MUSIC

"YARD STYLE showcases legendary vocalist Johnny Clarke and the budding genius of Mad Professor (b. Neil Fraser). The year was 1983, Mad Prof had yet to become the very well known mixer he is today. Later projects with, amongst others, Massive Attack, would see him firmly installed as the UK's premier dub remixer. Characterized by electronic kick drum, digital echo effects and his very own brand of technical wizardry. Sounding like no other, yet drawing heavily on the established rituals of dub music making. A bridge between the older roots of Jamaica and the purely electronic digital dub that took over in the UK and Europe."

aisie returns with a transformative descent into the darkness, assembled entirely from snippets of obscure educational science shows, ghost station radio transmissions, vinyl record detritus and blown-out microscopic field recordings. Twisted into mystifyingly revelatory aural documentations of moments that never were, it unfolds like a dream sculpted out of shadows. Enchanting, enigmatic and elusive like the origins of the source material used for its creation.

Kali Malone’s music reminds the listener that spectacle is felt in the chest. Its otherworldliness, represented by its scale, duration, and presentation in spaces defined by the aesthetics of transcendence, activates intimately held feelings of wonder and insight. Here is a space where sound can unlock a state of reflection and unwavering tenderness. Still, the creation of that music, Malone’s own experience of it in performance, has been one defined by focus and rigor, by adherence to structures that dictate cyclical returns and the detailed work of exploring microtonal harmony. For all its grandeur, her music is elemental at its core: born of sweat, concentration, the physicality of pipes vibrating as air rushes through them, the desire to share the emotional intensity ignited with each tonal shift. Burning Song, Malone’s first new album of solo compositions since early 2024’s All Life Long, represents a transformation in her compositional strategy towards a process that is more intuitive and direct. Feeling supersedes matrices, and each piece proceeds linearly, connected to one another by subtle bridging tones. The album was recorded at the historic Thomaskirche in Leipzig, Germany, where J.S. Bach was cantor for the last 27 years of his life; his body rests beneath the sanctuary. Malone is the first musician to perform contemporary works on the church’s Bach Organ, an instrument completed in 2000 but with bespoke tuning and temperament systems based on historical norms of the baroque period. She is joined by Lucy Railton on cello and Stephen O’Malley on bowed acoustic guitar, the same trio that honed a profound connection based on deep listening through the development of Malone’s work Does Spring Hide Its Joy. Recording took place over the course of two late nights in August 2025, with the engineer Francesco Donadello placing over 20 microphones throughout the room and closely upon the instruments, allowing the listener to locate themselves within the music as it fills the historic sanctum. Chord follows chord, each in slow succession, emerging like stones of various shades and shapes on a winding path. The trio moves as one, stepwise, through passages that are alternately ambiguous and radiant, at times triumphant as the tones rise towards the organ’s upper register. By discarding canon form, which has dominated much of her organ work, there is a clear sense of freedom that allows these pieces to unfold more gradually and speak more declaratively than ever before. Even with the presence of one of the most canonized and dissected composers of all time just underfoot, Malone felt the pressure of tradition lifting, an ease of being dictating the flow of the music. She is careful to never extend the narratives of any individual piece beyond what feels conclusive, resulting in a relatively compact cycle of compositions. The first half of Burning Song was commissioned for the 2023 Venice Music Biennale and presented at the remarkably ornate San Pietro di Castello. Initial seeds of these pieces were developed on a piano backstage at Bozar in Brussels following a solo electronic performance, long after the audience and staff had departed. It was the first time Malone had used the piano as a compositional tool since her childhood, offering a portal to a younger self. The album’s final three pieces were composed swiftly in the month preceding the recording session in 2025, their stately progressions emerging within her mind’s ear with a sense of ease and inevitability, hovering in the moment just before understanding, where revelation lives. The album’s final piece, “My Eve My Dawn,” represents a clear vision of this process; foregrounding the cohesion between endings and beginnings, it moves through passages of sadness and joy, the linking tones offering a sense of continuity, and thus of acceptance. The metaphor of burning holds two meanings. Fire moves in ways that appear intuitive, changing shape moment by moment, and relentlessly insistent. Here, Malone moves from harnessing the fractaline beauty of mathematics to reveling in the impact of feelings, of foresight, of something more undefined and from within. But burning is a process of change in which transformation spreads from a nexus point to rapidly consume whatever it encounters. The freedom found in the process of composing and realizing Burning Song is one that opens innumerable doors of possibility. In the fertility of ashes grows whatever comes next.

