NEW ARRIVALS

Guess-again specialists Death Is Not The End reissue Earle Brown’s 1974 solo debut of otherworldly concrète, notably featuring piano by live electronics pioneer and Cage foil, David Tudor, contributing to its uncanny magnetic tape soundscapes. ‘Music by Earle Brown’ features compositions written 1952-1963 during the years after its maker moved to New York to be closer to kindred spirits Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and David Tudor, whom he met years prior when they performed in Denver where he was teaching the Schillinger technique of composition. In New York, his style of open form composition would influence Cage’s own developments guided by indeterminacy, which in turn exposed Brown’s music to Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna, and whch led him to work with Morton Feldman, as heard on their 1962 split side - Brown’s first recording credit, for Time Records. The four works speak to the pivotal emergence of new music during that era. In chronological order, ’November 1952’ features a stop/start angularity, shards of keys and persuasive detonations precisely performed by David Tudor, gripping in its embrace of negative space, contrasting with the fractious concrète cut-up tones of ‘Octet I’, a 1953 piece composed and executed entirely by Brown and comparable as much with Stockhausen’s early electronics as the oddities emerging from Pierre Henry’s studio around that same time. Forward ten years to the album’s long-form bookends, where he conducts an acoustic octet in the fever dream-like play of dissonance and queered pitches on ‘Novara’ (1962), and conducts many of the same performers, and joins them on magnetic tape, for ‘Times Five’ (1963), a fascinating electro-acoustic whorl of rich colours and icicle rhythms that slips off the page into sustained, pitch bent notes with an effect that must have felt radical at the time, and still represents the curiosity and freedoms of the New York School of composers.

DINTE present a cassette-only issue of an NTS radio broadcast from back in early 2019. "A cross-continental trip through instrumental surf, short-run garage rock, and space-age psych oddities from across the globe, incl. groups from the US, UK, Peru, Angola, Thailand, Japan, Indonesia, India & Singapore among others."

Required listening for computer music freaks, 'Synthesized Voices' originally appeared in 1976, collecting innovative composer Charles Dodge's prophetic vocal experiments - recordings of Mark Strand's surrealist poems recreated on Bell Laboratories' uncanny synthetic speech tech. If you're into Anton Bruhin's deranged 'Speech Poems', this'll hit the spot. You've got to applaud DINTE for the timing of this one. Right now, it's hard to tell what's a real voice and what's been cobbled together using LLM tech, Frankensteined from decades of scraped voiceovers and newsreels. Synthesized voices are stapled to short form content and used to provide an air of humanity to mass-generated robo-slop. And listening to Dodge's set of pioneering studies, it's remarkable how the technology has evolved in such a short period of time. In the early '70s, when Dodge began his investigations, heavily synthesised voices were terrifyingly mechanical, usually used to depict malign forces - just cop any of those vintage Doctor Who episodes that feature Cybermen. What's fascinating is that Dodge seems to understand its crucial limitation; he doesn't attempt to make the voice sound more human (and therefore more tolerable), but mirrors Strand's absurdist logic instead, going beyond the limit of the larynx. Dodge explains that he labels it computer music because it's the Bell Labs computer setup that analysed and synthesised the voices, but he's quick to say that it's not generative music. Each poem was recorded to tape first then fed into the mainframe, that was then able to recreate the language using a pre-loaded archive of words and phrases. This would have resulted in a dry study, so Dodge tested the limits of the system by reconfiguring the parameters beforehand, shifting the pitch contour, the formants and duration of the syllables to radically diverge from the way we actually speak. The eight-minute 'In Celebration' is a great starting point. Composed in 1975, it seemingly shreds Strand's poem of the same name, in actuality locating its spirit, hanging on the word "you" just like Strand does. Dodge works with speed and pitch radically, twisting the phrases into machine-gunned barrages or disorienting decelerated harmonies. The words are still there - "your lungs prepare themselves for an ashen feeling" is a banger - but they've become hoarse, noisy growls or synthetic cries. The four part 'Speech Songs' is lighter, rooted in poems that were intended to invite audiences to respond with laughter, yet there's something even more disturbing about a computerised voice noisily bellowing out the same word, stuttering and getting stuck on throwaway rhymes. Really, Dodge hits his stride with the ambitious 'The Story of Our Lives', an "operatic dialogue for male and female synthetic voices" that we'd love to think Robert Ashley heard. There's a similar commitment to breaking down the formula of theater and opera on display here as Dodge corrupts these mundane utterances, forcing out near-songs and high drama from soap opera-ready domestic situations. With Dodge at the controls, the words shift haphazardly from recognizable to horrifyingly alien for almost no reason whatsoever, adding a sense of danger to what might regularly be daytime telly. It's an astute skewering of American culture that's maybe more relevant now than it ever was.

