MUSIC

Boards of Canada's masterpiece single. released in 2000.

At the latest with the release of the albums "Zauberberg" and "Königsforst", in the mid-1990s, one associates GAS, Wolfgang Voigt's very own artistic cross-linking of the spirit of Romanticism and the forest as an artistic fantasy projection surface, with intoxicatingly blurred boundaries of post-ambient infatuation and the impenetrable thicket of abstract atonality. The distant, iconic straight bass drum marching through highly condensed, abstract sounds taken from classical music by the sampler or modulated accordingly, and the enraptured gaze through pop art glasses into the hypnotic thicket of an imaginary forest, manifested over the years this unique connection of audio and visual, which to understand fully, then as now, would be neither possible nor desirable.

Quite the opposite. The album GAS - DER LANGE MARSCH once again invites us to follow the deep sounding bass drum, to give in to its irresistible pull into a psychedelic world of 1000 promises. In the process, the journey leads us past stations of memories sounding from afar, from "Zauberberg" to "Königsforst" and "Pop", from "Oktember" to "Narkopop" and "Rausch", back and forth, now and forever.

Way. Destination. Loop. Forest loop.

Veritable pioneers of electronic music, iconic act THE ORB returns to Kompakt with the new full-length MOONBUILDING 2703 AD - another major slice of psychedelic synth bliss, obscure loops and deep ambient textures tossed in swinging breakbeats and powerful basslines. Installing a forward momentum rather unusual for a genre-defying project like this, the latest effort from masterminds Alex Paterson and Thomas Fehlmann follows their 2005 album success on Kompakt, the cheekily named "Okie Dokie It's The Orb On Kompakt" (KOMPAKT CD 45), as well as several contributions to our Speicher and Pop Ambient series - but more importantly, it finds the legendary duo at the peak of its creativity, ringing in another essential phase in what can only be called a ground-breaking career.

True to form, the new offering MOONBUILDING 2703 AD features a small track list, but turns each one of its four cuts into a mini epic in its own right. Opener GOD'S MIRRORBALL hits the ground floating, employing a handful of cozy statics to great effect before finally discharging into an intricate mosaic of atmospheric melodic sketches and gripping rhythms. With a hypnotic runtime of more than 14 minutes, it immediately establishes a blueprint for the other album tracks to follow, perfectly illustrating the vast extent of the artists' vision and their impressive skills in luring in listeners - welcome to THE ORB's sonic labyrinth, where nothing is what it seems and the unexpected waits just around the corner.

Likewise, follow-up track MOONSCAPES 2703 BC presents itself as a uniquely versatile affair sitting comfortably between ambient flourishes and beat-driven focus, holding as many twists and turns as a caper movie, but carefully grounding every single one of its cliffhangers in its impeccable flow. With a runtime of approximately 9 minutes, LUNAR CAVES is the shortest jam of the bunch - and also the most ethereal, keeping its rhythmic content to a bare, pulse-like minimum and opting for enticing, freewheeling synth textures instead. Album closer and title cut MOONBUILDING 2703 AD introduces a surprisingly jazzy vibe mingling rather well with the wealth of electronic tricks up its sleeve - even indulging in abrasive bass sweeps and a breathtaking multitude of different rhythm sections constantly switching places. It's a fitting closing act for a full-length as multifaceted as this, as idiosyncratic as possible and as muscling as needed. 

Matching expansive ambience with environmental sound, Chihei Hatakeyama’s new album continues Field Records’ exploration of Japan and the Netherland’s shared approach to water management. As with Sugai Ken’s 2020 album Tone River, a specific project becomes Hatakeyama’s area of focus - in this case the Hachirōgata Lake in Akita Prefecture. Previously the second largest body of water in Japan, the government ordered extensive drainage work of Hachirōgata Lake after the second world war with the help of Dutch engineers Pieter Jansen and Adriaan Volker. After the project was completed in 1977, reclaimed land took up eighty percent of Hachirōgata Lake’s total size. As a result, a new ecosystem was established as plants spread from surrounding areas, bringing with them a wider variety of birds and other wildlife. Hatakeyama’s approach to this unique subject matter took in field recordings from particular locations around the lake - the drainage channels, the Ogata bridge, grassland conservation reserves and other key areas. The aquatic subject matter and sonic material is a natural fit for Hatakeyama’s accomplished sound, which has featured on numerous solo works for labels including Kranky, Room40 and his self-run White Paddy Mountain. From the intimate intricacies of the sampled material to the glacial expanses of droning synthesis and languid guitar, Hatakeyama creates a tangible environment which at once reflects the settings around Hachirōgata Lake, while offering the listener any number of imagined scenes to observe in their mind’s eye.

Black Truffle is thrilled to begin 2025 with a rare solo release from Konrad Sprenger, alias of elusive Berlin composer-producer-instrument builder Jörg Hiller. A prolific collaborator, Sprenger has worked extensively with icons of American minimalism such as Ellen Fullman (with whom her recorded the gloriously eccentric song album Ort) and Arnold Dreyblatt (as a core member of the Orchestra of Excited Strings since 2009), as well as releasing their music on his impeccably curated label, Choose. As an instrument builder and installation artist, he has overseen the creation of a computer-controlled multi-channel electric guitar and, with Phillip Sollmann, a modular pipe organ system designed to be reconfigured from space to space. In much of Hiller’s work, a scientific approach to acoustic phenomena co-exists with a pop sensibility and a sly sense of humour. Nowhere is this unique combination more in evidence than in his slim body of solo work, beginning with the startling diversity of instrumentation and compositional approaches heard on the short pieces of Miniaturen (2006) and Versprochen (2009), followed by the more single-minded exploration of the computer-controlled electric guitar on Stack Music (2017). Set brings together these various strands of Sprenger’s work into a wildly infectious, playful epic, performed by the composer and the mysterious Ensemble Risonanze Moderne. On the LP’s second side, we are also treated to a guest appearance from longtime collaborator Oren Ambarchi, on whose recent solo releases Simian Angel and Shebang Sprenger has made key production contributions. Ambarchi’s signature stuttering, swirling harmonics weave through a sparkling assemblage of electric guitars, acoustic instruments, percussion and electronics—though, given the deft use that much of Sprenger’s recent production work makes of midi-controlled sampled instrumentation, it’s anyone’s guess where the acoustic ends and the digital begins here. As soon as the needle drops on the first side, we are inside a musical world that Set will inhabit for its 33 minutes: sparkling guitar harmonics and palm-muted notes, tuned percussion, crisp electronic drum hits, flashes of horns, and untraceable bursts of synthetic sound are arranged into a skittering polyrhythmic framework calling up the detail-rich percussive constructions of contemporary techno filtered through the pointillism of the post-serialist European avant-garde. Behind this shifting mist of particulate sound, winds and strings sound out held chords, reminiscent of Arthur Russell’s Tower of Meaning in their epic yet seemingly aimless drift. The relationship between elements is mysterious, appearing both carefully considered and almost random. Though never straying too far from where it begins, as the piece moves along, it spotlights increasingly bizarre instrument choices (shakuhachi and steel drums, anyone?) as well as momentary liftoffs into motorik propulsion. Set is a fascinating, mercurial thing: at once propulsive and fragmented, essentially static in form yet ever-changing in detail, unabashedly egghead in its construction yet sure to get the feet tapping.