This is fun. L.A. purveyor of beats and certified hip-hop aficionado Samiyam, of Stones Throw and Flyamsam (with FlyLo) fame has made an album dedicated to another passion of his: a love of Death Metal. Thus the new record was born, consisting of 13 tracks of heavy beats and even heavier metal tones. Far out.

The EP "Trans Canada Highway", released in 2006 by the Scottish electronic music duo Boards of Canada on Warp. Against a backdrop of the nostalgia and sense of memory characteristic of Boards of Canada, synthesizers that evoke the warmth of analog equipment, hazily processed samples, and gently swaying beats layer together to create a soundscape that blurs the line between reality and memory. It is one of the defining works of Warp in the 2000s and an EP that leaves a particularly beautiful afterglow within their discography.

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

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

On October 15th and 16th, 2020, drummer Daniel Villarreal was joined by guitarist Jeff Parker and bassist Anna Butterss for two afternoons of recording in the backyard of Chicali Outpost in Los Angeles. For all three musicians, it was the first ensemble recording session they’d done in-person since the pandemic locked the world down just seven months prior. Some choice moments from these sessions made it onto Villarreal’s critically-acclaimed 2022 album Panamá 77, but most of the music remained unreleased. Lados B is a deep dive into the high-level spontaneous music made by Villarreal, Parker, and Butterss across those two days in 2020. Villarreal is heard leading the group through various rhythmic modes and structures for improvisation – flow as informed by the Latin funk of Fania Records as it is by the otherworldly humanity trance of Brain Records – while Parker and Butterss draw on their extensive experience playing free together (as heard on Parker's recently-released Mondays at the Enfield Tennis Academy, and the LA side of Makaya McCraven's 2018 LP Universal Beings) to build harmonic buoys for their spontaneous melodicism. The result is a beautifully vivid illustration of context, creativity, and collective composition from a particularly rich moment in history.

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

Influenced by the minimal music of the 60s and 70s, baroque music, and experimentation in studio environments, Canadian artist Sarah Davachi creates music using a variety of sounds including analog synthesizers, piano, electronic organ, pipe/reed organ, vocals, tape samplers, and orchestral music. Sarah Davachi, a Canadian artist who creates music with a variety of sounds, including piano, electronic organ, pipe/lead organ, vocals, tape sampler, and orchestral music, has released her latest album "Two Sisters" on her Late Music label. The album features a chamber ensemble and a pipe organ solo. A variety of instruments are used, including carillon (a keyboard instrument composed of very large cast-iron bells), chorus, string quartet, bass woodwinds, trombone quartet, and sine tones and electronic drones. The pipe organ is a 1742 Italian tracker organ, now located in the deserts of the American Southwest, and contains the sounds of a very rare pipe organ.

An EP released in 2015 featuring an experimental concept of computer-controlled acoustic instruments. Its minimal, fragmentary compositions retain the physical resonance of piano and drums while crafting rhythms and phrases impossible for human hands. This peculiar sonic world, like a robot's improvised performance, possesses an avant-garde quality resonating with contemporary music and sound art. An important work regarded as emblematic of Aphex Twin's “experimental spirit.”

Nearly 48 hours of live improvised performance recorded at 1 venue over 12 months and 28 shows - culled, cut, rendered, and remixed into 19 potent pieces of organic beat music.

In Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, he posits that the aura of art objects is destroyed by the ability to photographically reproduce them. When you had to make a pilgrimage to a work it remained elusive, charged, ever distant; but when you can easily see a reproduction, such aura dissipates. What Benjamin did not anticipate is that in the age of AI and the frictionless fount of digital content, we have imbued mechanical and analog means of media production with aura. Film cameras from the last 100 years are in high demand (the point and shoot Olympus Mju I featured in Wim Wenders film Perfect Days still sells for $200), vinyl sales continue to grow year by year, 35mm and 70mm film screenings have become aura-drenched events people travel across country for, and as to the world of vintage and analog synthesizers, when a friend asked for the price on the Yamaha CS-80 synth used on Toto’s “Africa”, the answer was a cool $60,000. Despite the ability to simulate almost any synthesizer on a computer, the original physical units retain their mystique. Perhaps this lies in the physical process, many of these synths are temperamental and difficult to fully utilize, and the effort and ingenuity can be felt in ways that will always be absent from easy digital simulacra. Perhaps there is an aura in their imperfection, as Brian Eno wrote: “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.” Some may call this nostalgia, but such sonic imperfections are the sounds of humans interacting with the physical world, and it is understandable to feel a pang of emotion and attachment in a time of exponential alienation. Marche 22 was recorded over a week at the Museo Del Synth Marchigiano in Macerata, Italy. The museum is filled with rare and obscure synths (especially CRB, GEM & Elka) as well as salvaged materials from a nearby shuttered Farfisa organ factory, including MARS, an unfinished realtime audio processing application developed by IRIS - similar to the now well known MAX/MSP. Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein play a suite of pieces that encompasses the last sixty years of synthesizer music—there are nods to Cluster, Tangerine Dream, Jean Michel Jarre, and Morton Subotnick. Dixon and Stein are like jazz masters playing the American songbook with their own riffs and quotations. What shines through in these varied works that are sometimes rhythmic, sometimes melancholic, and sometimes both, is a soul, a spirit, an emotion vibrating through the tones like the charge of coming rain or the thrum of a distant train on the tracks.

In Spacemen 3 Vinyl – Extended Edition, Danny Passarella assembles the definitive visual chronicle of Sonic Boom and J Spaceman’s recorded universe: a lavish, full‑colour archive of global pressings, ephemera and new interviews that turns their vinyl trail into a tactile, time‑spanning narrative. Spacemen 3 Vinyl – Extended Edition is a love letter to the grooves, labels, sleeves and hand‑made artefacts that carried Sonic Boom and J Spaceman’s music out into the world. Expanding and deepening the original volume, Danny Passarella charts the band’s vinyl story from 1986 right up to 2024, mapping how a cult psychedelic outfit from Rugby left behind one of the most obsessively collected discographies in underground rock. Presented in full colour and printed to a high standard, the book moves far beyond simple documentation to become a visual history of a band in constant sonic and aesthetic flux. At its core, the book is an exquisitely photographed survey of Spacemen 3’s physical output: LPs, 12"s, 10"s and 7"s from across the globe, encompassing original pressings, international variants and notorious bootlegs. Each release is reproduced with forensic care, foregrounding the work of the musicians, engineers, producers, graphic artists, photographers and fiercely independent labels who helped shape the group’s trajectory. From stark early Glas​s Records designs to later, more intricate packages, the pages reveal how typography, colour, printing quirks and wear all contribute to the band’s enduring aura. For fans and collectors, it functions as the definitive visual archive; for newcomers, it offers an immediate, tactile way into the Spacemen 3 universe. The Extended Edition adds a substantial tranche of rare and previously unseen material that pushes the project into deeper, more obsessive territory. Readers will find test pressings and label variants; original press releases and promo photos; gig and shop posters; misprints and artwork drafts that show sleeves in embryonic form; studio notes and handwritten lyric sheets that crack the door on the writing and recording process; a full Outer Limits fanzine feature; tour programmes and other pieces of paper ephemera that once lived in record shop windows, venue foyers or fan bedroom walls. Together, these fragments build a parallel narrative: the underground networks, scenes and micro‑economies that sustained the band far from the mainstream. Crucially, the book doesn’t only look backward through objects – it also listens to the people who were there. Spacemen 3 Vinyl – Extended Edition includes exclusive new interviews with key figures from the band and their label ecosystem: Sonic Boom, Pete Bain, Will Carruthers, Charlie Pritchard (Outer Limits), David Barker (Glass Records), Suzy Shaw (Bomp! Records), Dom Martin (The Great Pop Supplement) and Mark Lascelles (Runcible Records). Their recollections offer candid insight into the practical and emotional realities behind the artefacts: pressing plant adventures, artwork decisions, budget constraints, personal tensions and small triumphs that are otherwise only hinted at in matrix numbers and catalogue codes. Attention to detail extends to the new edition’s physical presentation. Every copy from the first print run comes with an exclusive A3 poster, turning the book into an instant centrepiece for any Spacemen 3 wall. The cover itself features a UV spot varnish finish that deliberately echoes the Glass pressing of The Perfect Prescription, mirroring the way collectors obsess over subtle manufacturing differences. In a landscape where streaming has flattened music into invisible files, Spacemen 3 Vinyl – Extended Edition reasserts the power of the record as a total object – sound, design, text and material history fused – and secures the band’s vinyl legacy between hard covers for the generations still discovering that taking drugs to make music to take drugs to really did leave behind some of the most beautiful artefacts of its era.

