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Sublime downbeat pressure for the horizontally-inclined, from Lyon-based Jonnnah, chasing 2025’s co:clear side with a 2nd session of tumescent ambient textures and rolling pulses that feels like Sa Pa, CS + Kreme or even his near namesake, Jonnine, slipping off the page into deep beatdown hypnagogia... "Conceived as a form of therapy, as much as a reflection and a testimony, the record retraces a process of introspection and confrontation with one’s own history, looking back at origins, DNA, and the invisible ties that connect us to our ancestors, while opening paths toward new connections. The double-sided structure of the album makes this journey tangible. The first side lingers in uncertainty : opaque atmospheres, fragmented rhythms, and restless textures mirror the doubts, questions, and fragile states of self-analysis. The second side, in contrast, embraces clarity and resolution, dense yet luminous soundscapes where reconciliation and acceptance take shape, culminating in The Blue Comet, a piece charged with finality and revelation. Opening with the multipart suite N-zero, symbolizing the beginning of therapy, and closing with O-one, evoking the soul’s original purity, the record traces a complete emotional and spiritual cycle. Between them, the third edition of Insomnia Never Ends once again portrays the struggle between sleep and the irresistible pull of musical distraction, a fragile tension that runs through the album as a whole. The record condenses Jonnnah’s language into something rawer and more direct. Layers of dub and dub sonic resonate against ethereal ambient passages, while techno impulses maintain tension and forward motion. Each piece feels at once intimate and expansive, designed as much for solitary listening as for collective experience. A new chapter in Jonnnah’s trajectory, the album is a document of transformation : from shadow to light, from questioning to acceptance."
Levi Bruce returns to Pacific Rhythm under his Unknown Mobile moniker for the first time since 2019 with a project entitled Field Work. The project is focused around field recordings taken during the winter and spring of 2025. These recordings come from both his travels abroad while on tour and areas near his home in Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, located on the traditional lands of the Ta’an Kwäch’än Council and Kwanlin Dün First Nation. Each field recording acts as the basis for a journal entry taken at the location. Raw data was used to reflect on the people, actions, and environmental elements connected to the site through additional production and manipulation.
A very cinematographic journey in between Ambient and Experimental, with a certain touch of Balearic right in the middle of the Leftfield. A super trippy trip, gifted by beautiful melodies and vocals like on the titles “Indisponible” or “Mambo n6”… as if you were crossing a super cozy desert on LSD, starting from the coast after a nice bath in the sea to the dryness of the sand under the sun, with intense divagations like on “Fastelavn” or “Kompasitu” to long relief of contemplations like on “Opium Swing” or “Blizzard” at the end of the way... This is a full immersive experience, one of those life soundtrack releases, and probably one of our favorite release ever.
APORIAMOR noun 1. The death of love’s contradiction. | “Embody APORIAMOR” Etymology aporia-: an irresolvable internal contradiction or logical disjunction in a text, argument, or theory. from Greek aporos ‘impassable’, from a- ‘without’ + poros ‘passage’ -amor: love. Sentimiento intenso del ser humano que, partiendo de su propia insuficiencia, necesita y busca el encuentro y unión con otro ser. Del latín amor. -mor: latin for death. APORIAMOR explores the affective ontological and organic processes of love and lust in the turmoil of an urban existence, through the female lens. It expresses the process of strengthening through heartbreak in its various forms. With her debut EP The Art of the Concrete, elsas knew that by giving that name to a record which was ironically expansive and experimental, she would be calling for a distilled and clearer path further down the line. This is what she’s been incorporating into the sonic world of this new EP, APORIAMOR, signifying the birth of a more matured and distilled version of herself as an artist. With APORIAMOR (“the death of love’s contradiction”) elsas conveys a personal process of healing in the romantic space. Through different experiences of heartbreak, elsas builds a language - a coping mechanism attached to its subsequent artistic expression – that isn’t founded on hardness or a closing-off, but instead, on a playful but profound reckoning, and learning of self-worth. APORIAMOR embraces the complexities of being a lover-girl: of moving through life with an open heart. It celebrates the clarity, sweet hindsight, and detachment that come from processing emotion. APORIAMOR is both an affirmation and a release. elsas makes canonical