Black Truffle is pleased to announce a new solo album by Eiko Ishibashi, her first for the label, following on from the duo recording Ichida alongside bassist Darin Gray. Hyakki Yagyō (Night Parade of One Hundred Demons) was produced for the ‘Japan Supernatural’ exhibition at The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney focusing on ghost stories and folklore from the Edo period onwards. As with The Dream My Bones Dream (Drag City, 2018), the album is a response to troubling questions about Japanese history, and the influence of the past upon the present, but finds Ishibashi shifting further away from her earlier piano-led songwriting and showing a deepening interest in electronics and audio collaging.

The two sidelong parts of Hyakki Yagyō feature layered synthesisers, acoustic instrumentation, recited verse and field recordings, at times densely mixed but always with a subtle interplay of changing elements. The influence of European and American forerunners as diverse as Alvin Curran, David Behrman and Strafe Für Rebellion can be traced, yet at the same time Ishibashi evokes the flute and string sounds associated with Japanese storytelling, and draws directly on the subversive literary tradition of Kyoka (‘mad poetry’) with a verse by the 15th-century poet Ikkyū Sōjun repeated throughout the album. Revisiting what has gone before, re-thinking what is possible musically, as a way of articulating what else might be possible in the future.

As Ishibashi’s liner notes make clear, the album reflects an attention to persistent dangers, myths and evasions in Japanese culture – as well as the lurking uncertainties that might threaten positive change. This would seem to be manifested in the emerging melodies soon met by dissonance, erratic collisions and near silence, as well as the eerie manipulation of the double-tracked vocals. Ishibashi’s underlying concerns ring true more widely of course. Hyakki Yagyō is a work of multiplicities, and mystery, a landscape where nothing is as it seems at first, and everything is vulnerable to sudden violent interruptions.

The album was produced with regular collaborators Jim O’Rourke (double bass) and Joe Talia (percussion), and features dancer and choreographer Ryuichi Fujimura performing Ikkyū’s satirical tanka. O’Rourke’s immersive mix creates a three-dimensional effect, with Ishibashi’s various sound sources enmeshing and interacting in captivating ways.

Pressed on coloured vinyl and presented in a deluxe package with an inner sleeve featuring an artist portrait and liner notes from Eiko Ishibashi.
Cover and label design by Shuhei Abe.
Back cover design by Lasse Marhaug.
Mixed and mastered by Jim O’Rourke. 

First limited edition
*With obi

A historic masterpiece that is indispensable when talking about the history of Japanese rock/punk! Friction's first album, "Friction," the first release from PASS Records, is being reissued on LP for the first time in a long time!

Friction was formed in 1978 by Reck (b/vo) who had just returned from New York, and released their memorable first album in 1980!
This is the only full studio album by the three-member lineup of Reck, Tsunematsu Masatoshi, and Chico Hige, and a masterpiece that shines brightly in the history of Japanese punk! The sound that connects the era of New York that gave birth to post-punk and no wave with Tokyo will send shivers down your spine, and as the title suggests, it's a miracle album that will never fade, with a creaking sound that can be heard from every corner of the album. Reck's thick bass and stoic vocals without a trace of sweetness, Tsunematsu's cool and solid guitar, and Chico Hige's precise and destructive drums surge forward in a trinity. From Reck's heavy bass roar at the beginning of the opening number "A-Gas" to Tsunematsu's saw-like guitar towards the end of the closing number "Out", everything is beautiful. It was co-produced by Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was a huge success with YMO at the time, and the band.

Ston Elaióna is John Also Bennett’s first album for Shelter Press since his 2019 solo debut Erg Herbe. The American born, Athens, Greece, based flautist, synthesist, and composer weaves a strikingly singular electroacoustic excursion for bass flute and Yamaha DX7ii, largely recorded in the golden haze of the early morning hours - bending time at the otherworldly juncture of consciousness and place. Translating from Greek as “in the olive grove”, Ston Elaióna is permeated with the ambiences of the ancient and present world, guided into form by a playfully rigorous approach to sound.

Initially emerging during the mid 2000s as part of Columbus, Ohio’s noise scene, before relocating to NYC around 2010, Bennett’s diverse activities picked up an increasing sense of pace over the following decade - performing and recording as a solo artist (JAB), with the trio Forma and with CV & JAB, his prolific duo with his partner Christina Vantzou, as well as playing in Jon Gibson’s ensemble among many other multifaceted collaborations. However, since 2020 the flautist and electroacoustic composer has existed in a semi nomadic state: drifting between Brooklyn, Brussels, extensive tours, and Greece, where he finally came to rest in Athens last year. Drawing upon a carefully honed attentiveness to the environments and experiences of everyday life, Ston Elaióna is a suite of nine pieces (with an additional track exclusive to physical formats), many of them composed and played live as the early morning sun touched the Parthenon, in full view from Bennett’s studio window in Athens. Bennett’s refinement and restraint, honed over his years adrift, led him to adopt a limited palette focused on his primary instrument, the bass flute, and a Yamaha DX7ii synthesizer tuned to just intonation scales. Alongside a handful of other keyboards, digital oscillators triggered by his flute, and occasional field recordings, this simple palette is reflected by the deeply emotive sense of minimalism that permeates the album’s two sides.