Equiknoxx’s crackshot screwball Gavsborg meets Grammy-nominated bassist Pele Fyah on a tracky soca and zouk style knees-up blessed with dreamy, discoid synth hooks and wickedly weirdo phrasing. 10 years since Equiknoxx’s landmark debut LP of skewed dancehall on DDS, and chasing up his Carrier collab, Gavsborg maintains an expressively off-kilter style and pattern on ‘Black Roses’, all bolstered by Pele Fyah’s spring-heeled steppas basslines, as formerly found in his band Raging Fyah. Limber like Usain, they bolt the traps at pace in the soca x digidub zinger ‘Black Roses Corner’ and brilliantly temper the momentum in 'Sak Pase', zipping up singeli-esque 16th note trills on swingeing bassline and tropical breeze pads. A killer ‘Spice Island Social Club’ tilts into something like Kraftwerk gone zouk, before they send it cosmic on a standout closer ‘Laventille Space Program’, recalling Hieroglyphic Being and Denis Wise astral-projecting the dance in its corkscrewing craftiness. Tip!

Haruomi Hosono, the pioneering Japanese musician, producer, composer, and founding member of Yellow Magic Orchestra and Happy End, has “found his voice in a late career renaissance," writes The Wire. His five-decade legacy continues to grow and attract new fans, and has been cited by an acclaimed list of artists, including Mac DeMarco, Cameron Winter, Ginger Root, Vampire Weekend, and Harry Styles. Shaped by mid-century American music, Hosono's work now reverberates back through a new generation of Western artists—a remarkable circular exchange.

Yours Sincerely, his 23rd studio album and first collection of new music in over seven years, finds Hosono ever-pushing his exploratory songcraft: “I am now 78 years old, but from here on, I feel a growing curiosity toward the unknown music that my new self will create, while also embracing the music of my former self—as if I now carry two musical worlds within me.” Across arrangements that span tender psych-folk and bubbling avant-pop, Hosono contemplates the concept of a maternal force that envelops the Earth, “humanity’s understanding of the unconditional love possessed by those who give us life,” he says. Songs tap into a collective current, engaging the “deeply buried instincts—maternal compassion and mercy, things we rarely engage with in our daily lives.”

The work represents an artistic and subconscious shift. Several tracks feature female vocalists, such as “Note of Mothership”, a group-chanted expression of childlike wonder, “To a Wild Rose”, which delights with oceanside hums and prose, and on the elegant, marching “Figlio Perdute.” “This was a completely new approach for me,” he adds.

The unofficial title track, “Sincerely”, frames the legend in his signature mode, strumming, singing, playfully pondering the answer to a simple question. How do you express the Japanese ideas of omoiyari (compassion), jihi (慈悲), or boseiai (母性愛) in English? Hosono explains, “I searched, but no word felt quite right. Each came close, yet carried a slightly different nuance…I turned to a more familiar word often used to close a letter: ‘Sincerely.’”

“It is in this spirit that I offer this album to you—sincerely, from the heart.”

