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The Payback is the 37th studio album by American musician James Brown. The album was released in December 1973 by Polydor Records. It was originally scheduled to become the soundtrack for the blaxploitation film Hell Up in Harlem, but was rejected by the film's producers, who dismissed it as "the same old James Brown stuff."
The Payback is considered a high point in Brown's recording career, and is now regarded by critics as a landmark funk album. Its revenge-themed title track, a #1 R&B hit, is one of his most famous songs and an especially prolific source of samples for record producers.
“Soul Revolution Part II” is a landmark roots reggae album created in 1971 by Bob Marley & The Wailers in collaboration with Lee “Scratch” Perry. Before their major label debut, the band delivered raw yet striking performances, enhanced by Perry’s innovative production, resulting in a uniquely deep and minimal sound. The album features numerous tracks that would later be re-recorded and gain worldwide recognition, including “Sun Is Shining,” “African Herbsman,” and “Keep On Moving.” Marley’s powerful lyrics, combined with the harmonies of Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer, reflect a profound spiritual and musical exploration that defines his early work. This album captures a rare moment where the maturity of The Wailers and Perry’s studio wizardry intersected to produce a truly significant piece of reggae history.
The third drop into the Poorly Knit ocean, sees Bruce washed ashore with three silted and barnacled explorations into dub techno, ambient and beyond.
Seizing the microphone for the first time since his sophomore album Not Ready For Love, Bruce weaves a seductive siren song with Golden Water Queen, treading sweet nothings into the bubbling abyss. Sinking further into the deep, The Hand fizzes and froths at the fringes of nothingness, born from the wishing of a softer and more insidious soundtrack to Denis Villeneuve’s Dune. Then finally the waves are parted with DHam’s Jam, bobbing along 8 minutes of bouncing kick and prancing percussion, pulling you with peaceful buoyancy along the dancefloor, into “the zone.”
With a continued emphasis on the importance of physical medium within dance music, the 12” is pressed with eco-friendly “Eco-Mix” reground PVC and sleeved in DIY lino printed sleeves.
Poole’s new album Ben Beinn follows 2024’s In a River Shadow, further exploring an electronic folkway composed of environment and abstraction. If the previous record moved with flowing water and submerged folk song, Ben Beinn climbs into elemental instability: passing storms, coded skies, and sodden ground.
Across the album, Poole creates a phantasmic Celtic New Age sound world that’s marked by microtonal harmony, and swelling dissonance. Voices in Gaelic, Norwegian, and English surface and dissolve, stretched beyond recognition — more weather than word.
The ten song cycle opens with 1000, bagpipes and strings emerge from mountain icicles and frozen streams. Leaf is the centre point, the skittering squelches of moss, mud and grass, form a slippery rhythmic track. The album closes with 365 Days of Rain, a year’s rainfall data becoming a rhythmic lattice that slips from metrical order into converging motifs.
Recorded in Scotland between 2024–2025, Ben Beinn is a located listen, shaped by recordings of frozen hill passes, storms, and granite using contact mics and hydrophones. Rather than simply reflecting place, these recordings press against it — layering the sonic materiality of landscape with synthesis and song. An inflection point between fabrication — folk music as performed identity, a carrier of story — and its obfuscation through digital networks, where tradition is refracted into plural forms.
Reference points include the emotionally saturated textures of Inoyama Land and the folk-electronic hybrids of Eli Storbekken. There’s a tuning of biophony with the hyperrealist processes of Noah Creshevsky, owing as much to Galen Tipton’s adventures than the disquieting sonic simulations of James Ferraro.
Ben Beinn continues Poole’s excavation of environmental and folk material through contemporary methods. Shaped by the slow pressures of land and sky — a music of erosion, recurrence, and elemental presence.
Absolutely killer drop on False Aralia, a new label set up by Brian Foote (Kranky, Peak Oil) to document the shifting forms of photographer/musician Izaak Schlossman, who explores a more sloshing, dubwise momentum this time as Selfsame - RIYL T++, Purelink, Vainqueuer, Xth Reflexion, Topdown Dialectic, Carrier
In finely stitched pursuit to his debut as Zero Key on False 01, this one is distinguished by a more bass-heavy meat on the liquified bones of his sound. All brownian motion and psychoacoustic spectres, the five tracks explore variants of a sound dear to anyone who’s followed the lines from Basic Channel’s ‘90s works thru the crankier mutations of Chain Reaction to where that sound has recently shored up in the leftfield ambient imagination via the likes of Huerco S. and co on one hand, and the more austere strain of Paperclip Minimiser and the Aught label on the other.
