MUSIC

A fictional soundtrack of the weekends lost during the pandemic Mellow, endless melodies and lo-fi, dubby, effects-processed soundscapes. 

There is a spring after the cold winter, and “Down the Road” by Lost Weekend captures our collective reawakening. This collaborative album was born when Japanese producer/DJ duo Slowly's Masato Komatsu and Ryo Kawahara discussed and compared each other’s perspectives on music during the pandemic. 

“As the pandemic continued, how I listened to music and values within me changed.
I started to feel that the music I was making was slightly different from the real world.” 

Slowly are best known for their uptempo tunes and remixes that often utilise reggae rhythms. They are a DJ’s DJ and DJ’s producer as many of their 7-inch releases have sold out and get played on dancefloors across the globe. Their remix of Struggle For Pride’s “Make a Rainbow feat. Yoshie Nakano” was selected as one of the best songs of 2020 on Gilles Peterson on his BBC Radio 6. With reggae at the core of his roots, Masato’s eclectic sound making is highly praised, and consists of a mixture of genres with futuristic visions to serve a worldwide audience. 

Disruptions from the pandemic hit club culture hard in Japan. When Masato and Ryo sat down, and compared their music notes over this long spell, they discovered that both were inspired by a similar direction in music: exotica, balearic and chillout. With the reassurance of looking in the same direction, during this challenging time, they decided to draw upon a new canvas. Bravely taking a big step away from the Slowly sound, they present Lost Weekend, a new project, creating a fictional soundtrack “longing for the weekend” that we lost during the pandemic. 

Long-awaited reissue of the historical masterpiece released by Kazumi Yasui, a female lyricist who established a new image of women in Japan! Yasui herself wrote all the lyrics, and Kunihiko Murai, Hiroshi Kamayatsuya, Kenji Sawada, Terumasa Hino, Mamoru Manu (Golden Cups) and others contributed songs. Released in 1970.

Miyazawa, who said, "We are Japanese, so I think we have to make something only Japanese can do." From 1969 to 1970, Miyazawa released "Four Units," "Iwana," and "Kiso," a series of works in deep pursuit of Japanese identity.

Among them, "Iwana", which he recorded with the most cutting-edge piano trio of the time, Masahiko Sato, Yasuo Arakawa, and Masahiko Togashi, is a true masterpiece of "Japanese jazz", creating a soaring musical world that is unparalleled in the world.

The tension-filled "Iwana", the leisurely "Kawamasu", the stunningly beautiful "Ayu", and the vibrant "Nijimasu". All of the pieces are masterpieces that will remain in the history of Japanese jazz.

Since the late 1960s, when jazz music began to diversify, many works were produced that attempted to return to Japan in a radical musical style, and "KOKEZARU KUMIKYOU" is a spearhead among them. The album is based on a fusion of jazz and traditional Japanese music, using Japanese and electric instruments, and injecting elements of contemporary rock and psychedelic music into it. The sound is relentless and intense. This is an ambitious and eternally problematic work by Miho, who has been called a genius by all.

Cold Spring proudly presents the new studio album from MERZBOW. As a life-long campaigner of animal rights, Masami Akita has delivered a brutal assault on those that cage and murder animals. 'ANIMAL LIBERATION - UNTIL EVERY CAGE IS EMPTY' is 5 tracks (49 mins) of total noise assault that only the King of Japanese Noise can provide.

"There is a theory that Covid-19 broke out from the poor conditioned wet markets where live animals are sold. If there were no poultry farms, there would be no mass destruction of chickens due to the spread of bird flu. Human beings' cruelty to animals, animal abuse and species discrimination are all adding up to a disaster for mankind and the whole planet. The pandemic is an opportunity to reflect on the relationship between animals and humans. Veganism is the future for humanity" (Masami Akita, 2021).

The artwork is a reflection of the animal rights and anarcho-punk movements of the 80's. Proceeds from this release will benefit animal rights charities.

Unfettered harsh noise from the legendary Japanese noise artist Masami Akita aka Merzbow. Tirelessly churning layers of distortion are punctuated across two tracks with glistening, jagged feedback and thrashing pulsations that lash at the ears and utterly invigorate the senses.

