NEW ARRIVALS

アフリカ最高の“ソネーロ”が甦る！
セネガルとキューバを結んだ伝説的歌手の決定版アンソロジー！

　西アフリカ音楽史において、キューバ音楽との深い結びつきを象徴する歌手として語り継がれているのがラバ・ソセー（Laba Sosseh）です。1942年にガンビアで生まれた彼は、セネガルとガンビアの両方にルーツを持つ“セネガンビア人”として育ち、英語圏とフランス語圏という二つの文化を自然に身につけました。後に彼は、その豊かな音楽的背景を武器に、西アフリカとラテン音楽の架け橋となる存在へと成長していきます。
　彼を見出したのは、“セネガル音楽の父”とも呼ばれるイブラ・カッセ（Ibra Kasse）でした。1960年代初頭、ダカールの名門ナイトクラブ〈マイアミ〉で歌っていたラバの才能に着目したイブラは、彼をスター・バンド・ド・ダカールへ迎え入れます。当時のスター・バンドは、後のセネガル音楽界を担う数多くの名手たちが集まる一大拠点であり、ラバはそこで頭角を現しました。その歌声は早くから高く評価され、「卓越した才能を持つ歌手が現れた」と評されたと伝えられています。
　その後、ナイジェリア出身のサックス奏者デクスター・ジョンソン（Dexter Johnson）が率いるスーパースター・ド・ダカールに参加し、さらに大きな人気を獲得。情熱的で伸びやかな歌声と圧倒的な表現力によって、“アフリカ最高のソネーロ（ソン歌手）”と称される存在となりました。彼の代表曲「Seyni」や「Aminata」は、西アフリカ各地で広く親しまれ、後にタブー・レイ・ロシュローやベンベヤ・ジャズをはじめとする数多くの音楽家によって取り上げられるなど、世代や国境を越えて歌い継がれていきました。
　その人気は国境を越え、マリではレイル・バンドで活動し、後にはコートジヴォワールへ渡ってSuper International Bandを結成。当時アフリカ音楽の中心地となっていたアビジャンで数多くの録音を残しました。さらにキューバ系音楽家との交流も深く、ロベルト・トーレス（Roberto Torres）やオルケスタ・ブロードウェイとの録音、キューバの名歌手モンギート（Monguito）との共演、さらにはオルケスタ・アラゴーン（Orquesta Aragn）との録音も実現。アフロ・キューバン音楽を体現するアフリカ人歌手として国際的な名声を確立しました。
　本作『ラ・ベル・エポック VOL.1』は、そんなラバ・ソセーの全盛期を振り返る２枚組アンソロジーです。代表曲「Seyni」や「Aminata」をはじめ、「Guantanamera」「El Manisero」などキューバ音楽の名曲も収録。彼のレパートリの幅広さと卓越した表現力を改めて堪能することができます。
　セネガルでンバラが誕生する以前、西アフリカがソンやルンバ、グァヒーラ、サルサに熱狂していた時代。その中心で歌い続けたラバ・ソセーの歌声は、今なお色褪せることなく輝きを放っています。アフリカ音楽とラテン音楽が幸福な形で結びついていた黄金時代の空気を伝える、まさに決定版と言うべき名編集盤です。
　アフロ・ラテン・ファンはもちろん、セネガル音楽の歴史を知りたい方にも強くお勧めしたい作品です。

●日本語による説明をつけた帯を商品に添付して発送いたします。日本語解説は同封しておりません。予めご了承ください

トラックリスト
CD１
1. Unite Africaine
2. Guantanamera
3. Seyni
4. Guateque De Juan
5. Ma Bedou
6. Aminata
7. Fechelen Khaleyi
8. Comolloran
9. Condoleance Au Psdt Houphouet
10. El Manisero
11. Abidjan Me Voy
12. Sindjeli
13. Yo Tango Una Mujer
14. Conel Masayo

CD 2
1. El Guaguanco
2. Ay Que No
3. La Portuguita
4. El Manicero
5. El Divorcio
6. Preparen Candela
7. No Quiero El Son
8. Leyli
9. Sitiera
10. Yamanekh
11. Marie Gomis
12. Boni Boni

A landmark work released in 1995 on the UK label RetroAfric by Sikamo Jazz, a super‑group formed in 1993 when veteran masters reunited to create new music together.