blends with a forward boundary-bending vision. Her sound in this record is naturally referential of both her Mediterranean heritage and UK alternative music — intrinsic parts of her lived experience. She has had the opportunity to collaborate with artists she deeply admires, each exchange enriching her creative world. The experience of working hand-in-hand with Sampha for the last 3 years and ongoingly has been a core of her evolution as an artist. She has also collaborated in many forms with artists like Florence + the Machine, Little Simz, Jordan Rakei, Jockstrap, Obongjayar, Black Country New Road, Genevieve Artadi (KNOWER) and Duval Timothy. Additionally, her ongoing work with the Idrîsî Ensemble, of which she is a core member, continues to inform her artistic depth. The making of this largely self-produced record unfolded over four years — “it’s a well-kneaded dough,” she says. These songs evolved through exposure to multiple environments: from early writing sessions in her childhood home in the Spanish countryside, to stages across the U.S. while on tour supporting Sampha. Experimentation and modulation are an intrinsic part of elsas’ method, conceiving songs as organisms that respond to their surroundings. Collaborators on this collection of songs include Shrink, Will Lister, Gabriel Gifford, Ethan P. Flynn and more. The record was mixed by David Wrench (a long-time supporter of elsas’) and Nathan Boddy, and mastered by Matt Colton. With APORIAMOR, elsas creates a visual world from the fabulation of the past, as an act of playful historical revisionism in which she embeds herself as both subject and storyteller. The songs function like an archive of her experiences across various years, each one unearthed and presented as some sort of archaeological artifact. Through this body of work, elsas begins to conceptualize herself as a legacy artist: one who honors the archive of her own becoming while emerging as a distinct and resonant voice in today’s musical landscape.
Aspen Edities is pleased to present Aerial, the third album of the experimental quartet Oker. Whereas their album debut Husene våre er museer (2018) and its follow-up Susurrus (2021) focused on collective and individual compositions, Aerial features two longform pieces of fully improvised music, sculpted from the recognizable acoustic sound palette that the quartet has developed across a decade of extensive touring. The titles, Aerial, Equinoctial Tide and Crepuscular Rays refer to meteorological and planetary phenomena, and in Oker’s interplay we hear light, wind, clouds, and tidal cycles transpire as shimmering, roaring, rubbing, coalescing and diverging environments of sound. The sonic stoicism and minimalism in their expression is challenged by frictioning micro-chaoses, combining to create calm, winding paths of musical detail and form. Echoing our planet and its meteorological reality, Aerial yields both consistency and perpetual change.
On Nocturnes, Jesse Hackett steps into the shadows, unveiling a deeply personal album of spectral piano and gothic chamber pieces. The record channels a sense of lingering unease and creeping dread and signals a new direction in Hackett’s unpredictable oeuvre. We were delighted when Jesse reached out to propose a collaboration on what he described as his most personal work to date. Written and produced during a particularly difficult period, Nocturnes plunges the listener into a beautifully eerie world of rain-soaked twilight jazz and gothic chamber music. Reminiscent of the soundtrack to an imagined Giallo thriller or Hammer Horror film, the album is deeply cinematic and evocative, conjuring unsettling mental images: shapeless presences lingering at the edges of uneasy dreams, candlelight casting wavering shadows, and unspeakable secrets hidden in the run-down bars and lounges of London’s bohemian underbelly. For Nocturnes, Jesse returns to the piano as his primary means of expression and collaborates with saxophonist and flautist Finn Peters. Together, they channel spirits summoned during late nights listening to the works of Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, Olivier Messiaen, and the jazz lineage of Bill Evans and Charles Mingus. The album is released on 27th February 2026 in a limited edition of 250 copies - black vinyl in a reverse board sleeve. Jesse Hackett is a London-based multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter renowned as a musical chameleon, shifting style and mood while working across genres. He is best known as a longtime live keyboard and synthesizer player for Gorillaz, contributing to their performances and recordings from 2010 to 2022. Alongside this, he has been involved in a wide array of globe-spanning projects, including the Afro-Futurist ensembles Owiny Sigoma Band, Ennanga Vision, and Nyege Nyege Tapes favourites Metal Preyers and Teeth Agency. In parallel, he has released warped synth-funk under the name Elmore Judd and forms one half of the experimental pop production duo Blludd Relations.