Immense tramplers and jigs by the whirling percussive dervish of Valentina Magaletti (Moin), João Pais Filipe (HHY & The Macumbas) & Leon Marks’ (Hey Colossus) aka CZN - huge RIYL Mark Ernestus' Ndagga Rhythm Force, Shackleton, Bernd Friedmann, Uwalmassa, Don't DJ, Photek. On their 2nd mission for TTT after 2021’s ‘Luxury Variations’, CZN come hungry for the ‘floor in all five parts of ‘Station to Station to Station’. While the title is a nod to Bowie, the EP has fuck all to do with him, and everything to do with untangling creaky limbs and showing nuff options for the aerobic mystics and polyrhythm-metered DJs. The battery of Magaletti, Filipe and Marks make a wickedly disciplined racket from drums, drums, and more drums, sealed in place with sparing dabs of triggered synth and FX. ‘Compliance Crew’ gathers their energies in a pendulous mid-tempo swirl, congas and wraithlike vocies dubbed to the rafters, before ‘Lawn Thug’ more explicitly references West African traditions, notably the tussle of Mbalax, in its pugilistic call and response, and ‘Year of the Rat’ ramps it on the slow/fast bent with rattling drums corkscrewing at angles over rudest South London subs and pads like a lost Horsepower x Hatcha fantasy. The cosmic whorl of ‘Born to Snap’ is perhaps best compared with the proggier urges of Shackleton and Bernd Friedmann, leading to a the EP’s straightest, hypnotic, 15 minute highlight of rolling linearity recalling Shackleton’s remix of Villalobos or Ron Trent deep house.

"Fearlessly Accessing the Divine Spirit From Here on Out" is the vinyl debut from up-and-coming pianist, composer, and producer Diego Gaeta. He has previously released projects as Club Diego and with the trio Human Error Club (whose members Mekala Session and Jesse Justice helped produce this record). He has quickly become a fixture in a number of Los Angeles musical environments, working with Lionmilk, The Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra, Carlos Niño, Black Nile among others. This album is a synthesis of these many LA environments, and carries chamber, jazz, ambient, and folk influences, ultimately giving it an uncategorizable feel similar to works by Arthur Verocai or David Axelrod. Gaeta recorded the initial ideas for the album by himself after experiencing a burst of creativity during the lockdown of 2020, in the aftermath of a season of protests in Los Angeles, on a piano at his home in El Sereno. “I was constantly not in tune with myself, always awaiting outrage and tragedy in a very unstable world. However, hitting the streets in support of various ongoing pandemic community actions felt necessary and it marked a point in time that ushered in large societal changes.The weight of that era made me feel allergic to making art at the time. All of these ideas came after that period, expressing my reflections subconsciously. I remember that the ideas came in a short amount of time, and then they developed.” Gaeta’s dream band for these ideas would be a 9-piece ensemble or “nonet”, which was finally assembled in the summer of 2021. After careful arrangements and rehearsals the album was recorded. Some of Los Angeles’s finest artists are featured in the ensemble and as featured guests, all combining efforts to fulfill the thematic vision of Gaeta’s inspirations and ideas.

"Busts Love" is the debut work by Hekura, the duo formed by Ernest Pipó and Edu Pons, both from Barcelona's impro music scene. The songs in this LP serve as a voyage that evokes daydreams inspired by the everyday. Daydreams that change in surprising ways, as if they were old slides reflecting long-forgotten objects that once carried significance. Everything begins with "the single petal of a rose" by D. Ellington in a choral rendition that emulates a dialogue between wind instruments, from which fantasy and memories flourish, starting with the ethereal "vane" and the dampness of "frogs". The first stage comes to an intense climax with a gripping gathering in the desert in "runes". "Mound" takes us on a beautiful descent into the darkest depths of "calf", from which we emerge with life, but tinged with nostalgia in "wine". The book's cover is sealed with a guitar epilogue, where once again, "the single petal of a rose" brings the journey full circle.

"First and last Inga Copeland album" The 2013 album, pressed on a limited edition LP. Premium material from the artist now recording as LOLINA.