A two‑disc anthology that looks back on the prime years of Laba Sossé, a singer remembered in West African music history as a symbol of the deep connection between local traditions and Cuban music.

A two‑disc compilation that assembles Afro‑Latin music which blossomed in Cotonou, the largest city in the Republic of Benin, during the 1960s and 1970s.

A two‑disc compilation bringing together Afro‑Latin music that developed in Conakry, the capital of the Republic of Guinea, during the 1960s and 1970s.

A collection of field recordings made during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s across Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Tennessee, featuring hymns, speeches, spirituals, and gospel songs.

The new album dad bb marks Hajime Tachibana’s first solo release in 13 years since his 2013 USB album MONACO, and stands as his tenth solo album.

The terms “nursery rhymes” and “children’s songs” may give rise to visions of idyllic innocence and the charms of childhood, but "Play Nursery Rhymes and Children's Songs" by Tokiyo Ooto & Orhythmo, their first release on EM Records, brings forth quite different aural imagery: this is an eerie and unsettling sonic picture book which hints at the darkness and mystery which form the hidden heart of many traditional songs and rhymes. The length of the songs provides a hint: each piece delves deeply into the latent uncanniness of the music, with superficial innocence gradually displaced as electric guitar, bass, field recordings and concrete sounds draw the listener into a chilly forest, while Tokiyo Ooto’s voice croons dark “lullabies for adults,” blending elements of folk, slowcore and dream pop. The Tokiyo Ooto & Orhythmo duo formed in 2023, releasing their first album in 2024. This release updates two pieces from the first album, and also includes a traditional Japanese children’s song from Shiga Prefecture and a masterpiece for children by composer Yasushi Akutagawa. Both musicians are Osaka-based: Otoo is a guitarist and singer-songwriter who also works in band and solo contexts; Orhythmo is a bassist with hardcore punk roots who focuses on improvisation, drone, noise and ambient sound. This release is available on CD, vinyl and DL; physical versions feature a printed insert with Japanese and English lyrics. The evocative cover is by Yoshitomo Ano.

