NEW ARRIVALS

22nd anniversary reissue of what is for us one of the greatest albums of the late 20th century, originally released on Rephlex in 1998, now painstakingly remastered by Rashad Becker after being unavailable on any format for more or less two decades. If you’re into anything from Prince to A Guy Called Gerald, Tirzah to Jai Paul, Autechre to Rick Rubin - this really is an all-time great.

When you make a record that doesn’t conform, expect to divide opinion. ‘Like Weather’ was released in 1998, on Rephlex - run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James - an often great label that had a following that couldn't quite deal with electronic music made by a girl - let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn’t fathom about ‘Like Weather’ is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM or Trip Hop, genres it has so often been awkwardly lumped in with, but something else that cant quite be categorised - even two decades later.

‘Like Weather’ echoes the world-building energy of Prince’s ‘Sign O The Times’ - every track is a self contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions - it’s full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you’re into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album, know that this here is the aesthetic, spiritual blueprint). It feels analog, then digital - it’s R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist - attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it’ll just find something else to slide into.

In 2020 we reckon it’s time to re-appraise ‘Like Weather’ as one of the great overlooked albums of our age, made by a female auteur operating in an overwhelmingly male-dominated scene at the turn of the century. Now newly remastered by Rashad Becker (a long, 6 month process - trust that a lot of work has gone into it) - it sounds fucking amazing, one of only a handful of records that have never left our side since we opened our doors in 1998.

So yeah, we could write a long thing here about Leila’s background playing keyboard for Bjork, her meeting with the Rephlex lads, the Aphex connection etc etc, but ‘Like Weather is a record that needs no hype - for real - listen to it and you’ll know.

Hylic by J.TRIPP distills post-millennial tensions, taking us to the edge of unfamiliarity and then pushing us back, inward, to find comfort in artificial intimacy. At first, it awakens a sense of disorientation - as if there were something we can’t quite grasp. As the listening deepens, the album begins to feel like the cohesive soundtrack to a metropolitan simulation - one where reality as we know it morphes into something new. At some points, soft and expansive; at others, sharp and distorted. Although its sonic world echoes urban landscapes, folk and pop sensibilities start to emerge - the human-like nature of the music feels suspended, while voices thread indistinct, siren-like messages, anchoring us to a melody that guides us through a hostile environment. Laic (feat. Lutto Lento) is our portal - we stomp into a dusty land without gravity, metallic sand in our eyes and mouth, and an echoing, child-like song in our ears. Static shocks propel us toward the next space, Gelid, a sparring between bells-loaded guns with no winners. The pace speeds up, then stretches down again, warping the walls around us in Skirr. We’re running inside a factory - machines pumping steam, shiny drops falling from the ceiling - until we stop again, feeling our heartbeat racing, head turning. Wend takes us back to the hazy atmospheres of Laic: a slow-motion, romantic dance in the quicksands. Then Comesss (feat. Enhancement), with its sticky textures and choir of mellifluous, distorted vocals and the odd bass slap, slashes and reverses reality. In contrast, Melic is a balm - the otherworldly lullaby, backed by the cooing of synthetic doves, is enchanting but wicked. We hesitate to indulge in it for long and step into Lithic, an endless ascension built on electric keys, strings and stomping beats, before entering the almost-fantastic realm of Whilom again - where a waterfall of dissonant flutes decompose into buzzing synths under the rumble of fake thunder. The conclusion of this lucid vision is Thole, where rattlesnakes slither at our feet - or is it the steam pushing through the underground’s iron grates? - and the memory of a song brings us back to a pop idea of emotions. Across nine tracks, Hylic reminds us that we’re already living the future we have been raving about - and that, perhaps, it’s already slipping away.