Following two solo albums defined by outward facing temperaments - 2022’s Out there in the middle of nowhere (Poole Music), which used a lap steel guitar and generative oscillators to evoke the surreal landscapes of the South Dakota badlands, and the largely synthetic atmospheres of the 2024 anthology Music For Save Rooms 1 & 2 (Editions Basilic) - the shift in Bennett’s worldly circumstances offered an intuitive return to the calm, inward states of creative exploration that have historically defined JAB’s sound. In parallel, context provided clear sources of inspiration for many of the album’s themes, as well as sources for some of its sounds. The aura of Greece, from the ancient to the present, from its stones and olive groves to its traffic, figures heavily across Στον Ελαιώνα (Ston Elaióna)’s two sides.

The album’s title track and opener “Ston Elaiona” is but one key to opening the album’s multilayered worlds: swells of intertwining of bass flute, oscillators, and DX7ii channel feelings of playful contentment felt by Bennett when “in the olive grove” or in his apartment, reflecting quiet moments spent among the ancient hills of the noisy city that he now calls home. Drawing upon chance encounters within daily life, the flowing synthesizer tones of “Gecko Pads” dance in motions that seem to mimic the movements of a house gecko that appeared on a wall of Bennett’s studio - a quick dash, and then stillness - while “Hailstorm” expands this vision of domestic intimacy, playing the rise and fall of bass flute melodies against the captured sounds of an intense storm outside: a potent sonic metaphor for his intra and extra worlds. As the sharpness and depth of Ston Elaióna comes into focus, playfully threaded amongst its seductive tonal interplay, we encounter Bennett moving across dimensions of time, topical experience, and layers of cultural conjunction. Like “Hailstorm”, “Easter Daydream” incorporates field recording, but here his flute tones are joined by urban ambience and subtle punctuations of melody and rhythm, captured from a day long bell procession at the small church across the street from his apartment during Orthodox Holy Week, seeding the composition with a deep sense of immediacy and place that draw consciousness well beyond the limits of sound.

Moving the narrative possibilities further out into the landscape, “A Handful of Olives” utilizes Bennett’s technique of triggering long synthesizer tones with another instrument - in this case, fluctuating modular synth drones underscoring the glacial melodies of his bass flute. Immersive and meditative, the piece’s title nods to the resilience of a character from a Nikos Kazantzakis novel, who begins a long journey across the countryside with nothing but some wine, a piece of cheese, and a handful of olives. “First Lament” is the oldest work on Ston Elaióna, having been performed live by Bennett, in evolving states, for the past three or four years. A strongly affecting exercise in deep listening, meditation, and sometimes emotional catharsis, like “A Handful of Olives” it utilizes his technique of triggering long synthesizer tones with the flute, extending and overlapping resonances to create tone clusters that hang in the air with an otherworldly effect, echoing Bennett’s heartfelt yet restrained melodies of lament.

Tapping a sense of dualism endemic to Greece, where the ancient world continues to occupy the present day, both “Sacred House” and “Oracle” refer to the building that housed the Oracle of Ancient Dodoni in Epirus, where people have continued to seek guidance or assistance from the gods for thousands of years, in modern times by hanging small notes on the tree within its grounds. Unaccompanied pieces composed and played on Bennett’s just intoned synths, each positions haunting, slow paced melodies - imbued with metaphysical and spiritual weight - as bridges that span the millennia and diverse states of the conscious and unconscious mind. With “Seikilos Epitaph”, Bennett takes his immersion into the subcutaneous depths of Ancient Greece one step further. The piece is a version of the oldest known surviving complete musical composition, found notated in Greek on a stone pillar / stele on the site of an ancient village. Played on his DX7ii, and subtly permeated with field recordings of environmental sounds, his brilliant rendering builds bridges between the present and the distant time Bennett calls forth: another key, equal to the title track, to unlocking the album’s lingering depths.

John Also Bennett’s Ston Elaióna forms an elegantly rigorous world of electroacoustic sonority, bridging the expanse of time with the immediacies of environment and happening in the here and now: a profound sonic mediation on the countless dimensions unlocked by life in Greece.

Strut Records proudly presents the official reissue of Hidden Fire Volumes 1 & 2, the final album released by Sun Ra on his El Saturn label in 1988.

Captured live over three nights at the Knitting Factory in New York City, these performances mark the closing chapter of a 33-year odyssey of radical, independent music-making. Originally issued in tiny quantities with minimal packaging and cryptic artwork—often featuring hand-written labels or Ra’s own handmade designs—Hidden Fire was among the most elusive entries in Sun Ra’s vast discography.

Musically, these recordings stand apart from Ra’s other '80s compositions. Here, Hidden Fire plunges into darker, more dissonant territory. Ra performs exclusively onn the Yamaha DX7 synthesiser, pushing its digital sound palette into alien dimensions.

The Arkestra lineup is uniquely configured, featuring a rare and heavy string section with three violins, including the legendary Billy Bang, and the singular space vocalist Art Jenkins, whose eerie textures and vocalisations had not been heard so prominently since the early 1960s Choreographers Workshop sessions. The music is raw, unsettled, and often overwhelming.

“Retrospect / This World Is Not My Home” opens with a palindromic riff that evokes Ellington before unraveling into a stark sermon from Ra, warning of death’s dominion over Earth-bound minds. “Hidden Fire Improvisation” is a furious explosion of tone science, with Marshall Allen, Billy Bang, and John Gilmore delivering fire-breathing solos over relentless drumming and Ra’s cascading synth clusters. “Hidden Fire Blues” offers a warped, electrified version of Ra’s familiar blues feature, led by Bruce Edwards on guitar and Rollo Radford on electric bass, transformed through the haze of DX7 textures. “My Brothers The Wind And Sun #9” evokes the experimental weight of The

Heliocentric Worlds with its crashing percussion, pulsing synth-vocal duets, and string- driven chaos that seems to spiral into oblivion.