A work of genuinely monumental proportions. Jean-Claude Eloy's Gaku-No-Michi - subtitled "Tao of Music" or "Ways of Music" - stands among the towering achievements of 20th Century electroacoustic practice. Produced at the electronic music studio of NHK Radio in Tokyo between 1977 and 1978, its four hours of concrete and electronic sound unfold as what the composer called "a film without images" - an immense, spiraling architecture of sonic transformation that remains, nearly five decades on, as radical and absorbing as the day it was conceived. Born in Paris in 1938, Eloy belonged to the great second wave of post-war European composers. He studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur, winning First Prizes in Piano, Chamber Music, Counterpoint, and Ondes Martenot, and worked on composition with Darius Milhaud. Summer courses at Darmstadt brought encounters with Messiaen, Boulez, and Stockhausen; he then entered Boulez's master class at the Music Academy in Basel. Yet Eloy was never content to remain within the European serialist orbit. A professorship at the University of California, Berkeley during the late 1960s opened his ears to Eastern aesthetics - to the vast, unhurried perception of time in Asian musical traditions. From that point forward, his trajectory diverged sharply from his contemporaries, carrying him toward India, Japan, and a singular practice in which the boundaries between Occident and Orient dissolved into sound itself. After the 135-minute electronic meditation of Shânti (1972-74), realized in Cologne, Eloy traveled to Tokyo. There, working inside the NHK Denshi Ongaku Studio, he produced Gaku-No-Michi - a composition of staggering ambition, structured in four linked parts. The first, "Tokyo", draws on the raw acoustic fabric of the city - subway announcements, factory hum, political speeches broadcast from loudspeakers in public squares - and subjects it to a slow, spiraling metamorphosis, pulling the concrete toward the abstract. "Fushiki-e", the longest section at nearly 80 minutes, reverses the trajectory: electronically generated material absorbs fragments of Gagaku court music, Nô theater, and Shômyô Buddhist chant, drifting toward a sustained "sound of immobilization" - an immense organ point of contemplative stillness. "Banbutsu no Ryûdô" works an endlessly metamorphosing weft of daily and extraordinary sound, where a nationalistic speech dissolves into the buzzing of insects, where the hollow strike of a bamboo Shishi Odoshi against stone emerges only after long electronic transformation. "Kaiso", the final movement, condenses reminiscences of all that preceded, built around the annual commemorative ceremony of Hiroshima, leading through gravity and lament toward an infinitely sustained tone of peace. What distinguishes Gaku-No-Michi from so much electroacoustic work of its era is the sheer physical presence of its sound world. Eloy does not merely manipulate material - he inhabits it. The timbral palette is extraordinarily rich: electronically fabricated Tibetan bells more haunting than their acoustic counterparts, iridescent spirals that diffract into divergent lines before converging into vast harmonic masses, crackling meteorite trails, low-pitched resonances swept by winds both violent and majestic. The experience of duration is central to the work's design. Four hours is not a provocation but a necessity - the time required for the listener's perception to shift, for ordinary awareness of passing minutes to give way to something closer to immersion, to what Eloy described as a "psychophysical acoustic" encounter with sound. This 4CD set on Hors Territories represents the first complete publication of the work in its digitalized and revised version, dedicated to the memory of Wataru Uenami. Packaged in a 10-panel digipak with a 16-page booklet in French and English, it is an essential document - not only for admirers of Eloy, but for anyone drawn to the outer reaches of what composed sound can achieve. A bridge between worlds, between concrete and abstract, between the noise of the living city and the stillness at the heart of contemplation. CD 1: “Pachinko” introduces “Tokyo” in a deliberately stiff, regular, almost mechanical and untranscended way while the big spiral of long successive waves, which further develops through Tokyo, becomes more and more varied in its material ending in the surpassing and searched-for transubstantiation taking place throughout the fi nal part. CD 2: The second disc, “Fushiki-e”, takes us (through varied, complex, contrasted and sometimes violent sound episodes) towards the four “stages of contemplation” including the last one, “Mokuso”, which represents the ultimate stage of the contemplative. It is the longest part of the whole piece, lasting almost 80 minutes. CD 3: “Banbutsu no Ryûdô” is a boundless continuous “weft” travelling so to say through all sorts of daily or exceptional « sound scenes » continually metamorphosing, going from political speeches to a Shishi Odoshi, transformed for a long time well before its pure, direct appearance. CD 4: “Kaiso “ is a moment of gravity innervated and built around the annual commemorative ceremony of Hiroshima, which however leads us beyond the evoked drama to a place of surpassing with peace through the « Han » sound, extending the work to infinity…”

Packaged in a 6 panel digipak. Includes a 16 page booklet in French & English. A massive, four side-long drone-epic masterpiece “Shânti” (1972-73) for electronic and concrete sounds, in a spectacular double CD digipack issue. A hundred-and-thirty-five minute piece of "meditation music" for a four-track magnetic tape by Jean-Claude Eloy, produced in the Electronic Studio of the Radio of Cologne “The term “meditation music” triggered many conflicting comments including positive ones (“... let us say that Shanti belongs to those very rare works that change you after listening to them. You are not exactly the same before and after.” - Gerard Mannoni, Le Quotidien de Paris, 1974). Others, wondering at the strong sound presence of the piece, consider such aspect as hardly helpful to their own meditation... Let us be clear: “what meditates” here (”that” who meditates) is the composer. He is the one who takes you on his journey and guides you through his work like in a classic or romantic symphony. As a listener you are invited to follow “his” meditation... The composition is the meditation.”

Through the ages, several people from moustachioed party boat troubadours to jazz elite like Jimmy Smith/McGriff and Shirley Scott have wielded the power of the electric organ to hypnotize listeners. Now, taking all the possible cues from these musical heavyweights, and breaking through the musical sound barrier to organ-ize your mind comes Mr. Sophisticated Fingers. Together with the ever-faithful Cold Diamond & Mink this mystical key stroker rephrases ten of the greatest hits from Emilia Sisco’s debut album “Introducing” in a unique lyrical style. In Organ-ized’s Slow Dance & Soul album these songs continue for further greatness. You may have heard them before, now listen to them again, as now they’ve been organ-ized by the musical maestro Mr. Sophisticated Fingers, baby!