Sun Electric - the legendary Berlin duo of Tom Thiel and Max Loderbauer - returns with Episodes, an enticing new album. While the pair has been active and creating over the years (remember their track 'Every Now And Then' on the 10 Years De:tuned compilation in 2019), Episodes marks their first album of original material in nearly 20 years. Now, with a renewed way of working together, they present fresh and captivating music on the Belgian De:tuned label, built from recordings made with the vintage 1960s Subharchord Synthesizer. Across 6 tracks, Sun Electric takes listeners on a strange yet wonderful journey through shifting moods and sonic textures, capturing their unmistakable sense of exploration and atmosphere. With kind support of the Studio for Electroacoustic Music of the Akademie der Kunste. Stay tuned!

Black Steel's "Jungle Warrior" via Ariwa Sounds. "Multi talented, multi instrumentalist Black Steel was born in the early 60s in Brockley south east London. He started playing instruments at the age of five years building the talent that has since aided a string ofhits from the Ariwa stable and other labels - 'You're lying', 'It's you', 'If I gave you my heart to you', 'Didn't I''Black pride' and many others This album features the man in a heavyroots style through the inspiration of THE most high. Special thanks to Mad Professor, Humble I, Jah Shaka, Dennis Brown, Winston Edwards, Steven King and DeMondo for giving I that roots and culture inspiration."

The eminently watchable Accidental Meetings introduce extended family member, Lovely Dave, with a real guess-again mixtape (the first in a series) refracting myriad strains of blissed synths, outernational jazz, new wave pop, post punk scuzz, screwed club and dub Six years into Accidental Meetings’ serendipitous plot, we know to expect anything and everything from the Bristol label, so long as it's got a unique soul and does not bore. Lovely Dave ideally plays true to that brief on his 99 minute mixtape, effortlessly glyding from outernational synth folk to a killer Curtis Mayfield cover via everything from thumb piano meditations, jazz-funked sidewinders, and a proto-new beat bomb on the A-side, before swerving from gothic new wave to smudged minimal wave audities, a pitch-slapped batacuda house ace, and meter-messing skronk on the backside. Brilliantly strange but true!