Even the quieter moments—such as “Hidden Fire II,” a duet between Ra and ArtJenkins—feel thick with unease and shadowy beauty. These performances represent a Sun Ra less concerned with cosmic joy or outer-space swing, and more focused on conjuring portals to the unknown.

Remastered from original sources and presented with archival photos, new liner notes by Paul Griffiths, and restored artwork inspired by the original Saturn editions, this reissue offers a definitive window into the last creative surge of one of music’s most visionary figures across two Vinyl LP’s.

Strut present the first ever compilation series to access the archives of one of the greatest of all French Caribbean labels, Disques Debs out of Guadeloupe. Set up by the late Henri Debs during the late ‘50s, the label and studio has continued for over 50 years, releasing over 300 7” singles and 200 LPs, covering styles varying from early biguine and bolero to zouk and reggae. Debs played a pivotal role in bringing the créole music of Guadeloupe and Martinique to a wider international audience. Volume 1 of this series marks the first decade of the label’s existence and takes in big band orchestras, home-grown stars, touring bands and a new generation that would emerge at the end of the ‘60s. Early releases were recorded in the back of Henri’s shop in Pointe-a- Pitre, from his own sextet playing percussive biguines to young saxophonist Edouard Benoit, leader of Les Maxels and regular arranger for Debs bands. Other artists ranged from big bands like Orchestre Esperanza and Orchestre Caribbean Jazz to poet and radio personality Casimir “Caso” Létang and folkloric gwo ka artist Sydney Leremon. Debs also capitalised on recording foreign touring artists visiting Guadeloupe during the early ‘60s including Haitian trumpeter Raymond Cicault and Trinidadian bandleader Cyril Diaz. Compiled by Hugo Mendez (Sofrito) and Emile Omar (Radio Nova), ‘Disques Debs International’ is released in conjunction with Henri Debs Et Fils and Air Caraibes. The package features a host of rare and unseen photos from the Debs archive with both formats featuring extensive sleeve notes and interviews with Philippe Debs and Max “Maxo” Severin of Les Vikings. Volumes 2 and 3 follow in 2019. Album cover - top right

Yowzers is a new album by Chicago composer, improvisor, instrumentalist and musical folklorist Ben LaMar Gay. The twelve track collection is a leap forward in the lexicon of Gay’s recorded output, and a veritable masterwork of ancient inner-body rhythms and intuitive melodic storytelling.

It’s worth mentioning that a leap forward for Gay is no small feat. The musical ground he has covered in the last decade, both as a bandleader and collaborator, is immense. His de facto debut album—the 2018 compilation Downtown Castles Can Never Block The Sun—properly introduced the world to Gay by placing fifteen stylistically diverse tracks from seven then-unreleased albums next to one another, letting the populace outside of Cook County in on an unintentionally best-kept-secret that Chicagoans had already been marveling at for quite some time. That secret has become even more open in the years since, with the full unveiling of those seven previously-unreleased albums, the release of his critically-acclaimed 2021 song cycle Open Arms To Open Us, and the explosive free sonics of 2022’s Certain Reveries.

In addition to being featured on a staggering number of International Anthem releases (including albums by Makaya McCraven, jaimie branch, Damon Locks, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly), Gay is one of the most prolific collaborators in creative music today. He makes active contributions to Mike Reed’s Separatist Party, Joshua Abrams’s Natural Information Society, Theaster Gates’s Black Monks, and many more. He is also a long-time participant in Chicago’s legendary Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. Suffice to say, his credentials are astonishing and the scope of his interests and abilities is seemingly limitless, with Yowzers representing the latest redrawing of that ever-expanding creative borderline.

Much of the music on Yowzers features his working quartet with Tommaso Moretti (drums, percussion, voice), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano, bells, voice), and Will Faber (guitar, ngoni, bells, voice). But the unlisted feature here is Gay’s own ability to summon and unleash the unique strengths of his collaborators. The quartet material leans into a vocabulary that the group has developed over the course of several years together on the road; and the repertoire delivers an arresting cocktail of pulsing and free rhythms that somehow swing alongside a gathering of melodic phrases that sweep the outer-reaches of harmony with nostalgic echoes of family songs from the living room.

“Building a language, or taking a while to build a language—it’s like every other thing,” says Gay. “These stories are passed around through melody. You write a story and you share the story with individuals, and then you allow their individuality to embellish the story and take it on in another way. That person is a whole universe. It’s about trusting these people—trusting the people you leave something with, just like people trust their kids and their grandkids to carry a thing on. To not give it all away. To keep it in this tightly-knit body and to just keep it going.”

It’s not a new concept for Gay. One uniting factor in his deep, multi-faceted discography is a never-ending commitment to taking the stories of the past and pushing them outward, filtered through a sense of self, to keep that information moving.

Information moves through Yowzers via the intuitive physicality of Gay’s creative polyrhythmic constructions as he covertly delivers familiar folk tunes and tales. “It’s the most natural thing,” says Gay. “That’s how the world is. There are overlapping rhythms all around us, and so it reminds you of the reality of the world when you hear them. It’s a loop and the loop is always changing.”

Yowzers is ripe with the fine mash of that loop’s changes and diffusions, recalling the high-minded freedom of Liberation Music Orchestra, the abstract boom-bap balladry of Georgia Anne Muldrow, the unbridled rhythms and sandpaper bellows of Bukka White, the harmolodic cartoon glory of Arthur Blythe’s Illusions, or the oft-copped but rarely distilled patterns of Naná Vasconcelos. More amalgam than pendulum swing; a fresh thought made up of old ideas, like some imaginary Sacred Heart Ensemble led by Elvin Jones and Rashid Ali. It’s all there, filtered through an improvisational approach and a lifetime of stories and secrets embodied. For a man who has inhabited and traveled these continents so extensively, it’s safe to call this work true Americana, despite what that word might mean to the average white person in the United States.

