NEW ARRIVALS

Catching up with Thee Sinseers ahead of their new Colemine Records release, Love Stories, one thing becomes abundantly clear: this is not an LP that explores a neat and tidy love story. The vision of love put forth on this record is full-spectrum. Think of the seminal 1993 East LA film Blood In Blood Out — three protagonists bound together through hardship, strife, and diverging roads, who ultimately circle back to reckon with why they remain. It's a similar story here. Love Stories isn't interested in the happy ending. It's interested in everything that comes before it, after it, and in spite of it. Of course, none of this is accidental. More than a new record, Love Stories is a portrait of a band that has finally grown into itself — one that knows exactly who it is and isn't shy about saying so. As Quiñones puts it: "It's a solidifying statement of where we are now. This is our style." Bassist Christopher Manjarrez described that confidence as something you can hear: "Everything was just that notch up." In contrast to Sinseerly Yours, which had developed organically from a four-piece into an eleven-member ensemble, Love Stories was built from the ground up as a collective effort — every role established before the band entered the studio. "We went in knowing these are the roles that are gonna be played by these people," Quiñones says. "Everybody was considered wholeheartedly in every arrangement aspect." That collective approach extended into the sonic choices themselves. Every member zoomed out — listening not just to their own parts but to the record as a whole, what Quiñones calls thinking like "a beautiful painting" rather than a collection of individual tracks. With that foundation in place, the band handed the final mix to engineer Kelly Finnigan. "We could get so far with our opinions," Quiñones admits, "but at the end of the day there's still 10 or 11 of us trying to figure out what's right." The band also leaned into earthier instrumentation — standup bass, guitars run through amplifiers for a warmer sixties-adjacent tone — pulling inspiration from wherever it presented itself, even the most unlikely of places. It's that cross-genre thinking that Quiñones sees as the record's defining quality. "It didn't feel like we were making soul music at any point," he says. "It felt like we were making our music." But the sonic ambition of Love Stories only tells half the story. The band sought to capture something more honest than a highlight reel — showcasing the highs and lows of romantic relationships while expanding the frame to include the familial, the complicated, and the unresolved. On "Let's Fall In Love (Again)," Quiñones's protagonist pleads for a second chance before stopping mid-song to acknowledge his own role in the heartbreak — trading wishful fantasy for something far more honest. It's that kind of emotional candor that runs throughout the record. The band's parents appear in the album art, their own love stories folded into the record's visual identity, some of those stories still standing, others not. As Manjarrez puts it: "Every single song title directs you down a different road of love — whether you win or lose." Quiñones wanted listeners to sit with that ambiguity. "Love is never-ending," he says. "It stretches beyond lifetimes. I want people to still be confused — I want it to be left like an open book." To achieve what they're reaching for, every member of Thee Sinseers has had to check their ego at the door — and mean it. "The sense of ego is, in a weird way, non-existent when it comes to recording and writing," Quiñones says. "We're all fans of each other at the end of the day." It's the kind of trust earned on the road, forged through years of shared miles and close quarters — and reflected in a lineup that welcomed new additions seamlessly, including expanded roles for familiar faces and string arrangements from newcomer Skip Heller that push the songs into new territory. That spirit of trust extends to their partnership with Colemine Records, built on patience and creative freedom. "Terry's like a homie," Quiñones says. "He gives us his input but we get a lot of freedom because he trusts us." For a band still actively defining itself on its own terms, that kind of label support isn't just appreciated — it's essential. Yet one thing remains constant throughout: Thee Sinseers' commitment to where they come from. That East LA identity doesn't announce itself — it simply exists, woven into the fabric of the music without being worn as a badge. As Francisco Flores puts it: "We're from here. You can hear it a thousand miles away. You can't deny it — but we don't try to. It just comes out that way." Nowhere is that more apparent than on "Minute by Minute," which Quiñones describes as the album's most neighborhood-feeling moment — a slow dance number that conjures the gymnasiums of Roosevelt and Garfield High, intimate and unhurried, like a memory you didn't know you were making. There's no performance of heartbreak here, just the real thing. Like an unsent love letter finally delivered, Love Stories carries the weight of everything that was felt but never quite said. The universality of that feeling is perhaps best captured in Quiñones's own words: "It's never too late to change. It's never too late to tell a person you love that you love them." After any song on this record, Eric Johnson says, there's really only one appropriate response. "Damn."

