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An EP released in 2015 featuring an experimental concept of computer-controlled acoustic instruments. Its minimal, fragmentary compositions retain the physical resonance of piano and drums while crafting rhythms and phrases impossible for human hands. This peculiar sonic world, like a robot's improvised performance, possesses an avant-garde quality resonating with contemporary music and sound art. An important work regarded as emblematic of Aphex Twin's “experimental spirit.”
Music celebrating the healing power of the natural world.
“The world is hurting,
Forever wars.
Feelings of hopelessness.
Abandoned,
I weep for humanity.”
These are the thoughts that have compelled the celebrated Yazz Ahmed to release this music. In these troubled times she hopes to bring a little inner peace and to encourage reconnection with the sacred landscapes we all share on this planet.
This collection of nature-inspired music was recorded remotely in 2020 at home and with good friends in Denmark and the UK.
From Recital:
"Recital is joyed to publish the newest record by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi. Currently working on her PhD in Musicology at UCLA, her trajectory has been unorthodox. Hailing from Calgary, Alberta, which, if you've never been there, doesn't really scream "Avant-Garde" (Calgary is the rodeo capital of the world). From a young age, Sarah was a driven pianist (and figure-skater, although that's a story for a different time). It is important and interesting that she chose to study esoteric music; as Sarah could have easily been a cowgirl or a concert pianist had her ingrained love of synthesis and sonic phenomenology not taken the wheel.
Sarah is a considered person. I find few people that have the diligence and resolve to take their time with music... especially in a live context. I respect that about her. The first time I saw Sarah perform, I presumptuously told her that her music reminded me of my favorite Mirror albums (the exceptional project of Andrew Chalk and Christoph Heemann). Sarah was not familiar with Mirror, so the compliment was initially lost on her. Years back I was in the same situation when a review compared my music to Andrew Chalk, who was unknown to me at the time. So I felt a kinship in our magnetic drift towards unspoken and clustered beauty.
Let Night Come On Bells End The Day follows the release of her "sound-wheel" LP All My Circles Run, which examines the isolation of different instruments. Let Night Come On..., recorded mainly with a Mellotron and electronic organ, feels like a return to the nest. Burrowed in the studio, Davachi was the only performer on this album. She both splays her compositional architecture and re-contextualizes the essence of her early output. She chiseled careful and shadowed hymns; anchors of emotion.
Two pillars of this album are "Mordents", which to my ears drops hints of her love for Progressive rock music - and "Buhrstone," comparable to a sombre funeral march of piano and flutes. These two examine punctuations of early music, gently plucking melodies and movements. The three other compositions are tonal works, blowing slow jets of lapping harmonics.
Writing this description now, I find it hard to separate "At Hand" from filmmaker Paul Clipson, who made a melancholic film for this piece of Sarah's. A fitting title for Sarah and Paul's relationship - frequently working in orbit of each other, meticulous and tactile. I cherish this track as a memory of Paul.
This is a lovely album to fill an evening living room with. A blanket, a cup of wine, a dim bulb, a wide window."
Ricky V runs wild on Mohammad Reza Mortazavi’s Persian tombak hand drum actions, expanding a 4 min kernel of inspiration into 24 minutes of mesmerising polyrhythmic traction. From an original 'Swamp' piece that practically recalls Ricardo’s style of slinky minimal techno sorcery to begin with, the Chilean-German maverick derives a more driving tract of rough hewn rhythmic grit bound to hypnotise dancefloors for the duration. Accentuating the undulating bass and dialling up the volume whilst retaining the frictional grind of the original, Villalobos gets right inside the groove with typically obsessive tekkerz, plucking out additional string motifs and tempering the flow with signature, taut but sinuous, loosey goosey flex that cross-pollinates cultures and gets right under the skin of the thing. Mohammad Reza Mortazavi (b. 1979, Iran) is a virtuoso percussionist known for his groundbreaking work with the tombak and daf, traditional Persian drums that he has radically redefined through new playing techniques and extended vocabulary. Mortazavi began playing the tombak at the age of six. By nine, he had already outpaced his teacher and won Iran’s national tombak competition — a distinction he would earn six more times. By his early twenties, he was widely regarded as one of the foremost players of the instruments. Since then, his music has continued to evolve, embracing new forms and vocabularies beyond tradition. Ricardo Villalobos (b. 1970, Chile) is a pioneering figure in minimal techno, celebrated for his hypnotic approach to rhythm. Raised in Germany after his family fled Pinochet’s regime, Villalobos was drawn early to percussion — he began playing congas and bongos at eleven, developing a tactile relationship to rhythm that would later inform his distinctive production style. Immersed in both Latin American folk traditions and the emerging house and techno scenes of late-80s Europe, he began DJing and producing in the early 1990s, quickly achieving cult status within global club culture. Swamp originally appears on the album Nexus, released in 2025 via Latency.
