazz performances by his group and beats sampled from them. Sharada Shashidhar and Mekala “Mickey” Session, who are also enrolled in Brooklyn's female singer and have collaborated with Jamael Dean many times, participated. The title comes from the Genesis of the Yoruba, a West African ethnic group. Both sides are fertile and superb!

A split sided album on clear vinyl with Chris Watson and Georgia Rodgers, pairing two artists whose works here show different but complementary new forms in the use of field recording in composition. Both were originally multi-channel installations before the release of these stereo versions.

Notes From The Forest Floor was originally premiered in a different form in July 2015 at the ICA as part of an evenings event dedicated to the work of Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi. It was recorded in La Selva tropical rain forest reserve in Costa Rica.

Line Of Parts was originally premiered at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2019 as part of the Huddersfield Professional Development Programme for Female Composers of Electronic Music project. It was recorded in the Cairngorms and North London.
artwork by Chris Bigg
photography by Chris Watson/Georgia Rodgers

This is the first analog reissue of a masterpiece that was originally released only on CD by 12k in 2004. The publisher is Germany's Keplar, which has recently reissued masterpieces by Vladislav Delay, Giuseppe Ielasi, Arovane and many others. This is the ultimate in ambient music, where minimalism and nostalgia melt together in the universal and timeless longing of electronica. It is truly one eternity. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut by Loop-o, the quality of the vinyl is perfect. Limited edition of 500 copies.

A timeless masterpiece left by the Japanese fusion / urban pop giant. From city pops such as Hiroshi Sato, Junko Hirotani, Etsuko Sai, and Piper to Yumin and Seiko Sawada, and a number of sharp anime records such as "星へ行く船" and "夢の碑", this person in the history of Japanese music. The original was a super rare album released from in 1982, but the long-awaited first analog reissue from , which is also known for the reissue of Japanese ambient / ambient music such as Takashi Kokubo and Yas-Kaz. A masterpiece aerobic record produced as a soundtrack to TBS TV's "Aerobics" by Ken Morimura, who is known as the keyboardist of the salsa band Orchestra del Sol! A masterpiece that will surely fascinate disco boogie-city pop and Balearic lovers. Come on while this is! Limited to 500 copies.

Italy's New Age / World label Black Sweat reissues 80 years of unknown electronic music from Italy.
A cassette work of a project called Futuro Antico. A meditation synth and a bewitching flute unfold, which is good because it has a gentle, violent, piercing sound. It's also reminiscent of Terry Riley and Don Cherry's legendary live performances in Cologne.

In an industry always pinning its hopes on the next big trend, Benny Sings is in it for the long haul. The Dutch artist has honed a signature sound while creating a colorful catalog of essential pop gems that have led to loyal global following. Music is Benny's 8th full-length album, and his second on Stones Throw after City Pop (2019).

City Pop is Benny Sings's sixth album and first for Stones Throw in 2019. Limited color vinyl LP will be released in 2021. (the original LP is sold out)
A sum of Benny's real-life observations and insights on love, held together by his soft rock- inspired songwriting, jazz instrumentation, leading piano and distinctive vocal. The album was inspired by and written in cities all over the world, including New York, LA, Tokyo, Paris and Benny’s hometown of Amsterdam. The album celebrates collaboration, with Mayer Hawthorne, Cornelius, Sukimaswitch (the “Japanese Steely Dan”), Mocky and Faberyayo among the featured artists.

Keyboardist and composer Weldon Irvine is among the most celebrated Jazz-Funk artists of all time. Throughout the 1970s, Irvine released a series of seminal albums full of deep, soulful, funky grooves. The Sisters is a collection of lost tracks and demos from his late-1970s studio sessions with fellow Jazz-Funk luminary Don Blackman.iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/1EuQGnOUXog" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen>

Pressure Sounds 77th album is Jesus Dread! Yabby You, a great roots musician, and King Tubby, the king of dub, are the strongest tag team! It's a mystery! The long sought after track Tr.8 "Deliver Dub" has been called King Tubby's masterpiece!

