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Following her Grammy-nominated debut, "surrealist blues poet" aja money returns with a soulful, jazzy scratch pad of ideas, concepts and philosophies that features Vic Mensa, Mick Jenkins, Brandee Younger, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and others. On the surface, monet's sophomore album might seem like a set of poems set to low-slung, post-Low End Theory beats and kosmische/spiritual jazz synths, but she's not that straightforward. Her politics are the beating heart of her craft and that heart beats with revolutionary energy: already this year, her second poetry book 'Florida Water' has been nominated for an NAACP award. Crucially, she reclaims the idea of surrealism for Black voices; following artists like Suzanne Césaire, she uses surrealism to set her politics free, not as a series of Jungian tropes and aesthetics. She's plugged in throughout and, most importantly, her delivery makes the music strangely gripping. Poetry's not the easiest sell, but monet's tongue-twisting tales of American brutalism have never felt more necessary. "Octavia Butler newscasting premonitions from a graveside in Altadena," she quips on 'hollyweird', just moments before a wild trumpet circles the air above. And on the brilliant 'for the Congo', she cuts even closer to the bone. "How many children," she asks. "How many children died for the sake of my comfort today?" African percussion penetrates her words and it's hard not to feel utterly crushed.
On revelations of divine love, jason calhoun’s fifth release for Dear Life Records, Calhoun has assembled an especially potent album of work that whirrs, hums, and glows. Unlike his recent output centered around extended, hypnotic compositions, the fourteen tracks here immediately request your attention and curiosity. Their concision only underscores one of his greatest strengths: the ability to capture an evaporating, fleeting moment, and hold it close. The title is a nod to British Anchoress Julian of Norwich, whose collected writing of the same title is the earliest of any woman written in English. Here it serves as a unifying theme for Calhoun's particular palette of restless textures and tentative melodies. This is personal music, to be sure, but it also feels tactile, almost taffy-like in its presentation—and with such a potent combination, it is hard to resist a smile while listening. Like when the insistent pulse grounding 'last one' suddenly changes color as yawning tones reveal themselves, or how 'eye dilation' tiptoes into the room with each note sounding like a carefully chosen step. Though never precious or fussy, the album remains resolutely intimate. Calhoun puts it plainly: “Julian of Norwich says “‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well’. These days, I’ve been having my doubts that this is true. As no solution to the issue at hand, I look for the revelations of divine love in my life, and I find them--in my partner asleep on the floor in our studio, my survival of a social interaction with a stranger, being bad at chess. Don't ask me what they mean-I'm still figuring that out myself. Maybe we can figure it out together.” It is from this place of doubt, searching, and openness that the album finds its footing. When asked about the origin of the album's cover art, Calhoun explained, "I see this spot all the time on my commute home from work". A true statement of how the mundane and meaningful are interwoven, from someone who celebrates that union better than most. Unlike Julian of Norwich, Calhoun is no hermetic mystic himself-but in his daily life he works at an oncology center, doing routine but necessary work to provide treatment for those in need of it. While he might resist any analogizing, it is sincerely easy to say that Calhoun's body of work, which is only fortified by revelations of divine love, also offers care and company.
Perhaps the most interesting PAN in a minute; ‘Lila’ is the label debut from Paris-based Algerian Mohamed Bourouissa, best known as a visual artist but now offering a glimpse into his musical practice for the first time, blending highly unusual ambient pulses with autotuned, low-lit vocals, recorded on the fly using a keyboard, mixer, microphone and effects. It runs like some lost 1980’s private press, tipped FFO early Yves Tumor, Yungwebster, Space Afrika, AYYA, Future, Kareem Lotfy. Bourouissa’s first solo album finds the 48 year old artist capturing the permeable membrane between Paris' various communities through a dream diary of hazed ambient reflections, cloud rap inversions and bass-heavy club malfunctions. It follows his work over decades incorporating music as a phantom thread of his practice in photography, sculpture, and video, and perfectly conveys a sense of longing and melancholy central to Arabic classical and pop songs mediated via an electronic hypermodernism . The album is an intimate, sometimes unsettling experience, aptly described as “hypnagogic” by PAN, as heard in its tendency to dreamlike slowness and the layered haze of FX and xenharmonic chords that shroud and wreath his melismatic woes. The dozen tracks play out through autotuned vocal plumes familiar from work by Ayshay, Rainy Miller or Future, crossed with the type of deep blooz oozing from that superb Taymour x Bareetlblad turn on the diy label earlier this year. Each track taps a different pole into the album's landscape, one beatless, and one filled with machinegun toms and explosive snares. The beatless tracks are peculiarly stirring and the heavier, noisier moments somehow vanish into the same aether. Bourouissa peppers the album with wild twists and turns, hitting a dark alley on the anxiety-inducing 'NMB' and descending corrugated steps to a members-only basement on 'MN'. The relief comes with the title track, a collaboration with Fanigliulo (aka Mushy) that's a tender, hopeful moment - a clouded love song that injects some hope into the darkness.