“A big part of the language this quartet has developed is spatial,” says Gay. “It’s seeing and hearing it live.” Translating that language to a studio situation is a tough task, even for a seasoned crew. “You’re dealing with a thing that is older than the industry that sells it, and if you’ve never experienced those bodies in a room there can be a disconnect.” Striving to document the magic of those live moments, to great end, Gay chose to track the quartet pieces (“the glorification of small victories,” “there, inside the morning glory,” “I am (bells),” and “cumulus”) for Yowzers live, in real time, seated with his bandmates in a small circle at Palisade Studios in Chicago.

The spectrum of the album is widened by a batch of music created via Gay’s highly successful approach to composing in-studio, augmented with contributions from his bandmates, instrumentalist Rob Frye, and a mini-choir comprising vocalists Ayanna Woods, Tramaine Parker, and Ugochi Nwaogwugwu. This straying from the quartet material throughout the course of the record acts as an expansion of detail rather than an interruption of continuity.

All together, the pacing and flow of Yowzers is proof-positive of Gay’s practiced grasp on how the album format can traverse such a breadth of atmospheres. The titular album opener “yowzers” is a simple, soulful, three-chord piano and vocal repetition nestled in the hypnotically swelling effect of the Woods/Parker/Nwaogwugwu choir. The undecorated lyrics leave ample room for a listener to comprehend references to the binding existential crises of our times. It’s a Blues that everyone in the world should feel in their bones:

Ain’t gon snow no more x4

Rain gon pour and pour x4

Fire don’t stop no more x4

“for Breezy”, a could-be New Orleans dirge, straddles the deep sigh of a heavy sadness and the sweet lift of a fond look back, echoing the most contemplative moments of Duke Ellington’s small group arrangements. Gay’s clustered synth chording sets the scene while Frye’s breathy flute and Moretti’s delicate brushwork are positioned front-and-center along with a synthetic static—the nagging question of darkness even as beauty blooms. Gay’s flugelhorn enters at the 1:35 mark, maneuvering slowly around Frye and locking the vibe into place. It’s a gorgeous and fitting tribute to an old comrade.

“John, John Henry” begins with doomy oscillations and click-clack electronic rhythm loops hovering atop a contextually disjointed swing beat from Moretti. Enter Gay and his choir, digging into a take on the dusty-yet-timeless tale of man versus machine, an update we didn’t know we needed and an entrance we didn’t know we wanted. The way the group’s vocal rhythms hit here is a classic example of the Gay conundrum: an idea that reads as challenging on paper but sounds simple to the ear and feels intuitive to the body. With spectacles underfoot and charts out the window, the listener sings along, unencumbered by know-how. It’s all in service of Gay’s ongoing exploration and expansion of folklore in his work—arguably the one concept that bridges the gap between all of the disparate elements of his oeuvre.

This bottomless bag of tricks never induces fatigue, instead allowing for breaths and bites as needed—the quick-vibe banana peel windup of “rollerskates”; the endlessly psychedelic metallic rhythm chant of the album’s centerpiece “I am (bells)”; and the triumphant free-folk shouts of “the glorification of small victories,” which is a drastic and collaborative quartet rework of a composition originally recorded for Gay’s album Grapes that serves as further evidence of his steady crew’s interpretive powers.

How, though, does Gay end a collection that covers so much ground? The sweetest sendoff is often the one that sounds like a beginning. The album closer “leave some for you”—a balladeer’s kiss as the sun comes up—pairs a deeply disintegrated series of rhythmic loops with a diddley bow shuffle, ushered by the sturdy-yet-understated swing of Moretti’s kit. Gay’s sweetly intoned low-register lilt is front and center with an affirmation delivered as an earworm. The simple melody carries it home:

You look brand new today

Not cause you need it

Just cause you want it

New

Placenta is the fourth collection of broadly imaginative and highly collaborative Carlos Niño & Friends music released on International Anthem in the last four years. It is also the first new music to be released by Carlos Niño & Friends following the November 2023 release of André 3000’s New Blue Sun – an album which Carlos produced alongside André, while co-writing, co-creating/playing, and co-mixing every song. Placenta is announced on April 11th, 2024, a date chosen because it is the 1st solar return of Moss Niño (a new being in human form, who Carlos and his partner Annelise are Earth parents of). Their experience of pregnancy, labor and delivery were all profoundly impactful for Carlos. Becoming a father again (a whole 24 years after the birth of Azul Niño, who has become a regular artistic collaborator with Carlos) he felt total Inspiration for this set of recordings, and hence it is perhaps the most conceptually-grounded Carlos Niño & Friends album we've yet to present – fully connected to the spirit of family, birth, and "how we get here."

Cindytalk is the mercurial, expressionist outlet of Scottish artist Cinder, inspired by the crossroads of exploratory UK post-punk and early European industrial. Her work thrives on chance and transformation, collaging elements of noise, balladry, soundtrack, catharsis, and improvisation. "We were trying to find our own space," says Cinder of the formative period 'Camouflage Heart' emerged from, amidst a move from Edinburgh to London and Cinder's evolving exploration of gender identity, well before culture at large was equipped to understand. With contemporary discourse we see that the project manifested her transgender ideas as visceral music. The guttural, feral sound marked a notably darker turn from The Freeze's six-year run on the fringes of punk. Changing the project's name became vital, not just because they kept hearing the former was already taken, but the desire to embody the spiritual and sonic shift, "to uncover new pathways…to feminize it," she says. Cinder, with bandmates David Clancy and John Byrne, arrived at Cindytalk, a winking nod to Sindy, the British fashion doll rival to Barbie known then for its pull-string talking mechanism. "The goal was to have a more interesting narrative, more interesting dialogue. Music was ultimately my only way of talking to people. That was my conversation with the world, an abstracted conversation…an attempt to make some kind of tiny, tiny mark, if possible, you hope somebody will notice." Over the years, Cinder has heard from fans who did pick up on the signals and find refuge in 'Camouflage Heart'. Subtle then, but she connects the dots more clearly now, playfully suggesting Dais reissue the long out-of-print vinyl in pink — "It had to be Barbie pink" — underscoring the mischief that's been there all along beneath the silvery surface of Cindytalk. 'Camouflage Heart' plays with tension and pace, from creeping to feverish to claustrophobic. The percussion moves between restless marches and barely-there pulses; for some parts, they scratched and hit a tin bath, among other objects. Guitar lines vibrate and stab as Cinder contorts her voice freely. She pulls poetry from a cerebral abyss, like "make the snake in your eye, pierce the camouflage heart" on the slow-droning centerpiece "The Spirit Behind the Circus Dream." In that register is raw power, both vulnerable and menacing, an ability to locate something deep and emotionally charged within. "I still remember that person who was way too intense for their own good," Cinder reflects. "I couldn't make a record like that now, certainly not vocally, while that anger hasn't dissipated; there's still a kind of warrior." For all the destruction and disintegration of Camouflage Heart, Cinder maintains the objective was never full-on fatalistic; these songs seek not to destroy but to poke and provoke, to transform and heal, to find cracks of light in a crumbling world. She points to the last lines of the opening track, "It's Luxury": "Don't look down," the lyric pines through static and rhythm. Cinder extrapolates, "I'm essentially saying, just keep fucking going. As time went on, for me, that falling became flying. Camouflage Heart is the beginning of believing in flight."