Caterina Barbieri is set to release a sister album of her 2019's acclaimed “Ectatic Computation”. “Myuthafoo“ will be out on June 2. Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent the best part of a decade breaking apart the rigid structures of electronic music, using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop landscapes. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the Important Records-released "Patterns of Consciousness", a confident fusion of analogue synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it with "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label in 2019, wide acclaim ensued, with critics praising its potent fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synth experimentation. Pitchfork has described her music as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreamachine for the ears". Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini. "Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.

Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism.

Following 2017’s acclaimed 2LP “Patterns of Consciousness”, “Ecstatic Computation” is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.

Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.

Double-LP version. The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas". Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet -- a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D'Avila's foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti's posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit. Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they've always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri's great passion and obsession and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through "Terminal Clock". As the album closes on "The Landscape Listens" -- a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)".

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms -- how even the quietest creative act ripples outward, a whisper with no fixed meaning. The Flower And The Vessel pursues this notion in a more literal fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour. She describes it as "a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy." Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself "What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?" The answer gradually revealed itself: "With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody." In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower And The Vessel. The album's 11 songs span whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences: Ravel's L'enfant Et Les Sortilèges, Debussy's La Mer, and Satie's Gymnopédies. There's certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks; melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia. Much of Atkinson's discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, but The Flower And The Vessel ventures further into silence. Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, and marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene. Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson's synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O'Malley, "Des Pierres," is one of the album's few pieces tracked in a proper studio, but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower And The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Original artwork by Julien Carreyn, mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates and Mastering.

Where Ben Vida’s music has previously explored the sound of text at the outer register of electronic composition, here, in collaboration with the Yarn/Wire quartet and the vocalist Nina Dante, the voice and the words it works to inhabit are placed back at the time-scale of a song. There is a familiarity to this music’s combination of restrained melody and heightened atmosphere. It feels, softly, like it’s made by a band: piano, percussion, voice. A composition kept aloft and even by its four stewards through a simultaneity of effort. The pace, across five pieces, hurries and relaxes but never outruns or distends language. You could find a story in the words being sung, if that’s what you need. But there are unfamiliar dimensions too. So many threads, so many timelines. A story or a thousand, or a litany of scraps: language complete but raw, language that can or cannot be translated. Singers fused at the breath. Oppositions or dualities—a question and an answer, two sides of a conflict, the sense of being here or over there—are drawn together into a single sentiment, plural with feeling. Voices negotiating in unison how to articulate a stance. Musical cues doling out tension as needed. The five pieces that make up The beat my head hit were developed with Yarn/Wire over the last four years, with roots in Vida’s 2018 performance for four voices and electronics “And So Now” at BAM in Brooklyn. The Yarn/Wire ensemble, founded in 2005, has been collaborating with a broad range of experimental composers and sound artists since its inception: most recently, they have performed work by the likes of Sarah Hennies, Annea Lockwood, Catherine Lamb, and Alvin Lucier. Vida, meanwhile, has maintained a practice as both a musician and a visual artist, which has included drone-leaning solo work for electronics as well as improvisatory collaborations with musicians including Martina Rosenfeld and Lea Bertucci. Working with Yarn/Wire, for Vida, was something like joining a band. Following a few early live performances, the material was worked through in the studio across many permutations, a process during which Vida, Dante, Russell Greenberg, Laura Barger created what Vida calls “a meta-voice out of the blending of our four voices.” Sustained presence—language bringing a group to the place of breathing in unison—becomes the backbone of the piece. That presence is an engine, but it's still full of negative spaces and exhales. It's thrilling, for example, to find oneself disarmed by the subtle harmonies introduced by the inevitable but infinitesimal distance between Vida and Dante’s voices. Or the introduction of subterranean bass on “Drawn Evening”: breath trapped? When ambient stillness steps in out of nowhere to replace fast talk on the title track, the evacuation of language is some other form of breath, too. The beat my head hit finds not just truth or reality in what happens at the periphery, but a kind of peace.

Available on vinyl for the first time since its original release in 1984, Outernational Sounds presents Build An Ark pianist Nate Morgan’s second outing for the celebrated Nimbus West label – the conscious and spiritualised sounds of Retribution, Reparation.