Gary Sullivan's Bodega Pop project returns to Dinte with a cassette-only collection of traditional sounds plucked from CDRs found in the night-markets of Savannakhet, Vientiane, and Luang Prabang. "In Lao PDR, music was seemingly everywhere. Walking through an open field outside Savannakhet to the sound of someone playing a khaen on a distant porch, the bracing rush of electronic molam from of one of Vientiane’s many aging malls, the awkward blending of the blind so u player’s voice with the bustling sounds of Luang Prabang’s night market. It was in that UNESCO World Heritage Site that I found most of the CDs and CD-Rs from which I’ve ripped the tracks for this compilation. I’m almost certain I picked up a thumb drive at the night market that held many hours of additional music that could have been included, but if so, I’ve misplaced it, lost it for good, or simply misremember purchasing it in the first place. What I do remember is that these discs were literally the last copies in the cafe, museum, bookstore, and night market where I bought them, and not all of them played all the way through without sonic deterioration. The sounds compiled here play in stark contrast to the more contemporary recordings I found in Laos, most of which featured some form of upbeat digital workstation molam or children’s songs. In addition to the ever-present khaen, this collection includes recordings of the sanai, a single-reed instrument fashioned from a water buffalo horn, the ceremonial khong nyai gong, the pi and similar free-reeds, and at least a dozen more traditional instruments played by Lao and ethnic minority artists. While some of these tracks were laid down in Vientiane or Luang Prabang, most were recorded near where the artists lived, from the legendary Vat Phou in the far south to the former Pathet Lao capital Xam Neua in the northeast. Unlike Laurent Jeanneau’s more focused Lao collections for Akuphone and Sublime Frequencies, which remain among my favorite albums of all time, the present cassette-only selection is literally all over the PDR map. The sequencing is entirely in response to rhythm and texture and includes recordings from the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and early aughts. This may frustrate those with more of an ethnomusicology bent, but my hope is that the listener experiences something akin to wandering for the first time through this majestic country, encountering the last copies of forgotten recordings one after another, and hearing in these remains fragments of the past and a living musical landscape." – Gary Sullivan

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."

The Unwound album that ended all Unwound albums. Recorded in a moldering farmhouse basement at the crest of the new century, Leaves Turn Inside You is the no-wave response to Spector’s wall of noise call. Infinite layers of choppy guitar stabs and bridge scrapes, guttural bass thronk, thrift store synths, and monotone chanting wash over suffocating rhythms to deliver the world’s only choral grunge LP. Remastered from the original analog tapes and pressed on heavyweight vinyl for the discerning noise-nik.

Yaphet is the new album from rapper Curly Castro- also known as one half of the dynamic duo Shrapknel- out September 18, 2026, on Backwoodz Studioz. On Yaphet, Castro draws inspiration from the Blaxploitation film genre of the 1970’s; using that era’s black heroes and antiheroes as a launching pad for his cinematic lyricism. Flows switch as effortlessly as camera angles; verses are saturated with references and entendres; it’s an endlessly rewind-worthy rap masterclass. But Yaphet is also Castro’s first solo album since 2021’s Little Robert Hutton, and beneath the fireworks, this album reflects the depth of his experiences in those intervening years. “I didn’t set out to be so honest about my life, but that’s what came out and the album is better for it,” Castro explains, “from facing the death of my infant daughter, to my father’s death, to facing my own impending mortality, these are my most vulnerable blades, on my deepest cuts.” Like Castro, this record marches to the beat of its drum, and make no mistake, there are drums a-plenty for the veteran MC to spar with, as only he can. Produced entirely by Milwaukee beat maker Locust, Yaphet is a bouncy, eclectic listen that nods to its influences, without ever looking backward. Castro is joined by a whirlwind of the genre’s finest: billy woods, PremRock, Fatboi Sharif, Brian Ennals, SKECH185, Blueprint, AJ Suede, shemar, ALASKA, Sunmundi, blackchai, & Margel the Sophant.

