MUSIC

Another spellbinding compilation exploring the depths of overlooked Greek folk music from the curatorial genius Christopher King. Highlighting the virtually unknown work of the heartbreakingly haunted hypnotic clarinetist Kitsos Harisiadis. From 1929 through 1931, Harisiadis recorded instrumentals that have endured in the Epirotic repertoire well into the twenty-first century. Kitsos plays all fourteen pieces as if he were a Greek-Shaolin monk conversing with a grasshopper at his feet. Through King’s painstakingly thorough research and immersive story-telling, the listener is able to fully absorb the otherworldly aura that radiates throughout the release. Painstakingly remastered directly from ungodly rare original 78 rpm discs and coupled with artwork by R. Crumb and design by Grammy Award-winner Susan Archie, the entire package is delightful in every sense.

Founded in 1951 by independent record store owner and radio show promoter Ernie Young, Nashville, TN’s Nashboro Records recorded some of the most potent and forceful gospel music of the time period. Although initially begun in response to overwhelming demand for gospel locally, Nashboro quickly became nationally applauded for its curatorial prowess (under the guidance of Rev. Dr. Morgan Babb of the Radio Four) and signature production style. The lightly-reverbed, clear sound of a Nashboro record is unmistakable. Give Me My Flowers is a compilation of some of the finest cuts released by Nashboro Records, many of which have not been previously reissued. It kicks off with a total banger, The Hightower Brothers’ “Until He Comes,” which would have made an amazing cover song for Spacemen 3. Iola and Sullivan Pugh, also known as The Consolers, top off the A-side of the compilation with the intensely potent namesake track, “Give Me My Flowers”. A final highlight is “Almighty God” from Sister Pope and the Pearly Gates; dare you to get it out of your head after you hear the chorus even once. Not only are the featured artists endlessly skilled at their craft, their songs are absolutely explosive. This is the opposite of indifference or irony; there is a mission here, steeped in a full-heartedness that can only be derived from selfless devotion. Additionally, the songs featured on Give Me My Flowers are representative of a far too overlooked and important chapter in Nashville’s music history. These musicians, store employees and businesspeople played a critical role in building the infrastructure for independent music to flourish in their city. Naturally, it is a cornerstone in Third Man’s long-term mission to support and highlight the complete music histories of Tennessee and Michigan, from the most rightfully revered to the most critically under-represented. All of these tracks were assembled with producer and journalist Mike McGonigal (Detroit Gospel Reissue Project, Temperature’s Rising: An Oral History of Galaxie 500) and transferred directly from the 45 collection of Kevin Nutt (Case Quarter Records, Sinner’s Crossroads radio program).

Cosmic Gypsy Sounds!! In the early 80s, the Ansambl Mileta Petrovica was formed in Nis, in the Serbian part of the former Yugoslavia. Mile Petrovic and his band were pioneers and modernised gypsy music by replacing the accordeon with synthesizers. The result is a psychedelic cocktail of traditional rhythms and spaced out sounds. As ˜Veseli Romi™ or ˜The Happy Roma™ they promoted their irresistible dance music. This album contains some of the best boundary pushing tracks the band recorded between 1986 and 1991.

This first volume of a two-volume series presents a selection of the best of early Syliphone recordings. The songs demonstrate not only the essence of Guinea’s authenticité policy and of its subsequent Cultural Revolution, but of a confluence of musical styles from Cuba, jazz, highlife and the diverse influences of Guinea’s cultural groups.

(2LP, High quality records in gatefold sleeve with extended liner and song notes) This is the second of a two-volume release which presents a selection of the best songs from Guinea's Syliphone recording label. This volume focuses on recordings from the 1970s, when Guinea’s authenticité policy had transformed the nation's music through a network of over 30 orchestras, each representing their local region, and each presenting Guinean musical traditions alongside the influences of Cuban music, jazz and funk.

