NEW ARRIVALS

Rejoice! The complete Crank!-era recordings of seminal Texas not-emo quartet Mineral are here. Gathered across three LPs are replicas of 1996's The Power of Failing, swan song sophomore effort EndSerenading, plus …And What Remains—a new collection of singles and demos. Nina Corcoran's in-depth notes untangle the complicated history of second wave's avoidant middle brother, all illustrated by dozens of period photographs, flyers, and lyrics in eye-scorching color. Testify.

Rejoice! The complete Crank!-era recordings of seminal Texas not-emo quartet Mineral are here. Gathered across three LPs are replicas of 1996's The Power of Failing, swan song sophomore effort EndSerenading, plus …And What Remains—a new collection of singles and demos. Nina Corcoran's in-depth notes untangle the complicated history of second wave's avoidant middle brother, all illustrated by dozens of period photographs, flyers, and lyrics in eye-scorching color. Testify.

Sep 11, 2026 (EST) CD LL020cd 617308054637 $6.00 TOTAL Afro-Disco Makossa is the first Linear Labs album built for the dance floor, and Adrian Younge is uniquely qualified to make it. Having already recorded modern Afrobeat classics with Tony Allen and Ebo Taylor through Jazz Is Dead, Younge asks a new question: what would a Ghanaian producer in '76 have made if he set out to create an American disco record for his hometown? The result is a relentless, hypnotic patchwork of Afrobeat, funk, and disco recorded to tape, built for the DJ of any era.

Marcos Valle JID003 is the third installation in the Jazz Is Dead catalog. This album features eight original songs by Adrian Younge, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, and Marcos Valle, one of Brazil’s most important musical icons. Marcos Valle JID003 uses Valle’s catalog as a production guide, resulting in an album of new recordings that crisscross Valle’s career long obsessions with samba, bossa, MPB and psychedelic funk. All songs produced by Adrian Younge & Ali Shaheed Muhammad. Recorded and mixed by Adrian Younge at Linear Labs, the preeminent analog studio of Los Angeles, CA.

Takashi Kokubo, one of Japan’s leading ambient musicians and sound designers, is best known for creating sounds such as the Earthquake Early Warning alert and payment confirmation tones. From his “Aeon Series” released in the 1990s, the highly popular title *Wind Oasis II: A Tale of Forest and Water* is finally being reissued!

Released in 1990, Heaven or Las Vegas was the band's most commercially successful release, reaching number seven in the UK album charts. Numerous publications have since declared it one of the best albums of the 90s, Pitchfork calling it “a core of ungodly gorgeous songs that is every bit as moving and relevant today as it ever was.” Label founder Ivo Watts-Russell goes further, candidly revealing in the recent 4AD biography, Facing The Other Way, that this album wasn’t just his favourite Cocteaus album but also his favourite all-time 4AD album, and “by a long shot”, calling it “the perfect record.”

When one thinks of the terms “mass” and “massive” in music, especially contemporary music, perhaps certain aural images come to mind: generic metal heaviness; dynamics-bereft noise; ear-battering dance floor madness; the multitudinous forms of drone darkness. All of these are massive in their own fashion. However, this new studio album from 7FO (pronounced “nana f o”), a composer-performer based in northern Osaka, investigates and inhabits a different aspect of the massive. A glorious combination: dense low frequencies; sculpturally condensed blocks of sound, subtly swinging gravitational fields ― and a surprising sense of rolling and rollicking joyfulness and play. “Massive” doesn’t have to mean “dark” ― consider the sun. This is the third 7FO release on EM Records, following the well-received “Ryu no Nukegara (Dragon's Husk)" (2018). On these 2024-25 recordings, 7FO focuses his drum machines, synths and musical vision into eight compact structures which were partially inspired by the intense essence of American pre-war blues and the shining soul of traditional Ethiopian music, especially the works related to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. While not obviously evident, the glowing core of these musics has been captured and condensed here; another inspiration is the massive sculptural 1980s works of Yoshi Wada ― although there are obvious differences, there is a similar material tangibility to the vibration of the air. The final piece, “Shirohebi”, is an update of the b-side of 7FO's 7-inch single "Healing Sword" (2023), featured on Henry Rollins’ radio program. We invite you to experience and enjoy these eight massive blocks of sound, imbued with 7FO’s heartfelt warmth and humour, dense but not dark; shifting, rolling, appearing and disappearing: 7FO once picked up a roadside stone, which split as it sat in his palm. This experience, referenced in the release’s title, hints at the metaphysical magic of music, a realm beyond mere coincidence: even the massive density of stone can split, and reveal the magic within. Available on CD, LP and digital download. Artwork by Hiroaki Hidaka.