A cranky, poetic-esoteric nEuro vibe puts wind behind the sails of Inkasso & ML’s maiden Stroom entry and their transition from whispered nocturnes to slompy cyber-slugs. Flickering shadowy integers of post-industrial, trip hop, theatrical music and sound poetry, ‘Fashion Recession’ finds the trio of Inkasso & ML indulging their whims toward a sort of soundtrack-like fantasy that leads on from their respective works for the artful types at Kashual Plastik and Osàre! Editions. The combo of dank synths with blunted vox and squashed grooves tessellates ideally with Stroom’s roster of angular audities primed for late night listening. Historic shades of everything from Tuxedomoon to Geins’t Naït and contemporary analogs Thomas Bush or Sholto Dobie come to mind in the album’s sideways drift from smudged downbeats on ‘Soft Layers’ to blown-out bass thunder in ‘Rhythm is a medium of change’, the soured music box melody of ‘Ghosting’, and striking moments of ‘90s noir in ‘Algorithm Poetry’ that sees it off into the Novo Line-like thrum and acidic croak of ‘Disturbing Circles’. Reckon this would all sound ideal on a solo midweek holiday to Antwerp after a break-up, when trying to write that novel you always intended to do.

The fifth studio album from the legendary American stoner metal duo is, you'll be glad to know, equally as doom laden and spiritually heavy as anything in their canon. They've paired up with production overlord Steve Albini again to craft the four tracks on 'God Is Good', starting with monolithic centrepiece, 'Thebes'. At just over nineteen minutes this is where you get your money's worth, and Om ensure customer satisfaction with one of their most exotic compositions. The first half of the track is given to a raga like meditation featuring a sublime Indian Tamboura operated by Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, accompanying Al Cisneros' foreboding vocals and distant tablas from Emil Amos, before subsiding into the crushing sloth-riffage you're built to expect, but have almost forgotten about in the state of induced bliss. 'Meditation Is The Practice Of Death' follows with a shorter and more intense movement featuring stunning studio trickery from the master engineers at hand, panning Amos' drums to the periphery of your psyche while Cisneros chants biblical prophecies and Lorraine Rath provides eerily indistinct Flute. Unusually 'Cremation Ghat I' features relatively uptempo time structures, revolving around polyrhythmic percussion and an ominous bass motif wafting up from below, before merging into 'Cremation Ghat II' with sumptuous Tamboura from Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe again, bringing the album to a reverent and spirit nutrifying close.

This acclaimed Japanese jazz masterpiece is available on cassette for the first time ever.

Brazil’s premiere guess-again specialists Lugar Alto have been threatening to unleash this one for a while and here it finally is; compiled by the goat GG Albuquerque and mixed by label enigma Akira Umeda, “My Life is a Movie and In It I Am the Villain” is a compendium of signature DJ drops and idents used in soundsystems from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo going back to the 1980's and right up to the present day - a genuinely synapse-popping madness that maps the constant evolution of the most vibrant and forward-facing soundsystem cultures of our time... If you've spent any time with Brazilian funk, you'll know the sonorous intros - always larger-than-life, tongue-in-cheek, fluoro-flavoured - almost as important as the songs themselves. You don't have to understand Portuguese to get the message, either; the cacophony of pitch-wonked vocal stims, familiar samples, pop culture references and cheapo effects is borderless in its appeal, a core component of contemporary funk that's just as important as the syncopated tamborzão beat itself. We've copped tracks that are entirely reliant on the "carimbos" (literally "stamps") and "vinhetas" (intros) so we were hoping someone would put together something like this. And Lugar Alto - the Brazilian imprint responsible for releasing those essential DJ Ramon Successo LPs and that shocking Djalma Corrêa anthology - have taken the most impressive approach imaginable, tasking fount of all knowledge and journalist GG Albuquerque (last seen putting together that sick MÉDIO GRAVE tape for Nyege Nyege Tapes) with compiling something from a genuine street's-eye perspective. The mix tells a non-linear, multi-dimensional story of Brazilian sound system culture, using DJ drops, stage calls, adverts, cheeky samples and explosive intros made between the 1980s and 2025. It takes us from the point where local sounds collided with funk, freestyle, electro and Miami bass in the wake of 'Planet Rock’ to the moment the scene eventually evolved into the splintered landscape of bruxaria, ritmado, brega and other sounds that we can interface with today via TikTok and Insta. It's a dense, fittingly psychedelic and suitably impertinent mosaic of references, in-jokes and mind-tickling sonics that's seemingly without beginning or end, a time-fluxing braindump of laugh tracks and aborted rhythmic snaps that's best compared to being airlifted into a Rio street party after being shot with medical-grade ketamine. Within a matter of seconds we get John Williams' 'Star Wars' intro followed by a Portuguese Darth Vader voice and a barrage of buzzing "tuin" effects - and it just gets madder and more frenetic from there. A sort of heatsick parallel narrative to decades of British pirate radio culture, 'Minha Vida...' Is an incredible artefact of a movement that defies easy categorisation, a multi-coloured collage of sounds, humour and idiosyncratic energy that's driven the sound since the very beginning. You can take the boom-cha-cha boom-cha-cha beat, but you can't even begin to mimic the sheer gusto.