Feet barely touch the floor thru his unique conception of ambient club physics. Spongiform subs and aqueous chords take a masterfully adroit motion from its air-stepping opener, threaded with tongue tip vocal contrails, into echoes of the way post-punks were spurred by steppers dub to mutate the sound to their own pleasures, and heads-down into what feels like a disembodied Torsten Profrock production with the 3rd work, whilst the 4th matches Carrier or Hoavi for levels of under the hood nuance, before properly bolstering the bass in its ‘04b’ like a prime Substance & Vainquerer techno stepper.
Tip!
Sleaford Mods have made an explosive return today, releasing brand new single Megaton via Rough Trade Records.
Over an arc of rolling beats and atmospheric electronics, the track is peppered with acerbic bars digging out cultural mediocrity. A union of groove and guile, Jason Williamson and Andrew Fearn are ruffling feathers and moving feet with their first new release as Sleaford Mods since 2023 album UK GRIM.
Continuing the duo’s partnership with the charity War Child, all profits from Megaton will be donated to support War Child’s life-changing work with children affected by conflict.
Alongside the digital release, a seven-inch single featuring the track Give ‘Em What They Want; as its B-side, is now available for pre-order & will be released on November 7.
All profits go to War Child
Reflecting years of listening from behind the drum kit arrives Low Air, the first solo LP from Jeremy Hyman.
Building on previous dance-floor-tuned outputs for Max D’s Future Times label, Low Air moves into a broader compositional arena: pared-down rhythms guide a wash of understated harmony, and compositions surface from a stream of purling noise. There were no standard operations across the music, but one key to the sound is the doubling and tripling of playback speed to fit musical passages into old sampling equipment. This process opened up a new line of inquiry into fidelity and pitch that can be heard throughout the LP.
The second volume of Invisible Inc’s 10-year anniversary celebrations has landed, hot on the heels of the scorching first volume.
Where Volume 1 focussed on the dub-style, electronic and ambient side of the label’s output, the second volume leans towards the ‘psych’ side of the label.
As has been a consistent pattern with the label in its decade of existence is its ethos of releasing new and exclusive tracks as well as releasing on vinyl pre-existing tracks that only ever saw the light of day in the digital realm. This compilation is no different. Alongside exclusive new material from Anna vs June, E Ruscha V, Banda Magnética, Exotic Gardens, Kanot and a Coyote remix of Sordid Sound System we also have for the first time on vinyl two tracks by Hena and Futurum that went somewhat under the radar first time round and really deserved to be shared with the wider world.
Emotional Response is delighted to present Aaron Coyes (Peaking Lights / Leisure Connection) new project, as Exotic Gardens. An additional music universe as his love of dub expands to include new wave, goth and acid psychedelics across 5 catchy, bass heavy songs.
While the continuing journey of his duo band, Peaking Lights, with his wife Indra, earns plaudits and fans alike, his early years as a one-man lysergic music polymath that saw his youth in punk and hardcore bands, expanded during a mid-90s burst of “living in San Francisco” creative expansion, devouring music, genres, and influences for life.
Started as a sub-project to Peaking Lights and his personal dub excursions, Exotic Gardens pollinates a rich tapestry. Recording through the pandemic in their then home in Amsterdam, before being archived, assembled, and completed following the move back ‘home’ to the West Coast, California.
Re-embracing that love of his inner goth, the analogue warmth is all there, now featuring Coyes’ dub-languidity of stripped drum machines, widescreen bass, haunting guitar lines and an almost idle voice to peddle true, raw songs.
Combined, the pop layer of hooks and tight grooves instantly catch you. Opener and EP title, Drugs & TV is the perfect anthem for the Exotic Gardens sound, before the “dubwave” of Last Of The Light and Tonite shimmer that yearning melancholy of youth.
In the almost 10 minute dub house opus Organize Your Movement an appreciation and understanding of the psychoactive properties of the Roland 303 and 909, they also hark to a love of Industrial / Noise bands, a lineage from the death pulse of his cult project Rahdunes through to Sound Design and Sound System culture to the pop-dub psychedelics with Indra, now melded here to include a dark assault, whispering invocations and pulsing pads.
To close, Turn It On is a roaming multi-genre evocation, an exotic end from this constant troubadour, cassette junkie, record dealer, sound system builder, always looking to get back on the road, to live to roam.
“I turn it on, you lose your mind’.
The Danish/Norwegian duo of Ida Urd and Ingri Høyland believe that music is an extension of one’s immediate sensory environment. Duvet, their collaborative full-length debut, explores the way that creating sounds together is intertwined with various quotidian actions: establishing surroundings, rearranging furniture, moving towards the light, collecting flowers or other objects for aesthetic and sensuous impulses. Through a quiet and attentive process, music becomes a way of nurturing space: a soft architecture for play, writing, care, or simply rest.