John Also Bennett (JAB)’s Music for Save Rooms 1 & 2 compiles two volumes of minimal music conceived as infinitely looping and morphing compositions for “save rooms” - temporary safe spaces within video game maps. The compositions primarily stem from a week spent at work in a former military barn in the Marin Headlands just north of San Francisco, spurred on by multimedia artist and Bennett’s frequent collaborator Peter Burr (for whom a handful of the pieces on these albums were initially composed). Consumed with the idea of music that could create an effortless sense of stasis, yet never exactly repeat itself, Bennett spent days alone in the remote, empty barn composing endless loops, experimenting with phasing techniques, and melding with the surrounding ambience. The groundwork was laid for over 11 compositions, a few of which at that time were finished. But in early 2020, faced with a pandemic-canceled tour and non-refundable plane tickets, Bennett digitally released a premature version of Music for Save Rooms containing two finished ‘Save Room’ pieces plus various unreleased odds and ends - a synthesized version of Arvo Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”, “Still Inside the Deku Tree”, an alto flute piece and live staple referencing Koji Kondo’s classic score for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, and “Utopia and Oblivion”, a work for a virtual just intonation piano & DX7. Bennett presents here a definitely mixed, mastered, and expanded version of Music for Save Rooms (now Music for Save Rooms 1), alongside Music for Save Rooms 2, a fully realized album of new music stemming directly from those original sessions in Marin County. Composed almost exclusively for a Yamaha DX7, Roland D-50 and JV1080, Music for Save Rooms 2 differs from its predecessor - instead of a collection of disparate works centered around the theme of stasis, the album presents a more cohesive narrative, with shorter tracks relative to its predecessor’s more long-form pieces. Opener “Sky Music'' contains as much silence as it does sound - effortless chords float into view and then sizzle into nothingness. “Power Plant”’s glissando vocal pads and deep percussion hits seem to create a regenerative space, while “Out Back” and “Ambling'' both hint at some distant, foggily recollected liminal place. “Glass Castle” is perhaps more explicit with its imagery, combining the sounds of a glass harmonica and fragile vocal pads with alternatively gorgeous and dissonant piano motifs that utilize a tuning system developed by Iannis Xenakis. Boiled down over years to only its essential parts, Music for Save Rooms 2 is a tour through the mind’s eye of an artist searching for an elusive place, somewhere deep in the open world of our collective consciousness.

Feed Like Fishes is Should's first full-length record — an album of noisy, sedate, and minimal pop songs. Falling somewhere between shoegazer, slowcore, and postrock, Feed Like Fishes is a wonderfully complicated record that echoes the sounds of Yo La Tengo, Slowdive, Bedhead, and Galaxie 500. The album also includes Should's take on The Wedding Present song "Spangle."

The album begins with "Fish Fourteen," a fuzzed-out lo-fi instrumental inspired by Colin Newman's instrumental solo record, Provisionally Entitled The Singing Fish. "Sarah Missing" fits perfectly with the work on Should's A Folding Sieve album, with its unforgettable vocal chorus awash in shoegazing delight.

"It Still Would" and "It's Pull Is Slight" are moderately-paced indie rock tunes that bring to mind Bedhead, the latter song featuring a parade of bells throughout its extended coda.

"Memdrive" encircles whispered vocals with gliding bass and guitar lines in the spirit of Main's early work. Should also explore Apollo-era Brian Eno on "Inst2" substituting heavy analog-delayed guitar notes for Eno's keyboards.

"Both Eyes Open" ends the record with a nod to the melodious, delicate side of Yo La Tengo with Marc and Tanya's coupled vocals going down as sweet as sugar.

Laurel Halo returns with an album of original soundtrack music, composed for the film Midnight Zone by visual artist Julian Charrière. Following the path of a drifting Fresnel lighthouse lens as it descends through the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone — a remote abyssal plain in the Pacific Ocean, rich in rare metals and increasingly targeted for deep-sea mining — the film traces a descent into one of Earth’s last untouched ecosystems.

Charrière’s film reveals the deep not as void, but as a luminous biome teeming with fragile life: bioluminescent creatures, swirling schools of fish, and elusive predators. The suspended lens becomes an abyssal campfire, attracting species caught in the tides of uncertainty, their futures hanging in the balance.

Echoing this tension, Halo’s compositions evoke a sensory freefall, where gravity falters and light and sound flicker in uncertain rhythms. Midnight Zone is a sonic drift through the space between what we seek to extract, fail to understand, and must protect.

Halo’s score evokes the life that exists beyond our physical airbound capacity. The material features long, subtle passages of electro-acoustic ambient, drone and sound design, slowly flowing and unfolding with rich detail. The music, composed largely on a Montage 8 synthesizer and Yamaha TransAcoustic piano at the Yamaha studios in New York City, possesses an uncanny quality: that of synthetic waveforms being amplified and sung through the stringboard of the physical body of the TransAcoustic piano. Combined with stacks of violin and viol da gamba, the music on Midnight Zone possesses trace elements of a human hand in an otherwise sunken landscape. Patient, submerged, and alive. The album will be the third on Halo’s imprint, Awe.