They paved the way for artists like Ali Farka Touré, Tinariwen, Mdou Moctar or Bombino. Although the group is still active today, they only recorded 2 LPs and a handful of singles. All these recordings took place in 1971 at the Boussiphone studios in Casablanca.

Re-issue of this ultra-rare Oriental psych monster from the organ king of Casablanca, combining traditional rhythms with spaced out modern sounds.

First issue of this previously unreleased Oriental psych monster from the organ king of Casablanca, combining traditional rhythms with spaced out modern sounds. Second part of Abdou El Omari's Nuits-trilogy. This albums contains heavenly compositions for The Moroccon diva Naima Samih and some moody instrumentals in a similar vein to the previous album.

First issue of this previously unreleased Oriental psych monster from the organ king of Casablanca, combining traditional rhythms with spaced out modern sounds. This album contains dazzling instrumentals spiced up here and there with some traditional vocals. While playing his fine melodies Abdou switches swiftly from his Farfisa Professional mothership to an analog ARP synthesizer. This new sound and some funky wah guitar riffs give his music an extra cosmic touch.

It long time for Cartola to release his first album, self-titled, which hit stores in 1974, through the Marcus Pereira label. Just as it is impossible to talk about samba without mentioning his name, it is unthinkable to discuss the national discography without citing his albums. As one of the founders of Estação Primeira de Mangueira, the composer, singer, and musician left a lasting mark on the history of national music and continues to be a significant reference. It is his first album that Polysom is bringing back to stores, on 180-gram vinyl, as part of the “Classics on Vinyl” collection.

PRE-ORDERSep 18, 2026 (EST) LP - Black SS083lp 6669454152402 $13.00 3 TOTAL 3 Teranga, the final album in the Wau Wau Collectif trilogy, the dreamy cross-cultural collaboration across cultures, finds the band finally coming together. Taking its name from the Wolof word “teranga” is used to express a welcomeness, a hospitality to others, and something loosely as a shared meeting - an apt title for the album that is an expression of a meeting. The project began in the village of Toubab Dialaw in 2018, where two musicians Arouna Kane and Karl-Jonas Winquist first conceived of the idea. Over the subsequent years, the project evolved, with the two producers trading files back and forth over WhatsApp, incorporating their network of friends and colleagues into what would become a the Wau Wau Collectif, culminating in their first album “Yaral Sa Doom” (2021) and "Mariage” (2022). Their latest album, Teranga, is the third entry and final entry in this trilogy, finalized and mixed during the the band's first live tour - a five week sprawling journey across Europe with "three swedes, three Senegalaise, and a french driver, a lovely mess of languages”, Karl-Jonas explains. At the heart at the heart of Wau Wau Collective is a strong musical foundation, borne not just by the wide cultural swath from which the collective draws inspiration but from the deftly talented musicians - composed and performed with a staggering 26 different songwriters and musicians, playing an impressive array of instrumentation, from balfon, ngoni, calabasse, violin, cello, saxophone, and omnicord. The resulting sound is complicated to place, but sonically has certainly found its place in Teranga. At times, dreamy and meditative, but imbued with an organic soul, a wholly unique sound that is both anachronistic and future facing. “Oh, Africa” could be at home on a classic reissue, with an almost Turkish guitar riff, where 100 ans (their first live studio recording) reminiscent of early 2000s Amadou et Mariam.With roots in avant garde (Karl-Jonas has cited Barney Wilen's Moshi as an inspiration) while Wau Wau draws inspirations from these experiments, though diverging in their dedication to the collaborative spirit - a project enabled by cellphones, WhatsApp, and mp3s zipping around the internet - slightly ironic considering how acoustic and grounded and human it feels. As we close the chapter on the trilogy, Karl-Jonas insists that this may well be just the beginning: “we have barely started in some ways” he says, with plans shaping in the next year for getting the whole band together, and more tours on the horizon, more hope, more humanity, and more coming together.