Nineteen beloved tracks culled from precious 45 rpm dub plates. Vivian Jackson, aka Yabby You, embodied the "struggles" of the streets and was instrumental in raising the spirit of Rastafari in Kingston and establishing roots reggae at its peak. Deeper Roots" reflects the Rasta spirit of the 1970's with King Tubby and is an irreplaceable legacy of Yabby You as an artist and producer, featuring rare singles and dub plates from the era. This album is a record of Yabby Yu's golden years, from which we can hear his unique spirituality, his life in the ghetto, and his music that resonates deeply with the Rasta spirit. The album has rocked sound systems not only in Kingston, but also in London, Birmingham, Manchester, and around the world. His special relationship with King Tavi resulted in the golden age of his career.

01. Valley of Joeasaphat - Smith & The Prophets
02. Joeasaphat Rock - Smith And The Prophets
03. Thanks and Praise - King Tubby
04. Don’t Touch I Dread - Barrington Spence
05. Tutch Dub - The Prophet All Stars
06. Fighting Dub - Tommy McCook & King Tubby Deeper Roots
07. Deliver Me - Yabby You
08. Deliver Dub - King Tubby & Yabby You
09. Milk River Rock - Don D Junior & The Prophets
10. Dip Them Bedward - Prince Pampidoo
11. Dub Them Bedward - The Prophets All Stars
12. Dub Vengence - King Tubby & The Prophets
13. Forward on the Track - King Miguel
14. Caymanas Rock - King Miguel & The Prophets
15. Love Sweet Love Drums - King Tubby & The Prophets All Stars
16. Lazy mood - The Prophets All Stars Deeper Roots
17. Open Your Hearts - King Tubby & The Prophets
18. Poor and Needy Dubwise - King Tubby & The Prophets All Stars
19. Cleo’s Dub - Hot City All Stars

Jon Hassell, a genius who just released a remastered version of the famous experimental music history "Vernal Equinox" in March of this year as a memorable debut work, "Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)" The latest work, "Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two)" has been released!

"Pentimento" means "in a painting, the original image, format, and brush flow that has been modified or overlaid reappear." The term accurately describes his innovative style of "painting", creating a new, indescribable, addictive palette by layering subtle differences.
Given the traditional Hassel, this title can be interpreted in many ways. But perhaps the most plausible interpretation at this point is the human instinct to sing and have fun in the face of repeated difficulties. It's the future blues that sang uncertainties and ever-changing shapes. On this album, Hassel is once again adventuring to create new forms and variants of music, incorporating elements of the "fourth world" of the past. It's a thrilling window-like work where you can see what the world's music will be like in the future.

"Jon Hassell is the most influential composer of the last 50 years. His invention, called'Fourth World Music', gives a deep respect to the music of different cultures around the world. He paved the way. His work had a great influence on other artists, through which his musical tastes changed dramatically. His unique intellectual contribution is also noteworthy. He is a patient and eloquent theorist and a great musician. "-Brian Eno

Jon Hassell's greatness in contemporary music history is comparable to Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, or The Velvet Underground. --The Wire Magazine

Definitely ahead of their time, A.T.R.O.X. were one of the first bands to move beyond typical new wave styles and introduce strong electronic elements, not too far from works of their contemporaries Tuxedomoon and Minimal Compact. "When we recorded Water Tales I was thinking of the sea as the only escape for mankind. I proposed this idea to the rest of the band and all of them were just thrilled". Probably it is the only new wave concept-album that was ever released. The sound, compared to the first album, is more influenced by the lessons of Eno and David Byrne, who were enriching their compositions with amazing and intriguing musical phrases and rhythms. Of course, we did not forget the lessons of NEU! and Faust. The Andreoni brothers and Marchini were both brilliantly creative and yielding, and they were responsible for all the musical themes upon which Benvisi carved the acoustics. Water Tales is a sincere album, then the season changed and suddenly we were 'every man for himself' almost without realizing it." --Francesco Paolo Paladino

Stunning compilation of great soul songs. The third in a six part series of compilations following a similar logic as Harry Smith’s Anthology Of American Folk Music – only where Smith covered folk, blues, gospel and old timey, this compilation covers just American soul music recorded between 1955 and 1972. Many deep ballads and a few rockers. Features extensive 12 page liner notes with lots of photo’s as well as a real special bonus insert. Cover has gold foil printing, and the records are housed in classy black sleeves. Super fancy limited edition double LP not to be missed.