If Surround can be listened to as music that’s as close to air itself, allowing us to enter each listener’s sound scenery, or as something that exists within a new perspective, expanding the middle ground between sound and music, and transforming it into a comfortable space, it would be much appreciated. — Hiroshi Yoshimura Originally released as an album in January 1986, Surround was recorded by Yoshimura as a commission from home builder Misawa Homes, intended to function as an “amenity” designed to enhance the company’s newly built living spaces. In his original notes for the album, Yoshimura recommends that Surround be placed in the same family of sounds “as the vibration of footsteps, the hum of an air conditioner, or the clanging of a spoon inside a coffee cup.” And, as he suggests, “with the addition of city noise from outside the window,” you may hear Surround in a completely new way. A pioneer in the field of environmental music, Yoshimura’s previous works included Music For Nine Post Cards (1982), originally produced to be played back inside a museum space, and designing sound environments for public spaces and subway systems. Surround was recorded almost concurrently with the acclaimed and popular GREEN (1986); the two albums are described by Hiroyoshi Shiokawa in his liner notes as being Yoshimura’s yin and yang. 12月上旬入荷。遂に満を持して登場。あの『Green』を凌ぐ人気を誇る、長年失われていた吉村弘最高峰のアンビエント・クラシックこと1986年作品『Surround』が〈Light in the Attic〉配給の〈Temporal Drift〉レーベルより待望の公式アナログ再発！日本の環境音楽のパイオニアであり、都市/公共空間のサウンドデザインからサウンドアート、パフォーマンスに至るまで、傑出した仕事を世に残した偉才、吉村弘。その最難関の音盤として君臨してきた幻の一枚が、今回史上初の公式アナログ・リイシュー。ミサワホームから依頼されて録音された作品で、これらは同社の新築居住空間をより充実させるために設計された「アメニティ」として機能することを目的としていた環境音楽作品。吉村自身による当時のライナーノーツに加え、オリジナル・プロデューサーであった塩川博義氏による新規ライナーノーツも同封（日／英）。 MASTERPIECE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Bismillah was composed in a small house surrounded by the forest of Montmirail in France. The album is built around modular synths, field recordings, and an old organ discovered in a nearby village. In Sara’s work, the organ’s sustained tones meet a lyrical introspection, articulated with precision and vulnerability. The slow permutation of patterns creates an atmosphere where time and space melt into a pure, constant present. Inspired by the pastoral setting, the sequencing used to animate the modules feels almost instinctive. In dialogue with the calls of merle birds, the sound cycles grow more complex over time, with DIY drum-machine loops and distorted field recordings adding an unpredictable counterpoint. On the cover, bushes, trees, and owl shadows were photographed in the very place where the album was composed. Simple melodies appear and disappear, mirroring the subtle movements and shadows of the surrounding landscape.