Wanda Felicia returns to Timmion Records with ‘Reflections Of Love’ b/w ‘All In The Game’, two tracks drawn from her debut Now Is The Time.... Backed by the analogue warmth of Cold Diamond & Mink, the release highlights the strength and character of Felicia’s voice. ‘Reflections Of Love’ leads with a relaxed funk pulse, Felicia gliding over the groove with a performance that balances confidence and tenderness. The result is both heartfelt and effortlessly danceable. On the flip, ‘All In The Game’ shifts into a slower, beat-driven ballad. Over a patient, steady rhythm, Felicia delivers a measured and soulful vocal that speaks to resilience and the unfolding nature of love. Together, the two tracks reveal complementary sides of her approach, confirming Wanda Felicia as one of Timmion Records’ most distinctive voices.
Two turntables and a microphone. There is a truth in the clarity of that simple coda, a truth that also belies the breadth of what is possible within its confines. Sometimes you gotta get reminded. I Guess U Had To Be There, the new album from NYC rapper ELUCID and veteran producer Sebb Bash, is one of those ones. So fresh it sounds like it was made tomorrow, but bet money you could put this on in '89 and get heads bopping.
There are moments in music when masters of their craft cross paths at the height of their respective powers - records like Madvillainy, Liquid Swords, Dr. Octagonecologyst, and Hell Hath No Fury - where the result is more than the sum of its parts. ELUCID and Sebb Bash find themselves in this heady, seemingly effortless ephemera on I Guess U Had To Be There. Everything is both familiar and groundbreaking. The beats shift and flip under ELUCID's feet but he tightropes it all, delivery nimble as a mountain goat, producer and rapper moving in perfect synchronization. Some shining stars make memorable appearances: billy woods, Breezly Brewin, Estee Nack, Shabaka Hutchings. But this is a two-man show, and the duo keep the spotlight where it belongs. I Guess U Had To Be There is a captivating, convention-defying listen and a high-water mark for two of the best artists in the genre.
Rio’s Felinto channel the punkish ‘80s vim and license of Os Replicantes on a pair of crazed, shouty, scrappy calls to resistance, issued in aid of activists in the favelas.
"Fresh from annihilating EU/UK audiences with his steppas tropicalia on the Bokeh Dekalog tour, Felinto presents a crazed vision of Sao Paulo party punk - industrial scuzz, dub squelch, grinding guitars and riot-ready vocals.
Festa Punk is a call to rage, to ritual, to celebration — as forms of resistance against the grim, creeping global fascism. It’s a shout to bend time, to create moments that shake off erased identities and flip the script on a world that treats violence like gospel.
It's also a homage to Brazilian hxc heroes, Os Replicantes, whose classic 'Fest Punk' appeared on the '87 LP Histórias De Sexo E Violência."
Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.
The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.
“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”
The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.
Where will the improvisation take place?
How will that space shape the sounds being made?
How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?
How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?
Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?
For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.
Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.
Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.
Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”
On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.
That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.
In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.
The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.
The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.
“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.
Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.
Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.
And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.
A sequel. An escalation. Pressure spikes from bar one: future-facing, low-latency. A firmware update for the body. Cuts bite into cuts. Fragments swarm, collide, die out. Drums stumble until they speak; samples crop up without names and leave without warning. Momentum is the one and only rule. Unpredictable, gridless, post-genre. From TikTok feed to vinyl: born digital, cut for the floor. The glitch grows a body, develops a nervous system. Match it or get out of the way. Damned be the ones that are stuck on tradition.
Khadim is a stunning reconfiguration of the Ndagga Rhythm Force sound. The instrumentation is radically pared down. The guitar is gone; the concatenation of sabars; the drum-kit. Each of the four tracks hones in on just one or two drummers; otherwise the sole recorded element is the singing; everything else is programmed. Synths are dialogically locked into the drumming. Tellingly, Ernestus has reached for his beloved Prophet-5, a signature go-to since Basic Channel days, thirty years ago. Texturally, the sound is more dubwise; prickling with effects. There is a new spaciousness, announced at the start by the ambient sounds of Dakar street-life. At the microphone, Mbene Diatta Seck revels in this new openness: mbalax diva, she feelingly turns each of the four songs into a discrete dramatic episode, using different sets of rhetorical techniques. The music throughout is taut, grooving, complex, like before; but more volatile, intuitive and reaching, with turbulent emotional and spiritual expressivity.