Sonically, Duvet feels like an extension of Høyland’s last album, 2023’s Ode to Stone, which also featured Urd along with ambient musician Sofie Birch and visual artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund. But where that album, created in response to an open call for work themed around Denmark’s national parks, suggested rolling landscapes and endless horizons, Duvet turns inward, countering chill winds with glowing warmth. Its eight tracks seek a balance between abstraction and melody, intention and happenstance.
“We had a truly inspiring and rewarding process working with Birk Gjerlufsen Nielsen from Vanessa Amara, who co-produced and mixed the album with us,” Ingri adds. “He approached the material with great care and sensitivity, while also bringing his own distinct presence and creativity into the sound.”
Høyland and Urd both studied at the Rhythmic Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, which has turned out many acclaimed artists over the past few years, including Erica de Casier, Astrid Sonne, and Smerz. Over many years, the two composers have developed a collaborative method based on connection and trust. A practice, they write, “where composing, or rather suggesting, sounds and melodies for one another is a way of carefully talking, mending emotions and obstacles. Saying yes to one another. The compositional space becomes a nest for entangling whatever emotions, thoughts, or barriers one of the composers brings to the given day or moment.”
Quiet and contemplative, Duvet is simple on the surface but rich in timbral, textural, and emotional complexity. Høyland and Urd sourced their sounds from an array of instruments and techniques—electronic devices, modules, pedals, and also electroacoustic treatments of various wind instruments. Mixing primarily through analog tape units added further mystery and depth, weaving together wordless voices and unknown sounds—breathing, rustling, perhaps the coppery gleam of Urd’s electric bass—into a dynamic matrix. Like a nest, pull one twig and the whole thing unravels.
In the winter of 2023, Ingri Høyland and Ida Urd retreated to a summer house along the coast to create the album. Picture the scene: an abiding quiet all around. Gardens carpeted by snow; beach grass silvery against the silvery sky; a tendril of smoke rising from the chimney. Not another soul in earshot. This sanctuary was the perfect setting to yield this meditation on shelter, trust, and communication. The two composers hope the album can be a similar space for others—a temporary space of residence, it can represent a summerhouse, a cabin in the woods, your favorite bench or wherever you need to go. “The album also works really well when picking out apples in the supermarket” Urd laughs.
Recorded just a few months ago, Pub's latest EP heads into deeper, darker territory, balancing the Glasgow-based veteran's hazed cosmic arpeggios with Gescom-like squelches and brassy, detuned analog pads.
Pub's been on a tear recently; since reissuing his classic catalog (including the perennial fave 'Summer' and the underrate 'Do You Regret Pantomime?'), he's been surprisingly active, releasing his first album of new tunes in over a decade, 'Process the Wise', just last year. 'Mamor' continues the thought, apparently foreshadowing not just a series of shows ("in obscure locations" no less) but more brand new material. It's not a big departure, but that's for the best. 'Rain For Rest' is a 'Summer' style balearic slow burner at first, with tempered arpeggios trapped behind a reclining, slowed-down 4/4, but give it time and it blots into a sci-fi nightmare, introducing 'Chiastic Slide' airlock percussion and gloopy, acid-washed Skam synths.
'Mi Cielo' works like a crack of sunlight then, matching Pub's jaunty melodic sequences with major key pads, echoes and balmy chimes, and on the lengthy closer 'Groundhed', his cheeky synth melodies are washed into a vortex and pitched into melted Philip Glass-esque orchestral bliss.
A mixture of raw blues and reggae from Skip McDonald (Sugarhill Gang, Tackhead, Strange Parcels) with guest appearances from Ghetto Priest and Bim Sherman. Originally released in 2002.
Skip McDonald aka Little Axe is here assisted by Dub Syndicate and Roots Radics (whose backing tracks are a combination of previously recorded material, reworked and rearranged for the album). McDonald croons blues lyrics and plays aching slide guitar; the overall sound is dark and rich. Originally released in 2011.
A new longform commissioned work for any ensemble of four similar instruments. The definitive string quartet version of 'Long Gradus' is available as a 2LP and CD, and the collection of all four arrangements (strings, woodwinds, brass & organ, choir & electronics) is presented as the 'Long Gradus: Arrangements' 4CD set.