Mu-inspired space cadets KiF Productions livicate their play of Japanese environmental ambient electronics, Hassellian 4th world, the KLF’s ‘Chill Out’, and Eno-esque harmonic perfumes, to the dearly departed Keith McIvor​. "Passiflora (Passifloraceae) is a genus of around 550 species of flowering plants, native to the tropical and subtropical Americas. The Passion Flower is a plant of improbable beauty - its blooms almost too intricate to be real, its climbing habit a quiet kind of determination. It has been used for centuries as a remedy for anxiety and sleeplessness, something that slows us and the world around us down. Fresh from last year's triumphant debut by KiF; Still Out, Passiflora, the album, follows the plant from its very beginning. It opens in darkness - 'Secret of the Seed', dormant, waiting - before the first tentative stir of 'First Movement' and the long, instinctive reach of 'Seeking Light'. From there, the journey unfolds with the patience of something that has no choice but to grow: drinking, climbing, flowering. 'Song of the Vine' carries the plant's quiet insistence upward, while 'Florescence' and 'Pollination Dream' catch it at its most open - that brief, extraordinary moment of full bloom. Then the turn. 'Fruiting (Slight Return)' and finally 'Return to Earth' - the cycle completing itself, giving back what it always borrowed. Each track is a stage. The whole is a life cycle."

“Live (At Open Ground)” by While My Sequencer Gently Bleeps is being released on Funkscapes as a cassette tape and documents a one-hour live set that offers a dense sequence of deep basses, clever drum patterns, and sparkling melodies. Recorded during a Funkscapes night at Open Ground in Wuppertal, the tape brings together well-known pieces as well as several previously unreleased tracks and conveys the immediate flow of the performance on cassette. At the center is Stefan Schwander’s project While My Sequencer Gently Bleeps, whose work is characterized by a playful combination of bass-focused drive, quirky bleeps, and warm harmonies. Schwander, also active as Harmonious Thelonious, A Rocket In Dub, and Antonelli Electr., uses the Elektron Monomachine as his main instrument and pushes its sequencing and sound capabilities to the limit. This approach shapes the characteristic sound of the set, in which loops, modulated bass lines, and pinpoint synth accents interlock organically. As a documentary live release, the cassette captures both the improvisatory energy and the meticulous sound shaping: stripped-down rhythms meet dub-like depth, while melodic fragments lend the set a surprising lightness. “Live (At Open Ground)” thus offers a focused glimpse into the project’s current musical self and its fusion of club aesthetics and experimental sound design.

ベルギー・リエージュを拠点に活動するfrançois vankaによる、東ベルギーの自然保護区や森との境界線、川の谷間を巡る散策の中で採集された音の断片を凝縮し、自然物から作り上げた自作楽器やフィールドレコーディングを用いて紡ぎ出された静謐な音響日記のようなデビュー作『quelques endroits』。セイヨウニワトコから削り出したチャイムやカタツムリの殻、フランス海岸の貝殻などを用いたハンドメイド楽器の素朴な不規則音と、霜のように繊細な音色、静かに漂うピアノとループが美しく交錯。風や水のせせらぎ、鳥たちの羽ばたきといった森のささやきに澄んだ響きが優しく溶け合い、作り手と聴き手の境目をやわらかく曖昧にしていくオーガニック・アンビエント空間を創出している。あらかじめ決められた構造を持たず、時間の流れから切り取られた自然の美しさと内省的な響きが調和した繊細な音像が静かに寄り添う好内容作！

