MUSIC

Sam Shepherd aka Floating Points has announced his new album Cascade will be released on 13 September via Ninja Tune. Along with the announcement Shepherd has shared lead single 'Key103' which comes with visuals continuing his ongoing collaboration with Tokyo based artist Akiko Nakayama.

Cascade is an eruption of unfinished business. In late 2022, Shepherd – renowned for drifting between genres as freely as his stage name implies – found himself in the Californian desert working on something new. Mere Mortals, his first ballet score, created with the San Francisco Ballet, was to be a collision of sound and dance exploring the ancient parable of Pandora through the prism of technology. "It was one of quite a few left turns I was taking around that time", recalls Shepherd. You can say that again: Promises, his multiple end-of-year-list-topping previous record, released in 2021, had seen him swap his typical modular synth tapestries and intricate drum patterns for airy dreamscapes, crafted with late legendary saxophonist Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra. It was a collaboration so popular, a Mercury Prize nomination and sold-out show at the Hollywood Bowl in September 2023 followed.
Between these projects and an upcoming anime score for Adult Swim - from the outside it might have seemed as though Shepherd was departing the dance floor for good. But as he wrote his ballet score by day, at night he found himself longing for the sweaty communion of a dance floor. For the pulse-racing abandon of electronic music.

Shepherd released Crush, his rave-reviewed second studio album, in November 2019. It was hailed as one of the albums of that year by Pitchfork, The Independent, Mixmag, Loud And Quiet and more – "but I never got to explore its ravey, experimental side live", laments the musician, whose world tour was cancelled due to lockdown. Cascade was devised as a follow-on from Crush that would allow him (and audiences) to experience Floating Points in its traditional form on a dancefloor once more: bursting with Buchla rhythms, glitching melodies bewitching a room full of heaving bodies. "It’s meant to be kind of a continuation", adds Shepherd. This explains Cascade’s artwork: another colourful sleeve, full of fluid imagery (created once more by Akiko Nakayama). It also explains its evocative title: like Crush, one word that implies movement, beauty and pressure. Most importantly, it explains its mesmerising sound: sumptuous sonic chasms to lose yourself in again and again.

Creating the album stripped Shepherd back. Not only in terms of his set-up – "I have a studio at home with all the gear I usually use, but I wasn’t there so I had to use my laptop, doing it all on headphones", he says – but in terms of his connection to electronic music, and to his home city where his love of music first flourished. "There’s something about Manchester that keeps coming back to me, and I think it’s partly to do with its record shops", says the producer, who found himself instinctively naming tracks after local landmarks and institutions. "As a kid, my school was around the corner from the Northern Quarter so at lunchtimes, I’d run out of the school gates and skip lunch altogether to go and listen to records. I’m sure I was a total pain in the arse constantly pulling records off the shelves", he laughs, "but it was amazing. I’d be listening to Autechre at Pelican Neck, Dilla at Fat City, David Morales mixes at the Factory Records shop… It gave me a parallel education in music to what I was being taught at school". This can be found in multiple tracks on the album including lead single 'Key103' - named after "an underground Manchester radio station I’d listen to religiously" that helped expand his music sensibilities beyond the classical composers he focused on in his academic work (Shepherd studied composition at Chetham's School of Music).

Other tracks took inspiration from the dust bowl surroundings off the Californian desert, but make no mistake: Cascade is a record forged in an adolescence spent in Manchester, discovering the mind-expanding (and emotion-purging) power of electronic music in all its forms. Though devised as a continuation of Crush, Cascade nonetheless pushes Floating Points’ sound forward into new places. The nine songs here are allowed to smoulder and spark for up to eight minutes at a time, allowing for more expansive exploration of sounds and grooves than before. Almost a decade on since Elaenia, his revered debut album, the composer has discovered ways to thread his experiments outside of club music seamlessly into his music designed for the dancefloor. "I’m just constantly chasing challenges", says Shepherd, explaining how this album fits into his ever-expanding web of creative projects, of which there are many. "I always want to keep things moving and go all in on things that excite me. Whether that’s working with a 100-piece orchestra on a ballet or on a laptop on my own", Shepherd grins. Cascade is the proof – when it comes to electronic innovation and simmering tracks that stand hairs on end, Floating Points will always, always have unfinished business. 