XKatedral Anthology II is the second installment in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by composers affiliated with XKatedral working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces written from 2018 to 2020 by composers Kali Malone, Jessica Ekomane, Mats Erlandsson, Theodor Kentros, Wilma Hultén and Maria W Horn. This collection of pieces focuses on the use of synthetic sound and algorithmic composition languages as tools for precise work within the realm of spectral exploration. In addition to this, the electronic instrumentation in many of the pieces is augmented by acoustic instruments.

XKatedral Anthology I is the first in a series of archival releases dedicated to presenting music by XKatedral affiliated composers working within the realm of slowly evolving harmonic and timbral music. This double-vinyl set contains an array of pieces dating from 2010 - 2020. Four of the works included here were originally released on cassette early on in the label's history, while the two remaining pieces are presented by the label for the first time.

Black Sarabande expands upon pianist-composer Robert Haigh’s beguiling debut for Unseen Worlds with a collection of intimate and evocative piano-led compositions.  Haigh was born and raised in the ‘pit village’ of Worsbrough in South Yorkshire, England. His father, as most of his friends’ fathers, was a miner, who worked at the local colliery.  Etched into Haigh’s work are formative memories of the early morning sounds of coal wagons being shunted on the tracks, distant trains passing, and walking rural paths skirting the barren industrial landscape

The album opens with the title track — a spacious, plaintive piano motif develops through a series of discordant variations before resolving. On ‘Stranger On The Lake,’ sweeping textures and found sounds lay the foundation for a two chord piano phrase evoking a sense of elegy. ‘Wire Horses’ is an atmospheric audio painting of open spaces and distant lights. ’Air Madeleine’ uses variations in tempo and dynamics to craft the most seductively melodic track on the album.  ‘Arc Of Crows’ improvises on a single major seventh chord, splintering droplets of notes as ghostly wisps of melodic sound slowly glide into view. ‘Ghosts Of Blacker Dyke’ is a melancholic evocation of Haigh’s roots in England’s industrial north — intermingling dissonant sounds of industry within a set of languid piano variations. ‘Progressive Music’  is constructed around a series of lightly dissonant arpeggiated piano chords which modulate through major and minor key changes before resolving at a wistful and enigmatic refrain. In ‘The Secret Life of Air’, a nocturnal, low piano line slowly weaves its way through the close-miked ambience of the room, nearly halting as each note is allowed to form and reverberate into a blur with the next. The ambitious ‘Painted Serpent’ calmly begins with drone-like pads and builds with the introduction of counterpoint piano lines and an orchestral collage of sound underpinned by a deliberate bass motif. ’Broken Symmetry’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ highlight Haigh’s gift for blurring the line between dissonance and harmony - opaque piano portraits of moonlight and shadows glancingly evoke the impressionistic palettes of Harold Budd, Debussy and Satie.

LIMITED EDITION OF 5000 180 GRAM OPAQUE DARK BLUE VINYLProduced by Brian Paulson at River North Recorders in Chicago and released by Touch and Go Records in April of 1991, the six songs on Spiderland methodically mapped a shadowy new continent of sound. The music is taut, menacing, and haunting; its structure built largely on absence and restraint, on the echoing space between the notes, but punctuated by sudden thrilling blasts of unfettered fury. It is a sound that no one had heard before and that no one will ever forget. The eerie, now-iconic black and white cover photo of the four-band member’s heads breaking the surface of the water was taken by their friend Will Oldham. Spiderland spawned a whole new genre, frequently called Post-Rock, and came to be regarded as one of the most important and influential records of the past thirty years. SLINT broke up shortly before Spiderland was released. Band members went on to play in Tortoise, the Breeders, Palace, The For Carnation, Papa M, Evergreen, Interpol, and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Recorded at night by candlelight in the Temple of La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland, Music for Intersecting Planes captures the immediacy of sound in space. Cellist Leila Bordreuil and organist Kali Malone join in a work of austere, ritualistic presence, where the granularity of air, the vibration of strings, feedback, and subdued sine waves intersect in sculptural form.