The film is central to Charrière’s current solo exhibition Midnight Zone. The exhibition engages with underwater ecologies, exploring the complexity of water as an elemental medium affected by anthropogenic degradation. Reflecting upon its flow and materiality, profundity and politics, its mundane and sacral dimensions, the solo show acts as a kaleidoscope, inviting us to dive dee

After decades spent shaping the sound of southern Madagascar, Damily returns with Fanjiry, his most intimate and focused record to date. A key figure in tsapiky as a guitarist and composer, and a driving force behind a genre he helped define, Damily has long expressed himself through the voices of the singers accompanying his bands. With Fanjiry, he takes a singular step forward: for the first time, he carries his compositions himself through singing — not by claiming the role of a singer, but as a natural extension of his playing and personal storytelling. Known for igniting village ceremonies and carrying the fever of Toliara far beyond Madagascar’s shores, he makes a shift here — not away from trance, but deeper into its core. Recorded and mixed in just three days at Studio Black Box with analog sound engineer Peter Deimel, Fanjiry reduces tsapiky to its essence: a single guitar and a single heartbeat. Damily plays alone, yet fills the entire space — bass, rhythm, melody, breath and pulse merging into a dense, vibrating and constantly moving sound. Each riff becomes architecture, each harmonic opens a door onto memory, childhood landscapes, and those nights when music heals, connects, and pushes back the dark. Free of nostalgia and frozen folklore, Fanjiry unfolds as an intimate territory where tsapiky naturally converges with memories of village life in the 1980s — the Pecto, Radio Mozambique, East African 7-inch records, Malagasy national hits — alongside possession rituals and the practices of local healers. Added to this is a second life lived far from Madagascar, which has allowed Damily to explore the depths of his guitar more freely, pushing his sound further, beyond constraints. Raw and precise, suspended between earth and sky, the album is born from gesture and necessity. Its title — the last star visible before dawn — captures that fragile moment when a single guitar can hold an entire world and still move forward. With Fanjiry, Damily does not step back — he opens the horizon. A solitary record reaching toward others, where intimacy becomes universal and the dance begins again, softly, before sunrise.

Following Léve Léve Vol. 1, this second volume continues a long-term exploration of the popular music of São Tomé and Príncipe, with a clear focus on rhythm, movement and dancefloor energy. Curated by Tom B., Léve Léve Vol. 2 brings together emblematic recordings from the 1970s and 1980s, carefully restored and remastered, designed as much for close listening as for DJ use. The compilation deepens and completes the first volume by returning to key groups such as Sangazuza, Conjunto Equador, Africa Negra and Pedro Lima, while also unveiling previously unreleased or hard-to-find tracks. Across the record, puxa and socopê rhythms unfold with remarkable intensity, capturing these bands at the height of their powers: tight arrangements, driving grooves and a strong sense of collective momentum. Beyond celebration, Léve Léve Vol. 2 also reflects a precise cultural and political context. Several songs reference Luso-African independence struggles, spirituality, love and everyday life, anchoring this music in a history shaped by resistance, circulation and hybridization. Recorded in São Tomé, Luanda or Lisbon — often with the involvement of key figures from the Lusophone diaspora — these tracks reveal a modern musical landscape that has long remained under-documented. Conceived as a living record rather than a static archival object, this compilation speaks equally to DJs and curious listeners. It once again affirms Bongo Joe’s approach: bringing powerful, popular and complex music back into circulation, without nostalgia or exoticism, and making it fully present today.

Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart are a trio who utilize string instruments, voices, and manual tape effect processing to craft compositions from alternately tranquil and disquieting improvised music. The three musicians are individually rooted in deep sound exploration, multi-disciplinary composition, and all manner of cross-genre collaboration. The musical ground covered by their solo practices is correspondingly expansive, and their individual recording and performance credits read as a veritable who’s who, ranging from DIY darlings to household names of experimental avant-garde, electronic, indie rock, and more.

The trio’s collective sound is based in improvisation—automatic, intuitive composition via their three voices and three string instruments (viola, cello, and violin, respectively). Their influences are vast—dispatched with more playful ease than a trio of string instruments is typically approached with, and just as likely to be found in the cloud-obscured mountains of Donegal, the low-rent cacophony of a midwestern basement, or the revelatory expanse of the Nurse With Wound list as in the storied halls of the academy. Touchstones and areas of interest aside, the main thing that Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart engage with in BODY SOUND is listening and reacting.

“Improvisation has a special capacity to facilitate a kind of sonic intimacy,” says Kohl. “We're making choices together in the moment. We're creating time together before thought enters the equation. It's an incredibly intimate and intuitive space to share, and feels like the heart center of this music and this practice.”