On their second album together, Vilnius-based Indonesian composer and instrument builder Johanes "Mo’ong" Santoso Pribadi, best known as one half of Raja Kirik, and Berlin-based Japanese producer Shigeru Ishihara (aka Scotch Rolex) survey their surroundings, dreaming up a vibrant fantasy landscape that teems with life. Manifesting their personal experiences as a sequence of poetic freeform experiments and dancefloor rituals, the duo realize a vast patchwork of resonant, anomalous sonic environments that form a mystifying new landmass. Pribadi and Ishihara see 'ABU' as a guide of sorts to an imaginary volcanic island that they've consolidated from the various physical locations and psychic topographies that have formed their separate identities. Constantly shifting, the "island of ash" vanishes between the borders of the three core sites where it was recorded - in Yogyakarta, Švenčionėliai and Berlin - absorbing local soundscapes and intermingling them, forming unstable, hallucinatory terrain. "On 'ABU', identity dissolves like sound in fog," they explain. "What remains is the pulse of movement, the echo of a voice crossing water and the endless reconstruction of home through noise." This might sound like familiar territory for Pribadi, who's worked extensively with Javanese traditional sounds, rupturing the timeline on 2021's acclaimed 'Rampokan', but for Ishihara it's a more alien process. While the producer has rallied against genre purity for decades, haphazardly searching out the sweet spot between breakcore, trap, dub, chiptune, hardcore and extreme noise, he's rarely examined his own cultural inheritance. So, once the duo had engaged with gamelan in Yogyakarta, working with found objects and self-built instruments, and channeled the Baltic air in Švenčionėliai into breathwork and vocal experiments, they finally reconvened in Berlin where Ishehara allowed himself to reconnect with the rituals, rhythms and soundscapes of Japan. Watching the island of 'ABU' flood with lava, burn and then regenerate itself, Ishihara handled the final mixdown himself, translating the pulse of taiko into rhythmic shockwaves that punctuate the record, echoing through the volcanic topsoil. The resulting record isn't Indonesian or Japanese, European or Asian, it's a sonic ecosystem that's not fixed on any map, floating perpetually. That means the tense, ceremonial atmosphere of opening track 'Hai no uta' isn't all it might appear to be on first blush. An intermixture of Javanese gong hits, rattling wooden percussion and xenharmonic flute blasts thats interspersed with unsettling electronic vibrations, it sounds unusually biomechanical: live and organic, and at the same time meticulously terraformed. The same feeling emerges as the title track takes shape and hoarse chants roll over the duo's unique cocktail of rhythms: tuned, gamelan-like resonances tumble through ordered electro-plated taiko structures, evolving into fractured free improv and harmonizing with syrupy drone metal before the track's complete. And while there's a sense of coherence throughout, the album keeps shifting, fluctuating every time it's properly perceived. On 'Api', the tense ceremonial sounds seem to flirt with hard dance textures, inviting heavy electronic kicks into the mannered mass of flutes and metallophone hits. And on the deafening 'Hino-Tori', Pribadi and Ishehara are no longer teasing, matching their shouts and acoustic instrumentation with carnivalesque synths and hardstyle rhythms. 'ABU' is an island that rewards the boldest wanderers, providing for those who can meet its energy head-on, drifting between continents with the same friction, the same mess of harmonies and dissonances. Wash up on its shores with an open mind and its mechanical tides and digital rituals will reshape your wildest hallucinations.

Heat Crimes follow that Father Dionysios Tabakis smash with Terskol’s debut album of coldly cavernous, crushing and ionzied slabs of Turkish sludge doom, recorded 2017-21 on modular synths and a knackered drum machine and highly advised to acolytes of Godflesh, Sunn O))), Joachim Nordwall, Muslimgauze, Kevin Richard Martin. Joining the label’s necklace of sore thumbs, the eponymous entry from Utku Önal aka Terskol exists at a crossroads of styles combined in ways that surely recalls the number of greats mentioned above, but also with an uncanny concision and metallic resonance that leaves ice burns to the touch. Not really rock, nor fully electronic; it’s best conceived as a sort of primordial cyborganic force of nature certain to find its audience lurking in the shadows of convention. Arguably; it’s the heaviest release in the label’s half decade run thus far; 11 uncompromising payloads of glacially-paced lurch defined with shivered machine drums and radioactive reverb, prone to keen from doomscapes evoking a fantasy Stephen O’Malley x Bryn Jones hookup, to bouts of horror score vamps and barbed distortion, into passages of burned-out bliss thru to sky-razing, warmonger riffs. As with the likes of Avenir’s ‘90s electronica on the label before them, Terskol’s formerly unreleased musick is effectively new to the world at large and feels like a missing link on the timeline, nailing a combo of styles with a cloistered vision that leaves the impression it was never really intended for wider consumption. After marinading in the archive for so long it’s all clearly ripe for ritual cleansing, pulling heads wholly into unheimlich zones of seething amp worship on ‘WMEMWAMS’, and setting fire to the air in the ambient sludge of ‘9A’, hackling like theeee nastiest Godflesh in ‘Backstepper’, and with a prescient title ‘Bedroht’ to sure to snag Gen-Z doomscrollers.

Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is a priest of the Orthodox Church. He serves at the Church of Panagitsa in Nafplio, the Nativity of the Theotokos, and records alone, at home. The music made in that house does not announce itself. It arrives from somewhere older than genre, older than the distinctions we use to organize sound. Tabakis is a musician of the Eastern Mediterranean in the fullest sense: formed in Byzantine theory and practice, fluent on qanun, oud, cümbüş, ney, zurna, Politiki and Pontic lyra, kabak kemane, yali tanbur. The system he works within is Byzantine, not as aesthetic choice or cultural reference, but as logic. The scales, the intervals, the way a note moves toward or away from another: this is the operating system. What emerges is slow, heavy, meditative, drone that carries the mass of stone walls and sustained prayer. It is still Byzantine music. Two tracks are built around the fretless electric guitar, perdesiz in Turkish, meaning simply: without frets. The fretless instrument is one of the few capable of producing moria, intervals smaller than a semitone, with the exactness the voice has and fixed-pitch instruments do not. Here the guitar does not behave like a guitar. It bends into pitches that Western tuning sealed off centuries ago, moving the way Earth moves in their slowest passages, or the way Scott Walker's later work used sound as weight rather than melody. On two tracks, Evgenia Symela Armeni sings. Her voice is psaltic, trained in the Orthodox chanting tradition, ψαλτοτράγουδο, chant-song, and it cuts through the drone the way a single candle cuts through a dark nave. Χαίρε Παρθένε Σουμελά, a Pontian hymn to the Theotokos of Soumela. Ρόδον Ψυχής, Rose of the Soul. Both devotional. Both immovable. Tabakis is also a writer. His books, among them Into the Abyss with a View of Paradise and The Mad Forerunner, move between Athonite monastic thought and the texture of contemporary life. The music moves the same way. Alienation, depression, isolation, not named as modern problems but as ancient conditions, long described, still present. The stillness of Athos and the noise of the present sit in the same frame, unresolved. Fr. Dionysios Tabakis is of Asia Minor descent, 53, married with three children. This is his first release.

Barely known outside of his home country during his lifetime, the late Japanese ambient music pioneer Hiroshi Yoshimura has seen his global stature rise steadily in the past few years. The 2017 reissue of his lauded debut, Music For Nine Post Cards, along with a slow building cult internet following has helped ignite a renaissance in his acclaimed body of work, much of which has never been released outside of Japan. Known for his sound design and environmental music, Yoshimura worked on a number of commissions following the 1982 release of Music For Nine Post Cards, including works for museums, galleries, public spaces, TV shows, video art, fashion shows, and even a cosmetics company. Originally released in 1986, GREEN is one of Hiroshi Yoshimura’s most well-loved recordings and a favorite of the artist himself. Recorded over the winter of 1985-86 at Yoshimura’s home studio, the compositions unfold at an unhurried pace, a stark contrast to the busy city life of Tokyo. As Yoshimura explained in the original liner notes, the album title in the context of this body of work is not meant to be seen as a color, but is rather used to convey “the comfortable scenery of the natural cycle known as GREEN”—which perfectly encapsulates the soothing and warm sounds contained on the album, although it was created utilizing Yamaha FM synthesizers, known for their crisp digital tones. This edition marks the first reissue of the highly sought-after and impossible to find album. It features the original mix preferred by Yoshimura himself, previously available only on the initial Japanese vinyl release (a limited edition remixed version of the album, with added sound effects, was released on CD in the US). Additionally, this release is the first in our ongoing series, WATER COPY, focusing on the works of Hiroshi Yoshimura.

Big Crown marks its tenth anniversary with BCR10 - Ten Years of Big Crown, gathering favourites from across the label’s catalogue alongside more recent material. Founded by Leon Michels and Danny Akalepse in 2016, Big Crown has built an international roster spanning soul, funk, jazz, psych and beyond. The collection features Lady Wray, El Michels Affair, Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band, Lee Fields & The Expressions, Derya Yıldırım & Grup Şimşek, Brainstory, Surprise Chef, Bobby Oroza, Liam Bailey, Holy Hive and many more, with liner notes from journalist and DJ Jeff Mao.