One of the universal experiences of life on Earth is staring, neck craned, at the cosmos. The vastness of one’s internal life meets the vastness of space, and in that moment those perspectives fuse in a state of wonder and curiosity. Space As An Instrument, the new album by French artist and musician Félicia Atkinson, invites listeners to explore the phantasmic landscapes created in such transformative encounters, when the mind is open and receptive to its environment. Like being absorbed by the immensity of the night sky, this music dilates the imagination and helps us to sit comfortably in the mystery of the ineffable. We are guided through Space As An Instrument by the piano, its a linear story told through restrained, iterative melodies that become entwined with the sounds at the music’s margins - a wisp of electronics, a pinprick of an enunciated consonant. They were recorded on Atkinson’s phone, which was placed next to the keys, or behind her, with the sound of the room bleeding through to give a sense of the place and time of the encounter. She describes these sessions as meetings where she and the piano commune to co-create these spiraling phrases and vaporous dissonances moment by moment. Complicating this dynamic is the presence of digital pianos, which exist in the surreal space of diodes and LED displays. They act as avatars of their three-dimensional counterparts: nowhere and everywhere simultaneously. Still, the inhabited world of people, water, and wind can be heard throughout Space As An Instrument. Often these recordings are integrated into the backdrop of electronics, or reduced to the sound of movements whose physical forms are obscured: the microphone straining against a forceful gust on “Sorry,” arhythmic footsteps traversing an invisible terrain on “Pensées Magiques.” These field recordings take us to the brink of synesthetic experience, allowing us to glimpse with our ear the topography of the imagination. But Atkinson’s music resists any kind of singular perspective on the scene, or any distinct conclusion. “It doesn’t explain anything,” she says, “but it translates the way I perceive it, somehow.” Atkinson is a polymath by nature, engrossed in a variety of daily artistic practices that nourish one another. In her garden, she performs the slow work of cross-species relationship building, cultivating an ideal space for introspection and further creation; many of the album’s vocal and electronic elements were recorded there. Poetry, which she prizes for its capacity to render the everyday tools of meaning-making more enigmatic, becomes folded into the music as well. She paints as often as time allows. One personal limitation Atkinson finds in painting, the rendering of perspective, has become one of her music’s defining characteristics. The vantage point of the listener is slippery and undefined, with sounds at once appearing gigantic and minuscule, distant and immediate. This phenomena is central to “Thinking Iceberg,” a 13-minute piece that was whittled down from an hour and a half performance, who remain only a ghostly presence on the album’s recording. Atkinson wrote the piece in response to Olivier Remaud’s book Thinking Like An Iceberg, in which the philosopher assigns agency to these massive, endangered objects and imagines how they might perceive their millenia-long relationship to humans. Stoic synthesizer tones percolate while water flows just out of the immediate frame with a disarming clarity and presence. As the piece crests, Atkinson’s whispered voice emerges softly, placed right against the listener’s left ear, contrasting with the billowing mass of sound that otherwise dominates. We emerge with a glimmer of awareness of how immensity and delicacy can coexist as time and humanity extract their toll. Félicia Atkinson says her music exists “on the verge of understanding and not understanding,” which often precludes such literal interpretations. But in that nebulous space there is humility and openness, and perhaps enough empathy to understand the consciousness of a massive, frozen chunk of water. With the listener’s perspective diffused into many different vantage points, how might that, too, become a vehicle for the development of compassion? As we listen, we encounter the wisdom that there is meaning not just in the experience of the sublime, that radical juxtaposition of limitlessness and intimacy, but also in the continuum of countless individuals that have taken the same journey.

Mutating out of the collaborative practice established on STROBE.RIP, Amnesia Scanner and Freeka Tet are so back with a new dual record project that explores and explodes norms of music production, songwriting and sonic aesthetics. HOAX is *not* an album and remix released together, but rather, a singular experience unfolding as two mirroring, mutually-reinforcing (or perhaps deconstructing) records.

The Amnesia Scanner “AS HOAX” record administers the liquid drip of devastating ballads, wandering mosh-ups and industrial flood lights that we fiend for. But, as with every AS record it is impossible to mistake the grunged-out doom for nihilism: there is simply too much raw emotion, vulnerable narrative and playful experimentation. With drums and chaos from Freeka on four “ASFT” tracks, AS has delivered perhaps their most prescient, hopeful and soon-to-be-seminal record of their genre-defining career.

Against this belligerent crispness emerges the sublime obelisk of noise in Freeka Tet’s “FT HOAX”. This is the debut full-length record released under the Freeka Tet moniker. It is a conceptual art piece that is unapologetically immediate. Using custom bashed scripts the AS record is negated, inverted and buffed down to reveal underlying rhythms and textures.
Freeka has taken the ubiquitous technology of noise-canceling headphones as a point of departure for this experiment in music-denial. The desire for eliminating environmental sounds is turned inwards to undermine the music itself. A variety of original techniques are used for ambient AS cancellation including creating a virtual space simulation and adding noise to spectrogram images.