For his new album, Irreparable Parables, Andrew Wasylyk felt a strong desire to write a set of songs featuring an element hitherto rare in his work: the human voice. Equally strong was the conviction that he did not want to sing them himself. The Scottish multi-instrumentalist and composer set about assembling a group of guest singers, sending out the songs to wherever they were in the world. The vocals were recorded remotely and then, like migrating birds, winged their way back to Scotland. The result is an album of great beauty which, perhaps preeminently in Wasylyk’s work, expresses the vulnerability and resilience of the human spirit. Six singers appear on the record, represented by six songbirds illustrated on the sleeve by Clay Pipe Music’s Frances Castle. The cuckoo is a nod to Belle and Sebastian’s 2004 single ‘I’m A Cuckoo’, that band’s Stuart Murdoch being the first voice you hear on the new album. When the vocal for ‘Private Symphony #2’ arrived, says Wasylyk, “it was everything that I was looking for and more. But this is Stuart Murdoch. Of course he’s going to make something incredibly beautiful and thoughtful.” The song lyrics were, for the most part, written by the singers. The music is Wasylyk’s creation. He navigates a sound world that lies somewhere beyond the borders of classical and jazz, ambient and abstract. It is difficult to describe, but easy to understand, which is to say to feel. That is the way Wasylyk’s work is experienced: as a feeling. It takes you back to childhood, perhaps, to feelings of comfort and safety, or to memories of walks at sunrise and sunset, or to the way a shadow falls on a particular field in a particular place at a particular time in your life. This is consoling music. That is why, though pretty, it is not merely pretty. These are songs to shore up the soul. Wasylyk writes in a room, in his native Dundee, full of “half-broken” instruments. He picks these up, plays a little, seeking an idea, a feeling, a door that lies ajar. The musical palette of Irreparable Parables includes brass and woodwind, a six-piece string section, guitar, bass, drums, vibraphone, Mellotron, Fender Rhodes, tape loops, synthesisers and percussion. The strings were arranged by the cellist Pete Harvey, a long-term collaborator. Among the other guest vocalists are Gruff Rhys of the Super Furry Animals, Saya Ueno from Japan’s Tenniscoats and Peter Brewis from Field Music. Wasylyk himself takes the lead vocal on the title track, though a throat infection and touch of pitch-shifting have altered his singing in a way that even he, having fallen out of love with his own voice, finds acceptable. The heart of the record can, arguably, be found in two tracks, ‘Love Is A Life That Lasts Forever’ and ‘Spectators In The Absence of God’, sung respectively by Molly Linen and Kathryn Joseph. The former, bright with trumpets, was inspired by the writing of Derek Jarman. “I was feeling deeply upset about the world and wanted to try and write something that was obviously hopeful,” Wasylyk says. ‘Spectators …’ offers an emotional counterpoint. It is an “apocalyptic hymn” that seems to grapple with watching human suffering from afar, too distant to be at physical risk, but experiencing the psychological wounding, and feelings of helplessness, even complicity, that come with constant awareness of other people’s pain. “Kathryn’s a pal, I love her dearly, and she’s a brilliant artist who really feels what she writes,” Wasylyk says. “The cracked tenderness of her voice is spellbinding.” The album closes with an instrumental piece, ‘Soul Enters The Ocean Sun Climbs Out Of The Sea’, all piano and strings, that offers a sense of resolution and ascension. A good moment, too, for Wasylyk to reflect upon the artistic companionship that he enjoyed while making this record – the songbirds that answered his call: “These humans are incredible at what they do. I’m deeply grateful and feel so lucky. It blows my mind.”

The spirit of legendary film score composer Toru Takemitsu looms large over Kotaro Maruyama’s economical yet lush studies, ranging from sublime echoes of Japanese environmental ambient to beatific pulse poems edging on weightless Heinrich Mueller works. "Composing primarily with the piano, Kotaro Maruyama creates music for a variety of visual media, including commercials and short films. Influenced by the composer Toru Takemitsu, he places importance on the “silence” and "ambience" of sound, aiming to create works where the music quietly depicts a scene. Kotaro Maruyama's first solo album, "Vapor Curve," is constructed entirely from the sound source of the OP-Z digital synthesizer. Notably, he avoids the concept of harmony for a single tone, instead pursuing a unique "woven harmony" created by intricately layering multiple independent melodies. Using only the OP-Z, and recording everything in a single take without using a computer, Kotaro Maruyama's "Vapor Curve" is distinguished by its uncompromising production style. The minimalist melodies that are layered to create an ambient soundscape, along with the incidental noise that gives an organic texture to the inorganic electronic sound, showcase the raw appeal of sound that is imperfect."