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.

Dublin-born, thirty years an immigrant. That's the spine of henry o henry's debut, Apocrypha, not as a concept but as a condition. "Ireland is the DNA of the thing," he says, "the thing before every other thing." He's spent three decades in the United States working in the trades, absorbing the country's mythologies, imagining Whitman's American spirit, and building what he calls "an idiosyncratic American language" out of it all. He is, by his own account, "formally and informally not a musician." A childhood nylon-string guitar, a few chords learned, and not much else until 2019, when his brother handed him a $6 charity-shop guitar with a repaired headstock and low strings that distorted unpredictably. All but two of the songs on Apocrypha were written on it. It doesn't appear on the record. The songs came with a kind of finality. "I wrote them for myself," he says, "and was certain every song was the last one." It was filmmaker Rick Alverson, a longtime friend who produced the sessions, who convinced him they could stand together as something. They do. The musicians Eamon O'Leary and Ned Steves, father and son, play most of the album, recording together for the first time, without rehearsal. Their instinct is at once precise and open, parts that feel discovered rather than placed, deepening the harmonic language without disturbing the clarity of the songs. The sessions were engineered by Peter Townsend, the longtime Will Oldham collaborator who drummed on Bonnie "Prince" Billy's I See a Darkness. Erik Hall mixed and contributed overdubs; Emilie Rex of Lean Year lends luminous harmonies to three songs; poet Callie Garnett appears on another. The arrangements grew in the room, the lyrics and melodies arriving intact, the music unfolding around them. Throughout, Alverson guided the tonal atmosphere and arrangements, shaping the space the songs inhabit as much as the performances themselves. The title does what o henry likes: it's slippery. Apocrypha suggests disputed texts, hidden books, stories that may or may not be true. "It suggests I might not be telling the truth," he says, "but also, some say, the Apocrypha were kept out of the Bible because they were too good." Across nine songs, with a sensibility that sits alongside John Cale, Nick Drake, and Leonard Cohen, o henry moves through time and place with a writer's quiet authority. "Spanish Girl" revisits his early-90s East Village years, an "operetta of agonies and enchantments." "Parade" is what it feels like when a place won't release you; "Driveway" is when the place is all that's left. Album standout "There" captures something harder to name: how powerful feelings drive you to the page, and how the thing you make can outlast the feelings that made it. "It feels like a triumph over something," he says, "even if you're a bit embarrassed by some of the sentiment." Apocrypha arrives as a debut but carries the patience of a life lived in full, shaped by Tarkovsky and Bolaño, by Frank O'Hara and a $6 guitar, by the specific weight of being somewhere for a long time without quite being from there.

AGON is the directorial debut of Giulio Bertelli. It follows a triptych of female athletes as they prepare and then compete in LUDOJ 2024, a fictional Olympic Games, in their personal disciplines - judo, fencing, and rifle shooting. Informed by the historical figures of Cleopatra, Joan of Arc and Nadezhda Durova, these women are portrayed against the political, social, technological and physical contexts that dominate the highest level of sports competition and performance. AGON explores a contemporary account of the contradictions of these sports, which began as peacetime practices for war, as their disciplines are institutionally sanitised, recast as wholesome global entertainment, and ultimately dematerialised altogether in new digital arenas. The events at LUDOJ are conducted not in sports arenas but on soundstages, with no live audience. These spartan spaces are populated only by athletes, sports officials, and film crew, capturing every audio-visual layer of information. Within this environment, every mat crash, sword clash and gunshot is experienced in exacting detail. Tom Wheatley’s score began as a conceptual mirror to this. He took three musicians, each with a singular approach to their instrument, each instrument having a language of articulation that relates to each sport: percussion for judo, cello for fencing, saxophone for rifle shooting. Added to this were claustrophobic analogue electronics, and bagpipes, to represent a state beyond competition: war. The rich, detailed signals from these players underwent extreme processing live in the studio, at times moving the music into a grey area between score, sound design and foley. “I saw a material parallel between the sportsperson and the musician. That you have these tools which you carry through life, which hold complex histories of use. These techniques and traditions are studied, and combined with contemporary technologies to unlock new potentials. As Alex Sokolov is to her gun, Jean-Luc Guionnet is to his saxophone. From this model sprung many ideas, which lay the foundation for the score: applying the gestural language of the fencing epee to Ute’s bow; the ‘tuned air’ of both the rifle and the saxophone; taking the judo concept of barycentre and applying that to a form of rhythmic gravity with Seijiro. It was a rich seam” – Tom Wheatley “Where realism and fiction are blurred in the world of AGON, Tom accomplished the same for the score, obfuscating the boundary between the acoustic landscape of the film and the music, respecting the theoretical framework of the film itself.” – Giulio Bertelli AGON premiered at Venice Film Festival 2025, was awarded the Luciano Sovena Award for Best Independent Production, and the FIPRESCI Award (International Federation of Film Critics). It is a MUBI/Match Factory production.