Yara Asmar’s new album, “everyone I love is sleeping and I love them so so much”, presents 11 pieces recorded over the past year between the small town of Alfred in upstate New York and Beirut. These sometimes fragile and tentative sound sketches reflect the times as Yara steps out, as if onto ice, into a new life on a new continent. She works with unfamiliar instruments, new materials and new sounds to build on her intimate style; homemade mechanical music boxes and a personal archive of family recordings form the backbone of its delicate textures. Asmar explores the peculiar resonance of the metallophone and her collection of deconstructed toy pianos, and guides her music into ever more surreal territories. The result is a work that is dreamlike, fragmentary and strangely timeless.

Orgone, a contemporary funk band based in Los Angeles, has spent years updating the sound of 60s and 70s soul and funk for the modern era. Among their catalog, New You stands out as one of the most beloved releases among fans.

With Réminiscences (2017–2019), Jean-Claude Éloy embarks on an ambitious journey through memory, transformation, and pure listening. This vast electroacoustic cycle—comprising Incantation, Confrontation, Contemplation, and Oppression-Libération—draws deeply from the sound world of his seminal work Yo-In. Éloy recycles and reworks electroacoustic materials originally created at the Institute of Sonology (Utrecht, 1979/1980) and incorporates an extraordinary archive of percussion samples recorded at his request by Japanese percussionist Sumire Yoshihara at NHK’s Electronic Music Studio in Tokyo, as well as contributions from Gaston Sylvestre and Michael Ranta. Unlike the original 1980 version—conceived as a sound theater for an imaginary ritual and realized with the participation of Michael W. Ranta—Réminiscences is conceived as a purely electroacoustic experience, liberated from the constraints of live performance. Éloy focuses on the most distinctive sources: boat sirens, natural phenomena (volcanoes, wind, rain, waves), African bird calls, industrial noises, and a wide palette of metallic, wooden, and skin percussion. The result is a celebration of sound itself—an acoustic ritual where each work explores a specific theme through the metamorphosis of its materials. Éloy’s intent is to draw the listener into a heightened state of auditory perception, encouraging a deep concentration on the sonic phenomena at the heart of the music. Réminiscences stands as a testament to his lifelong exploration of the power of listening and the transformative potential of electroacoustic art. Produced at Studio Eve-Défense, the composer’s home studio, and presented in a 5-panel digipak with a 24-page booklet, this release is both a culmination and a renewal of Éloy’s creative universe.

Subtitled: Primordial Vibration / Sound ceremonial with a contemplative character. Composed in 1983-1986. Sound ceremonial with a contemplative character for two voices of Japanese Buddhist monks (traditional Shômyô techniques - traditional temple chanting - in a larger, modern and creative form), three Japanese Gagaku instrumentalists (traditional court music in a modern and creative form), one percussionist (with a percussion instrument orchestra) and electro-acoustic (fixed interactive sounds). Electronic studio of the Sweelinck Conservatorium, Amsterdam (1984-86). With Ebihara Kôshin (Tendai sect): solo voice, Arai Kôjun (Shingon sect): solo voice, Yaotani Satoru: Ô-Hichiriki solo, Shiba Sukeyasu : solo Ryûteki, Miyata Mayumi: Shô solo, Ô-Shô, Alto-Sheng, Michael Ranta : solo percussions, Jean-Claude Eloy, electro-acoustic (sound projection, general coordination, mixing). Studio recording made during the Donaueschingen festival 1990 (Donaueschinger Musiktage) by the SWF (Südwestfunk), Baden-Baden. First World publication. Presented in a small box of 3 x CDs with 60 pages booklet.

First world publication for the seminal Yo-In (1980) an electro-acoustic work produced in Japan and revisited by the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris in 1981. “Sound Theater for an imaginary rite”. Yo-Inleads to a sort of “celebration-ritualization of the day of man on Earth”. Jean-Claude Eloy discovered the meaning of Yo-In by going deeper into the culture of Japan where he had been invited by Toru Takemitsu in 1970: “Yo-In, echo, rhyme, resonance, psychic reverberation”. Karheinz Stockhausen quickly valued Jean-Claude Eloy and has always supported him. Close universes, long-term works. Four acts for Reverberations “in an unusual context". Performed by Michael Ranta (solo percussionist) and Jean-Claude Eloy (electroacoustic projection, synchronisation, mixings). Recorded during a public concert given at the Warsaw Autumn festival Polish-Radio, Warsaw, September, 1994 "I look at my watch for the first time: it has been four hours since I entered the sanctuary and I have not left my seat. Actually, nowadays few musical pieces are capable of keeping the audience awake that long. 'Yo-In' does not just capture our attention through a mere act of hypnosis, through the spellbinding magic of sounds or through some hovering dizziness [...] 'Yo-In' is not born from a land of oblivion but from the realm of consciousness. Here, once time has been stretched by the long, evolving scores, one becomes much more accessible and open, extremely receptive to the many specific and complex events that follow one another, overlap, intermingle and combine with one another in a wonderfully mastered development. […]" J.C. Eloy Deluxe edition, 4xCD + 160pp book in english