The trio’s approach to improvisation is very much embedded in and informed by their Chicago music community. The city’s ongoing improvised music tradition, which can envelop every genre imaginable, is one where a working musician’s ideas can evolve at a near-constant pace and where anything can be explored in the name of sound. And with sound, there’s always space to consider.

Where will the improvisation take place?

How will that space shape the sounds being made?

How will that sound resonate in the dim light of a small neighborhood bar?

How will it sound in the chromatic refractions of an ornate church?

Can it feel different-yet-equally perfect?

For Whitney Johnson, Lia Kohl, and Macie Stewart the answer to the last question is yes, definitely.

Stewart: Our quest as a crew is to explore space and every iteration of what that can mean, be it physical space, emotional space, sonic space, etc. Space is an instrument.

Johnson: It’s more than the acoustic properties of the recording spaces. Our bodies, emotions, and relationships show up in those spaces with affordances and limitations for the music each time. We are vibrating beings, sensitive and expressive, an amoeba of physical and psychic pressures with specific resonances in time and space.

Kohl: The space we’re in always feels like a collaborator in this trio more than in other contexts. I can always feel us all responding to where we are and the resonances that live there.”

On BODY SOUND, the trio worked with International Anthem engineer and album co-producer Dave Vettraino to translate the sonic specificities of three recording locations: International Anthem studios on Iron Street (Chicago), Shirk Studios (Chicago), and Boyd’s Jig and Reel (Knoxville, TN, as part of Big Ears Festival). Vettraino also brought a deep knowledge of tape manipulation and a willingness to experiment. “All it took was for one of us to say, ‘What if that was a loop?’, and he was already setting up the reel-to-reel,” says Johnson of the album’s post-production, which leaned heavily into their shared love of saturated tape sounds.

That trust, it seems, was already there. In addition to the communal criss-cross inherent in sharing their Chicago home base, the trio worked with Vettraino on Stewart’s 2025 solo effort When the Distance Is Blue. It was her debut on International Anthem but far from her first appearance in the label’s catalog as a player. Ditto for Kohl and Johnson, whose collaboration and friendship with the label goes back years. Taken as a whole, we could argue that this most recent collaboration, the tape-manipulated fried beauty documented on BODY SOUND, has been a long time coming.

In the context of this work, tape sound is much more than a mixing treatment or a production tactic. Here Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart are using variations on the medium to edit and reshape the pieces themselves, employing multiple analog tape machines to reimagine their improvised material into meticulously crafted compositions (“another layer of improvisation,” says Stewart). It’s all a response to the spaces they were originally engaged with, and the use of a highly physical medium like analog tape deepens the spatial engagement of the trio’s work to striking, playful, and organically psychedelic effect.

The resultant BODY SOUND is deep, melancholy, and triumphant, coming across like a kind of lost or amalgamated folk music. It’s certainly part of an ongoing creative continuum, even boasting track titles adapted from Yoko Ono’s classic book of text scores Grapefruit.

The album’s opener “dawn | pulse” puts a morning drone at the threshold of their sound world. This undulating slow roller is a free time drift of bowed tonal clusters respiring in long, melodic swells, and unfurling among wordless singing. Despite the time marker in the title, this piece feels suitable for any part of the day—the morning stretch skyward, the afternoon ambling respite, or the late-nite chillout. Both majorly serene and deceptively avant garde, “dawn | pulse” is a perfect entrée into BODY SOUND.

“laundry | blood” begins with a near-waltz percussive tumble created by a tape loop of Kohl’s barrette-prepared cello. Its soft and eerie triplet propels a deep and snarling viola-cello-violin drone forward à la the doomiest moments of the Berlin School canon or the repetitive outsider glory of Tony Conrad & Faust's Outside the Dream Syndicate. It’s a darkly cinematic take on the ambient ideal for the scarcely visible slow-moving night train chug. You can almost see it roll by.

Some moments feel intentionally disconnected from the performance, instead tied more closely to the concept of LP format listenership: the disintegrated melodic pumps and clomps of “chewing gum”, the body shaking radiator hiss come-apart of “snow | touch”, the otherworldly bass and sub-bass of “stone | piece”.

Across the album’s 11 tracks, each piece manages to keep a foot in both worlds. “burning | counting (sleeping)” begins abruptly with massive bursts of heavily-bowed sawtooth strings looping in real time, creating a near-synthetic feeling. Deep stutter-step freneticism, tape-manipulated and rendered into overlapping moments of dense psychedelia give way to an oncoming long-note tranquility—an improvised cacophony evoking some long dissipated storm-paced Irish folk drone more so than a New Music exercise or a study of Kronos / Reich.