Savage first-wave screamo from San Diego’s white belt progenitors. Collected for the first time on this 39-minute LP are Antioch Arrow’s complete Gravity recordings, including In Love With Jetts LP (+ a pair of previously unissued outtakes), The Lady Is A Cat 12”, Candle split, and two live Che Cafe tracks captured at the quintet’s spazzy peak. 23 tracks remastered from corroded DATs and annotated by Tony Rettman, plus lyrics, photos, and flyers, all housed in a stunning gatefold jacket for maximum McClard rage-baiting. ”A roar of nothing”—HeartattaCk

Savage first-wave screamo from San Diego’s white belt progenitors. Collected for the first time on this 39-minute LP are Antioch Arrow’s complete Gravity recordings, including In Love With Jetts LP (+ a pair of previously unissued outtakes), The Lady Is A Cat 12”, Candle split, and two live Che Cafe tracks captured at the quintet’s spazzy peak. 23 tracks remastered from corroded DATs and annotated by Tony Rettman, plus lyrics, photos, and flyers, all housed in a stunning gatefold jacket for maximum McClard rage-baiting. ”A roar of nothing”—HeartattaCk

Their soulful funk awareness might have found its grandest stage with their self-titled 1979 “debut” for Mercury, an album that covered the band’s gritty soul with a layer of stifling L.A. gloss, that caused few heads to turn, and that marked the beginning of the end for Father's Children. Years before the coke dust had settled, another album’s worth of material had been tracked, the creative supernova that should have ushered the group into the nation's consciousness years prior. Who's Gonna Save the World is that 1973 explosion, conceived prematurely and then uncovered decades into a lengthy incubation inside producer Robert Hosea Williams’ suburban beltway garage. Unreleased previously, Father’s Children’s true freshman offering is a work genuinely concerned with its own time and place, bringing together comet-hailing funk, sunny group harmonies, fuzz-guitar solos, shimmering keys, bubbling percussion, spiritual prophecy, and dub experiments. Our deluxe LP edition includes the bonus 45 “Linda Movement” b/w “Intellect” and a folio full of promo photos that track the band’s evolution from D.C. doo-woppers to L.A disco denizens.

By popular demand…we had to press these two standouts from Marco Benevento’s new Glera album on 7 inch.The A side “Houdini” is a kick-in-the-door, dancefloor-filler that pushes genre boundaries while showcasing both his playing prowess and production chops. As the title suggests, there’s real magic here. The whistle blows and the game begins - punchy drums pull you in, and when the earworm piano phrase hits, it’s party time. The energy only builds from there, making this a sure shot for DJs around the globe.The B side “Miss Neptune” is a reggae inspired number featuring Elizabeth Steiner on harp. Pure mood music, this one lays you way back. Co-produced by the L.O.T.L.E. himself, Nick Movshon who plays drums and bass while Marco and Elizabeth trade off gorgeous riffs. An absolutely gorgeous tune sure to find an audience in everyone and become a staple in proper Reggae circles.