Thank you : floors, walls, ceilings, corridors, chairs, tables, air-conditioners, heaters, alarms, plastic, paper, foil, tins, boxes, containers, microphones, speakers, shellac, tape, magnets, dust, data, hollows, surfaces, bodies, actions, weather, vibration, Jennifer Callaway, Carly Fischer, Eric la Casa, David Prescott-steed, Martin Kay, Matthew Davis, Francisco Meirino, Justas Pipinis, Ursss, everyone from C3, Simon Whetham, Edwina Eves, Yvan Etienne, Chisato Ishiyama, Pierre Judon, Aposiopèse. Eamon Sprod (previously working as Tarab) works with sound collected from mundane or neglected urban spaces, pursuing an anti-naturalist field recording practice to draw oblique narratives and listening spaces from the everyday and its outer edges. Rather than describing spaces, he attempts to shape them, by working to include everyday spaces as active participants in aural experiences instead of only acting as their container.

During a 2016 trip to Colombia, I was very fortunate to be welcomed by the staff of the Rio Claro Natural Reserve, located in the central Cordillera. After several days of recording in the caves—the ones open to the public—inhabited by small colonies of cave-dwelling Guacharos (Steatornis caripensis), Juan Guillermo Garcés, director and founder of the Rio Claro sanctuary, allowed me to access a secret location outside of the reserve, home to what ornithologists reckon is one of the largest known colonies of these birds in Colombia. The only species of its kind, the Cave Guacharos (also known as Oilbird), is a gregarious, cave-dwelling animal that has developed the rare echolocation abilities usually found in cetaceans, bats and, more rarely, mammals. While the vast majority of echolocation signals known to exist in the animal world operate in a spectrum that is inaudible to humans, the signals emitted by Guacharos occur in the medium/high range of our auditory spectrum. Although Alexander Von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland reported the existence of these animals to Europe in 1799, and Von Humboldt described them between 1814 and 1817, their nesting sites were already well known to indigenous populations, who saw them as the seat of evil spirits. Traditionally used by these peoples for their meat and cooking oil, the Guacharos were largely decimated by the colonial presence in the area, then hunted until the 1960s before being listed as a protected species in the 1970s.

Roping in Pierre Bastien and Mark Cunningham to provide brass, Mike Cooper turns in his most kaleidoscopic fourth world dream sequence to date, drawing on dub and exotica to harmonise with Andrew Pekler's marooned soundscapes... Cooper admits in the liner notes that although he's often compared with Jon Hassell, it's German painter Mati Klarwein fantastical album covers that always reminded him exactly why he was doing what he was doing. Because Cooper makes music for imaginary places, not tangible soundtracks but half dreamed, half lived experiences that course through his catalog of experiments. And his process has never been quite so vivid as it is on 'Stochastic Parrot', a suite of vertiginous reverberations that are struck through with Cooper's "real and virtual" lap steel twangs, collaged together from samples and field recordings that wobble like heat haze. Different pockets of rhythm bash into each other on 'ARCHAEOPTERYX', accompanied by Bastien and Cunningham's spiraling brass improvisations. And Cooper holds the sounds together with his lulling repeated phrases; the hand drums might sound as if they're in conflict with the cycling drum machine crashes, but that's the point - it's not like channeling a dream so much as it's like being subjected to three or four dreams simultaneously. It's the ghosts of jazz fusion being raked over coals at midnight: just tune into 'SUMATRA SAMPHIRE', with its distant animalistic wails and popcorn drums, or the granulized 'HAT YAI', that sounds like the prelude to a druggy ritual.