Not that Khadim represents any kind of break. Its transformativeness is rooted in the hundreds upon hundreds of hours the Rhythm Force has played together. Nearly a decade has passed since Yermande, the unit’s previous album. Every year throughout that period — barring lockdowns — the group has toured extensively, in Europe, the US, and Japan. With improvisation at the core of its music-making, each performance has been evolutionary, as it turns out heading towards Khadim. “I didn’t want to simply continue with the same formula, says Ernestus. “I preferred to wait for a new approach. Playing live so many times, I wanted to capture some of the energy and freedom of those performances.” Though several members of the touring ensemble sit out this recording — sabar drummers, kit-drummer, synth-player — their presence abides in the structure and swing of the music here.
Lamp Fall is a homage to Cheikh Ibra Fall, founder of the Baye Fall spiritual community. The mosque in the city of Touba is known as Lamp Fall, because the main tower resembles a lantern. Soy duggu Touba, moom guey séen / When you enter Touba, he is the one who greets you. After a swift, incantatory start Mbene sings with reflective seriousness. Her voice swirls with reverb, over a tight, funky, propulsive interplay between synth and drums, threaded with one- two jabs of bass. Cheikh Ibra Fall mi may way, mo diayndiou ré, la mu jëndé ko taalibe… Cheikh Ibra Fall amo morome, aboridial / Cheikh Ibra Fall shows the way forward, he gives us strength, he gathers his disciples… Overflowing with grace, Cheikh Ibra Fall has no equal.
Interwoven with Wolof proverbs, Dieuw Bakhul is a recriminatory song about treachery, lies, and back-biting. Over moody, roiling synths and ominous, lean bass, Mbene throws out fluttering scraps of vocal, as if re-running old conversations in her head. The music shadows her despair to the verge of breakdown, at one moment seemingly so lost in thought and memories, that it threatens to disintegrate. Bayilene di wor seen xarit ak seen an da ndo… Dieuw bakhul, dieuw ñaw na / Stop judging your friends and companions… A lie is no good, a lie is ugly.
Khadim is a show-stopper; currently the centrepiece of Ndagga Rhythm Force live performances. The song is dedicated to Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba, aka Khadim, founder of the Mouride Sufi order. Serigne Bamba mi may wayeu / Serigne Bamba is the one who makes me sing. The verses name-check revered members of his family and brotherhood, like Sokhna Diarra, Mame Thierno, and Serigne Bara. Though Islam has been practised in Senegal for a millennium, it wasn’t until the start of the twentieth century that it began to thoroughly permeate ordinary Senegalese society, hand-in-hand with anti-colonialism. The verses here recall Bamba’s banishment by the French to Gabon, and later to Mauritania, in those foundational times. During exile, his captors once introduced a lion to his cell: gaïnde gua waf, dieba lu ci Cheikhoul Khadim / the lion doesn’t budge, it gives itself over to Cheikh Khadim. Deep, surging bass, steady kick-drum, and simple, reverbed chords on the off-beat lend the feel and impetus of steppers reggae. A reed plays snatches of a traditional Baye Fall melody; the dazzling polyrhythmic drumming is by Serigne Mamoune Seck. Mbene compellingly blends percussive vocalese, narrative suspense, exultant praise, introspection, and grievance.
Nimzat is a devotional tribute to Cheikh Sadbou, a contemporary of Bamba, buried in a mausoleum in Nizmat, in southern Mauritania. Way nala, kagne nala… souma danana fata dale / I call upon you and wonder about you… If I am overwhelmed, come to my aid. The town holds special significance for Khadr Sufism. An annual pilgrimage there is conducted to this day. The rhythm is buoyantly funky; the mood is sombre, reined-in, foreboding. Punctuated by peals of thunder, Mbene sings with restrained, intense reverence; huskily confidential, steadfast. Nanu dem ba Nimzat, dé ba sali khina / Let us go to Nimzat, to seal our devotion.
unification of techno and dub reggae. An outstanding universal masterpiece of sound dub/minimal techno released in 1993 by Mark Ernestus & Moritz von Oswald's Basic Channel, repressed in 2025.
On “Cold Sweat,” James Brown famously called to “give the drummer some.” In 1974, Philadelphia vibraphonist Khan Jamal called to Give the Vibes Some, with superb results. Pianist and composer Jef Gilson’s PALM label gave Jamal the platform he needed to deliver a thorough exploration of contemporary vibraphone. After launching PALM in 1973, Gilson quickly demonstrated that he would only produce records not found anywhere else. Give the Vibes Some, PALM number 10, was another confirmation of this guiding principle.