After critically acclaimed reissues of their mid-90s material, Seefeel return with their first new music since 2011.

Everything Squared is a one-off 6-track mini-album which presents a contemporary evolution of their trademark sound. Mainly composed and performed by the core duo of Mark Clifford and Sarah Peacock, with bass on two tracks from Shigeru Ishihara.

Mastered by Berlin-based engineer Stefan Betke aka Pole at Scape Mastering, and housed in a sleeve designed by Ian Anderson at The Designers Republic.

how it thrills us, the bird's clear cry...
any cry that was always there.
children, playing in the open air,
children already go crying by
real cries. cry chance in. through crevasses
in that same space whereinto, as dreaming
men into dreams, the pure bird-cry passes
they drive their splintering wedge of screaming.
where are we? freer and freer, we gyre
only half up, kites breaking
loose, with our frills of laughter flaking
away in the wind. make the criers a choir,
singing god! that resurgently waking
may bear on its waters the head and the lyre.

The seven compositions on this album, written between 2022 and 2024, form a conceptual suite and an observance of the mental dances that we construct to understand acts of passage; the ways that we commune and memorialize and carry symbols back into the world beyond representation.

To this end, THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR engages two references to the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus: Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus, a collection of poems from 1922, and Claudio Monteverdi’s l’Orfeo, an early baroque opera from 1607. The myth of Orpheus tells the story of a musician who, grief stricken by the passing of his wife, Eurydice, descends to Hades to persuade the deity of the dead for her return. Along the way, Orpheus seduces those who would block his passage with the deeply lamenting music he conjures from his lyre. Hades agrees but with one condition: Orpheus is not to turn around and look at Eurydice until the pair once again breach the world of the living. Not surprisingly, as they approach the surface, Orpheus grows anxious and turns around to confirm Eurydice’s presence behind him, therein sending her back to the underworld forever. As the story goes, Orpheus then sings for death to take him away; with his wish finally granted by a group of maenads, Orpheus’ detached head and his lyre float down the river, continuing their mournful song.

For many years, I sought to largely separate my studio practice from my live performance practice, with the awareness that the unique limitations and possibilities of each domain were almost sacred to their individual characters. THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR is a supplement of sorts to TWO SISTERS (2022) and ANTIPHONALS (2021), which were attempts to begin bridging this gap between the fixed electroacoustic pieces that emerge in the studio context and the somewhat open and slow-paced chamber writing that I do, in which each performance presents a new structure and in which each iteration offers the path to a new composition and deeper meaning. I am, as always, greatly indebted to the talented and incredibly sensitive musicians who appear on this album, many of whom are regular interpreters of my music: Andrew McIntosh (viola, Los Angeles), Mattie Barbier (trombone, Los Angeles), Lisa McGee (mezzo-soprano, Los Angeles), Pierre-Yves Martel (viola da gamba, Montréal), Eyvind Kang (viola d’amore, Los Angeles), and Rebecca Lane (bass flute, Berlin), Sam Dunscombe (bass clarinet, Berlin), Michiko Ogawa (bass clarinet, Berlin), M.O. Abbott (trombone, Berlin), and Weston Olencki (trombone, Berlin) of the Harmonic Space Orchestra (Winds). For my part, I again return to my favourite keyboard instruments on this album: Mellotron (in particular, the brass and woodwind samples that I so adore), electric organ (the Korg CX-3), synthesizer (the Prophet 5 and Korg PS-3100, which are both extremely useful in their tuning capabilities), and, of course, pipe organ.