Virga III is the third installment in Eluvium’s inspired experimental series – and the first in nearly five years. In unmistakable contrast to the dense, ominous sprawl of Virga II, the works that make up Virga III offer an almost divine reprieve. The nervous tension, loss of control, and patient recontextualization that inspires each volume of the Virga series manifests in unique ways. As composer and Eluvium architect, Matthew Robert Cooper describes, “While Virga I was brought to me by a temporarily evacuation from my house to my garage during a winter snowstorm – and Virga II by a phantasmal dream sequence during the height of a global pandemic – Virga III takes its inspiration from the worlds found in minor green spaces, culverts, and other miniature biological ecosystems operating within our daily deluge of cruel rhetoric, unspeakable violence, unending disruption and devastating disparity. A reflection on the micro and macro universes that surround us.” The songs on Virga III are composed and performed by Cooper, as always, but in the Virga universe, he essentially feels a unique collaboration within himself. As Cooper explains, “The Virga series affords me an opportunity to return to an older version of myself, but with a new level of understanding. Practicing more patience interacting with these built musical systems and recordings, I hesitantly duet with my past self in a new performance or manipulative layer, only after digesting the first for as long as possible, to a point of it conjuring new and uncharted feelings, in hopes of curating a sense of therapeutic self-awareness and discovery. A mixture of the exploratory mindset against a painterly emotional resonance, gradually unfurling itself unto itself.” The Virga III vinyl format is pressed onto crystal clear colored vinyl and housed in a full-color heavyweight old-style tip-on jacket. It is limited to a one-time pressing of 1,000 copies worldwide.
This album was compiled from original sources that have been lovingly restored and mastered. It represents a mere fraction of Connie's recorded repertoire.
アルバムについて Kassel Jaeger (aka François J. Bonnet) returns to Shelter Press after Swamps / Things, Shifted in Dreams, and the recent reissue of the classic Zauberberg, co-composed with Akira Rabelais and Stephan Mathieu. With this major new album, entitled Sub Re, Bonnet continues his long exploration of the musical possibilities of sound, extending the concrete approach developed at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales, the historic and essential Parisian studio that Bonnet has been directing since 2018. Sub re, in Latin, can mean “under the thing, under the substance, under the matter.” It's precisely this direct approach to music, drawing on the extraction of raw sound material, that forms the basis of this album. Under the matter thus signals the concrete aspect of music, but not the concrete that is transfigured, becoming vapor and form, the substrate of an idea. Rather, it signals the concrete beneath the concrete, in the immanence of sounds, in their becoming, as a driving force, like a tide, like a vault of imperious and powerful matter. To achieve this, Bonnet draws on a multitude of sound sources (acoustic, electronic, natural or artificial, created on purpose or found by chance) and a multitude of contexts and occasions to give them form. The movement, a shell, a bell, a spell, for example, was heard for the first time during a concert organized in Venice in connection with Latifa Echakhch's contribution to the Swiss Pavilion at the 2022 Art Biennale, while the last movement on the record, signalmirror, concluded a piece presented at the first Sound Biennale in Sion (Switzerland) in 2023. These elements, formed and detached from their original context of appearance, of the places and people who made them possible and listened to them, contribute to a complex layering of climates and sonic worlds and help create a contrasting album, where density and tenuity coexist in a succession of moving waves, sometimes laden with memories, sometimes filled with regrets, always set in motion by their own morphology. Sub Re also refers to a chapter in Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, a key passage in which the main character, faced with a colossal task, finds himself alone in the middle of the sea, beneath a gigantic shipwreck caught in the jaws of an isolated reef, surrounded by water, currents, and winds, alone to face the impossible. It is indeed beneath the surface that actions arise, decisions are made, and intuition guides us.