"Pianist Nate Morgan (1964-2013) was a central figure on the Los Angeles jazz undergound. A core member of the circle around the legendary bandleader, pianist and community organiser Horace Tapscott, Morgan had been part of Tapscott’s U.G.M.A.A. (Union Of God’s Musicians and Artists Ascension) since he was just a teenager, and was a key member of the Pan Afrikan People’s Arkestra, known as ‘The Ark’. Through the 1980s and 1990s he kept the PAPA flame alive, organising the Ark’s sprawling songbook, running legendary jam sessions, and keeping LA’s deep jazz roots well watered. By the early 2000s he was bringing hard won knowledge to a new generation as part of the Build The Ark collective. He was a musician’s musician, at the beating heart of the radical, community-minded Los Angeles jazz network that Tapscott and his associates had first put together in the early 1960s.

Retribution, Reparation was the second of the two LPs Morgan recorded for Tom Albach’s storied Nimbus West imprint. His first, Journey Into Nigritia (Outernational Sounds OTR- 008), had been a declaration of arrival laced with energies drawn from Cecil Taylor and Coltrane. One year later, with nods to Herbie Hancock (‘One Finger Snap’) and Ellington (‘Come Sunday’), Retribution, Reparation was a confident statement of purpose. Politically charged with pan-Africanist and Black nationalist sentiments inspired by Marcus Garvey, and titled with uncompromising directness, the album focusses the soundworld of the Ark into a surging, restless masterpiece of spiritualised modal jazz. With Danny Cortez on trumpet and Ark stalwart Jesse Sharps on saxophones the frontline is explosive (this set is also one of the few places the extraordinary Sharps can be heard in a small group setting), while Fritz Wise and Ark regular Joel Ector hold down the rhythm section. Morgan’s forceful, Tyner-like chords and virtuosic solos and bind the music together. From the poised drama of the opening dedication to Tapscott’s U.G.M.A.A. (‘U.G.M.A.A.GER’) to the propulsive militancy of the title track, Retribution, Reparation spreads the word: ‘Advance to Victory, Let Nigritia Be Free!’"

ZZK Records Presents: Luzmila Carpio’s Inti Watana: El Retorno del Sol The iconic voice of Luzmila Carpio rings out from the Andes, spreading messages of indigenous struggle, female empowerment and unceasing love for both the people and planet around us. An undeniable icon of Bolivian Andean culture whose career spans multiple decades, Luzmila has released more than 25 albums (there’s a reason that Rolling Stone described her as”one of the most prolific indigenous singers of South America”), inspiring millions while singing in both her native Aymara-Quechua language and Spanish. Yet Luzmila Carpio isn’t someone who’s content to simply rest on her laurels; she continues to take risks—and push her music into vibrant new soundworlds. On new album Inti Watana: El Retorno del Sol (her first LP in a decade), she’s teamed up with Argentinian producer Leonardo Martinelli (a.k.a. Tremor), a ZZK veteran who’s spent the bulk of his career finding the common ground between Latin American folk rhythms and modern electronics. Building off the momentum created by 2015’s Luzmila Carpio Meets ZZK collection—in which her music was reworked by not only Tremor, but standout electronic artists like Nicola Cruz, Chancha Vía Circuito and El Búho—this new album is meant to stretch across genres, generations and continents, with Luzmila’s sonorous, occasionally birdsong-inspired vocalizations gracefully gliding amongst ambient textures, programmed beats and (of course) a bevy of traditional instrumentation from around the globe. Over the course of the LP, Bolivian charangos and quenas sit comfortably alongside the sounds of harmonium, violin, acoustic and electric guitar, Argentinian bombo leguero and sacha guitar, Armenian duduk and a litany of Asian percussion. Inti Watana: El Retorno del Sol—which will be accompanied by a full length documentary—might not sound like previous Luzmila Carpio releases, but on a spiritual, political and lyrical level, her core values remain unchanged. A native of Bolivia’s Potosí region, she’s long been a beacon for indigenous communities in not just her home country, but throughout Latin America, her voice inspiring joy and pride amongst ancient peoples whose culture and inherent beauty are often overlooked. Her pursuit of music—a field traditionally dominated by men in Andean communities—long ago made her a pillar of women’s empowerment, but Carpio has also been a vocal proponent for social change, using her influence to advocate not just for the rights of women, but for the protection and increased visibility of all indigenous people. Yet it’s the planet itself that Carpio is most passionate about, and she’s devoted much of her new album to conversations with Mother Earth and Father Sun, whom she refers to as Pachamama and Tata Inti. In a time of acute environmental turmoil, it’s more important than ever to find harmony with our surroundings, and Carpio has purposely planned for the unveiling of her new LP to coincide with the June 21 solstice, while the record’s release date falls on September 21—the date of the September equinox. There 's an ancient magic flowing through Carpio’s music, one forged through millennia of ceremony, ritual and communion with nature. On Inti Watana: El Retorno del Sol, that magic feels more vibrant than ever before, whether she’s joyously referencing sacred traditions (“Kacharpayita”), pondering loss and regret (“Requiem para un Ego”), talking to birds (“Ofrenda de los Pájaros”) or paying tribute to the divinity of the natural world (“La Alegría del Gran Venado”). Through it all, Carpio exudes a palpable sense of wonder, her optimism (and reverence for all that exists beyond the everyday) undimmed by even the most seemingly insurmountable challenges. Pachamama and Tata Inti may be the central characters of Inti Watana: El Retorno del Sol, but it 's Carpio herself who emerges as the album 's most inspiring figure.