There are four pipe organs featured on this album: a mechanical-action instrument built by Tamburini in 1968, located in the Basilica di Santa Maria dei Servi of Bologna, Italy; an electric-action instrument built by Veikko Virtanen in 1969, located in the Temppeliaukio Church of Helsinki, Finland; a meantone mechanical-action instrument built by John Brombaugh in 1981, located at Oberlin College’s Fairchild Chapel in Oberlin, Ohio, USA; and, a mechanical-action instrument built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll in 1864, located in the Église du Gesù of Toulouse, France. The organ pieces on THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR focus more heavily on the instruments’ pedals as well as the textural variations made possible by the mechanical tracker actions that most possess. The Brombaugh organ at Oberlin College offered a particularly meaningful compositional opportunity both in its use of the meantone temperament that was typical of the early seventeenth-century organ designs it’s based on, and in its use of split accidental keys, which accommodate for the lack of enharmonic equivalence in an extended meantone system. ‘Possente Spirto’ is a loose conceptual reference to the aria ‘Possente spirto, e formidabil nume’ in l’Orfeo. As in Monteverdi’s version, my piece also emphasizes the use of strings and brass and observes a particular order in which they enter and exit, and also incorporates a sort of continuo framework. I depart from there to focus on a slow-moving chord progression and its variations in voicing, inspired by renaissance concepts of harmony as a vertical structure, set within a standard quarter-comma meantone temperament. The piece employs the same structure that I use in most of my chamber writing, where each iteration of a performance is slightly different, calling on players to respond in real time and engage in a more direct form of listening. Several different colours of interval are heard throughout: the typical meantone minor third of 310 cents, the wolf minor third of 269 cents, the wolf fifth of 738 cents, and finally the standard meantone major third of 386 cents, which is one of a few intervals that this tuning system shares with just intonation. As with essentially all of THE HEAD AS FORM'D IN THE CRIER'S CHOIR, this piece is also quite variable in duration. ‘Trio for a Ground’ continues this feeling of partitioned instrumentation, with the organ providing the continuo throughout and the choir handing off to a duo of strings. In this recording, I chose to work with baroque strings – the viola da gamba and the viola d’amore, the latter of which incorporates a set of sympathetic strings that exist entirely for resonance. ‘Res Sub Rosa’ was composed specifically for a wind quintet formation of Berlin’s Harmonic Space Orchestra, and employs a system of septimal just intonation as well as a similarly variable structure that allows the players some discretion in how the piece is shaped at any given moment and which encourages different harmonic and acoustic encounters in each performance. ‘Constants’ functions as an electronic counterpoint to ‘Res Sub Rosa’, substituting human decisions with the natural interruption and decay cycles of sound-on-sound tape delay to achieve a similar sense of pacing and unpredictability.

- Sarah Davachi, 2024

UK hip-hop artist Roots Manuva's two classic albums Roots Manuva's two classic albums are reissued by Big Dada to commemorate the 25th anniversary of their release.

A classic. Boards of Canada's 1998 masterpiece, their first album.

Musician haruka nakamura will be in charge of in-store music at several Tsutaya stores in Japan for one year from 2023 to 2024. All music will be newly written for the Tsutaya project. Based on the concept of a bookstore and the theme of “forest,” the birthplace of pianos and musical instruments, four albums will be produced through the summer of 2024 under the title “Blue Forest,” which is connected to Nakamura's hometown, Aomori. The first album, the first synthesizer-only music, has become a topic of conversation and has been well received by many listeners. The second album is a piano ambient world. It was well received by listeners with its long-awaited musical worldview. This work is a world of blue like the dawn, as expressed in the jacket photo by Rinko Kawauchi. This is the third work in the series and the deepest blue sound as if diving into the deepest inner voice. The total conceptualization of the Blue Forest series has also been developed into a beautiful binding that you will want to keep with you.

Spring /Autumn
THE NORTH FACE Sphere, an ambitious new store building to be opened in Harajuku, Tokyo in 2022.

In response to a request for "one album for each of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter," haruka nakamura created "Light years" as the soundtrack for the new building, which became a project to produce four albums over one year.
The LP is divided into "Spring and Autumn" and "Winter and Summer" based on the world view of the production timeline, and is the best of the four original albums.

The "Winter/Summer" album is the best of the first album "Light years" and the third album "from dusk to the sun".
（The "Spring and Autumn" version will be released at the same time.)

Winter/Summer
THE NORTH FACE Sphere, an ambitious new store building to be opened in Harajuku, Tokyo in 2022.

In response to a request for "one album for each of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter," haruka nakamura created "Light years" as the soundtrack for the new building, which became a project to produce four albums over one year.
The LP is divided into "Spring and Autumn" and "Winter and Summer" based on the world view of the production timeline, and is the best of the four original albums.