To be an attentive listener to the world as it stands is to be saturated with language. Speech resounds through nearly every space that features human beings, whether unwanted or desired, mundane or profound. Words sit on the page and in the ear, proliferating endlessly. This superabundance has long been a point of fascination for composer and musician Ben Vida, but over the past several years it has led to a new method of music making that simultaneously exalts and interrogates the primacy of language in our sonic and cultural environments. Gently, playfully, Vida breaks down language’s hierarchy of meaning and sound until they exist in egalitarian harmony. Oblivion Seekers is Vida’s newest album in this mode of composition, following 2023’s collaboration with new music ensemble Yarn/Wire The Beat My Head Hit. Like its predecessor, the music’s focus is on coordinated duets of spoken word in a neutral tone, the variable cadences of the words in motion creating complex internal rhythmic structures. He is joined by the voices of Nina Dante, Christina Vantzou, John Also Bennett, and Félicia Atkinson, creating a singular tone that is neither theirs nor his, fluid in its gender presentation, accent, and diction. The instrumental compositions that form the album’s understory have the casual flow of dialogue, conversational but subdued, rarely the agent of change. Here, Vida likewise called upon an accomplished community of players to accompany him: Dante on harp, Bennett on bass flute, Matt Bauder and Will Epstein on saxophones, Henry Fraser on bass, Cleek Schrey on violin, and Booker Stardrum on percussion. These elements form lattice-like structures that the text darts in and around, often adhering to downbeats but otherwise moving freely within each lilting phrase. A tranquil, focused temperament persists, enhanced by the reserved cadence of the voices that makes it feel as if the music is one long mantra that never quite reaches back to its genesis point. The effect is entrancing, equally soporific and gripping, implying repetition without ever moving exactly the same way twice. The instrumentation on each of the album’s four pieces varies; “Be Yr Own Abyss” is defined by the wave-like counterpoint of saxophones, while the ambiguous chime of vibraphone floats over “Oblivion Seekers” and Fraser’s swelling bass provides the album’s sole dramatic entrance. The music shifts in the ear as the text constantly redefines and recontextualizes the composition’s form and movement, even as it remains consistent in its otherworldly glow. The text is often drawn from snippets of language that Vida encountered throughout his life as he was composing: overheard mumblings from the supermarket line, impactful phrases from a novel he was reading, impressions of the music that wouldn’t leave his turntable. Small details, otherwise insignificant, accumulate not to form a narrative, but an impression of the complex meaning-making process that happens as one lives day to day. Characters and scenes flicker in and out of the frame, and phrases that beg to be unpacked are allowed to glide by. In “Be Yr Own Abyss” something like a thesis appears without fanfare: “Her tongue was out to kill her / all hail this mental space / constructing ambiguity / and the endless stream.” On two separate occasions the listener is told that waves are heading our way. There are many predecessors to these types of novel confluences of music and speech. Vida’s love of Robert Ashley is well documented, but perhaps even more significant are Mark E. Smith and The Fall, Neil Tennant and the Pet Shop Boys’ spoken verses, the entire history of hip hop, Meredith Monk. The way the words are delivered matters just as much as the words themselves, revealing an intentionality and directness that Vida highlights and subverts with the text’s abstract construction patterns. On Oblivion Seekers, the omnidirectional din is the marble Vida chips away at to illuminate the way we process the vast strangeness of the world. Its triumph is that we lose none of the beautiful mystery of how these signs bridge our external and internal worlds.
アルバムについて Following the jazzy library vibes of 2023’s collaborative Dolphin LP with Greg Foat and Moses Boyd, the venetian maestro Gigi Masin returns to the ambience for which he is renowned, with Movement - his first solo full-length since 2020’s Calypso, and his Sacred Bones Records debut. Fuelled by creative reinvention and rhythmic motion, he moves seamlessly between melancholy electronic notes, technoid robotics, groovy liminal cloudscapes, and fathoms-deep ambient aquatics. Since early beginnings in obscurity, his 1986 debut album Wind slowly built an organic following on late night radio, later bolstered when “Clouds” was sampled by artists like Björk, Post Malone, and more. He now counts Oneohtrix Point Never, Devendra Banhart, Caroline Polachek, and the late Kenny Wheeler as fans. The new album Movement reflects on Masin’s place within the pantheon of ambient masters, his ongoing artistic ambitions, and his aspirations for a scene which he’s seen grow exponentially from humble beginnings. The LP is also an ode to literal movement, both in nature, and in human physical expressions to sound. Masin strived to make ambient music for movement, not in the standard dance music sense, but “dynamic music, with a beating heart full of love.” Reconfiguring ambient’s association with solitary listening and cold academia, Gigi went outwards, channeling something somatic that connects with the body, not just the mind. “Bed on Mars” sets the titular tone for Masin’s renewed curiosity, with cosmic atmospherics evoking the sensation of waking up on a new planet unafraid, whilst the poignant synthesized trumpet and suspended liminal limbo of “Lost” feels like floating adrift in an unknown sea. Delving further into off-centre beats is the celestial techno funk of “Deception Dance,” which sounds like Sun Electric jamming with Carl Craig and Kraftwerk. The bright beaming light of “Golden” radiates warmth, sounding like the bossa nova brother of Göttsching’s Balearic classic E2 E4. Despite the passing of his wife after a long illness, and losing his musical archive in a flood, Gigi remains pure-at-heart and positive, pouring his soul into the pursuit of beauty. The latest in a slow starting but steadily building career, Movement sees Masin continue to secure his seat at the table of true ambient greats.