And that seems to be the story with all of the material within BODY SOUND. It’s music with inexplicably broad appeal while maintaining a sort of mysterious outsider quality. Johnson, Kohl, and Stewart have created a stunning album—an exquisitely textured, spatially vivid, wordlessly expressive, sonically multitudinous collection—that manages to decode a slew of high level concepts while clearly and directly speaking to the human impulse. BODY SOUND is right.

Art Into Life released a 5CD Anne Gillis archival box in 2015, and to celebrate its 10th anniversary we have created a second edition with newly redesigned packaging. This new edition is limited to 300 copies and comes in a black box featuring a photo from her 1994 installation, Tultim, and an accompanying portrait card.

French artist Manon Anne Gillis began creating everyday yet theatrical sound works and performances in the early 1980s. This is the first archival collection of her work, covering her earliest pieces from 1983 under the name Devil’s Picnic up to her installation and exhibition recordings from 2005. This five-CD box set includes all the LP and CD albums released on (CRI)2, DMA2, and Rangehen; her only collaboration with another artist—a 7-inch single with her close associate G.X. Jupitter-Larsen; her compilation contributions up to 1999 (excluding a few whose original masters have been lost); and eleven previously unreleased pieces appearing here for the first time. A dense compilation filled with the imagery of beautiful isolation.

All tracks newly remastered by Colin Potter in 2015. Boxset including disk sleeves with the original artwork and a 20-page booklet.

Shintaro Sakamoto's new album ‘Yoo-hoo’, his first release in about three and a half years, reflects his overseas live experiences over the past few years while showcasing a diverse sound incorporating blues, mood songs, 60s soul, surf instrumentals, funk, and more. Furthermore, the lyrics, captured through his unique perspective, are truly one-of-a-kind. The new album, containing ten tracks including the October digital single “To Grandpa” and the November digital single “Is There a Place for You?”, is now complete.

Like the previous work, this album was recorded primarily with members of the Shintaro Sakamoto Band: Yuta Suganuma on drums, AYA on bass & backing vocals, and Toru Nishinai on saxophone & flute. Guest player Mami Kakudo participates on marimba for two tracks. Recording engineer/mastering: Soichiro Nakamura. Artwork: Shintaro Sakamoto.

Majesty Crush are a Detroit based shoegaze band from the 90s, but lightyears ahead of their time. They released their first and only studio album Love 15 on Dali Records, which was a subsidiary label of Warner/Elektra but folded shortly after its release. The album offers listeners a dreamy, guitar-driven sound that blurs the lines between indie rock and pop - something that is a defining feature of Majesty Crush.

This hour-long ensemble piece from 2024, recorded in Stockholm, marks the twelfth album by Swedish composer Magnus Granberg on Another Timbre. Granberg, born in Umeå in 1974, studied saxophone and improvisation at the University of Gothenburg and in New York, but is self-taught as a composer. He formed his ensemble Skogen in 2005 to integrate experiences, methods and materials from various traditions of improvised and composed musics into a new modus operandi. Apart from his ongoing work with Skogen and other ensembles, he has increasingly been writing music on commission for musicians like Nate Wooley, andPlay, Apartment House, Ordinary Affects, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Insub Meta Orchestra and Dramaten, and has collaborated regularly with Toshimaru Nakamura, Ko Ishikawa, Rhodri Davies, Angharad Davies and Jürg Frey.

The Willow Bends and So Do I was written in spring 2024 and consists of four large pools of materials ordered into ten cycles of approximately six minutes each. As Granberg explains: "Each pool consists of individual sounds, a number of short phrases (each containing two to seven different sounds) as well as an eighteen bar melody in slightly shifting meters from which the performers can choose what and when to play in accordance with a set of guidelines which accompany the individual parts." The phrases are derived from tiny rhythmic modules in simple note values and their augmentations and diminutions, while "the tonal materials all are derived from a few bars from a song by American jazz and film music composer Johnny Mandel called 'A Time for Love', from which the piece also borrows its title."

Granberg first heard the song in his mid-teens on Alone, a solo piano album by jazz pianist Bill Evans recorded in the late 1960s, which was one of the very first CDs he bought in the late eighties. True to his compositional method, Granberg uses other music as inspiration for his own without copying other composers' work—the sources of inspiration are not at all obvious in the finished piece. There is actually more raw material that he wrote at the time but didn't use for this piece, intending it for what might eventually become a small family of pieces for various settings and ensembles.