AFTER DARK is the latest project from French producer Onra, conceived as the soundtrack to an imagined late-night film. Entirely self-produced, the album continues the sophisticated R&B and Modern Soul direction explored since his 2010 classic Long Distance and 2018's accomplished Nobody Has To Know, focusing on late 80's / early 90's inspirations. Structured like a film unfolding between dusk and dawn, After Dark moves through themes of intimacy, urban solitude, distance, and quiet indulgence. Analog synthesizers, tight drum programming, understated basslines, and selective live saxophone textures shape a cohesive body of work that favors mood and narrative over excess. The sequencing reinforces its cinematic intent, opening and closing with intro and outro pieces that frame the record as a cohesive night-time narrative album. Over 20 years since emerging in the mid-2000s from the beat scene, Onra has steadily evolved from sample-based Hip-Hop production toward polished, song-oriented projects rooted in contemporary R&B and Funk. With After Dark, he delivers one of his most focused and refined statements to date: a mature, immersive album built for late hours, and attentive listening. The first taster of the album to drop is the slick nostalgic ’Lap of Luxury’, sets the tone for the project, a blend between Instrumental Hip-Hop, late 80s R&B and 90''s Smooth Jazz.
Music From Memory presents 'Spacious Heart', the debut solo album from Los Angeles-based musician Anthony Calonico. Known for his work as part of the trio Total Blue, Calonico steps forward here with a collection of songs and instrumentals that invite the listener into his lush, expansive and deeply personal world. Written and recorded gradually between 2020 and 2024, 'Spacious Heart' emerged through a slow and open process, allowing the music to develop without rigid expectations. The album’s sonic landscape sits in a somewhat similar zone to Total Blue, with warm keys, synthesizers and rich production creating spacious environments where melodies and textures open up naturally. ‘Spacious Heart’ effortlessly straddles the transcendental qualities of spiritual jazz, the restraint and space of minimal composers such as Harold Budd, and the quiet intensity and dynamics of songwriters like Mark Hollis and John Martyn, ultimately arriving at something wholly its own. Where ‘Spacious Heart’ diverges mostly clearly from Total Blue is through the presence of Calonico’s voice, the emotional anchor of the record. Smooth, luminous and quietly expressive, his singing carries a sense of earnestness and vulnerability while remaining delicately restrained. The album unfolds as a conversation between song and atmosphere, with vocal pieces drifting in and out of focus, intimate and inward-looking. The surrounding instrumentals open up space for these emotions to breathe, settle and expand, creating a world where feeling, texture and nuance move softly together. ‘Spacious Heart’ will be released digitally, on vinyl and CD through Music From Memory on May 21st. Sleeve art and design by Michael Willis.
Having sold his instruments to fund a nomadic 1970s lifestyle, eccentric Irish experimentalist Michael O’Shea was forced to create his own handmade answer to the sitars and zelochords he’d become accustomed to playing on his travels around the globe.
Using an old door, 17 strings, chopsticks and combining them with phasers, echo units and amplification, the new device was to become his signature sound, mixing Irish folk influences with Asian and North African sounds in a mesmerising and soulful new way that brought him to the attention of the leading improvisers of his day - Alice Coltrane, Ravi Shankar, Don Cherry and more.
A logical follow up to AllChival’s recent reissue of Stano's debut LP, Michael O’Shea’s self titled LP was originally released on Wire's Dome Imprint in 1982.
The background to the album is as interesting and inspiring as the artist who created it - born in Northern Ireland but raised in the Republic, O’Shea was keen to travel and escape the troubles of his home.