Minimal in means yet expansive in effect, the music slowly unfolds like beads on a thread, punctuated by silence and deep breaths. Bellows whistle within feathered string harmonics, interference patterns pulsate throughout the chapel, and the environment itself becomes part of the composition, with ringing church bells and motorcycles passing in the distance.

Performed live in single takes, the music balances patience and intensity, composure and chance. The collaboration reveals new terrain: more tonal and composed than Bordreuil’s work, more textural and raw than Malone’s.

Music for Intersecting Planes is both severe and tender, an elemental convergence of cello and organ that resonates with the timeless intrigue of acoustic phenomena

Super Tip! Kali Malone and Drew McDowall have orbited each other's work for over a decade, their individual explorations of sustained tones and harmonic space suggesting an inevitable collaboration. When they finally entered McDowall's Brooklyn studio together, what emerged on Magnetism transcends mere musical compatibility. Malone has spent recent years extending the legacy of Éliane Radigue, redefining what electronic minimalism can accomplish through pipe organ and synthesizer. Her compositions stretch single chords into cathedral-sized architectures of sound, tracing harmonic territories that Radigue first mapped in her pioneering electronic works. McDowall brings a different lineage: as a veteran of Coil, he approaches synthesis with the patience of an alchemist, crafting electronic textures that breathe with unsettling life. Magnetism resolves this apparent contradiction through sonic diplomacy. Malone's melodic sensibilities—those long, searching lines that seem to trace the curvature of space itself—find new expression through McDowall's textural arsenal. Where Malone typically builds with mathematical precision inherited from the Radigue tradition, McDowall introduces the controlled chaos he perfected with Coil: digital distortion that pulses like organic matter, synthesis algorithms that decay at the speed of memory. The album's foundation reveals their shared fascination with the spaces between notes. Karplus-Strong synthesis becomes their primary tool, combined with just intonation tuning systems that allow Magnetism to inhabit frequencies conventional instruments cannot reach. But technique serves expression here, not the reverse. Across four extended movements, repetition becomes meditation, saturation a means of transcendence. There's something ritualistic about how these pieces unfold, their harmonic cycles suggesting ancient ceremonies filtered through electronic consciousness. This is music that operates on geological time while pulsing with digital immediacy. The collaboration marks significant evolution for both artists. Malone embraces the productive friction of working with another creative mind, while McDowall discovers in her melodic clarity a redemptive light reminiscent of Coil's more transcendent moments. Together, they've created something that feels both ancient and urgently contemporary—proof that experimental music's most profound statements emerge when distinct artistic visions recognize themselves in each other.

Release 20/1/2023. Does Spring Hide Its Joy is an immersive piece by composer Kali Malone featuring Stephen O’Malley on electric guitar, Lucy Railton on cello, and Malone herself on tuned sine wave oscillators. The music is a study in harmonics and non-linear composition with a heightened focus on just intonation and beating interference patterns. Malone’s experience with pipe organ tuning, harmonic theory, and long durational composition provide prominent points of departure for this work. Her nuanced minimalism unfolds an astonishing depth of focus and opens up contemplative spaces in the listener’s attention. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy follows Malone’s critically acclaimed records The Sacrificial Code [Ideal Recordings, 2019] & Living Torch [Portraits GRM, 2022]. Her collaborative approach expands from her previous work to closely include the musicians Stephen O’Malley & Lucy Railton in the creation and development of the piece. While the music is distinctly Malone’s sonic palette, she composed specifically for the unique styles and techniques of O’Malley & Railton, presenting a framework for subjective interpretation and non-hierarchical movement throughout the music. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is a durational experience of variable length that follows slowly evolving harmony and timbre between cello, sine waves, and electric guitar. As a listener, the transition between these junctures can be difficult to pinpoint. There’s obscurity and unity in the instrumentation and identities of the players; the electric guitar's saturation timbre blends with the cello's rich periodicity, while shifting overtone feedback develops interference patterns against the precise sine waves. The gradual yet ever-occurring changes in harmony challenge the listener’s perception of stasis and movement. The moment you grasp the music, a slight shift in perspective guides your attention forward into a new and unfolding harmonic experience. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy was created between March and May of 2020. During this unsettling period of the pandemic, Malone found herself in Berlin with a great deal of time and conceptual space to consider new compositional methods. With a few interns left on-site, Malone was invited to the Berlin Funkhaus & MONOM to develop and record new music within the empty concert halls. She took this opportunity to form a small ensemble with her close friends and collaborators Lucy Railton & Stephen O’Malley to explore these new structural ideas within those various acoustic spaces. Hence, the foundation was laid for Does Spring Hide Its Joy. 