The "Winter/Summer" album is the best of the first album "Light years" and the third album "from dusk to the sun".
（The "Spring and Autumn" version will be released at the same time.)

12" is Ryuichi Sakamoto's first original album in about 6 years, since "async" released in 2017. This is a collection of 12 songs selected from musical sketches he created as if he were writing a diary, and compiled them into a single album. The jacket was drawn by Lee Ufan, an international artist representing the "Mono-ha" school.

Jiro Inagaki was one of the central musicians in the development of jazz rock in Japan. Sensing the limitations of existing jazz music, Inagaki said, “I want to play something that has never been done before, not to mention jazz rock, with a band that has a strong rock flavor,” and in 1969 he began working in earnest in the soul media. This work, “Head Rock,” recorded in 1970, symbolizes his activities and musicality.

Jiro Inagaki was one of the central musicians in the development of jazz rock in Japan. Sensing the limitations of existing jazz music, Inagaki said, “I want to play something that has never been done before, not to mention jazz rock, with a band that has a strong rock flavor,” and in 1969 he began working in earnest in the soul media. This work, “Head Rock,” recorded in 1970, symbolizes his activities and musicality.

Civilistjävel! returns with Brödföda, the successor to 2022’s Järnnätter and his fourth release for FELT. The record features collaborations with Laila Sakini, Mayssa Jallad, Thommy Wahlström, ELDON, and Withdrawn. Tomas Bodén is a revered figure of the aural murk, known primarily for his work as Civilistjävel. It’s an alias that has spawned a catalogue of self-released peculiarities, featuring music that scorns traditional form, instead opting for unfussed symphonies of ice-hued minimalism; soft murmurs that emanate from his studio in the High Coast of Sweden. On Brödföda, his latest album for Fergus Jones’s FELT imprint, subtle new developments in mood prevail. Across its 75 minutes, Civilistjävel! unveils a breadth of emotions that on previous releases seemed distant. He also invites collaborators on record for the first time: Beirut-based singer Mayssa Jallad mournfully croons on “IV”, “VIII” hosts Coldlight’s ELDON & Withdrawn for an abstracted session of dub-hop murk, Laila Sakini offers a hallucinogenic monologue amidst melodica, sticks & bells playing on “IX”, and Thommy Wahlström floats scant acid dub stylings on “VI”. These additions and developments bring a forlorn intimacy to the music, and suggest an ambition that few artists of his ilk strive for. FELT’s (un)reliable cast of audio ghouls routinely summon the odd, with Civilistjävel! often its primary culprit; Brödföda gently modifies this path to pursue some of his and the label’s most quaintly beautiful music yet.

“Rocky Top Ballads” is the debut album of Copenhagen singer/songwriter and producer Fine. Woven around Fine's voice, with guitars, drums, samples, and synthesisers, the album visits both country and folk moods but with an underlying electronic world counter weighing. Recorded, produced, and mixed by Fine.

Love International and Test Pressing commemorate yet another cracking festival with the latest instalment in their collaborative compilation series for their LIXTP label. For The Sound Of Love International #006 they’ve chosen Jay Donaldson aka Palms Trax as their selector. The Berlin-based Brit launched his career in 2013 with releases on various labels which led to headline slots and globetrotting gigs from South America to Australia. He’s a regular at Love International, having spun at the first one in 2015, playing at Barbarella’s for an RA event. The scope of this new record reflects the eclecticism of Donaldson’s DJ sets and his long-running ‘Cooking With Palms Trax’ NTS radio show and parties. Comprising of cuts collected on his worldwide trips, it’s a magical mind-blowing selection. Jumping between generations and genres, yet all coming together as a wonderful whole. As document it definitely demonstrates the joys of real record shops and physical digging.