Graze the Bell is a collection of soul-stirring, mesmerizing solo piano pieces, and the most distilled offering of David Moore’s artistry to date. Known for his atmospheric compositions with Bing & Ruth, as well as his collaborations with guitarist Steve Gunn and Cowboy Sadness, this marks Moore’s first widely shared solo piano album. Using the piano to meditatively inquire into the human condition, Graze the Bell is a sanctuary of sound, and an invitation for listeners to meet him in the present moment.
Key importers/translators of Japanese Kankyō Ongaku to the Western world, Visible Cloaks present a fine new bouquet of digital flowers pruned in-the-mix with help from Lifted’s Joe Williams and arranged with input by Félicia Atkinson, Yoshio Ojima, and Satsuki Shibano. Ryan Carlile & Spencer Doran’s Visible Cloaks have been instrumental in bridging the rarified world of ’80s Japanese environmental ambient and its modern offshoots since their self-titled debut of 2015. Their ‘Fairlights, Mallets and Bamboo’ mixtape and original productions inspired by that particular time and space - circa the emergence and application of game-changing musical technology - have been indispensable for discerning diggers and ears. Their first album since 2019, ‘Paradessence’ now marks the duo’s return to a sound they helped bring to wider interest, displaying cross-border/generational binds between experimental scenes in Japan, US, and EU across an intricately crafted and romantic spirited album defined by its technical sorcery and sense of adventure. Benefitting from the energy of their collaborators and time out to sharpen and reassess their sound, ‘Paradessence’ feels like the most fully realised iteration of Visible Cloaks’ illusive world building. 14 succinct pieces open out a fantasy playground where prior spars Yoshio Ojima & Satsuki Shibano chime into the pitch bent, shatterproof contours of ’Shapes’ and again with Félicia Atkinson’s french vox in ‘Thinking’, before Satie-esque piano phrases are refracted into hyaline hyperprisms glistening with Joe Williams touch on ‘Zinna’. The shearing shape of ‘Balloon’ impresses in its hyperreal tactility, and the synthetic wind-swept strings of ‘Swirl’ brings us teasingly close to oneiric dimensions also touched on in ‘Telescoping’, suffused with ultrasonic insect sounds that lend a frisson of waking dream detail for the susceptible.
On Reflections Vol. 3: Water Poems, Félicia Atkinson and Christina Vantzou channel their friendship and atmospheric artistry into ceremonial focus. Spoken-word environments and orchestral imagination flow like tributaries into a unified stream, resulting in a collection of dreamlike songs and soundscapes anchored in sea, sky and stone. Through electro-acoustic instrumentation, voice, and environmental sound, Water Poems invites listeners into a subconscious space somewhere between everyday intimacy and the oceanic enigma from which all life unfolds.
The latest mixtape LP, “Even The Devil Smiles,” comes from rapper and producer IDK (Jason Mills).
Originally released in 1998, South Central Thynk Taynk by Abstract Tribe Unique (Abstract Rude, Fat Jack, Zulu Butterfly Priest, Irie Lion King, and DJ Drez.) captured a pivotal moment in Los Angeles’ underground scene—when young Black artists were reimagining hip-hop from the ground up. Blending jazz-inflected beats, spiritual insight, and fiercely independent production, the album became an anthem for self-reliance and creative rebellion. Now reissued by Rhymesayers Entertainment as a deluxe 2xLP set with a lyric booklet and bonus track, this long-unavailable classic returns for a new generation.At the cultural core of the record is Project Blowed, a legendary L.A. crew founded by Abstract Rude and Aceyalone, which birthed a lineage of rap innovators whose fingerprints are still felt in global hip-hop. While mainstream rap embraced the West Coast’s G-funk boom, the Blowed crew forged an alternate path—steeped in jazz, radical politics, and Afrocentric futurism. Thynk Taynk stands as a richly layered time capsule from this revolutionary moment, pairing Ab Rude’s deep lyricism with Fat Jack’s genre-melding approach to production, creating a poetic reflection on family, struggle, and artistic purpose.This new edition includes the “L.A. Styles Back (Project Blowed Remix)” featuring a cross-generational lineup of heavyweights— Aceyalone, Myka 9, Medusa, Pigeon John, Blu, 2Mex, Ellay Khule, Riddlore, and NGAFSH—underscoring how L.A.’s underground has remained a creative epicenter for decades. South Central Thynk Taynk is more than a cult artifact; it’s a living document of transformation, community, and artistic power.