In Kali’s own words: “Like most of the world, my perception of time went through a significant transformation during the pandemic confinements of spring 2020. Unmarked by the familiar milestones of life, the days and months dripped by, instinctively blending with no end in sight. Time stood still until subtle shifts in the environment suggested there had been a passing. Memories blurred non-sequentially, the fabric of reality deteriorated, unforeseen kinships formed and disappeared, and all the while, the seasons changed and moved on without the ones we lost. Playing this music for hours on end was a profound way to digest the countless life transitions and hold time together.” 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy has since been performed live on many European stages, in durations of sixty and ninety minutes. Including at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich, the Bozar in Brussels, Haus Der Kunst in Munich, and the Munch Museum in Oslo. Concerts are forthcoming at Unsound Festival in Krakow, Mira Festival in Barcelona, the Venice Biennale, and the Purcell Room at the Southbank Center in London. 

In addition to live concerts, the Funkhaus recordings of Does Spring Hide Its Joy have evolved in parallel as a site-specific sound installation. Malone has also invited the video artist Nika Milano to create a custom analog video work that interprets and accompanies the musical score as a fourth player, creating a visual atmosphere inspired by the sonic principles of the composition. Eight sequential video stills from Milano’s work are featured in the album artwork. 

Does Spring Hide Its Joy is packaged in a heavyweight laminated jacket with full-color printed inner sleeves with artwork by Nika Milano. Mastered by Stephan Mathieu and cut at Schnittstelle Mastering, the record is pressed in perfect sound quality by Optimal in Germany. 

In the mid-1970s, a force of nature swept across the continental United States, cutting across all strata of race and class, rooting in our minds, our homes, our culture. It wasn’t The Exorcist, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, or even bell-bottoms, but instead a book called The Secret Life of Plants. The work of occultist/former OSS agent Peter Tompkins and former CIA agent/dowsing enthusiast Christopher Bird, the books shot up the bestseller charts and spread like kudzu across the landscape, becoming a phenomenon. Seemingly overnight, the indoor plant business was in full bloom and photosynthetic eukaryotes of every genus were hanging off walls, lording over bookshelves, and basking on sunny window ledges. The science behind Secret Life was specious: plants can hear our prayers, they’re lie detectors, they’re telepathic, able to predict natural disasters and receive signals from distant galaxies. But that didn’t stop millions from buying and nurturing their new plants.

Perhaps the craziest claim of the book was that plants also dug music. And whether you purchased a snake plant, asparagus fern, peace lily, or what have you from Mother Earth on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles (or bought a Simmons mattress from Sears), you also took home Plantasia, an album recorded especially for them. Subtitled “warm earth music for plants…and the people that love them,” it was full of bucolic, charming, stoner-friendly, decidedly unscientific tunes enacted on the new-fangled device called the Moog. Plants date back from the dawn of time, but apparently they loved the Moog, never mind that the synthesizer had been on the market for just a few years. Most of all, the plants loved the ditties made by composer Mort Garson.