'Long Gradus' began in 2020 when Sarah Davachi was selected to participate in Quatuor Bozzini’s Composer’s Kitchen residency, which was to be a joint production with Gaudeamus Muziekweek in the Netherlands. With the postponement of the residency to the following year, the composer was given the opportunity to take a step back and look at the piece over a much longer period of time than would have ordinarily been possible. The resulting longform composition in four parts, written in its initial form for string quartet, was developed as an iteration of an ongoing preoccupation with chordal suspension and cadential structure. In this context, horizontal shifts in pitch material and texture occur on a very gradual scale, allowing the listener's perceptions to settle on the spatial experience of harmony. A system of septimal just intonation helps to further the production of a consonant acoustic environment. 'Long Gradus' uses a formalized articulation of time-bracket notation alongside unfixed indications of pitch, texture, and voicing that allow the players some discretion in determining the shape of the piece. A sense of pacing that is markedly different from that of mensural notation emerges accordingly, while the open structure of the composition results in each performance having a unique and unpredictable configuration.
The piece may be arranged in a quartet format for any instrumentation that can alter its intonation with some degree of accuracy or produce a natural seventh harmonic. Substitution of the string quartet with other instruments as desired or imagined, both acoustic and electronic, is entirely acceptable and indeed encouraged. To this end, Davachi has also offered the 'Long Gradus: Arrangements' 4CD set, which includes the string quartet version as well as arrangements for woodwinds, brass and organ, and choir and electronics. A 'gradus' is a sort of handbook meant to aid in learning a difficult practice; in this case, 'Long Gradus' is designed to considerably slow the cognitive movements of both listener and player, and to focus their attention on the relationships between moments. A rich harmonic landscape that is constantly shifting and which changes with each engagement is the listener’s return. For the player, 'Long Gradus' is an invitation to practice active listening and to immerse oneself in the stillness of psychoacoustic space and time.
Davachi comments: “I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Quatuor Bozzini for the opportunity to go through this process together, which is exceedingly uncommon in the context of chamber music. Typically, when writing for an ensemble or orchestra, the composer is given very few, if any, occasions to actually adjust their work in a meaningful way outside of perhaps one or two brief rehearsals of an essentially final score. It is extremely rare and an enormous luxury to begin with simple sketches or ideas and to actually construct a piece over a period of several months or more from a place of sonic assurance – that is, being able to listen and to explore and to continually fine tune in response to the sound itself, in conjunction with the performers. Part of the reason that my earliest compositional efforts arose within the domain of electroacoustic and acousmatic music is because of the control that it offered, to intuit sound in real time rather than through the indirect interpretation of future sound in the form of a score. Even now, when I compose work for chamber ensembles, I typically always start from a recorded version or from a demo – from the sound itself – and then work backwards to generate the score that will result in that music. It seems to be a vestige of conservatory thinking to view music performance, even in relation to new music, as a kind of reading of notes on the page that simply results in things just falling into place as expected. But, when the music goes beyond what’s on the page to include a dialogue with the acoustic space of the performance, and to require a certain patience and concentration on part of the performers, there needs to be a different approach; the Composer’s Kitchen residency offered that respect and curiosity.”
Mark Fell’s Nite Closures EP marks his return to rhythm-focused electronic music after a decade of acoustic explorations. Released on his own label, National Centre for Mark Fell Studies, the 12" features intricate polyrhythms, dub-infused textures, and minimal techno structures. The EP builds on his Sensate Focus series, blending experimental precision with club-ready grooves. Tracks like “Nite Closures (Extended Dub)” and “Auchterhouse (Inversion)” showcase his signature rhythmic complexity. It’s a bold re-entry into dancefloor abstraction from one of electronic music’s most cerebral figures.
Rat Heart’s debut album for Modern Love finds Tom Boogizm blurring genres with instinct and grit. Joined by Adam Sinclaire, Cansu Kandemir, Tha Payne, Ruby Conner and Juan Camilo, he weaves torch songs, DIY blues and cracked pop into something raw and compelling.
Opener ‘I H T’ sets the tone with its weary refrain and spectral flute, grounding the album’s mix of tenderness and unease. Kandemir’s smoky vocals glide through the ghostly shuffle of ‘Not 2Nite’ and ‘Senle’, while Ruby Conner’s spoken word adds bite to the funked-out ‘Real Hardcore Pleasure’. By the time Juan Camilo’s Spanish narration drifts through closer ‘IGOTDRONESINMYBONES’, the record has folded dream pop, post-punk and dub into a single, bruised vision.
A vivid, unclassifiable portrait of Northern soul, noise and nocturnal romance.
Now available for the first time on Vinyl, Sittin' By The Road Captures Blaze Foley on his earliest known recordings. Simple, straightforward and strong, the album contains a dozen tracks recorded during Blaze's 'treehouse' days in Georgia. Recorded in the mid-1970s on a home reel-to-reel machine, these songs showcase Blaze's talent in early form. Includes many of Foley's classic tunes plus three songs that did not appear on previous albums.