Avian Hydraulics was originally released by the German label Frei zum Abriss Kollektiv as a limited edition of 50 copies, pressed on a liquid-filled lathe-cut 10-inch. A liquid-filled record is a curious object: colored liquid or oil is sealed between two layers of transparent resin, so that when the record is moved, the fluid drifts and blooms into ever-shifting patterns. The concept first surfaced in 1978, when a prototype was developed for a Disney film — but the sealing technology of the era could not keep the liquid from leaking or evaporating, and the idea was abandoned before it ever reached the market. Since 2015, however, development has advanced toward resins that resist leakage and evaporation, bringing the format to where it stands today — though even now it remains an imperfect thing. The imperfections lie chiefly in the sound. By its very structure, room must be reserved inside the disc to hold the liquid, which means the grooves cannot be cut deeply, driving the playback volume to an extreme faintness — for the liquid itself absorbs the vibration of the stylus. In the case of lathe cutting, the grooves are even shallower because the cutting is performed directly onto a rigid resin—such as polycarbonate—rather than vinyl. The result is a double diminishment: the sound vibrations transmit poorly, and both the sonic pressure and the volume fall away. As an art object, the liquid-filled record is a singular and beautiful thing. But to hear the music as it was truly meant to be heard — at full volume, at full pressure, down to the finest detail — the digital version is the honest answer. Since Frei zum Abriss Kollektiv holds to a policy of no digital distribution, we have chosen to release it here, on Bandcamp. This work began, first of all, with the idea of the liquid-filled record itself. From that single image, the artwork and the titles of the songs were gradually drawn out and refined. Masami Akita

Folded cover sealed with hand numbered sticker. Edition of 50 hand-numbered copies. Recorded & Mixed at Munemihouse March 2026.

A highly anticipated 7-inch analog vinyl release, "Mr. Maxmetal," by DJ/producer Master Kohta—the owner of the retro gaming cafe "cafe la siesta" in Kiyamachi, Kyoto, and a pioneer who has driven the chiptune scene for many years—is now available from KUMARU Records!

2026 repress; clear with red color vinyl. "Standards, the fourth full-length recording from Chicago's Tortoise, boldly announces their return following 1998's TNT. Tortoise spent the bulk of 1998 and a portion of 1999 touring the world. Following tours of the U.S., Europe, South America, Japan, Brazil, and Australia, Tortoise members worked on other projects that occupied them until the spring of 2000 when they began to record Standards. In 1999 members of the band toured the US as the backing band for legendary Brazilian composer/singer Tom Zé's. Musically, Standards is their most concise statement of purpose thus far. The tunes are direct and immediate, yet they maintain the exploratory edge that has always characterized the group's output. The fusion of instrumental sounds (electric, acoustic, and synthesized) is subtle and subversive. Similarly, the group's fluency within the studio environment gives the finished work a quality that alternates between artifice and reality. Whilst TNT was constructed in the studio using segments recorded, improvised or altered electronically, the 'Standards' sessions began after a period of rehearsal and composition. The contrast, simply stated, is that the studio was used extensively as a compositional tool for TNT, whereas with Standards it was used predominantly as tool to realize and enhance the existing new compositions. The studio does not impose itself on the recording to the same degree listeners witnessed on TNT, and the resulting record is in many ways reminiscent of their unadorned self-titled debut. Sounds, notes and rhythms are manipulated but in general, processing is spare. Tortoise's highly lyrical melodies, rich and varied tonal palette and high level of musicianship were recorded in a studio designed by McEntire. The resulting record is the clearest demonstration of the band's many skills and strengths."