Sometimes, Mitski says, it feels like life would be easier without hope, or a soul, or love. But when she closes her eyes and thinks about what’s truly hers, what can’t be repossessed or demolished, she sees love. “The best thing I ever did in my life was to love people,” Mitski says. “I wish I could leave behind all the love I have, after I die, so that I can shine all this goodness, all this good love that I’ve created onto other people.” She hopes her newest album, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, will continue to shine that love long after she’s gone. Listening to it, that’s precisely how it feels: like a love that’s haunting the land. Love is always radical, which means that it always disrupts, which means that it always takes work to receive it. This land, which already feels inhospitable to so many of its inhabitants, is about to feel hopelessly torn and tossed again – at times, devoid of love. This album offers the anodyne. “This is my most American album,” Mitski says about her seventh record, and the music feels like a profound act of witnessing this country, in all of its private sorrows and painful contradictions. But “maybe it’s beyond witnessing,” she says. At times, it feels like the album is an exercise in negative capability – a fearless embodiment and absorption of the pain of other bodies. When I ask her what the album would look like, if it were a person, she says it would be someone middle-aged and exhausted, perhaps someone having a midlife crisis. But through the daily indignity and exhaustion, something enormous and ecstatic is calling out. In this album, which is sonically Mitski’s most expansive, epic, and wise, the songs seem to be introducing wounds and then actively healing them. Here, love is time-traveling to bless our tender days, like the light from a distant star. Mitski wrote these songs in little bursts over the past few years, and they feel informed by moments of noticing – noticing a sound that’s out of place, a building that groans in decay, an opinion that splits a room, a feeling that can’t be contained in a body. It was recorded at both the Bomb Shelter in East Nashville and the Sunset Sound Studios in Los Angeles. The album incorporates an orchestra arranged and conducted by Drew Erickson, as well as a full choir of 17 people - 12 in LA and 5 in Nashville - arranged by Mitski. And for the first time, it felt important to Mitski to have a band recording live together in the studio, to create this new sublime sound. Working with her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, the album has a wide-range of references, from Ennio Morricone’s bombastic Spaghetti Western scores to Carter Burwell’s tundra-filling Fargo soundtrack, from the breathy intimacy of Arthur Russell to the strident aliveness of Scott Walker or Igor Stravinsky, from the jubilation of Caetano Veloso to the twangy longing of Faron Young. From the first track, the album introduces and then heals a wound. “Bug Like an Angel” finds the divine in the ordinary, in the boozy drowning of sorrow. The narrator sings from the strange comfort of rock bottom: “sometimes a drink feels like family.” And suddenly, that choir of angels sings: “FAMILY!” This first track introduces a cosmic paradox: “The wrath of the devil was also given him by God.” This is an album in which dark and light exist in the same gesture, the same broken prayer. Like the Buddha inviting the demon Mara in for tea, The Land embraces brutal, daily pain — the necessary toll of transcendent love. In “Buffalo Replaced,” the wail of a freight train replaces the vibrations of the long-gone stampeding buffalo. Here, hope itself is personified, anthropomorphized into a sleeping creature, and our narrator wonders if life would be easier without her. But then, as though in response, “Heaven” offers a beautiful moment of passion, preserved like a fossil in time even though the “dark awaits us all around the corner.” This oasis is aggressively interrupted by “I Don’t Like My Mind,” a song from the perspective of someone in extraordinary pain. They are begging