"Shaking off the uneasy depths of Lapsed Gasps took a minute (those mix sessions were intense!). Oliver and I knew we’d like the record that followed to let in some light. Not much light, but enough to differently illuminate the darkened corners Push For Night prefers to inhabit. So we shifted the stone slab covering the conceptual entrance to the sarcophagal room that contains the idea of PFN, just a little, and the crepuscular light inside the room changed. The shadows behaved differently, sounded differently. The textures, sizes, shapes, and acoustics of our weird space altered. How can we interpret the shadows’ song and dance differently this time? In these subtle changes in perception there lies a wealth of things to investigate, to peer into, to be afraid of, to be excited by… That said, our writing process doesn’t involve too much premeditated verbal back and forth. We tend to start lobbing sessions at each other and a path inevitably clears. In this case, and in no small part, the clearing of the path of That Porous Line begins with the contributions of my longtime sonic comrade David Daniell. The two pieces Oliver and I made with David are the earliest in the sessions that would become this record. He brought, for lack of a better word, a beauty - a gentle, organic beauty - that ultimately reoriented PFN toward a sense of the melodic and of spontaneity. We moved away from programming sequences, generative patches, and atomizing every sound source via heavy processing. We lightened the gloom a bit. It might sound naive, but we touched instruments again; we played guitars and basses and keyboards and percussion, fingers on metal wire and wood. We reveled in less-than-perfect real time performance, and documented it as such. There is a certain lightness to that. Don’t get me wrong, That Porous Line is absolutely a collaged, flickering, chaotic, electro-acoustic record. The project is the project after all. Although our tomb-room isn’t fully hermetic (what is?), I think it is a place PFN will always reside. A total escape outside into harshly lit reality without mystery is fairly unappealing, for us anyway. Inside is personal, guarded from too much light; a dark terrarium of weird ghosts and peculiar shadows ripe for conjuring and harnessing in order to make them kick and howl in a way pleasing to us. Or at least be near enough to them to try and hear what they sing. That’s the motive. We decorate the cave, invite the specters to reveal a message, and try to capture something. Inside, cocooned in the semi-dark of our uncommon space, we bang our heads against the act of interpreting these shifty, chimeric, hidden sonic shadows. How big is it in here? How much further down can we go? Did something move in that corner over there? Can it touch us? Can we catch it? That’s where the fear is. That’s where the fun happens. That’s why we listen. That’s why we play."

Room 40's J.WLSN returns to Lawrence English's label flanked by his old mate Liam Keenan with a haze of guitars, synths and samples that evokes the rugged, beautiful landscape of New South Wales. Wilson and Keenan had been working together at an art museum in Sydney for some time when they finally decided to book a session at a local studio. It didn't take long either; working with their mutual friend David Akerman, they laid down a set of peaceful longform jams that appeared as they reminisced about different stretches of time in the area where they both grew up. Finding the shared similarities and differences, the music appeared as a soundtrack. On the four-part 'Teflon Blues', their hazy recollections buried beneath a fog of blurry instrumentation, while on the generous centerpiece 'The Power of Emptiness' they're obscured by gusts of white noise that seem to erode the duo's humming guitar tones. The album concludes with the three act 'Suburban Dopamine', a tape loop symphony that builds so slowly you don't even notice it coming. Eventually, the muggy, ferric guitars are interrupted by crystal clear plucks that roll across the duo's sonic landscape like tumbleweed.