Few characters in early electronic music can be both fearless pioneers and cheesy trend-chasers, but Garson embraced both extremes, and has been unheralded as a result. When one writer rhetorically asked: “How was Garson’s music so ubiquitous while the man remained so under the radar?” the answer was simple. Well before Brian Eno did it, Garson was making discreet music, both the man and his music as inconspicuous as a Chlorophytum comosum. Julliard-educated and active as a session player in the post-war era, Garson wrote lounge hits, scored plush arrangements for Doris Day, and garlanded weeping countrypolitan strings around Glen Campbell’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” He could render the Beatles and Simon & Garfunkel alike into easy listening and also dreamed up his own ditties. “An idear” as Garson himself would drawl it out. “I live with it, I walk it, I sing it.”

But as his daughter Day Darmet recalls: “When my dad found the synthesizer, he realized he didn’t want to do pop music anymore.” Garson encountered Robert Moog and his new device at the Audio Engineering Society’s West Coast convention in 1967 and immediately began tinkering with the device. With the Moog, those idears could be transformed. “He constantly had a song he was humming,” Darmet says. “At the table he was constantly tapping.” Which is to say that Mort pulled his melodies out of thin air, just like any household plant would.
The Plantae kingdom grew to its height by 1976, from DC Comics’ mossy superhero Swamp Thing to Stevie Wonder’s own herbal meditation, Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. Nefarious manifestations of human-plant interaction also abounded, be it the grotesque pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the pothead paranoia of the US Government spraying Mexican marijuana fields with the herbicide paraquat (which led to the rise in homegrown pot by the 1980s). And then there’s the warm, leafy embrace of Plantasia itself.

“My mom had a lot of plants,” Darmet says. “She didn’t believe in organized religion, she believed the earth was the best thing in the whole world. Whatever created us was incredible.” And she also knew when her husband had a good song, shouting from another room when she heard him humming a good idear. Novel as it might seem, Plantasia is simply full of good tunes.

Garson may have given the album away to new plant and bed owners, but a decade later a new generation could hear his music in another surreptitious way. Millions of kids bought The Legend of Zelda for their Nintendo Entertainment System back in 1986 and one distinct 8-bit tune bears more than a passing resemblance to album highlight “Concerto for Philodendron and Pothos.” Garson was never properly credited for it, but he nevertheless subliminally slipped into a new generations’ head, helping kids and plants alike grow.

Hearing Plantasia in the 21st century, it seems less an ode to our photosynthesizing friends by Garson and more an homage to his wife, the one with the green thumb that made everything flower around him. “My dad would be totally pleased to know that people are really interested in this music that had no popularity at the time,” Darmet says of Plantasia’s new renaissance. “He would be fascinated by the fact that people are finally understanding and appreciating this part of his musical career that he got no admiration for back then.” Garson seems to be everywhere again, even if he’s not really noticed, just like a houseplant.

-Andy Beta 

On Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou channel their friendship and atmospheric artistry into ceremonial focus. Spoken-word environments and orchestral imagination flow like tributaries into a unified stream, resulting in a collection of dreamlike songs and soundscapes anchored in sea, sky and stone. Through electro-acoustic instrumentation, voice, and environmental sound, Water Poems invites listeners into a subconscious space somewhere between everyday intimacy and the oceanic enigma from which all life unfolds.