Glorious vinylization of this 2022 duo session, originally issued as a cassette, documenting the first time Suzuki and Noyes ever collaborated. Ayami Suzuki has become known to cognoscenti for her brilliantly imagined vocal improvisations, through recordings with like-minded folks such as French vocalist/polymath Delphine Dora and avant hurdy gurdy player, TOMO. Rob Noyes has developed a parallel reputation as a master third-generation acoustic guitarist in the post-Takoma tradition. Originally based in the U.S. he wisely relocated to Tokyo several years ago. Which is where this meeting took place, And while I initially assumed the music had been composed to some degree. Rob assured me that was not true, He says, “I think the recording can seem like something we took a lot of time with and discussed/composed to some degree, but we actually just agreed to meet at a rehearsal studio. It took a little more than an hour to track it all, without ever having played together before or even really discussing the approach we were going to take. I just tuned my guitar to a different tuning for each one and we let it roll.” The results kinda speak for themselves, but I was blown away by the notion they had never collaborated previously. The intimate nature of their blend recalls such long-time collusionists as Tim Buckley & Lee Underwood or Loren Connors & Suzanne Langille. Rob's delicate instrumental arcs create a perfect net for Ayami's vocals, which are usually wordless (although they always feel weighted with emotional content). It's a mesmeric pairing of voices. Which I can only hope is the first of many. Classic Fevers and Chills is a perfect soundtrack for spring, Unconditionally magical. --Byron Coley, 2026

Infant crafts eight immersive dub pieces built from echo-laden rhythms, shimmering ambient textures and spacious production. Drawing on Detroit techno and sound system culture, the album unfolds with patience and depth, favouring mood over momentum, with blissed soundscapes that ripple and refreact like liquid metal. Recommended for fans of the ambient side of echospace [detroit] axis.

Emotional Rescue returns after a much-needed year hiatus, refreshed and ready, as it moves into its 15th year, to further explore the environs of oft-forgotten musical secrets and present them to new heads and minds. To celebrate, the label looks back to one of its favourite collaborations, the music of French ‘Ethno-Industrialists’ Vox Populi! in presenting a truly unique EP of 'In Dub', inspired remixes by 4 fellow Paris based artists of today in Full Circle, Froid Dub, Krikor and Shelter. 'In Dub' takes a selection of songs from the series of albums reissued or compiled on Emotional Rescue and sister label, Platform 23, and gives the Master tapes to this talented ensemble to offer their own, unique dub reworks. Coming about after a special meeting of all the protagonists at a Paris warehouse party, the project explores the on-going advances in technology offered, mixed with pure talent and a respectful homage. Formed by Axel Kyrou and including wife Mitra, as well as long-term music and art partners Pierre Jolivet aka Pacific 231 and Francis Lafont aka FR6 Man, they forged a path from obscure, drum and drum-based cassette releases on to fully realized albums and compilations on their now cult Vox Man Records. Alexis Le Tan and Joakim’s Full Circle project starts, with their electronic dub remake of Soleyman Dub from the ‘Alternatif Réalisme’ compilation (ERC079). With releases on Good Morning Tapes, Offen and their own “Released” label, their plaudits as master diggers and producers of dubby tripped-out inspired electronics – releasing slowed Trance some 10 years before anyone else – is inspired. Tuning in and turning on the original dub into a mantra style slow-breaks (Digi)dub is the perfect experimental flavour. Jube Man is next, a twisted, psychedelic dub out by rising stars Froid Dub. The stand-out from the ‘Magiques Creations’ release (ERC052), an album that explored Vox Populi’s furtive post-industrial period of 1984 to 1988, Jube Man was the perfect selection by the duo of François Marché and Stéphane Bodin. Froid Dub have steadily developed their “cold” Digidub style to acclaim – releasing a steady flow of dub inspired electronics on their own label Delodio, as well as recently appearing on sister label Emotional Response’s 10th year anniversary collection, ‘All Trades’. Their haunting, shuffling and murky acid / piano dub, with the drifting “Space Echoing” of Mitra’s vocals from the live desk mix, creates a ghostly version to effect. Next, master mixer, producer and engineer Krikor serves a steppers remake with his “OverDub” of Zen-Dub. With a career that spans releases on Tigersushi, LIES and Soul Jazz, his sound has developed from Electro, House and Techno, to Acid, Bleep, Dancehall, Dub and touches of Gabba. Taken from Vox Populi!’s master-opus Aither (ERC030), the first of our reissues dating back to 2016, Zen-Dub’s pacey, lo-fi dub experience is transformed and overdubbed into an incessant sound system throb, a true bass quaking “steppa”. To close, Micro Climax is put through Shelter’s increasing avant dub exposition. Appearing on the likes of Growing Bin, Emotional Response and his own Protopost, as well for – and being in-house designer – on the much-missed Séance Centre, Alan Briand aka Shelter productions have developed from Balearic, Edits and House to explore Avant, Raga and live Dub productions. Appearing on the recent ‘Ethniques Pyschedeliques’ compilation on Platform 23 (PLA032), in original form Micro Climax is a sprawling 10-minute ethno-dub of whispered vocals, drone and sub bass. Shelter strips it back, keeping background effects, adding live bass and percussion to create a wonky, slow, shuffling ska-lite excursion to complete a true 'In Dub'.