In many ways, DJ Black Low’s debut album, Uwami, shows the signs of an artist’s first offering in any musical genre. Showcasing fluency in a broad range of styles and stuffing a number of ideas to the record’s brim is the 20 year-old producer’s attempt to both introduce himself to a wide listenership and stamp a recognizable sound in their minds. In other ways, somewhat out of the young South African producer’s control, Uwami goes against the grain. The 11-track album released on the Awesome Tapes From Africa imprint comes at a time when South African electronic music is being fundamentally disrupted. Amapiano, the electronic music movement which first gained popularity with a small, core group of followers, now dominates the mainstream. Well-known and pervasive, amapiano borrows from a diverse palette of musical styles which are popular in South Africa’s largely Black townships- jazz, kwaito, dibacardi, deep and afro house among them. Instead of pandering to the seemingly insatiable local appetite and growing global penchant for amapiano though, on Uwami DJ Black Low seeks out the limits of the sound du jour and tries to stretch them. Asked how he generates ideas for his songs, Sam Austin Radebe said, “Usually when you make music from the heart, the ideas for making songs come easily. Ideas come from everywhere.” DJ Black Low mainly works in Fruity Loops, the production software, for his instrumentals. But the software doubles as a place for him. “Even when I am sitting and doing nothing,” he says, “I can go in there and be inspired…Some of the songs that I made were modified from old projects of mine.” On his solo productions, he uses the samples and compositional norms that make amapiano hits the bedrock on which to experiment and improvise. With collaborators, DJ Black Low improvises within the boundaries of listener-friendly grooves. He was discerning when choosing vocalists for the songs on the project. “I am more of a producer, lyrics come from the vocalists that I work with. I usually make a beat and then send it to people that I work with. They write something for the beat and I will decide which lyrics I use on which songs. If the vocals are sharp, I’ll include them.” Vocalists on the record use different South African languages including SePedi, Setswana and isiZulu. DJ Black Low has four completely solo productions on Uwami, “Downfall Revisit,” “Vula Vala,” “60 Days No Sleep” and “Stiwawa Quitter.” In “Downfall Revisit” he introduces the listener to the high-pitched keyboard melodies which are something of a signature. On the record’s last two tracks, “60 Days No Sleep” and "Stiwawa Quitter,” he is solo again. He is not veering from the amapiano realm, but exploring something distinctly new which for a brief moment exists simultaneously with amapiano. The sound he creates has foundations of what could easily have progressed into captivating amapiano songs on their own. But he uses improvised but structured electronic percussion and distortion sounds to drive the tracks in a particular direction. What remains is something like a deconstructed amapiano. “Vula Vala” borrows its title and refrain from popular amapiano producer Kabza De Small’s 2019 hit of the same name. DJ Black Low says that Kabza De Small’s success inspired him because they come from the same city, Hammanskraal, Pretoria. DJ Black Low showed an early interest in music, particularly in producing. “I’ve liked music a lot from a young age,” he says “I used to produce hip-hop and commercial house before I started producing amapiano. When I started out, I used to listen to a lot of commercial house. I used to DJ at places in my neighborhood, parties and weddings. I wasn’t getting big gigs.” For a young producer living in the townships of the greater Pitori area of South Africa’s Gauteng province, there were few avenues available for Radebe to pursue a career in music. His trajectory shows the vulnerability of this pursuit. “I had started producing in 2013 and it so happened that I lost my equipment in 2014. I couldn’t afford to buy equipment. In 2017, a friend of mine who had been making music found a job and decided to quit music. He gave me his equipment and I was able to start producing again. That’s when I started getting back to it. I tried to pick up where I had left off, with hip hop and commercial house but I found that amapiano was the popular music. I liked it, so I started producing it.” Solid for its ability to showcase DJ Black Low’s individual creativity and experimentation, Uwami is a promising debut. Most interesting , though is the producer’s ability to harness his improvisation and experimentation into compelling grooves when he collaborates with others, as he does so readily on this recording.