"I And I Survive" is a 1982 EP by Bad Brains, released on the heels of their iconic self-titled debut album. Like the band's subsequent album "Rock for Light", the recordings were produced by Ric Ocasek. The release was previously out of print for nearly four decades. This reissue marks the third release in the remaster campaign, re-launching the Bad Brains Records label imprint. In coordination with the band, Org Music has overseen the restoration and remastering of the iconic Bad Brains’ recordings. The audio was mastered by Dave Gardner at Infrasonic Mastering and pressed at Furnace Record Pressing.
Female fronted screamo from the cursed Elgin, Illinois scene. Hot on the heels of our Sequoia box set's repress of their $400 2x7", Numero gives The Lazarus Plot's complete recordings the hand-screened treatment. Compiled on Something Good Has Got To Come From All These Goodbyes are the aforementioned 2x7", split with Long Live Nothing, The End 7", a stray V/A, and two previously unissued songs, all housed in a D.I.Y. chipboard jacket and limited to 500 copies. Singer Laura Laurent's accompanying 24-page booklet includes lyrics and photos from these pioneering second waver's two year run. Not copping this will definitely remind you of your favorite word (regret).
Eccentric Sweet Soul explores a refined corner of soul music that came into focus in the late 1960s and 1970s, running parallel to — but distinct from — the harder, funk-driven sounds dominating the era. Curated and released by Numero Group, the collection captures a style built on warmth, melody and poise, favouring elegance over urgency.
Often described as sweet soul, this sound softened the genre’s edges without losing emotional depth. Arrangements lean towards symphonic ease and lowrider calm, while vocals are intimate and unforced, designed to linger rather than overwhelm. It’s music shaped for slow moments and repeat listens, its appeal undimmed decades on.
The compilation brings together defining voices of the style, including Majestic Arrows, Timothy Wilson, The Exceptional Three, Ujima, Family Connection, Third Generation, Sweet Breeze and The 5 Stepping Stars. Together, they map a lineage that feeds directly into what’s now understood as modern soul: tender, melodic and quietly assured.
FEAR - the joint album from Jared Mattson of The Mattson 2 and Ruban Nielson of Unknown Mortal Orchestra - was recorded in June of 2024. All recording and mixing took place in Palm Springs. Mastered by Matt Colton at Metropolis Studios in London. --- I woke up around noon, disoriented, half-dreaming. Music was playing — unfamiliar, fully formed, the kind of sound you assume belongs to someone else’s life. For a moment I thought I was still asleep, hearing music I wished I’d made. Then it hit me: Ruban Nielson was already awake, in the studio, listening to what we’d made. We both knew it. There was something inevitable about the music — like it hadn’t been created so much as uncovered. We listened on repeat, laughing, shaking our heads. One track brought up a shared image: an evergreen forest by a lake at sunset. Ruban suddenly looked up, eyes wide, like he’d just been handed a message. “I’ve got the title,” he said. American Eagle. The name landed the same way the music had — clean, obvious, impossible to argue with. The American Dream: hot dogs, Cokes, sunset drives. We both lost it, tears in our eyes from laughing hard for minutes straight. We swam in his pool. The conversation never stopped. The flow stayed constant, nourishing, effortless. Then Ruban said it again — the line that had already become a principle: “Let’s make more that sound exactly like this.” So we did. Two days later, 'FEAR' was finished. - Jared Mattson
Every artist has to discover their voice. Gia Margaret didn’t find herself until she lost hers. With a vocal injury that kept her from singing for years, she developed other musical languages, mastering the grammar of an intricate, homey form of ambient music pioneered by Ernest Hood and perfected by The Books. Now, her physical voice healed and her artistic voice honed, she comes full circle with Singing, her first vocal album since 2018’s There’s Always Glimmer. Led by soft piano lines that fall like breath on glass, the music on Singing evidences the same jeweler’s sensitivity to detail that she developed in her silence.
“There was a time when I really didn’t know if I would sing again. So once I healed, there was a lot of internal pressure to come back strong,” Margaret says. “I didn’t know who I was anymore. So it felt like beginning again, and reconnecting with these very old, old parts of myself.” This feeling of intermixed alienation and rediscovery is palpable across the album. In opener “Everyone Around Me Dancing,” she watches a party from the wings, aware of how her body keeps her from communal joy while also providing new modes of self-knowledge. Shut out from the scene, she is “closer to the ground, the planet.” In “Alive Inside,” she’s so far away from the source that she’s praying to whoever might hear (“a god, a friend that’s gone, a spirit”). As her voice rises, it seems to be trapped in a web of distortion; it’s as if in her pursuit, she’s pushing at the very boundaries of what can be said.