Wandering throughout Europe and the Middle East, O’Shea found himself living and working as a relief aid in Bangladesh in the mid Seventies where he learned to play sitar while recovering from a bout of hepatitis. A later period spent busking in France accompanied on zelochord by Algerian musician Kris Hosylan Harp led to O’Shea’s idea of combining both instruments as a homebuilt instrument - Mo Chara [Irish for "My Friend"].
He later described the process on the back of the LP himself saying: "Having sold my sitar in Germany and being desperate for money to travel to Turkey, I conceived of the idea of combining both sitar and zelochord. The first Mo Cara was born, taken from the middle of a door, which was rescued from a skip in Munchen"
A combination of dulcimer, zelochord and sitar, O Shea would play it with a pair of chopsticks, striking the strings softly using Irish folk rhythms mixed with the rich, nostalgic sounds of of the many Asian artists he’d encountered on his travels.
It was a pan cultural sound standing at an unusual crossroads of folk, traditional, rock, progressive, jazz, electronic and post-punk worlds without hesitation.
Perfecting the instrument on the streets, there were further spells spent busking in the underground stations and cafes of London's West End and Covent Garden during the heady days of the 1970s when they were full of eccentric street entertainers, jazz improvisers and musical pioneers.
His work with Rick Wakeman never saw the light of day but O’Shea’s contact with the world of post-punk London ensured his name would live on.
Introduced to Wire's Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis via cartoonist Tom Johnston, O’Shea eventually acquiesced to an open invite to record at their studio. Turning up unannounced in the first half of 1981 the LP was recorded in a day in the legendary Blackwing Studios and released on Dome the year after.
The first side features the fifteen minute masterpiece "No Journeys End" with the B side featuring more input from Wire in processing the Mo Chara sound.
Lewis himself said years later of the forgotten masterpiece: “I always said it was the best job we ever did.”
After an aborted LP with The The's Matt Johnson the following year, O’Shea quietly disappeared from the formal recording world . His brief but unique contribution to the music world came to a sad end in 1991 when O’Shea was struck by a post van and died a few days later in hospital in London.
This repress on All City’s AllChival imprint has been remastered and reissued with the approval of both Dome and his surviving siblings.
Clairvoyant Dimensions is the first album by Mei Homeycomb, a new duo of Jordan Czamanski, renowned as a member of the acclaimed Juju & Jordash and the Magic Mountain High project, with solo work released as Jordan GCZ, and legendary saxophonist Jeff Hollie, known mostly for his work with Frank Zappa and Ike Willis. An explorative ambient album, Clairvoyant Dimensions is an exercise in distance and contemplation, and the exhilarating feeling of insight, however fleeting, like staring at the midnight flicker of an old VCR. Czamanski's music has a trademark tenderness and soft-spokenness, an ability to maximize minimalist musical elements and bring them to an open-ended conclusion. Jeff Hollie provides interpretative sax lines on all tracks, slipping into the scene like a shadow, silent and unexpected, touching upon emotional registers almost explicit, yet confounding. As musical signifiers keep turning around themselves, they set up a mood of euphoria, one that suggests understanding. Never explicitly spaced-out, there is continuous reference to cosmoses both inward and far away. Ambient music in modern form. Jordan Czamanski uses his experience in producing off-the-charts club music to come up with five tracks that at times are standstills, and at times dwell in forward momentum. Jeff Hollie provides both comprehension and beautiful confusion. As grainy images switch into focus, Clairvoyant Dimensions is a beautiful and contemplative trip that suggests its own reality in delicate ways. One of the five tracks, the gorgeous live-recorded Painted Desert Pastel, features composer, performer, and researcher Ilya Ziblat Shay on double bass and electronics.
Third volume in Dave Huismans' stellar ex_libris series, further exploring the outer edges of deep house and leftfield music across three cuts in a total runtime of 25 minutes. The A-side offers up a rough-around-the-edges, spirited 4/4 beatdown epic, while the B1 & B2 venture into equally vivid world-building and fluttering wildlife curiosity. Limited edition - once again housed in lovingly hand-stamped, full-color sleeves. Design by Bernie van Vlijmen. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert at D&M.