Homer Steinweiss, the Brooklyn based soul/funk drummer, always had a soft spot for folk music. Paul Spring, a young idealist folk singer traveling the country with his guitar, always had a beautiful falsetto in his back pocket. A family introduction would lead to Homer producing a few solo records of Paul’s, which would eventually lead to the creation of Holy Hive. The two enlisted Joe Harrison on bass and started out recording their first tunes as a group. A tour with soul legend Lee Fields would turn out to have an unexpected effect on their sound as they played their material to crowds of soul fanatics looking to dance. It was this realization that forced the next step in their evolution and gave birth to a sound unique to Holy Hive, a sound that walks a line so perfectly it necessitated a new genre, Folk Soul. Homer has been drumming professionally since 2000 and has provided the back beat to records by Amy Winehouse, Bruno Mars, The Jonas Brothers, and Lady Gaga to name a few. He has toured the world over with soul acts like Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and The Arcs. With all of that under his belt, Holy Hive is the first band that is truly his own and you can hear that it is close to his heart. Paul is from a small town in Minnesota where he spent his formative years studying Ancient Greek mythology and practicing classical guitar. He toured the states for years with only the company of his guitar, playing solo shows to make ends meet and occasional library gigs promoting his self released children’s record, Home Of Song. Listening to their debut album, their different experiences and influences have all shown up. From the heavy downbeat of the lead single “Broom” to their intimate cover of Honeybus’ “Be Thou By My Side,” Float Back To You showcases their songwriting prowess as well as their impeccable musicianship. Spring’s fondness for ancient mythology shows up in a few places on the album as well adding another level to their work. They adapt the Greek poet Sappho’s “Fragment 31” to music on “Embers To Ash” and completely rework the Irish folk tune “Red Is The Rose” into a modern day two stepper. Another standout track is the already classic “Oh I Miss Her So,” which first showed up on their 2018 Harping EP and features accomplished harpist Mary Lattimore and trumpet by Dave Guy of The Roots. The symbiotic relationship of Homer and Paul has been likened to that of an oxpecker and a black rhino. Paul’s delicate falsetto and fluttering guitar rests atop Homer’s brawny drums in perfect harmony. There are many levels to Holy Hive, some of them show up on the surface, but some of them are like the album’s title track; you listen to a gorgeous love song only to find out later it is about coming home to your cat. This is perhaps the most telling of Holy Hive, they are easy to like on first listen but spending time with their music will reveal a much deeper experience.

Sufjan Stevens, Asthmatic Kitty, and Soundsfamilyre announce Sufjan's third full-length album, a collection of songs for his birth-state, MICHIGAN, "The Great Lake State." Composed as a geographical tone poem, MICHIGAN follows a metaphysical expedition through the idiosyncrasies of middle America. Drawing from personal anecdote, regional history, and state heritage, Stevens mixes social and political grievances with songs about snowmobiles, Henry Ford, the Detroit race riots, and love. MICHIGAN's songs resonate with a range of sources-Vince Guaraldi, Terry Riley, and Nick Drake as accompanied by Stereolab and The Sea & Cake-in executing Stevens' peculiar palette that is simultaneously rock and blue-grass, jazz and pop, a style The Village Voice appraises as "Arthur Lee meets the Book of Psalms." In MICHIGAN, Stevens combines intimate, soft-spoken songwriting with the dense compositional complexity displayed on his previous release ENJOY YOUR RABBIT, which XLR8R called "...a transgressive, majestic album conjuring an academic jam session of Stereolab and Luke Vibert conducted by Steve Reich." Guest artists include Elin, Megan, and Daniel Smith (of The Danielson Famile), and John Ringhofer (Half-handed Cloud). Album art features original hand-paintings by Martha Stewart crafts editor Laura Normandin. MICHIGAN is the inaugural entry of THE 50 STATES, a cumulative recording project by Sufjan Stevens unparalleled in its panoramic enterprise: a record for each state! You think he's kidding, don't you? Now available from Asthmatic Kitty and Soundsfamilyre. Distributed by Secretly Canadian: release date: July 1, 2003 (which happened to be Sufjan's birthday).

1974's "Natty Locks Dub" is well sought-after by reggae afficionados and viny collectors alike. Producer Winston Edwards left Jamaica to reside in the UK in 1974 and through his strong connections with reggae luminaries such as Joe Gibbs, Lee "Scratch" Perry and King Tubby began to travel back and forth between London and Kingston (JA) to bring back recordings to issue on his Fay Music label in the UK. In 1974 he issued his first dub album, the heavy hitting Natty Locks Dub featuring rhythms built at Lee Perry’s Black Ark and Joe Gibbs' new studio with overdubs done in the UK. These early dub tracks have a mystical atmosphere all of their own, cool, jazzy, melodic, with a great sound.