The album opens with Linda Waterfall’s Clarity. A fabulous flight of late 1970s spiritual jazz-influenced folk from the late Seattle-based singer / songwriter, who released her debut on Windham Hill, and studied transcendental mediation under the Indian guru, Baba Hari Dass. Sebastian’s Follow My Heart is a soulful soft rocker, a sax-y seduction theme. Its very European protagonist trying to entice you into a romantic liaison, and promising the time of your life. On Did It Have To Be Me, glorious gospel choir-like backing lifts Frank E. Jeffries Jr.’s cool croon, and the spirits of anyone lucky enough to be listening. Two tracks travel from `90s South Africa. El Pedro’s La Luna is a pumping piece of S.A. bubblegum, that’s strangely partly sung in Spanish and whose echoed snares mimic flamenco handclaps. Tropical, a little zouk-y and more mid-tempo kwaito, Novidade’s Masingita features great guitar picking and warm, welcoming group vocals. Dieta Berliner & Jean Baptiste’s Paula & Kaspar transports us back to Berlin and forwards to 2012. A B-side secret weapon from Dieta’s short-lived Pakalolo City Records, this is a cowbell-led hypnotic head nodding chug, with a swaying sing-along melody and highlife-like licks hidden way down deep in the mix. Culled from a cult Canadian 45 Angelo Mallia’s Hideaway is cute, catchy tumbling TR-808- driven synth-pop. A piece of plugged-in Belgian `80s prog-rock, Zardoz’s brilliant Brasilia Drums pits its titular percussion against big cosmic synths, and segues into a new age-y journey. Danish keyboard virtuoso Gert Thrue shows off his chops on I Play The Body Electronic. For nearly ten minutes switching between Hammond organ and Moog. Feeding everything through psychedelic phasing effects, and overdubbing some fab Fender Rhodes. A true emotional epic, the sonic auteur clearly got lost in its groove. In Trance 95 might be one of the better known acts here, since the Athens-based duo’s work has been collected on Veronica Vasicka’s Minimal Wave, and in the 2010s they also supported Depeche Mode. Their 1991 single, Warm Nights Driving On Wet Streets, is chunky chill out room gear. Downtempo techno, with moody minor chords, that’s actually a tender love song. Frenchman Alain Salvati is behind Flayer’s Wanna Get Back Your Love, which first appeared in 1983, oddly on an Italian 12. Rediscovered at the turn of the millennium it’s become a bona fide modern Balearic anthem. The closing cut, Jeancky’s Variations Sur Protestation, kind of brings the album, musically, full circle. Returning to the late `70s with campfire congas, bongos, and gentle acoustic strumming. Saxophone and vibes taking it in turns to serenade the soothing mantra-like vocal. The majority of the tracks included were self-released / privately pressed and in many cases the often mysterious artists’ only recorded outings. So, in putting this together Palms Trax has pulled a lot of talented people out of obscurity. No doubt exposing some holy grails and upsetting a few dealers, while making the dreams of folks who love good music come true. Full of excellent, eccentric finds, it’s a blissful collection that’ll fill floors and catch heads’ attention.

Ten unreleased deadly digi riddims from the myspace era by Copenhagen’s Maffi crew, dubbed out into 3D space by disrupt in 2024. Taking its name from a crucial Firehouse mixtape series, “Mastermind Computer Style” is full of raw nuggets of simplistic beauty, all made in trusty Propellerhead Reason between 2006 and 2009. Some of these riddims were a firm part of early Jahtari live shows, played out on sound systems all over the globe, but never have been cut to vinyl until now. Watch out for heavy synth driven 8-bit floaters like “Morkt Igen” or “Another Lara”, a Disco Dub version of the Kashif bomb “I’m in Love” by Evelyn King. And check oddities like “Skudduel” or “Jon Jovi”, an alien mutation of the Jon Bon riddim which became Solo Banton’s classic “Talk To Me“. Raw, primitive CyberDancehall at its best, nostalgic and oddly futuristic at the same time, this album is quickly becoming RoboCop’s favourite playlist when going to work.

Back in circulation after over a decade, Jahtari’s seminal “Jahtarian Dubbers Vol. 1 EP” receives the long-awaited reissue treatment, reviving the raw, 8-bit-infused dub vibes that defined a new era of digital roots music. Originally released in 2008 and quickly disappearing into dub obscurity, this heavyweight 12” returns with four essential cuts that perfectly encapsulate the Jahtari sound—where chiptune meets the echo chamber. The EP kicks off with Blaze Dem’s “Roots Defender,” a hypnotic concotion of deep basslines and eerie samples from a Swedish cult ritual, setting a heavy tone right from the start. disrupt’s cinematic “Kozure Okami” follows, channeling Black Ark vibes through 8-bit synth explorations. On the flip, John Frum delivers the hauntingly beautiful “January Dub,” while Rootah’s slomo slammer “Holy Mount Part 2” closes the EP with Lynchian, echo-soaked vibrations that linger long after the needle lifts. Timeless tracks, mastered by CGB-1 at D&M in Berlin for maximum impact. Pivotal piece of Dub music!