A bearhug of chill-out room gouching gear from MFM spanning the golden era of ‘90s ambient dance music with gems from David Moufang, LFO, Global Communication, Kirsty Hawkshaw, Sun Electric and many more notables of that era. Since the world turned into a big chill out room in early 2020, albeit with a heavy sense of anxiety, this set could hardly be better placed for downtime in the comfort of your own home, rolling out mystic highlights such as LFO’s MDMA-tingle arps and pads in ‘Helen’ and the sublime suspension systems of Global Communication’s remix of ‘Arcadian’, along with Move D’s early nugget ‘Sergio Leone’s Wet Dream’, and the lush pads of his close spar Jonah Sharp’s Spacetime Continuum, plus a strip of killer slow acid in Sideral’s ‘Mare Nostrum’, and the blissed romance of ‘Love 2 Love’ by Sun Electric. One for the lovers and the ravers.
Brendan Eder follows up minimalist 70s-jazz concept with new ambient-neoclassical record, Therapy. On March 3, 2023 Eder released his third album, THERAPY; a collection of meditative compositions recorded mostly at a church in Southern California. The self-released album went on to chart at #6 in Billboard's Crossover Classical and was featured in The Guardian's "The Best Albums of 2023 So Far." Following 2021’s Cape Cod Cottage — Eder’s understated-jazz concept album under the guise of Edward Blankman, a retired dentist in the 1970s — for Therapy, Eder drops the alter ego and the drumset and explores more reverberant sounds with his ensemble of woodwinds. The result is a distinctive take on ambient music subtly interwoven with Eder’s affinity for 20th century classical and jazz.
Compiled by Hunee, 'Sounds from the Far East' features highly sought after material by legendary Japanese house producer Soichi Terada and fellow producers Shinichiro Yokota, Manabu Nagayama!
Soichi Terada is an adventurous multitalent and over all a good sport. He was born in the sixties, and as a child he loved to play on his fathers’ electric organ. Terada majored in Computer Science and Electric Organ and after he graduated, he founded his Far East Recording in 1989, because he couldn't find a label for his compositions at that time.
The sound of Far East Recording is very much inspired by early nineties US deep house. Soichi Terada went out to parties in the late eighties, were he was equally influenced by house and hip-hop. A few years later, Terada took on producing music by using digital sampling. In the early nineties he occasionally DJ-ed with a DAT player and some reel tapes, instead of using records and turntables.
"Sounds From The Far East" shines new light on Soichi Terada's label and consists of material that was originally released in the early nineties. Next to Terada's music, Hunee also selected a few tracks by fellow artist Shinichiro Yokota for this compilation, as well as 'Sun Showered', a track based on the incredible Paradise Garage gem called 'Sunshower', by Terada and Nami Shimada.
Formed in Taipei in 2013, Scattered Purgatory (破地獄) has occupied a liminal space between drone, ambient, psychedelic folk and ritualistic kosmiche experimentation. Their early work, including ‘Lost Ethnography of the Miscanthus Ocean’ (2014) and ‘God of Silver Grass’ (2016), blended dense instrumental drones, improvisational guitar, and ambient textures rooted in the heat, humidity, and urban pulse of Taiwan. Over the years, the duo-turned-band has drawn on Krautrock, minimalist electronic music, and heavy drone traditions while remaining firmly grounded in Taiwanese geography and culture. ‘Post Purgatory’ emerges after a three-year hiatus following the pandemic, a period the band describes as pivotal to the album’s conception. “The feeling of loss and uncertainty has later become the inspiration of this record, and ‘time’ is the main theme – it can heal or it can destroy,” they explain. Musically and lyrically, the record traverses Taiwanese, traditional Chinese, and English, reflecting the multilingual fabric of Taipei life. While there isn’t a linear storyline, metaphor and poetry imbue the lyrics with reflections on love, loss, and the human experience, interlaced with influences of Hokkien and Mando pop and traces of trip-hop. Recorded half in their home and half at the studio where they composed their first album, ‘Post Purgatory' integrates precision, clarity, and digital production techniques. Guest contributions—from White Wu’s dynamic drumming to Minyen Hsieh’s tenor saxophone and dotzio’s sci-fi-infused vocals—expand the band’s sonic palette, creating a doom metal record shaped by electronic sensibilities. ‘Post Purgatory’ is a statement of loss and re-empowerment, a bridge between their past and present. Through it, Scattered Purgatory reclaim their distinctive voice, presenting a sound that is at once rooted in Taiwan, informed by global musical traditions, and unflinchingly forward-looking.