While Freeka’s gesture is extreme, the result brings you to a serene contemplative plateau. The dual mirrored records are meant to be unlocked together: listening to the drone-ification opens up patterns and movements previously hidden, your newly trained ear will go deeper into the layers of subliminal encoding on HOAX leaving you reprogrammed.
The lyrics are a sticker suspended above reflective abyss: labeled ingredients are anchors that pull a connection out of the crashing shores of Oracle’s baritone sax croning and operatic countertenor samples from latent space. The resulting They Live glasses that are ripped from your eyes makes this dual record project a scathing polemic on state of music and creativity, thus raising the stakes of what it means to be an artist in the post-post-post-digital-crypto-AI-utopia-anthropocene.

AS Over and FT Over (Active noise canceling script) is the first dual single from the project, released in August, the hooky mantra late summer anthem caused a stir with provocatively minimal AI-generated visuals of cursed plastic debris cruising the streets of stock-video-opolis. The lyrics “riding waves of discontent / Wondering where the feeling went” set-up the turbulent hero’s journey for HOAX.

On AS Amygdala anxiety turns to blissful release. A bender leaves us marooned on ego-death island, as a saccharine more-emo-than-emo vox shuffles back to a lost corporeality with “Who’s body this, not mine? / Five more days and body still said no.”

The second single, AS DISCO drops the gabber hammer with an unrelenting “Disco- Disco- Disco-nnect the Brain.” Extreme piercing machinery blooms into a happy hardcore glow-up soon to be damaging club sub-bass-thumpers and high-schooler skullcandy alike.

On AS U, Animatronic Ed Sheeran’s fusion core is slowly fading at the year 100 million BCE.

AS Back staggers through the stages of grief or maybe it’s Dante’s inferno as we scavenge for breadcrumbs out of the Dark Forest. “Numb the senses / Time changes in my absence” FT HOAX snaps to life at the first instant. The triple-fried waveform debris cocoons the listener in deep resonation and ASMR-worthy velcro timbres. Time slows in this Near-Death-Experience as AS HOAX flashes before your ears. Memories of the record appear as faded imprints. All the anxieties, longing and elation is washed away now as you are pulled out of time, into a liminal space. Does it last for days, weeks or seconds? Who can say.
FT HOAX’s building drone passages rumble and pan back and forth pulling you in deeper. The earworms decompose your echolalia leaving your brain refreshed and ready for another spin. 

80s synth magic for the four-track mind.

DIY outsider Rick Cuevas was a post-punk refugee on a vision quest for a hit. Tracked at home in 1984, "The Birds" is that 40-year-delayed viral smash, one of eight retro-futurist anthems that make up Cuevas' debut album. Remastered from the analog masters, this 40th anniversary edition replicates the 200-copy original for max teleportation value.

Premiere LP by Portland's finest practitioners of Great Black Music. A spiritual record for the ages. Roman Norfleet And Be Present Art Group play deeply felt sometimes earthy and sometimes cosmic music. A trio (sax, drums and organ) are augmented by additional percussion, soaring vocals and even a vocal appearance by a toddler. This record will take you where you need to go. Don't miss history in the making. Across six expansive tracks, Roman Norfleet and Be Present Art Group build from free-flowing ceremony through meditative groove-based prayer and into full-on gales of improvised music. “We build our own time,” Norfleet said, a collective act of liberation through sound. Raised in the Baptist church and trained in the Hindu/Vedic philosophy of Swamini Turiyasangitanada (Alice Coltrane), Portland multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Roman Norfleet travels a lineage of Great Black Music and the world’s spiritualities on his debut for Mississippi Records. The album emerged out of drum gatherings in Washington DC’s Malcolm X Park - a pocket of freedom built on collective improvisation and shared rhythm. In Portland, Norfleet gathered a collective of artists including Jacque Hammond and members of Brown Calculus to transmit the spirit of those DC sessions. A formative encounter with Pharoah Sanders furthered the young saxophonist’s journey via the spaceways, through Sun Ra and into the universe of contemporaries like Angel Bat Dawid. The album culminates in the beautiful “Turiya the Butterfly,” sung by 2-year-old Turiya Raiah. A daughter of band members Andre and Mia and named after the great Alice Coltrane, Turiya completes both the intergenerational circle and a spiritual classic in the present. Record comes with a glossy band photo and insert

more eaze and claire rousay’s collaborations are effortlessly joyful, their music evoking the warmth and respect they have for each other. Their bond goes back to their youthful hometown of San Antonio, Texas where they played in country outfits and noise rock bands respectively, and each pushed their music to extend beyond the traditions and conventions of genre. more eaze (the moniker of violinist/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice) and rousay have spent the past decade pushing boundaries, standing together at the vanguard of genre-shattering music that thrills and surprises with its vulnerability and creativity. no floor weds their prowess as sound designers and masterful skills as composers with their skills as acoustic instrumentalists. Eschewing the auto-tune inflected pop-psychedelia and found sounds of their previous collaborations, no floor is collage music as pastoral melancholia, a lush tour into their own version of Americana.

The duo’s ever-widening sonic scope is centered in their mastery of collage. Known for their extensive use of found sound and hyper pop escapades, maurice and rousay employ a more traditional compositional approach. On no floor the pair created their own elaborate sound world rather than manipulating field recordings. “It was a conscious choice to spend a lot of time making fucked up sounds and then figuring out how they could be beautiful in another context,” notes maurice. “With this record I had no idea what claire would do on each track, and we were both trying to match each other’s ‘freak’ in terms of sound design.” Movements across each piece uncover the ecstatic in nuance. The album’s gentle arc explores feeling with minute gestures and textural swells, carried by maurice and rousay’s enmeshed sonics. rousay’s ostinato guitar patterns and acoustic strums swim through tides of maurice’s pedal steel. Glitching electronics burble in dynamic fits as dramatic strings add waves of tension and release. no floor’s pieces are atmospheric, living biomes that breathe and grow with each passage, rewarding close listens with the revelation of its emotional core.