“Ruins are the style of our future cities, future cities are themselves ruins.” - Izosaki Arata A Note From Lawrence English Nostalgia is not an ideology, though in this moment, we could be mistaken for thinking it might be just that. Over the past years, the idea of nostalgia has been filtered through various political and technological lenses and has become a tool used for forgetting, rather than remembering. Instead of embracing histories’ complexities and inconsistencies, this version of nostalgia seeks only singular recollection. This contemporary phenomenon of nostalgia has become a methodology at best, and a weapon at worst, used to erode the past and project forward a collapsed and unimaginably sanitised version of things, places, and ways of being from former times. It’s this projection that sees it playing a mounting role in a social pathology associated with reducing the imagined possibilities of future. The Rest Is My Ghost is a record that interrogates the manifestations of this reductive futuring and celebrates those that have tried (and failed), and those who continue to push back against decayed and revisionist positions. It’s a record that considers the weaponisation of nostalgia for the purposes of cloaking possible futures. In recent times, I’ve proposed a term for this weaponised use of nostalgia, something I have called Acid Nostalgia. I offer it as a shorthand to describe the de-contouring of the future through a corrosive fixation on a flatten rendering of the preceding times. It is, in part, a certain type of lazy cultural scripting where tropes of the past are presented in the absolute, as empty pictorials; photocopies without any original from which to draw actual meaning, or useful detail. Acid Nostalgia describes an increasingly common political projection of nostalgia that exists without any subjective connection to the memory surrounding and contained within it. Like acid poured onto a surface, this use of nostalgia seeks to erodes and smooth out the complexity and texture of lived connection and longing, which has until recently guided contemplations of nostalgia. Acid Nostalgia instead erases the texture of histories and de-contours the past, and in doing so dematerialises the horizon of possibility, which by its very nature marks the beginning point for any (and all) imaginable futures. Acid Nostalgia is a dreamless screen, where uncertainty, restlessness and aspiration are subjected to corrosion, breaking down and neutralising the wellspring of futures which are birthed from within the ambiguously charged, complex and at times chaotic atmospheres of the present. The Rest Is My Ghost is not however some universal reading of these things and happenings. Rather it draws its breath from a very personal pathway carved through my own fraught experiences of nostalgia and framed through a disparate collage of chance encounters, situations, places and provocations. It takes oblique notes from civic and architectural references such as Japan’s Metabolist movement, Hong Kong’s ‘one line sky’ and Los Angeles’s vanished Sodium Vapour lights. It interpolates texts – factual and fictional – by authors such as Franco Berardi, Kate Crawford, JG Ballard, Katsuhiro Otomo, Mark Fisher and Alexei Yurchak who have each so wonderfully sought to rupture the familiarity of now, and push us towards other ways of imaging ourselves, our surroundings and our very ways of being in this world. I also owe a debt of thanks to Adam Curtis in helping launch what has become this edition. It was his provocation, in a conversation we shared about an overwhelming and profound sense of uncertainty around being able to predict the immediate future and how to respond to that, which sparked the earliest inklings of this edition. The Rest Is My Ghost is ultimately a record about the promise of constructions and connections to come, material, social and political. It's a record that accepts the fragility of failure as a source of ultimate potential, and a position from which the deepest freedom of imagination might be sought and summoned forth to conjure even the most unimaginable, (but) possible futures.

At the beginning of the 1960s, at the Berklee College of Music, Byard Lancaster met some feisty friends: Sonny Sharrock, Dave Burrell and Ted Daniel. It is easy to see why he rapidly became involved in free jazz. Once he was settled in New York, he appeared on Sunny Murray Quintet, recorded under the leadership of the drum crazy colleague of Albert Ayler. In 1968, the saxophonist and flutist recorded his first album under his own name: It’s Not Up To Us. The following year he came to Paris in the wake of… Sunny Murray. He would come back to France in 1971 (again with Murray) and in 1973 (without Murray for a change). This is when he met Jef Gilson, the pianist and producer who encouraged him to record under his own name again. On Palm Records (Gilson’s label), he would release four albums: Us, Mother Africa, Exactement and Funny Funky Rib Crib. “Funny Funky Rib Crib” is an unforgettable recording (made up of several sessions dating from the middle of 1974) of creative jazz overwhelmed by funk and soul. If Lancaster had already made successful albums in the same genre – notably New Horizons, under the name Sounds Of Liberation which he co-led with Khan Jamal –, this one is an homage to James Brown and Sammy Davis enjoying the company of a host of guests including François Tusques (electric piano), Clint Jackson III (trumpet), François Nyombo (guitar), Joseph Traindl (trombone)… Funny Funky Rib Crib’s cover is a three-quarter profile portrait of the saxophonist (who can also be heard on flute, piano and even vocals), however, on the record, it is the whole group, inspired and frenetic, that tests the melodies of “Just Test”, “Dogtown” or “Rib Crib” – the two versions of which display leader Lancaster’s art of nuance. On both sides of the album, the group also moves into a calmer groove, infused by blues and soul, “Work And Pray” and “Loving Kindness” are meditative tracks where listeners can lay back and relax before asking for more: Funny Funky Rib Crib!!!