‘BMB x OBI II’ sees the continuation of the much sought after collaboration between Minnesota’s afro-psych powerhouse, Black Market Brass, and the young, visionary talent that is Obi Original. Black Market Brass follows the initial release of this partnership, ‘Battle Ready,’ as hard-hitting as they’ve started it. Both sides highlight and deliver the raw, tenacious attitudes that the two artists are known for individually with a song selection that spans a wider spectrum than the first installment. Drawing a direct line between the godfather of soul and the father of afrobeat, Obi Original wields the raucous 10-piece ensemble in a way that evokes the stage of Zaire ‘74. These tracks hit hard, stay heavy, and make no apologies.
The A-side, ‘If I Do My Own,’ is funk. Heavy on the one, this track showcases Obi’s band leadership, à la James Brown; if only you could see him dancing in the vocal booth. Stacked horns, a leader barking orders, and a rhythm section that won’t quit leads listeners to the land of the get-down. The energy stays high as Obi calls forward soloists, even picking up the guitar himself to show us how “he does his own.” ‘If I Do My Own’ is a track slated to make the dance hall shake, with horn and vocal hooks that will live rent free in your head well after last-call.
The B-side, ‘I No Be (Colonizer)’, in no way lets its foot off the gas as dance music is concerned. This song, however, sees BMB returning to their polyrhythmic roots, creating a multi-varied weave of time feels, meter construction, and rhythmic emphasis. That challenge is met and answered by Obi’s Ebo infused lyrics and horn melodies that wind around the vocal rather than merely serving as background. Halfway through the song, BMB’s three-member percussion section rips into a soli. Powerful, unembellished, and raw, the trio doesn’t pull any punches when delivering this rhythm break which propels the song into an unrelenting four-on-the-floor vamp featuring a guitar solo turned up to 11 that will dance you right out of your shoes.
Bendik Giske’s 2023 album with Beatrice Dillon returns in a striking remix collection featuring Carmen Villain, aya, Hieroglyphic Being, Hanne Lippard, Wacław Zimpel and Dillon herself. Each artist reshapes Giske’s saxophone-led recordings into distinctive new forms, highlighting the versatility of his sound. Carmen Villain turns ‘Slipping’ into a rolling dub-concrète groove, while aya twists the same track into hypnotic, polyrhythmic flux. Zimpel adds microtonal synth flares for a psychedelic lift, and Hieroglyphic Being pushes ‘Start’ into raw, neon-lit club terrain. Lippard’s dry spoken-word cadence entwines with Giske’s circling sax on ‘Not Yet’, before Dillon closes with a spectral rework of ‘Rise and Fall’.
Bebedera takes the style of Tarraxo to a heightened awareness of its sexual nature. Tight, wicked layers of percussion, a suggestive ID ("Drinking is his life"), a slow pace that's not only perceptively slow, it sounds charged with intent, even malice, dissolution. Letting go of morality may be the big attraction in the music, permission to get down, this time in a heavy, conspicuous manner instead of a spiritual, breezy floatation. One has to recognize the impulse in ourselves. Once at peace with this rough nature, there are sublime grooves to follow, mind-boggling arrangements, a freedom from judgement in connecting with what may seem to be at first a very masculine take on dancefloor sensuality but which is in fact only human. Just with less filters.
In other ways, an aural combination of metal and flesh produces this notion of a cyborg, a very expressive physical body making its weight known to everybody around, a sort of walking fortress as in the "Moderan" group of sci-fi short stories. A glorious rattle of lata percussion, scraps from the junkyard. A sense of unease, even slight danger starts a flow of adrenalin. According to DJ Marfox, it's not the only thing flowing, there's also a strong desire for intercourse when a Bebedera tarraxo is playing. His very distinctive style has been a cult favourite for years. Accordingly, it took years to make contact, to reach an agreement, and the result is a set of classics that stretch as far back as 2014. Still the same punch, still the feeling no one has really stepped into this territory with such force.
Flipping the construct on its head, there's two Bebedera house tracks, we'd say almost an oddity, an abrupt change from the previous density of atmosphere, though they retain all the percussive bounce. Sensual, sure, a different tempo also letting through a romantic disposition other than the sheer physical attraction. One of the titles sums up the aesthetical power at play: "I Will Beat The Top High". As in reaching further out, further up. Wanting to. Time freezes - 2014 and 2016 (production years of these two tracks), fold up and melt into the Present. Where it matters.