The five tracks that make up no floor were named for seminal bars in the pair’s shared history, or as the duo humorously refer to them, “Pillars of our debauchery.” no floor is an introspective reflection on the emotional turmoil of youth as much as it is a celebration of a camaraderie forged in that turmoil. Freneticism dances atop the placid textures of pieces like “kinda tropical” and “limelight, illegally”, embodying the playfulness that comes with reveling in kinship at a shared safe space. The more reserved “hopfields” and “the applebees outside kalamazoo, michigan” reflect the less familiar locales of their namesakes, the former a sumptuous special occasion that glimmers with soft light and the latter a slow roil of the uncertainty and strangeness that comes with touring as experimental artists in one’s youth. “As we moved from being very close together to living further away and being involved in different scenes, we had more serious conversations,” notes rousay. “In the past it was more plug and play, where with this record we talked about every aspect before and while working on it.”

The pieces of no floor are born of the deep connection between more eaze and claire rousay, built from strands of familiarity and surprise, the two buttressing one another as they push themselves as instrumentalists, composers, and artists to unexplored boundaries. The wordless timbral compositions retain the duo’s lyrical approach to their craft. Infused with melody, the pieces are collages of sound and emotion. no floor exemplifies the duo’s shared skills in unearthing new and exciting sound arrangements, evoking the warmth and affection of their friendship and musical fearlessness.

claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. The album’s narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. rousay crafted the songs in various homes, bedrooms, hotels, and other private places, the feeling of time and energy spent alone radiating from each passage. The album is a collection of heart-rending, incisive pop songs that explore universal feelings with subtlety and remarkable vision. rousay’s vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions. “I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,” says rousay. From a sprawling math-rock duo, to an array of emo-inflected rock outfits to a hired hand in evangelical worship bands, rousay worked as a percussionist for over a decade before shifting her focus to the solo collage work she’s known for. sentiment folds those experiences into her compositions. rousay explains, “As the drummer in an evangelical rock band, it’s your job, with the singers, to manipulate the crowd. You start building on the drums and you know it’s one bigger chorus and then we’re out and you can see the tears, people just start crying. I still feel a version of that when playing my own shows now.” The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. “I have been on a quest to communicate my feelings and ideas as clearly as possible lately. Pop seemed like the way to do that this time,” says rousay. The confessional nature of sampled fragments of conversation give her pieces a specificity and sense of intimacy that is both immediate and curious. rousay’s innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. The resulting songs of sentiment are as anthemic as they are breathtakingly personal. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience.

Kohei Matsunaga aka NHKyx arrives on the Kasm wing of legendary Manchester label Skam with four cuts. Opening with the vibrant, joyous, intricate breakbeat techno of 'Filled With Vacuum' and a darker vision in the squirming 'Ancient Behave' on the A-side. Over on the flip, we get the melodic, squidgy 'Same Point Different Coordinate' propelled by flickering percussion, before the bubbling 'Formulated Rhythm 4s' rave signal from 20,00 leagues under the acid sea closed the EP in fine style.

Suntub’ is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer, entering further into the realm of electric guitars and layered vocals along with exploring new instrumental expressions. With an offset in open tunings on a 7-string Stratocaster, slide and fretless tablet guitars and deep-sampled virtual guitars, the album draws up narratives and locations in a distant time. Props like puddles, well buckets, bone barrels and flesh rags live in these scenes, suspended in air, drifting about, climbing stairs and ladders, all given life through guitar sensibilities and visceral vocals.

Suntub’ is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer, entering further into the realm of electric guitars and layered vocals along with exploring new instrumental expressions. With an offset in open tunings on a 7-string Stratocaster, slide and fretless tablet guitars and deep-sampled virtual guitars, the album draws up narratives and locations in a distant time. Props like puddles, well buckets, bone barrels and flesh rags live in these scenes, suspended in air, drifting about, climbing stairs and ladders, all given life through guitar sensibilities and visceral vocals.

Suntub’ is the second full length album from ML Buch, a double record of 15 pieces by the Danish composer and producer, entering further into the realm of electric guitars and layered vocals along with exploring new instrumental expressions. With an offset in open tunings on a 7-string Stratocaster, slide and fretless tablet guitars and deep-sampled virtual guitars, the album draws up narratives and locations in a distant time. Props like puddles, well buckets, bone barrels and flesh rags live in these scenes, suspended in air, drifting about, climbing stairs and ladders, all given life through guitar sensibilities and visceral vocals.

“It’s just too easy to make a standard dance track,” Aphex Twin said of his mindset back in 1992. “You’ve got to put a bit of thought into it to get something a bit different.” ‘Digeridoo’ was released on the Belgian R&S Records label in 1992, and originally peaked at #55 in the UK singles chart in May of that year. Over the last 32 years the track has become one of the essential Aphex Twin tracks in a gargantuan catalogue that continues to amaze and inspire. “I wanted to have some tracks to play to finish the raves I used to play in Cornwall, to really kill everybody off so they couldn’t dance,” Richard D James, AKA Aphex, told Select magazine back in the 90s. “Digeridoo came out of that.” Released as a 4 track EP that also included early Aphex productions (now classics) including the industrial, acidic clang of ‘Flap Head’ and hyperbolic futurism of ‘Isopropanol’, the release cemented a relationship with the R&S label that went on to release the ‘Xylem Tube’ EP and the pivotal album ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ in the same year. The label’s owner & A&R Renaat Vandepapeliere reflected “When I first heard Aphex Twin’s music I said, ‘This is it!’, and everybody else said, ‘You’re crazy!’ …a lot of the hardcore R&S fans dropped us. To them it wasn’t music.” ‘Digeridoo’ (Expanded Edition) is the first time the EP has been re-issued with extra material. Whilst digging in his DAT archive (allegedly stored in an airtight military ammo box), Richard James revisited the recordings, encoding them through a Nakamichi CR7e cassette deck, using the customised deck with vari-speed to encode at speeds “felt right at the time”. Alongside these CR7e versions, the original mixes have been remastered by Beau Thomas at Ten Eight Seven Mastering, offering a dilated insight into one of electronic music’s most endearing releases.