Raised and based in Philadelphia, Khan Jamal took up the vibes in 1968, after two years in the army during which he was stationed in France and Germany. Decisively drawn to the instrument by the work of the Modern Jazz Quartet’s Milt Jackson, Jamal studied under Philadelphia vibraphone legend Bill Lewis and soon made his debuts in the local underground.
Early in 1972, Jamal made his first recording, with the Sounds of Liberation. The band attempted an original fusion of conga-heavy grooves with avant-garde jazz soloing. Saxophonist Byard Lancaster, an important figure in Jamal’s development, contributed much of the solo work. Later in 1972, Jamal made his leader debut with Drum Dance to the Motherland, a reverb-drenched, never-to-be-replicated experiment with live sound processing. Both albums appeared on the tiny musician-run Dogtown label.
“We couldn’t get no play from nowhere. No gigs or recording sessions or anything. So I took off for Paris,” Jamal recalled in a Cadence interview with Ken Weiss. “Within a few weeks, I had a few articles and I did a record date. It didn’t make me feel good about America.” That was in 1974, while Byard Lancaster was recording the music gathered on Souffle Continu’s recent The Complete PALM Recordings, 1973-1974.
Jamal’s record date delivered Give the Vibes Some. At its core, it was an exploratory solo vibraphone album, even if two tracks added (through technological resourcefulness?) a très célèbre French drummer very much into Elvin Jones appearing under pseudonym for contractual reasons. Another track, for which Jamal switched to the vibes’s wooden ancestor, the marimba, added young Texan trumpeter Clint Jackson III. The most notable article published on Jamal during this stay in France was a Jazz Magazine interview. Jamal’s last word there were “The Creator has a master plan/drum dance to the motherland.” “Give the vibes some” could be added to this programmatic statement.
Rich in musical associations yet utterly singular in its voice, joyous with an inner tranquility, the music of Natural Information Society is unlike any other being made today. Their sixth album in eleven years for eremite records, descension (Out of Our Constrictions) is the first to be recorded live, featuring a set from London’s Cafe OTO with veteran English free-improv great Evan Parker, & the first to feature just one extended composition. The 75-minute performance, inspired by the galvanizing presence of Parker, is a sustained bacchanalia of collective ecstasy. You could call it their party album.
This was the second time Parker played with NIS. Joshua Abrams: "Both times we played compositions with Evan in mind. I don't tell Evan anything. He's a free agent."
The music is focused & malleable, energized & even-keeled, drawing on concepts of ensemble playing common to musics from many locations & eras without any one specific aesthetic realization completely defining it.
“The rhythms that Mikel plays are not an exact reference to Chicago house, but that’s in there,” Abrams says. “I like to take a cyclic view of music history, can we take that four-on-the-floor, & consider how it connects to swing-era music? Can we articulate a through line? I dee-jayed for years in Chicago & lessons I learned from playing records for dancing inform how I think about the group’s music. The listener can make connections to aspects of soul music, electronic music, minimalism, traditional folk musics, & other musics of the diaspora as well. It’s about these aspects coming together. I don’t need to mimic something, I need to embody it to get to the spirit, to get to the living thing.”
For jazz fans, the sound of Parker’s soprano & Jason Stein’s bass clarinet might evoke Coltrane & Dolphy, even though they didn’t necessarily set out to do that & they play with complete individuality. Abrams sees a bridge to the historical precedent, too. “Since we first met in the 1990s, one of the things that Evan and I connected on was Coltrane’s music,” he says. “I hoped that we would tap into that sound world intuitively. In this case, I think that level of evocation adds another layer of depth, versus a layer of reference.”
Indeed, this is a performance in which the connections among the ensemble & the creative tension between improvisation and composition build into a complex mesh of associations & interactions. While the band confines itself to the territory mapped out by Abrams’ composition, they are remarkably attentive & responsive, making adjustments to Parker’s improvisations. When Parker’s intricate patterns of notes interweave with the band, the parts reinforce one another & the music rockets upward. Sometimes, Parker’s lines are cradled by the group’s gentle pulse & an unearthly lyrical balance is struck.
Drummer Mikel Patrick Avery is locked-in, playing with hellacious long-form discipline, feel & responsiveness. Jason Stein’s animated, vocalized bass clarinet weaves in & out with Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium to state the piece’s thematic material; the pulsing tremolo on the harmonium brings a Spacemen 3 vibe to the party. Abrams ties together melody & rhythm on guimbri, a presence that leads without seeming to. Like his bandmates, he shifts modes of playing frequently, improvising & then returning to the composed structure.