Folds of water sanctify the river. Tracing soft, cool hands, the tall oak make way for a child who is older now. The moon gives chase, as clouds attempt to climb her. And choiceless, she falls through, further out of sight. An episodic, dreamlike place; Headwater is an invitation to explore what is fundamental to life – as if asking the listener; what, after losing my compass, is the nature of my experience? The headwater is the childhood of the stream – its beginning. And as though banished from the safety, innocence and purity of this place, the individual is carried through rapids, gashed and sawn, calling for the self to be woven again. In these early moments, the poignancy of this venture is felt in droves – a woman lost in the forest trying to find a way out, silhouette skating through light while something approaches, further out of sight. Everyone is thrown out of childhood – hurled into a life to make sense of something which lives on in memory. The mind catches fragments, painted by ink found in the canals of the veins and rivers within – their headwater, the heart. Like tentacles beneath our skin, their message arrives unannounced, while a great struggle embarks to keep them at bay – the clarity of their awareness polluted. After a time, the river is older now. The forest’s foliage has tuned, sculpted and moulded her – so much so, that the water is barely recognisable. But the girl is no fool, and her sensitivity will not be auctioned. Catching glimpses of the headwater – she cries out to the forest and the valley. This time, unafraid of the pain it wears and hides behind, pretending. She sings to the eclipse, crying for the stars and their breath on the river’s back. Calling for the animals, insects and fish - bowing to the scent of the pine in the evening warmth of the air, weeping to the memory of her childhood, she comes alive. Only in such a surrender does the headwater of her tears make itself known, and all that is longed for arise without having ever been lost. Could she really be creating all of it? And like a child with a boundless imagination, be confusing her role in the play with the candid, honest face of life itself? Humility might yet speak – claiming all she has taken herself to be as the leaves and foliage which pollute and fragment the stream. That a quest to return to childhood is an unnecessary one – because the currents which begun at the headwater still contain, at every step of the river, the headwater itself. And that the cries and memories heard starkly through the forest valley have still come from the deepest waterways the body has pronounced. And so, originate in the heart – and are no threat.

A note from Cleared Our approach to making records has always involved an exchange of individually created sounds, which are joined together through live improvisation, studio recording, and the use of diagrammatic visual scores. Over the last several years, we have been interested in expanding very small fragments of these discreet pieces of audio into long-form compositions. This process has resulted in a new approach to how we build tracks from the ground up. In this particular workflow, one of us is largely responsible for supplying the main cache of sounds, and the other is responsible for the processing and sequencing of those sounds. As we developed this kind of working relationship, the nature of the material has ventured into a palette that is more electronic. This is perhaps a result of the "collage" aspect of how the audio is arranged inside of a digital environment, as well as our continued discovery and use of new digital processing tools. We are constantly attempting to extract as much as possible out of an initial collection of audio, which typically includes field recordings, synthesis experiments, bits of acoustic instrumentation, and found sounds. In many instances the original sounds are manipulated far beyond their recognizable characteristics, which creates new and unexpected results. We also share a great personal interest in utilizing sounds with different levels of fidelity, as we both enjoy the unique traits inherent in various recording formats. The artifacts and destructive compression of antiquated digital recorders, and the pristine qualities of modern studio technology both contain, in different ways, our own intimate relationships to such devices and spaces. We believe this is reflective of how we associate and remember sound, which is through the peripherals of its delivery. In the context of Cleared, this interest is pursued to further the poetic and gestural features of our music, and to create records that are infused with visual imagery, memory, and the physical environments in which we find inspiration. Lustres is the most detailed and refined output of our studio practice using this method of exchanging sound material. The four tracks present a mood that, for us, is indicative of a kind of rolling celestial atmosphere. Simultaneously, there exists both a subterranean and starlit quality about the music. To us, it is not unlike the imagined terrain of a distant meteor or orbiting asteroid, alternating between the extremes of light and temperature as its path is slowly carved in a dark vacuum. It is music for contemplation and quiet reflection, as these are the states of listening we have come to greatly appreciate in our personal lives, and as the space in which we are most happy to have our music experienced. Lustres is a document being released as we near 15 years of the Cleared collaboration, and we hope it offers listeners a chapter of our story that, while rooted in our past material, advances the core discipline of what we have always pursued as our central theme: Patience.