The process of making Singing was one of learning how to trust each of those feelings. The album was partially recorded in London with Frou Frou’s Guy Sigsworth, who helped Margaret unify the spree of ideas she had for “Good Friend,” an album highlight that includes Gregorian chant by ILĀ and turntable scratches, among many other things. David Bazan and Amy Millan also make appearances, as do Kurt Vile and Sean Carey, while Margaret’s longtime collaborator Doug Saltzman plays on and co-produces much of the record. Deb Talan, previously of The Weepies, lends her voice, piano, and guitar to the album's closing—and definitive—statement, "E-Motion."
Gia Margaret is always singing. Every note of this album sings a warm requiem to her past selves; every layer sings her future self into being. Across the album, she applies the lessons of speechlessness—the quasirational ways we communicate without communicating, the way formless sound can cut to the heart of things like a scalpel—to her own artistic voice.
Market East finally shares their most important statement to the world in the form of their debut LP, French Street. The group, composed of Kurt Cain on vocals, Vincent John on vocals, bass, guitar and keys, and Maxwell Perla on vocals, drums and percussion, deliver their signature celestial three part harmonies over arrangements that have never sounded so rich and compelling.
French Street is extremely soulful and the vocals are lush, like if the Zombies recorded at Muscle Shoals. The lyrics are poetic and nostalgic, as the group wrote songs about their bygone “golden” years. Back then, the boys didn’t have much besides each other and their shared love of music. Vocalist Kurt Cain lived in a small rowhome in North Philadelphia on a nearly deserted alley named French Street. It was here that Cain, John, and Perla came together every week to escape reality and get high off sharing music. They developed a deep appreciation for all things 60s and 70s, from Simon & Garfunkel to the Moments, and everything in between.
All these years later, and Market East has created a classic record of their own. From the baroque pop of the title track and the roaring soul of “Roses,” to the Latin flavors of “Echoes of My Heart” and the orchestral flares of “Everyday, Springtime,” Market East shows their impressive range. Recorded to analog tape in Philadelphia, the record was produced by the band and Eraserhood Sound. Grab your copy of this timeless classic today.
Khruangbin did not know if they were actually making an album. All they knew in the first frigid days of 2025, as they shivered in the Central Texas barn where they’ve recorded almost all of their music, was that the 10th anniversary of their debut, The Universe Smiles Upon You, was steadily approaching. Months earlier, they’d bandied about ways to mark the occasion, debating orchestral arrangements or compendiums of bonus materials and alternate takes. Thing was, back before Khruangbin helped establish a new modern idiom of semi-instrumental and gently psychedelic American music, there had been no bonus material, no unused songs. And how interesting would alternate takes or symphonic extravagance really be for a band whose aesthetic—essential vibes, infinite grooves, riffs that rippled across the horizon—seemed so direct and pure, anyway? What if, they had instead wondered, they went back to the barn where it all began and recut the record that had started it all, on the actual 10th anniversary of those sessions? They decided, at least, to try.
It did not take long for Laura Lee, Mark Speer, and DJ Johnson to know that the idea was indeed a good one, that in holding up a mirror shaped by the past 10 years to their formative set of songs they could feel and hear how they had changed as people and players. The result is The Universe Smiles Upon You ii, 10 entirely new renditions of the songs from Khruangbin’s oldest album, played and sequenced in a way that works for them now without being strictly allegiant to who they were then. Watchful eyes, for instance, will notice that “Bin Bin ii”, a bonus track back in 2015, has moved toward this album’s center. More importantly, attentive ears will hear how liberated Khruangbin sound from any expectations rendered by their own success, how this is once again the sound of three longtime friends deciding how this material might move in real time.
The barn is an essential piece of Khruangbin lore. In 2009, many years before Khruangbin’s early singles started to shape their course or even before they were really a band, they began to head to the barn, bought by Speer’s parents in the ’80s on a modest cattle farm midway between Houston and Austin. They’d been looking for a place to rehearse in Houston when Speer’s parents volunteered the spot and the small house next door—three bedrooms downstairs, dorm-style bunks above, a century-old stove in a small kitchen. The process was so consummately D.I.Y. that, when they convened there in January 2015 to make what would become The Universe Smiles Upon You, Speer and Lee rushed to remove a nest of bees by playing bass and smashing cymbals loudly before Johnson (famously not into bees, mind you) arrived. They made the record for $1,500.
This time around, Khruangbin decided to try a few functional updates. They finally ripped out the plywood dancefloor that had been installed for a wedding nearly two decades earlier but had since become something of a sanctuary for critters that would inevitably destroy any gear left behind. They rented a new floor, then bought silent new space heaters and boxes of hand warmers that they’d stuff into gloves during sessions. The first day was Central Texas paradise—T-shirts in January, the sun shining as they set up their instruments, ran cables, and even recorded the seven-minute version of “Two Fish and an Elephant” that appears here, the rhythm that Lee and Johnson built offering a welcoming group hug for Speer’s flickering lead. But then the cold set in, a cold so gripping that they stuffed bits of construction flotsam into every crack and crevice they could find inside the barn. They moved closer and closer as the four days progressed, as if trying to absorb one another’s radiant heat.