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.

Originally released in 1998, Boston emo outfit Jejune's shoegaze-inspired second album has been given the Numero treatment with a long overdue remaster. RIUYL Rainer Maria, Superchunk or Karate.

Jejune were only around for four years, but they left behind them a subtle trail of influence that's exemplified on their milestone sophomore album. Unlike their debut 'Junk' (that Numero remastered and reissued earlier this year), 'This Afternoon's Malady' began to subvert the emo template, shoring up Arabella Harrison and Joe Guevara's fragile, cracking vocals with thick, wall-of-sound production that betrayed the influence of MBV's 'Loveless' and Catherine Wheel's 'Ferment'. The band were saddled with accusations of being "emo" when the album originally emerged in the late '90s and the term had become a slur, and now we can visualize their influence a little more clearly. They were emblematic of the genre's refined, ultra-melodic second wave, and since they splintered in 2000 they've been referenced constantly online. Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba called them one of his favorite bands, and Jejune neatly bridge the gap between hardcore punk and indie rock, foreshadowing the '00s boom.

Over the course of 2026, jazz piano trio Okonski (Steve Okonski on keys, Durand Jones and the Indications bandmate Aaron Frazer on drums, and bassist Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery) have been trickling out a wide variety of singles to keep fans at bay ahead of the highly anticipated 2027 LP3. The tracks offer a variety of influences, and include collaborations with the likes of Saxophonist Cochemea and harpist Rachel Kitchlew. To conclude this series of singles, Colemine records has pressed up a limited number of cassettes including all the newest tracks and a few bonus live tunes. The group's regarded EP 'Trio Session Demos' have been added to the flip of the cassette, the first time these hip-hop inspired early cuts have been available physically.At the top of 2025, Okonski released their sophomore LP 'Entrance Music' to wide acclaim. The spiritual jazz record received praise from Rolling Stone, BBC, Billboard, KEXP, countless others and has streamed over 10 million times. The trio recently completed a sold out LA show and embark on their first UK/EU tour this fall. There is much more to come from Okonski in the coming years.

50s-60s era country music with a slice of that famous southern humor

50s-60s era country music with a slice of that famous southern humor

AFTER DARK is the latest project from French producer Onra, conceived as the soundtrack to an imagined late-night film. Entirely self-produced, the album continues the sophisticated R&B and Modern Soul direction explored since his 2010 classic Long Distance and 2018's accomplished Nobody Has To Know, focusing on late 80's / early 90's inspirations. Structured like a film unfolding between dusk and dawn, After Dark moves through themes of intimacy, urban solitude, distance, and quiet indulgence. Analog synthesizers, tight drum programming, understated basslines, and selective live saxophone textures shape a cohesive body of work that favors mood and narrative over excess. The sequencing reinforces its cinematic intent, opening and closing with intro and outro pieces that frame the record as a cohesive night-time narrative album. Over 20 years since emerging in the mid-2000s from the beat scene, Onra has steadily evolved from sample-based Hip-Hop production toward polished, song-oriented projects rooted in contemporary R&B and Funk. With After Dark, he delivers one of his most focused and refined statements to date: a mature, immersive album built for late hours, and attentive listening. The first taster of the album to drop is the slick nostalgic ’Lap of Luxury’, sets the tone for the project, a blend between Instrumental Hip-Hop, late 80s R&B and 90''s Smooth Jazz.

Released in 1971, Maggot Brain stands as the towering masterpiece in Funkadelic’s groundbreaking catalog. Initially misunderstood upon release, the album is now widely regarded as one of the most influential records of all time. Anchored by Eddie Hazel’s otherworldly guitar performance on the legendary title track and featuring enduring favorites like “Can You Get To That,” Maggot Brain redefined the possibilities of funk, rock, and psychedelic music.For this definitive 2026 reissue, the album was mastered directly from analog tape, preserving the raw power, depth, and atmosphere of the original recordings with extraordinary detail. A longtime holy grail for collectors, Maggot Brain receives the fully analog treatment it has long deserved.