Or Sobre Blau's 'Making Friends' on Stroom."Andreu G. Serra and Kiran Leonard first met in Lisbon nine years ago, arriving in the city within weeks of each other by chance. Living together in a crumbling warehouse in Alto São João, they recorded a series of improvisations that became The Piri Piri Samplers (Memorials of Distinction, 2019): Serra’s abrasive, tape-warped guitar lines colliding with Leonard’s stark, pedal-free counterpoint. They played a single gallery show, left Lisbon that summer, and then spent almost a decade living in different countries.When Stroom reissued The Piri Piri Samplers in 2024, the label suggested the duo make a new record. At first, it seemed impossible: Leonard was in London, Ubaldo in southern Catalonia, and their attempts at long-distance recording quickly collapsed into nothing. But the near-failure sparked something. Leonard travelled to Catalonia to restart the process in person; soon after, Serra moved to South London, and the pair began meeting every week.The result is Making Friends: a richer, more expansive album built over six months. Where The Piri Piri Samplers was assembled from raw improvisations, Making Friends transforms fragments into fully realised songs, weaving together nylon and steel-string guitars, piano, drums, bells, samplers and more. For the first time, Serra and Leonard sing together, each in his own language - Catalan and English - sometimes translating one another in real time.Musically, Making Friends still carries the jagged dissonance and free-blues spirit of the duo’s earlier work, while opening outward toward everything from emo and blown-out noise to fractured chamber pop. There are only three guests on the album, and they are worth mentioning: Rachel Leonard and Antonia Serra (the musicians' mothers) on the seventh tune, and the American poet Pete Simonelli (of Enablers) appears on Top of Duboce / Tyne Bridge Crossing, one of the album’s two sprawling centerpieces.At its heart, Making Friends is an album about friendship: about distance, reunion, family, and the stubborn need to make music together. It begins with uncertainty and disconnection, but ends somewhere stronger - with, as put on the closing track, “molta il.lusió per lo que pugue vindre” or “much excitement for what may come.”"
Black Editions presents the expanded and definitive edition of White Heaven’s brilliant third album Next to Nothing. Originally released in 1994 by Tokyo’s Noon Disk, the full album was only ever available in a limited vinyl pressing of 250 copies. Since then, it has become one of the most sought-after artifacts of the 90’s Japanese underground and is regarded as a highpoint of Japanese psychedelic rock. Led by vocalist, songwriter and conceptualist You Ishihara, the album finds the group in a phase of refinement. Taking a more intricate and open approach, the music is buoyant and light yet at the same time, nocturnal and introspective. Next to Nothing marks the first time guitarists Michio Kurihara and Soichiro Nakamura appear together on record after having separate turns as lead guitar on the group’s first two albums. The pairing is revelatory as they weave luminous melodic lines, sometimes in parallel, sometimes opening into sustained intricate counterpoint. Bassist Koji Shimura and drummer Ken Ishihara shuffle and swing in parallel with a fluid, sinuous rhythm, while flourishes of synthesizer, mellotron and the introduction of Go Hirano on keyboards and piano deepens the group’s sound with orchestral colors and a soft cinematic haze. Across the album, clear, shimmering guitar tones and gentle chord progressions are layered with bright arpeggiated figures and darker minor-key passages. The songs develop through gradual changes in tone and dynamics as Ishihara's voice reveals a gentle yearning and wistfulness. An extended version of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “The Look of Love” serves as the album’s entrancing focal point; Stretching the song’s familiar lounge-pop swagger, the group renders it as a slow-burning, psychedelic meditation crackling with electricity as it drifts into the night. Available for the first time on vinyl in over 30 years and for the first time ever digitally (a truncated four song CD EP was also released in 1994). Remastered and expanded to include a second LP featuring three previously unreleased song versions cut at 45RPM. Presented in a heavy tip-on gatefold with metallic and ink pigment foil stamping, spot colors as well as a gatefold insert. House in a custom vellum wrap with a mirror metallic sticker seal. Lacquers cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Mastering, pressed at Record Technology Inc.
Back in stock ! João Gilberto’s 1970 En México captures the bossa nova legend in exile, blending Brazilian classics, boleros, and standards with his signature whisper-soft vocals and minimalist guitar. Recorded during his stay in Mexico City, the album features gems like “Bésame Mucho” and “Ela é Carioca,” offering a delicate, cross-cultural set that highlights Gilberto’s timeless, introspective style.