Music From Memory is thrilled to introduce Dead Sound, the collaborative project of Marco Sterk (aka Young Marco) and Berlin-based pop-auteur John Moods. Both artists are no strangers to the label; Sterk forms one third of the trio Gaussian Curve, while Moods released the 2022 album ‘Hidden Gem’ with The Zenmenn. Their collaboration was both planned and spontaneous; Sterk initially reached out in 2022 expressing his desire to work with Moods. The pair finally got together in 2024 to produce ‘Into The Void’, an album that burst into life over the course of a few creatively charged days in each other’s company. Moods’ dream-like, emotionally charged music wears its heart on its sleeve; its very human vulnerability makes it a perfect match for Sterk’s strong sense of melody and textural sonic visions. ‘Into The Void’ carries these psychedelic traits in its DNA, but they exist layered deep amongst the shadows. Painting on a wide canvas that effortlessly skips between genres, the pair weave anything that inspires them into a truly unique tapestry; a bold attempt to touch at the beyond. Exploring the space between perception (level of the mind) and the nature of the universe (actual level of reality) seems traditionally like an impossible task. But there’s gotta be a time and a space for the profound and this album invites the listener to go deep, letting go of concepts such as love and opening oneself up to one’s own authentic journey. This transformative force of healing is a central theme of ‘Into The Void’, a path that is lined with light and darkness in equal measure. But, as Moods says, “do not skip the darkness, let that door open and swallow you. And maybe you’ll find, it's not as dark as you perceived at first."

First compilation album by Argentine synthesizer maniac Nacho Marty Meyer… Tip! Since the 80’s, Meyer has been interested in synthesizers and electronic music, and started making demos. The compilation includes the Italo disco track ‘Magical Journey’, previously released under the name Xarion, which is now a hard-to-find record. Makoto (satoshi& makoto): “The sincerity conveyed in his work is very good and I love the primitive feel of the music.”

ICCHĀ, meaning 'desire', is a project that started in 2023 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Spearheaded and conceptualized by Miet Warlop and musically enhanced by Micha Volders, the work "Chant For Hope" was collaboratively realized with seven native performers and premiered at the opening of the Dhaka Art Summit. This monumental living sculpture involved casting hundreds of Bengali words in plaster, fostering a dynamic interplay between performers, public space, and participation while delving into the relationship between humans and language. The performance made words extremely tangible, sometimes leading to unexpected chaos and Impromptu slogans. Working together in Dhaka towards a shared goal was a profound experience for everybody involved, albeit one punctuated by cultural contrasts and unexpected challenges that ultimately infused the project with palpable energy and a sense of collective purpose. Recordings were carefully curated into a persuasive album that still carries the inherent structure and heart of chant for hope. The musical cadence and rich heritage of the Bengali language provide the foundation for a captivating soundworld, with angular drumming and vocals that oscillate in mantra-like repetitions. A powerful and uncompromising journey featuring the performances of slam poet Shayer Noor, the energetic Muhammad Shanto, and the Chittagonian-spirited Tanny Das Gupta as protagonists while navigating through the vibrant frenzy of Dhaka.

Japanese dub band MUTE BEAT's live album “LIVE”, selected from their live performances from 1988 to 1989, is now available for the first time on vinyl. The album includes live tours in North America, including SOB's in N.Y., and performances with legends such as Gladstone “Gladdy” Anderson and Roland Alfonso.

Meditations best seller! A Japanese talent who attracts attention from all over the world. Commissioned work for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanagawa. Hiroshi Yoshimura, a composer who has made significant contributions mainly in the fields of environmental music design and contemporary art, released his last album in 2003, a collection of music for the Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Contemporary Art in Hayama and Kamakura. The album contains four pieces for the opening and closing of the museums in Hayama and Kamakura respectively, and two "special versions" that incorporate waves and human voices. The tones blend casually into the art space. The wind blows over the hills overlooking the ocean. A time when the sun is slowly setting. The gentle and tranquil ambient sounds depict various scenes seen from the museum.