to keep their job, while actively keeping terrible traumatic memories at bay. Without their employment, these memories might take over, consuming them as relentlessly as the cake that they ate one “inconvenient Christmas.” The toggling between hope and despair in these four songs is masterful — the good, the bad, and the ugly in America’s backyard. This mythology continues to deepen with the stunning “The Deal,” in which someone is so burdened by their soul that they beg for it to be taken from them. Soon, the singer’s soul is revealed to be a bird perched on a streetlight. In a coup of songwriting, the narration does not switch into the newly-souled bird’s voice. No, we stay with the soulless “I.” The bird calls down: “You’re a cage without me. / Your pain is eased but you’ll never be free.” This song reinforces the album’s tug-of-war between the intoxication of love and the pain of isolation. Close on its heels is “My Love Mine All Mine,” an instant classic and the beating heart of the album, wherein the singer imagines their love shining down on the earth from the moon, long after the speaker is gone. “It’s just witness-less me,” she sings on “The Frost,” which suddenly takes us from the anticipation of loss right into the aching loneliness of it. On the subject of witnessing, Mitski says: “I’ve always been the person on the outside watching. And I’ve also done that with myself... outside of myself, witnessing myself, watching myself.” She thinks that she might have adopted this habit as a condition of being a woman of color, and that it’s led to the occasional post-apocalyptic fantasy of being the only person left in the world. We talked about Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in which a man is profoundly alone, with only an archive of old tapes to keep him company. He remembers the seismic event of an old sexual encounter, but now it’s: “Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.” The Land repeatedly offers that same hypothesis. Without love, is there anyone here? After the alien lift of “Star” comes the album’s showdown. “I’m Your Man” feels as inevitable, bloody, and haunting as a Sergio Leone duel scene. The “Man” in the title isn’t some fella proclaiming devotion, Mitski says, but rather the man inside her head, the haunting patriarch who treats her like a dog and can destroy her at whim. Despite his confidence and swagger, he is tracked down by a pack of hounds — who have unionized in the name of catharsis. After this violent reckoning, a Fowler’s Toad calls out in what sounds like a human scream. The night settles into silence. The earth might be uninhabited. We glide into the liberating closer, “I Love Me After You,” in which someone is truly alone but truly free. King of all the land. “I don’t have a self,” Mitski observes. “I have a million selves, and they’re all me, and I inhabit them, and they all live inside me.” Loving all of these selves does not yield the easy burst of a pop song. It’s the “long, complex, deep love, that you can never get to the end of, that’s always evolving, like a person. And there’s just no end to it. It feels like space travel.” The album is full of the ache of the grown- up, seemingly mundane heartbreaks and joys that are often unsung but feel enormous. It’s a tiny epic. From the bottom of a glass, to a driveway slushy with memory and snow, to a freight train barreling through the Midwest, and all the way to the moon, it feels like everything, and everyone, is crying out, screaming in pain, arching towards love. Maybe this is what our best artists do: take a spaceship into the furthest reaches of pain, in order to bring back the elixir that we already had inside us. The unknowable known of love. “You have to go to both worlds all the time,” Mitski says, by which she means the mysterious world of making and the brutal world of living. This album is an act of hyperlocal space travel. Love is that inhospitable land, beckoning us and then rejecting us. To love this place — this earth, this America, this body — takes active work. It might be impossible. The best things are.