A drummer who shone brightly in the Japanese jazz scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Hideo Shiraki recorded this album in Berlin in 1965.
The moment when the energy of Japanese jazz shines brightest: Terumasa Hino’s May Dance returns nearly 50 years after its creation as the sixth release in the Spin This Now! series.
Intergalactic Music Is Of the Outer Darkness It is rhythm against rhythm in kind dispersion It is harmony against harmony in endless coordination It is melody against melody in vital enlightenment (Excerpt from The Outer Darkness by Sun Ra) From Detroit’s techno resistance to Berlin’s elastic minimalism, Lusaka’s ancestral futurism to Chicago’s house communion, When There Is No Sun is a global recording project, uniting visionary electronic music producers to reimagine the universe of Sun Ra. One of the most radical musical pioneers of the 20th century, Sun Ra used jazz, electronics, poetry, and performance to expand the possibilities of sound, identity, and imagination. Commissioned by Omni Sound and curated by Ricardo Villalobos, the series brings together Underground Resistance, Chez Damier & Ben Vedren, Calibre, A Guy Called Gerald, She Spells Doom, Barış K, and Ricardo Villalobos himself. Drawing from Omni Sound’s recordings of Living Sky by the Sun Ra Arkestra and My Words Are Music, a spoken-word album of Sun Ra’s poetry, the producers pull fragments of sound and text into their own creative orbits, passing through the portal that Sun Ra opened into a realm where the impossible is possible. Invocations by Saul Williams, Anthony Joseph, Mahogany L. Browne, Abiodun Oyewole, Tunde Adebimpe, and Tara Middleton turn rhyme into rhythm and resistance into revelation. Rooted in deep reverence for Sun Ra’s legacy, yet reaching forward as a living, generative force, When There Is No Sun is not a tribute but a continuum, balancing the pulse of electronic music with the spirit of experimentation, embodying Sun Ra’s promise that ‘there are other worlds’ if you are willing to see them.
Intergalactic Music Is Of the Outer Darkness It is rhythm against rhythm in kind dispersion It is harmony against harmony in endless coordination It is melody against melody in vital enlightenment (Excerpt from The Outer Darkness by Sun Ra) From Detroit’s techno resistance to Berlin’s elastic minimalism, Lusaka’s ancestral futurism to Chicago’s house communion, When There Is No Sun is a global recording project, uniting visionary electronic music producers to reimagine the universe of Sun Ra. One of the most radical musical pioneers of the 20th century, Sun Ra used jazz, electronics, poetry, and performance to expand the possibilities of sound, identity, and imagination. Commissioned by Omni Sound and curated by Ricardo Villalobos, the series brings together Underground Resistance, Chez Damier & Ben Vedren, Calibre, A Guy Called Gerald, She Spells Doom, Barış K, and Ricardo Villalobos himself. Drawing from Omni Sound’s recordings of Living Sky by the Sun Ra Arkestra and My Words Are Music, a spoken-word album of Sun Ra’s poetry, the producers pull fragments of sound and text into their own creative orbits, passing through the portal that Sun Ra opened into a realm where the impossible is possible. Invocations by Saul Williams, Anthony Joseph, Mahogany L. Browne, Abiodun Oyewole, Tunde Adebimpe, and Tara Middleton turn rhyme into rhythm and resistance into revelation. Rooted in deep reverence for Sun Ra’s legacy, yet reaching forward as a living, generative force, When There Is No Sun is not a tribute but a continuum, balancing the pulse of electronic music with the spirit of experimentation, embodying Sun Ra’s promise that ‘there are other worlds’ if you are willing to see them.