Vinyl reissue with 1 bonus track! Yusef Lateef's 1961 Far East masterpiece, 'Eastern Sounds', has an exotic feel. A beautifully modal cover of the masterpiece "Love Theme From Spartacus" from Stanley Kubrick's blockbuster movie "Spartacus". 180g weight vinyl.

There were no deluxe studios for the musicians who recorded the devastating tracks contained herein. Nothing so grand. Most of these tracks were recorded live, with traditional instruments finding a place alongside any keyboards or guitars that could be found. And yet, it was the experiments of Khmer rock musicians which transformed the nightlife of the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh—and which many years later continue to seduce listeners around the world with their groovy sound. The music is wild and anarchic, rhythmic and undulating, or sweet and lyrical, but always moving and with that deep soulfulness, regardless of actual musical genre or style, that is the hallmark of the best and most important music. The lyrics often tell stories of angst, death, betrayal and sorrow. But there is a very real, deep, inescapable tragedy in these grooves as well. Alas, in 1975 came an entirely different type of transformation: the rise to power in Cambodia of the fanatical, anti-Western, Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. Within roughly four years, implementing their “concept of Year Zero,” Pot and his regime were responsible for the deaths of an estimated two million Cambodians (roughly 21% of the nation’s population), many in the notorious “killing fields.” Even the most famous and beloved Khmer musicians could not escape. Sinn Sisamouth, the “King of Khmer music”; Ros Sereysothea, the “Golden Voice of the Royal Capital”; and Pan Ron — all featured on this collection of songs written by the majestic Sinn Sisamouth — met their deaths at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. Jon Swain, who was the Sunday Times war correspondent in South Vietnam and Cambodia at the time, said: “Educated people, musicians, people with glasses… a lot were taken to the killing fields… so the great singers disappeared.” To us, the richness and deep soulfulness of Cambodian music is akin perhaps to what was excavated from Ethiopia and embraced worldwide over the years thanks to the “Ethiopiques” series — this despite the geographical and cultural distance between the two very different nations. It really is one world, not three. It has long been a dearest wish to be able to present on the Lion Productions label individual artist-specific volumes of some of the most important Cambodian music, with the blessing of the families of the artists. Thanks to the family of Sinn Sisamouth, what seemed a dream is now real! Enjoy this first volume of the many to come!

Light in the Attic, in cooperation with Laurie Anderson and the Lou Reed Archive, is thrilled to announce the forthcoming release of Why Don’t You Smile Now: Lou Reed at Pickwick Records 1964-65. Due out September 27th, the latest installment in LITA’s critically acclaimed Lou Reed Archive Series is a compilation of pop songs penned by Reed during his mid-60s stint as a staff songwriter for the long-defunct label Pickwick Records. The compilation follows on the heels of Lou Reed’s Hudson River Wind Meditations (2023) and Words & Music, May 1965 (2022). One of the most original and innovative figures in music history, Reed (1942-2013) first gained recognition as co-founder and frontman of the massively influential Velvet Underground. Over the course of his five-decade career, the two-time Rock & Roll Hall of Famer brought his singular vision to an eclectic expanse of musical endeavors, including era-defining albums like 1972’s Transformer and wildly experimental works like the 1975 avant-garde noise classic Metal Machine Music. But before establishing himself as an enduringly iconic singer, songwriter, musician, and poet, Reed got his start as an in-house songwriter (and occasional session guitarist/vocalist) for Pickwick Records—a label specializing in sound-alike recordings that emulated the major pop hits of the day. Encompassing everything from garage-rock and girl-group pop to blue-eyed soul and teen-idol balladry, Reed’s output for Pickwick ultimately offers a fascinating early glimpse at his ever-evolving and truly limitless artistry. The album has been restored and remastered by GRAMMY®-nominated mastering engineer John Baldwin. This release marks the first official anthology of Lou Reed’s work for Pickwick Records and features rarities, cult classics (The Primitives’ “The Ostrich”), & previously unreleased material (The Beachnuts’ “Sad, Lonely Orphan Boy”).