"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.

Happy Today, the third album from guitarist/bandleader Jeff Parker’s long-running ETA IVtet, was recorded live at Lodge Room in Los Angeles on August 20, 2025. This fresh entry into the IVtet’s catalog captures Parker and the band – including drummer Jay Bellerose, bassist Anna Butterss, and saxophonist Josh Johnson – on record outside of the now-shuttered Highland Park micro-club ETA for the first time.

The performance also captures a distinctly joyful night of togetherness set against the backdrop of dark times. “2025 was a very difficult year for me and my family,” Parker says. “Dealing with being displaced from the Eaton fires for eight months, and the kind of toll that that instability took on my family’s mental health and general outlook, coupled with Donald Trump being back in office and basically making life miserable for everyone… There was a lot of sadness and despair. But feeling the sense of community that we created with our concert, and later hearing the recording, seeing the beautiful footage that had been shot and the photographs of such joy to be back in that space and to be making music again: It was a very happy moment. So I called the record Happy Today. It’s meant to be a statement of joy.”

That joy and camaraderie found in communal space seems to be a major catalyst for the ETA IVtet’s music. The band’s audience is, somehow, an essential part of the formula. Case in point: the show at Lodge Room was actually meant to be the cherry on top of a weekend of studio sessions by the band. Those sessions were intended to be the next album released by the group, its first ever studio record. Upon listening back, though, it was clear to Parker that the Lodge Room performance was the recording that shined brightest and felt most true to the band’s spirit, harkening back to the weekly session the four musicians held at ETA for so many years.

ETA was undoubtedly more than just the namesake of the band. Part laboratory, part low-stakes proving ground, it’s where the language of the IVtet’s sound percolated and coalesced over the course of an almost mythical seven-year-long Monday night residency that yielded two critically-acclaimed records—2022’s Mondays at The Enfield Tennis Academy and 2024’s The Way Out of Easy—and an instantly recognizable group sound.

Happy Today is that sound—the IVtet's signature syntax built around long-form, minimalist improvisation—expanding confidently into a larger space while creating the same hypnotizing, deeply-tuned listening effect on visibly enraptured audiences. The album contains two sidelong pieces recorded as the band performed in the round at Lodge Room, surrounded by an audience of 400 or so deep listeners. (The venue, appropriately enough, sits on the same street and just a few hundred feet away from the storefront that used to be ETA.)

The drastic change in venue size, and this document in general, is representative of an expanding demand to experience this band live that has been surging for years, starting with the release of their debut album Mondays. For the subsequent, final year that ETA was open, there would typically be a line down the block on Monday evenings, with far more people trying to catch the show than the club could hold. Even if you could get inside the building, given the limited capacity, the IVtet was a difficult band to actually see play. Couple that with the fact that before the closure of the club in December 2023, the IVtet had never played outside of Los Angeles. Access to the live experience had been extremely limited, and that has seemed to feed a sense of mystery and allure around the band’s music for the many fans of Mondays and The Way Out of Easy.

On paper, the IVtet’s growing audience is something of a conundrum. After all, minimal longform improvisation is likely the precise antithesis of streaming-centered content culture. Despite that, at the show that produced Happy Today, as with any IVtet show, the audience willingly settles into and accepts the band’s pace as they iron out a story which digs deeply into every facet of an idea before investigating a new one. Here the attention economy feels lightyears away, the crowd instead surrendering to that old and very human penchant for listening. With open ears, the crowd stands ready for a big yarn, a long tale, and from the jump there seems to be a trust between performer and audience that mimics the trust between the musicians as they move from detail to detail.

“The band isn't afraid to explore static spaces,” says Parker. “It seems like the thing is to stay on one idea for a while. Really, for a long time. To kind of exhaust it. And then one person shifts and then the thing moves together.”

“Everybody is constantly dropping crumbs and you can take them or you can leave them,” agrees Bellerose. “There are these little hints, these little moments, and everybody's aware of them.”

“When it is time to change, it can change very quickly,” says Butterss. “If someone suggests a new idea, it can flip in an instant. Everyone's constantly ready to go with it if the moment calls for it.”