Originally released in 1980. "Hailing from the late seventies through 1980 originally, this has a state of the art Blackbeard mix from Dennis Bovell, production of the Well Pack Band from Winston Edwards and stands as a convincing album -- which goes some way to explain the advanced popularity entire dub sets went on to experience after punk's early love affair with sufferer's reggae. The vibes here are good, the titles great and while some of the themes may not be entirely dread, the playing is all high caliber and the one-drop dubs are very well crafted."

Another set of crucial Twinkle Brothers rhythms - Dub Massacre style! Each one of the Dub Massacre LPs has been a real joy to get our hands on and ears into (we'd been seeking them out ever since buying a CD copy of the first Dub Massacre album from a record stall at a Channel One soundsystem session in Bristol many, many years ago). This one, the Part 4, entitled The Killing Zone - yes these dubs are deadly - originally came out in 1989 and has not been up on here on our site for your perusal yet, so we're glad to fill the gap for our collection as well as yours potentially, in case you're also a fan of this series, and feel the need to have each one as much as we do. These dubs, compiled from rhythm tracks taken from - Breaking Down The Barriers, Twinkle In Poland and the (at the time of release, still forthcoming) Twinkle Brother* - Chant Rastafari albums. "This is the killing zone dub style!" and feature killer pacey dancehall/steppers-styled cuts such as the first track 'Panic In The Street', proper gun-shot / tape-wheelup, majestic dub such as Urban Gorilla, typical 80's uk roots, not a million miles of Aswad and Dennis Bovell's sound at the time ' Hunger And Starvation', big tunes such as 'Zulu Warrior' (quite possibly a nod to their close collaborator and musical family / official soundman Twinkle production dubplate champion Jah Shaka).... Then there's the big heads-down stepper 'Fighting Fight'.. Oooph, lots of heavyweight rhythms and deadly versioning on this one! Listen for yourself and you'll see that this is definitely one of the bigger Dub Massacre LPs, totally crucial gear. ...Love the artwork too!

Twinkle Brothers strike again, in dubwise style and fashion - Entitled 'Lion Head', this LP represents the fifth in the brilliant 'Dub Massacre' series... Packed with dubs, from straight-up dubwise killers to the brilliantly obscure digi-dancehall flavoured cuts, Lion Head consists of 9 selected instrumentals from the Twinkle Brothers studio, circa 1990. Worth it for the artwork and design aesthetic alone, it's also musically a killer LP that should be sat, either on your record shelf, or be spinning on your deck, depending on what time of the day it is...

1976's "Earthquake Dub" by The Revolutionaries, produced by Ossie Hibbert amounts to a crisp, spacy and texturally nuanced soundscape. The bass is front and center, very deep, rich and clear. In fact the listener may (for once) want to turn the bass down just a tad in order to hear the small, elegant details which are hidden below like tiny fossils. Several tracks feature some fine solo and ensemble horn lines (featuring Tommy McCook), which are appropriately spaced-out and ethereal. There is a also a bit of organ providing some sweetness to the mix, including some courtesy of Ossie himself. In fact, it may be Hibbert's capacity as a musician which allowed him to make such tasteful dubs on this, his very first dub album. There are virtually no vocals bringing Earthquake Dub down to earth, and that fact helps elevate it to true high art, abstract, nonlinear, and unfettered by earthly concerns. The deftly applied echo and reverb, augmented by the occasional bleep and bloop makes the tracks feel startlingly modern and fresh. It's marvelous how creative and ahead of their time the 1970s Jamaican dubmasters (including Hibbert) actually were. This is essential for any fan of the Revolutionaries, even for the track "River Bank" alone, which is an upbeat dubbed-out solo sax work out, with a skanky, almost carnival-sounding rhythm which will remind you why it's good to be alive.

Minyo Crusaders, who shocked not only Japan but the entire world with their hybrid of Japanese folk songs and Latin, cumbia, reggae, afrobeat, etc., released their masterpiece first album "Echoes of Japan" at the end of 2017. This 2-disc LP version is now a standard catalog item! This album, packed with killer tunes such as "Kushimoto Bushi," "Tanko Bushi," and "Aizu Bandaisan," will be delivered on vinyl for years to com

Classic Studio One instrumentals featured on Lennie Hibbert's essential album, including the spellbinding Roselen and bonus versions of Twilight Zone and Village Soul.