Spiritmuse Records is proud to present Journey To Nabta Playa, a new album from composer and multi-instrumentalist Angel Bat Dawid and multidisciplinary artist and musician Naima Nefertari (aka Karlsson), releasing May 2, 2025. A powerful meditation on memory, mythology, and ancestral science, the record draws deep inspiration from the ancient astrological stone circle of Nabta Playa, nestled in the remote deserts of Nubia. Journey To Nabta Playa is grounded in a shared inquiry between two artists connected by music, research, and sisterhood, and is a sonic journey through sacred time and space. Meeting through mutual spiritual and creative alignments, Dawid and Naima composed, performed and produced the album together—recorded between Dawid’s base in Chicago and Naima’s family home in Sweden (home of Don and Moki Cherry). Additional parts were captured at Elastic Arts (Chicago) and CoLabyrinth (home of Kahil El’Zabar), forging strong connections with community, lineage, and sound as ritual. Blending spiritual jazz, celestial electronics, ancestral instrumentation, and storytelling, the duo’s palette includes flute, clarinet, vibraphone, kalimba, clay pot, gong, mouth harp, piano and synths—layered with sounds like “Winds of Neptune” and “Rings of Saturn” to imagine futures grounded in ancient knowing. “This album is a story from beginning to end,” says Naima, “a mythology in music.” The tracklist acts as a cosmic narrative arc: from desert summoning and ritual procession, to astral ceremonies, burial, and liberation. Highlights include “Bishmillah”, a rare composition by Don Cherry and “Burial: String Quartet in E Minor”—a previously unreleased composition by Naima’s uncle, the late David Ornette Cherry. The piece was transcribed and arranged by the artists and recorded with four BIPOC string players, including a 14-year-old violinist in Chicago. The album’s first single, “Procession of the Equinox,” is released in alignment with the Spring Equinox on March 20th—a cosmic marker reflecting the album’s deep relationship with celestial cycles and sacred time. A portal for remembrance, Journey To Nabta Playa connects past and future, the earth and sky, the seen and the unseen. Inspired in part by Virginia Hamilton’s The People Could Fly: “They say the people could fly. Say that long ago in Africa, some of the people knew magic. And they would walk up on the air like climbin’ up on a gate. And they flew like blackbirds over the fields. Black, shiny wings flappin’ against the blue up there.” — Virginia Hamilton, The People Could Fly Presented as a deluxe 2xLP, the album arrives on 180g black vinyl in a gatefold sleeve with original artwork by Nep Sidhu and inner gatefold painting by Kahil El’Zabar. A 12-page booklet deepens the project’s archival and spiritual layers, featuring essays and reflections from Neneh Cherry, Tej Adeleye, Dr. Adam Zanolini, Imani Mason Jordan, and more. This is not just an album—it’s a constellation. A sacred sound offering from two artists listening deeply to the past, dreaming toward liberation. “Let the journey begin...” – Angel Bat Dawid
Anything can happen and often does. This is John Cage. A seminal example of indeterminate music from an icon on experimental sounds. This work was originally used as music for the choreographed piece by Merce Cunningham, "Field Dances," with stage and costume design in the original version by Robert Rauschenberg (from 1967 the designer was Remy Charlip). Variations IV is the second work in a group of three of which Atlas Eclipticalis is the first (representing 'nirvana', according to Hidekazu Yoshida's interpretations of Japanese Haiku poetry) and 0"00 is the third (representing 'individual action'). It represents 'samsara', the turmoil of everyday life. Cage indicates that sounds may be produced inside and outside the performance space. There are no indications of durations, dynamics, etc.. It could be argued that there is no more controversial figure in music history as avant-garde electronic composer John Cage. Perhaps best known for his composition "4'33,"" which consisted of Cage sitting at a piano for four-plus minutes of total silence, Cage was both loved and loathed in the 60s and 70s as a leading light in avant-garde music and as an entertainingly weird guy who used radios, televisions, live dancers and his own Adam's apple as instruments in his live performances. Cage's music blurred the line between music, performance art and visual art in a way that no other composer has before or since. Cage's performances were often wild one-of-a-kind happenings, and the shows that make up the recording of Variations IV are no different. The fourth in a series of concerts that stretched the boundaries of what music was, IV was designed for a group of performers playing literally anything they could get their hands on. They were also encouraged, if they got bored playing, to do "other activities" in addition to the music. The score consisted of two circles and seven points on a transparent sheet, to be interpreted however the performers saw fit. The end result: a wild album of music-concrete that should sound familiar to fans of the Beatles' "Revolution 9" -- no question Cage's composition influenced Lennon and Ono's experiments. detail Modern Harmonic brings you this gorgeous reissue of Cage's masterpiece, pressed on clear vinyl and wrapped in restored artwork that captures the unique and strange beauty of this headphone classic. Join the avant-garde!