“As specific as the composition is, the goal is to internalize it & mix it up,” Abrams says. “The idea is to get so comfortable that we can make spontaneous changes, find new routes of activity, stasis & byways every gig. It’s like a web we’re spinning. If someone makes a move, we all aim to be aware of it, make room for it. Experiencing & listening is what it’s about, & Evan supercharges that.”
& “supercharged” is the word for this album. With Parker further opening up their music, descension (Out of Our Constrictions) is the sound of Natural Information Society growing both more disciplined and freer, one of the great bands of its time on a deep run.
x2LP, mte-74/75, pressed on premium audiophile-quality vinyl at RTI from Kevin Gray / Cohearent Audio lacquers. Mastered by Helge Sten, Audio Virus, Oslo. Liner Notes by Theaster Gates. First eremite LP edition 1200 copies. CD edition & EU x2LP edition available thru our new EU new partner, Aguirre records (Belgium).
FELT enters 2026 with a newly established sub label for reissues, retrospectives and oddball adjacent non-FELT material under the anagram catch-all LEFT. First on the agenda is a vinyl issue of a modern classical tape by Danish guitarist Johan Surrballe Wieth, founding member of the band Iceage. Initially released on a limited cassette edition and plucked from the vast catalogue of the Copenhagen label Posh Isolation, the solo project Health & Safety can be read as composers meditation on anxiety, depression, insomnia and all the damned things they entangle. Wieth moves across the spectrum with dour, deliberate keys, mangled drone fx, barely-there violin scrapes, erratic chimes and whistles and with a knowing pace that feels akin to a guiding hand. We’re unsure if the form of each piece is meant to directly correlate to the drug so referenced but the quiet fever dream atmosphere of the 25 minutes also blurs each piece into a whole. This quote from Wieth certainly rings true for the highly introspective nature of Health & Safety - “You should be very careful listening to too much music when you're writing an album. It has a tendency to become a little too explicit”
Cult digidub mutators Froid Dub slow their steez to deeply knackered, ghostly levels on a follow-up to joints with Krikor and Ransom Note. Back with Parisian patrons Delodio, the pair bring a deep studio knowledge earned since the ‘90s (and their days together as Bosco) to a half hour of purposefully sluggish pressure slanted at the earliest or latest hours of the night/day. With Black Roots Players’ ‘Slow Tempo’ riddim possibly in the back of their mind, they keep it all heavily downbeat and rent with a psychoacoustic nous that draws lines between The Black Ark, GRM, and DJ Screw. ‘Deep’ feels like the onset of a space cake, all super blunted vox and wiggy synths, and ‘The Swap’ snaps tightly to slowed digidub templates, next to echoes of ’Slow Tempo’ in the cranky chords of the title tune. They really let the bass flare in acres of space on the spangled zingers ‘Too Digital’ and an acidic ‘Love’, whilst crossing lines with Full Circle’s proto-goa trance in ‘Diggin’’ and the swampy motion of ‘No Sense’.
A mutant beat manifesto from Miami luminaries Jonathan Trujillo (Jonny from Space) and Pablo Arrangoiz (El Gusano, DJ Fitness, Baüzer Vep), Crespi Drum Syndicate’s Colada Talk follows the duo’s debut on Sonido Isla with a freshly freaked collection of percussive oddities. Rooted in foundational clave rhythms and avant-garde experimentation, Crespi Drum Syndicate emerges from the amphibious underbelly of Miami’s Latin-infused club scene with their singular electro-acoustic vision. Extensive live recording sessions, free improvisation, and a ritualistic studio practice — countless hours spent twisting and rearranging sounds from found objects and Buchla modular systems — coalesce into new rhythmic forms. Atonal saxophone, bass clarinet, and slide whistle further expand upon Trujillo and Arrangoiz’s ever-evolving sonic palette, while NYC’s AceMo lends a hand on the heavily syncopated “Siu,” and closer “Boubow” might be the duo’s most hook-driven production to date with its mangled pop vocal and lewd drum-line bounce. Landing somewhere between Steve Reich’s polyrhythmic “Six Marimbas,” Moebius & Plank’s industrial Krautrock sessions, and Ricardo Villalobos’ hypnotic techno minimalism, Colada Talk delivers on a world of subtropical rhythmic futurism and experimental body music that’s as heady as it is culo-shaking. -Phil Cho