One of the finest vocal groups of the rocksteady and early reggae periods of Jamaican music, the Heptones first drew attention for the singles and albums they cut for Clement "Coxsone" Dodd's Studio One label during the late '60s. Poised on the cusp of a cultural shift, Leroy Sibbles (also a bass-wielding session man for Dodd) and partners Barry Llewellyn and Earl Morgan tackled a combination of the sort of pained love songs then in vogue and fresher "reality" material, a mix arguably heard best on On Top.

Twinkle BrothersのNorman Grantをプロデューサーに迎え、Dub JudahやMad Professor周辺の重要人物たちが参加した、UKルーツ・レゲエ・シーンを代表する女性シンガーAishaの1993年作『Daughters Of Zion』。90年代ニュールーツの発展期に生み出された作品として知られる1枚で、ラスタファリアン思想に根差したメッセージと凛としたヴォーカルが印象的に響く。重厚なベースラインと深いダブ感覚を軸にしながらも、過度に装飾へ走ることなく、伝統的なルーツ・レゲエの精神性をしっかり受け継いだサウンドが魅力。Aishaの力強く気品ある歌声が楽曲全体を貫き、UKニュールーツならではの硬質なリズムとスピリチュアルな空気感を結び付けている。90年代UKルーツを語るうえで外せない、〈Twinkle Music〉屈指の名作。

There are a dozen nice sultry instrumentals on this LP, released in the early '70s, though as always with vintage reggae albums, that doesn't necessarily indicate that all of the material was recorded then. Certainly it has the sound of the best rocksteady music, some of its trancier grooves hinting at the dub era.

Dub Judah's 1992 dub album, released on Twinkle Music. An 11-track instrumental set built around rhythms associated with the Twinkle Brothers, showcasing the distinctive sound of early 1990s UK digital dub, with production work carried out in part at Ariwa Studios.

Copilot said: A compilation of essential 1970s recordings by pioneering female reggae singer Jennifer Lara, who contributed session vocals and harmonies to numerous classics for the legendary Studio One label. Showcasing the warmth, depth, and unmistakable presence of one of Jamaican music's most underrated voices, this collection highlights a key figure in the evolution of reggae and rocksteady.

Joe Gibbs' 1979 album Majestic Dub stands as a unique and innovative take on the sound of Dub. The album opens with "Ten Commandments," an energetic track featuring prominent use of synthesizers, blending early techno influences with dub rhythms. This departure from the typical sound showcases Gibbs' ambition to modernize reggae without overusing electronic elements. The title track, "Majestic Dub," highlights the rhythmic prowess of the legendary Sly and Robbie, grounding the music with a strong reggae foundation while also experimenting with electronic drums, further pushing the sonic boundaries. As the album progresses, tracks like "Social Justice" and "Kings of Dub" continue to explore new textures. "Social Justice" introduces a synthesizer subtly woven into the rhythm, enhancing the track's depth and layering. In contrast, "Kings of Dub" feels lighter and more traditionally reggae, its smooth rhythms and precise production feel more grounded. These tracks exemplify Gibbs' ability to balance innovation with respect for reggae’s roots, allowing a variety of influences and styles to shine through without overwhelming the core dub essence. The album concludes with powerful tracks like "Edward the Eighth" and "Embargo," which return to more orthodox dub sounds while incorporating dynamic effects such as echo and delay. These final songs capture the essence of Majestic Dub, where traditional reggae rhythms meet modern production techniques. Gibbs' collaboration with top-tier musicians, including Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, and Tommy McCook, adds further depth to an already rich soundscape. Altogether, Majestic Dub serves as a bold, forward-thinking album that not only honors the roots of dub but also pushes it into exciting new territory.

Kyoto-based lo-fi home-recording funk duo Khan Brown and OHHKI return with a strictly limited 7-inch single cut from Ryokan, their self-released mini-album originally issued on cassette in 2025. Following a release on the renowned US label PPU, the pair deliver another dose of their distinctive DIY funk sound, now pressed on an exclusive 7-inch format.