Originally released in 1998, South Central Thynk Taynk by Abstract Tribe Unique (Abstract Rude, Fat Jack, Zulu Butterfly Priest, Irie Lion King, and DJ Drez.) captured a pivotal moment in Los Angeles’ underground scene—when young Black artists were reimagining hip-hop from the ground up. Blending jazz-inflected beats, spiritual insight, and fiercely independent production, the album became an anthem for self-reliance and creative rebellion. Now reissued by Rhymesayers Entertainment as a deluxe 2xLP set with a lyric booklet and bonus track, this long-unavailable classic returns for a new generation.At the cultural core of the record is Project Blowed, a legendary L.A. crew founded by Abstract Rude and Aceyalone, which birthed a lineage of rap innovators whose fingerprints are still felt in global hip-hop. While mainstream rap embraced the West Coast’s G-funk boom, the Blowed crew forged an alternate path—steeped in jazz, radical politics, and Afrocentric futurism. Thynk Taynk stands as a richly layered time capsule from this revolutionary moment, pairing Ab Rude’s deep lyricism with Fat Jack’s genre-melding approach to production, creating a poetic reflection on family, struggle, and artistic purpose.This new edition includes the “L.A. Styles Back (Project Blowed Remix)” featuring a cross-generational lineup of heavyweights— Aceyalone, Myka 9, Medusa, Pigeon John, Blu, 2Mex, Ellay Khule, Riddlore, and NGAFSH—underscoring how L.A.’s underground has remained a creative epicenter for decades. South Central Thynk Taynk is more than a cult artifact; it’s a living document of transformation, community, and artistic power.

On her sophomore album "Germ in a Population of Buildings”, upsammy moves through her surroundings with the curiosity of a place-bending landscape architect. The album is rooted in her interest for ambiguous environments in constant shift, and the feeling of discovering strange patterns in different ecosystems. Often, the Amsterdam-based artist finds herself zooming in and out beyond a place's most recognizable surface features to inhabit the microscopic and gigantic. Gathering field recordings and evocative environmental sounds, she shapes this source material into vibrating electro-acoustic rhythms and unstable, psychedelic textures. upsammy's debut album, 2020's critically-acclaimed "Zoom", was praised for its careful reimagining of IDM, evolving vignettes that nodded towards the dancefloor without being shackled to its rigid set of rules. On "Germ in a Population of Buildings" her process has evolved considerably; the skeletal trace of IDM is still present but it's been trapped in amber, allowing her unique sonic landscape to develop organically. 'Being is a Stone' is a proof of concept in many ways, layering upsammy's contorted voice in rickety patterns beneath a lattice of fragile rhythms and faintly melancholy synths. It's never immediately obvious where the sounds are coming from - a hiccuping beat might be glass cracking underfoot, and larger pulses could be wet concrete, rusted iron or bent plastic. As the sounds develop they morph into each other, demolishing what came before and building on top of the ornamental wreckage. On the dynamic 'Constructing', upsammy's sound design fluxes through hyperactive bass music structures, abstracting expectations at every turn. Often her sounds are whisper quiet, rattling and vibrating until heavier masonry drops and disrupts the structure. And when discernible rhythms subside into the background, like on the album's eerie title track, they become almost illusory, morphing between the real world and the electronic. upsammy's processed voice works like a bridge between these realms, snaking between stark, whimsical melodies on 'Patterning', arching from AutoTuned detachment into cooing, dreamy intimacy. By considering the harmonies between each location she's visited, upsammy has been able to build a unique topology that's an uncanny digital amalgam of her lived experience. It's a thoughtful alternative in an era more concerned with flatting the landscape than crumpling it and examining its peaks and troughs.

Connecting Wasulu hunter music, griot praises, Senufo pastoral dances, Fula and Mandingo repertoire alongside Western psychedelia, blues and afro-beat, Zani Diabaté’s Super Djata Band was among Mali’s top orchestras of the 1980s. On their 1982 album, Diabaté enshrines himself within the pantheon of mythical West African guitarists, hypnotically picking through eight vivid compositions on his path to godhead status.

Cut in three days in 1975, Doug Firebaugh’s Performance One captures a young songwriter alone in a Roanoke, Virginia motel room, chasing Nashville dreams through cosmic Americana haze. Self‑written and performed, with only a single pedal steel guest, it first appeared on a small grey‑market label. This Numero Group 50th‑anniversary remaster preserves its faded, wandering beauty.