伊音響系名門レーベル〈901 Editions〉から久々の新入荷！公園にスピーカーを持って行ってまったりしながら聴きたいかも?? Nicola RattiとのBellowsやInventing Masksといった名プロジェクトでも活動、Kassel JaegerやAndrew Peklerとのコラボレーションや〈12k〉に〈Editions Mego〉などからの傑出した作品も知られるイタリア実験音楽界隈の首領、そして、大名門〈Senufo Editions〉の運営者Giuseppe Ielasiによる2021年ソロ・アルバム『its appearance, reflected by three copies』をストック！2017年に発表した口笛をデジタル解析/加工したサウンドアート作品『Even When They Speak Of Space』を思い出す、共鳴し合う花弁のようでもある、トリッピーなサウンドが織りなす電子音響の傑作！6パネル・デジスリーヴ仕様。小ボリュームでの再生を推奨！

Since 2005, Chicago-based experimentalists Haptic have explored the intersection between composition and improvisation in concerts, site-specific installations, and critically acclaimed recordings. Often engaging in ambitious cross-genre collaborations, Haptic has worked closely with composers such as Michael Pisaro-Liu and Olivia Block and musicians such as Tony Buck (The Necks) and Tim Barnes (Text of Light), as well as with dancers, filmmakers, and artists from a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. Residencies and installations have included Triptych at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2009) and Abeyance at Chicago’s Lincoln Park Conservatory (2015), in addition to numerous festival performances and commissioned works. Individually, members of the group have recorded for a multitude of labels including Editions Mego, Relapse, Touch, Thrill Jockey, Kranky, and Another Timbre, among others.

"The Septuagint is the name in which the first Greek translation of the Old Testament is identified, datable to the 2nd century A.D. According to Aristea's letter to Philocrates, in which the genesis of this version is mentioned, 72 sages from Alexandria commissioned by Ptolemy II were responsible for the translation. Within the text, the term "prodigy" (τέρας, tearas) is never found alone but forms an inseparable binomial with "sign" (σημεῖον, semèion), thus forming the expression σημεῖα καὶ τέρατα (semèia kài tearata). Recorded in September 2019, Semèia Kài Térata is the first work by Ensemble Ektòs, a quartet of composers and performers based in Copenhagen. The work describes an austere yet imaginative path combining stillness with the use of silences. A ritual reiteration recalling the most extreme experiences of certain minimalism and microscopic attention to timbral stratification. Rigorous and evocative, with radical attention to the beauty of the whole sound set, Semèia Kài Térata well manages to identify that sense of mysterious inevitability evoked in the title, as well as the dark wonder that miracles often bear." Marco Baldini

Marginal Consort is a Japanese avant-garde improvisational group comprised of sound artists Kazuo Imai (a student of Japanese free jazz linchpin Masayuki Takayanagi and occasional performer in both Taj Mahal Travellers and Takayanagi’s New Direction Unit), Tomonao Koshikawa, Kei Shii, and Masami Tada (also in group GAP). Formed in 1997, the four members of Marginal Consort attended Takehisa Kosugi’s music classes at the Bigakkō art school in Tokyo in the mid-1970s, where they teamed up with other students to record East Bionic Symphonia’s debut album “Recorded Live” in 1976. Since its inception, each year Marginal Consort holds one (or more when invited) annual concert at spacious venues in which they perform continuously, without interruption, for over three hours. Their extended set explores forms of sound and ways of playing that never coalesce into music but create a group dynamic of ebb and flow, exploration and fluidity. Their performance, which is completely free from abstract, political or sometimes mystical ideas about improvisation, neither contraposes the immediacy of action or anonymousness of sound against music nor dramatises the dialectics between the individual and the whole. Even the general idea of the words “collective”, “improvisation” and “project” do not really tell the way they work. Marginal Consort performed at South London Gallery; St. Elisabeth Kirche, Berlin; Asahi Square, Tokyo; Kotoku Morishita Bunka Center, Tokyo; Mikawadai Junior High School, Tokyo; Super Deluxe, Tokyo; Tokyo Arts and Space, Tokyo; Macao, Milan; Instal 08, The Arches, Glasgow; St. John at Hackney Church (33-33), London; The Substation, Melbourne; Carriageworks, Sydney; Third Edition Festival, Stockholm; nyMusikk, Bergen; Borderline Festival, Athens; On the Boards, Seattle; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; PuSh Festival, Vancouver; Zebulon, Los Angeles; Pioneer Works, New York. ​​​​​​​“A form of sound that does not turn into music and a group that does not produce harmony; individual concepts and group fluidity; individuals who are at once independent entities and components of the whole; coexisting time frames and intersecting rhythms – these are among the images of group improvisation that have occupied my mind since the ’70s. These images neither presuppose specific elements nor regulate the entire process. There always remain, however, the fundamental premises that sounds are separately produced phenomena and that their accumulation forms the whole”. – Kazuo Imai