This particular version of Skogen is all Swedish, featuring longtime members alongside relative newcomers. The nonet includes Anna Lindal (violin), Eva Lindal (violin—Anna's sister), Leo Svensson Sander (cello), Finn Loxbo (acoustic steel string guitar), Stina Hellberg Agback (harp), Magnus Granberg (prepared piano), Erik Carlsson (percussion), Henrik Olsson (objects, contact microphones, thumb piano), and Petter Wästberg (contact microphone, mixing board, loudspeaker).

As Granberg notes: "I think the main reason for writing for this comparatively large ensemble was quite simply that I wanted to gather all the Swedish friends and members of the ensemble, including those players who started to play with Skogen during the pandemic... with the addition of guitarist Finn Loxbo whom we and I also had worked with on a couple of different occasions lately. But it's of course also a question of really enjoying writing for and playing with a relatively large ensemble of this kind, of being part of a musical environment consisting of so many different voices, movements, timbres and temperaments and the particular sense of fulfilment which it brings."

Eva Lindal and Stina Hellberg Agback have been playing with Skogen since the pandemic—both appeared on How Lonely Sits the City? (2021)—and are "such great and versatile musicians with experiences from so many different fields of music, including early and new music as well as improvised and experimental musics of various kinds." Guitarist Finn Loxbo first worked with Granberg on the double album Night Will Fade and Fall Apart (Thanatosis, 2022), and also joined Skogen for the music Granberg wrote for director Karl Dunér's production of The Persians and The Women of Troy at the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm in 2023. As Granberg says: "Finn is a wonderful and very exciting musician (for example with his brilliant ensemble Kommun) whose playing I have admired for a number of years, so I'm very happy to have him with us."

As one reviewer notes, with Granberg's compositions "no further information is necessary to know that this album will provide many hours of listening pleasure."

"The idea for Homestead came in 2023 during my time as Artist in Residence at Homestead National Historical Park in Beatrice, Nebraska, in whose archives I found the materials referenced in the titles of the movements, as well as the images on this album. As a fifth-generation Nebraskan, growing up on the native lands of the Chatiks si chatiks people (Pawnee), this project is a part of my process of learning, listening, and developing a relationship with the land and its stewards in my home state: a beautiful place with a rich history that is as much a part of me as it is part of the settler-colonial project of displacement and genocide through the Homestead Acts". Kory Reeder, March 2025

The images on the cover were kindly provided by the Homestead National Historical Park from the Reynolds family archive.

Muto Infinitas (2016/18) is an hour-long duo for quartertone bass flute and double bass, composed by the US-born Catherine Lamb, who is now resident in Berlin. It was recorded by Adama Asnan at Andreaskirche, Berlin Wannsee in 2019.

Cover artwork by Rebecca Lane

John T. Gast’s 5GT label shells the baddest yet by their secret weapon Xterea, panel-beating aspects of free party tekno D&B and UK steppers with a proper rusty, distorted tang that works a treat - RIYL Muslimgauze, Yann Dub, Carrier.

With scant background info, comparisons between Xterea and his label boss have almost inevitably been made - kinda like loads of artists on Rephlex were presumed to be AFX aliases - but we’re assured that Xterea is not JTG, they just share a thing for the grubbiest subterranean dub rave.

Whatever, their latest is also their strongest, arranging brittlest, nagging drums and murky atmospheres into hypnotic propulsion systems with a dead satisfying sort of unfinished, off-the-cuff, uncommercial quality that hits where it matters.

Their 4th release, after a ’24 debut with Mindseyerecords.xyz, and preceding pair for 5GT, ‘I’ll Call You Later’ is their most substantial in terms of length and locked-in effect. A case in point is the 10 min standout ‘Don’t Shoot the Messenger’, reminding us to the trippiest ends of frenchtek via the neuro pressure of late ’90s D&B, and getting right into the whirring details with a restrained, hands-on dub tactility.

That aesthetic is thoroughly explored with rude swagger across all seven cuts, variously squashed into an industry-dancehall swivel on the tense ‘Playtime’, and spangled in killer electro-dub noise of ‘Mix Up’, thru the serotonin-depleted, up-for-3-days limb-mill of ’Style Like This’ and its dub, to the secret backroom warehouse steez of ‘I Swear That’s X.’