Perhaps, then, that’s why The Universe Smiles Upon You ii feels so warm, as if they were tending a fire simply by playing together. Early into “August Twelve ii,” Johnson watched an eastern meadowlark sing just outside the barn, its song picked up by the microphones. It wasn’t their favorite performance, but they knew it captured the magic of the time and place, the yellow beauty’s melody calling these six gorgeous minutes to order. They are likewise jubilant during this very extended take on “People Everywhere (Still Alive),” applying the lessons about pace, momentum, and dynamics they’ve learned during a decade on the road to start and sustain this dance party. It is an immaculate map of the moment.
Funnily enough, while on tour with this electric trio during the last several years, Speer became fascinated with early European instruments that could sound full without being loud—the viol de gamba, for instance, or the clavichord. He imported that enthusiasm into these sessions, not only often playing acoustic guitar alongside Lee’s hollow-body Höfner bass and Johnson’s brushed drums but also covering instruments in contact mics, so that they sounded close and real. You can hear that pursuit clearly on “White Gloves ii,” a song that has become such a Khruangbin staple they initially struggled with how to remake it here. When Johnson suggested it become “country disco,” though, the track suddenly unlocked. A rural-funk canter buttresses the bittersweet vocals and twilit guitars; the recording makes it feel as if you’re sitting in the center of the barn, head pressed between the bass amp and bass drum as Khruangbin drift away.
In many ways, The Universe Smiles Upon You ii represents the close of Khruangbin’s first chapter, the complete culmination of the music they made when they arrived at the barn in January 2015. During the last decade, they have reached an apotheosis of sorts, their love of Thai pop and heavy dub and American soul and Ethiopian haze perfectly crystallized in a string of splendid records and live shows that have hypnotized massive theaters and festival crowds alike. They’ve repeatedly sold out the United States’ most famous venues, from Red Rocks and Forest Hills to the Hollywood Bowl and Radio City, and they’ve crowned festivals from Glastonbury to Bonnaroo. Paul McCartney plucked them to reimagine one of his songs, while they’ve collaborated with Mali legend and band inspiration Vieux Farka Touré to honor his late father on 2022’s Ali. After more than a decade of relentless touring and recording, their expertly polyglot 2024 album, A LA SALA, helped earn a Grammy nomination for Best New Artist. Not bad for a band that recorded its debut in a barn of bees and mice for a grand or so.
So, then, what is next? The Universe Smiles Upon You ii provides a point of pause for Khruangbin, a chance to step back from a sound they now know so well and figure out where it may go from here. They talk about woodshedding, about spending a few hours every day with their instruments to see what new shapes they can make. Khruangbin’s splendid next run, then, begins where the first one did, too—in the barn, finding their way into the world through the songs of The Universe Smiles Upon You, second time even more absorbing than the first.
Greg Mendez has always been an economical songwriter – he wields restraint and simplicity as tools, the core of his songs sharpened into simple, cutting truths. On Beauty Land, his new album and debut LP for Dead Oceans, we’re guided by a wry but forgiving narrator, an underdog who has learned to balance cynicism and faith. These songs are self-effacing without self-pity, carefully constructed altars of imperfection channeled through pop melodies, shimmering but urgent guitars, and a voice that reaches for choir boy innocence. The bulk of Beauty Land was recorded directly to tape, almost entirely alone in Mendez’s makeshift home studio in Philadelphia – a small room with no natural light. It’s his first full length since his unexpected self-titled breakthrough in 2023, which was a slow burn success following 15 years of writing and recording music in relative obscurity between Philly and New York. Beauty Land picks up where we left off three years ago – plumbing the depths of grief, love, and addiction – but its intense, quiet clarity shows Mendez at his songwriting best. Parts of Beauty Land feel like a lucid dream, dented characters carve their way through a world that’s cartoonish and warped – the broken-clock march of “I Wanna Feel Pretty,” the chiming toy piano on “Gentle Love.” “Mary / Dreaming” begins as a sparse, finger-picked lament before cutting abruptly to a deflated, Beach-Boys-but-make-it-fucked-up resolution that brings both melancholy and joy; a sense that all things can be true at once. None of the 14 tracks here break three minutes, but they tell stories that span lifetimes. Death floats through the record, whether it appears as a memory or a threat. Everything feels precarious. There’s a fragility to how these songs are built: the way the funeral organ hits alongside the morphine on “Looking Out Your Window,” the devastating simplicity of “Frog,” with its slowed-down keyboard and bare refrain: “Please forgive me for my faults.” Beauty Land feels, at times, impossibly lonely. Which makes it really count when it doesn’t – like when Mendez sings in harmony with his wife and bandmate, Veronica near the end of “So Mean” and it feels like a cherished reunion, a fleeting moment of redemption, a temporary parting of the seas.