“Like Swimwear,” the side-length opener of Happy Today, contains a quintessential example of this distinct IVtet move. The track gets off the ground slowly but deliberately, ramping up tension over the course of its first ten minutes without a moment of harmonic dissonance. The band, rather, steadily pulls at the corners of the rhythm. Here each member steps forward and backward in the sonic space to build a gleefully disorienting group cadence, where the repetitions of the individual overlap in such a trancelike way that even soloistic breaks from Parker’s electric guitar or Johnson’s effected alto sax never manage to snap the tension wire. Bellerose works deep into the rhythmic fascia, employing all manner of auxiliary percussion—strewn across his kit, tucked into his shoe, or wrapped around his legs—all without a hint of novelty. Every micro-choice comes from a place of both curiosity and confidence.

And then the shift: just as the thing is about to come unglued Bellerose opts into a smooth, low-register downbeat groove that Butterss has been auditioning for the previous minute or so. Parker swiftly kicks into an organ-like drone while Johnson and Butterss stay the course. It’s a series of decisions that could go any number of ways depending on the night, like running water pushing into fresh geography, moving from tributary to mainstream, past the levee and into the floodplain. There is no set path; if it went a different direction it would still be the cumulative result of the same water flowing.

That is to say that there are no hard and fast rules to what the IVtet does. Defining the music, in fact, is something that the band takes special care not to do. Living in that mystery, it seems, helps to keep the path open, cleared to push into new and satisfying territory.

“For me, the thing to protect is just where it started from, which was freedom and openness,” says Bellerose. “In the early days of the band Jeff was recognizing how we were all communicating within the structure of playing standards. He's one of the greatest producers I've ever worked with because he has this vision. And a big part of producing is casting—putting the right people in the room. So these shifts, they're completely natural within these improvised pieces that we do because the foundation was there and Jeff knew it. He had already noticed the communication within the band, but wanted to really push it further.”

The key to Parker’s push lies in the generosity to step back, to allow each member an equal voice, and to de-center himself. What we hear on Happy Today is an egalitarian group sound by design, curious and intuitive.

“Everybody's listening in a way where it's not always like ‘I'm going to go with you’,” says Johnson. “But it's always ‘I hear you’. And sometimes it's ‘I hear you and I'm going to stay here and allow the tension of these two things to exist for a while before maybe joining you.’ But the thing that's cool is that everybody’s hearing it. Because of the time that we've spent together there’s a maturity to the listening—a very special version of deep listening.”

“The number of times that we've talked about the music is so few compared to the years and years of playing,” Johnson continues. “I think that's one of the really beautiful things about the band—how organically the way that we play together has come about and evolved over time. Definitely on brand for the music that the band makes too. Slowly evolving, long form development.”

“I learned how to improvise in this band,” reveals Butterss, astonishingly. “I didn't really play improvised music before. So my whole approach to improvisation has been shaped by playing with Jeff, Jay, and Josh. It is a band and it has its own language. I think you could drop the needle on any of the recordings and people would be able to say ‘that's the quartet.’ It's very distinctive and it's developed very organically. We have never talked about it, I don't think.”

“That's our band,” says Parker of “Like Swimwear,” almost with an outsider’s sense of fascination at the recording. He seems to feel the same enchantment and surprise that the audience does while listening, despite being a primary part of the process. “That's it. I mean, that's what the ETA Quartet does.”

It’s a blessing for this band to be so expertly documented in its naturally public, live context. The two sidelong improvisations from Lodge Room that make up Happy Today, as with the recordings that made up the IVtet’s first two albums, are beautifully rendered by engineer Bryce Gonzales—recorded and mixed live, direct to a Nagra tape machine utilizing a compact outboard rig that he built himself, specifically to record this band. Much like the thumbprint originality coming from the players themselves, Gonzales’ capture of the music is its own signature, his mixes a form of sound improvisation themselves.

A major addition to this particular presentation is the full album length film by Charlie Weinmann, documenting the band's performance of Happy Today at Lodge Room, which will be released in tandem with the album. A shadow-laden, almost noirlike capture of the band in its full sprawling glory, Weinmann’s camera makes the joyful reality of seeing the IVtet at work widely accessible for the first time.

With Happy Today the reach of Parker’s IVtet extends further than ever before, but the essential formula, if there is one, remains the same. The anchor seems to be in variations on an almost alchemical communication—a feeling of connection between band members, sure, but also between the band and the audience. It’s an ongoing trust exercise, born organically in the corner of a small room in Los Angeles and flowing outward at exactly its own natural pace. It’s social music with a clear ability to move those willing to listen. Happy Today is an invitation to become part of the exchange and experience the joy of deep listening.

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.

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."

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.