For the exhibition “Flowers in 20th and 21st Century Art“, Eiko Ishibashi and Jim O‘Rourke had created the installation ”Lifetime of a Flower“ in which they set parameters but allowed the process itself to grow uncontrollably. Literally: in the garden of their Japanese house, they planted seeds and filmed the plant growing and thriving throughout the duration of the exhibition. Visitors were able to watch the stream in real time - and they heard a composition in which Ishibashi and O‘Rourke reflected the organic process in sound. The eponymous composition now available on LP, is an enigmatic and sophisticated layering of sounds, melodies and rhythms, noises from everyday life, all of which are repositories of associations, memories and expectations.

Source of Denial is the second LP from Nihiloxica, the Bugandan techno outfit hailing from Kampala, Uganda. It comes after more than three long years since Kaloli, their acclaimed debut on Crammed Discs.

The album points a (middle) finger at the hostile immigration and freedom of movement policies implemented in the UK, as well as across the world. Fueled by their frustrations with this intentionally convoluted system, the group have produced their most cataclysmic effort to date.

Returning to the Nyege Nyege studio in Kampala where the band recorded their early EPs, the band tracked Source of Denial over an intense month of sessions in early 2022. The cover art is emblazoned with an ultra-metallic new logo, echoing the growing presence of metal influences across the tracklisting, while the hi-vis, official-document styling wryly evokes the bureaucratic nightmare at the heart of the project. Tracks like Asidi and Baganga flirt with the dystopian, mechanical patterns and tonalities of djent godfathers Meshuggah, while the gargantuan synth line of the title track summons the spirit of an 8-string guitar, synthesised palm-mutes and all. This is all effortlessly compounded with the molotov cocktail of Bugandan ngoma (drums) and club sounds the group have become revered for. On tracks like Olutobazzi, Postloya and Trip Chug, the drums themselves are reanimated and manipulated more than ever before, further blurring the line between tradition and techno.

The only spoken words we hear throughout the album, outside of studio outtake Preloya, are computer generated. They speak of application processes, character backgrounds, and accountability, blasted through crackled phone speakers. The effect is a Kafkaesque feedback loop: an avalanche of constant call tones, uncanny British accents and rigorous interrogative questioning. The frustrations are a problem the band, a defiantly global outfit, has faced continuously. A whole UK tour was cancelled in 2022, and recently, a UK show had to be performed with only three members due to problems with a certain conglomerate visa agency who “provide services” for the UK, as well as a growing number of countries.

“We wanted to create the sense of being in the endless, bureaucratic hell-hole of attempting to travel to a foreign country that deems itself superior to where you’re from. We’re focussing on the UK as that’s where we’ve had the most trouble, but the problem goes much, much further. In this system if you have a certain passport or have even visited a certain country then you’re an appropriate subject to be interrogated and insulted time and time again just to prove that you’re worthy to enter, and normally this involves proving you have a good enough reason to want to leave again! The arrogance of it is unbearable. This album was a way to express our disdain towards it... What exactly is the source of your denial? Your passport? Your bank balance? Your skin colour? You’ve paid huge sums of money to be thrown from one profit-driven “service centre” to another, each denying responsibility, each limiting your right to freedom of movement as a human being. Despite some other serious humanitarian shortcomings, Uganda accepts some of the highest numbers of refugees in the world. Meanwhile the UK is trying to send them away to Rwanda. That says it all.” - Nihiloxica