Colemine is proud to present the newest 45 from Aaron Frazer's 'Into The Blue' LP. This one is a special one. Two cuts featuring the rhythm section of the legendary Cold Diamond & Mink, the backbone of the Finnish soul label Timmion. The A-side is a new cut, "It's A Shame". And it might be a shame this one didn't make the LP, cause it's a banger. Expertly chopped and arranged by Aaron and producer Alex Goose, the cut features tight drums, Aaron's trademark silky falsetto, and beautiful string arrangements. You'll be humming the hook for days to come. The B-side is the album closer on 'Into The Blue' and for good reason. Really feels like a sweet and soulful send off at the end of a movie. Lamenting the ups and downs of love, feeling foolish in the face of failure, but continuing to try nonetheless. Feels like a lost sample brought into the here and now expertly by Aaron and Goose.
If you were to ask Joey Quiñones where he found inspiration for his music, you wouldn't have to look far from where the East LA son grew up. Listen to his work, and you're transported to a two-block radius of his neighborhood—from the liquor store to Sign of Music record store on Whittier Boulevard and back to a homie's house. In those two blocks, you hear cumbia blaring from the stores, punk rehearsals from a garage, oldies drifting from a neighbor's yard—a sensory overload that follows you home, all those genres singing in your head at once. This isn't a revelation to longtime fans of Quiñones' music. He has established himself as a premier interpreter of his generation, dedicating his career to offering his unique perspective on the Chicano soul songbook. But before Thee Sinseers, before the lush orchestrations and pitch-perfect harmonies that became his signature, Quiñones cut his teeth leading various backing bands for visiting Jamaican ska and dancehall acts touring Southern California. He describes those years as reggae college, getting yelled at by every Jamaican artist who had a record out. Those years of apprenticeship in rock steady and roots reggae would inform everything that followed—and on his new solo record Inna Soul Steady Situation, Quiñones finally showcases those influences front and center. That quintessential blending of styles rings out immediately on the opening track "Soul Steady Situation"—Quiñones's vocals enter like a selector toasting over the riddim, an alarm call announcing his intentions with an urgency that feels club-ready and immediate. Then comes the classic drum fill, dropping into a rock steady groove that establishes the vibe: this is dancehall-infused soul meant for movement, not just contemplation. It's a deliberate departure from Thee Sinseers' lush orchestrations, stripped down to showcase the Jamaican foundations that have always lived beneath Quiñones's work. Before you know it, you've taken off on a sonic soul spaceship with Quiñones at the helm, supported by his two-person crew: Eric Johnson from Thee Sinseers on saxophone and Eleazar from the Brown Boyz on piano, as you cruise across silver-lined clouds and dip your toes into dreamy moonlit grooves found on "Don't Let Go," "Driftin'" and "One More Night." What Quiñones manages to do on this record—with the full support of Colemine Records, the defining label for contemporary soul music happening right now—is prove time and time again that he is an artist willing to take risks and continue to show his prowess when it comes to experimenting with different styles, while still being able to authentically express himself. It's a partnership built on trust: Colemine has established itself as the premier destination for modern soul artists pushing the genre forward, recognizing that genre-blurring isn't a gimmick but the natural evolution of soul music itself. With that authentic self-expression, Quiñones and his crew manage to squeeze in some lighthearted fun as well, establishing a sense of equilibrium to counteract the heavier emotional overtones found on previous Sinseers efforts. A perfect example is "Bolsita," a tongue-in-cheek party song paying homage to iconic anthems like "Tequila" by The Champs and "Tighten Up" by Archie Bell & the Drells. But Quiñones doesn't stop there—he folds in electric boogaloo, early Ray Charles big band energy, and the Latin soul flourishes of Joe Cuba and Willie Colón, creating something that feels both nostalgic and fresh. Eric Johnson's saxophone takes center stage, adding playful solos that widen the sonic spectrum. The term "bolsita," which translates to "little bag," serves as the lingua franca for "let's get the party started"—it's admittedly corny, Quiñones will tell you, but it's the kind of song where everybody's going to shout along whether they like it or not. And that's precisely the point. By the time you reach the end of the record, having followed Quiñones across various genres and eras, you realize you've witnessed an artist in his prime doing what the best always do: capturing something deeply specific—Chicano identity, East LA's sonic DNA—and in that specificity, revealing something universal. It's music that transcends age, race, geography, and class precisely because it refuses to sand down its edges. Cross-generational talent building timeless appeal, one genre-blurring groove at a time.